A DAY IN THE LIFE

A Science Fiction Anthology

edited, with introduction & commentary

by GARDNER R. DOZOIS

“Slow Tuesday Night,” by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Virginia Kidd.

“The Lady Margaret,” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1966, 1968 by Keith Roberts.

“Mary,” by Damon Knight. Copyright © 1964 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

“Driftglass,” by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc., his agents.

“A Happy Day in 2381,” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright ® 1970 by Harry Harrison.

“This Moment of the Storm,” by Roger Zelazny. Copyright © 1966 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc., his agents.

“The Haunted Future,” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1959 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Corporation.

“On the Storm Planet,” by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1965 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

A hardcover edition of this book is available from Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.

A DAY IN THE LIFE. Copyright © 1972 by Gardner R. Dozois. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., so East 53d Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

First PERENNIAL LIBRARY edition published 1973.

STANDARD BOOK NUMBER: 06-080307-X

eISBN: 978-1-61824-920-3

Digital Edition by Baen Books

http://www.baen.com

To:

Damon, Kate, and Bob Silverberg

and

my mother and sister

and

The Guilford Gafia

INTRODUCTION

And now the introduction, wherein I’m supposed to tell you how excellent the stories contained in this anthology are, and urge you to go ahead and buy the volume, since you are supposedly holding it in your hands in some dingy and/or floodlit bookstore and riffling through the pages in the venerable act of browsing. If this is true, and you are, then let me discharge my part of the thing right now: (1) the stories in this anthology are all excellent in their various ways or I wouldn’t have bothered to put them together in the first place; and (a) yes, you should buy the book, because I need the money, for one thing, and because you are getting a pretty good hunk of top-quality fiction, for another.

Now that that’s over, and you, swayed by my rhetoric, have supposedly bought this book and are now supposedly relaxing in whatever equivalent of a comfortable reading room you have (mine has a rickety bookcase, a faded convertible couch long past its prime, a wine bottle with some wild flowers poking out of it and a fire escape looking over one’s shoulder), let me move on to the other—and more interesting—things that should be covered by an introduction to an anthology:

Why did I do it at all? and

What did I hope to do with it, besides pay the rent?

This anthology grew, in part, out of frustration. I have been a professional reader for more than two years now, and that is a killing job, as any number of people would be happy to testify. Being a professional reader means being trapped in the same room with a slush pile for long stretches of time, and worse, being forced not only to coexist with it but also to relate to it. A slush pile is a fabulous monster with guts of steel and the head of an idiot—it is an accumulation of unsolicited manuscripts that have been submitted to a magazine or a publishing house. These manuscripts are as numberless and inexhaustible as the grains of sand in the Sahara: scoop them out from the bottom and they pour in again at the top. Most of these manuscripts are science fiction (or SF, as we initiates like to call it), a lot of them are god-awful, the vast majority of them are both SF and god-awful. You can’t ignore a slush pile—you are being paid specifically to read it, to make it go away. So I would sit and try to cope with it, and day after day I would read stirring sagas of the spaceways; I would read galaxy-shaking, sun-busting adventures; I would watch a hundred different avatars of Captain Wasp of the Terran Space Patrol singlehandedly making the universe safe for humanity; I would watch intrepid scientists constructing Amazing New Devices and Secret Weapons in their basement workshops out of birdhouse scraps and bailing wire; I would watch astronauts spacewalking along the hull in spite of a deadly meteorite shower to fix the damaged hyperwarp engine with a hairpin and a prayer; I would watch Jupiter falling out of its orbit “down on top of” the Earth, to be deflected at the last minute by a cobalt ray whipped up in a basement workshop; I would watch galactic conspiracies on a scale so complicated and paranoid as to make Dostoevsky blanch; I would watch star empires grow and wither in numbers as vast as all the tulips in all the Hollands that have ever been; I would read stories so huge and dynamic in scope that I had to struggle to thrust each glittering, bellowing handful of manuscript back into the return-address envelope.

They were all lousy.

And so I would sit at the Formica table every day at lunch, with my submarine sandwich and my cup of coffee, and my eyes dangling limply from their sockets like melted blue crayons, and I would watch the steam from the coffee and think: There must be some way to do all this right.

There is, of course.

This anthology contains eight stories that “do it right”—that take the common subject material of SF and handle it with intelligence, with humanity, with a high degree of literacy.

And they do more than that.

There has been a great deal of talk in the last few years about the “sense of wonder,” and many wailing lamentations that it is forever gone, that SF is no longer capable of delivering that quasi-religious shiver that goes through you when you come into contact with something bigger than yourself, that intuition into systems different from any you will ever know. This is what the nameless wretches in the slush pile were trying to do: they were trying to communicate the sense of wonder, but the only way they could think of to do it was to make their canvases bigger and bigger, and more and more gory. And those particular grooves on the record have worn pretty thin by now. That just doesn’t work anymore.

SF has developed an unfortunate evolutionary tendency to depend on melodrama: on world-shaking plots, heroic deeds, cliff-hanger action. And, as a result, on formula writing, cardboard characters, shallow conceptualization, simplex—or nonexistent—cerebration. On cliché that becomes genre under the weight of years. This makes for staleness, conformity, stagnation—the insistence on wide-screen dreams limiting the range of the field, becoming monotonous, finally defeating its own purpose: the instilling of wonder and awe in the reader. The microcosm of pulp stories becomes so widely divorced from what we know of the macrocosm, the quality of existence of the hero’s life becomes so divergent from the experience of our own everyday lives, that we cease to relate to it, it stops having any relevancy to us. It becomes fantasy, as strongly stylized as a No play. We fail to suspend our disbelief, we cease having any empathy with these supermen and their superdeeds. We cease to care—we know that it’s all nonsense anyway, something that would only happen on that little piece of paper. We know it has nothing to do with us.

And the sense of wonder dies.

The eight stories here find ways around that syndrome. They are stories that we intuit as life, that somehow fool us into thinking—while we are reading them—that they are something more than words on paper, that the events in the story are actually occurring in some dimension congruent with our own, viewed through the window of fiction. Most of them do this by keeping the focus tight, intense, personal, by concentrating on the people involved and letting them live the story from the inside out, so that their viewpoints and values become ours, and we care about the solution of their problems because they have become our own. They show us, with conviction, something we would otherwise never know on this earth: what everyday, day-to-day life would be like in a different society, an alien culture, another world. They are stories that are concerned with more or less ordinary people—however strange they seem to us in their own context—leading ordinary lives, struggling the way we do, loving, losing, dying, getting along. Not that the events portrayed here are mundane—there is more than enough action, color, sweep and drama—but that the action is dramatic exposition consistent with life, not melodrama. The action—Zelazny’s great storm, Roberts’ murderous routiers, Delany’s hostile and slaughtering sea, Leiber’s demoniac prankster, Smith’s battles and confrontations—is the type of sudden, violent incursion on normalcy that happens to us: I have been mugged in the streets of Manhattan, beaten, robbed, I have suffered great storms, I have seen people struck dead and down by cars. I can believe the type of action these authors give us, the senseless violence and uncaring cruelty, much more than I can believe the heroic escapades of Captain Wasp.

These stories translate us into another world in ways we can find believable and consistent, that allow us to share someone/thing else’s skin. And by so doing they engender a far greater sense of wonder than a library full of pulp world-shaking—because we are able to go Out There ourselves, not through a surrogate.

The stories here are all days in someone’s life, someone real, and that’s why we care. That’s what makes the difference.

I enjoyed collecting them. I hope you enjoy reading them.

And keep your cobalt ray dry. We may need it yet.

G.D.

SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT

R. A. Lafferty

“By 1990, we will have television.” SF has always been fond of statements like that. Most of them have been wrong—hardly anyone foresaw the incredible- acceleration of our society, the cultural/technological/psychological explosion that wrenched us from Kitty Hawk to Copernicus in seventy years, that gave us credit cards and pollution and LSD, that shoved us into the mass nervous breakdown of the late sixties. As a result, only those stories that were the most radical and farfetched in their conception of life in 1970 bear even a conservative correlation to reality. Satire ages best—I’m sure to the horror of the satirists, who must watch their created absurdities and distortions creeping into the headlines and becoming mundane. Listen to a TV commercial, watch an X-rated movie, look out the window (remember windows?), step outside and discover that you can’t breathe the air. Notice how much your morning newspaper resembles The Marching Morons? Catch-22 is one of the most realistic war novels ever written. Ask any private who’s ever been caught in the gears.

One thing we can be fairly sure of: if we don’t blow up the world or strangle in our own excreta, the future will be more complex and strange than we suppose, maybe more strange than we can even imagine. R. A. Lafferty—a man possessed of one of the most daring, flexible and incisive imaginations in the world—here blips us through a slow Tuesday night with the speed of a computer data transfer. Read it and laugh, because it is very funny, and at the moment it is satire. If you’re still around forty years from now, do the existing societal equivalent of reading it again, and you may find yourself laughing out of the other side of your mouth (remember mouths?). It will probably be much too conservative.

G.D.

A panhandler intercepted the young couple as they strolled down the night street.

“Preserve us this night,” he said as he touched his hat to them, “and could you good people advance me a thousand dollars to be about the recouping of my fortunes?”

“I gave you a thousand last Friday,” said the young man.

“Indeed you did,” the panhandler replied, “and I paid you back tenfold by messenger before midnight.”

“That’s right, George, he did,” said the young woman. “Give it to him, dear. I believe he’s a good sort.”

So the young man gave the panhandler a thousand dollars, and the panhandler touched his hat to them in thanks and went on to the recouping of his fortunes.

As he went into Money Market, the panhandler passed Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city.

“Will you marry me this night, Ildy?” he asked cheerfully.

“Oh, I don’t believe so, Basil,” she said. “I marry you pretty often, but tonight I don’t seem to have any plans at all. You may make me a gift on your first or second, however. I always like that.”

But when they had parted she asked herself: “But whom will I marry tonight?”

The panhandler was Basil Bagelbaker, who would be the richest man in the world within an hour and a half. He would make and lose four fortunes within eight hours; and these not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things.

When the Abebaios block had been removed from human minds, people began to make decisions faster, and often better. It had been the mental stutter. When it was understood what it was, and that it had no useful function, it was removed by simple childhood metasurgery.

Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous. Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period.

Freddy Fixico had just invented a manus module. Freddy was a Nyctalops, and the modules were characteristic of these people. The people had then divided themselves—according to their natures and inclinations—into the Auroreans, the Hemerobians, and the Nyctalops—or the Dawners, who had their most active hours from 4 A.M. till noon; the Day Flies, who obtained from noon to 8 P.M.; and the Night Seers, whose civilization thrived from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M. The cultures, inventions, markets and activities of these three folk were a little different. As a Nyctalops, Freddy had just begun his working day at 8 P.M. on a slow Tuesday night.

Freddy rented an office and had it furnished. This took one minute, negotiation, selection and installation being almost instantaneous. Then he invented the manus module; that took another minute. He then had it manufactured and marketed; in three minutes it was in the hands of key buyers.

It caught on. It was an attractive module. The flow of orders began within thirty seconds. By ten minutes after eight every important person had one of the new manus modules, and the trend had been set. The module began to sell in the millions. It was one of the most interesting fads of the night, or at least the early part of the night.

Manus modules had no practical function, no more than had Sameki verses. They were attractive, of a psychologically satisfying size and shape, and could be held in the hands, set on a table, or installed in a module niche of any wall.

Naturally Freddy became very rich. Ildefonsa Impala, the most beautiful woman in the city, was always interested in newly rich men. She came to see Freddy about eight-thirty. People made up their minds fast, and Ildefonsa had hers made up when she came. Freddy made his own up quickly and divorced Judy Fixico in Small Claims Court. Freddy and Ildefonsa went honeymooning to Paraiso Dorado, a resort.

It was wonderful. All of Ildy’s marriages were. There was the wonderful floodlighted scenery. The recirculated water of the famous falls was tinted gold; the immediate rocks had been done by Rambles; and the hills had been contoured by Spall. The beach was a perfect copy of that at Merevale, and the popular drink that first part of the night was blue absinthe.

But scenery—whether seen for the first time or revisited after an interval—is striking for the sudden intense view of it. It is not meant to be lingered over. Food, selected and prepared instantly, is eaten with swift enjoyment; and blue absinthe lasts no longer than its own novelty. Loving, for Ildefonsa and her paramours, was quick and consuming; and repetition would have been pointless to her. Besides, Ildefonsa and Freddy had taken only the one-hour luxury honeymoon.

Freddy wished to continue the relationship, but Ildefonsa glanced at a trend indicator. The manus module would hold its popularity for only the first third of the night. Already it had been discarded by people who mattered. And Freddy Fixico was not one of the regular successes. He enjoyed a full career only about one night a week.

They were back in the city and divorced in Small Claims Court by nine thirty-five. The stock of manus modules was remaindered, and the last of it would be disposed of to bargain hunters among the Dawners, who will buy anything.

“Whom shall I marry next?” Ildefonsa asked herself. “It looks like a slow night.”

“Bagelbaker is buying,” ran the word through Money Market, but Bagelbaker was selling again before the word had made its rounds. Basil Bagelbaker enjoyed making money, and it was a pleasure to watch him work as he dominated the floor of the Market and assembled runners and a competent staff out of the corner of his mouth. Helpers stripped the panhandler rags off him and wrapped him in a tycoon toga. He sent one runner to pay back twentyfold the young couple who had advanced him a thousand dollars. He sent another with a more substantial gift to Ildefonsa Impala, for Basil cherished their relationship. Basil acquired title to the Trend Indication Complex and had certain falsifications set into it. He caused to collapse certain industrial empires that had grown up within the last two hours, and made a good thing of recombining their wreckage. He had been the richest man in the world for some minutes now. He became so money-heavy that he could not maneuver with the agility he had shown an hour before. He became a great fat buck, and the pack of expert wolves circled him to bring him down.

Very soon he would lose that first fortune of the evening. The secret of Basil Bagelbaker was that he enjoyed losing money spectacularly after he was full of it to the bursting point.

* * *

A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality-signature. It had to come out a good work, for excellence had become the automatic minimum for such productions.

“I will scatter a few nuts on the frosting,” said Maxwell, and he pushed the lever for that. This sifted handfuls of words like chthonic and heuristic and prozymeides through the thing so that nobody could doubt it was a work of philosophy.

Maxwell Mouser sent the work out to publishers, and received it back each time in about three minutes. An analysis of it and reason for rejection were always given—mostly that the thing had been done before and better. Maxwell received it back ten times in thirty minutes, and was discouraged. Then there was a break.

Ladion’s work had become a hit within the last ten minutes, and it was now recognized that Mouser’s monograph was both an answer and a supplement to it. It was accepted and published in less than a minute after this break. The reviews of the first five minutes were cautious ones; then real enthusiasm was shown. This was truly one of the greatest works of philosophy to appear during the early and medium hours of the night. There were those who said it might be one of the enduring works and even have a holdover appeal to the Dawners the next morning.

Naturally Maxwell became very rich, and naturally Ildefonsa came to see him about midnight. Being a revolutionary philosopher, Maxwell thought that they might make some free arrangement, but Ildefonsa insisted it must be marriage. So Maxwell divorced Judy Mouser in Small Claims Court and went off with Ildefonsa.

This Judy herself, though not so beautiful as Ildefonsa, was the fastest taker in the city. She only wanted the men of the moment for a moment, and she was always there before even Ildefonsa. Ildefonsa believed that she took the men away from Judy; Judy said that Ildy had her leavings and nothing else.

“I had him first,” Judy would always mock as she raced through Small Claims Court.

“Oh that damned urchin!” Ildefonsa would moan. “She wears my very hair before I do.”

* * *

Maxwell Mouser and Ildefonsa Impala went honeymooning to Musicbox Mountain, a resort. It was wonderful. The peaks were done with green snow by Dunbar and Fittle. (Back at Money Market Basil Bagelbaker was putting together his third and greatest fortune of the night, which might surpass in magnitude even his fourth fortune of the Thursday before.) The chalets were Switzier than the real Swiss and had live goats in every room. (And Stanley Skuldugger was emerging as the top actor-imago of the middle hours of the night.) The popular drink for that middle part of the night was Glotzenglubber, ewe cheese and Rhine wine over pink ice. (And back in the city the leading Nyctalops were taking their midnight break at the Toppers’ Club.)

Of course it was wonderful, as were all of Ildefonsa’s—but she had never been really up on philosophy so she had scheduled only the special thirty-five-minute honeymoon. She looked at the trend indicator to be sure. She found that her current husband had been obsoleted, and his opus was now referred to sneeringly as Mouser’s Mouse. They went back to the city and were divorced in Small Claims Court.

The membership of the Toppers’ Club varied. Success was the requisite of membership. Basil Bagelbaker might be accepted as a member, elevated to the presidency and expelled from it as a dirty pauper from three to six times a night. But only important persons could belong to it, or those enjoying brief moments of importance.

“I believe I will sleep during the Dawner period in the morning,” Overcall said. “I may go up to this new place, Koimopolis, for an hour of it. They’re said to be good. Where will you sleep, Basil?”

“Flophouse.”

“I believe I will sleep an hour by the Midian Method,” said Bumbanner. “They have a fine new clinic. And perhaps I’ll sleep an hour by the Prasenka Process, and an hour by the Dormidio.”

“Crackle has been sleeping an hour every period by the natural method,” said Overcall.

“I did that for half an hour not long since,” said Bumbanner. “I believe an hour is too long to give it. Have you tried the natural method, Basil?”

“Always. Natural method and a bottle of red-eye.”

Stanley Skuldugger had become the most meteoric actor-imago for a week. Naturally he became very rich, and Ildefonsa Impala went to see him about 3 A.M.

“I had him first!” rang the mocking voice of Judy Skuldugger as she skipped through her divorce in Small Claims Court. And Ildefonsa and Stanley boy went off honeymooning. It is always fun to finish up a period with an actor-imago who is the hottest property in the business. There is something so adolescent and boorish about them.

Besides, there was the publicity, and Ildefonsa liked that. The rumor mills ground. Would it last ten minutes? Thirty? An hour? Would it be one of those rare Nyctalops marriages that lasted through the rest of the night and into the daylight off-hours? Would it even last into the next night as some had been known to do?

Actually it lasted nearly forty minutes, which was almost to the end of the period.

It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit.

Hundred-story buildings had been erected, occupied, obsoleted and demolished again to make room for more contemporary structures. Only the mediocre would use a building that had been left over from the Day Flies or the Dawners, or even the Nyctalops of the night before. The city was rebuilt pretty completely at least three times during an eight-hour period.

The period drew near its end. Basil Bagelbaker, the richest man in the world, the reigning president of the Toppers’ Club, was enjoying himself with his cronies. His fourth fortune of the night was a paper pyramid that had risen to incredible heights; but Basil laughed to himself as he savored the manipulation it was founded on.

Three ushers of the Toppers’ Club came in with firm step.

“Get out of here, you dirty bum!” they told Basil savagely. They tore the tycoon’s toga off him and then tossed him his seedy panhandler’s rags with a three-man sneer.

“All gone?” Basil asked. “I gave it another five minutes.”

“All gone,” said a messenger from Money Market. “Nine billion gone in five minutes, and it really pulled some others down with it.”

“Pitch the busted bum out!” howled Overcall and Bumbanner and the other cronies.

“Wait, Basil,” said Overcall. “Turn in the President’s Crosier before we kick you downstairs. After all, you’ll have it several times again tomorrow night.”

The period was over. The Nyctalops drifted off to sleep clinics or leisure-hour hideouts to pass their ebb time. The Auroreans, the Dawners, took over the vital stuff.

Now you would see some action! Those Dawners really made fast decisions. You wouldn’t catch them wasting a full minute setting up a business.

A sleepy panhandler met Ildefonsa Impala on the way. “Preserve us this morning, Ildy,” he said, “and will you marry me the coming night?”

“Likely I will, Basil,” she told him. “Did you marry Judy during the night past?”

“I’m not sure. Could you let me have two dollars, Ildy?”

“Out of the question. I believe a Judy Bagelbaker was named one of the ten best-dressed women during the frou-frou fashion period about two o’clock. Why do you need two dollars?”

“A dollar for a bed and a dollar for red-eye. After all, I sent you two million out of my second.”

“I keep my two sorts of accounts separate. Here’s a dollar, Basil. Now be off! I can’t be seen talking to a dirty panhandler.”

“Thank you, Ildy. I’ll get the red-eye and sleep in an alley. Preserve us this morning.”

Bagelbaker shuffled off whistling “Slow Tuesday Night.” And already the Dawners had set Wednesday morning to jumping.

THE LADY MARGARET

Keith Roberts

Unless you are the scion of a rich family, independently wealthy, a recluse, retired, under five, an invalid, on the lam or on the bum, work probably takes up a good percentage of your life. Probably it does even if you are one or all of the above. Sometimes they call it survival, sometimes they call it school, sometimes they call it job. Sometimes they call it art—which may mean that you’re lucky enough to get paid for doing what you’re driven to do anyway. Whatever they call it, it means work. Add all the seconds, minutes, hours and days together, and you’ll come up with a staggering total of time spent doing whatever it is you do to keep yourself alive. Unfortunately, too many people today despise the work that they do, or at least regard it with dull apathy. Which means that they spend a huge portion of their time on earth locked in a gray prison of circumstance, spend it with their minds and senses switched off, turned into clockwork golems functioning by rote, idling and fretting through endless days with one eye on the clock. And as the song says, life is just too short for that kind of thing.

England’s Keith Roberts here takes us to a world sideways in time for a starkly beautiful and intensely personal look at a man whose life is centered around the fulfillment of his work, around the open road and the high steel, the cold hush of an engine shed at dusk, the rolling belch and bellow of black spark-shot smoke, the pounding of massive engines, the thrilling of a wheel held steady by competent hands, the frost and bitter winter wind, the lonely huddled houses on the sweep of the heath, the sudden lantern gleam in the darkness that means the routiers.

G.D.

Dumovaria, England. 1968.

The appointed morning came, and they buried Eli Strange. The coffin, black and purple drapes twitched aside, eased down into the grave; the white webbings slid through the hands of the bearers in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti . The earth took back her own. And miles away Iron Margaret cried cold and wreathed with steam, drove her great sea voice across the hills.

At three in the afternoon the engine sheds were already gloomy with the coming night. Light, blue and vague, filtered through the long strips of the skylights, showing the roof ties stark like angular metal bones. Beneath, the locomotives waited brooding, hulks twice the height of a man, their canopies brushing the rafters. The light gleamed in dull spindle shapes, here from the strappings of a boiler, there from the starred boss of a flywheel. The massive road wheels stood in pools of shadow.

Through the half-dark a man came walking. He moved steadily, whistling between his teeth, boot studs rasping on the worn brick floor. He wore the jeans and heavy reefer jacket of a hauler; the collar of the jacket was turned up against the cold. On his head was a woolen cap, once red, stained now with dirt and oil. The hair that showed beneath it was thickly black. A lamp swung in his hand, sending cusps of light flicking across the maroon livery of the engines.

He stopped by the last locomotive in line and reached up to hang the lamp from her hornplate. He stood a moment gazing at the big shapes of the engines, chafing his hands unconsciously, sensing the faint ever-present stink of smoke and oil. Then he swung onto the footplate of the loco and opened the firebox doors. He crouched, working methodically. The rake scraped against the fire bars; his breath jetted from him, rising in wisps over his shoulder. He laid the fire carefully, wadding paper, adding a crisscrossing of sticks, shoveling coal from the tender with rhythmic swings of his arms. Not too much fire to begin with, not under a cold boiler. Sudden heat meant sudden expansion and that meant cracking, leaks round the fire-tube joints, endless trouble. For all their power, the locos had to be cosseted like children, coaxed and persuaded to give of their best.

The hauler laid the shovel aside and reached into the firebox mouth to sprinkle paraffin from a can. Then a soaked rag, a match . . . The lucifer flared brightly, sputtering. The oil caught with a faint whoomph. He closed the doors, opened the damper handles for draft. He straightened up, wiped his hands on cotton waste, then dropped from the footplate and began mechanically rubbing the brightwork of the engine. Over his head, long name-boards carried the style of the firm in swaggering, curlicued letters: Strange and Sons of Dorset, Haulers. Lower, on the side of the great boiler, was the name of the engine herself. The Lady Margaret. The hulk of rag paused when it reached the brass plate; then it polished it slowly, with loving care.

The Margaret hissed softly to herself, cracks of flame light showing round her ash pan. The shed foreman had filled her boiler and the belly and tender tanks that afternoon; her train was linked up across the yard, waiting by the warehouse loading bays. The hauler added more fuel to the fire, watched the pressure building slowly toward working head; lifted the heavy oak wheel scotches, stowed them in the steamer alongside the packaged water-gauge glasses. The barrel of the loco was warming now, giving out a faint heat that radiated toward the cab.

The driver looked above him broodingly at the skylights. Mid-December; and it seemed as always God was stinting the light itself so the days came and vanished like the blinking of a dim gray eye. The frost would come down hard as well, later on. It was freezing already; in the yard the puddles had crashed and tinkled under his boots, the skin of ice from the night before barely thinned. Bad weather for the haulers; many of them had packed up already. This was the time for the wolves to leave their shelter, what wolves there were left. And the routiers . . . this was their season right enough, ideal for quick raids and swoopings, rich hauls from the last road trains of the winter. The man shrugged under his coat. This would be the last run to the coast for a month or so at least, unless that old goat Serjeantson across the way tried a quick dash with his vaunted Fowler triple compound. In that case the Margaret would go out again; because Strange and Sons made the last run to the coast. Always had, always would. . . .

Working head, a hundred and fifty pounds to the inch. The driver hooked the hand lamp over the push-pole bracket on the front of the smokebox, climbed back to the footplate, checked gear for neutral, opened the cylinder cocks, inched the regulator across. The Lady Margaret woke up, pistons thumping, crossheads sliding in their guides, exhaust beating sudden thunder under the low roof. Steam whirled back and smoke, thick and cindery, catching at the throat. The driver grinned faintly and without humor. The starting drill was a part of him, burned on his mind. Gear check, cylinder cocks, regulator . . . He’d missed out just once, years back when he was a boy; opened up a four-horse Roby traction with her cocks shut, let the condensed water in front of the piston knock the end out of the bore. His heart had broken with the cracking iron; but old Eli had still taken a studded belt and whipped him till he thought he was going to die.

He closed the cocks, moved the reversing lever to forward full, and opened the regulator again. Old Dickon, the yard foreman, had materialized in the gloom of the shed; he hauled back on the heavy doors as the Margaret, jetting steam, rumbled into the open air, swung across the yard to where her train was parked.

Dickon, coatless despite the cold, snapped the linkage onto the Lady Margaret’s drawbar, clicked the brake unions into place. Three freight cars and the water tender; a light enough haul this time. The foreman stood, hands on hips, in breeches and grubby, ruffed shirt, grizzled hair curling over his collar. “Best let I come with ‘ee, Master Jesse. . . .”

Jesse shook his head somberly, jaw set. They’d been through this before. His father had never believed in overstaffing; he’d worked his few men hard for the wages he paid, and got his money’s worth out of them. Though how long that would go on was anybody’s guess with the Guild of Mechanics stiffening its attitude all the time. Eli had stayed on the road himself up until a few days before his death; Jesse had steered for him not much more than a week before, taking the Margaret round the hill villages topside of Bridport to pick up serge and worsted from the combers there; part of the load that was now outward bound for Poole. There’d been no sitting back in an office chair for old Strange, and his death had left the firm badly shorthanded; pointless taking on fresh drivers now, with the end of the season only days away. Jesse gripped Dickon’s shoulder. “We can’t spare thee, Dick. Run the yard, see my mother’s all right. That’s what he’d have wanted.” He grimaced briefly. “If I can’t take Margaret out by now, ‘tis time I learned.”

He walked back along the train pulling at the lashings of the tarps. The tender and numbers one and two were shipshape, all fast. No need to check the trail load; he’d packed it himself the day before, taken hours over it. He checked it all the same, saw the taillights and number-plate lamp were burning before taking the cargo manifest from Dickon. He climbed back to the footplate, working his hands into the heavy driver’s mitts with their leather-padded palms.

The foreman watched him stolidly. “Take care for the routiers. Norman bastards . . .”

Jesse grunted. “Let ‘em take care for themselves. See to things, Dickon. Expect me tomorrow.”

“God be with ‘ee. . . .”

Jesse eased the regulator forward, raised an arm as the stocky figure fell behind. The Margaret and her train clattered under the arch of the yard gate and into the rutted streets of Durnovaria. Jesse had a lot to occupy his mind as he steered his load into the town; for the moment, the routiers were the least of his worries. Now, with the first keen grief just starting to lose its edge, he was beginning to realize how much they’d all miss Eli. The firm was a heavy weight to have hung around his neck without warning; and it could be there were awkward times ahead. With the Church openly backing the clamor of the guilds for shorter hours and higher pay, it looked as if the haulage companies were going to have to tighten their belts again, though God knew profit margins were thin enough already. And there were rumors of more restrictions on the road trains themselves; a maximum of six trailers it would be this time, and a water cart. Reason given had been the increasing congestion round the big towns. That, and the state of the roads; but what else could you expect, Jesse asked himself sourly, when half the tax levied in the country went to buy gold plate for its churches? Maybe, though, this was just the start of a new trade recession like the one engineered a couple of centuries back by Gisevius. The memory of that still rankled in the West at least. The economy of England was stable now, for the first time in years; stability meant wealth, gold reserves. And gold, stacked anywhere but in the half-legendary coffers of the Vatican, meant danger. . .

Months back, Eli, swearing blue fire, had set about getting around the new regulations. He’d had a dozen trailers modified to carry fifty gallons of water in a galvanized tank just abaft the drawbar. The tanks took up next to no space and left the rest of the bed for payload; but they’d be enough to satisfy the sheriff’s dignity. Jesse could imagine the old devil cackling at his victory; only he hadn’t lived to see it. His thoughts slid back to his father, as irrevocably as the coffin had slid into the earth. He remembered his last sight of him, the gray wax nose peeping above the drapes as the visitors, Eli’s drivers among them, filed through the mourning room of the old house. Death hadn’t softened Eli Strange; it had ravaged the face but left it strong, like the side of a quarried hill.

Queer how when you were driving you seemed to have more time to think. Even driving on your own when you had to watch the boiler gauge, steam head, fire . . Jesse’s hands felt the familiar thrilling in the wheel rim, the little stresses that on a long run would build and build till countering them brought burning aches to the shoulders and back. Only this was no long run; twenty, twenty-two miles, across to Wool, then over the Great Heath to Poole. An easy trip for the Lady Margaret, with an easy load; thirty tons at the back of her, and flat ground most of the way. The loco had only two gears; Jesse had started off in high, and that was where he meant to stay. The Margaret’s nominal horsepower was ten, but that was on the old rating; one horsepower to be deemed equal to ten circular inches of piston area. Pulling against the brake the Burrell would clock seventy, eighty horse; enough to shift a rolling load of a hundred and thirty tons. Old Eli had pulled a train that heavy once for a wager. And won . . .

Jesse checked the pressure gauge, eyes performing their work nearly automatically. Ten pounds under max. All right for a while; he could stoke on the move, he’d done it times enough before, but as yet there was no need. He reached the first crossroads, glanced right and left and wound at the wheel, looking behind him to see each car of the train turning sweetly at the same spot. Good; Eli would have liked that turn. The trail load would pull across the road crown, he knew, but that wasn’t his concern. His lamps were burning, and any drivers who couldn’t see the bulk of Margaret and her load deserved the smashing they would get. Forty-odd tons, rolling and thundering; bad luck on any butterfly cars that got too close.

Jesse had all the haulers’ ingrained contempt for internal combustion, though he’d followed the arguments for and against it keenly enough. Maybe one day petrol propulsion might amount to something, and there was that other system, what did they call it, diesel. . . . But the hand of the Church would have to be lifted first. The Bull of 1910, Petroleum Veto, had limited the capacity of IC engines to 150 cc’s, and since then the haulers had had no real competition. Petrol vehicles had been forced to fit gaudy sails to help tow themselves along; load hauling was a singularly bad joke.

Mother of God, but it was cold! Jesse shrugged himself deeper into his jacket. The Lady Margaret carried no spectacle plate; a lot of other steamers had installed them now, even one or two in the Strange fleet, but Eli had sworn not the Margaret, not on the Margaret. . . . She was a work of art, perfect in herself; as her makers had built her, so she would stay. Decking her out with gewgaws—the old man had been half sick at the thought. It would make her look like one of the railway engines Eli so despised. Jesse narrowed his eyes, forcing them to see against the searing bite of the wind. He glanced down at the tachometer. Road speed fifteen miles an hour, revs one fifty. One gloved hand pulled back on the reversing lever. Ten was the limit through towns, fixed by the laws of the realm; and Jesse had no intention of being run in for exceeding it. The firm of Strange had always kept well in with the JPs and sergeants of police; it partially accounted for their success.

Entering the long High Street, he cut his revs again. The Margaret, balked, made a frustrated thunder; the sound echoed back, clapping from the fronts of the gray stone buildings. Jesse felt through his boot soles the slackening pull on the drawbar and spun the brake wheel; a jackknifed train was about the worst blot on a driver’s record. Reflectors behind the tail-lamp flames clicked upward, momentarily doubling their glare. The brakes bit; compensators pulled the trail load first, straightening the cars. He eased back another notch on the reversing lever; steam admitted in front of the pistons checked Margaret’s speed. Ahead were the gas lamps of town center, high on their standards; beyond, the walls and the East Gate.

The sergeant on duty saluted easily with his halberd, waving the Burrell forward. Jesse shoved at the lever, wound the brakes away from the wheels. Too much stress on the shoes and there could be a fire somewhere in the train. That would be bad; most of the load was inflammable this time.

He ran through the manifest in his mind. The Margaret was carrying bale on bale of serge; bulkwise it accounted for most of her cargo. English woolens were famous on the Continent; correspondingly, the serge combers were among the most powerful industrial groups in the Southwest. Their factories and storing sheds dotted the villages for miles around; monopoly of the trade had helped keep old Eli out ahead of his rivals. Then there were dyed silks from Anthony Harcourt at Mells; Harcourt shifts were sought after as far abroad as Paris. And crate after crate of turned ware, products of the local bodgers, Erasmus Cox and Jed Roberts of Durnovaria, Jeremiah Stringer out at Martinstown. Specie, under the county lieutenant’s seal; the last of the season’s levies, outward bound for Rome. And machine parts, high-grade cheeses, all kinds of oddments. Clay pipes, horn buttons, ribbons and tape; even a shipment of cherrywood Madonnas from that New World–financed firm over at Beaminster. What did they call themselves—Calmers of the Soul, Inc. . . . ? Woolens and worsteds atop the water tender and in car number one, turned goods and the rest in number two. The trail load needed no consideration. That would look after itself.

The East Gate showed ahead, and the dark bulk of the wall. Jesse slowed in readiness. There was no need; the odd butterfly cars that were still braving the elements on this bitter night were already stopped, held back out of harm’s way by the signals of the halberdiers. The Margaret hooted, left behind a cloud of steam that hung glowing against the evening sky. Passed through the ramparts to the heath and hills beyond.

Jesse reached-down to twirl the control of the injector valve. Water, preheated by its passage through an extension of the smokebox, swirled into the boiler. He allowed the engine to build up speed. Durnovaria vanished, lost in the gloom astern; the light was fading fast now. To right and left the land was featureless, dark; in front of him was the half-seen whirling of the crankshaft, the big thunder of the engine. The hauler grinned, still exhilarated by the physical act of driving. Flame light striking round the firebox doors showed the wide, hard jaw, the deep-set eyes under brows that were level and thickly black. Just let old Serjeantson try and sneak in a last trip. The Margaret would take his Fowler, uphill or down; and Eli would churn with glee in his fresh-made grave. . .

The Lady Margaret. A scene came unasked into Jesse’s mind. He saw himself as a boy, voice half broken. How long ago was that—eight seasons, ten? The years had a way of piling themselves one atop the next, unnoticed and uncounted; that was how young men turned into old ones. He remembered the morning the Margaret first arrived in the yard. She’d come snorting and plunging through Durnovaria, fresh from Burrell’s works in far-off Thetford, paintwork gleaming, whistle sounding, brasswork a-twinkle in the sun; a compound locomotive of ten nhp, all her details specified from flywheel decoration to static-discharge chains. Spud pan, belly pan, water lifts; Eli had got what he wanted, all right, one of the finest steamers in the West. He’d fetched her himself, making the awkward journey across many counties to Norfork; nobody else had been trusted to bring back the pride of the fleet. And she’d been his steamer ever since; if the old granite shell that had called itself Eli Strange ever loved anything on earth, it had been the huge Burrell.

Jesse had been there to meet her, and his kid brother Tim and the others, James and Micah, dead now—God rest their souls—of the plague that had taken them both that time in Bristol. He remembered how his father had swung off the footplate, looked up at the loco standing shaking like a live thing still and spewing steam. The firm’s name had been painted there already, the letters glowing along the canopy edge, but as yet the Burrell had no name of her own. “What be ‘ee gwine call en?” his mother had shouted, over the noise of her idling; and Eli had rumpled his hair, puckered his red face. “Danged if I knows. . . .” They had Thunderer already and Apocalypse, Oberon and Ballard Down and Western Strength; big-sounding names, right for the machines that carried them. “Danged if I knows,” said old Eli, grinning; and Jesse’s voice had spoken without his permission, faltering up in its adolescent yodel. “The Lady Margaret, sir . . . Lady Margaret . . .”

A bad thing that, speaking without being addressed. Eli had glared, shoved up his cap, scrubbed at his hair again and burst into a roar of laughter. “I like en . . bugger me if I don’t like en. . . .” And the Lady Margaret she had become, over the protests of his drivers, even over old Dickon’s head. He claimed it “were downright luck” to call a loco after “some bloody ‘oman. . . .” Jesse remembered his ears burning, he couldn’t tell whether with shame or pride. He’d unwished the name a thousand times, but it had stuck. Eli liked it; and nobody crossed old Strange, not in the days of his strength.

So Eli was dead. There’d been no warning; just the coughing, the hands gripping the chair arms, the face that suddenly wasn’t his father’s face, staring. Quick dark spattering of blood, the lungs sighing and bubbling; and a clay-colored old man lying abed, one lamp burning, the priest in attendance, Jesse’s mother watching empty-faced. Father Thomas had been cold, disapproving of the old sinner; the wind had soughed round the house vicious with frost while the priest’s lips absolved and mechanically blessed . . . but that hadn’t been death. A death was more than an ending; it was like pulling a thread from a richly patterned cloth. Eli had been a part of Jesse’s life, as much a part as his bedroom under the eaves of the old house. Death disrupted the processes of memory, jangled old chords that were maybe best left alone. It took so little imagination for Jesse to see his father still, the craggy face, weathered -hands, hauler’s greasy buckled cap pulled low over his eyes. The knotted muffler, ends anchored round the braces, the greatcoat, old thick working corduroys. It was here he missed him, in the clanking and the darkness, with the hot smell of oil, smoke blowing back from the tall stack to burn his eyes. This was how he’d known it would be. Maybe this was what he’d wanted.

Time to feed the brute. Jesse took a quick look at the road stretching out straight in front of him. The steamer would hold her course, the worm steering couldn’t kick back. He opened the firebox doors, grabbed the shovel. He stoked the fire quickly and efficiently, keeping it dished for maximum heat. Swung the doors shut, straightened up again. The steady thunder of the loco was part of him already, in his bloodstream. Heat struck up from the metal of the footplate, working through his boots; the warmth from the firebox blew back, breathed against his face. Time later for the frost to reach him, nibbling at his bones.

Jesse had been born in the old house on the outskirts of Durnovaria soon after his father started up in business there with a couple of plowing engines, a thresher, and an Aveling and Porter tractor. The third of four brothers, he’d never seriously expected to own the fortunes of Strange and Sons. But God’s ways were as inscrutable as the hills; two Strange boys had gone black-faced to Abraham’s bosom, now Eli himself. . . Jesse thought back to long summers spent at home, summers when the engine sheds were boiling hot and reeking of smoke and oil. He’d spend his days there, watching the trains come in and leave, helping unload on the warehouse steps, climbing over the endless stacks of crates and bales. There too were scents; richness of dried fruits in their boxes, apricots and figs and raisins; sweetness of fresh pine and deal, fragrance of cedarwood, thick headiness of twist tobacco cured in rum. Champagne and Oporto for the luxury trade, cognac, French lace; tangerines and pineapples, rubber and saltpeter, jute and hemp. . . .

Sometimes he’d cadge rides on the locos, down to Poole or Bourne Mouth, across to Bridport, Wey Mouth; or west down to Isca, Lindinis. He went to Londinium once, and northeast again to Camulodunum. The Burrells and Claytons and Fodens ate miles; it was good to sit on the trail load of one of those old trains, the engine looking half a mile away, hooting and jetting steam. Jesse would pant on ahead to pay the toll keepers, stay behind to help them close the gates with their long white-and-red-striped bars. He remembered the rumbling of the many wheels, the thick rising of dust from the rutted trackways. The dust lay on the verges and hedges, making the roads look like white scars crossing the land. Odd nights he’d spend away from home, squatting in some corner of a tavern bar while his father caroused. Sometimes Eli would turn morose, and cuff Jesse upstairs to bed; at others he’d get expansive and sit and spin tall tales about when he himself was a boy, when the locos had shafts in front of their boilers and horses between them to steer. Jesse had been a brake-boy at eight, a steersman at ten for some of the shorter runs. It had been a wrench when he’d been sent away to school.

He wondered what had been in Eli’s mind. “Get some bliddy eddycation” was all the old man had said. “That’s what counts, lad. . . .” Jesse remembered how he’d felt; how he’d wandered in the orchards behind the house, seeing the cherry plums hanging thick on the old trees that were craggy and leaning, just right to climb. The apples, Bramleys and Lanes and Haley’s Orange; Commodore pears hanging like rough-skinned bombs against walls mellow with September sunlight. Always before, Jesse had helped bring in the crop; but not this year, not anymore. His brothers had learned to write and read and figure in the little village school, and that was all; but Jesse had gone to Sherborne, and stayed on to college in the old university town. He’d worked hard at his languages and sciences, and done well; only there had been something wrong. It had taken him years to realize his hands were missing the touch of oiled steel, his nostrils needed the scent of steam. He’d packed up and come home and started work like any other hauler; and Eli had said not a word. No praise, no condemnation. Jesse shook his head. Deep down he’d always known without any possibility of doubt just what he was going to do. At heart, he was a hauler; like Tim, like Dickon, like old Eli. That was all; and it would have to be enough.

The Margaret topped a rise and rumbled onto a downslope. Jesse glanced at the long gauge glass by his knee and instinct more than vision made him open the injectors, valve water into the boiler. The loco had a long chassis; that meant caution descending hills. Too little water in her barrel and the forward tilt would uncover the firebox crown, melt the fusable plug there. All the steamers carried spares, but fitting one was a job to avoid. It meant drawing the fire, a crawl into a baking-hot firebox, an eternity of wrestling overhead in darkness. Jesse had burned his quota of plugs in his time, like any other tyro; it had taught him to keep his firebox covered. Too high a level, on the other hand, meant water reaching the steam outlets, descending from the stack in a scalding cloud. He’d had that happen too.

He spun the valve and the hissing of the injectors stopped. The Margaret lumbered at the slope, increasing her speed. Jesse pulled back on the reversing lever, screwed the brakes on to check the train; heard the altered beat as the loco felt the rising gradient, and gave her back her steam. Light or dark, he knew every foot of the road; a good driver had to.

A solitary gleam ahead of him told him he was nearing Wool. The Margaret shrieked a warning to the village, rumbled through between the shuttered cottages. A straight run now, across the heath to Poole. An hour to the town gates, say another half to get down to the quay. If the traffic holdups weren’t too bad . . . Jesse chafed his hands, worked his shoulders inside his coat. The cold was getting to him now, he could feel it settling in his joints.

He looked out to either side of the road. It was full night, and the Great Heath was pitch black. Far off he saw or thought he saw the glimmer of a will-o’-the-wisp, haunting some stinking bog. A chilling wind moaned in from the emptiness. Jesse listened to the steady pounding of the Burrell and as often before the image of a ship came to him. The Lady Margaret, a speck of light and warmth, forged through the waste like some vessel crossing a vast and inimical ocean.

This was the twentieth century, the age of reason; but the heath was still the home of superstitious fears. The haunt of wolves and witches, werethings and fairies; and the routiers . . . Jesse curled his lip. “Norman bastards” Dickon had called them. It was as accurate a description as any. True, they claimed Norman descent; but in this Catholic England of more than a thousand years after the Conquest bloodlines of Norman, Saxon and original Celt were hopelessly mixed. What distinctions existed were more or less arbitrary, reintroduced in accordance with the racial theories of Gisevius the Great a couple of centuries ago. Most people had at least a smattering of the five tongues of the land; the Norman French of the ruling classes, Latin of the Church, Modern English of commerce and trade, the outdated Middle English and Celtic of the churls. There were other languages, of course; Gaelic, Cornish and Welsh, all fostered by the Church, kept alive centuries after their use had worn thin. But it was good to chop a land piecemeal, set up barriers of language as well as class. “Divide and rule” had long been the policy, unofficially at least, of Rome.

The routiers themselves were surrounded by a mass of legend. There had always been gangs of footpads in the Southwest, probably always would be; they smuggled, they stole, they looted the road trains. Usually, but not invariably, they stopped short at murder. Some years the haulers suffered worse than others; Jesse could remember the Lady Margaret limping home one black night with her steersman dead from a crossbow quarrel, half her train ablaze and old Eli swearing death and destruction. Troops from as far off as Sorviodunum had combed the heath for days, but it had been useless. The gang had dispersed; gone to their homes if Eli’s theories had been correct, turned back into honest God-fearing citizens. There’d been nothing on the heath to find; the rumored strongholds of the outlaws just didn’t exist.

Jesse stoked again, shivering inside his coat. The Margaret carried no guns; you didn’t fight the routiers if they came, not if you wanted to stay alive. At least not by conventional methods; Eli had had his own ideas on the matter, though he hadn’t lived long enough to see them carried out. Jesse set his mouth. If they came, they came; but all they’d get from the firm of Strange they’d be welcome to keep. The business hadn’t been built on softness; in this England, haulage wasn’t a soft trade.

A mile or so ahead a brook, a tributary of the Frome, crossed the road. On this run the haulers usually stopped there to replenish their tanks. There were no waterholes on the heath; the cost of making them would be prohibitive. Water standing in earth hollows would turn brackish and foul, unsafe for the boilers; the splashes would have to be concrete lined, and a job like that would set somebody back half a year’s profits. Cement manufacture was controlled rigidly by Rome, its price prohibitive. The embargo was deliberate, of course; the stuff was far too handy for the erection of quick strongpoints. Over the years there had been enough revolts in the country to teach caution even to the Popes.

Jesse, watching ahead, saw the sheen of water or ice. His hand went to the reversing lever and the train brakes. The Margaret stopped on the crown of a little bridge. Its parapets bore solemn warnings about “ponderous carriages” but few of the haulers paid much attention to them, after dark at least. He swung down and unstrapped the heavy armored hose from the side of the boiler, slung its end over the bridge. Ice broke with a clatter. The water lifts hissed noisily, steam pouring from their vents. A few minutes and the job was done. The Margaret would have made Poole and beyond without trouble; but no hauler worth his salt ever felt truly secure with his tanks less than brimming full. Especially after dark, with the ever-present chance of attack. The steamer was ready now if need be for a long, hard flight.

Jesse recoiled the hose and took the running lamps out of the tender. Four of them—one for each side of the boiler, two for the front axle. He hung them in place, turning the valves over the carbide, lifting the front glasses to sniff for acetylene. The lamps threw clear white fans of light ahead and to each side, making the frost crystals on the road surface sparkle. Jesse moved off again. The cold was bitter; he guessed several degrees of frost already, and the worst of the night was still to come. This was the part of the journey where you started to think of the cold as a personal enemy. It caught at your throat, drove glassy claws into your back; it was a thing to be fought, continuously, with the body and brain. Cold could stun a man, freeze him on the footplate till his fire burned low and he lost steam and hadn’t the sense to stoke. It had happened before; more than one hauler had lost his life like that out on the road. It would happen again.

The Lady Margaret bellowed steadily; the wind moaned in across the heath.

On the landward side, the houses and cottages of Poole huddled behind a massive rampart and ditch. Along the fortifications, cressets burned; their light was visible for miles across the waste ground. The Margaret raised the line of twinkling sparks, closed with them slowly. In sight of the West Gate, Jesse spun the brake wheel and swore. Stretching out from the walls, dimly visible in torchlight, was a confusion of traffic: Burrells, Avelings, Claytons, Fowlers, each loco with a massive train. Officials scurried about; steam plumed into the air; the many engines made a muted thundering. The Lady Margaret slowed, jetting white clouds like exhaled breath, edged into the turmoil alongside a ten-horse Fowler liveried in the colors of the Merchant Adventurers.

Jesse was fifty yards from the gates, and the jam looked as if it would take an hour or more to sort out. The air was full of din; the noise of the engines, shouts from the steersmen and drivers, the bawling of town marshals and traffic wardens. Bands of Pope’s Angels wound between the massive wheels, chanting carols and holding up their cups for offerings. Jesse hailed a harassed-looking peeler. The sergeant grounded his halberd, looked back at the Lady Margaret’s load and grinned.

“Bishop Blaize’s benison again, friend?”

Jesse grunted an affirmative; alongside, the Fowler let fly a deafening series of hoots.

“Belay that,” roared the policeman. “What’ve ye got up there that needs so much hurry?”

The driver, a little sparrow of a man muffled in scarf and greatcoat, spat a cigarette butt overboard. “Shellfish for ‘is ‘oliness,” he quipped. “They’re burning Rome tonight. . . .” The story of Pope Orlando dining on oysters while his mercenaries sacked Florence had already passed into legend.

“Any more of that,” shouted the sergeant furiously, “and you’ll find the gates shut in your face. You’ll lie on the heath all night, and the routiers can have their pick of you. Now roll that pile of junk—roll it, I say. . . .”

A gap had opened ahead; the Fowler thundered contemptuously and moved into it. Jesse followed. An age of shunting and hooting and he was finally past the bottleneck, guiding his train down the long main street of Poole.

Strange and Sons maintained a bonded store on the quay, not far from the old customs house. The Margaret threaded her way to it, inching between piles of merchandise that had overflowed from loading bays. The docks were busy for so late in the season; Jesse passed a Scottish collier, a big German freighter, a Frenchman; a New Worlder, an ex-slaver by her raking lines, a handsome Swedish clipper still defiantly under sail; and an old Dutch tramp, the Groningen, that he knew to be still equipped with the antiquated and curious mercury boilers. He swung his train eventually into the company warehouse, nearly an hour overdue.

The return load had already been made up; Jesse ditched the freight cars thankfully, handed over the manifest to the firm’s agent and backed onto the new haul. He saw again to the securing of the trail load, built steam and headed out. The cold was deep inside him now, the windows of the waterfront pubs tempting with their promise of warmth, drink and hot food; but tonight the Margaret wouldn’t lie in Poole. It was nearly eight of the clock by the time she reached the ramparts, and the press of traffic was gone. The gates were opened by a surly-faced sergeant; Jesse guided his train through to the open road. The moon was high now, riding a clear sky, and the cold was intense.

A long drag southwest, across the top of Poole harbor to where the Wareham turn branched left from the road to Durnovaria. Jesse coaxed the cars around it. He gave the Margaret her head, clocking twenty miles an hour on the open road. Then into Wareham, the awkward bend by the railway crossing; past the Black Bear with its monstrous carved sign and over the Frome where it ran into the sea, limning the northern boundary of Purbeck Island. After that the heaths again: Stoborough, Slepe, Middlebere, Norden, empty and vast, full of droning wind. Finally a twinkle of light showed ahead, high off the road and to the right; the Margaret thundered into Corvesgeat, the ancient pass through the Purbeck hills. Foursquare in the cutting and commanding the road, the great castle of Corfe squatted atop its mound, windows blazing light like eyes. My Lord of Purbeck must be in residence then, receiving his guests for Christmas.

The steamer circled the high flanks of the motte, climbed to the village beyond. She crossed the square, wheels and engine reflecting a hollow clamor from the front of the Greyhound Inn, climbed again through the long main street to where the heath was waiting once more, flat and desolate, haunted by wind and stars.

The Swanage road. Jesse, doped by the cold, fought the idea that the Margaret had been running through this void fuming her breath away into blackness like some spirit cursed and bound in a frozen hell. He would have welcomed any sign of life, even of the routiers; but there was nothing. Just the endless bitterness of the wind, the darkness stretching out each side of the road. He swung his mittened hands, stamping on the footplate, turning to see the tall shoulders of the load swaying against the night, way back the faint reflection of the tail lamps. He’d long since given up cursing himself for an idiot. He should have laid up at Poole, moved out again with the dawn; he knew that well enough. But tonight he felt obscurely that he was not driving but being driven.

He valved water through the preheater, stoked, valved again. One day they’d swap these solid burners for oil-fueled machines. The units had been available for years now; but oil firing was still a theory in limbo, awaiting the Papal verdict. Might be a decision next year, or the year after; or maybe not at all. The ways of Mother Church were devious, not to be questioned by the herd.

Old Eli would have fitted oil burners and damned the priests black to their faces, but his drivers and steersmen would have balked at the excommunication that would certainly have followed. Strange and Sons had bowed the knee there, not for the first time and not for the last. Jesse found himself thinking about his father again while the Margaret slogged upward, back into the hills. It was odd; but now he felt he could talk to the old man. Now he could explain his hopes, his fears. . . . Only now was too late; because Eli was dead and gone, six foot of Dorset muck on his chest. Was that the way of the world? Did people always feel they could talk, and talk, when it was just that bit too late?

The big mason’s yard outside Long Tun Matravers. The piles of stone thrust up, dimly visible in the light of the steamer’s lamps, breaking at last the deadly emptiness of the heath. Jesse hooted a warning; the voice of the Burrell rushed across the housetops, mournful and huge. The place was deserted, like a town of the dead. On the right the King’s Head showed dim lights; its sign creaked uneasily, rocking in the wind. The Margaret’s wheels hit cobbles, slewed; Jesse spun the brakes on, snapping back the reversing lever to cut the power from the pistons. The frost had gathered thickly here; in places the road was like glass. At the crest of the hill into Swanage he twisted the control that locked his differentials. The loco steadied and edged down, groping for her haven. The wind skirled, lifting a spray of snow crystals across her headlights.

The roofs of the little town seemed to cluster under their mantle of frost. Jesse hooted again, the sound enormous between the houses. A gang of kids appeared from somewhere, ran yelling alongside the train. Ahead was a crossroads, and the yellow lamps on the front of the George Hotel. Jesse aimed the loco for the yard entrance, edged forward. The smokestack brushed the passageway overhead. Here was where he needed a mate; the steam from the Burrell, blowing back in the confined space, obscured his vision. The children had vanished; he gentled the reversing lever, easing in. The exhaust beats thrashed back from the walls, then the Margaret was clear, rumbling across the yard. The place had been enlarged years back to take the road trains; Jesse pulled across between a Garrett and a six-horse Clayton and Shuttleworth, neutralized the reversing lever and closed the regulator. The pounding stopped at last.

The hauler rubbed his face and stretched. The shoulders of his coat were beaded with ice; he brushed at it and got down stiffly, shoved the scotches under the engine’s wheels, valved off her lamps. The hotel yard was deserted, the wind booming in the surrounding roofs; the boiler of the loco seethed gently. Jesse blew her excess steam, banked his fire and shut the dampers, stood on the front axle to set a bucket upside down atop the chimney. The Margaret would lie the night now safely. He stood back and looked at the bulk of her still radiating warmth, the faint glint of light from round the ash pan. He took his haversack from the cab and walked to the George to check in.

They showed him his room and left him. He used the loo, washed his face and hands and left the hotel. A few yards down the street the windows of a pub glowed crimson, light seeping through the drawn curtains. Its sign proclaimed it the Mermaid Inn. He trudged down the alley that ran alongside the bars. The back room was full of talk, the air thick with the fumes of tobacco. The Mermaid was a haulers’ pub; Jesse saw half a score of men he knew: Tom Skinner from Powerstock, Jeff Holroyd from Wey Mouth, two of old Serjeantson’s boys. On the road, news travels fast; they crowded round him, talking against each other. He grunted answers, pushing his way to the bar. Yes, his father had had a sudden hemorrhage; no, he hadn’t lived long after it. Five of the clock the next afternoon . . . He pulled his coat open to reach his wallet, gave his order, took the pint and the double Scotch. A poker, thrust glowing into the tankard, mulled the ale; creamy froth spilled down the sides of the pot. The spirit burned Jesse’s throat, made his eyes sting. He was fresh off the road; the others made room for him as he crouched knees apart in front of the fire. He swigged at the pint, feeling heat invade his crotch, move into his stomach. Somehow his mind could still hear the pounding of the Burrell; the vibration of her wheel was still in his fingers. Time later for talk and questioning; first the warmth. A man had to be warm.

She managed somehow to cross and stand behind him, spoke before he knew she was there. He stopped chafing his hands and straightened awkwardly, conscious now of his height and bulk.

“Hello, Jesse . . . “

Did she know? The thought always came. All those years back when he’d named the Burrell; she’d been a gawky stripling then, all legs and eyes, but she was the Lady he’d meant. She’d been the ghost that haunted him those hot, adolescent nights, trailing her scent among the scents of the garden flowers. He’d been on the steamer when Eli took that monstrous bet, sat and cried like a fool because when the Burrell breasted the last slope she wasn’t winning fifty golden guineas for his father, she was panting out the glory of Margaret. But Margaret wasn’t a stripling now, not anymore; the lamps put bright highlights on her brown hair, her eyes flickered at him, the mouth quirked. . . .

He grunted at her. “Evenin’, Margaret . . .”

She brought him his meal, set a corner table, sat with him awhile as he ate. That made his breath tighten in his throat; he had to force himself to remember it meant nothing: After all, you don’t have a father die every week of your life. She wore a chunky costume ring with a bright blue stone; she had a habit of turning it restlessly between her fingers as she talked. The fingers were thin, with flat, polished nails, the hands wide across the knuckles like the hands of a boy. He watched her hands now touching her hair, drumming at the table, stroking the ash of a cigarette sideways into a saucer. He could imagine them sweeping, dusting, cleaning, as well as doing the other things, the secret things women must do to themselves.

She asked him what he’d brought down. She always asked that. He said “Lady” briefly, using the jargon of the haulers. Wondering again if she ever watched the Burrell, if she knew she was the Lady Margaret; and whether it would matter to her if she did. Then she brought him another drink and said it was on the house, told him she must go back to the bar now and that she’d see him again.

He watched her through the smoke, laughing with the men. She had an odd laugh, a kind of flat chortle that drew back the top lip and showed the teeth while the eyes watched and mocked. She was a good barmaid, was Margaret. Her father was an old hauler; he’d run the house this twenty years. His wife had died a couple of seasons back, the other daughters had married and moved out but Margaret had stayed. She knew a soft touch when she saw one; leastways that was the talk among the haulers. But that was crazy; running a pub wasn’t an easy life. The long hours seven days a week, the polishing and scrubbing, mending and sewing and cooking—though they did have a woman in the mornings for the rough work. Jesse knew that like he knew most other things about his Margaret. He knew her shoe size, and that her birthday was in May; he knew she was twenty-four inches around the waist and that she liked Chanel and had a dog called Joe. And he knew she’d sworn never to marry; she’d said running the Mermaid had taught her as much about men as she wanted to learn; five thousand down on the counter would buy her services but nothing else. She’d never met anybody that could raise the half of that; the ban was impossible. But maybe she hadn’t said it at all; the village air swam with gossip, and among themselves the haulers yacked like washerwomen.

Jesse pushed his plate away. Abruptly he felt the rising of a black self-contempt. Margaret was the reason for nearly everything; she was why he’d detoured miles out of his way, pulled his train to Swanage for a couple of boxes of iced fish that wouldn’t repay the hauling back. Well, he’d wanted to see her and he’d seen her. She’d talked to him, sat by him; she wouldn’t come to him again. Now he could go. He remembered again the raw sides of a grave, the spattering of earth on Eli’s coffin. That was what waited for him, for all God’s so-called children; only he’d wait for his death alone. He wanted to drink now, wash out the image in a warm brown haze of alcohol. But not here, not here . . . He headed for the door.

He collided with the stranger, growled an apology, walked on. He felt his arm caught; he turned back, stared into liquid brown eyes set in a straight-nosed, rakishly handsome face. “No,” said the newcomer. “No, I don’ believe it. By all tha’s unholy, Jesse Strange . . .”

For a moment the other’s jaunty fringe of a beard baffled him; then Jesse started to grin in spite of himself. “Colin,” he said slowly. “Col de la Haye . . .”

Col brought his other arm around to grip Jesse’s biceps. “Well, hell,” he said. “Jesse, you’re lookin’ well. This calls f’r a drink, ol’ boy. What you bin doin’ with yourself? Hell, you’re lookin’ well...”

They leaned in a corner of the bar, full pints in front of them. “God damn, Jesse, tha’s lousy luck. Los’ your ol’ man, eh? Tha’s rotten. . . .” He lifted his tankard. “To you, ol’ Jesse. Happier days . . .”

At college in Sherborne Jesse and Col had been fast friends. It had been the attraction of opposites: Jesse slow-talking, studious and quiet; de la Haye the rake, the man-about-town. Col was the son of a west country businessman, a feminist and rogue at large; his tutors had always sworn that like the Fielding character he’d been born to be hanged. After college Jesse had lost touch with him. He’d heard vaguely Col had given up the family business; importing and warehousing just hadn’t been fast enough for him. He’d apparently spent a time as a strolling jongleur, working on a book of ballads that had never got written, had six months on the boards in Londinium before being invalided home the victim of a brawl in a brothel. “A’d show you the scar,” said Col, grinning hideously, “but it’s a bit bloody awkward in mixed comp’ny, ol’ boy. . . .” He’d later become, of all things, a hauler for a firm in Isca. That hadn’t lasted long; halfway through his first week he’d howled into Bristol with an eight-horse Clayton and Shuttleworth, unreeled his hose and drained the corporation horse trough in town center before the peelers ran him in. The Clayton hadn’t quite exploded but it had been a near go. He’d tried again, up in Aquae Sulis, where he wasn’t so well known; that time he lasted six months before a broken gauge glass stripped most of the skin from his ankles. De la Haye had moved on, seeking, as he put it, “less lethal employment.” Jesse chuckled and shook his head. “So what be ‘ee doin’ now?”

The insolent eyes laughed back at him. “A’ trade,” said Col breezily. “A’ take what comes; a li’l here . . . Times are hard, we must all live how we can. Drink up, ol’ Jesse, the next one’s mine . . . .”

They chewed over old times while Margaret served up pints and took the money, raising her eyebrows at Col. The night de la Haye, pot-valiant, had sworn to strip his professor’s cherished walnut tree... “A’ remember that like it was yes’day,” said Col happily. “Lovely ol’ moon there was, bright as day. . . .” Jesse had held the ladder while Col climbed; but before he reached the branches the tree was shaken as if by a hurricane. “Nuts comin’ down like bloody hailstones,” chortled Col. “Y’ remember, Jesse, y’ must remember. . . . An’ there was that—that bloody ol’ rogue of a peeler Toby Warrilow sittin’ up there with his big ol’ boots stuck out, shakin’ the hell out of that bloody tree. . .” For weeks after that, even de la Haye had been able to do nothing wrong in the eyes of the law; and a whole dormitory had gorged themselves on walnuts for nearly a month.

There’d been the business of the two nuns stolen from Sherborne Convent; they’d tried to pin that on de la Haye and hadn’t quite managed it, but it had been an open secret who was responsible. Girls in Holy Orders had been removed odd times before, but only Col would have taken two at once. And the affair of the Poet and Peasant. The landlord of that inn, thanks to some personal quirk, kept a large ape chained in the stables; Col, evicted after a singularly rowdy night, had managed to slit the creature’s collar. The godforsaken animal caused troubles and panics for a month; men went armed, women stayed indoors. The thing had finally been shot by a militiaman who caught it in his room drinking a bowl of soup.

“So what you goin’ to do now?” asked de la Haye, swigging back his sixth or seventh beer. “Is your firm now, no?”

“Aye.” Jesse brooded, hands clasped, chin touching his knuckles. “Goin’ to run it, I guess. . . .”

Col draped an arm around his shoulders. “You be O.K.,” he said. “You be O.K., pal; why so sad? Hey, tell you what. You get a li’l girl now, you be all right then. Tha’s what you need, ol’ Jesse; a’ known the signs.” He punched his friend in the ribs and roared with laughter. “Keep you warm nights better’n a stack of extra blankets. An’ stop you getting fat, no?”

Jesse looked faintly startled. “Dunno ‘bout that. . . .”

“Ah, hell,” said de la Haye. “Tha’s the thing, though. Ah, there’s nothin’ like it. Mmmmyowwhh . . .” He wagged his hips, shut his eyes, drew shapes with his hands, contrived to look rapturous and lascivious at the same time. “Is no trouble now, ol’ Jesse,” he said. “You loaded now, you know that? Hell, man, you’re eligible. . . . They come runnin’ when they hear, you have to fight ‘em off with a—a pushpole couplin’, no?” He dissolved again in merriment.

Eleven of the clock came round far too quickly. Jesse struggled into his coat, followed Col up the alley beside the pub. It was only when the cold air hit him he realized how stoned he was. He stumbled against de la Haye, then ran into the wall. They reeled along the street laughing, parted company finally at the George. Col, roaring out promises, vanished into the night.

Jesse leaned against the Margaret’s rear wheel, head laid back on its struts, and felt the beer fume in his brain. When he closed his eyes, a slow movement began; the ground seemed to tilt forward and back under his feet. Man, but that last hour had been good. It had been college all over again; he chuckled helplessly, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. De la Haye was a no-good bastard, all right, but a nice guy, nice guy. . . . Jesse opened his eyes blearily, looked up at the road train. Then he moved carefully, hand over hand, along the engine, to test her boiler temperature with his palm. He hauled himself to the footplate, opened the firebox doors, spread coal, checked the dampers and water gauge. Everything secure. He tacked across the yard, feeling the odd snow crystals sting his face.

He fiddled with his key in the lock, swung the door open. His room was black and icily cold. He lit the single lantern, left its glass ajar. The candle flame shivered in a draft. He dropped across the bed heavily, lay watching the one point of yellow light sway forward and back. Best get some sleep, make an early start tomorrow. . . . His haversack lay where he’d slung it on the chair but he lacked the strength of will to unpack it now. He shut his eyes.

Almost instantly the images began to swirl. Somewhere in his head the Burrell was pounding; he flexed his hands, feeling the wheel rim thrill between them. That was how the locos got you, after a while; throbbing and throbbing hour on hour till the noise became a part of you, got in the blood and brain so you couldn’t live without it. Up at dawn, out on the road, driving till you couldn’t stop; Londinium, Aquae Sulis, Isca; stone from the Purbeck quarries, coal from Kimmeridge, wool and grain and worsted, flour and wine, candlesticks, Madonnas, shovels, butter scoops, powder and shot, gold, lead, tin; out on contract to the Army, the Church. . . . Cylinder cocks, dampers, regulator, reversing lever; the high iron shaking of the footplate . . .

He moved restlessly, muttering. The colors in his brain grew sharper. Maroon and gold of livery, red saliva on his father’s chin, flowers bright against fresh earth; steam and lamplight, flames, the hard sky clamped against the hills.

His mind toyed with memories of Col, hearing sentences, hearing him laugh; the little intake of breath, squeaky and distinctive, then the sharp machine-gun barking while he screwed his eyes shut and hunched his shoulders, pounded with his fist on the counter. Col had promised to look him up in Durnovaria, reeled away shouting he wouldn’t forget. But he would forget; he’d lose himself, get involved with some woman, forget the whole business, forget the meeting. Because Col wasn’t like Jesse. No planning and waiting for de la Haye, no careful working out of odds; he lived for the moment, vividly. He would never change.

The locos thundered, cranks whirling, crossheads dipping, brass gleaming and tinkling in the wind.

Jesse half sat up, shaking his head. The lamp burned steady now, its flame thin and tall, just vibrating slightly at the tip. The wind boomed, carrying with it the striking of a church clock. He listened, counting. Twelve strokes. He frowned. He’d slept, and dreamed; he’d thought it was nearly dawn. But the long, hard night had barely begun. He lay back with a grunt, feeling drunk but queerly wide awake. He couldn’t take his beer anymore; he’d had the horrors. Maybe there were more to come.

He started revolving idly the things de la Haye had said. The crack about getting a woman. That was crazy, typical of Col. No trouble maybe for him, but for Jesse there had only ever been one little girl. And she was out of reach.

His mind, spinning, seemed to check and stop quite still. Now, he told himself irritably, forget it. You’ve got troubles enough, let it go . . but a part of him stubbornly refused to obey. It turned the pages of mental ledgers, added, subtracted, thrust the totals insistently into his consciousness. He swore, damning de la Haye. The idea, once implanted, wouldn’t leave him. It would haunt him now for weeks, maybe years.

He gave himself up, luxuriously, to dreaming. She knew all about him, that was certain; women knew such things unfailingly. He’d given himself away a hundred times, a thousand; little things, a look, a gesture, a word, were all it needed. He’d kissed her once, years back. Only the one time; that was maybe why it had stayed so sharp and bright in his mind, why he could still relive it. It had been a nearly accidental thing; a New Year’s Eve, the pub bright and noisy, a score or more of locals seeing the new season in. The church clock striking, the same clock that marked the hours now, doors in the village street popping undone, folk eating mince pies and drinking wine, shouting to each other across the dark, kissing; and she’d put down the tray she was holding, watching him. “Let’s not be left out, Jesse,” she said. “Us too . . .”

He remembered the sudden thumping of his heart, like the fussing of a loco when her driver gives her steam. She’d turned her face up to him, he’d seen the lips parting; then she was pushing hard, using her tongue, making a little noise deep in her throat. He wondered if she made the sound every time automatically, like a cat purring when you rubbed its fur. And somehow too she’d guided his hand to her breast; it lay cupped there, hot under her dress, burning his palm. He’d tightened his arm across her back then, pulling her onto her toes till she wriggled away gasping. “Whoosh,” she said. “Well done, Jesse. Ouch . . . well done . . .” Laughing at him again, patting her hair; and all past dreams and future visions had met in one melting point of Time.

He remembered how he’d stoked the loco all the long haul back, tireless, while the wind sang and her wheels crashed through a glowing landscape of jewels. The images were back now; he saw Margaret at a thousand sweet moments, patting, touching, undressing, laughing. And he remembered, suddenly, a haulers’ wedding; the ill-fated marriage of his brother Micah to a girl from Sturminster Newton. The engines burnished to their canopies, beribboned and flag-draped, each separate plank of their flatbed trailers gleaming white and scoured; drifts of confetti like bright-colored snow, the priest standing laughing with his glass of wine, old Eli, hair plastered miraculously flat, incongruous white collar clamped round his neck, beaming and red-faced, waving from the Margaret’s footplate a quart of beer. Then, equally abruptly, the scene was gone; and Eli, in his Sunday suit, with his pewter mug and his polished hair, was whirled away into a dark space of wind.

“Father . . !”

Jesse sat up, panting. The little room showed dim, shadows flicking as the candle flame guttered. Outside, the clock chimed for twelve-thirty. He stayed still, squatting on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands. No weddings for him, no gayness. Tomorrow he must go back to a dark and still mourning house; to his father’s unsolved worries and the family business and the same ancient, dreary round.

In the darkness, the image of Margaret danced like a solitary spark.

He was horrified at what his body was doing. His feet found the flight of wooden stairs, stumbled down them. He felt the cold air in the yard bite at his face. He tried to reason with himself but it seemed his legs would no longer obey him. He felt a sudden gladness, a lightening. You didn’t stand the pain of an aching tooth forever; you took yourself to the barber, changed the nagging for a worse quick agony and then for blessed peace. He’d stood this long enough; now it too was to be finished. Instantly, with no more waiting. He told himself ten years of hoping and dreaming, of wanting dumbly like an animal—that has to count. He asked himself: What had he expected her to do? She wouldn’t come running to him pleading, throw herself across his feet; women weren’t made like that; she had her dignity too... He tried to remember when the gulf between him and Margaret had been fixed. He told himself never; by no token, no word. . . He’d never given her a chance. What if she’d been waiting too all these years? Just waiting to be asked . . . It had to be true. He knew, glowingly, it was true. As he tacked along the street, he started to sing.

The watchman loomed from a doorway, a darker shadow, gripping a halberd short.

“You all right, sir?”

The voice, penetrating as if from a distance, brought Jesse up short. He gulped, nodded, grinned. “Yeah. Yeah, sure . . .” He jerked a thumb behind him. “Brought a . . . train down. Strange, Durnovaria . . .”

The man stood back. His attitude said plainly enough, “One o’ they beggars . . .” He said gruffly, “Best get along then, sir, don’t want to have to run ‘ee in. ‘Tis well past twelve o’ the clock, y’ know. . . .”

“On m’ way, officer,” said Jesse. “On m’ way . . .” A dozen steps along the street, he turned back. “Officer . . . you m-married?”

The voice was uncompromising. “Get along now, sir. . .” Its owner vanished in blackness.

The little town, asleep. Frost glinting on the rooftops, puddles in the road ruts frozen to iron, houses shuttered blind. Somewhere an owl called; or was it the noise of a far-off engine, out there somewhere on the road? . . . The Mermaid was silent, no lights showing. Jesse hammered at the door. Nothing. He knocked louder. A light flickered on across the street. He started to sob for breath. He’d done it all wrong; she wouldn’t open. They’d call the watch instead. . . . But she’d know, she’d know who was knocking, women always knew. He beat at the wood, terrified. “Margaret . . .”

A shifting glint of yellow; then the door opened with a suddenness that sent him sprawling. He straightened up, still breathing hard, trying to focus his eyes. She was standing holding a wrap across her throat, hair tousled. She held a lamp high; then, “You . . . !” She shut the door with a thump, snatched the bolt across and turned to face him. She said in a low, furious voice, “What the devil do you think you’re doing?”

He backed up. “I . . .” he said, “I . . .” He saw her face change. “Jesse,” she said, “what’s wrong? Are you hurt? What happened?”

“I . . . Sorry,” he said. “Had to see you, Margaret. Couldn’t leave it no more. . . .”

“Hush,” she said. Hissed. “You’ll wake my father, if you haven’t done it already. What are you talking about?”

He leaned on the wall, trying to stop the spinning in his head. “Five thousand,” he said thickly. “It’s . . . nothing, Margaret. Not anymore. Margaret, I’m . . . rich, God help me. It don’t matter no more. . . .”

“What?”

“On the roads,” he said desperately. “The . . . haulers’ talk. They said you wanted five thousand. Margaret, I can do ten. . . .”

A dawning comprehension. And for God’s sake, she was starting to laugh. “Jesse Strange,” she said, shaking her head. “What are you trying to say?”

And it was out, at last. “I love you, Margaret,” he said simply. “Reckon I always have. And I . . . want you to be my wife.”

She stopped smiling then, stood quite still and let her eyes close as if suddenly she was very tired. Then she reached forward quietly and took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “Just for a little while. Come and sit down.”

In the back bar the firelight was dying. She sat by the hearth curled like a cat, watching him, her eyes big in the dimness; and Jesse talked. He told her everything he’d never imagined himself speaking. How he’d wanted her, and hoped, and known it was no use; how he’d waited so many years he’d nearly forgotten a time when she hadn’t filled his mind. She stayed still, holding his fingers, stroking the back of his hand with her thumb, thinking and brooding. He told her how she’d be mistress of the house and have the gardens, the orchards of cherry plums, the rose terraces, the servants, her drawing account in the bank; how she’d have nothing to do anymore ever but be Margaret Strange, his wife.

The silence lengthened when he’d finished, till the ticking of the big bar clock sounded loud. She stirred her foot in the warmth of the ashes, wriggling her toes; he gripped her instep softly, spanning it with finger and thumb. “I do love you, Margaret,” he said. “I truly do. . . .”

She still stayed quiet, staring at nothing visible, eyes opaque. She’d let the shawl fall off her shoulders; he could see her breasts, the nipples pushing against the flimsiness of the nightdress. She frowned, pursed her mouth, looked back at him. “Jesse,” she said, “when I’ve finished talking, will you do something for me? Will you promise?”

Quite suddenly, he was no longer drunk. The whirling and the warmth faded, leaving him shivering. Somewhere he was sure the loco hooted again. “Yes, Margaret,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

She came and sat by him. “Move up,” she whispered. “You’re taking all the room.” She saw the shivering; she put her hand inside his jacket, rubbed softly. “Stop it,” she said. “Don’t do that, Jesse. Please . . .”

The spasm passed; she pulled her arm back, flicked at the shawl, gathered her dress around her knees. “When I’ve said what I’m going to, will you promise to go away? Very quietly, and not . . . make trouble for me? Please, Jesse. I did let you in. . . .”

“That’s all right,” he said. “Don’t worry, Margaret, that’s all right.” His voice, talking, sounded like the voice of a stranger. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say; but listening to it meant he could stay close just a little longer. He felt suddenly he knew what it would be like to be given a cigarette just before you were hanged; how every puff would mean another second’s life.

She twined her fingers together, looked down at the carpet. “I . . . want to get this just right,” she said. “I want to . . . say it properly, Jesse, because I don’t want to hurt you. I . . . like you too much for that.

“I . . . knew about it, of course, I’ve known all the time. That was why I let you in. Because I . . . like you very much, Jesse, and didn’t want to hurt. And now you see I’ve . . . trusted you, so you mustn’t let me down. I can’t marry you, Jesse, because I don’t love you. I never will. Can you understand that? It’s terribly hard knowing . . . well, how you feel and all that and still having to say it to you but I’ve got to because it just wouldn’t work. I . . . knew this was going to happen sometime; I used to lie awake at night thinking about it, thinking all about you, honestly I did, but it wasn’t any good. It just . . . wouldn’t work, that’s all. So . . . no. I’m terribly sorry but . . . no.”

How can a man balance his life on a dream, how can he be such a fool? How can he live when the dream gets knocked apart? . . .

She saw his face alter and reached for his hand again. “Jesse, please . . . I think you’ve been terribly sweet waiting all this time and I . . . know about the money, I know why you said that, I know you just wanted to give me a . . . good life. It was terribly sweet of you to think like that about me and I . . . know you’d do it. But it just wouldn’t work. . . . Oh, God, isn’t this awful. . . .”

You try to wake from what you know is a dream, and you can’t. Because you’re awake already, this is the dream they call life. You move in the dream and talk, even when something inside you wants to twist and die. He rubbed her knee, feeling the firm smoothness. “Margaret,” he said. “I don’t want you to rush into anything. Look, in a couple of months I shall be comin’ back through. . . .”

She bit her lip. “I knew you were . . . going to say that as well. But . . . no, Jesse. It isn’t any use thinking about it; I’ve tried to and it wouldn’t work. I don’t want to . . . have to go through this again and hurt you all over another time. Please don’t ask me again. Ever.”

He thought dully: He couldn’t buy her. Couldn’t win her, and couldn’t buy. Because he wasn’t man enough, and that was the simple truth. Just not quite what she wanted. That was what he’d known all along, deep down, but he’d never faced it; he’d kissed his pillows nights, and whispered love for Margaret, because he hadn’t dared bring the truth into the light. And now he’d got the rest of time to try and forget . . . this.

She was still watching him. She said, “Please understand . . . “

And he felt better. God preserve him, some weight seemed to shift suddenly and let him talk. “Margaret,” he said, “this sounds damn stupid, don’t know how to say it. . . .”

“Try . . . “

He said, “I don’t want to . . . hold you down. It’s . . . selfish, like somehow having a . . . bird in a cage, owning it. . . . Only I didn’t think on it that way before. Reckon I . . . really love you because I don’t want that to happen to you. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt. Don’t you worry, Margaret, it’ll be all right. It’ll be all right now. Reckon I’ll just . . . well, get out o’ your way like. . . .”

She put a hand to her head. “God, this is awful. I knew it would happen. . . . Jesse, don’t just . . . well, vanish. You know, go off an’ . . . never come back. You see I . . . like you so very much, as a friend, I should feel terrible if you did that. Can’t things be like they . . . were before; I mean can’t you just sort of . . . come in and see me, like you used to? Don’t go right away, please. . . .”

Even that, he thought. God, I’ll do even that.

She stood up. “And now go. Please . . .”

He nodded dumbly. “It’ll be all right. . . .”

“Jesse,” she said. “I don’t want to . . . get in any deeper. But . . .” She kissed him, quickly. There was no feeling there this time. No fire. He stood until she let him go; then he walked quickly to the door.

He heard, dimly, his boots ringing on the street. Somewhere a long way off from him was a vague sighing, a susurration; could have been the blood in his ears, could have been the sea. The house doorways and the dark-socketed windows seemed to lurch toward him of their own accord, fall away behind. He felt as a ghost might feel grappling with the concept of death, trying to assimilate an idea too big for its consciousness. There was no Margaret now, not anymore. No Margaret. Now he must leave the grown-up world where people married and loved and mated and mattered to each other, go back for all time to his child’s universe of oil and steel. And the days would come, and the days would go, till on one of them he would die.

He crossed the road outside the George; then he was walking under the yard entrance, climbing the stairs, opening again the door of his room. Putting out the light, smelling Goody Thompson’s fresh-sour sheets.

The bed felt cold as a tomb.

The fishwives woke him, hawking their wares through the streets. Somewhere there was a clanking of milk churns; voices crisped in the cold air of the yard. He lay still, face down, and there was an empty time before the cold new fall of grief. He remembered he was dead; he got up and dressed, not feeling the icy air on his body. He washed, shaved the blue-chinned face of a stranger, went out to the Burrell. Her livery glowed in weak sunlight, topped by a thin bright icing of snow. He opened her firebox, raked the embers of the fire and fed it. He felt no desire to eat; he went down to the quay instead, haggled absentmindedly for the fish he was going to buy, arranged for its delivery to the George. He saw the boxes stowed in time for late service at the church, stayed on for confession. He didn’t go near the Mermaid; he wanted nothing now but to leave, get back on the road. He checked the Lady Margaret again, polished her nameplates, hubs, flywheel boss. Then he remembered seeing something in a shop window, something he’d intended to buy: a little tableau, the Virgin, Joseph, the Shepherds kneeling, the Christchild in the manger. He knocked at the shop door, bought it and had it packed; his mother set great store by such things, and it would look well on the sideboard over Christmas.

By then it was lunchtime. He made himself eat, swallowing food that tasted like string. He nearly paid his bill before he remembered. Now it went on account; the account of Strange and Sons of Dorset. After the meal he went to one of the bars of the George, drank to try and wash the sour taste from his mouth. Subconsciously he found himself waiting; for footsteps, a remembered voice, some message from Margaret to tell him not to go, she’d changed her mind. It was a bad state of mind to get into, but he couldn’t help himself. No message came.

It was nearly three of the clock before he walked out to the Burrell and built steam. He uncoupled the Margaret and turned her, shackled the load to the push-pole lug and backed it into the road. A difficult feat, but he did it without thinking. He disconnected the loco, brought her around again, hooked on, shoved the reversing lever forward and inched open on the regulator. The rumbling of the wheels started at last. He knew once clear of Purbeck he wouldn’t come back. Couldn’t, despite his promise. He’d send Tim or one of the others. The thing he had inside him wouldn’t stay dead; if he saw her again it would have to be killed all over. And once was more than enough.

He had to pass the pub. The chimney smoked, but there was no other sign of life. The train crashed behind him, thunderously obedient. Fifty yards on, he used the whistle, over and again, waking Margaret’s huge iron voice, filling the street with steam. Childish, but he couldn’t stop himself. Then he was clear. Swan-age dropping away behind as he climbed toward the heath. He built up speed. He was late; in that other world he seemed to have left so long ago, a man called Dickon would be worrying.

Way off on the left a semaphore stood stark against the sky. He hooted to it, the two pips followed by the long call that all the haulers used. For a moment the thing stayed dead; then he saw the arms flip an acknowledgment. Out there he knew Zeiss glasses would be trained on the Burrell. The Guildsmen had answered; soon a message would be streaking north along the little local towers. The Lady Margaret, locomotive, Strange and Sons, Durnovaria; out of Swanage routed for Corvesgeat, fifteen thirty hours. All well . . .

Night came quickly; night, and the burning frost. Jesse swung west well before Wareham, cutting straight across the heath. The Burrell thundered steadily, gripping the road with her seven-foot drive wheels, leaving thin wraiths of steam behind her in the dark. He stopped once, to fill his tanks and light the lamps, then pushed on again into the heathland. A light mist or frost smoke was forming now; it clung to the hollows of the rough ground, glowing oddly in the light from the side lamps. The wind soughed and threatened. North of the Purbecks, off the narrow coastal strip, the winter could strike quick and hard; come morning the heath could be impassable, the trackways lost under two feet or more of snow.

An hour out from Swanage, and the Margaret still singing her tireless song of power. Jesse thought, blearily, that she at least kept faith. The semaphores had lost her now in the dark; there would be no more messages till she made her base. He could imagine old Dickon standing at the yard gate under the flaring cressets, worried, cocking his head to catch the beating of an exhaust miles away. The loco passed through Wool. Soon be home now; home, to whatever comfort remained...

The boarder took him nearly by surprise. The train had slowed near the crest of a rise when the man ran alongside, lunged for the footplate step. Jesse heard the scrape of a shoe on the road; some sixth sense warned him of movement in the darkness. The shovel was up, swinging for the stranger’s head, before it was checked by an agonized yelp. “Hey’ ol’ boy, don’ you know your friends?”

Jesse, half off balance, grunted and grabbled at the steering. “Col. What the hell are you doin’ here?”

De la Haye, still breathing hard, grinned at him in the reflection of the sidelights. “Jus’ a fellow traveler, my friend. Happy to see you come along there, I tell you. Had a li’l bit of trouble, thought a’d have to spend the night on the bloody heath...”

“What trouble?”

“Oh, I was ridin’ out to a place a’ know,” said de la Haye. “Place out by Culliford, li’l farm. Christmas with friends. Nice daughters. Hey, Jesse, you know?” He punched Jesse’s arm, started to laugh. Jesse set his mouth. “What happened to your horse?”

“Bloody thing foundered, broke its leg.”

“Where?”

“On the road back there,” said de la Haye carelessly. “A’ cut its throat an’ rolled it in a ditch. Din’ want the damn routiers spottin’ it, gettin’ on my tail. . .” He blew his hands, held them out to the firebox, shivered dramatically inside his sheepskin coat. “Damn cold, Jesse, cold as a bitch . . . How far you go?”

“Home. Durnovaria.”

De la Haye peered at him. “Hey, you don’ sound good. You sick, ol’ Jesse?”

“No.”

Col shook his arm insistently. “Whassamatter, ol’ pal? Anythin’ a friend can do to help?”

Jesse ignored him, eyes searching the road ahead. De la Haye bellowed suddenly with laughter. “Was the beer. The beer, no? Ol’ Jesse, your stomach has shrunk!” He held up a clenched fist. “Like the stomach of a li’l baby, no? Not the old Jesse anymore; ah, life is hell. . .”

Jesse glanced down at the gauge, turned the belly tank cocks, heard water splash on the road, touched the injector controls, saw the burst of steam as the lifts fed the boiler. The pounding didn’t change its beat. He said steadily, “Reckon it must have been the beer that done it. Reckon I might go on the wagon. Gettin’ old.”

De la Haye peered at him, intently. “Jesse,” he said. “You got problems, my son. You got troubles. What gives? C’mon, spill....”

That damnable intuition hadn’t left him, then. He’d had it right through college; seemed somehow to know what you were thinking nearly as soon as it came into your head. It was Col’s big weapon; he used it to have his way with women. Jesse laughed bitterly; and suddenly the story was coming out. He didn’t want to tell it; but he did, down to the last word. Once started, he couldn’t stop.

Col heard him in silence; then he started to shake. The shaking was laughter. He leaned back against the cab side, holding onto a stanchion. “Jesse, Jesse, you are a lad. Christ, you never change. . . . Oh, you bloody Saxon . . .” He went off into fresh peals, wiped his eyes. “So . . . so she show you her pretty li’l scut, heh? Jesse, you are a lad; when will you learn? What, you go to her with—with this. . . .” He banged the Margaret’s hornplate. “An’ your face so earnest an’ black—oh, Jesse, a’ can see that face of yours. Man, she don’ want your great iron destrier. Christ above, no. . . . But a’—a’ tell you what you do . . .”

Jesse turned down the corners of his lips. “Why don’t you just shut up. . . .”

De la Haye shook his arm. “Nah, listen. Don’ get mad, listen. You . . . woo her, Jesse; she like that, that one. You know? Get the ol’ glad rags on, man, get a butterfly car, mak’ its wings of cloth of gold. She like that. . . . Only don’ stand no shovin’, ol’ Jesse. An’ don’ ask her nothin’, not no more. You tell her what you want, say you goin’ to get it. . . . Pay for your beer with a golden guinea, tell her you’ll tak’ the change upstairs, no? She’s worth it, Jesse, she’s worth havin’, is that one. Oh, but she’s nice. . . .”

“Go to hell. . . .”

“You don’ want her?” De la Haye looked hurt. “A’ jus’ try to help, ol’ pal. . . . You los’ interest now?”

“Yeah,” said Jesse. “I lost interest.”

“Ahhh . . .” Col sighed. “Ah, but is a shame. Young love all blighted. . . . Tell you what, though.” He brightened. “You given me a great idea, ol’ Jesse. You don’ want her, a’ have her myself. O.K.?”

When you hear the wail that means your father’s dead, your hands go on wiping down a crosshead guide. When the world turns red and flashes, and drums roll inside your skull, your eyes watch ahead at the road, your fingers stay quiet on the wheel. Jesse heard his own voice speak dryly. “You’re a lying bastard, Col, you always were. She wouldn’t fall for you. . . .”

Col snapped his fingers, danced on the footplate. “Man, a’ got it halfway made. Oh, but she’s nice. . . . Those li’l eyes, they were flashin’ a bit las’ night, no? Is easy, man, easy.. .. A’ tell you what: a’ bet she be sadistic in bed. But nice, ahhh, nice . . .” His gestures somehow suggested rapture. “I tak’ her five ways in a night,” he said. “An’ send you proof. O.K.?”

Maybe he doesn’t mean it. Maybe he’s lying. But he isn’t. I know Col; and Col doesn’t lie. Not about this. What he says he’ll do, he’ll do. . . . Jesse grinned, just with his teeth. “You do that, Col. Break her in. Then I take her off you. O.K.?”

De la Haye laughed and gripped his shoulder. “Jesse, you are a lad. Eh . . .? Eh . . .?”

A light flashed briefly, ahead and to the right, way out on the heathland. Col spun around, stared at where it had been, looked back to Jesse. “You see that?”

Grimly. “I saw.”

De la Haye looked around the footplate nervously. “You got a gun?”

“Why?”

“The bloody light. The routiers . . .”

“You don’t fight the routiers with a gun.”

Col shook his head. “Man, I hope you know what you’re doin....”

Jesse wrenched at the firebox doors, letting out a blaze of light and heat. “Stoke . . .”

“What?”

“Stoke!”

“O.K., man,” said de la Haye. “All right, O.K. . . .” He swung the shovel, building the fire. Kicked the doors shut, straightened up. “A’ love you an’ leave you soon,” he said. “When we pass the light. If we pass the light . . .”

The signal, if it had been a signal, was not repeated. The heath stretched out empty and black. Ahead was a long series of ridges; the Lady Margaret bellowed heavily, breasting the first of them. Col stared round again uneasily, hung out the cab to look back along the train. The high shoulders of the tarps were vaguely visible in the night. “What you carryin’, Jesse?” he asked. “You got the goods?”

Jesse shrugged. “Bulk stuff. Cattle cake, sugar, dried fruit. Not worth their trouble.”

De la Haye nodded worriedly. “Wha’s in the trail load?”

“Brandy, some silks. Bit of tobacco. Veterinary supply. Animal castrators.” He glanced sideways. “Cord grip. Bloodless.”

Col looked startled again, then started to laugh. “Jesse, you are a lad. A right bloody lad . . . But tha’s a good load, ol’ pal. Nice pickings . . .”

Jesse nodded, feeling empty. “Ten thousand quid’s worth. Give or take a few hundred.”

De la Haye whistled. “Yeah. Tha’s a good load. . . .”

They passed the point where the light had appeared, left it behind. Nearly two hours out now, not much longer to run. The Margaret came off the downslope, hit the second rise. The moon slid clear of a cloud, showed the long ribbon of road stretching ahead. They were almost off the heath now, Durnovaria just over the horizon. Jesse saw a track running away to the left before the moon, veiling itself, gave the road back to darkness.

De la Haye gripped his shoulder. “You be fine now,” he said. “We passed the bastards. . . . You be all right. I drop off now, ol’ pal; thanks for th’ ride. An’ remember, ‘bout the li’l girl. You get in there punchin’, you do what a’ say. O.K., ol’ Jesse?”

Jesse turned to stare at him. “Look after yourself, Col,” he said.

The other swung onto the step. “A’ be O.K. A’ be great.” He let go, vanished in the night.

He’d misjudged the speed of the Burrell. He rolled forward, somersaulted on rough grass, sat up grinning. The lights on the steamer’s trail load were already fading down the road. There were noises around him; six mounted men showed dark against the sky. They were leading a seventh horse, its saddle empty. Col saw the quick gleam of a gun barrel, the bulky shape of a crossbow. Routiers . . . He got up, still laughing, swung onto the spare mount. Ahead the train was losing itself in the low fogbanks. De la Haye raised his arm. “The last car . . .” He rammed his heels into the flanks of his horse, and set off at a flat gallop.

Jesse watched his gauges. Full head, a hundred and fifty pounds in the boiler. His mouth was still grim. It wouldn’t be enough; down this next slope, halfway up the long rise beyond, that was where they would take him. He moved the regulator to its farthest position; the Lady Margaret started to build speed again, swaying as her wheels found the ruts. She hit the bottom of the slope at twenty-five, slowed as her engine felt the dead pull of the train.

Something struck the nearside hornplate with a ringing crash. An arrow roared overhead, lighting the sky as it went. Jesse smiled, because nothing mattered anymore. The Margaret seethed and bellowed; he could see the horsemen now, galloping to either side. A pale gleam that could have been the edge of a sheepskin coat. Another concussion, and he tensed himself for the iron shock of a crossbow bolt in his back. It never came. But that was typical of Col de la Haye; he’d steal your woman but not your dignity, he’d take your trail load but not your life. Arrows flew again, but not at the loco. Jesse, craning back past the shoulders of the freight cars, saw flames running across the sides of the last tarp.

Halfway up the rise; the Lady Margaret laboring, panting with rage. The fire took hold fast, tongues of flame licking forward. Soon they would catch the next trailer in line. Jesse reached down. His hand closed slowly, regretfully, around the emergency release. He eased upward, felt the catch disengage, heard the engine beat slacken as the load came clear. The burning truck slowed, faltered, and began to roll back away from the rest of the train. The horsemen galloped after it as it gathered speed down the slope, clustered around it in a whooping knot and beat upward with their cloaks at the fire. Col passed them at the run, swung from the saddle and leaped. A scramble, a shout; and the routiers bellowed their laughter. Poised on top of the moving load, gesticulating with his one free hand, their leader was pissing valiantly onto the flames.

The Lady Margaret had topped the rise when the cloud scud overhead lit with a white glare. The explosion cracked like a monstrous whip; the shock wave slapped at the trailers, skewed the steamer off course. Jesse fought her straight, hearing echoes growl back from distant hills. He leaned out from the footplate, stared down past the shoulders of the load. Behind him twinkled spots of fire where the hell-burner, two score kegs of fine-grain powder packed round with bricks and scrap iron, had scythed the valley clear of life.

Water was low. He worked the injectors, checked the gauge. “We must live how we can,” he said, not hearing the words. “We must all live how we can.” The firm of Strange had not been built on softness; what you stole from it, you were welcome to keep.

Somewhere a semaphore clacked to Emergency Attention, torches lighting its arms. The Lady Margaret, with her train behind her, fled to Durnovaria, huddled ahead in the dim silver elbow of the Frome.

MARY

Damon Knight

There is an unfortunate tendency to point out Damon Knight’s accomplishments as a critic and editor—the Hugo-winning In Search of Wonder, his anthologies, his pioneering editorship of Orbit—and ignore his fiction, in spite of its complexity, beauty and power, its urbane intelligence. All as demonstrated in “Mary”: one of the first stories to deal with clones, and, not at all incidentally, one of SF’s most moving and memorable love stories.

Here is a future of quiet voices, cool shadows, shuttered stairwells, boats rocking at mooring, white ceramic islands on a placid blue sea, crystalline music, wine, new cloth. A drowsy, civilized afternoon of life, full of pastels and pleasant silences, where all the pieces fit neatly together and everything works smoothly and calmly, except for one piece just a little out of kind . . .

G.D.

Thirty sisters, alike as peas, were sitting at their looms in the court above the Gallery of Weavers. In the cool shadow, their white dresses rustled like the stirrings of doves, and their voices now murmured, now shrilled. Over the courtyard was a canopy of green glass, through which the sun appeared to swim like a golden-green fish: but over the roofs could be seen the strong blue of the sky, and even, at one or two places, the piercing white sparkle of the sea.

The sisters were ivory-skinned, strong-armed and straight of back, with eyebrows arched black over bright eyes. Some had grown fat, some were lean, but the same smiles dimpled their cheeks, the same gestures threw back their sleek heads when they laughed, and each saw herself mirrored in the others.

Only the youngest, Mary, was different. Hers was the clan face, but so slender and grave that it seemed a stranger’s. She had been brought to birth to replace old Anna-one, who had fallen from the lookout and broken her neck sixteen springs ago: and some said it had been done too quick; that Mary was from a bad egg and should never have been let grow. Now, the truth was that Mary had in her genes a long-recessive trait of melancholy and unworldliness, turned up by accident in the last cross; but the Elders, who after all knew best, had decided to give her the same chance as anyone. For in the floating island of Iliria, everyone knew that the purpose of life was happiness: and therefore to deprive anyone of life was a great shame.

At the far side of the court, Vivana called from her loom, “They say a new Fisher came from the mainland yesterday!” She was the eldest of the thirty, a coarse, good-natured woman with a booming laugh. “If he’s handsome, I may take him, and give you others a chance at my Tino. Rose, how would you like that? Tino would be a good man for you.” Her loom whirled, and rich, dark folds of liase rippled out. It was an artificial fiber, formed, spun, woven and dyed in the loom, hardening as it reached the air. A canister of the stuff, like tinted gelatin, stood at the top of every loom. It came from the Chemist clan, who concocted it by mysterious workings out of the sea water that tumbled through their vats.

“What, is he tiring of you already?” Rose called back. She was short and moon-faced, with strong, clever fingers that danced on the keyboard of her loom. “Probably you belched in his face once too often.” She raised her shrill voice over the laughter. “Now let me tell you, Vivana, if the new Fisher is as handsome as that, I may take him myself, and let you have Mitri.” Mounds of apple-green stuff tumbled into the basket at her feet.

Between them, Mary worked on, eyes cast down, without smiling.

“Gogo and Vivana!” someone shouted.

“Yes, that’s right—never mind about the Fisher! Gogo and Vivana!” All the sisters were shouting and laughing. But Mary still sat quietly busy at her loom.

“All right, all right,” shouted Vivana, wheezing with laughter. “I will try him, but then who’s to have Gunner?”

“Me!”

“No, me!”

Gunner was the darling of the Weavers, a pink man with thick blond lashes and a roguish grin.

“No, let the youngsters have a chance,” Vivana called reprovingly. “Joking aside, Gunner is too good for you old scows.” Ignoring the shrieks of outrage, she went on, “I say let Viola have him. Better yet, wait, I have an idea—how about Mary?”

The chatter stilled; all eyes turned toward the silent girl where she sat, weaving slow cascades of creamy white liase. She flushed quickly, and bowed her head, unable to speak. She was sixteen, and had never taken a lover.

The women looked at her, and the pleasure faded out of their faces. Then they turned away, and the shouting began again: “Rudi!”

“Ernestine!”

“Hugo!”

“Areta!”

Mary’s slim hands faltered, and the intricate diapered pattern of her weaving was spoiled. Now the bolt would have to be cut off, unfinished. She stopped the loom, and drooped over it, pressing her forehead against the smooth metal. Tears burned her eyelids. But she held herself still, hoping Mia, at the next loom, would not see.

Below in the street, a sudden tumult went up. Heads turned to listen: there was the wailing of flutes, the thundering of drums and the sound of men’s rich voices, all singing and laughing.

A gate banged open, and a clatter of feet came tumbling up the stair. The white dresses rustled as the sisters turned expectantly toward the arch.

A knot of laughing, struggling men burst through, full into the midst of the women, toppling looms, while the sisters shrieked in protest and pleasure.

The men were Mechanics, dark-haired, gaunt, leavened by a few blond Chemists. They were wrestling, Mechanic against Chemist, arms locked about each other’s necks, legs straining for leverage. One struggling pair toppled suddenly, overturning two more. The men scrambled up, laughing, red with exertion.

Behind them was a solitary figure whose stillness drew Mary’s eyes. He was tall, slender and grave, with russet hair and a quiet mouth. While the others shouted and pranced, he stood looking around the courtyard. For an instant his calm gray eyes met hers, and Mary felt a sudden pain at the heart.

“Dear, what is it?” asked Mia, leaning closer.

“I think I am ill,” said Mary faintly.

“Oh, not now!” Mia protested.

Two of the men were wrestling again. A heave, and the dark Mechanic went spinning over the other’s hip.

A shout of applause went up. Through the uproar, Vivana’s big voice came booming. “You fishheads, get out! Look at this, half a morning’s work ruined! Are you all drunk? Get out!”

“We’re all free for the day!” one of the Mechanics shouted. “You too—the whole district! It’s in the Fisher’s honor! So come on, what are you waiting for?”

The women were up, in a sudden flutter of voices and white skirts, the men beginning to spread out among them. The tall man still stood where he was. Now he was looking frankly at Mary, and she turned away in confusion, picking up the botched fabric with hands that did not feel it.

She was aware that two Mechanics had turned back, were leading the tall man across the courtyard, calling, “Violet—Clara!” She did not move; her breath stopped.

Then they were pausing before her loom. There was an awful moment when she thought she could not move or breathe. She looked up fearfully. He was standing there, hands in his pockets, slumped a little as he looked down at her.

He said, “What is your name?” His voice was low and gentle. “Mary,” she said.

“Will you go with me today, Mary?”

Around her, the women’s heads were turning. A silence spread; she could sense the waiting, the delight held in check.

She could not! Her whole soul yearned for it, but she was too afraid, there were too many eyes watching. Miserably, she said, “No,” and stopped, astonished, listening to the echo of her voice saying gladly, “Yes!”

Suddenly her heart grew light as air. She stood, letting the loom fall, and when he held out his hand, hers went into it as if it knew how.

“So you have a rendezvous with a Mainland Fisher?” the Doctor inquired jovially. He was pale-eyed and merry in his broad brown hat and yellow tunic; he popped open his little bag, took out a pill, handed it to Mary. “Swallow this, dear.”

“What is it for, Doctor?” she asked, flushing.

“Only a precaution. You wouldn’t want a baby to grow right in your belly, would you? Ha, ha, ha! That shocks you, does it? Well, you see, the Mainlanders don’t sterilize the males, their clan customs forbid it, so they sterilize the females instead. We have to be watchful, ah, yes, we Doctors! Swallow it down, there’s a good girl.”

She took the pill, drank a sip of water from the flask he handed her.

“Good, good—now you can go to your little meeting and be perfectly safe. Enjoy yourself!” Beaming, he closed his bag and went away.

On the high Plaza of Fountains, overlooking the quayside and the sea, feasts of shrimp and wine, seaweed salad, caviar, pasta, iced sweets had been laid out under canopies of green glass. Orchestrinos were playing. Couples were dancing on the old ceramic cobbles, white skirts swinging, hair afloat in the brilliant air. Farther up, Mary and her Fisher had found a place to be alone.

Under the bower in the cool shade, they lay clasped heart to heart, their bodies still joined so that in her ecstasy she could not tell where hers ended or his began.

“Oh, I love you, I love you!” she murmured.

His body moved, his head drew back a little to look at her. There was something troubled in his gray eyes. “I didn’t know this was going to be your first time,” he said. “How is it that you waited so long?”

“I was waiting for you,” she said faintly, and it seemed to her that it was so, and that she had always known it. Her arms tightened around him, wishing to draw him closer to her body again.

But he held himself away, looking down at her with the same vague uneasiness in his eyes. “I don’t understand,” he said. “How could you have known I was coming?”

“I knew,” she said. Timidly her hands began to stroke the long, smooth muscles of his back, the man’s flesh, so different from her own. It seemed to her that her fingertips knew him without being told; they found the tiny spots that gave him pleasure, and lingered there, without her direction.

His body stiffened; his gray eyes half closed. “Oh, Mary,” he said, and then he was close against her again, his mouth busy on hers: and the pleasure began, more piercing and sweet than she had ever dreamed it could be. Now she was out of herself again, half aware that her body was moving, writhing; that her voice was making sounds and speaking words that astonished her to hear. . .

Near the end she began to weep, and lay in his arms afterward with the luxurious tears wetting her cheeks, while his voice asked anxiously, “Are you all right?_ Darling, are you all right?” and she could not explain, but only held him tighter, and wept.

Later, hand in hand, they wandered down the bone-white stairs to the quayside strewn with drying nets, the glass floats sparkling sharp in the sun, spars, tackle and canvas piled everywhere. Only two boats were moored at the floating jetty below; the rest were out fishing, black specks on the glittering sea, almost at the horizon.

Over to eastward they saw the desolate smudge of the mainland and the huddle of stones that was Porto. “That’s where you live,” she said wonderingly.”

“Yes.”

“What do you do there?”

He paused, looked down at her with that startled unease in his glance. After a moment he shrugged. “Work. Drink a little in the evenings, make love. What else would I do?”

A dull pain descended suddenly on her heart and would not lift its wings. “You’ve made love to many women?” she asked with difficulty.

“Of course. Mary, what’s the matter?”

“You’re going back to Porto. You’re going to leave me.” Now the unnamed thing in his eyes had turned to open incredulity. He held her arms, staring down at her. “What else?” She put her head down obstinately, burying it against his chest.

“I want to stay with you,” she said in a muffled voice.

“But you can’t. You’re an Islander—I’m a Mainlander.”

“I know.”

“Then why this foolishness?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned her without speaking, and they stepped down from the promenade, went into the shadow of some storehouses that abutted on the quayside. The doors were open, breathing scents of spices and tar, new cordage, drying fish. Beyond them was a pleasant courtyard with boats piled upside down on one side, on the other a table, an umbrella, chairs, all cool in the afternoon shadow. From there they took a shallow staircase up into a maze of little streets full of the dim, mysterious blue light that fell from canopies of tinted glass between roofs. Passing a house with open shutters, they heard the drone of childish voices. They peered in: it was the nursery school—forty young Bakers, Chemists, Mechanics, fair skins and dark, each in a doll-like miniature of his clan costume, all earnestly reciting together while the shovel-hatted Teacher stood listening at the greenboard. Cool, neutral light came from the louvered skylights; the small faces there clear and innocent, here a tiny Cook in his apron, there two Carters sitting together, identical in their blue smocks, there a pale Doctor, and beside him, Mary saw with a pang, a little Weaver in white. The familiar features were childishly blunted and small, the ivory skin impossibly pure, the bright eyes wide. “Look—that one,” she whispered, pointing.

He peered in. “She looks like you. More like you than the others. You’re different from all the rest, Mary—that’s why I like you.” He looked down at her with a puzzled expression; his arm tightened around her. “I’ve never felt quite this way about a girl before; what are you doing to me?” he said.

She turned to him, embracing him, letting her body go soft and compliant against his. “Loving you, darling,” she said, smiling up, her eyes half-closed.

He kissed her fiercely, then pushed her away, looking almost frightened. “See here, Mary,” he said abruptly, “we’ve got to understand something.”

“Yes?” she said faintly, clinging to him.

“I’m going to be back in Porto tomorrow morning,” he said. “Tomorrow!” she said. “I thought—“

“My work was done this morning. It was a simple adjustment of the sonics. You’ll catch plenty of fish from now on. . . . There’s nothing more for me to do here.”

She was stunned; she could not believe it. Surely there would be at least another night—that was little enough to ask.

“Can’t you stay?” she said.

“You know I can’t.” His voice was rough and strained. “I go where they tell me, come when they say come.”

She tried to hold back the time, but it slipped away, ran through her fingers. The sky darkened slowly from cerulean to Prussian blue, the stars came out and the cool night wind stirred over the jetty.

Below her, in a cluster of lights, they were making the boat ready. Orchestrinos were playing up the hillside, and there was a little crowd of men and women gathering to say good-bye. There was laughter, joking, voices raised good-naturedly in the evening stillness.

Klef, pale in the lights, came up the stairs to where she stood; his head tilted as he came, his grave eyes holding hers.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said.

His hands took her arms, gripping her half in tenderness, half impatiently. “Mary, you know this is wrong. Get over it. Find yourself other men—be happy.”

“Yes, I’ll be happy,” she said.

He stared down at her in uncertainty, then bent his head and kissed her. She held herself passive in his arms, not responding or resisting. After a moment he let her go and stepped back. “Goodbye, Mary.”

“Good-bye, Klef.”

He turned, went quickly down the steps. The laughing voices surrounded him as he went toward the boat; after a moment she heard his voice too, lifted in cheerful farewells.

In the morning she awoke knowing that he was gone. A frightening knowledge of loss seized her, and she sat up with her heart leaping.

Down the high dormitory, smelling faintly of cinnamon oil and fresh linens, the sisters were beginning to rustle sleepily out of their cubicles, murmuring and yawning. The familiar hiss of the showers began at the far end of the room. The white-curtained windows were open, and from her bed Mary could see the cream and terra-cotta roofs spread out in a lazy descent. The air was cool and still and mysteriously pure: it was the best moment of the day.

She rose, washed herself and dressed mechanically. “What is it, dear?” asked Mia, bending toward her anxiously.

“Nothing. Klef is gone.”

“Well, there’ll be others.” Mia smiled and patted her hand, and went away. There was a closeness between them, they were almost of an age, and yet even Mia could not be comfortable long in Mary’s company.

Mary sat with the others at table, silent in the steaming fragrances of coffee and new bread, the waves of cheerful talk that flowed around her. Carrying her loom, she went down with the rest into the court and sat in her usual place. The work began. Time stretched away wearily into the, future. How many mornings in her life would she sit here, where she sat now, beginning to weave as she did now? How could she endure it? How had she ever endured it? She put her fingers on the controls of the loom, but the effort to move them appalled her. A tear dropped bright on the keyboard.

Mia leaned over toward her. “Is there anything the matter? Don’t you feel well?”

Her fists clenched uselessly. “I can’t—I can’t—” was all she could utter. Hot tears were running down her face; her jaw was shaking. She bowed her head over the loom.

Iliria was neither wearisomely flat, nor cone-shaped nor pyramidal in its construction, like some of the northern islands, but was charmingly hollowed, like a cradle. The old cobblestoned streets rose and fell; there were stairways, balconies, arcades; never a vista, always a new prospect. The buildings were pleasingly various, some domed and spired, others sprawling. Cream was the dominant color, with accents of cool light blue, yellow and rose. For more than three hundred years the island had been afloat, just as it now was: the same plazas with their fountains, the same shuttered windows, the same rooftops.

During the last century, some colonies had been creeping back onto the land as the contamination diminished; but every Ilirian knew that only island life was perfect. Above, the unchanging streets and buildings served each generation as the last; down below, the storage chambers, engine rooms, seines, preserving rooms, conveniently out of sight and hearing, went on functioning as they always had. Unsinkable, sheathed in ceramic above and below, the island would go on floating just as it now was, forever.

It was strange to Mary to see the familiar streets so empty. The morning light lay softly along the walls; in corners, blue shadow gathered. Behind every door and window there was a subdued hum of activity; the clans were at their work. All the way to the church circle, she passed no one but a Messenger and two Carters with their loads: all three looked at her curiously until she was out of sight.

Climbing the Hill of Carpenters, she saw the gray dome of the church rising against the sky—a smooth, unrelieved ovoid, with a crescent of morning light upon it. Overhead, a flock of gulls hung in the air, wings spread, rising and dipping. They were gray against the light.

She paused on the porch step to look down. From this height she could see the quays and the breakwater, and the sun on the brightwork of the moored launches; and then the long rolling back of the sea, full of whitecaps in the freshening breeze; and beyond that, the dark smudge of the land, and the clutter of brown windowed stone that was Porto. She stood looking at it for a moment, dry-eyed, then went into the shadowed doorway.

Clabert the Priest rose up from his little desk and came toward her with ink-stained fingers, his skirt flapping around his ankles. “Good morning, cousin, have you a trouble?”

“I’m in love with a man who has gone away.”

He stared at her in perplexity for a moment, then darted down the corridor to the left. “This way, cousin.” She followed him past the great doors of the central harmonion. He opened a smaller door, curved like the end of an egg, and motioned her in.

She stepped inside; the room was gray, egg-shaped, and the light came uniformly from the smooth ceramic walls. “Twenty minutes,” said Clabert, and withdrew his head. The door shut, joining indistinguishably with the wall around it.

Mary found herself standing on the faintly sloping floor, with the smooth single curve of the wall surrounding her. After a moment she could no longer tell how far away the big end of the ovicle was; the room seemed first quite small, only a few yards from one end to the other; then it was gigantic, bigger than the sky. The floor shifted uncertainly under her feet, and after another moment she sat down on the cool hollow slope.

The silence grew and deepened. She had no feeling of confinement; the air was fresh and in constant slight movement. She felt faintly and agreeably dizzy, and put her arms behind her to steady herself. Her vision began to blur; the featureless gray curve gave her no focus for her eyes. Another moment passed, and she became aware that the muffled silence was really a continual slow hush of sound, coming from all points at once, like the distant murmuring of the sea. She held her breath to listen, and at once, like dozens of wings flicking away in turn, the sound stopped. Now, listening intently, she could hear a still fainter sound, a soft, rapid pattering that stopped and came again, stopped and came again . . . and listening, she realized that it was the multiple echo of her own heartbeat. She breathed again, and the slow hush flooded back.

The wall approached, receded . . . gradually it became neither close nor far away; it hung gigantically and mistily just out of reach. The movement of air imperceptibly slowed. Lying dazed and unthinking, she grew intensely aware of her own existence, the meaty solidness of her flesh, the incessant pumping of blood, the sigh of breath, the heaviness and pressure, the pleasant beading of perspiration on her skin. She was whole and complete, all the way from fingers to toes. She was uniquely herself; somehow she had forgotten how important that was. . . .

“Feeling better?” asked Clabert, as he helped her out of the chamber.

“Yes . . .” She was dazed and languid; walking was an extraordinary effort.

“Come back if you have these confusions again,” Clabert called after her, standing in the porch doorway.

Without replying she went down the slope in the brilliant sunshine. Her head was light, her feet were amusingly slow to obey her. In a moment she was running to catch up with herself, down the steep cobbled street in a stumbling rush, with faces popping out of shutters behind her, and fetched up laughing and gasping with her arms around a light column at the bottom.

A stout Carter in blue was grinning at her out of his tanned face. “What’s the joke, woman?”

“Nothing,” she stammered. “I’ve just been to church. . . .”

“Ah!” he said, with a finger beside his nose, and went on.

She found herself taking the way downward to the quays. The sunlit streets were empty; no one was in the pools. She stripped and plunged in, gasping at the pleasure of the cool fresh water on her body. And even when two Baker boys, an older one and a younger, came by and leaned over the wall shouting, “Pretty! Pretty!” she felt no confusion, but smiled up at them and went on swimming.

Afterward, she dressed and strolled, wet as she was, along the seawall promenade. Giddily she began to sing as she walked, “Open your arms to me, sweetheart, for when the sun shines it’s pleasant to be in love. . . .” The orchestrinos had been playing that, that night when—

She felt suddenly ill, and stopped with her hand at her forehead.

What was wrong with her? Her mind seemed to topple, shake itself from one pattern into another. She swung her head up, looking with sharp anxiety for the brown tangle of buildings on the mainland.

At first it was not there, and then she saw it, tiny, almost lost on the horizon. The island was drifting, moving away, leaving the mainland behind.

She sat down abruptly; her legs lost their strength. She put her face in her arms and wept: “Klef! Oh, Klef!”

This love that had come to her was not the easy, pleasant thing the orchestrinos sang of; it was a kind of madness. She accepted that, and knew herself to be mad, yet could not change. Waking and sleeping, she could think only of Klef.

Her grief had exhausted itself; her eyes were dry. She could see herself now as the others saw her—as something strange, unpleasant, ill-fitting. What right had she to spoil their pleasure?

She could go back to church, and spend another dazed time in the ovicle. “If you have these confusions again,” the Priest had said. She could go every morning, if need be, and again every afternoon. She had seen one who needed to do as much, silly Marget Tailor who always nodded and smiled, drooling a little, no matter what was said to her, and who seemed to have a blankness behind the glow of happiness in her eyes. That was years ago; she remembered the sisters always complained of the wet spots Marget left on her work. Something must have happened to her; others cut and stitched for the Weavers now.

Or she could hug her pain to herself, scourge them with it, make them do something. . . . She had a vision of herself running barefoot and ragged through the streets, with people in their doorways shouting, “Crazy Mary! Crazy Mary!” If she made them notice her, made them bring Klef back . . .

She stopped eating except when the other sisters urged her, and grew thinner day by day. Her cheeks and eyes were hollow. All day she sat in the courtyard, not weaving, until at length the other women’s voices grew melancholy and seldom. The weaving suffered; there was no joy in the clan house. Many times Vivana and the others reasoned with her, but she could only give the same answers over again, and at last she stopped replying at all.

“But what do you want?” the women asked her, with a note of exasperation in their voices.

What did she want? She wanted Klef to be beside her every night when she went to sleep, and when she wakened in the morning. She wanted his arms about her, his flesh joined to hers, his voice murmuring in her ear. Other men? It was not the same thing. But they could not understand.

“But why do you want me to make myself pretty?” Mary asked with dull curiosity.

Mia bent over her with a tube of cosmetic, touching the pale lips with crimson. “Never mind, something nice. Here, let me smooth your eyebrows. Tut, how thin you’ve got! Never mind, you’ll look very well. Put on your fresh robe, there’s a dear.”

“I don’t know what difference it makes.” But Mary stood up wearily, took off her dress, stood thin and pale in the light. She put the new robe over her head, shrugged her arms into it.

“Is that all right?” she asked.

“Dear Mary,” said Mia, with tears of sympathy in her eyes. “Sweet, no, let me smooth your hair. Stand straighter, can’t you, how will any man—“

“Man?” said Mary. A little color came and went in her cheeks. “Klef?”

“No, dear. Forget Klef, will you?” Mia’s voice turned sharp with exasperation.

“Oh,” Mary turned her head away.

“Can’t you think of anything else? Do try, dear, just try.” “All right.”

“Now come along, they’re waiting for us.”

Mary stood up submissively and followed her sister out of the dormitory.

In bright sunlight the women stood talking quietly and worriedly around the bower. With them was a husky Chemist with golden brows and hair; his pink face was good-natured and peaceful. He pinched the nearest sister’s buttock, whispered something in her ear; she slapped his hand irritably.

“Quick, here they come,” said one suddenly. “Go in now, Gunner.”

With an obedient grimace, the blond man ducked his head and disappeared into the bower. In a moment Mia and Mary came into view, the thin girl hanging back when she saw the crowd, and the bower.

“What is it?” she complained. “I don’t want—Mia, let me go.

“No, dear, come along, it’s for the best, you’ll see,” said the other girl soothingly. “Do give me a hand here, one of you, won’t you?”

The two women urged the girl toward the bower. Her face was pale and frightened. “But what do you want me to—You said Klef wasn’t—Were you only teasing me? Is Klef . . . ?”

The women gave each other looks of despair. “Go in, dear, and see, why don’t you?”

A wild expression came into Mary’s eyes. She hesitated, then stepped nearer the bower; the two women let her go. “Klef?” she called plaintively. There was no answer.

“Go in, dear.”

She looked at them appealingly, then stooped and put her head in. The women held their breaths. They heard her gasp, then saw her backing out again.

“Crabs and mullets!” swore Vivana. “Get her in, you fools!”

The girl was crying out, weakly and helplessly, as four women swarmed around her, pushed her into the bower. One of them lingered, peered in.

“Has he got her?”

“Yes, now he’s got her.” Stifled mewing sounds were coming from the bower. “Hang onto her, you fool!”

“She bit!” came Gunner’s indignant voice. Then silence.

“Sst, leave them alone,” whispered Vivana. The woman at the bower entrance turned, tiptoed away. Together the women withdrew a few yards, found themselves seats on the old steps under the portico, and sat down comfortably close to one another.

There was a scream.

The women leaped up, startled and white. Not one of them could remember hearing such a sound before.

Gunner’s hoarse voice bawled something, then there was a stir. Mary appeared in the entrance to the bower. Her skirt was ripped, and she was clutching it to her lap with one hand. Her eyes were filmed, pink-rimmed. “Oh!” she said, moving past them blindly.

“Mary—” said one, reaching out a hand.

“Oh!” she said hopelessly, and moved on, clutching her garment to her body.

“What’s the matter?” they asked each other. “What did Gunner do?”

“I did what I was supposed to,” said Gunner, sulkily appearing. There was a red bruise on his cheek. “Gut me and clean me if I ever do it with that one again, though.”

“You fool, you must have been too rough. Go after her, someone.”

“Well, then serve her yourself the next time, if you know so, much.” Prodding his cheek gently with a finger, the Chemist went away.

Up the slope, an orchestrino began playing. “If you would not be cruel, torment me no more. Do not deny me ever; let it be now or never. Give me your love, then, as you promised me before....”

“Shut that thing off!” cried Vivana angrily.

Her ageship, Laura-one, the eldest Weaver, was pacing up and down the seawall promenade, knotting her fingers together in silent agitation. Once she paused to look over the parapet; below her the wall dropped sheer to blue water. She glanced over at the blur of Porto, half concealed in the morning haze, and at the stark hills above with their green fur of returning vegetation. Her eyes were still keen; halfway across the distance, she could make out a tiny dark dot, moving toward the island.

Footsteps sounded in the street below; in a moment Vivana appeared, holding Mary by the arm. The younger woman’s eyes were downcast; the older looked worried and anxious.

“Here she is, your ageship,” said Vivana. “They found her at the little jetty, throwing bottles into the sea.”

“Again?” asked the old woman. “What was in the bottles?”

“Here’s one of them,” said Vivana, handing over a crumpled paper.

“‘Tell Klef the Fisher of the town of Porto that Mary Weaver still loves him,’” the old woman read. She folded the paper slowly and put it into her pocket. “Always the same,” she said. “Mary, my child, don’t you know that these bottles never can reach your Klef?”

The young woman did not raise her head or speak.

“And twice this month the Fishers have had to catch you and bring you back when you stole a launch,” the old woman continued. “Child, don’t you see that this must end?”

Mary did not answer.

“And these things that you weave, when you weave at all,” said Laura-one, taking a wadded length of cloth from her apron pocket. She spread it taut and held it to the light. In the pattern, visible only when the light fell glancingly upon it, was woven the figure of a seated woman with a child in her arms. Around them were birds with spread wings among the intertwined stems of flowers.

“Who taught you to weave like this, child?” she asked.

“No one,” said Mary, not looking up.

The old woman looked down at the cloth again. “It’s beautiful work, but—” She sighed and put the cloth away. “We have no place for it. Child, you weave so well, why can’t you weave the usual patterns?”

“They are dead. This one is alive.”

The old woman sighed again. “And how long is it that you have been demanding your Klef back, dear?”

“Seven months.”

“But now think.” The old woman paused, glanced over her shoulder. The black dot on the sea was much nearer, curving in toward the jetty below. “Suppose this Klef did receive one of your messages; what then?”

“He would know how much I love him,” said Mary, raising her head. Color came into her cheeks; her eyes brightened.

“And that would change his whole life, his loyalties, everything?”

“Yes!”

“And if it did not?”

Mary was silent.

“Child, if that failed, would you confess that you have been wrong—would you let us help you?”

“It wouldn’t fail,” Mary said stubbornly.

“But if it did?” the older woman insisted gently. “Just suppose—just let yourself imagine.”

Mary was silent a moment. “I would want to die,” she said.

The two elder Weavers looked at each other, and for a moment neither spoke.

“May I go now?” Mary asked.

Vivana cast a glance down at the jetty, and said quickly, “Maybe it’s best, your ageship. Tell them—“

Laura-one stopped her with a raised hand. Her lips were compressed. “And if you go, child, what will you do now?”

“Go and make more messages, to put into bottles.”

The old woman sighed. “You see?” she said to Vivana.

Footsteps sounded faintly on the jetty stair. A man’s head appeared; he was an island Fisher, stocky, dark-haired, with a heavy black mustache. “Your ageship, the man is here,” he said, saluting Laura-one: “Shall I . . .”

“No,” said Vivana involuntarily. “Don’t. Send him back.”

“What would be the good of that?” the old woman asked reasonably. “No; bring him up, Alec.”

The Fisher nodded, turned and was gone down the stair.

Mary’s head had come up. She said, “The man . . . ?” “There, it’s all right,” said Vivana, going to her.

“Is it Klef?” she asked fearfully.

The older woman did not reply. In a moment the black-mustached Fisher appeared again; he stared at them, climbed to the head of the stair, stood aside.

Behind him, after a moment, another head rose out of the stairwell. Under the russet hair, the face was grave and thin. The gray eyes went to Laura-one, then to Mary; they stared at her, as the man continued to climb the steps. He reached the top, and stood waiting, hands at his sides. The black-mustached Fisher turned and descended behind him.

Mary had begun to tremble all over.

“There, dear, it’s all right,” said Vivana, pressing her arms. As if the words had released her, Mary walked to the Fisher. Tears were shining on her face. She clutched his tunic with both hands, staring up at him. “Klef?” she said.

His hands came up to hold her. She threw herself against him then, so violently that he staggered, and clutched him as if she wished to bury herself in his body. Strangled, hurt sounds came out of her.

The man looked over her head at the two older women. “Can’t you leave us alone for a moment?” he asked.

“Of course,” said Laura-one, a little surprised. “Why not? Of course.” She gestured to Vivana, and the two turned, walked away a little distance down the promenade to a bench, where they sat looking out over the seawall.

Gulls mewed overhead. The two women sat side by side without speaking or looking at one another. They were not quite out of earshot.

“Is it really you?” Mary asked, holding his face between her hands. She tried to laugh. “Darling, I can’t see . . . you’re all blurred.”

“I know,” said Clef quietly. “Mary, I’ve thought about you many times.”

“Have you?” she cried. “Oh, that makes me so happy. Oh, Klef, I could die now! Hold me, hold me.”

His face hardened. His hands absently stroked her back, up and down. “I kept asking to be sent back,” he said. “Finally I persuaded them—they thought you might listen to me. I’m supposed to cure you.”

“Of loving you?” Mary laughed. At the sound, his hands tightened involuntarily on her back. “How foolish they were! How foolish, Klef!”

“Mary, we have only these few minutes,” he said.

She drew back a little to look at him. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m to talk to you, and then go back. That’s all I’m here for.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “But you told me—”

“Mary, listen to me. There is nothing else to do. Nothing.”

“Take me back with you, Klef.” Her hands gripped him hard. “That’s what I want—just to be with you. Take me back.”

“And where will you live—in the Fishers’ dormitory with forty men?”

“I’ll live anywhere, in the streets, I don’t care—”

“They would never allow it. You know that, Mary.”

She was crying, holding him, shuddering all over. “Don’t tell me that, don’t say it. Even if it’s true, can’t you pretend a little? Hold me, Klef, tell me that you love me.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Tell me that you’ll keep me, never let me go, no matter what they say.”

He was silent a moment. “It’s impossible.”

She raised her head.

“Try to realize,” he said, “this is a sickness, Mary. You must cure yourself.”

“Then you’re sick too!” she said.

“Maybe I am, but I’ll get well, because I know I have to. And you must get well too. Forget me. Go back to your sisters and your weaving.”

She put her cheek against his chest, gazing out across the bright ocean. “Let me just be quiet with you a moment,” she said. “I won’t cry anymore. Klef—“

“Yes?”

“Is that all you have to say to me?”

“It has to be all.” His eyes closed, opened again. “Mary, I didn’t want to feel this way. It’s wrong, it’s unhealthy, it hurts. Promise me, before I go. Say you’ll let them cure you.”

She pushed herself away, wiped her eyes and her cheeks with the heel of one hand. Then she looked up. “I’ll let them cure me,” she said.

His face contorted. “Thank you. I’ll go now, Mary.”

“One more kiss!” she cried, moving toward him involuntarily. “Only one more!”

He kissed her on the lips, then wrenched himself away, and looking down to where the two women sat, he made an angry motion with his head.

As they rose and came nearer, he held Mary at arms’ length. “Now I’m really going,” he said harshly. “Good-bye, Mary.”

“Good-bye, Klef.” Her fingers were clasped tight at her waist.

The man waited, looking over her head, until Vivana came up and took her arms gently. Then he moved away. At the head of the Stairs he looked at her once more; then he turned and began to descend.

“Dear, it will be better now, you’ll see,” said Vivana uncertainly.

Mary said nothing. She stood still, listening to the faint sounds that echoed up from the stairwell: footsteps, voices, hollow sounds.

There was a sudden clatter, then footsteps mounting the stair. Klef appeared again, chest heaving, eyes bright. He seized both of Mary’s hands in his. “Listen!” he said. “I’m mad. You’re mad. We’re both going to die.”

“I don’t care!” she said. Her face was glowing as she looked up at him.

“They say some of the streams are running pure, in the hills. Grass is growing there—there are fish in the streams, even the wild fowl are coming back. We’ll go there, Mary, together—just you and I. Alone. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Klef—yes, darling.”

“Then come on!”

“Wait!” cried Laura-one shrilly after them as they ran down the stair. “How will you live? What will you eat? Think what you are doing!”

Faint hollow sounds answered her, then the purr of a motor.

Vivana moved to Laura-one’s side, and the two women stood watching, silent, as the dark tiny shape of the launch moved out into the brightness. In the cockpit they could make out the two figures close together, dark head and light. The launch moved steadily toward the land; and the two women stood staring, unable to speak, long after it was out of sight.

DRIFTGLASS

Samuel R. Delany

There are elemental things that do not change in kind, though they change in the specific—our relationship to them may alter, our perception and experience of them may blur when seen through the distorting mirror of society, but the things themselves remain the same. That is why we are fascinated with them, that is what gives them—not their power, for that indwells in them—a handle on our souls for that power to manipulate, a string to pull to make us jump. The sea is one of those things—living on the sea and from the sea, experiencing its storms and dangers, its calms and beatitudes. Neolithic fishermen, twenty-first-century mermen—the life is much the same: they would understand each other in that respect at least. Death is another such thing. Everybody understands death, eventually. And the rhythm of the generations: one up into sunlight and prominence, the other down into dusk and obsolescence; one knowing where the other has to go, the other knowing where the old one has been, and neither bit of knowledge making the slightest amount of difference to that ancient clock, which keeps on ticking rhythmically as it always has, regardless. That’s another.

Samuel R. Delany, one of the best modern SF authors, here gives us a vividly realized world, thoroughly in flux, elementally unchanged, a mirror and a window.

G.D.

Sometimes I go down to the port, splashing sand with my stiff foot at the end of my stiff leg locked in my stiff hip, with the useless arm a-swinging, to get wet all over again, drink in the dives with old cronies ashore, feeling old, broken, sorry for myself, laughing louder and louder. The third of my face that was burned away in the accident was patched with skin grafts from my chest, so what’s left of my mouth distorts all loud sounds; sloppy sartorial reconstruction. Also I have a hairy chest. Chest hair does not look like beard hair, and it grows all up under my right eye. And: my beard is red, my chest hair brown, while the thatch curling down over neck and ears is sun-streaked to white here, darkened to bronze there, ‘midst general blondness.

By reason of my being a walking (I suppose my gait could be called headlong limping) horror show, plus .a general inclination to sulk, I spend most of the time up in the wood and glass and aluminum house on the surf-sloughed point that the Aquatic Corp gave me along with my pension. Rugs from Turkey there, copper pots, my tenor recorder which I can no longer play, and my books.

But sometimes, when the gold fog blurs the morning, I go down to the beach and tromp barefoot in the wet edging of the sea, searching for driftglass.

It was foggy that morning, and the sun across the water moiled the mists like a brass ladle. I lurched to the top of the rocks, looked down through the tall grasses into the frothing inlet where she lay, and blinked.

She sat up, long gills closing down her neck and the secondary slits along her back just visible at their tips because of much hair, wet and curling copper, falling there. She saw me. “What are you doing here, huh?” She narrowed blue eyes.

“Looking for driftglass.”

“What?”

“There’s a piece.” I pointed near her and came down the rocks like a crab with one stiff leg.

“Where?” She turned over, half in, half out of the water, the-webs of her fingers cupping nodules of black stone.

While the water made cold overtures between my toes, I picked up the milky fragment by her elbow where she wasn’t looking. She jumped, because she obviously had thought it was somewhere else.

“See?”

“What . . . what is it?” She raised her cool hand to mine. For a moment the light through the milky gem and the pale film of my own webs pearled the screen of her palms. (Details like that. Yes, they are the important things, the points from which we suspend later pain.) A moment later wet fingers closed to the back of mine.

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”

“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”

“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”

“Ohhh!” She breathed as though the beauty of the blunted triangular fragment in my palm assailed her like perfume. Then she looked at my face, blinking the third, aqueous-filled lid that we use as a correction lens for underwater vision.

She watched the ruin calmly.

Then her hand went to my foot where the webs had been torn back in the accident. She began to take in who I was. I looked for horror, but saw only a little sadness.

The insignia on her buckle—her stomach was making little jerks the way you always do during the first few minutes when you go from breathing water to air—told me she was a Biological Technician. (Back up at the house there was a similar uniform of simulated scales folded in the bottom drawer of the dresser and the belt insignia said Depth Gauger.) I was wearing some very frayed jeans and a red cotton shirt with no buttons.

She reached up to my neck, pushed my collar back from my shoulders and touched the tender slits of my gills, outlining them with cool fingers. “Who are you?” Finally.

“Cal Svenson.”

She slid back down in the water. “You’re the one who had the terrible—but that was years ago. They still talk about it, down—” She stopped.

As the sea softens the surface of a piece of glass, so it blurs the souls and sensibilities of the people who toil beneath her. And according to the last report of the Marine Reclamation Division there are to date seven hundred and fifty thousand who have been given gills and webs and sent under the foam where there are no storms, up and down the American coast.

“You live on shore? I mean around here? But so long ago . . .”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

“I was two years older than you when the accident happened.”

“You were eighteen?”

“I’m twice that now. Which means it happened almost twenty years ago. It is a long time.”

“They still talk about it.”

“I’ve almost forgotten,” I said. “I really have. Say, do you play the recorder?”

“I used to.”

“Good! Come up to my place and look at my tenor recorder. And I’ll make some tea. Perhaps you can stay for lunch—”

“I have to report back to Marine Headquarters by three. Tork is going over the briefing to lay the cable for the big dive, with Jonni and the crew.” She paused, smiled. “But I can catch the undertow and be there in half an hour if I leave by two-thirty.”

On the walk up I learned her name was Ariel. She thought the patio was charming, and the mosaic evoked, “Oh, look!” and “Did you do this yourself?” a half-dozen times. (I had done it, in the first lonely years.) She picked out the squid and the whale in battle, the wounded shark and the diver. She told me she didn’t get time to read much, but she was impressed by all the books. She listened to me reminisce. She talked a lot to me about her work, husbanding the deep-down creatures they were scaring up. Then she sat on the kitchen stool, playing a Lukas Foss serenade on my recorder, while I put rock salt in the bottom of the broiler tray for two dozen oysters Rockefeller, and the tea water whistled. I’m a comparatively lonely guy. I like being followed by beautiful young girls.

II

“Hey, João!” I bawled across the jetty.

He nodded to me from the center of his nets, sun glistening on polished shoulders, sun lost in rough hair. I walked across to where he sat, sewing like a spider. He pulled another section up over his horny toes, then grinned at me with his mosaic smile: gold, white, black gap below, crooked yellow; white, gold, white. Shoving my bad leg in front, I squatted.

“I fished out over the coral where you told me.” He filled his cheek with his tongue and nodded. “You come up to the house for a chink, eh?”

“Fine.”

“Now—a moment more.”

There’s a certain sort of Brazilian you find along the shore in the fishing villages, old, yet ageless. See one of their men and you think he could be fifty, he could be sixty—will probably look the same when he’s eighty-five. Such was João. We once figured it out. He’s seven hours older than I am.

We became friends sometime before the accident when I got tangled in his nets working high lines in the Vorea Current. A lot of guys would have taken their knife and hacked their way out of the -situation, ruining fifty-five, sixty dollars’ worth of nets. That’s an average fisherman’s monthly income down here. But I surfaced and sat around in his boat while we untied me. Then we came in and got plastered. Since I cost him a day’s fishing, I’ve been giving him hints on where to fish ever since. He buys me drinks when I come up with something.

This has been going on for twenty years. During that time my life has been smashed up and land-bound. In the same time João has married off his five sisters, got married himself and has two children. (Oh, those bolinhos and carne assada that Amalia of the oiled braid and laughing breasts would make for Sunday dinner/supper/Monday breakfast.) I rode with them in the ambulance ‘copter all the way into Brasilia and in the hospital hall João and I stood together, both still barefoot, he tattered with fish scales in his hair, me just tattered, and I held him while he cried and I tried to explain to him how a world that could take a prepubescent child and with a week of operations make an amphibious creature that can exist for a month on either side of the sea’s foam-fraught surface could still be helpless before certain general endocrine cancers coupled with massive renal deterioration. João and I returned to ‘the village alone, by bus, three days before our birthday—back when I was twenty-three and João was twenty-three and seven hours old.

“This morning,” João said. (The shuttle danced in the web at the end of the orange line.) “I got a letter for you to read me. It’s about the children. Come on, we go up and drink.” The shuttle paused, back-tracked twice, and he yanked the knot tight. We walked along the port toward the square. “Do you think the letter says that the children are accepted?”

“It’s from the Aquatic Corp. And they just send postcards when they reject someone. The question is, how do you feel about it?”

“You are a good man. If they grow up like you, then it will be fine.”

“But you’re still worried.” I’d been prodding Pilo to get the kids into the International Aquatic Corp nigh on since I became their godfather. The operations had to be performed near puberty. It would mean much time away from the village during their training period—and they might eventually be stationed in any ocean in the world. But two motherless children had not been easy on João or his sisters. The Corp would mean education, travel, interesting work, the things that make up one kind of good life. They wouldn’t look twice their age when they were thirty-five; and not too many amphimen look like me.

“Worry is part of life. But the work is dangerous. Did you know there is an amphiman going to try and lay cable down in the Slash?”

I frowned. “Again?”

“Yes. And that is what you tried to do when the sea broke you to pieces and burned the parts, eh?”

“Must you be so damned picturesque?” I asked. “Who’s going to beard the lion this time?”

“A young amphiman named Tork. They speak of him down at the docks as a brave man.”

“Why the hell are they still trying to lay the cable there? They’ve gotten by this long without a line through the Slash.”

“Because of the fish,” João said. “You told me why twenty years ago. The fish are still there, and we fishermen who can not go below are still here. If the children go for the operations, then there will be less fishermen. But today . . .” He shrugged. “They must either lay the line across the fish paths or down in the Slash.” João shook his head.

Funny things, the great power cables the Aquatic Corp has been strewing across the ocean floor to bring power to their undersea mines and farms, to run their oil wells—and how many flaming wells have I capped down there—for their herds of whale, and chemical distillation plants. They carry two hundred sixty cycle current. Over certain sections of the ocean floor, or in sections of the water with certain mineral contents, this sets up inductance in the water itself which sometimes—and you will probably get a Nobel prize if you can detail exactly why it isn’t always—drives the fish away over areas up to twenty-five and thirty miles, unless the lines are laid in the bottom of those canyons that delve into the ocean floor.

“This Tork thinks of the fishermen. He is a good man too.”

I raised my eyebrows—the one that’s left, anyway—and tried to remember what my little Undine had said about him that morning. And remembered not much.

“I wish him luck,” I said.

“What do you feel about this young man going down into the coral-rimmed jaws to the Slash?”

I thought for a moment. “I think I hate him.”

João looked up.

“He is an image in a mirror where I look and am forced to regard what I was,” I went on. “I envy him the chance to succeed where I failed, and I can come on just as quaint as you can. I hope he makes it.”

João twisted his shoulders in a complicated shrug (once I could do that) which is coastal Brazilian for “I didn’t know things had progressed to that point, but seeing that they have, there is little to be done.”

“The sea is that sort of mirror,” I said.

“Yes.” João nodded.

Behind us I heard the slapping of sandals on concrete. I turned in time to catch my goddaughter in my good arm. My godson had grabbed hold of the bad one and was swinging on it.

“Tio Cal—“

“Hey, Tio Cal, what did you bring us?”

“You will pull him over,” João reprimanded them. “Let go.”

And, bless them, they ignored their father.

“What did you bring us?”

“What did you bring us, Tio Cal?”

“If you let me, I’ll show you.” So they stepped back, green-eyed and quivering. I watched João watching: brown pupils on ivory balls, and in the left eye a vein had broken in a jagged smear. He was loving his children, who would soon be as alien to him as the fish he netted. He was also looking at the terrible thing that was me and wondering what would come to his own spawn. And he was watching the world turn and grow older, clocked by the waves, reflected in that mirror.

It’s impossible for me to see what the population explosion and the budding colonies on Luna and Mars and the flowering beneath the ocean really look like from the disrupted cultural mélange of a coastal fishing town. But I come closer than many others, and I know what I don’t understand.

I pushed around in my pocket and fetched out the milky fragment I had brought from the beach. “Here. Do you like this one?” And they bent above my webbed and alien fingers.

In the supermarket, which is the biggest building in the village, João bought a lot of cake mixes. “That moist, delicate texture,” whispered the box when you lifted it from the shelf, “with that deep flavor, deeper than chocolate.”

I’d just read an article about the new vocal packaging in a U.S. magazine that had gotten down last week, so I was prepared and stayed in the fresh-vegetable section to avoid temptation. Then we went up to João’s house. The letter proved to be what I’d expected. The kids had to take the bus into Brasilia tomorrow. My godchildren were on their way to becoming fish.

We sat on the front steps and drank and watched the donkeys and the motorbikes, the men in baggy trousers, the women in yellow scarfs and brighter skirts with wreaths of garlic and sacks of onions. As well, a few people glittered by in the green scales of amphimen uniforms.

Finally João got tired and went in to take a nap. Most of my life has been spent on the coast of countries accustomed to siestas, but those first formative ten were passed on a Danish collective farm and the idea never really took. So I stepped over my goddaughter, who had fallen asleep on her fists on the bottom step, and walked back through the town toward the beach.

III

At midnight Ariel came out of the sea, climbed the rocks and clicked her nails against my glass wall so that droplets ran down, pearled by the gibbous moon.

Earlier I had stretched in front of the fireplace on the sheepskin throw to read, then dozed off. The conscientious timer had asked me if there was anything I wanted, and getting no answer had turned off the Dvořák Cello Concerto that was on its second time around, extinguished the reading lamp and stopped dropping logs onto the flame so that now, as I woke, the grate was carpeted with coals.

She clicked on the glass again, and I raised my head from the cushion. The green uniform, her amber hair—all color was lost under the silver light outside. I lurched across the rug to the glass–wall, touched the button and the glass slid down into the floor. The breeze came to my face as the barrier fell.

“What do you want?” I asked. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Tork is on the beach, waiting for you.”

The night was warm but windy. Below the rocks silver flakes chased each other in to shore. The tide lay full.

I rubbed my face. “The new boss man? Why didn’t you bring him up to the house? What does he want to see me about?”

She touched my arm. “Come. They are all down on the beach.”

“Who all?”

“Tork and the others.”

She led me across the patio and to the path that wound to the sand. The sea roared in the moonlight. Down the beach people stood around a driftwood fire that whipped into the night. Ariel walked beside me.

Two of the fishermen from town were crowding each other on the bottom of an overturned washtub, playing guitars. The singing, raucous and rhythmic, jarred across the paled sand. Sharks’ teeth shook on the necklace of an old woman dancing. Others were sitting on an overturned dinghy, eating.

Over one part of the fire on a skillet two feet across, oil frothed through pink islands of shrimp. One woman ladled them in, another ladled them out.

“Tio Cal!”

“Look, Tio Cal is here!”

“Hey, what are you two doing up?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be home in bed?”

“Papa João said we could come. He’ll be here, too, soon.” I turned to Ariel. “Why are they all gathering?”

“Because of the laying of the cable tomorrow at dawn.”

Someone was running up the beach, waving a bottle in each hand.

“They didn’t want to tell you about the party. They thought that it might hurt your pride.”

“My what?”

“If you knew they were making so big a thing of the job you had failed at—“

“But—“

“—and that had hurt you so in failure. They did not want you to be sad. But Tork wants to see you. I said you would not be sad. So I went to bring you down from the rocks.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Tio Cal?”

But the voice was bigger and deeper than a child’s.

He sat on a log back from the fire, eating a sweet potato. The flame flickered on his dark cheekbones, in his hair, wet and black. He stood, came to me, held up his hand. I held up mine and we slapped palms. “Good.” He was smiling. “Ariel told me you would come. I will lay the power line down through the Slash tomorrow.” His uniform scales glittered down his arms. He was very strong. But standing still, he still moved. The light on the cloth told me that. “I . . .” He paused. I thought of a nervous, happy dancer. “I wanted to talk to you about the cable.” I thought of an eagle, I thought of a shark. “And about the . . . accident. If you would.”

“Sure,” I said. “If there’s anything I could tell you that would help.”

“See, Tork,” Ariel said. “I told you he would talk to you about it.”

I could hear his breathing change. “It really doesn’t bother you to talk about the accident?”

I shook my head and realized something about that voice. It was a boy’s voice that could imitate a man’s. Tork was not over nineteen.

“We’re going fishing soon,” Tork told me. “Will you come?” “If I’m not in the way.”

A bottle went from the woman at the shrimp crate to one of the guitarists, down to Ariel, to me, then to Tork. (The liquor, made in a cave seven miles inland, was almost rum. The too tight skin across the left side of my mouth makes the manful swig a little difficult to bring off. I got “rum” down my chin.)

He drank, wiped his mouth, passed the bottle on and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come down to the water.”

We walked away from the fire. Some of the fishermen stared after us. A few of the amphimen glanced, and glanced away.

“Do all the young people of the village call you Tio Cal?”

“No. Only my godchildren. Their father and I have been friends since I was your age.”

“Oh, I thought perhaps it was a nickname. That’s why I called you that.”

We reached wet sand where orange light cavorted at our feet. The broken shell of a lifeboat rocked in moonlight. Tork sat down on the shell’s rim. I sat beside him. The water splashed to our knees.

“There’s no other place to lay the power cable?” I asked. “There is no other way to take it except through the Slash?”

“I was going to ask you what you thought of the whole business. But I guess I don’t really have to.” He shrugged and clapped his hands together a few times. “All the projects this side of the bay have grown huge and cry for power. The new operations tax the old lines unmercifully. There was a power failure last July in Cayine down the shelf below the twilight level. The whole village was without light for two days, and twelve amphimen died of overexposure to the cold currents coming up from the depths. If we laid the cables farther up, we would chance disrupting our own fishing operations as well as those of the fishermen on shore.”

I nodded.

“Cal, what happened to you in the Slash?”

Eager, scared Tork. I was remembering now, not the accident, but the midnight before, pacing the beach, guts clamped with fists of fear and anticipation. Some of the Indians back where they make the liquor still send messages by tying knots in palm fibers. One could have spread my entrails then, or Tork’s tonight, to read our respective horospecs.

João’s mother knew the knot language, but he and his sisters never bothered to learn because they wanted to be modern, and, as children, still confused with modernity the new ignorances, lacking modern knowledge.

“When I was a boy,” Tork said, “we would dare each other to walk the boards along the edge of the ferry slip. The sun would be hot and the boards would rock in the water, and if the boats were in and you fell down between the boats and the piling, you could get killed.” He shook his head. “The crazy things kids will do. That was back when I was eight or nine, before I became a waterbaby.”

“Where was it?”

Tork looked up. “Oh. Manila. I’m Filipino.”

The sea licked our knees, and the gunwale sagged under us.

“What happened in the Slash?”

“There’s a volcanic flaw near the base of the Slash.”

“I know.”

“And the sea is as sensitive down there as a fifty-year-old woman with a new hairdo. We had an avalanche. The cable broke. And the sparks were so hot and bright they made gouts of foam fifty feet high on the surface, so they tell me.”

“What caused the avalanche?”

I shrugged. “It could have been just a goddamned coincidence. There are rock falls down there all the time. It could have been the noise from the machines—though we masked them pretty well. It could have been something to do with the inductance from the smaller cables for the machines. Or maybe somebody just kicked out the wrong stone that was holding everything up.”

One webbed hand became a fist, sank into the other and hung.

Calling: “Cal!”

I looked up. João, pants rolled to his knees, shirt sailing in the sea wind, stood in the weave of white water. The wind lifted Tork’s hair from his neck; and the fire roared on the beach.

Tork looked up too.

“They’re getting ready to catch a big fish!” João called.

Men were already pushing their boats out. Tork clapped my shoulder. “Come, Cal. We fish now.” We stood and went back to the shore.

João caught me as I reached dry sand. “You ride in my boat, Cal!”

Someone came with the acrid flares that hissed. The water slapped around the bottom of the boats as we wobbled into the swell.

João vaulted in and took up the oars. Around us green amphimen walked into the sea, struck forward and were gone.

João pulled, leaned, pulled. The moonlight slid down his arms. The fire diminished on the beach.

Then among the boats, there was a splash, an explosion, and the red flare bloomed in the sky: the amphimen had sighted a big fish.

The flare hovered, pulsed once, twice, three times, four times (twenty, forty, sixty, eighty stone they estimated its weight to be), then fell.

Suddenly I shrugged out of my shirt, pulled at my belt buckle. “I’m going over the side, Jab!”

He leaned, he pulled, he leaned. “Take the rope.”

“Yeah. Sure.” It was tied to the back of the boat. I made a loop in the other end, slipped it around my shoulder. I swung my bad leg over the side, flung myself on the black water—

Mother-of-pearl shattered over me. That was the moon, blocked by the shadow of João’s boat ten feet overhead. I turned below the rippling wounds João’s oars made stroking the sea.

One hand and one foot with torn webs, I rolled over and looked down. The rope snaked to its end, and I felt João’s strokes pulling me through the water.

They fanned below with underwater flares. Light undulated on their backs and heels. They circled, they closed, like those deep-sea fish who carry their own illumination. I saw the prey, glistening as it neared a flare.

You chase a fish with one spear among you. And that spear would be Tork’s tonight. The rest have ropes to bind him that go up to the fishermen’s boats.

There was a sudden confusion of lights below. The spear had been shot!

The fish, long as a tall and a short man together, rose through the ropes. He turned out to sea, trailing his pursuers. But others waited there, tried to loop him. Once I had flung those ropes, treated with tar and lime to dissolve the slime of the fish’s body and hold to the beast. The looped ropes caught, and by the movement of the flares I saw them jerked from their paths. The fish turned, rose again, this time toward me.

He pulled around when one line ran out (and somewhere on the surface the prow of a boat doffed deep) but turned back and came on.

Of a sudden, amphimen were flicking about me as the fray’s center drifted by. Tork, his spear dug deep, forward and left of the marlin’s dorsal, had hauled himself astride the beast.

The, fish tried to shake him, then dropped his tail and rose straight. Everybody started pulling toward the surface. I broke foam and grabbed João’s gunwale.

Tork and the fish exploded up among the boats. They twisted in the air, in moonlight, in froth. The fish danced across the water on its tail, fell.

João stood up in the boat and shouted. The other fishermen shouted too, and somebody perched on the prow of a boat flung a rope and someone in the water caught it.

Then fish and Tork and me and a dozen amphimen all went underwater at once.

They dropped in a corona of bubbles. The fish struck the end of another line, and shook himself. Tork was thrown free, but he doubled back.

Then the lines began to haul the beast up again, quivering, whipping, quivering again.

Six lines from six boats had him. For one moment he was still in the submarine moonlight. I could see his wound tossing scarves of blood.

When he (and we) broke surface, he was thrashing again, near João’s boat. I was holding onto the side when suddenly Tork, glistening, came out of the water beside me and went over into the dinghy.

“Here you go,” he said, turning to kneel at the bobbing rim, and pulled me up while João leaned against the far side to keep balance.

Wet rope slopped on the prow. “Hey, Cal!” Tork laughed, grabbed it up and began to haul.

The fish prized wave from white wave in the white water.

The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.

João and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.

The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air.

I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”

João, grinning white and gold, pulled us back in to shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands—and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottle and was shaking them to the music. The guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.

“Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.

We turned the fish over.

“Here, Cal?”

He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.

“Fine.”

Tork jammed the spit in.

We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.

“Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”

But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded.

Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.

“Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.

“Taking a nap.”

“Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”

“He’s got a lot of work coming up. Sure you want to wake him up?”

“No, I’ll let him sleep.”

But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.

He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details—yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.

That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.

IV

The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.

“I don’t think they want to go,” João’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.

“They are just tired,” João said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal.”

“Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

Kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.

I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”

João’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, João, then got on the bus.

Someone was shouting out the window for someone else at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.

“I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.

“You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the—“

A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.

A clutch of men broke off and ran into the streets of the town. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me.

“What in hell is going on?”

For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.

“From the explosion—” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”

I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”

“About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’re still getting seismic disturbances.”

João was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas and green scales.

They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon.

Three of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the bodies were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.

“Tork—” I kept asking. “Is one of them Tork?”

It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying the bodies, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable bodies, yes, was Tork.

João brought me a glass of buttermilk in a café on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees.

“What are you thinking about?”

“That it’s time to go fix the nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish.” He regarded me a moment. “Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?”

“Are you wondering about—well—sending the kids off today?”

He shrugged. “Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?”

I finished my buttermilk. “The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over.”

He nodded. “Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow.”

We got up.

“See you, João.”

I limped back to the beach.

V

The fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking in dumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. “Ariel?”

She was kneeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again.

“Ariel?” I came down over the blistered stones.

She turned away to look at the ocean.

The attachments of children are so important and so brittle. “How long have you been sitting here?”

She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head.

Sixteen? Who was the psychologist a hundred years back, in the seventies, who decided that “adolescents” were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? “You want to come up to the house?”

The head-shaking got faster, then stopped.

After a while I said, “I guess they’ll be sending Tork’s body back to Manila.”

“He didn’t have a family,” she explained. “He’ll be buried here, at sea.”

“Oh,” I said.

And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean’s sands, changing shape, dulling.

“You were—you liked Tork a lot, didn’t you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other.”

“Yes. He was an awfully nice—” Then she caught my meaning and blinked. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I was—I was engaged to Jonni . . . the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We’re both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now . . . they’re sending his body back this evening.” Her eyes got very wide, then closed.

“I’m sorry.”

That’s it, you clumsy cripple, step all over everybody’s emotions. You look in that mirror and you’re too busy looking at what might have been to see what is.

“I’m sorry, Ariel.”

She opened her eyes and began to look around her.

“Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now, not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they’re better than any they grow in California.”

She kept looking around.

“None of the amphimen get over there. It’s a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them.” I leaned back on the rocks. “Or a cup of tea?”

“Okay.” She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn’t feel like it. “Thank you. I won’t be able to stay long, though.”

We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. “Cal?”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from-the eruption in the Slash?”

I squinted. “I think so. Come on inside.”

A HAPPY DAY IN 2381

Robert Silverberg

More land, more people, manifest destiny, “always more room somewhere,” the frontier pressing outward, translating forests into lumber, land into real estate, topsoil into crops, rivers into inland waterways, meadows into settlements, settlements into villages, villages into towns, towns into cities. “A big family—I always wanted a big family.” And always more people. And more people. And more. Five million in 8000 B.C., two hundred million at the birth of Christ, five hundred million in A.D. 1650, one billion in A.D. 1800, three billion in 1960, six billion by the year 2000. And the cities swelling like toads. And Atlanta into Baltimore into Washington into New York into Boston. And there is always more room somewhere.

Robert Silverberg—one of SF’s most able all-round practitioners—takes us on the kind of skilled and witty tour into the future that he does best, here escorting us into a happy world filled to bursting with Man and dedicated to growth, where there is always plenty for everybody and always plenty of everybody to partake of it—and also into one of the most quietly effective horror stories I know.

G.D.

Here is a happy day in 2381. The morning sun is high enough to reach the uppermost fifty stories of Urban Monad 116. Soon the building’s entire eastern face will glitter like the sea at dawn. Charles Mattern’s window, activated by the dawn’s early photons, deopaques. He stirs. God bless, he thinks. His wife stirs. His four children, who have been up for hours, now can officially begin the day. They rise and parade around the bedroom, singing:

God bless, God bless, God bless!

God bless us every one!

God bless Daddo, God bless Mommo, God bless you and me!

God bless us all, the short and tall,

Give us fer-til-i-tee!

They rush toward their parents’ sleeping platform. Mattern rises and embraces them. Indra is eight, Sandor is seven, Marx is five, Cleo is three. It is Charles Mattern’s secret shame that his family is so small. Can a man with only four children truly be said to have reverence for life? But Principessa’s womb no longer flowers. The medics have said she will not bear again. At twenty-seven she is sterile. Mattern is thinking of taking in a second woman. He longs to hear the yowls of an infant again; in any case, a man must do his duty to God.

Sandor says, “Daddo, Siegmund is still here. He came in the middle of the night to be with Mommo.”

The child points. Mattern sees. On Principessa’s side of the sleeping platform, curled against the inflation pedal, lies fourteen-year-old Siegmund Kluver, who had entered the Mattern home several hours after midnight to exercise his rights of propinquity. Siegmund is fond of older women. Now he snores; he has had a good workout. Mattern nudges him. “Siegmund? Siegmund, it’s morning!” The young man’s eyes open. He smiles at Mattern, sits up, reaches for his wrap. He is quite handsome. He lives on the 787th floor and already has one child and another on the way.

“Sorry,” says Siegmund. “I overslept. Principessa really drains me. A savage, she is!”

“Yes, she’s quite passionate,” Mattern agrees. So is Siegmund’s wife, Mattern has heard. When she is a little older, Mattern plans to try her. Next spring, perhaps.

Siegmund sticks his head under the molecular cleanser. Principessa now has risen from bed. She kicks the pedal and the platform deflates swiftly. She begins to program breakfast. Indra switches on the screen. The wall blossoms with light and color. “Good morning,” says the screen. “The external temperature, if anybody’s interested, is 28^0. Today’s population figures at Urbmon 116 are 881,115, which is +102 since yesterday and +14,187 since the first of the year. God bless, but we’re slowing down! Across the way at Urbmon 117 they added 131 since yesterday, including quads for Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky. She’s eighteen and has had seven previous. A servant of God, isn’t she? The time is now 0600. In exactly forty minutes Urbmon 116 will be honored by the presence of Nicanor Gortman, the visiting sociocomputator from Hell, who can be recognized by his outbuilding costume in crimson and ultraviolet. Dr. Gortman will be the guest of the Charles Matterns of the 799th floor. Of course, we’ll treat him with the same friendly blessmanship we show one another. God bless Nicanor Gortman! Turning now to news from the lower levels of Urbmon 116—“

Principessa says, “Hear that, children? We’ll have a guest, and we must be blessworthy toward him. Come and eat.”

When he has cleansed himself, dressed and eaten, Charles Mattern goes to the thousandth-floor landing stage to meet Nicanor Gortman. Mattern passes the floors on which his brothers and sisters and their families live. Three brothers, three sisters. Four of them younger than he, two older. One brother died, unpleasantly, young. Jeffrey. Mattern rarely thinks of Jeffrey. He rises through the building to the summit. Gortman has been touring the tropics and now is going to visit a typical urban monad in the temperate zone. Mattern is honored to have been named the official host. He steps out on the landing stage, which is at the very tip of Urbmon 116. A force field shields him from the fierce winds that sweep the lofty spire. He looks to his left and sees the western face of Urban Monad 115 still in darkness. To his right, Urbmon 117’s eastern windows sparkle. Bless Mrs. Hula Jabotinsky and her eleven littles, Mattern thinks. Mattern can see other urbmons in the row, stretching on and on toward the horizon, towers of superstressed concrete three kilometers high, tapering ever so gracefully. It is as always a thrilling sight. God bless, he thinks. God bless, God bless, God bless!

He hears a cheerful hum of rotors. A quickboat is landing. Out steps a tall, sturdy man dressed in high-spectrum garb. He must be the visiting sociocomputator from Hell.

“Nicanor Gortman?” Mattern asks.

“Bless God. Charles Mattern?”

“God bless, yes. Come.”

Hell is one of the eleven cities of Venus, which man has reshaped to suit himself. Gortman has never been on Earth before. He speaks in a slow, stolid way, no lilt in his voice at all; the inflection reminds Mattern of the way they talk in Urbmon 84, which Mattern once visited on a field trip. He has read Gortman’s papers: solid stuff, closely reasoned. “I particularly liked ‘Dynamics of the Hunting Ethic,’” Mattern tells him while they are in the dropshaft. “Remarkable. A revelation.”

“You really mean that?” Gortman asks, flattered.

“Of course. I try to keep up with a lot of the Venusian journals. It’s so fascinatingly alien to read about hunting wild animals.”

“There are none on Earth?”

“God bless, no,” Mattern says. “We couldn’t allow that! But I love reading about such a different way of life as you have.”

“It is escape literature for you?” asks Gortman.

Mattern looks at him strangely. “I don’t understand the reference.”

“What you read to make life on Earth more bearable for yourself.”

“Oh, no. No. Life on Earth is quite bearable, let me assure you. It’s what I read for amusement. And to obtain a necessary parallax, you know, for my own work,” says Mattern. They have reached the 799th level. “Let me show you my home first.” He steps from the dropshaft and beckons to Gortman. “This is Shanghai. I mean, that’s what we call this block of forty floors, from 761 to 800. I’m in the next-to-top level of Shanghai, which is a mark of my professional status. We’ve got twenty-five cities altogether in Urbmon 116. Reykjavik’s on the bottom and Louisville’s on the top.”

“What determines the names?”

“Citizen vote. Shanghai used to be Calcutta, which I personally prefer, but a little bunch of malcontents on the 775th floor rammed a referendum through in ‘75.”

“I thought you had no malcontents in the urban monads,” Gortman says.

Mattern smiles. “Not in the usual sense. But we allow certain conflicts to exist. Man wouldn’t be man without conflicts, even here!”

They are walking down the eastbound corridor toward Mattern’s home. It is now 0710, and children are streaming from their homes in groups of three and four, rushing to get to school. Mattern waves to them. They sing as they run along. Mattern says, “We average 6.2 children per family on this floor. It’s one of the lowest figures in the building, I have to admit. High-status people don’t seem to breed well. They’ve got a floor in Prague—I think it’s 117—that averages 9.9 per family! Isn’t that glorious?”

“You are speaking with irony?” Gortman asks.

“Not at all.” Mattern feels an uptake of tension. “We like children. We approve of breeding. Surely you realized that before you set out on this tour of—“

“Yes, yes,” says Gortman hastily. “I was aware of the general cultural dynamic. But I thought perhaps your own attitude—“

“Ran counter to norm? Just because I have a scholar’s detachment, you shouldn’t assume that I disapprove in any way of my cultural matrix.”

“I regret the implication. And please don’t think I show disapproval of your matrix either, although your world is quite strange to me. Bless God, let us not have strife, Charles.”

“God bless, Nicanor. I didn’t mean to seem touchy.”

They smile. Mattern is dismayed by his show of irritation.

Gortman says, “What is the population of the 799th floor?”

“805, last I heard.”

“And of Shanghai?”

“About 33,000.”

“And of Urbmon 116?”

“881,000.”

“And there are fifty urban monads in this constellation of houses.”

“Yes.”

“Making some forty million people,” Gortman says. “Or somewhat more than the entire human population of Venus. Remarkable!”

“And this isn’t the biggest constellation, not by any means!” Mattern’s voice rings with pride. “Sansan is bigger, and so is Boswash! And there are several bigger ones in Europe—Berpar, Wienbud—I think two others. With more being planned!”

“A global population of—“

“Seventy-five billion,” Mattern cries. “God bless! There’s never been anything like it! No one goes hungry! Everybody happy! Plenty of open space! God’s been good to us, Nicanor!” He pauses before a door labeled 79915. “Here’s my home. What I have is yours, dear guest.” They go in.

Mattern’s home is quite adequate. He has nearly ninety square meters of floor space. The sleeping platform deflates; the children’s cots retract; the furniture can easily be moved to provide play area. Most of the room, in fact, is empty. The screen and the data terminal occupy two-dimensional areas of wall that once had to be taken up by television sets, bookcases, desks, file drawers and other encumbrances. It is an airy, spacious environment, particularly for a family of just six.

The children have not yet left for school; Principessa has held them back, to meet the guest, and so they are restless. As Mattern enters, Sandor and Indra are struggling over a cherished toy, the dream-stirrer. Mattern is astounded. Conflict in the home? Silently, so their mother will not notice, they fight. Sandor hammers his shoes into his sister’s shins. Indra, wincing, claws her brother’s cheek. “God bless,” Mattern says sharply. “Somebody wants to go down the chute, eh?” The children gasp. The toy drops. Everyone stands at attention. Principessa looks up, brushing a lock of dark hair from her eyes; she has been busy with the youngest child and has not even heard them come in.

Mattern says, “Conflict sterilizes. Apologize to each other.”

Indra and Sandor kiss and smile. Meekly Indra picks up the toy and hands it to Mattern, who gives it to his younger son, Marx. They are all staring now at the guest. Mattern says to him, “What I have is yours, friend.” He makes introductions. Wife, children. The scene of conflict has unnerved him a little, but he is relieved when Gortman produces four small boxes and distributes them to the children. Toys. A blessful gesture. Mattern points to the deflated sleeping platform. “This is where we sleep. There’s ample room for three. We wash at the cleanser, here. Do you like privacy when voiding waste matter?”

“Please, yes.”

“You press this button for the privacy shield. We excrete in this. Urine here, feces here. Everything is reprocessed, you understand. We’re a thrifty folk in the urbmons.”

“Of course,” Gortman says.

Principessa says, “Do you prefer that we use the shield when we excrete? I understand some outbuilding people do.”

“I would not want to impose my customs on you,” says Gortman.

Smiling, Mattern says, “We’re a post-privacy culture, of course. But it wouldn’t be any trouble for us to press the button if—” He falters. “There’s no general nudity taboo on Venus, is there? I mean we have only this one room, and—”

“I am adaptable,” Gortman insists. “A trained sociocomputator must be a cultural relativist, of course!”

“Of course,” Mattern agrees, and he laughs nervously. Principessa excuses herself from the conversation and sends the children, still clutching their new toys, off to school.

Mattern says, “Forgive me for being overobvious, but I must bring up the matter of your sexual prerogatives. We three will share a single platform. My wife is available to you, as am I. Avoidance of frustration, you see, is the primary rule of a society such as ours. And do you know our custom of nightwalking?”

“I’m afraid I—”

“Doors are not locked in Urbmon 116. We have no personal property worth mentioning, and we all are socially adjusted. At night it is quite proper to enter other homes. We exchange partners in this way all the time; usually wives stay home and husbands migrate, though not necessarily. Each of us has access at any time to any other adult member of our community.”

“Strange,” says Gortman. “I’d think that in a society where there are so many people, an exaggerated respect for privacy would develop, not a communal freedom.”

“In the beginning we had many notions of privacy. They were allowed to erode, God bless! Avoidance of frustration must be our goal, otherwise impossible tensions develop. And privacy is frustration.”

“So you can go into any room in this whole gigantic building and sleep with—“

“Not the whole building,” Mattern interrupts. “Only Shanghai. We frown on nightwalking beyond one’s own city.” He chuckles. “We do impose a few little restrictions on ourselves, so that our freedoms don’t pall.”

Gortman looks at Principessa. She wears a loinband and a metallic cup over her left breast. She is slender but voluptuously constructed, and even though her childbearing days are over she has not lost the sensual glow of young womanhood. Mattern is proud of her, despite everything.

Mattern says, “Shall we begin our tour of the building?”

They go out. Gortman bows gracefully to Principessa as they leave. In the corridor, the visitor says, “Your family is smaller than the norm, I see.”

It is an excruciatingly impolite statement, but Mattern is tolerant of his guest’s faux pas. Mildly he replies, “We would have had more children, but my wife’s fertility had to be terminated surgically. It was a great tragedy for us.”

“You have always valued large families here?”

“We value life. To create new life is the highest virtue. To prevent life from coming into being is the darkest sin. We all love our big bustling world. Does it seem unendurable to you? Do we seem unhappy?”

“You seem surprisingly well adjusted,” Gortman says. “Considering that—” He stops.

“Go on.”

“Considering that there are so many of you. And that you spend your whole lives inside a single colossal building. You never do go out, do you?”

“Most of us never do,” Mattern admits. “I have traveled, of course—a sociocomputator needs perspective, obviously. But Principessa has never been below the 350th floor. Why should she go anywhere? The secret of our happiness is to create self-contained villages of five or six floors within the cities of forty floors within the urbmons of a thousand floors. We have no sensation of being overcrowded or cramped. We know our neighbors; we have hundreds of dear friends; we are kind and loyal and bless-worthy to one another.”

“And everybody remains happy forever?”

“Nearly everybody.”

“Who are the exceptions?” Gortman asks.

“The flippos,” says Mattern. “We endeavor to minimize the frictions of living in such an environment; as you see, we never refuse a reasonable request, we never deny one another anything. But sometimes there are those who abruptly can no longer abide by our principles. They flip; they thwart others; they rebel. It is quite sad.”

“What do you do with Hippos?”

“We remove them, of course,” Mattern says. He smiles, and they enter the dropshaft once again.

Mattern has been authorized to show Gortman the entire urbmon, a tour that will take several days. He is a little apprehensive; he is not as familiar with some parts of the structure as a guide should be. But he will do his best.

“The building,” he says, “is made of superstressed concrete. It is constructed about a central service core two hundred meters square. Originally the plan was to have fifty families per floor, but we average about one hundred and twenty today, and the old apartments have all been subdivided into single-room occupancies. We are wholly self-sufficient, with our own schools, hospitals, sports arenas, houses of worship and theaters.”

“Food?”

“We produce none, of course. But we have contractual access to the agricultural communes. I’m sure you’ve seen that nearly nine-tenths of the land area of this continent is used for food production; and then there are the marine farms. There’s plenty of food, now that we no longer waste space by spreading out horizontally over good land.”

“But aren’t you at the mercy of the food-producing communes?”

“When were city-dwellers not at the mercy of farmers?” Mattern asks. “But you seem to regard life on Earth as a thing of fang and claw. We are vital to them—their only market. They are vital to us—our only source of food. Also we provide necessary services to them, such as repair of their machines. The ecology of this planet is neatly in mesh. We can support many billions of additional people. Someday, God blessing, we will.”

The dropshaft, coasting downward through the building, glides into its anvil at the bottom. Mattern feels the oppressive bulk of the whole urbmon over him, and tries not to show his uneasiness. He says, “The foundation of the building is four hundred meters deep. We are now at the lowest level. Here we generate our power.” They cross a catwalk and peer into an immense generating room, forty meters from floor to ceiling, in which sleek turbines whirl. “Most of our power is obtained,” he explains, “through combustion of compacted solid refuse. We burn everything we don’t need, and sell the residue as fertilizer. We have auxiliary generators that work on accumulated body heat, also.”

“I was wondering about that,” Gortman murmurs.

Cheerily Mattern says, “Obviously eight hundred thousand people within one sealed enclosure will produce an immense quantity of heat. Some of this is directly radiated from the building through cooling fins along the outer surface. Some is piped down here and used to run the generators. In winter, of course, we pump it evenly through the building to maintain temperature. The rest of the excess heat is used in water purification and similar things.”

They peer at the electrical system for a while. Then Mattern leads the way to the reprocessing plant. Several hundred schoolchildren are touring it; silently they join the tour.

The teacher says, “Here’s where the urine comes down, see?” She points to gigantic plastic pipes. “It passes through the flash chamber to be distilled, and the pure water is drawn off here—follow me, now. You remember from the flow chart, about how we recover the chemicals and sell them to the farming communes . . .”

Mattern and his guest inspect the fertilizer plant too, where fecal reconversion is taking place. Gortman asks a number of questions. He seems deeply interested. Mattern is pleased; there is nothing more significant to him than the details of the urbmon way of life, and he had feared that this stranger from Venus, where men live in private houses and walk around in the open, would regard the urbmon way as repugnant or hideous.

They go onward. Mattern speaks of air-conditioning, the system of dropshafts and liftshafts, and other such topics.

“It’s all wonderful,” Gortman says. “I couldn’t imagine how one little planet with seventy-five billion people could even survive, but you’ve turned it into—into—”

“Utopia?” Mattern suggests.

“I meant to say that, yes,” says Gortman.

Power production and waste disposal are not really Mattern’s specialties. He knows how such things are handled here, but only because the workings of the urbmon are so enthralling to him. His real field of study is sociocomputation, naturally, and he has been asked to show the visitor how the social structure of the giant building is organized. Now they go up, into the residential levels.

“This is Reykjavik,” Mattern announces. “Populated chiefly by maintenance workers. We try not to have too much status stratification, but each city does have its predominant populations—engineers, academics, entertainers, you know. My Shanghai is mostly academic. Each profession is clannish.” They walk down the hall. Mattern feels edgy here, and he keeps talking to cover his nervousness. He tells how each city within the urbmon develops its characteristic slang, its way of dressing, its folklore and heroes.

“Is there much contact between cities?” Gortman asks.

“We try to encourage it. Sports, exchange students, regular mixer evenings.”

“Wouldn’t it be even better if you encouraged intercity night-walking?”

Mattern frowns. “We prefer to stick to our propinquity groups for that. Casual sex with people from other cities is a mark of a sloppy soul.”

“I see.”

They enter a large room: Mattern says, “This is a newlywed dorm. We have them every five or six levels. When adolescents mate, they leave their family homes and move in here. After they have their first child they are assigned to homes of their own.”

Puzzled, Gortman asks, “But where do you find room for them all? I assume that every room in the building is full, and you can’t possibly have as many deaths as births, so how . . .?”

“Deaths do create vacancies, of course. If your mate dies and your children are grown, you go to a senior citizen dorm, creating room for establishment of a new family unit. But you’re correct that most of our young people don’t get accommodations in the building, since we form new families at about two percent a year and deaths are far below that. As new urbmons are built, the overflow from the newlywed dorms is sent to them. By lot. It’s hard to adjust to being expelled, they say, but there are compensations in being among the first group into a new building. You acquire automatic status. And so we’re constantly overflowing, casting out our young, creating new combinations of social units—utterly fascinating, eh? Have you read my paper, ‘Structural Metamorphosis in the Urbmon Population’?”

“I know it well,” Gortman replies. He looks about the dorm. A dozen couples are having intercourse on a nearby platform. “They seem so young,” he says.

“Puberty comes early among us. Girls generally marry at twelve, boys at thirteen. First child about a year later, God blessing.”

“And nobody tries to control fertility at all.”

“Control fertility?” Mattern clutches his genitals in shock at the unexpected obscenity. Several copulating couples look up, amazed. Someone giggles. Mattern says, “Please don’t use that phrase again. Particularly if you’re near children. We don’t—ah—think in terms of control.”

“But—“

“We hold that life is sacred. Making new life is blessed. One does one’s duty to God by reproducing.” Mattern smiles. “To be human is to meet challenges through the exercise of intelligence, right? And one challenge is the multiplication of inhabitants in a world that has seen the conquest of disease and the elimination of war. We could limit births, I suppose, but that would be sick, a cheap way out. Instead we’ve met the challenge of overpopulation triumphantly, wouldn’t you say? And so we go on and on, multiplying joyously, our numbers increasing by three billion a year, and we find room for everyone, and food for everyone. Few die, and many are born, and the world fills up, and God is blessed, and life is rich and pleasant, and as you see we are all quite happy. We have matured beyond the infantile need to place insulation between man and man. Why go outdoors? Why yearn for forests and deserts? Urbmon 116 holds universes enough for us. The warnings of the prophets of doom have proved hollow. Can you deny that we are happy here? Come with me. We will see a school now.”

The school Mattern has chosen is in a working-class district of Prague, on the 108th floor. He thinks Gortman will find it particularly interesting, since the Prague people have the highest reproductive rate in Urban Monad 116, and families of twelve or fifteen are not at all unusual. Approaching the school door, they hear the clear treble voices singing of the blessedness of God. Mattern joins the singing; it is a hymn he sang too, when he was their age, dreaming of the big family he would have:

And now he plants the holy seed, That grows in Mommo’s womb, And now a little sibling comes—

There is an unpleasant and unscheduled interruption. A woman rushes toward Mattern and Gortman in the corridor. She is young, untidy, wearing only a flimsy gray wrap; her hair is loose; she is well along in pregnancy. “Help!” she shrieks. “My husband’s gone flippo!” She hurls herself, trembling, into Gortman’s arms. The visitor looks bewildered.

Behind her there runs a man in his early twenties, haggard, bloodshot eyes. He carries a fabricator torch whose tip glows with heat. “Goddamn bitch,” he mumbles. “Allatime babies! Seven babies already and now number eight and I gonna go off my head!” Mattern is appalled. He pulls the woman away from Gortman and shoves the visitor through the door of the school.

“Tell them there’s a flippo out here,” Mattern says. “Get help, fast!” He is furious that Gortman should witness so atypical a scene, and wishes to get him away from it.

The trembling girl cowers behind Mattern. Quietly Mattern says, “Let’s be reasonable, young man. You’ve spent your whole life in urbmons, haven’t you? You understand that it’s blessed to create. Why do you suddenly repudiate the principles on which—“

“Get the hell away from her or I gonna burn you too!”

The young man feints with the torch, straight at Mattern’s face. Mattern feels the heat and flinches. The young man swipes past him at the woman. She leaps away, but she is clumsy with girth, and the torch slices her garment. Pale white flesh is exposed with a brilliant bum-streak down it. She cups her jutting belly and falls, screaming. The young man jostles Mattern aside and prepares to thrust the torch into her side. Mattern tries to seize his arm. He deflects the torch; it chars the floor. The young man, cursing, drops it and throws himself on Mattern, pounding in frenzy with his fists. “Help me!” Mattern calls. “Help!”

Into the corridor erupt dozens of schoolchildren. They are between eight and eleven years old, and they continue to sing their hymn as they pour forth. They pull Mattern’s assailant away. Swiftly, smoothly, they cover him with their bodies. He can dimly be seen beneath the flailing, thrashing mass. Dozens more pour from the schoolroom and join the heap. A siren wails. A whistle blows. The teacher’s amplified voice booms, “The police are here! Everyone off!”

Four men in uniform have arrived. They survey the situation. The injured woman lies groaning, rubbing her burn. The insane man is unconscious; his face is bloody and one eye appears to be destroyed. “What happened?” a policeman asks. “Who are you?”

“Charles Mattern, sociocomputator, 799th level, Shanghai. The man’s a flippo. Attacked his pregnant wife with the torch. Attempted to attack me.”

The policemen haul the flippo to his feet. He sags in their midst. The police leader says, rattling the words into one another, “Guilty of atrocious assault on woman of childbearing years currently carrying unborn life, dangerous antisocial tendencies, by virtue of authority vested in me I pronounce sentence of erasure, carry out immediately. Down the chute with the bastard, boys!” They haul the flippo away. Medics arrive to care for the woman. The children, once again singing, return to the classroom. Nicanor Gortman looks dazed and shaken. Mattern seizes his arm and whispers fiercely, “All right, those things happen sometime. But it was a billion to one against having it happen where you’d see it! It isn’t typical! It isn’t typical!”

They enter the classroom.

The sun is setting. The western face of the neighboring urban monad is streaked with red. Nicanor Gortman sits quietly at dinner with the members of the Mattern family. The children, voices tumbling one over another, talk of their day at school. The evening news comes on the screen; the announcer mentions the unfortunate event on the 108th floor. “The mother was not seriously injured,” he says, “and no harm came to her unborn child.” Principessa murmurs, “Bless God.” After dinner Mattern requests copies of his most recent technical papers from the data terminal and gives them to Gortman to read at his leisure. Gortman thanks him.

“You look tired,” Mattern says.

“It was a busy day. And a rewarding one.”

“Yes. We really traveled, didn’t we?”

Mattern is tired too. They have visited nearly three dozen levels already; he has shown Gortman town meetings, fertility clinics, religious services, business offices. Tomorrow there will be much more to see. Urban Monad 116 is a varied, complex community. And a happy one, Mattern tells himself firmly. We have a few little incidents from time to time, but we’re happy.

The children, one by one, go to sleep, charmingly kissing Daddo and Mommo and the visitor good night and running across the room, sweet nude little pixies, to their cots. The lights automatically dim. Mattern feels faintly depressed; the unpleasantness on 108 has spoiled what was otherwise an excellent day. Yet he still thinks that he has succeeded in helping Gortman see past the superficialities to the innate harmony and serenity of the urbmon way. And now he will allow the guest to experience for himself one of their techniques for minimizing the interpersonal conflicts that could be so destructive to their kind of society. Mattern rises.

“It’s nightwalking time,” he says. “I’ll go. You stay here . . . with Principessa.” He suspects that the visitor would appreciate some privacy.

Gortman looks uneasy.

“Go on,” Mattern says. “Enjoy yourself. People don’t deny happiness to people here. We weed the selfish ones out early. Please. What I have is yours. Isn’t that so, Principessa?”

“Certainly,” she says.

Mattern steps out of the room, walks quickly down the corridor, enters the dropshaft and descends to the 770th floor. As he steps out he hears sudden angry shouts, and he stiffens, fearing that he will become involved in another nasty episode, but no one appears. He walks on. He passes the black door of a chute access door and shivers a little, and suddenly he thinks of the young man with the fabricator torch, and where that young man probably is now. And then, without warning, there swims up from memory the face of the brother he had once had who had gone down that same chute, the brother one year his senior, Jeffrey, the whiner, the stealer, Jeffrey the selfish, Jeffrey the unadaptable, Jeffrey who had had to be given to the chute. For an instant Mattern is stunned and sickened, and he seizes a doorknob in his dizziness.

The door opens. He goes in. He has never been a nightwalker on this floor before. Five children lie asleep in their cots, and on the sleeping platform are a man and a woman, both younger than he is, both asleep. Mattern removes his clothing and lies down on the woman’s left side. He touches her thigh, then her breast. She opens her eyes and he says, “Hello. Charles Mattern, 799.”

“Gina Burke,” she says. “My husband, Lenny.”

Lenny awakens. He sees Mattern, nods, turns over and returns to sleep. Mattern kisses Gina Burke lightly on the lips. She opens her arms to him. He shivers a little in his need, and sighs as she receives him. God bless, he thinks. It has been a happy day in 2381, and now it is over.

THIS MOMENT OF THE STORM

Roger Zelazny

It has become a cliché to say, “You can’t go home again.” But, like most clichés, it also happens to be absolutely true—which is why people said it often enough to metamorphose it into a cliché. You can’t ever go home to anything. Not even to yourself. The second that just ticked past while you read the previous line is forever out of your reach. You may think of a thousand things that you would rather have done with that second, but there is only one thing that you did do with it, regret it as you may. This is the heart of tragedy: that time is all blood under the bridge. We are like coral reefs, eaten away by the sea, recreated, eaten again, never the same, never static, a thing never repeated exactly once it is gone, though you may be mocked endlessly by a million near echoes that are never near enough. Try to trace a single drop of water through that sea, try to keep track of a favorite cell inside the multitudinous living reef of your body. Try to find home.

Here Roger Zelazny examines some of the basic elements that affect everyone’s life—the indifference of the universe, the alienation of distance, the inevitability of time—all dissected by his usual deft scalpel touch, wrapped in his feeling for humanity and distinguished by some of the most alive and atmospheric writing in the genre.

G.D.

Back on Earth, my old philosophy prof—possibly because he’d misplaced his lecture notes—came into the classroom one day and scrutinized his sixteen victims for the space of half a minute. Satisfied, then, that a sufficiently profound tone had been established, he asked:

“What is a man?”

He had known exactly what he was doing. He’d had an hour and a half to kill, and eleven of the sixteen were coeds (nine of them in liberal arts, and the other two stuck with an Area Requirement).

One of the other two, who was in the pre-med program, proceeded to provide a strict biological classification.

The prof (McNitt was his name, I suddenly recall) nodded then, and asked:

“Is that all?”

And there was his hour and a half.

I learned that Man is the reasoning animal, Man is the one who laughs, Man is greater than beasts but less than angels, Man is the one who watches himself watch himself doing things he knows are absurd (this from a Comparative Lit gal), Man is the culture-transmitting animal, Man is the spirit which aspires, affirms, loves, the one who uses tools, buries his dead, devises religions, and the one who tries to define himself. (That last from Paul Schwartz, my roommate—which I thought pretty good, on the spur of the moment. Wonder what ever became of Paul?)

Anyhow, to most of these I say “perhaps” or “partly, but—” or just plain “crap!” I still think mine was the best, because I had a chance to try it out, on Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan. . . .

I’d said, “Man is the sum total of everything he has done, wishes to do or not to do, and wishes he had done, or hadn’t.”

Stop and think about it for a minute. It’s purposely as general as the others, but it’s got room in it for the biology and the laughing and the aspiring, as well as the culture-transmitting, the love, and the room full of mirrors, and the defining. I even left the door open for religion, you’ll note. But it’s limiting too. Ever met an oyster to whom the final phrases apply?

Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name.

Delightful place too, for quite a while . . .

It was there that I saw the definitions of Man, one by one, wiped off the big blackboard, until only mine was left.

My radio had been playing more static than usual. That’s all. For several hours there was no other indication of what was to come.

My hundred thirty eyes had watched Betty all morning, on that clear, cool spring day with the sun pouring down its honey and lightning upon the amber fields, flowing through the streets, invading western storefronts, drying curbstones, and washing the olive and umber buds that speared the skin of the trees there by the roadway; and the light that wrung the blue from the flag before Town Hall made orange mirrors out of windows, chased purple and violet patches across the shoulders of Saint Stephen’s Range, some thirty miles distant, and came down upon the forest at its feet like some supernatural madman with a million buckets of paint—each of a different shade of green, yellow, orange, blue and red—to daub with miles-wide brushes at its heaving sea of growth.

Mornings the sky is cobalt, midday turquoise, and sunset emeralds and rubies, hard and flashing. It was halfway between cobalt and sea mist at 1100 hours, when I watched Betty with my hundred thirty eyes and saw nothing to indicate what was about to be. There was only that persistent piece of static, accompanying the piano and strings within my portable.

It’s funny how the mind personifies, engenders. Ships are always women. You say, “She’s a good old tub,” or “She’s a fast, tough number, this one,” slapping a bulwark and feeling the aura of femininity that clings to the vessel’s curves; or; conversely, “He’s a bastard to start, that little Sam!” as you kick the auxiliary engine in an inland transport vehicle; and hurricanes are always women, and moons, and seas. Cities, though are different. Generally they’re neuter. Nobody calls New York or San Francisco “he” or “she.” Mostly cities are just “it.”

Sometimes, however, they do come to take on the attributes of sex. Usually this is in the case of small cities near the Mediterranean, back on Earth. Perhaps it is because of the sex-ridden nouns of the languages that prevail in that vicinity, in which case it tells us more about the inhabitants than it does about the habitations. But I feel that it goes deeper than that.

Betty was Beta Station for less than ten years. After two decades she was Betty officially, by act of Town Council. Why? Well, I felt at the time (ninety-some years ago), and still feel, that it was because she was what she was—a place of rest and repair, of surface-cooked meals and of new voices, new faces, of landscapes, weather, and natural light again, after that long haul through the big night, with its casting away of so much. She is not home, she is seldom destination, but she is like unto both. When you come upon light and warmth and music after darkness and cold and silence, it is Woman. The old-time Mediterranean sailor must have felt it when he first spied port at the end of a voyage. I felt it when I first saw Beta Station—Betty—and the second time I saw her, also.

I am her Hell Cop.

When six or seven of my hundred thirty eyes flickered, then saw again, and the music was suddenly washed away by a wave of static, it was then that I began to feel uneasy.

I called Weather Central for a report, and the recorded girl-voice told me that seasonal rains were expected in the afternoon or early evening. I hung up and switched an eye from ventral to dorsal vision.

Not a cloud. Not a ripple. Only a formation of green-winged sky toads, heading north, crossed the field of the lens.

I switched it back, and I watched the traffic flow, slowly, and without congestion, along Betty’s prim, well-tended streets. Three men were leaving the bank and two more were entering. I recognized the three who were leaving, and in my mind I waved as I passed by. All was still at the post office, and patterns of normal activity lay upon the steel mills, the stockyard, the plast-synth plants, the airport, the spacer pads and the surfaces of all the shopping complexes; vehicles came and went at the Inland Transport Vehicle garages, crawling from the rainbow forest and the mountains beyond like dark slugs, leaving tread trails to mark their comings and goings through wilderness; and the fields of the countryside were still yellow and brown, with occasional patches of green and pink; the country houses, mainly simple A-frame affairs, were chisel blade, spike tooth, spire and steeple, each with a big lightning rod, and dipped in many colors and scooped up in the cups of my seeing and dumped out again, as I sent my eyes on their rounds and tended my gallery of one hundred thirty changing pictures, on the big wall of the Trouble Center, there atop the Watch Tower of Town Hall.

The static came and went until I had to shut off the radio. Fragments of music are worse than no music at all.

My eyes, coasting weightless along magnetic lines, began to blink.

I knew then that we were in for something.

I sent an eye scurrying off toward Saint Stephen’s at full speed, which meant a wait of about twenty minutes until it topped the range. Another I sent straight up, skyward, which meant perhaps ten minutes for a long shot of the same scene. Then I put the auto-scan in full charge of operations and went downstairs for a cup of coffee.

I entered the mayor’s outer office, winked at Lottie, the receptionist, and glanced at the inner door.

“Mayor in?” I asked.

I got an occasional smile from Lottie, a slightly heavy but well-rounded girl of indeterminate age and intermittent acne, but this wasn’t one of the occasions.

“Yes,” she said, returning to the papers on her desk.

“Alone?”

She nodded, and her earrings danced. Dark eyes and dark complexion, she could have been kind of sharp, if only she’d fix her hair and use more makeup. Well . . .

I crossed to the door and knocked.

“Who?” asked the mayor.

“Me,” I said, opening it, “Godfrey Justin Holmes—‘God’ for short. I want someone to drink coffee with, and you’re elected.”

She turned in her swivel chair, away from the window she had been studying, and her blond-hair-white-hair-fused, short and parted in the middle, gave a little stir as she turned—like a sun-shot snowdrift struck by sudden winds.

She smiled and said, “I’m busy.”

“Eyes green, chin small, cute little ears: I love them all”—from an anonymous Valentine I’d sent her two months previous, and true.

“. . . But not too busy to have coffee with Cod,” she stated. “Have a throne, and I’ll make us some instant.”

I did, and she did.

While she was doing it, I leaned back, lit a cigarette I’d borrowed from her canister and remarked, “Looks like rain.”

“Uh huh,” she said.

“Not just making conversation,” I told her. “There’s a bad storm brewing somewhere—over Saint Stephen’s, I think. I’ll know real soon.”

“Yes, grandfather,” she said, bringing me my coffee. “You oldtimers with all your aches and pains are often better than Weather Central; it’s an established fact. I won’t argue.”

She smiled, frowned, then smiled again.

I set my cup on the edge of her desk.

“Just wait and see,” I said. “If it makes it over the mountains, it’ll be a nasty high-voltage job. It’s already jazzing up reception.”

Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She’d be forty in the fall, but she’d never completely tamed her facial reflexes—which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the sort of child she’d been by looking at her, listening to her now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again too, I could tell. She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.

See, I’m around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she’d heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last time. I’d filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta’s first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born five hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I’ve made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as old as I look—but still, people always seem to feel that I’ve cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most disconcerting. . . .

“Eleanor,” said I, “your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?”

She took off her narrow, elegantly-trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.

“I haven’t made up my mind.”

“I ask not for press-release purposes,” I said, “but for my own.”

“Really, I haven’t decided,” she told me. “I don’t know. . . .”

“O.K. Just checking. Let me know if you do.”

I drank some coffee.

After a time, she said, “Dinner Saturday? As usual?”

“Yes; good.”

“I’ll tell you then.” “Fine—capital.”

As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.

She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.

“A bad storm?” she asked me.

“Yep. Feel it in my bones.”

“Tell it to go away?”

“Tried. Don’t think it will, though.”

“Better batten some hatches, then.”

“It wouldn’t hurt and it might help.”

“The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You’ll have something sooner?”

“Think so. Probably any minute.”

I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.

“Let me know right away what it is.”

“Check. Thanks for the coffee.”

Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.

Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen’s. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline. Beyond it, the waters were troubled.

My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:

Gray and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that’s what I saw.

And advancing.

I called Eleanor.

“It’s gonna rain, chillun,” I said.

“Worth some sandbags?”

“Possibly.”

“Better be ready, then. O.K. Thanks.”

I returned to my watching.

Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its sole continent.

How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually a bit smaller, and more watery. As for the main land mass, first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a counterclockwise direction and push it up into the northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you’re about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop them about at random down in the southern hemisphere, calling them after the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole, and don’t forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave. Thanks.

I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen’s until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven’s artillery. But then there are the bad ones—sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.

Betty’s position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and running roughly parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty percent of the 100,000 population is concentrated about the business district, five miles in from the river.

We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential country.

We’re a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the continent. Our original raison d’être, though, was Stopover, repair point, supply depot and refreshment stand, physical and psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, farther along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others—it just happened that way—and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest—at least for purposes of getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system, although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.

Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the time between the stars?

Think about it awhile, and I’ll tell you later if you’re right.

The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen’s was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.

I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn’t my stomach.

Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.

There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops upon the windowpane, then rivulets.

Flintlike, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen’s scraped its belly and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into something with a terrible crash, and the rivulets on the quartz panes turned into rivers.

I went back to my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man’s psychological makeup, stemming probably from an ancient tribal distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they’re right, then they’re somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.

I remembered then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella and rubbers. But it had been a beautiful morning, and WC could have been wrong. . . .

Well, I had another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could knock my eyes out of the sky.

I switched on the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.

Five hours later it was still raining, and rumbling and dark. I’d had hopes that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the picture still hadn’t changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening Hell Cop.

He seated himself beside my desk.

“You’re early,” I said. “They don’t start paying you for another hour.”

“Too wet to do anything but sit. Rather sit here than at home.”

“Leaky roof?”

He shook his head.

“Mother-in-law. Visiting again.”

I nodded.

“One of the disadvantages of a small world.”

He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.

“You know how old I am?” he asked after a while.

“No,” I said, which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.

“Twenty-seven,” he told me, “and going on twenty-eight soon. Know where I’ve been?”

“No.”

“No place, that’s where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled down here—and I’ve never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger. Now I’ve got a family. . . .”

He leaned forward again, rested his elbows on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like a kid when he was fifty. Blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny, takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he’d act like a kid at fifty too. I’ll never know.

I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have anything to say.

He was quiet for a long while again.

Then he said, “You’ve been around.”

After a minute, he went on:

“You were born on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others—they’re the same! Pictures. Names . . .”

I waited, then after I grew tired of waiting I said, “‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn . . .’”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s the beginning to an ancient poem. It’s an ancient poem now, but it wasn’t really ancient when I was a boy. Just old. I had friends, relatives, even in-laws, once myself. They are not just bones now. They are dust. Real dust, not metaphorical dust. The past fifteen years seem fifteen years to me, the same as to you, but they’re not. They are already many chapters back in the history books. Whenever you travel between the stars you automatically bury the past. The world you leave will be filled with strangers if you ever return—or caricatures of your friends, your relatives, even yourself. It’s no great trick to be a grandfather at sixty, a great-grandfather at seventy-five or eighty—-but go away for three hundred years, and then come back and meet your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, who happens to be fifty-five years old, and puzzled, when you look him up. It shows you just how alone you really are. You are not simply a man without a country or without a world. You are a man without a time. You and the centuries do not belong to each other. You are like the rubbish that drifts between the stars.”

“It would be worth it,” he said.

I laughed. I’d had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It had never bothered me much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that day—the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits, and his complaining—that had set me off.

His last comment had been too much. “It would be worth it.” What could I say to that?

I laughed.

He turned bright red.

“You’re laughing at me!”

He stood up and glared down.

“No I’m not,” I said. “I’m laughing at me. I shouldn’t have been bothered by what you said, but I was. That tells me something funny about me.”

“What?”

“I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and that’s funny.”

“Oh.” He turned his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.

“Aren’t you happy?” he asked. “Really, I mean? You’ve got money, and no strings on you. You could pick up and leave on the next IV that passes, if you wanted to.”

“Sure I’m happy,” I told him. “My coffee was cold. Forget it.”

“Oh,” again. He turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say, as in the distance. “It just seems to me that you should be one of the happiest guys around. . . .”

“I am. It’s the weather today. It’s got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Look at it rain, will you? Haven’t seen any rain in months. . . .”

“They’ve been saving it all up for today.”

He chuckled.

“I’m going down for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign on. Can I bring you anything?”

“No, thanks.”

“O.K. See you in a little while.”

He walked out whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid’s moods, his moods—up and down, up and down . . . And he’s a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for him, having to keep his attention in one place for so long. They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle—a hellcopper, I think. We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent countryside. Law enforcement isn’t much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is admissible in court—or, if we’re fast enough to press a couple of buttons, the tape that we make does an even better job—and we can dispatch live or robot cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.

There isn’t much crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up to, and there aren’t too many places for a fugitive to run. We’re mainly aerial traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all the sidearms).

SPCU is what we call the latter function—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us—which is the reason each of my hundred thirty eyes has six forty-five-caliber eyelashes.

There are things like the cute little panda puppy—oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder-puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda island viper’s, and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative cat with a rope of catnip.

Then there’s a snapper, which looks as mean as it sounds: a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head—one beneath each eye, like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose—legs about eighteen inches long, and a four-foot tail which it raises straight into the air whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a sandbag—and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.

Also, there are amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I’d rather not speak of them. They’re kind of ugly and vicious.

Anyway, those are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops—not just on Cyg, but on many, many frontier worlds. I’ve been employed in that capacity on several of them, and I’ve found that an experienced HC can always find a job Out Here. It’s like being a professional clerk back home.

Chuck took longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty, looked happy though, so I didn’t say anything. There was some pale lipstick on his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my cane and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.

It was coming down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.

I called a cab and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep mayor’s hours, and she’d departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door, listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes and made the windows cold to touch.

I’d planned on spending the evening at the library, but I changed my plans as I watched the weather happen. Tomorrow, or the next day, I decided. It was an evening for a good meal, a hot bath, my own books and brandy, and early to bed. It was good sleeping weather, if nothing else. A cab pulled up in front of the Hall and blew its horn.

I ran.

The next day the rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and it did not stop again.

It went on to become a steady downpour by afternoon.

The following day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.

Put dittos under Thursday’s weather report. That’s Friday. But I decided to do something anyway.

I lived down in that section of town near the river. The Noble was swollen, and the rains kept adding to it. Sewers had begun to clog and back up; water ran in the streets. The rain kept coming down and widening the puddles and lakelets, and it was accompanied by drum solos in the sky and the falling of bright forks and saw blades. Dead skytoads were washed along the gutters, like burned-out fireworks. Ball lightning drifted across Town Square; St. Elmo’s fire clung to the flagpole, the Watch Tower and the big statue of Wyeth trying to look heroic.

I headed uptown to the library, pushing my car slowly through the countless beaded curtains. The big furniture movers in the sky were obviously nonunion, because they weren’t taking any coffee breaks. Finally I found a parking place and I umbrellaed my way to the library and entered.

I have become something of a bibliophile in recent years. It is not so much that I hunger and thirst after knowledge, but that I am news-starved.

It all goes back to my position in the big mixmaster. Admitted, there are some things faster than light, like the phase velocities of radio waves in ion plasma, or the tips of the ion-modulated light beams of Duckbill, the comm-setup back in Sol System, whenever the hinges of the beak snap shut on Earth—but these are highly restricted instances, with no application whatsoever to the passage of shiploads of people and objects between the stars. You can’t exceed lightspeed when it comes to the movement of matter. You can edge up pretty close, but that’s about it.

Life can be suspended though, that’s easy—it can be switched off and switched back on again with no trouble at all. This is why I have lasted so long. If we can’t speed up the ships, we can slow down the people—slow them until they stop—and let the vessel, moving at near-lightspeed, take half a century, or more if it needs it, to convey its passengers to where they are going. This is why I am very alone. Each little death means resurrection into both another land and another time. I have had several, and this is why I have become a bibliophile: news travels slowly, as slowly as the ships and the people. Buy a newspaper before you hop aboard ship and it will still be a newspaper when you reach your destination—but back where you bought it, it would be considered an historical document. Send a letter back to Earth and your correspondent’s grandson may be able to get an answer back to your great-grandson, if the message makes real good connections and both kids live long enough.

All the little libraries Out Here are full of rare books—first editions of best sellers which people pick up before they leave Someplace Else, and which they often donate after they’ve finished. We assume that these books have entered the public domain by the time they reach here, and we reproduce them and circulate our own editions. No author has ever sued, and no reproducer has ever been around to be sued by representatives, designates, or assigns.

We are completely autonomous and are always behind the times, because there is a transit lag which cannot be overcome. Earth Central, therefore, exercises about as much control over us as a boy jiggling a broken string while looking up at his kite.

Perhaps Yeats had something like this in mind when he wrote that fine line “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” I doubt it, but I still have to go to the library to read the news.

The day melted around me.

The words flowed across the screen in my booth as I read newspapers and magazines, untouched by human hands, and the waters flowed across Betty’s acres, pouring down from the mountains now, washing the floors of the forest, churning our fields to peanut butter, flooding basements, soaking its way through everything, and tracking our streets with mud.

I hit the library cafeteria for lunch, where I learned from a girl in a green apron and yellow skirts (which swished pleasantly) that the sandbag crews were now hard at work and that there was no eastbound traffic past Town Square.

After lunch I put on my slicker and boots and walked up that way.

Sure enough, the sandbag wall was already waist high across Main Street; but then, the water was swirling around at ankle level, and more of it falling every minute.

I looked up at old Wyeth’s statue. His halo had gone away now, which was sort of to be expected. It had made an honest mistake and realized it after a short time.

He was holding a pair of glasses in his left hand and sort of glancing down at me, as though a bit apprehensive, wondering perhaps, there inside all that bronze, if I would tell on him now and ruin his hard, wet, greenish splendor. Tell . . . ? I guess I was the only one left around who really remembered the man. He had wanted to be the father of this great new country, literally, and he’d tried awfully hard. Three months in office and I’d had to fill out the rest of the two-year term. The death certificate gave the cause as “heart stoppage,” but it didn’t mention a piece of lead which had helped slow things down a bit. Everybody involved is gone now: the irate husband, the frightened wife, the coroner. All but me. And I won’t tell anybody if Wyeth’s statue won’t, because he’s a hero now, and we need heroes’ statues Out Here even more than we do heroes. He did engineer a nice piece of relief work during the Butler Township floods, and he may as well be remembered for that.

I winked at my old boss, and the rain dripped from his nose and fell into the puddle at my feet.

I walked back to the library through loud sounds and bright flashes, hearing the splashing and the curses of the work crew as the men began to block off another street. Black, overhead, an eye drifted past. I waved, and the filter snapped up and back down again. I think HC John Kearns was tending shop that afternoon, but I’m not sure.

Suddenly the heavens opened up and it was like standing under a waterfall.

I reached for a wall and there wasn’t one, slipped then, and managed to catch myself with my cane before I flopped. I found a doorway and huddled.

Ten minutes of lightning and thunder followed. Then, after the blindness and the deafness passed away and the rains had eased a bit, I saw that the street (Second Avenue) had become a river. Bearing all sorts of garbage, papers, hats, sticks, mud, it sloshed past my niche, gurgling nastily. It looked to be over my boot tops, so I waited for it to subside.

It didn’t.

It got right up in there with me and started to play footsie. So then seemed as good a time as any. Things certainly weren’t getting any better.

I tried to run, but with filled boots the best you can manage is a fast wade, and my boots were filled after three steps.

That shot the afternoon. How can you concentrate on anything with wet feet? I made it back to the parking lot, then churned my way homeward, feeling like a riverboat captain who really wanted to be a camel driver.

It seemed more like evening than afternoon when I pulled up into my damp but unflooded garage. It seemed more like night than evening in the alley I cut through on the way to my apartment’s back entrance. I hadn’t seen the sun for several days, and it’s funny how much you can miss it when it takes a vacation. The sky was a sable dome, and the high brick walls of the alley were cleaner than I’d ever seen them, despite the shadows.

I stayed close to the left-hand wall, in order to miss some of the rain. As I had driven along the river I’d noticed that it was already reaching after the high-water marks on the sides of the piers. The Noble was a big, spoiled blood sausage, ready to burst its skin. A lightning flash showed me the whole alley, and I slowed in order to avoid puddles.

I moved ahead, thinking of dry socks and dry martinis, turned a corner to the right, and it struck at me: an org.

Half of its segmented body was reared at a forty-five-degree angle above the pavement, which placed its wide head with the traffic-signal eyes saying “Stop” about three and a half feet off the ground, as it rolled toward me on all its pale little legs, with its mouthful of death aimed at my middle.

I pause now in my narrative for a long digression concerning my childhood, which, if you will but consider the circumstances, I was obviously quite fresh on in an instant:

Born, raised, educated on Earth, I had worked two summers in a stockyard while going to college. I still remember the smells and the noises of the cattle; I used to prod them out of the pens and on their way up the last mile. And I remember the smells and noises of the university: the formaldehyde in the bio labs, the sounds of freshmen slaughtering French verbs, the overpowering aroma of coffee mixed with cigarette smoke in the student union, the splash of the newly pinned frat man as his brothers tossed him into the lagoon down in front of the art museum, the sounds of ignored chapel bells and class bells, the smell of the lawn after the year’s first mowing (with big, black Andy perched on his grass-chewing monster, baseball cap down to his eyebrows, cigarette somehow not burning his left cheek), and always, always, the tick-tick-snick-stamp! as I moved up or down the strip. I had not wanted to take general physical education, but four semesters of it were required. The only out was to take a class in a special sport. I picked fencing because tennis, basketball, boxing, wrestling, handball, judo all sounded too strenuous, and I couldn’t afford a set of golf clubs. Little did I suspect what would follow this choice. It was as strenuous as any of the others, and more than several. But I liked it. So I tried out for the team in my sophomore year, made it on the épée squad and picked up three varsity letters, because I stuck with it through my senior year. Which all goes to show: Cattle who persevere in looking for an easy out still wind up in the abattoir, but they may enjoy the trip a little more.

When I came out here on the raw frontier where people all carry weapons, I had my cane made. It combines the better features of the épée and the cattle prod. Only it is the kind of prod which, if you were to prod cattle with, they would never move again.

Over eight hundred volts, max, when the tip touches, if the stud in the handle is depressed properly . . .

My arm shot out and up and my fingers depressed the stud properly as it moved.

That was it for the org.

A noise came from between the rows of razor blades in its mouth as I scored a touch on its soft underbelly and whipped my arm away to the side—a noise halfway between an exhalation and “peep”—and that was it for the org (short for “organism-with-a-long-name-which-I-can’t-remember”).

I switched off my cane and walked around it. It was one of those things which sometimes come out of the river. I remember that I looked back at it three times, then I switched the cane on again at max and kept it that way till I was inside my apartment with the door locked behind me and all the lights burning.

Then I permitted myself to tremble, and after a while I changed my socks and mixed my drink.

May your alleys be safe from orgs.

Saturday.

More rain.

Wetness was all.

The entire east side had been shored with sandbags. In some places they served only to create sandy waterfalls, where otherwise the streams would have flowed more evenly and perhaps a trifle more clearly. In other places they held it all back, for a while.

By then there were six deaths as a direct result of the rains.

By then there had been fires caused by the lightning, accidents by the water, sicknesses by the dampness, the cold.

By then property damages were beginning to mount pretty high.

Everyone was tired and angry and miserable and wet by then. This included me.

Though Saturday was Saturday, I went to work. I worked in Eleanor’s office, with her. We had the big relief map spread on a table, and six mobile eyescreens were lined against one wall. Six eyes hovered above the half-dozen emergency points and kept us abreast of the actions taken upon them. Several new telephones and a big radio set stood on the desk. Five ashtrays looked as if they wanted to be empty, and the coffeepot chuckled cynically at human activity.

The Noble had almost reached its high-water mark. We were not an isolated storm center by any means. Upriver, Butler Township was hurting, Swan’s Nest was adrip, Laurie was weeping into the river and the wilderness in between was shaking and streaming.

Even though we were in direct contact we went into the field on three occasions that morning—once when the north-south bridge over the Lance River collapsed and was washed down toward the Noble as far as the bend by the Mack steel mill; again when the Wildwood Cemetery, set up on a storm-gouged hill to the east, was plowed deeply, graves opened, and several coffins set awash; and finally when three houses full of people toppled, far to the east. Eleanor’s small flier was buffeted by the winds as we fought our way through to these sites for on-the-spot supervision; I navigated almost completely by instruments. Downtown proper was accommodating evacuees left and right by then. I took three showers that morning and changed clothes twice.

Things slowed down a bit in the afternoon, including the rain. The cloud cover didn’t break, but a drizzle point was reached which permitted us to gain a little on the waters. Retaining walls were reinforced, evacuees were fed and dried, some of the rubbish was cleaned up. Four of the six eyes were returned to their patrols, because four of the emergency points were no longer emergency points.

And we wanted all of the eyes for the org patrol.

Inhabitants of the drenched forest were also on the move. Seven snappers and a horde of panda puppies were shot that day, as well as a few crawly things from the troubled waters of the Noble—not to mention assorted branch snakes, stingbats, borers and land eels.

By 1900 hours it seemed that a stalemate had been achieved. Eleanor and I climbed into her flier and drifted skyward.

We kept rising. Finally there was a hiss as the cabin began to pressurize itself. The night was all around us. Eleanor’s face, in the light from the instrument panel, was a mask of weariness. She raised her hands to her temples as if to remove it, and then when I looked back again it appeared that she had: A faint smile lay across her lips now and her eyes sparkled. A stray strand of hair shadowed her brow.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked.

“Up, high,” said I, “above the storm.”

“Why?”

“It’s been many days,” I said, “since we have seen an uncluttered sky.”

“True,” she agreed, and as she leaned forward to light a cigarette I noticed that the part in her hair had gone all askew: I wanted to reach out and straighten it for her, but I didn’t.

We plunged into the sea of clouds.

Dark was the sky, moonless. The stars shone like broken diamonds. The clouds were a floor of lava.

We drifted. We stared up into the heavens. I “anchored” the flier, like an eye set to hover, and lit a cigarette myself.

“You are older than I am,” she finally said, “really. You know?”

“No.”

“There is a certain wisdom, a certain strength, something like the essence of the time that passes—that seeps into a man as he sleeps between the stars. I know, because I can feel it when I’m around you.”

“No,” I said.

“Then maybe it’s people expecting you to have the strength of centuries that gives you something like it. It was probably there to begin with.”

“No.”

She chuckled.

“It isn’t exactly a positive sort of thing either.”

I laughed.

“You asked me if I was going to run for office again this fall. The answer is no. I’m planning on retiring. I want to settle down.”

“With anyone special?”

“Yes, very special, Juss,” she said, and she smiled at me and I kissed her, but not for too long, because the ash was about to fall off her cigarette and down the back of my neck.

So we put both cigarettes out and drifted above the invisible city, beneath a sky without a moon.

I mentioned earlier that I would tell you about Stopovers. If you are going a distance of a hundred forty-five light years and are taking maybe a hundred fifty actual years to do it, why stop and stretch your legs?

Well, first of all and mainly, almost nobody sleeps out the whole jaunt. There are lots of little gadgets which require human monitoring at all times. No one is going to sit there for a hundred fifty years and watch them, all by himself. So everyone takes a turn or two, passengers included. They are all briefed on what to do till the doctor comes, and who to awaken and how to go about it, should troubles crop up. Then everyone takes a turn at guard mount for a month or so, along with a few companions. There are always hundreds of people aboard, and after you’ve worked down through the role you take it again from the top. All sorts of mechanical agents are backing them up, many of which they are unaware of (to protect against them, as well as with them—in the improbable instance of several oddballs getting together and deciding to open a window, change course, murder passengers, or things like that), and the people are well screened and carefully matched up, so as to check and balance each other as well as the machinery. All of this because gadgets and people both bear watching.

After several turns at ship’s guard, interspersed with periods of cold sleep, you tend to grow claustrophobic and somewhat depressed. Hence, when there is an available Stopover, it is utilized, to restore mental equilibrium and to rearouse flagging animal spirits. This also serves the purpose of enriching the life and economy of the Stopover world, by whatever information and activities you may have in you.

Stopover, therefore, has become a traditional holiday on many worlds, characterized by festivals and celebrations on some of the smaller ones, and often by parades and worldwide broadcast interviews and press conferences on those with greater populations. I understand that it is now pretty much the same on Earth too, whenever colonial visitors stop by. In fact, one fairly unsuccessful young starlet, Marilyn Austin, made a long voyage Out, stayed a few months, and returned on the next vessel headed back. After appearing on tri-dee a couple times, sounding off about interstellar culture; and flashing her white, white teeth, she picked up a flush contract, a third husband, and her first big part in tapes. All of which goes to show the value of Stopovers.

I landed us atop Helix, Betty’s largest apartment complex, wherein Eleanor had her double-balconied corner suite, affording views both of the distant Noble and of the lights of Posh Valley, Betty’s residential section.

Eleanor prepared steaks, with baked potato, corn, beer—everything I liked. I was happy and sated and such, and I stayed till around midnight, making plans for our future. Then I took a cab back to Town Square, where I was parked.

When I arrived, I thought I’d check with the Trouble Center just to see how things were going. So I entered the Hall, stamped my feet, brushed off excess waters, hung my coat and proceeded up the empty hallway to the elevator.

The elevator was too quiet. They’re supposed to rattle, you know? They shouldn’t sigh softly and have doors that open and close without a sound. So I walked around an embarrassing corner on my way to the Trouble Center.

It was a pose Rodin might have enjoyed working with. All I can say is that it’s a good thing I stopped by when I did, rather than five or ten minutes later.

Chuck Fuller and Lottie, Eleanor’s secretary, were practicing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and keeping-the-victim-warm techniques, there on the couch in the little alcove off to the side of the big door to TC.

Chuck’s back was to me, but Lottie spotted me over his shoulder, and her eyes widened and she pushed him away. He turned his head quickly.

“Juss . . .” he said.

I nodded.

“Just passing by,” I told him. “Thought I’d stop in to say hello and take a look at the eyes.”

“Uh—everything’s going real well,” he said, stepping back into the hallway. “It’s on auto right now, and I’m on my—uh—coffee break. Lottie is on night duty, and she came by to—to see if we had any reports we needed typed. She had a dizzy spell, so we came out here where the couch . . .”

“Yeah, she looks a little . . . peaked,” I-said. “There are smelling salts and aspirins in the medicine chest.”

I walked on by into the Center, feeling awkward.

Chuck followed me after a couple of minutes. I was watching the screens when he came up beside me. Things appeared to be somewhat in hand, though the rains were still moistening the one hundred thirty views of Betty.

“Uh, Juss,” he said, “I didn’t know you were coming by. . .” “Obviously.”

“What I’m getting at is—you won’t report me, will you?” “No, I won’t report you.”

“And you wouldn’t mention it to Cynthia, would you?”

“Your extracurricular activities,” I said, “are your own business. As a friend, I suggest you do them on your own time and in a more propitious location. But it’s already beginning to slip my mind. I’m sure I’ll forget the whole thing in another minute.”

“Thanks, Juss,” he said.

I nodded.

“What’s Weather Central have to say these days?” I asked, raising the phone.

He shook his head, so I dialed and listened.

“Bad,” I said, hanging up. “More wet to come.”

“Damn,” he announced and lit a cigarette, his hands shaking. “This weather’s getting me down.”

“Me too,” said I. “I’m going to run now, because I want to get home before it starts in bad again. I’ll probably be around tomorrow. See you.”

“Night.”

I elevated back down, fetched my coat and left. I didn’t see Lottie anywhere about, but she probably was, waiting for me to go.

I got to my car and was halfway home before the faucets came on full again. The sky was torn open with lightnings, and a sizzlecloud stalked the city like a long-legged arachnid, forking down bright limbs and leaving tracks of fire where it went. I made it home in another fifteen minutes, and the phenomenon was still in progress as I entered the garage. As I walked up the alley (cane switched on) I could hear the distant sizzle and the rumble, and a steady half-light filled the spaces between the buildings, from its flash-burn-flash-burn striding.

Inside, I listened to the thunder and the rain, and I watched the apocalypse off in the distance.

Delirium of city under storm.

The buildings across the way were quite clear in the pulsing light of the thing. The lamps were turned off in my apartment so that I could better appreciate the vision. All of the shadows seemed incredibly black and inky, lying right beside glowing stairways, pediments, windowsills, balconies; and all of that which was illuminated seemed to burn as though with an internal light. Overhead, the living/not living insect-thing of fire stalked, and an eye wearing a blue halo was moving across the tops of nearby buildings. The fires pulsed and the clouds burned like the hills of Gehenna; the thunders burbled and banged; and the white rain drilled into the roadway, which had erupted into a steaming lather. Then a snapper tri-horned, wet-feathered, demon-faced, sword-tailed and green, raced from around a corner, a moment after I’d heard a sound which I had thought to be a part of the thunder. The creature ran, at an incredible speed, along the smoky pavement. The eye swooped after it, adding a hail of lead to the falling raindrops. Both vanished up another street. It had taken but an instant, but in that instant it had resolved a question in my mind as to who should do the painting. Not El Greco, not Blake; no: Bosch. Without any question, Bosch—with his nightmare visions of the streets of Hell. He would be the one to do justice to this moment of the storm.

I watched until the sizzlecloud drew its legs up into itself, hung like a burning cocoon, then died like an ember retreating into ash. Suddenly it was very dark and there was only the rain.

Sunday was the day of chaos.

Candles burned, churches burned, people drowned, beasts ran wild in the streets (or swam there), houses were torn up by the roots and bounced like paper boats along the waterways, the great wind came down upon us, and after that the madness.

I was not able to drive to Town Hall, so Eleanor sent her flier after me.

The basement was filled with water, and the ground floor was like Neptune’s waiting room. All previous high-water marks had been passed.

We were in the middle of the worst storm in Betty’s history.

Operations had been transferred up onto the third floor. There was no way to stop things now. It was just a matter of riding it out and giving what relief we could. I sat before my gallery and watched.

It rained buckets, it rained vats; it rained swimming pools and lakes and rivers. For a while it seemed that it rained oceans upon us. This was partly because of the wind which came in from the gulf and suddenly made it seem to rain sideways with the force of its blasts. It began at about noon and was gone in a few hours, but when it left, our town was broken and bleeding. Wyeth lay on his bronze side, the flagpole was gone, there was no building without broken windows and water inside, we were suddenly suffering lapses of electrical power, and one of my eyes showed three panda puppies devouring a dead child. Cursing, I killed them across the rain and the distance. Eleanor wept at my side. There was a report later of a pregnant woman who could deliver only by Caesarean section, trapped on a hilltop with her family, and in labor. We were still trying to get through to her with a flier, but the winds . . . I saw burning buildings and the corpses of people and animals. I saw half-buried cars and splintered homes. I saw waterfalls where there had been no waterfalls before. I fired many rounds that day, and not just at beasts from the forest. Sixteen of my eyes had been shot out by looters. I hope that I never again see some of the films I made that day.

When the worst Sunday night in my life began, and the rains did not cease, I knew the meaning of despair for the third time in my life.

Eleanor and I were in the Trouble Center. The lights had just gone out for the eighth time. The rest of the staff was down on the third floor. We sat there in the dark without moving, without being able to do a single thing to halt the course of chaos. We couldn’t even watch it until the power came back on.

So we talked.

Whether it was for five minutes or an hour, I don’t really know. I remember telling her, though, about the girl buried on another world, whose death had set me to running. Two trips to two worlds and I had broken my bond with the times. But a hundred years of travel do not bring a century of forgetfulness—not when you cheat time with the petite mort of the cold sleep. Time’s vengeance is memory, and though for an age you plunder the eye of seeing and empty the ear of sound, when you awaken your past is still with you. The worst thing to do then is to return to visit your wife’s nameless grave in a changed land, to come back as a stranger to the place you had made your home. You run again then, and after a time you do forget, some, because a certain amount of actual time must pass for you also. But by then you are alone, all by yourself: completely alone. That was the first time in my life that I knew the meaning of despair. I read, I worked, I drank, I whored, but came the morning after and I was always me, by myself. I jumped from world to world, hoping things would be different, but with each change I was further away from all the things I had known.

Then another feeling gradually came upon me, and a really terrible feeling it was. There must be a time and a place best suited for each person who has ever lived. After the worst of my grief had left me and I had come to terms with the vanished past, I wondered about a man’s place in time and in space. Where, and when in the cosmos would I most like to live out the balance of my days? To live at my fullest potential? The past was dead, but perhaps a better time waited on some as yet undiscovered world, waited at one yet-to-be-recorded moment in its history. How could I ever know? How could I ever be sure that my Golden Age did not lie but one more world away, and that I might be struggling in a Dark Era while the Renaissance of my days was but a ticket, a visa and a diary page removed? That was my second despair. I did not know the answer until I came to the Land of the Swan. I do not know why I loved you, Eleanor, but I did, and that was my answer. Then the rains came.

When the lights returned we sat there and smoked. She had told me of her husband, who had died a hero’s death in time to save him from the delirium tremens which would have ended his days. Died as the bravest die—not knowing why—because of a reflex, which after all had been a part of him, a reflex which had made him cast himself into the path of a pack of wolflike creatures attacking the exploring party he was with—off in that forest at the foot of Saint Stephen’s—to fight them with a machete and to be torn apart by them while his companions fled to the camp, where they made a stand and saved themselves. Such is the essence of valor: an unthinking moment, a spark along the spinal nerves, predetermined by the sum total of everything you have ever done, wished to do or not to do, and wish you had done, or hadn’t, and then comes the pain.

We watched the gallery on the wall. Man is the reasoning animal? Greater than beasts but less than angels? Not the murderer I shot that night. He wasn’t even the one who uses tools or buries his dead. . . . Laughs, aspires, affirms? I didn’t see any of those going on. . . .

Watches himself watch himself doing what he knows is absurd? Too sophisticated. He just did the absurd without watching. Like running back into a burning house after his favorite pipe and a can of tobacco . . . Devises religions? I saw people praying, but they weren’t devising. They were making last-ditch efforts at saving themselves, after they’d exhausted everything else they knew to do. Reflex.

The creature who loves?

That’s the only one I might not be able to gainsay.

I saw a mother holding her daughter up on her shoulders while the water swirled about her armpits, and the little girl was holding her doll up above her shoulders, in the same way. But isn’t-that—the love—a part of the total? Of everything you have ever done, or wished? Positive or neg? I know that it is what made me leave my post, running, and what made me climb into Eleanor’s flier, and what made me fight my way through the storm and out to that particular scene.

I didn’t get there in time.

I shall never forget how glad I was that someone else did. Johnny Kearns blinked his lights above me as he rose, and he radioed down:

“It’s all right. They’re O.K. Even the doll.”

“Good,” I said, and headed back.

As I set the ship down on its balcony landing, one figure came toward me. As I stepped down, a gun appeared in Chuck’s hand.

“I wouldn’t kill you, Juss,” he began, “But I’d wound you. Face that wall. I’m taking the flier.”

“Are you crazy?” I asked him.

“I know what I’m doing. I need it, Juss.”

“Well, if you need it, there it is. You don’t have to point a gun at me. I just got through needing it myself. Take it.”

“Lottie and I both need it,” he said. “Turn around!”

I turned toward the wall.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’re going away, together—now!”

“You are crazy,” I said. “This is no time—“

“C’mon, Lottie,” he called, and there was a rush of feet behind me and I heard the flier’s door open.

“Chuck!” I said. “We need you now! You can settle this thing peacefully, in a week, in a month, after some order has been restored. There are such things as divorces, you know.”

“That won’t get me off this world, Juss.”

“So how is this going to?”

I turned, and I saw that he had picked up a large canvas bag from somewhere and had it slung over his left shoulder, like Santa Claus.

“Turn back around! I don’t want to shoot you,” he warned. The suspicion came, grew stronger.

“Chuck, have you been looting?” I asked him.

“Turn around!”

“All right, I’ll turn around. How far do you think you’ll get?”

“Far enough,” he said. “Far enough so that no one will find us—and when the time comes, we’ll leave this world.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think you will, because I know you.” “We’ll see.” His voice was farther away then.

I heard three rapid footsteps and the slamming of a door. I turned then, in time to see the flier rising from the balcony. I watched it go. I never saw either of them again.

Inside, two men were unconscious on the floor. It turned out that they were not seriously hurt. After I saw them cared for, I rejoined Eleanor in the Tower.

All that night did we wait, emptied, for morning.

Somehow, it came.

We sat and watched the light flow through the rain. So much had happened so quickly. So many things had occurred during the past week that we were unprepared for morning.

It brought an end to the rains.

A good wind came from out of the north and fought with the clouds, like En-ki with the serpent Tiamat. Suddenly, there was a canyon of cobalt.

A cloudquake shook the heavens and chasms of light opened across its dark landscape.

It was coming apart as we watched.

I heard a cheer, and I croaked in unison with it as the sun appeared.

The good, warm, drying, beneficent sun drew the highest peak of Saint Stephen’s to its face and kissed both its cheeks.

There was a crowd before each window. I joined one and stared, perhaps for ten minutes.

When you awaken from a nightmare you do not normally find its ruins lying about your bedroom. This is one way of telling whether or not something was only a bad dream, or whether or not you are really awake.

We walked the streets in great boots. Mud was everywhere. It was in basements and in machinery and in sewers and in living room clothes closets. It was on buildings and on cars and on people and on the branches of trees. It was broken brown blisters drying and waiting to be peeled off from clean tissue. Swarms of skytoads rose into the air when we approached, hovered like dragonflies, returned to spoiling food stores after we had passed. Insects were having a heyday, too. Betty would have to be deloused. So many things were overturned or fallen down, and half buried in the brown Sargassos of the streets. The dead had not yet been numbered. The water still ran by, but sluggish and foul. A stench was beginning to rise across the city. There were smashed-in storefronts and there was glass everywhere, and bridges fallen down and holes in the streets. . . . But why go on? If you don’t get the picture by now, you never will. It was the big morning after, following a drunken party by the gods. It is the lot of mortal man always to clean up their leavings or to be buried beneath them.

So clean we did, but by noon Eleanor could no longer stand. So I took her home with me, because we were working down near the harbor section and my place was nearer.

That’s almost the whole story—light to darkness to light—except for the end, which I don’t really know. I’ll tell you of its beginning, though. . .

I dropped her off at the head of the alleyway, and she went on toward my apartment while I parked the car. Why didn’t I keep her with me? I don’t know. Unless it was because the morning sun made the world seem at peace, despite its filth. Unless it was because I was in love and the darkness was over, and the spirit of the night had surely departed.

I parked the car and started up the alley. I was halfway to the corner where I had met the org when I heard her cry out.

I ran. Fear gave me speed and strength and I ran to the corner and turned it.

The man had a bag, not unlike the one Chuck had carried away with him, lying beside the puddle in which he stood. He was going through Eleanor’s purse, and she lay on the ground—so still!—with blood on the side of her head.

I cursed him and ran toward him, switching on my cane as I went. He turned, dropped her purse, and reached for the gun in his belt.

We were about thirty feet apart, so I threw my cane.

He drew his gun, pointed it at me, and my cane fell into the puddle in which he stood.

Flights of angels sang him to his rest, perhaps.

She was breathing, so I got her inside and got hold of a doctor—I don’t remember how, not too clearly, anyway—and I waited and waited.

She lived for another twelve hours and then she died. She recovered consciousness twice before they operated on her, and not again after. She didn’t say anything. She smiled at me once, and went to sleep again.

I don’t know.

Anything, really.

It happened again that I became Betty’s mayor, to fill in until November, to oversee the rebuilding. I worked, I worked my head off, and I left her bright and shiny, as I had found her. I think I could have won if I had run for the job that fall, but I did not want it.

The Town Council overrode my objections and voted to erect a statue of Godfrey Justin Holmes beside the statue of Eleanor Schirer which was to stand in the Square across from cleaned-up Wyeth. I guess it’s out there now.

I said that I would never return, but who knows? In a couple years, after some more history has passed, I may revisit a Betty full of strangers, if only to place a wreath at the foot of the one statue. Who knows but that the entire continent may be steaming and clanking and whirring with automation by then, and filled with people from shore to shining shore?

There was a Stopover at the end of the year and I waved good-bye and climbed aboard and went away, anywhere.

I went aboard and went away, to sleep again the cold sleep. Delirium of ship among stars . . .

Years have passed, I suppose. I’m not really counting them anymore. But I think of this thing often: Perhaps there is a Golden Age someplace, a Renaissance for me sometime, a special time somewhere, somewhere but a ticket, a visa, a diary page away. I don’t know where or when. Who does? Where are all the rains of yesterday?

In the invisible city?

Inside me?

It is cold and quiet outside and the horizon is infinity. There is no sense of movement.

There is no moon, and the stars are very bright, like broken diamonds, all.

THE HAUNTED FUTURE

Fritz Leiber

As I pontificate elsewhere in this book, much has been made of the prophetic aspect of SF. Those predictions that are “accurate” (if you wink at them a little) are usually concerned with hardware, or, on a higher level of sophistication, with the broad cultural changes triggered by that hardware. It is a jump from predicting the atomic bomb to predicting atomic submarines or breeder reactors, and it is another jump from there to predicting SAC and the AEC. Few authors have accurately predicted the way the cultural changes will seep inside our everyday lives and alter the experience and quality of it: from SAC to the McCarthy trials. Most SF can predict the car, some SF can predict the drive-in theater, but SF that can predict the changes in teen-age sexual behavior as a result of the drive-in is vanishingly rare.

Fritz Leiber’s “The Haunted Future” is a strongly prophetic story—not in detail, but in feeling and mood, in depicting the Zeitgeist in which we are submerged. Here—shot through with Leiber’s usual silver/black poetry and filtered through his strikingly theatrical eye—is a world of surface serenity and underlying turmoil, of health masquerading as insanity and insanity masquerading as health, of mass depersonalization vs. rampaging individuality, a controlled world where They “put the tranquillity in with a needle,” if They can’t lull and soothe you into it any other way. Crawl into this world and look around. You’ll recognize it. It is you. It is me. It is us. It is now.

G.D.

My strangest case, bar none, from the Psychotic Years was the Green Demon of New Angeles.

—From the notebooks of Andreas Snowden

It would be hard to imagine a more peaceful and reassuring spot, a spot less likely to harbor or attract horrors, even in America of the Tranquil early twenty-first century, than the suburb—exurb, rather—of Civil Service Knolls. Cozy was the word for the place—a loose assembly of a half thousand homes snuggling down in the warm moonlight a mountain ridge away from the metropolis of New Angeles. With their fashionably rounded roofs the individual houses looked rather like giant mushrooms among the noble trees. They were like mushrooms too in the way they grew with the families they housed—one story for the newlyweds, two for the properly childrened and community-seasoned, three for those punchdrunk with reproduction and happy living. From under their eaves spilled soft yellow light of the exact shade that color analysts had pronounced most homelike.

There were no streets or roads, only the dark pine-scented asphalt disks of sideyard landing spots now holding the strange-vaned shapes of ‘copters and flutteryplanes locked for the night, like sleeping dragonflies and moths. While for the ground-minded there was the unobtrusive subway entrance. Even the groceries came by underground tube straight to the kitchen in response to the housewife’s morning dialing, delivery having at last gone underground with the other utilities. Well-chewed garbage vanished down rust-proof ducts in the close company of well-bred bacteria. There were not even any unsightly dirt paths worn in the thick springy lawns—the family hypnotherapist had implanted in the mind of every resident, each last baldie and toddler, the suggestion that pedestrians vary their routes and keep their steps light and rather few.

No nightclubs, no bars, no feelie pads, no mess parlors, no bongo haunts, no jukebox joints, no hamburg havens, no newsstands, no comic books; no smellorama, no hot rods, no weed, no jazz, no gin.

Yes, tranquil, secure and cozy were all good words for Civil Service Knolls—a sylvan monument to sane, civilized, progressive attitudes.

Yet fear was about to swoop there just the same. Not fear of war, missile-atomic or otherwise—the Cold Truce with Communism was a good fifty years old. Not fear of physical disease or any crippling organic infirmity—such ills were close to the vanishing point and even funerals and deaths—again with the vital aid of the family hypnotherapist—were rather pleasant or at least reassuring occasions for the survivors. No, the fear that was about to infiltrate Civil Service Knolls was of the sort that must be called nameless.

A householder crossing a stretch of open turf as he strolled home from the subway thought he heard a whish directly overhead. There was nothing whatever blackly silhouetted against the wide stretch of moon-pale sky, yet it seemed to him that one of the moon-dimmed stars near the zenith quivered and shifted, as if there were an eddy in the air or sky. Heaven had wavered. And weren’t there two extra stars there now?—two new stars in the center of the eddy—two dim red stars close-placed like eyes?

No, that was impossible, he must be seeing things—his own blasted fault for missing his regular soothe session with the hypnotherapist! Just the same, he hurried his steps.

The eddy in the darkness overhead floated in pace with him awhile, then swooped. He heard a louder whish, then something brushed his shoulder and claws seemed to fasten there for an instant.

He gasped like someone about to vomit and leaped forward frantically.

From the empty moon-glowing darkness behind him came a cackle of grim laughter.

While the householder desperately pounded upon his own front door, the eddy in the darkness shot up the height of a sequoia, then swooped on another section of Civil Service Knolls. It hovered for a while above the imposing two-story residence of Judistrator Wisant, took a swing around the three-story one of Securitor Harker, but in the end drifted down to investigate a faintly glowing upstairs window in another three-story house.

Inside the window an athletically handsome matron, mother of five, was leisurely preparing for bed. She was thinking, rather self-satisfiedly, that (1) she had completed all preparations for her family’s participation in the Twilight Tranquillity Festival tomorrow, high point of the community year; (2) she had thrown just the right amount of cold water on her eldest daughter’s infatuation for the unsuitable boy visiting next door (and a hint to the hypnotherapist before her daughter’s next session would do the rest); and (3) she truly didn’t look five years older than her eldest daughter.

There was a tap at the window.

The matron started, pulling her robe around her, then craftily waved off the light. It had instantly occurred to her that the unsuitable boy might have had the audacity to try to visit her daughter illicitly and have mistaken bedroom windows—she had read in magazine articles that such wild lascivious young men actually existed in parts of America, though—thank Placidity!—not as regular residents of Civil Service Knolls.

She walked to the window and abruptly waved it to full transparency and then with a further series of quick sidewise waves brought the room’s lights to photoflood brilliance.

At first she saw nothing but the thick foliage of the sycamore a few yards outside.

Then it seemed to her as if there were an eddy in the massed greenery. The leaves seemed to shift and swirl.

Then a face appeared in the eddy—a green face with the fanged grin of a devil and hotly glowing eyes that looked like twin peepholes into Hell.

The matron screamed, spun around and sprinted into the hall, shouting the local security number toward the phone, which her scream triggered into ear-straining awareness.

From beyond the window came peals of cold maniacal laughter.

Yes, fear had come to Civil Service Knolls—in fact, horror would hardly be too strong a term.

Some men lead perfect lives—poor devils!

—Notebooks of A.S.

Judistrator Wisant was awakened by a familiar insistent tingling in his left wrist. He reached out and thumbed a button. The tingling stopped. The screen beside the bed glowed into life with the handsome hatchet face of his neighbor Securitor Harker. He touched another button, activating the tiny softspeaker and micromike relays at his ear and throat.

“Go ahead, Jack,” he murmured.

Two seconds after his head had left the pillow a faint light had sprung from the walls of the room. It increased now by easy stages as he listened to a terse secondhand account of the two most startling incidents to disturb Civil Service Knolls since that tragic episode ten years ago when the kindergarten hypnotherapist went crazy and called attention to her psychosis only by the shocking posthypnotic suggestions she implanted in the toddlers’ minds.

Judistrator Wisant was a large, well-built, shaven-headed man. His body, half covered now by the lapping sheet, gave the impression of controlled strength held well in reserve. His hands were big and quiet. His face was a compassionate yet disciplined mask of sanity. No one ever met him and failed to be astounded when they learned afterward that it was his wife, Beth, who had been the aberrating school hypnotherapist and who was now a permanent resident of the nearby mental hospital of Serenity Shoals.

The bedroom was as bare and impersonal as a gymnasium locker room. Screen, player, two short bedside shelves of which one was filled with books and tapes and neatly stacked papers, an uncurtained darkened windoor leading to a small outside balcony and now set a little ajar, the double bed itself exactly half slept in—that about completed the inventory, except for two 3-D photographs on the other bedside shelf of two smiling, tragic-eyed women who looked enough alike to be sisters of about twenty-seven and seventeen. The photograph of the elder bore the inscription, “To my Husband, With all my Witchy Love. Beth,” and of the younger, “To her Dear Daddikins from Gabby.”

The topmost of the stacked papers was a back cover cut from a magazine demurely labeled Individuality Unlimited: Monthly Bulletin. The background was a cluster of shadowy images of weird and grim beings: vampires, werewolves, humanoid robots, witches, murderesses, “Martians,” mask-wearers, naked brains with legs. A central banner shouted: NEXT MONTH: ACCENT THE MONSTER IN YOU! In the lower left-hand corner was a small sharp photo of a personable young man looking mysterious, with the legend “David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor.” Clipped to the page was a things-to-do-tomorrow memo in Joel Wisant’s angular script: “10 ack emma: Individuality Unlimited hearing. Warn them on injunction.”

Wisant’s gaze shifted more than once to this item and to the two photographs as he patiently heard out Harker’s account. Finally he said, “Thanks, Jack. No, I don’t think it’s a prankster—what Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames report seeing is no joke-shop scare-your-friends illusion. And I don’t think it’s anything that comes in any way from Serenity Shoals, though the overcrowding there is a problem and we’re going to have to do something about it. What’s that? No, it’s nobody fooling around in an antigravity harness—they’re too restricted. And we know it’s nothing from outside—that’s impossible. No, the real trouble, I’m afraid, is that it’s nothing at all—nothing material. Does the name Mattoon mean anything to you? . . .

“I’m not surprised, it was a hundred years ago. But a town went mad because of an imaginary prowler, there was an epidemic of insane fear. That sort of thing happening today could be much worse. Are you familiar with Report K? . . .

“No matter, I can give you the gist of it. You’re cleared for it and ought to have it. But you are calling on our private line, aren’t you? This stuff is top restricted. . . .

“Report K is simply the true annual statistics on mental health in America. Adjusted ones showing no significant change have been issued through the usual channels. Jack, the real incidence of new psychoses is up 15 percent in the last eight months. Yes, it is pretty staggering and I am a close-mouthed old dog. No, it’s been pretty well proved that it isn’t nerve viruses or mind war, much as the Kremlin boys would like to see us flip and despite those irrational but persistent rumors of a Mind Bomb. Analysis is not complete, but the insanity surge seems to be due to a variety of causes—things that we’ve let get out of hand and must deal with drastically.”

As Wisant said those last words he was looking at the “Accent the Monster” banner on the Individuality Unlimited Bulletin. His hand took a stylus, crossed out the “Warn them on” in his memo, underlined “injunction” three times and added an exclamation point.

Meanwhile he continued, “As far as Mr. Fredericks and Mrs. Ames are concerned, here’s your procedure. First, instruct them to tell no one about what they thought they saw—tell them it’s for the public safety—and direct them to see their hypnotherapists. Same instructions to family members and anyone to whom they may have talked. Second, find the names of their hypnotherapists, call them and tell them to get in touch with Dr. Andreas Snowden at Serenity Shoals—he’s up on Report K and will know what reassurance techniques or memory-wiping to advise. I depend on Snowden a lot—for that matter he’s going to be with us tomorrow when we go up against Individuality Unlimited. Third, don’t let anything leak to the press—that’s vital. We must confine this outbreak of delusions before any others are infected. I don’t have to tell you, jack, that I have a reason to feel very deeply about a thing like this.” His gaze went to the photo of his wife. “That’s right, Jack, we’re sanitary engineers of the mind, you and I—we hose out mental garbage!”

A rather frosty smile came into his face and stayed there while he listened again to Harker.

After a bit he said, “No, I wouldn’t think of missing the Tranquillity Festival—in fact they’ve got me leading part of it. Always proud to—and these community occasions are very important in keeping people sane. Gabby? She’s looking forward to it too, as only a pretty, sweet-minded girl of seventeen can who’s been chosen Tranquillity Princess. She really makes it for me. And now hop to it, Jack, while this old man grabs himself some more shut-eye. Remember that what you’re up against is delusions and hallucinations, nothing real.”

Wisant thumbed off the phone. As his head touched the pillow and the light in the room started to die, he nodded twice, as if to emphasize his last remark.

Serenity Shoals, named with a happy unintended irony, is a sizable territory in America’s newest frontier: the Mountains of Madness.

—Notebooks of A.S.

While the scant light that filtered past the windoor died, the eddy in the darkness swung away from the house of Judistrator Wisant and sped with a kind of desperation toward the sea. The houses and lawns gave out. The wooded knolls became lower and sandier and soon gave way to a wide treeless expanse of sand, holding a half-dozen large institutional buildings and a tent city besides. The buildings were mostly dark, but with stripes of dimly lit windows marking stairwells and corridors; the tent city likewise had its dimly lit streets. Beyond them both the ghostly breakers of the Pacific were barely visible in the moonlight.

Serenity Shoals, which has been called a “sandbox for grownups,” was one of twenty-first-century America’s largest mental hospitals and now it was clearly filled beyond any planned capacity. Here dwelt the garden-variety schizos, manics, paranoids, brain-damageds, a few exotic sufferers from radiation-induced nerve sickness and spaceflight-gendered gravitational dementia and cosmic shock, and a variety of other special cases—but really all of them were simply the people who for one reason or another found it a better or at least more bearable bargain to live with their imaginings rather than even pretend to live with what society called reality.

Tonight Serenity Shoals was restless. There was more noise, more laughter and chatter and weeping, more movement of small lights along the corridors and streets, more shouts and whistles, more unscheduled night parties and night wanderings of patients and night expeditions of aides, more beetlelike scurryings of sand-cars with blinking headlights, more emergencies of all sorts. It may have been the general overcrowding, or the new batch of untrained nurses and aides, or the rumor that lobotomies were being performed again, or the two new snackbars. It may even have been the moonlight—Luna disturbing the “loonies” in the best superstitious tradition.

For that matter, it may have been the eddy in the darkness that was the cause of it all.

Along the landward side of Serenity Shoals, between it and the wasteland bordering Civil Service Knolls, stretched a bright new wire fence, unpleasantly but not lethally electrified—one more evidence that Serenity Shoals was having to cope with more than its quota.

Back and forth along the line of the fence, though a hundred yards above, the eddy in the darkness beat and whirled, disturbing the starlight. There was an impression of hopeless yearning about its behavior, as if it wanted to reach its people but could not pass over the boundary.

From the mangy terrace between the permanent buildings and the nominally temporary tents, Director Andreas Snowden surveyed his schizo-manic domain. He was an elderly man with sleepy eyes and unruly white hair. He frowned, sensing an extra element in the restlessness tonight. Then his brow cleared and smiling with tender cynicism, he recited to himself:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.

Applies a lot more to Serenity Shoals, he thought, than to America these days. Though I ain’t no bloody copper goddess bearing a lamp to dazzle the Dagos and I ain’t got no keys to no golden doors. (Dr. Snowden was always resolutely crude and ungrammatical in his private thoughts, perhaps in reaction to the relative gentility of his spoken utterances. He was also very sentimental.)

“Oh, hello, doctor!” The woman darting across the corner of the terrace had stopped suddenly. It was hard to see anything about her except that she was thin.

Dr. Snowden walked toward her. “Good evening, Mrs. Wisant,” he said. “Rather late for you to be up and around, isn’t it?”

“I know, doctor, but the thought rays are very thick tonight and they sting worse than the mosquitoes. Besides, I’m so excited I couldn’t sleep anyhow. My daughter is coming here tomorrow.”

“Is she?” Dr. Snowden asked gently. “Odd that Joel hasn’t mentioned it to me. As it happens, I’m to see your husband tomorrow on a legal matter:”

“Oh, Joel doesn’t know she’s coming,” the lady assured him. “He’d never let her if he did. He doesn’t think I’m good for her ever since I started blacking out on my visits home and . . . doing things. But it isn’t a plot between me and Gabby, either—she doesn’t know she’s coming.”

“So? Then how are you going to manage it, Mrs. Wisant?”

“Don’t try to sound so normal, doctor!—especially when you know very well I’m not. I suppose you think that I think I will summon her by sending a thought ray. Not at all. I’ve practically given up using thought rays. They’re not reliable and they carry yellow fever. No, doctor, I got Gabby to come here tomorrow ten years ago.”

“Now how did you do that, Mrs. Wisant? Time travel?”

“Don’t be so patronizing! I merely impressed it on Gabby’s mind ten years ago—after all, I am a trained hypnotherapist—that she should come to me when she became a princess. Now Joel writes me she’s been chosen Tranquillity Princess for the festival tomorrow. You see?”

“Very interesting. But don’t be disappointed if—“

“Stop being a wet blanket, doctor! Don’t you have any trust in psychological techniques? I know she’s coming. Oh, the daisies, the beautiful daisies . . .”

“Then that settles it. How are they treating you here these days?”

“I have no complaints, doctor—except I must say I don’t like all these new nurses and aides. They’re callow. They seem to think it’s very queer of us to be crazy.”

Dr. Snowden chuckled. “Some people are narrow-minded,” he agreed.

“Yes, and so gullible, doctor. Just this afternoon two of the new nurses were goggling over a magazine ad about how people should improve their personalities by becoming monsters. I ask you!”

Dr. Snowden shrugged. “I doubt whether all of us are monster material. And now perhaps you’d better . . .”

“I suppose so. Good night, doctor.”

As she -was turning to go, Mrs. Wisant paused to slap her left forearm viciously.

“Thought ray?” Dr. Snowden asked.

Mrs. Wisant looked at him sardonically. “No,” she said. “Mosquito!”

Dull security and the dead weight of perfection breed aberration even more surely than disorder and fear.

—Notebooks of A.S.

Gabrielle Wisant, commonly called Gabby though she was anything but that, was sleeping on her back in long pink pajamas, stretched out very straight and with her arms folded across her breasts, looking more like the stone funeral effigy of a girl than a living one—an effect which the unrumpled bedclothes heightened.

The unocculted windoor let in the first cold granular light of dawn. The room was feminine, but without any special character—it seemed secretive. It had one item in common with her father’s: on a low bedside stand and next to a pad of pink notepaper was another sliced-off back cover of the Individuality Unlimited bulletin. Close beside the “David Cruxon: Your Monster Mentor” photo there was a note scrawled in green ink.

Gabs—How’s this for kicks? Cruxon’s Carny! or corny? Lunch with your MM same place but 130 pip emma. Big legal morning. Tell you then, Dave. (Signed and Sealed in the Monsterarium, 4 pip emma, 15 June)

The page was bowed up as if something about ten inches long were lying under it.

Gabrielle Wisant’s eyes opened, though not another muscle of her moved, and they stayed that way, directed at the ceiling.

And then . . . then nothing overt happened, but it was as if the mind of Gabrielle Wisant—or the soul or spirit, call it what you will—rose from unimaginable depths to the surface of her eyes to take a long look around, like a small furtive animal that silently mounts to the mouth of its burrow to sniff the weather, ready to duck back at the slightest sudden noise or apprehension of danger—in fact, rather like the groundhog come up to see or not to see its shadow on Candlemas Day.

With a faculty profounder than physical sight, the mind of Gabby Wisant took a long questioning look around at her world—the world of a “pretty, sweet-minded girl of seventeen”—to decide if it was worth living in.

Sniffing the weather of America, she became aware of a country of suntanned, slimmed-down people with smoothed-out minds, who fed contentedly on decontaminated news and ads and inspiration pieces, like hamsters on a laboratory diet. But what were they after? What did they do for kicks? What happened to the ones whose minds wouldn’t smooth, or smoothed too utterly?

She saw the sane, civilized, secure, superior community of Civil Service Knolls, a homestead without screeching traffic or violence, without jukeboxes or juvenile delinquency, a place of sensible adults and proper children, a place so tranquil, it was going to have a Tranquillity Festival tonight. But just beyond it she saw Serenity Shoals with its lost thousands living in brighter darker worlds, including one who had planted posthypnotic suggestions in children’s minds like time bombs.

She saw a father so sane, so just, so strong, so perfectly controlled, so always right that he was not so much a man as a living statue—the statue she too tried to be every night while she slept. And what was the statue really like under the marble? What were the heat and color of its blood?

She saw a witty man named David Cruxon who perhaps loved her, but who was so mixed up between his cynicism and his idealism that you might say he canceled out. A knight without armor . . . and armor without a knight.

She saw no conventional monsters, no eddies in darkness—her mind had been hiding deep down below all night.

She saw the surface of her own mind, so sweetly smoothed by a succession of kindly hypnotherapists (and one beloved traitor who must not be named) that it was positively frightening, like a book of horrors bound in pink velvet with silk rosebuds, or the sluggish sea before a hurricane, or night softly silent before a scream. She wished she had the kind of glass-bottomed boat that would let her peer below, but that was the thing above all else she must not do.

She saw herself as Tranquillity Princess some twelve hours hence, receiving the muted ovation under the arching trees, candlelight twinkling back from her flared and sequined skirt and just one leaf drifted down and caught in her fine-spun hair.

Princess . . . Princess . . . As if that word were somehow a signal, the mind of Gabby Wisant made its decision about the worth of the upper world and dove back inside, dove deep deep down. The groundhog saw its shadow black as ink and decided to dodge the dirty weather ahead.

The thing that instantly took control of Gabby Wisant’s body when her mind went into hiding treated that body with a savage familiarity, certainly not as if it were a statue. It sprang to its haunches in the center of the bed, snuffing the air loudly. It ripped off the pink pajamas with a complete impatience or ignorance of magnetic clasps. It switched on the lights and occulted the windoor, making it a mirror, and leered approvingly at itself and ran its hands over its torso in fierce caresses. It snatched a knife with a six-inch blade from under the bulletin cover and tried its edge on its thumb and smiled at the blood it drew and sucked it. Then it went through the inner door, utterly silent as to footsteps but breathing in loud, measured gasps like a careless tiger.

When Judistrator Wisant woke, his daughter was squatted beside him on the permanently undisturbed half of his bed, crooning to his scoutmaster’s knife. She wasn’t looking at him quite, or else she was looking at him sideways—he couldn’t tell through the eyelash-blur of his slitted eyes.

He didn’t move. He wasn’t at all sure he could. He humped the back of his tongue to say “Gabby,” but he knew it would come out as a croak and he wasn’t even sure he could manage that. He listened to his daughter—the crooning had changed back to faintly gargling tiger gasps—and he felt the cold sweat trickling down the sides of his face and over his naked scalp and stingingly into his eyes.

Suddenly his daughter lifted the knife high above her head, both hands locked around the hilt, and drove it down into the center of the empty, perfectly mounded pillow beside him. As it thudded home he realized with faint surprise that he hadn’t moved although he’d tried to. It was as though he had contracted his muscles convulsively, but discovered that all the tendons had been cut without his knowing.

He lay there quite flaccid, watching his daughter through barely parted eyelids as she mutilated the pillow with slow savage slashes, digging in the point with a twist, and sawing off a corner. She must be sweating too—strands of her fine-spun pale gold hair clung wetly to her neck and slim shoulders. She was crooning once more, with a rippling low laugh and a soft growl for variety, and she was drooling a little. The hospital smell of the fresh-cut plastic came to him faintly.

Young male voices were singing in the distance. Judistrator Wisant’s daughter seemed to hear them as soon as he did, for she stopped chopping at the pillow and held still, and then she started to sway her head and she smiled and she got off the bed with long easy movements and went to the windoor and thumbed it wide open and stood on the balcony, the knife trailing laxly from her left hand.

The singing was louder now—young male voices rather dutifully joyous in a slow marching rhythm—and now he recognized the tune. It was “America the Beautiful” but the words were different. This verse began,

Oh beautiful for peaceful minds, Secure families . . .

It occurred to Wisant that it must be the youths going out at dawn to gather the boughs and deck the Great Bower, a traditional preparatory step to the Twilight Tranquillity Festival. He’d have deduced it instantly if his tendons hadn’t been cut. . .

But then he found that he had turned his head toward the balcony and even turned his shoulders and lifted up on one elbow a little and opened his eyes wide.

His daughter put her knife between her teeth and clambered sure-footedly onto the railing and jumped to the nearest sycamore branch and hung there swinging, like a golden-haired, long-legged, naked ape.

And bring with thee

Tranquillity

To Civil Service Knolls.

She swung in along the branch to the trunk and laid her knife in a crotch and braced one foot there and started to swing the other and her free arm too in monkey circles.

He reached out and tried to thumb the phone button, but his hand was shaking in a four-inch arc.

He heard his daughter yell, “Yoohoo! Yoohoo, boys!”

The singing stopped.

Judistrator Wisant half scrabbled, half rolled out of bed and hurried shakingly—and he hoped noiselessly—through the door and down the hall and into his daughter’s bedroom, shut the door behind him—and locked it, as he only discovered later—and grabbed her phone and punched out Securitor Harker’s number.

The man he wanted answered almost immediately, a little cross with sleep.

Wisant was afraid he’d have trouble being coherent at all. He was startled to find himself talking with practically his normal confident authority and winningness.

“Wisant, Jack. Calling from home. Emergency. I need you and your squad on the double. Yes. Pick up Dr. Sims or Armstrong on the way but don’t waste time. Oh—and have your men bring ladders. Yes, and put in a quick call to Serenity Shoals for a ‘copter. What? My authority. What? Jack, I don’t want to say it now, I’m not using our private line. Well, all right, just let me think for a minute. . . .”

Judistrator Wisant ordinarily never had trouble in talking his way around stark facts. And he wouldn’t have had even this time, perhaps, if he hadn’t just the moment before seen something that distracted him.

Then the proper twist of phrase came to him.

“Look, Jack,” he said, “it’s this way: Gabby has gone to join her mother. Get here fast.”

He turned off the phone and picked up the disturbing item: the bulletin cover beside his daughter’s bed. He read the note from Cruxon twice and his eyes widened and his jaw tightened.

His fear was all gone away somewhere. For the moment all his concerns were gone except this young man and his stupid smirking face and stupider title and his green ink.

He saw the pink pad and he picked up a dark crimson stylus and began to write rapidly in a script that was a shade larger and more angular than usual.

For 100 years even breakfast foods had been promoting delirious happiness and glorious peace of mind. To what end?

—Notebooks of A.S.

“Suppose you begin by backgrounding us in on what Individuality Unlimited is and how it came to be? I’m sure we all have a general idea and may know some aspects in detail, but the bold outline, from management’s point of view, should be firmed. At the least it will get us talking.”

This suggestion, coming from the judistrator himself, reflected the surface informality of the conference taking place in Wisant’s airy chambers in central New Angeles. Dr. Andreas Snowden sat on the judistrator’s right, doodling industriously. Securitor Harker sat on Wisant’s left, while flanking the trio were two female secretaries in dark business suits similar to those men wore a century before, though of somewhat shapelier cut and lighter material.

Like all the other men in the room, Wisant was sensibly clad in singlet, business jerkin, Bermuda shorts and sandals. A folded pink paper sticking up a little from his breast pocket provided the only faintly incongruous detail. He had been just seven minutes late to the conference, perhaps a record for fathers who have seen their daughters ‘coptered off to a mental hospital two hours earlier—though only Harker knew of and so could appreciate this iron-man achievement.

A stocky man with shaggy pepper-and-salt hair and pugnacious brows stood up across the table from Wisant.

“Good idea,” he said gruffly. “If we’re going to be hanged, let’s get the ropes around our necks. First I’d better identify us shifty-eyed miscreants. I’m Bob Diskrow, president and general manager.” He then indicated the two men on his left: “Mr. Sobody, our vice-president in charge of research, and Dr. Gline, IU’s chief psychiatrist.” He turned to the right: “Miss Rawvetch, VP in charge of presentation—” (A big-boned blonde flashed her eyes. She was wearing a lavender business suit with pearl buttons, wing collars and ascot tie) “—and Mr. Cruxon, junior VP in charge of the . . . Monster Program.” David Cruxon was identifiably the young man of the photograph, with the same very dark, crew-cut hair and sharply watchful eyes, but now he looked simply haggard rather than mysterious. At the momentary hesitation in Diskrow’s voice he quirked a smile as rapid and almost as convulsive as a tic.

“I happen already to be acquainted with Mr. Cruxon,” Wisant said with a smile, “though in no fashion prejudicial to my conducting this conference. He and my daughter know each other socially.”

Diskrow stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels reflectively.

Wisant lifted a hand. “One moment,” he said. “There are some general considerations governing any judistrative conference of which I should remind us. They are in line with the general principle of government by Commission, Committee and Conference which has done so much to simplify legal problems in our times. This meeting is private. Press is excluded, politics are taboo. Any information you furnish about IU will be treated by us as strictly confidential and we trust you will return the courtesy regarding matters we may divulge. And this is a democratic conference. Any of us may speak freely.

“The suggestion has been made,” Wisant continued smoothly, “that some practices of IU are against the public health and safety. After you have presented your case and made your defense—pardon my putting it that way—I may in my judicial capacity issue certain advisements. If you comply with those, the matter is settled. If you do not, the advisements immediately become injunctions and I, in my administrative capacity, enforce them—though you may work for their removal through the regular legal channels. Understood?”

Diskrow nodded with a wry grimace. “Understood. You got us in a combined hammerlock and body scissors. (Just don’t sprinkle us with fire ants!) And now I’ll give you that bold outline you asked for—and try to be bold about it.”

He made a fist and stuck out a finger from it. “Let’s get one thing straight at the start: Individuality Unlimited is no idealistic or mystical outfit with its head in orbit around the moon, and it doesn’t pretend to be. We just manufacture and market a product the public is willing to fork out money for. That product is individuality.” He rolled the word on his tongue.

“Over one hundred years ago people started to get seriously afraid that the Machine Age would turn them into a race of robots. That mass production and consumption, the mass media of a now instantaneous communication, the subtle and often subliminal techniques of advertising and propaganda, plus the growing use of group and hypnotherapy would turn them into a bunch of identical puppets. That wearing the same clothes, driving the same cars, living in look-alike suburban homes, reading the same pop books and listening to the same pop programs, they’d start thinking the same thoughts and having the same feelings and urges and end up with rubber-stamp personalities.

“Make no mistake, this fear was very real,” Diskrow went on, leaning his weight on the table and scowling. “It was just about the keynote of the whole twentieth century (and of course to some degree it’s still with us). The world was getting too big for any one man to comprehend, yet people were deeply afraid of groupthink, teamlife, hive living, hypoconformity, passive adjustment and all the rest of it. The sociologist and analyst told them they had to play ‘roles’ in their family life and that didn’t help much, because a role is one more rubber stamp. Other cultures, like Russia, offered us no hope—they seemed further along the road to robot life than we were.

“In short, people were deathly afraid of loss of identity, loss of the sense of being unique human beings. First and always they dreaded depersonalization, to give it its right name.

“Now, that’s where Individuality Unlimited, operating under its time-honored slogan ‘Different Ways to Be Different,’ got its start,” Diskrow continued, making a scooping gesture, as if his right hand were IU gathering up the loose ends of existence. “At first our methods were pretty primitive or at least modest—we sold people individualized doodads to put on their cars and clothes and houses, we offered conversation kits and hobby guides, we featured Monthly Convention Crushers and Taboo Breakers that sounded very daring but really weren’t”—Diskrow grinned and gave a little shrug—“and incidentally we came in for a lot of ribbing on the score that we were trying to mass-produce individuality and turn out uniqueness on an assembly line. Actually a lot of our work still involves randomizing pattern details and introducing automatic unpredictable variety into items as diverse as manufactured objects and philosophies of life.

“But in spite of the ribbing we kept going because we knew we had hold of a sound idea: that if a person can be made to feel he’s different, if he is encouraged to take the initiative in expressing himself in even a rather trivial way, then his inner man wakes up and takes over and starts to operate under his own steam. What people basically need is a periodic shot in the arm. I bunk you not when I tell you that here IU has always done and is still doing a real public service. We don’t necessarily give folks new personalities, but we renew the glow of those they have. As a result they become happier workers, better citizens. We make people individuality-certain.”

“Uniqueness-convinced,” Miss Rawvetch put in brightly.

“Depersonalization-secure,” Dr. Gline chimed. He was a small man with a large forehead and a permanent hunch to his shoulders. He added, “Only a man who is secure in his own individuality can be at one with the cosmos and really benefit from the tranquil awe-inspiring rhythms of the stars, the seasons and the sea.”

At that windy remark David Cruxon quirked a second grimace and scribbled something on the pad in front of him.

Diskrow nodded approvingly at Gline. “Now, as IU began to see the thing bigger, it had to enter new fields and accept new responsibilities. Adult education, for example—one very genuine way of making yourself more of an individual is to acquire new knowledge and skills. Three-D shows—we needed them to advertise and dramatize our techniques. Art—self-expression and a style of one’s own are master keys to individuality, though they don’t unlock everybody’s inner doors. Philosophy—it was a big step forward for us when we were able to offer people ‘A Philosophy of Life That’s Yours Alone.’ Religion—that too, of course, though only indirectly . . . strictly nonsectarian. Childhood lifeways—it’s surprising what you can do in an individualizing way with personalized games, adult toys, imaginary companions and secret languages—and by recapturing and adapting something of the child’s vivid sense of uniqueness. Psychology—indeed yes, for a person’s individuality clearly depends on how his mind is organized and how fully its resources are used. Psychiatry too—it’s amazing how a knowledge of the workings of abnormal minds can be used to suggest interesting patterns for the normal mind. Why—“

Dr. Snowden cleared his throat. The noise was slight but the effect was ominous. Diskrow hurried in to say, “Of course we were well aware of the serious step we were taking in entering this field so we added to our staff a large psychology department of which Dr. Gline is the distinguished current chief.”

Dr. Snowden nodded thoughtfully at his professional colleague across the table. Dr. Cline blinked and hastily nodded back. Unnoticed, David Cruxon got off a third derisive grin.

Diskrow continued: “But I do want to emphasize the psychological aspect of our work—yes, and the psychiatric too—because they’ve led us to such fruitful ideas as our program of ‘Soft-Sell Your Superiority,’ which last year won a Lasker Group Award of the American Public Health Association.”

Miss Rawvetch broke in eagerly: “And which was dramatized to the public by that still-popular 3-D show, ‘The Useless Five,’ featuring the beloved characters of the Inferior Superman, the Mediocre Mutant, the Mixed-up Martian, the Clouded Esper and Rickety Robot.”

Diskrow nodded. “And which also has led, by our usual reverse-twist technique, to our latest program of ‘Accent the Monster in You.’ Might as well call it our Monster Program.” He gave Wisant a frank smile. “I guess that’s the item that’s been bothering you gentlemen and so I’m going to let you hear about it from the young man who created it—under Dr. Gline’s close supervision. Dave, it’s all yours.”

Dave Cruxon stood up. He wasn’t as tall as one would have expected. He nodded around rapidly.

“Gentlemen,” he said in a deep but stridently annoying voice, “I had a soothing little presentation worked up for you. It was designed to show that IU’s Monster Program is completely trivial and one hundred percent innocuous.” He let that sink in, looked around sardonically, then went on with, “Well, I’m tossing that presentation in the junk-chewer!—because I don’t think it does justice to the seriousness of the situation or to the great service IU is capable of rendering the cause of public health. I may step on some toes but I’ll try not to break any phalanges.”

Diskrow shot him a hard look that might have started out to be warning but ended up enigmatic. Dave grinned back at his boss, then his expression became grave.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “a specter is haunting America—the specter of Depersonalization. Mr. Diskrow and Dr. Gline mentioned it but they passed over it quickly. I won’t. Because depersonalization kills the mind. It doesn’t mean just a weary sense of sameness and of life getting dull; it means forgetting who you are and where you stand, it means what we laymen still persist in calling insanity.”

Several pairs of eyes went sharply to him at that word. Gline’s chair creaked as he turned in it. Diskrow laid a hand on the psychiatrist’s sleeve as if to say, “Let him alone—maybe he’s building toward a reverse angle.”

“Why this very real and well-founded dread of depersonalization?” David Cruxon looked around. “I’ll tell you why. It’s not primarily the Machine Age, and it’s not primarily because life is getting too complex to be easily grasped by any one person—though those are factors. No, it’s because a lot of blinkered Americans, spoon-fed a sickeningly sweet version of existence, are losing touch with the basic facts of life and death, hate and love, good and evil. In particular, due to a lot too much hypno-soothing and suggestion techniques aimed at easy tranquillity, they’re losing a conscious sense of the black depths in their own natures—and that’s what’s making them fear-depersonalization and actually making them flip—and that’s what IU’s Monster-in-You Program is really designed to remedy!”

There was an eruption of comments at that, with Diskrow starting to say, “Dave doesn’t mean—“, Gline beginning, “I disagree. I would not say—“, and Snowden commencing, “Now if you bring in depth psychology—” but Dave added decibels to his voice and overrode them.

“Oh yes, superficially our Monster Program just consists of hints to our customers on how to appear harmlessly and handsomely sinister, but fundamentally it’s going to give people a glimpse of the real Mr. Hyde in themselves—the deviant, the cripple, the outsider, the potential rapist and torture-killer—under the sugary hypno-soothed consciousness of Dr. Jekyll. In a story or play, people always love the villain best—though they’ll seldom admit it—because the villain stands for the submerged, neglected and unloved dark half of themselves. In the Monster Program we’re going to awaken that half for their own good. We’re going to give some expression, for a change, to the natural love of adventure, risk, melodrama and sheer wickedness that’s part of every man!”

“Dave, you’re giving an unfair picture of your own program!” Diskrow was on his feet and almost bellowing at Cruxon. “I don’t know why—maybe out of some twisted sense of self-criticism or some desire for martyrdom—but you are! Gentlemen, IU is not suggesting in its new program that people become real monsters in any way—“

“Oh, aren’t we?”

“Dave, shut up and sit down! You’ve said too much already.

I’ll—“

“Gentlemen!” Wisant lifted a hand. “Let me remind you that this is a democratic conference. We can all speak freely. Any other course would be highly suspicious. So simmer down, gentlemen, simmer down.” He turned toward Dave with a bland warm smile. “What Mr. Cruxon has to say interests me very much.”

“I’m sure it does!” Diskrow fumed bitterly.

Dave said smoothly, “What I’m trying to get over is that people can’t be pampered and soothed and wrapped away from the ugly side of reality and stay sane in the long run. Half truths kill the mind just as surely as lies. People live by the shock of reality—especially the reality of the submerged sections of their own minds. It’s only when a man knows the worst about himself and other men and the world that he can really take hold of the facts—brace himself against his atoms, you might say—and achieve true tranquillity. People generally don’t like tragedy and horror—not with the Sunday-school side of their minds, they don’t—but deep down they have to have it. They have to break down the Pollyanna Partition and find what’s really on the other side. An all-sugar diet is deadly. Life can be sweet, yes, but only when the contrast of horror brings out the taste: Especially the horror in a man’s heart!”

“Very interesting indeed,” Dr. Snowden put in quietly, even musingly, “and most lavishly expressed, if I may say so. What Mr. Cruxon has to tell us about the dark side of the human mind—the Id, the Shadow, the Death Wish, the Sick Negative: there have been many names—is of course an elementary truth. However . . .” He paused. Diskrow, still on his feet, looked at him with suspicious incredulity, as if to say, “Whose side are you pretending to be on?”

The smile faded from Snowden’s face. “However,” he continued, “it is an equally elementary truth that it is dangerous to unlock the dark side of the mind. Not every psychotherapist—not even every analyst”—here his gaze flickered toward Dr. Gline—“is really competent to handle that ticklish operation. The untrained person who attempts it can easily find himself in the position of the sorcerer’s apprentice. Nevertheless—“

“It’s like the general question of human freedom,” Wisant interrupted smoothly. “Most men are simply not qualified to use all the freedoms theoretically available to them.” He looked at the IU people with a questioning smile. “For example, I imagine you all know something about the antigravity harness used by a few of our special military units? At least you know that such an item exists?”

Most of the people across the table nodded. Diskrow said, “Of course we do. We even had a demonstration model in our vaults until a few days ago.” Seeing Wisant’s eyebrows lift, he added impressively, “IU is often asked to help introduce new devices and materials to the public. As soon as the harness was released, we were planning to have Inferior Supe use it on ‘The Useless Five’ show. But then the directive came through restricting the item—largely on the grounds that it turned out to be extremely dangerous and difficult to operate—and we shipped back our model.”

Wisant nodded. “Since you know that much, I can make my point about human freedom more easily. Actually (but I’ll deny this if you mention it outside these chambers) the antigravity harness is not such a specialist’s item. The average man can rather easily learn to operate one. In other words it is today technologically possible for us to put three billion humans in the air, flying like birds.

“But three billion humans in the air would add up to confusion, anarchy, an unimaginable aerial traffic jam. Hence—restriction and an emphasis on the dangers and extreme difficulties of using the harness. The freedom to swim through the air can’t be given outright; it must be doled out gradually. The same applies to all freedoms—the freedom to love, the freedom to know the world, even the freedom to know yourself—especially your more explosive drives. Don’t get me wrong now—such freedoms are fine if the person is conditioned for them.” He smiled with frank pride. “That’s our big job, you know: conditioning people for freedom. Using conditioning-for-freedom techniques, we ended juvenile delinquency and beat the Beat Generation. We—“

“Yes, you beat them all right!” Dave breaking in again suddenly, sounded raspingly angry. “You got all the impulses such movements expressed so well battened down, so well repressed and decontaminated, that now they’re coming out as aberration, deep neurosis, mania. People are conforming and adjusting so well, they’re such carbon copies of each other, that now they’re even all starting to flip at the same time. They were overprotected mentally and emotionally. They were shielded from the truth as if it were radioactive—and maybe in its way it is, because it can start chain reactions. They were treated like halfwits and that’s what we’re getting. Age of Tranquillity! It’s the Age of Psychosis! It’s an open secret that the government and its Committee for Public Sanity have been doctoring the figures on mental disease for years. They’re fifty, a hundred percent greater than the published ones—no one knows how much. What’s this mysterious Report K we keep hearing about? Which of us hasn’t had friends and family members flipping lately? Anyone can see the overcrowding at asylums, the bankruptcy of hypnotherapy. This is the year of the big payoff for generations of hysterical optimism, reassurance psychology and plain soft-soaping. It’s the DTs after decades of soothing-syrup addiction!”

“That’s enough, Dave!” Diskrow shouted. “You’re fired! You no longer speak for IU. Get out!”

“Mr. Diskrow!” Wisant’s voice was stern. “I must point out to you that you’re interfering with free inquiry, not to mention individuality. What your young colleague has to say interests me more and more. Pray continue, Mr. Cruxon.” He smiled like a big fat cat.

Dave answered smile with glare. “What’s the use?” he said harshly. “The Monster Program’s dead. You got me to cut its throat and now you’d like me to finish severing the neck, but what I did or didn’t do doesn’t matter a bit—you were planning to kill the Monster Program in any case. You don’t want to do anything to stop the march of depersonalization. You like depersonalized people. As long as they’re tranquil and manageable, you don’t care—it’s even OK by you if you have to keep ‘em in flip factories and put the tranquillity in with a needle. Government by the three Big C’s of Commission, Committee and Conference! There’s a fourth C, the biggest, and that’s the one you stand for—government by Censorship! So long, everybody. I hope you’re happy when your wives and kids start flipping—when you start flipping. I’m getting out.”

Wisant waited until Dave got his thumb on the door, then he called, “One moment, Mr. Cruxon!” Dave held still though he did not turn around. “Miss Sturges,” Wisant continued, “would you please give this to Mr. Cruxon?” He handed her the small folded sheet of pink paper from his breast pocket. Dave shoved it in his pocket and went out.

“A purely personal matter between Mr. Cruxon and myself,” Wisant explained, looking around with a smile. He swiftly reached across the table and snagged the scratchpad where Dave had been sitting. Diskrow seemed about to protest, then to think better of it.

“Very interesting,” Wisant said after a moment, shaking his head. He looked up from the pad. “As you may recall, Mr. Cruxon only used his stylus once—just after Dr. Cline had said something about the awe-inspiring rhythms of the sea. Listen to what he wrote.” He cleared his throat and read: “‘When the majestic ocean starts to sound like water slipping around in the bathtub, it’s time to jump in.’” Wisant shook his head. “I must say I feel concerned about that young man’s safety . . . his mental safety.”

“I do too,” Miss Rawvetch interjected, looking around with a helpless shrug. “My Lord, was there anybody that screwball forgot to antagonize?”

Dr. Snowden looked up quickly at Wisant. Then his gaze shifted out and he seemed to become abstracted.

Wisant continued: “Mr. Diskrow, I had best tell you now that in addition to my advisement against the Monster Program, I am going to have to issue an advisement that there be a review of the mental stability of IU’s entire personnel. No personal reflection on any of you, but you can clearly see why.”

Diskrow flushed but said nothing. Dr. Gline held very still. Dr. Snowden began to doodle furiously.

A monster is a master symbol of the secret and powerful, the dangerous and unknown, evoking the remotest mysteries of nature and human nature, the most dimly sensed enigmas of space, time and the hidden regions of the mind.

—Notebooks of A.S.

Masks of monsters brooded down from all the walls—full-lipped raven-browed Dracula, the cavern-eyed dome-foreheaded Phantom, the mighty patchwork visage of Dr. Frankenstein’s charnel man with his filmy strangely compassionate eyes, and many earlier and later fruitions of the dark half of man’s imagination. Along with them were numerous stills from old horror movies (both 3-D and flat), blown-up book illustrations, monster costumes and disguises including an Ape Man’s hairy hide, and several big hand-lettered slogans such as “Accent Your Monster!” “Watch Out, Normality!” “America, Beware!” “Be Yourself—in Spades!” “Your Lady in Black,” and “Mount to Your Monster!”

But Dave Cruxon did not look up at the walls of his “Monsterarium.” Instead he smoothed out the pink note he had crumpled in his hand and read the crimson script for the dozenth time.

Please excuse my daughter for not attending lunch today, she being detained in consequence of a massive psychosis. (Signed and Sealed on the threshold of Serenity Shoals)

The strangest thing about Dave Cruxon’s reaction to the note was that he did not notice at all simply how weird it was, how strangely the central fact was stated, how queerly the irony was expressed, how like it was to an excuse sent by a pretentious mother to her child’s teacher. All he had mind for was the central fact.

Now his gaze did move to the walls. Meanwhile his hands automatically but gently smoothed the note, then opened a drawer, reached far in and took out a thick sheaf of sheets of pink notepaper with crimson script, and started to add the new note to it. As he did so a brown flattened flower slipped out of the sheaf and crawled across the back of his hand. He jerked back his hands and stood staring at the pink sheets scattered over a large black blotter and at the wholly inanimate flower.

The phone tingled his wrist. He lunged at it.

“Dave Cruxon,” he identified himself hoarsely.

“Serenity Shoals, Reception. I find we do have a patient named Gabrielle Wisant. She was admitted this morning. She cannot come to the phone at present or receive visitors. I would suggest, Mr. Cruxon, that you call again in about a week or that you get in touch with—“

Dave put back the phone. His gaze went back to the walls. After a while it became fixed on one particular mask on the far wall. After another while he walked slowly over to it and reached it down. As his fingers touched it, he smiled and his shoulders relaxed, as if it reassured him.

It was the face of a devil—a green devil.

He flipped a little smooth lever that could be operated by the tongue of the wearer and the eyes glowed brilliant red. Set unobtrusively in the cheeks just below the glowing eyes were the actual eyeholes of the mask—small, but each equipped with a fisheye lens so that the wearer would get a wide view.

He laid down the mask reluctantly and from a heap of costumes picked up what looked like a rather narrow silver breastplate or corselet, stiffly metallic but hinged at one side for the convenience of the person putting it on. To it were attached strong wide straps, rather like those of a parachute. A thin cable led from it to a small button-studded metal cylinder that fit in the hand. He smiled again and touched one of the buttons and the hinged breastplate rose toward the ceiling, dangling its straps and dragging upward his other hand and arm. He took his finger off the button and the breastplate sagged toward the floor. He set the whole assembly beside the mask.

Next he took up a wicked-looking pair of rather stiff gloves with horny claws set at the finger ends. He also handled and set aside a loose one-piece suit.

What distinguished both the gloves and the coverall was that they glowed whitely even in the moderately bright light of the Monsterarium.

Finally he picked up from the piled costumes what looked at first like a large handful of nothing—or rather as if he had picked up a loose cluster of lenses and prisms made of so clear a material as to be almost invisible. In whatever direction he held it, the wall behind was distorted as if seen through a heat shimmer or as reflected in a crazy-house mirror. Sometimes his hand holding it disappeared partly and when he thrust his other arm into it, that arm vanished.

Actually what he was holding was a robe made of a plastic textile called light-flow fabric. Rather like lucite, the individual threads of the light-flow fabric carried or “piped” the light entering them, but unlike lucite they spilled such light after carrying it roughly halfway around a circular course. The result was that anything draped in light-flow fabric became roughly invisible, especially against a uniform background.

Dave laid down the light-flow fabric rather more reluctantly than he had put down the mask, breastplate and other items. It was as if he had laid down a twisting shadow.

Then Dave clasped his hands behind him and began to pace. From time to time his features worked unpleasantly. The tempo of his pacing quickened. A smile came to his lips, worked into his cheeks, became a fixed, hard, graveyard grin.

Suddenly he stopped by the pile of costumes, struck an attitude, commanded hoarsely, “My hauberk, knave!” and picked up the silver breastplate and belted it around him. He tightened the straps around his thighs and shoulders, his movements now sure and swift.

Next, still grinning, he growled, “My surcoat, sirrah!” and donned the glowing coverall.

“Vizard!” “Gauntlets!” He put on the green mask and the clawed gloves.

Then he took up the robe of light-flow fabric and started for the door, but he saw the scattered pink notes.

He brushed them off the black blotter, found a white stylus, and gripping it with two fingers and thumb extended from slits in the right-hand gauntlet, he wrote:

Dear Bobbie, Dr. Gee, et al.,

By the time you read this, you will probably be hearing about me on the news channels. I’m doing one last bang-up public relations job for dear old IU. You can call it Cruxon’s Crusade—the One-Man Witchcraft. I’ve tried out the equipment before, but only experimentally. Not this time! This time when I’m finished, no one will be able to bury the Monster Program. Wish me luck on my Big Hexperiment—you’ll need it!—because the stench is going to be unendurable.

Your little apprentice demon, D.C.

He threw the stylus away over his shoulder and slipped on the robe of light-flow fabric, looping part of it over his head like a cowl.

Some twenty minutes ago a depressed young man in business jerkin and shorts had entered the Monsterarium.

Now an exultant-hearted heat shimmer, with a reserve glow under its robe of invisibility, exited from it.

There is a batable ground between madness and sanity, though few tread it: laughter.

Notebooks of A.S.

Andreas Snowden sat in Joel Wisant’s bedroom trying to analyze his feelings of annoyance and uneasiness and dissatisfaction with himself—and also trying to decide if his duty lay here or back at Serenity Shoals.

The windoor was half open on fast-fading sunlight. Through it came a medley of hushed calls and commands, hurried footsteps, twittering female laughter and the sounds of an amateur orchestra self-consciously tuning up—the Twilight Tranquillity Festival was about to begin.

Joel Wisant sat on the edge of the bed looking toward the wall. He was dressed in green tights, jerkin and peaked cap—a Robin Hood costume for the Festival. His face wore a grimly intent, distant expression. Snowden decided that here was a part of his reason for feeling annoyed—it is always irritating to be in the same room with someone who is communicating silently by micromike and softspeaker. He knew that Wisant was at the moment in touch with Security—not with Securitor Harker, who was downstairs and probably likewise engaged in silent phoning, but with the Central Security Station in New Angeles—but that was all he did know.

Wisant’s face relaxed somewhat, though it stayed grim, and he turned quickly toward Snowden, who seized the opportunity to say, “Joel, when I came here this afternoon, I didn’t know anything about—“but Wisant cut him short with:

“Hold it, Andy!—and listen to this. There have been at least a dozen new mass-hysteria outbreaks in the NA area in the past two hours.” He rapped it out tersely. “Traffic is snarled on two ground routes and swirled in three ‘copter lanes. If safety devices hadn’t worked perfectly there’d have been a hatful of deaths and serious injuries. There’ve been panics in department stores, restaurants, offices and at least one church. The hallucinations are developing a certain amount of pattern indicating case-to-case infection. People report something rushing invisibly through the air and buzzing them like a giant fly. I’m having the obvious lunatics held—those reporting hallucinations like green faces or devilish laughter. We can funnel ‘em later to psychopathic or your place—I’ll want your advice on that. The thing that bothers me most is that a garbled account of the disturbances has leaked out to the press. ‘Green Demon Jolts City,’ one imbecile blatted! I’ve given orders to have the involved ‘casters and commentators picked up—got to try to limit the infection. Can you suggest any other measures I should take?”

“Why, no, Joel—it’s rather out of my sphere, you know,” Snowden hedged. “And I’m not too sure about your theory of infectious psychosis, though I’ve run across a little folie à deux in my time. But what I did want to talk to you about—“

“Out of your sphere, Andy? What do you mean by that?” Wisant interrupted curtly. “You’re a psychologist, a psychiatrist—mass hysteria’s right up your alley.”

“Perhaps, but security operations aren’t. And how can you be so sure, Joel, that there isn’t something real behind these scares?”

“Green faces, invisible fliers, Satanic laughter? Don’t be ridiculous, Andy. Why, these are just the sort of outbreaks Report K predicts. They’re like the two cases here last night. Wake up, man! This is a major emergency.”

“Well . . . perhaps it is. It still isn’t up my alley. Get your loonies to Serenity Shoals and I’ll handle them.” Snowden raised his hand defensively. “Now wait a minute, Joel, there’s something I want to say. I’ve had it on my mind ever since I heard about Gabby. I was shocked to hear about that, Joel—you should have told me about it earlier. Anyway, you had a big shock this morning. No, don’t tell me differently—it’s bound to shake a man to his roots when his daughter aberrates and does a symbolic murder on him or beside him. You simply shouldn’t be driving yourself the way you are. You ought to have postponed the IU hearing this morning. It could have waited.”

“What? And have taken a chance of more of that Monster material getting to the public?”

Snowden shrugged. “A day or two one way or the other could hardly have made any difference.”

“I disagree,” Wisant said sharply. “Even as it is, it’s touched off this mass hysteria and—“

“If it is mass hysteria . . .”

Wisant shook his head impatiently. “—and we had to show Cruxon up as an irresponsible mischief-maker. You must admit that was a good thing.”

“I suppose so,” Snowden said slowly. “Though I’m rather sorry we stamped on him quite so hard—teased him into stamping on himself, really. He had hold of some very interesting ideas even if he was making bad use of them.”

“How can you say that, Andy? Don’t you psychologists ever take things seriously?” Wisant sounded deeply shocked. His face worked a little. “Look, Andy, I haven’t told anybody this, but I think Cruxon was largely responsible for what happened to Gabby.”

Snowden looked up sharply. “I keep forgetting you said they were acquainted. Joel, how deep did that go? Did they have dates? Do you think they were in love? Were they together much?”

“I don’t know!” Wisant had started to pace. “Gabby didn’t have dates. She wasn’t old enough to be in love. She met Cruxon when he lectured to her communications class. After that she saw him in the daytime—only once or twice, I thought—to get material for her course. But there must have been things Gabby didn’t tell me. I don’t know how far they went, Andy, I don’t know!”

He broke off because a plump woman in flowing Greek robes of green silk had darted into the room.

“Mr. Wisant, you’re on in ten minutes!” she cried, hopping with excitement. Then she saw Snowden. “Oh, excuse me.”

“That’s quite all right, Mrs. Potter,” Wisant told her. “I’ll be there on cue.”

She nodded happily, made an odd pirouette and darted out again. Simultaneously the orchestra outside, which sounded as if composed chiefly of flutes, clarinets and recorders, began warbling mysteriously.

Snowden took the opportunity to say quickly, “Listen to me, Joel. I’m worried about the way you’re driving yourself after the shock you had this morning. I thought that when you came home here you’d quit, but now I find that it’s just so you can participate in this community affair while keeping in touch at the same time with those NA scares. Easy does it, Joel—Harker and Security Central can handle those things.”

Wisant looked at Snowden. “A man must attend to all his duties,” he said simply. “This is serious, Andy, and any minute you may be involved whether you like it or not. What do you think the danger is of an outbreak at Serenity Shoals?”

“Outbreak?” Snowden said uneasily. “What do you mean?”

“I mean just that. You may think of your patients as children, Andy, but the cold fact is that you’ve got ten thousand dangerous maniacs not three miles from here under very inadequate guard. What if they are infected by the mass hysteria and stage an outbreak?”

Snowden frowned. “It’s true we have some inadequately trained personnel these days. But you’ve got the wrong picture of the situation. Emotionally sick people don’t stage mass outbreaks. They’re not syndicate crooks with smuggled guns and dynamite.”

“I’m not talking about plotted outbreaks. I’m talking about mass hysteria. If it can infect the sane, it can infect the insane. And I know the situation at Serenity Shoals has become very difficult—very difficult for you, Andy—with the overcrowding. I’ve been keeping in closer touch with that than you may know. I’m aware that you’ve petitioned that lobotomy, long-series electroshock and heavy narcotics be reintroduced in general treatment.”

“You’ve got that wrong,” Snowden said sharply. “A minority of doctors—a couple of them with political connections—have so petitioned. I’m dead set against it myself.”

“But most families have given consent for lobotomies.”

“Most families don’t want to be bothered with the person who goes over the edge. They’re willing to settle for anything that will ‘soothe’ him.”

“Why do you headshrinkers always have to sneer at decent family feelings?” Wisant demanded stridently. “Now you’re talking like Cruxon.”

“I’m talking like myself! Cruxon was right about too much soothing syrup—especially the kind you put in with a needle or a knife.”

Wisant looked at him puzzledly. “I don’t understand you, Andy. You’ll have to do something to control your patients as the overcrowding mounts. With this epidemic mass hysteria you’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of cases in the next few weeks. Serenity Shoals will become a—a Mind Bomb! I always thought of you as a realist, Andy.”

Snowden answered sharply, “And I think that when you talk of thousands of new cases, you’re extrapolating from too little data. ‘Dangerous maniacs’ and ‘mind bombs’ are theater talk—propaganda jargon. You can’t mean that, Joel.”

Wisant’s face was white, possibly with suppressed anger, and he was trembling very slightly. “You won’t say that, Andy, if your patients erupt out of Serenity Shoals and come pouring over the countryside in a great gush of madness.”

Snowden stared at him. “You’re afraid of them,” he said softly. “That’s it—you’re afraid of my loonies. At the back of your mind you’ve got some vision of a stampede of droolers with butcher knives.” Then he winced at his own words and slumped a little. “Excuse me, Joel,” he said, “but really, if you think Serenity Shoals is such a dangerous place, why did you let your daughter go there?”

“Because she is dangerous,” Wisant answered coldly. “I’m a realist, Andy.”

Snowden blinked and then nodded wearily, rubbing his eyes. “I’d forgotten about this morning.” He looked around. “Did it happen in this room?”

Wisant nodded.

“Where’s the pillow she chopped up?” Snowden asked callously.

Wisant pointed across the room at a box that was not only wrapped and sealed as if it contained infectious material, but also corded and the cord tied in an elaborate bow. “I thought it should be carefully preserved,” he said.

Snowden stared. “Did you wrap that box?”

“Yes. Why?”

Snowden said nothing.

Harker came in asking, “Been in touch with the Station the last five minutes, Joel? Two new outbreaks. A meeting of the League for Total Peace Through Total Disarmament reports that naked daggers appeared from nowhere and leaped through the air, chasing members and pinning the speaker to his rostrum by his jerkin. One man kept yelling about poltergeists—we got him. And the naked body of a man weighing three hundred pounds fell spang in the middle of the Congress of the SPECP—that’s the Society for the Prevention of Emotional Cruelty to People. Turned out to be a week-old corpse stolen from City Hospital Morgue. Very fragrant. Joel, this mass-hysteria thing is broadening out.”

Wisant nodded and opened a drawer beside his bed.

Snowden snorted. “A solid corpse is about as far from mass hysteria as you can get,” he observed. “What do you want with that hot rod, Joel?”

Wisant did not answer. Harker showed surprise.

“You stuck a heat gun in your jerkin, Joel,” Snowden persisted. “Why?”

Wisant did not look at him, but waved sharply for silence. Mrs. Potter had come scampering into the room, her green robes flying.

“You’re on, Mr. Wisant, you’re on!”

He nodded at her coolly and walked toward the door just as two unhappy-looking men in business jerkins and shorts appeared in it. One of them was carrying a rolled-up black blotter.

“Mr. Wisant we want to talk to you,” Mr. Diskrow began. “I should say we have to talk to you. Dr. Gline and I were making some investigations at the IU offices—Mr. Cruxon’s in particular—and we found—“

“Later,” Wisant told them loudly as he strode by.

“Joel!” Harker called urgently, but Wisant did not pause or turn his head. He went out. The four men looked after him, puzzled.

The Twilight Tranquillity Festival was approaching its muted climax. The Pixies and Fairies (girls) had danced their woodland ballet. The Leprechauns and Elves (boys) had made their Flashlight Parade. The Greenest Turf, the Growingest Garden, the Healthiest Tree, the Quietest ‘Copter, the Friendliest House, the Rootedest Family and many other silently superlative exurban items had been identified and duly admired. The orchestra had played all manner of forest, brook and bird music. The Fauns and Pans (older boys) had sung “Tranquillity So Masterful,” “These Everlasting Knolls,” the Safety Hymn, and “Come Let’s Steal Quietly.” The Sprites and Nymphs (older girls) had done their Candlelight Saraband. Representing religion, the local Zen Buddhist pastor (an old Caucasian Californian) had blessed the gathering with a sweet-sour wordlessness. And now the ever-popular Pop Wisant was going to give his yearly talk and award trophies. (“It’s tremendous of him to give of himself this way,” one matron said, “after what he went through this morning. Did you know that she was stark naked? They wrapped a blanket around her to put her aboard the ‘copter but she kept pulling it off.”)

Freshly cut boughs attached to slim magnesium scaffolding made, along with the real trees, a vast leafy bower out of what had this morning been an acre of lawn. Proud mothers in green robes and dutiful fathers in green jerkins lined the walls, shepherding their younger children. Before them stood a double line of Nymphs and Sprites in virginal white ballet costumes, each holding a tall white candle tipped with blue-hearted golden flame.

Up to now it had been a rather more nervously gay Tranquillity Festival than most of the mothers approved of. Even while the orchestra played there had been more than the usual quota of squeals, little shrieks, hysterical giggles, complaints of pinches and prods in the shadows, candles blown out, raids on the refreshment tables, small children darting into the bushes and having to be retrieved. But Pop Wisant’s talk would smooth things out, the worriers told themselves.

And indeed as he strode between the ranked nymphs with an impassive smile and mounted the vine-wreathed podium, the children grew much quieter. In fact the hush that fell on the leafy Big Top was quite remarkable.

“Dear friends, charming neighbors and fellow old coots,” he began—and then noticed that most of the audience were looking up at the green ceiling.

There had been no wind that evening, no breeze at all, but some of the boughs overhead were shaking violently. Suddenly the shaking died away. (“My, what a sudden gust that was,” Mrs. Ames said to her husband. Mr. Ames nodded vaguely—he had somehow been thinking of the lines from Macbeth about Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane.)

“Fellow householders and family members of Civil Service Knolls,” Wisant began again, wiping his forehead. “In a few minutes several of you will be singled out for friendly recognition, but I think the biggest award ought to go to all of you collectively for one more year of working for tranquillity. . . .”

The shaking of the boughs had started up again and was traveling down the far wall. The eyes of at least half the audience were traveling with it. (“George,” Mrs. Potter said to her husband, “it looks as if a lot of crumpled cellophane were being dragged through the branches. It all wiggles.” He replied, “I forgot my glasses.” Mr. Ames muttered to himself, “The wood began to move. Liar and slave!”)

Wisant resolutely kept his eyes away from the traveling commotion and continued, “. . and for one more year of keeping up the good fight against violence, delinquency, irrationality . . .”

A rush of wind (looking like “curdled air,” some said afterward) sped from the rear of the hall to the podium. Most of the candles were blown out, as if a giant had puffed at his giant birthday cake, and the Nymphs and Sprites squealed all the way down the double line.

The branches around Wisant shook wildly. “. . . emotionalism, superstition, and the evil powers of the imagination!” he finished with a shout, waving his arms as if to keep off bats or bees.

Twice after that he gathered himself to continue his talk, although his audience was in a considerable uproar, but each time his attention went back to a point a little above their heads. No one else saw anything where he was looking (except some “curdled air”), but Wisant seemed to see something most horrible, for his face paled, he began to back off as if the something were approaching him, he waved out his arms wildly as one might at a wasp or a bat, and suddenly he began to scream, “Keep it off me! Can’t you see it, you fools? Keep it off!”

As he stepped off the podium backward he snatched something from inside his jerkin. There was a nasty whish in the air and those closest to him felt a wave of heat. There were a few shrill screams. Wisant fell heavily on the turf and did not move. A shining object skidded away from his hand. Mr. Ames picked it up. The pistol-shaped weapon was unfamiliar to him and he discovered only later that it was a heat gun.

The foliage of the Great Bower was still again, but a long streak of leaves in the ceiling had instantaneously turned brown. A few of these came floating down as if it were autumn.

Sometimes I think of the whole world as one great mental hospital, its finest people only inmates trying out as aides.

—Notebooks of A.S.

It is more fun than skindiving to soar through the air in an antigravity harness. That is, after you have got the knack of balancing your field. It is deeply thrilling to tilt your field and swoop down at a slant, or cut it entirely and just drop—and then right it or gun it and go bounding up like a rubber ball. The positive field around your head and shoulders creates an air cushion against the buffeting of the wind and your own speed.

But after a while the harness begins to chafe, your sense of balance gets tired, your gut begins to resent the slight griping effects of the field supporting you, and the solid ground which you first viewed with contempt comes to seem more and more inviting. David Cruxon discovered all of these things.

Also, it is great fun to scare people. It is fun to flash a green demon mask in their faces out of nowhere and see them blanch. Or to glow white in the dark and listen to them scream. It is fun to snarl traffic and panic pedestrians and break up solemn gatherings—the solemner the better—with rude or shocking intrusions. It is fun to know that your fellowman is little and puffed up and easily terrified and as in love with security as a baby with his bottle, and to prove it on him again and again. Yes, it is fun to be a practicing monster.

But after a while the best of Halloween pranks become monotonous, fear reactions begin to seem stereotyped, you start to see yourself in your victims, and you get ashamed of winning with loaded dice. David Cruxon discovered this too.

He had thought after he broke up the Tranquillity Festival that he had hours of mischief left in him. The searing near-miss of Wisant’s hot rod had left him exhilarated. (Only the light-flow fabric, diverting the infrared blast around him, had saved him from dangerous, perhaps fatal burns.) And now the idea of stampeding an insane asylum had an ironic attraction. And it had been good sport at first, especially when he invisibly buzzed two sandcars of aides into a panic so that they went careening over the dunes on their fat tires, headlight beams swinging frantically, and finally burst through the light fence on the landward side (giving rise to a rumor of an erupting horde of ravening madmen). That had been very good fun indeed, rather like harmlessly strafing war refugees, and after it Dave had shucked off his robe and hood of invisibility and put on a Glowing Phantom acrobatic display, diving and soaring over the dark tiny hills, swooping on little groups with menacing phosphorescent claws and peals of Satanic laughter.

But that didn’t prove to be nearly as good fun. True, his victims squealed and sometimes ran, but they didn’t seem to panic permanently like the aides. They seemed to stop after a few steps and come back to be scared again, like happily hysterical children. He began to wonder what could be going on in the minds down there if a Glowing Phantom was merely a welcome diversion. Then the feeling got hold of him that those people down there saw through him and sympathized with him. It was a strange feeling—both deflating and heartwarming.

But what really finished Dave off as a practicing monster was when they started to cheer him—cheer him as if he were their champion returning in triumph. Cruxon’s Crusade—was that what he’d called it? And was this his Holy Land? As he asked himself that question he realized that he was drifting wearily down toward a hilltop on a long slow slant and he let his drift continue, landing with a long scuff.

Despite the cheers, he rather expected to be gibbered at and manhandled by the crowd that swiftly gathered around him. Instead he was patted on the back, congratulated for his exploits at New Angeles and asked intelligent questions.

Gabby Wisant’s mind had fully determined to stay underground a long time. But that had been on the assumptions that her body would stay near Daddikins at Civil Service Knolls and that the thing that had taken control of her body would stay hungry and eager. Now those assumptions seemed doubtful, so her mind decided to risk another look round.

She found herself one of the scattered crowd of people wandering over sandhills in the dark. Some memories came to her, even of the morning, but not painfully enough to drive her mind below. They lacked pressure.

There was an older woman beside her—a rather silly and strangely affected woman by her talk, yet somehow likable—who seemed to be trying to look after her. By stages Gabby came to realize it must be her mother.

Most of the crowd were following the movements of something that glowed whitely as it swooped and whirled through the air, like a small demented comet far off course. After a bit she saw that the comet was a phosphorescent man. She laughed.

Some of the people started to cheer. She copied them. The glowing man landed on a little sandhill just ahead. Some of the crowd hurried forward. She followed them. She saw a young man stepping clumsily out of some glowing coveralls. The glow let her see his face.

“Dave, you idiot!” she squealed at him happily.

He smiled at her shamefacedly.

Dr. Snowden found Dave and Gabby and Beth Wisant on a dune just inside the break in the wire fence—the last of the debris from last night’s storm. The sky was just getting light. The old man motioned back the aides with him and trudged up the sandy rise and sat down on a log.

“Oh, hello, doctor,” Beth Wisant said. “Have you met Gabrielle? She came to visit me just like I told you.”

Dr. Snowden nodded tiredly. “Welcome to Serenity Shoals, Miss Wisant. Glad to have you here.”

Gabby smiled at him timidly. “I’m glad to be here too—I think. Yesterday . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“Yesterday you were a wild animal,” Beth Wisant said loudly, “and you killed a pillow instead of your father. The doctor will tell you that’s very good sense.”

Dr. Snowden said, “All of us have these somatic wild animals—” he looked at Dave—“these monsters.”

Gabby said, “Doctor, do you think that Mama calling me so long ago can have had anything to do with what happened to me yesterday?”

“I see no reason why not,” he replied, nodding. “Of course, there’s a lot more than that that’s mixed up about you.”

“When I implant a suggestion, it works,” Beth Wisant asserted.

Gabby frowned. “Part of the mixup is in the world, not me.”

“The world is always mixed up,” Dr. Snowden said. “It’s a pretty crazy hodgepodge with sensible strains running through it, if you look for them very closely. That’s one of the things we have to accept.” He rubbed his eyes and looked up. “And while we’re on the general topic of unpleasant facts, here’s something else. Serenity Shoals has got itself one more new patient besides yourselves—Joel Wisant.”

“Hum,” said Beth Wisant. “Maybe now that I don’t have him to go home to, I can start getting better.”

“Poor Daddikins,” Gabby said dully.

“Yes,” Snowden continued, looking at Dave, “that last little show you put on at the Tranquillity Festival—and then on top of it the news that there was an outbreak here—really broke him up.” He shook his head. “Iron perfectionist. At the end he was even demanding that we drop an atomic bomb on Serenity Shoals—that was what swung Harker around to my side.”

“An atom bomb!” Beth Wisant said. “The idea!”

Dr. Snowden nodded. “It does seem a little extreme.”

“So you class me as a psychotic too,” Dave said, a shade argumentatively. “Of course, I’ll admit that after what I did—“

Dr. Snowden looked at him sourly. “I don’t class you as psychotic at all—though a lot of my last-century colleagues would have taken great delight in tagging you as a psychopathic personality. I think you’re just a spoiled and willful young man with no capacity to bear frustration. You’re a self-dramatizer. You jumped into the ocean of aberration—that was the meaning of your note, wasn’t it?—but the first waves tossed you back on the beach. Still, you got in here, which was your main object.”

“How do you know that?” Dave asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Dr. Snowden said wearily, “at how many more or less sane people want to get into mental hospitals these days—it’s probably the main truth behind the Report K figures. They seem to think that insanity is the only great adventure left man in a rather depersonalizing age. They want to understand their fellowman at the depths, and here at least they get the opportunity.” He looked at Dave meaningfully as he said that. Then he went on, “At any rate, Serenity Shoals is the safest place for you right now, Mr. Cruxon. It gets you out from under a stack of damage suits and maybe a lynch mob or two.”

He stood up: “So come on then, all of you, down to Receiving,” he directed, a bit grumpily. “Pick up that junk you’ve got there, Dave, and bring it along. We’ll try to hang onto the harness—it might be useful in treating gravitational dementia. Come on, come on! I’ve wasted all night on you. Don’t expect such concessions in the future. Serenity Shoals is no vacation resort—and no honeymoon resort either though”—he smiled flickeringly—“though some couples do try.”

They followed him down the sandy hill. The rising sun behind them struck gold from the drab buildings and faded tents ahead.

Dr. Snowden dropped back beside Dave. “Tell me one thing,” he said quietly. “Was it fun being a green demon?”

Dave said, “That it was!”

ON THE STORM PLANET

Cordwainer Smith

Cordwainer Smith—Dr. Paul Linebarger—was a writer of enormous and various talents who, from 1948 until his untimely death in 1966, produced a double handful of the best short fiction this genre has ever seen, and innumerable lesser, but still excellent, stories—all twisted and blended and woven into an interrelated tapestry of incredible lushness and intricacy, a totally unique and baroque cosmology. It is impossible for me as a writer to imagine the state of modern SF without him, and I know any number of other authors who would agree with that statement without hesitation. Smith has been called “the man who dreamed the future,” and he is one of the few writers able to live up to that kind of promotional blurb—his future is complex and human enough to have just as much relevancy to 1970 as it had to 1960.

This story gives us an almost complete cross-section of his fabulous private universe. All of the threads are here: the Instrumentality, the underpeople, the childlike robots, forgetties, the Old North Australians, stroon, personality imprinting, planoforming, go captains and stop-captains, pinlighting, battle hypnotism, Space three, the Rediscovery of Man, the Old Strong Religion of the God Nailed High. And at the heart of it, as at the heart of all fiction, are his people, with all their frailties and strengths, their quirks, their holiness and carnality: the driven exile Casher, and the serene turtle-girl T’ruth, a millennium old, with only another eighty-nine thousand years left to watch and wait. . . .

G.D.

“At two seventy-five in the morning,” said the Administrator to Casher O’Neill, “you will kill this girl with a knife. At two seventy-seven, a fast groundcar will pick you up and bring you back here. Then the power cruiser will be yours. Is that a deal?”

He held out his hand as if he wanted Casher O’Neill to shake it then and there, making some kind of an oath or bargain.

Casher did not slight the man, so he picked up his glass and said, “Let’s drink to the deal first!”

The Administrator’s quick, restless, darting eyes looked Casher up and down very suspiciously. The warm sea-wet air blew through the room. The Administrator seemed wary, suspicious, alert, but underneath his slight hostility there was another emotion, of which Casher could perceive just the edge. Fatigue with its roots in bottomless despair: despair set deep in irrecoverable fatigue?

That other emotion, which Casher could barely discern, was very strange indeed. On all his voyages back and forth through the inhabited worlds, Casher had met many odd types of men and women. He had never seen anything like this Administrator before—brilliant, erratic, boastful. His title was “Mr. Commissioner” and he was an ex-Lord of the Instrumentality on this planet of Henriada, where the population had dropped from six hundred million persons down to some forty thousand. Indeed, local government had disappeared into limbo, and this odd man, with the title of Administrator, was the only law and civil authority which the planet knew.

Nevertheless, he had a surplus power cruiser and Casher O’Neill was determined to get that cruiser as a part of his long plot to return to his home planet of Mizzer and to unseat the usurper, Colonel Wedder.

The Administrator stared sharply, wearily at Casher and then he too lifted his glass. The green twilight colored his liquor and made it seem like some strange poison. It was only Earth byegarr, though a little on the strong side.

With a sip, only a sip, the older man relaxed a little. “You may be out to trick me, young man. You may think that I am an old fool running an abandoned planet. You may even be thinking that killing this girl is some kind of a crime. It is not a crime at all. I am the Administrator of Henriada and I have ordered that girl killed every year for the last eighty years. She isn’t even a girl, to start with. Just an underperson. Some kind of an animal turned into a domestic servant. I can even appoint you a deputy sheriff. Or chief of detectives. That might be better. I haven’t had a chief of detectives for a hundred years and more. You are my chief of detectives. Go in tomorrow. The house is not hard to find. It’s the biggest and best house left on this planet. Go in tomorrow morning. Ask for her master and be sure that you use the correct title: The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. The robots will tell you to keep out. If you persist, she will come to the door. That’s when you will stab her through the heart, right there in the doorway. My groundcar will race up one metric minute later. You jump in and come back here. We’ve been through this before. Why don’t you agree? Don’t you know who I am?”

“I know perfectly well”—Casher O’Neill smiled—“who you are, Mr. Commissioner and Administrator. You are the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, once of Earth Two. After all, the Instrumentality itself gave me a permit to land on this planet on private business. They knew who I was too, and what I wanted. There’s something funny about all this. Why should you give me a power cruiser—the best ship, you yourself say, in your whole fleet—just for killing one modified animal which looks and talks like a girl? Why me? Why the visitor? Why the man from off-world? Why should you care whether this particular underperson is killed or not? If you’ve given the order for her death eighty times in eighty years, why hasn’t it been carried out long ago? Mind you, Mr. Administrator, I’m not saying no. I want that cruiser. I want it very much indeed. But what’s the deal? What’s the trick? Is it the house you want?”

“Beauregard? No, I don’t want Beauregard. Old Madigan can rot in it for all that I care. It’s between Ambiloxi and Mottile, on the Gulf of Esperanzi. You can’t miss it. The road is good. You could drive yourself there.”

“What is it, then?” Casher’s voice had an edge of persistence to it.

The Administrator’s response was singular indeed. He filled his huge inhaler glass with the potent byegarr. He stared over the full glass at Casher O’Neill as if he were an enemy. He drained the glass. Casher knew that that much liquor, taken suddenly, could kill the normal human being.

The Administrator did not fall over dead.

He did not even become noticeably more drunk.

His face turned red and his eyes almost popped out, as the harsh 160–proof liquor took effect, but he still did not say anything. He just stared at Casher. Casher, who had learned in his long exile to play many games, just stared back.

The Administrator broke first.

He leaned forward and burst into a birdlike shriek of laughter. The laughter went on and on until it seemed that the man had hogged all the merriment in the galaxy. Casher snorted a little laugh along with the man, more out of nervous reflex than anything else, but he waited for the Administrator to stop laughing.

The Administrator finally got control of himself. With a broad grin and a wink at Casher, he poured himself four fingers more of the byegarr into his glass, drank it down as if he had had a sip of cream, and then—only very slightly unsteady—stood up, came over and patted Casher on the shoulder.

“You’re a smart boy, my lad. I’m cheating you. I don’t care whether the power cruiser is there or not. I’m giving you something which has no value at all to me. Who’s ever going to take a power cruiser off this planet? It’s mined. It’s abandoned. And so am I. Go ahead. You can have the cruiser. For nothing. Just take it. Free. Unconditionally.”

This time it was Casher who leaped to his feet and stared down into the face of the feverish, wanton little man.

“Thank you, Mr. Administrator!” he cried, trying to catch the hand of the administrator so as to seal the deal.

Rankin Meiklejohn looked awfully sober for a man with that much liquor in him. He held his right hand behind his back and would not shake.

“You can have the cruiser, all right. No terms. No conditions. No deal. It’s yours. But kill that girl first! Just as a favor to me. I’ve been a good host. I like you. I want to do you a favor. Do me one. Kill that girl. At two seventy-five in the morning. Tomorrow.”

“Why?” asked Casher, his voice loud and cold, trying to wring some sense out of the chattering man.

“Just—just—just because I say so . . .” stammered the Administrator.

“Why?” asked Casher, cold and loud again.

The liquor suddenly took over inside the Administrator. He groped back for the arm of his chair, sat down suddenly and then looked up at Casher. He was very drunk indeed. The strange emotion, the elusive fatigue-despair, had vanished from his face. He spoke straightforwardly. Only the excessive care of his articulation would have shown a passerby that he was drunk.

“Because, you fool,” said Meiklejohn, “those people, more than eighty in eighty years, that I have sent to Beauregard with orders to kill the girl . . . Those people—” he repeated, and stopped speaking, clamping his lips together.

“What happened to them?” asked Casher calmly and persuasively.

The Administrator grinned again and seemed to be on the edge of one of his wild laughs.

“What happened?” shouted Casher at him.

“I don’t know,” said the Administrator. “For the life of me, I don’t know. Not one of them ever came back.”

“What happened to them? Did she kill them?” cried Casher.

“How would I know?” said the drunken man, getting visibly more sleepy.

“Why didn’t you report it?”

This seemed to rouse the Administrator. “Report that one little girl had stopped me, the planetary Administrator? Just one little girl, and not even a human being! They would have sent help, and laughed at me. By the Bell, young man, I’ve been laughed at enough! I need no help from outside. You’re going in there tomorrow morning. At two seventy-five, with a knife. And a groundcar waiting.”

He stared fixedly at Casher and then suddenly fell asleep in his chair. Casher called to the robots to show him to his room; they tended to the master as well.

II

The next morning at two seventy-five sharp, nothing happened. Casher walked down the baroque corridor, looking into beautiful barren rooms. All the doors were open.

Through one door he heard a sick deep bubbling snore.

It was the Administrator, sure enough. He lay twisted in his bed. A small nursing machine was beside him, her white-enameled body only slightly rusty. She held up a mechanical hand for silence and somehow managed to make the gesture seem light, delicate and pretty, even from a machine.

Casher walked lightly back to his own room, where he ordered hotcakes, bacon and coffee. He studied a tornado through the armored glass of his window, while the robots prepared his food. The elastic trees clung to the earth with a fury which matched the fury of the wind. The trunk of the tornado reached like the nose of a mad elephant down into the gardens, but the flora fought back. A few animals whipped upward and out of sight. The tornado then came straight for the house, but did not damage it outside of making a lot of noise.

“We have two or three hundred of those a day,” said a butler robot. “That is why we store all spacecraft underground and have

no weather machines. It would cost more, the people said, to make this planet livable than the planet could possibly yield. The radio and news are in the library, sir. I do not think that the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn will wake until evening, say seven-fifty or eight o’clock.”

“Can I go out?”

“Why not, sir? You are a true man. You do what you wish.”

“I mean is it safe for me to go out?”

“Oh, no, sir! The wind would tear you apart or carry you away.”

“Don’t people ever go out?”

“Yes, sir. With groundcars or with automatic body armor. I have been told that if it weighs fifty tons or better, the person inside is safe. I would not know, sir. As you see, I am a robot. I was made here, though my brain was formed on Earth Two, and I have never been outside this house.”

Casher looked at the robot. This one seemed unusually talkative. He chanced the opportunity of getting some more information.

“Have you ever heard of Beauregard?”

“Yes, sir. It is the best house on this planet. I have heard people say that it is the most solid building on Henriada. It belongs to the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan. He is an Old North Australian, a renunciant who left his home planet and came here when Henriada was a busy world. He brought all his wealth with him. The underpeople and robots say that it is a wonderful place on the inside.”

“Have you seen it?”

“Oh, no, sir. I have never left this building.”

“Does the man Madigan ever come here?”

The robot seemed to be trying to laugh, but did not succeed. He answered, very unevenly, “Oh, no, sir. He never goes anywhere.”

“Can you tell me anything about the female who lives with him?”

“No sir,” said the robot.

“Do you know anything about her?”

“Sir, it is not that. I know a great deal about her.”

“Why can’t you talk about her, then?”

“I have been commanded not to, sir.”

“I am,” said Casher O’Neill, “a true human being. I herewith countermand those orders. Tell me about her.”

The robot’s voice became formal and cold. “The orders cannot be countermanded, sir.”

“Why not?” snapped Casher. “Are they the Administrator’s?”

“No, sir.”

“Whose, then?”

“Hers,” said the robot softly, and left the room.

III

Casher O’Neill spent the rest of the day trying to get information; he obtained very little.

The Deputy Administrator was a young man who hated his chief.

When Casher, who dined with him—the two of them having a poorly cooked state luncheon in a dining room which would have seated five hundred people—tried to come to the point by asking bluntly, “What do you know about Murray Madigan?” he got an answer which was blunt to the point of incivility.

“Nothing.”

“You never heard of him?” cried Casher.

“Keep your troubles to yourself, mister visitor,” said the Deputy Administrator. “I’ve got to stay on this planet long enough to get promoted off. You can leave. You shouldn’t have come.”

“I have,” said Casher, “an all-world pass from the Instrumentality.”

“All right,” said the young man. “That shows that you are more important than I am. Let’s not discuss the matter. Do you like your lunch?”

Casher had learned diplomacy in his childhood, when he was the heir apparent to the dictatorship of Mizzer. When his horrible uncle, Kuraf, lost the rulership, Casher had approved of the coup by the Colonels Wedder and Gibna; but now Wedder was supreme and enforcing a period of terror and virtue. Casher thus knew courts and ceremony, big talk and small talk, and on this occasion he let the small talk do. The young Deputy Administrator had only one ambition, to get off the planet Henriada and never to see or hear of Rankin Meiklejohn again.

Casher could understand the point.

Only one curious thing happened during dinner.

Toward the end, Casher slipped in the question, very informally: “Can underpeople give orders to robots?”

“Of course,” said the young man. “That’s one of the reasons we use underpeople. They have more initiative. They amplify our orders to robots on many occasions.”

Casher smiled. “I didn’t mean it quite that way. Could an underperson give an order to a robot which a real human being could not then countermand?”

The young man started to answer, even though his mouth was full of food. He was not a very polished young man. Suddenly he stopped chewing and his eyes grew wide. Then, with his mouth half full, he said, “You are trying to talk about this planet, I guess. You can’t help it. You’re on the track. Stay on the track, then. Maybe you will get out of it alive. I refuse to get mixed up with it, with you, with him and his hateful schemes. All I want to do is to leave when my time comes.”

The young man resumed chewing, his eyes fixed steadfastly on his plate.

Before Casher could pass off the matter by making some casual remark, the butler robot stopped behind him and leaned over. “Honorable sir, I heard your question. May I answer it?”

“Of course,” said Casher softly.

“The answer, sir,” said the butler robot, softly but clearly, “to your question is no, no, never. That is the general rule of the civilized worlds. But on this planet of Henriada, sir, the answer is yes.”

“Why?” asked Casher.

“It is my duty, sir,” said the robot butler, “to recommend to you this dish of fresh artichokes. I am not authorized to deal with other matters.”

“Thank you,” said Casher, straining a little to keep himself looking imperturbable.

Nothing much happened that night, except that Meiklejohn got up long enough to get drunk all over again. Though he invited Casher to come and drink with him, he never seriously discussed the girl except for one outburst.

“Leave it till tomorrow. Fair and square. Open and aboveboard. Frank and honest. That’s me. I’ll take you around Beauregard myself. You’ll see it’s easy. A knife, eh? A traveled young man like you would know what to do with a knife. And a little girl too. Not very big. Easy job. Don’t give it another thought. Would you like some apple juice in your byegarr?”

Casher had taken three contraintoxicant pills before going to drink with the ex-Lord, but even at that he could not keep up with Meiklejohn. He accepted the dilution of apple juice gravely, gracefully and gratefully.

The little tornadoes stamped around the house. Meiklejohn, now launched into some drunken story of ancient injustices which had been done to him on other worlds, paid no attention to them. In the middle of the night, past nine-fifty in the evening, Casher woke alone in his chair, very stiff and uncomfortable. The robots must have had standing instructions concerning the Administrator, and had apparently taken him off to bed. Casher walked wearily to his own room, cursed the thundering ceiling and went to sleep again.

IV

The next day was very different indeed.

The Administrator was as sober, brisk and charming as if he had never taken a drink in his life.

He had the robots call Casher to join him at breakfast and said, by way of greeting, “I’ll wager you thought I was drunk last night.”

“Well . . .” said Casher.

“Planet fever. That’s what it was. Planet fever. A bit of alcohol keeps it from developing too far. Let’s see. It’s three-sixty now. Could you be ready to leave by four?”

Casher frowned at his watch, which had the conventional twenty-four hours.

The Administrator saw the glance and apologized. “Sorry! My fault, a thousand times. I’ll get you a metric watch right away. Ten hours a day, a hundred minutes an hour. We’re very progressive here on Henriada.”

He clapped his hands and ordered that a watch be taken to Casher’s room, along with the watch-repairing robot to adjust it to Casher’s body rhythms.

“Four, then,” he said, rising briskly from the table. “Dress for a trip by groundcar. The servants will show you how.”

There was a man already waiting in Casher’s room. He looked like a plump, wise ancient Hindu, as shown in the archaeology books. He bowed pleasantly and said, “My name is Gosigo. I am a forgetty, settled on this planet, but for this day I am your guide and driver from this place to the mansion of Beauregard.”

Forgetties were barely above underpeople in status. They were persons convicted of various major crimes, to whom the courts of the worlds, or the Instrumentality, had allowed total amnesia instead of death or some punishment worse than death, such as the planet Shayol.

Casher looked at him curiously. The man did not carry with him the permanent air of bewilderment which Casher had noticed in many forgetties. Gosigo saw the glance and interpreted it.

“I’m well enough now, sir. And I am strong enough to break your back if I had the orders to do it.”

“You mean damage my spine? What a hostile, unpleasant thing to do!” said Casher. “Anyhow, I rather think I could kill you first if you tried it. Whatever gave you such an idea?”

“The Administrator is always threatening people that he will have me do it to them.”

“Have you ever really broken anybody’s back?” asked Casher, looking Gosigo over very carefully and rejudging him. The man, though shorter than Casher, was luxuriously muscled; like many plump men, he looked pleasant on the outside but could be very formidable to an enemy.

Gosigo smiled briefly, almost happily. “Well, no, not exactly.”

“Why haven’t you? Does the Administrator always countermand his own orders? I should think that he would sometimes be too drunk to remember to do it.”

“It’s not that,” said Gosigo.

“Why don’t you, then?”

“I have other orders,” said Gosigo, rather hesitantly. “Like the orders I have today. One set from the Administrator, one set from the Deputy Administrator, and a third set from an outside source.”

“Who’s the outside source?”

“She has told me not to explain just yet.”

Casher stood stock still. “Do you mean who I think you mean?”

Gosigo nodded very slowly, pointing at the ventilator as though it might have a microphone in it.

“Can you tell me what your orders are?”

“Oh, certainly. The Administrator has told me to drive both himself and you to Beauregard, to take you to the door, to watch you stab the undergirl, and to call the second groundcar to your rescue. The Deputy Administrator has told me to take you to Beauregard and to let you do as you please, bringing you back here by way of Ambiloxi if you happen to come out of Mr. Murray’s house alive.”

“And the other orders?”

“To close the door upon you when you enter and to think of you no more in this life, because you will be very happy.”

“Are you crazy?” cried Casher.

“I am a forgetty,” said Gosigo, with some dignity, “but I am not insane.”

“Whose orders are you going to obey, then?”

Gosigo smiled a warmly human smile at him. “Doesn’t that depend on you, sir, and not on me? Do I look like a man who is going to kill you soon?”

“No, you don’t,” said Casher.

“Do you know what you look like to me?” went on Gosigo, with a purr. “Do you really think that I would help you if I thought that you would kill a small girl?”

“You know it!” cried Casher, feeling his face go white.

“Who doesn’t?” said Gosigo. “What else have we got to talk about, here on Henriada? Let me help you on with these clothes, so that you will at least survive the ride.” With this he handed shoulder padding and padded helmet to Casher, who began to put on the garments, very clumsily.

Gosigo helped him.

When Casher was fully dressed, he thought that he had never dressed this elaborately for space itself. The world of Henriada must be a tumultuous place if people needed this kind of clothing to make a short trip.

Gosigo had put on the same kind of clothes.

He looked at Casher in a friendly manner, with an arch smile which came close to humor. “Look at me, honorable visitor. Do I remind you of anybody?”

Casher looked honestly and carefully, and then said, “No, you don’t.”

The man’s face fell. “It’s a game,” he said. “I can’t help trying to find out who I really am. Am I a Lord of the Instrumentality who has betrayed his trust? Am I a scientist who twisted knowledge into unimaginable wrong? Am I a dictator so foul that even the Instrumentality, which usually leaves things alone, had to step in and wipe me out? Here I am, healthy, wise, alert. I have the name Gosigo on this planet. Perhaps I am a mere native of this planet, who has committed a local crime. I am triggered. If anyone ever did tell me my true name or my actual past, I have been conditioned to shriek loud, fall unconscious and forget anything which might be said on such an occasion. People told me that I must have chosen this instead of death. Maybe. Death sometimes looks tidy to a forgetty.”

“Have you ever screamed and fainted?”

“I don’t even know that,” said Gosigo, “no more than you know where you are going this very day.”

Casher was tied to the man’s mystifications, so he did not let himself be provoked into a useless show of curiosity. Inquisitive about the forgetty himself, he asked:

“Does it hurt—does it hurt to be a forgetty?”

“No,” said Gosigo, “it doesn’t hurt, no more than you will.”

Gosigo stared suddenly at Casher. His voice changed tone and became at least one octave higher. He clapped his hands to his face and panted through his hands as if he would never speak again.

“But—oh! The fear—the eerie, dreary fear of being me!”

He still stared at Casher.

Quieting down at last, he pulled his hands away from his face, as if by sheer force, and said in an almost normal voice, “Shall we get on with our trip?”

Gosigo led the way out into the bare bleak corridor. A perceptible wind was blowing through it, though there was no sign of an open window or door. They followed a majestic staircase, with steps so broad that Casher had to keep changing pace on them, all the way down to the bottom of the building. This must, at some time, have been a formal reception hall. Now it was full of cars.

Curious cars.

Land vehicles of a kind which Casher had never seen before. They looked a little bit like the ancient “fighting tanks” which he had seen in pictures. They also looked a little like submarines of a singularly short and ugly shape. They had high spiked wheels, but their most complicated feature was a set of giant corkscrews, four on each side, attached to the car by intricate yet operational apparatus. Since Casher had been landed right into the palace by planoform, he had never had occasion to go outside among the tornadoes of Henriada.

The Administrator was waiting, wearing a coverall on which was stenciled his insignia of rank.

Casher gave him a polite bow. He glanced down at the handsome metric wristwatch which Gosigo had strapped on his wrist, outside the coverall. It read 3:95.

Casher bowed to Rankin Meiklejohn and said, “I’m ready, sir, if you are.”

“Watch him!” whispered Gosigo, half a step behind Casher. The Administrator said, “Might as well be going.” The man’s voice trembled.

Casher stood polite, alert, immobile. Was this danger? Was this foolishness? Could the Administrator already be drunk again?

Casher watched the Administrator carefully but quietly, waiting for the older man to precede him into the nearest groundcar, which had its door standing open.

Nothing happened, except that the Administrator began to turn pale.

There must have been six or eight people present. The others must have seen the same sort of thing before, because they showed no sign of curiosity or bewilderment. The Administrator began to tremble. Casher could see it, even through the bulk of the travelwear. The man’s hands shook.

The Administrator said, in a high nervous voice, “Your knife. You have it with you?”

Casher nodded.

“Let me see it,” said the Administrator.

Casher reached down to his boot and brought out the beautiful, superbly balanced knife. Before he could stand erect, he felt the clamp of Gosigo’s heavy fingers on his shoulder.

“Master,” said Gosigo to Meiklejohn, “tell your visitor to put his weapon away. It is not allowed for any of us to show weapons in your presence.”

Casher tried to squirm out of the heavy grip without losing his balance or his dignity. He found that Gosigo was knowledgeable about karate too. The forgetty held ground, even when the two men waged an immobile, invisible sort of wrestling match, the leverage of Casher’s shoulder working its way hither and yon against the strong grip of Gosigo’s powerful hand.

The Administrator ended it. He said, “Put away your knife . . .” in that high funny voice of his.

The watch had almost reached 4:00, but no one had yet got into the car.

Gosigo spoke again, and when he did there was a contemptuous laugh from the Deputy Administrator, who had stood by in ordinary indoor clothes.

“Master, isn’t it time for one for the road’?”

“Of course, of course,” chattered the Administrator. He began breathing almost normally again.

“Join me,” he said to Casher. “It’s a local custom.”

Casher had let his knife slip back into his bootsheath. When the knife dropped out of sight, Gosigo released his shoulder; he now stood facing the Administrator and rubbed his bruised shoulder. He said nothing, but shook his head gently, showing that he did not want a drink.

One of the robots brought the Administrator a glass, which appeared to contain at least a liter and a half of water. The Administrator said, very politely, “Sure you won’t share it?”

This close, Casher could smell the reek of it. It was pure byegarr, and at least 160 proof. He shook his head again, firmly but also politely.

The Administrator lifted the glass.

Casher could see the muscles of the man’s throat work as the liquid went down. He could hear the man breathing heavily between swallows. The white liquid went lower and lower in the gigantic glass.

At last it was all gone.

The Administrator cocked his head sidewise and said to Casher in a parrotlike voice, “Well, toodle-oo!”

“What do you mean, sir?” asked Casher.

The Administrator had a pleasant glow on his face. Casher was surprised that the man was not dead after that big and sudden a drink.

“I just mean g’bye. I’m—not—feeling—well.”

With that he fell straight forward, as stiff as a rock tower. One of the servants, perhaps another forgetty, caught him before he hit the ground.

“Does he always do this?” asked Casher of the miserable and contemptuous Deputy Administrator.

“Oh, no,” said the Deputy. “Only at times like these.” “What do you mean, ‘like these’?”

“When he sends one more armed man against the girl at Beauregard. They never come back. You won’t come back, either. You could have left earlier, but you can’t now. Go along and try to kill the girl. I’ll see you here about five twenty-five if you succeed. As a matter of fact, if you come back at all, I’ll try to wake him up. But you won’t come back. Good luck. I suppose that’s what you need. Good luck.”

Casher shook hands with the man without removing his gloves. Gosigo had already climbed into the driver’s seat of the machine and was testing the electric engines. The big corkscrews began to plunge down, but before they touched the floor, Gosigo had reversed them and thrown them back into the up position.

The people in the room ran for cover as Casher entered the machine, though there was no immediate danger in sight. Two of the human servants dragged the Administrator up the stairs, the Deputy Administrator following them rapidly.

“Seat belt,” said Gosigo.

Casher found it and snapped it closed.

“Head belt,” said Gosigo.

Casher stared at him. He had never heard of a head belt. “Pull it down from the roof, sir. Put the net under your chin.”

Casher glanced up.

There was a net fitted snugly against the roof of the vehicle, just above his head. He started to pull it down, but it did not yield. Angrily, he pulled harder, and it moved slowly downward. By the Bell and Bank, do they want to hang me in this! he thought to himself as he dragged the net down. There was a strong fiber belt attached to each end of the net, while the net itself was only fifteen to twenty centimeters wide. He ended up in a foolish position, holding the head belt with both hands lest it snap back into the ceiling and not knowing what to do with it. Gosigo leaned over and, half impatiently, helped him adjust the web under his chin. It pinched for a moment and Casher felt as though his head were being dragged by a heavy weight.

“Don’t fight it,” said Gosigo. “Relax.”

Casher did. His head was lifted several centimeters into a foam pocket, which he had not previously noticed, in the back of the seat. After a second or two, he realized that the position was odd but comfortable.

Gosigo had adjusted his own head belt and had turned on the lights of the vehicle. They blazed so bright that Casher almost thought they might be a laser, capable of charring the inner doors of the big room.

The lights must have keyed the door.

V

Two panels slid open and a wild uproar of wind and vegetation rushed in. It was rough and stormy but far below hurricane velocity.

The machine rolled forward clumsily and was out of the house and on the road very quickly.

The sky was brown, bright luminous brown, shot through with streaks of yellow. Casher had never seen a sky of that color on any other world he had visited, and in his long exile he had seen many planets.

Gosigo, staring straight ahead, was preoccupied with keeping the vehicle right in the middle of the black, soft, tarry road. “Watch it!” said a voice speaking right into his head.

It was Gosigo, using an intercom which must have been built into the helmets.

Casher watched, though there was nothing to see except for the rush of mad wind. Suddenly the groundcar turned dark, spun upside down, and was violently shaken. An oily, pungent stench of pure fetor immediately drenched the whole car.

Gosigo pulled out a panel with a console of buttons. Light and fire, intolerably bright, burned in on them through the windshield and the portholes on the side.

The battle was over before it began.

The groundcar lay in a sort of swamp. The road was visible thirty or thirty-five meters away.

There was a grinding sound inside the machine and the groundcar righted itself. A singular sucking noise followed, then the grinding sound stopped. Casher could glimpse the big corkscrews on the side of the car eating their way into the ground.

At last the machine was steady, pelted only by branches, leaves and what seemed like kelp.

A small tornado was passing over them.

Gosigo took time to twist his head sidewise and to talk to Casher.

“An air whale swallowed us and I had to burn our way out.”

“A what?” cried Casher.

“An air whale,” repeated Gosigo calmly on the intercom. “There are no indigenous forms of life on this planet, but the imported Earth forms have changed wildly since we brought them in. The tornadoes lifted the whales around enough so that some of them got adapted to flying. They were the meat-eating kind, so they like to crack our groundcars open and eat the goodies inside. We’re safe enough from them for the time being, provided we can make it back to the road. There are a few wild men who live in the wind, but they would not become dangerous to us unless we found ourselves really helpless. Pretty soon I can unscrew us from the ground and try to get back on the road. It’s not really too far from here to Ambiloxi.”

The trip to the road was a long one, even though they could see the road itself all the time that they tried various approaches.

The first time, the groundcar tipped ominously forward. Red lights showed on the panel and buzzers buzzed. The great spiked wheels spun in vain as they chewed their way into a bottomless quagmire.

Gosigo, calling back to his passenger, cried, “Hold steady! We’re going to have to shoot ourselves out of this one backward!”

Casher did not know how he could be any steadier, belted, hooded and strapped as he was, but he clutched the arms of his seat.

The world went red with fire as the front of the car spat flame in rocketlike quantities. The swamp ahead of them boiled into steam, so that they could see nothing. Gosigo changed the windshield over from visual to radar, and even with radar there was not much to be seen—nothing but a gray swirl of formless wraiths, and the weird lurching sensation as the machine fought its way back to solid ground. The console suddenly showed green and Gosigo cut the controls. They were back where they had been, with the repulsive burnt entrails of the air whale scattered among the coral trees.

“Try again,” said Gosigo, as though Casher had something to do with the matter.

He fiddled with the controls and the groundcar rose several feet. The spikes on the wheels had been hydraulically extended until they were each at least one hundred fifty centimeters long. The car felt like a large enclosed bicycle as it teetered on its big wheels. The wind was strong and capricious but there was no tornado in sight.

“Here we go,” said Gosigo redundantly. The groundcar pressed forward in a mad rush, hastening obliquely through the vegetation and making for the highway on Casher’s right.

A bone-jarring crash told them that they had not made it. For a moment Casher was too dizzy to see where they were.

He was glad of his helmet and happy about the web brace which held his neck. That crash would have killed him if he had not had full protection.

Gosigo seemed to think the trip normal. His classic Hindu features relaxed in a wise smile as he said, “Hit a boulder. Fell on our side. Try again.”

Casher managed to gasp, “Is the machine unbreakable?”

There was a laugh in Gosigo’s voice when he answered, “Almost. We’re the most vulnerable items in it.”

Again fire spat at the ground, this time from the side of the groundcar. It balanced itself precariously on the four high wheels. Gosigo turned on the radar screen to look through the steam which their own jets had called up.

There the road was, plain and near.

“Try again!” he shouted, as the machine lunged forward and then performed a veritable ballet on the surface of the marsh. It rushed, slowed, turned around on a hummock, gave itself an assist with the jets and then scrambled through the water.

Casher saw the inverted cone of a tornado, half a kilometer or less away, veering toward them.

Gosigo sensed his unspoken thought, because he answered, “Problem: who gets to the road first, that or we?”

The machine bucked, lurched, twisted, spun.

Casher could see nothing anymore from the windshield in front, but it was obvious that Gosigo knew what he was doing.

There was the sickening, stomach-wrenching twist of a big drop and then a new sound was heard—a grinding as of knives.

Gosigo, unworried, took his head out of the headnet and looked over at Casher with a smile. “The twister will probably hit us in a minute or two, but it doesn’t matter now. We’re on the road and I’ve bolted us to the surface.”

“Bolted?” gasped Casher.

“You know, those big screws on the outside of the car. They were made to go right into the road. All the roads here are neo-asphaltum and self-repairing. There will be traces of them here when the last known person on the last known planet is dead. These are good roads.” He stopped for the sudden hush. “Storm’s going over us—“

It began again before he could finish his sentence. Wild raving winds tore at the machine, which sat so solid that it seemed bedded in permastone.

Gosigo pushed two buttons and calibrated a dial. He squinted at his instruments, then pressed a button mounted on the edge of his navigator’s seat. There was a sharp explosion, like a blasting of rock by chemical methods.

Casher started to speak but Gosigo held out a warning hand for silence.

He tuned his dials quickly. The windshield faded out, radar came on and then went off, and at last a bright map—bright red in background with sharp gold lines—appeared across the whole width of the screen. There were a dozen or more bright points on the map. Gosigo watched these intently.

The map blurred, faded, dissolved into red chaos.

Gosigo pushed another button and then could see out of the front glass screen again.

“What was that?” asked Casher.

“Miniaturized radar rocket. I sent it up twelve kilometers for a look around. It transmitted a map of what it saw and I put it on our radar screen. The tornadoes are heavier than usual, but I think we can make it. Did you notice the top right of the map?”

“The top right?” asked Casher.

“Yes, the top right. Did you see what was there?”

“Why, nothing,” said Casher. “Nothing was there.”

“You’re utterly right,” said Gosigo. “What does that mean to you?”

“I don’t understand you,” said Casher. “I suppose it means that there is nothing there.”

“Right again. But let me tell you something. There never is.” “Never is what?”

“Anything,” said Gosigo. “There never is anything on the maps at that point. That’s east of Ambiloxi. That’s Beauregard. It never shows on the maps. Nothing happens there.”

“No bad weather—ever?” asked Casher.

“Never,” said Gosigo.

“Why not?” asked Casher.

“She will not permit it,” said Gosigo firmly, as though his words made sense.

“You mean her weather machines work?” said Casher, grasping for the only rational explanation possible.

“Yes,” said Gosigo.

“Why?”

“She pays for them.”

“How can she?” exclaimed Casher. “Your whole world of Henriada is bankrupt!”

“Her part isn’t.”

“Stop mystifying me,” said Casher. “Tell me who she is and what this is all about.”

“Put your head in the net,” said Gosigo. “I’m not making puzzles because I want to do so. I have been commanded not to talk.”

“Because you are a forgetty?”

“What’s that got to do with it? Don’t talk to me that way. Remember, I am not an animal or an underperson. I may be your servant for a few hours, but I am a man. You’ll find out, soon enough. Hold tight!”

The groundcar came to a panic stop, the spiked teeth eating into the resilient firm neo-asphaltum of the road. At the instant they stopped, the outside corkscrews began chewing their way into the ground. First Casher felt as though his eyes were popping out, because of the suddenness of the deceleration; now he felt like holding the arms of his seat as the tornado reached directly for their car, plucking at it again and again. The enormous outside screws held and he could feel the car straining to meet the gigantic suction of the storm.

“Don’t worry,” shouted Gosigo over the noise of the storm. “I always pin us down a little bit more by firing the quickrockets straight up. These cars don’t often go off the road.”

Casher tried to relax.

The funnel of the tornado, which seemed almost like a living being, plucked after them once or twice more and then was gone.

This time Casher had seen no sign of the air whales which rode the storms. He had seen nothing but rain and wind and desolation.

The tornado was gone in a moment. Ghostlike shapes trailed after it in enormous prancing leaps.

“Wind men,” said Gosigo glancing at them incuriously. “Wild people who have learned to live on Henriada. They aren’t much more than animals. We are close to the territory of the lady. They would not dare attack us here.”

Casher O’Neill was too stunned to query the man or to challenge him.

Once more the car picked itself up and coursed along the smooth, narrow, winding neo-asphaltum road, almost as though the machine itself were glad to function and to function well.

VI

Casher could never quite remember when they went from the howling wildness of Henriada into the stillness and beauty of the domains of Mr. Murray Madigan. He could recall the feeling but not the facts.

The town of Ambiloxi eluded him completely. It was so normal a town, so old-fashioned a little town that he could not think of it very much. Old people sat on the wooden boardwalk taking their afternoon look at the strangers who passed through. Horses were tethered in a row along the main street, between the parked machines. It looked like a peaceful picture from the ancient ages.

Of tornadoes there was no sign, nor of the hurt and ruin which showed around the house of Rankin Meiklejohn. There were few underpeople or robots about, unless they were so cleverly contrived as to look almost exactly like real people. How can you remember something which is pleasant and nonmemorable? Even the buildings did not show signs of being fortified against the frightful storms which had brought the prosperous planet of Henriada to a condition of abandonment and ruin.

Gosigo, who had a remarkable talent for stating the obvious, said tonelessly, “The weather machines are working here. There is no need for special precaution.”

But he did not stop in the town for rest, refreshments, conversation, or fuel. He went through deftly and quietly, the gigantic armored groundcar looking out of place among the peaceful and defenseless vehicles. He went as though he had been on the same route many times before, and knew the routine well.

Once beyond Ambiloxi he speeded up, though at a moderate pace compared to the frantic elusive action he had taken against storms in the earlier part of the trip. The landscape was earthlike, wet, and most of the ground was covered with vegetation.

Old radar countermissile towers stood along the road. Casher could not imagine their possible use, even though he was sure, from the looks of them, that they were long obsolete.

“What’s the countermissile radar for?” he asked, speaking comfortably now that his head was out of the headnet.

Gosigo turned around and gave him a tortured glance in which pain and bewilderment were mixed. “Countermissile radar? Countermissile radar? I don’t know that word, though it seems as though I should. . . .”

“Radar is what you were using to see with, back in the storm, when the ceiling and visibility were zero.”

Gosigo turned back to his driving, narrowly missing a tree. “That? That’s just artificial vision. Why did you use the term ‘countermissile radar’? There isn’t any of that stuff here except what we have on our machine, though the mistress may be watching us if her set is on.”

“Those towers,” said Casher. “They look like countermissile towers from the ancient times.”

“Towers. There aren’t any towers here,” snapped Gosigo.

“Look,” cried Casher. “Here are two more of them.”

“No man made those. They aren’t buildings. It’s just air coral. Some of the coral which people brought from earth mutated and got so it could live in the air. People used to plant it for windbreaks, before they decided to give up Henriada and move out. They didn’t do much good, but they are pretty to look at.”

They rode along a few minutes without asking questions. Tall trees had Spanish moss trailing over them. They were close to a sea. Small marshes appeared to the right and left of the road; here, where the endless tornadoes were kept out, everything had a parklike effect. The domains of the estate of Beauregard were unlike anything else on Henriada—an area of peaceful wildness, in a world which was rushing otherwise toward uninhabitability and ruin. Even Gosigo seemed more relaxed, more cheerful as he steered the groundcar along the pleasant elevated road.

Gosigo sighed, leaned forward, managed the controls and brought the car to a stop.

He turned around calmly and looked full face at Casher O’Neill.

“You have your knife?”

Casher automatically felt for it. It was there, safe enough in his bootsheath. He simply nodded.

“You have your orders.”

“You mean, killing the girl?”

“Yes,” said Gosigo. “Killing the girl.”

“I remember that. You didn’t have to stop the car to tell me that.”

“I’m telling you now,” said Gosigo, his wise Hindu face showing neither humor nor outrage. “Do it.”

“You mean kill her? Right at first sight?”

“Do it,” said Gosigo. “You have your orders.”

“I’m the judge of that,” said Casher. “It will be on my conscience. Are you watching me for the Administrator?”

“That drunken fool?” said Gosigo. “I don’t care about him, except that I am a forgetty and I belong to him. We’re in her territory now. You are going to do whatever she wants. You have orders to kill her. All right. Kill her.”

“You mean—she wants to be murdered?”

“Of course not!” said Gosigo, with the irritation of an adult who has to explain too many things to an inquisitive child.

“Then how can I kill her without finding out what this is all about?”

“She knows. She knows herself. She knows her master. She knows this planet. She knows me and she knows something about you. Go ahead and kill her, since those are your orders. If she wants to die, that’s not for you or me to decide. It’s her business. If she does not want to die, you will not succeed.”

“I’d like to see the person,” said Casher, “who could stop me in a sudden knife attack. Have you told her that I am coming?”

“I’ve told her nothing, but she knows we are coming and she is pretty sure what you have been sent for. Don’t think about it. Just do what you are told. Jump for her with the knife. She will take care of the matter.”

“But—” cried Casher.

“Stop asking questions,” said Gosigo. “Just follow orders and remember that she will take care of you. Even you.” He started up the groundcar.

Within less than a kilometer they had crossed a low ridge of land and there before them lay Beauregard—the mansion at the edge of the waters, its white pillars shining, its pergolas glistening in the bright air, its yards and palmettos tidy.

Casher was a brave man, but he felt the palms of his hands go wet when he realized that in a minute or two he would have to commit a murder.

VII

The groundcar swung up the drive. It stopped. Without a word, Gosigo activated the door. The air smelled calm, sea-wet, salt and yet coolly fresh.

Casher jumped out and ran to the door.

He was surprised to feel that his legs trembled as he ran. He had killed before, real men in real quarrels. Why should a mere animal matter to him?

The door stopped him.

Without thinking, he tried to wrench it open.

The knob did not yield and there was no automatic control in sight. This was indeed a very antique sort of house. He struck the door with his hands. The thuds sounded around him. He could not tell whether they resounded in the house. No sound or echo came from beyond the door.

He began rehearsing the phrase “I want to see the Mister and Owner Madigan. . . .”

The door did open.

A little girl stood there.

He knew her. He had always known her. She was his sweetheart, come back out of his childhood. She was the sister he had never had. She was his own mother, when young. She was at the marvelous age, somewhere between ten and thirteen, where the child—as the phrase goes—“becomes an old child and not a raw grownup.” She was kind, calm, intelligent, expectant, quiet, inviting, unafraid. She felt like someone he had never left behind: yet, at the same moment, he knew he had never seen her before.

He heard his voice asking for the Mister and Owner Madigan while he wondered, at the back of his mind, who the girl might be. Madigan’s daughter? Neither Rankin Meiklejohn nor the deputy had said anything about a human family.

The child looked at him levelly.

He must have finished braying his question at her.

“Mister and Owner Madigan,” said the child, “sees no one this day, but you are seeing me.” She looked at him levelly and calmly. There was an odd hint of humor, of fearlessness in her stance.

“Who are you?” he blurted out.

“I am the housekeeper of this house.”

“You?” he cried, wild alarm beginning in his throat.

“My name,” she said, “is T’ruth.”

His knife was in his hand before he knew how it had got there. He remembered the advice of the Administrator: plunge, plunge, stab, stab, run!

She saw the knife but her eyes did not waver from his face. He looked at her uncertainly.

If this was an underperson, it was the most remarkable one he had ever seen. But even Gosigo had told him to do his duty, to stab, to kill the woman named T’ruth. Here she was. He could not do it.

He spun the knife in the air, caught it by its tip and held it out to her, handle first.

“I was sent to kill you,” he said, “but I find I cannot do it. I have lost a cruiser.”

“Kill me if you wish,” she said, “because I have no fear of you.”

Her calm words were so far outside his experience that he took the knife in his left hand and lifted his arm as if to stab toward her.

He dropped his arm.

“I cannot do it,” he whined. “What have you done to me?”

“I have done nothing to you. You do not wish to kill a child and I look to you like a child. Besides, I think you love me. If this is so, it must be very uncomfortable for you.”

Casher heard his knife clatter to the floor as he dropped it. He had never dropped it before.

“Who are you,” he gasped, “that you should do this to me?”

“I am me,” she said, her voice as tranquil and happy as that of any girl, provided that the girl was caught at a moment of great happiness and poise. “I am the housekeeper of this house.” She smiled almost impishly and added, “It seems that I must almost be the ruler of this planet as well.” Her voice turned serious. “Man,” she said, “can’t you see it, man? I am an animal, a turtle. I am incapable of disobeying the word of man. When I was little I was trained and I was given orders. I shall carry out those orders as long as I live. When I look at you, I feel strange. You look as though you loved me already, but you do not know what to do. Wait a moment. I must let Gosigo go.”

The shining knife on the floor of the doorway she saw; she stepped over it.

Gosigo had got out of the groundcar and was giving her a formal, low bow.

“Tell me,” she cried, “what have you just seen! There was friendliness in her call, as though the routine were an old game.

“I saw Casher O’Neill bound up the steps. You yourself opened the door. He thrust his dagger into your throat and the blood spat out in a big stream, rich and dark and red. You died in the doorway. For some reason Casher O’Neill went on into the house without saying anything to me. I became frightened and I fled.”

He did not look frightened at all.

“If I am dead,” she said, “how can I be talking to you?”

“Don’t ask me,” cried Gosigo. “I am just a forgetty. I always go back to the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, each time that you are murdered, and I tell him the truth of what I saw. Then he gives me the medicine and I tell him something else. At that point he will get drunk and gloomy again, the way that he always does.”

“It’s a pity,” said the child. “I wish I could help him, but I can’t. He won’t come to Beauregard.”

“Him?” Gosigo laughed. “Oh, no, not him! Never! He just sends other people to kill you.”

“And he’s never satisfied,” said the child sadly, “no matter how many times he kills me!”

“Never,” said Gosigo cheerfully, climbing back into the groundcar. “‘Bye now.”

“Wait a moment,” she called. “Wouldn’t you like something to eat or drink before you drive back? There’s a bad clutch of storms on the road.”

“Not me,” said Gosigo. “He might punish me and make me a forgetty all over again. Say, maybe that’s already happened. Maybe I’m a forgetty who’s been put through it several times, not just once.” Hope surged into his voice. “T’ruth! T’ruth! Can you tell me?”

“Suppose I did tell you,” said she. “What would happen?”

His face became sad, “I’d have a convulsion and forget what I told you. Well, good-bye anyhow. I’ll take a chance on the storms. If you ever see that Casher O’Neill again,” called Gosigo, looking right through Casher O’Neill, “tell him I liked him but that we’ll never meet again.”

“I’ll tell him,” said the girl gently. She watched as the heavy brown man climbed nimbly into the car. The top crammed shut with no sound. The wheels turned and in a moment the car had disappeared behind the palmettos in the drive.

While she had talked to Gosigo in her clear warm high girlish voice, Casher had watched her. He could see the thin shape of her shoulders under the light blue shift that she wore. There was the suggestion of a pair of panties under the dress, so light was the material. Her hips had not begun to fill. When he glanced at her in one-quarter profile, he could see that her cheek was smooth, her hair well-combed, her little breasts just beginning to bud on her chest. Who was this child who acted like an empress?

She turned back to him and gave him a warm, apologetic smile.

“Gosigo and I always talk over the story together. Then he goes back and Meiklejohn does not believe it and spends unhappy months planning my murder all over again. I suppose, since I am just an animal, that I should not call it a murder when somebody tries to kill me, but I resist, of course. I do not care about me, but I have orders, strong orders, to keep my master and his house safe from harm.”

“How old are you?” asked Casher. He added, “If you can tell the truth.”

“I can tell nothing but the truth. I am conditioned. I am nine hundred and six Earth years old.”

“Nine hundred?” he cried. “But you look like a child. . . !’

“I am a child,” said the girl, “and not a child. I am an earth turtle, changed into human form by the convenience of man. My life expectancy was increased three hundred times when I was modified. They tell me that my normal life span should have been three hundred years. Now it is ninety thousand years, and sometimes I am afraid. You will be dead of happy old age, Casher O’Neill, while I am still opening the drapes in this house to let the sunlight in. But let’s not stand in the door and talk. Come on in and get some refreshments. You’re not going anywhere, you know.”

Casher followed her into the house but he put his worry into words. “You mean I am your prisoner.”

“Not my prisoner, Casher. Yours. How could you cross that ground which you traveled in the groundcar? You could get to the ends of my estate all right, but then the storms would pick you up and whirl you away to a death which nobody would even see.”

She turned into a big old room, bright with light-colored wooden furniture.

Casher stood there awkwardly. He had returned his knife to its bootsheath when they left the vestibule. Now he felt very odd, sitting with his victim on a sun porch.

T’ruth was untroubled. She rang a brass bell which stood on an old-fashioned round table. Feminine footsteps clattered in the hall. A female servant entered the room, dressed in a black dress with a white apron. Casher had seen such servants in the old drama cubes, but he had never expected to meet one in the flesh.

“We’ll have high tea,” said T’ruth. “Which do you prefer, tea or coffee, Casher? Or I have beer and wines. Even two bottles of whiskey brought all the way from Earth.”

“Coffee would be fine for me,” said Casher.

“And you know what I want, Eunice,” said T’ruth to the servant.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the maid, disappearing.

Casher leaned forward.

“That servant—is she human?”

“Certainly,” said T’ruth.

“Then why is she working for an underperson like you? I mean—I don’t mean to be unpleasant or anything—but I mean—that’s against all laws.”

“Not here, on Henriada, it isn’t.”

“And why not?” persisted Casher.

“Because, on Henriada, I am myself the law.”

“But the government?”

“It’s gone.”

“The Instrumentality?”

T’ruth frowned. She looked like a wise, puzzled child. “Maybe you know that part better than I do. They leave an Administrator here, probably because they do not have any other place to put him and because he needs some kind of work to keep him alive. Yet they do not give him enough real power to arrest my master or to kill me. They ignore me. It seems to me that if I do not challenge them, they leave me alone.”

“But their rules?” insisted Casher.

“They don’t enforce them, neither here in Beauregard nor over in the town of Ambiloxi. They leave it up to me to keep these places going. I do the best I can.”

“That servant, then? Did they lease her to you?”

“Oh, no,” laughed the girl-woman. “She came to kill me twenty years ago, but she was a forgetty and she had no place else to go, so I trained her as a maid. She has a contract with my master, and her wages are paid every month into the satellite above the planet. She can leave if she ever wants to. I don’t think she will.”

Casher sighed. “This is all too hard to believe. You are a child but you are almost a thousand years old. You’re an underperson, but you command a whole planet—“

“Only when I need to!” she interrupted him.

“You are wiser than most of the people I have ever known and yet you look young. How old do you feel?”

“I feel like a child,” she said, “a child one thousand years old. And I have had the education and the memory and the experience of a wise lady stamped right into my brain.”

“Who was the lady?” asked Casher.

“The Owner and Citizen Agatha Madigan. The wife of my master. As she was dying they transcribed her brain on mine. That’s why I speak so well and know so much.”

“But that’s illegal!” cried Casher.

“I suppose it was,” said T’ruth, “but my master had it done, anyhow.”

Casher leaned forward in his chair. He looked earnestly at the person. One part of him still loved her for the wonderful little girl whom he had thought she was, but another part was in awe of a being more powerful than anyone he had seen before. She returned his gaze with that composed half smile which was wholly feminine and completely self-possessed; she looked tenderly upon him as their faces were reflected by the yellow morning light of Henriada. “I begin to understand,” he said, “that you are what you have to be. It is very strange, here in this forgotten world.”

“Henriada is strange,” she said, “and I suppose that I must seem strange to you. You are right, though, about each-of us being what she has to be. Isn’t that liberty itself? If we each one must be something, isn’t liberty the business of finding it out and then doing it—that one job, that uttermost mission compatible with our natures? How terrible it would be, to be something and never know what!”

“Like who?” said Casher.

“Like Gosigo, perhaps. He was a great king and he was a good king, on some faraway world where they still need kings. But he committed an intolerable mistake and the Instrumentality made him into a forgetty and sent him here.”

“So that’s the mystery!” said Casher. “And what am I?”

She looked at him calmly and steadfastly before she answered. “You are a killer too. It must make your life very hard in many ways. You keep having to justify yourself.”

This was so close to the truth—so close to Casher’s long worries as to whether justice might not just be a cover name for revenge—that it was his turn to gasp and be silent.

“And I have work for you,” added the amazing child. “Work? Here?”

“Yes. Something much worse than killing. And you must do it, Casher, if you want to go away from here before I die, eighty-nine thousand years from now.” She looked around. “Hush!” she added. “Eunice is coming and I do not want to frighten her by letting her know the terrible things that you are going to have to do.”

“Here?” he whispered urgently. “Right here, in this house?”

“Right here in this house,” she said in a normal voice, as Eunice entered the room bearing a huge tray covered with plates of food and two pots of beverage.

Casher stared at the human woman who worked so cheerfully for an animal; but neither Eunice, who was busy setting things out on the table, nor T’ruth, who, turtle and woman that she was, could not help rearranging the dishes with gentle peremptories, paid the least attention to him.

The words rang in his head. “In this house . . . something worse than killing.” They made no sense. Neither did it make sense to have high tea before five hours, decimal time.

He sighed and they both glanced at him, Eunice with amused curiosity, T’ruth with affectionate concern.

“He’s taking it better than most of them do, ma’am,” said Eunice. “Most of them who come here to kill you are very upset when they find out that they cannot do it.”

“He’s a killer, Eunice, a real killer, so I think he wasn’t too bothered.”

Eunice turned to him very pleasantly and said, “A killer, sir. It’s a pleasure to have you here. Most of them are terrible amateurs and then the lady has to heal them before we can find something for them to do.”

Casher couldn’t resist a spot inquiry. “Are all the other would-be killers still here?”

“Most of them, sir. The ones that nothing happened to. Like me. Where else would we go? Back to the Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn?” She said the last with heavy scorn indeed, curtsied to him, bowed deeply to the woman-girl T’ruth and left the room.

T’ruth looked friendlily at Casher O’Neill. “I can tell that you will not digest your food if you sit here waiting for bad news. When I said you had to do something worse than killing, I suppose I was speaking from a woman’s point of view. We have a homicidal maniac in the house: He is a house guest and he is covered by Old North Australian law. That means we cannot kill him or expel him, though he is almost as immortal as I am. I hope that you and I can frighten him away from molesting my master. I cannot cure him or love him. He is too crazy to be reached through his emotions. Pure, utter, awful fright might do it, and it takes a man for that job. If you do this, I will reward you richly.”

“And if I don’t?” said Casher.

Again she stared at him as though she were trying to see through his eyes all the way down to the bottom of his soul; again he felt for her that tremor of compassion, ever so slightly tinged with male desire, which he had experienced when he first met her in the doorway of Beauregard.

Their locked glances broke apart.

T’ruth looked at the floor. “I cannot lie,” she said, as though it were a handicap. “If you do not help me I shall have to do the things which it is in my power to do. The chief thing is nothing. To let you live here, to let you sleep and eat in this house until you get bored and ask me for some kind of routine work around the estate. I could make you work,” she went on, looking up at him and blushing all the way to the top of her bodice, “by having you fall in love with me, but that would not be kind. I will not do it that way. Either you make a deal with me or you do not. It’s up to you. Anyhow, let’s eat first. I’ve been up since dawn, expecting one more killer. I even wondered if you might be the one who would succeed. That would be terrible, to leave my master all alone!”

“But you—wouldn’t you yourself mind being killed!”

“Me? When I’ve already lived a thousand years and have eighty-nine thousand more to go! It couldn’t matter less to me. Have some coffee.”

And she poured his coffee.

VIII

Two or three times Casher tried to get the conversation back to the work at hand, but T’ruth diverted him with trivialities. She even made him walk to the enormous window, where they could see far across the marshes and the bay. The sky in the remote distance was dark and full of worms. Those were tornadoes, beyond the reach of her weather machines, which coursed around the rest of Henriada but stopped short at the boundaries of Ambiloxi and Beauregard. She made him admire the weird coral castles which had built themselves up from the bay bottom, hundreds of feet into the air. She tried to make him see a family of wild wind people who were slyly and gently stealing apples from her orchard, but either his eyes were not used to the landscape or T’ruth could see much farther than he could.

This was a world rich in water. If it had not been located within a series of bad pockets of space, the water itself could have become an export. Mankind had done the best it could, raising kelp to provide the iron and phosphorus so often lacking in off-world diets, controlling the weather at great expense. Finally the Instrumentality recommended that they give up. The exports of Henriada never quite balanced the imports. The subsidies had gone far beyond the usual times. The earth life had adapted with a vigor which was much too great. Ordinary forms rapidly found new shapes, challenged by the winds, the rains, the novel chemistry and the odd radiation patterns of Henriada. Killer whales became airborne, -coral took to the air, human babies lost in the wind sometimes survived to become subhuman and wild, jellyfish became sky sweepers. The former inhabitants of Henriada had chosen a planet at a reasonable price——not cheap, but reasonable—from the owner who had in turn bought it from a post-Soviet settling cooperative. They had leased the new planet, had worked out an ecology, had emigrated and were now doing well.

Henriada kept the wild weather, the lost hopes, and the ruins.

And of these ruins, the greatest was Murray Madigan.

Once a prime landholder and host, a gentleman among gentlemen, the richest man on the whole world, Madigan had become old, senile, weak. He faced death or catalepsis. The death of his wife made him fear his own death and with his turtle-girl, T’ruth, he had chosen catalepsis. Most of the time he was frozen in a trance, his heartbeat imperceptible, his metabolism very slow. Then, for a few hours or days, he was normal. Sometimes the sleeps were for weeks, sometimes for years. The Instrumentality doctors had looked him over—more out of scientific curiosity than from any judicial right—and had decided that though this was an odd way to live, it was a legal one. They went away and left him alone. He had had the whole personality of his dying wife, Agatha Madigan, impressed on the turtle-child, though this was illegal; the doctor had, quite simply, been bribed.

All this was told by T’ruth to Casher as they ate and drank their way slowly through an immense repast.

An archaic wood fire roared in a real fireplace.

While she talked, Casher watched the gentle movement of her shoulder blades when she moved forward, the loose movement of her light dress as she moved, the childish face which was so tender, so appealing and yet so wise.

Knowing as little as he did about the planet of Henriada, Casher tried desperately to fit his own thinking together and to make sense out of the predicament in which he found himself. Even if the girl was attractive, this told him nothing of the real challenges which he still faced inside this very house. No longer was his preoccupation with getting the power cruiser his main job on Henriada; no evidence was at hand to show that the drunken, deranged Administrator, Rankin Meiklejohn, would give him anything at all unless he, Casher, killed the girl.

Even that had become a forgotten mission. Despite the fact that he had come to the estate of Beauregard for the purpose of killing her, he was now on a journey without a destination. Years of sad experience had taught him that when a project went completely to pieces, he still had the mission of personal survival, if his life was to mean anything to his home planet, Mizzer, and if his return, in any way or any fashion, could bring real liberty back to the Twelve Niles.

So he looked at the girl with a new kind of unconcern. How could she help his plans? Or hinder them? The promises she made were too vague to be of any real use in the sad, complicated world of politics.

He just tried to enjoy her company and the strange place in which he found himself.

The Gulf of Esperanza lay just within his vision. At the far horizon he could see the helpless tornadoes trying to writhe their way past the weather machines which still functioned, at the expense of Beauregard, all along the coast from Ambiloxi to Mottile. He could see the shoreline choked with kelp, which had once been a cash crop and was now a nuisance. Ruined buildings in the distance were probably the leftovers of processing plants; the artificial-looking coral castles obscured his view of them.

And this house—how much sense did this house make?

An undergirl, eerily wise, who herself admitted that she had obtained an unlawful amount of conditioning; a master who was a living corpse; a threat which could not even be mentioned freely within the house; a household which seemed to have displaced the planetary government; a planetary government which the Instrumentality, for unfathomable reasons of its own, had let fall into ruin. Why? Why? And why again?

The turtle-girl was looking at him. If he had been an art student, he would have said that she was giving him the tender, feminine and irrecoverably remote smile of a Madonna, but he did not know the motifs of the ancient pictures; he just knew that it was a smile characteristic of T’ruth herself.

“You are wondering . . . ?” she said.

He nodded, suddenly feeling miserable that mere words had come between them.

“You are wondering why the Instrumentality let you come here?”

He nodded again.

“I don’t know either,” she said, reaching out and taking his right hand. His hand felt and looked like the hairy paw of a giant as she held it with her two pretty, well-kept little-girl hands; but the strength of her eyes and the steadfastness of her voice showed that it was she who was giving the reassurance, not he.

The child was helping him!

The idea was outrageous, impossible, true.

It was enough to alarm him, to make him begin to pull back his hand. She clutched him with tender softness, with weak strength, and he could not resist her. Again he had the feeling, which had. gripped him so strongly when he first met her at the door of Beauregard and failed to kill her, that he had always known her and had always loved her. (Was there not some planet on which eccentric people believed a weird cult, thinking that human beings were endlessly reborn with fragmentary recollections of their own previous human lives? It was almost like that. Here. Now. He did not know the girl but he had always known her. He did not love the girl and yet he had loved her from the beginning of time.)

She said, so softly that it was almost a whisper, “Wait. . . . Wait. . . . Your death may come through that door pretty soon and I will tell you how to meet it. But before that, even, I have to show you the most beautiful thing in the world.”

Despite her little hand lying tenderly and firmly on his, Casher spoke irritably: “I’m tired of talking riddles here on Henriada. The Administrator gives me the mission of killing you and I fail in it. Then you promise me a battle and give me a good meal instead. Now you talk about the battle and start off with some other irrelevance. You’re going to make me angry if you keep on and—and—and—” He stammered out at last: “I get pretty useless if I’m angry. If you want me to do a fight for you, let me know the fight and let me go do it now. I’m willing enough.”

Her remote, kind half smile did not waver. “Casher,” she said, “what I am going to show you is your most important weapon in the fight.”

With her free left hand she tugged at the fine chain of a thin gold necklace. A piece of jewelry came out of the top of her shift dress, under which she had kept it hidden. It was the image of two pieces of wood with a man nailed to them.

Casher stared and then he burst into hysterical laughter.

“Now you’ve done it, ma’am,” he cried. “I’m no use to you or to anybody else. I know what that is, and up to now I’ve just suspected it. It’s what the robot, rat and Copt agreed on when they went exploring back in Space three. It’s the Old Strong Religion. You’ve put it in my mind and now the next person who meets me will peep it and will wipe it out. Me too, probably, along with it. That’s no weapon. That’s a defeat. You’ve done me in. I knew the sign of the Fish a long time ago, but I had a chance of getting away with just that little bit.”

“Casher!” she cried. “Casher! Get hold of yourself. You will know nothing about this before you leave Beauregard. You will forget. You will be safe.”

He stood on his feet, not knowing whether to run away, to laugh out loud, or to sit down and weep at the silly sad misfortune which had befallen him. To think that he himself had become brain-branded as a fanatic—forever denied travel between the stars—just because an undergirl had shown him an odd piece of jewelry!

“It’s not as bad as you think,” said the little girl, and stood up too. Her face peered lovingly at Casher’s. “Do you think, Casher, that I am afraid?”

“No,” he admitted.

“You will not remember this, Casher. Not when you leave. I am not just the turtle-girl T’ruth. I am also the imprint of the citizen Agatha. Have you ever heard of her?”

“Agatha Madigan?” He shook his head slowly. “No. I don’t see how . . . No, I’m sure that I never heard of her.”

“Didn’t you ever hear the story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon?”

Casher looked surprised. “Sure I saw it. It’s a play. A drama. It is said to be based on some legend out of immemorial time. The ‘space witch’ they called her, and she conjured fleets out of nothing by sheer hypnosis. It’s an old story.”

“Eleven hundred years isn’t so long,” said the girl. “Eleven hundred years, fourteen local months come next tonight.”

“You weren’t alive eleven hundred years ago,” said Casher accusingly.

He stood up from the remains of their meal and wandered over toward the window. That terrible piece of religious jewelry made him uncomfortable. He knew that it was against all laws to ship religion from world to world. What would he do, what could he do, now that he had actually beheld an image of the God Nailed High? That was exactly the kind of contraband which the police and customs robots of hundreds of worlds were looking for.

The Instrumentality was easy about most things, but the transplanting of religion was one of its hostile obsessions. Religions leaked from world to world anyhow. It was said that sometimes even the underpeople and robots carried bits of religion through space, though this seemed improbable. The Instrumentality left religion alone when it had a settled place on a single planet, but the Lords of the Instrumentality themselves shunned other people’s devotional lives and simply took good care that fanaticisms did not once more flare up between the stars, bringing wild hope and great death to all the mankinds again.

And now, thought Casher, the Instrumentality has been good to me in its big impersonal collective way, but what will it do when my brain is on fire with forbidden knowledge?

The girl’s voice called him back to himself.

“I have the answer to your problem, Casher,” said she, “if you would only listen to me. I am the Hechizera of Gonfalon, at least I am as much as any one person can be printed on another.”

His jaw dropped as he turned back to her. “You mean that you, child, really are imprinted with this woman Agatha Madigan? Really imprinted?”

“I have all her skills, Casher,” said the girl quietly, “and a few more which I have learned on my own.”

“But I thought it was just a story . . .” said Casher. “If you’re that terrible woman from Gonfalon, you don’t need me. I’m quitting. Now.”

Casher walked toward the door. Disgusted, finished, through. She might be a child, she might be charming, she might need help, but if she came from that terrible old story, she did not need him.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said.

IX

Unexpectedly, she took her place in the doorway, barring it.

In her hand was the image of the man on the two pieces of wood.

Ordinarily Casher would not have pushed a lady. Such was his haste that he did so this time. When he touched her, it was like welded steel; neither her gown nor her body yielded a thousandth of a millimeter to his strong hand and heavy push.

“And now what?” she asked gently.

Looking back, he saw that the real T’ruth, the smiling girl-woman, still stood soft and real in the window.

Deep within, he began to give up; he had heard of hypnotists who could project, but he had never met one as strong as this.

She was doing it. How was she doing it? Or was she doing it? The operation could be subvolitional. There might be some art carried over from her animal past which even her re-formed mind could not explain. Operations too subtle, too primordial for analysis. Or skills which she used without understanding.

“I project,” she said.

“I see you do,” he replied glumly and flatly.

“I do kinesthetics,” she said. His knife whipped out of his bootsheath and floated in the air in front of him.

He snatched it out of the air instinctively. It wormed a little in his grasp, but the force on the knife was nothing more than he had felt when passing big magnetic engines.

“I blind,” she said. The room went totally dark for him.

“I hear,” he said, and prowled at her like a beast, going by his memory of the room and by the very soft sound of her breathing. He had noticed by now that the simulacrum of herself which she had put in the doorway did not make any sound at all, not even that of breathing.

He knew that he was near her. His fingertips reached out for her shoulder or her throat. He did not mean to hurt her, merely to show her that two could play at tricks.

“I stun,” she said, and her voice came at him from all directions. It echoed from the ceiling, came from all five walls of the old odd room, from the open windows, from both the doors. He felt as though he were being lifted into space and turned slowly in a condition of weightlessness. He tried to retain self-control, to listen for the one true sound among the many false sounds, to trap the girl by some outside chance.

“I make you remember,” said her multiple echoing voice.

For an instant he did not see how this could be a weapon, even if the turtle-girl had learned all the ugly tricks of the Hechizera of Gonfalon.

But then he knew.

He saw his uncle, Kuraf, again. He saw his old apartments vividly around himself. Kuraf was there. The old man was pitiable, hateful, drunk, horrible; the girl on Kuraf’s lap laughed at him, Casher O’Neill, and she laughed at Kuraf too. Casher had once had a teen-ager’s passionate concern with sex and at the same time had had a teen-ager’s dreadful fear of all the unstated, invisible implications of what the man-woman relationship, gone sour, gone wrong, gone bad, might be. The present-moment Casher remembered the long-ago Casher and as he spun in the web of T’ruth’s hypnotic powers he found himself back with the ugliest memory he had.

The killings in the palace at Mizzer.

The colonels had taken Kaheer itself, and they ultimately let Kuraf run away to the pleasure planet of Ttiolle.

But Kuraf’s companions, who had debauched the old republic of the Twelve Niles, those people! They did not go. The soldiers, stung to fury, had cut them down with knives. Casher thought of the blood, blood sticky on the floors, blood gushing purple into the carpets, blood bright red and leaping like a fountain when a white throat ended its last gurgle, blood turning brown where handprints, themselves bloody, had left it on marble tables. The warm palace, long ago, had got the sweet sick stench of blood all the way through it. The young Casher had never known that people had so much blood inside them, or that so much could pour out on the perfumed sheets, the tables still set with food and drink, or that blood could creep across the floor in growing pools as the bodies of the dead yielded up their last few nasty sounds and their terminal muscular spasms.

Before that day of butchery had ended, one thousand, three hundred and eleven human bodies, ranging in age from two months to eighty-nine years, had been carried out of the palaces once occupied by Kuraf. Kuraf, under sedation, was waiting for a starship to take him to perpetual exile and Casher—Casher himself O’Neill!—was shaking the hand of Colonel Wedder, whose orders had caused all the blood. The hand was washed and the nails pared and cleaned, but the cuff of the sleeve was still rimmed with the dry blood of some other human being. Colonel Wedder either did not notice his own cuff, or he did not care. “Touch and yield!” said the girl-voice out of nowhere. Casher found himself on all fours in the room, his sight suddenly back again, the room unchanged, and T’ruth smiling. “I fought you,” she said.

He nodded. He did not trust himself to speak.

He reached for his water glass, looking at it closely to see if there was any blood on it.

Of course not. Not here. Not this time, not this place.

He pulled himself to his feet.

The girl had sense enough not to help him.

She stood there in her thin modest shift, looking very much like a wise female child, while he stood up and drank thirstily. He refilled the glass and drank again.

Then, only then, did he turn to her and speak:

“Do you do all that?”

She nodded.

“Alone? Without drugs or machinery?”

She nodded again.

“Child,” he cried out, “you’re not a person! You’re a whole weapons system all by yourself. What are you, really? Who are you?”

“I am the turtle-child T’ruth,” she said, “and I am the loyal property and loving servant of my good master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan.”

“Madam,” said Casher, “you are almost a thousand years old. I am at your service. I do hope you will let me go free later on. And especially that you will take that religious picture out of my mind.”

As Casher spoke, she picked a locket from the table. He had not noticed it. It was an ancient watch or a little round box, swinging on a thin gold chain.

“Watch this,” said the child, “if you trust me, and repeat what I then say.”

(Nothing at all happened: nothing—anywhere.)

Casher said to her, “You’re making me dizzy, swinging that ornament. Put it back on. Isn’t that the one you were wearing?”

“No, Casher, it isn’t.”

“What were we talking about?” demanded Casher.

“Something,” said she. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Casher brusquely. “Sorry, but I’m hungry again.” He wolfed down a sweet roll encrusted with sugar and decorated with fruits. His mouth full, he washed the food down with water. At last he spoke to her. “Now what?”

She had watched with timeless grace.

“There’s no hurry, Casher. Minutes or hours, they don’t matter.”

“Didn’t you want me to fight somebody after Gosigo left me here?”

“That’s right,” she said, with terrible quiet.

“I seem to have had a fight right here in this room.” He stared around stupidly.

She looked around the room, very cool. “It doesn’t look as though anybody’s been fighting here, does it?”

“There’s no blood here, no blood at all. Everything is clean,” he said.

“Pretty much so.”

“Then why,” said Casher, “should I think I had a fight?”

“This wild weather on Henriada sometimes upsets off-worlders until they get used to it,” said T’ruth mildly.

“If I didn’t have a fight in the past, am I going to get into one in the future?”

The old room with the golden-oak furniture swam around him. The world outside was strange, with the sunlit marshes and wide bayous trailing off to the forever-thundering storm, just over the horizon, which lay beyond the weather machines. Casher shrugged and shivered. He looked straight at the girl. She stood erect and looked at him with the even regard of a reigning empress. Her young budding breasts barely showed through the thinness of her shift; she wore golden flat-heeled shoes. Around her neck there was a thin gold chain, but the object on the chain hung down inside her dress. It excited him a little to think of her flat chest barely budding into womanhood. He had never been a man who had an improper taste for children, but there was something about this person which was not childlike at all.

“You are a girl and not a girl . . .” he said in bewilderment.

She nodded gravely.

“You are that woman in the story, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You are reborn.”

She shook her head, equally seriously. “No, I am not reborn. I am a turtle-child, an underperson with very long life, and I have been imprinted with the personality of the citizen Agatha. That is all.”

“You stun,” he said, “but I do not know how you do it.”

“I stun,” she said flatly, and around the edge of his mind there flickered up hot little torments of memory.

“Now I remember,” he cried. “You have me here to kill somebody. You are sending me into a fight.”

“You are going to a fight, Casher. I wish I could send somebody else, not you, but you are the only person here strong enough to do the job.”

Impulsively he took her hand. The moment he touched her, she ceased to be a child or an underperson. She felt tender and exciting, like the most desirable and important person he had ever known. His sister? But he had no sister. He felt that he was himself terribly, unendurably important to her. He did not want to let her hand go, but she withdrew from his touch with an authority which no decent man could resist.

“You must fight to the death now, Casher,” she said, looking at him as evenly as might a troop commander examining a special soldier selected for a risky mission.

He nodded. He was tired of having his mind confused. He knew something had happened to him after the forgetty, Gosigo, had left him at the front door, but he was not at all sure of what it was. They seemed to have had a sort of meal together in this room. He felt himself in love with the child. He knew that she was not even a human being. He remembered something about her living ninety thousand years and he remembered something else about her having gotten the name and the skills of the greatest battle hypnotist of all history, the Hechizera of Gonfalon. There was something strange, something frightening about that chain around her neck: there were things he hoped he would never have to know.

He strained at the thought and it broke like a bubble.

“I’m a fighter,” he said. “Give me my fight and let me know.”

“He can kill you. I hope not. You must not kill him. He is immortal and insane. But in the law of Old North Australia, from which my master, the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan, is an exile, we must not hurt a house guest, nor may we turn him away in a time of great need.”

“What do I do?” snapped Casher impatiently.

“You fight him. You frighten him. You make his poor crazy mind fearful that he will meet you again.”

“I’m supposed to do this.”

“You can,” she said very seriously. “I’ve already tested you. That’s where you have the little spot of amnesia about this room.”

“But why? Why bother? Why not get some of your human servants and have them tie him up or put him in a padded room?”

“They can’t deal with him. He is too strong, too big, too clever, even though insane. Besides, they don’t dare follow him.”

“Where does he go?” said Casher sharply.

“Into the control room,” replied T’ruth, as if it were the saddest phrase ever uttered.

“What’s wrong with that? Even a place as fine as Beauregard can’t have too much of a control room. Put locks on the control.”

“It’s not that kind of a control room.”

Almost angry, he shouted, “What is it, then?”

“The control booth,” she answered, “is for a planoform ship. This house. These counties, all the way to Mottile on the one side and to Ambiloxi on the other. The sea itself, way out into the Gulf of Esperanza. All this is one ship.”

Casher’s professional interest took over. “If it’s turned off, he can’t do any harm.”

“It’s not turned off,” she said. “My master leaves it on a very little bit. That way, he can keep the weather machines going and make this edge of Henriada a very pleasant place.”

“You mean,” said Casher, “that you’d risk letting a lunatic fly all these estates off into space.”

“He doesn’t even fly,” said T’ruth gloomily.

“What does he do, then?” yelled Casher.

“When he gets at the controls, he just hovers.”

“He hovers? By the Bell, girl, don’t try to fool me. If you hover a place as big as this, you could wipe out the whole planet any moment. There have been only two or three pilots in the history of space who would be able to hover a machine like this one.”

“He can, though,” insisted the little girl.

“Who is he, anyhow?”

“I thought you knew. Or had heard somewhere about it. His name is John Joy Tree.”

“Tree the go captain?” Casher shivered in the warm room. “He died a long time ago after he made that record flight.”

“He did not die. He bought immortality and went mad. He came here and he lives under my master’s protection.”

“Oh,” said Casher. There was nothing else he could say. John Joy Tree, the great Norstrilian who took the first of the Long Plunges outside the galaxy: he was like Magno Taliano of ages ago, who could fly space on his living brain alone.

But fight him? How could anybody fight him?

Pilots are for piloting; killers are for killing; women are for loving or forgetting. When you mix up the purposes, everything goes wrong.

Casher sat down abruptly. “Do you have any more of that coffee?”

“You don’t need coffee,” she said.

He looked up inquiringly.

“You’re a fighter. You need a war. That’s it,” she said, pointing with her girlish hand to a small doorway which looked like the entrance to a closet. “Just go in there. He’s in there now. Tinkering with the machines again. Making me wait for my master to get blown to bits at any minute! And I’ve put up with it for over a hundred years.”

“Go yourself,” he said.

“You’ve been in a ship’s control room,” she declared.

“Yes.” He nodded.

“You know how people go all naked and frightened inside. You know how much training it takes to make a go captain. What do you think happens to me?” At last, long last, her voice was shrill, angry, excited, childish.

“What happens?” said Casher dully, not caring very much; he felt weary in every bone. Useless battles, murder he had to try, dead people arguing after their ballads had already grown out of fashion. Why didn’t the Hechizera of Gonfalon do her own work?

Catching his thought, she screeched at him, “Because I can’t!”

“All right,” said Casher. “Why not?”

“Because I turn into me.”

“You what?” said Casher, a little startled.

“I’m a turtle-child. My shape is human. My brain is big. But I’m a turtle. No matter how much my master needs me, I’m just a turtle.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“What do turtles do when they’re faced with danger? Not underpeople-turtles, but real turtles, little animals. You must have heard of them somewhere.”

“I’ve even seen them,” said Casher, “on some world or other. They pull into their shells.”

“That’s what I do”—she wept—“when I should be defending my master. I can meet most things. I am not a coward. But in that control room, I forget, forget, forget!”

“Send a robot, then!”

She almost screamed at him. “A robot against John Joy Tree? Are you mad too?”

Casher admitted, in a mumble, that on second thought it wouldn’t do much good to send a robot against the greatest go captain of them all. He concluded, lamely, “I’ll go, if you want me to.”

“Go now,” she shouted, “go right in!”

She pulled at his arm, half dragging and half leading him to the little brightened door which looked so innocent.

“But—” he said.

“Keep going,” she pleaded. “This is all we ask of you. Don’t kill him, but frighten him, fight him, wound him if you must. You can do it. I can’t.” She sobbed as she tugged at him. “I’d just be me. “

Before he knew quite what had happened she had opened the door. The light beyond was clear and bright and tinged with blue, the way the skies of Manhome, Mother Earth, were shown in all the viewers.

He let her push him in.

He heard the door click behind him.

Before he even took in the details of the room or noticed the man in the go captain’s chair, the flavor and meaning of the room struck him like a blow against his throat.

This room, he thought, is Hell.

He wasn’t even sure that he remembered where he had learned the word Hell. It denoted all good turned to evil, all hope to anxiety, all wishes to greed.

Somehow, this room was it.

And then . . .

X

And then the chief occupant of Hell turned and looked squarely at him.

If this was John Joy Tree, he did not look insane.

He was a handsome, chubby man with a red complexion, bright eyes, dancing-blue in color, and a mouth which was as mobile as the mouth of a temptress.

“Good day,” said John Joy Tree.

“How do you do,” said Casher inanely.

“I do not know your name,” said the ruddy brisk man, speaking in a tone of voice which was not the least bit insane.

“I am Casher O’Neill, from the city of Kaheer on the planet Mizzer.”

“Mizzer?” John Joy Tree laughed. “I spent a night there, long, long ago. The entertainment was most unusual. But we have other things to talk about. You have come here to kill the under-girl T’ruth. You received your orders from the honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, may he soak in drink! The child has caught you and now she wants you to kill me, but she does not dare utter those words.”

John Joy Tree, as he spoke, shifted the spaceship controls to standby, and got ready to get out of his captain’s seat.

Casher protested, “She said nothing about killing you. She said you might kill me.”

“I might, at that.” The immortal pilot stood on the floor. He was a full head shorter than Casher but he was a strong and formidable man. The blue light of the room made him look clear, sharp, distinct.

The whole flavor of the situation tickled the fear nerves inside Casher’s body. He suddenly felt that he wanted very much to go to a bathroom, but he felt—quite surely—that if he turned his back on this man, in this place, he would die like a felled ox in a stockyard. He had to face John Joy Tree.

“Go ahead,” said the pilot. “Fight me.”

“I didn’t say that I would fight you,” said Casher. “I am supposed to frighten you and I do not know how to do it.”

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” said John Joy Tree. “Shall we go into the outer room and let poor little T’ruth give us a drink? You can just tell her that you failed.”

“I think,” said Casher, “that I am more afraid of her than I am of you.”

John Joy Tree flung himself into a comfortable passenger’s chair. “All right, then. Do something. Do you want to box? Gloves? Bare fists? Or would you like swords? Or wirepoints? There are some over there in the closet. Or we can each take a pilot ship and have a ship duel out in space.”

“That wouldn’t make much sense,” said Casher, “me fighting a ship against the greatest go captain of them all. . .”

John Joy Tree greeted this with an ugly underlaugh, a barely audible sound which made Casher feel that the whole situation was ridiculous.

“But I do have one advantage,” said Casher. “I know who you are and you do not know who I am.”

“How could I tell,” said John joy Tree, “when people keep on getting born all over the place?”

He gave Casher a scornful, comfortable grin. There was charm in the man’s poise. Keeping his eyes focused directly on Casher, he felt for a carafe and poured himself a drink.

He gave Casher an ironic toast and Casher took it, standing frightened and alone. More alone than he had ever been before in his life.

Suddenly John Joy Tree sprang lightly to his feet and stared with a complete change of expression past Casher. Casher did not dare look around. This was some old fight trick.

Tree spat out the words, “You’ve done it, then. This time you will violate all the laws and kill me. This fashionable oaf is not just one more trick.”

A voice behind Casher called very softly, “I don’t know.” It was a man’s voice, old, slow and tired.

Casher had heard no one come in.

Casher’s years of training stood him in good stead. He skipped sidewise in four or five steps, never taking his eyes off John Joy Tree, until the other man had come into his field of vision.

The man who stood there was tall, thin, yellow-skinned and yellow-haired. His eyes were an old sick blue. He glanced at Casher and said, “I’m Madigan.”

Was this the master? thought Casher. Was this the being whom that lovely child had been imprinted to adore?

He had no more time for thought.

Madigan whispered, as if to no one in particular, “You find me waking. You find him sane. Watch out.”

Madigan lunged for the pilot’s controls, but his tall, thin old body could not move very fast.

John Joy Tree jumped out of his chair and ran for the controls too.

Casher tripped him.

Tree fell, rolled over and got halfway up, one knee and one foot on the floor. In his hand there shimmered a knife very much like Casher’s own.

Casher felt the flame of his body as some unknown force flung him against the wall. He stared, wild with fear.

Madigan had climbed into the pilot’s seat and was fiddling with the controls as though he might blow Henriada out of space at any second. John Joy Tree glanced at his old host and then turned his attention to the man in front of him.

There was another man there.

Casher knew him.

He looked familiar.

It was himself, rising and leaping like a snake, left arm weaving the knife for the neck of John Joy Tree.

The image Casher hit Tree with a thud that resounded through the room.

Tree’s bright blue eyes had turned crazy-mad. His knife caught the image Casher in the abdomen, thrust hard and deep, and left the young man gasping on the floor, trying to push the bleeding entrails back into his belly. The blood poured from the image Casher all over the rug.

Blood!

Casher suddenly knew what he had to do and how he could do it—all without anybody telling him.

He created a third Casher on the far side of the room and gave him iron gloves. There was himself, unheeded against the wall; there was the dying Casher on the floor; there was the third, stalking toward John Joy Tree.

“Death is here,” screamed the third Casher, with a voice which Casher recognized as a fierce crazy simulacrum of his own. Tree whirled around. “You’re not real,” he said.

The image Casher stepped around the console and hit Tree with an iron glove. The pilot jumped away, a hand reaching up to his bleeding face.

John Joy Tree screamed at Madigan, who was playing with the dials without even putting on the pinlighter helmet.

“You got her in here,” he screamed, “you got her in here with this young man! Get her out!”

“Who?” said Madigan softly and absentmindedly.

“T’ruth. That witch of yours. I claim guest-right by all the ancient laws. Get her out.”

The real Casher, standing at the wall, did not know how he controlled the image Casher with the iron gloves, but control him he did. He made him speak, in a voice as frantic as Tree’s own voice:

“John Joy Tree, I do not bring you death. I bring you blood. My iron hands will pulp your eyes. Blind sockets will stare in your face. My iron hands will split your teeth and break your jaw a thousand times, so that no doctor, no machine will ever fix you. My iron hands will crush your arms, turn your hands into living rags. My iron hands will break your legs. Look at the blood, John Joy Tree. . . . There will be a lot more blood. You have killed me once. See that young man on the floor.”

They both glanced at the first image Casher, who had finally shuddered into death in the great rug. A pool of blood lay in front of the body of the youth.

John Joy Tree turned to image Casher and said to him, “You’re the Hechizera of Gonfalon. You can’t scare me. You’re a turtle-girl and can’t really hurt me.”

“Look at me,” said the real Casher.

John Joy Tree glanced back and forth between the duplicates.

Fright began to show.

Both the Cashers now shouted, in crazy voices which came from the depths of Casher’s own mind:

“Blood you shall have! Blood and ruin. But we will not kill you. You will live in ruin, blind, emasculated, armless, legless. You will be fed through tubes. You cannot die and you will weep for death but no one will hear you.”

“Why?” screamed Tree. “Why? What have I done to you?”

“You remind me,” howled Casher, “of my home. You remind me of the blood poured by Colonel Wedder when the poor useless victims of my uncle’s lust paid with their blood for his revenge. You remind me of myself, John Joy Tree, and I am going to punish you as I myself might be punished.”

Lost in the mists of lunacy, John Joy Tree was still a brave man.

He flung his knife unexpectedly at the real Casher. The image Casher, in a tremendous bound, leaped across the room and caught the knife on an iron glove. It clattered against the glove and then fell silent onto the rug.

Casher saw what he had to see.

He saw the palace of Kaheer, covered with death, with the intimate sticky silliness of sudden death—the dead men holding little packages they had tried to save, the girls, with their throats cut, lying in their own blood but with the lipstick still even and the eyebrow pencil still pretty on their dead faces. He saw a dead child, ripped open from groin upward to chest, holding a broken doll while the child itself, now dead, looked like a broken doll itself. He saw these things and he made John Joy Tree see them too.

“You’re a bad man,” said John Joy Tree.

“I am very bad,” said Casher.

“Will you let me go if I never enter this room again?”

The image Casher snapped off, both the body on the floor and the fighter with the iron gloves. Casher did not know how T’ruth had taught him the lost art of fighter replication, but he had certainly done it well.

“The lady told me you could go.”

“But who are you going to use,” said John Joy Tree, calm, sad and logical, “for your dreams of blood if you don’t use me?”

“I don’t know,” said Casher. “I follow my fate. Go now, if you do not want my iron gloves to crush you.”

John Joy Tree trotted out of the room, beaten.

Only then did Casher, exhausted, grab a curtain to hold himself upright and look around the room freely.

The evil atmosphere had gone.

Madigan, old though he was, had locked all the controls on standby.

He walked over to Casher and spoke. “Thank you. She did not invent you. She found you and put you to my service.”

Casher coughed out, “The girl. Yes.”

“My girl,” corrected Madigan.

“Your girl,” said Casher, remembering the sight of that slight feminine body, those budding breasts, the sensitive lips, the tender eyes.

“She could not have thought you up. She is my dead wife over again. The citizeness Agatha might have done it. But not T’ruth.”

Casher looked at the man as he talked. The host wore the bottoms of some very cheap yellow pajamas and a washable bathrobe which had once been stripes of purple, lavender and white. Now it was faded, like its wearer. Casher also saw the white clean plastic surgical implants on the man’s arms, where the machines and tubes hooked in to keep him alive.

“I sleep a lot,” said Murray Madigan, “but I am still the master of Beauregard. I am grateful to you.”

The hand was frail, withered, dry, without strength.

The old voice whispered, “Tell her to reward you. You can have anything on my estate. Or you can have anything on Henriada. She manages it all for me.” Then the old blue eyes opened wide and sharp and Murray Madigan was once again the man, just momentarily, that he had been hundreds of years ago—a Norstrilian trader, sharp, shrewd, wise and not unkind. He added sharply, “Enjoy her company. She is a good child. But do not take her. Do not try to take her.”

“Why not?” said Casher, surprised at his own bluntness.

“Because if you do, she will die. She is mine. Imprinted to me. I had her made and she is mine. Without me she would die in a few days. Do not take her.”

Casher saw the old man leave the room by a secret door. He left himself, the way he had come in. He did not see Madigan again for two days, and by that time the old man had gone far back into his cataleptic sleep.

XI

Two days later T’ruth took Casher to visit the sleeping Madigan.

“You can’t go in there,” said Eunice in a shocked voice. “Nobody goes in there. That’s the master’s room.”

“I’m taking him in,” said T’ruth calmly.

She had pulled a cloth-of-gold curtain aside and she was spinning the combination locks on a massive steel door. It was set in Daimoni material.

The maid went on protesting. “But even you, little ma’am, can’t take him in there!”

“Who says I can’t?” said T’ruth calmly and challengingly.

The awfulness of the situation sank in on Eunice.

In a small voice she muttered, “If you’re taking him in, you’re taking him in. But it’s never been done before.”

“Of course it hasn’t, Eunice, not in your time. But Casher O’Neill has already met the Mister and Owner. He has fought for the Mister and Owner. Do you think I would take a stray or random guest in to look at the master, just like that?”

“Oh, not at all, no,” said Eunice.

“Then go away, woman,” said the lady-child. “You don’t want to see this door open, do you?”

“Oh, no,” shrieked Eunice and fled, putting her hands over her ears as though that would shut out the sight of the door.

When the maid had disappeared, T’ruth pulled with her whole weight against the handle of the heavy door. Casher expected the mustiness of the tomb or the medicinality of a hospital; he was astonished when fresh air and warm sunlight poured out from that heavy, mysterious door. The actual opening was so narrow, so low, that Casher had to step sidewise as he followed T’ruth into the room.

The master’s room was enormous. The windows were flooded with perpetual sunlight. The landscape outside must have been the way Henriada looked in its prime, when Mottile was a resort for the carefree millions of vacationers, and Ambiloxi a port feeding worlds halfway across the galaxy. There was no sign of the ugly snaky storms which worried and pestered Henriada in these later years. Everything was landscape, order, neatness, the triumph of man, as though Poussin had painted it.

The room itself, like the other great living rooms of the estate of Beauregard, was exuberant neo-baroque in which the architect, himself half mad, had been given wild license to work out his fantasies in steel, plastic, plaster, wood and stone. The ceiling was not flat, but vaulted. Each of the four corners of the room was an alcove, cutting deep into each of the four sides, so that the room was, in effect, an octagon. The propriety and prettiness of the room had been a little diminished by the shoving of the furniture to one side, sofas, upholstered armchairs, marble tables and knickknack stands all in an indescribable mélange to the left; while the right-hand part of the room—facing the master window with the illusory landscape—was equipped like a surgery with an operating table, hydraulic lifts, bottles of clear and colored fluid hanging from chrome stands and two large devices which (Casher later surmised) must have been heart-lung and kidney machines. The alcoves, in their turn, were wilder. One was an archaic funeral parlor with an immense coffin, draped in black velvet, resting on a heavy teak stand. The next was a spaceship control cabin of the old kind, with the levers, switches and controls all in plain sight—the meters actually read the galactically stable location of this very place, and to do so they had to whirl mightily—as well as a pilot’s chair with the usual choice of helmets and the straps and shock absorbers. The third alcove was a simple bedroom done in very old-fashioned taste, the walls a Wedgwood blue with deep wine-colored drapes, coverlets and pillowcases marking a sharp but tolerable contrast. The fourth alcove was the copy of a fortress: it might even have been a fortress: the door was heavy and the walls looked as though they might be Daimoni material, indestructible by any imaginable means. Cases of emergency food and water were stacked against the walls. Weapons which looked oiled and primed stood in their racks, together with three different calibers of wirepoint, each with its own fresh-looking battery.

The alcoves had no people in them.

The parlor was deserted.

The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan lay naked on the operating table. Two or three wires led to gauges attached to his body. Casher thought that he could see a faint motion of the chest, as the cataleptic man breathed at a rate one-tenth normal or less.

The girl-lady, T’ruth, was not the least embarrassed.

“I check him four or five times a day. I never let people in here. But you’re special, Casher. He’s talked with you and fought beside you and he knows that he owes you his life. You’re the first human person ever to get into this room.”

“I’ll wager,” said Casher, “that the Administrator of Henriada, the Honorable Rankin Meiklejohn, would give up some of his ‘honorable’ just to get in here and have one look around. He wonders what Madigan is doing when Madigan is doing nothing. . . .”

“He’s not just doing nothing,” said T’ruth sharply. “He’s sleeping. It’s not everybody who can sleep for forty or fifty or sixty thousand years and can wake up a few times a month, just to see how things are going.”

Casher started to whistle and then stopped himself, as though he feared to waken the unconscious, naked old man on the table. “So that’s why he chose you.”

T’ruth corrected him as she washed her hands vigorously in a washbasin. “That’s why he had me made. Turtle stock, three hundred years. Multiply that with intensive stroon treatments, three hundred times. Ninety thousand years. Then he had me printed to love him and adore him. He’s not my master, you know. He’s my god.”

“Your what?”

“You heard me. Don’t get upset. I’m not going to give you any illegal memories. I worship him. That’s what I was printed for, when my little turtle eyes opened and they put me back in the tank to enlarge my brain and to make a woman out of me. That’s why they printed every memory of the citizeness Agatha Madigan right into my brain. I’m what he wanted. Just what he wanted. I’m the most wanted being on any planet. No wife, no sweetheart, no mother has ever been wanted as much as he wants me now, when he wakes up and knows that I am still here. You’re a smart man. Would you trust any machine—any machine at all—for ninety thousand years?”

“It would be hard,” said Casher, “to get batteries of monitors long enough for them to repair each other over that long a time. But that means you have ninety thousand years of it. Four times, five times a day. I can’t even multiply the numbers. Don’t you ever get tired of it?”

“He’s my love, he’s my joy, he’s my darling little boy,” she caroled, as she lifted his eyelids and put colorless drops in each eye. Absentmindedly, she explained. “With his slow metabolism, there’s always some danger that his eyelids will stick to his eyeballs. This is part of the checkup.”

She tilted the sleeping man’s head, looked earnestly into each eye. She then stepped a few paces aside and put her face close to the dial of a gently humming machine. There was the sound of a shot. Casher almost reached for his gun, which he did not have.

The child turned back to him with a free mischievous smile. “Sorry, I should have warned you. That’s my noisemaker. I watch the encephalograph to make sure his brain keeps a little auditory intake. It showed up with the noise. He’s asleep, very deeply asleep, but he’s not drifting downward into death.”

Back at the table she pushed Madigan’s chin upward so that the head leaned far back on its neck. Deftly holding the forehead, she took a retractor, opened his mouth with her fingers, depressed the tongue and looked down into the throat.

“No accumulation there,” she muttered, as if to herself.

She pushed the head back into a comfortable position. She seemed on the edge of another set of operations when it was obvious that an idea occurred to her. “Go wash your hands, thoroughly, over there, at the basin. Then push the timer down and be sure you hold your hands under the sterilizer until the timer goes off. You can help me turn him over. I don’t have help here. You’re the first visitor.”

Casher obeyed and while he washed his hands, he saw the girl drench her hands with some flower-scented unguent. She began to massage the unconscious body with professional expertness, even with a degree of roughness. As he stood with his hands under the sterilizer-dryer, Casher marveled at the strength of those girlish arms and those little hands. Indefatigably they stroked, rubbed, pummeled, pulled, stretched and poked the old body. The sleeping man seemed to be utterly unaware of it, but Casher thought that he could see a better skin color and muscle tone appearing.

He walked back to the table and stood facing T’ruth.

A huge peacock walked across the imaginary lawn outside the window, his tail shimmering in a paroxysm of colors.

T’ruth saw the direction of Casher’s glance.

“Oh, I program that too. He likes it when he wakes up. Don’t you think he was clever, before he went into catalepsis—to have me made, to have me created to love him and to care for him? It helps that I’m a girl. I can’t ever love anybody but him, and it’s easy for me to remember that this is the man I love. And it’s safer for him. Any man might get bored with these responsibilities. I don’t.”

“Yet—” said Casher.

“Shh,” she said, “wait a bit. This takes care.” Her strong little fingers were now plowing deep into the abdomen of the naked old man. She closed her eyes so that she could concentrate all her senses on the one act of tactile impression. She took her hands away and stood erect. “All clear,” she said. “I’ve got to find out what’s going on inside him. But I don’t dare use X rays on him. Think of the radiation he’d build up in a hundred years or so. He defecates about twice a month while he’s sleeping. I’ve got to be ready for that. I also have to prime his bladder every week or so. Otherwise he would poison himself just with his own body wastes. Here, now, you can help me turn him over. But watch the wires. Those are the monitor controls. They report his physiological processes, radio a message to me if anything goes wrong, and meanwhile supply the missing neurophysical impulses if any part of the automatic nervous system began to fade out or just simply went off.”

“Has that ever happened?”

“Never,” she said, “not yet. But I’m ready. Watch that wire. You’re turning him too fast. There now, that’s right. You can stand back while I massage him on the back.”

She went back to her job of being a masseuse. Starting at the muscles joining the skull to the neck, she worked her way down the body, pouring ointment on her hands from time to time. When she got to his legs, she seemed to work particularly hard. She lifted the feet, bent the knees, slapped the calves.

Then she put on a rubber glove, dipped her hand into another jar—one which opened automatically as her hand approached—and came out with her hand greasy. She thrust her fingers into his rectum, probing, thrusting, groping, her brow furrowed.

Her face cleared as she dropped the rubber glove in a disposal can and wiped the sleeping man with a soft linen towel, which also went into a disposal can. “He’s all right. He’ll get along well for the next two hours. I’ll have to give him a little sugar then. All he’s getting now is normal saline.”

She stood facing him. There was a faint glow in her cheeks from the violent exercise in which she had been indulging, but she still looked both the child and the lady—the child irrecoverably remote, hidden in her own wisdom from the muddled world of adults, and the lady, mistress in her own home, her own estates, her own planet, serving her master with almost immortal love and zeal.

“I was going to ask you, back there—” said Casher, and then stopped.

“You were going to ask me?”

He spoke heavily. “I was going to ask you, what happens to you when he dies? Either at the right time or possibly before his time. What happens to you?”

“I couldn’t care less,” her voice sang out. He could see by the open, honest smile on her face that she meant it. “I’m his. I belong to him. That’s what I’m for. They may have programmed something into me, in case he dies. Or they may have forgotten. What matters is his life, not mine. He’s going to get every possible hour of life that I can help him get. Don’t you think I’m doing a good job?”

“A good job, yes,” said Casher. “A strange one too.”

“We can go now,” she said.

“What are those alcoves for?”

“Oh, those—they’re his make-believes. He picks one of them to go to sleep in—his coffin, his fort, his ship or his bedroom. It doesn’t matter which. I always get him up with the hoist and put him back on his table, where the machines and I can take proper care of him. He doesn’t really mind waking up on the table. He has usually forgotten which room he went to sleep in. We can go now.”

They walked toward the door.

Suddenly she stopped. “I forgot something. I never forget things, but this is the first time I ever let anybody come in here with me. You were such a good friend to him. He’ll talk about you for thousands of years. Long, long after you’re dead,” she added somewhat unnecessarily. Casher looked at her sharply to see if she might be mocking or deprecating him. There was nothing but the little-girl solemnity, the womanly devotion to an established domestic routine.

“Turn your back,” she commanded peremptorily.

“Why?” he asked. “Why—when you have trusted me with all the other secrets.”

“He wouldn’t want you to see this.”

“See what?”

“What I’m going to do. When I was the citizeness Agatha—or when I seemed to be her—I found that men are awfully fussy about some things. This is one of them.”

Casher obeyed and stood facing the door.

A different odor filled the room—a strong wild scent, like a geranium pomade. He could hear T’ruth breathing heavily as she worked beside the sleeping man.

She called to him: “You can turn around now.”

She was putting away a tube of ointment, standing high to get it into its exact position on a tile shelf.

Casher looked quickly at the body of Madigan. It was still asleep, still breathing very lightly and very slowly.

“What on earth did you do?”

T’ruth stopped in midstep. “You’re going to get nosy.” Casher stammered mere sounds.

“You can’t help it,” she said. “People are inquisitive.”

“I suppose they are,” he said, flushing at the accusation.

“I gave him his bit of fun. He never remembers it when he wakes up, but the cardiograph sometimes shows increased activity. Nothing happened this time. That was my own idea. I read books and decided that it would be good for his body tone. Sometimes he sleeps through a whole Earth year, but usually he wakes up several times a month.”

She passed Casher, almost pulled herself clear of the floor tugging on the inside levers of the main door.

She gestured him past. He stooped and stepped through.

“Turn away again,” she said. “All I’m going to do is to spin the dials, but they’re cued to give any viewer a bad headache so he will forget the combination. Even robots. I’m the only person tuned to these doors.”

He heard the dials spinning but did not look around.

She murmured, almost under her breath, “I’m the only one. The only one.”

“The only one for what?” asked Casher.

“To love my master, to care for him, to support his planet, to guard his weather. But isn’t he beautiful? Isn’t he wise? Doesn’t his smile win your heart?”

Casher thought of the faded old wreck of a man with the yellow pajama bottoms. Tactfully, he said nothing.

T’ruth babbled on, quite cheerfully. “He is my father, my husband, my baby son, my master, my owner. Think of that, Casher, he owns me! Isn’t he lucky—to have me? And aren’t I lucky—to belong to him?”

“But what for?” asked Casher a little crossly, thinking that he was falling in and out of love with this remarkable girl himself.

“For life!” she cried, “In any form, in any way. I am made for ninety thousand years and he will sleep and wake and dream and sleep again, a large part of that.”

“What’s the use of it?” insisted Casher.

“The use,” she said, “the use? What’s the use of the little turtle egg they took and modified in its memory chains, right down to the molecular level? What’s the use of turning me into an under-girl, so that even you have to love me off and on? What’s the use of little me, meeting my master for the first time, when I had been manufactured to love him? I can tell you, man, what the use is. Love.”

“What did you say?” said Casher.

“I said the use was love. Love is the only end of things. Love on the one side, and death on the other. If you are strong enough to use a real weapon, I can give you a weapon which will put all Mizzer at your mercy. Your cruiser and your laser would just be toys against the weapon of love. You can’t fight love. You can’t fight me.”

They had proceeded down a corridor, forgotten pictures hanging on the walls, unremembered luxuries left untouched by centuries of neglect.

The bright yellow light of Henriada poured in through an open doorway on their right.

From the room came snatches of a man singing while playing a stringed instrument. Later, Casher found that this was a verse of the Henriada Song, the one which went:

Don’t put your ship in the Boom Lagoon,

Look up north for the raving wave.

Hemiada’s boiled away

But Ambiloxi’s a saving grave.

They entered the room.

A gentleman stood up to greet them.

It was the great go-pilot, John Joy Tree. His ruddy face smiled, his bright blue eyes lit up, a little condescendingly, as he greeted his small hostess, but then his glance took in Casher O’Neill.

The effect was sudden, and evil.

John Joy Tree looked away from both of them. The phrase which he had started to use stuck in his throat.

He said, in a different voice, very “away” and deeply troubled, “There is blood all over this place. There is a man of blood right here. Excuse me. I am going to be sick.”

He trotted past them and out the door which they had entered.

“You have passed a test,” said T’ruth. “Your help to my master has solved the problem of the captain and honorable John Joy Tree. He will not go near that control room if he thinks that you are there.”

“Do you have more tests for me? Still more? By now you ought to know me well enough not to need tests.”

“I am not a person,” she said, “but just a built-up copy of one. I am getting ready to give you your weapon. This is a communications room as well as a music room. Would you like something to eat or drink?”

“Just water,” he said.

“At your hand,” said T’ruth.

A rock crystal carafe had been standing on the table beside him, unnoticed. Or had she transported it into the room with one of the tricks of the Hechizera, the dreaded Agatha herself? It didn’t matter. He drank. Trouble was coming.

XII

T’ruth had swung open a polished cabinet panel. The communicator was the kind they mount in planoforming ships right beside the pilot. The rental on one of them was enough to make any planetary government reconsider its annual budget.

“That’s yours?” cried Casher.

“Why not?” said the little-girl lady. “I have four or five of them.”

“But you’re rich!”

“I’m not. My master is. I belong to my master too.”

“But things like this. . . . He can’t handle them. How does he manage?”

“You mean money and things?” The girlish part of her came out. She looked pleased, happy and mischievous. “I manage them for him. He was the richest man on Henriada when I came here. He had credits of stroon. Now he is about forty times richer.”

“He’s a Rod McBan!” exclaimed Casher.

“Not even near. Mr. McBan had a lot more money than we. But he’s rich. Where do you think all the people from Henriada went?”

“I don’t know,” said Casher.

“To four new planets. They belong to my master and he charges the new settlers a very small land rent.”

“You bought them?” Casher asked.

“For him.” T’ruth smiled. “Haven’t you heard of planet brokers?”

“But that’s a gambler’s business!” said Casher.

“I gambled,” she said, “and I won. Now keep quiet and watch me.”

She pressed a button. “Instant message.”

“Instant message,” repeated the machine. “What priority?”

“War news, double A one, subspace penalty.”

“Confirmed,” said the machine.

“The planet Mizzer. Now. War and peace information. Will fighting end soon?”

The machine clucked to itself.

Casher, knowing the prices of this kind of communication, almost felt that he could see the arterial spurt of money go out of Henriada’s budget as the machines reached across the galaxy, found Mizzer and came back with the answer.

“Skirmishing. Seventh Nile. Ends three local days.”

“Close message,” said T’ruth.

The machine went off.

T’ruth turned to him. “You’re going home soon, Casher, if you can pass a few little tests.”

He stared at her.

He blurted, “I need my weapons, my cruiser and my laser.”

“You’ll have weapons. Better ones than those. Right now I want you to go to the front door. When you have opened the door, you will not let anybody in. Close the door. Then please come back to me here, dear Casher, and if you are still alive, I will have some other things for you to do.”

Casher turned in bewilderment. It did not occur to him to contradict her. He could end up a forgetty, like the maidservant Eunice or the Administrator’s brown man, Gosigo.

Down the halls he walked. He met no one except for a few shy cleaning robots, who bowed their heads politely as he passed.

He found the front door. It stopped him. It looked like wood on the outside, but it was actually a Daimoni door, made of near-indestructible material. There was no sign of a key or dials or controls. Acting like a man in a dream, he took a chance that the door might be keyed to himself. He put his right palm firmly against it, at the left or opening edge.

The door swung in.

Meiklejohn was there. Gosigo held the Administrator upright. It must have been a rough trip. The Administrator’s face was bruised and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. His eyes focused on Casher.

“You’re alive. She caught you too?”

Quite formally Casher asked, “What do you want in this house?”

“I have come,” said the Administrator, “to see her.”

“To see whom?” insisted Casher.

The Administrator hung almost slack in Gosigo’s arms. By his own standard and in his own way, he was a very brave man indeed.

His eyes looked clear, even though his body was collapsing. “To see T’ruth, if she will see me,” said Rankin Meiklejohn.

“She cannot,” said Casher, “see you now. Gosigo!”

The forgetty turned to Casher and gave him a bow.

“You will forget me. You have not seen me.”

“I have not seen you, lord. Give my greetings to your lady. Anything else?”

“Yes. Take your master home, as safely and swiftly as you can.”

“My lord!” cried Gosigo, though this was an improper title for Casher. Casher turned around.

“My lord, tell her to extend the weather machines for just a few more kilometers and I will have him home safe in ten minutes. At top speed.”

“I can tell her,” said Casher, “but I cannot promise she will do it.”

“Of course,” said Gosigo. He picked up the Administrator and began putting him into the groundcar. Rankin Meiklejohn bawled once, like a man crying in pain. It sounded like a blurred version of the name Murray Madigan. No one heard it but Gosigo and Casher; Gosigo busy closing the groundcar, Casher pushing on the big house door.

The door clicked.

There was silence.

The opening of the door was remembered only by the warm sweet salty stink of seaweed, which had disturbed the odor pattern of the changeless, musty old house.

Casher hurried back with the message about the weather machines.

T’ruth received the message gravely. Without looking at the console, she reached out and controlled it with her extended right hand, not taking her eyes off Casher for a moment. The machine clicked its agreement. T’ruth exhaled.

“Thank you, Casher. Now the Instrumentality and the forgetty are gone.”

She stared at him, almost sadly and inquiringly. He wanted to pick her up, to crush her to his chest, to rain his kisses on her face. But he stood stock still. He did not move. This was not just the forever-loving turtle-child; this was the real mistress of Henriada. This was the Hechizera of Gonfalon, whom he had formerly thought about only in terms of a wild, melodic grand opera.

“I think you are seeing me, Casher. It is hard to see people, even when you look at them every day. I think I can see you too, Casher. It is almost time for us both to do the things which we have to do.”

“Which we have to do?” He whispered, hoping she might say something else.

“For me, my work here on Henriada. For you, your fate on your homeland of Mizzer. That’s what life is, isn’t it? Doing what you have to do in the first place. We’re lucky people if we find it out. You are ready, Casher. I am about to give you weapons which will make bombs and cruisers and lasers seem like nothing at all.”

“By the Bell, girl! Can’t you tell me what those weapons are?”

T’ruth stood in her innocently revealing sheath, the yellow light of the old music room pouring like a halo around her.

“Yes,” she said, “I can tell you now. Me.”

“You?”

Casher felt a wild surge of erotic attraction for the innocently voluptuous child. He remembered his first insane impulse to crush her with kisses, to sweep her up with hugs, to exhaust her with all the excitement which his masculinity could bring to both of them.

He stared at her.

She stood there, calm.

That sort of idea did not ring right.

He was going to get her, but he was going to get something far from fun or folly—something, indeed, which he might not even like.

When at last he spoke, it was out of the deep bewilderment of his own thoughts, “What do you mean, you’re going to give me yourself? It doesn’t sound very romantic to me, nor the tone in which you said it.”

The child stepped close to him, reaching up and patting his forehead.

“You’re not going to get me for a night’s romance, and if you did you would be sorry. I am the property of my master and of no other man. But I can do something with you which I have never done to anyone else. I can get myself imprinted on you. The technicians are already coming. You will be the turtle-child. You will be the citizeness Agatha Madigan, the Hechizera of Gonfalon herself. You will be many other people. And yourself. You will then win. Accidents may kill you, Casher, but no one will be able to kill you on purpose. Not when you’re me. Poor man! Do you know what you will be giving up?”

“What?” he croaked, at the edge of a great fright. He had seen danger before, but never before had danger loomed up from within himself.

“You will not fear death, ever again, Casher. You will have to lead your life minute by minute, second by second, and you will not have the alibi that you are going to die anyhow. You will know that’s not special.”

He nodded, understanding her words and scrabbling around his mind for a meaning.

“I’m a girl, Casher. . . .”

He looked at her and his eyes widened. She was a girl—a beautiful, wonderful girl. But she was something more. She was the mistress of Henriada. She was the first of the underpeople really and truly to surpass humanity. To think that he had wanted to grab her poor little body. The body—ah, that was sweet!—but the power within it was the kind of thing that empires and religions are made of.

“. . . and if you take the print of me, Casher, you will never lie with a woman without realizing that you know more about her than she does. You will be a seeing man among blind multitudes, a hearing person in the world of the deaf. I don’t know how much fun romantic love is going to be to you after this.”

Gloomily he said, “If I can free my home planet of Mizzer, it will be worth it. Whatever it is.”

“You’re not going to turn into a woman!” She laughed. “Nothing that easy. But you are going to get wisdom. And I will tell you the whole story of the Sign of the Fish before you leave here.”

“Not that, please,” he begged. “That’s a religion and the Instrumentality would never let me travel again.”

“I’m going to have you scrambled, Casher, so that nobody can read you for a year or two. And the Instrumentality is not going to send you back. I am. Through Space Three.”

“It’ll cost you a fine, big ship to do it.”

“My master will approve when I tell him, Casher. Now give me that kiss you have been wanting to give me. Perhaps you will remember something of it when you come out of scramble.”

She stood there. He did nothing.

“Kiss me!” she commanded.

He put his arm around her. She felt like a big little girl. She lifted her face. She thrust her lips up toward his. She stood on tiptoe.

He kissed her the way a man might kiss a picture or a religious object. The heat and fierceness had gone out of his hopes. He had not kissed a girl, but power—tremendous power and wisdom put into a single slight form.

“Is that the way your master kisses you?”

She gave him a quick smile. “How clever of you! Yes, sometimes. Come along now. We have to shoot some children before the technicians are ready. It will give you a good last chance of seeing what you can do, when you have become what I am. Come along. The guns are in the hall.”

XIII

They went down an enormous light-oak staircase to a floor which Casher had never seen before. It must have been the entertainment and hospitality center of Beauregard long ago, when the Mister and Owner Murray Madigan was himself young.

The robots did a good job of keeping away the dust and the Mildew. Casher saw inconspicuous little air-dryers placed at strategic places, so that the rich tooled leather on the walls would not spoil, so that the velvet bar stools would not become slimy with mold, so that the pool tables would not warp nor the golf clubs go out of shape with age and damp. By the Bell, he thought, that man Madigan could have entertained a thousand people at one time in a place this size.

The gun cabinet, now, that was functional. The glass shone. The velvet of oil showed on the steel and walnut of the guns. They were old Earth models, very rare and very special. For actual fighting, people used the cheap artillery of the present time or wirepoints for close work. Only the richest and rarest of connoisseurs had the old Earth weapons or could use them.

T’ruth touched the guard robot and waked him. The robot saluted, looked at her face and without further inquiry opened the cabinet.

“Do you know guns?” said T’ruth to Casher.

“Wirepoints,” he said. “Never touched a gun in my life.”

“Do you mind using a learning helmet, then? I could teach you hypnotically with the special rules of the Hechizera, but they might give you a headache or upset you emotionally. The helmet is neuroelectric and it has filters.”

Casher nodded and saw his reflection nodding in the polished glass doors of the gun cabinet. He was surprised to see how helpless and lugubrious he looked.

But it was true. Never before in his life had he felt that a situation swept over him, washed him along like a great wave, left him with no choice and no responsibility. Things were her choice now, not his, and yet he felt that her power was benign, self-limited, restricted by factors at which he could no more than guess. He had come for one weapon—the cruiser which he had hoped to get from the Administrator Rankin Meiklejohn. She was offering him something else—psychological weapons in which he had neither experience nor confidence.

She watched him attentively for a long moment and then turned to the gun-watching robot.

“You’re little Harry Hadrian, aren’t you? The gun-watcher.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the silver robot brightly, “and I’m owl brained too. That makes me very bright.”

“Watch this,” she said, extending her arms the width of the gun cabinet and then dropping them after a queer flutter of her hands. “Do you know what that means?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the little robot quickly, the emotion showing in his toneless voice by the speed with which he spoke, not by the intonation. “It-means-you-have-taken-over-and-I-am-off-duty! Can-I-go-sit-in-the-garden-and-look-at-the-live-things?”

“Not quite yet, little Harry Hadrian. There are some windpeople out there now and they might hurt you. I have another errand for you first. Do you remember where the teaching helmets are?”

“Silver hats on the third floor in an open closet with a wire running to each hat. Yes.”

“Bring one of those as fast as you can. Pull it loose very carefully from its electrical connection.”

The little robot disappeared in a sudden fast, gentle clatter up the stairs.

T’ruth turned back to Casher. “I have decided what to do with you. I am helping you. You don’t have to look so gloomy about it.”

“I’m not gloomy. The Administrator sent me here on a crazy errand, killing an unknown underperson. I find out that the person is really a little girl. Then I find out that she is not an underperson, but a frightening old dead woman, still walking around alive. My life gets turned upside down. All my plans are set aside. You propose to send me hope to fulfill my life’s work on Mizzer. I’ve struggled for this, so many years! Now you’re making it all come through, even though you are going to cook me through Space Three to do it, and throw in a lot of illegal religion and hypnotic tricks that I’m not sure I can handle. You tell me now to come along—to shoot children with guns. I’ve never done anything like that in my life and yet I find myself obeying you. I’m tired out, girl, tired out. If you have put me in your power, I don’t even know it. I don’t even want to know it.”

“Here you are, Casher, on the ruined wet world of Henriada. In less than a week you will be recovering among the military casualties of Colonel Wedder’s army. You will be under the clear sky of Mizzer, and the Seventh Nile will be near you, and you will be ready at long last to do what you have to do. You will have bits and pieces of memories of me—not enough to make you find your way back here or to tell people all the secrets of Beauregard, but enough for you to remember that you have been loved. You may even”—and she smiled very gently, with a tender wry humor on her face—“marry some Miner girl because her body or her face or her manner reminds you of me.”

“In a week?” he gasped.

“Less than that.”

“Who are you,” he cried out, “that you, an underperson, should run real people and should manipulate their lives?”

“I didn’t look for power, Casher. Power doesn’t usually work if you look for it. I have eighty-nine thousand years to live, Casher, and as long as my master lives I shall love him and take care of him. Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he wise? Isn’t he the most perfect master you ever saw?”

Casher thought of the old ruined-looking body with the plastic knobs set into it; he thought of the faded pajama bottoms; he said nothing.

“You don’t have to agree,” said T’ruth. “I know I have a special way of looking at him. But they took my turtle brain and raised the IQ to above normal human level. They took me when I was a happy little girl, enchanted by the voice and the glance and the touch of my master—they took me to where this real woman lay dying and they put me into a machine and they put her into one too. When they were through, they picked me up. I had on a pink dress with pastel blue socks and pink shoes. They carried me out into the corridor, on a rug. They had finished with me. They knew that I wouldn’t die. I was healthy. Can’t you see it, Casher? I cried myself to sleep, nine hundred years ago.”

Casher could not really answer. He nodded sympathetically.

“I was a girl, Casher. Maybe I was a turtle once, but I don’t remember that, any more than you remember your mother’s womb or your laboratory bottle. In that one hour I was never to be a girl again. I did not need to go to school. I had her education, and it was a good one. She spoke twenty or more languages. She was a psychologist and a hypnotist and a strategist. She was also the tyrannical mistress of this house. I cried because my childhood was finished, because I knew what I would have to do. I cried because I knew that I could do it. I loved my master so, but I was no longer to be the pretty little servant who brought him his tablets or his sweetmeats or his beer. Now I saw the truth—as she died I had myself become Henriada. The planet was mine to care for, to manage—to protect my master. If I come along and I protect and help you, is that so much for a woman who will just be growing up when your grandchildren will all be dead of old age?”

“No, no,” stammered Casher O’Neill. “But your own life? A family, perhaps?”

Anger lashed across her pretty face. Her features were the features of the delicious girl-child T’ruth, but her expression was that of the citizeness Agatha Madigan, perhaps, a worldly woman reborn to the endless worldliness of her own wisdom.

“Should I order a husband from the turtle bank, perhaps? Should I hire out a piece of my master’s estate, to be sold to somebody because I’m an underperson, or perhaps put to work somewhere in an industrial ship? I’m me. I may be an animal, but I have more civilization in me than all the wind people on this planet. Poor things! What kind of people are they, if they are only happy when they catch a big mutated duck and tear it to pieces, eating it raw? I’m not going to lose, Casher. I’m going to win. My master will live longer than any person has ever lived before. He gave me that mission when he was strong and wise and well in the prime of his life. I’m going to do what I was made for, Casher, and you’re going to go back to Mizzer and make it free, whether you like it or not!”

They both heard a happy scurrying on the staircase.

The small silver robot, little Harry Hadrian, burst upon them; he carried a teaching helmet.

T’ruth said, “Resume your post. You are a good boy, little Harry, and you can have time to sit in the garden later on, when it is safe.”

“Can I sit in a tree?” the little robot asked.

“Yes, if it is safe.”

Little Harry Hadrian resumed his post by the gun cabinet. He kept the key in his hand. It was a very strange key, sharp at the end and as long as an awl. Casher supposed that it must be one of the straight magnetic keys, cued to its lock by a series of magnetized patterns.

“Sit on the floor for a minute,” said T’ruth to Casher; “you’re too tall for me.” She slipped the helmet on his head, adjusted the levers on each side so that the helmet sat tight and true upon his skull.

With a touching gesture of intimacy, for which she gave him a sympathetic apologetic little smile, she moistened the two small electrodes with her own spit, touching her finger to her tongue and then to the electrode. These went to his temples.

She adjusted the verniered dials on the helmet itself, lifted the rear wire and applied it to her forehead.

Casher heard the click of a switch.

“That did it,” he heard T’ruth’s voice saying, very far away.

He was too busy looking into the gun cabinet. He knew them all and loved some of them. He knew the feel of their stocks on his shoulder, the glimpse of their barrels in front of his eyes, the dance of the target on their various sights, the welcome heavy weight of the gun on his supporting arm, the rewarding thrust of the stock against his shoulder when he fired. He knew all this, and did not know how he knew it.

“The Hechizera, Agatha herself, was a very accomplished sportswoman,” murmured T’ruth to him. “I thought her knowledge would take a second printing when I passed it along to you. Let’s take these.”

She gestured to little Harry Hadrian, who unlocked the cabinet and took out two enormous guns, which looked like the long muskets mankind had had on earth even before the age of space began.

“If you’re going to shoot children,” said Casher with his newfound expertness, “these won’t do. “They’ll tear the bodies completely to pieces.”

T’ruth reached into the little bag which hung from her belt. She took out three shotgun shells. “I have three more,” she said. “Six children is all we need.”

Casher looked at the slug projecting slightly from the shotgun casing. It did not look like any shell he had ever seen before. The workmanship was unbelievably fine and precise.

“What are they? I never saw these before.”

“Proximity stunners,” she said. “Shoot ten centimeters above the head of any living thing and the stunner knocks it out.”

“You want the children alive?”

“Alive, of course. And unconscious. They are a part of your final test.”

Two hours later, after an exciting hike to the edge of the weather controls, they had the six children stretched out on the floor of the great hall. Four were little boys, two girls; they were fine-boned, soft-haired people, very thin, but they did not look too far from Earth normal.

T’ruth called up a doctor underman from among her servants. There must have been a crowd of fifty or sixty undermen and robots standing around. Far up the staircase, John Joy Tree stood hidden, half in shadow. Casher suspected that he was as inquisitive as the others but afraid of himself, Casher, “the man of blood.”

T’ruth spoke quietly but firmly to the doctor. “Can you give them a strong euphoric before you waken them? We don’t want to have to pluck them out of all the curtains in the house, if they go wild when they wake up.”

“Nothing simpler,” said the doctor underman. He seemed to be of dog origin, but Casher could not tell.

He took a glass tube and touched it to the nape of each little neck. The necks were all streaked with dirt. These children had never been washed in their lives, except by the rain.

“Wake them,” said T’ruth.

The doctor stepped back to a rolling table. It gleamed with equipment. He must have preset his devices, because all he did was to press a button and the children stirred into life.

The first reaction was wildness. They got ready to bolt. The biggest of the boys, who by earth standards would have been about ten, got three steps before he stopped and began laughing.

T’ruth spoke the Old Common Tongue to them, very slowly and with long spaces between the words:

“Wind—children—do—you—know—where—you—are?”

The biggest girl twittered back to her so fast that Casher could not understand it.

T’ruth turned to Casher and said, “The girl said that she is in the Dead Place, where the air never moves and where the Old Dead Ones move around on their own business. She means us.” To the wind children she spoke again.

“What—would—you—like—-most?”

The biggest girl went from child to child. They nodded agreement vigorously. They formed a circle and began a little chant. By the second repetition around, Casher could make it out.

Shig—shag—shuggery,

shuck shuck shuck!

What all of us need is

an all-around duck.

Shig—shag—shuggery,

shuck shuck shuck!

At the fourth or fifth repetition they all stopped and looked at T’ruth, who was so plainly the mistress of the house.

She in turn spoke to Casher O’Neill. “They think that they want a tribal feast of raw duck. What they are going to get is inoculations against the worst diseases of this planet, several duck meals and their freedom again. But they need something else beyond all measure. You know what that is, Casher, if you can only find it.”

The whole crowd turned its eyes on Casher, the human eyes of the people and underpeople, the milky lenses of the robots.

Casher stood aghast.

“Is this a test?” he asked softly.

“You could call it that,” said T’ruth, looking away from him.

Casher thought furiously and rapidly. It wouldn’t do any good to make them into forgetties. The household had enough of them. T’ruth had announced a plan to let them loose again. The Mister and Owner Murray Madigan must have told her, sometime or other, to “do something” about the wind people. She was trying to do it. The whole crowd watched him. What might T’ruth expect?

The answer came to him in a flash.

If she were asking him, it must be something to do with himself, something which he—uniquely among these people, underpeople and robots—had brought to the storm-sieged mansion of Beauregard.

Suddenly he saw it.

“Use me, my lady Ruth,” said he, deliberately giving her the wrong title, “to print on them nothing from my intellectual knowledge, but everything from my emotional makeup. It wouldn’t do them any good to know about Mizzer, where the Twelve Niles work their way down across the Intervening Sands. Nor about Pontoppidan, the Gem Planet. Nor about Olympia, where the blind brokers promenade under numbered clouds. Knowing things would not help these children. But wanting—“

Wanting things was different.

He was unique. He had wanted to return to Mizzer. He had wanted return beyond all dreams of blood and revenge. He had wanted things fiercely, wildly, so that even if he could not get them, he zigzagged the galaxy in search of them.

T’ruth was speaking to him again, urgently and softly, but not in so low a voice that the others in the room could not hear.

“And what, Casher O’Neill, should I give them from you?”

“My emotional structure. My determination. My desire. Nothing else. Give them that and throw them back into the winds. Perhaps if they want something fiercely enough, they will grow up to find out what it is.”

There was a soft murmur of approval around the room.

T’ruth hesitated a moment and then nodded. “You answered, Casher. You answered quickly and perceptively. Bring seven helmets, Eunice. Stay here, doctor.”

Eunice, the forgetty, left, taking two robots with her.

“A chair,” said T’ruth to no one in particular. “For him.”

A large, powerful underman pushed his way through the crowd and dragged a chair to the end of the room.

T’ruth gestured that Casher should sit in it.

She stood in front of him. Strange, thought Casher, that she should be a great lady and still a little girl. How would he ever find a girl like her? He was not even afraid of the mystery of the Fish, or the image of the man on two pieces of wood. He no longer dreaded Space Three, where so many travelers had gone in and so few had come out. He felt safe, comforted by her wisdom and authority. He felt that he would never see the likes of this again—a child running a planet and doing it well; a half-dead man surviving through the endless devotion of his maidservant; a fierce woman hypnotist living on with all the anxieties and angers of humanity gone, but with the skill and obstinacy of turtle genes to sustain her in her reimprinted form.

“I can guess what you are thinking,” said T’ruth, “but we have already said the things that we had to say. I’ve peeped your mind a dozen times and I know that you want to go back to Mizzer so bad, that Space Three will spit you out right at the ruined fort where the big turn of the Seventh Nile begins. In my own way I love you, Casher, but I could not keep you here without turning you into a forgetty and making you a servant to my master. You know what always comes first with me, and always will.”

“Madigan.”

“Madigan,” she answered, and with her voice the name itself was a prayer.

Eunice came back with the helmets.

“When we are through with these, Casher, I’ll have them take you to the conditioning room. Good-bye, my might-have-been!”

In front of everyone, she kissed him full on the lips.

He sat in the chair, full of patience and contentment. Even as his vision blacked out, he could see the thin light sheath of a smock on the girlish figure, he could remember the tender laughter lurking in her smile.

In the last instant of his consciousness, he saw that another figure had joined the crowd—the tall old man with the worn bathrobe, the faded blue eyes, the thin yellow hair. Murray Madigan had risen from his private life-in-death and had come to see the last of Casher O’Neill. He did not look weak, nor foolish. He looked like a great man, wise and strange in ways beyond Casher’s understanding.

There was the touch of T’ruth’s little hand on his arm and everything became a velvety cluttered dark quiet inside his own mind.

XIV

When he awoke, he lay naked and sunburned under the hot sky of Mizzer. Two soldiers with medical patches were rolling him onto a canvas litter.

“Mizzer!” he cried to himself. His throat was too dry to make a sound. “I’m home.”

Suddenly the memories came to him and he scrabbled and snatched at them, seeing them dissolve within his mind before he could get paper to write them down.

Memory: there was the front hall, himself getting ready to sleep in the chair, with the old giant of Murray Madigan at the edge of the crowd and the tender light touch of T’ruth—his girl, his girl, now uncountable light years away—putting her hand on his arm.

Memory: there was another room, with stained-glass pictures and incense, and the weepworthy scenes of a great life shown in frescoes around the wall. There were the two pieces of wood and the man in pain nailed to them. But Casher knew that scattered and coded through his mind there was the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the Sign of the Fish. He knew he could never fear fear again.

Memory: there was a gaming table in a bright room, with the wealth of a thousand worlds being raked toward him. He was a woman, strong, big-busted, bejeweled and proud. He was Agatha Madigan, winning at the games. (That must have come, he thought, when they printed me with T’ruth.) And in that mind of the Hechizera, which was now his own mind too, there was clear sure knowledge of how he could win men and women, officers and soldiers, even underpeople and robots, to his cause without a drop of blood or a word of anger.

The men, lifting him on the litter, made red waves of heat and pain roll over him.

He heard one of them say, “Bad case of burn. Wonder how he lost his clothes.”

The words were matter-of-fact; the comment was nothing special; but the cadence, that special cadence, was the true speech of Mizzer.

As they carried him away, he remembered the face of Rankin Meiklejohn, enormous eyes staring with inward despair over the brim of a big glass. That was the Administrator. On Henriada. That was the man who sent me past Ambiloxi to Beauregard at two seventy-five in the morning. The litter jolted a little.

He thought of the wet marshes of Henriada and knew that soon he would never remember them again. The worms of the tornadoes creeping up to the edge of the estate. The mad wise face of John Joy Tree.

Space three? Space three? Already, even now, he could not remember how they had put him into Space three.

And Space three itself—

All the nightmares which mankind has ever had pushed into Casher’s mind. He twisted once in agony, just as the litter reached a medical military cart. He saw a girl’s face—what was her name?—and then he slept.

XV

Fourteen Mizzer days later, the first test came.

A doctor colonel and an intelligence colonel, both in the workaday uniform of Colonel Wedder’s Special Forces, stood by his bed.

“Your name is Casher O’Neill and we do not know how your body fell among the skirmishers,” the doctor was saying, roughly and emphatically. Casher O’Neill turned his head on the pillow and looked at the man.

“Say something more!” he whispered to the doctor.

The doctor said, “You are a political intruder and we do not know how you got mixed up among our troops. We do not even know how you got back among the people of this planet. We found you on the Seventh Nile.”

The intelligence colonel standing beside him nodded agreement.

“Do you think the same thing, Colonel?” whispered Casher O’Neill to the intelligence colonel.

“I ask questions. I don’t answer them,” said the man gruffly.

Casher felt himself reaching for their minds with a kind of fingertip which he did not know he had. It was hard to put into ordinary words, but it felt as though someone had said to him, Casher: “That one is vulnerable at the left forefront area of his consciousness, but the other one is well armored and must be reached through the midbrain.” Casher was not afraid of revealing anything by his expression. He was too badly burned and in too much pain to show nuances of meaning on his face. (Somewhere he had heard of the wild story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon! Somewhere endless storms boiled across ruined marshes under a cloudy yellow sky! But where, when, what was that? . . . He could not take time off for memory. He had to fight for his life.)

“Peace be with you,” he whispered to both of them.

“Peace be with you,” they responded in unison, with some surprise.

“Lean over me, please,” said Casher, “so that I do not have to shout.”

They stood stock straight.

Somewhere in the resources of his own memory and intelligence, Casher found the right note of pleading which could ride his voice like a carrier wave and make them do as he wished.

“This is Mizzer,” he whispered.

“Of course this is Mizzer,” snapped the intelligence colonel, “and you are Casher O’Neill. What are you doing here?”

“Lean over, gentlemen,” he said softly, lowering his voice so that they could barely hear him.

This time they did lean over.

His burned hands reached for their hands. The officers noticed it, but since he was sick and unarmed, they let him touch them.

Suddenly he felt their minds glowing in his as brightly as if he had swallowed their gleaming, thinking brains at a single gulp.

He spoke no longer.

He thought at them—torrential, irresistible thought.

I am not Casher O’Neill. You will find his body in a room four doors down. I am the civilian Bindaoud.

The two colonels stared, breathing heavily.

Neither said a word.

Casher went on: Our fingerprints and records have gotten mixed. Give me the fingerprints and papers of the dead Casher O’Neill. Bury him then, quickly, but with honor. Once he loved your leader and there is no point in stirring up wild rumors about returns from out of space. I am Bindaoud. You will find my records in your front office. I am not a soldier. I am a civilian technician doing studies on the salt in blood chemistry under field conditions. You have heard me, gentlemen. You hear me now. You will hear me always. But you will not remember this, gentlemen, when you awaken. I am sick. You can give me water and a sedative.

They still stood, enraptured by the touch of his tight burned hands.

Casher O’Neill said, “Awaken.”

Casher O’Neill let go their hands.

The medical colonel blinked and said amiably, “You’ll be better, Mister and Doctor Bindaoud. I’ll have the orderly bring you water and a sedative.”

To the other officer he said, “I have an interesting corpse four doors down. I think you had better see it.”

Casher O’Neill tried to think of the recent past, but the blue light of Mizzer was all around him, the sand smell, the sound of horses galloping. For a moment, he thought of a big child’s blue dress and he did not know why he almost wept.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT

THE LADY MARGARET

MARY

DRIFTGLASS

A HAPPY DAY IN 2381

THIS MOMENT OF THE STORM

THE HAUNTED FUTURE

ON THE STORM PLANET