1

Through the rear viewport, I could see bits of Wanderer, glowing bright as a sun, flaking off and trailing behind us, almost lost in a flare of burning gases—we were making a tunnel of fire through this planet's atmosphere, feeding it with the ship's substance.

Dark, using all his strength, was wrenching and punching the levers and buttons that usually needed only a touch to make Wanderer respond smoothly, whether in deep space, paraspace, or any known or predictable atmosphere. Any atmosphere, that is, which it entered with due respect for the laws of physics. Some obscure malfunction had brought us in at the wrong angle and velocity, and the oxygen-rich stuff outside was eating the ship as we bored through it at meteor speed.

"Controls aren't responding!" Dark bellowed, "Fused—maybe burned off!" Those flaming bits had to be something, why not the external control surfaces and jet orifices? Very likely the hull itself would last long enough for us to impact with the surface and produce a really spectacular conversion of mass—ours and the ship's—to energy. But Dark either had not given up hope or, more probably, was doing his job as long as he could. You don't get to be pilot of an Explorer ship unless you're the kind that sticks to things.

The same is true of Recorders. With probably something under three hundred heartbeats left to me (taking into account an understandably accelerated pulse rate) before our violent encounter with this planet we had meant to investigate and catalogue, I was still observing, just as though I would be making a draft report and then a final version later on. At least I had something to do. Ari was simply sitting, looking peaceful or maybe switched off. Imminent vaporization or roasting is significant to a lot of people, but it provides very little material to interest a Metahistorian.

Valmis, in contrast, was noticeably jumpy, fingering a small black box he was holding on his lap. Now, if ever, would have been the time for him to Integrate with the Infinite, putting himself into a context in which the destruction of Wanderer and its crew was only an insignificant rearrangement of fluxes. Valmis's function in Exploration is to Perceive the whole mental and physical Pattern of a world, on all possible levels, from the particular to the gross structural. I understand that approach in theory, and it has been known to happen that an Integrator's work was the most fruitful result of a particular Exploration, but it is too arcane and tenuous for me to be comfortable with. I imagine my own specialty is too much involved with the finite for me to be much good at the Infinite.

"We're approaching the surface!" Dark called. "Any time now!" He seemed almost cheerful at being able to predict reasonably precisely the instant of our deaths.

Valmis scrabbled the box open and pulled out a peculiar luminous object. It was composed of some very odd shapes—I could make out a helix, but other pieces of it seemed to be all wrong in a way I couldn't quite grasp. Some sort of Integrator's amulet or meditative aid? A bit late for that, surely.

He took a deep breath and jabbed at it with one forefinger. I was curious to see what good it might do him, but just then there was a jolt that shook Wanderer, a kind of twitching that felt as if I had been turned inside out and then back again, and I knew we had impacted.

Then I realized that being able to have that thought meant it wasn't so—Wanderer was still up and moving.

"Controls responding now!" Dark yelled. "We're changing altitude and losing velocity!"

I looked out the viewport again. The glow behind us was dying, and there were no ominous flakes of Wanderer's outside buffeting in our wake. It seemed we were not to blow a hole in the planet's crust—good luck for it, and us.

I checked the lower viewport. We were higher above the surface now, still moving desperately rapidly, but not enough to burn us. I could see nothing but vegetation, apparently large trees, flashing by beneath us.

"Do you plan to try to land here?" I asked Dark. "Looks very inhospitable."

"We land where Wanderer chooses," he said. "I've got some control back, not all—not enough to pick a spot. And no connection to the power plant or the antigravity—might have a last flick or so of thrust, but that's all. We're a ballistic problem now—moving on a trajectory and slowing. We'll hit the surface just about where the trajectory intersects it, with maybe a little adjustment at the last minute."

"How did you get control back at all?"

"No idea—I'd thought all the externals had ablated or fused, but there must have been something left, and maybe a servo cut in again for one last twitch. Anyhow, it's saved us."

I looked at the unending stretch of trees below us.

"Saved us from being vaporized in an instant so that we can experience the full sensation of being crushed inside Wanderer when it hits?"

Dark shrugged. "If the hull hasn't suffered too much, it might stand up to that. But there's water ahead—ocean-sized, that first orbital pass showed us. That's where we'll come down."

I turned back to the others. Ari still looked cool, only mildly interested in what was going on. Valmis, strangely, seemed more agitated than before, twisting his hands in front of him. I could see that the black box was empty, but did not see the strange object he had taken from it. His face looked haunted.

I sat next to him. "Well, it looks as though you may get to do some Integrating on this planet, after all," I said. "I wouldn't have thought it a while ago, but we do seem to have survived."

He looked at me wildly. "Did we? Did we, indeed? Yes and no, Recorder, yes and no. Record that, record that . . ."

"Tighten up, man," I said sharply. "You're saying everything twice."

He smiled in a way I didn't like at all, and said, "I didn't notice. But perhaps I have to."

I thought of asking what he meant, but decided not to. It was clear that he was in no state to make sense. Integrators are expected to be almost preternaturally stable and at the same time ultimately sensitive; they are bound to get off balance once in a while, and just barely avoiding being atomized is as likely as anything to do it.

There was nothing but gray water below us now. I went forward to Dark. "Are we any better off coming down out here than on land? There isn't much point in floating around until we sink."

He shook his head. "There's another land mass at the other side of this—I remember it from the orbital survey. Some evidence of population. I'll save up what power we have left and put us down as soon as we're in sight of it. That way we have some chance of help from the natives or of working out a way to get to shore ourselves."

True—the prospect of being killed by this planet had for the moment made me forget what we had already learned about it: continental distribution, gravity, atmosphere and so on. I had had the information neatly filed in my mind right up to the point when we entered the atmosphere for descent and the deadly buffeting began. Lights on the night side, indications of industry—hydrocarbons in the atmospheric spectra—no sign of atomics or space-flight capability: probably somewhere on what the Explorers call Level Four of cultural development.

The natives ought to be able to handle the problem of getting us safely on land, provided they noticed us. But considering the shape Wanderer was in, it looked as though that was about as much help as we were going to get. A Level Four technology tends to be purely mechanical / chemical, and the ship, after its burning passage through the atmosphere, was certainly going to need some Level Seven refitting—involving advanced metallurgy and electronics, refined fissionables.

I looked again at the ocean slipping by beneath us. It was beginning to seem likely that this planet would be our permanent home, so I might as well start becoming familiar with it. But there is nothing particularly striking about one stretch of water seen from above as against another.

Dark had been thinking along the same lines. "From what we saw, I doubt we'll find a shipyard that can handle Wanderer. But they do have industry of a sort, apparently. Just possible that they're far enough on so that we can give them the techniques and in a while they can develop far enough to let us get fixed up and out of here."

I was shaken. First our Integrator seemed to have fallen apart; now the Captain was proposing to violate one of the strictest tenets of the Explorers. "We can't possibly interfere with the planetary culture that much—it's the very first—"

"Not much point in Exploring," Dark said firmly, "if you don't get back to make your report. If we don't succeed in accelerating the locals so we can get away from here, the rules won't matter to us; if we do, we can handle the explanations—or take the penalties, if it comes to that—afterwards."

Valmis roused himself from his glassy-eyed lethargy and joined in. "Don't worry about that," he said bitterly. I waited for him to repeat it, but he seemed to have got past that habit. "We've already interfered with this world—and everything else. What have we done?"

"What's that mean?" Dark asked. "All I've been trying to do is keep this hulk from blowing a hole in the planet—now that would have been interference, if you like."

"Yes," Valmis said. "We were about to impact, weren't we? Just about to—there was no way out of it, right?"

"Well, we didn't." I gestured at the still-watery surface beneath us.

"We did, though," Valmis said.

"Are you maintaining that this is a sort of afterlife?" Dark said scornfully. "Seems pretty real to me."

"Not 'after'—other," Valmis said. We all three looked at him, Ari having evidently decided to switch on now that there was something to be argued about—though what it was I could not make out.

Valmis's explanation didn't help much. First there was something about the nature of Infinity, the idea being that it applies to possibilities as well as actualities—in an infinite universe, everything that can happen will happen. Otherwise it wouldn't be Infinity. But since every time something happens, something else doesn't—or many things don't—happen, Infinity is contradicted. Therefore it is necessary to assume that there are other parallel levels, planes, or what you will, of existence, in which all the things that don't happen in "reality" do take place. Whether these other levels are actual or only potential was still a matter of philosophical debate among Valmis and his fellow Integrators, who seemed to be the only people much occupied with this notion.

In any case, where there is a theory, instrumentation usually follows; and an Integrator with a fair grounding in paraphysics had come up with what he called a Probability Displacer, a device existing partly in "reality" and partly in some variant of paraspace that impinged on one of these alternate levels. Activated at a moment of high probability of an event's occurrence, it would displace the user to an alternate plane in which the highly probable event did not happen—theoretically the same in every respect as "reality" except for that one event.

This was obviously an effective shield against disaster—and Valmis had been intellectually curious enough about the Displacer to sneak it aboard and key it to Wanderer.

"Are you telling me," Dark said, "that it was your gadget that kept us from smashing up back there?" He looked as angry as you might expect a spaceship Captain who believes that his skill and nerve have prevented destruction would be at being told that it was all because of somebody's lucky charm.

"Yes and no," Valmis said, going back to his oracular manner. "It did and it didn't."

I could see that Dark was exasperated—so was I—over this yes-and-no business, but it seemed to interest Ari. "Fascinating," he said. "You mean that in the 'real' universe, Wanderer and we ourselves are now a dispersing cloud of random atoms, and that therefore we are in a different continuum in spite of having, in a sense, been destroyed?"

"Just so," Valmis answered, visibly relieved to have an understanding listener.

"But then," Ari went on, enjoying it, "there must have been a Wanderer, complete with Dark, Valmis, Ari and Raf, already in this continuum. Have we displaced them?"

Valmis tried to work it out that we were "them" as well as the luckless ones on the destroyed Wanderer, and he and Ari went at the logic of the situation in a fairly complex argument.

"It gets them after a while," Dark said quietly to me. "All that universal awareness. Valmis had set himself for being blown up, and finding he hasn't been has loosened his wits. We had some luck with the controls cutting back in, and we'll need some more to get down in one piece, but that's it."

I had to agree. This business of alternate planes was something well outside what a conscientious Recorder could deal with, and I suppose that, like most specialists, I rather tend not to believe in much outside my specialty. Meaningful reality is what I can observe: that's what I'm on an Explorer ship to do. Yet that odd twitch just as Valmis manipulated his gadget—I had observed that, but had put it down to the physical effect of the jolt when the control surfaces started to work again. . . .

"Valmis, where is this Displacer now?" I asked.

He showed me the empty black box beside him. "It vanished when we . . . changed," he said. "It existed in the actual reality and in the potential one at the same time—and when this potential reality became the actual one for us, the Displacer had to cease to exist, because the dynamic tension between the actual and the potential had vanished, so—"

I waved a hand impatiently. Left alone, he could go on forever about it. Just because a man is professionally involved with Infinity doesn't mean that he should talk at infinite length. "Well, it doesn't matter. If, as you say, this universe is like ours in every respect except that we're alive instead of dead, the thing to do is cope, with it, whatever it is."

Valmis looked at me intently. "Raf—you're unmoved by the fact that we have wrenched the fabric of the universe, in a sense created a new one?"

"It was you that did that," Dark said. "If it was done at all," he added in a lower tone.

Ari spoke up. "As Raf said, the thing we have to think about is what we're going to do about being where or what we are."

"What I was saying when we got into all this talk," Dark said, "was that we've got to get the natives here, if we can, smartened up enough to do the repairs Wanderer is going to need. And never mind Rule Whatever-it-is about interfering with alien cultures."

I could understand a Captain having that attitude—his job is to get his ship to where it's going and back, and any rule that interferes with that can expect to be disregarded. But Recorders have the noninterference rule drummed into them from the beginning of their training—besides, if they were constitutional interferers, they wouldn't want to be Recorders in the first place. Integrators, though for different reasons, are just as strong on that rule; and I appealed to Valmis for backing.

He said, "Raf, I have already interfered with this world—with the universe—to an ultimate degree. I hadn't worked it out before; in panic, I used the Displacer, but this plane did not exist before then. I called it into being! So you will see that I am not very much concerned about any further interference with it or any part of it!"

There was no use arguing with Valmis—he was set on his notion that he had done something cosmic with his weird device, and that was it. I turned to Ari, "Surely you can see—"

"I must agree with Valmis and Dark," he said. "Whether or not Valmis's contention is correct, the clear truth is that we are in a position where we must choose between interfering with the natives of an obscure—and perhaps in a sense unreal—planet, on the one hand, and settling among them, on the other—and if I must believe in displaced probabilities and so on in order to be at ease about that interference, then that's what I'll believe."

I knew quite well what, aside from self-preservation, was in his mind. Metahistorians, studying the flow of history on a myriad of planets, with as close an approximation to the scientific method as possible, lack one thing: the experiment. They are good at making what has happened fit in with Metahistorical theory and at explaining what's going to happen in a way that can always be made to seem accurate later on, but they are barred from saying, "If you wish this effect under these conditions, then that action will produce it," and carrying the idea out. To do such a thing to prove a scientific (or quasi-scientific) point would be appallingly callous and would also, of course, be a direct violation of the Explorers' noninterference rule. But Ari now had a pressing motive to justify what he might do, and Valmis's bizarre talk eased his conscience enough to allow this.

"And I expect you intend to work out the best ways to interfere?" I said.

"I will certainly make available, when I have acquired it, my understanding of the trends and crisis points on this planet," Ari replied suavely. "It should give you some interesting material to Record."

"Trends or not," Dark said, "we'll have to get these fellows turned into competent metallurgists and technicians—and I have some plans for how to do that. Strap in, all of you—there's land ahead! If there's anything left in the control jets, I'll point her down and try to slow her so we'll be able to take the landing."

I could see a shoreline, backed by mountains, catching the light of the planet's sun, which was behind us. As we descended, I could see Wanderer's shadow racing ahead of us—first smooth, then more and more distorted by the waves, now clearly recognizable as we neared the surface. I also got a flash of what appeared to be vessels—far off, but obviously able to see us, if we could see them. Whatever our encounter with them was to be—rescue or attack—it would be happening soon.

Now we were racing in, the shore and vessels lost to sight, only the sky above and the sea, nearly surrounding us. Wanderer shuddered and white foam splashed past the viewports, then clear air again for an instant—we must have hit the crest of a wave—then a slam that flung us against our retaining straps, a rolling motion that left us leaning far to right, then to left, before we settled—if that is the word—into a helical swaying that I found remarkably unnerving.

"We're down," Dark said unnecessarily. "Gather what gear you want to have with you—then there's nothing to do but wait."

2

Our spectral data on the planet had shown the atmosphere to be breathable, but it was all the same a relief when Dark cracked the top hatch and we sniffed the air that flooded in—tangy, a little high in oxygen, but quite compatible to our systems and pleasant after Wanderer's sterile, controlled atmosphere. We wouldn't have to worry about filters. Some planets which are technically hospitable to human life have really filthy air—it will keep you going, but you get into the habit of breathing shallowly and find it hard to respect the locals, who seem happy with the stuff.

An atmosphere of this sort strongly implied drinkable water. As for food, we would have to trust to luck after our store of concentrates ran out, though Explorer experience shows that a place where humans can breathe usually provides something they can eat. In any case, on joining the Service, we had all been surgically modified with a variety of implants so as to amplify the normal range of what we could safely and profitably eat—even wood in an emergency. But all of us made sure to load our coveralls with as many packets of concentrate as we could.

For me the most vital item of baggage was the Communicator, which after a short period of scanning any alien speech pattern, whether oral, gestural, or a combination, can give a skilled Recorder a reasonably good command of the language and refine it to perfection in a little longer. My own contribution to the Communicator is one of which I am particularly proud: the mode controls. When a Recorder is sure of the general sense of a sequence of talk—that fear, inquiry, anger or whatever is being conveyed—he presses the proper mode stud, and the Communicator's internal computer, by restricting itself to expressions appropriate to that sense, is enabled to shorten the time necessary to arrive at an accurate and relevant vocabulary. All this assumes that you can find a native who isn't too frightened to sit down and talk for a while; nontechnological beings—Level Three and below—often get the impression that the Communicator is absorbing some of their vital essence, so the first topics you get a good grasp of are apprehension and distaste rather than anything useful.

Each Explorer has his stresses, of course, but I have always felt that the Recorder, though considered the least important crew member in Survey work, has to endure more than most, in effect having to turn himself into a native, learning to think as well as talk as they do. Many of us are really finished for Exploration after no more than a dozen trips; it is time to leave the Service when you find yourself less and less able to be sure who you are after having been so many other people. And the occasional, though rare, encounter with a non-humanoid intelligent race hastens the process. One Recorder I knew did a comparatively short tour on a planet inhabited by beings who communicated by graceful waves of a fringe of tentacles accompanied by a buzzing noise which served to indicate emotion, emphasis and, where relevant, social standing. Pleasant fellows when you got to know them, he insisted, but he was never very easy to talk to after that, being unable to suppress a tendency to drone and make his fingers writhe.

Once I had made sure of the Communicator, its power pack and its accessory kit, I stored up on food concentrate; then, as ready as I could be, I looked at the others.

Dark had his Captain's personal tool kit, containing medical supplies and instruments and gadgets useful for small repairs and adjustments. He was also in charge of the slim cylinder containing the equipment we preferred not to think of—the stasis devices. That is a Captain's responsibility, a fact for which all other Explorers are thankful.

Ari was cradling his Metahistorical microtapes, which contained analyses of the pasts and presents and futures of any number of worlds and solar systems, and the hand viewer he used to scan them. I knew that, as our senior member, he had with him also a supply of the age/stress counter-treatments the Service provided for the elderly.

Valmis carried nothing except food concentrates—Integrators' equipment is all in their minds (and in the minds and equipment of the Metahistorians and Recorders, whom they shamelessly exploit whenever they need something concrete to weave into their Patterns!). The one exception was his so-called Displacer, and that appeared to have blown itself up when he tried it. Well, if the rest of us ran short, Valmis could be considered as a walking supply of concentrates.

Dark had the only clear view of our surroundings, the pilot's seat being higher than the rest of the cabin, as well as forward; the other viewports were covered by water most of the time, with an occasional glimpse of the sky and foam as a wave trough passed. He leaned down and said, "Visitors—close to."

He clambered amidships, pushed the top hatch fully open, and climbed out. We followed and gingerly balanced ouselves on Wanderer's hull as it pitched in the waves.

Dark looked gloomily at the approaching native craft. "At least it's not using oars." he said.

It seemed to me that an oar-powered vessel would have had to be better designed than the one approaching us. Its makers had built it to float and to carry a propulsion plant, but apparently had not thought much further than that.

"Hydrocarbon-fueled," Dark said—unnecessarily, as the wind brought a cloud of black smoke hurrying ahead of the ship to engulf us momentarily, and the stink was unmistakable.

A shout came from the deck of the ungainly craft as it neared us; the figures lining it were reasonably humanoid in appearance, though on the short, squat side, as far as I could make out.

Very soon it was alongside, carrying its own stench—which I hoped reflected bad housekeeping rather than the inherent essence of the natives—and lines snaked down to us from the deck, now about a body length above our heads. Dark climbed up briskly, hand over hand, then leaned over the railing to give a boost to Ari, physically always the least adept member of the crew. Valmis went up next and I followed.

I could have wished for a more dramatic first encounter between two intelligent races than this. We usually try to make it an impressive business, with careful preparation and ceremony, conveying clearly but tactfully that the Explorer team is both powerful and well-intentioned. A vital part of this is preliminary long-range work by the Recorder before actual contact, so that the first words spoken by the Explorers are in the native tongue, a tactic which has a powerful psychological effect.

As it was, there seemed no point in my saying anything; we stood in two groups, Explorers and natives, eyeing each other for a moment—my own concern being suddenly with the queasiness occasioned by the ship's motion, even more pronounced than Wanderer's—before one of the natives spoke. His voice was loud and firm. I guessed what he said to be a ritual greeting, suitable for an encounter which must have struck him as uncanny, something along the lines of "Greeting and peace, O strangers. What are your intentions toward us?"—possibly with some flattering adjectives added to placate us.

I had started up the Communicator as soon as I boarded the vessel, and the native's words were instantly stored in its computer, but I knew there would have to be a considerable amount of steady, directed conversation before it could provide much of a grasp of what was being said.

"Greeting to you also," I said. "Our spaceship was damaged and we were obliged to land here; thank you for taking us aboard your craft." Not that there was any chance of his understanding me, but it is best under those circumstances to say what you would if communication did exist—at least the manner and tone are appropriate.

He turned to some of the other natives and asked them something. "Ha," Ari said. "The only question he can logically be asking is whether any of them understood us. From this we infer that some of these people have encountered visitors from another planet already, and learned their language—"

"It could also be," I said, "that they have no knowledge or concept that there is anywhere but this planet to be from, and consider us some sort of exotics from another part of it."

"And it could be," said Dark, who always inclined to a suspicious view of natives and their ways, "that he's asking if they ought to sacrifice us to the sea gods."

For two of the native sailors were advancing on us. We stiffened, but they brushed past us to the rail.

"Hey!" Dark yelled as they slid down the ropes to Wanderer. "Captain—nice of you to pick us up, but those fellows can't go down there!"

"Don't worry, Dark," I said. "A quick look around will convince them that we're from a culture very different from anything on this planet, and we can start off on a proper footing with them. It's not as if there were anything loose in there for them to steal."

Dark glared at me. "It's not stealing I'm worried about, but they might—"

A cloud of steam burst from the water behind Wanderer's submerged stern jet; the ship lifted half its length above the surface, nose first, then slammed down with a smack like an explosion and raised a wave that heeled the native vessel so far over that for an instant I was looking down at the sea across the nearly vertical deck, as if I had been at the top of a wall. Then, of course, it rocked back nearly as far the other way. By the time we were certain the vessel would not capsize and I turned to look at Wanderer, there was nothing left of her but a boiling patch on the surface, as the last of her air was displaced by the alien sea.

"—meddle with the controls," Dark finished. "Just a whiff of power left, evidently. Blundering natives!" He subsided into an icy gloom.

The vessel's captain was roaring, and I fingered the anger mode stud on the Communicator. Two heads popped up in the agitated water, and the tone of the captain's roars changed; seamen hurried to throw lines to their shipmates, who were quickly hauled on board.

The dripping men talked excitedly to their captain, who glared at us and took them off to the crude cabin in the middle of the vessel. Evidently they had had a chance to take in some of the details of Wanderer's interior that did not accord with the usual run of things on this planet.

The other crewmen drifted away uneasily, leaving us alone on the forward deck. The vessel turned and began plowing through the waves.

Valmis said, "This will be a strange but rich experience, unique in Exploration. We will be the first Explorer team to be really part of a world, investigating it with only its own resources and our human qualities to depend on—a whole new insight—"

"You need a whole new head," Dark said. "The experience is that Wanderer's at the bottom of the sea and we're prisoners of a bunch of jumpy natives who aren't the least bit interested in being Explored."

I am by nature optimistic, but felt that Dark had summed the situation up all too accurately.

3

Soon a shoreline was visible, mountains running down almost to the sea. In a while we could make out buildings huddled densely, some tall and blocky, most low to the ground. Our vessel headed toward a tangle of ships, some larger than it was, but all of equally crude construction, and came alongside a wooden platform extending from the shore far out into the harbor.

The crewmen began fastening the vessel to the platform with lines, and the captain leaped onto it and walked to a shed at the shore end.

I had used the last part of our voyage for some planning. "The thing to do now," I said, "is to find some person of consequence who will at least understand that we are out of the ordinary and be interested enough to be willing to communicate with us. Once I have a command of the language, we can explain our predicament and our mission and set about enlisting the natives' aid."

"It might be as well to do so quickly," Ari said, nodding toward the remaining sailors. These—especially the two who had so disastrously boarded Wanderer, whom I was able to distinguish from their fellows by their still-sodden condition—were looking at us in what I felt sure was a menacing fashion. I got their expressions on the Communicator's visual scanner, keyed to the appropriate mode; this may have been a mistake, as pointing the device at them seemed to increase their anger.

"Thank you for your help," I said. "We are grateful for the rescue, but we must leave now to see to some business." Again I was relying on the principle of speaking normally so as to get the proper tone.

We moved to the edge of the craft and prepared to step down, and the natives immediately surrounded us. They did not actually seize us, but made it impossible to get past them without violence, which it would have been imprudent as well as discourteous to offer.

"I don't recall that any of them is likely to have said anything like 'Let us go' since we've been here," Ari said thoughtfully. "There wasn't any situation that called for that. If there had been, I suppose you could find the spot on your speech record and play it back to them."

So I could have, but Ari was right: nothing that had been said by any of the natives would have applied to our situation. However . . . I ran the recorder back to the captain's angry roaring when Wanderer had made its last leap and gone down, apparently drowning two of his seamen, and pressed the play stud.

At the sound of their chiefs voice, the natives fell back; as I had thought, they were conditioned to respect his wrath. They stood indecisively for a moment, and we jumped over the side and onto the platform.

We walked briskly down it toward the shore, moving especially quickly past the shed where the captain, his back to us, was talking with another native, presumably telling him of his strange catch at sea.

We did not take time to observe the curious features of the city we found ourselves in, but hurried down first one street and then another, taking right and left turns at random, until we were fairly sure we were not being followed by the captain.

I suppose we were not—at least he was not visible in the crowd we found about us as soon as we stopped. They seemed to have sprung out of the ground, and were jabbering and pointing. I had hoped that we might not be so unlike the natives so as to attract undue attention, but this was clearly not to be. There were at least thirty individuals surrounding us; and, while of a variety of sizes, shapes and modes of dress, they obviously had far more in common with one another than with us.

They continued to gesticulate and talk as their numbers increased, but did not approach us closely or attempt to touch us.

Having assumed the leadership of Wanderer's crew for the moment, I felt it was up to me to take some productive action, but I could not think of any.

"Tell them to take us to their leader," Dark suggested.

"How? I don't have the native words for anything yet, except what a sea captain says when he sees two of his crewmen dragged to the bottom by a metal sea monster!"

"We could mime it," Valmis said. To my irritation, largely because I should have thought of it first, I must admit, my colleagues immediately agreed, and we fell to working up a short bit of pantomime that would convey our wishes.

After quick consultation, we gathered around Dark, who stood at first with his arms folded, frowning, then made brusque gestures of command—move, kneel, turn, and so forth—which we obeyed with exaggerated respect. Valmis, Ari and I then pointed at Dark, holding the gesture for a moment. If the natives could not understand from this that he was our leader, it would really be hopeless to expect anything of them.

Once we were sure this idea had been gotten across if it was ever going to be, we all turned to point at the crowd, made a gesture as though drawing or fetching something toward us, then pointed back at Dark. If that didn't say, "Take us to your leader," or at least, "Bring your leader here"—there could be confusion on that point—I don't know what it did say.

To the crowd, though, it did not seem to be that clear. They laughed, waved, jumped, but did nothing that looked as if it would result in a leader turning up.

Then I saw one of them throw something; it clinked as it hit near me and rolled a bit before toppling on its side: a metal disc. Others began to do the same, and I feared we were under some sort of attack, though an inefficient one, as none of the discs came near hitting us or was thrown with any force.

Ari picked up a couple of them and said, "Probably tokens of small units of credit—characteristic of Levels Two to Six. See—several are identical, hence mass produced; probably a government monopoly."

"Could they not be amulets?" Valmis said. "That would be a more appropriate offering to strangers from another world—the images of their deities seem to be stamped on them."

"Ha!" Dark said. "Your charade has got us taken for wandering clowns—these natives have the impudence to toss us payment for entertaining them! Though I must say you fellows looked funny, kneeling and bobbing like that. You'd better pick those things up; we don't have anything else anybody on this world seems to want."

At this point a native pushed through the crowd, parting it with peremptory cries and a jab now and then from a stick he carried. He was dressed differently from any of them and, by the deference they showed in giving way, was certainly someone of authority.

This would not be the leader we were looking for, but he ought to be able to put us in touch with him or someone else of standing.

He stood looking at us severely—I was becoming more familiar with the natives' facial expressions, and his had many points of resemblance to the sea captain's—and said something in their incomprehensible language.

Now I had to make one of those judgments sometimes forced on Recorders—to make an intuitive leap toward communication with an alien race. The first sequence on my Communicator was the captain's opening words as we boarded his vessel—almost certainly, I had sensed at the time, a carefully polite greeting and query about our intentions. That being so, it should serve at least roughly for a salutation to this official. I slid back to that portion of the recording and depressed the play stud.

The captain's words boomed out, with instant, though varied, effect. Some of the crowd laughed, some opened their mouths and widened their eyes, some—females at a guess, from certain differences in costume and apparent structure—turned and left that place. The man with the stick grimaced—looking very like the captain now—and menaced me with it. He then called out, and others appeared, dressed like him and also carrying sticks. He spoke to them loudly, and they surrounded us and hustled us off.

"Whatever did you do, Raf?" Ari asked as we were trotted down the street. I explained.

"Well, at least," Dark said with a noticeable bite in his voice, "we have learned that ritual politeness to strangers is not a constant rule in this culture. Useful knowledge, Recorder, if hard won."

"What was it the captain actually said, do you suppose, Raf?" Valmis asked.

Dark answered, "Probably 'Where did you drop from, you ugly-looking freaks, and what do you think you're playing at?' Plus whatever they use for insulting expletives here. Those sailors looked like a crude lot."

I suspected that Dark's interpretation was based on what his own reactions might have been—he was never a very patient man—but had to admit that the effect of my playback made it probable. My own guess, I felt, had been the logical one, but it appeared that these natives' habits did not necessarily conform to logic.

We soon arrived at a large, substantially constructed building, and after what appeared to be official formalities—including, to our dismay, the removal of my Communicator and Dark's and Ari's equipment—we were thrust into a small room with bars at the door and window. It was dimly lit, and we did not at first notice a native already in the room; he was stretched out on a shelf against the wall, apparently asleep.

"Fascinating," Ari said. "Absolutely fits in with Level Four and lower. Special facilities for storing undesirable or dangerous individuals. It's really rather elegantly simple and efficient; they combine keeping people where they can't do whatever it is that got them disliked, with sufficient unpleasantness to deter others who might be inclined that way. Ingenious, for a primitive culture."

"What sort of unpleasantness?" Dark said, looking around the chamber with distaste. The native on the shelf was now sitting up, looking at us with an expression which was new to me, but which, if I could still trust logic, was very likely fear. In the gloom of the place, our one-piece coveralls had their characteristic glow, and that, combined with our small but distinct difference in height and proportion from the natives and our easy conversation in a tongue unknown to them, must have produced a powerful impression on his unsophisticated mind.

Ari shrugged. "It varies. Sometimes nothing special—one is just kept there. In other cultures, there may be punishment or torture administered"—we glanced quickly around for anything that might be used for such a purpose, but saw nothing—"or such a place may merely be for temporary detention until something definite is decided. Ah!" He brightened. "There was a most interesting report from Drifter, several Explorations back. Much the same arrangement as this, with the function of keeping assembled those individuals chosen to contribute to the food supply."

None of us seemed to want this made any clearer, but I felt I should ask. "You mean slave labor for farming?"

"No, no," Ari said good-humoredly. "A direct contribution. Such persons were confined, fed well, kept in good health, and then, um, processed as foodstuffs. Given a society unstable enough to produce conflicts and intolerable behavior, it is really an economical way of handling things."

"Elegantly simple, you might say," Dark said heavily.

"Precisely."

"Would you say," Dark asked after he had looked at Ari for a moment with silent loathing, "that there is much chance of that being what we are in for?"

"Oh, no, no, no." Ari was amused. "That was a Level Two culture! Very far behind this one. Among human races, at least, you hardly ever get cannibalism much past midway through Three. Once they're into Four to any extent, the primitive community spirit required for ritual cannibalism is lost."

"What a pity." For once. Dark and I spoke at the same time and said the same thing.

The native who shared the room with us now seemed to have lost his fear. He pointed and laughed at us. He said some things in what I took to be a friendly tone, and I decided to pass the time with some practical "freehand" communicating.

It must not be thought that we Recorders are totally dependent on the Communicator; before being allowed to use it, we are trained in establishing contact with no aids whatever, thus getting the most solid grounding in basic principles. I had done especially well in training, and I rather looked forward to the opportunity of reawakening my old skill and of demonstrating to my colleagues the difference between my own expert approach and their amateurish efforts on the street, in which I had participated only out of momentary lack of another idea.

I pointed at myself and said, "Raf." He nodded his head up and down—I registered this as some sort of affirmative gesture—then pointed at me and said, "Raf," then at each of the others, saying "Raf, Raf, Raf."

At this point Dark shouldered me aside and confronted the native, who said, "Raf!" to him. He seemed to find the sound amusing.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I want to find out what's in store for us!" Dark snapped. "If there's any prospect of us being eaten, I don't want it to come as a surprise!"

"That is just the sort of thing I should think one would prefer to be surprised by," Ari said. "That way, one is spared thinking about it, which is probably as bad as having it happen. Or, if not as bad, it lasts longer."

Dark ignored him and pointed vigorously at himself and the rest of us, then at his mouth, which he opened and shut as if chewing something. The native looked at him, then nodded his head up and down, smiled broadly, and, lifting his hands in front of him, palms inward, brought them almost together.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Dark asked uneasily, very much as if he were hoping he had not understood.

"Our native has done a very capable job of signing 'yes' and 'soon,' " I said.

"They're going to eat us!" Dark howled. "And I suppose that means this fellow gets spared for a while because of us—that's why he's so cheerful about it!" He glowered at the native, who backed away from him.

"It is a curious idea," Valmis said. "By ingesting the substance of individuals, they expect to take on some of their qualities; in a limited way, a striking recognition of the unity of all existence."

"I would be inclined to consider it more in the light of a political and economic manifestation," Ari said with the bright interest that always came to him when he had the chance of a good theoretical argument. "Though it is, of course, remarkable to find it in a Level Four culture. I am afraid I was rather dogmatic on that point a moment ago!" He chuckled ruefully, as at a good joke on himself. Dark's hand twitched, giving the impression that it wished, independently of its owner, to strike Ari.

"Consider: they hardly know enough about us to decide whether they would want to share our qualities, so we must dismiss Valmis's suggestion. The little we have seen of these people and their works inclines me to the view that they are mechanistic pragmatists—note for example the complete absence of awe at our mysterious appearance; the lack of ritual greeting formulas (as Rafs ill-advised experiment demonstrates!); their crass perception of us as street entertainers. I would say it is a matter of a combination of limited food supply, perhaps with a growing population, which can be expected, no matter what the cultural level, to produce aberrant—I might even say brutal—behavior."

"It's nice to know that you think it's aberrant of them to eat us," Dark said. "I don't think I could bear to feel you approved of it."

"No," Ari said seriously. "While it is my task to understand the dynamics of any culture and their relationship to the fundamentals of Metahistory, I admit that I cannot be objective in considering every manifestation of such a culture. Though dispassionate in observation, I would feel obliged to add my own opinion in a final report—"

Dark slammed his fist against the stone wall of the room. "Final report! Your final report'll be a hearty belch from some savage while he's picking fragments of you out of his teeth!"

Ari bridled, and I intervened. "The problem, Dark, may be one of communication. The native apparently understood the concepts of 'eat' and 'us' as you conveyed them, and rather neatly gave you his 'yes—soon' answer, but the whole thing was very sketchy around the operants. You really ought to leave that sort of thing to me; I am trained for it."

Dark ground his teeth. I continued, looking past him through the barred door to the corridor beyond to verify my conclusion. "For instance, may he not have understood you to mean 'Do we eat?' rather than 'Are we to be eaten?' If so, the reply 'soon,' together with an expression of cheerfulness, becomes logical and friendly rather than a piece of heartless barbarity."

"A bit far-fetched," said Ari, clearly reluctant to abandon his unique discovery of industrialized cannibals.

"I think not. If you will look into the corridor, you will see one of the attendants bringing along dishes of something and placing them in the rooms—if not food, what?"

"Fattening us for the slaughter, then," Dark grumbled, though he did seem relieved.

In a moment the native was at our door, opened it, and slid in five bowls heaped with an unfamiliar but pungent-smelling substance, and closed the door again in a practiced series of motions.

"Our" native took one of the bowls, lifted a utensil inserted in the stuff, and began to eat it, after waving at us and the remaining bowls.

Dark, Ari, Valmis and I picked them up, fished out the utensils, and sampled the food. After a mouthful, by common consent we laid the bowls down and opened and ate a unit of food concentrate each. I signed to the native that he might have our bowls, but he seemed to find his own fairly hard going after the first pangs of hunger were stayed, and did not take the offer.

"Well," Dark said thoughtfully, "I suppose we're safe from being eaten. Whatever that stuff is, it can't be meant to fatten anything up!"

4

We were now well if not enjoyably fed, and as we could see through the small window that we were now well into the planet's night cycle, there seemed little to do but compose ourselves for sleep on the shelves along the walls. Ari wished to discuss our plight and what to do about it, but the events of the day had left us all exhausted.

"I have the feeling we'll have plenty of time to figure things out while we're here," Dark said. "I somehow don't see a delegation of local dignitaries coming to fetch us in the morning and wanting to know what they can do for us." He nodded at the native, who, after eating his meal, had yawned, wrapped himself in some pieces of cloth, and fallen asleep. "That chap looks as if he's not expecting anything to happen for quite a while." Dark looked almost savagely gloomy, and I could sense that he, most of all, wanted to be finally done with the day that had seen the loss of his beloved Wanderer.

As Valmis settled onto his shelf, he muttered, "This would be quite uncomfortable, if it were real." Dark and I exchanged glances. It would be too bad if Valmis suffered a breakdown at a time when our only hope lay in functioning as effectively as any Explorer team had ever done. I fell asleep resolving that first thing in the morning I at least would set about my own duty, Communication, in spite of the absence of my equipment.

Nobody in the cell was at all cheerful when we awoke. We four Explorers each experienced the dreadful moment of coming back to consciousness with the realization that we were marooned on an alien world, after a comforting split-second of thinking ourselves in our quarters on Wanderer; the native, sitting bolt upright on his shelf, looked at us with alarm and incredulity, as if he had not seen us before. He shook his head several times, then finally shrugged.

Mindful of my decision of the previous night, I approached him; while he pressed himself against the wall, he did not actually flee from me. I considered asking the others to help me establish Communication with him, but recalled the less than satisfactory results of our performance on the street the day before, and decided to handle it on my own.

It seemed to me that the most important thing was to get across to him the idea that we did not come from his planet. Anything we might wish to accomplish with any of the natives had to start from that fact. I also hoped to determine from his reaction whether our reception as off-worlders would be more likely to be respectful or hostile.

I squatted on the dusty floor in front of him and sketched a circle with my forefinger, to represent his planet. I then pointed at him and rapidly sketched in a stick figure standing on the border of the circle: you belong to this world. He looked at it blankly, then at me. I studied the lines in the dust and had to admit that they appeared to form the picture of a man balancing himself on a ball, like an acrobatic performer.

I brushed it away and moved to a clear space. This time I drew a larger circle and, inside it, an irregular line resembling what I could remember of the nearby coastline as seen from the air; I had not paid all that much attention to it, but there were some distinctive inlets and promontories that I was able to dredge from my memory, which apparently registered with the native, who narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly. At about the position of the port, I made a smudge with my thumb, pointed once again at the native, and sketched a diminutive figure near the smudge. He nodded vigorously.

I moved some distance away across the floor and drew another circle, then pointed at myself, Ari, Dark and Valmis, and drew four rudimentary figures on the border of that circle: we belong to that world.

The native looked at the farther circle and at us, nodded once again, and muttered something aloud.

Moving with some difficulty, he levered himself up off his shelf and walked to the circle representing our home world. He bent over, placed his hand on the sketched figures representing us, then raised it, walked over to the drawing of his planet, and laid it down with an explosive noise: you have traveled from your world to mine and impacted on it?

I nodded, and he sat back on his shelf, looking at us thoughtfully. I was anticipating the next information I would try to get across to him—the need for us to meet with someone of importance—when, to my surprise, he jumped up, ran for the door, and began yelling urgently.

In a moment, one of the uniformed natives appeared, and, after an exchange of shouts, our fellow tenant was marched away and out of sight.

"What was that all about?" Dark asked.

"As soon as I managed to convey to the native that we were from another world, he started raising that fuss," I said uneasily. I could not see why he had done so, but it was an unexpected and therefore disturbing reaction.

"Level Four cultures are rarely geared to deal comfortably with alien contact," Ari said. "Industrialization promotes a world view that places great reliance on mechanics and simple physics, hence denies the unfamiliar as a matter of principle, and the idea of voyagers through space is bound to be the most unfamiliar one possible. Some such cultures retain Level Three (and lower, of course) characteristics of superstition, and begin by treating alien visitors as supernatural beings, which often has amusing results."

Dark started. "Amusing? I'll bet that fellow has gone off to denounce us as demons and suggest that we be burned or something!"

"That would probably be only fair," Valmis said.

I forestalled Dark's violent response by saying, "Look, Valmis, I know you're brooding over that business of switching universes about, or whatever you think you did, and I'm sorry if it's weighing on you. But it's done, and we're here, and I don't think it matters whether this universe is an alternate that you've somehow called into being, or the real one. It seems to work the same way the one we were in yesterday did, and we are in just as bad a spot as if it were real—we've got to do everything we can, use all of our abilities to the utmost, to get out of it! So leave off that stuff about wrenching the cosmos, and act like an Explorer!"

I think that Valmis was as much impressed by Dark's and Ari's respectful response to my brief harangue as by the words themselves; none of them were used to my being at all forceful, since Recorders usually look upon themselves as being, however vital to the success of any mission, rather passive instruments, or machines in human form, with the decision and action left to the others. However, this was a new and, so far as we knew, unprecedented situation, even aside from Valmis's notions, and a new approach seemed called for.

"Well, then," said Dark, "let's get to it. What sort of plan had you in mind?"

Unhappily, even my un-Recorderlike behavior did not seem to affect our situation, which was that we were locked up.

We discussed several possible approaches, with even Valmis shedding his philosophical gloom and guilt and joining in, but none of them seemed at all productive. Without an improved attitude on the part of the natives or, at the very least, access to my Communicator so that we might make a beginning at explaining ourselves, there seemed no place to start. I own that I felt a certain pride at my fellow Explorers' clear acknowledgment that my specialty was the necessary starting point for any of them to employ theirs, but this gratification was considerably diminished by the fact that I wasn't able to do anything at all in my line under these conditions, and what I had done in making our origins evident to the native who had shared our chamber appeared to be of distinctly two-edged significance.

We had pretty well exhausted our fund of ideas when a crowd of natives boiled into our corridor, and one of them unlocked and opened the door. Our former companion was among them, though he did not now seem to be in the custody of any one of them, and made urgent beckoning gestures to us. We were surrounded and hustled down the corridor to the room where our equipment had been taken away from us, and to my surprise it was handed back to us. Our native friend, now seeming, for reasons I could not understand, to exercise some authority, superintended its return.

A great wash of relief and, I confess, comfort flooded me as I felt once again the familiar shape and bulk of my Communicator. And I daresay Ari and Dark felt the same way about their own equipment. A specialist can accomplish much by relying solely on his training, but it is undeniable that the machinery we use amplifies our abilities enormously.

Our native, unaccompanied, I was relieved to see, by the others, led us outside the building and into a vehicle, which started off with a roaring noise as soon as we were inside. I did not take much note of its nature, my interest not being in that direction, and in any case I was absorbed with the Communicator. Dark and Ari were exclaiming at the curious spectacle of the city we were passing through; Valmis was looking at the view with a detached expression; and the native, who now seemed to be effectively in charge of us, was regarding us with an air of speculation.

I fingered the Inquiry/information mode controls and gestured, first at the passing panorama, then at the Communicator, while looking meaningfully at the native. He appeared to understand something of its function, for he leaned toward the mechanism and spoke, more loudly and slowly, I noticed, than had been his habit.

I then pressed the replay stud, and his words were repeated; he nodded as though to show he understood. Either sound reproduction was known in this culture or he was willing to assume that visitors from another world would be likely to have some such device. This was a relief to me, as the responses of the ship's crew and the crowd in the street had left me uncertain about whether this particular bit of technology might not be looked on here as witchcraft, a notion that Ari's earlier comments had made appear all too plausible.

"Are you explaining things to him, Raf?" Dark asked. "Any prospects that we can get help in refitting Wanderer?"

"It'll be a while before I can do that, I'm afraid. First we have to store an immense amount of language information, then let the computer sort it out and—"

"But you fellows are supposed to be able to start chattering the local lingo as soon as you run up against the natives. That's your job, isn't it?"

"If," I said with some asperity, "things go properly and we have a decent period of surveillance, as laid down in regulations, there is no problem. With enough to go on, the Communicator can build up a decent vocabulary by encounter time and achieve perfect fluency as soon as we've been able to do some directed work with the indigenes. I'm not blaming anybody, you understand, Dark, but if we're dumped in the middle of an alien culture by what I'm sure was unavoidable mechanical failure, you can't expect the same results as if it had all gone as it was supposed to."

I was really rather irritated, not so much by Dark's criticism as by the fact that our exchange was taking up time that I would rather have used in gathering information from our native host.

"I don't know if you can find out about it now," Valmis observed, "but it would be worthwhile looking into what's happened to this city lately. The Pattern is all off: there are bare spaces and new buildings right alongside old ones in a way that doesn't make sense. When you can, you might try to find out it they've had a war here recently, or some other kind of disaster."

I didn't appreciate Valmis's attempt to load more work on me at a time when it was impossible to do as he asked, but I did feel somewhat cheered that he was emerging from his gloom enough to take a practical interest in his work. A capable Integrator can be tremendously useful in Exploration, in spite of the mystical bent of most of them, in spotting anomalies the other specialists might overlook. I'll look into it when I can," I said, "though once I've got the language stored and interpreted, any of you will be able to put your own questions."

Our vehicle stopped at that moment in front of an imposing building of several stories, and our native guide hustled us inside and up a flight of stairs, pausing in the large room at the entrance to secure the services of another, smaller native, one of a throng standing about, who trotted ahead and opened a door for us. The room into which we were ushered was luxuriously furnished and was evidently a living apartment.

"Ten to one this is a sort of inn he's putting us up at," Dark said, looking around with satisfaction. "Seems as though our little friend is prepared to do handsomely by us. Now all you've got to do, Raf, is get to work with your machine and educate him enough to understand us."

I sighed; would it ever be possible to make an Explorer pilot understand the nature of a Recorder's work? "It's the other way around," I said patiently. "The Communicator makes it possible for us to learn their language. What you suggest wouldn't be reasonable; they're at an earlier stage in cultural development and wouldn't have the ability to frame enough concepts in our language to make it useful. The fact that we're the ones making the first contact shows the difference readily enough."

In the course of the ensuing planetary days, the native who had taken us in charge saw that our wants in the way of food were attended to, though it was made clear that we were not allowed to leave our quarters. He brought to view us a number of his fellows, whom I at length divined to be scientists of varying sorts. To these I conveyed what I had to our host concerning our origin on a planet other than theirs, though I was dismayed when they set about poking, prodding, probing and scraping me in an evident effort to determine what physical characteristics might verify our difference from their race. This they also did to the others, which at least relieved my companions' boredom.

After some time, it was clear that they were satisfied on this point, and they departed. Some of their conversation had been added to my Communicator's memory banks, though not enough to advance my understanding of the local language to any useful extent, at least not to the point of being able to use it. I could pretty well understand some of what was said to me, however, and thus could relay it to my companions.

On the fifth day I was able to give them some news that brightened their moods, which were somewhat dampened by our enforced seclusion: another native was to join us and prepare us for wider contact with the people of this world.

"Now we're getting somewhere!" Dark exclaimed. "What are they giving us? One of their technicians? Maybe we can start finding out what sort of help they can give us with Wanderer."

"I should think that whatever the local analogue is for a Metahistorian would be more fruitful," Ari observed.

"Well . . ." I said. "It isn't either of those."

"Another scientist? What sort?" Ari asked.

"Not a scientist, either. It's a . . . a composer of fictions."

They looked at me in amazement for a moment. "I don't suppose," Dark asked heavily, "that your Communicator gadget might have got a crossed circuit in it someplace?"

"The sealed unit is completely—"

"Ah, never mind. It's of a piece with the rest of this idiotic place—I can't make out what any of it means, and this is no odder than the rest of what we've gone through. D'you suppose this planet's a dumping ground for the feeble-minded from some other worlds? That would explain—"

A chuckle from Valmis interrupted him. "It may be that these folk have an intuitive sense of Patterns, that they know, don't you see, that we're fictions now and so are they . . ."

"Stow that!" Dark said hotly. "Or we'll see if a fictional fist can raise a bruise on your fictional hide!"

Valmis looked at him calmly. "I expect you're right, Dark. Whether this universe was here before I used the Displacer or not, it's what we're in, after all. What's done is done. But I wonder," he added after a pause, "if all this is real now . . . is anything more real than that? Are all the Probabilities no more than the sum of our agreements to Perceive them?"

I never knew an Integrator who could say something simply, without raising unanswerable and irrelevant questions. It is probably unkind to think that this is how they maintain the idea that they're necessary.

5

Bizarre though the notion was as our friend explained it, I was able to see the sense in this plan of having a romancer deal with us. It seemed that he had actually composed fictions which had brought the theme of flight through space to public attention and that these had gained wide popularity. Therefore, when the news of our existence was made known to the public, it would be helpful to have the authority of this person employed to this end, as the generality of people were unclear as to the distinction between fact and fiction in any case.

Though still badly hampered by not being able to make myself understood, and beginning to be apprehensive on this account, as the Communicator should by now have been able to instill in me a perfectly adequate fluency in this tongue, I was able to gather from our native much information to clear up some matters that had puzzled us.

It appeared that he was an employee of an information-gathering organization, or, more accurately, once more so occupied. At the time we met him, he had been confined by the authorities for offenses committed while celebrating his dismissal from his position, but, upon noting in his cell the uncanniness of our nature, he had communicated with his former chief and arranged his and our release.

It was his chief's anticipation that his organization would benefit greatly from controlling the dissemination of information concerning us, and to this end he had agreed to undertake the expenses of our maintenance and the verification of our nature, as well as to rehire our friend and put him in charge of the operation. I noted that our agreement to this arrangement had not been sought, but could not see that we had any choice. At least something was happening, which appeared to be all that we could expect at this point.

We had to wait a few more days for the romancer to join us, as he had been summoned, at considerable cost, from another region of the planet. When he arrived, he proved to be a physically unimpressive specimen, but ebullient and inquiring of manner and most frustrated by my inability to provide him with any detailed information. Fortunately, the operation of the Communicator, even though it was not completely fulfilling its purpose, fascinated and diverted him.

Now that our party was completed to our guide's employer's satisfaction, events moved quickly, and we and our possessions were soon conveyed to a string of narrow wagons which removed us from the seaport at a great rate of speed.

"Evidently the fellow our friend works for carries a lot of weight," I told my companions. "He's set it up for us to meet with the native political chief."

"Of the planet? That is good news," said Ari.

"Not quite. They do that by sections here, I gather—one chief here, one there, dozens of them for the planet. The romancer himself is from another of these sections."

"Another Level Four characteristic, is it?" Dark said with some asperity. "If this chief fellow ran the whole world, it'd do some good to speak to him about helping us, but if he's only in charge of one potty little patch of land inhabited by savages, what's the point?"

Dark's estimate of the size of the native ruler's realm was undergenerous. It took us six local days to cross it, the chiefs steading being on the other side of it from where we had come ashore; and at that we made a fair rate of speed for land transportation. I did not bother myself with the details of our conveyance, but they delighted Ari, who claimed that the whole method could clearly be seen to derive from an earlier age, Levels Three and Two most probably, in which the motive power had been draft animals.

"You must perfect yourself in this language, Raf," he said to me on the second day, "and pass it on to us. I can't wait to start finding out all about this place. It looks perfectly fascinating, a textbook example of cultural progression, with fossil remnants of the past embedded in it according to the best principles of Meta-history. Just look at that!"

He pointed to the landscape which rolled by us, and I could see a cluster of huts made of some sort of fabric huddled in the desolate landscape. "Just at the border between Levels One and Two, I'd say, and here we are passing them in a high-grade Level Four device. Theory predicts that, but I don't know when I've seen it so, clearly embodied."

Valmis spoke up, something he did rarely. "Raf, once you do have the language, I've been wondering, what are we to tell them about ourselves?"

"How do you mean?" Dark said.

"Well, if we're set on interfering with them so as to get their science and all that in the shape we want, I wonder how they're going to like being told that? Not very much, I'd say."

This was a thought that had not struck me, or any of the others, it developed. It soon became apparent that it would not be much good explaining to the natives that we were Explorers, either, since without Wanderer we should not be able to do any worthwhile Exploring or Survey work, and so would have no visible function; from the little we had seen of this planet, it did not look like a place very hospitable to those considered of no use.

It was Dark who hit on the idea that we ought to present ourselves as an embassy from the Galactic Empire.

"But there isn't a Galactic Empire," Ari said. "It wouldn't work—the galaxy's too big. Only the smallest solar systems have empires, and they're pretty rickety."

"The natives aren't to know that, though, are they?" Dark said. "The thing to do is give them an impressive story, the more puffed up the better, to make sure they'll treat us right."

We agreed on this, and I began polishing the details of the imposture against the day when the Communicator might function well enough to allow me to use it.

This had not happened by the time we were making our approach to the meeting with the native chief. We were proceeding in open wagons toward his headquarters, having left the conveyance which had been our home for six days, and I was once more trying to persuade the Communicator to give me instantaneous access to the native vocabulary stored within it that it was meant to provide, Dark watched me for a moment and asked, "What seems to be wrong with it, anyhow?"

"I don't know. It just doesn't seem to be doing what it ought to."

"Well, have you . . . here, let me have a look." After he had examined its interior for a moment, he looked up at me. "How well," he said in a gentle tone, "do you expect a piece of machinery to work if one of its two power leads is loose?"

"Ah . . . not very?"

"Just so. Now, give it a try."

I adjusted the control and placed the earpiece in position, then pressed the activating stud.

I experienced with a joyous excitement the familiar avalanche of sensations, in itself not at all pleasant, but overwhelmingly welcome under the circumstances, of an entire alien language being impressed upon my mind. In a moment it was all there: I could place names to all I saw, converse with anyone, and in general feel like a civilized being again.

"Thank you, Dark," I said in our own tongue. "It's worked, finally. That was a bit of luck. I'll adjust it to see to you fellows when we've done talking to this chief, for I see we're almost to what must be his place."

This was an ornate edifice of wood in a fenced-off open space in the midst of the town through which we had been driven. We were ushered into it, and into a room where an imposing native stood ready to greet us.

He was an impressive figure, well fleshed and exuding an air of fitness—belied, I was surprised to see, by a pair of lenses perched on his nose; it was certainly odd, even for a Level Four culture, for a ruler to be chosen who required artificial aids for his sight! Even if medical correction of such a condition were expensive, it seemed to me that so powerful a chief as this man was supposed to be ought to have had it as a matter of right.

However, he did not seem to be daunted by his infirmity, and he bared his teeth in what I had come to understand as a sign of welcome, the gesture somewhat obscured by a substantial growth of hair beneath the nose, a local fashion I still found somewhat unnerving.

I gave a prideful glance at my companions, both Explorers and natives—what a surprise it would be for them to hear me flawlessly deliver a greeting in the native tongue, rather than leaving it all to our guide!

"We, the representatives of the Galactic Empire, thank you for your graciousness in receiving us," I said. "And, in turn, we ourselves bring you greetings from beyond the stars, President Roosevelt."

6

The effect of my statement, handsomely phrased though it was, was electric. My companions, except for Dark, the only one aware that the Communicator had finally done its job, looked startled to hear me use the native tongue; the two natives who had accompanied us jumped as if bitten. Only the President seemed composed, and said, "Nice of you to say so."

"What's all this about a Galatic Empire? And, say, how do you come to talk English all of a sudden?" our native mentor asked. "Are you trying to pull a fast one?"

"No, Mr. Oxford," I said—I was pleased at last to be able to use his name, Ted Oxford—"it's just that my Communicator is working at last, and I acquired a full command of your language just as we were approaching the White House."

"Well, you might have let me and Wells know," Oxford grumbled. "Lord, that was a worse shock than waking up in the clink and seeing you fellows for the first time. Sorry, Mr. President—I didn't mean to spring any surprises on you like that."

"Willie Hearst didn't say anything about a Galactic Empire when he called me from California," the President said. "Just that these were definitely people from another planet, and I ought to see them before he broke the news. Looks as though he's got a bigger story than he bargained on. Are you sure this isn't one of your yarns, Wells? I read that story about the Martians, and it was bully stuff, but I don't care for being fed fairy tales in my own office."

I reassured myself with the knowledge that, though he had stated the situation with essential accuracy, the President had no way of actually knowing this, and I launched into a presentation of the wonders of the Empire, its benevolence and advanced civilization. I contrived to make it seem as though it were Imperial policy, when a new planet was come across, to drop an embassy on it, which would then inspect it with a view to establishing favorable relations. Our own had suffered a misfortune in landing, I explained, leading to the loss of our ship, but we were untroubled by that, as, within a period of time I did not specify, our masters would inquire after us and ascertain our opinion of Earth. The Empire, I made a point of explaining, considered hospitality to strangers one of the marks of a world worth dealing generously with.

When I had done, the President whistled. "This is going to raise an almighty fuss, no mistake," he said. "Half the people in the country won't believe it or will hope it isn't so. Good Lord, Bryan'll go out of his mind—he'll probably spend the campaign preaching against you, saying you're devils or something, as there's nothing about you in the Bible. What a mess it'll be!"

"Well, Mr. President," Oxford said, "that'll be Taft's problem, won't it?"

Roosevelt looked at the far wall. "So it will. I hope he's up to it. If I hadn't promised not to run again . . . By George, I'd cut my hand off to here"—he pointed at his right wrist—"if I could only not have said that!"

It was agreed that we should return the next day to continue our conversation after the President had had a chance to consult his advisors and to talk to Oxford's employer, Mr. Hearst, on the telephone—this in order to make sure that there was no release of any news concerning us until government policy was fully set—and I had had a chance to employ the Communicator on my companions so that they might make whatever contributions they were capable of.

We spent the evening at an inn, talking at great length to Wells and Oxford, keeping firmly in mind the fiction of our ambassadorial status and our nonexistent Empire. We were able to mingle fact and fiction quite nicely, drawing on many of our Exploration experiences in painting word pictures of the far-flung realm we supposedly represented.

I in turn asked for some enlightenment on matters that had puzzled me, notably Mr. Roosevelt's wish to part with his right hand.

"Well, in ought-four, he put his foot in his mouth"—I nearly asked what that odd performance had to do with his hand, but refrained; this language was evidently rich in poetic images which it would be profitless to analyze each time they came up—"when he promised not to run again this year." This, as far as I could understand, came from the superstition that no President should hold office for more than two fixed periods, and that four years previously Mr. Roosevelt had considered a partial term he had served to count as a full one. The explanation for the abbreviated term was even odder than the superstition: the previous President had been killed while in office, apparently not as a ritual sacrifice, although two earlier Presidents had, at roughly twenty-year intervals, abandoned their office in the same manner, a fact which I am sure Ari would have found significant.

The more usual method of changing the head of government was to allow the two chief factions in the country to put up candidates and allow the populace to choose between them. Mr. Roosevelt had persuaded his group to champion his friend Taft, a large and amiable man, while the opposition had put up one Bryan, a noted orator, who had twice unsuccessfully entered earlier contests.

"If he lost twice, why would they want to use him again?" I asked. "Wouldn't they do better with someone who might win?"

Oxford explained to me that the emblem of this party was an animal known for stubbornness and lack of sense, and that loyalty obliged them to display these qualities in all their proceedings.

In any case, Mr. Roosevelt, having come to enjoy the presidency mightily, now regretted his earlier statement, but felt he could not disavow it, hence the wistful comment about cutting off his hand. It seemed rather a lot of information to have to get in order to answer such a simple question, but I supposed it might in the long run prove useful, if I could keep it clearly enough in mind to convey it to Ari; it was really more in his line than mine.

"Teddy's a lame duck now, d'you see?" Oxford explained. "So already people are paying more attention to Taft than to him, and it gets under his hide."

I suppressed a sigh. The Communicator had acquainted me with the language, but apparently there were aspects of it even that instrument could not convey.

When we arrived next morning at the White House, Mr. Roosevelt did not yet seem at all clear on what his plans might be. Accepting me as spokesman for our party, he directed the establishment's steward, a Mr. Hoover, to show Wells and the others around the premises, and led Oxford and me to his office. I was startled when we entered to find it already occupied—it seemed to me, for an instant, filled—by the bulkiest native I had yet seen. He wore a moustache larger than the President's, and his broad face expressed a basic geniality overlaid with worry.

"Will, this is the . . . visitor I told you about. And Mr. Oxford, Hearst's man. He's been in on this from the start and has as big a stake as anyone in keeping mum until the right time. Gentlemen, Mr. Taft."

Roosevelt cut short our greetings and went on, "Now, Will, we've got to get things on a proper footing right off. I think I'll have Loeb draft whatever documents are called for now. Loeb!" he shouted.

When his secretary entered, Mr. Roosevelt gave him the required instructions and sent him off once more, then turned to Taft.

"This will be a deucedly hot potato during the campaign, Will. How do you propose to handle it?"

Taft stroked his luxuriant moustache for a moment before he replied. "I suppose," he said hopefully, "that I could talk about the Philippines. The job I did there's my strong suit, and I could point out that it qualifies me to deal with—"

Roosevelt snorted. "Will, you've got to realize that . . ." He stopped, and his shoulders slumped. He looked at his right hand and gave a grimace.

"Look here," he said. "Bryan's going to jump on this with both feet and stir up a lot of feeling. Right now he's a sure loser, but this could turn the whole thing around. You've got to have some sort of policy!"

Taft ruminated once again. "Couldn't we delay the announcement until after the election?" he asked. "Then, once I was in, I could handle it pretty easily, I suppose."

Roosevelt sighed. "If that's the best you can—"

"Mr. President," Oxford said, rather loudly. "Excuse me, but I don't think Mr. Hearst is going to be overjoyed about sitting on this story for four months."

Roosevelt smiled, though with little mirth in the expression. "If Willie Hearst wants to try conclusions with the government of the United States, he'd better be prepared to—what is it, Loeb?"

The secretary had entered the room and now crossed to the President's desk. "Two visitors, Mr. President, on urgent business."

"Well, I've got something pretty urgent here! You can just tell 'em, whoever they are, to wait 'til I'm ready to see them."

"Mr. President," Loeb said firmly, "you have asked me to do a number of pretty tough things in this job, and I haven't minded. But I just don't see myself telling J. P. Morgan and Thomas Edison to cool their heels for an hour or so!"

Roosevelt sprang from his chair and slammed a fist onto his desk; Taft manifested almost equivalent agitation by lifting himself some inches from his chair, then sinking back again. Next to me, Oxford whistled softly.

"That's torn it," the President said. "Those fellows wouldn't barge in like that unless . . . Well, it might be something else, though I can't imagine what. Bring 'em in, Loeb."

"Morgan's the biggest money man in the country," Oxford whispered to me. "Banks, steel-making, finance.

Even passes the plate in church on Sunday—can't get out of the habit of collecting money. Edison's invented just about everything since the wheel, from the electric light to the electric chair."

I looked on with interest as Loeb ushered these two notables into the office. Morgan was a tall, imposing man, with piercing eyes and a remarkable nose, bulbous and bright red in hue; it seemed to me odd that a man so wealthy would not have had something done about it. Perhaps, though, it played some role in his business; it might be useful for him to be identifiable at a considerable distance.

Edison was a shorter, stocky man with a thatch of white hair and a constantly darting glance; he appeared to be taking mental note of everything he saw.

"Mr. Morgan, Mr. Edison," the President said.

"A council of war, Roosevelt?" Morgan asked, looking first at Taft, then at Oxford and me.

"Now, what are you fellows—" Roosevelt began.

"Mr. President," Morgan said, "if you don't know why we're here, you're a lot less sharp than you used to be. I didn't get where I am by letting myself be surprised, and I make it my business to have ways of finding out what's going on. And when I hear both from San Francisco and Washington that creatures from another world are among us, it seems to me that it's time to sit up and take notice. Once the news gets out, the market will go wild, and there could be a panic worse than last year's unless the banking community and the Treasury take steps to control it."

He looked at Oxford and me. "Are these they? They look ordinary enough."

"That one of 'em?" Edison asked, as though he had not heard Morgan. He pointed at me. "Been sorting through faces I've seen, and I don't know as I recollect one just like it. Something about the set of the eyes:"

"Mr. Edison, that is in fact Ambassador—" the President began.

"Hey?" Edison said. "You from another planet?"

I was taken aback at the inventor's rudeness to his chief of state and at the President's apparent acquiescence to the interruption. Edison studied my face intently as I replied that I was, indeed, not from Earth.

"Edison!" Morgan fairly shouted. "You can talk to him later! Right now, let's get some things settled with the President!"

"Right, Mr. Edison!" Roosevelt yelled. "Now that you're here, it's clear that we can't keep this quiet much longer!"

Oxford saw my bewilderment at this sudden alteration in the mode of speech, and explained to me that Edison was what he called stone-deaf.

I considered this—while Morgan, Edison and the President boomed at one another—then asked, "But doesn't that make it hard to talk to him? Why doesn't he have something done about it?"

Oxford looked at me curiously. "Isn't anything can be done. Lord knows, Edison's tried. Didn't get anywhere, except, of course, inventing the phonograph."

I thought for a moment, then whispered to Oxford, "I'll be right back," and slipped out of the room unnoticed by the shouting President, Morgan and Edison. In the anteroom, I fetched out the Communicator and its accessory kit from the pocket of the native costume with which I had been provided and rummaged through it. There was a modification device which had been standard equipment ever since the discovery of a race of beings which used sound, but at such a high volume that ordinary Exploration devices could not cope with it, and the team Exploring that planet had come back suffering from extreme hoarseness owing to having had to scream constantly to get anything across. No such people had been encountered since, but each accessory kit now came equipped with a small self-powered amplifier which could be attached to the Communicator's speech element, magnifying its output substantially. I fished mine out; as I had recalled, it was a small, light, metallic wafer, threaded to fit into the Communicator. I breathed into one side of it, and Loeb, seated at his desk, jumped and looked at me sharply as a loud rasping noise echoed through the room.

I found a stiff piece of wire in the kit, bent it into a loop at one end to hold the amplifier, and shaped the rest to fit the curve of the human head. I then reentered the President's office, went to Mr. Edison, and slipped the device onto his head, positioning the amplifier just above an ear.

He started back in his chair, protesting, "What are you up to—say!"

"What is it, Edison?" called Roosevelt.

The inventor clapped his hands to his ears. "Don't need to shout," he said peevishly. He dropped his hands and looked about the room. "Don't . . . need . . . to . . . Hell's fire, gentlemen, I can hear! How'd you manage that, young fellow?"

"A spare part I happened to have," I said.

"Spare part for what? Ah, never mind that—how does it work?"

I shrugged. "I don't know much about that sort of thing. Our Captain might have some idea."

Edison touched the amplifier. "Believe I'll have a talk with him sometime. Now, gentlemen"—he turned to the others—"what do we propose to do?"

With Edison brought effectively into participation without the need to shout, the discussion went on in a brisker yet more relaxed fashion.

"There's no chance of keeping the secret of these . . . these . . ." Morgan flapped one hand toward me as he searched for a suitable term.

"Wells coined a word," Oxford said. "Figured if the fellows who sailed in the Argo with Jason in that legend were called 'argonauts,' it'd do to call Raf and his friends 'astronauts'—sailors among the stars, d'you see?"

Morgan considered this. "Not quite a parallel. To be exact, you ought to use the name of their ship as a prefix—"

"In your language, that would be Wanderer," I said.

"—but on the whole, it'll do. Anyhow, Mr. President, Mr. Taft, you must see that if I've got onto this, it'll get around within days or weeks. The question is, how do we handle it?"

"I've been trying to think of a precedent for any of this," Taft said from the corner where he sat—his first contribution—"but there isn't any I know of."

Roosevelt grimaced, and Oxford whispered to me, "Bet he's wishing he'd made Big Bill Chief Justice instead of running him for President. Bet Taft wishes that, too."

"Hell, there ain't no rules for this kind of thing," Edison said. "We're just trying to get some'p'n done here."

I was fascinated to note that his voice, high-pitched and comparatively uninflected earlier, was a tone deeper and notably more expressive. He must, I reflected, have a remarkably quick and vigorous intellect to adjust so quickly to the restoration of his hearing.

"Now, Morgan," he said, "this is going to break any time, and, from what you've told me, Randolph Hearst's got a lock on it, so it'll get a huge play in all his papers. Is he likely to turn it into a big scare—'Remember the What's-it' and so on?"

"If I can intrude, sir," Oxford said, "I can say that Mr. Hearst doesn't want to do that. He figures there'll be enough excitement over the facts to sell—to make journalistic history. And with Mr. H. G. Wells and me having the inside track with the, uh, astronauts, the rest of the papers'll have to make do with the crumbs from our table, so W. R. doesn't have to pull any funny stuff to keep out in front on this."

After more discussion, it was decided that Hearst would be placed under pressure to hold off his release of the news for two more days, during which time we would be sequestered in a hotel in a city called New York. This would allow Morgan, Edison and others they chose to notify confidentially to make the commercial dispositions necessary to cushion whatever shock this might occasion. Immediately after the announcement, our party would be sent on a tour around the nation, the custom with foreign dignitaries. It was felt that this adherence to habit would make us appear more ordinary and therefore more acceptable—and also not particularly interesting—to the populace, so that this course might, with luck, allow us to remain comparatively obscure until after the elections, some four months in the future.

"After that it'll be in your lap, Will," Roosevelt said.

"Not much room there," Taft observed genially, patting the swell of his stomach—I estimated his mass at about twice that of an ordinarily sturdy man—but Edison, Morgan and the President did not seem amused at his jest.

My consent to the plan was asked. It was clearly a matter of form, as three of the most powerful men in the country had determined on it, but in any case it suited me well enough. It would afford us time to study this strange world and its ways and would allow Ari to perfect his plans for turning those ways to our advantage.

The others, when we conferred in a corridor of the White House, agreed. "That's the way to do your Exploring," Dark said. "Let the natives make all the arrangements and stand the expense."

I was a little nettled to be reminded of the fact that we were Explorers, in view of the gross violation of Exploration rules our own plans entailed, but I let the remark pass; Dark was a complete pragmatist, interested only in whether things worked and not in the grand design behind them or in the laws under which both beings and devices operated. In this it seemed to me that he resembled Edison, and I recalled the inventor's remark that he proposed to have a long talk with Dark sometime. I imagined it should be quite an interesting conversation.

7

The two days we spent in New York before the announcement was made were instructive but largely uneventful. Wells and Oxford showed us some of the city; Ari pronounced himself pleased with the many typical Level Four characteristics it displayed, such as the simultaneous presence of opulence and misery; Dark was fascinated by the many modes of transportation—powered by steam, electricity, hydrocarbons, draft animals, and even, in the case of certain mobile shops, natives; Valmis claimed that there were Patterns there, but that he could not as yet Perceive them.

During the sightseeing on the second day before the announcement was to be made, we alighted from an electric vehicle near a tall, wedge-shaped building, which Dark wished to sketch, as he had never seen anything like it on any world; it was called after a utensil used to smooth clothes, I suppose because such items were manufactured or sold there. He pulled out the sheaf of molecule-thick metal sheets which Captains affect as notebooks and made his drawing.

We were at this time standing on a pavement beneath the building, and were frequently jostled by hurrying natives. That at least one had been motivated by more than thoughtlessness became evident shortly after Oxford suggested we repair to a place of refreshment across Fifth Avenue from where we stood, called the

Hoffman House. This establishment boasted a long counter at which a number of natives stood and consumed a variety of liquids.

"Ha!" Dark said enthusiastically after his first draught of what Oxford had recommended as suitable for a hot day, a substance called Würzburger. "This is the right idea! Here, let me pay for this round."

The gesture was less generous than it might seem, as the local currency we possessed had been provided by Mr. Hearst through the instrumentality of Oxford, who had presented us with well-filled flexible money containers and instructions on their use. It was also pointless, as Dark, reaching for his container, suddenly began patting his costume and glaring about.

"Hey, it's gone! That wallet thing, with the mazuma in it!" I wished that Dark, having been effortlessly granted the gift of communication in this tongue, had not evidenced quite so much fondness for the undignified cant terms in which it abounded.

"Welcome to Gotham," Oxford said equably. "Baghdad-on-the-Subway, home of some of the lightest fingers in the world."

"Come, now," Wells objected. "London's pickpockets are the deftest known. Look at Oliver Twist and Fagin. It's well known that social conditions—"

"It doesn't matter," Oxford said. "We've got the white card from W. R., and there's no problem about drawing some more cash and even springing for another wallet. Maybe a card of safety pins'd be a good idea, too."

"Well," Dark said uneasily, "that's all very well about the money and so on. But the chap got away with my notepad and, uh . . . " He searched for the word, but there was no equivalent in this language. "What I use to write with, you know. Among other things."

Oxford set his glass down. "Write with?" he said. "Among other things? What other things?"

"Well. . ." Dark took a sip of his liquid. "It's a tool we have, d'you see? You can set it to write on metal, or for small cutting and welding jobs, or for melting, or drilling, or punching holes. It's a matter of controlled, um, energy."

"Holes," Oxford said thoughtfully. "What size holes?"

"Oh, pretty much what you choose. It's a matter of focus,"

Oxford emptied his glass and demanded that it be refilled. When this had been done, he took a long drink from it. "What does this jim-dandy little tool look like?" he asked softly.

"Well, like a . . . like what it is. About so long, and a bit thinner than my finger. Comes to a point at the end."

"Something like this?" Oxford said heavily, reaching inside his coat and bringing out an object.

"Fairly. Only it's metal, of course, not wood. What's that thing?"

"We call it a pencil. Only all it does is write. It doesn't cut, melt, weld or punch holes in things. Damn it, man, do you realize—"

At this moment there arose a hubbub just outside the room—shouts of amazement, alarm and rage, and the sound of running feet.

Oxford turned and ran from the counter. We followed, heedless of the attendant's cries for payment for what we had consumed.

In the anteroom, a large area paved with decorative stone and adorned with trees in containers, we observed a slightly built native struggling in the clutches of three others. A cloud of smoke was rising from a large glass case containing a number of boxes and piles of elongated brown cylinders. The top of the case was marred by an irregular hole with a melted edge, and feeble flames flickered among the case's contents, producing the smoke, which was highly aromatic.

"Say, what d' hell is dis?" The native behind the case called out in agitation. "Dis bloke comes in an' asks fer a hot tip on a horse, so I'm a pal an' give him one, an' he goes to write it down, and next thing you know, dere's a hole in me case an' eight dollars' wort' of Perfecto Perfectos are goin' up in smoke all by demselves!"

"It wasn't me!" the captive native squealed. "Somebody must of set off a bomb in—"

"I'll handle this," Oxford said, stepping forward. He pulled his wallet from his pocket, flapped it briefly in front of the men holding the struggling native, so quickly that I doubt they could have had time to see anything displayed to them, and said, "Inspector Callahan, Anarchist Squad. We've had our eyes on this fellow for a long time, and now we've caught ye in the act, ye dim spalpeen! All right"—he gestured at us, grimacing ferociously, from which I deduced that he wished us to aid him in this sudden impersonation—"Sullivan, Dougherty, O'Brien, Levinsky, Napolitano, secure the prisoner and hustle him out! I'll meet yez on the street afther I've sifted for what this offers in the class of clues."

The four of us and Wells surrounded the confused native and marched him from the building. He seemed dazed and said nothing, only staring at his right hand, which I observed to be reddened and blistered.

"I think," Dark said, "that this must be the fellow—"

"Better drop that until . . . the Inspector comes out," Wells said.

Our prisoner emerged from his stupefaction at the sound of Wells's voice. "Which one are you?" he said sharply. "I don't know no Levinskys, or Napolitanos or Sullivans what talks like dat. Say, what kind of game is—"

Oxford now rejoined us, holding up a glittering shaft of metal. "This yours?" he asked Dark. "Found it in the cigar case. Dopey the Dip here"—I was surprised to find that he knew the little native's name, but I supposed that his work must have given him access to all sorts of information—"dropped it when his hot tip got hotter than he'd figured."

"All I done," the little chap whined, "was try t' write de horse down. But de pencil wasn't workin', and I give it a twist, an' den . . ."

"Quite a nice pencil," Oxford remarked musingly. "Where'd you get it?"

"Ah . . . Wanamaker's," the fellow said huskily. "Dey was on sale."

"Same place you got this and this?" Oxford reached inside the native's jacket, brought out Dark's notepad and wallet, and handed them to their owner.

"Say, you can't—"

"I just did, Willie."

The little man bristled. "Say, you ain't no bulls! What—"

Oxford nodded. "Right as rain, Raymond. We are not the bulls. We're with the Big Fellow."

The prisoner paled. "Not . . . ?"

"Not him," Oxford said scornfully. "D'you think that bozo has gadgets like the one you made the mistake of heisting? No, our boss is so big you haven't even heard of him. And you'd better make sure, Chauncey, that he don't hear of you, get me?"

"O . . . Okay. I . . . I c'n go?"

"You'd better, if you know what's good for you. All right, boys, he won't—"

"Ha!" Dark exclaimed delightedly. He had been inspecting his restored property. "That idiot didn't hurt it at all. See—" He pointed the instrument at the pavement. A hole about the size of a vehicle wheel in diameter and about the width of three fingers in depth appeared in it.

We all looked at it with fascination, none more so than our prisoner, who seemed especially struck by the fact that the perimeter of the shallow crater intersected the tips of his footgear, exposing the ends of his toes. He gave a shrill cry, wrenched himself from our grip, and bounded across the street, heedless of the rushing vehicles.

"Huh," Dark said. "Guess I spoke too soon. He must've jiggled the focus setting a bit. It shouldn't have done that."

"Shouldn't it?" Oxford said with quiet politeness, stepping away from the indented circle. "Perhaps you'll be good enough to arrange that it doesn't do it again? Or to put it away where some damned pickpocket can't get at it?"

"No need to be stuffy," Dark answered. "I can't help it if some bungler gets hold of a good tool and misuses it. Anyhow, nothing much happened."

"Nothing much!"

Dark chuckled. "Now, if he'd turned it up to full power, number twelve focus, say, well that would have been a different story."

"Different?" Wells said. "Different in what way?"

"Well . . . the core of your planet is molten, right? So—"

"I think we'd best get back to the hotel, fellows," Oxford said, looking suddenly quite tired.

That evening, in our quarters in a place called the Waldorf-Astoria, Oxford turned to me and said, "So far you haven't given me palpitations, Raf. D'you suppose it'd be safe for you to accompany me on a little stroll through the purlieus? Most of the time it's okay, hanging around you fellows and thinking about the bylines I'm going to get out of it—but once in a while it really hits me that I'm hobnobbing with men from some star I can't even see at night, and I'd like to take a small dive off the wagon. You game, Raf?"

I understood from this that Oxford wished companionship in some excursion about the city, and readily agreed. We walked to near where the wedge-shaped building was, the evening being clement, and were soon at a large structure adorned with arches and constructed of a golden stone.

Oxford told me that it was called a garden, which I did not understand, and was named for an open space next to it, called Madison Square. We ascended to the roof, where we found a number of tables, trees in containers, and a raised platform where singers and musicians performed.

This, according to Oxford, was known as a roof garden. I was impressed with the flexibility of a culture which apparently had no difficulty in handling the concept of a garden (of one sort) atop a garden (of quite another), neither of them resembling a plot of earth for growing edible or ornamental vegetation, but it also seemed to me to argue an imprecision of thought which boded ill for our hopes for this people's technical advancement. It would do us little good to have Wanderer refitted by a race which might well have three contradictory definitions of "aft control vane."

"Hey," Oxford said, "George M.'s here tonight—over there." He gestured toward a group at another table. "Bet you anything they ask him to do a number—sure enough, there they go."

The leader of the musicians who had been playing a lilting tune—having to do, Oxford informed me, with a woman who was cheerful in spite of (or perhaps because of) the loss of her mate—now came down from the platform and approached the table Oxford had pointed at. He spoke to a short man seated there, who, after shaking his head and smiling, arose and bounded to the platform.

The musicians struck up a lively air, and the short man capered about vigorously and sang in a loud, though not unpleasing, voice. His selections—involving, I recall, an announcement of his birth during the present month, called July, his preference for the name Mary, and a statement that he would soon be at a numbered street about a mile uptown from where we were—somewhat mystified me, but were received with great applause, in which I joined.

When the man came down from the platform and made for his table, Oxford called out to him, "Mr. Cohan!"

He approached us and said, "Hi. You're—oh, yeah. Ned Oxford. Hearst papers, right? Met you when you were going out to cover the Russky-Nip scrap. Say, you know I tried to work up a song about that, but never got to first base. Had a good line about the Yalu Peril, but there wasn't any heart to it. Main problem, audience didn't know which side they were rooting for."

Cohan looked at me sharply. "Heard something . . . yeah. You one of the fellows in this Hearst stunt?"

"Stunt?" Oxford said.

"Been talk around, last day or so, that your boss is up to something new, going to be a big story. This fellow part of it? Something about men from Mars, way I understand it. You from Mars, fellow?"

I looked at Oxford, nonplussed. He sighed and said, "There's no way of keeping a secret once the wise guys on Broadway start getting a sniff of it."

"Rosenthal and them are making book that Hearst is pulling a Barnum routine," Cohan said.

"Well, you could clean up pretty well if they give you odds," Oxford told him. "It's no stunt. Certified, proven fact, and the story breaks tomorrow. But don't put any money on Mars. Ambassador Raf, here, comes from a lot farther away than that. Listen, Cohan, you'll keep this on the Q.T., okay?"

"Surest thing you know," Cohan said. "I don't want the odds to drop before I've got a bundle down."

Oxford then took me to a place inhabited by members of his craft, among whom he circulated with great animation. I was left to my own devices at a counter much like the one at the Hoffman House, with nothing to amuse me but the view in a mirrored surface behind the counter and a glass of what Oxford called a "highball," arrived at by mixing a brown, aromatic fluid with water.

The taste was somewhat sharp, and the drink seemed to me to require further dilution. The attendant was in earnest conversation with a client some distance away, but I was pleased to see a large bottle of water within my reach. I withdrew the plug that closed its top and filled my glass, and was surprised to find that the taste was no less sharp, though different. The diluted drink in any case warmed me, and I looked with considerable interest and amusement at the images in the mirror, no longer minding Oxford's desertion.

The attendant, when he returned, seemed upset that I had helped myself to the water, but was mollified when I handed him the quantity of local currency he asked for. It seemed to me an excessive amount to pay, but I had no way of knowing the native customs on this point. And I had to admit that it was considerably more authoritative than any water I had yet tasted here.

Some time later we found ourselves at yet another counter, in a room of what appeared from the outside to be an elegant private house, but which, Oxford assured me, was the quarters of an organization of "players." I was about to ask him what game or games the members played, when my attention was drawn by the sight of Mr. Cohan talking animatedly to a group of people at the far end of the room. I pointed this out to Oxford, who invoked the name of one of the planetary deities, said, "I'd better give George M. the quietus on this again," and left me.

A native standing next to me at the counter sipped from his glass and said, "With a bare bodkin, preferably?"

I ran over the local expressions of inquiry I had assimilated and essayed what I hoped was an appropriate one. "How?"

"Oh, George is a good enough fellow. It's just that it offends me to the very soul that the theater has come to this pass. The song-and-dance stuff is all the go now, and trashy melodramas, and that fellow Shaw drawing the crowd by standing everything on its head. Nobody wants the real thing, the Bard. Women flock to the theater to look at me—"

I inspected him to see if I could determine the reason for this. He had wavy, thick hair; a straight, sharply pointed nose; and a firm, rounded jaw, and appeared to glare as he regarded me. I could see nothing really peculiar about him.

"—so all the managers care about is finding something that keeps my profile stage front. I could play Hamlet—"

"At what?" I asked.

My neighbor turned his stare upon me. "Not a joking matter; greatest role on the stage," he said truculently, and I realized my mistake. "Play," both in this conversation and, presumably, in the name of the club I was visiting, was to be understood in the sense of acting a part in a drama, not engaging in a sport or contest. It was another example of the chaotic nature of this language, and it struck me indeed that it might be possible to construct a whole sentence the significant words of which could be taken two ways.

"I 'played' in the 'garden,' " I said, chuckling at the conceit.

The man next to me ignored my deft wordplay and said, "Could do a Hamlet that'd knock their eyes out." He stared at the glass he held, then drank from it. "Listen." I did so, hoping to learn something of this Hamlet matter, but he then changed the subject, advising me that being was the central question of existence (or possibly the other way round; his terms were elaborate and unclear) and that, in the face of certain conditions (which he enumerated), voluntary termination of life might be called for.

One advantage of the philosophical style of conversation is that, being both personal and imprecise, it requires little in the way of actual information, and I welcomed the chance to engage in a discussion which would not reveal my ignorance. "The ethics of self-ending vary from world to—from place to place," I observed. "But if you were to do as you suggest, how then would you get to play Hamlet?"

My neighbor looked first at me, then into his glass, apparently studying it deeply. "Either I've been having too many of these things, or you have," he said. "Maybe both. What the hell did you mean by—No, I don't want to know. I'll be as bad off as you are if I try to work out what you said. Are you on the pipe or something?"

"Your race's fluids affect my physiology differently from the way they do yours," I explained. "I find they cheer but do not inebriate. That may, of course, be a result of my internal modifications as an Explorer." I had a feeling that there was something wrong with what I had just said, but could not isolate it.

"An Explorer?"

"Why, yes, how did you know?" My glass was empty, and I took a good draught from the one Oxford had left behind him. "Speaking of Exploring, I am reminded of the story of the time Pado's crew dropped in on this methane-breathers' world. They breathe methane there, d'you see," I explained, wishing him to be clear on the point, "not as it might be oxygen or helium or whichever it is you people use—I forget just what for the moment." The anecdote was a good one, and I fancied it held my listener's interest fully, as he stared at me throughout it, his eyes fairly glazing" with the intensity of his concentration.

Just as I finished, Oxford came up to us and said, "Sorry I took so long with Cohan, Raf, but I've got him to see he mustn't—ah, hello, Jack."

"Oxford," my conversant said in a low, plaintive voice, "this fellow's been telling me—to be fair, I should say I think he's been telling me—that he's a creature from another world. Has my mind slipped its clutch, or do you have the latest model in lunatics in tow?"

"Been spilling the beans, Raf?" Oxford said severely. "You know you shouldn't. . . ah, well, it's not that important. Jack'll keep it under his hat, I'm sure, and the story breaks tomorrow anyway. No harm done. Yeah, Jack, Raf's with a bunch of fellows that got stuck here when their, um, airship—only it goes through space—cracked up near Frisco, and Hearst's keeping 'em under wraps 'til he can spring the news right. They've already seen Teddy Roosevelt and been stamped 'passed.' Read all about it in tomorrow's American and Journal."

The man closed his eyes and drew in, then let out, a long breath through his mouth. "That's it," he said in a whisper. "When the ears go back on you and start feeding nonsense to the brain, then it's time to throw in the towel. Tomorrow I'll probably start hearing cues from some other play right in the middle of the second act." He pushed his glass from him. "Gentlemen, you have seen Jack Barrymore take his last drink, to be shortly followed by his exit, pursued by bugbears. Good night, sweet princes, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if I hear flights of angels singing me to my rest this night!"

I watched him leave the room, then turned to Oxford and said, "Sighbleshap."

"What?"

I was aware of points of heat at my nose and cheek-bones the sudden physical manifestation of impatient anger at Oxford's probably deliberate obtuseness. "Excitable chap," I repeated with forced patience.

Oxford gave me an appraising look and, with an inconsequence I found alarming, demanded that I give him some particulars concerning a person who sold sea shells next to the ocean, which I refused to do, not being in any way informed on the matter.

"It doesn't show much," he said, "but my expert opinion, Mr. Ambassador, is that you're grandly sozzled, and it's time to toddle on home to John Jacob's palace."

The computerlike speed and precision with which I divined from this string of cant terms the insulting suggestion that the substances I had consumed had altered my mental state was in itself a refutation of the slander, but as I was about to deliver a stinging retort, all the accumulated stresses of our near-fatal arrival on this planet, the uncertainty of both present and future, our travels, encounters and adventures—all these suddenly manifested themselves on my over-strained system, and I lapsed into insensibility.

8

The reaction to my accumulated fatigue stayed with me much of the next day, marked by such symptoms as dryness of the mouth, a stabbing pain in the head, and spatial disorientation, and I thus missed much of the immediate excitement surrounding the release of the news of our presence.

I was aware of Oxford rushing in to where I lay, early in the morning, and waving a copy of a newspaper at me. The front surface was covered with large red letters and marks indicating emphasis, but they vibrated before my eyes, and I was content to accept Oxford's assurance that they announced our arrival and ostensible mission. Apparently the bulk of the paper was given over to material concerning us, prepared by Oxford and Wells, with only the necessary information on sporting events and a page of humorous drawings remaining of the paper's normal contents.

"Circulation's double normal, and they're fighting for 'em in the streets," Oxford announced happily. "We'll have to throw the others a bone, of course. I've set if up for some of the press fellows to interview you this afternoon; otherwise they'd claim it's all a fake, in spite of the President backing you—but they'll never catch up with us now! William Randolph and Mrs. Oxford's boy Ted have got the inside track for fair! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"

At the thought of granting any interview in my present state, I gave a hollow laugh—which I regretted immediately, as it produced the illusion that the top of my head had suffered explosive decompression. When I pointed this out to Oxford, he looked at me closely and remarked, "Yeah, you're the original Katzenjammer Kid right now, I'd say, home address Hangover Square. What you want is a good, reliable corpse-reviver."

I gathered that this colorful, if repellent, term denoted a restorative for fatigue, and certainly the dark brown liquid he brought me after consultation with a number of the hotel staff had that effect. The taste was remarkably unpleasant, and it appeared to contain some corrosive substance which acted powerfully on the greater part of my interior surfaces, but I shortly found that my head had stopped pounding and that I was able to move from one point to another with reasonable accuracy and without the necessity of supporting myself on various pieces of furniture.

All the same, I was conscious of a certain weakness as I faced the group of about twenty reporters who crowded our suite a few hours later. They looked distinctly unfriendly and only begrudgingly impressed by the exotic appearance we made in our own clothing, which Oxford had insisted we resume for the occasion.

"What kind of fake is Hearst trying to pull off?" one man yelled, and there were approving mutters from some of the others.

"Before you boys get yourselves out on a limb," Oxford said, "you better have a look at these. Official government medical records, TR's statement, the works." He passed out numerous sheaves of paper, which seemed to impress the reporters, for their angry murmurs died down.

"This is one of the great news stories of the age," Oxford said, "and I can see you'd be sore, being scooped on it. But Hearst got it first, and that's the breaks of the game. Now he's being square enough to give you all your own chance at it, and I suggest you make the most of it. Gentlemen—and ladies; I see we have a few of you here today—I give you Ambassador Raf, who will tell you in his own words of his immense journey through the wastes of space to this planet and of his mission among us; questions afterward, please."

I gave them substantially the same account I had contrived for President Roosevelt, but it was received with less friendliness.

"How do we know you're not scouts for an invasion?" "What so-called benefits are we supposed to get when your masters come here?" "Isn't it true that your people will flood us with cheap labor?" "How does this stuff about life on other worlds square with Scripture?"

"His paper's for Bryan," Oxford whispered to me of the last speaker. "The Boy Orator's already come out with a statement saying you can't be so because you ain't in the Bible."

I fear that I did not make a vigorous response to any of these questions, as I still felt quite feeble, and they were fired with such rapidity that there was no time to compose coherent answers. This did not seem to matter much, for each questioner would start scribbling on a piece of paper or notepad he or she held as soon as the query was made, without awaiting any answer. "They know their own paper's line," Oxford muttered again, "so they've already got the story angle they need—it don't really matter that much what you say. Teddy's for you, so the Republican papers'll make you out a cross between the Rover Boys and Andy Carnegie, and the ones that are backing Bryan'll come out for burning you at the stake." I hoped he was jesting.

Questions of a startling irrelevancy now emerged, and I was asked whether I thought certain giants (a class of being of which I had not been aware) would manage to gain a pennant they were apparently in search of (I suggested that their height ought to allow them to reach it successfully, if it was out of the reach of ordinarily constructed natives, which seemed to be the right response), my opinion of the city's tall buildings and whether I had as yet visited a public monument of some sort which they had placed in the midst of a large body of water.

"That's the color stuff," Oxford advised me in an undertone. "They use that to make you seem just like everybody else."

"If they want to portray us as totally ordinary," I whispered to him, "what is the point of writing about us at all?"

He shrugged. "The whole thing is to persuade the readers that even the most remarkable people, or whatever, are something they can handle. A prince or a king or something, d'you see, they don't cotton to him unless they know he's got tight shoes or likes baseball or eats a hot dog—then they've got something in common, and don't feel they have to shy a half-brick at his head. And believe me, you fellows need all—oh, oh. You better field the sob sister's spitball pretty smartly: she's a flaming suffragette."

A female native was waving energetically at me.

"Mr. Ambassador!" she called in a strident voice. "You have told us nothing of life on your world. Is there equality of the sexes, as there should be in an advanced civilization? What in fact is the position of women there?"

I confess that I had not anticipated questions relating to a life which now seemed so long ago and far away, and, for a moment, I was at a loss as to how to reply. Dark, who with my two other companions had been standing behind me, stepped forward, evidently tired of his subordinate role in the proceedings. "I think I can say something about that," he said. "Wells has been discussing the matter with me pretty thoroughly—it's the kind of thing he goes in for—and—" Wells, his face scarlet, plucked at Dark's sleeve, but was shaken off. "—I've got a lot of things pretty clear in my mind that I'd sort of forgotten, what with all that time I've spent in space. Now, as to the position of women among us, there are a number of them. My own favorite—"

He then gave a succinct description of certain of our folk's standard mating practices. The woman who had requested this information did not seem at all happy to have received it, for she turned white, swayed, and appeared about to lose her equilibrium. A man next to her took her arm to steady her, but she wrenched herself free and made a gesture as if to strike him with her writing instrument. The reactions of the other reporters included awe, hilarity, and dismay; several took notes on pieces of paper other than those they were using to prepare their stories.

"Boys," one of them said after a moment, "my paper's got a motto about all the news that's fit to print, and I think we have now come past that point. I don't know that I could keep my hand steady enough to write anything more down just now. Thanks, Oxford, Mr. Ambassador; I guess we've had enough."

It was another example of how much we had to learn about this culture that I was surprised that it took so long for the results of the interview to become available; taking into account the widespread use of electricity, I had expected some sort of viewing of the news to commence almost immediately. However, I learned from Oxford that this was not the case and that the appearance of what he called "Extras" from all the newspapers within only a few hours marked an extraordinary effort.

It was certainly remarkable that they had managed to print so much based on the skimpy material the reporters had gathered, but Oxford assured me that this was a specialty of the craft, and not to be wondered at. Many journals contained highly imaginative drawings of the four of us, some of humorous intent. One showed us, ludicrously out of scale, grouped at the top of the planet and looking down at its surface. Dark was highly amused by the printed line underneath, which represented one or all of us as saying, "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there." I myself found it a distressing reminder of our situation.

"Ah," Oxford said with satisfaction, pausing in his rapid survey of the newspapers. "I was looking for this. This fellow's stuff goes down awfully well with the public, and if he's written you up, they'll be ready to believe you're okay."

He passed a page to me, indicating an item. There seemed, as I read, to be an element in the writing I had not yet encountered, though I could not be sure what it was. "These gents have come from outer space," it began, "to visit this poor human race, and, truth to tell, they're not so weird or sinister as might be feared. They seem like ordinary folks, and one of them likes risky jokes (at least we hope the guy was joking). Their presence sets old Gotham smoking—what they're doing, what they want, what they can do, what they can't, are things that no one knows for sure (we note not all their thoughts are pure!) . . ." There was more in the same vein, which I found hard to follow.

As Oxford had predicted, reactions differed according to the politics of the papers' owners. Readers of a journal favoring Bryan in the coming election might well receive the impression that we constituted a menace to civilization and to religion; one such suggested that since their cult considered Earth the spiritual center of the Universe, without making provision for the existence of life elsewhere, we must be regarded as supernormal manifestations of powers inimical to the cult, and that harsh measures toward us might be appropriate.

An opposing paper presented to its readers a glowingly optimistic account of the benefits to be expected once full contact with our supposed Empire was established, and called for what it referred to as an "Open Door Policy" toward space.

A journal called The Times contained a piece which made Oxford raise his eyebrows. "This'll get some backs up," he said. "Listen: 'With the coming of these ambassadors, so like us in appearance and behavior, yet emissaries of a realm unimaginably far and strange, a new age has opened for humanity. It is an irony of history that this has happened in the waning days of Mr. Roosevelt's presidency, for the vigor and breadth of vision which even his opponents have respected would have meant much to the nation in the dealings with the astronauts. Whatever the virtues of the two contenders for the office, it cannot be said that either has demonstrated any qualities which will be outstandingly useful in handling a situation so utterly without precedent in history.' "

Oxford set the paper down and looked at Wells. "True enough," he said. "If a problem can't be solved by Bible-thumping and orating, it ain't up Bryan's alley. And Taft did all right pacifying the Philippines, but it's not the same thing. In fact, come to think of it, we're the little brown brothers in this setup. I guess there's a lot of people going to be wishing it was Teddy running again, not those two. And I'm not sure I'm not one of them."

"I wish I could disagree with you," Wells said thoughtfully. "I really prefer to look at history as being determined by large-scale things, such as science and invention, economics and so on—the whole business of making out that it's the fights between kings and such that's important irritates me. It's damned sloppy thinking, and is responsible for more . . . well, never mind that. But I have to say that this does seem to be an age of accidentally important men. Your President's one of them—I'm sure the history of the last eight years would have been different without him in office—and there are others. I can't imagine, for instance, anyone else affecting Germany the way the Kaiser has; without him on the throne, things would be quite different. It's an odd thought, you know, the changes one different circumstance could make. It might be rather amusing to work out what might happen if just one thing in history had gone differently. Say the South in this country had won the Civil War. Then the whole business of the transcontinental railroad, the colonization of the Midwest, the destruction of the Indians, would never have happened. Instead of a world power, the United States would have been a moderate-sized republic, secondary in influence perhaps to Brazil or Canada, with the hegemony of the northern continent falling to the Confederacy, with its strong European ties. That's the thing," he went on animatedly, his bulbous eyes shining. "It's almost like a chemistry experiment—make one change and, if you, know what's involved, you can see what would or should or might or could happen as a consequence. And the thing is, if you make that one change—you don't need others—things are bound to happen. It wouldn't be . . . what? That's it"—he gestured with his right hand, occasioning the loss of some portion of the fluid restorative he held in a glass—"elegant, that's the word, otherwise. Slip one change into the equation and see how the rest all balances out; add one or two more, and there you are with the three-body problem, and who wants that, I ask you? I may do a piece on that for one of the papers, so I don't want you fellows pinching the idea in advance and flogging it to Frank Leslie's or Collier's. That's it; put in one change, and the most fantastic upshots will start shooting up. Next thing you know, given the right single change, Lord Alfred Douglas might be crowned Queen in Westminster Abbey, not that he isn't about halfway there already. What a marvelous idea!"

Ari, Dark and I looked toward Valmis, who appeared agitated at this unwitting echo of his obsession from a being who, in Valmis's view, was himself inhabiting a continuum created by just such an altered circumstance. Valmis seemed on the point of speaking to Wells, but Dark stepped between them and Ari spoke up. "Ah, yes, Wells, you were telling me something of the, um, Kaiser, was it? Most interesting, most; and I'd appreciate it if we might continue. We may leave looking through these tedious newspapers to Raf and Mr. Oxford." He drew Wells to a far corner of the room.

"Now, you shut up about this nonsense," Dark muttered to Valmis. "It's bad enough some of 'em think we're demons or some such. If you go prattling about how your mythical machine created 'em or split 'em off or whatever it is, they'll lock us up as lunatics if they don't believe you, or put us in that chair of Edison's if they do!"

Valmis nodded resignedly, and I felt safe in returning to Oxford and the newspapers. With a little effort, I might be able to puzzle out the significance of that curiously cadenced news story.

9

The President appeared more vigorous and buoyant than when we had last seen him. He crossed his office and extended his hand to each of us in turn, saying, "It's bully to see you gentlemen again, just bully! By George, you've stirred things up, haven't you?"

Behind me, Oxford whispered, "That stuff about dumping Taft's got to him, all right."

The details of the trip which was to introduce us to such of the American nation as chose to notice us, and them to us, had been worked out by discussion among the presidential officials and Oxford, and it had been agreed that the journey should start with an official meeting with Mr. Roosevelt in Washington. It seemed to me a strange proceeding, as Roosevelt, in common with the greater part of those involved in the government, had fled the capital to avoid the damp heat and noxious vapors of summer a day or so after his second private interview with us, and was now ensconced in his family home about twenty miles from New York City; but it was felt to be vital that images for reproduction in the newspapers be taken of us in front of the White House, and so he and our party had traveled, though separately, for several hours on the trains for the encounter.

"Well, I don't mind telling you that I'm taking a good deal more interest in these proceedings right now," the President said jauntily. "I believe it may be that you people and I will have a lot to discuss in a few months. It's a little early to talk about formal treaties, of course, but I think we all might be keeping in the backs of our minds what's involved. We'd want, for one thing, to work out what sort of guarantees—"

At this point, his secretary, Mr. Loeb, entered with a whispered word for his chief, much as he had done just before the incursion of Mr. Morgan and Mr. Edison previously.

"Well, I . . ." the President said uncertainly.

"He says it's urgent, Mr. President."

"Well, I can't just . . . it's difficult, but, yes, I suppose you'd better . . ." He gestured impatiently, and Loeb left. "I think I know what this is," he muttered, looking at Oxford over his pince-nez. "Guess you do, too. There's been talk going around . . ."

Mr. Taft entered the office, fairly shaking the floor with his tread. "Theodore—Mr. President," he said, "I've . . . they've been to talk to me." He sank into a chair, which quivered for an instant, but held firm. "The party bigwigs, and Cannon, you know, plus a couple of Senators. They . . . they . . ."

"Will," the President said softly, "you're a big man . . . in every sense. Don't let this get to you."

Taft threw Mr. Roosevelt a sharp look. "You've got some notion of what's going on, then? You seem to be taking it mighty coolly."

"Well, now, Will, it's a grave matter, and calls for calmness. What is it Kipling says, 'If you can keep your head when all about are losing theirs'?"

Taft looked at him again before replying. "If you're in the mood for poetry, Theodore, I'll tell you that I feel like that line in 'The Wreck of the Hesperus'—'"We are lost!" the captain shouted as he staggered down the stairs.' Rhymes with yours, too, come to think of it."

"Just what's happened, Will?" the President asked him. "What did these fellows who came to see you want?"

"I suspect you've got a pretty clear idea of that. These . . . astronauts here"—he threw us a glance bright with dislike—"have thrown a monkey wrench into the whole damned election. Bryan's all for having 'em exorcised or lynched or such, and our crowd's saying that I'm not the man to handle 'em so as to get something useful out of 'em. And the party feels that our line has got to be that we've got a candidate who can do just that. And, by God, they've got on the telegraph and polled a quorum of the delegates to the convention—the same fellows that nominated me on the first ballot last month!—and got 'em to agree to 'accept my withdrawal if offered.' "

"Ah, Will," the President said, laying his hand on the big man's shoulder. "It's a heavy load to bear, but for the good of the country . . . And look at it this way: the presidency was always a second choice for you, I know. You wanted a place on the Court more than anything—well, I'll be able to see to that for you, by George! That business about not running again, well, that can't apply now, not with . . ." He gestured toward us—with, I noticed, his right hand. I was pleased that he would apparently be able to accomplish his goal without sacrificing that useful member.

Taft looked up at him, then, impressive as a force of nature, rose from his seat until he stood, looking slightly downward at the President, seeming to dominate the room by his very bulk and gravity. "Theodore," he said, "you've only got the half of it. You're not going to be the one putting up Supreme Court appointments to the Senate, any more than I am. The National Committee, well, they've been talking with some of the fellows in industry and finance, and they've all pitched on someone they think can work the best with our visitors—someone who knows science and so on—a man who—"

"Confound it, Will! What the devil are you trying to say?"

"Oh, Lord!" Oxford said behind me. "They can't be—but, oh, sweet spirits of ammonia, it makes an awful kind of sense . . ."

"I have the honor to inform you, Mr. President," Taft said bitterly, but not without a note of satisfaction in his tone, "that the delegates to the Republican National Convention for the year 1908, electrically reconvened, are prepared to designate as their candidate Mr. Thomas Alva Edison."

The President's teeth and eyeballs shone vividly as both were bared by a sudden contraction of his facial muscles, but there was a dead silence in the room until Wells broke it with an awed murmur: "Gorblimey!"

10

After the picture-taking, which was conducted in a subdued mood—I noted later that the results were quite striking, as the President bore an uncharacteristic expression of savage gloom—we returned to New York to prepare for our tour. On the way, Oxford and Wells animatedly discussed the startling political developments. We did not participate, but at one point Oxford said to me, "This'll smooth things for you. It was going to be a pretty dull campaign 'til this happened, and now it'll be a humdinger. The public will be grateful to you for gingering it up. You'll be as popular on the road as John L. or Christy Mathewson."

And so it proved. Wherever we went during the next months, we were greeted with enthusiasm, mixed with a certain derisive affection; evidently the Americans had in the main concluded that, whatever our supposed mission, our actual function was to provide them with some novelty and distraction. We—usually I, as it was agreed that Dark was too apt to say alarming things, that Ari had little interest in communicating anything except Metahistorical data, and that Valmis was still too high-strung—addressed crowds from the rear platform of our train, at banquets in cities and small towns, at picnic grounds, at county fairs; we shook hands, wrote our names in native characters and our own script in albums designed for the purpose; posed for pictures with local dignitaries, sometimes partly garbed in regional costume; spoke well of prominent features of the landscape and whatever manufactured or agricultural products characterized the area; threw out the first ball at baseball contests and threw curved pieces of iron, normally intended to protect the feet of work animals, at uprights set in the ground. All of this was recorded by a picture-taker accompanying us, written up at great length by Oxford and telegraphed each night to the Hearst newspapers in New York and San Francisco; and, as he told me, resulted in a substantial rise in circulation for what he called "the whole chain."

It took us from the beginning of August to the middle of October to complete the tour, which seemed to me an excessive length of time for the benefits that might be expected, and I told Oxford so. "We're dragging it out a little," he admitted, "but Teddy—and Edison, when he got into it—held out for that. They want you off the board for most of the campaign, and while you're whistle-stopping around like this, you aren't in any one place long enough for folks to get excited about you for more than a day. If you were where the news-hawks and politicians could get at you, there's no telling what you might say or what someone might pull, and the whole applecart could turn over. As it is, it's going fine. Edison's line in the campaign is to ignore Bryan, and it looks like the voters are doing that, too. Edison mostly sits out in Menlo Park and talks about the wonders of the future, and when he does stir to make a speech, it draws the crowds like flies. Bryan's making a fool of himself, pounding away on the same note—send you back where you came from and don't contaminate our pure old Earth with heathen ideas—and all he gets is half-empty halls, with the audience shuffling its feet and wishing he'd get back to Free Silver."

Our quarters—a three-car private train—were a good deal more spacious than Wanderer, but the journey was so extended and filled with repetitions of essentially the same events that I found myself unable to retain any clear impression of the whole or to form any picture of the nation through which we were paraded, and could afterward recall only a few striking incidents.

I do remember our first stop, only a few miles from New York City, at Mr. Edison's establishment. Though the inventor was absent, to Dark's disappointment—he was, we later learned, in Washington, conferring with the President and his party leaders and at that very hour agreeing to accept the hastily offered nomination—we were shown about with great courtesy. It was somewhat tedious for Ari, Valmis and myself, as our interests did not encompass machinery, to which the place seemed to be devoted, but Dark was fascinated.

"This electricity stuff," he told me, "that's all very well, but it's really a pretty crude way of working with something they already knew about. What's really impressive is that talking machine thing—d'you know Edison thought it all up himself? Now that's inventiveness, that is. Of course, it's all wrong," he said to one of the staff, who stood nearby.

The man stiffened. "Wrong?"

"Well," Dark explained, "you aren't going to get really accurate sound reproduction by working mechanically, you see. No matter what you do, you're limited by the fact that you've got one solid thing bouncing off another. It's awfully clever, but it's like trying to get into space travel by shooting off explosives—you can make a start at the idea, but it won't get you far. What you want to do is, you want to get down the electric impulses, and then reproduce those."

"But . . . huh," the man said. "Say, you folks mind if Charley here takes you the rest of the way round? I've got something I want to get at."

Dark chatted in the same manner with a succession of guides, apparently boring them greatly, as each tended to pass us on to another on the plea of work to be done.

Certain other happenings of the tour remain with me, though it would be hard to say when or where they took place. I recall that Oxford was most impressed when we met with an ancient native, who was apparently held in great honor and affection because, in the course of conducting warfare on behalf of his nomadic tribesmen against the dominant culture, he had slaughtered a great number of Oxford's people and achieved a reputation for cruelty. It may be that I missed some element of Oxford's explanation that would have made it more logical.

The old man studied me keenly. "Your people sending a war party after you?" he asked. I assured him that this was not so, and he appeared disappointed.

"I saw the white men come with their trains and telegraph wires and fences, and the Indians vanished like mist. Wasn't their soldiers that ended us, but the things they had and the way they lived. I saw that—me, Geronimo. Saw it and fought it but couldn't stop it. Nobody could. I'd like to see the same thing happen to the white man while I'm still alive. Be a damn good joke."

I noticed that after this interview Oxford and Wells looked at me uneasily from time to time.

It was a constant habit of the natives to escort us about such of their industrial establishments as were located conveniently near our stopping places, and we developed the custom of relegating this duty to Dark, as he was the only one of us capable of at least appearing interested in such matters. This generally worked well, but led to one unfortunate incident.

He and Oxford had gone off on one of these excursions, which we expected would take at least two hours. Wells, Ari, Valmis and I were taking our ease in the lounge car when we were surprised to see the vehicle in which they had left returning at a high speed. It stopped next to our car, and Oxford fairly dragged Dark from it and thrust him onto the train, then turned to an individual in a blue uniform who remained in the vehicle and shoved a sheaf of currency at him.

"Thanks, Chief," I heard him call. "This should help you keep a lid on what happened, right? And, say, listen, would you tell the engineer to pour on the steam and get us the hell out of here right now?"

"Surest thing you know, Mr. Oxford," the uniformed man said respectfully, quickly thumbing through the bills.

In a moment, Oxford and Dark entered our car, stumbling as the train suddenly started into motion. Dark had a bruise under one cheekbone, and his native jacket had a tear at the collar.

"Whatever's been going on?" Ari asked, peering at him.

Oxford glared at Dark. "Your friend here suddenly took a notion to cut loose and start beating up our hosts. Is he subject to fits or something? It cost me a lot of W. R.'s long green to square things with the police there, but I guess they'll handle it. What the hell did you think you were—"

"I couldn't help it," Dark said. "It just got to me. Listen, Raf, do you know what these people do?"

"All sorts of things, I expect," I replied.

"No, I mean—look, I know I don't get out as much as you fellows when we're—"

I broke in, for in his agitation he appeared to be about to say more than I thought prudent about our actual work, Exploration—it was still vital to keep up the fiction of being a diplomatic advance guard. "Oxford, Wells—would you mind if we discussed this alone? I promise you we'll get at this, but Dark's a bit upset just now, and I think we'll find out what's wrong more easily if we have him to ourselves."

When the two Earthmen had gone, Dark resumed. "You see, I stick with the ship mostly, while you three go out and sniff around the natives of whatever planet it is. So maybe it's that I don't get to see so much of what goes on in different places. But I tell you, this . . . I couldn't believe it!"

It appeared that he and Oxford had been taken on a tour of a factory engaged in producing textiles. There were a great many machines of commendable ingenuity, all creating a great noise and filling the air with an unwholesome dust composed of fibers of the material being processed. The work, Dark observed, was carried out by small creatures, perhaps half the size of the natives, who performed it quite nimbly. These he supposed, to be certain members of a class of creatures known as primates, some of which, distant evolutionary cousins of the humans, we had seen in cages in a park in New York, assiduously trained for tasks which the natives themselves would find distasteful or perilous.

"That didn't set too well with me, for I could see that the job would wear the beasts out pretty quickly. But, after all, that's the way it is with sentient races; the ones further down the ladder are going to be used for something by the fellows on top." What had really made Dark uneasy was what seemed to him the rather nasty-minded humor involved in removing the creatures' facial hair and dressing them in clothing similar to, though of poorer quality than that worn by the natives, so as to make them resemble their masters.

His disapproving comment on this was received with incomprehension by those conducting him through the factory, and he was finally given to understand that the workers were not what he had supposed, but rather were in fact juvenile humans.

"And it wasn't even as if they were being punished," he said to us wonderingly. "Their own children, put out to work like that. They didn't look like humans any more, really—all sort of dried up, and some of them coughing . . ."

As Dark told it, once this had sunk in, he had given a yell of outrage, struck out wildly, and felled two or three of those nearest him; only Oxford's quick action in removing him from the scene and "squaring" the chief of police had averted an extremely awkward scene.

"I am afraid you do get a narrow view, being confined to the ship," Ari observed. "Certainly, according to our own standards, what you observed is distressing, even outrageous. But there are practices among other humanoid races which we, as Explorers, have been obliged to witness calmly, beside which this pales into insignificance. I recall particularly the Pththn, who—"

Valmis and I recalled them as well, and begged Ari not to go into any detail.

"Well," Dark said, glowering, "it's all very well to keep up a detached attitude about these natives and what they do to each other. But I'm damned if it's going to worry me any more, this business of messing around with their culture; they could use some pretty drastic changes!"

Normally our encounters along the way were conducted with prearranged care and formality, but there was an amusing instance somewhere in the middle of the country, after our departure from a town, village or place called Dayton, when Oxford appeared in the lounge car, marching two natives before him. These were lanky, solemn-looking individuals, who looked at us with a sort of feverish eagerness.

"Stowaways," Oxford said grimly. "Nipped on board while the crowd was surging around you and hid under some seats up forward."

I was feeling pleasantly relaxed, having been treated during our halt to some few glasses of a local fruit drink known, I believe, as applejohn, and I spoke to the intruders in a friendly manner. "You wanted our autographs, then, my good men? You needn't have gone to all that trouble to—"

"They're not interested in souvenirs," Oxford said. "These chaps claim to have built an airship—"

"Heavier-than-air," the taller of the two said indignantly. "There's a difference. And it ain't a claim—Wilbur and I, we've flown it, shown it around, even demonstrated it to the Army, but nobody'll pay it any mind, not even you newspaper fellows, that'll write up a two-headed calf as if 'twas the biggest news since Richmond fell. Now, from what everyone says, these foreign gentlemen here, they've got the President's ear, and Wilbur and me, we think that if they was to tell him—"

"Ah, now, look," Oxford said. "This is that sort of kite thing you flew in North Carolina five years back? Now, I remember that; it got a line or so in the metropolitans, but what's so great about it?"

"Hey," Dark said. "You say you got something up in the air without, um, floating it? And you don't have gravity repulsion here, that's for sure—how did you manage that?"

As the two brothers explained it, they had joined together the unrelated concepts of a kind of airborne toy, a propulsion mechanism intended for boats, and a power plant used in road vehicles to construct their machine.

"My word," Dark said, "that's quite something. And you worked out the airflow stuff all on your own?"

He and the two strangers repaired to a corner of the car and talked earnestly for some time, all three of them frequently making swooping motions in the air with their hands.

At our next stop, about an hour later, Dark saw them off the train before our ritual greeting by the town's dignitaries. "You're on the right track," he called after them. "You've got to look for better power sources, d'you see, and ways to lose weight. All the rest follows, if you're going that way. You can't do much that's worthwhile unless you get hold of antigravity, of course, but that'll do to get on with. Really remarkably clever for natives," he added, turning to me, "but I tell you, it's discouraging to think that that's the best they've come up with. It's all very well for them to find ways to potter around in their atmosphere, but it's no indication that we're going to get these people licked into any kind of shape to help us out with Wanderer."

As I have said, the middle of the time period known as October found us back in New York City, and we spent two weeks recovering from the effects of our journey, undertaking nothing more in the way of exertion than short walks and one excursion to the statue about which we had been questioned at the news reporters' interview in August. This was a large structure of metal, shaped almost as if to represent a native female, located on an island near the city, positioned so as to dominate another island nearby, on which persons wishing to enter the country were detained for some time. The intent, both of the detention and the location of the statue, appeared to be to intimidate the newcomers and prevent them from causing any inconvenience to those already resident. This insight, which I arrived at almost intuitively, was borne out by an inscription at the base of the statue, which referred to the arrivals from other places as "wretched refuse." Though striking me as strong—it was admittedly difficult for me, at this point, to distinguish between one sort of native and another—the designation appeared to reflect accurately the opinion held by more established inhabitants of those who passed through what the same inscription mysteriously referred to as "the golden door."

Our travels and our relaxation from them had kept us from paying much attention to the election campaign, although we had gathered from occasional discussions between Oxford and Wells that there was hardly any chance that Edison would not get what Oxford called the nod. This was a relief, as it was clear that Mr. Bryan, if victorious, would deal with us harshly, as offenders against his cult's views.

We were, all the same, somewhat on edge as we gathered in our hotel suite on the night of the election to listen to the results. A newly installed device, something like an enlargement of the Communicator amplifier I had given Edison, hung on one wall, and transmitted to us the latest information.

After some time, I realized that the voice relaying it was curiously familiar. "Bryan's sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, ladies and gentlemen," it said. "Latest reports show that there's something rotten in the State of Georgia—by less than a thousand votes, it's gone Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. O! that this too, too solid South would melt—and, by God, it's doing just that! Hum; there's nothing else coming in over the wires for the moment. Just time for a quick—that is, in the ensuing interval, my sister Ethel will entertain all you hundreds of electrodiffusion subscribers out there with a rendition of her Broadway hit, 'Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines.' "

"Wasn't that . . . ?" I asked Oxford.

"It sure was," he answered. "Barrymore's got a, great voice for this thing. Good for him—but what's it going to do to newspapers? These gadgets have only come out in the last month or so, so hardly anybody has 'em, but by the time the next election rolls around, they'll be all over the place—and then who's going to rush out and grab the papers out of the newsies' hands to find out what's going on? I tell you, this century's rolling on a bit fast for mine."

"It's a great medium for popular education," Wells said. "Imagine—the great men of the time speaking their thoughts into every home, the classics of the race brought within the reach of all. It'll be ten times more the cultural revolution that we had in England with the Popular Education Acts and the penny press."

Oxford gave him a tired look. "Maybe so," he said.

"But you'll notice that they don't have a great mind or even an experienced reporter handling the election coverage on this thing, but an actor. Barrymore doesn't know beans about politics, but he's got nice, pear-shaped tones, and that seems to be what counts. I think this gadget's going to be a way to get more drivel across to people than the papers ever dreamed of trying."

Ari, Dark, Valmis and I turned in, once it was mathematically certain that Edison had won the election; Wells and Oxford remained awake, intent on the electrodiffuser, until well past sunrise. As I left the sitting room, I heard Barrymore's voice saying, "It appears, ladies and gentlemen, that William Jennings Bryan, in the words of the Swan of Avon, must now be seen as a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more." At least, I thought, he had dropped his monomania, which I so vividly recalled from our encounter at the player's club, for someone he called the Bard, and had a new enthusiasm, this Swan, whoever he might be.

11

It was in a state of some discomfiture that I found myself, a few days after the election, in a horse-drawn vehicle ascending the winding road that led to President Roosevelt's home outside New York City—Sagamore Hill. I had been given to understand that Mr. Edison would not become President for some months, and I had hoped to defer my confession of our actual circumstances until that time. However, an urgent summons to Sagamore Hill to meet with the (soon-to-be-ex-) President and his successor to discuss "matters of mutual concern to the United States of America and the Galactic Empire," delivered the day before by a White House messenger, left no doubt that Mr. Edison meant, as Oxford put it, to "jump the gun."

I could not expect Edison to take at all well the news that we were not an advance embassy, sent to open the way for a profitable relationship between Earth and a mighty realm of spacefarers, but rather that we were merely a party of castaways with nothing to offer. And even this, of course, would not be the whole truth. Our intention of making every attempt to speed the growth of the planet's technology still presented our only hope of departure, though we had not yet been able to arrive at any clearly defined plans, and it did not seem to me to be prudent to go into this.

I looked uneasily at Ted Oxford, who sat next to me in the carriage. I had wished to tell him of our problem, but Dark and Ari had been firmly against that. "Do it once and get it over with," Dark had advised. "If you spill it to Oxford, he'll likely start getting the jim-jams imagining what the government will do to him for being mixed up in it—prison, hanging, the Edison chair, or something else they might get up specially. The very thought would make the poor chap so nervous he'd be apt to do anything."

I could well believe this—certainly, similar thoughts centered on myself were producing very unsettling effects. I felt that I could have consulted Wells to useful effect, but he had been obliged to return to England the day after the election, as he put it, "to see to my affairs." Dark later told me that, from what he gathered from Wells's conversation, these affairs were apt to be political or sexual or a combination of the two, and I could understand the urgency which possessed the slightly built journalist.

I was roused from my brooding by the halting of our conveyance and a murmured "oh-oh" from Oxford. A large and elegant automobile, with a small American flag displayed on its front parts, stood in front of us, leaning at an angle, with two wheels in a ditch at the side of the road. Two uniformed men were laboring with long poles to right it, but did not seem to be making much progress.

"Them as takes their autos up this road always seems t' get stuck just about here," the driver of our carriage said dreamily. "Or if 'tain't here, then on the next bend. Station hack ain't good enough for 'em, my, no, got t' chug up here in their fancy gas-burners. Pride goeth before a fall and an haughty spirit before destruction," he further observed, which seemed to me an excessively harsh way of putting it.

"Hi! You!" With some dismay, I recognized a stocky, white-haired figure standing beside the stranded car as Edison. "I've got to get on up to Sagamore Hill to—oh, it's you fellows. Give me a lift, will you?"

"Lift," our driver muttered to Oxford. "It's farm carts, or as it might be your family buggy, that gives lifts. A hack, now, takes fares. There's a difference, you see, one bein' in the amateur line and t'other in the professional."

"Driver," Oxford informed him in a low voice, "the gentleman requiring our help is Thomas Alva Edison, President-Elect of the United States."

"Hum," the driver said. "In that case, and seein' as we're most of the way there, he c'n ride for half fare."

To my relief, Edison did not plunge into the topic which I had been summoned to discuss. Looking back at the toiling chauffeurs as our carriage moved on, he said, "That's a fool way to do things, building cars that don't fit the roads they've got to run on. I expect you people"—he turned to face me with a sour look—"don't have that sort of problem."

"Our ground transportation is organized on somewhat different lines," I admitted. "I don't know the details, but the—"

"Don't tell me," Edison said. "Whatever you've got there, it wouldn't work for us, I'm sure. But there should be a way to get a narrower wheelbase that'd support enough weight and still be stable . . . let me see . . .". He fished a notepad from his pocket and became absorbed in making notes and sketches on it. "No, that wouldn't do it," he muttered. "Outriggers? A built-in jack . . . nope. Ha! There's a thought, now. You'd have to . . . Yeah, that'll make Ford sit up and take notice; I c'n get this off to him tonight . . ."

He spent the rest of the journey on his rapid calculations, giving vent to an occasional pleased exclamation.

Mr. Roosevelt met us on the lawn in front of his house and ushered us into a room of considerable size, much more imposing, yet, as it were, personal, in atmosphere than his office in the White House. A large heating device in which pieces of wood were burned, providing both warmth and a decorative effect, stood at one end of it; that it was dangerous to approach this mechanism was indicated by the presence of the outer covering of a large animal, with intact teeth displayed warningly, stretched in front of it.

Another such skin, covered with irregular spots, but without the teeth, was thrown over the back of a type of wide chair, ample for two or three; this skin must have had a different significance, as Roosevelt seated himself and Edison on the piece of furniture with no sign of a qualm, and invited Oxford and me to draw up chairs to face them. I was glad to do so, as this position placed my back to the head of a large, horned animal protruding from one wall. Although the balance of its body was evidently contained behind the wall, so that it was prevented from entering the room, it had a fixed, unfriendly stare that I did not care for.

"Now that we don't have to worry about Bryan declaring you anathema," Roosevelt said, "we can get down to business. Most of it's going to be Edison's problem, but I imagine there are some things I can do while I'm still in office to get this business started."

"Right, Mr. President." It seemed to me that Edison used the term with a certain sardonic relish. "For instance, Ambassador, just about how soon do you expect to be able to make your report to your people?"

It was clear that my last chance to temporize was gone, that my only possible course was to be completely candid and forthright. "There is a . . . um . . . difficulty about that," I said, suddenly feeling that forthrightness could wait for a bit.

"Difficulty?" "Difficulty?" The two Presidents spoke as one President.

"Well, about this Empire . . . it . . . there isn't what you could actually call an Empire, really. . . ."

Edison's face was unnervingly stony, Roosevelt's even more unnervingly mobile, as I gave my explanation.

When I had finished, Roosevelt said slowly, seeming to bite off each word with his large teeth as if he wished to destroy it as it was spoken, "Do you mean to tell me that you have turned the politics and government—the very history—of the United States of America upside-down with this story? And that it's not true? By Godfrey—"

"Well, we are from another planet," I broke in hastily. "That part's true enough, and there's really quite a number of advanced civilizations about. It's that . . . um . . . well, they don't do much in the way of trading and such, especially with the . . . ah . . ."

"Primitives," Roosevelt said heavily.

"Well, yes; you see, it wouldn't be worthwhile . . . It's not that your sort of world isn't interesting," I said. "Why, that's what the Explorer Service is all about, to gather information about places unlike our own planet, don't you see? It helps the young people so much, and quite a few adults consult our archives, too, when they've nothing better—when there's something they want to know about, that is."

Edison jammed his hands deeply in his trouser pockets and regarded the tips of his shoes. "Well, well," he said mildly. "Ten thousand or so years of human history, a few billion souls, the great republics, kingdoms and empires of a planet—a rainy day's amusement for the kiddies, that's what we are, huh?"

"Our climate differs from yours in that—" I began.

"Keep quiet, by George!" Roosevelt said. "You'll pay for—"

Edison lifted a hand. "Now, Mr. President," he said. "Just put yourself in these fellows' place. When you're off to Africa next year, why, s'pose you got lost in the jungle, lost your supplies and so on. And you came to some tribe you couldn't be sure was friendly. Now, wouldn't you maybe try a tall story on 'em so's you could count on their help? You didn't have any big stick to carry, why, you'd have to bluff, right?"

Roosevelt evidently did not care for the comparison, but apparently could not fault it. He gritted his teeth, then turned to Oxford, who had sat quite still beside me since I had begun my confession. "By Godfrey, were you in on this? Was Hearst? Was it a put-up job between you and these . . . derelicts?"

"It's news to me, Mr. President," Oxford said, with a forced attempt at his normal jauntiness.

"Well, it had better not be news for Willie Hearst!" Roosevelt declared. "If a word of this gets out in the papers, it'll be an almighty embarrassment to the government and to me personally—but it'll be the devil to pay and no pitch hot for Hearst, let me tell you!"

"Mr. President," Oxford said earnestly, "let me tell you straight out that I had sooner take passage on the Flying Dutchman, and steerage at that, than to explain to Mr. Hearst that the stories I've been getting my bylines on for the last couple of months have been all moonshine. My lips are sealed, believe me."

"They sure are," Edison affirmed, sitting up suddenly. "Now, I'm counting on you to back me on this, Roosevelt, 'cause it's the only way to handle it. Oxford, you're not working for Hearst any longer, effective at close of business, as of even date, and business has just now closed. You are an officer in the United States Army, bound to official secrecy by whatever appropriate acts and ordinances, et cetera, et cetera. Roosevelt, swear him in—you can have Loeb do the paperwork and figure out what rank he is later on."

"But I don't see—" Roosevelt began.

"Don't have to see it, man! I'm goin' t' be carrying the can on this, and you've got to help me!"

Both Roosevelt and Oxford appeared bemused as the one administered and the other received the oath confirming the impromptu commission.

"Fine!" Edison said. "So you're our man now, Oxford, not Hearst's. And your job's to ride herd on this bunch of castaways—keep 'em happy and out of sight until after I'm inaugurated, and make sure there's nothing about 'em gets in the papers that hasn't been there already. I don't have the least idea in the world what I'm goin' to do about 'em, but now's no time to start rocking the Ship of State. Once I get to the wheelhouse, I'll have worked out what to do. There'll be something, I don't doubt. I've lit up the world, startin' with a piece of burnt bamboo for a filament, and it'd be mighty strange if I couldn't figure a use for two brace of astronauts!"

12

Although he appeared to have relegated Mr. Roosevelt to a minor role, Edison did turn to him for help in finding quarters for us, and the President was able to place us in a house some miles from his own, without alerting the owner or the townspeople to our identity. The cost of our housing and maintenance, including an elderly couple named Bonacker who saw to the cooking and housekeeping, was paid out of the public purse, again by some means arrived at by Mr. Roosevelt.

By the time we were settled in the large house, on a bluff overlooking a harbor, the foliage had fallen from the trees, and we were able to see some distance, down to the water and across to the opposite shore. It was a lonely place, sparsely built up, with a huddle of houses and a shipyard and a dock on the shore below us—the name of the place, Glenwood Landing, appeared to derive in part from this last feature—and an establishment which combined the functions of provision store and post office a little inland. A couple of miles' walk up a long hill led to a larger cluster of stores and houses, called Glen Head, and a station on the railway. Oxford told us as we debarked from the train from New York that we were seeing this station for the last time until he had further word from the President or Edison. "You fellows are free to stroll around the shore and so on, but the station area's off-limits, by order of Lieutenant Colonel Oxford, Commanding."

He spoke lightly, but it was evident that he felt the gravity of his hastily conferred military rank. "I tell you, Raf," he confided to me about that time, "it's not that it makes me all that nervous that I could be shot for insubordination or something if I pull a bad boner now; I mean, if you get W. R. Hearst down on you, why, shooting'd seem like a week by the beautiful sea compared to that. But I am now, by presidential order, an officer and a gentleman. Lord, if the Market Street crowd in Frisco heard that Ned Oxford was a certified gentleman, it'd hand them a laugh, no kid!"

We now settled into a time of quiet, which I at least found restful, occupying myself mainly with invigorating walks through the nearby area. A few miles away, past a large lake on a private estate, guarded by large swimming birds which appeared ready to attack any intruder, or even passer-by, lay a small village at the head of the harbor. There was in this place a refreshment establishment with a convivial crowd of habitues, from whose conversation I was often able to pick up much information on the culture—which was, after all, a part of my function—although it often developed that after spending some time there and joining in the refreshment, I was unable to retain any very accurate impression of what I had heard.

Valmis spent most of his time reclining on a stuffed piece of furniture on a glassed-in porch, regarding the trees and sky outside. He claimed that this was the best way to Integrate, given our circumstances.

Ari was happily busied with going over great piles of books and journals which Oxford had sent from New York City and elsewhere, and he declared that he was beginning to arrive at an understanding of the principles of Metahistory as they applied to Earth.

Dark also studied some of the journals, though little of their text; he was fascinated by pictorial representations of mechanical devices, especially those of self-powered land vehicles. "Wouldn't it be great to drive one of those," he said wistfully on one occasion. "The thing about running a spacecraft is, unless you run into trouble, there's no feel to it. But imagine pushing yourself through the atmosphere, just ramming through it, the engine roaring in front of you, feeling every bump in the road, the landscape spinning past you, and you controlling the whole thing! But Oxford won't let us have one, damn it!"

I thought I might divert him with an excursion to Roslyn, the neighboring village, as I had noticed next to the tavern a large mechanical device of a sort I thought he might find interesting. "Ha," he said when he saw it. "The water coming down off the hill there turns it, and that shaft it's connected to runs inside that building, where it does some work. My word, these people like to do things on the cheap—all that power, and not paying for it. Hmm—interesting arrangement of slats or whatever . . . catches the water so it turns, but lets it out so it doesn't slow the motion down. How . . . ?"

He leaned forward to examine it, but his interest was dampened—as indeed, was he himself, as I humorously pointed out afterward, though he did not seem to understand the jest—when he slipped and fell onto the wheel, which rolled him down into the stream that fed it, then carried him beneath it and expelled him into the waters of the harbor.

A native in a boat nearby caught him when he surfaced, hoisted him aboard, and brought him ashore. As a needed restorative measure for Dark, and a reward for his rescuer, I insisted that both repair with me to the tavern. In short order, Dark, wrapped in a blanket while his sodden clothing steamed in front of the fire which warmed the room, sat next to me on a bench, while our guest faced us across our table and sipped a warming drink.

Dark took a gulp of his—it was made, I believe, with a distillate of fermented molasses and adorned with a lump of animal-derived fat, and had been heated by plunging a piece of hot iron into its container—and said, "Ha! What power that thing had! Just whooshed me along under the water and flung me out! Those slat things really bite into the water. Say . . . that'd work the other way, wouldn't it? I mean, look—you could put a power source onto one of those wheel things, d'you see, and stick it into the water. And if you had it on the side of a boat, when it turned, why, the boat would just push through the water like mad!"

Our guest looked at his glass and at ours before he spoke. "Seems t' me you'd just sort of spin round if you did that," he said carefully. "Hangin' it over the side, the way you seem t' be suggestin', why, it'd turn your boat in circles, 'stead of goin' ahead, as I s'pose you'd want it t' do."

"Oh." Dark thought this over. "You're right, I guess. What a shame."

"O' course," the other went on wryly, "you could put a pair of 'em on, one on one side, one on t'other. That way they'd balance out, an' you'd get more power, too, I expect."

"Hey, that's a great idea!" Dark exclaimed. "Listen," he said to me, "do you think we could do ourselves some good with these people by putting them onto that? Or maybe," he went on, lowering his voice and giving a quick glance across the table, "if things don't go so well when You-know-who gets inaugurated as You-know-what next March, and we have to make our own way, we could sell the notion. We'd cut this chap in on the profits for helping, of course."

"There was talk," said Dark's rescuer, looking at a point somewhere above our heads, "about sellin' off the William Cullen Bryant place down the shore road for a lunatic hospital. Either of you fellers hear if that ever come about? Or if there was any other such enterprise openin' up hereabouts?"

"No," I answered. "We don't, ah, get around very much, and don't get to hear what the na—what you people talk about."

"Did seem t' me that was the way of it," the man said, standing up. "Been interesting talkin' to you fellers. I don't know when I've had a conversation just like it. Thanks fer the drink, but I think I've had enough. Suggest maybe you have, too."

"Ah," Dark said, "but look at it this way. If one of these things gives me a whole new approach to water transportation, what wouldn't another one do?"

The native seemed to have no adequate response to that, and left.

Our walk home, an hour later, began pleasantly, though the sky was covered with clouds and the brisk wind was bitingly cold. After a bit, though, I had the uneasy impression that the unfamiliar stimulant we had taken at the tavern was affecting my senses; it seemed to me that I saw several white spots whirling through the air, and at the same time I experienced a chilly, stinging sensation on my face and hands. Worse, it appeared to me that the ground and trees were gradually becoming tinged with white, as though my ability to perceive color were draining away.

"Well," Dark said loudly as we trudged along. "This is interesting countryside, the trees and all. They look different from our trees, don't they? The fronds or whatever they are falling off them like that."

"They aren't the same as at home, no," I agreed.

"Quite different, in some ways," he said. "And the ground, too. One notices, from time to time, so to speak, some differences about that." I saw him give a quick sidelong glance at me. "And it isn't to be expected, I suppose, that the air would always be the same, either."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Nothing in particular, Raf, but—whoop!" One foot skidded from under him, leaving a trail in the illusion of whiteness on the roadway, and he nearly fell.

I stooped and ran my hand along the ground. A scraping of white matter gathered on it, which quickly resolved itself into a clear liquid which I recognized as water.

"Hey, this stuff's real, isn't it?" Dark called, having made the same experiment.

"It seems so," I replied. "It's like rain, I imagine—of course, it'd naturally come down frozen when the temperature drops." I was irritated with myself for not having foreseen this phenomenon, which now seemed natural enough. It does not occur on our home planet—nor does the climate there change with time, as on Earth, which I suppose accounts for its absence—and I had not encountered it in the course of my Exploration duties; but still, given the factors involved, I ought to have been able to predict it.

"That's good," Dark said. "I thought that stuff we drank was making me see things."

"That would be extremely unlikely," I told him.

"Our implants are specifically designed to keep us from being affected harmfully by anything we ingest." I spoke with some severity, I fear, as I was reproaching myself for having forgotten this.

"That may be," Dark said, "but I don't know that they were meant to handle anything like that rum stuff."

In spite of our enforced leisure, the time passed swiftly. Shortly after we marked the turning of the year with the ceremonies Oxford insisted on, which for some reason resulted in all of us being afflicted by a temporary return of the fatigue I had experienced at the players' club in New York, I realized that there was not much time remaining before Mr. Edison's inauguration as President.

I sought out Ari. "Listen," I said, "hadn't we better start working our plans out? I don't know what Edison will do with us, but it seems to me we've got to be ready to get at this business of speeding up the native technology, or we'll never get away from here."

"I think I've got an approach," Ari said. "Mind you, it's not completely clear in my mind yet, but it's coming. This is a remarkable world, remarkable. There are some very intriguing possibilities. . . ."

As an experienced Recorder, I have to say that this sounded as though what was being communicated was that Ari was completely baffled, but in fact only a few weeks later, he called us together out of Oxford's hearing to lay out his proposed course of action.

"One thing that has fascinated me," he began—Dark rolled his eyes; we all knew from experience that whatever fascinated Ari was likely to take a lot of time in the telling—"is the attitude toward warfare. It seems to be a general assumption that, in spite of the disastrously prolonged wars of the planet's past, modern weaponry and transport will result in wars which, if they are fought at all, will be short and sharp. All the major nations have secret plans, which journalists are able to ferret out only with some effort, calling for swift movement of troops by railway, automobile and bicycle to deliver decisive blows to an adversary. At the same time, there is a worldwide interest in peace, with many nations cooperating in a running conference designed to assure it in one of the smaller countries in Europe. The almost unanimous opinion of informed people is that wars are on the way to becoming a thing of the past and, if they occur at all, will only be temporary and local.

"Yet," he went on, "I have discerned a Metahistorical pattern in some of the very measures designed to assure this. In Europe, for instance, all the major powers are allied with others, the notion being that no one will go to war with any one nation, as several others are pledged to assist it, presenting a joint antagonist too powerful to deal with."

"That doesn't seem like such a bad notion," Dark observed. "I've gone to lots of refreshment places and such on different worlds that I wouldn't care to enter unless I had a couple of friends with me to discourage some disorderly chap from seeing if he could take me apart for fun."

"Quite," Ari said. "But I recall a few occasions on which such friends have had to deliver you to Wanderer in a fairly used-up state."

"Well, that was when the disorderly chap had some friends with him, too, and . . . oh."

"Precisely. This balance of alliances may well deter one power from making war on another—but if it does not, it then assures that any war becomes a general war. And that, gentlemen, is what is about to happen."

We would have taken his word for it, but he felt impelled to go into detail—I suppose to have some fun after all those months of research. There was a lot about the effects of industrialization and public health work, but the interesting bits concerned the fairly odd people who ran some of the big countries. There was one in England, where Wells came from, who seemed fairly sensible, but he was getting on and not well, and so would have to be considered as a temporary element. For some reason, which I didn't understand Ari's explanation of, two of the other important rulers were relatives of this King Edward's, by blood or marriage. One of them, the Emperor of Germany, was apparently a highly excitable type and much given to doing alarming things. He claimed to be an absolute monarch, but all the same had nearly been thrown out, within the past few months, owing to a lot of odd goings on. Apparently he had been at a party where one of his generals, dressed in a woman's dancing costume, had dropped dead; and this and similar matters had not set well with the Germans. The other was also an emperor, in a place called Russia, and while not as active as his cousin or whatever the relationship was, was almost as alarming, as he had a tendency to do nothing much and pay attention to whomever had spoken to him last. This resulted in many countries being under the impression that they had agreements of various sorts with Russia—agreements which turned out not to be effective.

These and several of the other kings, emperors and such in Europe had possessions and alliances in other parts of the planet. "So the whole point," Ari explained, "is that once anything happens, it's going to spread all around the world. And, given the factors I have already pointed out and the extremely unstable temperament of the principal personalities involved—Wells was right about that, you know—why, that anything is bound to happen. This Nicholas, the one in Russia, for instance; he could get nervous about keeping his people under control and decide to start up a war to give them something to keep busy at. He tried it a few years ago, and it didn't work, but that doesn't seem to bother these people. If he went into what they call the Balkans, say, that would bring Turkey into it, and England would get nervous about India, and likely join with the French to stop him; William in Germany might lend a hand either way, and they'd all draw on their colonies and friends and relations, and you'd have—"

"Hey!" Dark said. He had been studying the map Ari had provided, trying to keep track of the countries involved in the discourse. "Here's something interesting."

"Interesting as opposed to what?" Ari said testily.

"Look here. This Russia place, a bit of it runs all the way to this ocean here, see? And on the other side of that, you've got San Francisco, which is near where those ham-fisted natives sank poor old Wanderer. Well, then, this part here, what they call Siberia, that's where we near as anything crashed. I think I could work it out . . . Ha! Right here, a place called Tunguska. We'd have blown a damned big hole in it if we'd impacted."

Ari and I looked quickly at Valmis, expecting him to get into his familiar routine about the morality of using the Probability Displacer and point out that in one continuum we had created an impact crater in the Tunguska region, but he merely shrugged and said, "What is, is. Or perhaps it isn't. But we might as well act as if it is, as there isn't any way to act as if it isn't."

There isn't much you can do with a statement like that, and I rather welcomed Ari's resumption of his lecture.

"The main point is, this whole place is close to critical mass, so to speak. It's going to go up, to explode in general warfare, and soon. Probably not for another three years, but certainly within six or seven—say, 1912 to 1916. Every principle of Metahistory dictates that, in spite of what the natives may think. There will be wholesale destruction and slaughter; much of the civilization on this planet will lie in ruins; all the energy, wealth and ingenuity the major nations possess will be expended on an effort which will drain them completely and achieve none of the objectives they intend."

We contemplated this dire picture for a moment, then Dark said, "Ah, then, what we've got to do is work out a way to get them to stop it and set about learning how to do what they've got to do to refit Wanderer. How do you think we could—"

"No." Ari shook his head. "On the contrary, we must bend every effort to get them into this war as quickly as possible!"

13

I am no Metahistorian, nor would I care to be, so I could not fault Ari's logic as he explained it; but the idea did seem a bit raw to me.

So it did to Dark. "It makes sense the way you put it," he said dubiously, "but I can't say I like it. I mean, it's all very well to say that they're going to have the war anyhow, and if they start it up now, it'll go faster and be done with, so we get the benefit of the speed-up in science and so on without everything getting used up—all right, you're the Metahistorian, and I expect you know what you're talking about. But all the same, prodding them into it, that seems pretty shabby."

"True enough," Ari said. "It was not an easy decision to arrive at, either ethically or, I may point out, in terms of long hours of study and calculation performed whilst you, Raf and Valmis were amusing yourselves. It represents my best effort and thought, but I should of course be glad to hear of any more acceptable alternative you might have to offer."

As he was well aware it would, this effectively silenced our objections, and he proceeded to the next stage of his plan. It was necessary, according to him, to pay personal visits to certain of the important rulers—mainly Edward of England, Nicholas of Russia, William of Germany, and possibly Francis Joseph of Austria, though this last, being advanced in years, might well not be in any condition actually to comprehend much of what was said to him—and, using Metahistorical principles and techniques, to act upon them so as to speed up their war plans. He refused to be more specific than this, saying, "I'm a Metahistorian, and you're not. It's all I can do to handle the responsibilities of my craft, and I can't imagine what it might do to you to have to deal with it. I'm certain I don't want to be an Integrator or a Captain or a Recorder."

"How are you to get to see these fellows?" Dark asked. "Or is that a secret, too?"

"On the contrary," Ari replied. "It is a matter of practical detail, not of Metahistory, and so does not fall within my scope. Getting us from one place to another, setting up appointments—that's the sort of thing Recorders and Captains traditionally do, as I recall, and I am sure that you and Raf can manage it. I am perfectly willing to handle the really difficult parts of the enterprise, the actual dealing with these monarchs."

Dark and I found after a few moments' discussion that the solution was easily arrived at. That is not to say that it struck either of us as very good, just that it was the only possible one.

"Everyone still takes us for ambassadors, bar Oxford, Edison and Roosevelt," Dark summed it up, "so there'd be no trouble about getting at the kings and such, once we were where they are. So we've got to get Edison to let us go over to this Europe and go see them. Not, of course, telling him that we want to stir them up into shooting at each other—I don't suppose he'd go for that—but, oh, saying that they might want to help out in doing something to get Wanderer refitted. That's what we actually will be after, of course, in the long run, so it's not that far off the truth."

When we told Oxford what we felt prudent to reveal of our plans, he said, "I don't know why he wouldn't go for that. If you're traveling around hobnobbing with the Kaiser and so on, that'll help keep up the fiction that you're what you're supposed to be a while longer. I don't know what he'd do with you otherwise. I have to say, it tickles me that you guys put such a big one over on both those big guns, Teddy and Edison. And, for that matter, I'm a little easier in my mind thinking of you as beached sailors instead of a sort of advance guard of a whole new civilization. It kind of got to me when old Geronimo said what he did, because that seems to be the way of it—even if the civilized fellows come in with the best of intentions, the ones who are there already get it in the neck, one way or another. They just can't compete, and they sort of give up and turn themselves into carbon copies of the new people. We've done that often enough, Lord knows, and I don't favor poetic justice one bit, not when I'm on the short end of it."

As our intention was precisely to create drastic change in the society of the whole planet, though not quite in the way he spoke of, his comment made me uneasy. I liked Oxford—we all did—and had reason to be grateful to him, and it went against my grain to have to conceal from him that we proposed to act in a way he would find upsetting. On the other hand, concealment was necessary if our interests were to be served, so there seemed no choice; conscientious action, it seemed to me, ought always to be founded on rationality.

"It is a sort of ordeal," Ari observed, "perhaps a survival of customs I have read of in Levels Two and Three in this planet's cultural evolution. They conduct the ceremony in the open in this abominable cold to show that both the old President and the new one are hale enough to stand it, and I suppose it works well enough; I believe only one of them ever died of it."

I was more interested in the content of Edison's inaugural speech than in its setting, though my ears and face were painfully chilled. We had been invited to witness the ceremonies, and Oxford had taken us down to Washington—rather faster, I noted, than the trip had taken us seven months before, as the newly installed electric turbine locomotive cut considerable time from the run. As we had been bidden to a White House afternoon reception immediately afterwards, I had determined to put our proposition to the newly installed President then, so paid special attention to his references to us in his speech.

"We have this past year," he said, his voice carried to the extensive crowd—and, I realized, to many parts of the country—by the rapidly growing network of elec-trodiffusion devices, "been privileged to encounter the greatest opportunity and challenge mankind has yet had to face. Men from another planet—from another star, one we cannot see—are among us. What they bring to us, and how we deal with them and their gifts, will mark our future. That future is far more varied and exciting than it appeared to be before last summer. We have had our eyes opened to the fact that we are not alone in the Universe, and even, in some ways, may not count for very much. Well, it will be the main work of this Administration to see that the American people aren't counted out—that we use the presence of these visitors from unimaginably far away to secure a place in the future fitting to our glorious past."

Quite gracefully put, I thought, and neatly avoiding any awkward references to the nonexistent Galactic Empire. Perhaps if nobody mentioned it any more, it would be forgotten; the people of Earth did appear to manifest somewhat flighty intellects. The rest of the speech did not hold my attention, as it dealt with such parochial matters as the establishment of a national scientific academy, the regulation of electrodiffusion, and the granting of independence to some Pacific and Caribbean islands obtained in a war ten years before, on the grounds that they were more trouble than they were worth.

This last item appeared to agitate Oxford, however, for an abrupt movement he made in the chair next to me nearly caused the tall cylindrical hat he was wearing for the occasion, as all of us were, to fall off. "If he can do that, he's a wonder," he muttered. "The fire-eaters in Congress'll be after him in no time. But if anyone could bring off turning the Filipinos and the Porto Ricans loose, I guess he could—all he's got to do is tell 'em it makes scientific sense and dollars-and-cents sense, too, and who's to argue with the genius who's electrified the world and made a fortune at it? Imagine, we've finally got a President who means to do things because they're sensible—who ever heard of that?"

The reception at the White House was a crowded affair, and the new President was so much in demand that I did not get a chance for a word with him for nearly two hours. I drove off the effects of the cold with several glasses of a warming beverage that had the peculiar quality of bubbling in the glass, something like the Würzburger Oxford had recommended to us at the Hoffman House, except that it was paler and had a more delicate taste.

President Edison spent a good deal of time with a somewhat younger man, thinner and notably shrewd-looking. I later saw this man talking with Dark, to their apparent mutual interest; he then drifted over to Ari. I joined them in time to hear Ari say, "Mr. Ford, I cannot agree with you. The study of the past is the only key to the future and, indeed, to the present."

"I'll tell you again," the man said, "history is bunk."

"Your opinion as to the worth of the scholarship extant on your own planet," Ari said with determined politeness, "is, of course, your own business. However, looking at the principles expounded and tested by the discipline of Metahistory—"

"And Metahistory is metabunk, I guess," the man said. "This fellow here one of you? He know how any of your things work?"

"I am a Recorder—as well as being an ambassador, of course," I added hastily, still wishing to keep up our pretense. "Recorders Record and Communicate; they do not study mechanics."

"Huh," the man said. "How about the fourth one of you? Has he got any notion of mechanics?"

Ari explained to him the function and methods of an Integrator, and the man shook his head. "Four of you, and only that Dark fellow's got the know-how to talk about any of the things you use. What a way to run a railroad!"

"What did he mean about a railroad?" Ari asked after the man had left us. "We don't have anything to do with railroads. Nor does he, from what he told me; he makes those car things, not trains."

"These people, even the brightest of them, have a way of lapsing into inconsequence," I told him. "They start with one thing and finish with another. I expect their brains work differently from ours. Remember that, as it may work to our advantage."

I finally found the President alone, leaning against a wall and looking rather tired. I had acquainted myself with the name of the drink being served, and I gestured cordially with a glass of it as I approached him. "Nice champagne, this," I remarked.

Edison curtly said, "I s'pose it is. Would have liked to've had American stuff, but they tell me it isn't good enough yet. That's another thing we'll see to in time; no reason we can't put out wines as good as anything that comes from France."

"Ah, France," I said, pleased that a natural introduction to my proposal had presented itself. "That's in Europe, France is."

"I know that," Edison said.

"We ought to go to Europe, d'you see?" I went on. "A good idea, visiting Europe. See the kings and whatnot. Being ambassadors."

"But you darned well aren't ambassadors!"

"Ah, but they don't know that," I said, shaking an admonitory finger at him. "Wouldn't it be nice if we all went to see them, see, and . . . and, well, got them to see if they could help us get poor old Wanderer back together. I should think any king or emperor would want to do that, if he was the right sort of king. Or emperor," I added, wishing to be fair. I had not given Mr. Edison the closely reasoned presentation that Dark and I had worked out, but in the festive circumstances of the occasion, it seemed to me that something more informal was called for. Also, I found that I could not quite recall the full details of my intended argument.

"You fellows want the U.S. government to stake you to the Grand Tour? Go call on royalty and chat with 'em about your problems, the things you know, and so on? That what you've got in mind?"

"In a nut-husk," I said, pleased that he had understood so quickly.

"That's about the size of it, I'd guess," he said, with a glance at me. "Well, I'll tell you. Let's see, you're all going back tonight to that Glenwood place?"

I assured him that we were. "Fine. Well, you'll have my answer in the morning, you can be sure of that."

Our late afternoon journey back to New York was enlivened by the presence of Mr. Roosevelt, who for a while abandoned his family, traveling a car or so ahead, and joined us.

"By George, I was pretty sore at you fellows for a while," he told us. "But I'll tell you, just as Edison was taking the oath today, and I was telling myself how sorry I was for myself, I saw in a flash how I'd be feeling if I was taking it—and that was pretty darned glum. I could've taken another four years of it in my stride, in the ordinary way of things—there's the Canal to see through, and the trusts could do with a little stampeding still, politics and all that—it would have been lots of good fights of the kind I'm used to, and maybe some good coming of it, which is all you can ask. But this business with you people—I have to say that's 'way off my range. I expect I know more than most men about this Earth and what goes on on it, but I'm not geared to look outside it, and I guess Edison's the right man to see to it, after all. . . ." He looked at the landscape speeding by outside the window for a moment, then turned to us, shedding his pensive mood.

"Well, I'll be busy enough, anyhow," he continued.

"My son and I are packing and sorting things for the African trip, and I don't suppose I'll have an unoccupied minute for the next three weeks. Oxford, why don't you bring 'em to Hoboken to see me off?"

Oxford said that might be a good idea, as we had travel plans of our own and might wish to acquaint ourselves with the general aspect of a ship before embarking. Mr. Roosevelt questioned us about these plans and gave us much information about King Edward, the Kaiser, the Czar, and Francis Joseph, who was also called a Kaiser. He explained this by informing us that "kaiser"—and, indeed, "czar"—were derived from the family name of a native chieftain who flourished two millennia previously. He then discoursed on language, giving me some most valuable insights into the mental workings of the natives; on political and social experiences he had had, which quite fascinated Ari; on naval gunnery and the construction of battleships, to Dark's great interest; and even drew Valmis out of his customary Integrator's state of withdrawal—which in persons of other crafts would be known as torpor—and into an animated discussion of the relationship of philosophy and the workings of nature as exemplified in the behavior and construction of animals.

"By Godfrey," Roosevelt said, standing and rubbing his hands together, "I feel the better for our little chat. Be interesting to see how Edison handles you fellows for the next four years. Always good to match wits, isn't it? If he's not up to snuff . . . well, 1912 isn't all that far off. I'll be seeing you."

Tired after our journey to and from Washington, we slept late the next morning. I, in fact, did so to a lesser extent than I should have preferred, as I was awakened from a comfortable, sound slumber by Oxford's hand shaking my shoulder.

"If a fellow's been on the trains for hours and frozen his ears and nose in some primitive ceremony, and hung about a reception and all that," I said, "it seems to me that that fellow ought to be able to sleep a bit and not have a fellow shaking a fellow's shoulder."

"I believe," Oxford said, "that you told me the President said you'd have his answer about the trip this morning?"

"Oh," I said, sitting up. "It's come, then? What is it?"

Oxford strode to the window of my room, raised the shade and then the window itself, admitting a gust of chilly air. "Take a look."

I got out of bed and went to where he stood. When I leaned out the window, I could see the front entrance to the house. I could also see the two uniformed men who stood in front of it, each resting on his shoulder a firearm equipped with a sort of knife on the front part.

The two others at each visible corner of the house were similarly equipped.

"That's the answer," Oxford said grimly. "A detachment of Marines—to keep us under house arrest!"

14

Oxford showed me the letter the officer in charge of the party of intruders had presented to him upon their arrival about a quarter of an hour before.

Lt. Col. Oxford:

You and the so-called astronauts in your charge are hereby ordered confined to your present quarters until further notice, said orders to be enforced by the detachment of Marines who will bring you this letter. I am using Marines as I don't think there will be any question of your trying to pull anything funny about your rank with any of them. Marines don't pay much mind to the Army, and I am told that holds true for Capt. Thatcher especially.

I have got nothing against you, but you are needed there to keep an eye on them and for other purposes I will explain, and remember that you are in the Army, which means I am your Commander in Chief, so it is not just a matter of a pink slip in your pay envelope if something goes wrong. You know what I mean, I am sure.

Now, these astronauts have had more than half a year's board and room and travel and per diem and so on, at U.S. expense, and most of it under false pretenses. It is time they started earning their keep. I suspect some of them are not playing with a full deck

"What does that bit mean?" I asked Oxford. "It's one of our terms dealing with, ah, cultural differences; don't worry about it, just go on reading."

but there is knowledge there that is bound to be useful to the U.S.A. I certainly do not propose to have them gadding around the Old World, telling anything they might know to a crowd of foreigners. We have got to get what we know from them and develop it, and then we can decide how much of it we can sell—not give away—to other countries.

You have a great opportunity to be of service to your country, and I am sure you see that you had better take it. Set these fellows to work writing down what they know about their machinery, power sources, weapons, and so on. Get any stuff they have away from them on some pretext so that our technicians can work on it, but be sure to find out if there's anything dangerous about any of it first, as I do not want Menlo Park to burn down again. The engineer one and the simp I know have some interesting things, but do not overlook the other two, as even what they might use as a toothbrush might turn out to be something we haven't even thought about here yet.

I emphasize that these people are a vital resource in the possession of the U.S.A., and with them in your charge, I expect that you will get good results. You had better.

I am sure I do not need to tell you that disclosing the contents of this letter to any person, and especially to the astronauts, is a court-martial offense. I have not asked anybody to look me up the military law on that point, for I don't doubt that the President can find a way to make sure that an officer who disobeys a direct order is not just in hot water but in superheated steam.

Yours in confidence

Edison

There were a number of points about this missive which seemed to call urgently for my attention, but one stood out above the others.

"Why did you show this to me?" I asked. "Now he'll boil you or whatever he meant."

"I don't expect," Oxford said, "that you'll put a call through to the White House to tell him about it. I have to admit that some of the things you do and say make me less sure of that than I'd like to be, but I'm banking on it all the same. The thing is, I didn't like that letter. I don't like being pushed around, and I don't like having you fellows pushed around and milked like cows. And I damned well don't like the President—a man I've been brought up to revere since I was a kid, and that I voted for—pulling a stunt like this. No President should do that, and Tom Edison especially shouldn't—it's not worthy of the office or the man—it's a cheap business, and I don't mean to go along with it."

"Well," I said uneasily, "that's very square of you." It was certainly useful that Oxford had chosen to side with us, but once again I felt a momentary oppression at the thought of the necessity we labored under to change his world around him without his consent.

"I can see his point, of course," Oxford went on. "He's under an awful lot of pressure—it'll be the devil's own job to pull the fuse out of that business about your nonexistent Empire, now that folks have got hotted up about it, and there's no denying that you've got some pretty sharp items in your luggage—Lord, I don't like to think what Edison'd do if he got wind of that jim-dandy little tool Dark uses to take notes with! And that agate-type-sized ear trumpet you gave him, why, he's used that to build those electrodiffusion gadgets that're all over the place now. But all the same, it seems to me he's got to stand the pressure and find a way to do things that's fitting for him and for the country. And holing you up here and making you produce information he thinks he needs to know isn't that. And I'm feeling just enough of a patriot to see that he doesn't get away with it. If this be treason, he can make the most of it, and I imagine he will, but what the hell?"

There seemed to be a considerable number of contradictions and logical flaws in this statement, such as the notion of patriotic treason, but, in spite of his erratic mental capabilities, it was clear that Oxford was prepared to be of help to us, which was nice to know. It would be even nicer, it seemed to me, to gain some idea of how he proposed to do that.

His next words bore on this point. "All right. We want to figure out what to do next. It seems to me that this dodge about you going to Europe is the thing to look at. I mean, once you're off there, I see Edison as being pretty well stymied, and that's what we want. It might even give him time to come to his senses, which I'd like. I still think the old boy's basically a great man, even a good man, and he's just got some unexpected pushes that have turned him the wrong way for a while. Now, how do we work that?"

"I don't imagine Edison would let us off to see Mr. Roosevelt start his trip," I said. "If he did, I suppose we could find some way to get on a boat that would take us to Europe."

"No, I don't see him doing that . . . but hold on a minute! You've given me a notion, Raf!" He dashed from the room, returning perhaps ten minutes later.

"I didn't think they'd have bothered to do anything about the 'phone," he said, seating himself on the edge of my bed. "And so they haven't; it's working fine. If they've put wiretappers onto it, we're in trouble, but I didn't hear any clicks. You'd better get yourself and the others looking presentable; we're going to have a pretty considerable visitor in an hour or so."

"From the tone of Mr. Edison's letter," I ventured, "it seems unlikely that our guards would wish us to have visitors."

"I don't think they'll make any trouble about this one," Oxford said with a tight smile.

And indeed Mr. Roosevelt was greeted most deferentially by Captain Thatcher, the Marine officer who commanded the small detachment. "Since these fellows are in the neighborhood, thought I'd look them up and have a good gab with 'em," the ex-President boomed. "With your permission, of course, Captain."

"Certainly, Mr.—that is, Colonel," the officer said. "They're restricted, but I don't see that that applies to you, sir."

"Quite right, so it doesn't, by George," Mr. Roosevelt agreed, and was ushered inside the house.

Oxford quickly apprised him of the situation and handed him Edison's letter. "Now that's a bad business, a bad business," Roosevelt muttered, scanning it. "Edison's gone off the rails about this; he's going about it all the wrong way. You people may have been pretty sharp with us, but that doesn't mean he's got any call to mew you up and pick your brains."

"I'd hoped you'd feel that way, sir," Oxford said. "And that you might be willing to do something to help."

"Help?" Roosevelt demanded. "Help contravene the direct orders of the duly elected President of the United States of America? Help these scamps escape the consequences of their actions? Put myself in hazard merely because I believe the President is acting hastily and unfairly? Get involved in God knows what kind of a scheme that probably wouldn't work anyway? By George, I believe I will!"

This decision once taken, Mr. Roosevelt and Oxford worked out their plans with remarkable swiftness, while Dark, Ari, Valmis and I looked on. The details seemed fairly simple, and I supposed that any of us Explorers might have come up with an equally good idea had it been expected of us.

"That's it, then," Roosevelt said after a while, standing up. "I'll see to my end of it on my own, and you get these fellows ready for what they have to do. It'll all be set up for the right time and day—if there's any hitch about that, I'll get word to you some way. I'd rather not use the telephone any more, as I think you're on a party line here, even if there's no tapping. By Godfrey, this is a bully wheeze, so it is! And the best of it is, Edison'll thank me for it someday when he's seeing things clearer, just the way they all did after all that Panama business died down. They were all after my hide then, for slicing Panama out of Colombia and seeing to it that the new government gave us the rights to the Canal, but you don't notice anyone whining about it now, do you? This is one of those things—the man that's got the vision to see what needs to be done does it, and the consequences sort themselves out afterwards."

The ensuing weeks of inactivity were a strain on my nerves. This period did not differ in any substantial particulars from the months before, but the knowledge that it was soon to end—and end extremely actively—preyed upon me. It may have done the same on Ari, Dark and Valmis, but we found that we tended to be uncommunicative among ourselves during this time.

A visit from Mr. Roosevelt's son Kermit, ostensibly to present us with some large migrant birds his father had killed and wished us to eat, signaled that the end of our waiting was near. "Dad's got it all set," the youth told Oxford. "Five passages on the Pavonia, leaving Thursday from Pier Fifty-Six at four. So you work your end of it out to start at just about noon. Here's the schedule for everything." He handed Oxford a sheaf of papers. "Good luck!" he said, and left.

In accordance with the plan Roosevelt and Oxford had determined on, at about ten on the appointed morning we all repaired to the stable next to the house and hauled out the carriage stored there. It had been deprived of its animal motive power by our guards soon after they arrived, the beast having been sent off to enjoy a sort of holiday on a nearby farm, and our sole ordinary contact with the outside world had thereafter been the once-daily arrival from the nearby store of a wagon bringing ourselves and our guards necessary provisions, all this being considered needful to prevent us from entertaining ideas of unauthorized departure.

His mind having been bent to mistrust by his orders, it was only natural that Captain Thatcher should stroll over to us to ask, "What do you people think you're doing?"

"Tests, Captain," Oxford said genially. "I've finally got 'em out of their sulks, and they're willing to start in to work, the way the Commander in Chief wants. They've got some concepts that could revolutionize metallurgy, but they've got to test out the tensile strength of our steel, see? So what they've got to do is work out how strong these buggy springs are, as a starting point."

"Right," Dark said, slinging his equipment into the equipage. "I'll activate the parodbmnis here, and once the fleegle is adjusted, we'll set this other stuff going"—here he grabbed the cases containing our previously packed equipment and threw them into the body of the carriage—"and then we'll all get in and bounce in it a bit and see how strong the springs are. After that, we'll be able to invent up a storm for Uncle Tom."

"Well, you've got it in a pretty slim location there," the officer observed, giving Oxford a sharp look. "You get to jostling it, that buggy could roll right down the drive and into the road. And I kind of doubt you'd want that, Colonel. And I know for sure the C-in-C wouldn't, so why don't I just take a little security measure about that?" And within a moment or so he had fetched a length of chain and a padlock, with which he fastened the carriage to a stout tree.

"There, now," he said, standing back. "You can experiment all you want, and no bother about rolling away."

"That's dished us," Oxford whispered to me.

"Don't worry," muttered Dark, who had overheard him. "Just carry on as planned."

Accordingly, we all climbed into the carriage and began jouncing up and down in it, as if to test the strength of the springs. Dark clambered into the rear seat, fumbled in his pocket, and brought out his writing instrument. He twisted the barrel slightly, then leaned over and held it against the chain stretched taut between the carriage and the tree. A portion of it glowed white, and it parted and fell away.

The Marine captain called, "Hey, what're you—"

Dark sprang to the ground, gave the carriage a mighty shove, and leapt aboard again as it began to roll down the slope of the drive.

As we gathered speed, confused shouts came from behind us.

"It'll take Thatcher's men a while to get organized,

Oxford told us. "That's the advantage of surprise. TR said—"

A sharp crack sounded, followed by the sound of something whipping through the air over our heads.

"They recovered fairly fast," Dark said.

"Well, that's just a warning," Oxford said. "They wouldn't want to take a chance on harming us—you're too important to the—"

Another couple of cracking noises came, and Oxford jerked his hand away from the side of the carriage, where a large splinter of wood had sprung up, quite near his fingers.

"On the other hand," Ari observed, "they might well feel that they would be better off having us on hand severely damaged than not at all."

"Well, we'll be out of their line of fire in a second—hold on!"

The rapidly moving carriage encountered a turn and struck the low wall which lined the drive a glancing blow, thus changing its direction. The curve put a screen of trees between us and our now running pursuers.

The remainder of the drive was steeply pitched and led to the main road; we gathered speed at an alarming rate as we approached it.

"Isn't this faster than you figured?" Dark called.

"Some," Oxford answered grimly, holding on tightly—as we all were—as the carriage bounced over the rough surface of the drive.

"How are we going to stop?" Dark asked.

"From the looks of it, by crashing into that tree on the other side of the road! Lord, TR and I calculated it'd be just a fast sort of coast down here, not a runaway!"

"Well, we don't want that, do we?" Dark said. He leaned over first the right rear side of the carriage, then the left, and straightened up. "I think we'll be—"

The carriage suddenly gave a lurch, then tipped backwards, the rear of its body slamming onto the driveway with a force that sprang several of its parts and jarred us all horribly; it scraped along a few feet farther and stopped.

Ahead of us, two detached wheels ran crazily down the drive and across the road and into the trees.

We untangled ourselves and our possessions from the wreckage and at Oxford's urging ran down the short remaining length of the drive. "I didn't think it'd go far without a full set of wheels," Dark panted, running beside me. "So . . . zip!" He flourished his writing tool, then tucked it back into his pocket.

True, it had been a quick and effective solution to the immediate problem, but it did seem to me that a person of Dark's mechanical ingenuity might have come up with something that did not involve quite so many bruises as those I was now becoming aware of.

I was gratified to see, as we came onto the road, a large closed automobile with a figure in the driver's seat, waiting a few yards past the drive; it quivered and rumbled, a welcome indication of its readiness to move.

We piled into it; Oxford sprang to the seat next to the driver and called out, "Drive like hell!"

With a jerk the machine started off, and we were soon fairly flying down the long hill. Dark twisted to look behind us. "Those Marine fellows got down the drive just in time to get a glimpse of us—now they'll know what kind of car we're in!"

"Good," Oxford said. "Be a shame if they didn't."

I was not particularly interested in this cryptic observation, being more concerned with the discomfort and alarming nature of our journey. The car bounced and swayed, and made quite an unsettling screaming sound as it made the sharp turn at the bottom of the hill without noticeably slackening its excessive speed.

We tore along the shore road, in the direction away from Roslyn, and were soon in a sparsely inhabited, heavily wooded area. Perhaps five miles—and about four minutes, as I calculated it—along, we drew up at a deserted pier and were instructed to leave the vehicle.

A larger one, with a boxlike body bearing in ornate gold letters the legend OSTERMAIER'S—THE ALE THAT PUT FLATBUSH ON THE MAP, stood at the side of the road. We were ushered hastily into the interior, which was crowded with large pungent-smelling barrels, among which we were hard put to find space; the driver swung the rear doors to, and in a moment we were once more being jolted uncomfortably, only this time in total darkness and with a very penetrating, though not unpleasant odor.

"Where's that lamp?" I heard Oxford ask. "That fellow was told to leave one—ah, here it is." There was a rattling, a clinking, and a scraping sound; a light flared and then steadied as Oxford adjusted the oil lamp and set it on the floor of the vehicle.

"It's going just fine," he announced. "They'll find that car within an hour or so, and they'll have to cover the chance that we got away by boat—that'll give 'em some extra trouble and cover our trail a bit. We'll cut over to Glen Cove and head back for New York by the high road. If the truck's stopped, we'll duck into those empty barrels toward the front there, but I don't think we'll need to do that. Now you better start getting into these."

He dragged forward some paper-wrapped bundles, which proved to contain native clothes of a style distinctly different from what we were wearing, and we followed his instructions. After we were garbed, he surveyed us. "You look like a bunch of farmers in from upstate who've been snagged by a sidewalk tout for a Grand Street clothes store—great! Nobody'll give you a second glance, even supposing there's somebody watching out for us." Oxford did not bother to assume a different costume, contenting himself with affixing a large moustache to his face, this item having been included in the bundles, along with our clothes.

"Say," Dark said, "isn't Roosevelt going to get in trouble over this? I mean, he and his son were the only ones to visit us, and I don't see Edison not thinking that that's something that has to be looked into."

"For one thing, TR and Kermit sailed for Africa yesterday," Oxford replied, "so it'd be pretty hard to ask him any embarrassing questions just now. But the main thing is, I've left behind a pretty ripe red herring for Edison and his people. When they search the house, they'll find all sorts of scraps of paper left behind in my room, covered with mysterious jottings and lots of telephone numbers. Aha! they'll say, and go about finding who's on the other end of those numbers—and they'll learn that most of 'em are foreign consulates. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Japan, Servia, Russia—lots more, too. I made calls to all of 'em, the last couple of days—asked 'em a few dumb questions—so the local operator'll remember having placed them. And to add to the fun, I put down a number I happen to know—a New York City cop, a high-up fellow, who's known to be in with some of the gangs. So when they piece this all together, won't they have a nice Conan Doyle plot all laid out for them? Turncoat Oxford solicits help from foreign agents anxious to get U.S. secrets, makes contact with corrupt policeman, and contrives escape with aid of gangsters! They can't help swallowing that, or at least spending most of their effort looking into it for a long time. Especially," he added thoughtfully, "as the car that picked us up belongs to a dead rabbit."

"Pull yourself together, Oxford," Dark said severely. "What would even a live rabbit want with a motorcar? You're driveling, man!"

He was not, though, as it developed. The persons actually responsible for the confusion were a group of criminals who had chosen to call themselves the Dead Rabbits. We were all of us seasoned enough to Earth's ways not to bother inquiring into their motives for this; if they were by chance known, we probably would not understand them. The car had been appropriated clandestinely in New York earlier that morning through the agency of an officer whom Roosevelt had known while in charge of the police force some years previously and whom he was able to bring into the scheme in confidence.

"He was tickled to do it," Oxford said. "The Pinker-tons or whoever Edison uses will trace its ownership in no time, so that way, the Rabbits'll have an awful lot of pressure on them from the Federal government, which will please the cops mighty well—at least the honest ones, and they won't mind a bit if Lieutenant Becker, the one whose phone number I jotted down, gets a bit of a grilling, too."

He fingered his moustache morosely. "Of course, I don't like it that this casts me as the twentieth-century Benedict Arnold. But I guess it'll blow over sometime, and the fellows that know me won't believe I've sold out, and I don't much care what anybody else thinks. And anyway, what the hell; you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs."

His comment on cookery, though irrelevant to what he had been saying, as was so often the case in his conversation, was an unwanted reminder that, out of nervousness, I for one had eaten skimpily of breakfast and had had nothing since. There seemed to have been no food brought along for this journey, though I should have thought it would have occurred to Oxford to make such a provision, and I was obliged to make shift by inhaling the vapors emanating from the empty barrels, which, while not satisfying hunger, at least after a while induced a sense of well-being and indeed a tendency to slumber during the remainder of the trip.

I was awakened to be deposited with the others on a stone-paved street in the city, lined with large sheds and the prows of ships.

"Let's hustle!" Oxford said, and, grabbing our belongings, we followed him into the nearest shed, while the ale truck sped away down the street. We then climbed a slanted sort of walkway and found ourselves on board a large vessel, in which we were led to assigned sleeping compartments.

As was the case with the train on which we had traveled, the Pavonia was staffed with persons willing to perform a number of personal services, especially bringing some food and drink to those who desired it; and I was soon happily combining my modest unpacking with a needed light meal and a quantity of ale—the aromatic journey in the truck had made me curious about this substance, which I had not encountered before, but it proved to be not dissimilar to the Würzburger I had previously enjoyed. To test out this perception, I requested the servitor to bring me some Würzburger, and by judicious alternation I was able to arrive at a clear understanding of both the similarities and the distinctions between them.

The sky was darkening as the Pavonia steamed out into the city's harbor and passed the statue we had visited so many months before. Standing at the rail, as seemed to be the obligatory custom, though I should have been quite happy to be reposing in my sleeping place, I recalled the phrase in the inscription on the statue's base about "yearning to breathe free," and had to admit its aptness; now that I was departing from this alarming America, with its rapid journeys, weapons-using guards, complex ruses, and really quite unreasonable President, I was certainly beginning to breathe more freely.

"Just look at that, would you!" Dark caught my upper arm in a painful grip as he spoke. With his free hand he pointed to one side, where another vessel lumbered over the broad waters. It was facing pretty well at us, though not, I was glad to see, moving at a speed which carried any suggestion that it might run into us; and I could see, on either side, a large wheel turning about and dipping into the water.

"That damned fellow in the tavern!" Dark growled. "He's gone off and sold the idea on his own, and cut us out completely! Well, that does it! If Ari wants to get these chaps shooting and blowing each other up, more power to him! It might not be a bad idea, even if it doesn't get us off the planet, just on general principles."

15

Of our journey, which occupied some six days, there is little of note to Record. One stretch of the ocean looked much like another, and the regular succession of ample meals, two out of the daily three accompanied by an interesting variety of wines, marked the passage of time in a soothing but not especially lively manner.

On Oxford's advice, we mainly avoided contact with our fellow passengers, as he did not seem confident that we could sustain an extended conversation without revealing that we were other than we purported to be. "It was hard enough getting you on board under fake names," he observed, "without chancing blowing it now. Lucky the U.S. don't have a passport system, the way they do in Russia and other places, or we could never have done it."

Dark may have been unlucky, or perhaps less conscientious than the rest of us, for he found himself in frequent conversation with a female who, seated at a table next to us at meals, gradually insinuated herself into our group, concentrating her attention upon Dark. It appeared that she had lost, or perhaps mislaid, her mate—whether voluntarily or otherwise was unclear—and so was perhaps one of those "cheerful widows" I had heard the song about, in the "garden" atop the "Garden."

On the third night of the voyage, Ari, Valmis and I were relaxing in the smoking lounge when Dark, whom we had not seen since dinner, approached us. "Damned woman wanted me to take her for a walk on the deck to look at the moon. I told her it was no great shakes, all a lot of rocks and dust—you remember, fellows, we got a close look at it as we came in?—and that anyhow it was confoundedly cold outside. And she said the weather wasn't the only thing that was cold and flounced off to her cabin. Now, what was that all about?"

"It is hard to tell, without full awareness of the larger Patterns," Valmis said, "but, looking at, as it were, the micro-Patterns, I should hazard a guess that she had undertaken an early step in a mating ritual, to which your response indicated a lack of any interest whatever."

"Do you really think so?" Dark said. "Ha!" He strode from the lounge, and the three of us resumed our desultory conversation. I had obtained a measure of something called brandy and was investigating its properties when he returned, some twenty minutes later.

"You were right," he told Valmis.

"How were you able to arrive at that conclusion?" Ari asked.

"Well, I went on down to her cabin, which she'd let me know the number of some time back, and banged on the door, and when she opened it and wanted to know what I wanted, I asked her, was that nonsense about going for a walk something to do with a mating ritual? and she laughed and said she guessed it was, so I said, Right, then! and so we did. Closing the door, first, of course; she told me she preferred it that way."

Valmis seemed pleased that his assessment of the situation had proved accurate; Ari looked at Dark with interest, and I with alarm.

"What was it like?" Ari said.

Dark shrugged. "Much the same. When you have this sort of standard humanoid structure, there aren't many surprises that way. I had an idea that would be the case, from what Wells told me. Wells seems to know a lot about that end of things, though it gets him in trouble from time to time."

"And he's not the only one!" I cried. Intimate knowledge of native females was, for a variety of reasons, discouraged firmly by Explorer rules; and, to this end, our biosurgical implants had, on recent voyages, been extended in scope so as to remove this problem from the area of free choice. "D'you mean to say the implants don't function?"

Dark's face bore a contented smile as he looked at me. "Not," he said, "if you work hard at it."

As the Pavonia edged up to its berth, I was cheered to recognize the diminutive figure of Wells waving at us from the pier. He had brought along a large chauffeured motorcar into which the six of us, with our possessions, fitted comfortably; after the formalities of debarkation had been seen to, we sped away. I was surprised to see that shop signs and other visible examples of writing were largely indecipherable, and said so.

"Well, they're in French, you see," Wells explained.

"Why is that? I understood you had the same language in England as they have in America."

It was then that I learned we were in France and not England, even though we were to call on the King of the English. The King, it appeared, made a habit of leaving his country for substantial periods of time, especially during the uncertain weather of late winter and early spring, which he spent in France, but also in summer and autumn. His subjects, far from resenting this, were gratified, as most of them would themselves have preferred to be elsewhere much of the time, and so took a prideful vicarious pleasure in their monarch's travels.

"It was quite a to-do, getting this all arranged," Wells said. "Roosevelt's cables—he shot them off to the King, the Prime Minister, and the President of the Board of Trade—set everyone by the ears, and they all had to come to me to get a line on what they should do. Dear me, didn't it go hard with Asquith to have to get advice from a 'horrid little Fabian sensualist'!" Wells spoke the phrase with relish, as if he gloried in each descriptive term, as I suppose he did. "But he had to, all the same, to get my assurance that you were the real article and some tips on how to get on with you. Asquith's all for seeing what can be got out of you for the benefit of the Em-pah, but young Churchill, at Trade—Roosevelt got him in on it 'cause he thinks Winnie's the same sort of chap he is at bottom, though right now they don't agree politically, Churchill being for the moment more to my way of thinking, or says he is—is all for letting whatever joy you've got flow unconfined, for the benefit of all mankind. Anyhow, it's worked out that you're to see the King at Biarritz, which is where we're on our way to. He's a dear old chap, really—knows what he likes in food, wine, cigars, horses and women, which makes him beloved of all good Englishmen. About women, by the bye, if you should meet a Mrs. Keppel whilst you're there, you've got to strike a sort of medium between being quite cordial and not seeing her; she's an awfully good chum of the King's, if you take my meaning, but nobody's supposed to take any notice of it."

"Speaking of women," Dark said, "there was a funny thing happened on the way to France, about this widow. . . ." He and Wells were for some time occupied with a discussion which appeared to absorb them, while the rest of us watched parts of France whirl by the car.

When they had done, Oxford spoke up. "Wells," said he, "there's something you ought to know. Our friends here don't come as emissaries from any star-girdling Empire, no, indeed." When he had completed his explanation, Wells looked at us oddly. "As far as I'm concerned," he said, "I haven't heard that. When it comes to getting in to see the King with one story, and then telling him the facts have got to be altered a bit, I'd sooner leave that up to you. If there's a flaming row about it, I stand ready to pick up your remains, but not to get into the middle of it."

The journey took the remainder of that day and part of the next, the hours of darkness being spent at an inn in a small town which afforded little of interest. I took a turn around it in the evening and found a place marked with what I was told was the French word for "coffee," a mild stimulant I had enjoyed in the mornings in America, but the range of coffees here was considerably larger than I had before encountered. There was one sweet kind, called "absinthe," which went down quite smoothly, and another, called "cognac," which was harsher in immediate effect but appeared to produce quite a bit of internal heat, which was useful in driving off the chill the air carried.

This air must have possessed soporific qualities, as it was only with the greatest difficulty that I was aroused early the next morning for the resumption of our journey.

We drew up before a large hotel in Biarritz shortly after ten in the morning and were quickly ushered to a large suite of rooms on the first floor. The hotel was called by the French word for "palace," which I suppose is why the King had chosen it. Oxford remained behind in the lobby, as it was felt that his status as a fugitive U.S. Army officer might later present embarrassments for the King.

A large man, somewhere between Roosevelt and Taft in bulk, and sporting a moustache as impressive as Roosevelt's, plus a beard, was sitting at the head of a large table on which were spread various kinds of meats, condiments, breads, beverages, sweets and utensils.

Wells, at this point the head of our party, bowed low and said, "Good morning, Your Majesty."

"You're Wells," the King stated, pointing a fork at him. "Socialist, aren't you? Trouble over women, too, hey? I've heard about that. No harm in it as long as you don't behave meanly, no harm. And these are the gentlemen from outer space, are they? So." He regarded us with his slightly bulging eyes. "You don't look any stranger than a lot of people in my Empire," he said, "or, for that matter, in my court. But if Mr. Roosevelt, whom God preserve, vouches for you, I must accept it that you are what you say." He spoke in a very different way from Wells, and I made a note that the aristocratic, or royal, classes in England used a mode of speech that emphasized the impact of the "r's" and turned the "w's" very nearly to "v's."

"It would have been interesting to see what my mother would have made of you," the King said, studying us. "I expect she would have been gracious, and full of advice, but not at all amused. My father, now, he would have been the man for you—interested in everything, he was, machinery and progress and so on. He'd have been fascinated by the idea of talking with people from another world. Though he might have had some trouble reconciling your existence with his firm belief in the Bible."

"Mr. Bryan had something of the same difficulty about us during the American elections," Ari said, absently taking from a dish a piece of something that might have been fish, and chewing on it.

King Edward looked at him coldly and said, "If I had not already been persuaded by Mr. Roosevelt and my Prime Minister—and, for reasons I do not see, but shall make it my business to find out, the President of the Board of Trade—that you are what you purport to be, I should now be convinced of it. To compare William Jennings Bryan with Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Prince Consort to the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and Defender of the Faith, that is believable only in a person not of this Earth! My dear man, you'll want to take the bones out of that trout, or you'll choke on them—here, let me show you how."

At the King's invitation, we joined him at his breakfast, of which there seemed plenty to go around.

"Now," he said at the conclusion of the meal, "we have some business to get to, eh? Strange circumstances, I must say, strange circumstances. Roosevelt sent some devilishly long cables, but they really didn't make everything too clear. I gather that you left the United States rather hastily?"

"Our talks with Mr. Edison were not proceeding satisfactorily," Ari said, which was certainly true enough. "He wished to bring them to a conclusion as soon as possible, but we felt that we should be better able to go on with them once we had a greater store of information about your planet. He was most pressing, unfortunately, so in order to avoid unpleasantness we . . ."

"Stood not upon the order of your going, eh?" the King said. "Well, I don't want to do anything to upset our relations with the United States, God knows, but I don't see how Mr. Edison can make any sort of issue out of this—I mean, the whole thing about ambassadors is that they've got to be able to move about freely, or diplomacy's nowhere at all, eh?"

Both Wells and Ari looked uneasy at this. I reflected that this situation would take some delicate handling. The King still took us for ambassadors, which Wells now knew we were not. We would have to convey our true aims to the King, while keeping them secret from Wells and Oxford, at least at this stage. I hoped Ari considered this problem as falling within the scope of a Metahistorian, as I did not see that any of the rest of us was qualified to handle it.

"Very well," the King went on. "Which of you do I talk to?"

"Myself, Your Majesty," Ari replied. "I am the spokesman for our, ah, embassy. And if I may, I should like to have my colleague Raf with us. He is the Recorder for our mission and should be present to set straight any confusion that may arise."

"A good idea," the King agreed. "I wish there had been someone else than my nephew William to take note of my talks with him in Berlin two months back. We spoke of our navies, and he convinced himself that I had made some most remarkable statements on that subject! Now, as for the rest of you, why don't you take a drive about the countryside this morning? You'd enjoy that; I always do. You might drop in on the pelota matches at Anglet, and there's some good racing at La Barre. They're excellent cars, Mercedes, most reliable."

"Would they be the big reddish ones I saw outside?" Dark asked.

"My machines are claret-colored, yes," the King said.

"Ah, I'd like a spin in one of those," Dark said. "Tell me, what's the gear ratio for the highest speed? I think American cars—"

"You might ask my chauffeur that," the King said. "I find the things fascinating, but haven't the least idea how they work."

Having put the others in the care of one of his attendants, the King led Ari and me to his study. "Ah, good," Ari said, looking about the large room. "Maps and things—that round one there, the model of the planet, with everything on it; that's useful, I expect. I was hoping you'd have plenty of maps. Lots of people don't, I gather."

The King eased himself into a large chair behind his desk and looked at Ari severely. "Lots of people aren't kings, either," he said. "How do you expect I could reign over an Empire that's spread over the whole world if—well, never mind. Gentlemen, as you are representatives of another Empire, one which, I gather, is substantially larger than my own, I think you might begin by telling me something of your intentions and interests here, toward the British Empire first, and then the rest of the world."

I admired Ari's aplomb as he outlined the actual facts of our situation as opposed to the fiction by which we had gained admittance to the King's presence. King Edward listened gravely, his face showing neither anger nor astonishment. At the conclusion of Ari's statement, he lit a cigar carefully and drew deeply upon it, occasioning a momentary fit of coughing, then looked at us.

"Some of my predecessors would have had you hanged in chains or racked for presenting yourselves falsely as ambassadors," he remarked. "And I must say I am not pleased by your imposture. However, one must be flexible in dealing with persons from another world, I suppose. And I shall say that it's a relief to me that you're not what you said you were. We have quite enough to go on with, with the Empires we now have, and coping with another one from off the Earth entirely would probably drive all the foreign offices clean mad. Those that are not already," he added.

"Very well, then," he went on, "what you're really after is some aid in refitting your airship, or whatever it is. We ought to be able to do something about that. Our British shipyards are the envy of the world, and I make no doubt that they ought to be able to do something. I dare say the government would be willing to underwrite the cost, as it would be an excellent advertisement for our industry. I'll have it brought to the attention of the Board of Trade—Churchill would probably be all afire for it."

"With all respect, Your Majesty," Ari said, "there's no chance that any shipyard could help Wanderer just now. The planet just doesn't have the technology for it. There's got to be a lot of progress, what you might call a great leap forward, before anything can be done."

I was awaiting with considerable interest the unveiling of the arcane Metahistorical techniques by which Ari proposed to manipulate the King to our advantage. To my surprise, he launched baldly into his thesis on the inevitability of an imminent major war, the destruction it would work at the same time as it promoted science, and the desirability of getting it launched quickly so as to minimize the worst effects while preserving the favorable (from our point of view) ones. I had to admit he made his point convincingly, bolstering it by darting from map to map, outlining hypothetical movements of armies and fleets, demonstrating the role that the nature of continental land masses would play, citing statistics of industrial and agricultural production, but it seemed to me that it was not the most tactful method of persuasion.

The King apparently shared my feeling. Though obviously shaken at the ghastly picture Ari had painted of what lay in store for his civilization, he squinted at him and asked slowly, "And what did Edison make of all this when you told him?"

"Ah, we didn't do that, of course, Your Majesty," Ari said. "You see, the Americans elect their leaders. They just did that with Edison, you know."

"I am aware of the American electoral process," the King said grimly.

"That's good; then you'll see that their main job, really, is getting elected, not running the country, so naturally they never get to be really professional at it. I couldn't be candid with Edison, you see, as he couldn't possibly be prepared to understand and act on what I would have told him."

"An interesting viewpoint," the King said, looking at the cloud of smoke emanating from his cigar. "And . . . ?"

"Well, you people, emperors and all, you're brought up from birth to rule, and you know that you'll be on the job for life, unless something upsetting happens, as with bombs in Russia or beheadings, like your Charles. Though come to think of it, those people left off being Czars and whatnot only when they were dead, didn't they, so it comes out to the same thing. Anyhow, it stands to reason that a hereditary monarch is in the nature of things better equipped to look at matters of state logically—to comprehend, if I may put it that way, the principles of Metahistory that underlie the growth and decay of cultures."

The King drew on his cigar, then, removing it, pursed his mouth oddly and emitted a quantity of smoke, which assumed the shape of a ring and hung in the air for some time. "It isn't every time I can do that," he observed, then turned to face Ari directly. "My good man, if we monarchs are as clear-sighted as you seem to think, why ever are you visiting us with this appalling idea of a world war? Don't you think we'll do everything we can to stop it? And that would, of course, make us perfectly useless from your standpoint, I gather."

Ari chuckled and answered, "Dear me, no. I do hope you all will see the logic in what I say, and make your dispositions so as to have your war over and done with without wrecking your civilization completely, as that would involve us in a more extensive delay than I care to think about, but there's no chance of averting it. Look," he said, pointing toward the window. "D'you see those hill things out there, with the white on top?"

The King looked in the indicated direction and said, "Yes. They're the Pyrenees, in fact, if it matters."

"Well, now, imagine you've got some big stones on top of one of them, quite a few, scattered about. And they're all on one of the steep bits, if you follow me. Now, if one of those stones comes loose and starts rolling, it's going to bang into another one and jar it loose, so you've got two of them going. They'll hit some of the others, and pretty soon you've got a bunch of stones rolling down the mountain, going faster and faster. And whatever's in the way, a person or an animal, or as it might be a village, now, that's going to get smashed. And even if you catch sight of the rocks when they're about halfway down, and you know they're going to smash the village, you can't do a thing about it. And my Metahistorical examination of your situation on this planet shows that the rocks, so to speak, are rather more than halfway down, and gaining speed."

"But, damn it, man," the King said explosively, "people and nations aren't rocks! We are thinking beings! We choose our actions, I tell you, and we need not—" At this point, he fell to coughing once more, which allowed Ari to speak without the discourtesy of interrupting.

"Individuals, of course," Ari said, "may behave in any number of unpredictable ways, the humanoid types especially, which is what makes them the most interesting races to study Metahistorically. I mean, there's not much challenge in working out what a race of sentient crystals is going to do, is there? They spend most of their time forming lattices; quite decorative, but not affording much scope for the Metahistorian, I can tell you. But this humanoid diversity, taken in the aggregate, adds up to complete determinism, if I may put it so. The courses of nations and of worlds may be charted with complete accuracy, as I have charted yours. You've got Russia here"—he tapped on the map with an extended forefinger—"Germany here,

Austria-Hungary there, France, Turkey and so on, and yourselves spread all over the place. Given everything I've gone into before, you're bound to have a most remarkable disaster, millions dead and ruins all over the place, and there's nothing you can do about it. That's what Metahistory shows quite clearly, and if it weren't so, it wouldn't be Metahistory, would it?"

The King looked pale and tired. "We have all told ourselves that it would not come to this," he said in a low voice, "that we could keep everything balanced somehow—that we could go on building ships and guns so that we should not have to use them, that our generals could devise cleverer and cleverer plans, that—"

"Well, that's one thing," Ari interrupted, careless of etiquette. "Generals and such. They've got an inherent error factor built in, you see. I mean, suppose you have two countries; you could call them A and B, to keep things clearer. Now, there's a dispute between them, and the generals on both sides make their plans. Now, assuming they're pretty nearly equally matched—otherwise they'd be silly to try a war, wouldn't they?—well, then, at least half the generals have got to be wrong."

"How is that?" the King said faintly.

"Well, obviously, each lot of generals, A's and B's, tells their government that their plans will work, or they wouldn't start up the war. And, as one side or the other loses, the generals on the losing side are proven wrong. It's usually worse than that," Ari went on reflectively, "as even the winning ones are quite often wrong about what will happen, how long the whole thing will take, and so on. You had that in South Africa, as I recall—won the war, but it was much harder than you expected, so your generals were half wrong, and the Boers' generals all wrong, which works out to about twenty-five-percent accuracy for the trade, if I have got my figures right. I don't think you'd be at all happy if your chauffeurs or your cooks got things correct only half the time or less, so that's the difficulty in working with generals, you see."

The King considered this proposition for some little time, then roused himself to say, "I had never thought of it quite like that. It makes a dreadful kind of sense, though I think that you people's brains must work rather differently from ours."

"Thank you, Your Majesty," Ari said, pleased with the compliment.

"It is a terrible prospect you show me," the King continued. "Terrible—and I fear that I cannot dismiss it. You confirm what I have begun to dread, and yet you offer no escape. . . ."

"Well, no, there isn't any," Ari said. "That's Metahistory for you."

The King chewed gloomily on his cigar. "If it must be so, it must. God grant I do not live to see it."

"That's about an even chance," Ari said, looking at him appraisingly. "If you were to get at it pretty quickly, as I recommend, which would serve your planet's people's ends as well as our own, as I have tried to make clear, you'd probably see it pretty well launched. If you and your fellow kings just let things drag on another couple of years or so, why, I'd have to agree that you'd probably be pretty well out of it."

"What!" the King shouted, rising to his feet, his aristocratic accent making the word come out nearly as "Vot!"

"Well, that coughing, and the way your face changes color. A moment ago, it was quite pale, and now you've got a nasty flush about the cheeks. From what I learned when Mr. Hearst's doctors looked us over, you people function about the same as we do, so I'd say your heart's in very bad shape. A year or so, that's about what you'd be safe in counting on."

King Edward's face was indeed now a most startling hue, more toward the purple side than the red; his eyes protruded even more than they had before, and he began to splutter at Ari, evidently an expression of anger. This changed into another bout of coughing, and he sank back into his chair, his massive body heaving as he tried to stem its force.

"Dear me," Ari said, "I hope I haven't upset him."

"I believe you've upset us properly," I observed, watching the writhing monarch strive to catch his breath. "I shouldn't be surprised if he died right here and now, and I don't care to think what happens when two strangers are closeted with a King-Emperor and are later found with his corpse. Something tells me that the upshot would be regrettable."

"Well, we certainly don't want that," Ari said. "Let me see, did I bring—ah, yes, here they are." He drew a small metal container from a pocket of his costume.

"What have you got there?"

"Those things I take from time to time, you know. It's all very well for you young fellows to get along with the implants, and they do you very nicely, I'm sure; but I'm a bit older than you, and I'd start going wrong inside in all sorts of ways without a little extra treatment to clear out dead cells and other bits of rubbish. So I take one of these once a voyage or so, if I start feeling run-down, and it gets rid of everything that doesn't belong there."

"Will it work the same way on him?"

Ari looked at the King, whose face had darkened further and who now seemed scarcely able to breathe at all; his feet drummed on the carpet. "Well, if it doesn't, I can't see that he—or we—would be any worse off. Here, give me a hand."

I stood behind the feebly twitching King, holding his head steady, as Ari forced a capsule into his mouth. "Mmmm—wharyer . . . ?" I heard him mumble; he stiffened and then relaxed. I feared the worst, but as I went to stand beside Ari, I saw King Edward's face resume a more normal hue and his contorted features become smooth.

After a moment he sat upright in his chair, looked at us, and said, "Good Lord, what did you do? What was that? I haven't"—he placed a hand on his chest and took a deep breath—"been able to breathe that easily in years. And I don't feel that sort of pain right here . . ."

"Well, I'm sorry, Your Majesty," Ari said uneasily. "But you did seem to be in immediate trouble, and I thought I would try . . . That is, this is something the older fellows like me take along on these trips we go on; they sort of wash out accumulations of poisons and fats and things. They take a while before they're fully effective—"

"Do they?" said the King. "Do they? There is more of this effect to come, then?"

"If you've been having stiffnesses in the hands and elsewhere, as I expect might happen," Ari said, "you'll find that's a good bit less, or even all gone, in a day or so. The same thing with any problems about seeing and other senses, I should think."

"Indeed?" said the King. "Tell me, do you have another one or so of those you could spare? I feel tremendously fit right now, but it would be nice to have one or two on hand to use when this one wears off tomorrow or next week."

"Next year, more likely," Ari said. "That's going to go on working until it's undone all the stuff your system's accumulated over the last . . . however many years it may be. It'll take a while, even with all the smoking and food and such, to get it all back, if ever. But you might as well have a couple, certainly—here you are."

"Thank you." The King looked at the capsules in his palm, then back at Ari. "I am grateful, of course. But tell me, how is it that, just before my attack, when you were talking about my condition with such exemplary detachment, you did not think to suggest the use of one of these?"

"Well, we don't like to interfere, you know," Ari said, with some evident embarrassment. "We're trained not to do that, interfere with na—with persons on other planets. And especially when it's something like that, you know—a condition you've built up over the years. It's hard to know why you'd want it, of course; I certainly wouldn't, but if you hadn't, you wouldn't have done all the things that brought it on, would you? So it was really none of my business to do anything about it, but it really didn't set well to let you choke to death like that, as you seemed about to—turning purple and twitching and fighting for breath and—"

"Quite, quite," the King broke in testily. "The experience was sufficiently vivid in itself; I do not require that it be rehearsed for me."

"It's bad enough," Ari went on, "that we're coming around to set you right on this war business—we're not supposed to do that, either—but interfering with what you've chosen to do to your own body, that's really fairly intrusive, and I can only say—"

"If you attempt to apologize for saving my life and restoring me to a state of health I have not enjoyed for years, perhaps decades," the King said, "I warn you that I shall be positively uncivil." He looked at us once more and shook his head slowly. "You people do indeed think differently from us. Be that as it may, I am in your debt. Your proposal that the nations of the world fling themselves at one another's throats in order to oblige you by some scientific advances that might result strikes me, I must tell you candidly, as repellently cold-blooded—although I admit our world can display some parallels—but I shall at least see that you get a chance to present it. You ought to see my nephew William next, the Kaiser. I believe he might be even more impressed by you than I am. William's an original thinker, for royalty, and I believe it might do him good to come up against minds even odder than his own. It should take no more than a day to make the arrangements for him to receive you, so you should plan on being in Berlin the day after tomorrow."

He rose, walked to the window, and leaned out. "I can smell the spring in the air, and the sea," he said. "It's a long time since I could do that . . . and the mountains—I can see them more clearly. It's as if I were young again. . . . Well, I shall set about advising my nephew that he is to receive some very curious visitors and would do well to listen most closely to what they have to say; I can't do better than that, can I, eh?"

The King summoned two aides, one of whom led us away to rejoin our friends. As we left his study, I heard him instruct the other to inform his guests that he would not join them on a proposed automobile outing that afternoon, and to advise Mrs. Keppel that he would be calling on her after lunch.

"Look here," I said as we walked down the corridor. "You told us all that about how oddly these emperors went on. I mean, the Kaiser and the ballet-skirted general, and so on—that all came into your Metahistorical predictions. How does that square with this business of them being more rational than Edison?"

"Metahistory is not your field of endeavor, my dear Raf," Ari said kindly. "Personality, which is infinitely variable, has nothing to do with the reasoning powers, which exist and function independently. I myself, while hail-fellow-well-met to a fault in my personal dealings, am yet a remorselessly logical intellectual machine when circumstances require me to fulfill my ordained function. Thus it is with these monarchs."

16

Wells was impressed by Ari's carefully edited account of our conversation with King Edward and his promise to arrange an interview with the Kaiser.

"You're artful, you are," he told us, "getting round the old boy like that. I should have thought he'd have had you flayed or something for passing yourself off as ambassadors."

"His Majesty is, naturally enough, a most reasonable man," Ari explained, "and so was able to deal with our problem reasonably. I expect it will be the same with the Kaiser."

"What a hope," Wells said. "Look here, I'd better go along to Berlin with you chaps. If you rub the Kaiser the wrong way, you're likely to end up in a fortress, and you'll want someone on hand to send you in a sausage now and then."

Oxford had collected a pile of journals during the motor outing and was going through them rapidly. "Nothing in yesterday's London papers," he observed. "And I don't make out anything about Edison or whatever the French might be for 'space' or 'astronauts' in the heads in today's French papers. So it looks as though Edison's keeping the lid on this. Very sensible of him, and a good thing for us. It'd be awkward, having the U.S. raising a hue and cry after us. I imagine he's thought better of the whole idea."

In spite of King Edward's expressed fondness for the resort, Biarritz was not a particularly interesting town, and a few strolls around it soon exhausted its attractions, at least for me. Thus, when Oxford, Dark and I were taking yet another walk along the promenade the next afternoon—Wells being busied with our travel arrangements, Ari with refining the details of what he proposed to tell the Kaiser, and Valmis with contemplating the significance of what Patterns were perceptible on the ceiling of his bedchamber—we welcomed the distraction provided by an automobile that drew up alongside us, the driver of which beckoned to us urgently.

He was, it appeared, in the business of taking tourists for trips into the countryside, and as the rate he mentioned seemed surprisingly reasonable and he spoke English fluently—I had not yet gone to the trouble of using the Communicator to equip myself with any other language, having been given to understand that any monarchs we might encounter would be well versed in our first native tongue—we agreed to his proposal and entered his vehicle.

We were soon out of the town and climbing a winding road into the hills. "I don't see that this is all that interesting," Dark said, looking about.

"There's a swell view from up ahead," the driver called back.

"That fellow speaks pretty good American-style English for a Frenchman," Oxford remarked. "I suppose he's spent some time in the States."

The excellent view the driver had promised did not materialize. Instead, as we rounded a bend we saw a large closed automobile with pulled-down blinds drawn up at the side of the road, with its front parts opened to expose the engine; a man was bent over as if to examine its workings.

"Hey, I don't think we better stop," Oxford said as our own vehicle slowed. "I've heard there's lots of bandits in these hills, and this could be—"

"Got to stop and see if we can help," the driver answered. "Law of the road." He pulled up beside the other machine, and we got out. Dark went to peer into the engine over the shoulder of the man working on it, fascinated as always by mechanical details. Oxford and I, for want of anything better to do, joined him.

"Now, how does this thing work?" Dark asked the native, poking at some part with his writing tool. "What seems to be wrong? Is it this thing here? I can see that there might be something that's got loose—why don't I—"

At this point, we were startled by the noise of a car engine springing to life—quite obviously not that of the one we were examining. We turned—Dark exclaiming "Oh, damn!"—and saw the machine which had brought us to this spot moving rapidly down the road and soon vanishing around a curve.

"Here, what's all this about?" Dark said. "Why did he . . . "He stopped, noticing, as we all did, a handheld projectile weapon which the motorist had produced and was now pointing at us.

"I can explain that, gentlemen," a voice from behind us announced, and we turned once again. Stepping down from the interior of the car, and holding another, somewhat larger weapon, was Captain Thatcher, the Marine officer from whose custody we had escaped a week before.

"We're in the soup, I'd say," Oxford muttered gloomily.

"Into the car, you men," Thatcher said, gesturing with his weapon. Seeing no really practical alternative, we obliged him. He remained outside and called, "All right, Olson, crank her up and let's get going!"

"Been doing that, Captain, but damned if there really ain't something wrong with her!"

"Well, get it for God's sake fixed fast! It can't be anything serious; you went over it before we started out." He turned toward us again.

"You fellows weren't as clever as you thought," he said. "That was a mighty nice dodge you thought up, all that gang and foreign stuff, but what ditched you was a fisherman out in the harbor—saw you changing from the car to the brewery truck. He didn't come ashore until 'way later that day, so the Pinkertons didn't get it out of him until it was too late to stop you from sailing. But we traced the truck to the pier—a cop there noticed it specially, 'cause Ostermaier's don't deal with the saloons around there, and he was wondering if something new like that mightn't mean some graft for him—and had a talk with the steamer line's passenger people. And don't you know, there was five passages bought at the last minute, so it seemed pretty clear what you'd done—and don't think Colonel Roosevelt ain't going to have some fancy explaining to do when he gets back from the Dark Continent, I want to tell you!

"Now, thanks to you folks, I had the signal honor of a personal interview with the President of the United States, and that don't come the way of a Marine captain very often. And Mr. Edison laid it out nice and clear. 'Captain,' he says to me, 'I don't hold one mistake against a man. So you've got your chance to go and get me these people—pick a couple of men to help you, anything you need. But get 'em back from where they've gone to. If you don't, why, that's another mistake, and that I do hold against a man. And the man I hold that mistake against is going to be personally supervising sanitary facilities in the Canal Zone for the rest of his hitch, at the lowest possible level.' So you can see I got a stake in bringing this off—and so does the President, I'll tell you; he got me and Olson and Dyer, him that drove you up here, over to France on a fast destroyer, boilers supercharged all the way. Docked ahead of the Pavonia and trailed you down here, and now, by God, I've got you! The important ones, anyway," he said, looking at us as though he found that hard to believe. "The President was mighty particular about you two, not so much about the others—and he's got some special treatment laid away for Mr. Lieutenant Colonel Oxford, here. My, he just didn't care at all for what you done, Colonel, and he means to let you know it. Hey, Olson!" he called. "Isn't that damn motor fixed yet?"

"Well, you come and have a look, Captain! It should work, but it don't."

Captain Thatcher said something that had not been included in the vocabulary which the Communicator had instilled in me, and slammed the door. "Now, don't you get any ideas about running off," we heard him say. "So much as a head gets poked out the door, and there'll be a bullet in it."

In the darkness of the enclosed car, we could hear the clinking sound of the two men examining the engine. "I don't think they're going to get it to go," Dark remarked after a while.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Well. . . when I was having a look at it, I thought I spotted something loose. So I was just going to give it a little weld to hold it in place, d'you see?" He produced his combination writing instrument and portable tool. "And when our car ran off like that, it startled me, and I gave it more power than I'd meant to. I think it fused a couple of bits that are supposed to move."

"That's nice," Oxford said. "Now, not only are we kidnapped, but we'll have to be walked to wherever Thatcher wants to take us instead of being driven there, unless he feels like plugging us right now to save the bother."

"I am sure he wouldn't want to do that," I reassured him. "Mr. Edison seems to want us pretty badly, and I don't see that our cadavers would be much use to him."

"Considering what Edison's likely to do to me, I might be better off if Thatcher gets it over with right now." Oxford sat back, lost in gloom, but presently he brightened and said, "Say, I think I hear—"

The door was pulled open and Thatcher scrambled into the car with us, and shut it again, covering us with his weapon. "I can hear a car coming up the hill," he said. "Now, don't anybody get funny—no calling for help or such. Edison wants you alive, but I guess he can get along just as well if you're shy a finger or a kneecap. And you wouldn't want the blood of some poor Frenchman on your hands, would you? For if I've got to start loosing this off to keep you folks quiet, I don't mean to leave any witnesses behind."

In silence we heard the approaching car grind its gears as it negotiated the turn below us, then the growing noise of its engine as it came near our vehicle. The three of us sat upright as the noise changed character, indicating that the new machine had stopped; Thatcher glared and flourished his weapon.

A booming voice asked, "What seems to be the trouble, my good man? My chauffeur may be able to help; I'll send him over. Ponsonby, fetch me a campstool; I do love to watch people fixing cars."

Dark and I turned to each other. "That's . . ."we said in unison.

"Who?" Oxford asked, whispering in deference to a savage wave of Thatcher's weapon. "Oh, wait—you can't mean . . . ? You do, don't you?" Reading the expressions on our faces correctly, he turned to Thatcher.

"Thanks for the ride, Captain, though it didn't get very far. We'll be taking our leave."

"Will you, now?" the Marine demanded thoughtfully, sighting his weapon between Oxford's eyes. "I kind of doubt that. You make any moves, and you're going to get damaged some. Plus I might just help myself to that nosy jasper's car to get out of here with."

"Captain," Oxford said, "the gentleman who is taking such an interest in your breakdown is Edward the Seventh, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain and Ireland, and all that. Further, I understand that he travels on these excursions with another car, loaded with French policemen, fully armed and alert—I may say nervously alert—to any possibility of violence in the immediate vicinity of His Majesty. Your program of plugging us and then stealing his car therefore seems to me impractical."

Thatcher raised the blind on one window, looked out, and cursed. Before he snapped it down again, I caught a glimpse of two large red cars, the rear one crowded, as Oxford had predicted, with several tough-looking natives in blue uniforms and flat caps.

Keeping his eyes on Thatcher, Oxford slowly reached for the door handle, then eased the door open. "We've played the King, Captain," he told him softly. "Unless you've got an ace, it looks like you'd better fold your hand."

17

The King very graciously invited our party to return to Biarritz with him, as the motorcar did not seem likely to be fixed at any time in the near future. Oxford contrived it so that he, Dark and I rode with His Majesty, and Thatcher in a following vehicle along with a number of French policemen; the unfortunate Olson was left behind to protect the disabled car until help could be sent from the town.

Once we were under way, the King looked at Oxford shrewdly. "There was something about all that that didn't quite look like a spin in the countryside," he observed. "For one thing, it doesn't seem to me that you'd get much benefit from the view in a closed car—with drawn blinds." His aide, seated beside him—the three of us were ranged on a sort of padded bench opposite them, obliging us to ride backwards, which, it being his automobile, seemed reasonable enough—also gave us an inquiring look.

"Well, it's an odd business all right, sir," Oxford admitted, and explained briefly the circumstances of our abduction.

"Dear me," the King said, stroking his beard. "That won't do, will it? But it's deuced awkward—I can't very well cause a complaint to be made, I suppose—it's just not done to take official notice of these things—and yet those men will doubtless try to impede your travels if they're free to do so. And I'm beginning to feel that it's rather important that you go on with your plans to see the Kaiser and whatever else you might choose to do afterwards. . . ." He raised one eyebrow as he looked at me, from which I divined that he assumed we had not revealed the full truth about our intentions to Oxford and that he did not himself propose to enlighten the reporter.

"If I understand the problem aright, Your Majesty," the aide said, "there need be no particular difficulty. The French legal system, unlike ours, is admirably designed to deal with inconveniences to important personages without undue formality."

"Well, I wouldn't want those fellows guillotined or any such thing as that, you know," the King said.

"No need for that, I'm sure," the aide replied. "But there's no reason the police couldn't manage a few days' detention, and nothing written down about it. They'd probably be pleased as Punch to do it; nobody's tried to assassinate you, and I expect they're getting a little bored."

Upon our arrival back at the King's quarters, the occupants of both cars disembarked, and the aide went over and exchanged a few words with the police. These were in the French language, so I did not understand them; evidently, neither did Captain Thatcher, who ignored the conversation and stood glowering at us. The police seemed to take the meaning quite clearly, which was only to be expected, they being French and therefore adept at the tongue, for they seized Thatcher and bore him away, struggling and shouting.

"I think you and your companions should have a clear track to Berlin, gentlemen," the King remarked.

In this he was accurate, for we experienced no trouble on our train journey, and drew into the German capital about mid-morning of the next day but one and were swiftly conveyed to what we were informed was called the Old Palace, somewhat away from the center of the city.

Our reception there was in marked contrast to the almost furtive way in which we had been brought in two closed cars from the railway station. We were ushered through gates into a large garden with a long path running through its center. On both sides of this stood a number of men in colorful uniforms holding cutting weapons upright—Wells relieved my mind considerably by claiming that these, in this setting at least, were purely decorative in function—and wearing metal hats with a spike on top of each, which it seemed to me might prove quite useful in warfare, as they would discourage an enemy from dropping onto you from above.

As instructed by the persons who had met us, we walked slowly between the files of men toward where a flight of steps ended the path. At the top of this stood a tall figure dressed in white, fairly ablaze with bits of bright metal and cloth in the area of the chest. Like Roosevelt and King Edward, he wore an imposing moustache, differing from theirs in that the ends turned upward to form sharp points, quite like those on his soldiers' metal hats, though it seemed to me they could hardly serve a similar purpose. He wore a highly ornamented cutting weapon hanging in a container from his belt, and his right hand rested on its handle. I noted with some surprise that his left arm was held close to his body in an awkward fashion, and appeared to be somewhat shorter than the other.

"He's being cagey, you see," Wells muttered to me.

"No public fuss about your arrival, in case he should decide that he doesn't want to acknowledge you, but just enough pomp here so that you'll feel well done-by if it turns out you're worth it. He's got a terrific sense for that sort of thing; I imagine he'd have done well as an actor-manager, probably better than he has as Kaiser."

The Kaiser greeted us cordially, declaring that as we came recommended by his uncle and Mr. Roosevelt, whom he claimed to admire above all men, he would listen with great attention to what we had to say, although he felt obliged to point out that it was difficult to see any way in which Germany might benefit from intercourse with another Empire, as it already contained everything necessary to civilized life.

He ushered us through some portions of the palace, pointing out with evident pride many pieces of furniture, woven wall hangings, paintings, and a profusion of smaller objects in cases or on tables; all these, he declared, were of the best quality, and furthermore, many were associated, in ways which would interest us remarkably, with his personal and family history.

"Nice jar, this," Dark said, picking up a ceramic container adorned with representations of birds and flowers, which the Kaiser had informed us had been taken by his troops from a place called China during what I understood, perhaps incorrectly, to be an uprising of prize-fighters.

"Put it down, man!" the Kaiser said. "It's worth thousands! Everything here is quite expensive, and I should be obliged if you would remember that. I don't come to your planet and fiddle about with your objets d'art, and I don't see why you should feel free to do so with mine!"

Dark's action may have been fortunate for us, as the Kaiser, still somewhat nettled when we reached his study, made a point of excluding Oxford and Wells from our deliberations. "What the Emperor of Germany and these men from the stars have to say to each other is their affair, and not that of Great Britain or the United States," he said stiffly. "You gentlemen will be taken on a further tour of the palace, and mind you don't touch anything." We were thus enabled to continue avoiding revealing our true purpose to our friends, a course I preferred, as I still felt that they did not have the breadth of view that would allow them to perceive the necessity of hastening the destruction of their civilization.

Nor was the Kaiser notably sympathetic to this notion when Ari laid it before him. King Edward had indicated, he said, that we had matters of grave consequence to discuss with him; he had not expected to be subjected to an inundation of pig-dog nonsense.

"The peace of Europe is assured!" he told us, striding back and forth behind his desk. "I have the guarantees of my cousin the Czar; I have an understanding with the Turkish Sultan; the might of my Army and Navy is such that all must see the clear choice between the hand of German friendship and my Empire's mailed fist! I am called William the Peacemaker, and I assure you it is for good cause!"

All the same, Ari's presentation of his thesis began to intrigue the Kaiser. Both Wells and the King had told us that William possessed an inquiring mind, and he was evidently caught up in spite of himself as Ari expounded on Metahistory, pointed out what the maps showed, and in the main brought up the same arguments that he had with King Edward.

"I don't like this," the Kaiser commented after Ari had done. "I don't believe it, but I can't altogether dismiss it. I know what my blood tells me is the correct destiny for the German people, for Europe, for the world—but you turn everything on its head, and make me begin to doubt. . . ." He walked to the window and looked out, then turned back to us.

"Gentlemen, we have been too long in this room, and my head is not so clear as it should be. Let us all take a turn in the fresh air and let it blow away some of the cobwebs you have spun about me. A few breaths of God's good ozone, and we shall all look at this differently, eh? We Germans are great believers in the doctrine that the healthy body houses the healthy mind!"

I saw Dark glance sharply at the Kaiser's left arm, and I experienced a sinking feeling about my midsection. Our Captain, though a very capable man, was not so versed as Ari and myself in the ways of tactful association with persons of alien planets and was all too inclined to say things which, while perhaps true, produced alarming effects.

And so it proved. We had scarcely walked past a bend in one of the graveled paths through the garden, which put us in the midst of a grove of trees, when he spoke up. "Look here," he said. "That healthy body business—how does that square with that arm of yours?"

The Kaiser wheeled and glared at him—and, I was sorry to see, at the rest of us. "What!"

"I've been noticing the way you hold it, and you don't use it at all, so it can't be good for much, can it?"

The Kaiser's face contorted remarkably, which caused his moustache to assume a variety of configurations. "This is unheard of!" he gasped in a low, hoarse voice, as though something were blocking his throat. "Disgraceful! Barbaric! A piece of not-to-be-borne insolence!" He clapped his right hand to the hilt of the cutting weapon at his side and drew it partway from its container, at the same time taking a step toward Dark. The container somehow impeded his leg movement, and he stumbled and fell heavily to the path.

"There, you see?" Dark said. "If you'd been able to use that arm properly, you'd have very likely kept your balance."

The Kaiser gave a sort of low, wordless howl as he attempted to struggle to his knees. I exchanged an uneasy glance with Ari. It did seem that the monarchs we encountered were an excitable lot, and I found myself wondering if there were not some flaws in his theory about their greater-than-normal rationality.

18

"Here," Dark said, "let me give you a hand. As you've got only one that's any use to you," he added, in what struck me as an ill-advised attempt at relieving the situation with a touch of humor.

The Kaiser gritted his teeth and muttered, "No—don't need it—lèse-majesté to touch the Emperor's person, anyhow, except under prescribed circumstances. . . ."

When he regained his feet, his rage seemed to have subsided, and he looked at us in bewilderment, apparently careless of the gravel which clung to the knees of his uniform breeches. "I can't imagine what the devil made you say that," he said wonderingly. "It went past rudeness, past mere insult, past anything I have ever known or heard of. Old Bismarck had an edge to his tongue, especially when I had to sack him, and I've had some bluff conversations with honest peasants whilst inspecting my estates—who may well have been taking advantage of an opportunity to get in a safe dig at the All-Highest, though that's by the way—but I've never ever . . ." The Kaiser fell silent and looked at Dark as though he were for the first time truly realizing that he (and therefore the rest of us) were beings outside his experience.

"Well, I'm sorry if I somehow seem to have hit a sore point," Dark said, "but I do think machinery ought to work properly—that's my craft, you see—and I suppose I do speak my mind when I see something out of order like that."

"The human body," the Kaiser said, "is not a . . . a steam turbine or a railway train, as you appear to be suggesting."

"Not at all," Dark said. "Different entirely—fuel, materials, control system, just about everything. But all the same, it's machinery, and it seems to me to be pretty slovenly to let it get out of whack like that. Don't people laugh at you about it?"

"They do not, I assure you," the Kaiser answered grimly. "Not in my hearing, nor in that of any man who has pledged his sword to me. I may say that the rigors I have forced upon myself in order to make myself an accomplished horseman in spite of this"—he slapped his left arm with his good hand—"have won me much of the respect I command from my subjects. The greatest strength is the overcoming of weakness!"

"If you say so," Dark responded. "But it seems to me that it'd have been simpler to have it put right."

The Kaiser closed his eyes briefly. "I cannot imagine why the physicians who delivered me, not to mention their many successors who tormented my childhood with their remedial measures, never thought of that," he said.

His tone did not seem to me to carry any appreciable degree of sincerity, but Dark replied indignantly, "Well, they darned well ought to have! It'd have been a lot easier to take care of it at the beginning than it would be now."

"Take care of it? Do you mean to tell me . . ." The Kaiser stopped speaking and looked intently at Dark.

"Are you saying, sir, that you consider that this . . . condition could have been corrected by some means you know of?"

"Of course. It's a part that's not working, so what your technicians ought to have done was work out why, and fix it. It's all very well to talk about being strong by overcoming weakness and so on, but you've just now got your knees all dirty, and, I ask you, is it worth it?"

The Kaiser took a long look about him. "I appear to be on the grounds of my Own palace, and not on the moon or in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, so I must behave as though what I have heard is what has in fact been said, and make some rational response to it. We Hohenzollerns are not subject to demented fancies, unlike some of the Habsburgs and others I could name not a thousand miles from here. . . . I have the impression, Herr Dark, that you somehow believe it is by choice—"

"Say!" Dark cried. "I've got it! Of course; you people aren't onto a lot of things that we know about, so you get stuck with things like that you can't help. Dear me, what a pity. I don't suppose," he asked diffidently, "now you've grown up with it and all, that you'd care to get it working properly again? I don't want to be pushy, but I hate to see things not doing what they're meant to do."

"My arm," the Kaiser exclaimed angrily, "was ruined at my birth! It was wrenched from its socket, and by the time it was restored to its place, the nerves and muscles were destroyed!"

"I thought it might be something like that," Dark said. "You'd want to reestablish the nerve connections, first thing, then get in a supply of protein to build up the muscle tissue. I don't expect you could do very much about the bones at this late date, perhaps add an inch or two onto them, but I don't see getting a really accurate match with the other arm."

"You can do this?" the Kaiser whispered.

"Well, yes." Dark looked surprised. "We Captains have got to be ready to maintain all sorts of equipment, and that naturally includes the people on the team. There wouldn't be much point, would there, in having your ship in good order if the crew got bent or broken or something? Mind you," he added, "most of my stuffs on the ocean bottom with Wanderer, so I couldn't do you a brand-new arm or anything like that. But I do have what you might call a first-aid kit in my gear, and that should be enough to let me do a sort of makeshift repair job like that. If you wouldn't object to the trouble, it'd take about three of your days, I'd say—and it would be rather a treat," he added wistfully, "to get back in practice again. I get this feeling that I'm going stale without something to do."

Ari and I found it quite amusing that someone who valued precision so highly as Dark was so far off in his calculations. (Valmis, as usual, took little notice of what was going on with our endeavor, preferring to watch the Berliners go about their business from his vantage point in a place called Café des Westens; he said they formed Patterns unlike any he had yet seen.) It took not three days to rebuild the Kaiser's arm, as Dark had so confidently stated, but four; a thirty-three and one-third percent error, far beyond what a trained engineer ought to encounter.

On the Kaiser's instruction, we did not inform Wells or Oxford of what Dark was doing with him. We put it about that they were having extended talks on topics of great import, which did not require the participation of anyone else.

Wells expressed some perturbation about this supposed state of affairs. "I'm not, of course, taken in by the fiction of nationalism," he told me, as we sat over a couple samples of a local refreshment called Schnapps at the Café des Westens, where we had joined Valmis (who reported that it was quite effective in aiding the Perception of Patterns), "but I'm bound to say that it makes me uneasy that Dark's been en tête-à-tête with the Kaiser for such a time. I'd hate to think that Germany was getting all sorts of plans for long-range guns or land ironclads or things like that that might be used against England. Or for that matter against America—what d'you say to that, Oxford?"

Oxford, who had contrived somehow to find a glass of his favorite Würzburger so far from home, remarked mildly, "It'd have to be a mighty long-range gun to worry us, I expect. With three thousand miles of Atlantic between us and any worthwhile enemy, I guess we can afford to consider your wars as sporting events we can get good newspaper copy from."

Recalling Ari's sure prediction of the involvement of all nations in the coming conflict, I once more felt a pang of distress at the dissimulation we were obliged to practice, and ordered a double portion of the Schnapps restorative, which immediately exercised a calming influence on me.

"Dark wouldn't do a thing like that," I said. "He's as straight as they come, straight as a . . . whatever it is you have here that's very straight. If he knew anything about long-range guns, which I know for a fact he doesn't, and he told the Kaiser about it, which he wouldn't, why, then, he'd tell King Edward the same, if he was asked, and Edison, and Geronimo, and Mr. Hearst, and Captain Thatcher, and that chap who so kindly drove us in the brewery truck, and Mr. Barrymore, and the lady he met on the boat—Dark, that is, not Barrymore, for I'm sure he wasn't traveling with us—and . . ." I went on a bit more, being rather pleased with myself for remembering so many of the very interesting people we had run across during our enforced stay on this planet. But both Oxford and Wells lost interest in the topic of conversation and turned to talk of other subjects, particularly the varieties of evening entertainment Berlin offered.

They embarked on an exploration of these, on which I accompanied them, although I have no precise recollection of what happened during it. In different establishments, a number of persons, both male and female, sang or spoke prepared speeches, which aroused generally favorable reactions, but as this was done in the German tongue, to which I was a stranger, I did not attempt to arrive at any opinion about what I saw. Refreshments were available in copious quantities, and I tried several sorts of them. Most were quite good, and I resolved to make a list of the best, but later lost it, or perhaps forgot to write it out.

It was the next morning, the fourth after our arrival in Berlin, when Dark came to the quarters that had been allotted to me in the Palace. I did not welcome him, as I was once again experiencing excessive fatigue and suffering apprehensions about whether some element in this planet's atmosphere might not be overcoming the protective effects of my implants.

"Here, you'd better come along," he said. "I'm just finishing off the last bits on that Kaiser fellow's arm, and he's likely to carry on some when he comes to."

I followed him reluctantly to the Kaiser's study, where Dark had been conducting his repair work. The Kaiser was stretched unconscious on a couch, his upper body bare except for the left arm, which, wrapped in a protective sheath, lay extended on a low table next to the couch.

"Most of the stuff worked just about as it does on us," Dark said, peeling the sheath off. "Needed a bit more anesthetic, but the tissue materials worked rather faster." Indeed, the Kaiser's arm now looked quite normal, aside from being opened deeply, exposing the bone.

Dark inspected the cavity with some small instruments and pronounced himself satisfied with the operation of the nerves and muscles, then deftly closed it and sealed the surface.

"That was quite a job," he observed, as he stowed his implements in his medical kit. "I hope not too many of us need any major repairs while we're here; I've about used up a number of things I doubt I can replace, though I expect I can synthesize the basic stuff locally. Ah, he's coming out of it."

The Kaiser stirred, then opened his eyes and slowly sat up. "Ah, I'm . . . oh, yes." He looked blearily at Dark and me, as though attempting to focus his eyes.

"You'll be all right in a minute," Dark assured him. "That stuff wears off fast."

The Kaiser's repaired arm hung limply by his side, and he reached for it with his right hand as though to position it more comfortably. The left arm twitched, and its lower part struck him smartly on the chest.

"Lieber Herrgott!" he said, looking at it. He clenched and unclenched the left hand, spreading the fingers as wide as they would go. Then he stretched out both arms in front of him and looked from one to the other, his eyes wide.

"It takes some managing, since you haven't had the use of it," Dark said, "but you'll get accustomed, once you've run it a bit. I'm afraid it's still a trifle shorter than the other, by not quite an inch, and the flesh is rather firmer than on the other one, but I think you'll find it in quite good working order."

The Kaiser said nothing, but sat looking at his arms for a moment. Then he reached for a white shirt which was folded over the back of a chair, and, with a practiced motion of his right hand, slid it over his shoulders and inserted his right arm into the sleeve. "If you would be so kind . . ."he said to Dark, then stopped. With considerable difficulty and several false starts, he placed his left arm in its sleeve and drew the garment around him. He was now quite pale.

He put his hands to the front of the shirt near the top and began fumbling with a button and the hole through which it was meant to go. "If you'd like some help with that . . ." Dark began, but the Kaiser snapped, "No! Do you realize this is the first time I have ever been able to use both hands to do something so simple as button my shirt?"

"Or will be able to, anyhow, once you get the hang of it," Dark observed.

It took the Kaiser very nearly a minute to manage the first button, but fastening the others went more quickly.

His shirt properly arranged, he stood and surveyed us solemnly. "Thanks would be meaningless," he stated gravely. "So would honors or money. I shall not insult you by offering them." I rather wished Ari had been there, as he would have appreciated better than either of us the subtle delicacy and graciousness of the Kaiser's statement.

He walked to his desk and stood behind it. His white shirt was caught in a flood of sunshine that came through the window, and he seemed almost to blaze with light. "Be assured that you have earned the gratitude of Wilhelm Hohenzollern and his House," he said earnestly. "And perhaps of . . ."

He did not conclude his statement, but looked down at his left hand, which lay upon the desk in a patch of sunlight. He lifted it somewhat and contorted it, studying the shadow it cast. "My word," he murmured. "That's quite a good rabbit. And how do you . . . yes, that's it, a goose, no doubt about it. And here comes a wicked wolf to eat him up. . . . Excuse me, gentlemen, I was distracted for a moment."

He brooded awhile (keeping his hands still), then looked up at us. "Though you, Herr Dark, and I have been occupied with other matters these last days, the words and arguments of Professor Doctor Ari have not been absent from my mind. I have tried to make myself consider them nonsense, but the knowledge he has shown of the forces of history have made it impossible to dismiss them so easily. I do not accept what he says completely—if I did so, it would be difficult to continue living, even with . . ." He glanced again at his left hand.

"However, it is his and your wish to bring your theories to the attention of other world rulers, and I cannot deny you this. It shall be arranged that you go to St. Petersburg and talk with my cousin the Czar. I know not what may come of it, but . . ."

He moved from behind the desk and paced slowly across the room. When he spoke, it was so quietly that I could hardly hear, as though he addressed himself rather than any audience. "It was the scorn that was hardest," he murmured. "The electric treatments and such, they hurt, really hurt, but she couldn't stand her first-born not being perfect, and she let me know it early and often. . . . When Papa knelt before Grandpapa at Versailles and gave him homage as Emperor—the first of our line, newly crowned in the heartland of the foe he had defeated!—it came to me that I should one day have that crown . . . and that my arm was a sign of my own destiny and my people's." Though his voice had risen, he did not yet seem to be talking to us directly. "The strength to overcome misfortune—the strength to deny weakness—the strength to fight for a rightful place in the sun—the strength to weld a stiff-necked people into a joyously obedient instrument of the racial will—I drew that from my withered arm! It was God's sign to me that He had touched me as He did Jacob at Peniel, and threw his thigh out of joint, that he might be no more Jacob but Israel, and would prevail. . . ."

He stopped his pacing and looked once more at his left arm, turning the hand over slowly. "And now I am as other men," he said, again so softly that he could hardly be heard.

19

It was quite comical to see the expression on Wells's and Oxford's faces as the Kaiser bade us good-bye that afternoon, coming to each of us in turn and grasping our right hands in both of his. They responded in an absent manner to his wishes for a good journey to St. Petersburg and to his expression on his regard for the great nations they represented, or at least came from; as we walked to the carriages that were to take us to the railway station, they kept glancing at their right hands in apparent bewilderment.

"You saw that, too, Wells?" Oxford asked, once we were in the train and leaving Berlin.

"And felt it," Wells replied. "It hardly seems fair that Raf should have tried to drink Berlin dry last night and it's us that gets the hallucinations. Only," he went on, looking at Dark, "it's not a hallucination, is it? You mended his arm somehow, didn't you, during those 'talks' you put it out you were having? Or did you graft a new one onto him, like some Frankenstein? I don't know if you realize what you've done. . . . I'm not in fact sure that I do, either. . . ."

Dark shrugged uncomfortably. "Well, it seemed to me something that wanted doing, so I did it. What's the harm in that? Look, it cheered him up enough so that he's sent us on to this Czar person, which is what Ari wants, and what you're along for a look at, so it's all worked out right, hasn't it?"

Neither Wells nor Oxford seemed totally satisfied with this, but neither did they appear able to find any adequate further comment on it, and the conversation became desultory.

The trip was almost as devoid of incident as the landscape was of interest; both were in the main flat and featureless. There was a moment of near-excitement when we were obliged to change conveyances at the border between the Russian and the German empires, owing to both nations' inability to agree on how far apart a train's wheels ought to be and the determination of each to have its own way on the matter within its borders.

At this halt, many passengers stood about on the platform and were questioned by Russian officials before being allowed to proceed to the next train. As we bore letters requiring our free passage, we were not so examined, and proceeded toward the waiting Russian train without hindrance. I heard a hubbub behind us and turned to see Captain Thatcher and Sergeant Olson being surrounded by shouting Russians.

"What's all that?" said Wells—who, it will be recalled, had not encountered either of the pair of far-traveled Marines—and ran down the platform to see.

When he came back, he said, "They've caught a pair of anarchists—fellows trying to sneak into Russia whilst carrying pistols. What a damn fool thing to do—even if they're not anarchists, they ought to know that the Russians won't take 'em for anything else, if they're armed."

Oxford and the four of us exchanged glances. Evidently Mr. Edison had not given up on his plans to retake us.

Nicholas Romanov, Czar of All the Russias (I had not been told there was more than one Russia, but that seemed to be his official title, all the same), was not nearly so impressive a specimen as his two royal relatives that we had met. He was a shortish, slight man, with a moustache and beard which, unlike King Edward's, appeared to be designed to conceal rather than to adorn his features. He was also, after we had gone through the by now familiar preliminaries of being closeted with him in his place of work—these emperors appeared to spend a lot of their time behind desks—a good deal less attentive to what Ari had to say.

"It's really too much for me," he said peevishly. "I can't think what Willy and Uncle Edward were about, asking me to receive you. I have the Duma, "and the Court, and the peasants, and the Army, all at me all the time, and now you people, with this talk of wars and so on. I don't want a war, and I don't know anybody who does. We had one with the Japanese a few years ago, and it was most distressing, most; it very nearly meant the end of the monarchy, and I don't propose to have that happen, no matter what anyone says. No, no; it won't do, and it's really too bad of the Kaiser and the King to send you on to upset me this way. My family and I come out here to have a little peace and quiet, and next thing you know, I'm expected to listen to beings from another world tell me I'm supposed to go to war for some reason I can't at all understand. It's not the way to do things, and I'm not at all pleased."

This interview occurred at a place called Tsarskoye Seloe, some distance from St. Petersburg, where the Czar and his wife and children frequently retired to enjoy what they considered a simpler manner of life than that obtaining in the capital city. The palace they inhabited seemed to me fairly elaborate, but emperors doubtless look at these things differently. Wells and Oxford had not taken too kindly to being excluded from our deliberations, but the Czar, on hearing that his cousin the Kaiser had made the same proviso, insisted on the point. "I don't see the reason myself," he had said, "but William knows about these matters, so I'd best be guided by his example."

Now he clearly appeared to regret having agreed to see us at all; he was certainly looking at us in a most unfriendly manner and moving papers about on his desk as though he wished us to leave but had not quite worked up the resolution to ask us to do so.

Ari was beginning to look rather discouraged, but he still persisted. "The findings of Metahistory, Your Majesty, leave no room—"

"Don't plague me with your Metahistory, sir! I won't be hounded in my own palace, not for the King or the Kaiser or anyone! It's really not fair to—"

The Czar's complaint was interrupted by the opening of his study door and the entrance of a small boy, who rushed toward him, calling impatiently, "Papa!" Then he saw us and stopped. "Everybody must stand up when the Heir to the Throne comes in," he announced importantly.

"But we are standing," Dark said, as we were, since the Czar had not invited us to do otherwise.

"Then sit down and then stand up," the boy advised. "I like it when people have to stand up."

"Alexei," the Czar said fondly, reaching for the lad. "You know you're not supposed to come in when Papa is talking business. However, I suppose it doesn't matter; I believe we have concluded our talk. It was good of you to come to see me, gentlemen, but I must not presume on your valuable time any longer. You may—"

At this point, the boy Alexei, in attempting to climb into his father's lap, slipped and struck his head a glancing blow on the desk. He gave a snort of pain and impatience, and a trickle of blood began to flow from his nose.

I understood this to be a common enough reaction to a minor injury, but the effect on the Czar was startling. He turned pale, grabbed the boy up, and darted over to a couch at one side of his study, yelling loudly enough to be heard outside the room, "Send for Grigori immediately! Grigori must come! The Czarevitch . . ." His voice broke. He laid the boy tenderly on the couch and began dabbing helplessly at the continuing flow of blood with a handkerchief.

In a moment, several persons entered, following a huge and hairy man clad in a rough robe. He strode to the couch and bent over the boy, speaking soothingly in the Russian tongue. As he passed us, I got a whiff of a rank odor, which, taken together with his appearance, suggested that he had somehow been prevented from washing for some time.

The Czar stood back, relief evident in his expression. Valmis, looking alert for once, drifted over near the couch and stood by as the hairy man, presumably the Grigori called for, continued to speak to the boy, at the same time stroking his forehead and gazing at him intently.

In a moment the trickle of blood stopped. Grigori wiped the stains from the boy's face with the Czar's handkerchief, which he crumpled into a ball and dropped, took him in his arms, and walked from the room, followed by the attendants who had come in with him. The Czar, sighing deeply, sank back into his chair.

"What was that all about?" Dark asked. "Wasn't it rather a lot of fuss over a kid's nosebleed?"

The Czar looked at him somberly. "I must ask you," he said, "to keep secret what you have just seen. It must not be known that the Czarevitch, who will one day rule in my stead, suffers from . . ." He sighed. "My son . . . there is something wrong with his blood. The slightest injury or cut is dangerous to him; the blood flows and will not stop, or it seeps under the skin, causing huge, inflamed bruises. The doctors can do nothing—only that holy man, Grigori, who has been sent from God to help us, can preserve him. It's a pity," he went on, with a return to his former querulous manner, "that he's got to create such a fuss wherever he goes, though. What he gets up to with the ladies of the Court is something shocking—and, worse, some of them don't seem to mind it! But the Empress turns a blind eye to it all, and so must I. It's upsetting having Rasputin here, but it would be unthinkable for Alexei to be without him."

"He's quite good at it," Valmis said. "From what I could see, it looked as though he were getting the boy to relax his consciousness enough to take control of the small veins and get them to tighten up and stop the blood. Very sound Perception of the Patterns involved, I have to say; I've seen nothing like it here."

The Czar looked at him in bewilderment. "Nobody knows how Grigori exercises his healing effect. It is a holy mystery."

"Not especially," Valmis said. "It's seeing what the Patterns are, you know, and acting with them.

Every sort of organization of matter has its Pattern, whether it's a single cell or a galaxy, or anything in between. Once you sense the Patterns fully, you're able to Integrate. That's my specialty, Integration, you see."

"Valmis," Ari broke in, "I cannot think that His Majesty cares to—"

"One moment." The Czar held up his hand and looked gravely at Valmis. "I don't understand you, but you seem to be claiming some knowledge of my boy's illness. That is hard to believe, but . . ."

"Well, it follows. It's part of the Pattern of blood to clot when there's a flow of it out of a puncture of some sort, so as to seal the wound off. And if it's not doing it, then the Pattern is off in some way. Your Grigori's work is most impressive, but I don't think he's getting at it directly enough. Where the Pattern's gone wrong would be in the blood itself, I should say, something extra or missing in the cells."

"The doctors have said something like that," the Czar replied wearily, "but what good does it do to know this? And in any case, they can't identify just what it is that is wrong."

"Perhaps I ought to have a look, then," Valmis suggested. "I'm not a medical technician or anything like that, but I should hope I haven't lost my touch at getting hold of a simple cellular Pattern! Dark, would you let me have the use of your kit for a bit? I'll want to use that viewer thing you've got in it to get a good look at the cells."

Though plainly at a loss to comprehend what was going on, the Czar gave orders for Dark's gear to be fetched. When it had come and Valmis had extracted the instrument he required, he pushed aside some papers to make a clear spot on the Czar's desk and spread out the crumpled bloodstained handkerchief Rasputin had left behind. Adjusting the viewer from Dark's medical kit, he inspected this closely for some time, muttering to himself. When he had done, he straightened up and said, "I believe that's it. There's a sort of—is it 'protein' you call it here?—anyhow, something the cell's Pattern seems to call for, and it's not there. I'd like to make sure of that, though. Do you have a clean pin or something like that about you, Your Majesty? Ah—" He went to a wall map and pulled out a pin with a brightly colored head, one of many inserted there.

"That's the Twenty-third Regiment!" the Czar cried in some agitation. "You can't—"

"Don't worry, I'll put it back in the right place," Valmis said. "I've got the Pattern of all those pins clear in my mind—though it's not a very good one; I should think you'd want a lot more of them over on the left side, near Germany. Now, put your hand on the desk, palm up, please . . . there!"

The Czar gave a start and a sharp cry as Valmis jabbed a fingertip with the pin and blotted up the resulting spot of blood with a piece of paper. This he also inspected with the viewer.

"As I thought," he said after a moment. "It's here"—he pointed at the blood spot in the paper—"and not here." He indicated the handkerchief.

"You have found the cause of my son's disease?" the Czar-asked wonderingly.

"Well, yes," Valmis replied.

"Amazing! But . . . what good does it do to know this? The fault is in the blood; very well, we have learned that. But it is still there, and . . ."

Valmis, ignoring him, was rummaging through the medical kit. "Dark, where is that synthesizer thing? I've forgotten what it looks like. . . . Say, is this it, the one with the yellow bands near the top?" He held up a complex-looking object.

"That's it," Dark told him. "Look, you shouldn't be fooling around with—"

"Don't nag," Valmis retorted. "It puts me off when I'm Integrating. You don't seem to understand that Integration's not just a matter of sitting about and Perceiving things, though that's a lot of it, but there are times when you've got to get your hands dirty, too, and that's Integrating just as much as the other is, so I'd be obliged if you'd refrain from putting me off my stride."

It was not only the Czar who was gaping at Valmis now; Ari, Dark and I were almost equally perplexed. We had rarely, if ever, seen Valmis so energized, and certainly not since our precipitous arrival on this planet. His mystical, melancholy obsession with his fancied distortion of reality seemed to have vanished.

He looked up from a further inspection of the paper and the handkerchief and caught our gaze. He grinned and remarked, "A very pretty problem, this. I must say it does me no end of good to have something to sink my teeth into. There's a lot of Integrators who don't think it's worthwhile bothering with anything this size, but I always say a Pattern's a Pattern, no matter where you find it, and it doesn't do anybody credit to ignore even the smallest ones. Either snobbery or laziness, that's what it is."

He turned to the Czar. "Look here, do you think you could let me have some blood? About a . . . what are your measures, now? As much as would go into this cup here?" He held up a moderate-sized vessel from Dark's kit. "It won't hurt, I assure you, and I don't believe you'll miss it at all—your system'll replace it in no time. All you have to do is take off that jacket and roll up your shirt-sleeve."

"I don't understand," the Czar whispered. "What are you . . . what would you do with it?"

"Well, it's obvious," Valmis answered. "I'll put it through the synthesizer, to activate those protein things you've got and your son hasn't, so they can make replicas of themselves. Then we inject some of it into the boy, and the protein things start grabbing onto his blood cells, so that in a while they've all got them, and the new cells he produces are the way they're supposed to be. It's a clumsy way of doing it, I grant you, but it'll do the job well enough. Now, if you'd rather we got someone else in to let us have the blood, I suppose—"

"No!" The Czar spoke more firmly than I had yet heard him do. Staring wide-eyed at Valmis, he began undoing his tunic. "If this thing is to be, then my son shall have my blood!"

20

To my disappointment, and I suppose to the Czar's, Valmis said his process would not be immediately effective, and we should have to wait until the next morning to test its results. As a result, we were obliged to spend a most tense afternoon and evening. The Palace was in an uproar, with the Czar, pale and defiant, overriding all argument and insisting on Valmis being allowed to treat the boy Alexei; the Czarina, a very excitable lady, alternating between tearful hopefulness and angry objection (also tearful); the doctors and Rasputin, for once in agreement, bellowing and railing against the whole idea; and the general run of other people, from equerries and generals to the men who drove the carriages, arguing, expostulating, calling out, singing, praying, weeping, rushing about, whispering in corners, flinging themselves onto couches and off again, drinking quantities of a very warming stuff called vodka, and, in short, carrying on as though demented.

By common agreement, they left our party strictly alone, whether because of the Czar's decision to trust us or because they regarded us as possibly supernatural and dangerous beings, I could not be sure. Rasputin gave us some quite ugly looks when he chanced to stride by us, but did not make any approach. I was glad of this, as he had not yet found occasion to wash, and his presence in a place could be detected for some time after he had left it.

We contrived to get something to eat from the obviously reluctant and apprehensive servants. The meal was accompanied by some of the vodka, which I welcomed, as I found that its warming properties relieved much of the unease and tension which surrounded us.

"You people have got us in the soup properly if this business doesn't work," Wells predicted gloomily as we ate. "Whatever possessed you to meddle with the boy?"

"Well," Valmis returned defensively, "I saw the Pattern of it, and it just sort of came to me that I should do something about it. I've been keeping myself pretty much unaware here, as it's upsetting to see so many distorted Patterns and not be able to set them right—it's not all that easy, being an Integrator, don't think that for a minute—but there this one was, wasn't it? Besides," he added, "the Czar was awfully sulky, and I thought that doing something about this might cheer him up so we could get on with . . . with what we were talking about."

Wells breathed heavily. "I daresay it might. And if it doesn't work out, sulky won't be the word for the way he'll be feeling! That man doesn't have a great supply of backbone, but he is a near-absolute monarch, and if he's badly disappointed, we're going to find that out, and quite unpleasantly, too. My will's up to date, thank goodness."

"Oh, it'll work, all right," Dark assured him. "Look how nicely the Kaiser's arm worked out."

"Ah, yes, the Kaiser's arm," Wells repeated distantly. "You do get into the way of doing these things, don't you? I don't suppose," he went on, "that you had a chance to do anything drastic to the King, did you? He, at least, has not been . . ."He stopped what he was saying and looked at Ari, who had suddenly developed an intense interest in the contents of his plate. "Oh, no," Wells said softly.

"Well, the man was choking," Ari said. "Be reasonable, can't you? I mean, it would have gone awfully hard with us if they'd come in and found Raf and me there, and the King dead on the floor; surely you can see that? And we didn't do anything drastic, the way you said. Just gave him a little something I take myself to keep the system working properly, so he won't have to be bothered again, worrying about his heart."

Wells rose from the table. "You people are too much for me," he said. "The Martians I invented aren't anything like as odd as you are, tentacles and all. I could never write you up properly, though Shaw might perhaps be able to do you justice. I believe I shall find my way to my bedroom now and try to get some rest. I find I'm quite tired."

As there was nothing much to do, with the Palace in such a turmoil, and as dinner had been given us very late, the rest of us repaired to our assigned rooms as well.

I composed myself for sleep, but found it evaded me. It seemed clear that our mission to Europe was not going as we had hoped. Ari's theory about hereditary monarchs being, as it were, the summit of rationality was not, in my view, being borne out by experience. They seemed quite as prone to confusion and emotion as other humans, if not more so. And, if that were the case, it was understandable that they were not properly impressed by the inexorable logic of his Metahistorical arguments and would therefore not be likely to see the advantages of accelerating their inevitable war. So it appeared that our venture might well turn out to be fruitless, and our wait for the planet's technological improvement as protracted as we had feared. Still, the war, whether it came quickly or in a few years, would be the needed first step; once it was going, we ought to be able to do a few things that would help achieve our ends. . . .

This was fairly bleak comfort, and as I have said, I could not get to sleep at all easily. After some time, I rose and attempted to find the room in which we had dined. I recalled that there had been a bottle of the vodka there and believed its refreshing qualities might lighten my mood of worry sufficiently to allow a good night's rest.

I did not encounter anyone in the dimly lit corridors and hallways, the hour being advanced, although I could have done with some information, since after obtaining and sampling the bottle I had gone in search of, I discovered that I could not readily retrace my steps.

After a while, I found myself near what I recognized to be the Czar's study, the door of which was partially opened. I could see a dim light from inside; hearing a low murmur, I approached to see if I could be directed to my room.

When I peered in, I saw the Czar, his back to me, seated in front of a communications instrument, something like a telephone, into which he was speaking urgently, but in so low a tone that I could not catch any actual words. On a panel attached to it, I could see a flickering black-and-white image, which, by squinting, I could make out as that of King Edward; His Majesty's lips moved, but I could hear none of his words, which were evidently being transmitted into the earpiece the Czar held. I had not seen this particular sort of instrument before; I supposed that they must be quite expensive and therefore used only by the wealthy.

As the Czar seemed intent on his conversation, I did not disturb him, but left, taking a thoughtful pull on the bottle. I wondered what he might be discussing with King Edward, and I hoped that it might bode well for our aims. I took some comfort from this thought and from the vodka, and, upon regaining my room after some wandering, fell quickly asleep.

21

It seemed to me curious that when, after an hour of exhaustive tests the next morning, the physicians normally charged with the care of the Czarevitch wonderingly informed the Czar that his son bore no traces of his disease, the reaction was hardly to be distinguished from that which the decision to embark on his untried treatment had occasioned on the previous day. There was quite as much running, praying, crying, and so on; in addition, someone caused a number of cannons to be let off at intervals throughout the day and several loud bells to be rung very nearly continually. The Russians appeared to be an alarmingly volatile people, given to expressing joy as well as consternation in an extreme manner.

Although the bottle of vodka had aided me to attain a healthful night's slumber, I had somehow acquired a severe pain in the upper and rear portions of my head, and this ominous suggestion of malfunction on the part of my implants led me to feel quite dispirited, as well as irritated at the constant volume of noise.

This was added to, somewhere toward the middle of the day, when, on the Czar's orders, Rasputin, yelling most horridly, was driven from the palace and dispatched to St. Petersburg. He had, it appeared, attempted to assault Valmis and to accuse him of being in league with ill-disposed supernatural entities, and of an unwholesome cleanliness of person; and, when diverted forcibly from this, he had tried to mate with one or more of the Czarina's female attendants, who raised objections to this course of action.

"He was a false prophet," the Czar said sternly, watching the struggling robed figure being escorted away by a considerable number of soldiers. "It is to my shame that I tolerated him here; now that I need not, my court is cleansed of a stain which I had not allowed myself to see. Thank God, we have seen the last of him!"

I agreed heartily with this sentiment, as he seemed to be the noisiest of a noisy crowd.

I did not follow the events of the next day or so at all closely, as I was attempting, with only indifferent success, to rid myself of my lingering malaise by a judicious administration of the vodka refreshment. This, while occasionally effective, was not always so, for many of the symptoms, such as sensitivity to noise, head pains and the like, would return in full force after a period, and increasing the dose seemed to do little or no good.

I gathered, though, that Ari was encouraged by the progress of his talks with the Czar. "He's cagey, no doubt about it," he told me, having come unbidden to my bedchamber. "He won't let on what he means to do, but he's been on that picture telephone thing a good deal, talking with the Kaiser and King Edward. It must be that they're working out what they want to do to arrange their war, though I'm not allowed to listen in, which seems unfair. But that's royalty for you."

On the third day after the results of Valmis's treatment of the Czarevitch had become apparent, we were summoned to the Czar's study. I was feeling somewhat better, in spite of the professed inability of the servants to supply me with any vodka for the preceding twenty-four hours, on the claim that somehow most of what had been on hand had unaccountably vanished, and was beginning to hope that my implants, after a period of malfunction, had started to operate properly once more.

"I have grave news, gentlemen," the Czar said. I noticed that he bore himself in a more decisive manner than when we had first met him and that this was reflected in his speech. "I owe you much, and on that account have even gone to the length of giving careful attention to the remarkable proposition with which you approached me, abominable though it is. I have conferred with the Kaiser and King Edward as to courses of action that seem appropriate in the light of what you say, and you may be assured that there will, in due course, be certain results from those discussions which you will find significant. There is, however, another point which requires our immediate attention. Rasputin has evidently been telling his troubles all over St. Petersburg, and his highly colored account of your presence here has come to the attention of the Ambassador from the United States. My Foreign Minister, Isvolsky, has within the hour come to me with an urgent communication from President Edison, demanding your return and that of Mr. Oxford, as a military officer under serious charges, to his custody."

He frowned at a piece of paper he held in his hand and said, "He is most pressing about this. But I could not, in all conscience, allow you, who have done so much for me, to be taken captive against your will. Nor can I, as ruler of Russia, take such a provocative step as outright refusal against a powerful nation with whom we have many dealings. Therefore you must disappear."

"How do we do that?" Dark asked uneasily. It seemed to me, too, in light of what Wells had said about the Czar's autocratic powers, that "disappear" had a sinister ring to it.

The Czar gave a tight smile, as if divining what had passed through our minds. "I mean leave here, and in quite sound condition. Especially," he added dryly, with a look at me, "as our vodka supply appears to have been exhausted. You shall quit Russia, and in such a manner that there will be no official involvement of my government—ordinarily, I should have sent you off in a naval cruiser, but you will see why that is out of the question in this situation. However, there is a Spanish nobleman resident in St. Petersburg, owner of a seaworthy yacht and well known to me. I have arranged with him to put this vessel and its crew at your disposal for a fast sail to England, where you will be quietly received and sequestered until matters have developed further. The King is on his way home now and has promised to make all necessary arrangements for your secure accommodation there."

"Won't Edison's crowd figure out pretty quick what's going on?" Dark wondered.

"It may be so," the Czar replied, "but he won't be anxious to make a public outcry once you're away from here, and I can truthfully maintain that I am free of any official involvement. And he won't be likely to protest to Spain about your use of the yacht, as the Americans have already had one war with that country, and the public would not take kindly to beating a dead horse."

When we conveyed this news to our friends, along with the Czar's instructions to pack immediately, Wells bore it more philosophically than Oxford did. "At any rate, I'll get back to England," he observed, "and that's more than I felt like counting on a day or so ago."

Oxford was on the edge of surliness. "I've been smelling something fishy for some time," he said. "There's a lot going on I don't like the look of, and this is part and parcel of it. If what you've been telling all these king people is just that you'd like their help in getting your ship back in shape, how come it's so secret? And how come they're getting themselves all worked up over you? If we're to be whisked to England and hidden, that makes it seem as though there's more in it for the King than what you say. I'll stick by you fellows, for I don't seem to have a choice right now, but I'm bound to say that I don't think you're being square with me and Wells."

"They're not, of course," Wells told him mildly, arranging some clothing very neatly in a container he was packing. "That's one of the things that encourages me. It makes them seem more like us, doesn't it?"

"You will understand, I am sure," Ari said smoothly, "that what has been discussed between ourselves and the monarchs who have been kind enough to grant us their attention must of necessity remain confidential, and that what you take for a furtive secrecy is in reality a matter of necessary diplomatic courtesy. I trust this will allay your unworthy suspicions."

"See what I mean?" Wells said. "They're getting more human every day."

It was dusk when we reached St. Petersburg, after a comparatively brief train journey, and the carriage conveying us to the waterfront district, where we were to board the Spanish yacht, passed along a wide street lit by softly glowing lamps which cast pools of brightness onto the pavement.

As we approached one of these lit areas, Dark took a close look at a group of people outlined by the light. "My word, there's that Rasputin fellow!" he exclaimed. When we were nearly up to them, he leaned from the window and called jeeringly, "Hey, monk, had your bath yet? He won't have understood, of course," he said, sitting back in his place once more, "but I expect he caught the tone pretty well."

I looked back and saw the huge robed figure glaring after us; I also got a clear view of the two men with him. "If he didn't," I told Dark, "Captain Thatcher and Sergeant Olson will very likely explain it to him."

Though we had naturally anticipated pursuit after this encounter, it did not materialize, so far as we could see, and we gained the yacht's mooring place, boarded it, and stood out to sea without any hindrance.

"All the same, I don't like it," Oxford said as we stood on the deck and watched the lights of St. Petersburg dwindle behind us. "Thatcher and Olson are after us to save their hides, and Rasputin'd like to drink our blood for getting him thrown out of his cushy berth in the Palace."

"True enough," said I. "But now that we're out of Russia, there's nothing they can do, is there?"

Next morning, which broke gray and damp in the open reaches of the sea, I congratulated myself on having put this observation in the form of a question rather than a definite statement. Had I not done so, I should have been quite abashed at the sight of a large ship, bristling with guns and flying the ensign of the United States, cutting through the water to intercept us.

A loud voice, amplified, I imagine, by some mechanism, emanated from the ship, instructing our vessel to halt its progress. When, at Oxford's urging, the yacht's captain refused to do so, Oxford's order was effectively countermanded by a shot which raised an impressive spout of water not far ahead of us.

The warship drew up alongside us, and the captain yelled up at it, "This is piracy, señor!"

"Not at all, Don Diego, or whatever your name is!" the voice boomed from the ship. "We're following the orders of the President of the U.S.A. and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Navy, and I guess that makes it legal enough for me! We want your passengers, and we're going to have them. Far as I'm concerned, you're just a leftover we forgot to sink at Santiago Harbor, and I don't mind adjusting the error now, if you've a mind for it."

"This would not hold up under international law," Wells muttered.

"And this ship wouldn't hold up under a four-inch shell through the hull," Oxford said dispiritedly. "I guess we've been trumped, fellows. Edison wants us, and he's got us. Let's get our stuff together; they'll be coming for us any time now."

When we were conveyed to the warship by a party of sailors and brought on board, it was dismaying, but not excessively surprising, to be greeted by Captain Thatcher and Sergeant Olson. Behind them stood Rasputin, who grinned wolfishly at us and snarled something in Russian.

"He's saying, near's I can make out, that you can't be so fond of baths neither, since you give up rather than havin' to take one in the ocean," Olson told us with a derisive grin.

22

Our trip back across the Atlantic went more quickly than the one from America, the captain of the destroyer not being concerned with the comfort of his crew and passengers, but only with completing his assignment, and we were approaching New York harbor five days after we had been obliged to come on board.

Though we were prey to great apprehensions concerning our reception, the intervening time was not without its points of interest. Strangely enough, Thatcher and Olson, secure in the successful completion of their mission, became quite friendly and appeared particularly to enjoy talking with Dark, who shared many of their traits; they traded experiences of encounters in far places with evident relish.

Rasputin, now that his lust for revenge had been satisfied, appeared rather at loose ends, and spent much time striding about the deck alone. Only Olson spoke any Russian, and he was mostly occupied with Dark; in any case, the ship's crew pointedly avoided the bearded monk, as he grew hourly more unpleasant to be close to, with the salt from the sea spray and a certain tang from the coal smoke the ship's engines poured forth adding memorably to his already pungent personal atmosphere.

It was not any real fellow-feeling—for I did not think I could ever actually like Rasputin—but rather boredom that drove me to seek his company. Ari and Valmis were mostly sunk in gloom, as were Wells and Oxford, and I did not wish to spend what might be my last days of comparative freedom for some time in sharing their misery. To pass the time, I fetched out the Communicator, virtually unused since it had been employed to give us four a command of English, and adjusted it so as to perform, in a limited way, the same function for Rasputin.

This could not be done with full effectiveness, as its memory banks contained only the limited amount of English—quite enough for practical purposes, but of course nowhere near the complete language—that they had been fed, and no Russian whatever. All the same, with Rasputin's at first reluctant cooperation, in a day or so he was able to make himself understood most of the time, if without any degree of elegance, and to comprehend a good bit of what was said to him.

"What you think I can doing in Oo Ess?" he asked me, once we were on a conversational footing. "I don't think monk business very good there. Thatcher and Olson, they tell me when I help catch you, they see I be all right there, but I don't know. I so mad at you fellows curing Czarevitch when I can't, so Little Father throw me out, away from all good food and nice ladies, that I don't care, so long as you get it in neck. But now is time for cooling heads, and I am worry. Can't go back to Holy Russia, or Little Father have me struck with knout many times a day, every day, for hurting his friends. I don't think any good tell him I'm sorry, you?"

I agreed that it was unlikely that the Czar would feel that a handsome apology met the case adequately, and I suggested that one requisite to success in the United States would be a reform of his external hygiene.

"Wash?" he asked, puzzled. "Why that? Dirt has nothing to do with soul. Besides, women like man to smell like man. Countess, duchess, they go weak when I approach—I be's outside room, and their nose tell them I coming, they faint with desire." It seemed to me that he might have been right about the effect; though not the emotion involved; and I told him that in any case, from what I had seen in advertisements in the journals I had leafed through, it did not work that way in the United States.

He reluctantly agreed to allow himself to be bathed, and a party of cheering sailors hosed him down on the afterdeck, as he capered and shouted in the chilly spray. After his unspeakable robe had been scalded with live steam from the boilers and dried by being held in front of the firebox, he put it on his newly cleaned form, and said, "By God, I feel like new man! Old Grigori washed away, as in Blood of Lamb. New man for New World, not? You say ladies like clean there: they get clean. It work same way, clean or not." It did not appear that his exterior laundering had penetrated at all deeply.

It was as we entered New York harbor that I saw, circling the head of the symbolic statue there, a large mechanism making its way through the air. "What's that?" I asked a nearby sailor.

"One of them new Wright electric fliers," he told me. "Takes sightseers around the harbor; I went up in one when I was here on liberty a couple of weeks ago. Don't make no noise, hardly, and goes like the wind, faster'n a train, almost. I hear they'll be using 'em to carry the mail next."

"We having like that in Russia pretty soon, I bet," Rasputin said as he lounged at the rail beside me. "Fellow came to see Little Father, month, two month back, name Sikorsky, he all hot in collar about flying machines, say he got brand-new idea. No wings, but spinning thing on top keep in air. He want money to build, and Little Father say he think about it. I tell him idea from devil, so he drop, but I guess he go for it now Grigori not there. Hey, what goddam tall buildings! If that where American men work, I bet they tired at nights from climb up and down, no good to wives. Not worry, wives! Here come Grigori!"

Rasputin, of whom we lost sight after we had docked at a shipyard across the river from the main island of New York—I understood that he had been given a sum of money and escorted to a section of the city inhabited by persons formerly of his country—was the only one of our group who took our arrival thus light-heartedly. Oxford and Wells and we four Explorers were naturally subdued at the thought of what was in store for us—Wells, though not directly involved in our escape and not really subject to Mr. Edison's authority, could not hope to avoid some awkward moments at the least; Thatcher and Olson were grimly aware of their responsibility in getting us over the last leg of our journey.

"Boys," Thatcher said, as he directed us into a large, closed van, "we've got you this far, and I want you to know I don't propose to lose you between here and Glenwood. For you may as well know we're going on back to your little gray home in the East, as Mr. Edison thinks you'll be safest there. Of course, there'll be a few changes, such as the park-like grounds being enclosed with electrified barbed wire, and dogs loose after dark, and, to guard you, a full company of Marines that's seen service against the Moros and don't like anybody that ain't a Marine. But you won't notice that, boys, so long as you stay inside the house or lounge careless-like on the front porch of an afternoon, and do what you're told. Now, that ain't no mean setup to go back to, is it? So don't get notions about pulling any of that cute stuff, the way you done before. I like you guys, I really do, and it'd pain me to do you a lasting injury with this forty-five you will observe me holding. I believe I may safely speak for Sergeant Olson as well."

Olson agreed that this expressed his viewpoint precisely, and we began our journey into captivity.

Wells was quite interested to see our house and, with his ingratiating manner, smoothed the ruffled feathers of the servant couple (that is of course a metaphor, as they were, like almost all employees on the planet, human and not avian), who had been somewhat brusquely handled in the commotion after our hasty departure.

Oxford went with Wells to get him settled into a vacant bedroom, and the four of us took the opportunity to confer privately.

"Well, here we are again," Dark said. "And much good it did us to leave in the first place! All it's accomplished that I can see is that it's put us in the way of being shocked or bitten to death if we get a little careless in strolling around."

"I fail to take your meaning," Ari responded. "Our talks with the King, the Kaiser and the Czar were of the greatest moment. It may take a while for the seeds I have planted in their minds to bear fruit, and it is certainly a pity that we did not have the opportunity to acquaint other rulers with—"

"Ah, stow that!" Dark said violently. "Those chaps thought your top story had a 'for rent' sign up, and no tenant applying; they made that clear enough! Face it, man, they don't have the stomach to set up a war on your say-so, no matter how much Metahistory or meta-whatever you feed them. Your game's played out, Ari, and it's damned well time I took a hand."

"How do you propose to do that, Captain?" Ari asked coldly. "While my own poor efforts in effecting changes in the course of a planet's historical development may not seem impressive to you, I fail to see how a . . . a mechanic could do better. And while we're at it," he continued, turning to Valmis and me, "I suppose you two have your own notion of how to manage what we're after? Perhaps you, Raf, are carting around some splendid plan you haven't yet bothered us with? Ah, that's what I like, a nice, crisp negative shake of the head—there's Communication for you, economical of means, yet conveying accurately an admirable sentiment. And you, Valmis, have you Perceived how to use the Patterns of this planet to our advantage? Do let us know."

He and the rest of us were taken aback when Valmis answered mildly, "Well, you know, I think I might. It seems to me—"

"Damn your 'seems,' sir!" Ari said. "It's preposterous that you and Dark seem to think—"

While I was made quite uncomfortable by this acrimonious display, I was not especially happy to have it ended abruptly by the entrance into our sitting room of Captain Thatcher, now back in full uniform, who paused at the door, looked behind him, and said, "They're in here, sir. I'll get Oxford and the Englishman down and shoo them in, too." He gave a salute and left.

Mr. Edison came into the room and stood leaning on a cane held in front of him, surveying us with unconcealed dislike. He looked older than when I had last seen him, and the lines on his face were etched noticeably more deeply.

"I'll wait 'til your friends are here before I tell you what you're going to do," he said, without any preamble or greeting, and continued to survey us in the same unfriendly manner.

When Oxford and Wells were ushered—pushed, very nearly—into the room, he acknowledged their presence by grunting. "Oxford," he remarked after a moment, "I've looked it up, and I find I can't have you shot. Not legally, anyhow. But you'd better make it your business to help me deal with these people, or you can bet you'll be looking up loopholes to see if you can find some way to rate a firing squad. You, Wells, it don't look as though I can do anything to, I'm sorry to say. But you helped this crew on their way when you knew darned well I wanted 'em here, and if you're meaning to try any lecture tours in the United States, I wouldn't advise it. I never especially wanted to be President, but, by God, now I am, and I don't take kindly to being flouted, by my own people or by foreigners."

He turned and once more let his baleful gaze rove over Ari, Dark, Valmis and me. "Now, you," he said. "I'm not going to bandy words with you people. You know things we can use, and you're going to give 'em to us. End of transmission. I don't know what you thought you were up to, busting out of here, but you are now darned well going to sit here and draw up plans and specifications about everything you know of, until I'm satisfied you don't know any more. We need what you've got, and we're going to get it. And if it takes red-hot pincers, or a few experiments with live wires here and there on you, why, I don't know that I'd mind that all that much."

His voice had become hoarse and shrill, and his lips drew tightly over his teeth. My uneasiness deepened into alarm. The strains of office had evidently told deeply on Edison, and he seemed to me to be approaching a condition of marked instability. I wondered what might be done to mollify him, but could think of nothing that might be effective.

"How much did you tell those people, I wonder?" he went on in the same unsettling tone. "That was low, that was, scooting off to help give those other countries a head start over us, the people that took you in—"

"It wasn't like that at all," Dark said indignantly. "We didn't tell them anything about how to make things; we didn't go there for that. It was just that Ari had this idea he could get them to start up their war a little sooner, so it'd be over quicker and everything would happen faster, you see, so that . . ." Edison, Oxford and Wells listened with awestruck fascination as Dark explained Ari's plans, each of them looking from Dark to the rest of us with expressions I could not fathom.

"But, you see," Dark finished, "it doesn't seem to have come to anything, so here we are again."

Edison had sunk into a chair during this recital. The eerily tight expression had gradually been smoothed from his face, and he looked merely extremely tired. "That was quite something to hear," he commented after a moment. "I take it, Oxford, Wells, that it came as a surprise to you?"

"Yes, Mr. President," Oxford answered, with a note in his voice I had not heard before. "We . . . it . . . yes, you could say it wasn't quite how we thought things were."

Edison sighed and closed his eyes. "I feel like I'm coming out of a fever," he said. "I don't know . . . I got so caught up in thinking we had to have these fellows feeding us ideas, that it got to be an obsession with me. I don't go having people locked up, and chased and kidnapped when they get away, just so's they can work for me; that's not Thomas Alva Edison at all. But I've done just that, ain't I? And it took something like this—this weird, cold-blooded, crackpot notion these people came up with—to make me see it. Oxford, don't you worry about what I said before. I think you did me a favor, helping 'em escape. And I kind of wish I'd let it stay that way."

He started to rise, and then sank back again in his chair and looked glumly at the top of his cane. "But all the same, they are back, ain't they? And they do know things we can use, you can't get around that. And, as President, I'm bound to do what I can to get hold of that knowledge, though I don't have much heart for it any more. Oxford, if you're not holding any grudges and are willing to let bygones be bygones, do you think you could help me work out a way—"

"Hey!" Dark broke in. "All right, we know what you're after. So why not let's get on with it?"

"Dark!" Ari exclaimed. "You can't! It's gross interference with a planetary culture!"

"I'll leave you and Valmis to argue about the ethical difference between getting a whole bunch of people into a war earlier than they want, and giving them a few tips on things they might get some use out of and which would get us a lot nearer the day they can help us put Wanderer spaceworthy again. Look here," he said, turning to Edison, "what kind of things would you like to know?"

It would be unkind to say that Edison was gaping, but there was certainly a pronounced look of relaxation about his jaw. "Well," he replied slowly, "there's a lot of work to be done with flying machines, for a starter."

"Ah, gravity repulsion's the thing there; I was telling those Wright fellows that last year, when we ran into them. The way you get gravity repulsion is, you . . ." He launched into a technical description which I could not follow; Mr. Edison seemed to be able to do so sufficiently to realize that the required technology and certain vital substances did not exist on Earth.

"I can see that'd be so," Dark said. "After all, if you could put together a gravity-repulsion unit, even if you had to be shown how to do it at first, why, then, the same thing'd hold for Wanderer, wouldn't it? And we wouldn't have to go to all this trouble. Let me see, what's something a bit simpler?"

He worked out a design for a standard spacesuit, very cleverly, it seemed to me, adapted to available materials and skills, but, as he had no clear idea of certain key processes in producing the metals and ceramics required for the sort of primitive spacecraft that Earth's resources might admit of, this did not appear to be of any immediate utility.

"True enough," Dark said with a chuckle. "If you can't get into space, what's the use of a spacesuit? Mind you, they look pretty unusual, and there's a chance they could catch on as a fashion, so you might sell quite a few. But that's not the sort of thing you're looking for, is it?"

Mr. Edison agreed that it was not, and made the same comment on the next couple of ideas Dark came up with.

"Of course!" Dark finally cried. "I don't know why I didn't hit on it first off, but here's something you can really use. I've still got a cinder in my eye from that damned destroyer you had us picked up by, and I remember thinking just after it went in how unnecessary it was, burning all that dangerous stuff. A power source, that's what you want."

Edison at last began to look interested. "Well, yes," he said. "I'd admire to know about a new power source, seeing's I've made some little contribution in that line."

"Well, this'll do you very nicely, then." Dark went on to outline the construction of a form of fuel cell used in isolated areas not served by broadcast power on our home world. I was interested in following his description, as I had never concerned myself with how the things were put together. It seemed to be a simple matter and of course resulted in a very effective product at little cost, depending on the conversion of hydrogen to energy.

Edison was also fascinated, though looking less pleased than I would have expected. "Let me get this straight," he said. "Anybody could slap one of these things together, so long's he could read plans, handle tools, and had about three dollars seventy-five cents to buy what he needed to start off? And he could pull what hydrogen he needed out of water? And he could use one of 'em to run an auto, or a ship, or a flying machine, or a windmill, or a lathe, or a dynamo, or practically anything that needs power? And not pay more'n a cent or so a day to use it?"

"That's it," Dark agreed jovially. "I think that'll do nicely to start off with."

Edison gave him a long, careful look. "I'll tell you something," he said. "First invention I ever patented, back in 'sixty-nine, I knew telegraphy backwards and forwards, and it came natural to think up something that used what I knew. And I put this together, and it worked fine. It was for legislatures, like the Congress, and it was a machine that was set up so every time there was a vote, each member could just press a button, and whichever way he voted, yes or no, it'd be recorded instantaneously. A second after the vote was called for, it'd be down and counted, and the result known, and no hours spent in roll calls. Well, I showed that to a committee of Congress, and they turned it down flat. One of 'em was kind enough to take me aside and tell me why. Seemed that those fellows needed that waste of time. Gave 'em a chance to see which way the wind was blowing and change their votes if they were going to lose bad or happened to be voting the other way from some fellow they wanted to keep in good with, and so on. So something like that, that looked so good, would upset the whole applecart, and they weren't about to have it."

He looked down at the floor. "Same way with this. Nearly free power for everyone, available tomorrow, ain't that grand? No need to buy coal, gasoline, oil, wood, anything like that. And no need to pay the coal miners, oil people, filling stations, anybody like that. I calculate it'd take about six weeks for the country to turn into a howling wilderness of starving mobs using free power to get to places where they could steal food to stay alive."

He rose to his feet. "Gentlemen," he declared, "I broke the law and I broke faith with myself to drag your secrets out of you. And then you gave them to me of your own free will, and they're ashes in my mouth. Well, that's often the way of it, that's so—I guess I forgot that there ain't much fun or profit to be had in something you don't sweat to get for yourself. No such thing as a free lunch, as they say. That business of keeping you prisoners here to milk you of ideas is out, done with, knocked in the head. I will make you another proposition. As distinguished alien visitors, or whatever damned category I can fit you under, I'll see to it that I'm authorized to grant you a handsome pension that will keep you in comfort here for as long as you're around. But only on condition that you keep your mouths shut about any such trifling boons as free power, perpetual motion and the like. That's too rich for our blood, and we'd die of it pretty quick. We're an industrious and inventive people, and I don't see any easy gifts you could let us have being worth losing that."

When he had left, with a terse farewell, Dark looked after him, dumbfounded. "What a fellow for not knowing what he wants," he muttered.

"I could have told you your idea wouldn't work," Valmis said comfortably. "Edison saw right off that it was a problem of Patterns, that bringing out one of your machinery things the way you wanted would distort the Patterns so badly that they'd fall apart."

Dark suggested Valmis do something with his Patterns that I believe he must have heard from the sailors on the destroyer.

23

Ari's confidence in the eventual results of the scheme he had at least partially set in motion was, so he maintained, unabated. "It'll start working on the King and the Kaiser and so on, you see, and they won't be able to help themselves. They'll struggle a bit and worry over it, but they'll come round to seeing it, and then we've got our war on. Just you wait and see."

There was no practical alternative course of action that we could see, so we followed Ari's. This we were obliged to do without the company of Oxford. When he returned, some days after Edison's visit, from a trip to New York to see Wells off to England, he sprawled on the couch in the sitting room and said, "Fellows, I've got news. Adieu, adieu, kind friends, adieu, yes, adieu. I can no longer stay with yieu, stay with yieu. Fare thee well, for I must leave thee, et cetera."

"You're not going away?" Dark asked.

Oxford gave him a sharp look. "As a matter of fact, yes, that was what I was trying to get across. Look, you can get on perfectly well without me—you've got Mr. and Mrs. Bonacker to look after you, and you're not any longer going up and down in the earth, seeking whom you may devour, so you don't need a keeper. And, while it's been interesting—I don't deny that for a moment—it's not my regular line of work. So after I put Wells on the boat, I went around to see old man Pulitzer at the World and put a proposition to him I've been thinking of for some time. And, in short, he's backing me in it."

Although there were a large number of journals, published at nearly every conceivable interval, from one day to three or four months, and offering news, fiction, advice, and comment in profusion, it had seemed to Oxford that there was room for yet another. This was to be a weekly magazine which would summarize the events that had taken place since the previous issue, in the brief, pithy style characteristic of the daily journals, yet in greater detail; for the further benefit of the readers, the reading matter would be arranged by topic, so that one section would be devoted to matters concerning foreign countries, another to American politics, and so on.

"Pulitzer's wild for it," Oxford said, "and I'm to start putting it together next week. I know a lot of reporters who'd give their eyeteeth to work on something like this, and I bet I can put together a staff that'd beat anything going. I've got to work up a name for it, though, something snappy. You fellows want to turn your own odd brand of logic onto that problem?"

We thought awhile, but came up with nothing useful; it was to be expected that we would not be sufficiently acquainted with the subtleties of this culture to be much help. To be polite, I offered one suggestion. "As it seems to me this new journal would save your readers a lot of time, you might call it something like Save."

Oxford said that he didn't quite see it, but that there might be the germ of an idea there. He took his final leave the next day, and we were on our own to await the outcome of Ari's contrivings.

From time to time he professed to find evidence in the journals or in the news programs on the electrodiffuser that events were working out as he had hoped. He was particularly excited by the announcement of a joint visit by the Kaiser, King Edward, and the Czar to the principal nations of Europe, which he considered a sure presage of war, saying, "Just get all those fellows together in one place, and they'll be at each other's throats in no time." But months passed with no perceptible increase in world tensions.

The first anniversary of our arrival on the planet passed, and then that of Mr. Edison's election; winter closed in once more. Our long experience of interstellar flight had habituated us to inactivity, but we did find time hanging heavy on our hands, and we welcomed the purchase of an improved electrodiffusion set which carried pictures as well as sound, something like the telephone I had observed the Czar using. This instrument provided us with much diversion, though not of any very deep content. Mr. Barrymore seemed to take up a good deal of time on it, and I was interested to see some of the antics of Mr. Cohan, whom I had seen perform at Madison Square Garden.

Another year turned—it was now 1910, by local reckoning—and, some weeks into it, I noticed that Valmis was becoming increasingly edgy. "Look here," he said to me one afternoon as the last of the snow was melting on our lawn, "I don't know that I can stand this much longer, hanging on for Ari's war. He keeps saying that it's all right, that his calculations just need a little revising, but I can't see it. I was even thinking of going into stasis—"

"You wouldn't do that!" I exclaimed, shocked. It happens from time to time that an Explorer ship's warp malfunctions, and a journey that would normally be accomplished in weeks stretches into centuries; as a precaution against the effects of this, Explorers are provided with the means of placing themselves in a state of complete inactivity for very long periods so that they can be aroused with no sense of the passage of time, if they should chance to arrive at a place inhabited by anyone with the capacity for doing so. As it is not actually known that the process has worked successfully in practice, Explorers regard the whole idea with a dread verging on the superstitious, even though it is required by regulations for each Captain to keep the necessary equipment by him, as Dark had.

"Well, not really," Valmis said, abashed. "It was just that I got to feeling so low that it crossed my mind. But I've got a much better notion now. Look, Ari's had his chance at getting this planet going the way we want it, and it doesn't seem to have come to much. And Dark's idea of force-feeding them technical things . . . well, we saw what happened about that. But, you know, I've got my own specialty, and it seems to me that it might be the way."

"How would that be?"

"Well, you see, what's in the way of these people getting on fast enough to help us with Wanderer is really their Patterns. What Ari's after is counting on a sudden change in the Patterns in the shape of a war. And Dark ran up against the fact that you can't work something into a world's Patterns that doesn't fit into them. But they don't know anything about Patterns, really, not like I do, and I think I've got the way to do something about these."

When he later put his proposition before the others, they were dubious. He meant, it appeared, to give public lectures, by means of which he would bring his audiences to Perceive the Patterns relating to their lives and to their planet in general, and thus would bring about changes in their consciousness and a resultant rapid readjustment of the Patterns. "It's like I did with that Alexei boy," he explained. "I got the protein things into his bloodstream, and they altered the whole thing. It's the same, once you've got a whole crowd of people learning to Perceive—it'll spread and change everything."

"You needed my medical kit to do that," Dark pointed out.

Valmis was impatient with this cavil. "Naturally, enough, if you're dealing with a mechanism, like the body, it stands to reason you've got to use other mechanisms. But with minds, you work with the mind. Look here, Raf, you've met this Cohan man, and I understand he knows his way around the entertainment business; do you think he could give me some tips on how to rent a place where I could speak and hope to draw a pretty fair crowd?"

None of the rest of us was really hopeful about Valmis's plan, but I humored him by suggesting that he go to New York and look up Oxford, who could doubtless put him in touch with Cohan.

We saw Valmis off at the Glen Head railway station, carrying a lunch Mrs. Bonacker had packed for him, as he had not yet got the knack of ordering meals in public eating places. As the train glided out on its overhead rail, Dark said, "He'll be back this evening all crestfallen, poor chap, but at least he'll have had an outing."

Valmis's return was otherwise than Dark had predicted. He strode in animatedly, humming a song I recalled from the electrodiffuser, sailed his hat across the room, and sank into a chair, grinning broadly.

"So Cohan put you on to how to hire a hall?" Ari asked.

"Hire a hall?" Valmis repeated scornfully. "Let me tell you, that notion's down there among the remnants and markdowns! George M. says that's for soulful ladies who want to get across the latest line in theosophy, or fellows with lantern slides of the Holy Land, not a red-hot proposition like yours truly!"

"What . . . what has he in mind, then?" Ari said faintly.

Valmis produced a large cigar, bit the end off, and lit it, drawing upon it luxuriously. "Havana Perfecto," he remarked around it. "Fifty cents each, no less. George M. gave me a handful of 'em, that's the kind of fellow he is. He saw right off that the lecture dodge wasn't for mine, no sir! It isn't every day that you get a fellow guaranteed to be from another planet, and fresh from a tour of the crowned heads of Europe, ready to give forth the wisdom of the ages, and George M. means to see to it that I get a proper showcase. He's seeing to everything: setting up when and where I'm to appear, how I should dress—he wants me to wear the coverall from Wanderer, says a chap in a chalk-stripe gent's three-piece with pinched waist ain't going to cut much ice when it comes to the philosophy game—and he wants me to write down some of my material so's he can polish it up and see that it gets across."

"How much is all this going to cost you?" Dark said. Our pensions from Mr. Edison were ample for our needs and some luxuries, but would not really cover a considerable extra expense.

"Cost me? Cost me?" Valmis threw his head back and laughed. "Not a single simoleon, that's what it's going to cost me. George M.'s going to pay me!"

For the next few weeks, Valmis was absent much of the time, taking a morning train to New York to confer with Mr. Cohan, and returning only in the evening; he would even occasionally stay at a city hotel overnight. As presaged by his manner after his first encounter with Cohan, his speech and general attitude underwent startling changes. He would talk knowledgeably of theatrical performances and restaurants and cabarets frequented by actors, often offer to give us advice concerning wagers on sporting events, though we did not follow these entertainments at all closely, and regale us with a vast fund of anecdotes concerning persons of whom we knew nothing. One exception to our ignorance of his new circle of acquaintances was Rasputin, who appeared to be gaining a growing if in the main unsavory reputation among New York's flourishing motion picture colony. "Sharp fellow, that," Valmis remarked approvingly. "He's getting on in movie work and picking up a nice bundle of change endorsing soap for the ads. He's got a picture of himself the way he was in Russia, and they run that alongside a new one, and a balloon coming out of his mouth saying, 'Ebony soap did this for me—what wouldn't it do for you?' "

"I think," Ari observed later, "that Valmis is getting caught up in a Pattern he's not aware of."

Valmis was completely absent for some days before his first public appearance, having left word as to the time and place we should present ourselves to witness it. On the appointed day, we made our way to the theatrical district of New York. It was, I realized, at least a year and a half since I had had any close look at this portion of the city, and I was struck by some changes in it. Hardly any horse-drawn vehicles were to be seen, and the many motorcars operated much more quietly than I recalled, as did the elevated railways, which were now, I understood, converted to the turbine engine in general use on trips between cities. Overhead, a large flying machine slowly drew an advertising banner across the sky, offering inexpensive air trips to a place called Florida.

At one motion picture theater, I was interested to see a large poster promising that those who ventured within would see:

MAD MONK-EY SHINES

A New Sound Feature

Starring JOHN BARRYMORE

as "Grigori the Great"

A GOLDFISH-LASKY-RASPUTIN Production

Written by GREG RASPUTIN

Directed by GREG RASPUTIN

Technical Advisor GREG RASPUTIN

The auditorium to which Valmis had directed us, an ornately decorated place, was crowded, though this was the afternoon of a working day. We found our seats and settled into them with anticipation, in spite of our reservations about Valmis's course, proud that so many Earth people had turned out to see our companion.

We were thus at a loss when he did not appear at the rise of the curtain. A lady came out and sang, to the accompaniment of an orchestra just below the stage, a long song which seemed to turn on the fact that the words "June" and "moon" end in similar sounds. She was followed by a man who obliged a dog to do a number of things which I would have thought unlikely had I not seen them, and then by two bearded men whose conversation, though opaque to me, aroused great enthusiasm from the audience.

"What is all this?" I whispered to Ari. "Did Valmis send us to the wrong place?"

"It may be," Ari answered, "that this collection of oddities is meant to show the consequences of striving to live without Perceiving Patterns. Those last two, Weber and Fields, might well illustrate the principle of complete anarchy and chaos in an undetermined Universe."

"I don't know about that," Dark put in, "but the native term for this is three-a-day."

After two more people had come out and thrown each other into the air for some time, a placard was pushed onto the stage reading: THE AMAZING VALMIS—THE MAN FROM THE STARS.

"Ah," Dark said, "now we get down to it. I wonder what this crowd'll make of a lecture on Patterns after they've been worked up by all these other acts?"

The orchestra struck up a brisk tune, and Valmis, the spotlight gleaming on his white coverall, sauntered onto the stage. I was surprised to see him carrying a light walking stick, and hoped that he had not suffered an injury.

He assumed a negligent attitude, leaning on the stick, and, in time to the music from the orchestra, sang. I was later able to obtain a copy of the words of this song from him, though he insisted that any reproduction of them was strictly forbidden without mention of the fact that they were copyright 1910 by Co-Val Music Corp.

When singing in the bathtub or walking in the rain,

he warbled in a high, nasal voice,

Do you ever think to wonder what gives pleasure and what pain?

Why East is East and West is West, and never twain do meet?

Why sky is blue and grass is green, and honey mighty sweet?

Well, folks, I've got the news on that, and now you'll have it, too:

You've got to make your mind go blank, and let the Patterns through!

At this point, the tempo of the music became faster, and he executed a series of intricate steps, which had the effect of causing him to rotate about the walking stick as he continued to sing.

It's the Patterns! The Patterns!

In rabbits and their habits, in stars and Christmas trees,

In toads and frogs and puppy dogs, in hives of bumblebees;

It's the Patterns that all make 'em—

It's the Patterns, you can't break 'em—

Once you see 'em, you can shape 'em—

It's the Patterns that make all things as they are!

It was, I was obliged to admit, a catchy tune, and as Valmis accompanied succeeding verses with ever more imaginative steps, the performance was well received by the audience.

When he left, to be succeeded by an individual who announced his intention of divining the thoughts of any person in the audience, we quitted our seats and made our way to an area behind the stage, as Valmis had previously requested us to do.

We found him in a small room, seated in front of a mirror, removing some colored substance from his face.

"Didn't it go well?" he asked. "I thought I really had 'em after the verse, and once I swung into the chorus and did that sort of shuffle around the cane, they were in the palm of my hand—right, George?"

I now saw that Mr. Cohan was seated on a chair in the corner of the room. He nodded approvingly and assured Valmis, "You killed 'em, boy. You just want to watch your timing toward the end—you nearly kicked the cane out from under you and took a pratfall."

"Well," Valmis said, "don't you think a bit of comedy might in fact go well just there? It would, I don't know, give it a sense of—"

"Hey!" Dark strode over to Cohan. "You were supposed to be giving our friend here a chance to get some deep stuff across to the public, right? So what's this business about making him into a vaudeville turn?"

"I'll tell you," Cohan replied, looking up at the towering Captain. "I thought about it some, after Valmis came to me, and it just didn't seem to me that he would get any kind of a hearing, doing what he planned. So I worked out how he could at least draw an audience. And say," he added, glaring at Dark, "where do you get off knocking vaudeville turns, anyhow? Can you think of anything else you fellows are good for?"

24

We all knew after that, I think, what the future held for us, though the ingrained dread of which I have spoken caused us to avoid facing it for a very long time.

Valmis, though he insisted on playing out the engagement to which Mr. Cohan had bound him, had no heart to continue further when the disparity between his intention and the reality of his performance had been made clear to him. He spent much time in his room, looking morosely at a collection of signed photographs of theater people he had mounted on his wall, and sighing.

Ari, with an increasing lack of conviction, scanned all journals for signs of the oncoming war.

Dark sought relief in busying himself with mechanical matters; he participated in several automobile races and did quite well. During the latter part of this period, he was aided by Sergeant Olson, as mechanic, and Captain Thatcher, as manager, they having retired from the Marine Corps. But to an Explorer Captain cut off from his ship, automobile racing prizes are only a palliative, they do not cure; and the passage of time only deepened his gloom.

I quite enjoyed my trips to the Roslyn tavern, in spite of an occasional return of my fatigue, but these also could not make me forget that we were where we ought not to be, with little prospect of leaving . . . at least not during our normal life span.

Thus, the word "stasis," while unspoken among us, began to loom larger in my mind and, I now know, in those of my companions.

The events of that time held moments of occasional interest for us, even of high excitement. I shall never forget, for instance, the Titanic disaster, as we saw it on the color electrodiffuser. The scene of the great ship, mortally ripped by a piece of floating ice, slowly slipping under the sea, was eerily impressive, and contrasted dramatically with the darting movements of the rescue fleet of Wright fliers and Sikorsky ornithopters which had been dispatched from the American and European shores within moments of the arrival of the news of the ship's plight. After all the passengers and crew had been removed, one lone aircraft in the service of the electrodiffusion company remained, floodlighting and relaying the scene until, with a sudden boiling movement of the ocean, the ill-fated liner vanished. All of us were shaken, recalling Wanderer's disappearance in just such a manner . . . four years before, now.

It was in the same year that we saw and heard President Edison's unexpected speech in which he announced his decision not to run for a second term, as he wished to get back to work. "There's more going on than I ever dreamed possible," he declared, "and I mean to show the world that I'm up to getting in on it."

Mr. Roosevelt's triumphant return to office was also a reminder of our first days here, when our hopes had been so high.

One afternoon in July of 1914, Ari burst into my room in high glee. "It's late, but it's coming!" he announced. "I just heard on the electrodiffuser that somebody's shot the heir to the Austrian throne in Europe, and that's just the stuff to set them off. You wait, there'll be ultimatums and mobilizations and I don't know what else, and then, bang!"

"Well, that's nice," I said, not being able to rouse any real enthusiasm, for I had been through many such moments with Ari. And of course I was correct in this, the shooting, in the usual way of such crises, resulting in nothing more than the standard conferences of heads of government and some political readjustments.

A year or so later, for some reason, the papers, Oxford's magazine, and the electrodiffuser gave a great deal of coverage to Czar Nicholas's installation of one Vladimir Ulyanov as Minister-President of the Russian Democratic Empire; according to the electrodiffusion commentary, delivered, curiously enough, by Rasputin, who appeared to have spread himself over much of the communications and entertainment industry, this signaled political changes of great moment.

"A historical day, ladies and gentlemen," we heard him say, as the screen showed a view of the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. "Vladimir Ilich now kneeling before Little Father—all that about Siberia forgotten now, by damn!—and giving homage. On platform I can seeing Emperor from China, Kaiser, King Edward. Bells in cathedrals ringing now—that banging you hearing is twenty-one-gun salute from battleship Potemkin. When it finish, is sign that Holy Mother Russia be changed, all legal and by vote, to democratic monarchy! This Greg Rasputin, bringing you scene I never expecting to see!"

Ari switched the set off and regarded it glumly. "Everything's going on, and we're left out of it. I'm beginning to have moments, you know, when I almost lose my faith in Metahistory. I know it backwards and forwards, and everything I ever learned about it tells me that there should have been a war by now, even if I miscalculated about being able to do something to bring it on faster. But, damn it, it's as if we weren't here, as if we were ghosts or something, unable to get anybody to hear us or pay any attention to us. It's almost enough . . ."

All the same, we put off making the decision for another two years, watching the months come and go at what seemed to be an ever-increasing pace, and ourselves becoming less and less active.

It was Valmis who voiced our thoughts openly, on a bright autumn day. "Damn it, we might as well be in stasis, for all the good we are to ourselves, each other, or Wanderer. Your war is not coming on, Ari, and that means there's no telling when this planet's going to be up to helping us. I don't know what went wrong—maybe that Ford man was right about Metahistory being metabunk—but in any case that's a dead end. And the same about anything else the rest of us have tried. If we're not just going to sit around here until we wither, the only thing to do is face it and go into stasis for as long as we need to."

Our protests were a half-hearted ritual, for we had each privately arrived at the same conclusion some time before, though not yet daring to act on it.

Once the decision was taken, we took a melancholy pride in carrying it out quickly and efficiently. We consulted Oxford and were granted an interview with President Roosevelt (who had persuaded the voters in 1916 that the next term would not, if you looked at it the right way, actually be his fourth). Both were disconcertingly quick to agree that stasis would be a good solution.

"You just get off to sleep, then," the President said heartily, "and we'll have you woken up when we're ready to help you on your way, by Godfrey! Not before, mind you; we wouldn't want you cooling your heels any longer and thinking about getting wars started, eh?"

He agreed to have a stasis chamber constructed according to our specifications in a corner of a military cemetery at a place called Arlington. "Might as well," Ari muttered morosely. "The way things are going, it's not going to be used for much else."

Oxford agreed to set up, with the assistance of Wells, an organization that would oversee our period—perhaps centuries—in stasis and ensure that when the time came we should be awakened. Both the method of going into stasis and the process of awakening were quite simple, so that there would be little likelihood of the necessary instructions being garbled by the passage of years.

Soon the time came for us to leave the house at Glenwood, to return no more. We bade farewell to Mr. and Mrs. Bonacker, to whom we had deeded the place in appreciation of their services for almost precisely ten years, and took the train to New York.

"Look," Dark said, "why don't we put this off for a day or so and have one last look around Europe? There were some nice places there, and the fliers can get you across within a day. It'd be fun, wouldn't it?"

But, having made our decision, the rest of us agreed that it would be unnerving to defer its execution, and we proceeded to Washington and thence the next morning to the chamber prepared for us at Arlington.

We set out the stasis-inducing equipment and prepared it for use, and we stowed the reanimation instruments in a prominent place, not wishing them to be overlooked when the time came. We made all the preparations we could before sealing the chamber, and we stood for a moment at the half-opened door. It was a clear day, with the sky a deep blue and a touch of frost in the air; we heard the sound of a distant bell giving several slow chimes.

"Eleven o'clock," Dark said, counting them. "Well, that's a bit of a Pattern for you, Valmis. Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. If we'd had the sense to do this seven years ago, it'd have been the eleventh year of the century, too. Well, let's get on with it—we haven't been able to do anything with this place, so the sooner we're out of it the better."

He pulled the door to and sealed it.

25

All the information we had been given on stasis was firm on the point that there was no subjective awareness of the passage of time, that the interval between entering that state and leaving it would seem no more than a blink. As I have stated, this was mainly theory, based only upon limited experimentation, since volunteers to test the proposition that this effect would hold true over a period covering several normal life spans were not forthcoming.

I thus expected at the time I awoke to be somehow conscious that a number of years had come and gone, but the theory turned out in fact to be true after all. When I found myself aware of my surroundings again, it seemed to me so soon that I could almost fancy I heard the echo of the chiming bell still ringing in my ears.

Light flooded our chamber, and I looked up curiously to see what manner of future man might have awakened us. I felt an eerie chill as I saw in the two figures who now stood among us an uncanny resemblance to Wells and Oxford. These were men of more advanced years, but close to identical to them in feature and bearing. The clothing they were wearing, though substantially different in cut, was also sufficiently close to twen-tieth-century garments to suggest a bizarre idea.

Could it be, I wondered, that the "sleeping spacemen" had become the object of a cult, as decade followed decade and century followed century into the past? Had Oxford and Wells become the founders of a hereditary priesthood, passing their genes down the years to their successors? It would follow, then, that the prescribed ritual garments would be modeled after those of the original priests, or keepers. If such were the case, it boded little good, it seemed to me, as the level of superstition it suggested would not be compatible with the technology we required. It was in no easy frame of mind that I sat up and looked at my companions.

"Wells? Oxford?" Dark said. "What the hell are you doing here? We've only just got set to . . . in fact, somehow, I thought we had . . . and what are you wearing those funny clothes for?"

"Good to see you again, fellows," the "Oxford" one said. "Why don't you stretch a bit and then get up? You might be a bit stiff after all this time."

"You mean we've been in stasis already?" Dark demanded. "But then who are you, and how long has it been? What year is this, anyhow?"

"Nineteen thirty-three," answered the "Wells" one—and then, of course, I realized that it was not, so to speak, a "Wells," but Wells himself!

"That's nice," Dark said heavily. "Do you plan to bring us out of stasis every fifteen years to let us know the time? Kind of you, I'm sure, but we really don't need it. It's bad enough, to go into this sort of thing once, let alone over and over again."

"You won't have to go back into stasis," Oxford explained. "Not unless your warp drive goes out on the way home, which I don't think it will, as we've had it checked over pretty thoroughly. The Wrights' people have made some changes in the atmosphere control surfaces which I think you'll find useful, too."

If we were stiff after our period of stasis, I do not believe we were aware of it. In an instant we were on our feet, surrounding the two Earthmen and bombarding them with questions.

Oxford and Wells soon made it clear to us that in spite of the absence of war during the entire fifteen-year period of our stasis, to say nothing of the years immediately preceding it, there had been a great worldwide flowering of science and technology, together with many social and political changes, and that this had resulted in the locating, raising, and refitting of Wanderer within the past few months.

"Everybody pitched in, you see," Wells told us. "Scientists and technicians from all over the place came to help. We had some most valuable contributions from the new universities in Africa, and Einstein himself came in from Berlin to see that the calculations for the warp drive were done properly. Oh, it was an international effort, right enough."

"Well, that was decent of them," Dark said. "But, look here, how come? I mean, before, well, we could hardly get anybody to pay attention to us. We just got sort of pushed aside, until there wasn't anything to do but put ourselves out of it for a bit. So how does it happen that there's this great rush to help us?"

"And I should take it kindly," Ari continued with some asperity, "if you could make it clear to me in what way the principles of Metahistory have come to such grief in dealing with your planet. What you tell us is impossible by any Metahistorical precepts, and I'm not at all sure you're not giving us some fanciful story for purposes of your own."

"Come on outside, fellows," Oxford said gently. We followed him and Wells from our chamber into the sunlight. At some distance, we could see the city of Washington in the clear air. I could recognize many of the buildings, but there were others, some of a shimmering white hue and graceful shape, others somewhat partaking of the qualities of a rainbow. A long ovoid sped through the sky high above us; somewhat nearer the ground, brightly colored winged machines, each with a visible passenger, darted and swooped silently in apparent play.

"All right," Ari said after a moment. "It's there, I can see that. You have come a long way, then. But how? We tried so hard to . . ." He stopped, apparently a little embarrassed at recalling the method by which he had attempted to speed Earth's progress.

"You did a lot, you know," Oxford said. "I don't know that anybody could ever trace everything, but you left quite a trail of surprises. I don't know what Metahistorical teaching's like, but doesn't it take into account things like what happens to a man when he's been a crippled megalomaniac all his life, and then all of a sudden he's not a cripple? Or a father who has the fear that his son's going to die any minute lifted from him? Metahistory doesn't consider that giving those fellows a whole new idea of what life can be like might have a little effect here and there?"

"It is the nature of Metahistory to deal with probabilities of increasing refinement," Ari replied. "Thus the inescapable tendencies are clearly established."

"Well, I guess your probabilities were pretty unrefined," Oxford retorted. "And if you really wanted that war, why on Earth did you go and tell the King and the Czar and the Kaiser what it'd be like? Couldn't you see they'd bust their crowns to avoid it?"

"I was counting on their rationality," Ari said.

Both Wells and Oxford threw their heads back and laughed. "Oh, my!" Wells exclaimed delightedly.

"You mean," Valmis said slowly, "that what Ari did to change things worked just the wrong way? I knew there was a reason why we weren't supposed to meddle in other planets' affairs."

"That was some of it," Oxford said. "But the main thing, I guess . . . the big effect you've had, was just the fact of you. Once we all knew that there were other worlds, that there were people pretty much like us some place else, why, when that sank in, it gave everyone here a whole new way of looking at things, you see. For ten thousand and some years, we've been free to consider our neighbors, the fellow next door or in the next country, as somebody else, a foreigner, and likely an enemy. This planet was all there was, and there was plenty of room for suspicion and jealousy and shooting people in the head on the off chance they might be a bother to you. But that doesn't hold up any more. It took a while, but when you fellows showed up, it kind of took the heart out of things like that. For the first time ever, people started getting a clear notion of what it was to be human and to live on a planet in space."

"So we didn't need the wars to get on," Wells continued. "Within a few years after you went into that place"—he gestured at the dark chamber behind us—"there was a new age of science, literature and art, and advances in economics and social progress, like nothing there's ever been, and it's been buzzing along like mad ever since."

"Well, I could have given you a start on that, only Edison told me to shut up about it," Dark said sullenly.

"He was right, d'you see!" Wells exclaimed. "Right as rain. He finally saw that it was the idea that something could be done that counted, not getting the plans as a gift. He didn't invent electrodiffusion by dissecting that hearing-aid thing you gave him, Raf—he saw what was there, and then he worked out how electrodiffusion had to be done. And the same with the Wrights and the others—once they learned something about the sorts of things you had, once they knew there was something great to get at, why, then, they could go and do it. And, by God, haven't we just done it!"

"So," Ari said after a moment, "it is in gratitude for our completely involuntary services—our blundering and our ignorance, not to mince matters—that we are being assisted on our way by a considerable number of your population. It is not an easy thought to accept."

"If it gets me back behind the controls of Wanderer, I don't mind a bit if I'm made to look something of a fool," Dark declared.

Valmis looked rather pale, and I wondered if he were still troubling himself about his so-called use of the Probability Displacer, ten—no, twenty-five—years before. If he persisted in clinging to that delusion, he would be bound to be somewhat shaken by Oxford's and Wells's description of the changes we had occasioned.

We spent one more week on Earth, the greater part of it occupied with a tour of the planet, it being thought that we ought to see how it had got on in our absence.

The first evening after our awakening, we dined with President Roosevelt—not our old acquaintance, who had perished tragically some eight years previously when an early moon rocket launch he was observing failed in a spectacular explosion, but a cousin of his—who insisted on taking us on an extensive tour of the White House and its grounds, walking at a pace that quite tired us. "Uncle Ted was right," he called back to us over his shoulder. "The strenuous life, that's the thing—in this job, you can go stale awfully quickly if you don't keep moving."

The news of our revival had been kept secret until after its accomplishment and, in fact, until very nearly the time of our departure for Europe the next day. We thus avoided a crush of newsmen and electrodiffusion people, but were able to take with us on the sleek Wright flier that carried us over the ocean—hardly recognizable as a descendant of the electric-powered dragonflies that had darted over the Titanic—an armful of journals relating the event.

These made interesting reading, as there were not only news stories, but what Oxford called "think pieces" and other sorts of literary effort presented.

I was struck by one of these, a verse by a person named Seeger. Its opening lines:

We have a rendezvous with Life

At some still-distant planetfall

seemed to suggest that Earth was setting about an endeavor in space which might bring our peoples into contact. I was not sure that this would be a good idea, and made a note to mention to the Explorer directorate when we arrived home that it would be well to keep an eye out for this unpredictable race.

I retain few clear impressions of the world tour, as reception followed reception with dizzying swiftness. We were greeted in London by King Edward's recently crowned successor, George the Fifth, who had a remarkable resemblance to Czar Nicholas, and by the Poet Laureate, Sir Rupert Brooke, who composed a rather florid ode in our honor. I transcribed part of this as well, as I do not believe any residents of other planets have written verse about Explorers, and thought it worth preserving as a curiosity, especially as it seemed intended to represent a personification of the planet itself.

Earth's Farewell to the Starmen

And when you leave, think only this of me,

That there's some planet of a foreign star

That is for ever your world; there shall be

On this rich Earth a heritage by far

More splendid than we ever dared to hope. . . .

It went on for some time in this vein.

In St. Petersburg, Czar Alexei, now quite a strapping young fellow, received us handsomely; he had little recollection of Valmis's intervention in the matter of his health, but had been told of it often enough by his late father, he said.

It was a melancholy thought that the passage of fifteen years had taken so many of those we had encountered only recently, as it seemed to us; we were pleased that Kaiser William himself, quite white-haired now, was present when we touched down in Berlin. We accompanied him through the streets of the city in an open vehicle that appeared to have no wheels; the Kaiser told us that it rested upon a cushion of air, which Dark found implausible. At one spot where the crowd was dense and our machine therefore slowed somewhat, a dark-haired man darted from the crowd, thrust an object into the Kaiser's hand, shouted something, and withdrew. "Ha!" the Kaiser commented. "Not bad. He said he wanted you to have it as a souvenir—it would be nice to think his name and work would travel to other worlds." He handed it over for us to examine. It was a detailed, if lifeless, portrait in colored inks of the four of us, apparently radiating from our heads a strong light which fell upon a representation of the planet placed in front of us.

"I've seen his work," the Kaiser remarked. "He illustrates for some trashy magazines my grandsons read. Well, I daresay you'll be the only Explorers with a genuine Hitler drawing for your private gallery!"

The Sultan of Turkey, the President of India, the Emperor of China . . . these dignitaries, their lands and their cities, are all a blur to me now. We came, were greeted and displayed to the crowds, and we went on, day after day.

I remember asking Wells, who was also showing the strain of the journey, how it was that in the face of the changes he had described in the world, so many of the old political entities remained unaltered.

"There wasn't any need to alter them," he told me. "When everybody got to working together and understanding that we all had to fit on the same planet, why, it just sort of bypassed the old business about revolutions and independence and such. Since governments are responsive to the needs of the people, the forms and the boundaries don't much matter now, and the people're perfectly content to leave matters of that sort as they are and get on with things that really interest them."

The last leg of our journey was over the same body of water that Wanderer had traversed in its final descent; it was with a thrill that I saw the coastal features of San Francisco emerging ahead. Then, as the aircraft circled before landing, I could see below us a familiar gleaming shape.

"That's Wanderer down there!" Dark bellowed. "By God, there she is, sleek as ever and ready to take us home!"

And so she was. There was no official ceremony, just a hasty farewell from Wells and Oxford. "It's been quite a time, fellows," Oxford said. "I wouldn't have missed it for anything. But . . . you're not planning on coming back, are you?"

We assured him that we had no such intention.

"Good," he remarked, stepping back to allow us to enter Wanderer. "I kind of think once was enough. So long."

With this last cryptic example of Earthly conversation, we took our departure.

When the globe was dwindling behind us, sparkling blue and white against the darkness of space, I observed that Valmis and Ari were looking back at it, as I was, their expressions ambiguous. Dark was peering ahead as well as from side to side; he muttered gloomily, "If they've been up to all that they said, no telling what we might run into without expecting it before we can get into warp."

"Raf," Ari asked, his eyes still on Earth, "have you started composing your Survey Report?"

"In a sense, yes," I replied. "I've got down pretty well all that happened, at any rate. But . . ."

"Precisely," Ari said. "Though Recording is your province and none of us would presume to suggest how you ought to handle it, there is still the fact that a total Recording would present certain problems for all members of this team. There is much that happened during our extended sojourn there which, considered by overworked bureaucrats in the Directorate, would have an aspect that would not be conducive to the most tempered—"

I was beginning to wonder whether Ari had embarked on a sentence to which there was no possible ending and which might therefore go on until he wore out, but Dark interrupted him:

"You mean we're in the soup if we let it get out that you tried to start a war and kept one of their rulers alive past his time, and that I put that Kaiser man's arm straight and did what I could to turn their technology on its head, and that Valmis laid 'em in the aisles with his Patterns patter number, right? Well, we don't tell them, see? It's that simple."

"I imagine," I said, "that the normal process of editorial compression would—"

"You'll fudge it, then? Good," Dark said. "Whoo! That was a damned big something that just went by, and no mistake! Lights flashing all over it. My word, these chaps have been up to something while we were out of the swim."

"My own opinion," Ari remarked, "is that Mr. Oxford's and Mr. Wells's remarks were, though well-intentioned and appreciative, wide of the mark, and reflected a certain primitive bias typical of Level Four cultures—though they do seem to have got to Level Seven rather quickly. Therefore, any moderate infractions of the directives which we may have fallen into must be seen as actually having no effect on the planetary culture, and therefore are hardly worthy of being brought to the attention of—"

"Of what?" Valmis asked, turning away from the ever-smaller globe visible in the rear viewport. "Don't you see, it's not the Directorate we're going back to, but another one. One that didn't exist until I used the Displacer twenty-five years ago. Maybe none of us can tell the difference, and maybe they can't, but it's there all the same. I did that to save our lives, and at least we're here to worry about it. . . ."

Dark, Ari and I did not normally find ourselves in accord on any given question, but the looks of disapproval, boredom and long-suffering patience which we turned toward Valmis bore a substantial resemblance to one another.

"Back there, twenty-five years back," Valmis said, "I made a cowardly choice. I kept us from crashing into that place you found out about, Dark—Siberia, was it? And we landed, and we met all those people and did all those things, and I wrote that rather nice song—though I don't suppose I'll ever see any royalties on it. And . . . things turned out as we saw, and the people back there don't seem too badly off, I suppose. But, you know, there would have been a world, almost like that, in which a spaceship hit the Tunguska region in 1908, and probably blew up like a meteorite, and so no Explorers talking to Roosevelt and Oxford and Wells and mending the Kaiser and the Czar's son and all that. They'd have been left to find their own way, don't you see? And it almost tears me apart to think about it. My using the Displacer, and all those other things we did . . . we shouldn't have, you know. Because they had the right to their destiny; we can only have diminished them by our meddling! For the rest of my life I'll be haunted by wondering . . ."

He cast a glance backward at the last blue-white glint in the encompassing darkness.

"What might they not have become without us?"