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1 PARA ONE. The one who speaks for all (Lt-Col 2 Sheffield H Jackman?) rests. With righteous 3 action comes surcease from care. I (identity 4 not certain, but probably Mrs Annette Marin 5 Becklund, less probably one of the other three 6 female personnel aboard, or one of their de- 7 scendants) come in his place, moved by charity 8 and regret. 9 PARA TWO. It is not enough to study or to do 10 deeds which make the people frown and bow 11 their heads. It is not enough to comprehend 12 the nature of the sky or the sea. Only through 13 the understanding of all can one approach wis14 dom, and only through wisdom can one act 15 rightly. 16 PARA THREE. These are the precepts as it is 17 given us to see them. 18 PARA FOUR. The one who imposes his will by 19 force lacks justice. Let him be thrust from a 20 cliff. 21 PARA FIVE. The one who causes another to 22 lust for a trifle of carved wood or a sweetmeat 23 lacks courtesy. Let him be restrained from the 24 carrying out of wrong practices. 25 PARA SIX. The one who ties a knot and says, "I 26 do not care who must untie it," lacks foresight. 27 Let him wash the ulcers of the poor and carry 28 night soil for all until he learns to see the day 29 to come as brother to the day that is. 30 PARA SEVEN. We who are in this here should 31 not impose our wills on you who are in that 32 here by force. Understanding comes late. We 33 regret the incident of next week, for it was 34 done in haste and in error. The one who 35 speaks for all acted without thinking. We who 36 are in this here were sorry for it afterward. 37 PARA EIGHT. You may wonder (literally: ask 38 thoughtless questions of the hexagrams) why 39 we are communicating in this language. The 40 reason is in part recreational, in part heuristic 41 (literally: because on the staff hand one 42 becomes able to strike a blow more ably when 43 blows are struck repeatedly), but the nature 44 of the process is such that you must go through 45 it before you can be told what it is. Our steps 46 have trodden this path. In order to reconstruct 47 the Chinese of the I Ching it was first neces48 sary to reconstruct the German of the trans49 lation from which the English was made. Error 50 lurks at every turn. (Literally: false apparitions 51 shout at one each time the path winds.) Many 52 flaws mark our carving. Observe it in silence 53 for hours and days until the flaws become part 54 of the work. 55 PARA NINE. It is said that you have eight days 56 before the heavier particles arrive. The dead 57 and broken will be few. It will be better if all 58 airborne nuclear reactors are grounded until 59 the incident is over. 60 PARA TEN. When you have completed rebuild61 ing send us a message, directed to the planet 62 Alpha-Aleph. Our home should be prepared 63 by then. We will send a ferry to help colonists 64 cross the stream when we are ready.

The above text comprises the first 852 groups of the transmission. The remainder of the text, comprising approximately 7500 groups, has not been satisfactorily translated. In the opinion of a consultant from the Oriental Languages Department at Johns Hopkins, it may be a poem.

/s/ Durward S Richter Durward S Richter Maj Gen USMC Chief Cryptographer Commanding

Distribution: X X X BY HAND ONLY

Knefhausen had almost read the spots off the blue-bound flimsy when his jailors came for him and escorted him, no, rushed him to the room where Murray Amos was waiting for him. "Explain that garbage!" Amos commanded. In spite of everything, one had one's pride. Although he was shaking with fatigue, and perhaps with more than fatigue, Knefhausen moved precisely to the center of the room, peering down at the President's assistant as he sat behind a steel Army desk. "My duty is to the President," he said steadfastly. "I wish to see him at once." Murray Amos had fatigue of his own, and perhaps it had made him more reasonable. He sighed. "Oh, Knefhausen," he said, "do you think I don't know that? The President is—not very well. I am carrying out his instructions." He glanced up curiously and frowned, for the lights were flickering. "I do not have much time," he said to Knefhausen, "so come on, boyl Give us a break."

Knefhausen hesitated, but what choice did one after all have? "Very well. I can of course tell you little that is not apparent. Have you complied with the instructions and grounded all nuclear aircraft?"

Amos's eyes narrowed. "Not questions, Knefhausen. Answers!"

"Very well. But what is there to say? 'Heavier particles' no doubt refers to some sort of nucleides, for what purpose I cannot conjecture, although from the reference to 'dead and broken' one may suspect—"

"And I don't want to hear what you suspect, either! I want you to tell me—oh, damn the lights!" They had gone out completely, and only a faint sunset glow through the shuttered windows let them see each other.

In the old heart of Dieter von Knefhausen a thrill of both fear and excitement struck. He watched Amos stab at buttons on his desk, and swear when there was no response; and then, howling with surprise and pain, wrench his wrist-watch off his arm and hurl it to the floor, rubbing the scorched skin.

Knefhausen could not know just what had happened; he had no instruments; he had been through too much for his wits to be entirely about him; he was too tired and perhaps too old. But he could observe the results as the kaons struck, and could guess that it was the end of radioactivity on the surface of the Earth.

Fortunately the kaons did not penetrate very deep. If the nucleides at the core had broken apart the planet could not have survived it. But he could see that much had broken apart already, of what little in the world he had known had managed to survive.

There was a noise at the door, and an Army doctor burst in. "The President!" she cried. "The life-support system isn't working! His signs are flat!"

Knefhausen nodded thoughtfully and walked over to a chair. "I think," he said, "there is now no longer a need to speculate at what it is that is coming to us, for it has arrived."

SINCE I DON'T HAVE ANYONE MUCH TO TALK TO, I TALK TO

myself. I look in my mirror, at that ugly old face that's really only about thirty-eight years old, well, maybe forty or so but certainly not much over, and I say: "Hello, Eve Barstow. Let me introduce myself. I'm Evelyn Clarissa Letterman. You used to be me, you know, before you mar- ried that good-looking Jim Barstow. Heaven knows who you are now." And heaven does know, I hope, because I am not sure I always do. Mostly I am called Aunt Eve, and mostly by the kids. The grownups seldom call me at all. And what I mostly do is tend the truck garden and the cabbage patch.

It isn't just that my fellow pioneers don't much want to talk to me. I'm not thrilled to be talking to any of them, either. Their conversation never did much to raise my spirits, even when I could understand what they said.

I used the word "said" very loosely, for they have evolved their own quicker, preciser ways of communicating. Old married couples rub together for half a century before they understand that his yawn means he doesn't agree and she signifies depression by sewing curtains. My dears didn't take that long. They didn't confine it to their true spouses, either. My God, no. Jim said so little to me over the years that, without the kids, I would surely have lost the power of speech while he was smacking his lips and snapping his fingers and twitching his toes and his nose and, I swear, his ears and his scalp to Flo and Ski and Dot and even now and then to some of the kids. But never, ever, to me. All right. I'm the dummy.. I don't care. I don't want to hear what they're saying anyway. I do sometimes want them to hear me, to be sure. That's mostly when I think they're doing something wrong, which is a lot of the time. They don't listen to that, either. They didn't even listen to me when we found out what Shef and Ann had been doing. They don't care if I oppose them, and they don't even care if I approve. (Do you care if a daisy approves when you pluck its petals?)

Sometimes I wonder what has happened to us. I pull out the family album I have meticulously hung onto through all these years. There are our prelaunch pictures, with the King of England kissing Dot Letski's hand, and the President of the United States, looking like Bugs Bunny in a morning coat, pinning a ribbon on Shef. The grownups won't even look. Even the older kids are pretty tired of Aunt Eve's photographs, although the littlest ones are generally thrilled with them. Or pretend to be.

We have all changed so very much since those pictures. Shef is a stick figure of himself, less than a hundred pounds, his Ruggero the Gnome King whiskers flying all around his head. I think he starches them. Or perhaps it is only willpower that stretches them taut. Flo has become grossly fat. She says it has to be that way so she can accommodate two uterine lobes working at once, since she is a frequent mommy. But it is also from eating too much. As to the late Will Becklund—well, Will is what he chooses to be, and mostly he chooses to be nearly invisible. So we are rather an odd-looking lot, skeletal Shef, gross Flo, pyknic Dot, bent Ski, willowy Ann—not to mention my lord and master Jim, who seems to have sagged all of his innards into a potbelly you cannot imagine. I am the only mesomorph in the bunch and even I, I must confess, no longer trim my nails or blow-dry my hair. Add in the scuttling littlest kids and the half-civilized older ones and, if you want to know what we all look like, go to any swamp and tip over a rock.

I will not speak of the other sensory impressions you might get of the lot of us, or at least not of the smells.

As to the sounds, ah, my God, how strangel Back when the U. S. of A. really cared about us they used to transmit cheer-up tapes. I have one of all of us on "Meet the Press" —steam radio, not TV— broadcast over the American propaganda network so that all the world could hear what delicious middle-American types we all were. And we really were. Shef's Tulsa, Ann's Bryn Mawr, just a hint of Brooklyn in Ski. Now, my heavens! None of the grownups speak English anymore, or at least not if they can help it. Except to me, and there they try when they have to but don't always succeed. Shef has completely lost the knack, and uses

a computer translator to convert those majestic thoughts of his into words I can understand, but I would not say that it works at all well. The children speak pretty good English, it's true. But for some reason or other they'd rather talk to each other than to any of us. You've heard of a generation gap? No. You just think you have. Here on the old Constitution we've raised a race of enemies. I don't know why. Except that we original eight have ourselves become quite inimical people, or seven-eighths of us have.

The Holocaust was Jim's fault, originally. For all I know they were all in it, but it was James Madison Barstow, my dear whilom Ail-American hubby, who was our resident nuclear wizard, custodian of quarks, basher with the big stick. Way back in circumsolar space he began tinkering with the ship's fusion drive. Along about midpoint he rebuilt it. Well, that produced both good news and bad news. The good news was that it worked a lot better. The bad news, not counting that it killed old Will, was that he got Shef interested in his hadron hatchery, and, oh, how I wish that had not happened!

So what Shef wound up with was one of those marvels of technological sophistication from the space program we used to hear about all the time. Only this one wasn't a frying pan. It was a way of frying Dieter von Knefhausen. Shefs miracle of better living through science gifted him with a whole new litter of feisty little nuclear particles that just loved fat atoms. When any one of them came near a big one it screwed right into it, and all that superheavy fission energy just oozed out as great gooey glops of heat.

I'm not sure why. Or how. After I cooled down I kept after them until they explained it to me, but there were gaps. Jim gave it a good try but, whatever he was saying, what I heard was:

"All he had to do was , modulate a of

for baryon-baryon interactions with Then he just ,

and and every heavy actinide on Earth had to ." And that's when I began to scream, but they'd done it anyway.

On the next morning, which was the morning of Day 3841, I woke up not really wanting to wake up at all, because it was so nice to be dreaming of home and Mom

and Dad and all the heads I used to hang out with in Southern California.

Of course, the home I had now wasn't so bad. The architect for our little world was a fellow named Tsiolkowsky, or maybe O'Neill; my nearly eidetic memory tosses up both names and I've long since tired of arguing which. I didn't have a personal room anymore. I had a personal house. Or maybe you would call it a hut, because it surely wasn't fancy, but at least it had a kitchen and a bathroom and a plot of herbs and flowering plants around it. And a lock on the door. And when I opened the door to go out and see if this day, finally, was going to be worth living, I found something tucked under my door-knocker. It was a vegetable. Or a fruit, or a flower; I couldn't really tell what, so I reached out and caught the arm of one of Flo's two-year-olds as she bounded past. "Modany, do you know who put this here?"

Her eyes widened politely. "Wower, Aunt Evel Doesn't that smell sweet!" But she didn't know. I patted her bottom and let her run on to the cookies and milk and took the thing out of the knocker.

It was something like a large carrot, heart-shaped in cross section, the color of honey. It was not anything I had grown, or even seen growing. Since I was the woman of all work in the hydroponics department, that meant somebody had been deliberately keeping it secret. When I bit a piece off, it tasted the way it smelled, chocolaty-mint. I didn't observe until I lifted it for a second bite that inside, on the fracture surface, it bore a message:

Happy Birthday Dear Aunt Eve Barstow

The lettering went all the way through the length of the stalk, like a stick of Brighton rock. It was unsigned. But who needed a signature to recognize the work of her first-born and maybe best-born son?

Jeron's personal room was only two north and four east of mine, but he wasn't in it to be thanked. Or scolded, if that was what I was going to decide to do. As I was breakfasting I decided that it would be thanked because, although in my simple old-fashioned heart I did not approve of his courting his own mother, he had at least taken my mind off Uncle Shefs villainy. I was able to make myself go to work. No matter what, someone has to till the cotton and someone has to hoe the corn, and that's me.

While I was stewing up the morning's protoplasts Molomy came flying back through the fruit vines, giggling and shrieking, along with half a dozen others of her cohort. They raced like bunnies being chased by a friendly fox, and the fox was the very son I was looking for, Jeron. As they came in sight he paused, yelled something after the prey good-naturedly, and let them escape. "Hello, Aunt Mommy," he said in his sweet, pure soprano.

I decanted the bright green soup and handed him the flask. "Hold this while I get some filter paper. What are you doing to those kids?"

He grinned. "Uncle Ski told me to struggle them while he works on the fifth cohort, but they're okay. Happy birthing day."

Jeron's simple English was pretty good, like most of the kids, but not perfect. "That's birthday, dear." I counted up. "My God. I'm thirty-nine years old today. And feel like ninety."

He steadied the flask while I repoured the decoction through the filter. "Don't be upset on your birthing day— birthday," he wheedled. "It's all over."

Jeron is a very handsome boy, not tall, complexion darker than either his father's or mine, a little portly for a seven- year-old. When he scowled he looked much older, and he was scowling now. "I know, Jeron. Thanks."

He rubbed his downy chin, nodding, then helped me put away the filtrate and knelt gracefully with me to snip shoot tips for the next enzyme stew. He was watching me out of the corner of his eye, and I knew I was in for some cheering

up. "Aunt Mommy? If you were home on your birthday now, what would you be doing?"

"Oh, Jeron, you don't want to hear all that stuff again." But I could feel myself cheering. He persisted.

"Please, Aunt Mom. You would have a cake with candles?"

"Most likely, uh-huh. Of course, that kind of a party is really for children. If your father and I were still in our old apartment in Houston we'd probably ask a few friends over, maybe for dinner. You remember how we used to eat our meals, getting together in kinship or friend groups, all at about the same time? I told you about it."

"Parents and children, yes. And everybody eating the same thing."

"Well, that's because preparing meals was a lot harder, and it was pretty inefficient, yes. But it made a meal a kind of ceremonial. Especially if there was a real occasion, like Christmas or a birthday, or everybody getting together after the family had been all over."

"So that's what you would do for your birthday?"

"Oh, maybe more than that. After dinner perhaps we would all go to a play, or out dancing—to a public place, with a bar and a live band. Ther.e might be four or five hundred people all together in a place like that."

"Will you teach me how to dance, Aunt Eve?" "Why, Jeron! Of course I will. If you're sure you really want to learn. I don't want you just being kind to me."

He frowned to look older. "Aunt Mom? I hate your logical inconsistencies. You praise me for being kind, and now you tell me you don't want to do it."

I said humbly, "You're right, Jeron, and of course I'll teach you how to dance and it doesn't matter what your reasons are."

"Now?"

"Well. I should be getting the crops in right now—"

"Not now," he decided. "Not because of your crops, though. Because I want to show you something."

There was no arguing with Jeron when he had his mind made up. He took my hand and tugged me through the quarter-acre I was supposed to be tending, and would not say why.

That didn't surprise. What would have surprised about Jeron would have been an occasion when he didn't go out

of his way to be surprising. I tried to slow him down when I saw that he was dragging me into the unfinished sections of the shell. I didn't like going there. Outside of the microclimate of my little garden patch the air was too thin and too dry and generally too uncomfortable still, though not nearly as bad as it had been. But he wouldn't stop, not until he clattered across a bare strip of structural steel, nothing between us and the vacuum outside but a fingernail's width of asteroidal iron, and jerked me to a stop. "There!" he cried.

I looked.

It was Ann Becklund. Not one of my favorite sights. "She's meditating again," I said. "Now I'm going back—"

"Look!" He darted over and touched her; she didn't move. "Full padmasana! She's been there all day!"

"She does that all the time, Jeron," I said scornfully.

"Touch her!" he said angrily. "Stupid!"

The time for teaching manners to my son was unfortunately long past, so I decided to ignore his rudeness. I touched her.

Ann didn't seem to be breathing, but I was pretty sure she was, somehow—there was a trick of breathing in one , nostril and out the other that went with the full-lotus pretzel she had bent herself into. She looked strange. Not just her padmasana position. I have mentioned that Ann's slim figure and long blond hair were a source of constant aggravation to me. They looked fine. In fact, she looked as perfectly well groomed as she ever had . . . except for one thing.

When I got close I noticed that there was a faint patina of dust on her hair and skin.

Jeron was hopping with excitement. "You see? All day today, just like that. And all day yesterday, and all day the day before, and—"

"That's impossible. After all, she had to eat—drink water, at least."

He stopped short, his nostrils flaring furiously. "It is not impossible, since I have said it was so!"

"I only meant it was hard to believe, dear. I wonder if there's something wrong with her. Maybe we should try to wake her up."

"Yes? Yes!" he crowed. "Please do!"

Well, I know a dare when it is offered, but I didn't like looking cowardly in the eyes of my oldest son. I touched her again, harder, and called her name.

There was no response, at first. Then the rolled-back eyes came slowly down to focus on me, and the lacquered face cracked into an expression of rage.

I said shakily, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I was worried about you, Ann." She made a sound—I wouldn't say she spoke. "I didn't understand that, dear," I said, full of tenderness and sympathy.

Her mouth moved slowly for a moment, rehearsing the nearly forgotten skill of speaking. "No," she croaked. And then, "You don't." And then she hit me.

I don't mean she made a fist and punched me with it. It wasn't like that. I didn't know what she hit me with, but I felt it, all right; it was like an explosion in the air before me, and I went flying.

The shock must have dazed me, because the next thing I remember was hearing Jeron whimpering, and feeling his hands under my armpits as he was tugging me away. "You got her mad, Aunt Eve! How stupid!"

"Let go of me!" I pulled myself to my feet, holding onto Jeron's shoulder to keep from wobbling in the light gravity. "She's saying something."

"That does not matter. Let's leave her alone, Aunt Eve!"

"I want to hear!" I moved back toward her, though keeping a fringe of high-bush rhubarb between us. The expression on her face showed how hard it was for her to say English words, but she finally forced them out:

"Not again."

Jeron was tugging at my arm. "She doesn't want you to bother her again," he said accusingly. "Now let's go!"

"Wait a minute, there's more!"

She was bawling something at us. It was more complicated and she forced the words out twice, but I could not understand them till Jeron translated for me: "She's saying "Chandrasekhar's other limit,' Aunt Eve, whatever that means, and now can we get the hell out of here?"

On the morning of Day 4104 Jeron woke me up by stroking my ear. He was lying stretched out next to me, but on top of the flower comforter. "Jeron," I said sternly, cough

ing to get the hoarseness out of my throat—it had been a rough night—"cut that out. Your mother is not an appropriate sex object for you."

"I know that. I just like your bed." He was sulking, of course.

I have developed the bed myself, out of honeysuckle and milkweed mostly, but with flower scents bred in. "Do you want me to grow one for you?"

"If I wanted one, I would grow one, and it would be better than this." But he wasn't really angry, because he reached behind him and handed me a steaming cup of coffee—well, as near as we had come to coffee. It wasn't bad.

"God bless you." I swallowed as much as I could gratefully. "That's very sweet of you, Jeron."

"I know. You told me your mother used to do that for you in the mornings, and I wanted to surprise you. Don't worry, I made sure Uncle Ski was gone before I came in." He tasted the coffee to confirm that he still didn't like it, made a face, and handed it back to me. "Did he tell you what Aunt Ann meant about Chandrasekhar?"

"Now, just a minute, Jeronl How did you know what I asked Uncle Ski?"

"I wasn't listening at the door," he said indignantly. "Everybody knows everything you're going to do long before you do it, don't you know that? You're the easiest to figure out!"

I took another sip of the coffee and decided to let that pass. Actually, I had asked Ski, when there was time for talking, but of course he hadn't really been able to answer. Most of the grownups could talk to me, somewhat, if they wanted to, but not easily. And seldom wanted to. "I want to get cleaned up, Jeron," I said.

He grinned. "You mean you want me to leave. You are so very strange, Aunt Eve." But he was being courteous enough to grant me my idiosyncrasies; only, to make sure I understood he was going out of his way to be courteous, he took his time about it. He paused at the door to stroke his small, thin, dark mustache. "Do you like it?" he demanded.

He had been working on it for months, so I knew what he wanted to hear. "It makes you look older," I said, and I said it as though it were a compliment. Wholly pleased, he

left me to my privacy and my unusual habits. Shower, eat, get to work: I was probably the only adult person within four light-years with so fixed a morning ritual.

It kept me going. It did not give me comfort. As I rinsed myself clean of sweat and Ski, and replenished my blood-sugar level at one end of me and replenished the hydroponics cultures at the other ... as I tugged a comb through my very uncoiffed hair and studied the jagged ruins of my fingernails, as I headed across the fields of seedling trees and fabric plants to where my ten little helpers had already begun the day's work ... I wondered why, really, I bothered.

But there was one good reason, always. I bothered because of the kids. I loved them every one. All of us had children—frequently and multiply—but I had more than anyone else, because I had theirs as well as my own. I was the only one of the crew, I think, who actually wanted children; what the others wanted was only subjects.

My work crew was unusually silent, all ten tiny little toddlers of them, and I instantly saw why. There was Aunt Flo, perched on a dewpole, silent as dusty Ann. She was wearing one of those red muumuus that were all the trouble she would go to to dress and, fat as she was, she looked like a candy apple on a stick. A mean one.

Under that wicked, wordless gaze my crew were busier than they had ever been for me, skinning plant cells to make protoplasts, challenging tip-of-the-shoot meristems with the witches' brew I had left for them. Actually, the recipe was Flo's in the first place. Flo was the one who started all those new models coming off the hydroponic assembly line, way back to the beets that tasted like lamb chops and even the exothermic vegetable womb, and so you might think she was just there to supervise our carrying out her project. I doubted that. All the supervision she ever did took one quick glance. Then either she went away ("Pass") or whopped you with a trowel ("Fail"), and that was the way you got your grades. Or you might think she was just being motherly, since all but three of my helpers were her own identical septuplet girls. Wrong again. Flo was often a mother but never motherly.

All of which left the problem of just what she was doing there.

Since it was not a problem I could solve, I ignored it. "Modany! Take Thruway and Ringo to the cabbage patch," I ordered—God, what strange names Flo gave her kids! "Check to see that all the babies are warm. Fry and Tud-easy, come with me." And I set about tweezering tiny calli onto a flat, and letting the children poke them into seedbeds.

The work was pleasant after a hard night. What I do makes no demands on the intelligence; I just have to do what any housewife does in the kitchen. Strain it, and stew it, and mix it, and set it out to ripen. You mince up the right parts of your plants. Then you make protoplasts; these are just naked cells, and the way you get the cell to take its clothes off is to stew it with an enzyme. In two weeks your protoplasts grow back their skins and they're cells again. A couple of days later they clump together and form calli, and they've begun to grow.

Of course, that's no good. You don't want them to spread into lumps like mold. You want them to specialize into stems and leaves and roots and fruits and so on, so you challenge them with some brew or other, and you watch your osmotic pressures like a hawk, and, next thing you know, the little callus turns emerald green and it's ready "to be set out.

Most of what you get's no good at all, and at least half of it just dies. But the rest—well, that's where it all comes from, you see. Ski and Flo do stranger things than that, but they've never shown me how. You have to be pretty careful, too. Any time Shef comes near a new batch he's ruined it; he sweats too heavily. My husband, one morning when he stopped by and forgot what it was he wanted of me, ruined one whole crop because he kept sneezing. But it's still no more than cookery. If you can put a perfect chocolate souffle on the table two minutes after the last guest has finished his steak, you can do what I was allowed to do.

By the time I had the whole batch set out I noticed that Flo had moved. She was still on the dewpole, but she had turned around; she was looking toward where Ann Beck-lund still sat, and what she was looking at was Dot Letski.

I drifted over. Dot was studying Ann as carefully as I had, or somewhat more carefully, because she had the intelligence not to touch her.

I never start a conversation with any of my age cohort, but this time I broke my rule. I said, "She's been like that for days, Dot, and yesterday she said something like 'Chan-drasekhar's other limit.' Also she hit me with something."

I have some very good rules, and every time I break them I realize how good they are. Dot didn't say anything. She was peering into Ann's nostrils from an eyelash length away; but she must have given some indication, because I heard a noise from behind me and when I turned Flo was leaping toward us. Behind her the dewpole was still vibrating, and the little foil streamers that catch the moisture in the air and drip it onto the plants were shaking like pennons in a breeze. She wasn't looking at Dot or Ann. She was looking at me. She stopped in the middle of her rush, poised daintily on one foot—Did you ever see the Walt Disney dance of the hippopotamuses? That was Flo—and said several English words. They were, in order, "Dragonfly. Barrier. Roll the bones."

I did not of course understand her any more than I'd understood Ann after she hit me, and I liked this just as little because I had started an argument between my two dear friends. Freely translated, the conversation went like this:

Dot: "Why are you confusing the dummy?"

Flo: "She doesn't understand what Ann's doing."

I mean, that was the first two seconds, if that, and only a tiny fraction of it, and it wasn't in words. It had to be seen to be understood, like dance mime. It went like this:

Why—eyebrows up—you—chin thrust at Flo—confuse— eyes crossed, jaw dropped—dummy?—contemptuous twitch of the shoulder toward me.

And then Flo replying: She—same twitch toward me, less contemptuous, maybe, but no more affectionate—not comprehend— same idiot eyes and jaw—Ann—jerk of the head toward the screening rhubarb.

And then Dot laughed, and stabbed her chin, tongue out and fluttering, toward Flo, shaking her head: The image of fast chatter, with a sort of wrinkle of the nose to suggest that not only did I not understand Flo, either, but perhaps all that Flo had to say was not very important anyway. But

you must not think that was all of it. Or even much. Because at the same time they were talking, in clipped, run-together, sketchy words, to each other and perhaps to me or even to distant unhearing Ann. Not in sequence, like the dialogue in a play. Simultaneously. Maybe even interactively, so that the sentence one was saying was modified before it finished by the input from the other. What a catfight! They sounded like cats. They spoke so fast that, even when they used language, the words flew by in growls and yowls and screams.

I couldn't follow what they said after the first few seconds, but it appeared that Dot was taking my side—or at least opposing Flo's— on the grounds of an outmoded adherence to causality. Was I grateful? Oh, was I ever not\ For to have Dot best Flo over me made Flo my enemy, and she was bad enough as my gene-splicing guru. I tried to look un-involved. Now and then a single word lay in my ear long enough to be heard, sometimes even a phrase. I caught a few epithets: "Stochastic bitch!" "Aleatory asshole!" "Serendipitous slob!"—for there were times when even the efficiency of quick-speech had to be sacrificed for the solid English-language impact of an insult in words. But whether the names were aimed at me, or at unhearing Ann, or at each other, I did not know. Or care. These same fights had been going on for a decade or more, and my greatest concern was to stay out of them. I didn't care to be in the middle, like the family dog with his head on his paws, looking from Him to Her as they bickered, with no hope but somewhere to catch an "Eat" or a "Come!" or, dream of Heaven!, an "Out?"

So when Dot, still jabbering away at the jabbering Flo, jerked her head to signify "Let's move on," and Flo shrugged "All right," I was not at all displeased. The jabber kept up unchecked until Flo and Dot were ten meters away, and then it stopped like the throwing of a switch. Dot kept on; Flo turned back to me.

All my little helpers had been standing slack-jawed and grinning, enjoying the fireworks that were not aimed at them. When Flo faced back they all instantly resumed their occupations, but it was me she was approaching.

She did not seem to be angry, exactly, or at least not exactly at me. She scowled and scratched her immense belly

and wrinkled her face. She was making an effort to find words, and it took her some time. And at last she failed, for what she finally produced was one explosive sentence:

"Forget it," she snapped, and was gone, lumbering lightly up the slope of the shell, over the planted fields.

I slept not very well that night, and alone, which may have been the reason I did not sleep very well.

But when I woke, on the morning of Day 4243, I still had the feeling that I had had visitors in the night. It felt as though some child of my own, lost but loving, had crept into my bed in the middle of the night, but of course when I stretched out my hand there was nothing there. Sometimes waking to find that a pet had snuggled in beside me was comforting. Mostly it was principally sad. Even guilty, in a way, because to some extent it was my fault that Will had made the first pet. I could not accept that Ann's first little girl had died, and pleaded with Will to do for her what he had done for himself—and he did try, but there was not enough there to save, really. Or on that later time, when I came to the vegetable womb to touch and fuss over my own, and found the cabbage soft and cold. I could not accept that, either.

It left me pensive, though, and the always difficult task of getting myself going in the morning took even longer than usual. When I got out of the shower there actually was someone in my bed. I mean someone live. I could not see who; he had the flowerlets pulled over his head, and all I could see was the lump of flesh under the blanket of roses.

It was too big to be one of the work team, and too small to be one of my regular gentleman callers. "If that's you, Jeron," I warned, "you're going to be in big trouble."

But it wasn't he. It wasn't any he, it was six-year-old Molomy, one of Flo's numerous children and, I had always thought, about the sweetest of them. She popped her head out of the coverlet, grinning, as pretty a poppet as Flo had ever pupped. "S'prise, Aunt Evel" she cried. "Can I come back and work for you some more?"

I pulled my shorts on under my robe (how they laughed at Aunt Eve's robe!), dropped a blouse over my head, and sat down beside her. "Well, sure you can, honey," I said, extremely pleased. Molomy had been one of my very favor

ites, and it was quite a blow when, at four and a half or so, she had decided farming was too dumb for her to stay with and switched over to Shef and orbital dynamics. "I'm a little surprised, though," I added.

"I'm pregnant!" she said proudly. "So I want to tend my own baby the first time—isn't that the way you all used to do it, back on Earth?"

By the time I had explained to her that, yes, we all used to tend our own babies before they were born, but not exactly in the same way, I had got some more information out of her. She wasn't shy about it. She prattled gaily all the way to the farm plots. She just wasn't sure. She thought Jeron was the father, but of course she couldn't be positive until Aunt Flo or Uncle Ski removed the embryo and put it in the cabbage patch, when they would test it and let her know—and change it around any way she wanted, if she wanted, but she didn't really think she wanted to edit it, did I agree?, except of course to make sure that it had her aptitude for navigation and maybe a handful of other useful traits, because your first baby always ought to be kind of natural, as much as possible, didn't I agree?

I agreed. I put her to work, in charge of all ten of the other little girls, to keep them busy while I thought things out.

Actually Molomy was not the first of the girls to come up pregnant, or even the twentieth. Some of the others had been younger at the time than she. It wasn't Molomy I was worried about. Eight weeks after conception someone would take the fetus and implant it in a vegetable womb, and Molomy would be none the worse. What I was worried about was Jeron. He was so awfully young to be a father!

I was not getting much work out of my team that morning; Molomy's news was too exciting. They were all patting her belly and listening to her navel, and I could see the jealousy growing behind their pretty, bright, two-year-old eyes. I could even feel a little jealousy growing behind my own.

Maybe not really jealousy. I certainly didn't want to change places with them! But something unwelcome.

Was it because I felt threatened—because I was not ready to be a grandmother? (But actually I had been at least twice

before that—but not with Jeron as the father.) Was it just that I was sorry for them, losing their childhood so early?

Only none of them were really children. They began to talk at six months, to read at two, to write legibly at two and a half—to make love at six or seven, sometimes earlier than that.

Early sexual maturity was bred into almost all the kids, from the fifth cohort on. Back in the early days when we were all primaparas and the simple common miracle of a child was excitement enough, we took what came. But then Flo and my quirky husband decided to play a more complicated game. They spliced and blended and turned out fifteen identical sibs from four mothers and three fathers. It was an experiment, Jim said (he was still talking in those days),-to see if tailored genes could indeed produce absolute genetic clones, and so they did. I could not tell my own babies from the other twelve, and all fifteen were cross-tolerant of implants and transfusions. After that we got all sorts of things, but one of the designed traits for almost everybody was rapid maturation.

Which Ringo now proved—two years old, remember! Her nose was out of joint with Molomy's news, and she stood up and walked toward me: "I can't work anymore, Eve," she piped in her clear, sweet voice, bending her neck to look up at me, "because I have to go pick a tampon. I decided to menstruate today."

"Me too!" cried Odd, delighted by the idea, and so did two or three of the others, crowding around me and all chirping at once.

I started to give them my little menarche speech, about how it was all a natural function and they shouldn't worry (but who could think they were worrying}), and it should not interfere with most of their normal activities, especially including doing their work (but they had other ideas than that!) . . . and discovered none of them were listening.

So I dismissed them all for the day, my temper ragged. I had a small new agricultural experiment of my own that had looked as though it was ripening nicely, and I decided it was as good a time as any to test it out.

We had four sections added onto the habitat by then— nearly a mile along its axis—and the internal diameter was

fifteen hundred feet. After the tenement squalor of the Constitution even the first section we moved into seemed like the endless plains of Iowa; by now every one of us, kids and all, had about seven acres to play with. So I hadn't had any trouble finding a section, a quarter of the way around the swell of the third section, where soil was laid and dewposts were moistening it from the water in the air (we didn't have much rain, you see, so we had to trick the water out another way)—and nobody usually came.

Nobody would have done anything to my crops, of course. But I do have this primitive need for privacy now and then, and some of my needs I am not proud of.

This particular patch was planted in a little invention of my own. It started out, basically, as watermelons; but I put a hard shell on them like coconuts, sweetened the pulp a little, injected each one with yeasts and a few other things—and, just the way I wanted it to come out, when I poked a hole in one end. of the nuts, what came out was a really very satisfactory kind of beer.

I had planted rhubarb trees around for privacy, and they already made a sort of grove twice as tall as I was, and I lay back in the stripy sunlight from Alpha and tried another nut, and another, and with each one I felt a little better . . . up until the time I saw somebody sailing purposefully in my general direction, big, bounding leaps of ten yards at a time, and observed that it was Jeron.

I used the word "privacy," but in fact there's not a lot of it in Alpha-Aleph. Not counting the little bit that the old Constitution hid by being suspended at the center of the cylinder, there was hardly any part of the habitat that was not directly visible to every other part. I could see my own little house, with the blue and white honeysuckle growing over it, and the garden plots where the experimental plantings took place, and motionless Ann, still silent in her padmasana position; I could even see the bright red bounding dot that was Flo, pursuing some other bounding dot that I could not recognize for sure, but looked a lot like my husband; and the bad part of all that was that, if it were not for the rhubarb trees, they could all see me, too. Especially Jeron would, as soon as he got a little closer, and I didn't want to see Jeron. More accurately, I didn't want him to see his mother drunk.

Uncle Ghost saved me. Jeron brought up short, listening to what 1 could not see, scowling. "You sure?" he demanded. "I thought I saw her in her malt-nuts." He listened again, to a whisper I could not hear, said something annoyed and turned away.

I cracked another malt-nut and lay back, relaxing.

I was feeling grouchy, and even the malt-nuts were only blurring my discontent, not curing it. Discontent with what? With everything. With our habitat, with my work, with everyone around me. With myself. I was about as close to a hermit as a human being could get in Alpha-Aleph, and I was getting tired of it. If Shef and Ski, sometimes even Jim, had not come calling every once in a while at night, I would have had almost no contact with my own age group. And with Shef and Ski and Jim I rarely did much talking. I knew most of what was going on in our little community; we were too small for anything to be remote. But I knew it in the way I used to know what was happening in Washington by watching the network news. Most of it seemed no more relevant to personal me.

If the adults were remote, the children were elusive. I could love them, but I couldn't really understand them. I could be jealous of them easily enough. Especially of the little girls. Womanhood had become so very convenient! I'm not just talking about childbearing, because I got the benefit of that too—but that little trollop Molomy had got to me. Before us, I don't think the woman ever lived who took menstruating so easily—not for the first ten years of it, anyway. I don't think the woman ever lived who welcomed it, either—oh, maybe they were relieved sometimes, when they found they weren't knocked up, after all. But it had absolutely nothing else to recommend it. Especially when you were just starting. You'd be sitting in school, or in church, or in your boy friend's car, and you'd feel that warm damp spot growing, and, oh God, what shall you do? Get up and embarrass yourself? Stay there until you died? Ann Becklund could do that, in her damn padmasana, but not me—

"I did not know you hated her so," Uncle Will whispered from the rhubarbs.

"I didn't know I was talking out loud," I said, hiccoughing. "Sorry. Thanks for chasing Jeron away, though."

He didn't answer for a moment, and he had not chosen to make himself visible. Uncle Will makes me nervous. I said, as much to make sure he was still there as because I had anything to say, "She hurt me yesterday."

"I know. You disturbed her."

"I thought she was sick or something! And then .she said something crazy about Chandrasekhar—you know, the astronomer, I guess—"

"About Chandrasekhar's other limit, yes."

"I don't even know what it is! Oh, of course, Chandrasekhar's limit is one point four solar masses, the mass range above which a star goes supernova; everybody knows that. But the other limit I never heard of."

Will did not exactly appear, but he let a shimmering sort of suggestion of himself appear among the rhubarbs. He sighed softly and whispered, "It is an old folk story he is supposed to have liked to tell, Evelyn. It is about dragonfly larvae. You see, if you are a dragonfly larva, swimming around in the water and getting ready to metamorphose, you don't know what will happen to you; you only know that from time to time your friends suddenly go to Heaven. That is, they go up through the surface of the water. What happens to them then? You don't know. What really happens, of course, is that they change into adult dragonflies; but you have no way of knowing that until you yourself become one, and then you can never come back to tell. No one ever does. Can't, because they can't penetrate the surface tension of the water, even if they had the desire to. So, being a stupid larva and not knowing this, you call all your friends around you and say, 'I will be different! I will come back, I promise! And I will tell you what lies beyond this shiny, wavery thing we see over our heads!' But you can't do it, when the time comes. It is an irreversible process."

I lay there staring at him in amazement. It was the longest speech I had heard from Will Becklund since he was alive. "And what has that to do with your dear widow, Ann?"

There was a hint of shadowy laughter, but all he said was, "That, too, is an irreversible process, Eve. And you interfered with it. She still had one tentacle on this side of the surface, so to speak, so she could communicate just a little.

But not anymore. She will pass Chandrasekhar's other limit, you see, and will never speak to a human being again."

I suppose it was the beer, but I suddenly felt that that was the saddest thing I had ever heard. "Oh, the poor thing!" I cried, forgiving her completely.

There was a pause. " 'Poor thing'?" Uncle Ghost whispered questioningly.

"To be cut off like that, forever! When will it happen?"

"It is already happening, Eve. It is what Jeron came to tell you about."

"Oh, my God! Where?" But I didn't have to ask, because I could see. I scrambled to my feet, staring at the place where Ann had sat so long and so silently, but she was not there anymore. She was still in the padmasana position, legs folded back on themselves, hands grasping her toes, head lowered to her breast, but instead of perching on a mound of undistributed soil she was floating in the air, a good hundred yards above the surface, moving slowly toward the end of the habitat. By the time she reached it she was too distant for me to see clearly, but I knew what was happening. That was where the exit lock was. It was open and waiting for her; it closed behind her, and she was gone.

"She'll die!" I cried.

"Why should she die?" whispered Uncle Ghost.

"But even if she lives—out there, all by herself! And you say she won't ever come back?"

"Never, Eve." There was a pause, and then his soft, despairing whisper: "Oh, how I wish I were she!"

My name is willis becklund, deceased. i am an engineer,

a soliton, an astronaut, and a ghost—depending on how you look at me, and providing you can see me at all. You can see me when I want you to, though, because unlike most of us dead I have a foot on either side of Chandrasekhar's other limit. Do you think that is an advan

tage? It is not. It means only that I am not wholly in either

your here or that other here; I have no home anyhere, and so I wander.

This is what demonstrates that I am a ghost.

What demonstrates that I am an engineer is that I was trained that way, long ago when I was alive and young, and I'm still good at it. Better than all of them. Shef could never have deployed his dis-ray without me, not to mention building the O'Neill we all live in—no, make that reside in. Not to mention even the rebuilding of the drive long and long ago. None of this would have happened without me, although I do not usually claim credit. In some of those cases I am not sure there is any credit to claim.

What demonstrates that I am an astronaut, of course, is that dirty Dieter manipulated me into being one, and what demonstrates I am a soliton is that there is no other way to account for the fact that I am here. A standing wave. I don't dissipate. I just keep on being a wave.

Now, I know this is all very difficult for you. See, it is not what you don't know, it is what you think you do know that gets in the way. Take the dis-ray. That was very elementary. (Ha-ha. In the sense of elementary particles, do you see?) "Dis" doesn't mean disintegration. It's an acronym. The kaons break up atoms. They don't do it through fission in the normal way—they don't fiss—they do it through deep inelastic scattering, which we call DIS for short The DIS weakens the bonds, and electrostatic repulsion breaks the heavy atoms up; could anything be more simple?

The best way to understand, really, is to roll the bones and absorb the hexagrams, but as most human beings are too lazy for that, let me simply say that your big problem is to avoid getting lost in the miasma of things like Einstein separability, which, when you come right down to it, I suspect is the single dumbest question Man has propounded to Man since the days of counting angels on a pin. Take the simplest case, that is, the question of spin in quantum mechanics, all right? Perform a simple experiment:

First steal two protons. Put them together in the singlet state, then break them up. Well, now, experiment will show you that every time one of them will turn out to have -f spin and the other has — spin, whatever axis of the proton you measure spin on I Wowl How strangel How can that be? you demand. I mean, how can this proton over here, with a plus

spin, know that that one over there has a minus, so it knows what to be?

See, that's your foggy thinking for you. It comes of using words like "spin" to mean rotation (my gosh, the little devils certainly don't rotate!), and even more it comes from using words like "there." There is no "there"! There are only a lot of different "heres"! So if you find that the Bell inequality is unequal, don't you see?, it is only because you are measuring it with two bent tools!

Now, with that basis for your understanding, I think I can tell you what it is that makes me sad. Then you can go back to listening to poor dumb little Eve. Eve has very little to recommend her, but she has an option open to her—the option of growing, and changing, and then of dying—which is no longer open to me. Someday, perhaps, she can do what Shef and Flo and the others have done; she may even be able to do what Ann has done. And I never can.

You know that when we arrived in the Alpha Centauri system we built ourselves a habitat out of bits and pieces of debris, and if you know anything at all you will know that we did not by any means use all the pieces. Even a loner like Alpha has quintillions of tons of matter floating around it. Ultimately we found that there were actually three asteroid belts, nearly an equal mass in comets, and about a Moon's worth of other trash, and some of us wanted to push them all together to make a real world. The wiser ones laughed. Building a world is not a matter of sticking bricks together with mortar, they said. There is a dynamic balance. The interior must be squeezed and heated into magma so that the oxygen and hydrogen can migrate to the surface. The surface must cool, so that the water can stay there and the rapid gas molecules will not spin off into space. Not hundreds of years, at least millions!

So causality doth capture us all . . . until we transcend it.

It had taken all this time for Ann to transcend it; and that was why I envied Ann Becklund, who was once my mortal wife.

ON THE MORNING OF DAY 6354 JERON WAS HURRYING ME

—"Come and see somethingl • Come onl"—and I didn't want to be hurried. "What's the matter, Aunt Mommy?" he demanded, bristling his little moustache at me. "You hung over again?"

I was not, or even close to it. The operative word was

not "hangover" but "depression." But "You'll be really interested," he wheedled. "I have to get to the cabbage patch." "Do not! Aw. Come on. It won't	he take	was more	insistent: than a
minute."

Part of what he said was no doubt true—I didn't really have to get to the cabbage patch; Molomy had taken over the biggest part of keeping the crew in line. Part was false. It took a lot more than a minute, and I did not at first see what he was trying to show me.

Partly it was because he took me to the great viewing port with all the funny little wrinkles built into its glass, where I almost never go, and we were not alone there. Standing tall and strange was my dearly beloved Other Half.

"Hello, Jim," I said. It didn't matter. Jim is sometimes willing to talk to me, but he's got this speech impediment. He has forgotten how. He gets all sweating and stammering, trying to find the words, and then he's not good for much else. So we mostly don't talk at all anymore. He looked away from the viewer and at me, trying to remember who I was—maybe even what I was—and I patted him on the shoulder. "That's all right, Jim," I said. "Don't let us dis-turb you." He sighed rustily and turned back to whatever he was watching.

Which, it seemed, was what Jeron wanted me to watch too.

The viewing window is not a solid piece of glass, and I am not sure if it is glass at all. It is made of layers and clots of transparent material of many varieties and indices of

refraction, so that if you move around you can magnify parts of what you are looking at. It helps to know what parts are of interest. The biggest thing outside the window at that moment was the factory, with its immense bright sails trapping the heat of Alpha and the structural parts of the next ring of the habitat, wandering out of the finished-products end until they brought up at the limits of their tethers. That did not interest me. It was not what interested Jeron, either, and he was quite irritable about it: "No, Eve, not therel Beyondl Toward the damn Dipper!"

Well, that was a part of the sky I knew pretty well, because in our Centaurian constellations it was not far from where the good old home Sun lay; there were only about half a dozen first-magnitude stars in that whole section.

But now there were seven. The new one was reddish- rusty-ugly, and I had never seen it before. I bobbed around before the port, trying to get the best look at it; and under the highest magnification I could find the damned thing displayed an actual disk.

"My God," I said. "What am I looking at?"

Jeron was crowing with excitement. "Aunt Ann!" he cried. "She's pulling a new planet around her!"

The reason I hadn't had a hangover was that I had been spending more and more time sleeping, just sleeping. And the reason I had been sleeping was that more and more I had preferred my dreams, or nothing at all, to the world around me; and among the things I liked least about it were notions such as Ann Becklund building a planet.

Molomy had all the gardening crew hard at work when at last I showed up, and she gave me a hard look. "There's something the matter, right?" she decided.

I certainly didn't want to talk about it, since I didn't even want to think about it. "Did you get the new rows in?" I asked—to change the subject, because I had already seen that she had. The ten tiny farmhands were already snipping off shoots for the next brew.

"Of course," she said, frowning, and stood up, rubbing gently at her small breasts. Now that Molomy had a child of her own in a vegetable cow she didn't trust the little kids to tend the cabbage patch anymore, and that was where

I had found her. "My boobs hurt. Aunt Eve," she complained. "It's just as though Albert was right in my belly, just like you used to have them in the old days."

I knelt down and felt the occupied pods myself. "I didn't really, Molomy," I said. "All the babies I had I had just the way you're having Albert—is that what you're going to call him?"

"Either that or Walter. Or Picklebick, or Bill. You mean you didn't ever get pregged with all that sex you were doing back on Earth?"

"Actually, no—well," I said, remembering, "I did get pregnant a couple of times when I was a kid. But I decided not to have them." That was in the Los Angeles days, and who wanted to have kids then? But no one knew about those old abortions, not even Kneffie; they were caught early and aspirated out, schloop, ptooie, and you weren't pregnant anymore.

"How very strange," Molomy said primly, and did not speak again for a while. We loosened the soil around the roots of the vegetable wombs and I thought about all that sex I had been doing back on Earth—although the sex had not been all of it. The most important part, maybe.

How long ago that seemed, and, from four light-years away, how pleasant! Especially compared to the scary thinking about what Ann was up to. It was an easy time. Los Angeles County paid for my root-canal work and doled out welfare checks, and the feds gave me food stamps, and for spending money all you had to do was hitch to Mexico to buy goods. I don't mean drugs. I was always too fearful to deal drugs. But in Tijuana you could buy cheap sleazy silver and cheap make-believe turquoise, and back home in Venice you could glue the turquoise to the silver, hitch down Santa Monica Boulevard (or take the bus) to the Century Plaza or one of the downtown hotels, and sell the stuff to the tourists. Easy money. Tax-free cash. And good friends! The loosest and coolest people I ever knew shared those beachfront houses. Don the Drunk, Harold the Head, sweet Lily, Marian the Marauder who could clean off any drugstore counter in the time it took the clerk to turn around for a pack of cigarettes. And studious old Jim.

Jim lived in the same lockless rooms as the rest of us, but by day he went to engineering school and at night he tended bar in a beach joint; and, as soon as he asked me, we got married.

Why, if it wasn't for marrying Jim Barstow, how could I possibly have got to Alpha Centauri? He was the one who shamed me into going back to school, settling down, making careers for the two of us. I owe him a lot, damn his soul.

"Those kids!" cried Molomy in indignation, and stood up. "Ringo!" she screeched. "You break any more petri dishes and I'll pound you good!"

The two-year-old thumbed her nose and screeched back, "Up yours, Molomy!" Honor was satisfied; but there was less rattling of glassware as they worked in the stripy sunlight thereafter, so Molomy was satisfied too. Molomy was tired of working, if not of authority, so she decided to converse herself a rest. "I guess you've heard," she said confidingly, one grownup to another. "Crazy, isn't it?"

"You shouldn't say grownups are crazy," I said automatically, although of course I agreed with her. Crazy? Impossible would have been a better way to put it, if I hadn't seen the little worldlet growing with my own eyes. "It's quite an astonishing thing Aunt Ann is doing!"

"Oh, sure, but I meant the others. Flo wants more breeding stock, and Uncle Shef says it's too much trouble making chromium and iridium and all those things here, so he wants some shipped out—"

I stood up and faced her. "I don't know what you're talking about!"

She was triumphant; old Aunt Eve was always the last to know, but she hadn't been sure in this case. "Why, the plan to demand some new shipments from Earth, Eve. I thought you knew. Everybody knew, even the little kids." And tittering from the workbench confirmed it, until Molomy quelled them with a look.

And I hadn't known a thing about any of this!

I needed someone to talk to. When you came right down to it, there was only one logical candidate.

Jeron's personal house was in the middle of a cathedral grove of towering redwoods. Not real redwoods; the thirty-meter tallest of them was only six years old, and their chief ancestor had been rhubarb. But they looked quite fine.

They were my own grove, or had been, and you would think Jeron would have been a little grateful to the person who gave them to him.

Not he. He shrugged, and pointed out that I should not be surprised that Ann was making a new planet. She had, after all, said in the message to Knefhausen that she intended to.

"But that was just rhetoric! It's impossible—isn't it? The bits and pieces of matter have to take a long time to get together. Even longer to cool—"

He laughed. "Still trapped in the myth of causality," he observed. "If you don't understand, shall I show you?"

"Show me what?"

"Something." He led me proudly to his bedroom, a chamber I had been careful to stay out of for some years, and flung the door wide.

It was an Uncle Ghost production, and it looked like Fourth of July fireworks—only reversed fireworks, because they were going the wrong way. Not exploding. Imploding. It showed bits and pieces of matter spiraling into a central point, and that point becoming a world. It was rather pretty, like all of Will Becklund's toys for the kiddies, but it was not what I wanted to see. "Uncle Ghost made it for me personally," he said importantly, and unnecessarily.

"He doesn't like to be called Uncle Ghost."

"I don't like to be told what Uncle Ghost likes to be called," he said, "and anyway, you didn't come here to ask me about Ann's planet."

I hesitated. "Actually you're right. I'm concerned about this message to Earth."

He pushed me out of his room crossly and closed the door. "We want some things they have. What's wrong with that?"

"It's that word 'demand.' It just isn't the right way to do things, Jeron. I can understand wanting things from Earth —there are some I'd like too! Some decent coffee, a couple of recent issues of Good Housekeeping, a box of cordial cherries from Blum's. But I wouldn't demand them."

"We need templates," he said. "Anyway, it's not exactly a demand. More like a threat."

"A threat!"

"They send us what we want, Shef won't use the dis-ray on them again."

"Jeron! What we want can't be so much! That's like putting a pistol
to somebody's head to ask him what time it is."
He shrugged. "What would you do?"
"I'd be more polite. We could exchange gifts! We've got all these
wonderful new things we've grown—there's nothing like them back
home! We could put together a sort of package of the best of them
and send them off. Then, if we mentioned what kind of things we
wanted, they'd send them to us. I'm sure they would."
He rubbed his velvet chin and scowled at me. "Mostly wouldn't
work. Our stuff is adapted for light gravity. For Earth they'd need
whole new stem and root systems, God knows what else."
"Oh, I could breed that in no time."
"Huh." He stood up and peered out at the habitat, thinking.
"Will you help me, Jeron?"
He shook his head irritably. "No, what you say is dumb, Eve. I
don't like your idea. But I've got a better one."

THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (WASHINGTON, D.C.)

opened the storm window of his study and leaned out to yell at his Chief Science Advisor. "Harry, get the lead out! We're waiting for you!" Harry looked up and waved, then continued doggedly plowing through the dripping jungle that was the North Lawn. Between the overgrown weeds and the rain and the mud it was slow going, but the President had little sympathy. He slammed down the window and said, "Damn the man, he just goes out of his way to aggravate me. How long'm I supposed to wait for him so I can decide if we have to move the capital or not?" The Vice President looked up from her knitting. "Jimbo, honey, why do you fuss yourself like that? Why don't we just move and get it over with?"

"Oh, woman! We can't do that. It would look so bad." The President threw himself into a chair despondently. He was a big man, and the old chair creaked warningly. "I was really looking forward to the Tenth Anniversary Parade," he complained. "Ten years, that's really something to brag about! And I don't want to hold it the hell out in the sticks, I want it right down Constitution Avenue just like the old days, with the people cheering and the reporters and the cameras all over and everything. Then let that son of a bitch in Omaha say I'm not the real President."

His wife said placidly, "Don't fuss yourself about him, honey. There's worse nearer."

"He wouldn't even send a delegation!"

"We got enough to feed right now, you know that. Jimbo? You know what I've been thinking, though? The parade might look a little skimpy on Constitution Avenue anyway. It would be real nice on a kind of littler street."

"Oh, what do you know? If Washington's under water, what makes you think Bethesda would be any better?"

His Secretary of State put down his solitaire cards and looked interested for the first time. "Doesn't have to be in Bethesda, Jimbo. I got some real nice land up near Dulles we could move to. It's high there."

"Why, sure. Lots of nice high land over to Virginia," the Vice President confirmed. "Remember when we went out on that picnic after your Second Inaugural? That was at Fairfax Station. There was hills there all around. Just beautiful."

The President slammed his fist on the coffee table and yelled, "I'm not the President of Fairfax Station, Virginia, I'm the President of the U. S. of A.! What's the capital of the U. S. of A.? It's Washington! Always has been. Always will be. And that's where the President stays! My God, don't you see how those jokers in Houston and Omaha and Salt Lake and all would laugh if they heard I had to move out of my own capital? 'Sides, there's all those delegations that's here already, the Amish and the New York and the Wheeling folks." He broke off and scowled suspiciously at his Vice President, who was also his wife. "Now, what are you looking that way for?"

She said placidly, "I didn't hear you mention that little fox from Puget."

" 'Specially her! I mean them. Look how far away they come!"

"Not so far they haven't been eating us out of house and home two weeks, over there to Blair House. I notice you spend a lot of time negotiating with her."

"You think you know a lot, but you don't know nearly as much as you think," the President said cuttingly, but he was pleased with the interruption when his Chief Science Advisor came in the door, shaking himself, dripping mud as he got out of his oilskin slicker. "Well, Harry?" the President demanded. "What did they say?"

The Vice President moved the good pillows to one side so Harry could sit down on the couch. "It's terrible out there," he complained. "Anybody got a dry cigarette?" The President threw him a sack of makings, and Harry dried his fingers on his shirt front before he started to roll one. "Well," he said, licking the paper, "I went to every boat captain I could find. They all said the same. Ships they talked to, places they'd been. All the same. Tides are higher than they've ever been, all up and down the coast. They don't think they're rising much anymore, but they're way high already."

He looked around for a match. The President's wife handed him a gold cigarette lighter with the Great Seal of the United States on it, which, after some effort, he managed to ignite. "It don't look really good to me, Jim. Right now it's low tide, and that's all right, but it's coming in. Even if the tides don't come up higher, there's going to be storms. Not just rains like this, I mean, but you got to figure on a tropical depression coming up from the Bahamas now and then, these next few months."

"We're not in the tropics," the Secretary of State said suspiciously.

"It doesn't mean that," said the Science Advisor, who had once given the weather reports over the local Top Forty FM radio station, back when there were FM stations and charts to be in the Top Forty of. "It means storms. Maybe hurricanes, coming up the coast from the Bahamas. Maybe the ice has stopped melting, who knows about that? But even if the water doesn't come up any higher, it sure isn't going to go down any lower, and any little piss-ant storm could have us swimming."

The President drummed his fingers on the coffee table, which was glass-topped, covering photographs of F.D.R., Ronnie Reagan, Harry Truman, and about six other ex-Presidents surrounding his own image. It often soothed him, but not this time. Suddenly he shouted: "I don't want to move my capital!"

No one answered. His temper outbursts were famous. The Vice President became absorbed in counting stitches, the Secretary of State picked up his cards and began to shuffle, the Science Advisor got up to retrieve his slicker and hang it carefully on the back of a door.

The President said, "You got to figure it this way. If we move out, then all those local yokels that claimed to be a President are going to look just that much better on their own turf, and the eventual reunification of our nation is going to be just that much more delayed." He moved his lips for a moment, and then burst out, "I don't ask nothing for myself! I never have. I only want to play the part I have to play in what's good for all of us, and that means keeping up my position as the real President, according to the U.S. Constitution as amended. And that means I got to stay right here in the real White House, no matter what."

His wife said hesitantly, "Honey, how about this? The other Presidents had like a Summer White House, and Camp David, and like that. Nobody fussed about it. Why couldn't you do the same as they did? We could pick out one of those old farm houses by Fairfax and fix it up real pretty."

The President looked at her with surprise. "Now, that's good thinking," he declared. "Only we can't move permanently, and we have to keep this place garrisoned so nobody will take it away from us, and we have to make sure of title."

"Oh, there's good titles to those places I have," the Secretary of State assured him hastily.

"I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to Harry. We have to come back here once in a while to show we own it, so is there going to be any problem there?"

The Science Advisor said thoughtfully, "We could rent some boats, I guess, if we couldn't get the horses in."

"No 'guess'! No 'if'!" the President yelled, looking at his Chief Science Advisor with irritation. "That's a national priority. We have to do it that way to keep those bastards in

the rest of the country paying attention to the real President."

"Well, Jimbo, honey," said the Vice President after a moment, emboldened by recent praise, "you have to admit they don't pay a lot of attention to us right now. When was the last time they paid their taxes?"

The President looked foxily at her over his glasses. "Talking about that," he said, "I might have a little surprise for them anyway. What you might call a secret weapon."

"I hope it does better than we did in the last war," said his wife, "because if you remember, when we started to put down that uprising in Frederick, Maryland, we got the pee kicked out of us."

The President stood up, indicating the Cabinet meeting was over.

"Never mind," he said sunnily. "You go on out again, Harry, and see if you can find any good maps in the Library of Congress where they got the fires put out. Find us a nice high place within, um, twenty miles if you can—if it happens to belong to somebody we know, we'll get an appropriation for it. Otherwise we'll get the Army to condemn us a Summer White House, like Mae says, and maybe I can sleep in a bed that isn't moldy for a change."

Alerted by his tone, his wife looked suddenly worried. "Jimbo, what are you going to do?"

He chuckled. "I'm just going to check out my secret weapon."

He shooed them out of his study and, when they were gone, went to the little kitchen and got himself a bottle of Fresca from the sixpack in the open refrigerator. It was warm, of course. The Marine guard company was still trying to get the gas generators in operation, but they were having very little success. The President didn't mind. They were his personal Praetorians. If they lacked a little as appliance repairmen, they had proved their worth when the chips were down. The President was always aware that during the Troubles after the bolt from Alpha Centauri he had been no more than any other Congressman—appointed to fill a vacancy, at that— and his rapid rise to whip, majority leader, Speaker of the House and heir apparent, finally to the presidency itself, was due not only to his political skills and merits, but also to the fact that he was the only re motely legitimate heir to the presidency who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the commander of Washington's Marine garrison.

The President was, in fact, quite satisfied with the way the world was going. If he envied Presidents of the past (missiles, fleets of nuclear bombers, billions of dollars to play with), he certainly saw nothing in the present, when he looked at the world around him, that surpassed his own stature in the world he lived in. Oh, there were places where improvements could be made—the Science Advisor was a loser, and his brother-in-law had been better as a Marine major than he was as a Secretary of Defense. But he had plans for making improvements.

He finished his soda, opened his study door a crack, and peered out.

No one was nearby. He slipped out and down the back stairs.

In what had once been the public parts of the White House, you could see the extent of the damage more clearly. After the riots and the trashings and the burnings and the coups, the will to repair and replace had gradually dwindled away. The President didn't mind. He didn't even notice the charred walls and the fallen plaster. He was listening to the sound of a distant gasoline pump chugging away, and smiling to himself as he approached the underground level where his secret weapon was locked up.

The secret weapon, sniffling and sneezing although the weather was hot, was trying to complete that total defense of every act of life that he called his memoirs. His name was Dieter von Knefhausen.

Knefhausen was less satisfied with the world than the President of the United States (Washington, D.C.). When the power nets collapsed with the loss of all the nuclear plants, and transportation broke down for lack of power, and communications stopped mattering in any way because there was no effective means for anyone's will to be enforced past the visible horizon—then the world as Knefhausen knew it had come to an end.

This new one was far less pleasing. Knefhausen could have wished for many changes. Better health, for one thing. He was well aware that his essential hypertension, his bron

chitis, his arthritis, and his gout were fighting the last stages of a total war to decide which one would have the honor of destroying their mutual battleground, which was himself. That was not unexpected. He was eighty years old, after all. But there were ills against which one had a right to complain. He did not much mind his lack of freedom, but he did mind the senseless destruction of so many of his papers.

The original typescript of his autobiography was long lost. But he had wheedled his superiors at Johns Hopkins, who had granted him a precarious haven for nearly two years, into making a search for what could be found of them. A few tattered and fragmentary Xerox copies had turned up, some sent from institutions far away. He had begun to restore the gaps as best he could when the raiders of this present President—the pretender, that is, who called himself by the name "President of the United States"—had found him and carried him here. And left half the papers behind, of course, and no amount of pleading seemed to make them willing to bring them to him.

Still—the essential story was there, of how he had planned Project Alpha-Aleph, with all the details meticulously itemized as to how he had lied, forged, and falsified to bring it about. Earliest training lasted longest, and Knefhausen was a thorough record-keeper.

He spared himself nothing. He admitted his complicity in the "accidental death" of Dot Letski's first husband in a car smash, thus leaving her free to marry the man he had chosen to go with the crew to Alpha Centauri. He explained de Bono's experiments, and related how he had decided to carry them out in the large. He confessed he had known the secret would not last out the duration of the trip, thus betraying the trust of the President who had made it happen. He put it all in, all he could remember, and boasted of his success.

For it was clear to him that success was already a fact. What could be surer evidence of it than what had happened ten years ago? The "incident of next week" was as dramatic and complete a proof as anyone could wish. If its details were still undecipherable, largely because of the demolition of most of the world's technology it had brought about, its main features were obvious. The shower of heavy particles,

whatever particles they were, had drenched the Earth, and every radionuclide had leaked its energy out as heat.

Also there were the messages received and understood; also there were the still more significant messages for which there had unfortunately been no translation; and, take them all together, there was no doubt. The astronauts had done precisely as predicted. Well, almost precisely. They had developed knowledge so far in advance of anything on Earth that, from four light-years out, they could impose their will on the human race. They had done so. In one cloudburst of particles, the entire military-industrial complex of the planet perished.

How? How? Ah, thought Knefhausen, with envy and pride, there one posed the question! One could not know. All that was known was that every nuclear device and concentration—bomb or ore dump, hospital radiation source or power-plant core—had ceased to exist as a source of nuclear energy. The event was not rapid and catastrophic, like a bomb. It was slow and long-lasting. The uranium and the plutonium had simply melted in the long, continuous reaction that was still bubbling away in the •seething lava lakes where the silos had stood and the nuclear plants had generated electricity. Little radiation was released, but a good deal of heat.

Knefhausen had long since stopped regretting what could not be helped. Still he wished, wistfully, that he had had the opportunity to make proper measurements of the total heat flux. Not less than 10¹® watt-years, he was sure, just to estimate from the known effects on the Earth's atmosphere: the storms, the gradual raising of temperature all over, above all the rumors about the upward trend of sea level that bespoke the melting of the polar ice caps. There was no longer even a good weather network, but the fragmentary information he was able to piece together suggested a world increase of four, maybe as many as five or six degrees Celsius already, and the reactions still seething away in Czechoslovakia, the Congo, Colorado, and a hundred lesser infernos.

Rumors about the sea level?

Not rumors, he corrected himself. No. Facts. He lifted his head and stared at the snake of hard rubber hose that began under the duckboards at the far end of the room and ended outside the barred window, where the gasoline pump

outside did its best to keep the water level inside his cell low enough to keep the water below the boards. Judging by the inflow, the grounds of the White House must be nearly awash.

A great triumph I

In the long run, it was only an annoyance that the triumph had been not quite complete. It was planned that the astronauts should develop such knowledge. It was not planned that they should use it against their benefactors, or fail to share it with them.

It was ungrateful to God to complain that the triumph was not perfect—but in his heart Knefhausen could not stop complaining. Wir siegen uns zum Tode. We have won so many victoriesl—and they have destroyed us.

The door opened. The President of the United States patted the shoulder of the thin, scared, hungry-looking kid in green Marine fatigues who guarded it, and walked in, closing it behind him.

"How's it going, Knefhausen?" the President began sunnily. "You ready to listen to a little reason yet?"

Knefhausen stood as straight as he could. "I will do whatever you wish, Mr. President, but as I have told you there are certain limits. Also I am not a young man and my health—"

"Screw your health and your limits, Knefhausen!" the President shouted. "Don't start up with me!"

"I am sorry if I have given offense, Mr. President," Knefhausen whispered.

"Don't be sorryl Sorry doesn't cut the mustard. What I got to judge by is results. See that pump, Knefhausen? You know what it takes to keep it going? It takes gasoline. Gas is rationed, Knefhausen! Takes a high national priority to get it! I don't know how long I'm going to be able to justify this continuous drain on our resources if you don't cooperate!"

Sadly but stubbornly, Knefhausen said, "Up to the limits imposed by the realities of the situation, Mr. President, I cooperate."

"Yeah. Sure." But the President did not push the matter. He was in an unusually good mood, Knefhausen observed with the prisoner's paranoid attention to detail. The Presi

dent changed the subject. "Knefhausen, I'm going to make you an offer. Just say the word, and I'll fire that dumb son of a bitch Harry Stokes and make you my Chief Science Advisor. Now, how do you like that? Right up at the top of the heap again! An apartment of your own. Electric lights. Servants—you can pick 'em out yourself, and there's some nice-looking little girls in the pool. The best food money can buy. A chance to perform a real service for the U. S. of A., helping to reunify this great country to become once again the great power it should and must be."

"Mr. President, naturally, I wish to help in any way I can. But we have been over this subject before. I will do anything you like, but I don't know how to make the bombs work again. You saw what happened, Mr. President. They no longer exist."

"I didn't say anything about bombs, did I? Look, Kneffie, I'm a reasonable man. You say you can't make bombs; all right, but there are other things. How about this. You promise to use your best efforts in any way you can."

Knefhausen hesitated. "What other things, Mr. President?"

"Don't press, Knefhausen. Services to your country." The President locked his hands over his belly and smiled benignly. "You give me that promise and you're out of here today. Or would you rather I just turned off the pump?"

Knefhausen's head-shake was not so much negation as despair. "You do not understand the difficulties! What can a scientist do for you today? If there were anything, do you think I would have spent these last years writing memoirs?"

"That's why I took you out of that, Knefhausen."

"Yes, you took me from Johns Hopkins University, where I was fulfilling some function until your band of looters came along."

"Watch your mouth," the President said in righteous indignation. "That was an IRS field team."

"Naturlich, Mr. President, tax collectors, not looters—a distinction not always easily made. Nevertheless! The preconditions for what you want no longer exist. Ten years ago, five maybe, yes, something perhaps could have been done. Now, no. When all the nuclear plants went out— When the factories that depended on them ran out of power— When the fertilizer plants couldn't fix nitrogen

and the insecticide plants couldn't deliver— When the people began

to die of hunger and the pestilences started—"

"Yes or no, Knefhausen," the President cut in.

The scientist paused, looking thoughtfully at his adversary. A gleam of the old shrewdness appeared in his eyes.

"Mr. President, you know something. Something has happened."

"Rightl You're smart. Now tell me, what is it I know?"

Knefhausen shook his head. After seven decades of life, and another decade of slowly dying, it was hard to allow himself to hope again. This terrible upstart, this lump— he was not without animal cunning, and he seemed very sure. "Please, Mr. President, tell me."

The President put a finger to his lips, and then an ear to the door. When he was convinced no one could be listening, he came closer to Knefhausen and said softly:

"We're not such hicks here as you think. I have contacts all over the continent. Would you like to know what one of them just brought me?"

Knefhausen did not answer, but his watery old eyes were imploring.

"A message," the President whispered.

"From the Constitution}" cried Knefhausen. "But, no, it is not possible! Farside is gone, Goldstone is destroyed, the communications satellites are running down—"

"It wasn't a radio message," said the President. "And it didn't come from Goldstone. It came from some people from the West Coast, and they got it from some other place. From some observatory in Hawaii, they said, although maybe they just said that to get the price up. They say there's some telescope out there that didn't get smashed, and I guess there's some old fogies that still look through it sometimes, and they got a message. In laser light. Plain Morse code. From what they said was Alpha Centauri. From your little friends, Knefhausen."

He took a folded slip of paper from his pocket and held it up.

Knefhausen was racked by a fit of coughing, but he managed to reach for it. "Give it to me!"

The President lifted it out of his reach. "Do we have a deal?"

"Yes, of course. YesI Anything you say, but give me the message I"

"Why, certainly," smiled the President, and passed over the much-creased sheet of paper.

It said:

PLEASE BE ADVISED. WE HAVE CREATED THE WORLD ALPHA-ALEPH. IT IS BEAUTIFUL AND CRAND. WE WILL SEND A FERRY TO BRING SUITABLE STOCK AND TO COMPLETE CERTAIN OTHER BUSINESS. OUR SPECIAL REGARDS TO DR. DIETER VON KNEFHAUSEN, WHOM WE WANT TO TALK TO VERY MUCH. EXPECT US IN 250 DAYS FROM THIS MESSAGE.

Knefhausen read it over twice, lifted his head to stare at the President, and read it again. Then he stared into space, the paper dangling from his fingers.

The President snatched it back, folded it, and put it in his pocket, as though the message itself was the key to power. "Do we have a deal?"

"Zwei hundert funfzig— Mr. President, when was this message received?"

"About seven months ago, near as I can tell. That's right. They'll be here very soon, and you can imagine what they'll havel Guns, tools, everything—and all you have to do is persuade them to join us in restoring the U. S. of— Knefhausen!"

The President jumped forward, but he was too late. The scientist had fallen limply to the duckboards. The guard, when ordered, ran for the White House doctor, who limped as rapidly to the scene as his bad legs would let him, but he was too late too. Everything was too late for Knefhausen, whose old heart had failed him . . . just in time.

EIGHT WENT OUT TO ALPHA CENTAURI AND EIGHT CAME

back, but they were by no means the same eight. The pilot's name was Quittyyx, which signified, among other odd things, that he was of the tenth cohort, and therefore only six years old when they left Alpha-Aleph. That wasn't so bad. His deputy, Jeromolo Bill, was not quite two.

Of course, tiny Bill would not be trusted with the guidance of the interstellar vessel Shef had designed for them until he was at least four, but there was not really a whole hell of a lot to do in the first half of the trip. Turnover was the time that counted. All the universe concentrated into a single terrifying starburst of light, watching the very act of Creation, and no other signposts were in the skies. By then Jeromolo Bill was able to take his turn with his elder. They both had what none of the others had, what none of the Original Eight had had, a genetic, built-in capacity to handle relativistic computations in their heads. They were not smarter than anyone else, simply hard-wired to match and measure the asymptotic slopes of mass and velocity and time and convert them into direction.

The long voyage home took all of four years, but at that less than half as long as it had taken Constitution on the way out. The reason was that they were in a better vessel than Constitution. They were in Sheffield Jackman's masterpiece, built like a basketball and filled with Flo's genetics, Jim's optics, Ski's communications, and, in lieu of any contribution from their researches. Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost themselves in the flesh—or, in Will Becklund's case, whatever it was he was in rather than flesh. It was a darling souped-up speedster of a ship, all right, and apart from the fact that they had power to burn there was a valuable purpose in burning it. Acceleration was good for them. It was even necessary. Every one of the voyagers needed to accommodate his body to the crushing weight they had to look forward to on Earth.

So the ship started off slowly—relatively slowly, no more than a quarter G. Even so, most of them crept around in walkers. When they fell, not infrequently, there was a rich harvest of fractures and sprains. But the bodies toughened. The muscles swelled. The porous bones grew denser and stronger. Every one of them (Uncle Ghost always excepted) drank from Flo's nauseating sap of harvested calcium-salts solution every morning and every night; and they were at half a G, three-quarters, as much as a gravity and a half of

acceleration toward the end, and the ship fairly flew, and Jeron was its captain. He said so himself. Even so, it was a long, long trip.

For the six young ones in the crew, the voyage was a sort of class trip to an exciting freak show. They bled Aunt Mommy dry of every scrap of geography she could remember, and pestered Uncle Ghost, when they could find him, for stories and sidelights and gossip. When those ran out, they quarreled with each other for amusement; and the long trip grew longer.

Although they never said so, Aunt Eve and Uncle Ghost shared a certain purpose. The first part was clear. The climax less so. It was to find Dirty Dieter, if he still lived, and—and—and do something, though what that something was was the unclear part. Even Jeron carried that unwritten purpose in a corner of his heart—even the younger ones, sometimes—for their childhood lessons had taken. Diabolical Dieterl Kneffie the ineluctably badl Thinking of him as they drifted off to sleep, the little ones sometimes growled in their throats, and when they realized how terminally tedious the long voyage was, it was Dieter von Knefhausen they blamed. When Jeromolo Bill was three years old—old enough to be worth persecuting—the other children invented the game of "Do It to Dieter" and made Bill their quarry in long whooping chases all around the ship. Even Jeron sometimes joined in, out of boredom, while Uncle Ghost retreated to invisibility and Aunt Eve to her latest crop of malt-nuts. They consoled themselves by thinking that the exercise, at least, was good for the young muscles.

Hopes of revenge could carry one just so far. Dreams of curiosity satisfied, not much farther; the concept of delayed gratification takes long to learn, and longer to be felt as real. The voyage was far too long for tiny tots. The good part of that was that, out of boredom, they were willing to learn anything that anyone was willing to teach, and so on good days Aunt Eve sobered up and demonstrated knitting and plant husbandry, and lectured on the subject of The Good Old Days on Earth. Uncle Will Becklund could not demonstrate much of anything, but he explained the casting of the bones for the I Ching and taught the

true meaning of The Moon in Water. It was not enough. Shef had designed the ship for speed and efficiency, not for pleasure. It was a golden globe a hundred yards through, with two smaller globes bulging from its poles like snowball ears on a snowman's face for landing craft; inside half of it was for living, and storage of the dormant seeds they were bringing to Earth as gifts, and for machinery; and the other half bare floors as big as skating rinks.

When they were only local commuting distance from Earth—the Sun no longer a star but a Sun; the biggest planets now visible with disks—there was work to do at last. So they fed Aunt Eve coffee and kept her sober for a few weeks, while Molomy lashed the littler kids into pulling out the first lots of seeds and cuttings and planting them in the tanks on what had been bare floors. But then it was back to the malt nuts for Eve, not so much from boredom anymore as from fear. The closer Earth got, the scarier the idea of returning there became.

By the end of the trip even the youngest, Jeromolo Bill, was six years old. It was notable that no children had been born on all the long voyage. Partly it was prudence. No one wanted a squalling brat to tie him down when they embarked on the heart-stopping adventure of exploring old Earth. It was also for earthier reasons. In the close quarters of Shef's speedster for four long years they couldn't even stand themselves, much less each other. Their sexual contacts were short, infrequent, and without issue. For Aunt Eve there was no sex at all in the four-year trip, because with the children she wouldn't and with Uncle Ghost she really couldn't, and therefore the malt-nuts. She spent most of her time in her flowered sleeping sack. It took a great deal to get her out of it.

What did it, just as they were about to round the Sun for final deceleration, was a ninety-decibel shout.

It didn't just wake Eve. It woke everyone who was asleep, and pierced the ears of everyone who was awake. Jeron came running into Eve's cubicle, and it was several seconds before either of them realized that the yell was a message from Uncle Ski. "What's he saying?" Eve cried in terror.

"Attenuate it, Eve! Hold your hands over your ears like this!" And when she followed her son's orders, she could make out the words. It was a kind of shopping list!

"—fly agaric, henbane, bladderwort, belladonna, parsley, parsnips—"

"Can't you turn it down?" she yelled over the noise, and Jeron yelled back grimly:

"fie installed it himself—I don't know how. That message has been chasing us for four years."

It went on for minutes: "—Venus fly-trap, madder, yucca, Jack-in-the-pulpit, skunk cabbage—"

Eve moaned, shrugged a shoulder up to an ear to release one hand, and reached for another malt-nut. She popped it open with the dagger that lay beside her bed and took a long drink of the milky fluid. Jeron scowled impartially at the malt-nut and the yelling, and then he had an idea. Wincing, he took his hands away from his ears long enough to pull blossoms from Eve's bower bed. He rolled them into fingertip-sized balls, did something with two of them, then reached for Eve's head while holding two more. She ducked away; he snarled at her, and she perceived what he intended, and allowed him to insert the cool, moist plugs in her ears. Thus diluted, the roar from the communicator was merely loud, and she was able to identify, the voice. It wasn't Ski, or Shef or Jim; of course it wasn't, for that much plain English prose would have tied any one of them up in knots for hours. The voice cataloguing plants, flowers, and even lichens and ocean plankton belonged to a fifth-cohort son of Ann and Shef named Araduk.

At last it ended: "Under no circumstances," it howled, "are you to fail to return viable samples of all the foregoing!" There was no good-bye; it just stopped.

Cautiously Eve pulled the plug out of her ear, and Jeron stood up, flexing his knees in the pull of the 1.5 gravity. "I suppose you're going to drink yourself back to sleep now," he said.

"Is there any reason not?"

He shrugged. "Sightseeing," he said disdainfully. "We're about to scoot around the Sun."

"For me," she said, reaching for the malt-nut, "that's just a rerun. I caught it first time around."

But she did not mean it, did not mean most of the things she said to Jeron when he took that contemptuous, cold tone to her, any more than, she hoped, he meant it to her.

Shef had built their ship with many eyes and, though most of them were hooded for the perihelion approach, through the multiply filtered smallest of them the entire chip's crew gazed wonderingly at the immense sea of flame below.

The ship whipped around the Sun, shedding velocity, and eased back to Earth's orbit from the inside. Quittyyx and Jeromolo Bill were relieved of their responsibilities for a time—the ship was no longer relativistic, and had not yet begun orbiting maneuvers. Jeron took command. Since they had done their job well, he had litde to do. The ship crept toward the point in Earth's orbit where Earth would be when they got there; and there it was, old green Terra, the mottled blue and white marble with its honey-colored child spinning beside it.

By the time they were half a million miles away—only twice as far as the Moon—their speed had dropped to two hundred miles a second. They were well within the safety margins for the ballistic program. They entered a low-Earth orbit, killed the rest of their surplus velocity, and shut down the drive.

All Shef's built-in eyes were open now. The most powerful of them, visible from outside only as a slotted patch on the gleaming gold sphere, gave them magnification enough to make out surface objects only a few hundred yards across. The difficulty was that most of the objects were usually covered by clouds. All of them had heard of "clouds." None but Eve and the late Will Becklund had ever seen them; in the habitat, moisture was leached out of the air by condensation and rain rarely fell.

They clustered around the narrow magnifying port. "All right," piped Jeromolo Bill, standing on tiptoes to see what the taller, older ones could see without effort, "so where do we go, dad?"

Jeron quelled him with a look. Jeron was fully a man now, especially in his own opinion. He had attained his six thousandth day just a week or so before, and besides he was captain of this vessel. Having put by such childish things as the nasty sniping ridicule in Jeromolo Bill's voice, he snapped, "Shut up, kid," squared his shoulders, and prepared to issue commands.

For this he was well qualified, since he had been secretly studying stories about ship's captains out of the tapes trans

mitted by open-time communicators from Earth long ago. "Um, hum," he said thoughtfully, out of Horatio Horn-blower, and, "Is the crew assembled?" out of Nicholas Monsarrat. But the crew was long since assembled, even fumbly, blowsy Aunt Eve, and he really hadn't a clue. Damn clouds! How could you make a plan when you couldn't see what you were looking at?

Of course, there were the maps.

They were good maps. They had been assembled out of the-recollections of the Original Eight, but their memories were good and some days of shrill bickering had mediated their differences. Unfortunately the maps lied. They pretended that there were differences in color between sea and land, and even between one nation's land and another, and Jeron could see none.

Gradually, however, he began to realize that those sections of the globe with visible shadows and folds could not be sea, and therefore must be land. Then he began to perceive shores and peninsulas— that one, no doubt, was Yucatan, protruding into the Gulf of Mexico. But where was Florida? Where, in fact, was the Atlantic Ocean?

At that point he realized he was looking at it the wrong way up. The maps always presented themselves with north at the top. The planet itself was not so obliging. That peninsula just disappearing over the horizon was half a world away from the Yucatan. "Ah, yes," he said, nodding sagely, "you see, that is Italy just going out of sight; of course, you must have recognized the Mediterranean Sea?"

"I think I see the Pyramids," Aunt Eve said, hiccoughing slightly. And it was true. Although there were clouds over the eastern Mediterranean, farther south the skies were transparent. Those sharp-angled blocks were unmistakable.

It was time for action. "Molomy," he ordered, "see that our first batch of gifts is in the landing craft. Bill! You will navigate us to a landing. I advise that you get some sleep first, so go take a little nap."

Jeromolo Bill whistled scornfully but, after waiting enough of a second to indicate that he was doing it because he thought it was worth doing, not because he was told to, he turned and headed for his cubicle, leaving Jeron to study the slowly turning globe. Molomy reappeared and drafted the rest of the children to help her stow the landing

craft. Aunt Eve, with a malt-nut in her hand but no longer drinking, stared apprehensively over his shoulder; and Uncle Ghost, thrilled and uneasy as any of them, allowed himself to be seen beside them.

"The Horn of Africa," he whispered, and Eve shuddered. The field of view shifted ever westward as the ship orbited, the Indian subcontinent with the pearl of Ceylon hanging from its tip; a muddle of islands; then the broad Pacific. Australia was clear enough, and the smudge just at the southern rim of the Earth might easily be New Zealand . . . but what, Jeron wondered, was this astonishing sprinkling of white? Could they be ships? Ocean liners? Immense ones?

He said nonchalantly to Aunt Eve, "I did not believe so much technology had survived until I saw the cruise ships."

She gazed blearily at the sea, and shook her head. "Don't see them. Hard to pick them out among all those icebergs, I guess."

Jeron kept his face masklike as he nodded, but he was thrilled. Icebergsl It was as though she had said, ah, yes, dragons. "But icebergs are not the question, Aunt Eve. We must decide on where to land."

Aunt Eve sighed. The prospect of meeting von Knefhausen and all those others down there was pressing heavily on her. "Well," she said doubtfully, "pretty soon you'll see a sort of twisty thing up there, I think, and that'll be the Isthmus of Panama. Pretty much straight up north from there is where we ought to go."

"Oh, yes," he said, nodding wisely, "Florida."

"No! Who wants to go to Florida? But once we find Florida then we just go up the coast to Chesapeake Bay, I think I'll know that when I see it, and then it's just up the Potomac River to Washington. Where dirty old Dieter lives. Lived. Whatever. But," she added, "I think I will make myself presentable before we land."

"Next orbit!" Jeron called after her back. "Ninety minutes! See you're ready! And then"—he swallowed—"we're going to be there."

When an early spacecraft came back to Earth, an Apollo or a Salyut or a Shuttle, the timing had to be precise and the entry window was tiny. Great banks of computers in

Houston or some Russian town took the readouts from a thousand sensors and converted them into simple yes-no instructions: "Burn." "Stop burning." "Burn for 1.3 seconds." "Burn yaw thruster." "Pray."

The returnees from Alpha-Aleph had no such ground support going for them. They had only two things, though either was enough. First they had the landing craft itself, with Jim's power plant and Ski's plasma, and so they could have come down like an elevator if they chose. And they also had Jeromolo Bill.

The six-year-old was in his full power now. His genes had been edited for mathematics, and not merely the relativistic phase-shifting of the high-speed voyage itself. As a matter of pride he plotted a course. It required him to take into consideration the shuttle's geocentric position vector, the gravitational parameter of the Earth, the gravitational force due to the Earth's nonsymmetric mass distribution and the time-varying contributions from tides, the perturbing force due to the effects of the Sun and Moon, the force due to the effects of atmospheric resistance, and the force due to solar radiation pressure. Since he had no data on many of these, he had to deduce them as he went along, from the perturbations observed in the very ship he was flying. He did it in his head. He was able to feel the responses of the sensors and convert them into attitude and thrust instructions as well as any IBM or Cray-1 monster in old Texas, and it did not even raise a sweat.

The difficulties were quite other than that. The difficulties included the fact that the world did not look the way it was supposed to.

There wasn't any Florida, for instance. Where there should have been a peninsula, there was only a string of tiny islets. All up and down the coast, and all to the west, there were broad, ragged bays where there should have been river mouths and deltas. Clearly the world's water level had risen. The question was, was there still a Washington, D.C.?

As they felt the first gentle shaking that told them their shuttle, for the first time in its life, had an atmosphere around it. Eve appeared and buckled herself in. She was sober, clean, and dressed in her best clothes.

Jeron was captain, Bill was pilot, but Eve was Aunt Mommy. She leaned forward to gaze at the approaching globe, and the others waited on her word.

There was a thunderstorm over the Virginia shore and a line of squalls all the way up into Pennsylvania. It was no real problem for the landing craft that Shef had designed, but the fact that the integrity of the ship was assured did nothing for the integrity of the stomachs of the crew. None of them had been exposed to that sort of lurching, staggering motion for a quarter of a century; most never had. Eve did not seem to notice the turbulence. Through a break in the clouds she saw the river, grossly swollen, an island with a marble monument, a hillside covered with grave stones, a bridge nearly awash, and from them recognized the marsh that had been Washington National Airport. She placed a finger on the port. "There, Bill," she said.

By the time they landed the inside of the shuttle was thick with the smell of airsickness, and six-year-old Jeromolo Bill was sickest of all. But he got them there.

Aunt Eve pulled herself together and stood up.

"We're going out now," Jeron guessed, watching her face.

Eve looked around at her corps of hardened adventurers — average age, nine; average height, not much over four feet. She smiled and shook her head.

"Not just yet," she said. "We're going to be good guests. We're going to stay right here in the lander until something happens outside, to give our hosts time to get ready for us."

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND IT HAD STOPPED

raining. The President's Press Secretary was grateful for the latter, if not the former. She had been up all night printing the President's announcements, and now had the job of hand-delivering them before daybreak. There were only about eight that really had to be delivered, because their recipients were the important ones. But you never knew which eight were important in the President's eyes. So she had to deliver them all, forty identical little white envelopes, each containing a card that said:

THE PRESIDENT of The United States Takes pleasure in inviting

To attend the Reseption Of our Visitors from Alpha Cent. R.S.V.P.

As she bicycled along the broad, empty avenues she could see lights in some of the windows. A whickering from the stables of the Pennsylvania delegation, where the lordly Amish had deigned to interrupt their sleep. Everyone knew. Everyone could see. Any minute now— Yes! There it was! The storm past, the skies had cleared, and the news was there in the sky for all to see, a great new golden star that swung through the constellations at the rate of four degrees a minute, the width of the full Moon every eight seconds. She slipped an envelope under the door of Blair House (yes, lights there, too, as the people from Puget talked among themselves about the great event), and headed out toward the less important stops by the mosquito-ridden margins of the river—the homes of the Supreme Court justices, the lesser Cabinet members, the so-called "delegations" with suspect credentials who had turned up for the advertised Tenth Anniversary gala, and found themselves present for something far greater.

The satellite was almost out of sight again at the far horizon by the time she had finished the last of them and walked her bicycle to the top of the levee for the easy ride home, and there was the lander. A great gold marble. Sitting there across the river and waiting for morning.

It was not cold, but she shivered.

By dawn the city was wide awake. "They're getting ready to come out!" everyone was shouting to everyone else, but each time the rumor was false. There was a spotter leaning out the windows at the top of the Washington Monument

with Army field glasses and a battery-powered walkie-talkie, and he kept everyone posted on what was happening. Which, so far, was nothing—fortunately, in the opinion of the Vice President, trying to get things ready for company. Half the Marine guard had been impressed into peeling potatoes for the great welcoming banquet planned for the evening, and the other half was sewing buttons on its uniforms for the grand dress parade on the White House lawn; and, in the middle of it all, the President sat like a stone.

"Oh, Jimbo," his wife cried as she came breathless into the Oval Office and found him unmoving there. "Can't you get yourself going?" She felt his coffee pot and found it was cold, nodded to the orderly for a refill. "What a day, honeyl I been down to the levee to see them. Jimbo, that thing is big. And it's got no wings. All it looks like to me is the darlingest big flying pumpkin you ever saw—but please get yourself dressed, will you?"

She sat down happily, pulling off her galoshes. Even with the sandbags all around and the dikes along the banks of the river, the White House grounds stayed soggy. "You know, honey, this is going to be the nicest time we ever had! Better than your Second Inaugural. Better than when the wine ship got stuck down by the Kennedy Center. Better than anything!"

Her. husband shook his head. He said, "We weren't bothering them. What they got to bother us for?"

The Vice President scratched the soles of her feet, studying her husband. "It's going to be all right, honey. You'll see. Whatever it is you got on your mind. Now, you got to get out of that thing and get yourself dressed up." He was still sitting in his robe. It was made of pure silk and it had the Presidential seal on its breast, but it did not close across his belly; it had been made for a much smaller man. "Come on, Jimbo! What's the matter?" she demanded.

He said bitterly, "What should be the matter? I hear you got troops around the spaceship."

"Well, sure, Jimbo. Just Cousin Buzz's company. They look real nice, and you could look at it like they're a kind of guard of honor for them."

"I hope you don't get them sore at us."

His wife sighed. "If they're not sore now," she said reasonably, "I don't really see what we could do to make

them that way. Now change your clothes. The gray suit's clean, and you've got some nice white shirts in the closet that I brought down from Virginia." She picked up his desk clock and shook it, then decided it was running. "You have time to take a shower, honey. Company won't be here for a couple hours, easy."

The President nodded thoughtfully, moving over to the window. His face was somber. He stared toward where the spaceship was, though of course it was not in sight—too many buildings, too many overgrown trees. "Everybody been told they got to dress up for this?" he demanded.

"Course they have, honey." His wife came up behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. "Listen, put your happy face on, Jimbo. This is a party. We're going to give these folks the nicest damn formal reception this town's seen in twenty years. The fire department's got three big pumpers ready, and they're going to squirt hoses in the air, and that skinny little chick from Puget said she got some fireworks for us."

"Fireworks?" said the President, smiling for the first time.

"You bet. And we're going to have a real fine state banquet. Smell the cooking?" He nodded, but did not turn around, and the Vice President said softly, "What is it, Jimbo? Something to do with that fellow you buried a couple-three weeks ago? Is that it?" He shrugged morosely. "You been real edgy ever since then," she persisted. "You want to tell me who he was?"

The President turned and looked at her, then shook his head. The President was not a bad man. He wasn't a particularly good one, either—you couldn't be altogether good and still do what you had to do to rise to the top in the yeasty bubble of the world as it was—but he tried to deal fairly with everyone. Usually. And a little more than fairly with his Vice President-and-wife.

He threw off the brocaded robe and scratched his chest for a moment before heading for the shower. "Let it lay, honey," he said. "You're better off if you don't know."

The skinny little chick from Puget, whose name was Darien McCullough, was busy deploying her forces. She had come to Washington with a party of five—you hardly traveled across a continent with fewer than that these days

—and every one of them had a job. The present job of the two strongest of them was to carry the load of skyrockets and Roman candles she had picked up in York State on the way down to the White House. Another was being wired for instant communication, as Darien was herself, and the fifth was given the job of staying home and keeping an eye on things while Darien gave in to her curiosity.

It was a good long walk to the banks of the Potomac, but if you stayed to the main streets you could manage it without getting your good shoes wet. Of course, you had to climb the side of the dike of sandbags to see across the Potomac, because the tides were now running six feet above what used to be the riverbank. But it was worth it.

The golden globe lay there, faintly luminous, in the shadow of what had once been the Eastern Airlines shuttle terminal. Darien was not alone as she stared. The levee was filled with sightseers, members of the delegations who had come for the President's Tenth Anniversary gala as well as Washington natives. She joined them in studying the great globe. It was, after all, precisely what she had crossed the continent to see.

"Good morning to you, Miss McCullough," said someone beside her, and she turned to greet the head of the Amish delegation, a tall old man with a beard and broad-brimmed hat. There was a whole wagonload of the stately Amish there, and heaven knew how many back in the Amish embassy on K Street. After the disaster the Amish, along with the Mennonites, the Doukhobors, and a few other sects, came into their own. They hadn't needed much from modern technology even before the power plants slagged down; they needed even less later on. While Iowa corn farmers stared in dreary despair at the fields they could neither plant nor sow without power for the tractors and a whole spectrum of chemicals to feed the plants and kill the pests, the Amish brought out their teams and prospered. Darien spoke politely to the Amishman. She was on good terms with their government, as she was with nearly every government in North America and a few which were not; that was one of the reasons why Puget stayed as healthy as it did.

Darien McCullough had been a teenager when the world as she knew it came to an end. She was in high school in

Ottawa, firmly intending to become either a nuclear physicist or perhaps a world-champion tennis player . . . unless she went into the family business. Which was politics. Like all good Canadians, she both despised and loved the wretched giant to the south. She had seen a lot of the United States from her father's embassy residence in Washington, D.C., as a small child. She was not anxious to see more. Quebec was more interesting. So was tennis. So were boys. When the kaons sluiced into every fissionable atom on the surface of the Earth, Darien's first thought was that it was a pretty good joke on the U.S.A. The mighty American muscle had simply melted away. All over the hemisphere U.S. bomber crews were parachuting to the ground, dozens of them over Canada, as their nuclear warheads dissolved their casings and the aircraft became uninhabitable. School closed early that day. At home, the telly showed CBC reporters following stunned generals around the Pentagon, asking questions that had no answers at all.

Then even CBC went off the air.

Forty percent of North American, not just Canadian, electric power came from nuclear reactors. As the cores softened and slumped, the turbines stopped turning. CANDUs were no luckier than the Westinghouses or the breeders. The power net failed. The grid died.

There was a bad week then, even in Ottawa. Nothing at all, compared to Detroit or L.A. But bad. When it became clear to her parents that it would be easier to stay alive in their home province than in Ottawa, they simply bought a train ticket and got on board. (A few weeks later it got harder.) The rail trip was normal enough— wheat fields do not riot—although there were delays and the restaurant car offered little choice. But Vancouver, when they got there, was wholly blacked out.

Saunders McCullough, Darien's father, was well equipped for the problem. He had been given the ambassadorship as a reward for political service, and the best of his service was with the national power authority, with an engineering degree from McGill before that. He was the one who put together the hydroelectric network that gave most of British Columbia and parts of the former states of Oregon and Washington a head start on returning to industrial civilization—or something fairly like it—after the disaster. Darien's mother was also an exceptional individual. Burned-out women'srights revolutionary turned housewife, she sparked to life again and led the secessionist movement that put Puget together as an independent nation. The McCulloughs were certainly the first family of Puget, and the daughter was the logical choice to pick up the torch when the old folks died. Puget didn't have a President. It had a Council, but if there was a first among equals among them it was Darien McCullough. And when they unscrambled the Hawaiian Kingdom's message from space, she was the logical one to bring it to Washington.

A remote beepbeepbeep interrupted her thoughts.

The Amishman glanced disapprovingly at her purse, where the sound came from, but approvingly enough at Darien herself as he removed himself a few paces for politeness' sake. She held the purse up to her mouth to respond, then to her ear. It whispered to her, in the voice of Jake Harris, the anchorman back at Blair House, "Darien? You better get back here, ay? Looks like they're going to have a parade and we're supposed to be in it."

She frowned at the thought of walking down Pennsylvania Avenue behind the President's prized cavalry. "They don't need me, Jake."

"Course not. But you know how His Nibs gets."

"He's.got plenty on his mind today. He won't even notice I'm not there." She peered past the Amish family to judge distances and then nodded to herself. "Look, I'll pick up the procession at the Arlington Bridge if I have to. So make my excuses till then, right? I have to sign off now."

There was a faint squawk of protest from the walkie-talkie in her bag, but she paid no attention. Like a proper sightseer, she concentrated on the great golden globe across the river.

The soggy ground beneath the sphere was cracked and dry. Tremendous heat had boiled the water out of the mud, between and over the old runways, for a distance of fifty yards around the spacecraft. Darien studied the caked mud thoughtfully. That meant waste heat, surely, but from what? Some immense energy had cushioned the fall of that globe, but there was no external sign of how it was applied. It had no wings, no visible rocket nozzles. Jake, who had watched the orbiting parent sphere the night before, thought

that there had seemed to be some huge, wavy sort of aurora behind it—plasma? Darien could not guess, and shook her head regretfully. It was more important than ever, she thought, that she get to the people in the globe before anyone else did.

There were mottled irregularities on the globe that might have been windows, but if they gave a view at all it was only from the inside looking out. What did they look like, the people who undoubtedly were peering at her even now? Great golden gods and goddesses, as bronzed as their spaceship? Two-headed mutants? She felt a shudder run up her back, in spite of the muggy heat.

What the spacefarers were seeing was far less impressive. The pathetic rabble that was the President's picked corps of commandos was knotted around the ship, their oddly assorted weapons pointed at the ship, at the sky, at each other in random directions as they whispered to each other and strained to look inside the ship; and it was beginning to rain.

Darien sighed, rummaged in her purse, and took out a camera. It did not look any different than any other of those Japanese minis that still existed in quantity; cameras were not rare. But she attracted glances when she peered through its viewfinder at the ship because it was rare enough to see one used; film had not been in the stores for twenty years. For Darien's camera that didn't matter. It didn't use film. She clicked away, as a dozen generations of tourists had before her in that spot, and then she noticed what images she was storing on the magnetic tape.

A door in the golden globe was opening.

There was a gasp, then a shout, from the watchers on the levee. Even the Amish. Darien saw one of the levee policemen turn and wave frantically toward the top of the Washington Monument, but even he turned right back to see the most exciting group of tourists to enter Washington D.C.'s National Airport in at least two decades ... or ever!

"What a funny bunch!" cried one of the Amish women, earning a reproving look from her husband.

But she was right. They came strutting out of the entrance and each one—at precisely the same point—stopped, and stared slack-jawed at the immense sky overhead, and was bumped out of the way by the person behind him. It

was not just the infinite overhead sky. Most of the interstellar wayfarers were experiencing rain falling on their heads for the first time ever.

They were all very young. Not just young. The operative word, Darien thought, was "weird." Some of them were darker than the President himself, some almost albino white. They had features that ranged from emaciated aquiline -to puffy blobs of noses surrounded by bulging cheeks—and yet, Darien thought, how could that be? There should not be such differences! They were all children of the same eight astronauts. All of them had been white, looking about as interchangeable as any NASA crew. How did the kids come to be all so different?

And, above all, how come they were so young? Barring one middle-aged woman, they were children—some of them surely no more than three or four years old. She had expected perhaps the original eight, now surely in their fifties or beyond, with perhaps a leavening of the more mature, teenagers . . . but not this kindergarten!

All around the ship was now a scene of confusion. Half a dozen state coaches were being galloped across the taxi strip by agitated drivers, the unmatched teams surging and tangling with each other under the whip. The guards were trying to come to attention. All the old rifles were at port arms now, not actually pointed at the visitors but ready, and the soldiers were looking to their lieutenant for orders —who, in turn, was peering through opera glasses at the top of the Washington Monument. Darien caught a flicker of light from one of the little windows under the shaft's aluminum cap. If it was a signal, the lieutenant did not seem to find it helpful. He was arguing with a teenager from the ship, trying to keep his eyes on the Monument at the same time, and the discussion collapsed entirely when the horses and carriages pulled up. The children from the ship wailed and fled. Only the physical obstruction of the older woman at the door, trying to calm them, kept them from retreating into the ship. The teenager had joined the panicky retreat, but he recovered quickly and began shouting commands. Slowly the others came back toward the carriages. Those huge snorting animals in the traces were less terrifying than the teenager, it seemed.

Darien picked up her purse and held it to her lips. "I'm going to the bridge now," she murmured.

"Good idea, Derry. They're starting to move here—" The voice was lost in a blare of band music.

"Say again, Jake," she ordered, wincing at the noise.

"You can hear for yourself," his voice shouted. "Jesus God, what a racket! But you'd better get on over there, because they're on their way!"

The head of the President's parade was approaching the bridge by the time Darien got there, and the traffic congestion was considerable. Darien pushed her way through a knot of government employees in dungarees and cotton flannel shirts, no doubt given the day off to swell the crowd, and found herself behind a line of twenty or thirty soldiers doing traffic duty. They were keeping farm wagons off the bridge but allowing pedestrians to pass. Darien glanced at the approaching parade, studied the reviewing stand just across the road which was obviously where it was going to wind up, and decided the pedestrians had the right idea. For one thing, they were farther from the parade's two bands.

She walked out onto the span just as the first mounted soldiers in the escort appeared at the other end.

From the District end of the Arlington Bridge you could see right up the weedy hill that had once been America's best-kept cemetery. A later administration had built a small cinder-block fort commanding the bridge itself, and the outriders turned aside to gather under the fort, leaving the carriages with the visitors to enter the bridge alone.

And there they stopped.

There was some argument going on. It appeared the people from the spacecraft were arguing with their drivers, and, although Darien was too far to know which side won, the debate was resolved by the spacefarers' getting out of the carriages and lining up to cross the bridge on foot.

Even from that distance, Darien could see that they were not enjoying themselves. The rain had more or less stopped, but what was left in its place was a muggy, buggy heat. Some of them were sneezing violently, and had to be helped along by soldiers from the guard detachment. All of them were swatting at the insects.

Even so, they started off across the bridge bravely enough. Before they were halfway the bold marching step had slowed down, and even the arrogant teenager from the scene at the airport was beginning to limp. They reached the point where Darien stood, and that was the end of it. Two small children sat down in the middle of the road, weeping. The teenager snapped angrily at them without effect, then shrugged. His gaze wandered over the crowd on the curb, with incurious loathing, pausing briefly to meet Darien's eyes.

Darien McCullough could count on her fingers as well as any neighbor gossiping about a pregnant bride. She knew that it was unlikely that any of the children could be as much as twenty years old, yet there was a grownup ferocity in the man's stare. It shook her. She looked away quickly, but when she glanced back his eyes were still on her.

The carriages were beginning to approach from the far end of the bridge, and the noise distracted him, freeing her to look more attentively at the rest of the group. There seemed to be seven of them in all, two quite small boys, three young girls surrounding the age of puberty, the angry- eyed young man—and, good heavens!, Eve Barstow!

For Darien McCullough, the sight of Eve Barstow was a personal shock, saddening and complete. How different she looked! The slim, smiling bride who had taken off so bravely for Alpha Centauri was now transmuted into a plump, faded woman who limped as though her feet hurt. No doubt they did. Even her Earth-born muscles had lacked practice for twenty years. And there, behind her, there was— -

There was what, exactly? Darien could not be sure. The day was still warm, but surely not hot enough to be producing mirages over the pavement. And yet there was something behind Eve Barstow, between her and the approaching carriages, that was making the hillside across the bridge creep and waver, like a view seen through flawed glass. It was too small to be heat refraction, too well defined to be a blurring of her own vision—why, she thought in amazement, it almost looked like the outline of a human form!

That was the first time anyone on Earth saw Uncle Ghost.

YOU KNEW THAT YOUR NEAREST AND DEAREST HAD FIRED A

wad of devastation at the Earth. You knew that the consequences' had to be awful. But you didn't know, until you saw with your own eyes, that what resulted was not so much tragic as tacky. The majesty of the Presidency had boiled away with the nukes.

There was this matter of the parade, for instance. You want to talk about parades? Eve Barstow had seen real parades\ Dozens of them! Parades that took four hours to pass a given point, with regimental bands blaring in perfect sync and drum majorettes doing baton whirls and cart-wheels down the avenue, and the people lined up twenty deep for miles on end. Fourth of July parades and Pasa- dena Rose Bowl parades and Armed Forces Day parades, and the least of them could have swallowed this pipsqueak affair up in between a Boy Scout troop and a Lithuanian- American Ladies' Marching Society delegation and never noticed it. And yet, truly, this was parade enough for her to participate in. She got to the White House simply worn out, even though they had been in carriages most of the way, and the kids were worse off than she. Strength is not endurance. The man who can clip seconds off a four- minute mile may fall over in total exhaustion before he gets halfway through the Boston marathon. And although they had carefully strengthened themselves for the unfor- giving pull of 32 ft/sec², they had not practiced long marches, because in the spacecraft where was there to walk to?

So some of the kids were carried into the White House, and even Jeron and Molomy limped, and none of them were really happy. "Aunt Eve! Why does anybody need a house as big as this?" "Aunt Eve! Can't they get rid of these 'bugs'?" "Aunt Eve, you won't believe the toilets!" She did, of course, because she had seen flush toilets before, but none of the children had ever experienced a waste-

disposal system that did not recycle. Or spicy, humid breezes, or, above all, so many hundreds, even thousands, of people.

As soon as they were in the White House, the Vice President whisked them away to a private room, firmly barring the door on the guests and visitors outside. No doubt she had her reasons, Eve thought, but it was a kindness all the same. And when the President appeared, proudly holding a tray with two bottles on it, a J & B and a Jim Beam, Eve felt her heart flutter. Real drinking whiskey again! She let him pour her half a tumbler full of bourbon, accepted a splash of water, and had it halfway to her lips before her conscience stopped her. "President Tupelo," she said—

"No, no! Call me Jim," the President urged.

"Jim, then—the first thing we want is to have a word with Dieter von Knefhausen."

The President's face fell. Standing next to him, his wife reached out and took his hand. "Well, there's a problem there, honey," the Vice President said. "See, Dr. Von Knefhausen passed away a while back. He's got a real nice plot there, out in the old Rose Garden. I can take you to see it if you want to."

Eve looked over the glass, into the face of the woman, frozen in that position. Behind the Vice President Eve could see an agitated shimmering against the drapes; Uncle Ghost had heard it too. At length she sighed and took a sip of her drink.

"What a pity," she said. "Tell me, did he die peacefully?"

What a pity. ... An hour later, back out among the crowds of invited guests, Eve still had not got over what a pity it was. What she would have said to Dieter von Knefhausen had never been clear, but now she would not have the chance to say anything at all. It was strange that she should feel that as strongly as she did, considering that she seemed to be having a chance to talk to everybody else in the world at once. Or at least to listen, or to shake their hands. So many people! And every one of them, it seemed, with but one goal in life, and that to touch the visitors and talk to them.

It was a pity it was so warm, Eve thought; it made it hard for the children, some of whom seemed obviously unwell.

It was not just sweat. In the close confines of the ship all of them had been exposed to all varieties of natural odors, from the botanicals in the food chambers to the stinks of their siblings, friends, and selves. But there were smells here that were entirely new: Cigars. Charcoal fires on the patio. Above all, the many smells of cooking.

On the habitat, cooking was not very important, because most of what Eve grew could be eaten raw. Natural Earth foods were less kind. They had to be stewed or boiled or roasted or fried, and all processes seemed to be going at once. The immense meal was full of animal protein and saturated fats—right there, matters almost out of the experience of the children. The flavors were odd, the textures unfamiliar. The "meat," as the children learned to call it, was rich with blubber and laced with little cartileginous nuggets of gristle and, good heavens, they discovered, often fastened to a sort of gray-white stone called "bone" that nearly broke the teeth and was not meant to be swallowed at all. In theory the children knew what bone was, but it certainly was not the kind of thing you expected to find in your food!

The visitors were given a sort of corral to eat in, surrounded by Marine guards with flitguns, trying to keep the mosquito population down and visitors out at the same time. When the meal was over their protection vanished, and, one by one, the visiting dignitaries were brought up to the undignified visitors for introductions. Eve Barstow, who had washed down her spareribs with bourbon, found herself giggling out loud as she contrasted this reception with that long-ago one before the launch of the Constitution. Instead of the President of France, they had the Chairing Freeholder of the Carolina Confederacy; instead of the Russian ambassador, a slip of a girl from Puget Sound. Most of them brought gifts, the Amish a fletch of home-smoked bacon, the Puget girl a carved miniature totem pole, which she ceremoniously draped over Jeron's neck. By the time the sordid meal was over, the last bug picked out of the greasy food, the last plate picked up from the shrubbery and carried away, the last VIP greeted and dismissed, it was full dark, and Eve was feeling the bourbon. Her malt-nuts ran no more than six or seven percent alcohol; what she had been drinking was four or

five times as powerful, even diluted, and she had been swallowing them pretty fast.

The realization came almost too late; Eve barely made it to the bathroom under the great carpeted stair.

Eve stayed in there for a long time, and when she came out the party was visibly dwindling. Not enough so. It was more than she wanted to handle. She turned away from the party sounds and wandered through the damp, shabby rooms, now deserted. None of this was the way she had planned it! Never mind that Kneflie was dead; that was probably better that way, since they really hadn't known what to say, or do, to him anyway. But the whole thing was a disappointment. She thought about the gifts she had planned so carefully, all of them still carefully wrapped in their moist seed pods and ready for germination or planting. Did she really want to give them to these people? There were fifty different kinds of wonders. The vegetable womb, to relieve women forever of the pains of parturition. The supercannabis, euphoria and analgesia without penalty. The bunny-fur plants, fibers with the porous structure of wool and the washability of cotton; the seeds were the size of peanuts and, as the gossypols had been bred out, they could be roasted to make a tasty snack. The malt-nuts, the squash-citrusprotein baby food, the meat substitutes—not to mention the ones that just looked pretty, or smelled sweet.

Not to mention the secrets of how to do all this, which she had once intended to share, the gifts that could change the genes themselves, and thus change the human race forever. But did she want to give all this to the likes of President James Tupelo?

A crash of china distracted her. A skinny young girl in Marine fatigues had entered the room, caught sight of Eve, and dropped the dirty dishes she was carrying to the kitchen. "You scared me," she said reproachfully. "How come you wandering here all by yourself?"

"I'm sorry," Eve offered.

"Sorry don't cut the mustard, miss. Listen. If you don't want to go back to the beer bust, why don't you let me show you upstairs? You got a real nice room. All ready for you. You only have to share it with one other person. Used to have the Carolinas in it, but they rousted them out this

morning so's you could have it, and we changed the sheets and everything." Suddenly a bed sounded like a good idea, and Eve followed willingly enough.

The other person turned out to be Molomy, sound asleep in one corner of a huge bed. It was the only bed in the room. Eve sighed and climbed into it, trying not to disturb Molomy, who grumbled and thrashed over to a new position. Eve closed her eyes. The bed was impressive without being comfortable, far lumpier and damper than the flower sacks Eve had bred for herself, but the fact that she was exhausted made up for a lot—

It did not, however, make up for the noises on the other side of the plywood partition that divided the room. Eve listened, then became aware of motion beside her and opened her eyes.

Molomy was sitting up, grinning. "It's Jeron," she whispered. "And he's got somebody with him."

When Jeron noticed that Aunt Eve was missing he thought briefly of looking for her, then decided against it. He didn't need her. What he needed was to get away from all these people, not least the people he had flown four light-years with, and think things out. He found Molomy, glassy-eyed with fatigue, and set her to shepherding the smaller children, who were more exhausted still, off to bed. Then he returned to what was left of the party and stared out over the lawn, wondering if he could get away long enough to take a walk through the strange, oppressive city, and wondering even more if his legs were up to it.

He did not get the chance. The young woman who had looped that unpleasant carved-wood object around his neck came up to him. "I'm Darien McCullough," she said. "Would you like to dance?"

He looked her over carefully before he answered, because Jeron had learned his lessons well. Aunt Eve had explained to him that dancing was a social ritual in which young men and young women experimented with touching each other and arousing each other as a preliminary to sexual intercourse; and for a young man whose entire universe of possible lovers was limited to about thirty possible partners, almost all of them by now so familiar as to be tedious, the prospect was enticing. So was Darien McCullough. She was tall, dark, slim—and new. He did not have any way ot guessing her age, but it would not have occurred to him for that to matter. If they were big enough they were old enough. "Of course I can dance," he said. "Where shall we do it?"

Her expression faltered for a second. "Well," she said, her look strained, "the usual place is probably on the dance floor, you know."

Although he could see no reason for it, he was in no doubt. She was laughing at him. He nodded carelessly. "Of course," he agreed, "but at this moment I wish to remain here to study, ah, the incrustations on this pillar." He had in fact been looking at the white rime on the pedestals beside him, wondering if it were intended as art. For some reason that amused the woman even more.

"It's called bird lime," she said. "I wouldn't touch it, if I were you."

"I did not intend to touch it," he said frostily. "You speak of birds. Do you know that in my home there are no birds? I have never seen a bird until today," he went on, proud of his ability to make social conversation and pleased that she no longer looked as though she were laughing at him.

"Why don't we walk around the garden while you tell me about your home?" she suggested, and then, without pause, "Oh, hell." She was looking past him.

From behind him, the voice of the President of the United States (Washington, D.C.) said, "There you are, boy. Having a good time?"

Jeron said politely, "Yes, thank you. Darien McCullough and I were talking about these birds." He picked up an overlooked French-fried potato and tossed it toward a pigeon on the lawn, but, instead of eating it, the bird flew off to the top of the pillars. "They behave very strangely," he commented, craning his neck to stare up. He could hear a cooing sound from the birds overhead, but it was too dark to make out what they were doing.

"Ah, sonny," the President said diffidently, "I wouldn't gawk up at those pigeons so close."

"Would you not, then," Jeron said. To demonstrate his independence he found a fork in the grass and shied it at the pigeons overhead. The fork came nowhere near, but forty startled birds flew off in all directions, and Jeron felt something hot and damp strike down along his ear.

The President grinned broadly. "Now you know where all that white decoration comes from, Mr. Jeron. Well, I was about to invite you to come in for a little sit-down with the Vice President and me, so why don't we take you into the Oval Office and get you cleaned up a little? Nice to see you, Miz McCullough," he added politely, steering Jeron away. The woman looked angrily after them, to Jeron's great pleasure.

"She wanted to make love with me," he remarked to the President. "After I'm cleaned up, I think I'll come back and permit it."

"No, no," the President said earnestly. "Take my advice, boy, those wild people from the West are all full of the worst kinds of VD and everything. You just leave her be. There's plenty of nice American girls right here in Washington, D.C., that'd be proud to be with a man like you— but not that one, no sir!"

If there were indeed all these nice American girls lusting for his flesh, Jeron could find no sign of them in the Oval Office. Once he had got himself cleaned up he was led to a couch, the Vice President fluffing up pillows for him and offering a tray of sweet little cakes in paper wrappings and bottles of lukewarm, acidy, bubbly brown drinks. The President pulled up a chair to face him and said, "Now, my boy, let's you and me talk turkey. You didn't come here for nothing, right?"

Jeron nodded. "That is correct. What we want—"

"So we can make a deal," the President nodded. "I knew when I saw you that you were a reasonable man. You're the kind of person that puts your cards right on the table, just like me, right? Mae! Put a little sweetener in this good man's Coke while we talk us some business here."

"It is already quite sweet," Jeron objected, but the Vice President was already shaking her head.

"I don't believe he's much used to drinking, Jimbo honey," she said sweetly. "Isn't that right, Jeron?"

The President shrugged amiably. "Then let's get right to it. I imagine you folks came here with trading goods, right? Mind telling us what you've got to offer us?"

"Offer?" Jeron was finding the whole interview confusing, rather like a conversation in a foreign language that he barely understood.

"What you brought for us, son," the President amplified.

"Oh, to be sure," said Jeron, glad to have understood him at last. "Yes. Aunt Eve has a great many things for you. Different kinds of plants and vegetables—some of which I helped her breed," he bragged.

The President's expression seemed to turn in on itself. "Plants and vegetables?" he repeated.

"Yes. Of course, some of them might not grow properly here—the gravity is so strong, you see, and you do not maintain good control of temperature and humidity, I think."

"Uh-huh," the President said. "I see. Actually, I was thinking more of weapons."

"What would we be doing with weapons?" Jeron demanded, scandalized.

"What anyone else would be doing with them! You mean you don't have any? —No, don't say that, 'course you do. Why, that ship of yours all by itself would have pretty good military applications, used right."

"You want the ship?" Jeron thought for a moment, then shrugged. "We would have to send someone back to orbit to get the other one, but, yes, why not? And in return I have a list of what we require. It is in the lander, but as I remember it includes strawberry, coconut, papaya, tobacco, redwood, sugar maple—"

"Son, I don't know if we can exactly get you a whole redwood tree."

"Seeds alone will be adequate; there are about six hundred vegetable species, I think. Also animals, including possum, gorilla, rattlesnake, dolphin—"

"You gonna have a real Noah's Ark, boy," the President said uneasily, revising his estimate of the size of the ship in orbit.

"There too, genetic materials will be enough. We would prefer sperm and ova, though we can make do with other cells. I do not expect you to ask a female gorilla to let you

investigate her private parts," said Jeron, laughing to notify them that that was a joke.

The President laughed too, but he looked at his wife and almost shrugged. "That's all you want? Just some livestock?"

"No, no. I also wish recent publications, on microfiche by choice. Philosophical Transactions, Science, the Journal of Astrophysics, and about one hundred fifty others."

The President's wife said, "We don't have much of that kind of stuff, Jeron. I think we got some copies of Popular Science Monthly down to the Marine dayroom, but they've mostly got pretty tatty by now."

"No, nol Science. Or any equivalent journal of recent research in the physical sciences."

The President cleared his throat. "I think you better have a drink after all, son. There's no magazines like that coming out anymore."

"There must be! How else would scientists exchange information about available instruments, for instance?"

The Vice President put her hand on his arm in real sympathy for this young boy who was so evidently feeling frustrated and angry. "I'm real sorry, honey. We don't get any magazines like that—or, tell the truth and shame the devil, most any new magazines at all. Don't need that sort of thing anymore, you know. The only instrumentation we need's maybe a stick to measure how high the water's got."

Jeron scowled, rubbing the area around his navel. The thought of returning to Uncle Shef and Uncle Ski without the journals they had ordered was giving him a stomachache. He said stubbornly, "I just can't believe there isn't any scientific research going on."

"Oh, hell, 'course there is," the President said with pride. "I got over twenty-five people over to the Defense Department, making gunpowder and such, and Mae's got a whole bunch in the Department of Home Economics and Cooking, don't you, hon?"

"Well, yeah. But that's not quite what the young man means, Jimbo. There's none of that fancy stuff here. I don't think there's any of that anywhere in the world—" The Vice President hesitated. "Except maybe in Puget," she finished. "They're more into technology there. I mean, if that's really what you want," she added, catching her husband's chilly eye.

"What she means," the President explained, "is you don't want to mess around with the Pugets. They still take scalps, you know."

The Vice President had never had any children, but all that proved was that nature made some silly mistakes. She was as motherly a type as had ever occupied that high office, and she frowned, leaned forward, and pressed the palm of her hand against Jeron's forehead. "Jimbo," she declared, "this boy doesn't need any more talk of taking scalps and making deals. He's wore out. What he needs is to go right off to bed."

The President looked rebellious, but only for a minute; after all, he would have plenty of other chances. "One last thing," he said jovially. "And I'm gonna insist you put just a drop of this mountain dew in your Coke for it. You and me and Mae here are going to drink a toast. To our eternal friendship between planets! And to our common goal, the reunification of the U. S. of A., and then of the whole doggone world!"

Jeron had a flickering electric light in his room, but all the rest of the furnishings looked ancient. He pulled back the covers, regarded the narrow canvas cot he was supposed to sleep in with distaste, and climbed in. What a place! And what people!

There was hardly a word they said that did not seem to reflect so basic a difference in orientation and desires that communication was almost hopeless. That "toast" of the President's, for instance—was that what the President thought they were here for? To help him "reunify" something that Jeron really thought was a lot less troublesome left fragmented? There was really only one reason they were here—because he and Aunt Eve had idly dreamed up the trip, and Shef and Flo and Ski had seen enough practical value in it for themselves to help build the ship.

He sighed heavily and flounced over in the cot, trying to get comfortable . . . and then sat up.

Someone had opened his door.

"It's only me, Darien McCullough," whispered a female voice.

"How did you get in here? What do you want?" he demanded.

"You always ask at least two questions at once," the woman complained. He could hear her moving around, and then the light went on—she had known, he perceived, exactly where to find it. "Satisfied?" she asked, spreading her hands. "See, no guns, no knives. Now I better turn the light off again, so nobody will come up to see what's going on." As the light went off, she added, "I just wanted you to know. We aren't, and we don't."

"Aren't what? Don't what?" The only illumination now was misty moonlight coming in through the window, but Jeron could see her well enough as she came to sit on the edge of his bed.

"We aren't riddled with VD, and we don't take scalps. Jimbo's a liar, you see."

Jeron said, "Huh." He pulled his ankles up under his thighs and studied her. It was very hard to tell how old these Earthies were. She could have been anything from his own age to Aunt Eve's. Dressed simply in denim slacks and a patterned blouse, her fair hair short and curly, she looked principally female. She smelled that way, too, in ways that none of the women of his experience had ever smelled. Jeron knew it was called "perfume" from reading, but until now his knowledge of it had been entirely theoretical. "I think," he said, "that you could not know that the President had said such things of you unless you used electronic instruments. Is that correct?"

"It's none of your business, Jeron," she said, pleasantly enough. "We do know a lot of what the President says when he doesn't think we're listening. Some of it worries us, and it ought to worry you, too."

There was something about the way she averted her eyes as she spoke that made Jeron suspect he was violating her nudity tabus; he pulled the stiff sheet up over him, and she relaxed. "Jim takes that 'President' stuff pretty seriously," she went on. "He won't be happy until he's President of fifty states again, all the way to Hawaii, and I think you ought to know that he's counting on you to do it for him."

"That's silly," Jeron said dispassionately. "We would not involve ourselves in these petty disagreements."

"You may not have a choice, buster!" Her tone was suddenly sharp, but softened as she went on. "You ought to get

out of here while you have the chance," she said seriously. "That's why I came trekking all across the continent. To warn you. And to invite you to Puget."

"Huh," said Jeron, sniffing a little more deeply. The smells of sex he knew and the scents of flowers he knew, but this combination was something new. He moved, and the sheet fell away, and Darien McCullough glanced down.

"Oh, for God's sake," she said, "shame on you. Why, I'm old enough to be your mother."

"So is my mother old enough to be my mother," said Jeron, "but that does not keep me from wanting—"

"I don't want to hearl" She was laughing, but she was embarrassed, too—one more way in which she resembled his mother, Jeron thought. She clung to her subject. "So will you come? To Puget, I mean?"

"Huh." Jeron pulled the sheet up again. "How far is it?"

"About four thousand kilometers, I guess, more or less." He scowled with the effort of trying to imagine four thousand kilometers in a straight line. "We'd have to go in your ship," she added, "but I guess there's room, and anyway you want to get it away from Jimbo as soon as you can. Unless you want to take the road, train, boat, and portage, the way I came?" She stood up, suddenly, and listened for a sound outside. Then, more softly, "I have to go. Think about it, Jeron. It's important. . . ."

When she was gone, leaving behind only that disturbing scent, a shimmer of moonlight told Jeron that he still had company. "I really thought you were going to get laid that time, boy," Uncle Ghost whispered from the draperies over the windows.

"I didn't know you were therel" Jeron said indignantly.

"No, I guess you didn't. Jeron? You know, I get the impression that she's telling the truth about this President person. I don't like this place."

"Fat lot of difference it makes to you," Jeron sneered. "You've been hiding the whole time."

"And I'm going to go right on hiding, and I don't want anybody telling these people I'm here." Jeron sniffed, rolling over and burying his head in the musty pillow. "You hear me, Jeron?"

"Of course I hear you," Jeron said into the pillow.

There was a pause, and then the faintest whisper of a sigh. "I thought," mused Uncle Ghost, "that it would be more fun than it is. I even thought that after we took care of Knefhausen, we could help these people. Now I don't know."

Jeron lay sullenly in the damp heat, waiting for Uncle Ghost to go on. When he didn't, Jeron said, "Help them how? And why?"

But there was no one there to answer anymore.

THE VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES HAD BEGUN

her career as a diet technician, Spec. 5, in the 456tn Infantry Battalion. The other name for her job was KP pusher, but Mae Prewick was the gentlest overseer the kitchen help ever had. They got the work done all the same, because they liked her. Everybody did, especially the platoon leader as it turned out.

When Mae Prewick married Lt. James Braddock Tupelo it did not really interrupt her career. It simply gave her a new one. Her career became not so much a matter of ad- vancing her own status as of keeping James B. from screw- ing up his, as he made the transition from Army officer to government flunky, to Congressman—ultimately to where he was now. She was happy in her work. James B. was a good-hearted man, with a few exceptions.

She was hoping very much that these people from Alpha

Centauri

were

not

going

turn

out

one

the

exceptions.

They

were

really

freaky

lot,

the

Vice

President's

opinion, but not a whole lot freakier than the creatures from all over North America she had been dealing with for a decade now. Farmers and freebooters. Romantic voy- ageurs from Canada Fran^aise and arrogant embassies from the West Coast. Pipsqueak potentates from what used to be Appalachia, kings of three hills and half a valley—she had entertained them all. And all about the same way. She pushed her White House KPs into producing lavish meals,

made sure there was plenty of drinking liquor to make the negotiations run smooth, nursed the hangovers on the mornings after.

It didn't really make much of a change from what she would have been doing anyway, if James B. had stayed in the Army and by now she had been setting up Saturday- night poker games for his company officers. The stakes in the games were higher now, and they weren't played with cards, but those all-night sessions were still bluff and call, sweep up the pots or take your licking. It did not matter that now she was sometimes called Mrs. Vice President instead of Hey-Mael Especially since what she was Vice President of was really bounded only by Norfolk, Baltimore, and the Shenandoah National Park. But it mattered, a little anyway, that this new batch of gamblin' friends didn't seem to know how to play the games. So many of them were kids. Mae Tupelo had never been able to have kids of her own, and she was sentimental about them. All of them. Even weirdos like this batch. And the ones that weren't children, or next thing to it, like that funny Jeron —well, Eve Barstow had been a fine woman at one time, the old pictures proved it, but she had sure let herself go. Five little kids. One half grownup. One fat lady that gasped every time she climbed two steps . . . the Vice President frowned to herself, because she didn't really know, and nobody else seemed to know either, whether or not there was another member of the crew. Sometimes seemed like there was. Sometimes seemed like there wasn't; and you couldn't get a straight answer out of any of them. There were times when you'd swear before God you heard a grownup man talking. And then you'd say something to them, not nosy but friendly, and you'd get one of those laughs.

They really knew how to laugh nasty when they wanted to, and at those times the Vice President told herself she didn't care a bit what her husband was up to. Serve them right! But then she'd see how little they were, really. That one they called Molomy. Fourteen at the most. Never had a dress-up doll until Mae Tupelo gave her one. And then, come to find out, that littlest one, the only one with the sensible name, Bill, was her kid!

And the seesaw of the Vice President's feelings went back to not caring a bit what happened to them.

You had to admit, though, that in some ways they had been raised up pretty well. You invited them, they invited you. You welcomed them to Washington with a big party, and they invited you to a picnic in front of their ship the next day. Not the kind of picnic Jimbo had much use for, all greens and fruits and things, but real pretty the way they were spread out. You took them for a cruise up the river to see Mount Vernon, and they came back with asking you to come see the inside of their ship the next day. That had cheered Jim up some, although he wasn't invited in the ship—ladies only, Eve Barstow said, as though it was some kind of a joke. Funny, but Jimbo took it as a joke, too, or at least laughed that way he had when somebody did something he expected them to, and didn't really like. There was something going on, all right. What proved it was that the President didn't even get mad when he found out that the girl from Puget and one of the Amish ladies were invited too.

And then the next morning, when she started out for the ship, half the guards around the White House were missing and the other half wouldn't meet her eye.

So Mae Tupelo was not entirely at ease as she entered the ship, but as soon as she got inside she forgot to worry. What a funny place!

Although it looked forbiddingly large on the outside, it was quite cramped on the interior. "That doesn't really matter," Eve Barstow told her, "because we only have to be in it for a few hours at a time."

"The big ship is still in orbit," Jeron offered—evidently "ladies only" did not refer to the ship's crew. "That one we stayed in for four years."

"You fixed it up real nice," the Vice President said automatically, but not very sincerely. Much of what she saw was simply confusing. The padded seats, the toilets, the wonderful windows for looking out—that she understood easily enough; and the control board, worse than any washer-dryer in the Officers Quarters in the old days, she could accept without having to understand. But what were those ragged clusters of things that looked like-—like what? Seed pods? Rotting tamales? They hung along the walls like garlic buds in a delicatessen. Eve Barstow pulled some of them out with pleasure.

"They're going to be presents, Mae," she said, unwrapping some to show to her, others for the other women. "It won't be much of a surprise now, but here they are. These are lamb. You have to give them plenty of nitrogen and phosphorus when you plant them. These are marshmallows, we use them mostly for sugar. These are different kinds of decorative flowers—-I'm not really sure which is which right now. It's hard to tell from the seedlings—"

"Not for me," Jeron corrected. He placed his finger on one shoot. "This one will bloom red, white, and blue," he said. "Eve thought you'd like that. This one blossoms with a picture of me on it. I bred that one myself," he said offhandedly, no longer looking at Mae Tupelo. His eyes were on the woman from Puget as he stripped the damp husk from the seedling. "Would you like it?" he asked. "I don't know if it'll grow in all that snow in Puget, though."

She laughed in surprise. "We get less snow than they do in Washington."

"That's ridiculous," Jeron said with scorn. "I can read a map. You're as far north.as Maine, and Uncle Shef told me about Maine winters. You don't have to take it if you don't want it," he added, and carelessly tossed the husk back in its rope basket.

The Vice President sighed softly. Aunt Eve took pity on her. "The red, white, and blue is for you, for sure," she said. "Now, do you want to see how this thing works?"

There was a sudden air of tension in the ship. "You mean go up for a flight?" Darien asked after a moment.

"Sure, why not?"

But the Amish woman looked so startled and worried that the Vice President shook her head. Jimbo would kill her, but she said, "No, really, I mean thanks a lot but no. Do you think you could tell us a little bit about how it runs, though?"

Jeron reached back and pulled young Bill forward. The boy instantly piped, "Well, those are the seats we sit in. It's pretty easy to fly this thing, but sometimes your delta-Vs get pretty hairy if you're operating in an atmosphere, so

we tied ourselves in." He frowned as he noticed an expression of incomprehension on the faces peering at him, and Darien McCullough cut in:

"That doesn't exactly explain what makes it go."

"Oh, that." He patted a white enamel cylinder about the size of a domestic hot-water tank. "It's just thermonuke, inside here. There's a plasma cord in there about the size of my finger, and it's real hot. Ski says it's about a million Kelvins—of course, it's turned off now."

"I think they mean how do we contain that much energy," Aunt Eve offered. She sighed and scratched her head. "Let's see. I helped draw up that Godel message that explained the whole thing, but it's a long time ago. . . . The first thing to do is renormalization. Do you people know what that means?"

Obviously they did not; Darien was looking intent but unsure, the Amish lady skeptical and somewhat unhappy, only the Vice President seemed comfortable. "Good lord, no," she said, "but I do like hearing those words, so go right ahead and explain it."

"All right." Eve thought for a second. "Well, everybody knows that quantum field theory says even empty space has to contain infinite energy, right? That's just Heisenberg. In a practical sense that does not usually make any difference, because you don't get work done from energy, you get work from changes in energy states or differences between energy states. So when the old physicists wanted to do mathematics about energy in space they dropped out the term for the infinite energy; that was called renormalizing it."

Darien raised a hand. "Are you saying that you, what is it, renormalize equations?"

"No, no, no! We renormalize space." Eve looked around to the children for help, but they were as perplexed as she. None of them had ever been exposed to human beings, at least to human beings over the age of two, who did not understand simple physics. She said, unsure of herself but unable to find a better way, "If you read the Godel message, you probably remember something Ski put in; it was a quotation from John Wheeler. It went like this: 'Geometry bent one way describes gravitation. Rippled another way somewhere else it manifests all the qualities of an electro

magnetic wave. Excited at still another place, the magic material that is space shows itself as a particle.' Do you see? It's all geometry. All we have to do is arrange the geometry properly and the rest takes care of itself; space is renormalized, energy flows, and we move."

Jeromolo Bill giggled, "Look at them, Aunt Eve!" he squeaked. "They're not taking in a word of it, are they?"

The Vice President could find it in heart to love even bratty kids; she patted Bill on the head, looked at her Mickey Mouse watch, and sighed, "Oh, my goodness! Look at the time! Thanks for the tour, but if you folks are going to get any lunch I better be getting back to the White House."

Lunch was only Chesapeake Bay oyster chowder and a nice salad from the Vice President's own kitchen garden. Her KPs didn't need to be supervised for that, so what she said was not true; and as she walked back to the White House she was worrying.

Little bitty untruths, of course, never worried the Vice President. Social lies rested lightly on her; she was not a theoretician, and abstract arguments in that area were as meaningless to her as what that John Wheeler, whoever he was, had said about gravitation, whatever he meant by that. She knew what gravitation was—it was what made you puff when you went up a flight of stairs. It wasn't geometry, and neither was matter, and what difference did it all make, for heaven's sake? Mae Tupelo did not deny that in some theoretical sense all that stuff might be true—but who cared?—or even that there might be some abstract rule requiring truth-telling rather than falsehood, say when you were testifying under oath. None of that affected her life. It often turned out that the truth hurt people, and a pleasant lie left them at peace.

The truths she was carrying around right now were very likely to hurt. The truthful thing to have said to the visitors was, "My husband's up to something tricky and I have to find out what it is," but a person couldn't say that. And the truthful thing to say to her husband, when she saw him, was, "You're never in this world going to be able to handle that ship, so forget it." And maybe she would say that; but before she tried any truths on James B. she

was going to find out what falsehoods he had been laying on her.

Mae Tupelo did not expect her husband to have no secrets at all. He had plenty. She could name three of them right off—their names were Rose and Diane, and that little Marine orderly, Sylvia. That didn't mean anything. That was just the dog in any man. No, the kind of secrets she didn't want Jimbo keeping from her were like that bad thing with Dieter von Knefhausen—Mae Tupelo was sure she could have kept him alive, good thick stews and fresh greens, instead of whatever he got in that silly old dungeon—and, most especially, whatever it was that was going on now.

The question was, what could she do about it?

One way was to ask him. That was the wrong way. The Vice President had better ones, and so by the time the President was up in the Lincoln Room digging out his ears and buttoning his shirt to be ready for lunch, she had already had a few words with her own personal CIA. "Jimbo," she said, "you got to have the White House Guard off practicing commando tactics in Rock Creek Park, and it's not going to work."

He scowled like a thundercloud. "What's not going to work?" he demanded dangerously, but she stood up to him.

"Hijacking that spaceship. That's what's not going to work. Not counting it's a really mean thing to do, you can't get away with it."

He sat down and reached for a Fresca, his gaze calculating as he looked at his wife. "You think not?" he inquired.

"I know it, James B!"

He shook his head. "How they going to stop me, Mae? They've got no guns. You see any guns there anywhere?"

"There's worse things than guns! Besides, how do you know what they've got up in that big ship up in orbit?"

"Up in orbit's not here. Besides, once we get this one, we could just run up there and take that one too, right? What's to stop us?"

"We-don't-know-how is to stop us, for one thing."

He grinned. "They do, honey."

"Jimbo! They're company! How's it going to look if you make slaves out of them?"

He finished the Fresca and tossed the bottle out onto the overgrown lawn. "You know," he said sweetly, "you might be right at that, Mae. I'm going to have to think this over, but right now it's about time to eat lunch."

The President joined his guests for the drinks on the porch and then wandered off for a private word with the guard commandant, and that was all the Vice President needed. She had not moved more than five yards from Jeron, waiting for her chance. Of course he was talking real close with that Puget woman—same dog in every man —but there might not be another chance. "Mr. Jeron, honey," she said, low and fast, "by this time tomorrow night my husband's going to have armed men in your ship, and you're not going to get in it until you do what he wants you to."

"That's silly," said Jeron scornfully. "He can't do that!" But the Puget girl put her hand on his arm.

"Yes, he can, Jeron. Listen to Mrs. Tupelo—what should Jeron do?"

The Vice President smiled and bobbed her head as though they were talking about the drinks or the other guests or the weather, her eyes never off the door her husband had left through. "Though it gravels me to say it," she said, "I think you ought to take that little flight you were talking about, and don't come back for a while. Do it soon. Do it before he gets up tomorrow morning, because after he's had his coffee it's going to be too late."

WITHOUT DARIEN MC CULLOUGH'S HELP THE ALPHA-ALEPHS

would never have made it to the spacecraft, much less succeeded in sneaking past the dozing guards, but even so by the time they got there they were pitiably exhausted. Eve Barstow's Earth-born muscles were beginning to come back into shape and she was the least damaged, but even Eve plopped herself into a seat and croaked, "Let's get away from here, Bill."

Darien looked around. "—Five, six, seven," she counted. "Is that all of you?"

"Close enough. Go!" grunted Jeron, and Darien barely had time to seat herself when little Jeromolo Bill expertly whipped the ship off the ground and up.

The kind of thrust involved was entirely out of Darien's experience. She weighed twice, three times what she had ever weighed before, and when she turned her head as it leaned against the back of her seat she thought her eyes would be twisted out of their sockets. She knew in theory that sharp acceleration produced G-thrusts, but theory did not persuade her body that everything was proceeding normally. For a moment she thought she would throw up— but couldn't—and then the pressure eased and she could, but didn't any longer need to.

There was a shrill gabble of children's voices to celebrate the fact that they could now get up again. Darien winced at the noise, and then realized that the reason she could hear it was that there was no noise from the ship itself. No roar of motors, not even a scream of air passing around the ship itself. How very strange! She was near enough to the white cylinder that held the power plant to reach out a hesitant finger to touch it. Cool. Also strange. Everything strange; and strangest of all the people, who did not know how strange they were.

Although they had some very grownup ways, most of them were still children, and you could see that in the strain on their faces, the pouting lips, the way they flew at each other. The youngest of all was the child who seemed to be flying the ship! Not yet three feet tall, with sweet, plump skin and eyebrows almost invisibly blond—how could he be trusted with such a thing?

Perhaps it was good for him. He seemed calm enough, whereas the two youngest of the girls—their names seemed to be Ringo and Tudeasy—were shrieking at each other, and close to tears. The older girl, Molomy, and the boy called Quittyyx were trying to quiet them down, while Jeron cursed them all impartially.

It was Eve Barstow who restored order, with a simple, "Shut up, everybody." They obeyed. "Bill, where are we going?" she asked.

"North Pole, Aunt Eve," said the six-year-old.

"Why?"

"Want to see what it looks like," he offered. He hesitated, baby teeth nibbling at baby lip, then grinned. "Also it's the only place I could think of that I know how to go to."

"That's ridiculous," said Jeron scornfully, and the hubbub broke out again until Darien McCullough called over it:

"I have a suggestion. Come stay with us in Puget for a while."

Silence, with everyone looking at her, then another burst of raucous noise until Jeron quelled it. "I think that sounds interesting," he said, and his eyes said why he thought so.

"Hell with that," cried Molomy strongly. "You can get sex anywhere, Jeron, you don't have to go among the savages to get it. You! Darien-McCulloughl You're not supposed to be here in the first place, so be quiet."

There was enough truth in that to slow Darien down. She'd sneaked them through the sleeping city of Washington, but when they got to the ship there was no invitation to come inside. It wasn't until the argument threatened to wake the guards that Jeron pulled her in and shut the door. Eve quieted the new outbreak and said, "I don't want to be offensive, but how do we know we won't get into the same problem in Puget?"

"Well, you don't," Darien conceded. "But you can leave one person in the ship all the time if you like— Or maybe just one or two come out with me at a time until you get a look at us— Or you could just trust me? Listen. I knew you were coming, and that's why I made that whole damned long trek to Washington. It's important!"

"Trust you!" sniffed Molomy; but the little pilot piped up:

"I trust her." Everybody was talking at once again until Eve's deeper, slower voice cut through.

"The best way to make up our minds," she said, "is to roll the bones."

There was a silence. Then Molomy said, "We don't do that anymore, Aunt Eve. Only the old folks do it."

"The old folks made some pretty good decisions with the I Ching, Molomy. I say let's read the hexagram and see what it says."

"We don't have any bones," Jeron objected. "Could use a coin, I

guess, if we had a coin. Have you got a coin?" he asked Darien. Talk about strange—! But she found a coin, or at least a Puget retail token that had both heads and tails, and Molomy was elected to flip it. First flip: Heads. Jeron drew two short lines with his thumbnail on the skin of his knee. Second flip: Heads again. Jeron nodded. "Pride stirred up because of somebody else's transgressions," he said, making the same mark just below the first. Third flip: Heads again. Fourth flip: Heads. "You walk in the midst of others, but you return alone," Molomy sighed. Fifth flip: Heads. Darien was watching in fascination. "In Puget," she said, "when they do that, they do it the other way. From bottom to top." "On our ship," Jeron said, "we do it our way. Shut up." Sixth flip, tails—and the hexagram was complete as Jeron drew a solid line at the bottom:

Eve straightened up. "It's K'un over Chen," she said. "It's The Turning Point.' " Jeron rubbed at his knee and nodded, but Molomy cried indignantly, "Same old garbage! You can read it either way —see why we don't cast the hexagrams anymore?" Eve sat down in her chair and began to belt herself in. "Dear Molomy, that's the nature of the hexagram. But the nature of important decisions is that you have to decide them. One way or the other. If we don't go to Puget we haven't made a decision, we've just postponed one." "But—" "But, but, butt out," Jeron interrupted. "We cast the hexagram and it's over. Bill! Take us to Puget."

By the time they had made their decision the craft, according to Jeromolo Bill's built-in navigation aids, was somewhere over Lake Erie. He studied a map for a moment —strange map, north was not at the north and it had no political markings at all, only coasts and mountain ranges— and then nodded negligently. "Belt up," he piped, and barely gave them time to settle in before he whipped the ship around in a sharp left-hand turn. Then he unstrapped himself and began to play a game with his chief pilot, Quittyyx, using Darien's coin. He didn't need to guide the ship anymore; it was going in the right direction. It was not a difficult sum—there were no relativistic factors to be considered—but it made Darien nervous. She didn't want to criticize the boy's piloting, so she said instead, "Isn't that an awfully wasteful way to travel?"

He looked up. "Wasteful of what? Oh, I see. Energy." He laughed, and called: "Aunt Eve, is there anything to eat?"

That started another battle, Eve insisting that he really should sleep instead, since they had, by his own calculations, an hour and fifty minutes before they reached the Pacific Ocean and it was well past his bedtime. Darien withdrew from the discussion and tried to reconcile herself to the bumpy ride. Shef's landing craft was not an aerodynamic shape, and so the buffeting was considerable. It did not seem to bother anyone but Darien—was not, in fact, a patch on the turbulent landing they had had a few days earlier. It was simply what you had to expect when you were moving fast in air, and all the spacefarers had learned to accept it.

Darien divided three thousand-odd kilometers by an hour and fifty-five minutes in her head and realized that they were traveling at nearly twice the speed of sound. Then she understood why there was so little noise. The noise was there; they were simply moving too fast for it to catch up. All across the continent no doubt people were waking from sleep and jamming their fists in their ears and running out into the open to see what catastrophe was splitting their skies, but inside the ship the greatest noise came from its occupants, now squabbling over which ones got the ripest fruits Eve Barstow was unwrapping.

Darien McCullough was old enough to remember jet planes, and all the other resources of the great age of technology, but it had been a very long time since she looked down on a continent. It puzzled her that, as they crossed what must have been Lake Michigan, it seemed to be growing lighter; and then, minutes later, she saw the Sun rising—queerly in the west! They were outracing it! The rest of the crew had no preconceived ideas of where sunrise should occur and did not understand what she was exclaiming at, but all of them clumped around the viewing angles to see the marvelous light. The rising Sun illuminated the sky from the top down. Just below them clumps of altocumulus floated at forty thousand feet like luminous pink and white cotton candy, with tiny white cumulus clouds floating in the shadows far below. Even Jeron thought it was beautiful.

In his own surroundings Jeron did not seem quite as arbitrary and scornful as he had in the sphere of the President of the U.S. (Washington). He was not a handsome boy —man, she corrected himself; regardless of calendar age. Too skinny, too dark, and above all, even on his best behavior, too belligerent. But inside that belligerence was the person who had bred a flower with a portrait etched in its chromosomes, and as he stood silent beside Darien McCullough she discovered that he was holding her hand.

The clouds were thickening up, but she could see moun-taintops. She shivered. "I think that's Blackfoot Country," she said.

Jeron studied the ground thoughtfully, then leaned back and regarded the map. "Aunt Eve? What's this part here?" he asked, pointing.

She got up from where she was stroking Jeromolo Bill's sleeping head and came over. "South Dakota?" she said doubtfully.

Darien shook her head. "That was when there used to be states, when there used to be a United States. It's all Blackfoot now. Cornbelt south of us, Prairie Confederation up in what used to be Canada, Rocky Mountain Republic just ahead—but that's Blackfoot. We detoured all clear up through Saskatchewan on the way East, just to miss them."

"There must be roads that go straighter," Eve offered, frowning at the map.

"Probably are. But you'd be crazy to use them. Two hundred years ago the Blackfoot were the meanest bastards in the West. Never did get along with settlers—not that you can blame them. Now they're coming back."

"Indians? Oh, wow!" Jeron's youth showed in his awed face. "I thought they were all extinct!"

"Not a bit of it—especially since the Blackfoot let other Native Americans immigrate. Not to be citizens, you know. They don't go that far. But the Blackfoot have plenty of food, they've even got the buffalo coming back, and it's not so good in, for instance, the Desert Countries. People can't really survive there. They could for a while, when there was plenty of power and they could import everything they needed, but you folks showed them the error of their ways."

Eve fell silent, and Darien was aware she had been tactless. Jeron gave her no opportunity to think what she could do about it, because he was tracing the map with his thumb. "Huh," he grunted. "You came all that way on horses?"

"Oh, Jeron, what do you think we are? Not on horses. By car— alcohol fueled—as far as the lakes, then down by water to the New York Thruway." She sat for a moment, remembering, and then conceded, "It wasn't always that comfortable, of course, but we had a good reason." He looked a question at her. "To see you people, of course," she explained. "We didn't think Jimbo Tupelo would have got your message—and if he had God knows what he would have done—so I brought it to him in person. There're still a few observatories going, you know, though not of course in the East. So—I decided to take a little trip."

He scowled at her. "It is not a 'little' trip and you didn't do it just to give that man the message."

Darien looked at him for a moment. "I never know how to take you," she observed. It was true. He was startlingly self-confident for someone barely out of his teens; most of the people she knew did not get that self-assured manner until middle age. It was not really an attractive trait. "Well," she said unwillingly, "I never meant to lie to you, I just haven't had a chance to tell you everything. We've been having a few problems in Puget. Volcano problems; we've had two bad ash eruptions in the last five years, and both of them hit when the crops were vulnerable. That's

not too serious—I mean, if it doesn't happen every year it won't be—but it leaves us a little exposed. We've had to make deals with our neighbors for food. Even the Blackfoot. And Jimbo's a problem."

"Him? So far away?"

"He doesn't want to stay so far away, Jeron. He wants to be President of everything anybody else has ever been President of, and maybe a little more. He's making deals and alliances, and if he had this ship— If he had whatever else you people can give him— He'd get smashed, of course, because he's just a pipsqueak tyrant, but if he started a real war everybody else would start maneuvering too, and while his neighbors were eating him up the SoCals and the Rocky Mountain boys and a few others might get the fever. It's been pretty chancy ever since the sneak attack."

Eve looked up from her thoughts. "The sneak attack? Is that what you call what Shef did?"

"Oh, God," said Darien penitently, "nobody's blaming you."

"I'm blaming me."

"No, really! You folks did us a kind of a favor."

Eve frowned and shook her head.

"No, really," she said again. "I don't think you know what shape the Earth was in. Talk about armed camps! There were missiles under every front porch, and it was only a question of time until they went off. You messed us up, sure. But there were plenty of survivors—and if you people hadn't wiped out the worst of the weapons, I'm not sure there would have been any."

Jeron said, almost apologetically, "I do not think we meant to do you any favor."

"We certainly did not," Eve said bitterly, with a look of decision in her eyes. "Maybe we can now, though. I think we owe you something, and. ... I wish I could talk to Uncle Ghost."

There was something worrying about the way she said it, Darien thought. "Who? Someone you left back on Alpha Centauri?"

"Not exactly," said Eve Barstow, and then, suddenly, "Oh, look! That must be the Pacific Ocean! We'd better wake Bill up to land us!"

SOMETIMES I WALK AMONG YOU IN A FORM OF FLESH AND

sometimes hover like an airy cloud. My name is Willis Becklund, and I died twenty years ago. More or less. I don't mean more or less twenty years, I mean more or less "ago." When you stand where I stand it is not easy to see what is "ago."

Since it is important that you understand what I am saying, let me give you an illustration. When I was alive and standing on the face of the Earth, I could see ahead of me and behind, but only as far as nothing got in the way. To see farther I had to rise higher; but the higher I rose the more distant what I saw became, and the harder to make out. Thus in space. So in time. I am on neither side of Chandrasekhar's other limit, but above it as you might say, and you would be astonished at how tiny you all look from here. Multiplying embryos in one direction. Moldering corpses in the other. And I am not always sure which way I am facing since, once you rid yourself of the myth of causality, it makes no difference at all.

—No."That is not true. It makes a difference.

I think the difference it makes will surprise you, for it is no more than public opinion. Let me find an analogy. You can, if you wish, paint your body green, dress in your wife's undergarments, and make indecent gestures before a mirror. Do you do this, ever? I wouldn't be surprised if you did, in the privacy of your own home. But if you were to do it, say, at a baseball game or in the middle of a veterans' convention, that would surprise me. You would not. You could. But you wouldn't, for you adapt to the conventions of the group. And so do we all. Even II The event that cost me my physical body gave me in exchange a kind of freedom I had never imagined, but for twenty years I stayed with my fellows and my progeny and was dragged along with them into their myths.

I could, of course, have followed my whilom wife Ann.

There was a good reason why I did not, however. The reason was simply cowardice. None of us dragonflies can ever come back, but once in a great while one of us—I am one—can see just a bit of the other side, and it terrifies me.

So when we came back to Earth I found a chance and I seized it. I escaped. I stole away from the children and the churls who were making them welcome and I roamed, ah, God, how I roamed this dusty planet!

It was not as much of an escape as I had hoped, because in spite of the best we had done the planet was still full of people, and all of them followed the causal myth. Wherever I was. Unseen guest at a lynching in Wheeling, W. Va., or riding a charcoal-burning bus down Fifth Avenue—also unseen—they were there. I found some pleasure in their pleasure, when they had any, and even in their pain; and then I decided to seek some lost familiar pleasures and pains of my own. Why not?

So I recreated some of the lost loves of my youth. There are ten thousand of them or so by now, including the childhood, the almost, and the ones I made up out of my own mind—the last category is far the most numerous. There was Jenny, classmate and briefly bedmate at I.I.T., all love and hunger to please; and just yesterday I stood by the overgrown weeds by the waterworks, for she was my Chicago love, and made her live again. She was in the water of Lake Michigan, under it, swimming toward me. I could see her twilit and distorted face under the ripples, upturned and afraid. I formed a current in the water that swept along the sides of the peninsula and drove her away. I fear for my soul that I let her drown, but of course she was not real. Not even as a standing wave. There was Sharon. When I did her it was only an abstraction, a sense of loss and deprivation, a stain on a pillow and a smear on a sheet; she hurt me, and I will not give her any life at all. Rosemary. She was my least and longest love, in the next seat in high school and for a quick screw two weeks before we boarded the shuttle orbiter, in a motel at Cocoa Beach. We saw each other, oh, a hundred times, over years, but only to go to bed and then claw wittily at each other afterward. I am sure she is deader than I now. I brought her

back for a week this morning. When we kissed it was like dry bones clashing. So, all in all, since we came back from that very ingenious place we manufactured near Alpha to this very crude place of our origin, I have recreated fifty sexual partners of my youth, five real and the rest only wished for. It gives me no pleasure, less pleasure than when I amused the children by creating inch-high elephants and candy-colored Tiger tanks for them to play with. Amusing myself was harder. It gave me so little pleasure that I masked what I was doing, even to myself, as a "survey trip," to "scout out the lay of the land" and to "report back" to my kith on what structure survived in the compost heap we had made of a world.

But when I came to report, they were gone.

I knew they would be. There was no question in my mind that they would get in trouble with that oaf Jim Tupelo and have to flee. And I knew that they would not wait for me, for who worried about someone who is already dead? Not even I, who happen to be the corpse.

Ah, you say, trying to sound as though you are following this, but you still move and talk, so how can you be a corpse?

Well, *sigh*, I will explain. After I died, the particles that made up my physical body were so rearranged that they could no longer support each other, but something remained. This "I" is what remained, and "I" am a soliton. A soliton is like a wave. Not a wave wave—in the sense of surf on a beach, or the wiggling vibrations of light or sound—but what a matter wave would be if there were a matter wave that resembled a light wave. If you do not follow what I have just said then you need to go back to freshman physics. Solitons are not a theory. They are a fact. You can see soliton waves in water if, for instance, a big boat suddenly stops and you see the lump of water at its prow continue indefinitely. That is a standing wave. A soliton. It is nondissipative, and so am I.

You, on the other hand, are an instanton. An instanton is a soliton that does not survive very long, and that describes you to a T. You are a pattern, like a giant jigsaw puzzle. As long as the particles of your body exist in the proper geometrical relation to each other you also exist. When you sweep the pieces off the card table back into

the box, you have reduced the pattern to randomness and it is gone. I am a persisting pattern, like the orographic clouds over a hill. Break me up if you can, but I will return. In order to be nondissipative, a wave's motion must be nonlinear, and I am that, too. Therefore I am here. While Jenny and Sharon and Rosemary— and you, too—are gone. Got it? Fine. Glad to clear that up for you.

But under certain conditions I can bring you back, you see. I had had enough of lost familiar joys. I sought a lost familiar misery instead, and his name was Dieter von Knefhausen.

So I elevated myself over the city of Washington, D.C., studying what you call the lay of the land. There it sprawled in the watery moonlight, here brooding Lincoln, there Washington's phallic shaft, there the cutesy gingerbread that celebrated Thomas Jefferson. The Potomac was a lot broader than it used to be. Foggy Bottom was Soggy Bottom. There were lights burning bright in the White House where Jimbo, no doubt, was screaming at his evaded aides, and a few others, here and there; and it was, in some sense, sad.

Time was when this city held the spark that stirred the world, for good or evil, when all those circles and avenues were solid with cars and each marble building held its thousand industrious tamperers with everything. It was not like that anymore. The world no longer respected the District, or feared it, either. It was just another weedy marsh, stretching from Arlington to the Maryland line, and if ever I have taken pleasure in the loss of the flesh it was when I heard the steady song of mosquitos all around.

Knefhausen was not buried in any Arlington. Not he. Not in view of the low status he enjoyed at the time of his death. It didn't matter. I knew where they had planted him, close enough. It was not strictly necessary for me to find his wretched remains to do what I wished to do, but I like to do things properly. One never knows what is "necessary," and so I sought out the wretched dog's trough where all the physical facts of the body of Dieter von Knefhausen lay, in the tangle of the White House rose garden. It was easy to find his grave. The tangled thorns grew two feet above the jungle around them: so his corpse found its

function. I felt for him. I found him; and in a moment I had him there, as large as life, rising spectrally above the sodden turf.

"Why, it's Dr. Becklund," he said, after he had blinked at me for a moment—self-possessed devil! "What a great pleasure, my dear Willis! I had thought you were dead."

"So I am, Kneffie. So we both are, and what else is new?"

He peered at me with that opaque, nearsighted smile I had seen so often, in Huntsville and at the Cape and all the places in between, masking whatever quick reassessments were going on in his mind. He was even uglier than he had been at the launch. He was also quite shabbily dressed. They had not valeted him well in his ultimate prison, and of course the natural chemistry under the swampy ground had not improved his appearance. "So 1 have died," he said, nodding as he comprehended and accepted the position. "To be sure. It is only what I had expected. And yourself, my dear Willis?"

"Even deader. Or at least, I have been dead longer, though perhaps not as thoroughly."

He gave me the ghost of that tolerant smile, the look of being apologetic that masked his utter confidence that he had never had anything to apologize for. A Peace rose bobbed annoyingly through his mouth as he spoke. "I do not think I quite understand. If we are not alive then, please, what are we?"

"We are nonlinear equations, Kneffie, and it is not important that you understand. I didn't rouse you to answer your questions but for you to answer mine."

"To be sure." He pursed his lips. Decay or none, he still possessed that broad, clear brow, so awfully and proudly the mark of the master race, and he smiled with the expression of a person addressing an inferior whom it is not yet time to chastise. "Please do ask what you will, my dear Willis," he said warmly.

"I shall," I said, but the truth was that I was not sure how to proceed, although I had formed the questions a hundred thousand times: What is it like to be a dragonfly, rather than a worm? What does Chandrasekhar's other limit look like from the far side? But I could not concentrate for, among other reasons, the rose was still annoying

me. He had moved slightly and now it was dipping in and out of his ear.

That at least I could deal with. I gave us both substance. He sprang away as his form took flesh and the rose's thorns ripped across his cheek. "That was wickedly donel" he cried, rubbing the wound.

"I have done it to myself too, old man," I said, since the thorns had found me; but the experience was interesting as well as painful and I let it stand. "Be grateful that you can feel at all," I advised.

He glowered at me, then quickly controlled himself. It was the old, known Kneffie who rapped: "Your questions, then, if you please."

"Very well." I glanced about the dim and moonlit jungle, as though there were someone who might hear this Wal-purgis conference, before I plunged in. "1 want to know if, after you died, you were judged?"

Knefhausen looked at me opaquely, and then at the blood on his fingers. "What a curious question," he murmured, ripping the lining out of a pocket to wipe his hand clean before he replied. "But I understand the curiosity, it is only that it is strange coming, from a person in your position. Nevertheless! The answer is that I have no recollection of meeting the Herr God. I have no recollections at all, after coughing very severely and feeling very ill, until I saw you standing here."

"Not even—" I hesitated.

"Not anything at all," he said firmly, "and certainly no sort of what you would call 'judgment.' What would I be judged for, my dear Willis?"

I had thought I was past anger, but even as a revenant he was insufferable! "You have the arrogance to ask me that, Knefhausen?"

"Ah, I see," he said, nodding, "you refer to my experiment. To be sure. One can see that, from the point of view of the subject, the exercise was, what shall I say, quite disconcerting—"

"Disconcerting!"

He stood up to my anger. "Disconcerting, yes! As a subject, one could not enjoy it, naturally. But the purposes, dear Willard! The sublime purposes! It was purely an

experiment, conducted with great ends in view, and you must admit that it succeeded for you yourself are the proof. Judge me? Of course, if you wish! Anyone may judge me, but the success of the experiment, that is my defense!" It would have been sensible of him to stop there, but the old peacock could not help but preen: "To be sure," he smirked, "one does not expect the schoolboy to welcome the birch."

"Shut up!" I shouted—not only in words.

So, of course, he could not help but shut up as ordered. He stood

frozen there, neither wave nor motion, while I calmed myself down.

It was a temptation to send the old bastard back to his grave!

Dead or alive, Knefhausen was a slippery and evil person—enough

to piss off a preacher, as we used to say; enough, enough, to anger

as dead a person as I. The fact that I have lost the flesh does not

mean that I do not feel its fury. Throb of blood in the temple, rush of

adrenaline, trembling of the building of rage—I feel them all; if I am

an illusion I create for myself, at least I create it in all details.

Even feeling rage is better than feeling nothing. Any feeling is

welcome, when you have known very few for -some time. It was like

the physical circumstance of my having given us flesh. I itched. My

skin stung where the roses had pricked. The back of my neck was a

target for blood-seeking bugs. (And what did they gain from that?)

An orgasm, after all, is nothing but the explosive easing of an almost

unbearable itch. These itches I could end at any moment, by

dissolving away the flesh; so I could almost enjoy them.

Not, however, so tranquilly that I did not want to hurt von

Knefhausen. I took my revenge. "You are an arrogant son of a

bitch," I told him, "so try a little humility." And I caused him to

shrink to half his height and twice his breadth. I lengthened his nose

to a Roman hook worthy of the worst posters of his childhood.

"Vot? Vot?" he gasped. "Vot are you doink to me?"

"I'm teaching you a lesson, Knefhausen," I told him, pleased with

my joke.

He clapped a hand to his forehead. "Oy veh! Lessons I need, a dead person already?"

"It doesn't matter what you need. A lesson is what you're going to get."

He shrugged immensely, and I could see the half-snarl fading into his usual opaque smile. What control! "So ven is comink de lessons, bubbeleh?" he demanded.

"You bastard," I said, but what was the use of anger in this situation?

"Such a mensch," he sneered. "One deader plays tricks on another!" " "All right," I said. "I'll let you off the accent, but I won't change the way you look. I want to discuss something with you."

"Thank you," he said stiffly, squinting to look at his nose. "But you have no grounds for this. It is unjust to charge me with the deeds of others, which took place when I was only a child. Still! You are the person in authority, is that not so? And so I must play this game by your rules. Tell me then what you want of me."

I said unwillingly, "I want to know what to do."

"Do? My dear Willis! Whatever you wish, of course! In what respect?"

"I would like to help these people," I said, "and I don't know how."

He nodded slowly, his fingers feeling the shape of his nose and lips. "I too wanted to help these people," he said. "And with your help I believe I did. Do you follow me? No? Let me explain. It is necessary to cut in order to cure, and I was willing to cut. The world you left—-with my assistance—was on the verge of destroying itself. It had almost no hope of surviving. I made the assumption that the knowledge that could be gained—by you!— from my little experiment might in some unpredictable way save it. And so it did! You made the final cataclysm impossible. Now are you going to throw away your success?"

"Our success? What success is that, man?"

"The chance to remold the world!" he cried grandly, the Prussian voice no longer sounding strange out of those thick caricatured lips. "The world is yours now, Willis, to form aright! Peasants and petty tyrants—there is no force on

Earth that can prevent you from bringing a wonderful new order to the human race! Peace and wisdom and the fruits of the mind, in tranquility, for a thousand years!"

And suddenly my little game was turning out poorly. We were on no mountaintop, but that devil was offering me everything!

I resolved to end the game. It was simply done: "Go away, Dieter," I ordered—again, not only in words.

So the tears dried, the triumph on the hideous face turned into an apprehensive, placatory half-smile. The smile turned into fear, and became transparent, and so did all of him.

And then the last of him was gone—I do not think it is profitable to ask the question "where?" Back into my own memory, maybe. Once again a revenant, returning to his dissolving corpse under the roses . . . perhaps. ( But he had left a seed in my mind, and I could not help but feel it grow.

The poison in the pill was its truth. I could not deny it. If I wanted the world reborn, I could give it parturition-— " with Eve and Jeron and the others if I chose, and they did. Or without them, by my sole self.

I rose up into the sky over Washington, D.C., and hung there for a long time, as the Earth turned and at last the eastern sky softened into pearl gray.

I do not like being instructed by myself. Yet I had been taught a lesson by Dieter von Knefhausen, or by the simulacrum I had created out of memory and rage. Should I follow it? Should I grasp the sorry scheme of things entire —I had already shattered it to bits, with Shef's help, and the remolding would be easy. And if I did, would what came then be only another construction of my mind?

And there I was, back to the ultimate question. What is reality?

Maybe all the universe is only the other half of the inside of my mind. For sure Dieter's specter came out of my mind, and would not have existed without it.

So, when I spoke to him, who was I talking to?

Or—generalizing—who am I talking to when I talk to anyone, including you?

THE SUN WAS VERY HOT, EVEN THIS FAR NORTH, WHY?(JERON

had not quite grasped the concept of "summer.") The stuff beneath his bare feet was hot, too, so hot that he winced and howled until Darien showed him how to scoop down to a cool place—and the stuff it was made ofl Crushed rock, sharp shell edges—like a hydroponics bed before you sludged it and wet it. And the things out in the harbor, great-bellied floating houses with tall sticks—sometimes as they moved swelling out with white "sails" on the "masts"; other, leaner floating houses with metal stacks that sometimes emitted "smoke" and "steam"; smaller ones with oars or paddles, apparently just for fun—some of the people in them were children. "The clipper ships," Darien said, stripping down to the bikini bra she wore for comfort and the G-string for modesty, "they belong to the King of Hawaii, but they're ours on lease; we trade him timber, potatoes, and apples for pineapples, sugar, and rum. The ocean-going steamers are Japanese. They had some idea of colonizing here for a while, but we talked them out of it—" She pointed to a rusting hulk across the bay, and Jeron realized with a thrill it had been a warship. "The kayaks are for pleasure, the dories for commuting to islands across the bay. Coming in for a swim?"

He had automatically been removing his own clothes as she took hers off—when in Rome!—but he stopped with his tunic just over his head. "A what?"

"A swim. In the water," she explained. "Come on! I won't let you drown."

Jeron looked after her in amazement as she ran down the pebbly beach. Swim? In the water? But one could not see into it! One could only speculate what other "swimmers" there might be, for he was, oh, so fully aware that under that pleasing sinusoidal blue there were a great variety of sorts and kinds and sizes of living things. Who ate each other! Who might well wish to eat him\ Things with bony shells and crushing claws, things with tentacles that stung, things with great jaws and teeth—and all of them, always, hungry!

But still—

It certainly looked like fun, as Darien hurled herself into a wave and other swimmers laughed and splashed nearby. He screwed up his courage, hesitated on the firm wet sand the retreating waves had left, squealed as a new wave splashed him to his thighs. "Come on, dummy!" she shouted, but he still hesitated; in Jeron's imagination every wave concealed a triangular fin and every shard of shell was the claw of a sheep-sized lobster, about to lop off a leg for its dinner.

And yet, the sheer physics of the thing was fascinating. At home, the whirled gravity was so light that any motion at all, in the few bodies of open water they had yet created, kept even a skinny child afloat; the tiny positive buoyancy of the human body was not important. Now hip deep, he felt the queer sensation of lifting and dropping as the waves passed him; and when a bigger one came and lifted him off his feet entirely, he no longer resisted. He coughed and splashed and spluttered, but he stayed afloat; then he forgot about lobsters and sharks and splashed together with Darien, laughing, until at last she was the one to drag him out. They flung themselves on the hot sands, breathing hard.

For a primitive technology, they had some pretty neat stuff, Jeron admitted to himself. The beach, the sky, the Sun, sometimes the rain—a very interesting set of phenomena, when you had never seen them before. More than that, they had kinds of technology the Alpha-Aleph people had forgotten existed. Darien's perky little alcohol-fueled car. Elevators in the buildings. Television! With situation comedies and game shows!

Darien pushed herself up on her elbows and shaded her eyes. "See that big ship just coming through the narrows? It's a tanker. From Japan. Oil."

"Oil! I thought all the oil was used up!"

"Oh, no, not all of it. It's too expensive to burn, but we use it for feedstock—fertilizer, industrial chemicals, some plastics."

Jeron marveled at the sheer size of the ugly thing, and listened to all she had to say. The oil was from China's offshore fields originally, but it was Japan's canny businessmen who had financed the drilling and marketed the product. They had survived the kaon stream very well. It was only the end of their world as they knew it—but Japan's World As It Knew It seemed to end about once every other generation, regular as the flick of a digital clock. The nation that had coped with Commodore Perry and Hiroshima, with the God-Emperor and the Meiji rebirth, with the samurai and the Economic Miracle—with incalculable change, always when least expected—simply picked itself up and rewrote its habits. Their electric power net was wholly wiped out and, as the seas rose, much of the low-lying shore area became swamps and uninhabitable tidelands. But just inside the beaches the archipelago's islands rose steeply to mountains. Most of the country remained dry. The Toyota plants became food warehouses. The night-soil carriers once again replaced the agricultural chemists. Surprisingly few starved. In China, even fewer— industrialization had not gone far enough for its loss to shock—but farther west the-losses of life and property had been appalling. But then, they always had been, in good times and bad. Nothing worse than Calcutta's slums and the Bangladesh floods had happened, because nothing could.

"So," said Jeron, nodding, "you have brought back International Trade. Uncle Ski taught us about this. Imperialism. Colonization. Trusts and cartels and dumping."

Darien laughed, but only out of friendship and good humor, not in the wounding way that would make the boy bottle up inside his sneering face. "It hasn't gone quite that far. I don't think anybody wants it to; I expect we're making plenty of mistakes, but I hope not the same ones all over again. No. What we trade is mostly food, some raw materials—and now and then information. Did you ever wonder how we knew you were coming?"

"We sent a message," Jeron said.

"You sent it by laser light. From Alpha Centauri. Did it ever occur to you superbrains that Alpha Centauri is never visible from the continental United States? It's too far south. But there are still telescopes on the mountains of Hawaii, and the King of Hawaii graciously allows the astronomers to use them-—and graciously traded us the

message. Cost two hundred pounds of liquid nitrogen, though by the time he got it I suppose half of it had boiled away. Suppose you were worth it?"

The scowl flickered briefly back on his face—was she making fun of him? He did not want her to do that. What he wanted was for her to like him, very much, so that he would be able to like her as much as he wanted to—as much as he was coming to like all this complicated, strange, huge planet—

He was relieved to see that her smile was still friendly. Then it changed to concern. "Oh, hell, you're burning up, Jeron! You're just not used to this sun. Hold on a sec while I grease you up."

As she spread the sunscreen oil over his body he stretched slowly, pleased with the softness of her touch. No one had stroked him so gently since, at least, Aunt Mommy cared for the very young child he had been—

"Why, Jeron," she said softly, glancing at his face and then lower. "You seem to be falling in love again. Tell you what. It's about time I showed you where I live, eh? It's only up the hill. . . ."

Up the hill was what had once been a huge, rambling motor hotel, saunas and swimming pool, banquet rooms and lecture, facilities. There weren't enough transients or sales meetings to keep it busy anymore, and so it had become housing for nearly fifteen hundred Pugets. Mostly the occupants were singles, though there were some childless couples and, in the larger suites on the upper floors, a few families.

In energy terms it was a good bargain. Half of each picture window had been silvered over to keep out summer sun and keep in winter warmth, and the building was sturdy. It was true that the upper floors were unattractive without elevator service; the winches that pulled the cars imposed a considerable drain. But most of the inhabitants used the stairs by choice, except for moving furniture or carrying heavy loads of groceries, and lifting was energy-cheaper than heating. Things that go round use less energy than things that heat up; and "smart" cybernetics traded from the chip people down south in Santa Clara economized on trips. Each room had huge beds, a small refrig

erator, a little stove, its own bath—it was not a bad life for a single. You didn't have much space for keeping knickknacks and family heirlooms, but who wanted all that stuff anyway?

Above all, the beds! How different from President Tupelo's soggy mattresses, or even the flower sacks back home! And what wonderful things one could do on them!

Although Darien was twice Jeron's age, it was at least an open question which brought more craftsmanship to their iovemaking. Or more puzzlement. Jeron's peculiar twitches and pokings in the middle of everything—they were off-putting, but how was Darien to know that they were what Jeron had picked up of the sex-ascommunica- tions modality the Constitution's grownups had evolved? The attempts were wasted on her, but not much else was; it was good. Explosively good, and then when at last they rolled apart and their breathing slowed it was Jeron's turn to be puzzled. His voice almost tender, he said, "Perhaps we should save this one."

Darien, who had been playing with the long, straight hair that lay across his shoulder, propped herself up to look at him. "Save what, Jeron?"

"The baby," he explained. "Aunt Eve's probably going to want to plant some of the cabbages pretty soon. Of course, you'd have to carry it for a few weeks until the vegetable womb grows out—"

Darien had not yet switched her reasoning mind back on. She was slow to respond; but then the meaning of the words penetrated and she sat up. "What baby?"

"What do you mean, what baby? Our baby. I've been thinking it might make a nice cross." He sat up too, nodding as he thought it out. "See, I'm Eve and Jim Barstow—you can tell that by the name—"

"Tell what by the name?"

"Breeding. All the first ten cohorts or so show their bloodlines in the name—then they began fooling around, but my name, for instance, shows E for Aunt Eve and O for Uncle Jim. The J means I'm from the third cohort, R just means I'm unedited. The N has no significance, that's just for pretty. 'Jeron,' you see? Well! A lot of the younger kids, like Jeromolo Bill, have been edited some—there are plenty that have been edited more than him—but basically,

there's just been the same four male and four female lines to play with. So what I'm saying is, I think it's a good idea to breed out a little."

The last time Darien remembered blushing she was six years old, tripping on her skirt as she curtseyed to the most famous people she had ever met; but she could feel her shoulders and throat reddening. Sexuality never made her blush. But such light talk of childbearing! "I'm thirsty," she said, getting up to fetch two bottles of beer out of the tiny fridge. She showed Jeron how to pry off the cap without damaging it, so that it could be used again, and took a long swallow.

She seemed doomed to go on repeating What strange people! to herself for the rest of her life. She had been doing it now, she counted, for a week and a day, the brief meetings in Washington, the quick flight across the continent, showing the visitors around Puget—and still they had the capacity to astonish! Or this one did, anyway. "Jeron," she said, "around here we don't get pregnant that easy, in fact a lot of us don't ever expect to get pregnant at all. But when we do, we take it pretty seriously. Sounds like you folks do it a little different, eh?"

His astonishment was equal to her own, and for ten minutes they exchanged data on childbirth and rearing. They let the actual foetal development take place in a surrogate vegetable womb, he explained. Obstetrician? Was that some kind of doctor? No, of course not. What would they need a doctor for? Most everybody knew how to do it, just as in the old world most everybody knew, for instance, how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or perform the Heimlich maneuver. Finding the ovum was a little tricky, he admitted, but there was a douche with a selective stain that made it easier once you got the speculum and cannula deployed. Then you had to check if it was fertilized. If not you could always do it all in vitro—if you wanted to do any editing or cross-linking you pretty near had to— but mostly it seemed more fun to knock each other up in the old-fashioned way. Then you transferred the embryo to the vegetable womb. Any time in the first thirteen weeks was plenty of time, he assured her—you could let it go

later if you wanted to, but who would want to? Then, for the next six or eight months, you could watch it swell with your child.

"Yes, but— Yes, but—" she kept saying. "Yes, but what about overpopulation?" (Not a problem when you were filling up a solar system!) "Yes, but suppose you don't want a child?" (Why wouldn't you?) "Yes, but suppose you don't even like the other person?"

He stared at her in increasing astonishment. ("What strange people!") "Now, what difference would that make?" he asked. "There's always somebody who likes to take care of babies. Don't you have any Aunt Mommies around here? Although," he added, with what Darien construed as a touch of embarrassment, "I did sort of teach my first two for a while. Not Bill, though. There was a second-cohort woman named Odirun who kind of liked to do that— Of course, I wouldn't interfere if you wanted to take that on . . ."

She shook her head. "It isn't going to happen, Jeron," she said, and explained why. Years before she had had a kid-not implant in her Fallopian tubes, as had nearly every nubile teenaged woman in Puget. Childbearing in Puget was almost always intentional, requiring an act of decision on at least the woman's part. He looked skeptical, then tolerant.

"We could always do it in vitro," hej>ointed out. "Or Aunt Eve will know how to reverse it. Or we could do tissue clones, like with Uncle Ghost's old blood specimens when we wanted to breed him after he died."

"Who's Uncle Ghost?"

"The one who died," he explained, and then, his face brightening, "Oh, Darien! We can do so much for you peoplel" He took another quick swig from the bottle, while Darien reflected that the last person who had said anything like that in her hearing was the commander of the Japanese warship across the bay. He swallowed hurriedly and went on. "Like Uncle Ski taught," he said, "Zen! You go through a couple of years of that and you're really able to handle things! Anything! And we can teach you— And all that waste space we flew over, why, with the vegetable wombs, we can fill that up in no time. And—•"

"Can we tome in?" piped a voice from the door, interrupting him. The voice didn't wait for an answer but opened the door and entered, he oldest of the girls, Molomy, and one of the younger ones, perhaps the one called Ringo. "Been fucking?" Molomy asked politely. "They said you were up here, Jeron. Listen. You better come down to the ship. Uncle Ghost's there, and you won't believe what he's got with him!"

ON THE MORNING OF DAY 9563 I WOKE UP NEXT TO A

perfect stranger. Well, I think it was Day 9563— somewhere around there, anyway—maybe as much as ten days after we had inally set down on Earth—how can you tell for sure, with all the elativistic corrections and complicated counting? Close enough. And Toby wasn't wholly a stranger, and not absolutely perfect.

But close enough.

He had sprawled one big thigh over my (big enough) thigh, which was friendly but inclined to cut off the circulation. My whole leg was asleep but, as 1 slid myself out from under and sat briefly on he edge of the bed, the part of me I sat on was happily awake and eminiscing of good fun gone by. Not perfect? Compared to what I'd been waking up next to for the past twenty years or more, Tobias Pettyvass was perfect enough.

So I woke up feeling like rather a different woman—no, not like a different woman. Like the woman I used to be when I was saucy young Eve Barstow, Queen of the Space Rangers, back around Day 250 or so when we were all young and medium innocent and very very scared of what we were into. Those were about the best days of my whole life, with Jim and me taking our turns in the Honeymoon Hotel and Eve and Ski tossing the ruble and Flo just beginning to play games with the hydroponics plants. Up to then, growing up. After then—God! But in that little time while we still thought we were doing something fine

and never suspected anyone was manipulating us, yes, those were days to be glad to be alive in. . . .

And the funny thing was, when I caught a glimpse of myself in Toby's bathroom mirror, I looked like that little fresh Mrs. Eve Barstow! I had lost at least five kilos. I looked like somebody who was getting laid nicely. I wasn't any spring chicken—you might guess I was past the big Five Oh and you might even suspect the ten thousand liters of alcoholic bevs that had poured past those cupid'sbow lips. No Miss America! Not with the sagging stuff behind the cheekbones and under the chin, not to mention the eyes— And yet, you know, not bad! I wasn't a puddle of Silly Putty that walked like a woman any more. The drag of one-G exercise had sucked some of it off me, and there was a sparkle in the old blue eyes.

The sun was well up over the gorgeous blue Pacific, which meant it was late morning, pushing noon; I thought about waking Toby, but that peaceful bearded Toby mug lay so happily on the pillow that I didn't bother. And in the shower I found I was singing to myself. Softly. I didn't want to wake the man who had been guiding me so nicely around the wonders of Puget by day and the wonders of his bedroom by night. It was really astonishing what a few days had done for me, not just physically, not just mentally, not just emotionally— I don't know in what way. For instance. I'd been clinging to jthe illusion that I was the one person around Alpha Centauri who was essentially the same as the common run of humanity on Earth. Not flying off into the peculiar, like the rest of the grownups. Not raised to be bent, like the kids. Just normal. . . . But I wasn't! The experience had changed me too. Although I was the dummy of the group, I had learned the knack of learning and there was much to be learned: Toby was impressed, I could tell, by how much I knew and how much I could do as he showed me around the sleepy police station and the self-tending sewage plant and the parks and the bars of Puget. I wasn't Aunt Mommy—the kids were off on their own. I wasn't the wife of the famous astronaut, or even the local drunk and easy lay; I was just me, Eve Barstow, and me, Eve Barstow, seemed by then to be a very good thing to be. Good enough, it struck me, to have goodness to share.

Why not share it?

Why not spend the rest of my life right here in Puget, helping these people get their world together?

The more I thought of it the better I liked it; and so I stepped out of the shower, wrapped a towel around me, and shook Toby's shoulder. "Wake up, it's morning," I caroled, "and I'm going to stay here in Pugetl"

There was another nice thing about Toby Pettyvass. He woke up nicely. He didn't snort and struggle, like my whilom husband, or jerk like a galvanized frog leg, like Ski, or sulk, or glower, or do any of the other things my few recent bedmates had taught me to expect. He just opened his eyes and woke up. "That's nice," he said.

"But you'd better get up!" I leaned forward to let my hair hang down, then wrapped it in the towel. Toby was just lying there, admiring me. Fair exchange. I was admiring him, too: big man, former football player, now Darien's Chief of Special Services, which meant, mostly, that he was in charge of Puget's police and firefighters. And squiring around visiting ladies. "Look at the sun," I scolded.

Then I looked at it myself. The confounded thing was distinctly lower than it had been. "Oh, God," I said, "wrong ocean! It's the middle of the afternoon! We've been in bed all day!" So much for the swift and impressive Eve Barstow. . . .

But it was not for my brain alone that Toby admired me. "I like your outfit," he said, and grabbed. Since my outfit consisted of a soggy towel wrapped around my hair, I understood at once what he had in mind. Quel homme! Older than I was, waking up out of a sound sleep after an unusually active night, and he grabbed! Well. I knew what to do about that. 1 grabbed back, and the sun was lower still by the time we were conversational again. He at least had known well that it was afternoon, because he had been up for a couple of hours in the forenoon while sated Eve replenished her powers in sleep, had checked with the department to see if he was needed, wasn't, came back to bed without waking me.

"But don't they need you now and then?"

He shrugged. "They'll call me on the beeper if it's important. There was a little brushfire in the hills—we don't get them often, and they kind of appreciated the chance to handle it by themselves. How else are they going to learn?"

Now, do you see how quick and intelligent Eve Barstow is, after all?

I wasn't listening to him, I was listening to the urgings inside my own head. "I guess you didn't hear what I said," I told him, taking his hand off my breast and kissing him to show that he wasn't to take it personally. "I'm going to stay here, Toby."

He grinned and gave a good answer. "I'm glad."

"And I'm going to help you peoplel" I-threw my arms around him—nice hard warm male skin over nice hard strong male bones— but he didn't exactly respond. He looked as though he thought, but wasn't sure, that his message beeper had gone off.

When I am naked and put my arms around a naked man I expect more of his attention than that, no matter how many times we have been making it. I was feeling really good, and it was a downer to suspect that Toby didn't seem to be. "What is it, love? What they say, Omnes triste post coito or something like that?"

He looked at me as though I had suddenly begun speaking Greek, but of course it wasn't. "That's Latin," I explained, "meaning all men seem to get gloomy after making love, only if that's what it is how come you never showed any signs of it before?"

"Oh, no," he said, stirring himself. "I was just thinking about— something. Sayl Aren't you getting hungry?"

Well, of course I was, once he mentioned it, but it didn't answer my question. It did change the subject, because we certainly couldn't go out to eat the way we were.

You hear a lot about how long men have to wait for their lady friends to get dressed. It wasn't like that with us. I was out of the shower and into a dress and sandals and perched on Toby's nice, solid window ledge, watching nice, solid Toby lace his boots, in about seven minutes. He was slower. He had to buckle his belt with the big Puget medallion, and load it up with his beeper and his handcuffs and his flashlight, and then he had to call in on the

beeper to say he was back on duty. I just sat there admiring him, and working up an appetite. "Don't you have to blow-dry your hair or something?" he asked, while he was checking the cartridges in his gun.

"Not with hair like mine. Do you ever shoot that thing?" I asked, because guns make me feel as though I'd eaten tuna salad that had been in the fridge a day too long.

He grinned. "Not usually, not counting snakes and now and then a wolf, up in the hills. What do you want to eat?"

"Seafood!"

"What else?" he sighed, and took my arm as we went out the door. Of course, the fruits of the sea were old stuff to Toby because he'd been eating them all his life. Not me. We had had five meals together, and had them in five different fish restaurants. I had scored sand dabs, crabmeat cakes, abalone, poached salmon, and that thing they call dolphin, although it isn't, and I was ready to run right down the menu, one by one, to make up for twenty-some years of eating nothing that didn't come out of the garden patch. Even the kids had taken to Earth food, especially seafood; when we took Jeron along the night before he'd ventured oyster stew, and loved it until he found a whole oyster in his mouth. I didn't blame him for that. I'd finished his plate for him, and all that that did for me was make me want some oysters of my own. So when we got to the new place Toby had picked out, nice ramshackle frame building looking right out over the bay, I ordered them fried, and a shrimp cocktail to start with, and when Toby ordered a beer I virtuously declined. I hadn't even cracked a malt- nut in forty-eight hours. Didn't need it. I was intoxicated enough just with being where I was and thinking about all the great things we were going to do for these poor people in Puget—and with Toby. I explained all this while he worked on his beer. That took us through the shrimp and well into the fried oysters and home-fries. And there it was again. He wasn't lighting up with joy. He was just nodding, and staring out over the bay at the sailboats and the big lumber vessel and the wreck of the Japanese cruiser across the water, and it was enough to make a girl wonder if her deodorant had failed to work.

So the first oyster was a delight, crisp outside and gummy and sinewy inside, with that marvelous iodine Pacific taste;

and the second very good, and the third nice enough, but by the time I got to the fifth the salt had lost its savor. I put down my fork. "Toby?" I said.

He turned to look at me. "Yeah?"

I said, feeling my way, "Listen, love, I'm not talking about getting married, or anything like that. I mean, I'm not claiming any kind of rights."

He had a forkful of crab Louis halfway to his mouth, and he stopped there. "Ah, no, Eve," he said. "It's not that."

"Then it is something, right? What?"

He put the crabmeat in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. An ox could have finished a mouthful of hay before he got that mouthful pulpy enough to suit him. "I was thinking about all you people staying here to, what you said, help us."

"Right!" I cried. "You've had a tough time, and we want to make up for it! We're going to show you ways to live you never even dreamed of—not just the vegetable womb and the other presents we brought—although you wouldn't be drinking that stuff out of a bottle if you'd ever tasted a malt-nut! No. A whole new life-style, Toby dear. We've had twenty-five years to work it out, and we've got a lot to teach you—"

I stopped, because his beeper had beeped. He spoke into it, put the plug in his ear, listened a moment, and then frowned. He put it away and glanced at me. "You finished with that?" he asked.

"What's the matter?"

He rubbed two fingers across his lips. "Your friendly ghost is the matter," he said. "He's at the ship, and so is everybody else. And they're not alone. There's something pretty funny going on."

Now, the term "pretty funny" could easily be applied to almost anything involving us. I admit that. It's all a matter of perspective. If you grow up with a cross-eyed kid sister you get used to her, but you know that strangers are going to look at her in a different way. So it was with our little family. Sassy Jeron, flabby me, weird littler kids— but the prize for funniness had to belong to Will Becklund.

However, there was something funny in a different way, and that was that Toby had known that Uncle Ghost existed. We'd been having fun about that, all of us, dodging questions in Washington and letting the President and Darien and all the others wonder if their eyes had played tricks on them; but Toby had not been fooled. And I didn't know why not. In his bright red little gas-burner, cruising along the bay front to the beach where the golden ship nestled on the shore, I tried to figure out how that, was. I didn't succeed, and then we were there.

There was a crowd of Pugets surrounding a smaller crowd that was all the rest of us from Alpha-Aleph, just in front of the ship. People who have never seen Willis Becklund have many varying reactions. The Pugets had them all, but mostly what they had was narrowed eyes and closed-in expressions. Not me. My jaw dropped. Because there really was someone else. Someone no more than four feet tall, with a great hooked nose and blubbery lips. When it moved its nearly transparent head around to stare at the staring crowd I could not fail to recognize it. Although it looked like a baggy-pants burlesque version of a Jewish comic, I knew who it was. Had been. Was again. Whatever! It was none other than Dieter, or anyway the ghost of Dieter, the dreadful von Knefhausen.

"My God," I said, hopping out of Toby's three-wheeler and almost falling because I wasn't looking at what I was doing. When Toby came around the car I grabbed his hand to steady myself and tugged him through the crowd of silent Pugets.

Dieter and Will and the kids turned to me at once, all excited and kind of glowing, and, oh, what a clatter of words and clash of tongues! We were talking so fast that it was almost quick-speech, and, of course, everybody was talking at once.

Twenty-plus years with our little extrusion of the human race had trained me to certain expectations. One of them was that whatever I wanted to do, the next person I talked to would want to do something else; whatever I thought or felt, most of the rest of our bunch would disagree. With me; with each other. But not this time! The least-mean- square measure of difference was almost undetectable, because all our great minds had run in the same channels. Jeron had been brainwashing the younger kids, who were wild to try altruism and beneficence now that they'd heard of it; Will had roamed the Earth all by himself until he came out of the wilderness with the same idea. And with this curiously malformed version of Dieter von Knefhausen. I couldn't help it; I had to ask. "Why'd you bring this funny-looking ghost, and why—"

"Soliton!" Will corrected angrily; he never did like those race names.

"This funny-looking soliton, then, and why does he look that way?"

"I almost didn't," he whispered, while Dieter's ripply face expressed polite interest, "but then I figured he ought to have a chance to mend his karma with the rest of us."

"And for this," Dieter von Knefhausen said politely, "I am quite grateful, although the alterations you have "made in my appearance are, you could say, most disagreeable."

"Shut up, Kneffie," Will whispered. "Just count yourself lucky you're here at all. Anyway! Listen. Here's what we've decided! Jeron, Bill, and the two girls are going to stay here, and so am I, for a while. Molomy and the others will take ten Earthies back to Alpha-Aleph for training. We'll radio for some more ships to be built. Lots of them— what?"

Knefhausen coughed and indicated the Pugets. The indrawn look was tighter than ever. Will sighed with a sound like a distant air-brake—an irritated one. The happy villagers were supposed to be dancing and throwing flowers by that point, but the script wasn't playing.

Will sighed. "How annoying it is," he remarked, "when you strike a spark and the audience does not catch fire. Well. If I can't tell you, then I will show you," he whispered, and flung a glassy arm toward the sea.

I will say for Uncle Ghost that he can put on a great show when he wants to. The distant shore began to wrinkle and fade; the setting sun turned glassy, paling from apple to peach to soft shimmering pineapple Jell-O, and then it all melted away. We were looking at a huge fluted shell of color, like what I think Radio City Music Hall used to look like, and within it Will was staging a show that beat the Rockettes.

Oh, none of it was real. The Pugets knew that as well as we did. It didn't even look real, because it was all that

wrinkled-cellophane look that was the best Will could manage. Through the paler parts of the display you could see the sun and even the beached wreck of the Japanese warship—but, oh, what a show all the same! He threw a starry sky across the shell. Against it a dozen golden globes slid through space, then a hundred—many hundreds—then one spun directly toward us, growing huge, changing shape. It opened at the side and stretched and flowed aifd turned into an immense golden cornucopia, with all the treasures of the world—our world—spilling out. Trees that grew into barkless two-by-fours, then cabins, then handsome homes. Luscious fruits in a hundred shapes and colors— you could nearly smell them and touch them, though not quite. Vegetable wombs with cunning cherubs popping out, blinking adorable eyes and clapping fat little hands with glee—oh, Will was stretching it some. No doubt about that. We never grew a house like that, although I suppose we could have if we'd wanted to, and babies from the cabbage patch get just as wet and cranky as any from Nature's Gate.

But it was a real five-bell smash performance, and what astonished me was that it was falling flat. The Pugets weren't buying it. Will knew it, too; the vision collapsed and the sun popped out again.

I felt Toby let go of my hand, and realized how terribly confusing this must be for the poor darling. "It's all right," I said reassuringly. "It's good, really—no, wonderful! We've all come to the same conclusion, and we're going to turn your life right around!"

"Turn us around?"

His tone worried me. All the other Pugets were straining to hear, but not crowding around—they stayed back, almost out of earshot. It was all pretty peculiar. I said impatiently, "We're going to give you the help you need. Teach you how to use the I Ching, show you how we edit our offspring for any characteristics we like—why, Will might even teach you how to turn your terminally ill people into solitons, so that you don't even need to die!"

Toby sighed deeply and nodded. "I thought it was something like that," he remarked, and his hand went to the butt of his gun. And his was not the only one. All those Pugets lounging around were suddenly a guard perimeter, and half a dozen of them had guns.

"That's it," cried Darien McCullough. "You're all under arrest. Nobody moves, nobody goes near your ship until we get things straightened out."

It was one of the worst moments of my life. I mean, gunsl Rational adult human beings don't use guns to settle differences! And they were all in it together, that hypocritical Darien, my own all but perfect Toby, every one of them; they'd planned it all along and rehearsed it.

Much good it did them.

What they did not know, of course, was that five of the six children had grown up under Zen Master Ski's personal tutelage, and all those years of challenging each other with flower stems paid off at once. "Hai!" shouted Molomy, launching herself at Toby's knees, and "Hai!" yelled Jeron, spinning like a top with his two fists locked together; the battering ram of his fists bloodied the nose of one of Toby's gunmen while Jeron's foot in the abdomen of another took him out of action. "Hai!" and "Hai!" and "Hai!" and Araduk and Ringo and Modany each marked a target and clobbered them, and even little Jeromolo Bill, who had done most of his growing-up light-years away from Ski, threw himself at the two young women who were heading for the ship. Even I managed to get the old bones moving long enough to lay out the girl behind me, and Will Becklund, who had no body to charge with, blew himself up huge as a Macy's Thanksgiving monster. No Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse, he; he towered like a demon in a Chinese opera, hands the size of mattresses, tipped with talons as long as spears, and out of them he hurled grenades and firebombs, Napalm and fiery coals at the Pugets. None of them were real, of course. As with all Will's shapings, you could see clear through them when the light was right. But they sure were disconcerting. And he yelled-—if you can imagine a cobra yelling instead of hissing, immense volume but no voice to give it body—"Stop it, all of you! This minute!"

And when we sorted ourselves out, the biggest of the Pugets were rolling on the ground, mostly clutching their testicles, and all the rest of them were staring at a gun apiece in the hands of Araduk and Bill and Molomy, and one in each hand for Jeron.

"Let me up," said Toby from the ground, wriggling slightly under the not very considerable weight of Molomy sitting on his chest.

"For what?" Jeron demanded, trying to point both guns at him simultaneously.

Toby sighed. "Don't wave those things around, will you? We weren't going to shoot you."

"Nol" sneered Jeron. "Of course notl You were just going to try to steal our ship and our technology!"

Toby lifted Molomy clear and sat up. "Wrong," he said. "One hundred percent dead wrong. We weren't trying to take any of that stuff from you. We were trying to get you to keep it."

Way, way back, ever so long ago, when I was a happy head in the beautiful California Southland, I made an anniversary present for my dad and mom. The present was me. For two solid weeks before their anniversary I didn't drink a drop or smoke a joint. I washed my hair every morning, and brushed it a hundred strokes every night; I took the money I made from hustling junk jewelry to the tourists and bought a white blouse and a dark skirt, and on the plane ride home I not only didn't take a drink from the airline stewardesses, I didn't even eat their peanuts. And you know what my mom said when I came in the door? She said, "Evelyn, why do you let yourself get so fat?"

I always thought that was the most unexpected stab in the back I'd ever had in my life, but that was before Puget. I just didn't know what to do, say, or think. Neither did anyone else. Jeron was scowling furiously, fiddling with the guns. Molomy was pouting, and the other kids were staring back and forth, trying to figure out what was going on; tableau. Then Darien broke it. "Put the guns away, please," she said. Jeron glowered at her furiously, then disdainfully hurled the guns to the ground. "Thank you," she said. "After all, we can't blame you."

"Blame us!" I squeaked. I couldn't help it.

She looked at me, sadly and sympathetically. "Excuse me if I'm hurting your feelings, Eve. I know you mean well-according to your lights. We've been bugging you since the day you landed, you know; we know everything you've said to each other. You think you can run our lives better

than we can, and I guess that's natural enough. That's the kind of world you come from. Old von Knefhausen there, he learned how to trick and force and cajole from some of the best teachers in the world, and he manipulated the eight of you, and you manipulated your kids, and I guess you just can't imagine any other way of dealing with people. Any of you. But we don't want it. We know you think you'd be doing it for our own good. So were our Japanese friends, when they came around to include us in their Greater Pacific Co-Recovery Sphere, and we had a lot of trouble talking them out of it." She nodded across the bay, to the rusting warship on the beach. "The thing is, we want to make up our own minds what's for our good. And so what we'd like best of all from you folks, please, is if you'd leave. Go back to Alpha. We won't bother you, we promise. And we won't let you bother us, either—because," she finished, "I should tell you, it doesn't make much difference whether you got the guns away from us or not. Up on the rooftops there are twenty more of us with machine guns. If they start shooting they'll likely hit some people they're not aiming at, and some of us will get killed—as well as all of you. Or all of you that still can get killed. And you know what? It will be worth it."

We all looked up at the rooftops. Darien had told the truth, all right. I could see a black barrel pointing out over the red Howard Johnson's cupola, and two more over the K-Mart, and others all up and down the beach avenue.

Jeron looked at me. I looked at Jeron. None of us said a word, until I did. I sighed. "Kids," I said to Araduk and Molomy and Jeromolo Bill, "put the guns away. Darien? Toby? Leave us alone for a minute. We've got some talking to do."

IN THE EVENING OF DAY 22,305, HOUR 17, MINUTE 22—1 CAN give you seconds to the millisecond, if you like, even

to that least of all Dirac units, the length of time that it takes light to cross the radius of an electron. At that moment, I say, I watched Nephew Jeron set foot on his own planet. Watched? Watch. Will watch; you know the trouble us ghosts have with mortal temporal fancies. It is all one time, not causal, and it goes on forever. If I pick one moment to consider a "now," it is my own caprice to do so— as you might, strolling, stand on a particular flagstone next to your wading pool to survey your property, rather than the graveled driveway near the mint patch. One place is as much "your place" as any other. One moment is as much "my moment" as any of the myriad alternatives from the instant events began to their remote terminal full stop. Oh, yes! I have been there! But the farther I go from my physical "now" the harder it is, and so I have gone only once to The End, and will not again. Enough of that. I don't want to speak of things that terrify even a ghost. For even the end of events is not the end of time.

So what I seek is friendly, familiar events, the doings of my colleagues and our get. It was just the same when I was in college. I faced the cruel beauty of mathematics and was glad to turn from it to the letter from home, Joan's new baby, Arnie's transfer to California, the leak in the porch roof, and how well the little vegetable garden was doing this year. And so it gives me pleasure that Jeron has found himself a world, and that the Jeron-Molomy cross is doing so well, and that Eve Barstow has her heart's desire.

Jeron surprised us all in Puget, would not stay, would not go home; he had a better idea, he said, and he was right. He went back to Aleph only long enough to build new ships and recruit a new community, and now he has a world of his own. If I had had eyes I would have wept with pleasure when he brought the fleet of golden globes to the third planet of Epsilon Eridani. Rich genes to cross! He had a dozen former Pugets with him, and a couple of the President's old White House guards, to add to the stock from Aleph—including fifteen of his children in body and about a hundred more in stored buds from the cabbage patch. They will make some handsome strains. Molomy was not there; she stayed on Earth with Eve. And that's going well enough, for Eve is fat and frail and happy with her Toby and their lives. She persuaded Puget to make treaties with New York and London and all the other great glamor

places of the Grand Tour, and now she drinks tea at the Ritz and eats onion soup on the Champs Elysees whenever she wishes to, and the old mother planet is gradually limping toward ease. Ann? Ann is encrusted inside her own planet. She makes it rumble now and then, throwing up a mountain range or opening a sea. I visited her once, in her crystal catacomb at the core, but she responded to me not at all, and anyway magma is not to my taste. Shef and Flo have built forty navigable habitats and sent some of them flying off to Arcturus and Procyon, with Jeromolo Bill and some of his children and grandchildren to fly them, solving tensor equations in their heads. And I . . .

Oh, I'm all right. More or less.

I'm alone, of course. Now and then I would call up a Knefhausen or a former love to imitate a companion, but it was like making faces in a mirror. I wait and hope. Hope for someone as cowardly as myself, who dares not break through the surface tension to see what is on the other side; but all the other larvae seem willing to turn to dragonflies.

So I roam. Looking for the starburst. Slipping through gas clouds and watching the organic molecules form. Plumbing the hearts of suns. Waiting. As long as events occur I will have something to do, but after events stop . . . oh, after events stopl When the last stars of spongy iron dissolve as their protons melt away and there is only a universal soup of decaying photons—

Oh, then I will have no choice but to spread my wings and enter the place I fear; and then, perhaps, I will rediscover purpose. And the coming of the knowledge of that purpose, yes, that is it: that is what I fear.