THE WIND BETWEEN THE WORLDS

By Lester del Rey

IT WAS hot in the dome of the Bennington matter transmitter building. The metal shielding walls seemed to catch the rays of the sun and bring them to a focus there. Even the fan that was plugged in nearby didn't help much. Vic Peters shook his head, flipping the mop of yellow hair out of his eyes. He twisted about, so the fan could reach fresh territory, and cursed under his breath.

Heat he could take. As a roving troubleshcoter for Teleport Interstellar, he'd worked from Rangoon to Nairobi—but always with men. Pat Trevor was the first of the few women superintendents he'd met. And while he had no illusions of masculine supremacy, he'd have felt a lot better working in shorts or nothing right now.

Besides, a figure like Pat's couldn't be forgotten, even though denim coveralls were hardly supposed to be flattering. Cloth stretched tight across shapely hips had never helped a man concentrate on his work.

"One more bolt, Vic," she told him. "Phew, I'm melting . . . So what happened to your wife?"

He shrugged. "Married her lawyer right after the divorce. Last I knew, they were doing fine. Why not? It wasn't her fault. Between hopping all over the world and spending my spare time trying to get on the moon rocket they were building, I wasn't much of a husband."

Unconsciously, his lips twisted. He'd grown up before DuQuesne discovered the matter transmitter, when reaching the other planets of the Solar System had been the dream of most boys. Somehow, that no longer seemed important to people, now that the world was linked through Teleport Interstellar with races all across the Galaxy.

Man had always been a topsy-turvy race. He'd discovered gunpowder before chemistry, and battled his way up to the atom bomb in a scant few thousand years of civilization, before he had a world-wide government. Other races, apparently, developed space travel long before the matter-transmitter, and long after they'd achieved a genuine science of sociology.

DuQuesne had started it by investigating some obscure extensions of Dirac's esoteric mathematics. To check up on his work, he'd built a machine, only to find that it produced results beyond his expectations; matter in it simply seemed to disappear, releasing energy that was much less than it should have been, but still enough to destroy the machine.

DuQuesne and his students had rechecked their math against the results and come up with an answer they didn't believe. This time they built two machines and experimented with them until they worked together. When the machines were operating, anything within the small fields they generated simply changed places. At first it was just across a few yards, then miles—then half around the world. Matter was transmitted almost instantaneously from one machine to the other no matter how far apart they were.

Such a secret couldn't be kept, of course. DuQuesne gave a demonstration to fellow scientists at which a few reporters were present. They garbled DuQuesne's explanation of electron waves covering the entire universe that were capable of identity shifts, but the accounts of the actual experiment were convincing enough. It meant incredibly fast shipping anywhere on the globe at an impossibly low cost.

The second public demonstration played to a full house of newsmen and cold-headed businessmen. It worked properly —a hundred pounds of bricks on one machine changed place with a hundred pounds of coal on another. But then . . .

Before their eyes, the coal disappeared and a round ball came into existence, suspended in mid-air. It turned around as if seeking something, an eyelike lens focused on the crowd. Then it darted down and knocked the power plug loose.

Nothing could budge it, and no tricks to turn on power again worked.

Even to the businessmen, it was obvious that this object, whatever it was, had not been made on Earth. DuQuesne himself suggested that somewhere some other race must have matter transmittal, and that this was apparently some kind of observer. Man, unable to reach even his own moon yet, had apparently made contact with intelligence from some other world, perhaps some solar system, since there was no theoretical limit to the distance covered by matter transmittal.

It was a week of wild attempts to crack open the "observer" and of futile attempts to learn something about it. Vic's mind had been filled with Martians, and he had tried to join the thousands who flocked to DuQuesne's laboratory to see the thing. But his father had been stubborn—no fare for such nonsense. And Vic had had to wait until the papers sprang the final surprise, a week later.

The ball had suddenly moved aside and made no effort to stop the machine from operating. When power was turned on, it had disappeared, and this time the Envoy had appeared. There was nothing oudandish about him—he seemed simply a normal man, stepping out of the crude machine.

In normal English, he had addressed the crowd with the casual statement that he was a robot, designed deliberately to serve as an ambassador to Earth from the Galactic Council. He was simply to be the observer and voice of the Council, which was made up of all worlds having the matter transmitter. They had detected the transmitter radiation, and, by Galactic Law, Earth had automatically earned provisional status. He was here to help set up transmitter arrangements. Engineers from Betz would build transports to six planets of culture similar to Earth's, to be owned by the Council, as a nonprofit business, but manned by Earthmen as quickly as they could be trained.

In return, nothing was demanded, and nothing more was offered. We were a primitive world by their standards, but we would have to work out our own advancement, since they would give us no extra knowledge.

He smiled pleasantly to the shocked crowd and moved off with DuQuesne to await results. There were enough, too, from a startled and doubting world. The months that followed were a chaos of news and half-news. The nations were suspicious. There was never something for nothing. The Envoy met the President and Cabinet; he met the United Nations. India walked out; India walked back quickly when plans went ahead blithely without her. Congress proposed tariffs and protested secret treaties. The Envoy met Congress, and somehow overcame enough opposition to get a bare majority.

And the Betz II engineers came on schedule. Man was linked to the stars, though his own planets were still outside his reach. It was a paradox that soon grew stale, but what, actually, would be the point in flying to Mars or Venus when we were in instant touch with the farthest parts of the Galaxy?

There were major wrenches to the economy as our heavy industries suddenly found that other planets could beat them at their work. Plathgol could deliver a perfect Earth automobile, semi-assembled and advanced enough to avoid our patent laws, for twenty pounds of sugar. The heavy industries folded, while we were still experimenting with the business of finding what we had to offer and what we could receive from other worlds. Banks had crashed, men had been out of work. The governments had cushioned the shock, and the new wonders helped to still the voices that suddenly rose up against traffic with alien worlds. But it had been a bitter period, with many lasting scars.

Now a measure of stability had been reached, with a higher standard of living than ever. But the hatreds were pretty deep on the part of those who had been hurt, and others who simply hated newness and change. Vic had done well enough, somehow making his way into the first engineering class out of a hundred thousand applicants. And twelve years had gone by . . .

Pat's voice suddenly cut into his thoughts. "All tightened up here, Vic. Wipe the scowl off and let's go down to check."

She collected her tools, wrapped her legs around a smooth pole, and went sliding down. He yanked the fan and followed her. Below was the crew. Pat lifted an eyebrow at the grizzled, cadaverous head operator. "Okay, Amos. Plathgol standing by?"

Amos pulled his six-feet-two up from his slump and indicated the yellow stand-by light. Inside the twin poles of the huge transmitter that was turned to one on Plathgol, a big, twelve-foot diameter plastic cylinder held a single rabbit. Matter transmitting was always a two-way affair, requiring that the same volume be exchanged. And between the worlds, where different atmospheres and pressures were involved, all sending was done in the big capsules. One-way handling was possible, of course, but involved the danger of something materializing to occupy the same space as something else-even air molecules. It wasn't done except as rigidly controlled experiments.

Amos whistled into the transport-wave interworld phone in the code that was universal between worlds, got an answering whistle, and pressed a lever. The rabbit was gone, and the new capsule was faindy pink, with something resembling a giant worm inside.

Amos clucked in satisfaction. "Tsiuna. Good eating, only real good we ever got from these things. I got friends on Plathgol that like rabbit. Want some of this, Pat?"

Vic felt his stomach jerk at the colors that crawled over the tsiuna. The hot antiseptic spray was running over the capsule, to be followed by supersonics and ultraviolets to complete sterilization. Amos waited a moment, then pulled out the creature. Pat hefted it.

"Big one. Bring it over to my place and 111 fry it for you and Vic. How does the Dirac meter read, Vic?"

"On the button." The seven per cent power loss was gone now, after a week of hard work in locating it. "Guess you were right—the reflector was off angle. Should have tried it first, but it never happened before. How'd you figure it out?"

She indicated the interworld phone. "I started out in anthropology, Vic. Got interested in other races, and then found 1 couldn't talk to the teleport engineers without being one, so I got sidetracked to this job. But I still talk a lot on anything Galactic policy won't forbid. When everything else failed, I complained to the Ecthinbal operator that the Betz II boys installed us wrong. I got sympathy instead of indignation, so I figured it could happen. Simple, wasn't it?"

He snorted, and waited while she gave orders to start business. Then, as the loading cars began to hum, she fell behind him, moving out toward the office. "I suppose you'll be leaving tonight, Vic. I'll miss you. You're the only trouble-shooter I've met who did more than make passes."

"When I make passes at your kind of girl, it will be legal. And in my business, it's no life for a wife."

But he stopped to look at the building, admiring it for the last time. It was the standard Betz II design, but designed to handle the farm crops around, and bigger than any earlier models on Earth. The Betz II engineers made Earth engineering look childish, even if they did look like big slugs with tentacles and had no sense of sight.

The transmitters were in the circular center, surrounded by a shield wall, a wide hall all around, another shield, a circular hall again, and finally the big outside shield. The two opposite entranceways spiraled through the three shields, each rotating thirty degrees clockwise from the entrance portal through the next shield. Those shields were of inert matter that could be damaged by nothing less violent than a hydrogen bomb direcUy on them—they refused to soften at less than ten million degrees Kelvin. How the Betzians managed to form them in the first place, nobody knew.

Beyond the transmitter building, however, the usual offices and local transmitters across Earth had not yet been built. That would be stricdy Earth construction, and would have to wait for an off season. They were using the nearest building, an abandoned store a quarter mile away, as a temporary office.

Pat threw the door open and then stopped suddenly. "Ptheela!"

A Plathgolian native sat on a chair, with a bundle of personal belongings around her, her three arms making little marks on something that looked like a used pancake. The Plathgolians had been meat-eating plants once. They still smelled high to Earth noses, and their constandy shedding skin resembled shaggy bark, while their heads were vaguely flowerlike.

Ptheela wriggled her arms. "The hotel found regretfully that it had to decorate my room," she whisded in Galactic Code. "No other room and all other hotels say they're full. Plathgolians stink, I guess. So 111 go home when the transmitter is fixed."

"With your trade studies half done?" Pat protested. "Don't be silly, Ptheela. I've got a room for you in my apartment. How are the studies, anyhow?"

For answer, the plant woman passed over a newspaper, folded to one item. 'Trade? Your House of Representatives just passed a tariff on all traffic through Teleport."

Pat scanned the news, scowling. "Damn them. A tariff! They can't tax interstellar traffic. The Galactic Council won't stand for it; we're still accepted only on approval. The Senate will never okay it!"

Ptheela whistled doubtfully, and Vic nodded. "They will. I've been expecting this. A lot of people are afraid of Tele-port."

"But we're geared to it now. The old factories are torn down, the new ones are useless for us. We can't get by without the catalysts from Ecthinbal, the cancer-preventative from Plathgol, all the rest. And who'll buy all our sugar? We're producing fifty times what we need, just because most planets don't have plants that separate the levo from the dextro forms. All hell will pop!"

Ptheela wiggled her arms again. "You came too early. Your culture is unbalanced. All physics, no sociology. All eat well, little think well."

All emotion, litde reason, Vic added to himself. It had been the same when the industrial revolution came along. Old crafts were uprooted and some people were hurt. There were more jobs now, but they weren't the familiar ones. And the motorists who gloated at first over cheap Plathgol cars complained when Plathgol wasn't permitted to supply the improved, ever-powered models they made for themselves.

Hardest of all had been the idea of accepting the existence of superior races. A feeling of inferiority had crept in, turned to resentment, and then through misunderstanding of other races to an outright hatred of them. Ptheela had been kicked out of her hotel room; but it was only a minor incident in a world full of growing bitterness against the aliens.

"Maybe we can get jobs on Plathgol," Vic suggested harshly.

Ptheela whisded "Pat could, if she had three husbands-engineers must meet minimum standards. You could be a husband, maybe."

Vic kept forgetting that Plathgol was backward enough to have taboos and odd customs, even though Galactically higher than Earth, having had nearly ten thousand years of history behind her to develop progress and amity.

The televisor connecting them with the transmitter building buzzed, and Amos' dour face came on. "Screwball delivery with top priority, Pat Professor named Douglas wants to ship a capsule of Heaviside layer air for a capsule of Ecdunbal deep-space vacuum. Common sense says we don't make much shipping vacuums by the poundl"

"Public service, no charge," Vic suggested, and Pat nodded. Douglas was a top man at Caltech, and a plug from him might be useful sometime. "Leave it on, Amos—I want to watch this. Douglas has some idea that space fluctuates, somehow, and he can figure out where Ecthinbal is from a sample. Then he

can figure how fast an exchange force works, whether it's instantaneous or not. We've got the biggest Earth transmitters, so he uses us."

As they watched, a massive capsule was put in place by loading machines, and the light changed from yellow to red. A slightly greenish capsule replaced the other. Amos signaled the disinfection crew and hot spray hit it, to be followed by the ultrasonics. Something crackled suddenly, and Amos made a wild lunge across the screen.

The capsule popped, crashing inward and scattering glass in a thousand directions. Pressure-glass; it should have carried a standard Code warning for cold sterilization and no super-sonics. Vic leaped toward the transmitter building.

Pat's cry brought him back. There were shrieks coming from the televisor. Men in the building were clinging frantically to anything they could hold, but men and bundles ready for loading were being picked up violently and sucked toward the transmitter. As Vic watched, a man hit the edge of the field and seemed to be sliced into nothingness, his scream cut off, half-formed.

A big chunk of glass had hit the control, shorting two busbars, holding them together by its weight. The transmitter was locked into continuous transmit And air, with a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch, was running in and being shipped to Ecthinbal, where the pressure was barely an ounce per square inch! With that difference, pressure on a single square foot of surface could lift over a ton. The poor devils in the transmitter building didn't have a chance.

He snapped off the televisor as Pat turned away, gagging. "When was the accumulator charged?"

"It wasn't an accumulator," she told him weakly. "The whole plant uses an electron-pulse atomotor, good for twenty years of continuous operation."

Vic swore and made for the door, with Pat and Ptheela after him. The transmitter opening took up about two hundred square feet, which meant somewhere between fifty and five hundred thousand cubic feet of air a second were being lost. Maybe worse.

Ptheela nodded as she kept pace with him. "I think the tariff won't matter much now," she stated.

VICS action in charging out had been pure instinct to get where the trouble lay. His legs churned over the ground, while a wind at his back made the going easier.

Then his brain clicked over, and he dug his heels into the ground, trying to stop. Pat crashed into him, but Ptheela's arms lashed out, keeping him from falling. As he turned to face them, the wind struck at his face, whipping up grit and dust from the dry ground. Getting to the transmitter building would be easy—but with the wind already rising, they'd never be able to fight their way back.

It had already reached this far, losing its force with distance, but still carrying a wallop. It was beginning to form a pattern, marked by the clouds of dust and debris it was picking up. The arrangement of the shields and entrances in the building formed a perfect suction device to set the air circling around it counter-clockwise, twisting into a tomado that funneled down to the portals. Men and women near the building were struggling frantically away from the center of the fury. As he watched, a woman was picked up bodily, whirled around, and gulped down one of the yawning entrances. The wind strangled her cries.

Vic motioned Pat and Ptheela and began moving back, fast. Killing himself would do no good. He found one of the little hauling tractors and pulled them onto it with him, heading back until they were out of the worst of the rising wind. Then he swung to face Ptheela.

"Galactic rules be damned, this is an emergency, and we need help! What now?"

The shaggy Plathgolian made an awkward gesture with all three arms, and a slit opened in her chest. "Unprecedented."

The word came out in English, surprisingly, and Pat's look mirrored his; Plathgolians weren't supposed to be able to talk. "You're right. If I speak, I shall be banished by die Council from Plathgol. Ask, nevertheless. I may know more—we've had the teleport longer—but remember that your strange race has a higher ingenuity quotient."

"Thanks." Vic knew what the seven husbands back on her home planet meant to her, if she were exiled, but he'd worry about that after he could stop worrying about the world. "What happens next?"

She dropped back to the faster Galactic Code for that. As he knew, the accidental turning on of the transmitter had keyed in the one on Ecthinbal automatically to receive, but not to transmit; the air was moving between Earth and Ecthinbal in one-way traffic. The receiving circuit, which would have keyed in the Ecthinbal transmit circuit had not been shorted. Continuous transmittal had never been used, to her knowledge; there was no certainty about what would happen. Once started, no outside force could stop a transmitter; the send and stop controls were synchronous, both tapped from a single crystal, and only that proper complex wave-form could cut it off. It now existed as a space-strain, and the Plathgolians believed that this would spread, since the outer edges transmitted before matter could reach the center, setting up an unbalanced resonance that would make the force field grow larger and larger. Eventually, it might spread far beyond the whole building. And, of course, since the metal used by the Betz II engineers could not be cut or damaged, there was no way of tunneling in.

"What about Ecthinbal?" Pat asked.

Ptheela spread her arms. "The game, in reverse. The air rushes in, builds up pressure to break the capsule, and then rushes out—in a balanced stream, fortunately, so there's no danger of crowding two units of matter in one unit of space."

"Then I guess we'd better call die Galactic Envoy," Vic decided. "All he's ever done is to sit in an office and look smug. Now—"

"He won't come. He is simply an observer. Galactic Law says you must solve your own problem or die."

"Yeah/' Vic looked at the cloud of dust being whirled into the transmitter building. "And all I need is something that weighs a couple tons per square foot—with a good crane attached."

Pat looked up suddenly. "How about one of the small atom-powered army tanks, the streamlined ones. Flavin could probably get you one."

Vic stamped down on the pedal, swinging the little tractor around sharply toward the office. The wind was stronger there, but still buckable. He clicked the televisor on, noticing that the dust seemed to disappear just beyond the normal field of the transmitter. It must already be starting to spread out.

"How about it?" he asked Ptheela. "If it spreads^ won't it start etching into the transmitter and the station?"

"No. Betz II construction. Everything they built in has some way of grounding out the effect. We don't know how it works, but the field won't touch anything put in by the Betzians."

"What about the hunk of glass that's causing the trouble?"

For a moment she looked as if she were trying to appear hopeful. Then the flowerlike head seemed to wilt. "It's inside the casing, protected from the field."

Pat had been working on the private wire to Chicago, used for emergencies. She was obviously having trouble getting put through to Flavin. The man was a sore spot in Teleport Interstellar, one of the few political appointees. Nominally, he was a go-between for the President and the Teleport group, but actually he was simply a job-holder. Finally Pat had him on the screen.

He was jovial enough, as usual, with a red spot on each cheek which indicated too" many drinks for lunch. A bottle stood on the desk in front of him. But his voice was clear enough. "Hi, Pat. What's up?"

Pat disregarded the frown Vic threw her, and began outlining the situation. The panic in her voice didn't require much feigning. Flavin blustered at first, then pressed the hold button for long minutes. Finally, his face reappeared.

"Peters, you'll have full authority, of course. I'll get a couple tanks for you, somehow, but I have to work indirectly." Then he shrugged and looked rueful. "I always knew this sinecure would end. I've got some slips here that make it look as if you / had a national disaster."

His hand reached for the bottle, just as his eyes met Vic's accusing look. He shook his head, grinned sourly, put the bottle away in a drawer, untouched. "I'm not a fool entirely, Peters. I can do a litde more than chase girls and drink. Probably be no use to you, but the only reason I drink is I'm bored, and I'm not bored now. I'll be out shortly."

Flavin apparendy had influence. The tanks arrived just before he did. They were heavy, squat affairs, super-armored to stand up under a fairly close atomic bomb hit, but small enough to plunge through the portals of the transmitter building. Flavin came up as Vic and Pat were studying them. His suit was designed to hide most of his waistline, but the fat of his jowls shook as he hurried up, and there was sweat on his forehead, trickling down from under his toupee.

"Two, eh? Figured that's what I'd get if I asked for a dozen. Think you can get in—and what'll you do then?"

Vic shrugged. He'd been wondering the same thing. "If we could somehow ram the huge piece of glass and crack it where it was wedged into the wiring inside the shielding, it might release the shorted wires. That should effect an automatic cut-off. That's why I'm going with the driver. I can extemporize if we get in."

"Right," Pat agreed quickly. She hitched up her coveralls and headed for the other tank. "And that's why I'm going with the other."

"Pat!" Vic swung toward her. But it wasn't a time for stupid chivalry. The man or woman who could do the job should do it. He gave her a hand into the compact little tank. "Good luck, then. Well need it."

He climbed into his own vehicle, crowding past the driver and wriggling into the tiny observer's seat. The driver glanced back, reached for the controls. The motor hummed quietly under them, making itself felt by the vibration of the metal around them. They began moving forward, advancing in low gear. The driver didn't like it as he started through his telescreen, and Vic liked it even less from the direct view through the gun slit. Beside them, the other tank got into motion, roughly paralleling them.

At first it wasn't too bad. They headed toward the north portal, going cautiously, and the tank seemed snug and secure. Beside him, Vic saw a tree suddenly come up by its roots and head toward the transmitter. It struck the front of the tank, but the machine pushed it brutally aside.

Then the going got rough. The driver swore at the controls, finding the machine hard to handle. It wanted to drift, and he set up a fixed correction, only to revise it a moment later. The tank began to fist and pitch. The force of the wind increased geometrically as they cut the distance. At fifty feet, the driver's wrists were white from fighting to overcome each tilt of the wind.

Vic swallowed, wondering at the nerve of the man driving, until he saw blood running from a bitten Hp. His own stomach was pitching wildly.

"Try another ten feet?" the driver asked.

"Have to."

They crawled by inches now. Every tiny bump threatened to let the force of the wind pitch them over. They had to work by feel. Vic wiped his forehead and wiped it again before he noticed that the palm of his hand was as damp as his brow.

He wondered about Pat and looked for her. There was no sight of the other machine. Thank God, she'd turned back. But there was bitterness in his relief; he'd figured Pat was one human he could count on completely. Then he looked at the driver's wider screen, and sick shock hit him.

The other tank had turned turtle and was rolling over and over, straight toward the portal! As he looked, a freak accident bounced it up and it landed on its treads. The driver must have been conscious; only consummate skill accounted for the juggling that kept it upright then. But its forward momentum was still too strong, and it lurched for the portal.

Vic jerked against his driver's ear, pointing frantically. "Hit it!"

The driver tensed, but nodded. Though the shriek of the insane wind was too strong for even the sound of the motor, the tank leaped forward, pushing Vic down in his webbed and padded seat. The chances they were taking now were pure gamble, but the driver moved more smoothly with a definite goal. The man let the wind help him pick up speed, jockeying sidewise toward the other tank. They almost rolled over as they swung, bucking and rocking frantically, but the treads hit the ground firmly again. They were drifting across the wind now, straight toward the nose of the other tank.

Vic strained forward; the shock of hitting the tank knocked his head against the gun slit. He hardly felt it as he stared out. The two tanks struggled, forcing against each other, while the portal gaped almost straight ahead.

"Hit the west edge and we have a chance," Vic yelled in the driver's ear. The man nodded weakly, and his foot pressed down harder on the throttle. Against each other, the two tanks showed little tendency to turn over, but they seemed to be lifted off the ground half the time.

Inch by slow inch, they were making it. Pat's tank was well beyond the portal, but Vic's driver was sweating it out, barely on the edge. He bumped an inch forward, reversed with no care for gears, and hitched forward and back again. They seemed to make litde progress, but finally Vic could see the edge move past, and they were out of the direct gale into the portal.

A new screen had lighted beside the driver, and Pat's face was in it, along with the other driver. The scouring of the wind made speech impossible over the speakers, but the man motioned. Vic shook his head, indicated a spiral counterclockwise and outward, to avoid bucking against the wind, with the two tanks supporting each other.

They passed die soutii portal somehow, though there were moments when it seemed they must be swung in, and managed to gain ten feet outward on the turn. The next time around, they had doubled that. It began to be smoother going. The battered tanks lumbered up to their starting point and a little beyond.

Vic crawled out of the seat, surprised to find his legs stiff and weak; the ground seemed to reel under him. It was some comfort to see that the driver was in no better shape. The man leaned against the tank, letting the raw wind dry the perspiration on his uniform. "Bro-ther! Miracles! You're nervy, guy, but I wouldn't go in there again with the angel Michael."

Vic looked at the wind maelstrom. Nobody else would go in there, either. Getting within ten feet of the portal was begging for death, even in the tank—and it would get worse. Then he spotted Pat opening the tank hatch and stumbled over to help her out. She was bruised and more shaky than he, but the webbing over the seat had saved her from broken bones. He lifted her out in his arms, surprised at how light she was. His mind flicked over the picture of her tank twisting over, and his arms tightened around her. She seemed to snuggle into them, seeking comfort.

Her eyes came up, just as he looked down at her. There was no other way than kissing her to show his relief. "You scared hell out of me, Pat."

"Me, too." She was regaining some color, and wriggled to be put down. "Do you know how I feel about what you did in there?"

Flavin cut off any answer Vic could have made, waddling up with his handkerchief out, mopping his face. He stared at them, gulped, shook his head. "Lazarus twins," he growled.

"Better get in the car—there's a drink in the right door pocket."

Vic looked at Pat and she nodded. They could use it They found the car and chauffeur waiting farther back. Vic poured her a small jigger, and took one for himself before putting the bottle back. But the moment's relaxation over cigarettes was better than the drink.

While Flavin was talking to the tank drivers, a small roll of bills changed hands, bringing grins to their faces. Political opportunist or not, he knew the right thing to do at the right time. Now he came back and climbed in beside them.

"I've had the office moved back to Bennington. The intercity teleport manager offered us space." The locally owned world branches of intercity teleport were independent of Teleport Interstellar, but usually granted courtesy exchanges with the latter. "They'll be evacuating the city next, if I know the Governor. Just got a cease and desist order—came while you were trying to commit suicide. We're to stop transmitting at oncel"

He grunted at Vic's grimace, and motioned the chauffeur on, just as a radiophone call reached them. Vic shook his head at the driver and looked out to see Ptheela ploughing along against the wind, calling to them. The plant woman's skin was peeling worse than ever.

Flavin followed Vic's eyes. "You going to let that ride with us? The way Plathies stink? Damned plants, you can't trust 'em. Probably mixed up in this trouble. I heard . . ."

"Plathgol rates higher in civilization than we do," Pat stated flatly.

"Yeah. Ten thousand years stealing culture we had to scratch up for ourselves in a thousand. So the Galactic Council tells us we've got to rub our noses to a superior race. Superior plants! Nuts!"

Vic opened the door and reached for Pat's hand. Flavin frowned, fidgeted, then reached out to pull them back. "Okay, okay. I told you that you were in charge here. If you want to ride with stinking Plathies—well, you're running things. But don't blame me if people start throwing mud." He had the grace to redden faindy as Ptheela came up finally, and changed the subject hastily. "Why can't we just snap a big hunk of metal over the entrances and seal them up?"

"Too late," Ptheela answered, sliding down beside Pat, her English drawing a surprised start from Flavin. "I was inspecting the tanks; they're field-etched where they touched. That means the field is already outside the building, though it will spread more slowly without the metal to resonate it. Anyhow, you couldn't get metal plates up."

"How long will the air last?" Pat asked.

Vic shrugged. "A month at breathing level, maybe. Fortunately the field doesn't spread downward much, with the Betzian design, so it won't start working on the Earth itself. Flavin, how about getting the experts here? I need help."

"Already sent for them," Flavin grunted. They were heading toward the main part of Bennington now, ten miles from the station. His face was gray and he no longer seemed to notice die somewhat pervasive odor of Ptheela.

They drew up to a converted warehouse finally, and he got out, starting up the steps just as the excited cries of a newsboy reached his ears. He flipped a coin and spread the extra before them.

It was all over the front page, with alarming statements from the scientists first interviewed and soothing statements from later ones. No Teleport Interstellar man had spoken, but an interview with one of the local teleport engineers had given the basic facts, along with some surprisingly keen guesses as to what would happen next.

But above everything was the black headline:

BOMB TRANSMITTER, SAYS PAN-ASIA

The ultimatum issued by Pan-Asia was filled with high-sounding phrases and noble justification, but its basic message

atdu.it By Chad Oliver

COLLINS floated through the jet blackness that composed the innards of the ship. He moved with every sense alert. He heard the low hum of voices welling up out of the emptiness ahead of him and the oxygen in the still air tasted sweet to him as he drank it into his lungs. The cold smell of metal was all around him, hemming him in, and he shivered involuntarily in the darkness.

At precisely the right instant, he extended his hand forward, made contact with an invisible brace that felt rough and dead to his tingling fingers, and changed direction with a light, delicate shove. The new tunnel was almost as dark as the one he had left behind him, but he could see a faint luminous haze in the distance. His pulses quickened as tiny warmth currents touched his skin and he caught the smell of men in the abyss ahead of him.

It was good to be going toward men, Collins thought. It was a good feeling. He kept to the exact center of the shaft, as far away from the cold metal taste as he could get. A man knew loneliness in the eternal night, alone with his thoughts. A man knew fear-He guided his body around another turn, and still another, and felt the sudden life shocks in front of him. He closed his eyes to narrow slits, letting them adjust. He could feel space and air on all sides, and the cold, unpleasant smell of metal receded into the distance. Warmth currents bathed his skin. And yet there was a coolness even here, an icy coolness of hostility that mottled the warmth tides like a cancerous disease-Collins shook the feeling from his mind. Slowly, gradually, the chamber took shape around him, although he still could

51 not look directly at the intolerable, flickering flame that hissed and sputtered atop the fire torch. Black shadows writhed in the gray half-light on the periphery of the fire-glow and white bodies floated all around him, waiting.

Collins took a deep breath. He could see again.

"Class will come to order," he said into the silence.

The men—young men, all of them—hesitated and then moved into a circle around him. The circle was composed of three distinct layers, one even with Collins, one slighdy above him, and another just below him. Each layer contained four men. Collins forced himself to look directly at the fire torch, even though the unaccustomed brightness lanced little needles of pain through his eyes and narrowed their pupils to tiny dots of black. It was not easy, but he kept his face expressionless.

Men were made to five in light.

"Before we start, do any of you have any questions about your work for today?" His voice was soft, patient. But it had a firm edge to it—sheathed now, but capable of cutting like a knife when the need arose.

The young men looked at each other, faintly hostile, uncertain.

"Speak up," Collins said, smiling. "Asking questions is not a sign of ignorance, you know. It is only the stupid who never ask questions."

One of the men cleared his throat. It was Lanson, one of the most intelligent of them. Collins nodded encouragement.

"We don't understand our problem for today, sir," he said, faindy accenting the sir to give it a slighdy contemptuous ring. "We've talked it over among ourselves, but we can't seem to get it."

"Be specific, Lanson. Exactiy what is it that you do not understand?"

Lanson shifted nervously in the still air. "It's about this problem of falling bodies, sir," he said. His voice was genuinely puzzled now; Lanson was interested almost in spite of himself.

"You stated that, because of gravity, two bodies will fall through a vacuum at precisely the same rate of speed, regardless of weight—that is, if we get your meaning correcdy, a heavy body will fall with the same speed as a light body, or, to use your example, a piece of paper and a chunk of metal will hit the floor together."

"O.K. so far, Lanson." Collins braced himself, knowing what was coming. It was difficult.

"Well, sir," Lanson continued, choosing his words with care, "we sort of see what you're driving at in the concepts heavy and light—but what is falling? What pushes the piece of paper and the chunk of metal down? Why don't they float like we do?"

"They do float," a voice whispered loudly. "Everyone knows that."

Collins looked at the white bodies around him, pale and ghosdy in the dancing fireglow. Beyond them, the great darkness hovered like a gigantic beast, shadow tentacles writhing, waiting to envelop them, pull them all into the black vault of the abyss. Collins shivered again as an icy chill crawled down his spine. They couldn't go on like this forever, he knew. They weren't trying the way they used tort was very hard, and they weren't trying. Every day, every hour, they lost ground. And below them, dancing around their great fires-He had to make them see.

"You are right, in a sense," he told them carefully. "I'm glad to see that you're using your minds and not just accepting what I say without thought of your own. They do float, as you've seen here. The point is that conditions here are unnatural, not normal, although they are the only ones we've ever known. I've tried to tell you about gravity—"

"Him and his gravity," someone snickered.

"We're not approaching the situation with the proper gravity," someone else whispered. Several of the young men laughed aloud at the pun, staring at CoUins with ill-concealed contempt.

"Yes, but what is gravity?" Lanson persisted. "You say that in science we experiment, we measure, we deal with facts rather than wishful thinking. Very well—show us some gravity then."

Collins breathed deeply, feeling the doubt all around him. "I can show you no gravity that you can recognize as such," he said slowly. "Nor can I show you the atoms of which matter is composed, much less the subatomic constituents of the atoms themselves. You must be patient, you must consider the situation in which we find ourselves. "Even in science, gendemen, there are times when we must go along on faith, do the best we can—"

"We're not trying to dispute your word, sir," said Lanson, who was doing precisely that. "But it seems to us that even if all this stuff were true somewhere, sometime, we still have to live here and not there. Since we have to live here, why not confine ourselves to this world, to what can be of practical use to us, and just forget about—"

"No!" Collins said sharply, the anger rising in him like a hot flood. "That will do, Lanson, unless you wish to be reported. We must not forget, or we are lost; we are animals, we are no longer men. One day you will see and understand. Until then-"

He stopped, suddenly. The men shifted uncertainly in the air. Collins tensed, every sense alive, vibrant, questing. He probed the deep shadows. His skin tingled. Something was out there—those shadows were no longer empty. Something—

"The other men," he hissed. "Kill that torch."

The flame sputtered and died. The men drifted backward, united now against a common danger, fighting to adjust their eyes again to the absence of light Collins felt his heart hammering in his throat and cold sweat in the palms of his hands. He drew his knife, waiting.

In the dead silence, panic stalked on padded feet through the chamber of darkness.

Ship's Officer Mark Langston tossed off a few choice expletives and permitted them to explode harmlessly within the confines of his book-lined office. He flipped open a desk drawer, removed a well-wom flask, and treated himself to a short snifter of Scotch. Then he replaced the flask, banished the contemptuous expression from his face, and glued a patient smile to his mouth.

"Come in," he said, bracing himself.

The office door opened with a calm precision that hinted at a hurricane just below the horizon. A tall, angular, hatchet-faced woman marched inexorably into the room with her teenage daughter following meekly in her wake.

"You are the Ship's Officer?" inquired the woman in a voice like a file sawing on iron.

"Right the first time," said Mark Langston.

"You're not the same man I spoke to last time," the woman stated suspiciously. "Where is Mr. Raleigh?"

"He jumped overboard," Mark Langston wanted to say.

"Mr. Raleigh is not on duty at the moment," Mark Langston said. "My name is Langston—may I be of service?"

"Well, I should certainly hope so. I am Mrs. Simmons, and this is my daughter Laura."

Mark Langston nodded and glanced at the note that Raleigh had left on his desk. As a small token of my esteem, I have willed you Mrs. Simmons, the note read. May God have mercy on your soul.

"What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Simmons?"

Mrs. Simmons sighed deeply, giving an excellent imitation of a death ratde. "It's this excruciating artificial gravity, Mr. Langston," she said. "I simply cannot stand it another moment. I'm having terrible pains around my heart and my back aches. I'm a nervous wreck. You've got to do something, my man. And my darling Laura absolutely can't sleep at night-she does need her sleep so, she's such a delicate child. Aren't you, Laura?"

"Yes, mother," said Laura in a delicate voice.

"Well now, Mrs. Simmons," Langston said carefully, struggling desperately to maintain the smile on his face. "I find this most difficult to understand. Do you have these symptoms back on Earth? You see, ship's gravity is Icept at all times at Earth normal—there's no difference whatever, in effect, between artificial gravity and the gravity you have lived with all your life."

"My good man," Mrs. Simmons said, drawing herself up haughtily, "are you accusing me of—"

"Not at all, not at all," Langston lied. He forced himself to remember Mr. Simmons and his power and influence with the Interstellar Board of Trade. "It's quite possible that the machinery is out of adjustment or something. Ill check into it at once, Mrs. Simmons. We will spare no effort in securing your comfort during your stay on our ship. In the meantime, won't you check with Dr. Ford on Three Deck? I'm certain that he'll be able to help you and your daughter."

Mrs. Simmons brightened visibly. "Oh, Mr. Langston!" she breathed. "Do you really think I require medical attention?"

"It's entirely possible, Mrs. Simmons," Mark Langston said, and meant it.

After mother and daughter had left, Langston got up from his desk and limped over to the private screen against the outside walL He flicked it on and an infinity of night reached coldly into his soul and pulled him out among a myriad of incredible stars.

There it was, right in his office with him: space, deep space, the endless darkness and the stars that had been his life, his very being. He lost himself in the ever-new immensities. This was space—the space that he had helped to conquer, the star trails that he had made his own. This was the strange world that he had chosen for a home. Out there, far beyond imagining, distant beyond belief, the men and the women that he had lived with, fought with, laughed with, flashed forever into the deeps of night. They carried the great adventure onward, always. And now . . .

And now he was no longer with them.

Mark Langston turned off the screen and limped back to his desk. They had opened up the greatest frontier of them all—and for what? For Mrs. Simmons and Laura? For stupidity and greed and ignorance? For wealthy tourists who made the Earth a world to be ridiculed? For what?

A red light flashed over his visibox. He switched it on. It was Stan Owens, the ship anthropologist. He looked excited, which was profoundly unusual.

"What's up, Stan? More of those pesky space pirates?"

"Cut the clowning, Father Time. We've run smack dab into the middle of something."

"On the Capella run? What is it—the Ultimate Boredom at last?"

"On the level, Mark. We need you in the control room on the double."

Mark Langston eyed his friend's face with sudden interest. "Hey," he said, "you're not kidding!"

"Come up and see for yourself," Owens smiled, and switched off.

Mark Langston left his office at a thoroughly respectable speed, hurried down the corridor with scarcely a limp, and caught the lift to the control room. He stepped out and instantly it hit him—the spirit, the feel of a ship up against the unknown. He had known that feeling a thousand times in his life, and he responded to it with a spreading grin.

Owens collared him and pulled him toward a knot of men gathered around a subsidiary computer. "Hang on tight, old son," the anthropologist said. "This may be too much for your ancient nervous system—this crate has hit the well-known jackpot."

The men stepped back to make room and Captain Kleberg welcomed Mark by shoving a computer report into his hand. 'Take a look at this, Mark," he said, running his fingers through his iron-gray hair. "I've about decided that the computer's psycho, or we're psycho, or both."

Langston examined the report with a practiced eye. It was a sub-space survey report—normal space being sub-space widi respect to their ship, the Wilson Longford, in hy-perspace—and seemed to be routine enough at first glance.

There was the usual coordinate check, the drift check, the hydrogen check, the distress beam check—nothing to get excited about. In fact—then he saw it.

"But that's impossible," he said.

"Agreed," said Captain Kleberg. "But there it is."

"You figure it out," Owens suggested.

Mark Langston checked the report again carefully. "Is this a gag?" he asked, knowing full well that it wasn't. "There cant be a ship down there."

"Just the same," pointed out the Navigation Officer, "thar she blows!"

"Maybe it's the Flying Dutchman," Owens offered.

Langston tried to think the thing through logically. But it simply wasn't logical. There evidendy was some sort of a ship down there, in normal space, light-years out from any planetary system. What was it doing there? How did it get there?

"Any distress calls of any sort?" he asked. "Dead silence," said Captain Kleberg. "And we can't get a blip out of her."

"How about positioning?"

"We're almost direcdy 'above' her," the Navigation Officer reported. "We're practically back-pedaling to keep from losing her."

"How about accelerations?"

"Hard to tell, but I'd guess that she's in free fall. Absolutely no energy tracings at all, and no radiations. She's dead."

Langston let that sink in for a minute. "Have you got a picture yet?" he asked finally.

"They're building one up downstairs," Captain Kleberg said. "It isn't an easy job, of course, but they should be getting something soon."

"Just wait until some of our noble human cargo gets wind of the fact that we're off our course and will miss scheduled landing time by a week or three," Stan Owens chuckled. "Well have everybody down on us like a pack of hyenas."

There was a whirring buzz, and a three-dimensional mockup thumped out of a chute. Captain Kleberg snatched it up and put it on a chart table where everyone could get a good look at it.

There was dead silence in the control room. "It just can't be," Captain Kleberg said finally, his voice very small.

"No," Mark Langston agreed softly. "But it is." The men stared at each other, searching for words that were not there.

They came up from the depths, spawned in hate, fed on fury, Collins could smell them, feel the warm currents from their bodies and the rush and surge of air currents from beating wings. They choked the chamber, filling it, strangling it, shooting up like gas under pressure from the world below. Like creatures from hell, and yet—

Collins edged back to the mouth of the tunnel and stopped, letting the rest of the rear guard slide into position around him. Differences were forgotten now, melted in the flame of danger; Collins smiled without humor. It was ironic—they respected him only as a fighter.

He floated down to the very floor of the chamber and touched the cold metal. He blanked his mind, watching his chance.

The other men came in high, as they always did, and he felt and smelled and heard the battle in the darkness above him. Knives and clubs and spears collided with clanging crashes and the echoes of harsh breathing filled the chamber with sound. He strained his eyes, trying to see. Something wet and sticky brushed his face: blood pumping in a warm pulsing stream from a punctured artery.

With a blind rage seething within him, a rage as much at himself as his enemies, Collins launched himself from the floor. His nostrils quivered and he angrily choked off a low animal growl of defiance in his throat He went up, high and hard, his knife extended in front of him. For a long, intolerable instant there was nothing. And then—contact

Collins cut and slashed with methodical accuracy, giving no warning and no quarter. Like so many men who see fighting for what it is, he cherished no illusions about it and was chillingly effective. His invisible antagonist fought in silence and stopped, suddenly. Collins moved on, pushing the body away from him. He went up again, slowly, trying to sort the sounds and smells and feelings of battle into some kind of a coherent pattern that would enable him to tell friend from foe. He hesitated, briefly, sensing danger, and then shifted just in time as something hissed past his head and struck his shoulder a numbing blow.

Fighting to see, Collins closed to the attack. The man almost got away from him, but he grabbed a foot and held on. The man suddenly lurched forward and up, and CoUins felt the rush of air from his wings. Desperately he lashed out with his knife. He had to get the mutant before he was smashed against a wall—those fragile wings gave the man an impossible advantage in the open air.

A foot kicked him over and over again, methodically, in the face. There was a complete absence of vocal sound, lending to the combat the unreal deadness of a dream. Collins twisted into position, ignoring the kicking foot, and slashed at a wing. The knife punched home, and Collins carefully ripped the thin membrane to shreds. His opponent faltered. Collins cut him again, and then was pushed away. Collins let him go and dived for the tunnel. He could feel the batde receding around him as the other men began to turn back. The smell of blood was sickening in the still air. His shoulder throbbed with pain and his throat was dry and thick with dust.

Collins darted into the tunnel, gasping for breath, and pushed himself forward. He hadn't gone ten yards before he contacted someone else—going the other way.

A knife whirred past his ear and he caught an arm and twisted. There was only a weak, hopeless resistance. Tired or wounded, or perhaps both, he thought grimly. He moved in for the kill, his own knife ready.

"You're beaten," he whispered. "Surrender."

By way of reply, a hand reached out of the darkness and fingernails clawed at his face. Collins closed in warily, seeking an opening. A cornered animal was always dangerous, he had read, and man was no exception. But he was sick of the killing, sick with horror and the smell of blood. His anger was gone, leaving the man. But he could see no way out. What could you do with such a man? When you gave him a chance for his life, he thanked you by renewed fury. His enemy was not a man, he caught himself thinking. He was an animal. Collins raised the knife.

"My spirit will return to destroy you," the man hissed weakly. "My spirit will not forget!"

Suddenly revolted by the thing he had almost done, Collins returned the knife to its sheath.

"You are my prisoner," he said quietly.

The man laughed in his face and clawed him again, feebly. Collins hit him once, wincing as his fist smashed into his jaw, holding on to the other's arm to keep him from floating away. Then he pulled the inert body with him down the tunnel, away from the chamber of death and into the endless darkness and the silence.

After turning the man over to Malcolm, and resting briefly in his quarters, Collins swam up through the dark tunnels to the captain's room. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and floated inside.

The captain's torch was burning as always. It was a wonderful thing, as all the special torches were with their combustion draft chambers. But more wonderful still was the soft, steady light from the myriad of stars that were suspended like gleaming jewels in the black velvet of the viewports. Collins drank in their beauty with his eyes and then turned toward the captain.

"Sit down, my boy," the captain said. "I was just having lunch."

The captain was eating alone at the little table in the center of the control room. His long, snow-white hair was silver in the flickering torchlight and his dark eyes flashed in his hard, deeply lined face. The captain had strapped himself into his chair and fastened the plate and glass to the nailed-down table. It was far simpler to eat while floating, but the captain refused to do so.

Collins slid into the chair across from him and buckled himself in place. He ate in silence for a moment, swallowing the sticky synthetics without relish and washing them down with drafts of water sucked up through a straw from a closed glass.

"We've got to find a way," Collins said finally.

"Yes. We lost a man."

"There must be a way."

"There is no way," the captain said slowly. "But we must keep trying."

Collins looked at the captain, his mind tired with worry. The captain was very old now, he thought. Very old, this man who had held them all together for so long. When he was gone—

"They are beginning to slip, my boy," the captain said. "I don't know how much longer we can hold them. They are turning into animals like the rest of them. And when that happens, we are through. The fools! Do they believe that the food and water will last forever? Time, time—we must have more time, and it is running out on us."

Collins shrugged. "We're losing the fight as it is," he pointed out. "Let's not kid ourselves. We need more than time, and dreams won't change the situation any."

"You're young yet, my boy," the captain said softly. "There will come a time when dreams will be all you have left."

Collins was nervous, sitting there in the great loneliness with the captain. The turn their conversation had taken worried him, and his worry was tinged with embarrassment. It was not good to sit in on another man's innermost thoughts; that was why there were barriers between human beings. And the captain was so old, sitting there—a shell of a man with his strength eaten away by long years spent in a futile battle. If there had been but one real victory, rather than an endless slow defeat. . .

But there hadn't been. And yet the captain must not give up,^for when he went down they all went down. 'This is a real problem, sir," he said, "a problem in science. As such, it has an answer. You've told me that all of my life. If it isn't true—"

"Oh, it's true, it's true," the captain sighed, running a thin hand through his snow-white hair. "It's true as far as it goes. But it isn't just a problem in science we have to face here— it's a problem in human relationships. We have to solve that problem first, and even then I'm no longer sure that we're capable of solving the other. It's been so long—"

"It's impossible," Collins stated flady, drawing the captain out. "It just couldn't have happened. What could have gone wrong? We've been over it a thousand times, all of us—studied the plans, the records, the theories. There must be an extra factor somewhere, some strange and unknowable—"

"Rubbish!" exclaimed the captain violendy, stung out of his apathy. "Let's have no metaphysical gibberish, my boy—not in this room."

"But how did it happen?"

"That's not the question," the captain snapped, his eyes flashing again. "The question is, what are we going to do about it? Here we are—accept that. Where do we go from here?"

Collins didn't answer him, for a good and simple reason. There wasn't any answer. Then he looked at the captain, who watched him wordlessly. He had not quit. He had fought and tried and worked and dreamed until his blood grew slow within him and still had not surrendered to the shadows and the darkness. He had nagged them and ridiculed them and hurt them—but he had kept them men.

Collins unfastened his belt and floated free of the chair.

"I'm going to see the other man I brought in," he said. "Maybe I can find a lead."

"Good luck, my boy," said the captain sofdy.

Collins pushed off against a brace and swam into the darkness. All life ended in death, that he knew. But it was how you met that death that made the difference, that marked off finally one man from another. When his turn came, as he sensed it was coming now, he wanted to go out the way a man should—and not like a mindless beast that screamed and struggled in a black vault of emptiness, unloved and alone.

The four men eyed each other over the bottle on Captain Kleberg's private table. All of them occupied chairs, but other than that their positions were remarkably dissimilar. Captain Kleberg sat in a remotely orthodox position, looking, Mark Langston thought, as though his best friend had just strolled in and punched him in the face. Stan Owens, an enigmatic smile playing around the comers of his mouth, had tilted his chair back at a precarious angle and propped his large and unlovely feet up on the table. Jim McConnell, the lanky chief engineer on the Wilson Longford, slouched far down with his long legs extending far underneath the table and his face just about even with the neck of the bottle. Mark Langston had turned his chair backwards and perched on it like a saddle, puffing steadily on a thoroughly venerable pipe and occasionally bombarding all concerned with an ominous cloud of blue smoke.

"Well, gentlemen," said Mark Langston, "we seem to have walked smack into a double-dyed purple whiz."

"You've said that before," Captain Kleberg pointed out gloomily. "I want to know what we're going to do about it."

"O.K.," said McConnell, hanging a cigarette at a miraculous angle out of his mouth, "here's the way I see it. First of all, we've found a derelict. It happens to be the old Viking, but what's the difference?"

"What's the difference?" echoed Mark Langston. The first ship, his mind whispered. The first of them all. "If you meant that, it's a singularly cold remark to make."

"Agreed," Jim McConnell nodded, smiling faintly. "If I meant it. I'm just trying to jolt you jokers down to earth, or at least to ship-level. We won't get anywhere with this ah-the-wonder-of-it-all attitude. That dead ship down there is the Viking, the first of the interstellar ships, the ship that vanished—the ship that was, in fact, an anachronism almost before it got started. But as far as we're concerned it might just as well be the Mudbatt X. With reference to this problem, it's just a ship and the sooner we start looking at it that way the sooner well start getting somewhere. End of speech, protected by copyright."

"Don't stop now, Jim," Captain Kleberg said. "Let's see where we get."

McConnell lit a new cigarette from the remnants of its predecessor and shifted his shoulders against the back of the chair until he was comfortable. "Here's the deal then, as I see it," he said slowly. "The Viking down there has been unreported for over two hundred years. As far as we can tell, there's no life on her—or at any rate none that's capable of handling her technological equipment. The Viking appears to be good and dead. But when she blasted off, back in the year 2100, she carried a crew of two hundred—one hundred men and one hundred women. Every schoolboy knows their story. First question: Is it possible that anyone is still alive on that ship?"

There was a long silence in Captain Kleberg's room while the four men thought of that lonely ship, alone for centuries, dead and silent and outmoded. A heroic thing, reduced to tragi-comic dimensions by the onrush of technology, and yet—

Mark Langston put his cold pipe on the table and leaned forward. "My guess is yes," he said carefully. "Yes, it's possible."

"Air?" questioned Captain Kleberg doubtfully. "Water? Food? Gravity? The ship is dead, you know—there's no question about that part."

Langston nodded. "Yes, I've taken that into account. Look at it this way: First of all, the Viking was not, of course, a faster-than-light ship. The trip to Capella was expected to occupy the better part of two hundred years, with the descendants of the original crew finishing the trip. The food would be synthetic, and there would of necessity be plenty. The air supply on the Viking was supplied by sealed hydro-ponic tanks, the valve of which, unless I'm greatly mistaken, were pressure affairs that operated independendy of the main power source. I think the air supply would hold out—it's at least possible. The water was carried in tanks and wouldn't be markedly affected by a power failure. Gravity? Well, there wouldn't be any, as far as I can see—"

"Man is a very adaptable animal," Stan Owens said, anticipating him. "He could survive—theoretically at any rate."

"That's it, then," McConnell said. "Until we find out differently, we'll have to assume that there is life of some sort still present in that hulk. Two hundred plus years isn't a fantastic length of time; there may very well be people on that ship. That takes care of our plan of action. It's simple. They're there, trapped. We're here, with a nice new ship. Solution: Go get them and bring them aboard."

Stan Owens' chair hit the floor with a bang.

"Beg pardon," he said, "but that's the one thing we can't do."

Mark Langston turned and looked at him.

Stan Owens picked up the empty bottle from the table and jabbed it in McConnell's general direction. 'Think a moment, all of you," he said. This thing isn't quite as simple as it looks and going off half-cocked isn't going to get us anything but a nice soggy fizzle."

"O.K., ape-man," McConnell sighed at the anthropologist. T might have known that you would come up with something complicated. You guys wouldn't fix a bicycle without a field report and culture analysis."

"Look," said Stan Owens patiendy. "Let's assume that everything Jim has said is true—if it isn't, if the ship is dead inside as well as out, it doesn't concern us. Let's assume that there are people, human beings, still alive on the Viking— people who have lived their entire lives in the darkness, who have never known gravity, who have lived in a world as different from ours as hydrogen is from uranium, who have lived in a static world of death and decay, a world slowly running down—"

A cold chill seemed to seep through the little room like an icy mist. The children of the Viking, Mark Langston thought with a feeling akin to awe, the strange children of the Viking—

"Let's not have any romantic hogwash, now," Stan Owens continued, waving the empty bottle. "We have no way of knowing how long the Viking has been a dead ship, nor do we know what happened to her. But the drive was automatic, wasn't it, Jim?"

McConnell nodded. 'That's right. An early atomic drive, kicking up a thrust about equal to a bit less than one-fifth light-year per year in terms of unit distance."

"It wouldn't have just failed," Mark Langston added. 'It must have been tampered with."

"Well, that's all conjecture," Owens said slowly. "The important point is that at best the ship has been dead for a good hundred and fifty years, otherwise it would have been contacted by the first faster-than-light ships that tried to hunt her down. That gives us a span of four or five generations living under those upsetting and difficult conditions."

The other men remained silent, watching him.

Jim McConnell shook his head. "O.K.," he said.

Stan Owens spun the bottle on the table with one hand. "We've got two possibilities," he explained. "One, they know full well what the score is. In that case, their whole lives, their very reason for being, is tied up with the Viking—that ship reaching Capella under her own steam and through her own efforts is the only thing that can make their living hell mean anything. Take that away from them and they are broken, dead. Take that away from them and you are murderers."

"And if they don't believe?" suggested Captain Kleberg.

The second possibility is tougher," said Stan Owens. "If they have completely adapted to their new environment, then the shock of putting them on this ship would probably be fatal. The change would be too much; their whole culture, the very fabric of their lives, would be shattered with one blow. Ignoring that little point meant the extinction of more people than I like to think about, on Earth and elsewhere, to say nothing of butcher-wars and revolutions. We are smarter now, or at least we like to think that we are."

Mark Langston nodded at his friend. He had seen enough in his life to back up everything Owens had said, with interest. When you were dealing with human beings, you ignored the human element at your risk. "There's the question of gravity, too," he said.

"Of course," Owens agreed. "If there's been no power on the Viking for over a century, and thus no artificial gravity, the sudden change would wipe them out—crush them like flies in a vice. And I dare say that Captain Kleberg wouldn't care to throw this ship into free fall from here to Capella with a load of unconditioned and generally hysterical passengers. We've got a culture too, you know."

Captain Kleberg gave his best approaching-the-guillotine smile. "Don't even think about it," he advised. "We'll all wind up in the funny room. But remember—we've got to make it fast, whatever we do. And no mistakes, of course. This may be a life or death matter for those people, and our own orbital error isn't going to be any joke, even for the computers. Ill hold this ship in position as long as necessary, but well have to get with it. If there are people on that ship—"

'That's enough 'ifs' for one session, I think," smiled Mark Langston, stoking up his pipe again.

The small but rugged space launch, utterly dwarfed by the vast distances all around her, came down with a wrenching whine—out of hyperspace and into normal subspace where the dead Viking waited. The shock of the transition stunned even the trained crew, and offered convincing evidence of why the great star ship, the Wilson Langford, could not be so maneuvered into normal space without a minimum of five days of physical and psychological conditioning for her passengers.

Mark Langston nursed the launch toward the dark shadow of the Viking, which was now visible to the naked eye. It floated ahead of them, cold and alone, like a vast creature of the ocean deeps that had grown old and tired and now only floated mindlessly with the currents it once had challenged. Despite the faint throbbing in his bad leg, Mark Langston felt better than he had in a long, long time. He was home, lost in the stars, and the weary years fell away from him one by one and left him young again.

The Viking swam nearer, dominating space. Mark Langston guided the launch with well-remembered skill.

The launch swung alongside the Viking and Mark Langston eased her in toward an exact velocity-match.

"How about that?" questioned Jim McConnell thoughtfully. "If we find anyone alive in there, and manage to do anydiing for them, what becomes of them when they chug into Capella some twenty-thirty years from now and find out that interstellar travel is already old-hat? You talk about destroying their values, Stan, but how do you think they're going to feel when they find out that it's all been for nothing, that they might as well have stayed home?"

The launch hovered next to the black hulk of the Viking and Mark Langston swung her abreast of the engine room and clamped her there with gravitraction beams.

"Space suits," he said shortly.

"That isn't quite as tough a problem as it looks like," Stan Owens explained as he struggled into his suit. "Remember that these are not the original members of the crew—they are a wholly new group, with new values. If they manage somehow to bring the Viking in, that in itself will be enough. Anyhow, in a sense they are the first. We'vegot lots of time before the Viking lands, if she does, and we can set the psychology boys to work in that interval. Don't worry—when the Viking approaches the Capella system she'll get a hero's— or is it heroine's—welcome that'll put all others to shame. And what's more it'll be completely genuine. There are other distinctions in life besides winning the race, you know."

"You seem to have this all figured to the last decimal point," laughed McConnell, "and we don't even know whether or not the Viking is empty. Nothing like looking ahead."

The efficient team of the launch, spacesuited for protection, swung the emergency air lock and cutter into position between the launch and the dark shell of the Viking. McCon-nell's crew set the cutters with meticulous care. There was a brief whine and the lights dimmed. That was all.

"Let's go," said Mark Langston.

Cautiously, ready for anything, the men moved through the air lock one by one into the black interior of the dead Viking.

Four "days" passed. A class was taught and a battle fought, and an old man spoke with his son . . .

Floating through the dark tunnels, smelling the cold metal all around him, Collins thought of destiny. Destiny, so the books would have you believe, was what you made of it: fate was up to you. But it was a strange destiny, surely, that had placed him in this dark asylum, protected for the moment against the frigid death outside, even deluded into a kind of comfort, but sinking, always sinking, into a living death in the black shadows below.

Sometimes, it did seem hopeless. Without the captain, he knew, they would be lost—the captain would lead them to safety if anyone could. He thought of the early days of the Viking, the early halcyon days that he had read about, when the scientists had lived in a veritable artificial paradise, with unlimited time at their disposal and the company of intelligent, congenial friends to make the long hours pass quickly. Collins wished fervently that he might have lived then, in the golden age-Ruthlessly, he thrust the thought from his mind. What was it that the captain had said? Man could not move backwards and survive. He must go forward, not to the good old days, but to the good new ones.

But how much science had they managed to keep alive?

Was it enough? Time was running out, and the problems yet to be solved were staggering. What was wrong with the engines? Even if they knew, could they fight their way through the world of the other men to the engine room? Where was the ship? If they could manage somehow to bring her to life again, would they have time to go anywhere—go before the synthetics were just a memory and the ship turned into a total horror of starving maniacs?

And how long could even die captain bind the men to his will—men who had never known anything but darkness and free flight, men who with each passing "day" became more and more adapted to their ship asylum in the black sea of space and less and less suited for the lives of human beings? Was their fight only a hopeless race up a blind, fantastic alley?

Perhaps the younger men were right. Perhaps they should simply treat the other men, with their backsliding primitive culture and superstition, as animals and try to exterminate them to make the synthetics last longer. Perhaps, from the initial revolution down to the present, it had all been their fault. Perhaps they should forget about being men, forget about saving the ship, and just make the best of the life with which they were confronted.

Collins shook the thought from his mind. That way only seemed to be the easy way, he knew. That way meant death for all of them. The time would come, the time must come, when they would need those savage people who now crouched around their strange fires in the black world below.

Collins drifted around a comer and there was Malcolm.

Malcolm, now growing old but still with a twinkle in his eyes, seemed dignified as always in the light of his small torch. He floated rigidly in the air, his spine unbending and his clothing fauldessly neat as usual.

"I say, Collins," he said briskly, "good to see you."

Collins smiled. Malcolm had discovered from the records that his parents had been British, and he had therefore read all the books he could find upon an incredibly distant England and her people. He had picked up what he fancied to be British phrases, and he used them doggedly. A pathetic thing, to be sure, and a trifle comic, but Collins respected the man's effort to build a desperate individual personality in the midst of chaos. Once he had even tried to find tea, although he hardly knew what it was. "How's the prisoner?" Collins asked.

"Quite well," Malcolm replied. "He seems to be much stronger now than when you brought him in. Beasdy business. What are you going to do with him?"

"Couldn't say," Collins shrugged. "You go and get some sleep and 111 have a talk with our friend. O.K.F'

"Righto," Malcolm said brighdy and shoved off down the corridor.

Collins smiled again. Malcolm always made him feel better somehow. He unlocked the corridor door and floated in to where the other man waited in the darkness. The man watched him steadily, without fear. Collins could feci his presence in the room, vibrant, unafraid.

"You have come to kill me," the man stated calmly.

"No," said Collins. "I only want to talk to you. You will not be harmed."

The man laughed in his face.

Collins ignored him and fired a torch. The flame sputtered and caught as the torch built up air pressure, pushing the shadows back and filling the room with warm orange light. Collins narrowed his eyes to slits against the glare and looked at the man. He returned the gaze frankly. He had a strong face, Collins decided. His hair was long and wild and his teeth were sharp and white. His clothing was old and wrinkled, but not unclean. There seemed to be intelligence in his eyes. Or was it only the uncertain light from the torch that made it seem so?

"Start talking," the man said shortly. "Or do you always speak without words?"

"My name is Collins," he said, forcing a smile. "I'm the one who—"

T remember," the man said. ,

"Do you have a name, or must I make up one? I'm quite

willing to call you Thing or Ug, but maybe you prefer your

own name."

"My name is Owens."

"O.K., Owens. Now, look—I'd like to help you if I can. I know you're in a difficult position here—"

"I'll do my worrying," Owens said. "You do yours."

Collins felt himself oddly drawn toward this man before him. A savage? Perhaps. But courage was courage, and even in an enemy it commanded respect.

"You know you could be killed," he told him quiedy. "I may not be able to save you for long. Our food supplies are short. I know what would happen to me if I were your captive."

"You might make a good meal at that," Owens stated.

"You," Collins informed him, "are not exactly a born diplomat. Doesn't the prospect of death mean anything to you? Your situation is not ideal, you know."

"Neither' is yours," the man said surprisingly. "I have known death all my life. I know that it comes whether you are afraid of it or not, so why be afraid? Your own life will soon be over; perhaps you would do well to reserve your charity."

Collins floated toward the man through the shadows, his own eyes cold and hard. He gripped Owens' arm tighdy and applied pressure until his fingers ached. Owens did not flinch and continued to meet his gaze squarely.

"What did you mean by that?" whispered Colh'ns tensely. "What do you know about my life?"

"Your world will be dead within twenty sleep periods, and you will die with it," the man said, his voice edged with hate. The world will be ours."

Those are big words," Collins said, fingering his knife with his free hand. "But they are only words."

Owens smiled coldly. "You think that we are fools because we do not believe as you do," he said evenly. "You think that we are fools because we know the stars are gods. But we know other things as well, my stupid friend." "Such as?" suggested Collins, drawing his knife. "You threaten me?" the savage asked, and laughed. Collins pressed closer, his heart pulsing in his throat. What did this man know?

'The tanks, the air tanks," Owens hissed, his eyes wild and bright. "You think we don't know where the air comes from? We do know, and the tanks are in our part of the world— we're going to seal you off from your air, and the work has already begun."

Collins floated back, stunned. The air-Before he had a chance to recover himself, the door to the room burst open. Young Lanson hurtled through, his body quivering with excitement.

"There he is, there he is!" Lanson screamed, pointing at Owens. "Kill him!"

"Calm down," Collins snapped. "What's the matterP' "Matter?" whispered Lanson hoarsely. "You fool, it's the captain, the captain!"

Collins just stared at him, unable to speak. "Your father is dead," Lanson said, his voice breaking with hysteria. "He's been murdered."

Slowly, inexorably, Collins felt the fury creep through his veins. Not rage, not hot, blinding madness, but fury—cold, chill fury that seeped like ice through his body, into his heart, his mind. The captain-Shielded now by a wall of ice, his mind took command. He gestured toward Owens. "Bring him," he said shortly, and launched himself into the dark corridor. He left his torch with Lanson and hurtled through the darkness that was his home, his mind refusing even to think of what the captain's death meant to them now. He must think ahead, keep moving . . .

He swam into the control room, and there was the captain. His chest was red where they had pulled the knife out, and he was very still. His people were clustered around him in the control room and the torch cast broken shadows on the walls, but the captain could not see them. His dead eyes looked outward, out to the silver stars, and now he was alone.

"Dad," said Collins, and his voice was very small. He could not speak further. The captain had been a symbol to him all his life, a force, a principle, that held the ship together. But now, in death, he was only an old man again, an old man with snow-white hair, and Collins was his son.

Collins felt a hand touch his. He looked up to see Helen, his wife, who knew that she could not comfort him but was brave enough to try. Collins squeezed her hand to show that he understood and then turned to his people.

"We will elect a new captain soon," he said quiedy. "I will not try to assume the position unless I am asked. We have other problems before us now."

There were murmurs from the crowd, but Collins ignored them. He moved slowly over to where Owens was floating, guarded by Lanson. He looked at Owens coldly for a full minute, staring into his eyes. He waited, smiling very slightly. Then he hit him in the face.

Owens reeled back, shaking his head. Collins hit him again.

"We're going to get through to the engine room," Collins hissed, his face very close to his prisoner's. "This time we're going to get through, and you're going to take us." He hit him again and watched the blood trickle from a split hp.

"Understand?"

Lanson pressed in, knife blade gleaming. "Kill him," he screamed. "Kill the—"

"Shut up," Collins looked at the man once, and that was enough. "We need our friend here. The other men are blocking off our air supply. This is our last chance. If we fail this time, we die."

The crowd shifted and moved with the shadows and tension filled the air.

"If he won't take us through—" one voice began. "Hell take us," Collins replied. "Ji we can't fix the drive after we get there—"

"We've got to try," Collins said coldly. "I tell you, those engines couldn't have failed! They were tampered with, shut off! If one man can turn them off, another can turn them on." He paused. "Ill kill any man who stands in my way."

"I'm on your side, old boy," Malcolm said, and didn't smile.

Collins shot him a glance and then relaxed a little. "Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to strike any heroic poses."

Malcolm shrugged. "You lead," he said. "Ill follow."

"No, that won't do," Collins pointed out. "You pick a detail and stay back here—we may not come back, you know. Set the controls, and make certain that the gravity is aditisted to not more than one-fifth Earth-normal. Understand?"

"Righto," said Malcolm, and moved off about his task.

"Webb, Renaldo, Echols—you older men who learned your science from the captain—are you with me?"

The men smiled their assent. One muttered something that sounded suspicious like "At last" and went to get his equipment. Spirit and enthusiasm, as though kindled out of the very air, needing only an initial spark, filled the chamber.

Collins spun Owens around and twisted the man's arm up behind his back. "O.K.," he whispered. "Let's go."

Lanson hesitated. "Now?"

"Now," said Collins flatly. "We can pick up weapons and synthetics on the way."

Quite suddenly, Owens twisted himself loose. He floated there before them, his keen eyes flashing.

"Fools!" he said clearly. "He would lead you all into death. We would be butchered before we even drew near my people's world. Do you think that my people are imbeciles, that you can simply move in and succeed where all others have failed? Your leader is a fool!"

Collins icily hit the man again in the face. Owens just laughed at him, wiping the blood away with his hand.

"You prove nothing," Owens said calmly. "You cannot answer my arguments with your fists."

Collins moved in close again and there was death in his eyes. "It's up to you to get us through," he told the man, beginning to feel the doubt slink back into the chamber and

take its ugly hold on the people. "If you do not, we'll tear you

apart—inch by inch."

Owens hesitated, cold sweat standing out on his forehead. "There is a way," he said finally. "There is one way—" Collins gripped his arm, digging his nails into the man's

flesh.

"If you cannot go through," Owens pointed out, "you have to go around."

Collins felt his body go dead within him. Around? That

meant—

"There's only one way," Owens said. "We'll have to go . . . Outside."

Stars. It was one thing to view them from the shelter of the control room but a different proposition entirely when seen from Outside. Cold they were, and close—it seemed to Collins that he had only to reach out a spacesuited hand to pluck an ice-diamond from its field of velvet black. If he should lose his footing, float off into nothingness, forever alone-He tried not to think about it. If the dark and brooding Viking had seemed quiet in her strange Odyssey through the star-seas, how much more was he conscious of the silence now. It was not merely silence, but an absence of all sound, utter and complete. The old radios of the suits no longer functioned; the air supply was uncertain. Collins almost fancied that his breathing was already flat and stale.

Inch by inch, foot by slow agonizing foot, the men pulled themselves like ants along the silent side of the Viking. Collins could see the monstrous, incredible figure of Owens ahead of him, like a robot-suit without a human being in it. Behind him he sensed his people: Webb, Echols, Renaldo, their equipment strapped to their backs, feeling their way along the emergency guy rod even as he was doing. Were they good enough? The thought crept, unbidden, into his mind. They had worked hard, they were good, but they had learned under terrible handicaps. Their tools were inadequate. Could they fix the drive? If not-Getting out of the Viking in their old spacesuits had been something of a feat in itself, although the problem was not in getting through the small air lock but in not getting blown through it into infinity. Getting back into the ship again through the engine room was, to say the least, going to be something else again. Owens had said that there was an operable air lock there that he had seen, one that could be opened from Outside, but—Was the man leading them all to their deaths? Was this all simply a last, ironic gesture of defiance?

Collins inched his way along. He had no choice, he realized. It was act now or not at all. A chance, however desperate, was still a chance. Owens . . . there was something strange about the man.

Collins stared at the cold metal side of the Viking as he crept along it. In there, separated from him by scant feet, were the other men, the children of the revolutionaries. He was in their territory now, their part of the ship, where they gathered around their great synthetic fires and lived then-proud but futile lives, sliding back, back, back into a cold death in an empty ship.

Could they be saved, turned to use, if the ship were recovered? Collins had always said that they could, and he believed it. For all their differences, for all their strangeness, these were yet people—people who had chosen to follow a different path from his, but people none the less. A common goal, a common hope, might yet unite the two. And all hands would be needed if the Viking were to come through at last.

Collins smiled bitterly. What was that expression he had read in his youth? Don't count your chickens before they're liatched. Collins laughed, and the sound was eerily deafening in the closeness of his suit. He had never seen a chicken, and he was unworried about the hatching of an egg. He didn't have any eggs.

His stomach was a hollow knot within him and the palms of his hands, although beginning to freeze, were clammy with sweat. It seemed to him that he had been crawling for an eternity, crawling forever, crawling through the night and under the merciless stars. The engine room—where was the engine room?

They made it. Somehow, they made it. One minute he was crawling inch by inch along the endless guy rod and the next he had stopped, behind Owens. He breathed a cold breath of relief. There, bulging oddly out from the side of the dark Viking, was an air lock. Owens had maneuvered himself into position in front of it and was attempting to turn a valve handle. It did not move. Owens waved a gloved hand urgentiy.

Collins managed to get himself into position next to the other man, and together they twisted at the valve. It didn't budge. Collins felt the cold seeping into his suit and his lungs were choked and constricted. He looked at Owens. Owens looked at him, and for a moment they hung there, motionless, on the brink of eternity.

Then Collins waved to Echols, who slowly made his way over to join them. Wordlessly, Collins fumbled with the pack on Echols' back. It was slow work and his hands were very cold in their thick, insulated gloves. But he finally managed to extract a large hammer. Clumsily, he signaled to Owens and Echols to hold onto him. They braced themselves and got a firm grip on his legs.

Desperately, Collins swung the hammer at the valve. He knew that he might jam it hopelessly, but he had no time now for niceties. The valve had to be jarred loose somehow, and that very quickly. The cold was growing worse.

Collins swung the hammer with as much force as he could muster in his awkward position and then the three men hit the valve together, pulling and tugging and clawing at it with the frenzy and the strength of men who see death staring them icily in the face.

The valve moved. With numbing fingers, they spun it until it would move no more. Then Collins and Owens grasped the handle. Together they heaved with all their strength. Nothing happened. The stars seemed to creep nearer— They pulled again, despair lending strength to their numb muscles. Collins gasped, his heart pounding in his throat. Had it moved? Was it frozen? Therewith a sudden, silent explosion the air-lock door puffed outward. The men held on and then moved into the small air lock one by one, almost completely filling it. Coughing for breath and numb with cold, they sealed the outer door again and went to work on the inner one. Collins tasted blood in his throat and a dead whiteness was washing over his brain.

This time, it was easier. The inner door burst open as the ship's air rushed into the air lock and then Collins led his men into the ship. Instandy, without waiting even to look around them, the men ripped off each other's helmets and gulped in great drafts of heady air. Never before in the lives of any of them had air tasted so sweet; never before had they fully realized the ecstasy of breathing.

When he had partially recovered, Collins secured a synthetic torch from Renaldo's pack and coaxed it into flame. Light leaped out, blinding his eyes, and the room jumped into sharp relief. Owens had not lied. Collins felt something that might have been tears start to his eyes as he looked around him.

They were alone in the engine room.

Collins rallied his mind, still somewhat stunned from Its brush with an unfamiliar Outside, and set to work. The first requirement was safety and he floated across the chamber and checked the after door. It was closed, but unlocked. He threw the switch on it and then turned back to his companions.

The next necessity was light. Together, the men kindled torches and planted them strategically around the room. The light was flickering and uneven, but it would have to do. Even at that, it hurt their eyes; Collins doubted that they could have stood much more.

He looked around the engine room, and his doubts returned.

The main plutonium pile, together with its water reactant,

was of course invisible behind its graphalloy shielding. If the trouble proved to be not at the surface, but deep within the pile itself, Collins knew that the situation was probably hopeless. But he felt a strange exhilaration none the less. Here, at last, was a straight problem in technology: a problem too difficult for his limited means, perhaps, but still a problem he could sink his teeth into.

Collins eyed the shielding, and the dials and switches with a feeling akin to awe—not superstitious awe, nor unreasoning wonder, but simply a healthy respect for a supreme accomplishment of his people. This was the power that had lifted the Viking long ago from the bonds of Earth, carried her beyond Pluto and into interstellar space. And this was the power that had been silent for more than a century. Had the power failed the men, or had the men failed the power? It was no mere rhetorical problem. Upon its solution hinged the fate of Earth's first emissary to the stars.

The men set to work with a will. Collins, Echols, Renaldo, and Webb, the cream of the ship's scientists now that the captain was gone, went at their job with the cool precision of men who have studied and planned for many lonely years for just such an eventuality. Owens stood alone, watching, making no sound, with his face beginning to swell painfully from the blows he had received. The chamber was quiet, but filled with a tense, electric anticipation that was a tangible thing.

Invisible behind its shield, the great pile waited. Outside, hovering beyond the air lock, the stars floated in austere splendor . . .

The crew of four worked on, absorbed in their problem, oblivious to time. The silence was broken only by the harsh breathing and the short, staccato sentences as the men exchanged information and asked questions. They had pitifully little to go on, with their limited instruments, but they had knowledge and understanding. And they had something else— a burning, unquenchable ferocity of purpose that would not be denied.

Man was writing another chapter now—and Collins and his tiny band would not give up.

Time passed as the minutes supped into hours and the hours crept forward into a day and on.

Finally, they had done all they could.

"It all checks, as far as I can see," said Webb, rubbing his bloodshot eyes, his great beard floating free in the air.

Renaldo nodded. "Someone threw the rods," he agreed. "That's all—there could have been no other failure. Or why are the rods in place?"

Echols, thin and pale, said nothing. There was only one thing to try, his expression seemed to say. They must simply try it, and if it failed then that was that.

Collins was the first to look up. Startled, he surveyed the engine room with quick eyes. "Owens," he said quietiy. "He's gone."

The others followed his gaze to the air-lock door, almost without interest. They had greater problems than Owens to worry about; the man's usefulness was at an end.

"He didn't get out the door into the ship," Renaldo offered. T would have noticed that. He's gone Outside."

"Why?" speculated Collins, and then let it drop. It could not concern them now.

"I guess we're as ready as we'll ever be," Webb said shortly, a tight litde smile on his hps.

"Sequence pull," Collins said.

No man spoke what was in his heart, for there were no words. Even their thoughts were under control; they thought of the problem before them and nothing else.

One by one, the damping control rods were pulled. There were eight of them; Renaldo pulled the last.

Nothing happened. There was a deathly silence. Collins held his breath. It might be that Malcolm, in the control room, had not followed instructions. Or they themselves had miscalculated. Or—

A tiny, feeble clicking sounded in the room. In the silence, it was almost deafening as each fragile click was magnified in the listeners' imagination until it became a thundering roar.

"The counters," whispered Collins. "The counters—"

With a mounting intensity, the clicks increased in both numbers and strength. They beat a tattoo in the chamber, a tattoo that modulated into a smooth whir of power.

Suddenly, there was light: white, blinding light that slashed at the mind and burned into eyeballs. Someone screamed, then choked it off.

A crushing, terrible force leaped from the floor and smashed the men down. They fell sprawling, gasping for breath, flecks of blood touching the corners of their mouths with crimson. They were pressed into the hard floor—it seemed that they must press through it entirely and out into space to perish.

A humming roar filled the engine room and the great ship, still for numberless years, vibrated with a surge of power and energy.

"Wrong," gasped Echols hoarsely, his mouth pulled out of shape by the terrible pressure. "What went wrong?"

"Nothing," coughed Collins, pulling himself along the floor like a snake. "That's it—don't you see? Nothing."

The four men stared at each other then, wincing from the pressure pull and the glare of the white lights. And there, prostrate, in fearful pain, they smiled.

The dead Viking had come back from a nameless grave; now, at last, she lived again.

Captain Kleberg, his iron-gray hair neatly combed, leaned back in his chair and with an expression almost of contentment on his face puffed on a pipe which had seen better days. Mark Langston, Jim McConneU, and Stan Owens challenged their chairs in their usual ways and perhaps drank more of Captain Kleberg's Scotch than the rule book strictly allowed.

Mark Langston's leg was throbbing unpleasantly but he ignored it. The murmur of the vibrations, the distant hum of buzzers, the clicking of instruments, the far-off song of the jets—all these were once more blended together into the music he had known. What he had done, and what he had seen, on the dark Viking had washed his bitterness away as though it had never existed. He could look his fellow man in the eye again, with pride. That was one of those things you never discussed with anyone, that stayed bottled up within you always. But that was also one of the things that counted in the long run.

"They never would have had a prayer alone," Stan Owens said. "Not a prayer."

"Hardly," agreed McConnell. "It was almost more than we could manage, even with the power unit from the launch, to clear that drive and rig the rods so they could handle them. They wouldn't have had as good a chance as a man trying to build a spaceship with a screw driver."

"From one point of view they were ridiculously overconfident in even trying to get that ship going again," Owens said thoughtfully, sipping his drink. "That was one reason the captain had to go—he knew too much to try. As long as he lived, the situation was static; if he had remained in command we couldn't have done a thing."

The captain. Mark Langston chewed on the stem of his pipe but didn't light it. He could see the captain now, alone in that great control room, his old eyes alert as he listened to them explaining to him why he had to relinquish his command for the good of his ship. He could hear Owens' quiet voice showing him- how his men put their trust in him as a symbol, and waited for him to save them—waited too long. He could hear the captain's slow, careful questions. And he could seethe knife, the sudden knife, the knife they had not been able to stop. The captain, sizing up the situation, had taken his own life to give his people the best possible chance. No man had ever given more.

McConnell hung a cigarette at an impossible angle out of his mouth. "You feeling any better?" he asked Owens. "You took quite a beating in there."

Stan Owens fingered his battered face ruefully. "I didn't see any other way to handle it," he said. "Next time 111 just walk through a meat grinder."

Stan Owens. Mark Langston looked at his friend. It had all been his plan, his responsibility—and he, more than any other man, Iiad brought life again to the lost Viking. The old captain, his son Collins, Webb, Renaldo, Echols, the strange and wonderful Englishman Malcolm—these would one day be household names, known to every schoolboy from the saga of the first of the interstellar ships. But who would ever hear the name of Stan Owens, save perhaps as a dimly remembered legend, a ghost-name? Would historians of the future ever figure out what really had happened on tliat dark ship—and would they correctly identify Owens as the "savage" who had led Collins to the engine room? Would they puzzle unduly over the extra air lock that had not been present when the ship left Earth? Would they ever understand that a switch had been made with Collins' original prisoner, with Owens taking over with his story of a vanishing air supply to goad the desperate Collins into action?

It had been a masterly plan, considering the time handicaps under which H was devised and executed. The prisoner they liad removed from under old Malcolm's eyes had been closeted and given a strong psychological conditioning—he himself Itad helped in that—so that he would exert a favorable influence among his people when the ship came to life again.

It would take the Viking thirty years or more to finish her incredible voyage to CapeUa. But slie would get there and find a subtly directed welcome that would surpass her wildest dreams. Civilization would thrill to Iter story, and Collins and Webb and Renaldo and Echols would be immortalized in story, picture, and legend.

And Stan Owens? Jim McConneU? Captain Kleberg? Members of the complement of the Wilson Langford, inexcusably late on a standard run from Earth—except in a few forever-secret records, they would be unknown.

And it did not matter—that was the best part of it.

Collins stood alone in the midst of the noise and activity of the control room. The white lights beat down on him and even behind his standard dark glasses his eyes hurt. To every man, woman, and child on the ship, he was the captain now— with one exception. To Collins himself, there would always be only one captain.

He walked carefully over to the viewport, forcing his untrained muscles to carry him through the light gravity. It would be years, he knew, before they could stand one-half normal gravity—but they would make it.

Collins stood alone, looking out at the stars his father had loved. Very sofdy then, so that only he could hear, he whispered a promise:

"We're coming."

"Finished," he said.

Kit went back into his arms.

The space liner Delilah sped on. She traveled, now, at some two thousand times the speed of light. In a day she covered nearly twice the average distance between solar systems. In a week she would go from one star cluster to another. In a month from one quadrant to another. In a year she would travel farther than mankind had expanded in the first two thousand years of space travel.

Presently, almost reluctantly, Brent and Kit moved back toward the passengers' quarters. In the air-lock that led in they were again pressed closely together. But this time Brent bent down hungrily to the face lifted up to him.

Later in Den Harlow's cabin, Brent closed and locked the door. He took the second of the two essential cases from his pocket.

"This is a microwave relay," he explained. "I was working on ships out in the Cephis cluster, you remember. This is a gadget used to test circuits when you don't want to be right on the spot. The relay box is out near the ship's skin. This controls it. I've got a dozen different circuits lined in to that box, and from here I can work with any one of them. As long as I have this in my hand, I should be able to run the ship from anywhere in it, only since I can't see outside the ship, it's no use for navigating."

He explained the manner of his rewiring job. Of course the ancient practice of bulky insulation had long since been abandoned. Nowadays, dipped in dun lacquer, a wire became insulated by a transparent, almost infinitesimal film which was proof against any voltage.

He recounted the Thommasson Law, which explains the superconductivity of mercury and tin and other metals at four degrees Kelvin. He explained that he had made his connections to his relay box by first painting a stripe of insulation along the ship's girders, and then had painted a narrower stripe of dissolved superconductor in the middle. A superconductor has literally no electrical resistance at all. A thread the size of a spider's web will carry a hundred thousand amperes without heating. So Brent had very simply and effectively concentrated all the controls of the Delilah at his remote-controlled relay by means of strips of practically invisible lacquer. And he should now have the ship entirely obedient to him in his cabin.

"We'll shake 'em up a bit first," he said tensely, "and then send some dot-dash stuff on their lighting system."

Kit watched his face. He opened the relay-control box. He pushed a button. Instantly there was the dizzy spiralling of all space and a feeling of acute nausea. The Delilah's overdrive was off again. He left it off for three seconds. He pressed another button. The spiralling—in reverse—and again the nausea. The ship was again traveling at two thousand times the speed of fight. He left it on three seconds, and cut it, and left it off three seconds, and threw it on again. He did it with deliberate rhythm, so there could be no doubt that it was being done by intention.

"The passengers will panic again," he said, "but I can't help that!"

He gave them a series of jolts by flicking the overdrive on and off.

"Now 111 talk to them," said Brent. "This is the ticklish part."

He began to press and release another button on the relay box. It was dot-dash communication, utterly primitive in form but still used for emergency communication by spacecraft. As Brent pushed and released his button, the lights in the crew's quarters and all the working part of the ship dimmed and brightened. It would amount to the most self-evident yet untraceable form of signaling.

"I a-m s-t-o-w-a-w-a-y," he ticked off. "Y-o-u c-a-n-n-o-t f-i-n-d m-e."

The light in the cabin went out. Brent groped in his bag and a tiny but very fierce bluish-white battery lamp glowed. It lighted the small room, with Den Harlow watching, and Kit looking warmly at Brent.

"Smart man, the Skipper," said Brent grimly. "He thinks fast. When I started sending him signals, he turned out our lights. If I demanded to have them back on again he'd know a passenger was responsible."

He ticked off:

"I w-i-1-1 r-e-s-t-o-r-e c-o-n-t-r-o-1 t-o y-o-u i-f y-o-u p-r-o-c-e-e-d t-o n-e-a-r-e-s-t h-a-b-i-t-a-b-l-e p-l-a-n-e-t a-n-d 1-a-n-d a-n-s-w-e-r v-i-a c-r-e-w 1-i-g-h-t-i-n-g s-y-s-t-e-m."

"What could he do?" asked Kit breathlessly, "if he won't believe you?"

"He could pump air out of the passengers' quarters," said Brent. "But he couldn't bleed it out into space while we're in overdrive. Not unless he went crazyl"

He watched a tiny dial on the relay-control box.

A long time later, the dial on his control box kicked. He watched it.

"He's agreed," he said skeptically. "My guess is he'd have to shoot all his crew if he didn't. But he's in a bad fix!" He signalled again, for a long time.

"I've told him his new speed and given him ten hours to find a planet. I told him how to handle the ship on planetary approach. Now we'll see what happens."

He put the case in his pocket. He unlocked the door. He put out the light from his bag before he opened it.

Blackness pervaded the passengers' lounge. A woman was weeping hysterically. Then someone flicked on a pocket lighter. It was a tiny point of light. The overdrive went off. It stayed off for minutes. Brent murmured: "He's picking a nearby solar system—astrogation." The overdrive went on again. Kit said:

"Shouldn't the . . . passengers be given some hope?"

"Not yet," said Brent.

There was a long wait. A tense wait. Then the lights came on.

There were crewmen coming out of the bar and the kitchen and the steward's airlock. They had blasters bearing on all who stirred. They were frightened, as well as desperate. A man in a skipper's uniform, with dark brows almost meeting over his forehead, glared at the again-terrified passengers.

Brent said sharply to the two beside him, "Get hold of something! Quickly!"

He caught at a chair rail on the wall with his right hand. His left went swiftly into his pocket.

The skipper said, raging, "Go ahead! Wipe them out!"

He raised his blaster to aim at Den Harlow.

And then all weight vanished. The ship's artificial gravity went off.

Brent shifted hands, holding himself steady with his left hand. The skipper did not realize, for a moment. He raised his blaster. As his arm and the heavy weapon rose, his body tilted gracefully forward. The blast made a spurt of smoke from the floor. Then Brent fired with his soundless pocket weapon. There were shrieks of terror from the passengers.

They fell—endlessly, horribly, interminably. Their feet did not press upon the floor. They could not flee or dodge. They could not even turn their bodies. If a woman tried to thrust her child behind her, she found herself floating inches from the floor and the child an uncontrollable floating object which moved her as she moved it. A man lifted his hands before his eyes to shut out the sight of doom, and his body rotated grandly so that he floated face-down. There was not a person who could move from the spot where he had been standing— because there was no traction of his feet upon the floor. But there was no movement of a body's member which did not change the angle of the body to the floor and walls and ceiling. And there was the sensation of ghastiy falling towards infinity .. .

But Brent was anchored. His first shot had killed the skipper as the skipper's aim was made impossible by his lack of weight. There was bedlam. Crewmen, their faces contorted, tried to shoot, but they could not aim either. To move one's hand meant that one's body moved also, in the opposite direction. And the crew was half-mad anyhow.

Holding fast and steadied by his grip, Brent fired with complete ruthlessness. He found himself gripped, and Kit was steadying herself by him and shooting gallantly, too. And Den Harlow had not heard Brent's command in time to obey. But he floated calmly, and turned his wrist only, and deliberately pulled trigger when, and only when, his blaster bore upon a crewman with a blaster he was trying to use.

Brent bellowed, "Throw your blasters away or every man dies!"

Six men threw down their blasters and bleated for mercy. They were in such a state of panic and horror that their cries were unintelligible.

Then Brent put his left hand back in his pocket and the ship's artificial gravity came back on. Passengers and crew members alike toppled to the floor from whatever position they had assumed with relation to it.

"Harlow!" barked Brent. "Pick up those blasters! Shoot any man who tries to get them again!"

Kit's father moved forward grimly to help. Kit pressed close against Brent, desperately ready to fire in his defense, until the crew members who survived were backed into one of the cabins and the door locked upon them with a key Harlow nonchanlantly pulled out of his pocket.

"Now," said Brent, his eyes burning. "We've got to see if there are any more. They figured they had to yield to an unknown stowaway, but they weren't going to let anybody tell about them after he got off. Distribute those blasters where they'll do some good, Harlow! Who's coming with me to the control room?"

Brent surveyed the situation. The control room was familiar enough, if old-fashioned. Panels of the wall were dented and smashed. Somebody had gone out of his head with panic. But the instrument board was unharmed. Kit was close behind him, her brows knitted.

"Hm . . ." said Brent. "I'm no astrogator, but I can manage after a fashion."

He pushed a button marked "General Communication." He spoke into a microphone.

"I am about to cut the overdrive once more," he said firmly, "to make sure we are headed for a planetary system. I will let you know what I find."

His voice would resound through every portion of the Delilah's fabric. The passengers might still be fearful, but that could not be helped.

Brent cut the drive. With the ship's main telescope he inspected the star straight ahead. He made quick estimates.

"We are within ten minute's travel of a solar system," he said to the microphone. "I am going to take the Delilah there and land."

He slipped the ship into overdrive. He smiled at Kit. Then he said:

"Orders for former members of this ship's crew. Harlow, take the spacemen down to the exit-port. Have them carry all dead bodies of other spacemen—no passengers. Have them ready to land."

He smiled again at Kit. Time passed, and passed, and passed. Brent threw off the overdrive. The stars sprang into being all around the ship. And they were amazingly close to a habitable world. Brent regarded them critically and said:

"Passengers will not land until all members of the crew are off. This is an order!"

He had no authority to give it, but there would be no protest.

He swung the ship on her gyros. He let down, slowly at first but then with increasing confidence. Mountains appeared below. They swelled and grew large. He saw signs of cultivation—not intensive, but there were humans here.

He could see trees. He slowed the Delilah's rate of descent. Handling an unfamiliar ship was an uneasy business. Tree branches and then tree trunks crashed and crackled as the ship settled to the ground. Brent punched the exit-port speaker button and ordered:

"Crew to ground, carrying all bodies of crew members."

A light glowed on the panel. "Exit Port Open." Kit's father had done that. Only moments later Harlow's voice came: "Crew all aground."

The "Exit Port Open" light faded. Brent gave the interplanetary drive his attention. The Delilah lifted once more. In seconds the blue sky turned purplish. Presendy it was black, with many stars.

In half an hour. Brent turned off the drive. The Delilah floated on. He stared out the ports. The local sun was definitely sol-type and there were other planets. He used the main telescope. He said briefly: "That one is inhabited. Ice caps and all the rest. Some oceans."

He began to operate the gyro controls to turn the ship. All the multitude of stars about the Delilah seemed to turn in a stately maneuver. He centered the planet. Then he carefully placed it a trifle away from the crosshairs of the scope. He reached over and barely touched the overdrive. Space swirled and swirled again. They were in perfect landing position. He sent the ship toward the second planet.

"Well let the passengers off here," he said. "It's inhabited and they'll get along all right. But I don't get off. After all, the Profession's no advantage. It's an obligation. According to the law I'm a pirate for mutinying against the lawful skipper of this ship, and of course it's a capital offense to maroon anybody, as I just did to the survivors of the crew. I'm liable to prosecution for several murders, mutiny in space, marooning, piracy . . . and when the passengers tell their side of the story—I'm going to take the ship and go on off.".

T think that's the right thing," said Kit with conviction.

"You and your father will get word to Earth that there's almost certainly a matter-transmitter on Khem IV, and that what's happened to Procus and Sardin and Luxor and so on—you'll get the word back?"

"No," said Kit.

"What's that?" he demanded sharply.

He glanced out the bow-ports. The planet they neared was green and pleasing. It looked as if it would be a kindly world.

There was at least one city. The passengers of the Delilah would want to land there and most likely stay there.

"Anyhow," said Kit, "my father says you'll be trying to find Earth to take the news yourself. He's going to come along with you. There ought to be at least three or four men on a ship this size." Then she added irrelevandy, "Besides, my father likes you. Very much."

Brent swallowed.

Kit looked intently at her fingemads.

"It might be nice," she said slowly. "And—my father said— in case I should think of anything so foolish or so drastic-he's a Commerce Commissioner and so automatically a magistrate. He said if we wanted him to, he'd—he'd marry us."

The green globe ahead was a world that humans lived on all their lives. It was a nice world. It was an admirable world. It grew slowly larger as the Delilah drew nearer to it.

It was fortunate, though, that for some litde while Brent didn't have to pay exclusive attention to the controls.

DL WifLntk y<

By Martin Pearson

RALPH STRIKER'S mind was too confused and bewildered to appreciate the full danger of his position. He knew he was tottering on the brink of precipice; he could see water far below. But his thoughts were numb from the shock of sudden transference from the world he knew and understood, to completely alien surroundings.

In what had seemed the veriest fraction of a second, he had been hurled a million years into the future, whisked from a laboratory where everything was comprehensible to—what?

Instinctively, he tried to throw himself backward to safety, even as his brain sought to grasp the newness of the scene before him. His body was not responding properly yet: the shock had thrown him off balance; he was falling . . .

He could feel the terrible fear of it deep in his stomach, the same feeling that he received from the big roller-coaster at Coney Island. Then his brain began to work. He must remember to breathe while he was falling, must let himself fall limp. The water was looming beneath him now—

Splash! He was in. The coldness of the water bit into him; yet, as he struggled upward, some measure of security returned. This was still danger, but it was danger he could understand and cope with.

Carefully, now, he swam up to the surface, looked around quickly for sharks, or their equivalent in this world of the future.

Not too far away he could see land, a low-lying bank with the suggestion of docks and cranes. Good. Calmer now, he struck out for shore, swirmiung heavily from the equipment that dragged at his shoulders. Striker wished he could drop his rifle and bandolier at least, but he didn't dare. No telling what might be waiting on that shore—

A steam whisde sounded behind him and he looked around to see a small launch pulling alongside. Hands clutched at him, hauled him over the rim of the craft, and Striker looked into faces as human as his own. They were chattering amiably at him, obviously asking questions, but he couldn't understand a word of the language.

His rescuers were three; suddenly they fell silent as they realized what a strange fish they had pulled out. Striker stared blankly and saw that they were certainly human. It was he, then, who did not give the impression of a reasoning being. His wet, matted hair—the rifle, hand-gun, cooking kit, rucksack crammed with tins, all insanely slung from his waist in a clattering mass—he must be a sight! He grinned feebly at the three rescuers. They were smaller than he; dark-skinned, with a prognathous cast to their features. Their costumes were much less radical than Striker's for they knew where they were going.

"Thanks, friends," said Striker gratefully. Whoever or whatever they were, they had helped him out.

Then the shock of his sudden transition into the future, his thirty-foot drop into icy waters, the strain until his rescue, took their toll. Striker went down and out.

He woke in a sort of hospital ward, flopping like a fish out of water. For a moment of orientation he was bewildered. Then he sat up violently when he recalled where—and when— he was. His was but one of a long row of beds. They were only a foot off the ground, and a bit too short and skimpy for his big body. Down the length of the room were other litter-like beds, occupied by representatives of the future race in various stages of disrepair. Some were lying still; others were chattering cheerfully.

"Hey!" Striker querulously called out. Abrupdy the noise of the room shut off like water from a faucet; all tumable heads were turned his way. From a great deal of furtive whispering

Ill

STRIKER shifted the heavy-laden pack on his shoulders. It had been the rucksack tha? he had taken with him into this world of the future, and with it he carried the rifle and air-gun that had been also part of his equipment. He didn't trust the tricky little steamguns of the people who had befriended and enriched him.

He had left his porters behind him at the last weatherstation, heeding their terrified pleading. And now had come sudden realization of the futility of carrying with him, as he had planned, the masses of observational equipment now discarded.

Ahead of him, the trail was unmarked and the snow new. Glimpsing high above him the sharp line of demarcation between snow and sky, he felt his body go cold. It must be the altitude, he diought. When he had dropped the porters, they had told him that the highlands ahead were almost unexplored. They thought that he would find an aboriginal village inhabited by natives of the continent. They thought, also, that these natives would give him food and shelter. But they were by no means sine. Once beyond the timberline, they were automatically lost, despite the marvelous maps and trek-charts that Maun had prepared for the journey.

He paused to look behind him for a moment, seeing his tracks in rotten snow, then mushed on. And at the peak of the pass he stopped short. Before him stretched so incredible an expanse of snowy tundra that his eyes ached at the effort of encompassing ail at one glance. Clumps of plain grass stretched before him, growing tiny in the vast distances of the snowy prairie.

Striker sat down in the snow, breathing deeply. He unshipped his pack and pulled out one of the trek-charts his scholarly friend had drawn for him. With a red pencil he marked a deliberate X in the very center of the pass indicated on the map. Underneath him, he knew, was a cairn buried by previous adventurers. They had gone about a hundred miles farther and turned back, broken in mind and body. Blame it on the weather, he thought. If the cool, dry wind kept up he was fairly safe; he might even make it to Bolama in two more days, using every glissading trick and braker he knew. And if one of the prairie blizzards swept down on him, it might take longer. Or he might never get there at all.

Wearily, Striker rose again and started down, his feet plunging deeply in the snow. He rubbed his eyes as specks on the bleak tundra swirled before him. Hastily, knowing from three Himalayan expeditions how swiftly and terribly snow-blindness could come, he fumbled for his dark glasses, snapped them on his head. But the spots were still there. They were too large to be men and moved too swiftly. Could they be mounted riders, he wondered. He had heard something of the sort about the aborigines of this land.

Deliberately, he sat in the snow to wait. The moving figures grew larger. He could see that they were riders: short, dark men on wry little canine-type animals. He lit one of the cigars to which he had become accustomed as the figures approached.

"Hello, friends!" he called out across the snow. They did not understand. Drawing rein they unshipped from their shoulders bows of laminated horn, raising them against him. With a start he whipped the air-gun from his belt. Three times the flat crash of the weapon sounded. He had aimed for their mounts; two bolted, bucking wildly, and the third dropped where it stood, its rider tumbling off.

With a cry the little man scrambled to his feet, drawing the powerful bow taut. Striker was about to send a fourth slug smacking into the man's skull when the gun fell from his hands. His skin was tight and hot as though a sudden fever had come over him, and he was trembling in every fiber. The sun, low in the west, seemed suddenly eclipsed and Striker felt faint and weary. With half an eye he saw the barbarian with the bow had exploded into lumps of flesh scattered over the tundra.

Striker looked up and saw litde, electric-blue balls of fire, each bearing a similar caricature of a face, clustering above him.

He found his tongue as two thinly shining rays of light enveloped him and he was lifted up into the cold air. "Lights," the man from the past said thickly. "Lights in the sky."

What happened to Striker then, happened at an inconceivable pace. He had no concept of his motion except that afforded by "persistence of vision." Just as a lightning flash that seemed to last for a full second actually comes and goes in a millionth of that time so Striker saw beneath him the sweep of a whole continent, followed by a brief flash of blackness, as of space.

He thought he saw before him, hanging among the stars, a vast open hall of pure light and color. And the next thing he knew he was standing in that glowing hall. The small, blue spheres that had been carrying him floated before him, then split cleanly in half and, as they disappeared there floated from the spheres luminous points of white, surrounded by little tangles of viscera, glaring filaments and radiants.

Striker knew then what was about to happen to him; and with all the incredible stubbornness of a human mind he braced himself against the shock that was coming.

Then, in a colossal flash of enlightenment, it came over him. The'tangle of guts floating before his eyes spoke in a deep, vibrant voice: "We aren't gods. We can't tell you the truth and not blow your brains out like an electric chair. But if you discover for yourself—"

Striker, abruptly, was disembodied and hurled into the past. Painless, soulless, he was there to see and remember. Very, very slowly the intelligence he had experienced began to take form. Slowly the matrix dissociated from its background and emerged aglow with meaning:

One million years into the past slid the ego of Striker and again he saw his own world, but as he had never seen it before. From the cold black of space he looked down with eyesight incredibly clear and at the same time heard and understood the strange babble of two billion tongues and followed the thread of two billion lives.

He discerned himself on the roof of the bleak, barnlike structure on Staten Island, the highest point of the Eastern Seaboard, stepping into the cubicle on which he had been laboring intermittendy for the past eighteen years. Striker dispassionately saw himself as he had been—clear gray eyes staring fearlessly into the future. He well knew that the cluster of men about him, his assistants who operated the external controls of his time-catapult, were smaller of soul. Without hatred he clearly saw into the mind of his young assistant the festering thought: ". . . hope the old swine never comes back-risking his priceless reserves: time, money, me. . . ." And the thought trailed off into a rotten pocket of suppurating vile-ness.

A slam of sound and a flash of light and Striker saw that he had vanished from the cabinet. Watching from the black of space, he felt no pain or shock. What had happened to this other Striker had happened.

His attention focused sharply on other things of his day: hospitals, factory, shipyards. With the cruel dissecting eyes of a surgeon he probed into the lives of his people, keenly noting the action and interaction. "Practice enough," he thought at last.

Then he cut sharply into a little cellar apartment, the incarnation of squalor and dank poverty. It was the contrast between his clean, brisk lab, this hell of stenches and fetor. It was a contrast too intolerable, almost, to be real. He probed the minds of the family that lived there—terror-ridden, hating, despising and despised.

Striker was shocked. His emotions were stirred, and that, he found abruptly, as he tried to shift his focus of attention, was very bad, because if he let his emotions enter into the matter he was stuck. And the fear that this realization engendered nearly undid him for good. With a coldly violent wrench he snapped himself into the next day. It would not do to observe too closely, he realized.

After a thorough inspection of the world of the 1950's, he drifted on along the time-stream for a score of years, alternately contracting and expanding his ego, as it were. This seemed to give him some sort of purchase on the fabric of space; the mechanical analogy was peristalsis.

The North America of 1970 was not pretty to see. All hell had broken loose, and the fin du siècle mind had begun to assert itself. New York city was still the biggest town in the world, but it had regained the unwanted title of the most corrupt. To the customary sewer and sanitation grafts there had been added a few new ones; Striker saw into the minds of what was known as the "Powerhouse," the dozen men who ran the lives of the dozen milhon New Yorkers.

Striker shifted to the West Coast and found things in better shape. There the factories were cleaner and better-lit; there were anti-speedup laws enforced by a reform government. Hollywood, entertainment capital before television had granted that palm to high-up, centrally located Denver, was the world focus for plastics manufacture. Square miles of buildings turned out everything from buttons to houses, molded in one piece. Striker actually saw houses rolling three per minute from the assembly line.

Then Striker took a fairly long jump through time—fifty years—and landed smack in the middle of a second civil war, this time between the East and the West. And this time there was direct participation by the foreign nations. America was the battleground of the world. There wasn't a square foot in the corn belt that hadn't been poisoned, shelled or bombed by one side or the other. New Yorkers were living in their vast subway system on canned goods when Striker looked in. They were mentally in the same state of dumb terror that always grips the small man when he is crushed between two forces which he does not understand.

In Los Angeles things were worse, because the people there had no subways to protect themselves from the Asian bombers that were flying over nightly from the Land of the Rising Sun—on behalf of the Allegheny States—to lay their eggs. The wheels had stopped turning in Hollywood; by tuning in on some Army high-ups, Striker found out that production facilities were scattered over most of Arizona, under the sand.

He located one of these and projected his mind into an empty battle tank as it was being trucked out to a distribution point near ruined Tucson, blasted to powder years ago.

The tank was manned by a foul-mouthed youth, about seventeen, who ferried it to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where it joined several thousand others. A more experienced hand took over. From the conversation Striker realized that they were going to try to get through to Springfield, Ohio, and to cut off the Easterners from the Great Lakes.

The monster division of tanks met opposition in some very solid forts, rolling over them at great cost in life and fire-power. For the next week they kept moving, slower and slower, harried by planes and infantry. When Striker's tank was blown up he departed to his observation point in space, quite certain that the Westerners would not reach Springfield, Ohio—not this time.

He worked himself ahead exactly a century and looked down on a continent again peaceful. The war had been decided by a plague which had wiped out whole armies on both sides. Foreign powers had moved in to carve up the rich prize.

Another century passed and Striker saw another American Revolution, not by a landed, rum-smuggling aristocracy, but by the slavelike labor who ran the foreign-owned factories and mines. This time it was keeps; there were scenes of slaughter that made the watcher sick to his imaginary stomach. And he found that he was jammed again, unable to move in space or time. It took discipline to wrench himself away from the bloody scenes going on beneath him.

He did not observe very closely on his next jump. For the first thing he saw was a little arc of light spilling sparks from a port, shooting through space all the way to the Moon, where it crashed leaving no survivors. Striker's feelings of pride and accomplishment were as dangerous as his disgust with needless slaughter.

Striker moved ahead five hundred years and watched from a distance, finding the void thick with darting jewels made by man. Rockets were everywhere, ferrying human beings and priceless commodities. Cautiously, he peered at Mars to find there a human population of a billion, and growing steadily, from all indications. Surprisingly, there were few great public works and dwellings. Man was living a natural life. There was a score of years devoted to schooling, then the usual human activities of working, breeding and finally dying. But it looked very attractive to Striker, for there was no more disease and the life-span had more than tripled. It was a superb exaggeration of a genus' life history. And it was the same on nearly all the other planets.

He was not sure how far ahead he moved on his next jump into futurity, but it must have been unthinkable centuries. Mars had been depopulated by some unspecified catastrophe, and the race was determined that that would not happen again. Tinkering with genes had produced a strain of men with homy plates covering their bodies and great safes surrounding their brains so that nothing less than a stick of dynamite in the mouth could harm them. But it proved to be a blind alley, for with the reversion to brutally strong body-formation, came a corresponding psychological atavism; over the course of the next thousand years crime reappeared and bmte lust-murders were common.

Concerted action by the humans who had not the hom-plate genes wiped out the strain in quick order. Experiments began anew at an opposite pole, and man became slight in the next few generations.

The end result of this Striker did not see. At the end of one of his flights he landed off Saturn and probed down to the surface to see what he could. And what he sawl Pavements that glowed with inner fire, buildings that were little more than arcs of electricity between four terminals! It was when he saw the men that he feared for his sanity, for they were slight creatures, right enough. And many had pulpy little homs on their brows. Some glowed with enormously stimulated mito-genic rays.

The implication of this chilled Striker with horror; he tried to leave, to retreat into space for a while to think—and could not move. This was at last what he had dreaded, and the horror snowballed, gathering magnitude and intensity.