most possibly habitable. But now, we could clearly see that life could not exist on it. It was an airless sphere, sheathed in eternal snow and ice.

The other five planets were even more hopeless. And we could not change course now, anyway. It was a question of whether the two strained generators that still functioned would be able to furnish enough power to slow down our landing speed and save us from total destruction.

Death was close, and we knew it, yet we remained unshaken. Not that we were heroes. But we belonged to the Star Service, and while the Star Service yields glory, its members always have the shadow of death over them and so grow accustomed to it.

Many in the Star Service had died in the vast, endless task of mapping the galaxy. Of the little exploring ships that went out like ours to chart the farther reaches of stars, only two-thirds or less ever came back. Accidents accounted for the rest—accidents like the blowing of our generators from overload in attempting to claw our way quickly out of a mass of interstellar debris.

Tharn's voice came to us calmly.

"We'll soon hit it. I'll try to crabtail in, but the chances are poor. Better strap in."

Using the metal arms of our suits clumsily, we hooked into the resilient harnesses that might give us a chance of survival.

Dril peered at the largening white globe below.

"There look to be deep snows at places. It would be a little softer there."

"Yes," Tharn replied quietly. "But our ship would remain buried in the snow. On the ice, even if wrecked it could be seen. When another ship comes, they'll find us, and our charts won't be lost."

Well, for a moment that made me so proud of the Star

Service that I was almost contemptuous of the danger rushing upon us.

It is that wonderful spirit that has made the Service what it is, that has enabled our race to push out from our little world to the farthest parts of the galaxy. Individual explorers might die, but the Service's conquest of the universe would go on.

"Here we go, muttered Dril, still peering downward.

The icy white face of the desolate world was rushing up at us with nightmare speed. I waited tensely for Tharn to act.

He delayed until the last moment. Then he moved the power bar, and the two remaining generators came on with a roar of power.

They could not stand that overload for more than a few moments before they too blew out. But it was enough for Thnrn to swing the falling ship around and use the blast of propulsive vibrations as a brake.

Making a crabtail landing is more a matter of luck than skill. The mind isn't capable of estimating the infinitesimal differences that mean disaster or survival. Use a shade too much power, and you're bounced away from your goal. A shade too little, and you smash to bits.

Tharn was lucky. Or maybe it wasn't luck as much as pilot's instinct. Anyway, it was all over in a moment. The ship fell the generators screamed, there was a bumping crash, then silence.

The ship lay on its side on the ice. Its stern had crumpled and split open at one place, and its air had puffed out, though in our suits we didn't mind that. Also the last two generators had blown out, as expected, from the overload in cushioning our fall.

"We made it!" Dril bounded from despair to hope. "I never thought we had a real chance. Tharn, you're the ace of all pilots."

But Tharn himself seemed to suffer reaction from tension. He unstrapped like ourselves and stood, a bulky figure in his globular suit, looking out through the quartz portholes.

"We've saved our necks for the time being," he muttered. "But we're in a bad fix."

The truth of that sank in as we looked out with him. This little planet out on the edge of the galaxy was one of the most desolate I had ever seen. There was nothing but ice and darkness and cold.

The ice stretched in all directions, a rolling white plain. There was no air—the deep snows we had seen were frozen air, no doubt. Over the gelid plain brooded a dark sky, two-thirds of which was black emptiness. Across the lower third glittered the great drift of the galaxy stars, of which this system was a borderland outpost.

"Our generators are shot, and we haven't enough power-loy to wind new coils for all of them," Tharn pointed out. "We can't call a tenth the distance home with our little communicator. And our air will eventually run out."

"Our only chance," he continued decisively, is to find on this planet enough tantalum and terbium and the other metals we need, to make powerloy and wind new coils. Dril, get out the radio sonde."

The radio sonde was the instrument used in our star mapping to explore the metallic resources of unknown planets. It worked by projecting broad beams of vibrations that could be tuned to reflect from any desired elements, the ingenious device detecting and computing position thus.

Dril got out the compact instrument and tuned its frequencies to the half dozen rare metals we needed. Then we waited while he swung the projector tubes along their quadrants, closely watching the indicators.

"This is incredible luck!" he exclaimed finally. "The sonde shows terbium, tantalum, and the other metals we need all together in appreciable quantities. They're just under the fce and not far from here!"

"It's almost too good to be true," I said wonderingly. "Those metals are never found all together."

Tharn planned quickly.

"We'll fit a rough sledge and on it we can haul an auxiliary power unit and the big dis-beam, to cut through the ice. We'll also have to take cables and tackle for a hoist."

We soon had everything ready and started across the ice, hauling our improvised sledge and its heavy load of equipment.

The frozen world, brooding beneath the sky that looked out into the emptiness or extra-galactic space, was oppressive. Wc had hit queer worlds before, but this was the most gloomy we had ever encountered.

The drift of stars that was our galaxy sank behind the horizon as we went on, and it grew even darker. Our krypton lamps cut a white path through the somber gloom as we stumbled on, the metal feet of our heavy suits slipping frequently on the ice.

Dril stopped frequently to make further checks with the radio sonde. Finally, after several hours of toilsome progress, he looked up from the instrument and made a quick signal.

"This is the position," he declared. "There should be deposits of the metals we need only a hundred feet or so beneath us."

It didn't look encouraging. We were standing on the crest of a low hill of ice, and it was not the sort of topography where you would expect to find a deposit of those metals.

But we did not argue with Dril's findings. We hauled the auxiliary power unit off the sledge, got its little ato-turbine going, and hooked its leads to the big dis-beam projector which we had dismounted from the bows of our ship.

Tharn played the dis-beam on the ice with expert skill. Rapidly it cut a ten-foot shaft down through the solid ice. It went down for a hundred feet like a knife through cheese and then there was a sudden backlash of sparks and flame. He quickly cut the power.

"That must be the metal-bearing rock we just hit," he said.

Dril's voice was puzzled.

"It should be seventy or eighty feet lower to the metal deposits, by the sonde readings."

We'll go down and see," Tharn declared. "Help me set up the winch."

We had brought heavy girders and soon had them forming a massive tripod over the shaft. Strong cables ran through pulleys suspended from that tripod and were fastened to a big metal bucket in which we could descend by paying out cable through the tackle.

Only two of us should have gone down, really. But somehow, none of us wanted to wait alone up on the dark ice, nor did any of us want to go down alone into the shaft So we all three crowded into the big bucket.

"Acting like children instead of veteran star explorers," grunted Tharn. "I shall make a note for our psychos on the upsetting effect of conditions on these worlds at the galaxy edge."

"Did you bring your beam guns" Dril asked suddenly.

We had, all of us. Yet we didn't know quite why. Some obscure apprehension had made us arm ourselves when there was no conceivable need of it.

"Let's go," said Tharn. "Hang on to the cable and help me pay it out, Oroc."

I did as he bade, and we started dropping smoothly down into the shaft in the ice. The only light was the krypton whose rays Dril directed downward.

We wentNJown a hundred feet, and then we all cried out. For we saw now the nature of the resistance which the dis-beam had met Here under the ice there was a thick stratum of transparent metal, and the dis-beam had had to burn its ay through that.

Underneath the burned-out hole in that metal stratum there was—nothing. Just empty space, a great hollow of some kind here beneath the ice.

Tharn's voice throbbed with excitement

"I'd already begun to suspect it. Look down there!"

The krypton beam, angling downward into the emptiness below us, revealed a spectacle which stunned us.

Here, boncnth the ice, was a city. It was a great metro-

oIIk of white cement structures, dimly revealed by our ttle light. And this whole city was shielded by an immense dome of transparent metal which withstood the weight of the ice that ages had piled upon it.

"Our dis-beam cut down through the ice and then through the dome itself," Tharn was saying excitedly. "This dead city may have been lying hidden here for ages."

Dead city? Yes, it was dead. We could see no trace of movement in the dim streets as we dropped toward it.

The white avenues, the vague facades and galleries and spires of the metropolis, were silent and empty. There was no air here. There could be no inhabitants.

Our bucket bumped down onto the street We fastened the cables and climbed out, stood staring numbly about us. Then we uttered simultaneous cries of astonishment

An incredible thing was happening. Light was beginning to grow around us. Like the first rosy flush of dawn it came at first, burgeoning into a soft glow that bathed all the far-flung city.

"This place can't be dead!" exclaimed Dril. "That light-"

"Automatic trips could start the light going," said Tharn. "These people had a great science, great enough for that,"

"I don't like it," Dril murmured. "I feel that the place is haunted."

I had that feeling, too. I am not ordinarily sensitive to alien influences. If you are, you don't get accepted by the Star Service.

But a dark, oppressive premonition such as I had never felt before now weighed upon my spirits. Deep in my consciousness stirred vague awareness of horror brooding in this silent city beneath the ice.

"We came here for metal, and we're going to get it," Tharn said determinedly. "The light won't hurt us, it will help us."

Dril set up the radio sonde and took bearings again. They showed strongest indications of the presence of the metals we needed at a point some halfway across the city from us.

There was a towering building there, an enormous pile whose spire almost touched the dome. We took it as our goal and started.

The metal soles of our pressure suits clanked on the smooth cement paving as we walked. We must have made a strange picture—we three in our grotesque metal armor tramping through that eerily illuminated metropolis of silence and death.

"This city is old indeed," Tharn said in a low voice. "You notice that the buildings have roofs? That means they're older than—"

"Tharn! Orocr yelled Dril suddenly, swerving around and grabbing for his beam pistol.

We saw it at the same moment. It was rushing toward us from a side street we had just passed.

I can't describe it. It was like no normal form of life. It was a gibbering monstrosity of black flesh that changed from one hideous shape to another with protean rapidity as it flowed toward us.

The horror and hatred that assaulted our minds were not needed to tell us that this thing was inimical. We fired our beams at it simultaneously.

The creature sucked back with unbelievable rapidity and disappeared in a flashing movement between two buildings. We ran forward. But it was gone.

"By all the devils of space!" Dril, his voice badly shaken. "What was that?'*

Tharn Nccmcd as stunned as we.

"I don't know. It was living, you saw that. And its swift retreat when we fired argues intelligence and volition."

"Ordinary flesh couldn't exist in this cold vacuum—" I began.

"There are perhaps more forms of life and flesh than we know," muttered Tharn. "Yet such things surely wouldn't build a city like this—"

"There's another!" I interrupted, pointing wildly.

The second of the black horrors advanced like a huge, unreared worm. But even as we raised our pistols, it darted away.

"We've got to go on," Tharn declared, though his own voice was a little unsteady. "The metals we need are in or near that big tower, and unless we get them we'll simply perish on the ice above."

"There may be worse deaths than freezing to death up there on the ice," said Dril huskily. But he came on with us.

Our progress through the shining streets of that magically beautiful white city was one of increasing horror.

The black monstrosities seemed to be swarming in the dead metropolis. We glimpsed and fired at dozens of them. Then we stopped beaming them, for we didn't seem able to hit them.

They didn't come to close quarters to attack us. They seemed rather to follow us and tuatch us, and their numbers and menacing appearance became more pronounced with every step we took toward the tower.

More daunting than the inexplicable creatures were the waves of horror and foreboding that were now crushing our spirits. I have spoken of the oppression we had felt since entering the city. It was becoming worse by the minute.

"We are definitely being subjected to psychological attack from some hostile source," muttered Tharn. "All this seems to be because we are approaching that tower."

"This system is on the edge of the galaxy," I reminded. "Some undreamed-of creature or creatures from the black outside could have come from there and laired up ón this dead world."

I believe we would at that point have turned and retreated had not Tharn steadied us with a reminder.

"Whatever is here that is going to such lengths to force us to retreat is doing so because it's afraid of us! That argues that we can at least meet it on equal terms."

We were approaching the wide flight of steps that led up to the vaulted entrance of the great tower. We moved by now in a kind of daze, crushed as we were by the terrific psychic attack that was rapidly conquering our courage.

Then came the climax. The lofty doors of the tower swung slowly open. And from within the building there lurched and shambled out a thing, the sight of which froze us where we stood.

"That never came from any part of our on galaxy!" Dril cried hoarsely.

It was black, mountainous in bulk, and of a shape that tore the brain with horror. It w%f something like a monstrous, squatting toad, its flesh a heaving black slime from which protruded sticky black limbs that were not quite either tentacles or arms.

Its triangle of eyes were three slits of cold green fire that watched us with hypnotic intensity. Beneath that hideous chinless face, its breathing pouch swelled in and out painfully as it lurched, slobbering, down the steps toward us.

Our beams lashed frantically at that looming horror. And they had not the slightest effect on it. It continued to lurch down the steps. And, most ghastly of alL there was in its outlines a subtly hideous suggestion that it was parent, somehow, to the smaller horrors that swarmed in the city behind us.

Dril uttered a cry and turned to flee, and I stumbled around to join him. But from Tharn came a sharp exclamation.

"Wait! Look at the thing! It's breathing?'

For a moment, we couldn't understand." And then dimly, I did. The thing was obviously breathing. Yet there was no air here!

Tharn suddenly stepped forward. It was the bravest thing I have ever seen done by a member of the Star Service. He strode right toward the towering, slobbering horror.

And abruptly, as he reached it, the mountainous black obscenity vanished. It disappeared like a clicked-orf televisor scene. And the black swarm in the city behind us disappeared at the same moment.

"Then it wasn't real?" Dril exclaimed.

"It was only a projected hypnotic illusion," Tharn declared. "Like the others we saw back there. The fact that it was breathing here where there is no air, gave me the clue to its unreality."

"But then," I said slowly, "whatever projected those hypnotic attacks is inside this building?

Yes, and so are the metals we want," Tharn said grimly. "We're going in."

The ceaseless waves of horror-charged thought beat upon us even more strongly as we went up the steps. Gibbering madness seemed to shriek in my brain as we opened the high doors.

And then, as we stepped into the vast, gleaming white nave of the building, all that oppressive mental assault suddenly ceased.

Our reeling minds were free of horror for the first time since we had entered this dead city. It was like bursting out of one of the great darkness clouds of the galaxy into clear space again.

"Listen!" said Tharn in a whisper. "I hear—"

I heard, too. We didn't really hear, of course, It was not sound, but mental waves that brought the sensation of sound to our brains.

It was music we heard. Faint and distant at first, but swelling in a great crescendo of singing instruments and voices.

The music was alien, like none we had ever heard before. But it gripped our minds as its triumphant strains rose and rose.

There was in those thunderous chords the titanic struggles and hopes and despairs of a race. It held us rigid and breathless as we listened to that supernal symphony of glory and defeat,

"They are coming," said Tharn in a low voice, looking across the white immensity of the great nave.

I saw them. Yet oddly, I was not afraiu now, though this was by far the strangest thing that had yet befallen us.

Out into the nave toward us was filing a long procession of moving figures. They were the people of this long-dead world, the people of the past.

They were not like ourselves, though they were bipedal, erect figures with a general resemblance to us in bodily structure. I cannot particularize them, they were so alien to our eyes.

As the music swelled to its final crescendo and then died away, the marching figures stopped a little away from us and looked at us. The foremost, apparently their leader, spoke, and his voice reached our minds.

"Whoever you are, you have nothing more to fear," he said. "There is no life in this city. All the creatures you have seen, all the horror that has attacked you, yes, even we ourselves who speak to you, are but phantoms of the mind projected from telepathic records that are set to start functioning automatically when anyone enters this city."

"I thought so," whispered Tham. "They could be nothing else."

The leader of the aliens spoke on.

"We are a people who perished long ago, by your reckoning. We originated on this planet"—he called it by an almost unpronounceable alien name—"far back in your past. We rose to power and wisdom and then to glory. Our science bore us out to other worlds, to other stars, finally to exploration and colonization of most of the galaxy.

"And then came disaster. From the abyss of extra-galactic space came invaders so alien that they could never live in amity with us. It was inevitable war between us and them, we to hold our galaxy, they to conquer it.

"They were not creatures of matter. They were creatures made up of photons, particles of force—shifting clouds capable of unimaginable cooperation between themselves and of almost unlimited activities. They swept us from star after star, they destroyed us on a thousand worlds.

"We were finally hemmed in on this star system of our origin, our last citadel. Had there been hope for the future in the photon race, had they been creatures capable of creating a future civilization, we would have accepted defeat and destruction and would have abdicated thus in their favor. But their limitations of intelligence made that impossible. They would never rise to civilization themselves nor allow any other race in the galaxy to do so.

"So we determined that, before we perished, we would destroy them. They were creatures of force who could only be destroyed by force. We converted our sun into a gigantic generator, hurling some of our planets and moons into it to cause the cataclysm we desired. From our sun generator sprang a colossal wave of force that swept out and annihilated the photon race in one cosmic surge of energy.

'It annihilated the last of us also. But we had already prepared this buried city, and in it had gathered all that we knew of science and wisdom to be garnered by future ages. Some day new forms of life will rise to civilization in the galaxy, some day explorers from other stars will come here.

"If they are not intelligent enough to make benign use of the powers we have gathered here, our telepathic attacks should frighten them away. But if they are intelligent enough to discern the clues we leave for them, they will understand that all is but hypnotic illusion and will press forward into this tower or our secrets.

"You, who listen to me, have done this. To you, who-
ever and of whatever future race you may be, we be-
queath our wisdom and our power. In this building, and
in others throughout the city, you will find all that we
have left. Use it wisely for the good of the galaxy and
all of its races. And now, from we of the past to you of
the future—farewell." ^

The figures that stood before us vanished. And we three remained standing alone in the silent, shimmering white building.

"Space, what a race they must have been!" breathed Tharn. "To do all that, to die destroying a menace that would have blighted the galaxy forever, and still to contrive to leave all that they had gained to the future!"

"Let's see if we can find the metals," begged Dril, his voice shaky. "All I want now is to get out of here and take a long drink of sanqua."

We found more than the metals we needed. In that wonderful storehouse of alien science we found whole wave generators of a type far superior to ours, which could easily be installed in our crippled ship.

I shall not tell of all else we found. The Star Service is already carefully exploring that great treasury of ancient science, and in time its findings will be known to all the galaxy.

It took labor to get the generators back up to our Ship, but when that was done, it was not hard to install them. And when we had fused a patch on our punctured hull, we were ready to depart.

As our ship arrowed up through the eternal dusk of that ice clad world and darted past its smoldering dying

he had no one eke to talk to, Mcllvaine took it without complaint. Well, as I said, I never heard of him until one morning the city editor—it was old Bill Henderson then-called me in and said, 'Harrigan, we just got a lead on a fellow named Thaddeus Mcllvaine who claims to have discovered a new star. Amateur astronomer up North Clark. Find him and get a story.' So I set out to track him down...."

It was a great moment for Thaddeus Mcllvaine. He sat down among his friends almost portentously, adjusted his spectacles, and peered over them in his usual manner, half-way between being a querulous oldster and a reproachful schoolmaster.

"I've done it," he said quietly.

"Aye, and what?" asked Alexander testily.

"I discovered a new star."

"Oh," said Leopold flatly. "A cinder in your eye."

"It lies just off Arcturus," Mcllvaine went on, "and it would appear to be coming closer."

"Give it my love," said Richardson with a wry smile. "Have you named it yet? Or don't the discoverers of new stars name them any more? Mcllvaine's Star—that's a good name for it. Hard a port of Arcturus, with special displays on windy nights."

Mcllvaine only smiled. "It's a dark star," he said presently. "It doesn't have light." He spoke almost apologetically, as if somehow he had disappointed his friends. "I'm going to try to communicate with it."

"That's the ticket," said Alexander.

"Cut for deal," said Leopold.

That .was how the news about Mcllvaine's Star was received by his cronies. Afterward, after Mcllvaine had dutifully played several games of euchre, Richardson conceived the idea of telephoning the Globe to announce Mcilvaine's discovery.

"The old fellow took himself seriously," Harrigan went on. "And yet he was so damned mousy about it. I mean, you got the impression that he had been trying for so long that now he hardly believed in his star himself any longer. But there it was. He had a long, detailed story of its discovery, which was an accident, as those things usually are. They happen all the time, and his story sounded convincing enough. Just the same, you didn t feel that he really had anything. I took down notes, of course; that was routine. I got a picture of the old man, with never an idea we'd be using it.

"To tell the truth, I carried my notes ardund with me for a day or so before it occurred to me that it wouldn't do any harm to put a call in to Yerkes Observatory up in Wisconsin. So I did, and they confirmed Mcllvaine s Star. The Globe had the story, did it up in fine style.

"It was two weeks before we heard from Mcllvaine again...." '

That night Mcllvaine was more than usually diffident. He was not like a man bearing a message of considerable importance to himself. He slipped into Bixby's, got a glass of beer, and approached the table where his friends sat, almost with trepidation,

"It's a nice evening for May," he said quietly.

Richardson grunted.

Leopold said, "By the way, Mac, whatever became of that star of yours? The one the papers wrote up."

"I think," said Mcllvaine cautiously, "I'm quite sure— I have got in touch with them. Only, his brow wrinkled and furrowed, "I can't understand their language."

"Ah," said Richardson with an edge to his voice, "the thing for you to do is to tell them that's your star, and they'll have to speak English from now on, so you can understand them. Why, next thing we know, you'll be getting yourself a rocket or a space-ship and going over to that star to set yourself up as king or something."

"King Thaddeus the First,'' said Alexander loftily. "All you star-dwellers may kiss the royal foot."

"That would be unsanitary, I think," said Mcllvaine, frowning.

Poor Mcllvaine! They made him the butt of their jests for over an hour before he took himself off to his quarters, where he sat himself down before his telescope and found his star once more, almost huge enough to blot out Arcturus, but not quite, since it was moving away from that amber star now.

Mcllvaine's star was certainly much closer to the earth than it had been.

He tried once again to contact it with his homemade radio, and once again he received a succession of strange, rhythmic noises which he could not doubt were speech of some kind or other—a rasping, grating speech, to be sure, utterly unlike the speech of Mcllvaine's own kind. It rose and fell, became impatient, urgent, despairing— Mcllvaine sensed all this and strove mightily to understand.

He sat there for perhaps two hours when he received the distinct impression that someone was talking to him in his own language. But there was no longer any sound on the radio. He could not understand what had taken place, but in a few moments he received the clear conviction that the inhabitants of his star had managed to discover the basic elements of his language by the simple process of reading his mind, and were now prepared to talk with him.

What manner of creatures inhabited Earth? they wished to know.

Mcllvaine told them. He visualized one of his own kind and tried to put him into words. It was difficult, since he could not rid himself of the conviction that his interlocutors might be utterly alien.

They had no conception of man and doubted man's existence on any other star. There were plant-people on Venus, ant-people on Andromeda, six-legged and four-armed beings which were equal parts mineral and vegetable on Betelguese—but nothing resembling man. "You are evidently alone of your kind in the cosmos," said his interstellar correspondent,

"And what about you?" cried Mcllvaine with unaccustomed heat.

Silence was his only answer, but presently he conceived a mental image which was remarkable for its' vividness. But the image as of nothing he had ever seen before— of thousands upon thousands of miniature beings, utterly alien to man; they resembled amphibious insects, with thin, elongated heads, large eyes, and antennae set upon a scaled, four-legged body, with rudimentary beetle-like wings. Curiously, they seemed ageless; he could detect no difference among them—all appeared to be the same age.

"We are not, but we rejuvenate regularly," said the creature with whom he corresponded in this strange manner.

Did they have names? Mcllvaine wondered. "I am Guru," said the star's inhabitant. "You are Mcllvaine."

And the civilization of their star?

Instantly he saw in his mind's eye vast cities, which rose from beneath a surface which appeared to bear no vegetation recognizable to any human eye, in a terrain which seemed to be desert, of monolithic buildings, which were windowless and had openings only of sufficient size to permit the free passage of its dwarfed dwellers. Within the buildings was evidence of a great and. old civilization. ...

"You see, Mcllvaine really believed all this. What an imagination the man had! Of course, the boys at Bixby's gave him a bad time; I don't know how he stood it, but he did. And he always came back. Richardson called the story in; he took a special delight in devilling Mcllvaine, and I was sent out to see the old fellow again.

"You couldn't doubt his sincerity. And yet he didn't sound touched."

"But, of course, that part about the insect-like dwellers of the star comes straight out of Wells, doesn't it?" I put in.

"Wells and scores of others," agreed Harrigan. "Wells was probably the first writer to suggest insectivorous inhabitants on Mars; his were considerably larger, though."

"Go on."

"Well, I talked with Mcllvaine for quite a while. He told me all about their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

"Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a connection to Mcllvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant to give Mcllvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let him make a fool of himself.

"It didn't work out quite that way, however. . . ."

"Mcllvaine, can you hear me?"

Mcllvaine started with astonishment. His mental im-

ression of Guru became confused; the voice speaking nglish came clear as a bell, as if from no distance at all "Yes," he said hesitantly.

"Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against Earth. . . ."

"But why?" cried Mcllvaine, astounded.

The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of Guru betrayed anger.

"There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

Before he left the machine, Mcllvaine had the impression of a greater machine being attached to the means of communication which the inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

"McIIvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding flash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also a run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound —as if, as he put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag.' He went back in and examined the space from the window to the machine; there were to thin lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been attached to the machine and led outside.

"Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine represented the wires he had attached to his microphone while Mcllvaine was at Bixby's entertaining his other two cronies, but this is fact, not fiction, and the point of the episode is that Richardson disappeared from that night on."

"You investigated, of course?" I asked.

Harrigan nodded. "Quite a lot of us investigated. The police might have done better. There was a gang war on in Chicago just at that time, and Richardson was nobody with any connections. His nearest relatives weren't anxious about anything but what they might inherit; to tell the truth, his cronies at Bixby's were the only people who worried about him. Mcllvaine as much as the rest of them.

"Oh, they gave the old man a hard time, all right. They went through his house with a fine-toothed comb. They dug up his yard, his cellar, and generally put him through it, figuring he was a natural to hang a murder rap on. But there was just nothing to be found, and they couldn't manufacture evidence when there was nothing to show that Mcllvaine ever knew that Richardson planned to have a little fun with him.

"And no one had seen Richardson there. There was nothing but Mcllvaine's word that he had heard what he said he heard. He needn't have volunteered that, but he did. After the police had finished with him, they wrote him off as a harmless nut. But the question of what happened to Richardson wasn't solved from that day to this."

"People have been known to walk out of their lives," I said. "And never come bact."

"Oh, sometimes they do. Richardson didn't. Besides, if he walked out of his life here, he did so without more than the clothing he had on. So much was missing from his effects, nothing more."

"And Mcllvaine?"

Harrigan smiled thinly. "He carried on. You couldn't expect him to do anything less. After all he had worked most of his life trying to communicate with the worlds outside, and he had no intention of resigning his contact, no matter how much Richardson's disappearance upset him. For a while he believed that Guru had actually disintegrated Richardson; he offered that explanation, but by that time the dust had vanished, and he was laughed out of face. So he went back to the machine and Guru and the little excursions to Bixby's. . . ."

"What's the latest word from that star of yours?" asked Leopold, when Mcllvaine came in.

"They want to rejuvenate me," Said Mcllvaine, with a certain shy pleasure. "What's that?" asked Alexander sourly. "They say they can make me young again. Like them up there. They never die. They just live so long, then they rejuvenate, and they begin all over. It's some kind of process they have."

"And I suppose they're planning to come down and fetch you up there and give you the works, is that it?" asked Alexander.

"Well, no," answered Mcllvaine. "Guru says there's no need for that—it can be done through the machine; they can work it like the disintegrators; it puts you back to or twenty or wherever you like." ell, I'd like to be twenty-five again myself," admitted Leopold.

"I'll tell you what, Mac," said Alexander. "You go ahead and try it; then come back and let us know how it works. If it does, we'll all sit in." "Better make your will first, though, just in case." "Oh, I did. This afternoon."

Leopold choked back a snicker. "Don't take this thing too seriously, Mac. After alL we're short one of us now. We'd hate to lose you, too."

Mcllvaine was touched. "Oh, I wouldn't change," he hastened to assure his friends. "I'd just be younger, that's all. They'll just work on me through the machine, and overnight I'll be rejuvenated."

"That's certainly a little trick that's got it all over monkey glands," conceded Alexander, grinning.

"Those little bugs on that star of yours have made scientific progress, I'd say," said Leopold.

"They're not bugs," said Mcllvaine with faint indignation. "They're people, maybe not just like you and me, but they're people just the same."

He went home that night filled with anticipation. He had done just what he had promised himself he would do, arranging everything for his rejuvenation. Guru had been astonished to learn that people on Earth simply died when there was no necessity to do so; he had made the offer to rejuvenate Mcllvaine himself.

Mcllvaine sat down to his machine and turned the complex knobs until he was en rapport with his dark star. He waited for a long time, it seemed, before he knew his contact had been closed. Guru came through.

"Are you ready, Mcllvaine?" he asked soundlessly.

"Yes. All ready," said Mcllvaine, trembling with eagerness.

"Don't be alarmed now. It will take several hours," said Guru.

"I'm not alarmed," answered Mcllvaine.

And indeed he was not; he was filled with an exhilaration akin to mysticism, and he sat waiting for what he was certain must be the experience above all others in his prosaic existence.

"Mcllvaine's disappearance coming so close on Richardson's gave us a beautiful story," said Harrigan. "The only trouble was, it wasn't new when the Globe got around to it. We had lost our informant in Richardson; it never occurred to Alexander or Leopold to telephone us or anyone about Mcllvaine's unaccountable absence from Bixby's. Finally, Leopold went over to Mcllvaine's house to find out whether the old fellow was sick.

"A young fellow opened up.

"'Where^ Mcllvaine?' Leopold asked.

" 'I'm Mcllvaine,' the young fellow answered.

'"Thaddeus Mcllvaine,' Leopold explained.

" 'That's my name,' was the only answer he got,

" 'I mean the Thaddeus Mcllvaine who used to play cards with us over at Bixby's,' said Leopold.

"He shook his head. 'Sorry, you must be looking for someone else.'

" 'What're you doing here?' Leopold asked then.

" 'Why, I inherited what my uncle left,' said the young fellow.

"And, sure enough, when Leopold talked to me and persuaded me to go around with him to Mcllvaine's law-

rer, we found that the old fellow had made a will and
eft everything to his nephew, a namesake. The stipula-
tions were clear enough; among them was the express
wish that if anything happened to him, the elder Thad-
deus Mcllvaine, of no matter what nature, but particu-
larly something allowing a reasonable doubt of his death,
the nephew was still to be permitted to take immediate
possession of the property and effects." j

"Of course, you called on the nephew," I said. '

Harrigan nodded. "Sure. That was the indicated course, in any event. It was routine for both the press and the police. There was nothing suspicious about his story; it was straightforward enough, except for one or two little details. He never did give us any precise address; he just mentioned Detroit once. I called up a friend on one of the papers there and put him up to looking up Thaddeus Mcllvaine; the only young man of that name he could find appeared to be the same man as the present inhabitant's uncle, though the description fit pretty well"

"There was a resemblance, then?"

"Oh, sure. One could have imagined that old Thaddeus Mcllvaine had looked somewhat like his nephew when he himself was a young man. But don't let the old man's rigmarole about rejuvenation make too deep an impression on you. The first thing the young fellow did was to get rid of that machine of his uncle's. Can you imagine his uncle having done something like that?"

I shook my head, but I could not help thinking what an ironic thing it would have been if there had been something to Mcllvaine's story, and in the process to which he had been subjected from out of space he had not been rejuvenated so much as just sent back in time, ; in which case he would have no memory of the machine nor of the use to which it had been put. It would have been as ironic for the inhabitants of Mcllvaine's star, too; they would doubtless have looked forward to keeping this contact with Earth open and failed to realize that Mcllvaine's construction differed appreciably from theirs.

"He virtually junked it. Said he had no idea what it could be used for, and didn't know how to operate it."

"And the telescope?"

"Oh, he kept that. He said he had some interest in astronomy and meant to develop that if time permitted."

"So much ran in the family, then."

"Yes. More than that. Old Mcllvaine had a trick of seeming shy and self-conscious. So did this nephew of his. Wherever he came from, his origins must have been backward. I suspect that he was ashamed of them, and if I had to guess, I'd put him in the Kentucky hill-country or the Ozarks. Modern concepts seemed to be pretty well too much for him, and his thinking would have been considerably" more natural at the turn of the century.

"I had to see him several times. The police chivvied him a little, but not much; he was so obviously innocent of everything that there was nothing for them in him. And the search for the old man didn't last long; no one had seen him after that last night at Bixby's, and, since everyone had already long since concluded that he was mentally a little off center, it was easy to conclude that he had wandered away somewhere, probably an amnesiac. That he might have anticipated that is indicated in the hasty preparation of his will, which came out of the blue, said Barnevall, who drew it up for him.

"I felt sorry for him."

'Tor whom?"

"The nephew. He seemed so lost, you know—like a man who wanted to remember something, but couldn't. I noticed that several times when I tried to talk to him; I had the feeling each time that there was something he wanted desperately to say, it hovered always on the rim of his awareness, but somehow there was no bridge to it, no clue to put it into words. He tried so hard for something he couldn't put his finger on."

"What became of him?"

"Oh, he's still around. I think he found a job somewhere. As a matter of fact, I saw him just the other evening. He had apparently just come from work and he was standing in. front of Bixby's with his face pressed to the window looking in. I came up nearby and watched him. Leopold and Alexander were sitting inside—a couple of lonely old men looking out. And a lonely young man looking in. There was something in Mcllvaine*s face—that same thing I had noticed so often before, a kind of expression that seemed to say there was something he ought to know, something he ought to remember, to do, to say,

summits of the Barnacle Masters glistened with a luster as of wind-glazed sandstone.

The summits protruded slightly above the water, and luminous shadows moved behind their yawning Valves. To the web-footed man these shadows were more omniscient than the mysterious forces which had created him, for the swollen bodies of the majestic lords of the sea, and the enormous complex minds in their capitulums, had set stern limits to his willing, and relentlessly conditioned his behavior.

Beside him in the warm sea another man was swimming. His body was feeble, his mind fearless. In his persistent human way he strove to pierce the heavy dark veil which concealed the future. As he swam cliffward he spoke in a sibilant whisper:

"Clulan, they intend to shrink us. They have decided
that we are less alert than our mates; that our fingers are
clumsy, our bodies uncouth. They admire the slim grace-
ful bodies and agile minds of our mates. To diminish our
ugliness they will shrivel our bodies and minds, as the
forces of nature have shriveled the males of their own
kind. *

Clulan shuddered, and a feeling of dread pervaded his little being. He turned slowly upon his back, said:

"Ten million years ago, Sla, when the glory of terrestrial dominance enveloped our little race, the Tall Ones had minute, complementary mates. It was always so, and they have grown indifferent to the shame and humiliation. But if they shrink us, our mates will despise us."

"That is true, Clulan," agreed Sla, in a grim tone.

Sla, being weak of body, was seldom sent forth on food-gathering missions. As a wise and able servitor of the Barnacle Masters in the chemical caverns he was privileged to glimpse the future dimly, to behold vaguely prefigured the vast, stupendous dreams of perfection which were continually taking shape in the minds of the crustacean overlords.

He knew that the Barnacle Masters dreamed hideously of world dominion in their white shell towers. For millions of years they had contended with the great land invertebrates for terrestrial supremacy, working secretly with obscure chemicals and vegetable ferments to transform their on bodies, and the bodies of their tiny human serfs. Their ultimate aim was the complete destruction of the insect hordes which held the continents in servile bondage.

More relentless than the insects, they moved grimly toward appalling ends. Their dream of perfection was immediate, personal. Lacking the selfless minds of the ants and bees they dreamed of glutinous absorption, of sense-channeled delights. Swaying immense in their tall shells they sought to surround themselves with purely nutritive pleasures. It was the females who dreamed thus. The little shrunken males were mere complementary mockeries which scuttled ignominiously about in the vicinity of their mates.

The sense of contempt tinged with mockery which the female barnacles experienced in the presence of their complements flowed outward and enveloped their little human servitors. With a kind of malignant cosmic irony they dreamed of restoring the balance in a lowly sphere of being by making the women of the human race as relatively enormous as themselves, and reducing the males to physical and mental insignificance. It was an utterly malicious dream, evoked by enforced idleness, the product of immense power seeking to sate itself in trivial cruelties.

The two little swimmers were now abreast of the great circular summits of the barnacle shells. Seizing hold of a ladder-shaped polyp, they ascended the rounded eminence, and flicked the water from their bodies. The surface which supported them was vibrant with the slow, rhythmic movements of the Barnacle Masters in their sea-immersed houses.

Through tiny slits in the summits of the domed shells they could glimpse the great forms within as they floated upright in slothful majesty.

Clulan sighed in bitter foreboding, gazed downward and outward at the jasper sea beneath, and the tiny human forms that flecked it. Thousands of little figures were disporting themselves in the cliffward curving swells, some still diving for foodstuffs, and others merely swinuning for recreation.

Clulan looked at Sla. "Will you return at once to the laboratories?" he asked.

Sla nodded. "Yes, Clulan. All is in readiness there. The new glandular secretion will be poured from its immense vat before the sun grows bright again."

Clulan's face was taut with apprehension. "And it is this gland substance which they will inject into our veins, to shrivel, and perhaps destroy us?"

"Yes," assented Sla. "They have wrought such incredible technical miracles in the last sun-cycle, Clulan, that they are mad with impatience to release their slumbering ereativeness on some one or something. In another cycle they will subdue the continents as they have subdued the sea, but they are still unprepared for that awful and titanic conflict. The hive and tunnel hordes are still too wary, too powerful. But the chemical caverns hold much that is terrible even now—immense troughs of corrosive plants, body transforming chemicals. In another cycle they will enwrap the terrestrial sphere in flame and carnage."

A shudder convulsed Clulan's small body. He looked downward through a dark, sun-baked slit in the shell at the wavering bulk beneath. It seemed almost unbelievable to him that a form so majestic and omniscient could harbor such malice. Awe and adoration contended with rebellious resentment in his mind. If they did that to him, could he still loyally serve them?

Sla said: "I must go now, Clulan. Perhaps they will pity us in the end. All of us who have selnessly served will prostrate ourselves in humble supplication when the great vat turns and the gland substance streams forth. We will plead for you—and for ourselves. But chiefly for you who swim in the depths, and have mates who love you. We are feeble of body, and if they shrink us —he shrugged—"it will not matter so much.

He turned then, and moved swiftly toward a round dark aperture in the cliff wall. Hundreds of similar vents dotted the immense stone surface behind the summits of the barnacle shells, some leading to the laboratory caverns in the sunless depths of subterranean arteries cut in the cliffs spacious interior; others to dark food chambers where the garnerings of the little servitors rested in frigid containers against moisture-dripping walls. Still other apertures led to the rectangular dwelling chambers of the servitors and their mates.

In pitying sorrow Clulan watched the stooped and emaciated form of the laboratory worker advance toward the vent, and disappear. He sighed, took one last somber look at the sun-reddened sea far beneath, and walked swiftly toward the only aperture which led to peace and serenity and momentary forgetfulness in the blue depths of the tall cliff.

He walked slowly along a low, damp passage, stooping from time to time to avoid grazing his scalp against low-hanging stalactites and sharp projections in the solid rock. For an interminable distance he repeated these stoopings, passing farther and farther into the cliff, his little human mind shedding its grim fears and growing more serene as he advanced.

Presently light burst upon his vision, and he emerged into a rectangular chamber with burnished stone walls, and a sloping floor of veined feldspar. As he emerged from the tunnel a slim, white form arose from a recumbent position, and advanced toward him. She was a creature of unusual loveliness, with large dark eyes, and wondrously curving lashes. Her pale skin and long silvery hair which descended fanwise to her waist endowed her with an elusive, almost ghostly, beauty as she stood waiting expectantly in the center of the chamber.

With joyfoul exclamation he advanced and clasped her. Her lips softly caressed his bearded face as he pressed her to him. Gently he twined his fingers in her hair and turned them slowly about, inflicting a slight, tender pain. For an instant their cheeks met in sudden ecstasy. Then, slowly, reluctantly, he released her.

She stood looking at him with glowing eyes. "You look tired," she murmured. "My sweet, little one."

It was a term of endearment which she had used a thousand times in the course of their life together. But now the adjective sent a cold chill to the core of his being. He trembled, turned pale.

Her eyes widened in surprise. "Why, what is the matter, my little one—"

He uttered a muffled groan and stopped her mouth with his hand. Then he led her firmly to a repose slab in the wall and settled down beside her.

Her eyes met his in a troubled stare. "What is it, Clu-lan?" she pleaded. "I await the truth without fear. Have you met some one who—"

Clulan shook his head, ran his palm tenderly over her cheeks and forehead. "There will never be another," he said. "You know that, Mutal. We are one body, one mind forever." "Then what is it?"

"I swam shoreward with the laboratory worker, Sla. He knows many things which have been concealed from the food gatherers. The Tall Ones intend to—"

He bit his lips.

"Yes, Clulan."

"They intend to shrink us."

Horror flared in the woman's eyes. She sat bolt upright, in tremulous apprehension. "You mean, they will shrivel our bodies, Clulan?"

"They will not shrivel your body, Mutal," replied Clulan. "They will shrivel mine. They have found no adequate outlet for the immense energies which consume them. They are too feeble as yet to wage war on the tunnel and hive hordes, but they can amuse themselves by tormenting us. The pitiful smallness of their own mates has taught them contempt for all males. We are ridiculous in their sight, and they intend to torture and humiliate us."

The woman's lips were trembling. "But can they do it, Clulan? Have they discovered a way?"

"They can easily alter our bodies, MutaL" said the little food gatherer. "A million years ago we had no webs between our toes. In the dim ages of the comet's dust, when changes in the earth's atmosphere immeasurably aided their development, and the development of the tunnel hordes, and our little kind nearly perished beneath the weight of the antarctic glaciations, there were no web-footed men. The men who now serve the tunnel and hive hordes are not web-footed. In their deep dark tunnels they walk with primitive toes. Then the Tall Ones injected glandular secretions from web-footed mammals into the veins of our ancestors, and by slow stages we developed these hideous appendages. There is still something in us, a deeply buried instinctive loathing, which will not down. That is why we experience shame when we gaze upon our feet, which are so abnormal, so monstrous.

He made a curious sobbing sound in his throat, "Our feet are ugly, but more hideous still will be this new change, which will destroy what we treasure most—the tie that unites us, the sense of wonder and release which we experience when we are together. You will despise me, Mutal—"

"If they shrivel your body, Clulan," said Mutal, in a grim, tortured tone, "I will swim deeply into the water and die. I will never—"

Her speech was arrested by a sudden flare of prismatic light. Clulan's gaze leaped upward.

The circular visual transmitter in the chamber's roof was streaked with rapidly alternating banners of green and orange light. Across its glazed surface the signals wavered in ominous sequence.

Mutal gripped her mate's wrist with her thin fingers, sinking her nails into his flesh till he cried out in pain.

"Clulan," she murmured. "It is for you, your colors. One of the Tall Ones has gone mad?'

The blood drained from the little food gatherer's face as he stared. More terrible than any threat of shrinkage was the task to which he had been summoned; the hideous ordeal beneath the sea which would tax his energies beyond endurance and perhaps destroy him.

With a choking cry Mutal seized his head and drew it to her bosom. Tenderly she wept over him, swaying as she gazed deep into his tortured eyes.

She was familiar with the grim menace that lurked in the depths of the tall barnacle shell and as her terrified mind envisioned the nerve-racking descent to the poisoned capitulum and the glaring mania in the eyes of the afflicted Tall One she clutched Clulan more firmly, and refused to release him.

Wallowing in their tall houses the female barnacles were not immune to disease. Weakened by slothful living, and the slaking of pernicious emotional urges, the huge, complicated minds in their capitulums occasionally cracked beneath the strain. So horrible was the ensuing disharmony that the mad forms became a menace to the entire community which only the little human servitors could surmount.

So tiny that they could slip with ease between the deadly lashing tentacles of the mad ones they were privileged to attack the great bodies with poisoned cutters, becoming for a moment in that strange reversion of function more powerful than the titan shapes they served. But the penalty of that brief usurpation of power was usually an appalling one, death lurking in every flick of the wildly weaving tentacles.

Gently but with grim tenacity Clulan untwined Mural's arms and drew himself up. His eyes were aglow with social consecration and the horrible caprices of the barnacles, their cold and arbitrary cruelties, were, for the instant forgotten. Once in a sun-cyle a barnacle went mad, and once in twenty sun-cycles one of the little food gatherers was summoned by the visual transmitter to contend with that awful horror in the depths.

The task fell alternately on laboratory workers, valve tenders, storehouse guards, and food gatherers, but it was now the food gatherers' turn, and among a hundred thousand potential saviors Clulan was the elected one; the tiny, consecrated purger of the community of barnacles, more powerful and omniscient in his little hour of dedication than the twenty thousand Tall Ones who majestically in their fathom-deep houses usurped the continental coast.

Mutal cried out to him in hysterical dismay, and attempted to restrain him as he moved toward the tunnel entrance by twining her arms about his legs. Tenderly, but with firmness, he released himself, pressed his nose to her forehead, and stepped into the tunnel.

Swiftly he sped along it, dodging the stalactites with agile dexterity. As he neared the cliff opening a shrill ululation impinged on his hearing and grew quickly louder as he pounded onward. It was a grimly ominous sound, and in his haste to emerge he nearly stumbled on the slippery stones beneath. His heart was thudding furiously, and his breath came in spasmodic jerks.

There were no longer any tiny human swimmers in the cliffward surging waves when he emerged and descended with incredible speed to the nearest domed shell. He stood for an instant on the summit of the dome, staring downward at the immense stretch of glistening water beneath him. The sun was very low now, and the waves were the hue of the blood in his veins.

A few gulls skimmed the unruffled surface far out, swooping, shrieking. To steady himself he gazed at the immense purplish arc of the heavens. His swift visual appraisement had imbued him with a sickening vertigo; a diffuse and queer kind of agony. It was as though a sharp cutter had rasped the edges of every nerve in his body.

Directly beneath him, about the sea-laved circumference of the great shell, the water was black with the dead of his kind. Thousands of little men and women floated there in the churning current. The great barnacle in its madness had sucked in all of the happy swimmers and spewed them forth with delirious rage.

It was the barnacle directly beneath him which had gone mad. Through the long cracks in the shell's summit he caught furtive glimpses of something huge and wet moving loathsomely about with an unnatural animation, and as he stared the uluation arose suddenly to intensify his terror, swelling till it deafened him, and then subsiding, and rising again. And when it fell to a thin, hideous wailing a churning sound from below usurped its function, and Clulan knew that the bodies of the crushed and mangled swimmers were flowing once more into the deep shell, drawn inward in the wake of a relentless suction.

A hand fastened on Clulan's shoulder. He turned about in swift affright. Then, slowly, the startled look faded from his countenance.

"Come with me quickly, Clulan," said the little laboratory worker. He was standing shivering on the dome, his thin body bent cliffward in urgent entreaty.

Without a word Clulan followed him. They entered the laboratory aperture, and passed swiftly between long tiers of low-hanging stalactites. Presently the passage widened, and they emerged into a cavern so enormous that its sloping roof was lost in swirling vapors five hundred feet above their heads.

In grim awe Clulan followed his guide across the great chamber, passing unbelievable marvels as he progressed—enormous metallic vats a hundred feet in height, with luminous dials, and slowly revolving crystal wheels shining and flashing in the half-light; translucent, spore-breeding cylinders filled with many-hued growths so brilliant in hue that they cast a spell upon his senses, causing his eyes to smart and his Drain to reel with a sick revulsion; cyclopean tiers of loathsome fungus tubes containing in their blue-lighted interiors growths more malignant than the virulent plants of the ant hordes; a thousand contrivances and repositories, cyclopean and hideous, glowing with technical menace, the fruit of milleniums of experimentation in the depths of the tall cliff.

Clulan followed Sla to the base of a thin inverted funnel of startling transparency which arose from a square, elevated base and spiraled upward in the uncertain light till it was lost in the mists above. Behind the bright surface a dark liquid rose and fell in the center of the funnel

Sla swiftly thrust out his little hand and turned a metallic control mechanism at the base of the structure. The darkness deep within seemed to deepen and settle down in circular folds.

The laboratory worker said "Give me your cutters, Clulan."

Clulan sat down and drew the cutters from his heeL He handed the sharp implements to Sla without a word. The muscles in his jaw were twitching. Sla held the cutters firmly, and advanced upon the funneL With steady aim he hurled both cutters directly at the dark fluid. There as a tinkling murmur as of little bells ajangle as the thin, protective coating tore across.

The cutters were enveloped by the dark fluid. For an instant Sla stood in silence waiting for them to grow cold with a frigidity that was beyond anything known to his little race in the days of its supremacy.

Presently from his loose body covering of translucent shill Sla drew a thin, sharp metallic instrument, and two soft pads of cold-resisting ditunite. Stooping, he enwrapped Clulan's little webbed feet in the pads. Then he drew forth a pair of ditunite hand coverings and twined them about his fingers. Holding the thin instrument securely he stepped forward, pierced the transparent surface skin of the funnel, and drew out the two cutters.

He slipped them quickly and securely over Clulan's ditunite-incased heels. "We must hurry," he whispered, in a tense tone.

The two tiny forms moved.rapidly across the chamber. As Clulan's feet glided over the floor there" arose a low hissing sound, and a thin blue vapor curled upward and enveloped his little person.

"If the cutters touch your flesh you will die in agony," warned Sla.

They passed between towering vats and tubes and horizontal disks slowly revolving. A look of terror was stenciled on Clulan's countenance as he progressed. He looked fearfully upward at the most menacing of the enormous vats—a rectangular bulk with burnished surface, flecked with immense luminous eyes that seemed to glare malignly down at him in the gloom. He sensed, however, that the eyes were in reality pouring vents through which the interior substance would descend in glutinous streams when the great lever at the base of the container moved downward.

"The gland vat?" he asked, clutching Sla's arm, and pointing. His voice was tremulous with foreboding.

"No, said Sla. "The gland vat is over there!" He turned slightly, and gestured toward the shadows behind him.

"But what—what is that then?" "The Great Cold is resting there," replied Sla, in a grim tone.

Qui an was near the dark inner entrance of the cliff-piercing tunnel; but at Sla's words he stopped abruptly, although the cold in the cutters had penetrated his body, his mind. The Great Cold! Rumors, legends of it had penetrated even to the little abode chambers of the food gatherers in the cliffs.

"It would freeze all the seas between the continents," murmured Clulan, parroting statements he had heard, as his own ancestors had once mechanically repeated the names of mighty deities without form or substance as they squatted in terror on lonely, fire-etched hills in the early Pleistocene dawn. "It would destroy all life in the oceans. It would shrivel and kill every living thing."

Sla was gripping his arm, urging him onward. "We must hurry," he entreated.

Clulan shivered; threw off with an effort his panicky inertia. He passed into the tunnel, and sped swiftly along it, Sla followed, murmuring feverish advice in his thin, tremulous voice.

"When you strike, thrust deeply. Avoid the soft parts-strike directly at the base of the capitulum."

The hideous ululations of the mad barnacle increased ominously in volume as they neared the outer world. Clulan was the first to emerge. He ran swiftly alone a sloping ledge of rock on the cliff's face and leaped downward to the rounded summit of the great shell.

Sla followed. For an instant the two little figures swayed unsteadily in the twilight. Then Clulan raised his palm and pressed it to the other's forehead in comradely salute.

"Farewell, Sla," he said. "You have been a loyal and generous friend."

Speedily he divested himself of his outer body-covering of translucent shilL His little frame gleamed ruddily as he stood for an instant on the extremity of the sloping summit,

"Strike boldly, and avoid the lashing tentacles," warned Sla, with tears in his voice.

Grimly Clulan nodded. Raising his arms, he leaped vigorously outward and descended in a swift, graceful arc to the darkling water beneath.

His tiny body cleaved the surface film, and descended deeply. The water was no longer warm. As he righted himself in the purple depths something cold and rigid collided with his extremities. For an instant he stared through a wavering film into white, sightless eyes set in a pain-racked countenance. Tiny luminous crustaceans had clustered thickly about the hair of the submerged corpse, casting a ghostly radiance on its swollen features.

With reluctance Clulan raised his leg, and lashed at the gruesome obstruction with the cutter attached to his heel. The dead man divided as the cutter pierced him. The awful cold seared his flesh in an instant, and his body fell apart, and descended in two fragments.

Clulan knew then that he was armed with a technical weapon more deadly and effective than death ray or fungus spore, and a renewed confidence surged up within him.

He swam slowly toward the towering shell. The water grew brighter as he drew near to it, and presently through a murky film he saw the square mouth of a fathom-deep valve. His little countenance set in tense lines as he turned slowly about far under the sea and swam with even strokes toward the immense mad shape in the interior of the shell.

The water within was a churning maelstrom. As he passed through the valve an ascending current caught him up, and drew him swiftly in the direction of the demented Tall One's great crested capitulum. The capitu-lum quivered with purblind squirmings and lashings, and the attached elastic peduncle, a hundred feet in width, was distended in fury.

Nearer and nearer to the great form he swirled. Two long tentacular legs ascended from their rigid sheaths and shot toward him. He turned swiftly, and lashed at them with his feet. One divided and fell away in the depths. The other knotted itself in swift menace. He plunged frantically downward as the circle of death shot past him, missing his little form by the fraction of a foot.

He turned over and over in the water. The current carried him swiftly upward again, in a straight line toward the barnacle's capitulum. A hundred feet it towered in the dark brine, its hooded summit glued to the great shell far above, its blood-red lower segments quivering meanacingly in the tides.

It swelled as he shot toward it. Straight into it he plunged, keeping his little body poised with swift and frenzied arm lashings and manipulating the cutters with deadly accuracy. Twice the unearthly cold seared the great form's swollen bulk as Clulan's heels cut across it.

For an instant the little food gatherer swirled about in the unimpeded current. Then two more tentacles arose, churning the dark water as they darted toward him. He plunged between their noosehke coils and returned to the swollen head.

Again and again he jabbed at it with his heels. The entire capitulum quivered as the cutters pierced it. Then, horribly, the lower segments divided and fell away, descending into the black depths beneath. Quiveringly downward they sank, carrying their hideous seeds of madness, until nothing remained of the great shape but a drained and empty hood that swayed sluggishly in the tides.

Relief and joy flooded Clulan's tiny being. He turned exultantly about in the darkness, and swam with robust strokes to the surface of the water.

As he emerged beneath the dome a small black shape scuttled quickly toward him. From its lair beneath the summit of the great shell the little male barnacle had watched the glare slowly fade from the hood of its mate; had heard the frenzied ululations diminish and subside.

It hung suspended from a rock ledge immediately above the swimming form of the little food gatherer and watched him intently as he cleaved the black water. A kind of bestial joy, degraded and mirthless, was stamped on every lineament of its small wrinkled head.

As Clulan floundered it stretched forth a thin leg and lifted him from the water. Setting him firmly on the ledge it retreated a pace with a shrill cry. Clulan knew then that he was safe; that the little form would not harm him.

In its degenerate, nearly mindless fashion it was convulsed with gratitude.

As Clulan rested on the ledge staring at the little creature's joy-contorted head his exaltation vanished, and a great wave of horror and loathing flooded his being. He remembered; he understood. With relentless clarity the menace that overhung the males of his own little race returned hideously to his mind and assumed a sickening imminence.

He had contended in vain in the dark water. His reward would be eternal shame and ignominy, and there could be no peace for him beneath the glimmering constellations. The little barnacle felt no sorrow. It was consumed with a cold and hellish joy; a degenerate gratitude. Its long bondage was over. It was free now to starve slowly beside its slain mate, and even the wet rot which would soon consume its shriveled body-segments would be less difficult to bear than the shame it had endured in life.

It was to Clulan's credit that he was incapable of self-deception. He perceived with realistic clarity that he would hate his dear little one with a consuming hate if they shriveled him. And when she died—his brain grew cold with the horror of the image that loomed.

He got up, stared for an instant at the little barnacle with a consuming pity. Then he turned, and ascended swiftly to the surface of the dome. Dexterously he heaved himself up over wet and glistening rock projections, and emerged through a crevice on the surface of the great shelL

Hundreds of tiny white forms came flocking about him with joyous cries. Foremost in the throng was his little mate, and as his gaze enveloped her a brief, fierce joy surged up in him again. He took her with avid huggings to his bosom.

The encircling men and women prostrated themselves before him, clung to his wet legs, embraced his shoulders with worshipful cries. It was his little hour of victory.

For a brief moment Clulan towered godlike beneath the gleaming net of stars that spanned the luminous skyway above him. Sla touched his arm, whispered in awe:

"A moment such as this is worth all the years of tedious striving, Clulan. All these people would die for you in an instant. They would hurl themselves into the waves below at your command. It is the intoxication of power, Clulan, the intoxication of glory. Your heroism flows out to them. They identify themselves with you, share in your triumphs. As I stand here beside you I can feel the current flowing outward. It envelops me, and I share in the glory and power. Great deeds ennoble, Clulan. They seem to exist in themselves, as sentient realities, and when their aura descends upon us we become transfigured, transformed. Are you not proud, Clulan?"

Gently Clulan set Mutal down, turned about till he was staring directly into the worshipful eyes of the little laboratory worker.

"I am not proud, Sla. I am ashamed, ashamed. We are the heirs of a mean destiny. Yet if I should dare boldly now—"

Madly the little figures continued to press about him, shouting, chanting, extolling his heroism in a frenzy of adoration. He swayed for an instant in the press, holding

Mutal grimly to him with his vigorous right arm, as though reluctant to relinquish her precious, slender form —to relinquish all the sweetness and wonder that had sustained his little life for so long.

Mutal murmured: "You are tired, my dear little one. Let us go quickly into the rock."

Clulan drew her swiftly to him, welded his countenance to hers. For an instant tears stung his eyelids. Then he freed himself, stood erect.

"Come!" he shouted.

The throng divided in wonder as he advanced across the domed shell, and entered the laboratory vent. In the dark entrance he paused an instant, raised his hand in fervent appeal.

"Follow me!" he cried.

Down the wide tunnel he sped. Beneath the uneven stone roof his little form leaped forward, with chest out-thrust and head thrown back in exultant triumph.

A sense of godlike power flooded his midget being. Five thousand of his land followed swiftly at his heels. Sla ran beside him, clutching at his arm in sudden apprehension.

"Go with Mutal into the rock," he panted. "You are tired, distraught. You are violating the sanctity of the cavern. Give heed to me, Clulan. You are courting disaster—"

But Clulan was deaf to advice. He sped onward, turning from time to time to beckon and shout. And presently he was in the great cavern itself, and the little forms that obeyed him blindly were all about him, awaiting his commands.

With a kind of oracular majesty he flung up his arm, and pointed into the shadows toward the towering receptacle of the Great Cold.

Climb up, all of you. Pull down the lever."

Exclamations of terror and amazement burst from the throats of the little servitors who adored him. Some fell prone in supplication and entreaty, torn between reluctance and desire. Others turned and fled, with paling cheeks. But the majority obeyed his grim command.

They ascended with shrill cries, clustering upon the immense metallic lever till it was completely covered their small white bodies. For a moment the midget shapes twisted and turned in the dim, blue-lighted cavern, high in the air above Qulan's swaying form. Then slowly, terribly the squirming human mass descended, and the great vat turned.

As the lever moved downward the vat slanted, and the luminous eyes far above opened automatically in its cyclopean bulk. The glow vanished and a dark opacity usurped the pouring vents and—

Enwrapped in the white flame of a superhuman daring Qulan gazed swiftly about him. He was not alone on the ground. Several of the little men and women had ignored his command, and were standing entwined in one another's arms, oblivious of the horror that loomed.

As his gaze swept the unheeding forms all the exaltation and power seemed to ebb from him, to flow away in a dark, remorseless tide. He swayed backward in mute agony.

As he did so a slender woman emerged from the shadows and ran swiftly toward him. Encircling him with her arms, she pressed her cheek fervently to his, and stared fearlessly upward. Her silver hair descended fan-wise to her waist, giving her a spectral look in the vast, dim cavern. From somewhere near at hand the voice of the little laboratory worker said:

"Farewell, Qulan. Death is a dark, bitter fruit. But the core—the core is luminous, Qulan. When the rind is gone all the darkness will vanish forever."

Kelvin Chair of Electrical Engineering at Brendon University, from which he was granted indefinite leave of absence to carry out his researches. In these he was joined by the late Dr. Clayton, sometime Chief Geologist to the Ministry of Fuel and Power. Their joint research was financed by grants from the Paul Fund and the Royal Society.

The Professor hoped to develop sonar as a means of precise geological surveying. Sonar, as you will know, is the acoustic equivalent of radar, and although less familiar, is older by some millions of years, since bats use it very effectively to detect insects and obstacles at night.

Professor Hancock intended to send high-powered, supersonic pulses into the ground and to build up from the returning echoes, an image of what lay beneath. The picture would be displayed on a cathode ray tube and the whole system would be exactly analogous to the type of radar used in aircraft to show the ground through clouds.

In 1957 the two scientists had achieved partial success but had exhausted their funds. Early in 1958 they applied directly to the Government for a block grant. Dr. Clayton pointed out the immense value of a device which would enable us to take a kind of X-ray photo or the Earth's crust, and the Minister of Fuel gave it his strongest approval before passing on the application to us. At that time the report of the Bernal Committee had just been published and we were very anxious that deserving cases should be dealt with quickly to avoid further criticisms.

I went to see the Professor at once and submitted a favourable report. The first payment of our grant (S/543A/68) was made a few days later. From that time on I have been continually in touch with the research and have assisted to some extent with technical advice.

The equipment used in the experiments is complex, but its principles are simple. Very short but extremely powerful pulses of supersonic waves are generated by a special transmitter which revolves continuously in a pool of heavy organic liquid. The beam produced passes into the ground and "scans" like a radar beam searching for echoes. By a very ingenious time delay circuit which I will resist the temptation to describe, echoes from any depth can be selected. So a picture of the strata under investigation can be built up on a cathode ray screen in the normal way.

When I first met Professor Hancock, his apparatus was rather primitive, but he was able to show me the distribution or rock down to a depth of several hundred feet and we could see quite clearly a part of the Bakerloo which passed very near his laboratory.

Much of the Professor's success was due to the great intensity of his supersonic bursts. Almost from the beginning he was able to generate peak powers of several hundred kilowatts, nearly all of which was radiated into the ground. It was unsafe to remain near the transmitter, and I noticed that the soil became quite warm around it, I was rather surprised to see large numbers of birds in the vicinity, but soon discovered that they were attracted by the hundreds of dead worms lying on the ground.

At the time of Dr. Clayton's death in 1960, the equipment was working at a power level of over a megawatt. Quite good pictures of strata a mile down could be obtained. Dr. Clayton had correlated the results with known geographical surveys and had proved beyond doubt the value of the information obtained.

Dr. Clayton's death in a motor accident was a great tragedy. He had always exerted a stabilizing influence on the Professor, who had never been much interested in the practical applications of his work.

Soon afterwards I noticed a distinct change in the Professor's outlook, and a few months later he confided his new ambitions to me. I had been trying to persuade him to publish his results (he had already spent over 50,000 pounds and the Public Accounts Committee was being difficult again), but he asked for a little more time. I think I can best explain his attitude by his own words, which I remember very vividly, for they were expressed with peculiar emphasis.

"Have you ever wondered," he said, "what the Earth really is like inside? We've only scratched the surface with our mines and wells. What lies beneath is as unknown as the other side of the Moon.

"We know that the Earth is unnaturally dense—far
denser than the rocks and soil of its crust would indicate.
The core may be solid metal, but until now there's been
no way of telling. Even ten miles down the pressure must
be thirty or more tons to the square inch and the tem-
perature is several hundred degrees. What it's like at the
center staggers the imagination: the pressure must be
thousands of tons to the square inch. It's strange to think
that in two or three years we may reach the Moon—but
when we've got to the stars we'll still be no nearer that
inferno four thousand miles beneath our feet. .

"I can now get recognizable echoes from two miles down, but I hope to step up the transmitter to ten megawatts in a few months. With that power, I believe the range will be increased to ten miles—and I don't mean to stop there."

I was impressed, but at the same time I felt a little sceptical.

"That's all very well," I said, "but surely the deeper you go the less there'll be to see. The pressure will make any cavities impossible. And after a few miles there will simply be a homogeneous mass getting denser and denser."

"Quite likely," agreed the Professor. "But I can still learn a lot from the transmission characteristics. Anyway, we'll see when we get there!"

That was four months ago and yesterday I saw the results of that research. When I answered his invitation the Professor was clearly excited, but he gave me no hint of what, if anything, he had discovered.

He showed me his improved equipment and raised the new receiver from its bath. The sensitivity of the pickups had been greatly improved, and this alone had effectively doubled the range, apart from the increased transmitter power. It was strange to watch the steel framework slowly turning and to realize that it was exploring regions which, in spite of their nearness, man might never reach.

When we entered the hut containing the display equipment, the Professor was strangely silent. He switched on the transmitter, and even though it was a hundred yards away I could feel an uncomfortable tingling. Then the cathode ray tube lit up and the slowly revolving time-base drew the picture I had seen so often before. Now however, the definition was much improved owing to the increased power and sensitivity of the equipment.

I adjusted the depth control and focussed on the Underground, which was clearly visible as a dark lane across the faintly luminous screen. While I was watching, it suddenly seemed to fill with mist and I knew that a train was going through.

Presently I continued the descent. Although I had watched this picture many times before, it was always uncanny to see great luminous masses floating towards me and to know that they were buried rocks—perhaps the debris from the glaciers of fifty thousand years ago.

Dr. Clayton had worked out a chart so that we could identify the various strata as they passed. Presently I saw that I was through the alluvial soil and was entering the great clay saucer which traps and holds the city's artesian water. Soon that too was past, and I was dropping down through bedrock almost a mile below the surface.

The picture was still clear and bright, though there were now few changes in the ground structure. The pressure as already rising to a thousand atmospheres; soon it would be impossible for any cavity to remain open, for the rock itself would begin to flow. Mile after mile I sank, but only a pale mist floated on the screen, broken sometimes when echoes were returned from pockets or lodes of denser material. They became fewer and fewer as the depth increased—or else they were now so small that they could no longer be seen.

The scale of the picture was, of course, continually expanding. It was now many miles from side to side, and I felt like an airman looking down upon an unbroken cloud ceiling from an enormous height. For a moment a sejnse of vertigo seized me as I thought of the abyss into which I was gazing. I do not think that the world will ever seem quite solid to me again.

At a depth of nearly ten miles I stopped and looked at the Professor. There had been no alteration for some time, and I knew that the rock must now be compressed into a featureless homogeneous mass. I did a quick mental calculation and shuddered as I realized that the pressure must be at least thirty tons to the square inch. The scanner was revolving very slowly now, for the feeble echoes were taking many seconds to struggle back from the depths.

"Well, Professor," I said, "I congratulate you. It's a wonderful achievement. But we seem to have reached the core now. I don't suppose there'll be any change from here to the center."

He smiled a little wryly. "Go on," he said. "You haven't finished yet"

There was something in his voice that puzzled and alarmed me. I looked at him intently for a moment; his features were just visible in the blue-green glow of the cathode ray tube.

"How far down can this thing go?" I asked, as the interminable descent started again.

"Fifteen miles," he said shortly.

I wondered how he knew for the last feature I had seen at all clearly was only eight miles down. But I continued the long fall through the rock, the scanner turning more and more slowly now, until it took almost five minutes to make a complete revolution. Behind me I could hear the Professor breathing heavily, and once the back of my chair gave a crack as hisi fingers gripped it

Then suddenly, very faint markings began to reappear on the screen. I leaned forward eagerly, wondering if this was the first glimpse of the world's iron core. With agonizing slowness the scanner turned through a right angle, then another. And then—

I leaped suddenly out of my chair, cried out, and turned to face the Professor. Only once before in my life had I received such a shock—fifteen years ago, when I had accidentally turned on the radio and heard of the fall of the first atomic bomb. That had been unexpected, but this was inconceivable. For on the screen had appeared a grid of faint lines, crossing and recrossing to form a perfectly symmetrical lattice.

I know that I said nothing for many minutes, for the scanner made a complete revolution while I stood frozen with surprise. Then the Professor spoke in a soft, unnaturally calm voice.

"I wanted you to see it for yourself before I said anything. That picture is now thirty miles in diameter, and those squares are two or three miles on a side. You'll notice that the vertical lines converge and the horizontal ones are bent into arcs. We're looking at part of an enormous structure of concentric rings. The center must lie many miles to the north, probably in the region of Cambridge. How much further it extends in the other direction we can only guess."

"But what is it, for heaven's sake?"

"Well, it's clearly artificial."

"That's ridiculous! Fifteen miles down!"

The Professor pointed to the screen again. "God knows I've done my best," he said, "but I can't convince myself that Nature could make anything like that."

I had nothing to say, and presently he continued: "I discovered it three days ago, when I was trying to find the maximum range of the equipment. I can go no deeper than this, and I rather think that the structure we can see is so dense that it won't transmit my radiations any further.

"I've tried a dozen theories, but in the end I keep returning to one. We know that the pressure down there must be eight or nine thousand atmospheres, and the temperature must be high enough to melt rock. But normal matter is still almost empty space. Suppose that there is life down there—not organic life, of course, but life based on partially condensed matter, matter in which the electron shells are few or altogether missing. Do you see what I mean? To such creatures, even the rock fifteen miles down would offer no more resistance than water—and we and all our world would be as tenuous as ghosts."

"Then that thing we can see—"

"Is a city, or its equivalent. You've seen its size, so you can judge for yourself the civilization that must have built it. All the world we know—our oceans and continents and mountains—is nothing more than a film of mist surrounding something beyond our comprehension."

Neither of us said anything for a while. I remember feeling a foolish surprise at being one of the first men in the world to learn the appalling truth; for somehow I never doubted that it was the truth. And I wondered how the rest of humanity would react when the revelation came.

Presently I broke into the silence. "If you're right," I said, "why have they—whatever they are—never made contact with us?"

The Professor looked at me rather pityingly. "We think we're good engineers," he said, 'Tjut how could we reach them? Besides, I'm not at all sure that there haven't been contacts. Think of all the underground creatures of mythology—trolls and cobalds and the rest. No, it's quite impossible—I take it back. Still, the idea is rather suggestive."

All the while the pattern on the screen had never changed: the dim network still glowed there, challenging our sanity. I tried to imagine streets and buildings and the creatures going among them—creatures who could make their way through the incandescent rock as a fish swims through water.

It was fantastic—and then I remembered the incredibly narrow range of temperatures and pressures under which the human race existed. We, not they, were the freaks; for almost all the matter in the universe is at temperatures of thousands or even millions of degrees.

"Well," I said lamely, "what do we do now?"

The Professor leaned forward eagerly. "First, we must learn a great deal more, and we must keep this an absolute secret until we are sure of the facts. Can you imagine the panic there would be if this information leaked out? Of course, the truth's inevitable sooner or later, but we may be able to break it slowly.

"You'll realize that the geological surveying side of my work is now utterly unimportant. The first thing we have to do is to build a chain of stations to find the extent of the structure. I visualize them at ten-mile intervals towards the north, but I'd like to build the first one somewhere in South London to see how extensive the thing is. The whole job will have to be kept as secret as the building of the first radar chain in the late thirties.

"At the same time, I'm going to push up my transmitter power again. I hope to be able to beam the output much more narrowly, and so greatly increase the energy and concentration. But this will involve all sorts of mechanical difficulties, and I will need more assistance."

I promised to do my utmost to get further aid, and the Professor hopes that you will soon be able to visit his laboratory yourself. In the meantime I am attaching a photograph of the vision screen, which although not as clear as the original will, I hope, prove beyond dc^ubt that our observations are not mistaken.

I am well aware that our grant to the Interplanetary Society has brought us dangerously near the total estimate for the year, but surely even the crossing of space is less important than the immediate investigation of this discovery which may have the most profound effects on the philosophy and the future of the whole human race. ...

I sat back and looked at Karn. There was much in the document I had not understood, but the main outlines were clear enough. "Yes," I said, "this is it. Where's that photograph?"

He handed it over. The quality was poor, for it had been copied many times before reaching us. But the pattern was unmistakable and I recognized it at once.

"They were good scientists," I sddadrniringly. "That's Callastheon, all right. So we've found the truth at last, even if it has taken us three hundred years to do it."

"Is that surprising," asked Karn, "when you consider the mountain of stun we've had to translate and the difficulty of copying it before it evaporates?"

I sat in silence for a while, thinking of the strange race whose relics we were examining. Only once—never again!—had I gone up the great vent our engineers had opened into the Shadow World. It had been a frightening and unforgettable experience. The multiple layers of my pressure suit had made movement very difficult, and despite their insulation, I could sense the unbelievable cola that was all around me.

"What a pity it was," I mused, "that our emergence destroyed them so completely. They were a clever race, and we might have learned a lot from them."

"I don't think we can be blamed," said Karn. "We never really believed that anything could exist under those awful conditions of near vacuum and almost absolute zero. It couldn't be helped."

I did not agree. "I think it proves that they were the more intelligent race. After all, they discovered us first. Everyone laughed at my grandfather when he said that the radiation he'd detected from the Shadow World must be artificial."

Karn ran one of his tentacles over the manuscript.

"We've certainly discovered the cause of that radiation," he said. "Notice that date—it's just a year before your grandfather's discovery. The Professor must have got his grant all right!" He laughed unpleasantly. "It must have given him a shock when he saw us coming up to the surface, right underneath him."

I scarcely heard his words, for a most uncomfortable feeling had suddenly come over me. I thought of the thousands of miles of rock lying below the great city of Callestheon, growing hotter and denser all the way to the Earth's unknown core.

And so I turned to Kara.

"That isn't very funny," I said quietly. "It may be our turn next."

Wonderful.

Marcusson lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. "I'll remember this," he said.

Sam Conrad puffed on his pipe. "I'm honored. The world's most currently famous man comes to visit me."

"Cut it out. My head's crammed full with that kind of rot. It's also full of exact science and cold mathematical calculations. Facts and figures haunt my dreams. I want some good steadying conjecture—some of your tobacco-stained philosophy to wet down the indigestible mass."

"Are you afraid, Charles?"

"No—no, I don't think so." Marcusson leaned suddenly forward in his chair. "Sam—what do you think I'll find?"

Conrad shrugged. "Your men at the Foundation would know more about that than I. Mars is really beyond the abstract and restful philosophies—"

"Let's not kid ourselves. They know nothing at all—I know nothing."

"Nor do I. But let's project a bit from what solid^ ground we have. We'll look at it this way: you are a lone Earthman hoping to set your feet on the planet Mars. Therefore, your instinctive interest is in your own safety. What sort of people will you find there—if any? Will they haul you from your ship and kick the life out of you? Will they find pleasure in tearing you to pieces?"

"What do you think, Sam?"

The older man poured two leisurely glasses of lemonade. "We can project with a fair chance of being right. Mars is an old planet. There will certainly be no newly evolved life-forms there. So, if you find living creatures, they will certainly have every right to be called people."

'Til go along with that."

"Ana people, Charles, are the same everywhere." "I don't know-"

"There is absolutely no reason why they shouldn't be. In constructing humankind, Nature invented a fixed formula—a pattern of behavior built upon basic instincts to meet certain physical needs and spiritual conditions. Those conditions, so far as a humanoid is concerned, are the same here on Earth as they would be in the furthest reaches of space. Physical characteristics, of course, are changeable to meet changed geographical and geological conditions. But such things are only trappings; outer garments, so to speak. The spiritual and emotional care of the humanoid is as fixed as the stars."

"Then you believe people are the same everywhere?"

"People—wherever they are able to exist—are all the same."

Marcusson left an hour later. He shook hands with Conrad at the gate and pointed to a certain spot in the heavens. "Tomorrow night about this time, look just-there. You may not see me, but don't forget to look."

"I certainly shall. Good luck."

As Marcusson drove home, he thought again of Conrad's words and found a comfort in them. Not that he was afraid, he assured himself.

Then he refuted that assertion and admitted the truth. Of course he was afraid. Any man in his position would know fear whether he admitted it or not. So the words of his friend were a comfort.

People—wherever they are able to exist—are all the same. And as he went to sleep, the thought was still there: People are all the same.

Everything went off as scheduled—as smoothly and efficiently as Foundation know-how and money could make it. And Marcusson was struck, later, by how swiftly it all slithered into the past and found a storage-niche in his memory. He thought of this when he was far out in space and there was time to think.

He also thought of Sam Conrad.

But the schedule ran true, and before too long there were other things to think about. A planet rearing up out of the void to seemingly snatch at his little craft and bring it into strange port.

Here, the mathematics failed to some extent. Marcus-son was supposed to have set down in daylight, but as he arced in out of his orbit, the moons of Mars were racing through the sky. This was a bit disappointing, but he set down safely, so the mathematics could not really be charged with failure. He left the ship, cautiously removed his oxygen mask, and found he could breathe. Also, that he was exhausted to a point of physical weakness. He sat down on the cool ground for a moment's rest. He slept.

He awakened. Daylight was blazing down. He blinked.

And saw the Martians.

There were two of them—males, Marcusson decided. One was about three inches shorter than the other and the taller stood roughly four feet five inches. They wore clothing of a loose, comfortable sort. The garments were dyed in the brightest hues imaginable and, while they hung to body contour, they seemed to be starched or impregnated with some similar substance.

The Martians were not ugly or especially beautiful from the standpoint of an Eartnman's eye. Nor was the land striking in any manner whatsoever. There was a gray spired city off to the left, but the only Martians in sight were the two males who stood at a safe distance regarding him.

One of them was obviously armed. He carried a small stick with a butt set into it at right angles. He gripped the butt lightly in his small fist, but made ho motion to use the weapon.

But Marcusson paid scant attention to all this. These were merely the outer trappings—the superficial structure-work in which these people existed.

He was interested basically and tensely in—the Martians.

He got slowly to his feet, careful to make no sudden movements. They were alert, wary, but not afraid. They had eyes of a particularly clear sea-green, and behind these eyes was intelligence. They paid no attention to the ship, having evidently inspected it to their satisfaction while he slept. They watched Marcusson and discussed him between themselves in a musical language— a pleasant, bird-like warble that gave off most ably the nuances of mood, thought, and inflection for which anyone unfamiliar with a language always listens.

Marcusson tentatively extended a hand, thinking, with elation, that all was well. People were the same everywhere. These could be two Earthmen inspecting an interplanetary arrival on Terra. Their reactions, their natural caution, their instincts, were of the same pattern exactly.

One of them was eyeing the gun on Marcusson's hip. Quite obviously, the Martian knew what it was. Marcusson made no motion toward it. Rather, he smiled and raised his hand, palm outward.

"I am Charles Marcusson. I come from Earth. I come in peace and with a spirit of brotherhood." He didn't expect them to understand, but he had invented that speech during the long hours in void and wanted to get it off his chest.

The Martians glanced at each other with bright interest. They did not speak to Marcusson but discussed something between themselves, glancing now and again at the spires of the city beyond the rolling hills.

It was obvious to Marcusson that they were attempting to arrive at some decision. A moment later he knew this had been accomplished because they nodded in agreement and turned their attention to the Earthman.

But cautiously and with ever-present alertness. The one with the weapon motioned—a beckoning motion—after which he pointed across the hills toward a spot somewhat to the right of the city.

Then, both Martians invited Marcusson to walk in that direction by doing so themselves. They stopped, glanced back expectantly, and both of them smiled.

Marcusson chuckled inwardly at these hospitable and kindly gestures. Without hesitation, he moved in the indicated direction. The Martians registered, between themselves, a marked satisfaction. An almost childlike elation, Marcusson thought, at getting their simple ideas across to him. They did not come close, but moved to a point on either side of him and well out of harm's way if he made a quick movement. The armed one kept^his weapon ever at ready, but his smile mirrored the friendliness in his mind.

Marcusson estimated they had traveled about four miles when they moved over a low hill and came to the house. Obviously it was a house, but it was like nothing Marcusson had ever seen in the way of a dwelling.

It was a perfect square and no attempt had been made to achieve beauty. Each side ran about twenty feet, and beside it was a smaller square, identical in every respect except size. Grayish windowless walls about ten feet high. Marcusson got the impression of a stockade with a roof, and a tool shed hard by.

The door was merely a section of the wall that pushed inward. Marcusson would have had trouble locating it. One of the Martians opened the door and then both of them stepped back, a careful distance away, and indicated. Marcusson was being invited to precede them.

This he did and was struck immediately by the lighting system inside; or rather, by the apparent absence of a lighting system. He could not discover from whence came the iUumination; yet, through some indirect means, there was shadowless light throughout the single room of the house.

Swiftly he took the place in, and marveled at the entirely different manner in which another race on another planet could arrive at the same objective as the inhabitants of Earth. While the contents of the great room bore no similarity to the furnishings of a Terran home, yet there was doubt that people could live here comfortably and adequately.

They'll be surprised, he thought, when I tell them about this back in New York.

The Martians entered behind him, closed the door and looked at each other in complete understanding.

Never in his life had Marcusson had such a feeling of contentment, well-being, and achievement. At times he thought to marvel at how smoothly everything had gone. Time slipped by and he felt no sense of urgency, because each day brought accomplishment in increased knowledge of these people.

He did not see any Martians other than the two in whose house he lived. And he got the idea he was being jealously guarded by these two; sort of an honored guest they didn t care to share with their world.

This amused him and he made no protest because he felt all that could be taken care of in due time. Besides, he was learning a great deal about the Martians. He discovered they were far ahead of Earthlings in many facets of science. The lighting, for instance. He was never able to discover from whence it came. Yet he knew that it was artificial.

The small shed next to the house seemed to contain a great many things they needed. He was never invited to enter it and did not press the point, but he felt sure the lighting, the refrigeration, the water supply, and all the Martian's conveniences of living originated in that small building.

He was somewhat surprised that, while the two Martians were unfailingly attentive and courteous, they continued to mistrust him. They never came close to him in a pair. Always one stood back on the alert, ready to use the small weapon if necessary.

He discarded his own weapon the first night, as a gesture of friendship. He was disappointed, but not discouraged, when they did not reciprocate.

Yet he had no complaint. It was a little like having two excellent servants to do his bidding night and day.

And he was puzzled at the continual air of anticipation between them. They had long discussions in the soft liquid language and, though he couldn't understand it, he felt it was all of a tenor, always relative to the same subject.

Then came the day he'd hoped for—the day they definitely became more intimate with him. The taller of the two took the initiative in the missionary work, and after a little time Maracusson found out what he was driving at. He wanted to know about the place Marcus-son had come from.

Their intercourse took on varied forms. Marcusson printed the word Earth on a metal writing plate and the Martian swiftly understood. He put down some spidery hieroglyphics of his own and Marcusson picked up a smattering of the language. But not much. It was very difficult.

Most of the communications were by way of drawings. When Marcusson indicated the Martian domicile with a wave of his arm and then sketched a Terran cottage, the

Martian was highly elated and went into conference with his partner.

The Martian evinced a tremendous interest in the sketch and Marcusson elaborated upon it greatly, sketching out the rooms, the furnishings, and several outside angles until the Martian appeared satisfied.

On the day following the final sketching of a Terran dwelling place, Marcusson awoke to find what he rated as almost a miracle. The Martians alertly invited him outside and over the brow of the nearest hilL Marcusson gasped.

They had built him a house.

They watched him closely for his reaction, and were pleased when it was favorable. Marcusson moved forward in a daze, entered the cottage and felt himself to be back on Earth. Every detail of his sketches had been carried out with amazing accuracy. The furniture, the floor coverings, the wallpaper—even the light fixtures were in place. And when Marcusson snapped a wall switch, the bulbs gave forth the yellow radiance he had known on Terra.

He was astounded. They are far ahead of us, he thought. Beside them, we are children. Here advance science is commonplace. Science of which we have not even dreamed.

But Conrad was right, he thought warmly. They are people. Basically they are no different from us.

Marcusson moved into his new home that night, much to the delight of the Martians. He ate his dinner at a table which could have come from any Terran furniture store. He lay down in a bed any Terran would have been proud to own.

The Martians did not dine with him. Instead they stood by, conversing in their soothing musical language, happiness mirrored in every syllable.

When darkness felL they left him alone in his house.

Marcusson filled the early evening hours studying the written Martian language. He had made quite a little progress with the words and could now pick out phrases and whole sentences from the long, narrow books the two Martians had given him.

It was about time, he decided, to widen his areas of research. Tomorrow he would insist upon visiting the gray city across the hills.

But the people of the city came to visit him. He arose the next morning and found breakfast awaiting him. But as he sat down to the table, something caught his eye through the window. He arose and went outside.

The Martians were there—hundreds of them—and more coming over the hills from the spired city. ^_.

A chill such as he had never known swept through Marcusson. He saw the bars in which he was imprisoned— the cage erected around his house—the sign in Martian lettering he interpreted into his own language and read with horror:

EARTH CREATURE—IN ITS NATURAL HABITAT

He saw the staring eyes of the Martians and realized the full, ghastly truth of Conrad's words: People are the same everywhere.

He gripped the cage bars in his fists.

And screamed.

"That will be Parkhurst," he said to himself, rising. "It's about time."

Five weeks he had been alone, and more than anything he wanted company. It was just five weeks to the day that young Oberlin, his assistant, had been taken sick with fever. Grayson had packed him off in the post gig while he was still able to get about.

"Tell Parkhurst to send me another as good as you," he had said not unkindly. "You deserve a better place than this anyway."

Grayson opened the screen door and made his way down the catwalk to the jetty. The last glimmers of daylight were just passing. In the gloom, silhouetted against the lighter glow of open water, he saw the launch turn inshore and head for a landing.

A moment later he caught a line and secured it to the bollards as a tall gangly man leaped onto the jetty.

"Hullo, Grayson, the man said. "How's every little' thing?"

Grayson shook hands warmly but cast a surprised eye down into the launch. "Everything's fine sir, he said, "but where's my new assistant?"

Parkhurst smiled. "We'll discuss that later. Right now I could do with a drink and a chance to stretch my legs. I would have taken a copter, but you know how those things act up over this infernal bog. . . ."

In puzzled silence, Grayson led the way back to the veranda, switched on a lamp and an insect repellant tube and got out glasses and a bottle of Earthside whiskey. Parkhurst lingered over his drink luxuriously. He was a big man, almost completely bald save for a fringe of reddish hair just above the ears, and there was an air of efficiency about him in spite of his bulk.

"It was a good idea, sending Oberlin back when you did," he said. "The medics at the base found he had incipient mold fever. That can be pretty nasty, but fortunately they caught it before it got a start. I read your report too. You're doing a good job here, Grayson. I don't mind telling you that this post is better managed than any in Venus South."

He went on, discussing the weather, giving the idle gossip of the base which under ordinary circumstances would have held Grayson in rapt attention. Tonight, however, the controlleur writhed under the delay. At length he could stand it no longer.

"In my report, sir, I asked for another assistant. I don't mind the swamp, though it can bepretty bad at times, but it's no place for a man alone. The psychos said that when they laid out this place and . . ."

Parkhurst smiled like a man withholding something until the last possible moment.

"Oh I brought you your assistant all right,"

"You did?' said Grayson, looking bewildered. "Then where. . . . ?"

"He's in the launch," chuckled Parkhurst, "Under the hatch."

"Under the hatch . . . !"

"Perhaps I'd better explain," said Parkhurst, "Your assistant—his name is Rafael, by the way—comes directly from the Ensenada Production Works at Madrid on Earth. He represents the latest electronic development and scientific research of the present day. He . . ."

"Just a minute, sir." A horribly chilling thought had suddenly struck Grayson. "Are you telling me that you've brought a robot?"

Parkhurst got a cheroot out of his pocket and lit it slowly. "Not exactly," he said. "Wait, I'll go down to the launch and get him."

Grayson's fists clenched as his superior went out the screen door and disappeared into the blackness. Parkhurst was gone only a moment. When he reappeared, a second figure was at his heels. As they entered the ellipse of light, Grayson stared, then felt his misgivings pass.

The newcomer was tall and erect, a man who appeared to be about thirty-five, with strong aquiline features, clad in a suit of whites, plastic insect boots and a mold-protector helmet.

"This is Rafael, your new assistant," Parkhurst said. "He's an Epwa."

Grayson grinned. "Glad to know you," he said cordially. Then: "Pardon my ignorance, but what the devil's an Epwa?"

The shock was quick in coming. The hand he stretched out closed over fingers that gave resiliently but were cold as metal to the touch. A voice said flat and tone-lessly, "How do you do. Yes, I am an Epwa. The word is derived from the names, Ensenada Production Works Assembly, where I was created. I hope our relationship will be a mutually favorable one."

So they had sent him a mechanical contrivance in place of an assistant! Grayson could feel the indignation rise like a hot flush within him. And after eighteen years! That's what came of giving the best part of one's life to this damned colonial service. Probably thought he was getting old, and this was a polite way of telling him he'd better look to his retirement, Grayson remembered with a pang the days of his youth on Earth. He had been something then. He had graduated from Western Hemisphere College but he had pushed his way through school by his own bootstraps. His father had been nothing more than Third Engineer on a space freighter. Grayson gloried in the fact that he had been accepted by the new post atomic aristocracy on the basis or intelligence alone. Out here on Venus South he had managed to preserve his mental superiority by his dealings with the

Venusians, who were, according to the Mokart anthropological scale, a decidely inferior race.

He looked again at Rafael, and he was astonished at the life-like qualities of the new assistant. Save for a frozen immobility of countenance—the eyes did not wink and there was no movement of the features except when he spoke—the impression that he was facing a human was overpowering.

Parkhurst smiled as he witnessed Grayson's astonishment. "You're behind the times, old man. Wonders have been done in electronics during the last decade. Rafael here can do everything a man can do and is a damned sight more efficient. He requires no food or sleep. He will obey commands as far as his powers of visibility are concerned. Moreover, he records all those commands on an internal chart for future reference. He can talk and answer questions, though naturally his abilities' in that field are somewhat limited. But he can hold up his end of the conversation just so he isn't required to do so too often. A background of personal memoirs has been recorded into the mechanism of his brain. His outer covering, which as you see has been tinted to resemble flesh, is formed of the new transluk plastic which permits his entire inner workings to be visible when an inner light is switched on. He's as good as and probably better than any assistant you could possibly get,

Grayson sank back in bis chair with a look of awe. "Are there a lot of these . . . these Epwas . . . back on Earth?"

"No." Parkhurst shook his head slowly. "Not yet at any rate. Public reaction has been somewhat antagonistic to them so far. That's why we're trying them out here in the colonies first."

Two hours later Parkhurst shook hands, re-entered the launch and disappeared into the swamp darkness. As he paced back down the catwalk, Grayson's first emotion was one of embarrassment. How to treat Rafael? Like any other mechanical contrivance with which the post was equipped—the automatic ventilators and air filters, the storm warning gadgets, the radar screen which kept him appeaised of the movements and activities of the neighboring Venusian tribes? Or should he treat him with a quasi-human relationship as one would an uneducated native or a child?

Upon reaching the veranda, Grayson said self-consciously, "If you'll follow me, I'll show you to your quarters."

Rafael nodded and rose jerkily from the chair. Passing through the central quarters of the dome, lit now by a soft glow of hidden lights, Grayson noted with some irritation that the assistant was so light on his feet no sound of his steps would be heard. He opened the door of the spare bedroom, and Rafael stepped inside.

"I get up at seven," the Earthman said. You will go down to the spring and bring back a bucket of fresh water some time before that. The water system here is temporarily out of- order, and I haven't got around to repairing it yet."

Rafael said, "I understand. Where is the spring?"

The question was fiat and toneless but clear and distinct. Then Grayson remembered: the assistant could obey commands only as far as his visibility or detailed directions went,

"The spring is approximately fifty yards from the dome," he explained. You go down the catwalk as far as the jetty, then turn right on the path there." He added, "Be careful not to stray off the path. Quicksand, you know."

Rafael said, "I understand. Spring, fifty yards, path, quicksand."

Grayson went across to his room, undressed, and lay down on his bed. He tried to court sleep but lay there wide awake while troubled thoughts milled in his brain. What the devil was wrong with them at the base? It was companionship he needed here at Blue Mold. One man could easily take care of the duties, but one man would go quite mad if left in this swamp alone for any length of tune. It wasn't so much the silence or the incredible isolation, though they were bad enough. It was the subtle, insidious alien quality of the marsh that worked slowly into a man's mind and took hold there like a bulbous thing alive. Wherever one went there was mold, blue parasitical mold that came drifting down from the thick sky like balls of indigo cotton. Where they landed, they adhered with leech-like tenacity, developing rootlets, growing, spreading with a loathsome fecundity. The roily water was blue, the cat-tail trees were blue, the marsh grass, the Venusian bamboo, the very air had a bluish cast to it. And the damnable color was endemic; already Grayson had detected bluish spots at his fingertips, along the under side of his arms.

The Venusian tribes who looked to, him as their magistrate alone seemed to thrive in these surroundings. But they were a low caliber lot, semi-nomadic, too shiftless to build decent permanent habitations.

About midnight Grayson finally fell into a restless sleep. He dreamed unpleasant dreams of pulling a launch through the shore ooze of the great swamp—like a boatman on the Volga—while four Epwas, each identical to the others, cracked whips and urged him on. When he finally awoke, it was with the enervating sensation that no time at all had elapsed He felt better, however, after he had showered and dressed, and when he went into central-quarters an agreeable sight met his gaze. On the table was a flagon of cold water. Rafael stood in the center of the room, motionless, apparently awaiting commands.

Breakfast over, Grayson crossed to his desk at the far side of the room to lay out his work for the day. This was the part of the morning he enjoyed best. Here he could sit amid the pleasant disorderhness of piled papers, pencils, pipes, and his books on Venusian lepidopters and

lan briefly his work for the next seven or eight hours, 'he fact that he never followed through on these plans troubled him not at all. Grayson wasn t a tidy man; he did things hit or miss fashion, although in the end he usually managed to accomplish what he had set out to do.

Two feet away from his desk, he stopped staring. Gone were the familiar piles of paper. In their place was a naked expanse of desk surface, the dark ivonwon wood/ polished to the nines. His pipes were neatly arrayed in the rack on the wall; his books, three of which he had left* open to passages he wanted to reread, were closed and stacked, bindings out, on the desk top.

Grayson's face slowly drained of color. Like all untidy men he hated to have his personal possessions disturbed. He swung and called Rafael. The assistant approached quietly. "After this," Grayson said, controlling his anger with an effort, "you will touch nothing on this desk at all. Do you understand, nothing at all. As far as you're concerned, this desk is tabu, . . . verboten."

The assistant said, "Desk . . . not touch ... I understand."

It was a full week before Grayson adjusted himself to the presence of his new companion, but never, he told himself, could be quite accept the fact that Rafael was not human. Several times he had ordered the assistant to stand still while he switched on the light that lit up his intenor. Then he stood there and marveled at the world of wires, electronic tubes, and resistors, which made up the assistant's inner man.

But as Parkhurst had said, Rafael was efficient. He performed every duty expertly and completely. His memory was prodigious; he needed to be told only once to do a task. It was this very efficiency that began to eat away, like drops of falling water, at Grayson's usual aplomb.

Unconsciously he fell to watching the assistant in his various performances for something to criticize. He found nothing. Moreover, Rafael was at all times a gentleman which Grayson was not. It infuriated the Earthman to receive a quiet spoken genteel reply in answer to one of his own that was barbed with profanity.

"Rafael, get me my meerschaum pipe. * "Meerschaum ... I do not understand the word, sir."

"You idiot! It's the white one on the desk." "Desk . . . desk. I am not to touch anything on the desk, sir."

"Damn you, you're to do as I say. Get the pipe."

But Grayson remembered one detail of Rafael's construction very well and he took pains to act accordingly. The assistant's internal chart upon which were recorded all the commands given him. It would not do to send him about on false missions.

It was the last day of January when Rafael had been brought to the post. Now it was getting on to the middle of February and on the fifteenth certain as clockwork, the rainy-mold season would begin. That meant for exactly thirty days they would be confined to the dome. Weather changes went off with machine precision here in Venus South, and during the rm days an Earthman's life wasn't worth a single credit if exposed to the elements in the great swamp.

On the fourteenth he said to Rafael, "You will leave at once for Village Xanon, see the headman and find out why the regular tax payment has not been made. Village Xanon is approximately ten kilometers from here. It lies inland due East, and there is a trail of plastic discs mounted on trees at regular intervals. Be back here by tomorrow noon at the latest."

A slight whirring issued from the assistant's head as he mulled over this information.

After Rafael had gone, Grayson settled in a chair, lit his pipe and felt extremely satisfied. He had given the assistant a metal umbrella to fend off the falling mold

ores, but during the rm days that was scant protection, id rm started tomorrow. Although he would not admit it to himself, Grayson hoped Rafael would not return. Then when Parkhurst came for his regular inspection trip in March, he could say, "Send me down another assistant, will you. And make it an Earthman this rime. That last contraption of yours wasn't very . .. durable."

But Rafael did come back. He came back with his new insect boots stained and plastered with mud, with his suit of whites ripped and torn and his face mottled from contact with mold spores. He brought not only the overdue tax payment but also a small bag woven of blue ipso grass.

"What's this, Rafael?" "A personal gift, sir." "A gift?"

"From the Venusians, sir. They . . . like me."

It was the evenings that Grayson always disliked. Where the average Earthman finds this a time to relax and review the events of the day, Grayson always saw himself a day older with another period of frustration ticked off in a life that had been one large disappointment. He was tired then too, even though the day's activities had been light, but weariness was a feeling unknown to Rafael.

Grayson began to hate the sight of the assistant, always so fresh, so composed, always so ready to respond to his every command. The fact that Rafael needed no sleep to revitalize his energy led the Earthman to wonder what occupied the assistant's thoughts during the lonely hours of the night. That was absurd, of course. An Epwa couldn't think in the abstract sense. Yet as if to refute this, Rafael was always ready to launch into a series of personal reminiscences whenever the silence hung heavy in the dome. Grayson knew those tales and anecdotes were part of a fabricated past skillfully woven into Rafael's brain by his ingenious manufacturer, but the effect of reality was always there.

"Did I ever tell you of the time I was lost on Mars' red desert?"

"Yes, you did, Rafael. Keep your machine-made recollections to yourself."

As the days of his enforced stay in the dome dragged past a land of tension began to build up in the Earthman. Grayson sought to fight this tension by making himself physically slack. He neglected the first rule of a colonial on any of the backward planets, that of dressing for dinner and shaving every day. Yet although a disregard for these habits helped to alleviate the nervous strain, he was acutely aware that the assistant needed no such indulgences.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain and the mold ended. But with a richer luxuriance than before caused by the excessive moisture, the blue vegetation now took on a purplish hue that spread itself voluptuously across the great marsh. Grayson felt the tension within him increase rather than lessen.

To make matters worse, the Indigo birds—Ornithop-tera-azure—changed their migration habits and came down from Venus North, nesting in vast numbers about the post. A repulsive scavenger species with razor-sharp beaks and long saurian tails, they had an unpleasant trick of directing their attack against the eyes. Grayson found it necessary to carry a weapon with him whenever he left the dome. The birds stayed two weeks. They gave way to the Lyzata, equally horrible, who were fur-bearing serpents of python size and who, though harmless, crawled over everything like enormous caterpillars.

In the early part of April Grayson realized quite suddenly that native conditions here in his sector of Venus South had gone from bad to worse. Neither Village Xanon nor any of the other pahongs had followed up on their regular monthly tax payments. Furthermore, when he occasionally met a Venusian on the jungle trail, the native stared at him impudently and made no move to bow, a recognition which the controlleur always insisted upon. Grayson had only contempt for these swamp creatures, and his dealings with them, as overlord, were touched with cruelty and arrogance. Two years ago he had found it necessary to whip a Venusian arcolat, within an inch of his life, all because the scoundrel had failed to wash his filthy hands before preparing food that had been presented to the Earthman.

When Grayson went to Village Xanon to see about the tax, he was met with open resentment. The grizzled old chief replied he could not pay for five days and no amount of threatening could alter his stand.

"Great sir, why do you not send the man-who-cannot-smile to our pahong? He is kind and considerate and speaks to us softly."

Grayson stiffened. The man-who-cannot-smile! You mean Rafael?"

"That is his name. Yes."

The Earthman controlled his rage with difficulty.

"Get this through your head," he replied. "It makes no difference who comes to collect, you'll pay. Understand?"

Then he had done something he regretted because it violated one of the most stringent rules of a Venus colonial. He had struck the chief across the mouth with the flat of his hand. All too well Grayson knew that to a Venusian the body of a chief was considered inviolable.

Retarning the back trail to the dome, the controlleur told himself it was time indeed to get rid of his Epwa assistant. Not only was Rafael a calculating errorless machine who could offer no normal companionship, he was disturbing the morale of the entire native organization. Let him stay on here with his equality treatment of the Venusians and Blue Mold would shortly become unbearable.

Grayson mulled this over after he had reached the post.

He knew he could get rid of Rafael by no regular channels. Parkhurst was a straight-laced fool to whom rules and regulations were gods to be obeyed at all costs. He would never consent to replace the assistant unless he were given a logical reason. Moreover Rafael's internal chart effectually blocked any move by which the assistant might be made to do harm to himself.

The controlleur set about devising plans and putting them into action.

He carefully changed the plastic discs trail markings so that instead of leading to Xanon village they wound deeper into a remote section of the swamp.

But although he was gone a day longer, Rafael came back from his mission, bringing the overdue tax payment plus more gifts the Venusians had given him.

Grayson next dispatched Rafael via the spare gig in-country some eighteen kilometers to investigate a report that a saurian beast had been seen in that area. Before the assistant left Grayson drilled several holes in the gig below the water line and plugged them with quick melting cozar, a kind of beeswax found in the swamp.

But again the assistant returned and placidly made his report. There was no beast but only an odd shaped rock outcropping which the natives had mistaken at a distance. Grayson nodded silently and this time asked no questions.

Instead he went out the screen door, paced into the compound and halted a short distance from the dome, staring up into the thick sky. Moments passed, and he glanced at his watch impatiently.

Abruptly a high pitched scream of air sounded. An instant later the aluminum shell landed, half burying itself in the spongy soil.

Someday the men back at the base who figured the trajectory of this cartridge were going to miscalculate and hit the dome. Grayson picked up the shell, unscrewed its cap and dumped out its contents; mostly magazines and newspapers, a few letters.

The Earthman always went over his mail thoroughly. There were several copies of Colonial Spaceways, one of which contained an article, The Future of the Epwa, which he read with a good deal of interest. There were also two decks of playing cards sent by a thoughtful friend in Venus City.

One passage in the Epwa article he read several times:

Under average conditions the Epwa is a highly developed mechanism that is practically indestructible. Care should be taken, however, not to subject its mental powers to sustained strain over a long period of time. Failure to heed this warning by the manufacturer may result in a complete breakdown of the device's electronic brain.

The controlleur rose and called to Rafael. When the assistant appeared, Grayson took one of the decks of cards and tossed it upon the table.

"I'll show you a game," he said, "a game that will test your powers of concentration. It's called Solitaire."

He explained carefully. This wasn't ordinary Canfield solitaire. It was a better game, less ruled by chance.

"In the first part you need a partner," Grayson said, "although it isn't required. This partner goes through the deck, drawing a card at a time, concentrating on its suit and numerical value, but permitting only the backs to be visible to you. Now here is where parapsychology or cryptesthesia comes into play. Some persons call it E. S. P.—or Extra Sensory Perception. As the partner concentrates on each card, you attempt to receive his thought wave and "guess" what the card is. In this fashion you divide the deck into four packs of what you assume to be four complete suits. Of course if you rely on chance alone, the odds against you would be pretty heavy. But since mental action probably sets off a radiation and since your electronic brain has been devised to receive such stimuli, you should score fairly high.

"The rest is simple. Drawing one card at a time from any of the four packs, you form a cross of five cards face up on the table. You play upon this cross in reverse rotation, paying no attention to suit. In other words, on a nine you can play any eight, on a queen any knave. When you have played as far as you can, the next card you draw goes in the corner, thus filling out the cross into a square. Let us suppose this card is a five spot. Then into each corner must go one of the other three fives and on these corner cards you build up in regular rotation: six, seven, eight, et cetera, according to suit.

"The object of the game is to form each corner into a complete run of one suit, but the method is far more than a simple matter of luck. It goes back to E. S. P. and your mental division of the pack by thought-concentration. Is all that clear?"

Rafael nodded and Grayson fancied he saw interest light up that plastic face. They began to play and when the controlleur had gone through the deck for the initial selection, he left the table, crossed to a chair, lit his pipe, and sat down to watch.

It was worth watching. With his head bent slightly forward and his body erect in the chair, the assistant was the picture of concentration. He formed the cross of five cards. Moving slowly, slurring to the discard pile only after long thought, he began to build up three corners. But the fourth corner was stubborn and as the pile began to grow, it soon became evident that he was going to lose. At length he swept the cards together impatiently.

"Again!" he said to Grayson.

So again Grayson went through the deck while the assistant mentally sorted and evaluated them. Rafael was playing hurriedly now, almost as if a high stake had been placed on the game.

For an hour Grayson watched as Rafael lost game after game. The controlleur yawned then and headed for his room. But halfway he checked on impulse and slid into the chair before the.radar panel. For several moments he sat there, turning dials and making adjustments. Then he leaned back, a scowl darkening his features.

The screen told a disturbing story. The Venusians were on the move; large parties from three neighboring villages were apparently converging on Village Xanon. And that could mean only one thing: the grievance ceremony, a council held by the men of the tribes to discuss an alleged wrong brought against them by an officer of the government. That's what came of having a mealy mouthed mechanical parrot for an assistant.

Grayson shrugged and went to bed.

When he emerged into central quarters the next morning Rafael was still at the table, playing cards. The Earth-man smiled crookedly but said nothing.

He went about his duties at the post and in the afternoon set out into the swamp to inspect his traps. He was bending over one of the snares when a spiked thorn dart whispered by his head and plunged into a nearby bole of a tree. In a fury Grayson wheeled in time to see a Venusian thrust his head above a fern frond, leer at him defiantly, and then disappear.

That settled it. It was time to put these damned aliens in their place. Grayson swung into the back trail and headed rapidly for the post. Back at the dome he went to his room, took down a heat pistol and nipped the chamber to see that it had a full charge. He dropped it into his pocket and strode into central quarters.

Rafael was seated at the table, playing cards.

Grayson smiled as he observed the partial fruition of his plans. If it were possible for an Epwa to do so, the assistant already looked wan and haggard. There was a dull reddish glow about his eyes and his plastic hands as he manipulated the cards, moved nervously and jerkily.

"I'm going to Village Xanbn," Grayson said, striding to the door. "You will stay here and take care of the post."

Rafael looked up from the cards.

"Village Xanon is dangerous now, sir," he said. "If I don't hear from you within a reasonable length of time, I'll follow."

"You'll do nothing of the sort," Grayson said. "You'll stay here and play the cards. That's an order."

Parkhurst's regular inspection visit was three days late, and the colonial official was somewhat concerned as he nudged the electric launch to the landing stage at Blue Mold. Brooding silence hung over the post and no light was visible through the ports of the dome. Parkhurst climbed the veranda steps.

"Hullo!" he called. "Anyone here?"

A darker shadow roused itself then from a wing-back chair as Rafael, the assistant, came forward, switching on a lamp.

"I give you greetings," he said formally. "Grayson has not yet returned."

Parkhurst surveyed Rafael closely. The Epwa, he was glad to see, appeared in good shape. His clothing, although showing signs of wear, was clean and neatly pressed, and his plastic face and hands seemed in perfect condition.

"WelL how've you two been getting on?" Parkhurst queried, lighting a cheroot. "Where is Grayson, by the way?"

^,!He's at Village Xanon," Rafael replied. "He told me to stay here and play the game."

Parkhurst's eyes lifted. "Game?"

"A game called Solitaire. It is played with these cards."

The colonial official moved across to the table and while he watched, Rafael swept the deck together and began to explain the game as Grayson had explained it to him. Listening, Parkhurst showed impatience at first; then his brow furrowed in a deep frown.

"Grayson preferred to go himself. He went to see about a grievance council the Venusians are holding."

"Grievance co—!" Alarm sounded in Pargkhurst's voice. "Great thunder, what's wrong?"

"I don't know exactly. Except that Grayson struck their chief when he became insubordinate." Parkhurst slumped slowly into a chair. A muscle

uivered on his cheek. "When was he due back?" he emanded hoarsely.

"He has been gone five days. Do you wish to play the game with me?"

Five days! And the fool had struck a chief. Parkhurst turned and stared out into the silent blackness that was the great swamp. Five days! A controlleur had implicit orders never under any circumstances to remain away from his post more than forty-eight hours. Suddenly the colonial official's throat went dry and a feeling of nausea entered his stomach. The cheroot slipped from his fingers to the floor.

With a queer inner horror he realized that Grayson was not going to return.

Parkhurst sat there in a stupor, cold sweat breaking out upon his body while Rafael continued to babel about the card game. His words seemed to come from far off. Something about the deck Grayson had given him containing only fifty-one cards, an error which the Epwa had discovered and taken care of soon after the Earth-man's departure.

Then Elven stiffened. The humming behind him shaped itself into faint English speech altered by centuries of slurring, but still essentially the same.

"You fly fast, Elven."

"Faster than any of your hunters," Elven agreed softly without looking around, and added, "FTL"—meaning Faster Than Light.

"You fly far, Elven. Tens of light-years," the wounded voice continued.

"Scores," Elven corrected.

"Yet I speak to you, Elven."

"But you don't know where I am. I came on a blind reach through deep sub-space. And your FTL radio can take no fix. You are shouting at infinity, Fedris."

"And fly you ever so fast and far, Elven," the wounded voice persisted, "you must finally go to ground, and then we will search you out,"

Again Elven laughed gayly. His eyes were still on the green doorway. "You will search me out! Where will you search me out, Fedris? On which of the million planets of the sos? On which of the hundred million planets not of the sos?"

The wounded voice grew weaker. "Your home planet is dead, Elven. Of all the Wild Ones, only you supped through our cordon."

This time Elven did not comment vocally. He felt at his throat and carefully took from a gleaming locket there a tiny white sphere no bigger than a lady beetle. Holding it treasuringly in his cupped palm, he studied it with a brooding mockery. Then, still handling it as if it were an awesome object, he replaced it in the locket.

The wounded voice had sunk to a ghostly whisper.

"You are alone, Elven. Alone with the mystery and terror of the universe. The unknown will find you,

Elven, even before we do. Time and space and fate will all conspire againstyou. Chance itself will—"

The spectral FTL-radio voice died as the residual power in the wrecked- machinery exhausted itself utterly. Silence filled the broken gut of the spaceboat.

Silence that was gayly shattered when Elven laughed a last time. Fedris the Psychologist! Fedris the Fool! Did Fedris think to sap his nerve with witch-doctor threats and the power of suggestion? As if a man—or woman— of the Wild Ones could ever be brought to believe in the supernatural!

Not that there wasn't an unearthliness loose in the universe, Elven reminded himself somberly—an unearthly beauty born of danger and ultimate self-expression. But only the Wild Ones knew that unearthliness. It could never be known to the poor tame hordes of the sos, who would always revere safety and timidity as most members of the human sos—or society—have revered them—and hate all lovers of beauty and danger.

Just as they had hated the Wild Ones and so destroyed them.

All save one.

One, had Fedris said? Elven smiled cryptically, touched the locket at his neck, and leaped lightly to his feet.

A short time later he had what he needed from the wreck.

"And now, Fedris," he murmured, "I have a work of creation to perform." He smiled. "Or should I say recreation?"

He directed at the green doorway the blunt muzzle of a dustgun. There was no sound or flash, but the green boughs shook, blackened—the thorns vanishing—and turned to a drifting powder fine and dark as the ashes carpeting Earth's Moon. Elven sprang to the doorway and for a moment he was poised there, yellow-haired, cool-lipped, kughing-eyed, handsome as a young god—or adolescent devil—in his black tunic embroidered with platinum. Then he leaned out and directed the dustgun's ultrasonic downward until he had cleared a patch of ground in the thorn forest. When this moment's work was over, he dropped lightly down, the fine dust puffing up to his knees at the impact.

Elven snapped off his dustgun, flirted sweat from his face, laughed at his growing exasperation, and looked around at the thorn forest, ft had not changed an iota in the miles he'd made. Just the glassy thorns and the lance-shaped leaves and the boughs rising from the bare, reddish earth. Not another planet to be seen. Nor had he caught the tiniest glimpse of moving life, large or small—save the thorns themselves, which "noticed him whenever he came too close. As an experiment he'd let a baby one prick him and it had stung abominably.

Such an environment! What did it suggest, anyhow? Cultivation? Or a plant that permeated its environs with poison, as Earth's redwood its woody body. He grinned at the chill that flashed along his spine.

And, if there were no animal life, what the devil were the thorns for?

A ridiculous forest! In its simplicity suggesting the enchanted forests of ancient Earthly fairy tales. That idea should please witch doctor Fedris!

If only he had some notion of the general location of the planet he was on, he might be able to make better guesses about its other life forms. Life spores did drift about in space, so that solar systems and even star regions tended to have biological similarities. But he'd come too fast and too curiously, too fast even to see stars, in the Wild Ones' fastest and most curious boat, to know where he was.

Or for Fedris to know where he was, he reminded himself.

Or for any deep-space approach-warning system, if there were one on this planet, to have spotted his arrival. For that matter he hadn't foreseen his arrival himself. There had been just the dip up from sub-space, the sinister black confetti of the meteorite swarm, the collision, the wrecked spaceboat's desperate fall, clutching at the nearest planet.

He should be able to judge his location when night came and he could see the stars. That is, if night ever came on this planet. Or if that high fog ever dispersed.

He consulted his compass. The needle of the primitive but useful instrument held true. At least this planet had magnetic poles.

And it probably had night and day, to support vegetable life and such a balmy temperature.

Once he got out of this forest, he'd be able to plan. Just give him cities! One city!

He tucked the compass in his tunic, patting the locket at his neck in a strangely affectionate, almost reverent way.

He looked at the laced boughs ahead. Yes, it was exactly like those fairy forests that cost fairy-book knights so much hackwork with their two-handed swords.

Easier with a dustgun—and he had scores of miles of cleared path in his store of ultrasonic refills.

He glanced back at the slightly curving tunnel he'd made.

Through the slaty ashes on its floor, wicked green shoots were already rising. He snapped on the duster.

The boughs were so thick at its. edge that the clearing took Elven by surprise. One moment he was watching a tangled green mat blacken under the duster's invisible beam. The next, he had stepped out—not into fairyland, but into the sort of place where fairy tales were first told.

The clearing was about a half mile in diameter. Round it the thorn forest made a circle. A little stream bubbled out of the poisonous greenery a hundred paces to his right and crossed the clearing through a shallow valley. Beyond the stream rose a small hill.

On the hillside was a ragged cluster of gray buildings. From one of them rose a pencil of smoke. Outside were a couple of carts and some primitive agricultural implements.

Save for the space occupied by the buildings, the valley was under intensive cultivation. The hill was planted at regular intervals with small trees bearing clusters of red and yellow fruit. Elsewhere were rows of bushy plants and fields of grain rippling in the breeze. All vegetation, however, seemed to stop about a yard from the thorn forest.

There was a mournful lowing. Around the hillside came a half dozen cattle. A man in a plain tunic was leisurely driving them toward the buildings. A tiny animal, perhaps a cat, came out of the building with the smoke and walked with the cattle, rubbing against their legs. A young woman came to the door after the cat and stood watching with folded arms.

Elven drank in the atmosphere of peace and rich earth, feeling like a man in an ancient room. Such idyllic scenes as this must have been Earth's in olden times. He felt his taut muscles relaxing.

A second young woman stepped out of a copse of trees just ahead and stood facing him, wide-eyed. She was dressed in a greenish tunic of softened, spun, and woven vegetable fibers. Elven sensed in her a certain charm, half sophisticated, half primitive. She was like one of the girls of the Wild Ones in a rustic play suit. But her face was that of an awestruck child.

He walked toward her through the rustling grain. She dropped to her knees.

"You . . . you—"' she murmured with difficulty. Then, more swiftly, in perfect English speech, "Do not harm me, lord. Accept my reverence."

"I will not harm you, if you answer my questions well," Elven replied, accepting the advantage in status he seemed to have been given. "What place is this?"

"It is the Place," she replied simply.

"Yes, but what place?"

"It is the Place, she repeated quakingly. "There are no others."

"Then where did I come from?" he asked.

Her eyes widened a little with terror. "I da not know." She was redhaired and really quite beautiful.

Elven frowned. "What planet is this?"

She looked at him doubtfully. "What is planet?"

Perhaps there were going to be language difficulties after all, Elven thought. "What sun?" he asked.

"What is sun?"

He pointed upward impatiently. "Doesn't that stuff ever go away?"

"You mean," she faltered fearfully, "does the sky ever go away?"

"The sky is always the same?"

"Sometimes it brightens. Now comes night."

"How far to the end of the thorn forest?"

"I do not understand." Then her gaze slipped beyond him, to the ragged doorway made by his duster. Her look of awe was intensified, became touched with horror. "You have conquered the poison needles," she whispered. Then she abased herself until her loose, red hair touched the russet shoots of the grain. "Do not hurt me, all-powerful one," she gasped.

"I cannot promise that," Elven told her curtly. "What is your name?"

Sefora," she whispered.

"Very well, Sefora. Lead me to your people." She sprang up and fled like a doe back to the farm buildings.

When Elven reached the roo.f from which the smoke rose, taking the leisurely pace befitting his dignity as god or overlord or whatever the girl had taken him for, the welcoming committee had already formed. Two young men bent their knees to him, and the young woman he had seen standing at the doorway held out to him a platter of orange and purple fruit The Con-

ueror of the Poison Needles sampled this refreshment, len waved it aside with a curt nod of approval although he found it delicious.

When he entered the rude farmhouse he was met by a blushing Sefora who carried cloths and a steaming bowl. She timidly indicated his boots. He showed her the trick of the fastenings and in a few moments he was sprawled on a couch of hides stuffed with aromatic leaves, while she reverently washed his feet

She was about twenty, he discovered talking to her idly, not worrying about important information for the moment. Her life was one of farm work and rustic play. One of the young men—Alfors—had recently become her mate.

Outside the gray sky was swiftly darkening. The other young man, whom Elven had first seen driving the cattle and who answered to the name of Kors, now brought armfuls of knotty wood, which he fed to the meager fire, so that it crackled up in rich yellows and reds. While Tub/a—Kors' girl—busied herself nearby with work that involved mouth-watering odors.

The atmosphere was homey, though somewhat stiff. After all, Elven reminded himself, one doesn't have a god to dinner every night. But after a meal of meat stew, fresh-baked bread, fruit conserves, and a thin wine, he smiled his approval and the atmosphere quickly became more celebratory, in fact quite gay. Alfors took a harp strung with gut and sang simple praises of nature, while later Sefora and Tulya danced. Kors kept the fire roaring and Elven's wine cup full though once he disappeared for some time, evidently to care for the animals.

Elven brightened. These rustic folk faintly resembled his own Wild Ones. They seemed to have a touch of that reckless, ecstatic spirit so hated by the tame folk of the sos. (Though after a while the resemblance grew too painfully strong, and with an imperious gesture he moderated their gaiety.)

Meanwhile, by observation and question, he was swiftly learning, though what he learned was astonishing rather than helpful. These four young people were the sole inhabitants of their community. They knew nothing of any culture other than their own.

They had never seen the sun or the stars. Evidently this was a planet whose axes of rotation and of revolution around its sun were the same, so that the climate was always unvarying at each latitude, the present locality being under a cloud belt. Later he might check this; he told himself, by detennining if the days and nights were always of equal length.

Strangest of all, the two couples had never been beyond the clearing. The thorn forest, which they conceived of as extending to infinity, was a barrier beyond their power to break. Fires, they told him, sizzled out against it. It swiftly dulled their sharpest axes. And they had a healthy awe of its diabolically sentient thorns.

All this suggested an obvious line of questioning.

"Where are you parents?" Elven asked Kors.

"Parents?" Kors" Wow wrinkled.

"You mean the shining ones?" Tulya broke in. She looked sad. "They are gone."

"Shining ones?" Elven quizzed. "People like ourselves?"

"Oh no. Beings of metal with wheels for feet and long, clever arms that bent anywhere."

"I have always wished I were made of lovely, bright metal," Sefora commented wistfully, "with wheels instead of ugly feet, and a sweet voice that never changed, and a mind that knew everything and never lost its temper."

Tulya continued, "They told us when they went why they must go. So that we could live by our own

ower alone, as all beings should. But we loved them and ave always been sorry.

There was no getting away from it, Elven decided after making some casual use of his special mind-searching powers to test the veracity of their answers. These four people had actually been reared by robots of some sort. But why? A dozen fantastic, unprovable possibilities occurred to him. He remembered what Fedris had said about the mystery of the universe, and smiled wryly.

Then it was his turn to answer questions, hesitant and awestricken ones. He replied simply, "I am a black angel from above. When God created his universe he decided it would be a pretty dull place if there weren't a few souls in it willing to take all risks and dare all dangers. So here and there among his infinite flocks of tame angels, sparingly, he introduced a wild strain, so that there would always be a few souls who would kick up their heels and jump any fences. Yes, and break the fences down too, exposing the tame flocks to night with its unknown beauties and dangers." He smiled around impishly, the firelight making odd highlights on his lips and cheeks. "Just as I've broken down your thorn fence."

It had been pitch black outside for some time. The wine jar was almost empty. Elven yawned. Immediately preparations were made for his rest. The cat got up from the hearth and came and rubbed Elven's legs.

The first pale glow of dawn aroused Elven and he slipped out of bed so quietly that he wakened no one, not even the cat. For a moment he hesitated in the gray room heavy with the smell of embers and the lees of wine. It occurred to him that it would be rather pleasant to live out his life here as a sylvan god adored by nymphs and rustics.

But then his hand touched his throat and he shook his head. This was no place for him to accomplish his mission—for one thing, there weren't enough people. He needed cities. With a last look at his blanket-huddled hostesses and hosts—Sefora's hair had just begun to turn ruddy in the increasing light—he went out

As he had expected, the thorn forest had long ago repaired the break he had made near the stream. He turned in the opposite direction and skirted the hill until he reached the green wall beyond. There, consulting his compass, he set his course away from the wrecked space-boat Then he began to dust

By early afternoon—judging time from the changing intensity of the light—he had made a dozen miles and was thinking that perhaps he should have stayed at the wreck long enough to try to patch up a levitator. If only he could get up a hundred feet to see what—if anything—was going to happen to this ridiculous forest!

For it still fronted him unchangingly, like some wizard growth from a book of fairy tales. The glassy thorns still curved back and struck whenever he swayed too close. And behind him the green shoots still pushed up through the slaty powder.

He thought, what a transition—from ultraphotonic flight in a spaceboat, to this worm's-crawl. Enough to bore a Wild One to desperation, to make him think twice of the simple delights of a life spent as a sylvan god.

But then he unfastened the locket at his throat and took out the tiny white sphere. His smile became an inspired one as he gazed at it gleaming on his palm.

Only one of the Wild Ones had escaped from their beleaguered planet, Fedris had said.

What did Fedris know!

He knew that before Elven reached his spaceboat, he had escaped in disguise through the tremendous cordons of the sos. That in the course of that escape he had twice been searched so thoroughly that it would have been a miracle if. he could have concealed more than this one tiny tablet.

But this one tiny tablet was enough.

In it were all the Wild Ones.

Early humans had often been fascinated by the idea of an invisible man. Yet it hadn't occurred to them that the invisible man has always existed, that each one of us begins as an invisible man—the single cell from which each human grows.

Here in this white tablet were the genetic elements of all the Wild Ones, the chromosomes and genes of each individual. Here were fire-eyed Vlana, swashbuckling Nar, soft-laughing Forten—they, and a billion others! The identical twins of each last person destroyed with the planet of the Wild Ones, waiting only encasement in suitable denucleated growth cells and nurture in some suitable mother. All rolling about prettily in Elven's palm.

So much for the physical inheritance.

And as for the social inheritance, there was Elven.

Then it could all begin again. Once more the Wild Ones could dream then* cosmos-storming dreams and face their beautiful dangers. Once more they could seek to create, if they chose, those giant atoms, seeds of new universes, because of which the sos had destroyed them. Back in the Dawn Age physicists had envisioned the single giant atom from which the whole universe had grown, and now it was time to see if more such atoms could be created from energy drawn from sub-space. And who were Fedris and Elven and the sos to say whether or not the new universes might—or should—destroy the old? What matter how the tame herds feared those beautiful, sub-microscopic eggs of creation?

It must all begin again, Elven resolved.

Yet it was as much the feel of the thorn shoots rising under his feet, as his mighty resolve, that drove him on.

An hour later his duster disintegrated a tangle of boughs that had only sky behind it. He stepped into a clearing a half mile in diameter. Just ahead a bubbling stream went through a little valley, where russet grain rippled. Beyond the valley was a small, orchard-covered hill. On its hither side, low gray buildings clustered raggedly. From one rose a thread of smoke. A man came around the hill, driving cattle.

Elven's second thought was that something must have gone wrong with his compass, some force must have been deflecting it steadily, to draw him back in a circle.

His first thought, which he had repressed quickly, had been that here was the mystery Fedris had promised him, something supernatural from the ancient fairy-book world.

And as if time too had been drawn back in a circle—he repressed this notion even more quickly—he saw Sefora standing by the familiar copse of trees just ahead. .

Elven called her name and hurried toward her, a little surprised at his pleasure in seeing her again.

She saw him, brought up her hand and swiftly tossed something to him. He started to catch it against his chest, thinking it a gleaming fruit-He jerked aside barely in time. It was a gleaming and wickedly heavy-bladed knife. "Sefora!" he shouted.

The red-haired nymph turned and fled like a doe, screaming, "Alfors! Kors! Tulya!" Elven raced after her.

It was just beyond the first out-building that he ran into the ambush, which seemed to have been organized impromptu in an ancient carpenter's shop. Alfors and Kors came roaring at him from the barn, the one swinging a heavy mallet, the one a long saw. While from the kitchen door, nearer by, Tulya rushed with a cleaver.

Elven caught her wrist and the two of them reeled with the force of her swing. Reluctantly then—hating his action and only obeying necessity—he snatched out his duster for a snap-shot at the nearest of the others.

Kors staggered, lifted his hand to his eyes and brushed away dust. Now Alfors was the closest. Elven could see the inch-long teeth on the twanging, singing saw-blade. Then its gleaming lower length dissolved along with Alfors' hand, while its upper half went screeching past his head.

Kors came on, screaming in pain, swinging the mallet blindly. Elven sent him sprawling with a full-intensity shot that made his chest a small volcano of dust, swung round and cut down Alfors, ducked just in time as the cleaver, transferred to Tulya's other hand, swiped at his neck. They went down together in a heap, the duster at Tulya's throat.

Brushing the fine gray ashes frantically from his face, Elven looked up to see Sefora racing toward him. Her naming hair and livid face were preceded by the three gleaming tines of a pitchfork.

"Sefora!" he cried and tried to get up, but Alfors had fallen across his legs. "Sefora!" he cried again imploringly, but she didn't seem to hear him and her face looked only hate, so he snapped on the duster, and tines and face and hair went up in a gray cloud. Her headless body pitched across him with a curious little vault as the blunted pitchfork buried its end in the ground. She hit and rolled over twice. Then everything was very still, until a cow lowed restlessly.

Elven dragged himself from under what remained of Alfors and stood up shakily. He coughed a little, then with a somewhat horrified distaste raced out of the settling gray cloud. As soon as' he was in clean air he emptied his lungs several times, shuddered a bit, smiled ruefully at the four motionless forms on which the dust was settling, and set himself to figure things out.

Evidently some magnetic force had deflected his compass needle, causing him to travel in a circle. Perhaps one of the magnetic poles of this planet was in the immediate locality. Of course this was no ordinary polar climate or day-night cycle, still there was no reason why a planet's axes of magnetism and rotation mightn't be far removed from each other.

The behavior of his last evening's hosts and hostesses was a knottier problem. It seemed incredible that his mere disappearance, even granting they thought him a god, had offended them so that they had become murderous. Ancient Earth-peoples had killed gods and godsymbols, of course, yet that had been a matter of deliberate ritual, not sudden blood-frenzy.

For a moment he found himself wondering if Fedris had somehow poisoned their minds against him, if Fedris possessed some FTL agency that had rendered the whole universe allergic to Elven. But that, he knew, was the merest morbid fancy, a kind of soured humor.

Perhaps his charming rustics had been subject to some kind of cyclic insanity.

He shrugged, then resolutely went into the house arm prepared himself a meal. By the time it was ready the sky had darkened. He built a big fire and put in some time constructing out of materials in his pack, a small gyrocompass. He worked with an absent-minded mastery, as one whittles a toy for a child. He noticed the cat watching him from the doorway, but it fled whenever he called to it, and it refused to be lured by the food he set on the hearth. He looked up at the wine jars dangling from the rafters, but did not reach them down.

After a while he disposed himself on the couch Kors and Tulya had occupied the night before. The room grew dim as the fire died down. He succeeded in keeping his thoughts away from what lay outside, except that once or twice his mind pictured the odd little vault Sefora's body had made in pitching over him. In the doorway the cat's eyes gleamed.

When he woke it was full day. He quickly got his things together, adding a little fruit to his pack. The cat shot aside as he went out the door. He did not look at the scene of yesterday's battle. He could hear flies buzzing there. He went over the hill to where he had entered the thorn forest last morning. The thorn trees, with their ridiculous fairy-book persistence, had long ago repaired the opening he'd made. There was no sign of it. He turned on the tiny motor of the gyrocompass, leveled his gun at the green wall, and started dusting.

It was as monotonous a work as ever, but he went about it with a new and almost unsmiling grimness. At regular intervals he consulted the gyrocompass and sighted back carefully along the arrow-straight, shoot-green corridor that narrowed with more than perspective. Odd, the speed with which those thorns grew!

In his mind he rehearsed his long-range course of action. He could count, he must hope, on a generation's freedom from Fedris and the forces of the sos. In that time he must find a large culture, preferably urban, or one with a large number of the right sort of domestic animals, and make himself absolute master of it, probably by establishing a new religion. Then the proper faculties for breeding must be arranged. Next the seeds of the Wild Ones pelleted in the locket at his throat must be separated—as many as there were facilities for—and

laced in their living or non-living mothers. Probably ving. And probably not human—that might present too many sociological difficulties.

It amused him to think of the Wild Ones reborn from sheep of goats, or perhaps some wholly alien rooster or browser, and his mind conjured up a diverting picture of himself leading his strange flocks over hilly pastures, piping like ancient Pan—until he realized that his mind had pictured Sefora and Tulya dancing along beside him, and he snapped off the mental picture with a frown.

Then would come the matter of the rearing and education of the Wild Ones. His hypothetical community of underlings would take care of the former, the latter must all proceed from his own brain—supplemented by the library of educational micro-tapes in the wrecked spaceboat. Robots of some sort would be an absolute necessity. He remembered the conversation of the night before last, which had indicated that there were or had been robots on this planet, and lost himself in tenuous speculation—though not forgetting his gyrocompass observations.

So the day wore on for Elven, walking hour after hour behind a dustgun into a dustcloud, until he was almost hypnotized in spite of his self-watchfulness and a host of disquieting memories fitfully thronged his mind: the darkness of sub-space; the cat's eyes at the doorway, the feel of its fur against his ankle; dust billowing from Tulya's throat; the little vault Sefora's body had given in pitching over him, almost as if it rode an invisible wave in the air; an imaginary vision of the blasted planet of the Wild Ones, its dark side aglow with radioactives visible even in deep space; the wasplike humming in the wrecked spaceboat; Fedris' ghostly whisper, "The unknown will find you, Elven—

The break in the thorn forest took him by surprise.

He stepped into a clearing half a mile in diameter. Just ahead a stream bubbled through a little valley rippling with russet grain. Beyond was a small orchard-covered hill against whose side low, gray buildings clustered raggedly. From one rose a ribbon of smoke.

He hardly felt the thorns sting him as he backed into them, though the stimulus they provided was enough to send him forward again a few steps. But such trifles had no effect on the furious working of his mind. He must, he told himself, be up against a force that distorted a gyrocompass as much as a magnet, that even distorted the visual lines of space.

Or else he really was in a fairy-book world where no matter how hard you tried to escape through an enchanted forest, you were always led back at evening to—

He fancied he could see a black cloud of flies hovering near the low gray buildings.

And then he heard a rustling in the copse of trees just ahead and heard a horribly familiar voice call excitedly, "Tulya! Come quickly!"

He began to shake. Then his hair-triggered muscles, obeying some random stimulus, hurled him forward aimlessly, jerked him to a stop as suddenly. Thigh-deep in the grain, he stared around wildly. Then his gaze fixed on a movement in the twilit grain—two trails of movement, shaking the grain but showing nothing more. Two trails of movement working their way from the copse to him.

And then suddenly Sefora and Tulya were upon him,

ringing from their concealment like mischievous chil-en, their eyes gleaming, their mouths smiling with a wicked delight. Tulya's throat, that he had yesterday seen billow into dust, bulged with laughter. Seforas red hair, that he had watched puff into a gray cloud, rippled in the breeze.

He tried to run back into the forest but they cut him off and caught him with gales of laughter. At the touch of their hands all strength went out of him, and it seemed to him that his bones were turning to an icy mush as they dragged him along stumblingly through the grain.

"We won't hurt you," Tulya assured him between peals of wicked laughter.

"Oh, Tulya, but he's shy!"

'"Something's made him unhappy, Sefora."

"He needs loving, Tulya!" And Elven felt Sefora's cold arms go round his neck and her wet lips press his. Gasping, he tried to push away, and the hps bubbled more laughter. He closed his eyes tight and began to sob.

When next he opened them, he was standing near the gray buildings, and someone had put wreaths of flowers around his neck and smeared fruit on his chin, and Alfors and Kors had come, and all four of them were dancing around him wildly in the twilight, hand in hand, laughing, laughing.

Then Elven laughed too, louder and louder, and their gleaming eyes encouraged him, and he began to spin round and round inside their spinning circle, and they grimaced their joy at his comradeship. And then he raised his dustgun and snapped it on and kept on spinning until the circle of other laughers was only ah expanding dust ring. Then, still laughing, he ran over the hill, a cat scampering in swift rushes at his side, until he came to a thorny wall. After his hands and face were puffing with stings, he remembered to lift something he'd been holding in his hand and touch a button on it. Then he marched into a dust cloud, singing.

All night he marched and sang, pausing only to reload the gun with a gleeful automatism, or to take from his pack another flashglobe of cold light, which revealed the small world of green thorns and dust motes around him. Mostly he sang an old Centaurian lied that went:

"We'll fall through the stars, my Deborah, We'll fall through the skeins of light,

We'll fall out of the Galaxy And I'll kiss you again in the night."

Only sometimes he sang "Sefora" instead of "Deborah" and "kill" instead of "kiss." At times it seemed to him that he was followed by prancing goats and sheep and strange monsters that were really his brothers and sisters. And at other times there danced along beside him two nymphs, one red-haired. They sang with him in high sweet voices and smiled at him wickedly. Toward morning he grew tired and unstrapped the pack from his back and threw it away, and later he ripped something from his throat and threw that away, too.

As the sky paled through the boughs, the nymphs and beasts vanished and he remembered that he was someone dangerous and important, and that something quite impossible had truly happened to him, but that if he could really manage to think things through—

The thorn forest ended. He stepped into a clearing a half mile in diameter. Just ahead a stream gurgled through a small valley. Beyond was an orchard-covered hill. Russet grain rippled in the valley. On the hillside low gray buildings clustered raggedly. From one rose a thin streamer of smoke.

And toward him, striding lithely through the grain, came Sefora.

Elven screamed horribly and pointed the dustgun. But the range was too great. Only a ribbon of grain stretching halfway to her went up in dust. She turned and raced toward the buildings. He followed her, gun still pointed and snapped on at full power, running furiously along the dust path, taking wild leaps through the gray clouds.

The dust path drew closer and closer to Sefora, until it almost lapped her heels. She darted between two buildings.

Then something tightened like a snake around Elven's knees, and as he pitched forward something else tightened around his upper body, jerking his elbows against his sides. The dustgun flew from his hand as he smashed against the ground.

Then he was lying on his back gasping, and through the thinning dust cloud Alfors and Kors were looking down at him as they wound their lassos tighter and tighter around him, trussing him up. He heard Alfors say, "Are you all right, Sefora?" and a voice reply, "Yes. Let me see him. And then Sefora's face appeared through the dust cloud and looked down into his with cold curiosity, and her red hair touched his cheek, and Elven closed his eyes and screamed many times.

"It was all very simple and there was, of course, absolutely nothing of the supernatural," the Director of Human Research assured Fedris, taking a sip of mellow Magellanic wine from the cup at his elbow. "Elven merely walked in a straight line."

Fedris frowned. He was a small man with a worried look that the most thoroughgoing psychoanalyses had been unable to eradicate. "Of course the Galaxy is tremendously grateful to you for capturing Elven. We never dreamed he'd got as far as the Magellanics. Can't say what horrors we may have escaped—

"I deserve no credit," the director told him. "It was all sheer accident, and the matter of Elven's nerve cracking. Of course you'd prepared the ground there by hinting to him that the supernatural might take a hand."

"That was the merest empty threat, born of desperation," Fedris interrupted, reddening a bit,

"Still, it prepared the ground. And then Elven had the devilish misfortune of landing right in the middle of our project on Magellanic 47. And that, I admit, might be enough to startle anyone." The director grinned.

Fedris looked up. "Just what is your project? All I know is that it's rather hush-hush.

The director settled back in his easy-chair. "The scientific understanding of human behavior has always presented extraordinary difficulties. Ever since the Dawn

Age men have wanted to analyze their social problems in the same way they analyze the problems or physics and chemistry. They've wanted to know exactly what causes produce exactly what results. But one great obstacle has always licked them."

Fedris nodded. "Lack of controls."

"Exactly," the director agreed. "With rats, say, it would be easy. You can have two—or a hundred—families of rats, each family with identical heredity, each in an identical environment. Then you can vary one factor in one family and watch the results. And when you get results you can trust them, because the other family is your control, showing what happens when you don't vary the factor."

Fedris looked at him wonderingly. "Do you mean to

The director nodded. "On Magellanic 47 we're carrying on that same sort of work, not with rats, but with human beings. The cages are half-mile clearings with identical weather, terrain, plants, animals—everything identical down to the tiniest detail. The bars of the cages are the thorn trees, which our botanists developed specially for the purpose. The inmates of the cages—the human experimental animals—are identical twins—though centuplets would be closer to the right word. Identical upbringings are assured for each group by the use of robot nurses and mentors, set to perform always the same unvarying routine. These robots are removed when the members of the group are sufficiently mature for our purposes. All our observations are, of course, completely secret—and also intermittent, which had the unfortunate result of letting Elven do some serious damage before he was caught.

"Do you see the setup now? In the thorn forest in which Elven was wrecked there were approximately one hundred identical clearings set at identical intervals. Each clearing looked exactly like the other, and each contained one Seiora, one Tulya, one Alfors, and one Kors. Elven thought he was going in a circle, but actually he was going in a straight line. Each evening it was a different clearing he came to. Each night he met a new Sefora.

"Each group he encountered was identical except for one factor—the factor we were varying—and that had the effect of making it a bit more grisly for him. You see, in those groups we happened to be running an experiment to determine the causes of human behavior patterns toward strangers. We'd made slight variations m their environment and robot-education, with the result that the first group he met was submissive toward strangers; the second was violently hostile; the third as violently friendly; the fourth highly suspicious. Too bad he didn't meet the fourth group first—though, of course, they'd have been unable to manage him except that he was half mad with supernatural terror."

The director finished his wine and smiled at Fedris. "So you see it all was the sheerest accident. No one was more surprised than I when, in taking a routine observation, I found that my 'animals' had this gibbering and trussed-up intruder. And you could have knocked me over with a molecule when I found out it was Elven."

Fedris whistled his wonder. "I can sympathize with the poor deviL" he said, "and I can understand, too, why your project is hush-hush."

The director nodded. "Yes, experimenting with human beings is a rather hard notion for most people to take. Still it's better than running all mankind as one big experiment without controls. And we're extremely kind to our 'animals.' As soon as our experiment with each is

The Martian and The Moron

BY THEODORE STURGEON

In 1924, when I was just a pup, my father was a thing known currently as a "radio bug." These creatures were wonderful. They were one part fanatic, one

art genius, a dash of child-like wonderment, and two uckets full of trial-and-error. Those were the days when you could get your picture in the paper for building a crystal set in something small and more foolish than the character who had his picture in the paper the day before. My father had his picture in there for building a "set" on a pencil eraser with a hunk of galena in the top and about four thousand turns of No. 35 enamelled wire wrapped around it. When they came around to take his picture he dragged out another one built into a peanut. Yes, a real peanut which brought in WGBS, New York. (You see, I really do remember.) They wanted to photograph that too, but Dad thought it would be a little immodest for him to be in the paper twice. So they took Mother's picture with it. The following week they ran both pictures, and Dad got two letters from other radio bugs saying his eraser radio wouldn't work and Mother got two hundred and twenty letters forwarded from the paper, twenty-six of which contained proposals of marriage. (Of course Mother was a YL and not an OW then.) Oddly enough, Dad never did become a radio man. 127

He seemed satisfied to be the first in the neighborhood to own a set, then to build a set (after the spider-web coil phase he built and operated a one-tube regenerative set which featured a UX-11 detector and a thing called a vario-coupler which looked like a greasy fist within a lacquered hand, and reached his triumph when he hooked it into a forty-'leven pound "B-eliminator" and ran it right out of the socket like a four-hundred-dollar "electric radio), and first in the state to be on the receiving end of a court-order restraining him from using his equipment. (Every time he touched the tuning dials —three—the neighboring radios with which Joneses were keeping up with each other, began howling unmercifully.) So for a time he left his clutter of forms and wire and solder-spattered "Bathtub" condensers shoved to the back of his cellar workbench, and went back to staffing field mice and bats, which had been his original hobby. I think Mother was glad, though she hated the smells he made down there. That was after the night she went to bed early with the cramps, and he DX'd WLS in Chicago at four-thirty one morning with a crystal set, and wanted to dance. (He learned later that he had crossed aerials with Mr. Bohackus next door, and had swiped Mr. Bohackus' fourteen-tube Atwater-Kent signal right out of Mr. Bohackus' goose-neck megaphone speaker. Mr. Bohackus was just as unhappy as Mother to hear about this on the following morning. They had both been up all night.)

Dad never was one to have his leg pulled. He got very sensitive about the whole thing, and learned his lesson so well that when the last great radio fever took him, he went to another extreme. Instead of talking his progress all over the house and lot, he walled himself up. During the late war I ran up against security regulations—and who didn't—but they never bothered me. I had my training early.

He got that glint in his eye after grunting loudly over the evening paper one night. I remember Mother's asking him about it twice, and f remember her sigh—her famous "here we go again" sigh—when he didn't answer. He leapt up, folded the paper, got out his keys, opened the safe, put the paper in it, locked the safe, put his keys away, looked Knowingly at us, strode out of the room, went down into the cellar, came up from the cellar, took out his keys, opened the safe, took out the paper, closed the safe, looKed knowingly at us again, said, "Henry, your father's going to be famous," and went down into the cellar.

Mother said, "I knew it. I knew it! I should have thrown the paper away. Or torn out that page."

"What's he going to make, Mother?" I asked.

"Heaven knows, she sighed. "Some men are going to try to get Mars on the radio."

"Mars? You mean the star?"

"It isn't a star, dear, it's a planet. They've arranged to turn off all the big radio stations all over the world for five minutes every hour so the men can listen to Mars. I suppose your father thinks he can listen too."

"Gee," I said, "I'm going down and—"

"You're going to do no such thing," said Mother firmly. "Get yourself all covered with that nasty grease he uses in his soldering, and stay up until all hours! It's almost bedtime. And—Henry—"

"Yes, Mother?"

She put her hands on my shoulders. "Listen to me, darling. People have been—ah—teasing your father." She meant Mr. Bohackus. "Don't ask him any questions about this if he doesn't want to talk, will you, darling? Promise?"

"All right, Mother." She was a wise woman.

Dad bought a big, shiny brass padlock for his work-ship in the cellar, and every time Mother mentioned the cellar, or the stars, or radio to him in any connection, he would just smile knowingly at her. It drove her wild. She didn't like the key, either. It was a big brass key, and he wore it on a length of rawhide shoelace tied around his neck. He wore it day and night. Mother said it was lumpy. She also said it was dangerous, which he denied, even after the time down at Roton Point when we were running Mr. Bohackus' new gasoline-driven ice-cream freezer out on the beach. Dad leaned over to watch it working. He said, "This is the way to get thing done, all right. I can't wait to get into that ice-cream," and next thing we knew he was face down in the brine and flopping like a banked trout. We got him out before he drowned or froze. He was bleeding freely about the nose and lips, and Mr. Bohackus was displeased because Dad's key had, in passing through the spur-gears in which it had caught, broken off nine teeth. That was six more than Dad lost, but it cost much more to fix Dad's and showed, Mother said, just how narrow-minded Mr. Bohackus was.

Anyway, Dad never would tell us what he was doing down in the cellar. He would arrive home from work with mysterious packages and go below and lock them up before dinner. He would eat abstractedly and disap-

iear for the whole evening. Mother, bless her, bore it with ortitude. As a matter of fact, I think she encouraged it. It was better than the previous fevers, when she had to sit for hours listening to crackling noises and organ music through big, heavy, magnetic earphones—or else. At least she was left to her own devices while all this was going on. As for me, I knew when I wasn't needed, and, as I remember, managed to fill my life quite successfully with clock movements, school, and baseball, and ceased to wonder very much.

About the middle of August Dad began to look frantic. Twice he worked right through the night, and though he went to the office on the days that followed, I doubt that he did much. On August 21—1 remember the date because it was the day before my birthday, and I remember that it was a Thursday because Dad took the next day off for a "long week end," so it must have been Friday—the crisis came. My bedtime was nine o'clock. At nine-twenty Dad came storming up from the cellar and demanded that I get my clothes on instantly and go out and get him two hundred feet of No. 27 silk-covered wire. Mother laid down the law and was instantly overridden. "The coil! The one coil I haven't finished!" he shouted hysterically. "Six thousand meters, and I have to run out of it. Get your clothes on this instant, Henry, number twenty-seven wire. Just control yourself this once Mother and you can have—Henry stop standing there with your silly eyes bulging and get dressed —you can have any hat on Fifth Avenue— hurryf

I hurried. Dad gave me some money and a list of places to go to, told me not to come back until I'd tried every one of them, and left the house with me. I went east, he went west. Mother stood on the porch and wrung her hands.

I got home about twenty after ten, weary and excited, bearing a large metal spool of wire. I put it down triumphantly while Mother caught me up and felt me all over as if she had picked me up at the root of a cliff. She looked drawn. Dad wasn't home yet.

After she quieted down a little she took me into the kitchen and fed me some chocolate-covered doughnuts. I forget what we talked, about, if we talked, but I do remember that the cellar door was ajar, and at the bottom of the steps I could see a ray of yellow light. "Mother," I said, "you know what? Dad ran out and left his workshop open."

She went to the door and looked down the stairs.

"Darling," she said after a bit, "Uh—wouldn't you like to—I mean, if he—"

I caught on quick. "I'll look. Will you stay up here and bump on the floor if he comes?"

She looked relieved, and nodded. I ran down the steps and cautiously entered the little shop.

Lined up across the bench were no less than six of the one-tube receivers which were the pinnacle of Dad's electronic achievement. The one at the end was turned back-to-front and had its rear shielding off; a naked coil-form dangled unashamedly out.

And I saw what had happened to the two alarm clocks which had disappeared from the bedrooms in the past six weeks. It happened that then, as now, clocks were my passion, and I can remember clearly the way he had set up pieces of the movements.

He had built a frame about four feet long on a shelf at right angles to the bench on which the radios rested. At one end of the frame was a clock mechanism designed to turn a reel on which was an endless band of paper tape about eight inches wide. The tape passed under a hooded camera—Mother's old Brownie—which was on a wall-bracket and aimed downward, on the tape. Next in line, under the tape, were six earphones, so placed that their diaphragms (the retainers had been removed) just touched the under side of the tape. And at the other end of the frame was the movement from the second alarm clock. The bell-clapper hung downwards, and attached to it was a small container of black powder.

I went to the first clock mechanism and started it by pulling out the toothpick Dad had jammed in the gears.

The tape began to move. I pulled the plug on the other movement. The little container of black powder began to shake like mad and, through small holes, laid an even film of the powder over the moving tape. It stopped when it had put down about ten inches of it. The black line moved slowly across until it was over the phones. The magnets smeared the powder, which I recognized thereby as iron filings. Bending to see under the tape, I saw that the whole bank of phones was levered to move downward a half an inch away from the tape. The leads from each of the six phones ran to a separate receiver.

I stood back and looked at this Goldberg and scratched my head, then shook same and carefully blew away the black powder on the tape, rewound the movements, refilled the containers from a jar which stood on the bench, and put the toothpick back the way I had found it.

I was halfway up the stairs when the scream of burning rubber on the street outside coincided with Mother's sharp thumping on the floor. I got to her side as she reached the front window. Dad was outside paying off a taxi driver. He never touched the porch steps at alL and came into the house at a dead run. He had a package under his arm.

"Fred!" said Mother.

"Can't stop now," he said, skidding into the hallway. "Couldn't get twenty-seven anywhere. Have to use twenty-five. Probably won't work. Everything happens to me, absolutely everything." He headed for the kitchen.

"I got you a whole reel of twenty-seven, Dad."

"Don't bother me now. Tomorrow," he said, and thumped downstairs. Mother and I looked at each other. Mother sighed. Dad came bounding back up the stairs. "You what?"

"Here." I got the wire off the hall table and gave it to him. He snatched it up, hugged me, swore I'd get a bicycle for my birthday (he made good on that, and on Mother's Fifth Avenue hat, too, by the way), and dove back downstairs.

We waited around for half an hour and then Mother sent me to bed. "You poor baby," she said, but I had the idea it wasn't me she was sorry for.

Now I'd like to be able to come up with a climax to all this, but there wasn't one. Not for years and years. Dad looked, the next morning, as if he had been up all night again—which he had—and as if he were about to close his fingers on the Holy GraiL All that day he would reappear irregularly, pace up and down, compare his watch with the living-room clock and the hall clock, and sprint downstairs again. That even went on during my birthday dinner. He had Mother call up the office and say he had Twonk's disease, and kept up his peregrinations all that night and all the following day until midnight. He fell into bed, so Mother told me, at 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning and slept right through until supper-time. He still maintained a dazzling silence about his activities. For the following four months he walked around looking puzzled. For a year after that he looked resigned. Then he took up stuffing newts and moles. The only thing he ever said about the whole crazy business was that he was born to be disappointed, but at least, this time, no one could rib him about it. Now I'm going to tell you about Cordelia.

This happened years and years later. The blow-off was • only last week, as a matter of fact. I finished school and went into business with Dad and got mixed up in the war and all that, I didn't get married, though. Not yet That's what I want to teffyou about

I met her at a party at Ferris'. I was stagging it but I don't think it would have made any difference if I had brought someone; when I saw Cordelia I was, to understate the matter, impressed.

She came in with some guy I didn't notice at the time and, for all I know, haven't seen since. She Slipped out of her light wrap with a single graceful movement; the sleeve caught in her bracelet, and she stood there, full profile, in the doorway, both arms straight and her hands together behind her as she worried the coat free, and I remember the small explosion in my throat as my indrawn breath and my gasp collided. Her hair was dark and lustrous, parted in a wide winging curve away from her brow. There were no pins in it; it shadowed the near side of her face as she bent her head toward the room. The cord of her neck showed columnar and clean. Her lips were parted ever so slightly, and showed an amused chagrin. Her lashes all but lay on her cheeks. She came across to my side of the room and sat down while the Thing who was with her went anonymously away to get her a drink and came unnoticeably back.

I said to myself, "Henry, my boy, stop staring at the lady. You'll embarrass her."

She turned to me just then and gave me a small smile. Her eyes were widely spaced, and the green of deep water. "I don't mind, really," she said, and I realized I had spoken aloud. I took refuge in a grin, which she answered, and then her left eyelid dropped briefly, and she looked away. It was a wink, but such a slight, tasteful one! If she had used both eyelids, it wouldn't have been a wink at all; she would have looked quickly down and up again. It was an understanding, we're-together little wink, a tactful, gracious, wonderful, marvellous, do you begin to see how I felt?

The party progressed. I once heard somebody decline an invitation to one of Ferris' parties on the grounds that he had been to one of Ferris' parties. I tend to be a little more liberal than that, but tonight I could see the point. It was because of Cordelia. She sat still, her chin on the back of her hand, her fingers curled against her white throat, her eyes shifting lazily from one point in the room to another. She did not belong in this conglomeration of bubbleheads. Look at her—part Sphinx, part Pallas Athenae. . . .

Ferris was doing his Kasbah act, with the bath towel over his head. He will next imitate Clyde McCoy's trumpet, I thought. He will then inevitably put that lamp shade on his head, curl back his upper lip, and be a rickshaw coolie. Following which he will do the adagio dance in which he will be too rough with some girl who will be too polite to protest at his big, shiny, wet climaxing kiss.

I looked at Cordelia and I looked at Ferris and I thought, no, Henry; that won't do. I drew a deep breath, leaned over to the girl, and said, "If there were a fire in here, do you know the quickest way out?"

She shook her head expectantly.

"I'll show you," I said, and got up. She hesitated a charming moment, rose from her chair as with helium, murmured something polite to her companion, and came to me.

There were French doors opening on the wide terrace porch which also served the front door. We went through them. The air was fragrant and cool, and there was a moon. She said nothing about escaping from fires. The French doors shut out most of the party noises-enough so that we could hear night sounds. We looked at the sky. I did not touch her.

After a bit she said in a voice of husky silver,

"Is the moon tired? she looks so pale Within her misty veil:

She scales the sky from east to west, And takes no rest.

"Before the coming of the night The moon shows papery white; Before the dawning of the day She fades away."

It was simple and it was perfect. I looked at her in wonderment. "Who wrote that?"

"Christina Rosset-ti," she said meticulously, looking at the moon. The light lay on her face like dust, and motes of it were caught in the fine down at the side of her jaw.

"I'm Henry Folwell and I know a place here we could talk for about three hours if we hurry," I said, utterly amazed at myself, "I don't generally operate like this."

She looked at the moon and me, the slight deep smile playing subdy with her lips. "I'm Cordelia Thorne, and I couldn't think of it," she said. "Do you think you could get my wrap without anyone seeing? It's a—"

"I know what it is," I said, sprinting. I went in through the front door, located her coat, bunched it up small, skinned back outside, shook it out and brought it to her. "You're still here," I said incredulously.

"Did you think I'd go back inside?

"I thought the wind, or the gods, or my alarm clock would take you away."

"You said that beautifully," she breathed, as I put the coat around her shoulders. I thought I had too. I notched her high up in my estimation as a very discerning girl.

We went to a place called the Stroll Inn where a booth encased us away from all of the world and most of its lights. It was wonderful. I think I did most of the talking. I don't remember all that passed between us but I remember these things, and remember them welL

I was talking about Ferris and the gang he had over there very Saturday night; I checked myself, shrugged, and said, Oh well. Chacun a sa goiite, as they say, which means—"

And she stopped me. "Tlease. Don't translate. It couldn't be phrased as well in English."

I had been about to say "—which means Jack's son has the gout." I felt sobered and admiring, and just sat and glowed at her.

And then there was that business with the cigarette. She stared at it as it lay in the ash tray, followed it with her gaze to my lips and back as I talked, until I asked her about it.

She said in a soft, shivery voice, "I feel just like that cigarette." I, of course, asked her why.

"You pick it up," she whispered, watching it "You enjoy some of it You put it down and let it—smolder. You like it, but you hardly notice it . . ."

I thereupon made some incredibly advanced protestations.

And there was the business about her silence—a long, faindy amused, mward-turning silence. I asked her what she was thinking about

"I was nmiinating," she said, in a self-depreciating, tragic voice, "on the futility of human endeavor," and she smiled. And when I asked her what she meant, she laughed aloud and said, "Don't you know?" And I said, "Oh. That," and worshipped her. She was deep. I'd have dropped dead before Id have admitted I didn't know what specifically she was driving at

And books. Music, too. When we were at the stage where I had both her hands and for minutes on end our foreheads were so close together you couldn't have slipped a swizzlestick between them, I murmured, "We seem to think so much alike.... Tell me, Cordelia, have you read Cabell?"

She said, "Well, really," in such a tone that, so help me, I apologized. "Love stuff," I said, recovering.

She looked reminiscently over my shoulder, smiling her small smile. "So lovely."

"I knew you'd read him," I said, struck with sweet thunder. "And Faulkner—have you read any of Faulkner?"

She gave me a pitying smile. I gulped and said, "Ugly, isn't it?"

She looked reminiscently over my other Shoulder, a tiny frown flickering brow. "So ugly," she said.

In between times she listened importantly to my opinions on Faulkner and Cabell. And Moussorgsky and Al Jolson. She was wonderful, and we agreed in everything.

And, hours later, when I stood with her at her door, I couldn't do a thing but shuffle my feet and haul on the hem of my jacket. She gave me her hand gravely, and I think she stopped breathing. I said, "Uh, well," and couldn't improve on it. She swept her gaze from my eyes to my mouth, from side to side across my forehead; it was a tortured "No!" her sUghtly turning head articulated, and her whole body moved minutely with it. She let go my hand, turned slowly toward the door, and then, with a cry which might have been a breath of laughter and which might have been a sob, she pirouted back to me and kissed me—not on the mouth, but in the hollow at the side of my neck. My fuse blew with a snap and a bright light and, as it were, incapacitated my self-starter. She moved deftly then, and to my blurred vision, ap-parently changed herself into a closed door. I must have stood looking at that door for twenty minutes before I turned and walked dazedly home.

I saw her five more times. Once it was a theater party, and we all went to her house afterward, and she showed great impartiality. Once it was a movie, and who should we run into afterward but her folks. Very nice people. I liked them and I think they liked me. Once it was the circus; we stayed very late, dancing at a pavilion, and yet the street was still crowded outside her home when we arrived there, and a handshake had to do. The fourth time was at a party to which I went alone because she had a date that night. It devolved that the date was the same party. The way she came in did things to me. It wasn't the fact that she was with somebody else; I had no claim on her, and the way she acted with me made me feel pretty confident. It was the way she came in, slipping out of her wrap, which—caught on her—bracelet, freezing her in profile while framed in the doorway... I don't want to think about it. Not now.

I did think about it; I left almost immediately so that I could. I went home and slumped down in an easy-chair and convinced myself about coincidences, and was almost back to normal when Dad came into the room,

"ArghP' he said.

I leapt out of the chair and helped him to pick himself up off the middle of the rug. "Blast it, boy," he growled, "why don't you turn on a light? What are you doing home? I thought you were out with your goddess. Why can't you pick up your big bony feet, or at least leave them somewhere else besides in the doorway of a dark room?" He dusted off his knees. He wasn't hurt. It's a deep-piled rug with two cushions under it, "You're a howling menace. Kicking your father." Dad had mellowed considerably with the years. "What's the matter with you anyhow? She do something to you? Or are you beginning to have doubts'?" He wore glasses now, but he saw plenty. He'd ribbed me about Cordelia as only a man who can't stand ribbing himself could do.

"It was a lousy party," I said.

He turned on a light, "What's up, Henry?"

"Nothing," I said. "Absolutely nothing. I haven't had a fight with her, if that's what you're digging for."

"All right, then," he said, picking up the paper.

"There's nothing wrong with her. She's one of the most wonderful people I know, that's alL"

"Sure she is. He began to read the paper.

"She's deep, too. A real wise head, she is. You wouldn't expect to find that in somebody as young as that. Or as good-looking." I wished he would put his eyebrows down.

"She's read everything worth reading," I added as he turned a page a minute later. "Marvellous," he said flatly.

I glared at him. "What do you mean by that?" I barked. "What's marvellous?"

He put the paper down on his knee and smoothed it. His voice was gentle. "Why Cordelia, of course. I'm not arguing with you, Henry.

"Yes, you—well, anyway, you're not saying what you think."

"You don't want to hear what I think."

"I know what I want!" I flared.

He crackled the paper nervously. "My," he said as if to himself, "this is worse than I thought." Before I could interrupt, he said, "Half of humanity doesn't know what it wants or how to find out The other half knows what it wants, hasn't got it and is going crazy trying to convince itself that it already has it

"Very sound," I said acidly. "Where do you peg me?"

He ignored this. "The radio commercial which annoys me most," he said with apparent irrelevancy, "is the one which begins. 'There are some things so good they don't have to be improved.' That annoys me because there isn't a thing on God's green earth, which couldn't stand improvement. By the same token, if you find something which looks to you as if it's unimprovable, then either it's a mirage or you're out of your mind."

"What has that to do with Cordelia?"

"Don't snap at me, son," Dad said quietly. "Let's operate by the rule of reason here. Or must I tear your silly head off and stuff it down your throat?"

I grinned in spite of myself. "Reason prevails, Dad. Go on."

"Now, I've seen the girl, and you're right; she's striking to look at. Extraordinary. In the process of raving about that you've also told me practically every scrap of conversation you've ever had with her."

"I have?"

"You're like your mother; you talk too much," he smiled. "Don't get flustered. It was good to listen to. Shows you're healthy. But I kept noticing one thing in these mouthings—all she's read, all the languages she understands, all the music she likes—and that is that you have never quoted her yet as saying a single declarative sentence. You have never quoted her as opening a conversation, changing the subject, mentioning something you both liked before you mentioned it, or having a single idea that you didn't like." He shrugged. "Maybe she is a good listener. They're—"

"Now wait a minute—"

"—They're rare anywhere in the world, especially in this house," he went on smoothly. "Put your hands back in your pockets, Henry, or sit on 'em until I've finished. Now, I'm not making any charges about Cordelia. There aren't any. She's wonderful. That's the trouble. For Pete's sake get her to make a flat statement."

"She has, plenty of times," I said hotly. "You just don't know her! Why, she's the most—"

He put up his hands and turned his head as if I were aiming a bucket of water at him, "Shut up!" he roared. I shut, "Now," he said, "listen to me. If you're right, you're right and there's no use defending anything. If you're wrong you'd better find it out soon before you get hurt. But I don't want to sit here and watch the process. I know how you tick, Henry. By gosh, I ought to. You're like I was. You and I, we get a hot idea and go all out for it, all speed and no control. We spill off at the mouth until we have the whole world watching, and when the idea turns sour the whole world gets in its licks, standing around laughing. Keep your beautiful dreams to yourself. If they don't pan out you can always kick yourself effectively enough, without having every wall-eyed neighbor helping you."

A picture of Mr. Bohackus with the protruding china-blue eyes, our neighbor of long ago, crossed my mind, and I chuckled.

"That's better, Henry," said Dad. "Listen. When a fellow gets to be a big grownup man, which is likely to happen at any age, or never, he learns to make a pile of his beloved failures and consign them to the flames, and never think of them again. But it ought to be a private bonfire."

It sounded like sense, particularly the part about not having to defend something if it was right enough to be its own defense. I said, "Thanks, Dad. I'll have to think. I don't know if I agree with you. ... I'll tell you something, though. If Cordelia turned out to be nothing but a phonograph, I'd consider it a pleasure to spend the rest or my life buying new records for her."

"That'd be fine," said Dad, "if it was what you wanted. I seriously doubt that it is just now."

"Of course it isn't. Cordelia's all woman and has a wonderful mind, and that's what I want."

''Bless you, my children," Dad said, and grinned.

I knew I was right, and that Dad was simply expressing a misguided caution. The Foxy Grandpa routine, I thought, was a sign of advancing age. Dad sure was changed since the old days. On the other hand, he hadn't been the same since the mysterious frittering-out of his mysterious down-cellar project. I stopped thinking about Dad, and turned my mind to my own troubles.

I had plenty of tune to think; I couldn't get a Saturday date with her for two weeks, and I wanted this session to run until it was finished with no early curfews. Not, as I have said, that I had any doubts. Far from it. All the same, I made a little list. . . .

I don't think I said ten words to her until we were three blocks from her house. She quite took my breath away. She was wearing a green suit with surprising lapels that featured her fabulous profile and made me ache inside. I had not known that I was so hungry for a sight of her, and now she was more than a sight, now her warm hand had slipped into mine as we walked. "Cordelia..." I whispered.

She turned her face to me, and showed me the tender crinkles in the corners of her mouth. She made an interrogative sound, like a sleepy bird.

Cordelia," I said thickly. It all came out in a monotone. "I didn't know I could miss anybody so much. There's been a hollow place in my eyes, wherever I looked; it had no color and it was shaped like you. Now you fill it and I can see again."

She dropped her eyes, and her smile was a thing to see. "You said that beautifully," she breathed.

I hadn't thought of that. What I had said was squeezed out of me like toothpaste out of a tube, with the same uniformity between what came out and what was still inside.

"We'll go to the Stroll Inn." I said. "It was where we met. We didn't meet at the party. We just saw each other there. We met in that booth."

She nodded gravely and walked with me, her face asleep, its attention turned inward, deeply engaged. It was not until we turned the corner on Winter Street and faced the Inn that I thought of my list; and when I did, I felt a double, sickening impact—first, one of shame that I should dare to examine and experiment with someone like this, second, because item five on that list was "You said that beautifully...."

The Stroll Inn, as I indicated before, has all its lights, practically, on the outside. Cordelia looked at me thoughtfully as we walked into their neon field. "Are you all right?" she asked. "You look pale."

"How can you tell?" I asked, indicating the lights, which flickered and switched, orange and green and blue and red. She smiled appreciatively, and two voices spoke within me. One said joyfully, "'You look pale' is a declarative statement," The other said angrily, "You're hedging. And by the way, what do you suppose that subtle smile is covering up, if anything?" Both voices spoke forcefully, combining in a jumble which left me badly confused. We went in and found a booth and ordered dinner. Cordelia said with pleasure that she would have what I ordered.

Over the appetizer I said, disliking myself intensely, "Isn't this wonderful? All we need is a moon. Can't you see it, hanging up there over us?"

She laughed and looked up, and sad sensitivity came into her face. I closed my eyes, waiting.

" 'Is the moon tired? she looks so pale— " she began.

I started to chew again. I think it was marinated herring, and very good too, but at the moment it tasted like cold oatmeal with a dash of warm lard. I called the waiter and ordered a double rum and soda. As he turned away I called him back and asked him to bring a bottle instead. I needed help from somewhere, and pouring it out of a bottle seemed a fine idea at the time.

Over the soup I asked her what she was thinking about. "I was ruminating," she said in a self-depreciating, tragic voice, "on the futnity of human endeavor." Oh, brother, me too, I thought. Me too.

Over the dessert we had converse again, the meat course having passed silently. We probably presented a lovely picture, the,two of us wordlessly drinking in each other's presence, the girl radiating an understanding tenderness, the young man speechless with admiration. Look how he watches her, how his eyes travel over her face, how he sighs and shakes his head and looks back at his plate.

I looked across the Inn. In a plate-glass window a flashing neon sign said bluely, "nil UortS. nnl llortS." "Nni llorts," I murmured.

Cordelia looked up at me expectantly, with her questioning sound. I tensed. I filled the jigger with rum and poured two fingers into my empty highball glass. I took the jigger in one hand and the glass in the other.

I said, "You've read Kremlin von Schtunk, the Hungarian poet?" and drank the jigger.

"Well, really," she said pityingly.

"I was just thinking of his superb line "Nni llorts, nov shmoz ka smorgasbord," I intoned, "which means—" and I drank the glass.

She reached across the table and touched my elbow. "Please. Don't translate. It couldn't be phrased as well in English."

Something within me curled up and died. Small tight, cold and dense, its corpse settled under my breastbone. I could have raged at her, I supposed. I could have coldly questioned her, pinned her down, stripped from her those layers of schooled conversational reactions, leaving her ignorance in nakedness. But what for? I didn't want it. . .. And I could have talked to her about honesty and ethics and human aims—why did she do it? What did she ever hope to get? Did she think she would ever corral a man and expect him to be blind, for the rest of his life, to the fact that there was nothing behind this false front—nothing at all? Did she think that—did she think? No.

I looked at her, the way she was smiling at me, the deep shifting currents which seemed to be in her eyes. She was a monster. She was some graceful diction backed by a bare half-dozen relays. She was a card-file. She was a bubble, thin-skinned, covered with swirling, puzzling, compelling colors, filled with nothing. I was hurt and angry and, I trunk, a little frightened. I drank some more rum. I ordered her a drink and then another, and stayed ahead of her four to one. I'd have walked out and gone home if I had been able to summon the strength. I couldn't, I could only sit and stare at her and bathe myself in agonized astonishment She didn't mind. She sat listening as raptly to my silence as she had to my conversation. Once she said, "We're just being together, aren't we?" and I recognized it as another trick from the bag. I wondered idly how many she might come up with if I just waited.

She came up with plenty.

She sat up and leaned forward abruptly. I had the distinct feeling that she was staring at me—her face was positioned right for it—but her eyes were closed. I put my glass down and stared blearily back, thinking, now what?

Her lips parted, twitched, opened wide, pursed. They uttered a glottal gurgling which was most unpleasant I pushed my chair back, startled. "Are you sick?"

"Are you terrestrial?" she asked me. "Am I -whatr

"Making—contact thirty years," she said. Her voice was halting, filled with effort.

"What are you talking about?"

"Terrestrial quickly power going," she said clearly. "Many—uh—much power making contact this way very high frequencies thought. Easy radio. Not again thought. Take radio code quickly."

"Listen, toots," I said nastily, "This old nose no longer has a ring in it. Go play tricks on somebody else." I drank some more rum. An I. Q. of sixty, and crazy besides. "You're a real find, you are," I said.

"Graphic," she said. "Uh-write. Write. Write." She began to claw the table cloth. I looked at her hand. It was making scribbling motions. "Write, write."

I nipped a menu over and put it in front of her and gave her my pen.

Now, I read an article once on automatic writing—you know, that spiritualist stuff. Before witnesses, a woman once wrote a long letter in trance in an unfamiliar (to her) hand, at the astonishing rate of four hundred and eight words a minute. Cordelia seemed to be out to break that record. That pen-nib was a blur. She was still leaning forward rigidly, and her eyes were still closed. But instead of a blurred scrawl, what took shape under her flying hand was a neat list or chart. There was an alphabet of sorts, although not arranged in the usual way; it was more a list of sounds. And there were the numbers one to fourteen. Beside each sound and each number was a cluster of regular dots which looked rather like Braille. The whole sheet took her not over forty-five seconds to do. And after she finished she didn't move anything except her eyelids, which went up. "I think," she said conversationally, "that I'd better get home, Henry. I feel a little dizzy.

I felt a little more than that. The rum, in rum's inevitable way, had sneaked up on me, and suddenly the room began to spin, diagonally, from the lower left to the upper right. I closed my eyes tight, opened them, fixed my gaze on a beertap on the bar at the end of the room, and held it still until the room slowed and stopped. "You're so right," I said, and did a press-up on the table top to assist my legs. I managed to help Cordelia on with her light coat. I put my pen back in my pocket (I found it the next morning with the cap still off and a fine color scheme in the lining of my jacket) and picked up the menu.

"What's that?" asked Cordelia.

"A souvenir," I said glumly. I had no picture, no school ring, no nothing. Only a doodle. I was too tired, twisted, and tanked to wonder much about it, or about the fact that she seemed never to have seen it before. I folded it in two and put it in my hip.

I got her home without leaning on her. I don't know if she was ready to give a repeat performance of that goodnight routine. I didn't wait to find out, I took her to the door and patted her on the cheek and went away from there. It wasn't her fault ...

When I got to our house, I dropped my hat on the floor in the hall and went into the dark living room and fell into the easy-chair by the door. It was a comfortable chair. It was a comfortable room. I felt about as bad as I ever had. I remember wondering smokily whether anyone ever loves a person. People seem to love dreams instead, and for the lucky ones, the person is close to the dream. But it's a dream all the same, a sticky dream. You unload the person, and the dream stays with you.

What was it Dad had said? "When a fellow gets to be a big grown-up man ... he learns to make a pile of his beloved failures and consign them to the flames." "Hah!"
I ejaculated, and gagged. The rum tasted terrible. I had
nothing to burn but memories and the lining of my stom-
ach. The latter was flaming merrily. The former stayed
where they were. The way she smiled, so deep and se-
cret

Then I remembered the doodle. Her hands had touched it, her mind had— No, her mind hadn't. It could have been anyone's mind, but not hers. The girl operated under a great handicap. No brains. I felt terrible. I got up out of the chair and wove across the room, leaning on the mantel. I put my forehead on the arm which I had put on the mantel, and with my other hand worried the menu out of my pocket. With the one hand and my teeth I tore it into small pieces and dropped the pieces in the grate, all but one. Then I heaved myself upright, braced my shoulder against the mantel, which had suddenly begun to bob and weave, got hold of my lighter, coaxed a flame out of it and lit the piece I'd saved. Jt burned fine. I let it slip into the grate. It flickered, dimmed, caught on another piece of paper, flared up again. I went down on one knee and carefully fed all the little pieces to the flame. When it finally went out I stirred the ashes around with my finger, got up, wiped my hands on my pants, said, "That was good advice Dad gave me," and went back to the chair. I went back into it, pushed my Shoes off my feet, curled my legs under me and, feeling much better, dozed off.

I woke slowly, some time later, with granulated eyelids and a mouth full of emory and quinine. My head was awake but my legs were asleep and my stomach had its little hands on my backbone and was trying to pull it out by the roots. I sat there groggily looking at the fire.

Fire? What fire? I blinked and winced; I could almost hear my eyelids rasping.

There was a fire in the grate. Dad was kneeling beside it, feeding it small pieces of paper. I didn't say anything; I don't think it occurred to me. I just watched.

He let the fire go out after a while; then he stirred the ashes with his finger and stood up with a sigh, wiping his hands on his pants. "Good advice I gave the boy. Time I took it myself." He loomed across the shadowy room to me, turned around and sat down in my lap. He was relaxed and heavy, but he didn't stay there long enough for me to feel it. "Gah!" he said, crossed the room again in one huge bound, put his back against the mantel and said, "Don't move, you. I've got a gun."

"It's me, Dad."

"Henry! Bythelordharry, you'll be the death of me yet. That was the most inconsiderate thing you have ever done in your entire selfish life. I've a notion to bend this poker over your Adam's apple, you snipe." He stamped over to the bookcase and turned on the light. "This is the last time I'll ever—Henry! What's the matter? You look awful! Are you all right?"

"I'll live," I said regretfully. "What were you burning?"

He grinned sheepishly. "A beloved failure. Remember my preachment a couple weeks ago? It got to working on me. I deceided to take my own advice." He breathed deeply. "I feel much better, I think."

"I burned some stuff too," I croaked. "I feel better too, I tliink," I added.

"Cordelia?" he asked, sitting near me.

"She hasn't got brain one," I said.

"Well," he said. There was more sharing and comfort in the single syllable than in anything I have ever heard. I looked at him. He hadn't changed much over the years. A bit heavier. A bit grayer. Still intensely alive, though.

And he'd learned to control those wild projects of his. I thought, quite objectively, "I like this man.

We were quiet for a warm while. Then, "Dad—what was it you burned? The Martian project?"

"Why, you young devil! How did you know?"

'1 dunno. You look like I feel. Sort of—well, you've finally unloaded something, and it hurts to lose it, but you're glad you did."

"On the nose," he said, and grinned sheepishly. "Yup, Henry—I really hugged that project to me. Want to hear about it?"

Anything but Cordelia, I thought. "I saw your rig," I said, to break the ice. "The night you sent me out for the wire. You left the workshop open."

"I'll be darned. I thought I'd gotten away with it."

"Mother knew what you were up to, though she didn't know how."

"And you saw how."

"I saw that weird gimmick of yours, but it didn't mean anything to me, Mother told me never to mention it to you. She thought you'd be happier if you were left alone."

He laughed with real delight. "Bless her heart," he said. "She was a most understanding woman."

"I read about the Martian signals in the papers," I said. "Fellow named—what was it?"

"Jenkins," said Dad. "C. Francis Jenkins. He built a film-tape recorder to catch the signals. He tuned to six thousand meters and had a flashing light to record the signals. Primitive, but it worked. Dr. David Todd of Amherst was the man who organized the whole project, and got the big radio people aU over the world to cooperate. They had a five-minute silence every hour during Mars' closest proximity—August 21 to 23."

"I remember," I said "It was my birthday. 1924. What got you so teed-off?"

"I got mad," said my father, folding his hands over bis stomach. "Just because it had become fashionable to use radio in a certain way on earth, those simple souls had to assume that the Martian signals—if any—would come through the same way. I felt that they'd be different."

"Why should they be?"

"Why should we expect Martians to be the same? Or even think the same? I just took a wild stab at it, that's alL I tuned in on six wave-lengths at the same time. I set up my rig so that anything coming through on any one wave-length would actuate a particular phone."

"I remember," I said, trying hard. "The iron filings on the paper tape, over the earphones."

"That's right. The phone was positioned far enough below the tape so that the magnetic field would barely contain the filings. When the diaphragm vibrated, the filings tended to cluster. I had six phones on six different wave-lengths, arranged like this," and he counted them out on the palm of his hand:

1 2 3 4 5 6

"What could you get? I don't figure it, Dad. There'd be no way of separating your dots and dashes."

"Blast!'' he exploded? '"That's the kind of thinking that made me mad, and makes me mad to this day! No, what I was after was something completely different in transmission. Look; how much would you get out of piano music if all the strings but one were broken? Only when the pianist hit that note in the course of his transmission would you hear anything. See what I mean? Supposing the Martians were sending In notes and chords of an established octave of frequencies? Sure—Jenkins got signals. No one's ever been able to interpret them. Well, supposing I was right—then Jenkins was recording only one of several or many 'notes' of the scale, and of course it was meaningless."

"Well, what did you get?"

"Forty-six photographs, five of which were so badly under-exposed that they were useless to me. I finally got the knack of moving the tape carefully enough and lighting it properly, and they came out pretty well. I got signals of four of the six frequencies. I got the same grouping only three of four times; I mean, sometimes there would be something on phones 1, 2, and 4, and sometimes it would only be on 4, and sometimes it would be on 2 and 6. Three and 5 never did come through; it was just fantastic luck that I picked the right frequencies, I suppose, for the other four."

"What frequencies did you use?"

He grinned. "I don't know. I really don't. It was all by guess and by golly. I never was an engineer, Henry. I'm in the insurance business. I had no instruments—particularly not in 1924. I wound a 6,000-meter coil according to specs they printed in the paper. As for the others, I worked on the knowledge that less turns of heavier wire means shorter wave-lengths. I haven't got the coils now and couldn't duplicate 'em in a million years. All I can say for sure is that they were all different, and stepped down from 6,000.

"Anyway, I studied those things until I was blue in the face. It must've been the better part of a year before I called in anyone else. I wrote to Mr. Jenkins and Dr. Todd too, but who am I? A taxidermical broker with a wacky idea. They sent the pictures back with polite letters, and I can't say I blame them . . . anyway, good riddance to the things. But it was a wonderful idea, and I wanted so much to be the man who did the job.... Ever want something so badly you couldn't see straight, Henry?" "Me?" I asked, with bitterness.

"It's all over now, though. I'm through with crazy-projects, for life. Never again. But gosh, I did love that project. Know what I mean?"

"No," I said with even more bitterness.

He sat up straight. "Hey. I'm sorry, fellow. Those were rhetorical questions. Maybe you'd better spill it."

So I told it to him—all of it. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I told him about the moon poem and the "well, really" gimmick and the "please don't translate" routine, and the more I talked the worse I felt. He sat and listened, and didn't say "I told you so," and the idea was worming its way into the back of my mind as I talked that here sat one of the most understanding people ever created, when he screamed. He screamed as one screams at the intrusion of an ice-cube into the back of one's bathing suit

"What's the matter?" I asked, breaking off.

"Go on, go on," he gabbled. "Henry, you idiot, don't tell me you don't know what you're saying for Pete's sake, boy, tell it to—"

"Whoa! I don't even remember where I was."

"What she said to you—'Are you a terrestrial?'"

"Oh, don't get so excited, Dad. It doesn't mean anything. Why bother? She was trying to interest me, I suppose. I didn't let it get to me then and I won't now. She-"

"Blast her! I'm not talking about her. It was what she said. Go on, Henry! You say she wrote something?"

He wormed it all out of me. He forced me to go over it and over it. The windows paled and the single light by the bookcase looked yellow and ill in the dawn, but still he pounded at me. And I finally quit. I just quit, out of compounded exhaustion and stubbornness. I lay back in the big chair and glared at him.

He strode up and down the room, trying to beat his left hand to a pulp with a right fist. "Of course, of course," he said excitedly. "That's how they'd do it. The blankest mind in the world. Blank and sensitive, like undeveloped film. Of course! 'Making contact thirty years' they said. 'Much power making contact this way—very high frequencies thought.' A radionic means of transmitting thought, and it uses too much power to be practical. 'Easy radio. Not again thought.'"

He stopped in front of me, glaring. '"Not again thought,' he growled. "You—you dope! How could my flesh and blood be so abjectly stupid? There in your hands you held the interplanetary Rosetta Stone, and what did you do with it?"

I glared back at him. "I was quote consigning one of my beloved failures to the flames end quote, I said nastily.

Suddenly he was slumped and tired. "So you were, son. So you were. And it was all there—like Braille, you said. A series of phonetic symbols, and almost certainly a list of the frequency-octave they use. And—and all my pictures. ... I burned them too." He sat down.

"Henry-"

"Don't take it so hard, Dad," I said. "Your advice was good. You forget your Martians and I'll forget my moron. When a fellow gets to be a grown-up man—"

He didn't hear me. "Henry. You say her folks like you?"

I sprang to my feet. "NO!" I bellowed. "Dad, I will not, repeat, not under any circumstances woo that beautiful package of brainless reflexes. I have had mine. I—"