COPYRIGHT © 1949, BY AUGUST DERLETH

THE GREAT ship poised a quarter of a mile above one of the cities. Below was a cosmic desolation. As he floated down in his energy bubble, Enash saw that the buildings were crumbling with age.

"No signs of war damage!" The bodiless voice touched his ears momentarily. Enash turned it out.

On the ground he collapsed his bubble. He found himself in a walled enclosure overgrown with weeds. Several skeletons lay in the tail grass beside the rakish building. They were of long, two-legged, two-armed beings with skulls in each case mounted at the end of a thin spine. The skeletons, all of adults, seemed in excellent preservation, but when he bent down and touched one, a whole section of it crumbled into a fine powder. As he straightened, he saw that Yoal was floating down nearby. Enash waited until the historian had stepped out of his bubble, then he said:

"Do you think we ought to use our method of reviving the long dead?"

Yoal was thoughtful. "I have been asking questions of the various people who have landed, and there is something wrong here. This planet has no surviving life, not even insect life. We'll have to find out what happened before we risk any colonization."

Enash said nothing. A soft wind was blowing. It rustled through a clump of trees nearby. He motioned towards the trees. Yoal nodded and said, "Yes, the plant life has not been harmed, but plants after all are not affected in the same way as the active life forms."

There was an interruption. A voice spoke from Yoal's receiver: "A museum has 'been found at approximately the center of the city. A red light has been fixed on the roof."

Enash said, "I'll go with you, Yoal. "There might be skeletons of animals and of the intelligent being in various stages of his evolution. You didn't answer my question. Are you going to revive these things?"

Yoal said slowly, "I intend to discuss the matter with the council, but I think there is no doubt. We must know the cause of this disaster." He waved one sucker vaguely to take in half the compass. He added as an afterthought, "We shall proceed cautiously, of course, beginning with an obviously early development. The absence of the skeletons of children indicates that the race had developed personal immortality."

The council came to look at the exhibits. It was, Enash knew, a formal preliminary only. The decision was made. There would be revivals. It was more than that. They were curious. Space was vast, the journeys through it long and lonely, landing always a stimulating experience, with its prospect of new life forms to be seen and studied.

The museum looked ordinary. High-domed ceilings, vast rooms. Plastic models of strange beasts, many artifacts too many to see and comprehend in so short a time. The life span of a race was imprisoned here in a progressive array of relics. Enash looked with the others, and was glad when they came to the line of skeletons and preserved bodies. He seated himself behind the energy screen, and watched the biological experts take a preserved body out of a stone sarcophagus. It was wrapped in windings of cloth, many of them. The experts did not bother to unravel the rotted material. Their forceps reached through, pinched a piece of skull that was the accepted procedure. Any part of the skeleton could be used, but the most perfect revivals, the most complete reconstructions resulted when a certain section of the skull was used.

Hamar, the chief biologist, explained the choice of body. "The chemicals used to preserve this mummy show a sketchy knowledge of chemistry. The carvings on the sarcophagus indicate a crude and unmechanical culture. In such a civilization there would not be much development of the potentialities of the nervous system. Our speech experts have been analysing the recorded voice mechanism which is a part of each exhibit, and though many languages are involved evidence that the ancient language spoken at the time the body was alive has been reproduced they found no difficulty in translating the meanings. They have now adapted our universal speech machine, so that anyone who wishes to need only speak into his communicator, and so will have his words translated into the language of the revived person. The reverse, naturally, is also true. Ah, I see we are ready for the first body."

Enash watched intently with the others as the lid was clamped down on the plastic reconstructor, and the growth processes were started. He could feel himself becoming tense. For there was nothing haphazard about what was happening. In a few minutes a full-grown ancient inhabitant of this planet would sit up and stare at them. The science involved was simple and always fully effective.

.... Out of the shadows of smallness, life grows. The level of beginning and ending, of life and not life; in that dim region matter oscillates easily between old and new habits. The habit of organic, or the habit of inorganic. Electrons do not have life and un-life values. Atoms form into molecules, there is a step in the process, one tiny step, that is of life if life begins at all. One step, and then darkness. Or aliveness.

A stone or a living cell. A grain of gold or a blade of grass, the sands of the sea or the equally numerous animalcules inhabiting the endless fishy waters the difference is there in the twilight zone of matter. Each living cell has in it the whole form. The crab grows a new leg when the old one is torn from its flesh. Both ends of the planarian worm elongate, and soon there are two worms, two identities, two digestive systems each as greedy as the original, each a whole, unwounded, unharmed by its experience. Each cell can be the whole. Each cell remembers in detail so intricate that no totality of words could ever describe the completeness achieved.

But paradox memory is not organic. An ordinary wax record remembers sounds. A wire recorder easily gives up a duplicate of the voice that spoke into it years before. Memory is a physiological impression, a mark on matter, a change in the shape of a molecule, so that when a reaction is desired the shape emits the same rhythm of response.

Out of the mummy's skull had come the multi-quadrillion memory shapes from which a response was now being evoked. As ever, the memory held true.

A man blinked, and opened his eyes.

"It is true, then," he said aloud, and the words were translated into the Ganae tongue as he spoke them. "Death is merely an opening into another life but where are my attendants?" At the end, his voice took on a complaining tone.

He sat up, and climbed out of the case, which had automatically opened as he came to life. He saw his captors. He froze, but only for a moment. He had a pride and a very special arrogant courage, which served him now. Reluctantly, he sank to his knees and made obeisance, but doubt must have been strong in him. "Am I in the presence of the gods of Egypt?" He climbed to his feet. "What nonsense is this? I do not bow to nameless demons."

Captain Gorsid said, "Kill him!"

The two-legged monster dissolved, writhing in the beam of a ray gun.

The second revived man stood up, pale, and trembled with fear. "My God, I swear I won't touch the stuff again. Talk about pink elephants"

Yoal was curious. "To what stuff do you refer, revived one?"

"The old hooch, the poison in the hip pocket flask, the juice they gave me at that speak ... my lord!"

Captain Gorsid looked questioningly at Yoal, "Need we linger?"

Yoal hesitated. "I am curious." He addressed the man. "If I were to tell you that we were visitors from another star, what would be your reaction?"

The man stared at him. He was obviously puzzled, but the fear was stronger. "Now, look," he said, "I was driving along, minding my own business. I admit I'd had a shot or two too many, but it's the liquor they serve these days. I swear I didn't see the other car and if this is some new idea of punishing people who drink and drive, well, you've won. I won't touch another drop as long as I live, so help me."

Yoal said, "He drives a 'car' and thinks nothing of it. Yet we saw no cars. They didn't even bother to preserve them in the museums."

Enash noticed that everyone waited for everyone else to comment. He stirred as he realized the circle of silence would be complete unless he spoke. He said, "Ask him to describe the car. How does it work?"

"Now, you're talking," said the man. "Bring on your line of chalk, and I'll walk it, and ask any questions you please. I may be so tight that I can't see straight, but I can always drive. How does it work? You just put her in gear, and step on the gas."

"Gas," said engineering officer Veed. "The internal combustion engine. That places him."

Captain Gorsid motioned to the guard with the ray gun.

The third man sat up, and looked at them thoughtfully. "From the stars?" he said finally. "Have you a system, or was it blind chance?"

The Ganae councilors in that domed room stirred uneasily in their curved chairs. Enash caught Yoal's eye on him. "The shock in the historian's eye alarmed the meteorologist. He thought: "The two-legged one's adjustment to a new situation, his grasp of realities, was unnormally rapid. No Ganae could have equaled the swiftness of the reaction."

Hamar, the chief biologist, said, "Speed of thought is not necessarily a sign of superiority. The slow, careful thinker has his place in the hierarchy of intellect."

But Enash found himself thinking, it was not the speed; it was the accuracy of the response. He tried to imagine himself being revived from the dead, and understanding instantly the meaning of the presence of aliens from the stars. He couldn't have done it.

He forgot his thought, for the man was out of the case. As Enash watched with the others, he walked briskly over to the window and looked out. One glance, and then he turned back.

"Is it all like this?" he asked.

Once again, the speed of his understanding caused a sensation. It was Yoal who finally replied.

"Yes. Desolation. Death. Ruin. Have you any ideas as to what happened?"

The man came back and stood in front of the energy screen that guarded the Ganae. "May I look over the museum? I have to estimate what age I am in. We had certain possibilities of destruction when I was last alive, but which one was realized depends on the time elapsed."

The councilors looked at Captain Gorsid, who hesitated; then, "Watch him," he said to the guard with the ray gun. He faced the man. "We understand your aspirations fully. You would like to seize control of this situation and ensure your own safety. Let me reassure you. Make no false moves, and all will be well."

Whether or not the man believed the lie, he gave no sign. Nor did he show by a glance or a movement that he had seen the scarred floor where the ray gun had burned his two predecessors into nothingness. He walked curiously to the nearest doorway, studied the other guard who waited there for him, and then, gingerly, stepped through. The first guard followed him, then came the mobile energy screen, and finally, trailing one another, the councilors.

Enash was the third to pass through the doorway. The room contained skeletons and plastic models of animals. The room beyond that was what, for want of a better term,

Enash called a culture room. It contained the artifacts from a single period of civilization. It looked very advanced. He had examined some of the machines when they first passed through ,it,, and had thought: Atomic energy. He was not alone in his recognition. From behind him. Captain Gorsid said to the man:

"You are forbidden to touch anything. A false move will be the signal for the guards to fire."

The man stood at ease in the center of the room. In spite of a curious anxiety, Enash had to admire his calmness. He must have known what his fate would be, but he stood there thoughtfully, and said finally, deliberately, "I do not need to go any farther. Perhaps you will be able to judge better than I of the time that has elapsed since I was born and these machines were built. I see over there an instrument which, ac cording to the sign above it, counts atoms when they explode.

As soon as the proper number have exploded it shuts off the power automatically, and for just the right length of time to prevent a chain explosion. In my time we had a thousand crude devices for limiting the size of an atomic reaction, but it required two thousand years to develop those devices from the early beginnings of atomic energy. Can you make a comparison?"

The councilors glanced at Veed. The engineering officer hesitated. At last, reluctantly, he said, "Nine thousand years ago we had a thousand methods of limiting atomic explosions."

He paused, then even more slowly, "I have never heard of an instrument that counts out atoms for such a purpose."

"And yet," murmured Shuri, the astronomer, breathlessly, "the race was destroyed."

There was silence. It ended as Gorsid said to the nearest guard, "Kill the monster!"

But it was the guard who went down, bursting into flame.

Not just one guard, but the guards! Simultaneously down, burning with a blue flame. The flame licked at the screen, recoiled, and licked more furiously, recoiled and burned brighter. Through a haze of fire, Enash saw that the man had retreated to the far door, and that the machine that counted atoms was glowing with a blue intensity.

Captain Gorsid shouted into his communicator, "Guard all exits with ray guns. Spaceships stand by to kill alien with heavy guns."

Somebody said, "Mental control. Some kind of mental control. What have we run into?"

They were retreating. The blue flame was at the ceiling, struggling to break through the screen. Enash had a last glimpse of the machine. It must still be counting atoms, for it was a hellish blue. Enash raced with the others to the room where the man had been resurrected. There, another energy screen crashed to their rescue. Safe now, they retreated into their separate bubbles and whisked through outer doors and up to the ship. As the great ship soared, an atomic bomb hurtled down from it. The mushroom of flame blotted out the museum and the city below.

"But we still don't know why the race died," Yoal whispered into Enash's ear, after the thunder had died from the heavens behind them.

The pale yellow sun crept over the horizon on the third morning after the bomb was dropped, the eighth day since the landing. Enash floated with the others down on a new city. He had come to argue against any further revival.

"As a meteorologist," he said, "I pronounce this planet safe for Ganae colonization. I cannot see the need of taking any risks. This race has discovered the secrets of its nervous system, and we cannot afford"

He was interrupted. Hamar, the biologist, said dryly, "If they knew so much why didn't they migrate to other star systems and save themselves?"

"I will concede," said Enash, "that very possibly they had not discovered our system of locating stars with planetary families." He looked earnestly around the circle of his friends. "We have agreed that was a unique accidental discovery. We were lucky, not clever."

He saw by the expressions on their faces that they were mentally refuting his arguments. He felt a helpless sense of imminent catastrophe. For he could see that picture of a great race facing death. It must have come swiftly, but not so swiftly that they didn't know about it. There were too many skeletons in the open, lying in the gardens of magnificent homes, as if each man and his wife had come out to wait for the doom of his kind. He tried to picture it for the council, this last day long, long ago, when a race had calmly met its ending. But his visualization failed somehow, for the others shifted impatiently in the seats that had been set up behind the series of energy screens, and Captain Gorsid said, "Exactly what aroused this intense emotional reaction in you, Enash?"

The question gave Enash pause. He hadn't thought of it as emotional. He hadn't realized the nature of his obsession, so subtly had it stolen upon him. Abruptly now, he realized.

"It was the third one," he said slowly. "I saw him through the haze of energy fire, and he was standing there in the distant doorway watching us curiously, just before we turned to run. His bravery, his calm, the skilful way he had duped us it all added up."

"Added up to his death!" said Hamar. And everybody laughed.

"Come now, Enash," said Vice-captain Mayad good humouredly, "you're not going to pretend that this race is braver than our own, or that, with all the precautions we have now taken, we need fear one man?"

Enash was silent, feeling foolish. The discovery that he had had an emotional obsession abashed him. He did not want to appear unreasonable. He made a final protest, "I merely wish to point out," he said doggedly, "that this desire to discover what happened to a dead race does not seem absolutely essential to me."

Captain Gorsid waved at the biologist, "Proceed," he said,

"with the revival."

To Enash, he said, "Do we dare return to Gana, and recommend mass migrations and then admit that we did not actually complete our investigations here? It's impossible, my friend."

It was the old argument, but reluctantly now Enash admitted there was something to be said for that point of view.

He forgot that, for the fourth man was stirring.

The man sat up. And vanished.

There was a blank, horrified silence. Then Captain Gorsid said harshly, "He can't get out of there. We know that.

He's in there somewhere."

All around Enash, the Ganae were out of their chairs, peering into the energy shell. The guards stood with ray guns held limply in their suckers. Out of the comer of his eye, he saw one of the protective screen technicians beckon to Veed, who went over. He came back grim. He said, "I'm told the needles jumped ten points when he first disappeared. That's on the nucleon level."

"By ancient Ganae!" Shun whispered. "We've run into what we've always feared."

Gorsid was shouting into the communicator. "Destroy all the locators on the ship. Destroy them, do you hear!"

He turned with glaring eyes. "Shuri," he bellowed. "They don't seem to understand. Tell those subordinates of your to act. All locators and reconstructors must be destroyed."

"Hurry, hurry!" said Shuri weakly.

When that was done they breathed more easily. There were grim smiles and a tensed satisfaction. "At least," said Vicecaptain Mayad. "he cannot now ever discover Gana. Our great system of locating suns with planets remains our secret. There can be no retaliation for" He stopped, said slowly, "What am I talking about? We haven't done anything. We've not responsible for the disaster that has befallen the inhabitants of this planet."

But Enash knew what he had meant. The guilt feelings came to the surface at such moments as this the ghosts of all the races destroyed by the Ganae, the remorseless will that had been in them, when they first landed, to annihilate whatever was here. The dark abyss of voiceless hate and terror that lay behind them; the days on end when they had mercilessly poured poisonous radiation down upon the unsuspecting inhabitants of peaceful planets all that had been in Mayad's words.

"I still refuse to believe be has escaped." That was

Captain Gorsid. "He's in there. He's waiting for us to take down our screens, so he can escape. Well, we won't do it."

There was silence again as they stared expectantly into the emptiness of the energy shell. The reconstructor rested on metal supports, a glittering affair. But there 'was nothing else. Not a flicker of unnatural light or shade. The yellow rays of the sun bathed the open spaces with a brilliance that left no room for concealment.

"Guards," said Gorsid, "destroy the reconstructor. I thought he might come back to examine it, but we can't take a chance on that."

It burned with a white fury. And Enash, who had hoped somehow that the deadly energy would force the two-legged thing into the open, felt his hopes sag within him.

"But where can he have gone?" Yoal whispered. Enash turned to discuss the matter. In the act of swinging around, he saw that the monster was standing under a tree a score of feet to one side, watching them. He must have arrived at that moment, for there was a collective gasp from the councilors. Everybody drew back. One of the screen technicians, using great presence of mind, jerked up an energy -screen between the Ganae and the monster. The creature came forward slowly. He was slim of build, he held his head well back. His eyes shone as from an inner fire.

He stopped as he came to the screen, reached out and touched it with his fingers. It flared, blurred with changing colors. The colors grew brighter, and extended in an intricate pattern all the way from his head to the ground. The blur cleared. The pattern faded into invisibility. The man was through the screen.

He laughed, a soft curious sound; then sobered. "When I first awakened," he said, "I was curious about the situation. The question was, what should I do with you?"

The words had a fateful ring to Enash on the still morning air of that planet of the dead. A voice broke the silence, a voice so strained and unnatural that a moment passed before he recognized it as belonging to Captain Gorsid.

"Kill him!"

When the blasters ceased their effort, the unkillable thing remained standing. He walked slowly forward until he was only a half dozen feet from the nearest Ganae. Enash had a position well to the rear. The man said slowly:

"Two courses suggest themselves, one based on gratitude for reviving me, the other based on reality. I know you for what you are. Yes, know you and that is unfortunate. It is hard to feel merciful. To begin with," he went on, "let us suppose you surrender the secret of the locator. Naturally, now that a system exists, we shall never again be caught as we were."

Enash had been intent, his mind so alive with the potentialities of the disaster that was here that it seemed impossible that he could think of anything else. And yet, a part of his attention was stirred now. "What did happen?" he asked.

The man changed color. The emotions of that far day thickened his voice. "A nucleonic storm. It swept in from outer space. It brushed this edge of our galaxy. It was about ninety light-years in diameter, beyond the farthest limit of our power. There was no escape from it. We had dispensed with spaceships, and had no time to construct any. Castor, the only star with planets ever discovered by us, was also in the path of the storm." He stopped. "The secret?" he said.

Around Enash, the councilors were breathing easier. The fear of race destruction that had come to them was lifting. Enash saw with pride that the first shock was over, and they were not even afraid for themselves.

"Ah," said Yoal softly, "you don't know the secret. In spite of all your great development, we alone can conquer the galaxy." He looked at the others, smiling confidently. "Gentlemen," he said, "our pride in a great Ganae achievement is justified. I suggest we return to our ship. We have no further business on this planet."

There was a confused moment while their bubbles formed, when Enash wondered if the two-legged one would try to stop their departure. But when he looked back, he saw that the man was walking in a leisurely fashion along a street.

That was the memory Enash carried with him, as the ship began to move. That and the fact that the three atomic bombs they dropped, one after the other, failed to explode.

"We will not," said Captain Gorsid, "give up a planet as easily as that. I propose another interview with the creature."

They were floating down again into the city, Enash and Yoal and Veed and the commander. Captain Gorsid's voice tuned in once more: "... As I visualize it" through the mist Enash could see the transparent glint of the other three bubbles around him "we jumped to conclusions about this creature, not justified by the evidence. For instance, when he awakened, he vanished. Why? Because he was afraid, of course. He wanted to size up the situation. He didn't believe he was omnipotent."

It was sound logic. Enash found himself taking heart from it. Suddenly, he was astonished that be had become panicky so easily. He began to see the danger in a new light. Only one man alive on a new planet. If they were determined enough, colonists could be moved in as if he did not exist. It had been done before, he recalled. On several planets, small groups of the original populations had survived the destroying radiation, and taken refuge in remote areas. In almost every case, the new colonists gradually hunted them down. In two instances, however, that Enash remembered, native races were still holding small sections of their planets. In each case, it had been found impractical to destroy them because it would have endangered the Ganae on the planet. So the survivors were tolerated. One man would not take up very much room.

When they found him, he was busily sweeping out the lower floor of a small bungalow. He put the broom aside and stepped on to the terrace outside. He had put on sandals, and he wore a loose-fitting robe made of very shiny material.

He eyed them indolently but he said nothing.

It was Captain Gorsid who made the proposition. Enash had to admire the story he told into the language machine. The commander was very frank. That approach had been decided on. He pointed out that the Ganae could not be expected to revive the dead of this planet. Such altruism would be un natural considering that the ever-growing Ganae hordes had a continual need for new worlds. Each vast new population increment was a problem that could be solved by one method only. In this instance, the colonists would gladly respect the rights of the sole survivor of this world.

It was at this point that the man interrupted. "But what is the purpose of this endless expansion?" He seemed genuinely curious. "What will happen when you finally occupy every planet in this galaxy?"

Captain Gorsid's puzzled eyes met Yoal's, then flashed to

Veed, then Enash. Enash shrugged his torso negatively, and felt pity for the creature. The man didn't understand, possibly never could understand. It was the old story of two different viewpoints, the virile and the decadent, the race that aspired to the stars and the race that declined the call of destiny.

"Why not," urged the man, "control the breeding chambers?"

"And have the government overthrown!" said Yoal.

He spoke tolerantly, and Enash saw that the others were smiling at the man's naiveté. He felt the intellectual gulf between them widening. The creature had no comprehension of the natural life forces that were at work. The man spoke again:

"Well, if you don't control them, we will control them for you."

There was silence.

They began to stiffen. Enash felt it in himself, saw the signs of it in the others. His gaze flicked from face to face, then back to the creature in the doorway. Not for the first time, Enash bad the thought that their enemy seemed helpless. "Why," he decided, "I could put my suckers around him and crush him."

He wondered if mental control of nucleonic, nuclear, and gravitonic energies included the ability to defend oneself from a macrocosmic attack. He had an idea it did. The exhibition of power two hours before might have had limitations, but if so, it was not apparent. Strength or weakness could make no difference. The threat of threats had been made: "If you don't control we will."

The words echoed in Enash's brain, and, as the meaning penetrated deeper, his aloofness faded. He had always regarded himself as a spectator. Even when, earlier, he had argued against the revival, he had been aware of a detached part of himself watching the scene rather than being a part of it. He saw with a sharp clarity that that was why he had finally yielded to the conviction of the others. Going back beyond that to remoter days, he saw that he had never quite considered himself a participant in the seizure of the planets of other races. He was the one who looked on, and thought of reality, and speculated on a life that seemed to have no meaning. It was meaningless no longer. He was caught by a tide of irresistible emotion, and swept along. He felt himself sinking, merging with the Ganae mass being. All the strength and all the will of the race surged up in his veins.

He snarled, "Creature, if you have any hopes of reviving your dead race, abandon them now."

The man looked at him, but said nothing. Enash rushed on, "If you could destroy us, you would have done so already. But the truth is that you operate within limitations. Our ship is so built that no conceivable chain reaction could be started in it. For every plate of potential unstable material in it there is a counteracting plate, which prevents the development of a critical pile. You might be able to set off -explosions in our engines, but they, too, would be limited, and would merely start the process for which they are intended confined in their proper space."

He was aware of Yoal touching his arm. "Careful," warned the historian. "Do not in your just anger give away vital information."

Enash shook off the restraining sucker. "Let us not be unrealistic," he said harshly. "This thing has divined most of our racial secrets, apparently merely by looking at our bodies. We would be acting childishly if we assumed that he has not already realized the possibilities of the situation."

"Eruishi" Captain Gorsid's voice was imperative.

As swiftly as it had come, Enash's rage subsided. He stepped back. "Yes, commander."

"I think I know what you intended to say," said Captain Gorsid. "I assure you ,1 am in full accord, but I believe also that I, as the top Ganae official, should deliver the ultimatum."

He turned. His body towered above the man. "You have made the unforgivable threat. You have told us, in effect, that you will attempt to restrict the vaulting Ganae spirit."

"Not the spirit," said the man.

The commander ignored the interruption. "Accordingly, we have no alternative. We are assuming that, given time to locate the materials and develop the tools, you might be able to build a reconstructor. In our opinion it will be at least two years before you can complete it, even if you know how. It is an immensely intricate machine, not easily assembled by the lone survivor of a race that gave up its machines millennia before disaster struck.

"You did not have time to build a spaceship. We won't give you time to build a reconstructor.

"Within a few minutes our ship will start dropping bombs. It is possible you will be able to prevent explosions in your vicinity. We will start, accordingly, on the other side of the planet. If you stop us there, then we will assume we need help. In six months of traveling at top acceleration, we can reach a point where the nearest Ganae planet would hear our messages. They will send a fleet so vast that all your powers of resistance will be overcome. By dropping a hundred or a thousand bombs every minute, we will succeed in devastating every city so that not a grain of dust will remain of the skeletons of your people.

"That is our plan. So it shall be. Now, do your worst to us who are at your mercy."

The man shook his head. "I shall do nothing now!" he said. He paused, then thoughtfully, "Your reasoning is fairly accurate. Fairly. Naturally, I am not all powerful, but it seems to me you have forgotten one little point. I won't tell you what it is. And now," he said, "good day to you. Get back to your ship, and be on your way. I have much to do."

Enash had been standing quietly, aware of the fury building up in him again. Now, with a hiss, he sprang forward, suckers outstretched. They were almost touching the smooth flesh when something snatched at him. He was back on the ship.

He had no. memory of movement, no sense of being dazed or harmed. He was aware of Veed and Yoal and Captain Goisid standing near him as astonished as he himself. Enash remained very still, thinking of what the man had said: "... Forgotten one little point." Forgotten? That meant they knew. What could it be? He was still pondering about it when Yoal said:

"We can be reasonably certain our bombs alone will not work."

They didn't.

Forty light-years out from Earth, Enash was summoned to the council chambers. Yoal greeted him wanly. "The monster is aboard."

The thunder of that poured through Enash, and with it came a sudden comprehension. "That was what he meant we had forgotten," he said finally, aloud and wonderingly. "That he can travel through space at will within a limit what was the figure he once used of ninety light-years."

He sighed. He was not surprised that the Ganae, who had to use ships, would not have thought immediately of such a possibility. Slowly, he began to retreat from the reality. Now that the shock had come, he felt old and weary, a sense of his mind withdrawing again to its earlier state of aloofness. It required a few minutes to get the story. A physicist's assistant, on his way to the storeroom, had caught a glimpse of a man in a lower corridor. In such a heavily manned ship, the wonder was that the intruder had escaped earlier observation. Enash had a thought.

"But after all we are not going all the way to one of our planets. How does he expect to make use of us to locate it if we only use the video" be stopped. That was it, of course. Directional video beams would have' to be used, and the man would travel in the right direction the instant contact was made.

Enash saw the decision in the eyes of his companions, the only possible decision under the circumstances. And yet, it seemed to him they were missing some vital point. He walked slowly to the great video plate at one end of the chamber. There was a picture on it, so sharp, so vivid, so majestic that the unaccustomed mind would have reeled as from a stunning blow. Even to him, who knew the scene, there came a constriction, a sense of unthinkable vastness. It was a video view of a section of the milky way. Four hundred mil lion stars as seen through telescopes that could pick up the light of a red dwarf at thirty thousand light-years.

The video plate was twenty-five yards in diameter, a scene that had no parallel elsewhere in the plenum. Other galaxies simply did not have that many stars.

Only one in two hundred thousand of those gloving suns had planets.

That was the colossal fact that compelled them now to an irrevocable act. Wearily, Enash looked around him.

"The monster has been very clever," he said quietly. "If we go ahead, he goes with us, obtains a reconstructor, and re' turns by his method to his planet. If we use the directional beam, he flashes along it, obtains a reconstructor, and again reaches his planet first. In either event, by the time our fleets arrived back here, he would have revived enough of his kind to thwart any attack we could mount."

He shook his torso. The picture was accurate, he felt sure, but it still seemed incomplete. He said slowly, "We have one advantage now. Whatever decision we make, there is no language machine to enable him to learn what is it. We can carry out our plans without his knowing what they will be. He knows that neither he nor we can blow up the ship. That leaves us one real alternative."

It was Captain Gorsid who broke the silence that followed.

"Well, gentlemen, I see we know our minds. We will set the engines, blow up the controls, and take him with us."

They looked at each other, race pride in their eyes.

Enash touched suckers with each in turn.

An hour later, when the heat was already considerable, Enash had the thought that sent him staggering to the communicator, to call Shuri, the astronomer. "Shun," he yelled, "when the monster first awakened remember Captain Gorsid had difficulty getting your subordinates to destroy the locators. We never thought to ask them what the delay was. Ask them ... ask them"

There was a pause, then Shuri's voice came weakly over the roar of the static. "They... couldn't... get... into the... room. The door was locked."

Enash sagged to the floor. They had missed more than one point, he realized. The man had awakened, realized the situation; and, when he vanished, he had gone to the ship, and there discovered the secret of the locator and possibly the secret of the reconstructor if he didn't know it previously. By the time he reappeared, he already had from them what he wanted. All the rest must have been designed to lead them to this act of desperation.

In a few moments, now, he would be leaving the ship, secure in the knowledge that shortly no alien mind would know his planet existed. Knowing, too, that his race would live again, and this time never die.

Enash staggered to his feet, clawed at the roaring communicator, and shouted his new understanding into it. There was no answer. It clattered with the static of uncontrollable and inconceivable energy. The heat was peeling his armored hide as he struggled to the matter transmitter. It flashed at him with purple flame. Back to the communicator he ran shouting and screaming.

He was still whimpering into it a few minutes later when the mighty ship plunged into the heart of a blue-white sun.

ORIGINAL SIN

S. Fowler Wright

I am XP4378882. I write this with a pen, on sheets of paper in the old way, instead of speaking it into a recorder, because I want it to have a chance of survival, even though a time should come when no more of those instruments can be made or preserved; and because it is a very private thing. If this should be seen by one who could read its words, my death would be nearer even than are those of the men and women among whom I move.

I am writing on the 28th day of September, 2838, being nineteen years of age yesterday, and my friend Stella being two minutes younger than I. We two are the youngest people now alive in the world, having been born somewhat after our time, though there may be eight millions of those who are not more than fourteen days older than we.

For when men conquered disease, and the life of a healthy child became a certain thing, there was a law made that no parents should have more than three (though they could have less if they would, and there were always some that were barren; but there was margin enough for that, and for such as died young, being scalded, or burnt, or perhaps choked with a bone); and then it was soon seen that it was a foolish thing for these children to be born whenever their parents would, as in the old disorderly days, and there was a further law that there should be a space of five years during which all married people might have what children they would (being it not more than three), and after that there should be a period of twenty-five years when none should be born at all.

This worked well in more ways than might be thought at the first, for the children bred were all of a like age, and could be taught at one time, and would advance in a level way, whether at task or game, and the training of each year was in no more than three grades, and they were of a like age to wed when the time came, and would be still in their youth when the law was that they might have children themselves. There was time to plan how the next generation should be reared and taught, and each was divided from each in a clear way.

So it has been now for three hundred years, and each generation has been born into a fairer world. There is no disease. There is no dirt. There is no hunger or thirst. There is no pain. There is enough for all of all things that a man can need, so that there is no cause either to envy or hate, either to strive or long.

Men have learnt to see that they need not die till their strength fails, and then death can be made pleasant enough; but the question of why they live has been left unsolved, and it is one which has been asked in an ever more urgent way.

It is over a century ago that the Doctrine of Futility was first discussed, in records two of which still remain. It was not regarded seriously at first, and was freely allowed. But there came a time when it became a cult which some strongly held, and others disliked with the emphasis which the Law of Moderation forbids.

Consequently, it was banned, and all recordings erased, excepting only those which were preserved in the Great Museum at Timbuctoo.

There was cause for this law, as it had been found that men might hold different opinions with an obstinacy of assertion which would lead to violent quarrels, when wounds might be given, even such as would cause death; and there had been a general determination to remove all occasions of premature decease from the world.

Opinions must not be publicly expressed, except those on which all men were united, or excepting only such a minority as would not dare to dissent aloud, lest they should provoke the Law for the Elimination of Pests, which no one would wish to do.

But these prohibitions were revised every twenty-five years, and it was a remarkable observation that the great majority of controversial questions would become innocuous in such a period, like a wasp that had lost its sting.

This did not happen so quickly to the Doctrine of Futility, but at each successive revision it was regarded by the Guardians of Public Tranquillity with an increased benevolence, until, at the fourth review, there was the necessary unanimous agreement that few would dissent from, and no one would be likely to be seriously disturbed by, the theory which it propounded.

That, briefly stated, was that sentient life on the Earth, and particularly the forecasting and introspective self-consciousness of mankind, is an evolutionary blunder or, at best, a futility, inevitably destined to be corrected by the deliberate action of its own products so soon as they should reach an intellectual maturity sufficient to enable them to recognize both their own abortion, and their power to terminate it.

Sooner or later, it was argued, mankind must reach a maturity of thought which would recognize the vanity of the procession of life and death, and, by its own deliberate and orderly extinction, restore the Harmony of the Universe, which had been momentarily disturbed by the flicker of sentient life on the planet on which we live.

This theory, being released anew by the Guardians of Public Tranquillity as a harmless, and even obvious proposition, was accepted at first with the passive assent due to that which all men can clearly and equally see. But that mood was quickly succeeded by one of excited interest, as it was realized that it offered a prospect of affirmative action to men whose whole lives had been negative till that hour.

The elimination of every kind of adversity from the experience of human life had left it both emotionally and intellectually barren, without hope and without fear. Its futility had an indisputable quality. Men felt that they had already arrived on the crest of the wave of life—a crest where they scarcely were or did.

But here was something that could be done, something to break the monotony of eventless days. With alacrity, even with enthusiasm, men caught at the idea, discussed, approved, planned. As they did so, their eyes brightened, their listless motions quickened, their voices stirred slightly from their accustomed drawl. Paradoxically, life became faintly valuable again, as the prospect of its destruction engaged their minds.

Should they attempt the extinction of life of every kind? It might be beyond human power. It would certainly be an enterprise of extraordinary difficulty. Actually, all the higher forms of life, apart from mankind, had, for reasons of safety, prudence, or sanitation, been eliminated during several previous centuries. Only its more rudimentary forms remained, and these in severely restricted forms. To sterilize every germ of life in ocean and land and air—no, it could not be done. But such as would remain would be elementary in character: they would be of doubtful consciousness, and surely incapable of the curse of thought. They must be left to blunder to their own ends in their own ways.

But the futility of human life, all its aimless recurrences, could be ended now.

And though, as has been said, as men planned thus, they began paradoxically to feel that they had some purpose in life again, so that, with the thought of its destruction, its value rose, yet they did not therefore weaken in their resolve, for to do so would be to sink back into the sorrowless, joyless atrophy which, as they thus became half-awake, was their greatest dread.

Such has been the talk around us for the last year, while plans for its realization have been developed and approved. It was a doom which even the young accepted with some degree of pleasant excitement rather than sharp demur, for when nothing has happened for nineteen or twenty years of monotonous days—I will not say that I did not accept it myself until the plan was announced in detail, and Stella drew me apart to a secret place, where our whispered voices could not be overheard or recorded in any Nay, and said, very quietly: "Don't you see what that means for us?" and then: "Don't speak to me again, or give any sign if you mean to do what I hope you will. You'll throw away the last chance if you do. But I had to let you know how I feel, or you might not have guessed you could count on me."

It is only a week till it will happen now, and no one has guessed what is in my mind, nor has the plan been altered in any way that would make it vain. I have not looked at Stella, nor, I think, has she looked at me, nor given any sign of what I know she is thinking and hoping now. But she can't be sure, because it must depend upon me. I might leave her alone, and I wonder what she would do then? Or, of course, before that, I might give her away. While I don't, she must see reason to hope ...

The plan is that the oldest ones will go first, while all the comforts remain. There is evident sense in that, and in any case, their time for liquidation would be very near.

After that, the younger ages will go, working progressively downward, and the means of sustaining life will be destroyed in the same progressive manner, so that, when it will come to those of our own age, if we do not destroy ourselves, it will be impossible to live as we do now.

In particular, the means of regulating temperature will be gone, so that we should only be able to resist cold or heat in the old crude ways—by clothes or roofs and walls, or the lighting of fires. And the provision of food would present such difficulties that it is hard to see how they could be overcome. It seems absurd to think that anyone should be willing to remain alive under such conditions as that. But, if Stella thinks it may be worth while—after all, we can always die.

III

It has begun, and the first million, or more, are already dead. The method is that each in turn shall receive an injection from the one next below him on the list, after which he will pass into pleasant dreams. It is a drug that is often used, so that its effects are exactly known. There is an antidote by which men can recover without evil effect, if it be given within two or three hours, but, if they be left without it, their sleep drifts into death.

The injection is best given in the spinal column, so that it can be done better by a man's neighbour than by himself.

Elaborate arrangements for the comfort of all have been made, and the routine is swift, so that it will be no more than three days before my turn and Stella's will come. But we had a fright this morning, and the fact that I found it to be a fright showed me for the first time, with certainty, what I really wish to happen.

We were called, Stella and I, before the Council of Routines. They told us that we were last on the list, which might be an alarming position, we being as young as we were, though it is evident that someone must be there. They said they had discussed changing our places with others of the previous generation, who had volunteered to relieve us.

I thought it best to seem indifferent, and only said that they needn't trouble as far as I was concerned: I couldn't see that it mattered one way or other.

They turned to Stella, and she said: "Oh, don't change it for me! I don't mind being last of all. I rather like the idea."

Anyone would have thought they would have been too lethargic to say any more after that, but the liveliness with which she spoke seemed to rouse the Second Councillor up. He looked at her, almost alertly, and asked: "You will be last of all. How will you give yourself the injection? Have you thought of that?"

"Oh, yes," she said readily, "we've discussed that. I shall give it to Cerdic, and then, before it has any effect on him, he'll have time to give it to me."

The Councillors didn't look pleased at her use of my familiar name instead of my official number. It showed lack of respect for them, as she should have known. But even they may have seen the humor of making trouble on such a point, when it was not more than thirty hours, or two days at most, before they would extinguish themselves.

Stella said: "I guessed that. Didn't you?"

We had just heard that there had been trouble over the two who had been proposed to take our places at the end of the list. They had been missing when their turn had come—missing, and hard to find. It came out then that it had been their own proposal to the Council of Routines that they should be put last on the list in place of ourselves, and everyone was saying that the Council had shown its wisdom in rejecting their plea.

I was alarmed at first, for I feared that it might lead to some precaution being taken against evasion of the law of extinction by those who would be last on the list, for it was agreed that their purpose had been to attempt to remain alive, and it was said that that would destroy the self-justification of what we did.

For it was obvious that if the human race should perpetrate its own complete self-destruction, it would have demonstrated its own futility in an unanswerable manner, which would be the justification of what it did. But if two should remain alive, and should become the parents of a new race, the whole action would be abortive, and this might be held to be the condemnation of those who did it, rather than of the creation to which they belonged.

This being the prevailing view, it might have been reasonably anticipated that the discovery of unwilling individuals, even two among millions, might have led to some precautionary action which would have been difficult to evade, but I found that opinion was taking another direction, ridiculing the folly of the detected two, and emphasising how short a time they would have outlived their fellows, and how sharply the pain and misery in which they would have died would have led them to repent their choice.

It was pointed out that it was to avert the possibility of such survivals that all the requirements of human existence were being systematically destroyed, so that, as the final exits were made, it would be impossible for any man or woman to remain alive for more than a few further hours except under conditions of intolerable discomfort, such as, even if they should attempt to endure them, would be promptly fatal.

This is not a view which holds much comfort for us, and though it must be true that our ancestors experienced such conditions in earlier periods, it must be different for us, who have not experienced adverse temperatures or imperfect foods. . . . Well, it is a risk which we must have courage to face, and may have vigor to overcome.

The two who rebelled did not make any great trouble after they were found, and their folly had been fully explained to them. It is said that they took their turns like lambs, as the saying is. (I am not clear as to what a lamb was, but these sayings outlast the meaning, which was doubtless clear to those by whom they were first used.) They are dead by now and our time is not more than a few hours ahead.

It is done. And we are alone in an empty world. There was an incident at the last which I did not like, but it cannot be altered now.

The time came when there were only six to whom the fatal injection had not been given. And then five—and then four. Rida, who was the last except ourselves, drove the needle into the neck of the one who came before her, and I saw her hand shake as she did it. He lay down in his own place, and it was my turn to deal with her.

I picked up the syringe and refilled it and as I did so I bad a feeling of revulsion at what I was expected to do. Why should I not let her live? Why not at least give her the choice —the chance? She looked frightened. She might be glad.

The fact that we were not accepting the law—that we were not intending to kill ourselves—seemed to make it different for me from what it had been for the others. Of course Stella would have no such difficulty. There would be nothing for her to do. But I felt that I should be a murderer if I did not at least ask Rida if she would be willing to live. And she was one whom I like in some ways better than Stella. Anyone would.

As I filled the syringe Stella was watching me with ale impatient eyes. They met mine and I was sure that she read my thoughts.

Rida had turned her back to me now. I could see her trembling. She said: "I don't like waiting. Be quick."

I lifted the syringe, hesitating. Stella's eyes were on me, bright, hard, insistent.

I said: "I think you ought to know that there's another course you can take if--" I didn't get further than that. Stella reached over, and grasped my hand. The fatal pressure came from her, not from me. It was done in a second. She said: "Cerdic had it an inch too low." I don't know whether Rida heard. She went to lie down without looking round. What could anything, after that, matter to her?

I haven't quarreled with Stella. What use would it be? And when you're alone in the world, and got to be very quick to find means to live—

Should we survive, and found a new race, we ought to make a better world than it was before. But it seemed to me that it was a bad start.

SPIRO
Eric Frank Russell

The only certain feature was that the vessel in which he came resembled a huge opalescent egg. Even the egg was of indeterminate hue; its surface was a weird, shifting mixture of lights and shadows, gleams and evasions and fleeting darknesses that danced and blended and swirled into oneness with the sooty clouds, the lowering sky, and the eternal void that had belched this cursed thing forth. But, in shape, it was an egg.

From this mystic ovoid crept a thing that might have been an iridescent python, if for the space of a single minute it had been content to retain its initial shape. It was not so simple to identify. Fixation of contours or permanency of form was no characteristic of this alien newcomer which may have been made of the very stuff of thought. Its changes had the sharpness and rapidity of a purely mental process.

It spurted from the egg in a long, writhing column. Then it looped upon itself with the disgusting sinuosity of a mutilated worm, turned from a fiery red to a deep, morbid blue, became a relatively tranquil but still ominous ring of azure. There came a moment of quiescence during which strange, extramundane senses probed the surroundings with what might have been surprise, interest, or cold speculation.

That condition lasted exactly twenty seconds. The ghastly, glowing ring shrank in its horizontal plane, swelled in the vertical, bloomed to a ball of pale yellow moonshine practically invisible in the strong light of day. Then, with shocking vim, it popped into nothingness, leaving a startling vacancy in the maw of the cosmos. But below its former place stood a small flowering shrub—a shrub that had not been there before.

To one side a fascinated rabbit, sole witness of the whole amazing performance, crouched stiff and still in a thrall of intense fear. As if deliberately to boost its terror to the very verge of death, the shrub squirmed grotesquely, sucked its leaves and branches into itself, reduced and lumped itself until it had assumed the shape, form and all the fine details of another rabbit. It bounced across to the terrified watcher, nosed its paralyzed body contemptuously, then shot into the shadow of the egg.

Like the instrument of some unearthly super-magician, the imitation rabbit changed again. First it was there, sitting upright, front paws dangling, long ears erect. Next it had flashed back to the shape of the fiery invader which originally had dominated the scene.

Disregarding the world around him, Spiro the Spy, chosen venturer of the Martian Mimics, made a sinuous motion, thrust a fine, scintillating fiber into the egg, felt delicately around, then withdrew. He waited a moment. The egg trembled. Weird shadows on its surface rioted fantastically. Then the alien vessel boosted itself skyward at tremendous speed and in complete silence. A tall, gyrating pillar of leaves and dust climbed in its wake, was easily outdistanced, collapsed back to Earth as the egg vanished through the clouds.

The passenger it had borne twisted upon himself, glowed and sparkled with feral luster, then writhed away. Fifteen minutes after he had gone, the fascinated rabbit shuddered from nose to tail, patted the ground with a weak, still-numb paw. A little later it managed a clumsy hop.

Old Josh Hawkins rumbled, "Here, Soldier!" Soldier promptly abandoned his quest for beautiful smells, trotted the correct one yard behind old Josh's worn and dirty pants. The pair went through the gate and into the field.

Wrinkling his aged, watery eyes, old Josh looked at the sheep. He fumbled in a pocket, drew out a large, crimson handkerchief ornamented with white polka dots, wiped his eyes, blew his nose loudly. Soldier sat down, lolled his tongue, stared upward with questioning gaze. Old Josh had another and clearer look at the sheep.

"Summat be wrong wi' they sheep," he muttered.

"Yuff!" commented Soldier, moderating his voice in manner becoming to his station.

To the eye of anyone who wouldn't know a tup lamb from any other kind of lamb, there was nothing the matter with the sheep. It was merely that the flock had clustered tightly and fearfully into the farther angle of the field, the biggest and strongest animals on the outside, the lambs and bearing ewes penned between them and the two lines of fence forming the corner. It was an old technique developed when flocks were circled in the night by things that slavered.

One sheep, either abnormally stupid or unusually individualistic, stood apart from the flock. It was halfway up the field, watching the arrivals. Down in that distant corner the huddled mass also watched with idiotic but anxious eyes. There came to the ears of old Josh a chorus of appealing bleats ranging from adult basses to the weak, faltering mewings of the lambs. He knew sheep with the thoroughness of one who has stank of them these sixty years come Thanksgiving.

All the same, that one, lone animal irritated him. Its very aloofness plucked at his sheep-sensitive nerves. Perhaps deep within his wool-coated mind stirred the ancient quake of his animal-mastering ancestors: the fear that some day their mastery might prove incomplete, might be challenged. Or maybe he sensed in that solitary animal's independent stance a sudden defiance of the age-old herd instinct, of human overlordship, of Soldier, and of himself. So he pointed a knotty but still adept finger at the sheep that chose to stand alone. He chirruped between his teeth.

Soldier responded with the swiftness of a perfectly controlled automaton. Muzzle forward, ears back, eyes fixed on the object of his attention with almost hypnotic intensity, he slid forward belly-low in the grass. The dog was far too old a hand to rush forward barking. The proper way is to slide wolfishly around and intimidate. Soldier proceeded to hand out some suitable intimidation.

The sheep said, "Baa!"

Soldier stopped his forward snaking. His ruff stood up as a furry collar. He stared straight into eyes that were not like the inane eyes of the flock and saw therein a certain something that had been seen by nothing on Earth excepting one helpless rabbit. He commenced to back away, his beseeching whine reaching old Josh in canine protest.

Old Josh was amazed. Thrusting two fingers into his mouth, he tried to drive the dog into action by sheer power of his commanding whistle.

The shrill, authoritative sound screamed across the hill and wailed away down the valley. Soldier half yelped, half whined. His body hunched curiously as his rear portion obediently tried to slink forward while his front insisted on going back. The distant flock bawled and mewed and shuffled agitatedly. The single sheep stood its ground and glared.

Old Josh took one impatient step forward. The lone sheep took three. Then old Josh decided he really did need those glasses he'd been thinking of getting for the last ten years. The danged animal wasn't a sheep at all. It was a dog, a strange dog, the very twin of Soldier. No wonder the latter had behaved so queerly.

But Soldier's sharp mind worked differently. He'd half been about to discipline something posing as a sheep when the thing had changed into the likeness of another dog—and both had eyes of fire drawn from a source unthinkable. Soldier waited not upon the order of his going. He departed with extreme alacrity, his frantic feet touching the ground at three-yard intervals. A hole in the fence marked his exit.

Old Josh gaped at the hole. The hole gaped back at old Josh. Then he did something he had never done these sixty years, whether Thanksgiving were coming or not—he deserted his jittery sheep. Taking one horrified look at the dreadful eyes, he turned and ran.

The thing followed him. He looked back, saw it loping out through the gate and along the road. Cold perspiration ran down his spine as he pelted along at the best pace his old legs could make. His breath came in wheezy gasps while in his mind still stood those vampire eyes which seemed to thirst for the substance of his very soul. He took another wild glance over his shoulder, saw his tracker maintaining its distance. Doglike, the thing lolled its tongue, but the crimson organ licked out with the length and brilliance of a devouring flame.

Squirming and yelping in his frantic eagerness to get inside, Soldier was waiting at the cottage door. When old Josh reached and opened it, Soldier dived through the gap, sought the farthest and darkest corner of the room, tried to embed himself in the wall. From somewhere out back, Tinker and Tailor moaned in horrid chorus.

The dog that wasn't a dog now stood in the gateway staring toward the open door. Old Josh decided there was no time to get around the back and unleash Tinker and Tailor. With his rheumy eyes intent upon the thing in the path, old Josh cautiously felt behind the door, got his shaking hand on cold metal.

In one swift movement, he stuck his shotgun through the gap of the doorway and let go with both barrels. The heavy charges of buckshot went down the path on a wave of thunder that drowned the slam of the door and the noise of hurriedly thrust bolts. In the brief instant after he had fired he had seen that the path and the gateway were empty and that there was nothing at all where there ought to have been the body of a dead dog.

With the reloaded gun in his hand, he went around and made sure that all the windows were fastened securely on the inside. Then he poked up the fire, treated himself to a tall drink of whiskey, and sat down to think things over. He had been thinking them over for half an hour when, out back, Tinker and Tailor screamed together. He had never heard a dog scream before. It was an awful sound. He had to take Soldier in his lap and nurse him back to quiet.

Tinker and Tailor were still after that. Old Josh wondered why they were so silent. He sniffed, fancied he could smell scorched hair. Something padded softly past the nearest window, below the level of the sill, where he couldn't see it. Soldier went wild again.

The fire was still blazing, and the corn half consumed, when daylight faded. Old Josh picked up the gun, went to a window, and gazed into gathering twilight. He was slightly drunk, and mumbled steadily to himself in a dull monotone. He saw nothing weaving in the evening mists outside; no shape of menace, no formless phantasm lusting to add his divine spark to its own diabolical fire. He pulled the shades and lit the oil-lamp.

Three hours of silence and much potent alcohol eased his fears to some extent. He was getting old, he solemnly reflected. He had lived by himself too long and had become queer. Maybe if he had married the widow Jenson he would not have been chased around by figments of his own imagination. He dozed before the bright, warm fire. At one moment, Soldier groaned and old Josh automatically snatched at his gun. But he was only half awake, and his hand soon relaxed its hold. Outside, a moon climbed into the ragged sky.

He was sound asleep when a thin line of peculiar, flickering light seeped through the narrow gap between the bottom of the door and the stone step. The light waxed stronger, glowing and fattening as if it were creeping in with the silent, secretive flow of some phosphorescent liquid.

The invading luminescence had become a purple puddle, humping itself toward globulousness, when Soldier opened an eye and saw it. He moaned softly, tried to move, failed. The fearsome globule flicked out an immaterial tentacle and silenced him forever. The dog rolled onto its side, all four legs twitching spasmodically, a thin whiff of burned hair rising from its carcass.

Old Josh knew nothing of this. He had always been a noisy sleeper and now was excelling himself. With eyes closed and mouth open, he gasped, swallowed, mumbled and snorted before the fire whose crackling embers had lulled him into unconsciousness. Now and again his legs jerked, his hands gestured, as if such futile motions served to emphasize the unspoken sentiments of his dreams.

It was a bad dream he was having. And a startlingly vivid dream. A veritable nightmare that beaded his back with sweat. In the depth of his slumbers it seemed to him that something had occupied the opposite chair. He wasn't sure whether it was Soldier, a sheep, or a rabbit. Now it shone blindingly, shifted identities, and became a caricature of himself.

Whatever the thing was, it settled in the chair, laughed in a chilly, pseudo-human voice, and proceeded to cross-examine him. Old Josh strongly resented the persistent questioning, but found himself unable to do anything about it. The inexorable voice went on and on, asking the most idiotic questions about the most commonplace things, and all that old Josh could do was answer to the best of his ability.

For what purposes were sheep used? Could many other animals be domesticated? Were any animals intelligent? Why did old Josh wear clothes? What was the weapon with which he had blown some absurd pellets of lead down the garden path? What other kinds of weapons were in general use? Was he of average intelligence, or were there superior minds on Earth? Did he know of methods of illumination better than the crude lamp he was using? Electricity . . .

. . . was that used for any purpose other than illumination?

Thus it went on. He struggled against it. He disliked this sardonic treatment of an education that wasn't as good as it might have been. He objected to being treated like a chird's primer, to be opened and read for the sake of some kindergarten knowledge. Finally, he resented the downright foolishness of some of the questions, the answers to which everybody knew.

"Dogs dislike cats—what are cats?"

The doctor looked down at the body of Josh Hawkins and said, "I don't care if a thousand people claim to have seen him since then. I say he died about two o'clock this morning and that his death was from natural causes." He glanced at his watch. "He's been dead about fourteen hours."

Police Officer Kelly felt far from satisfied. There was nothing surprising about the old sheepman's demise, especially when you considered his age. But there were one or two strange features about the case that needed clearing up before it could be considered neat and tidy. Kelly liked his jobs to be neat. In addition to which, he was and always had been a very suspicious man.

"But look here, Doctor Lanigan," he protested. "Jeff Anderson swears he saw Josh waiting for the first charabanc out of the village at seven-thirty this morning. Three people say they saw Josh getting off the charabanc at the depot at seven-thirty. A few more say they noticed him wandering around. They noticed him particularly, because he was acting strangely. He was looking around like a visitor who'd never seen the place before, and when a couple of them spoke to him he wouldn't answer."

"Two o'clock," declared Doctor Lanigan stubbornly.

"If he got a lift back here, or even if he walked, he must have been alive around eight to have reached home again."

"He was dead long before then," asserted the medico, flatly. "The evidence puts it beyond dispute." He closed his bag with the air of one whose position is unassailable. "And let me tell you, Kelly, corpses don't go gallivanting around and catching charabancs."

"Let me ride down to the village with you," requested Kelly. "There's something strange somewhere. I'm going to ask some questions," He heaved his heavy frame into the doctor's car, and added, "Why should Josh's three dogs have popped off with him? Did they die around two o'clock? Heck of a coincidence, isn't it?"

"You'll have to get a vet to examine them," said Lanigan. "I admit that it's very strange that the dogs should have died too. Maybe Josh went queer at the end, and finished them off himself."

"I'll get a vet all right!" growled Kelly.

They sped down to the village, the doctor silent and certain, the police officer surly and dissatisfied. As they were passing the tiny post office, Kelly let out a yell, waving frantically to an ambling pedestrian. Doctor Lanigan braked his car to a stop.

"Jeff," said Kelly, as the walker came up, "tell the doctor what time you last saw Josh Hawkins."

"I told you once." Jeff Anderson's frown showed that already he was sick of the subject. "It was seven-thirty."

"Impossible!" Lanigan snapped.

"Why?" demanded Anderson, his frown changing to a scowl.

"He was dead. What's more, he'd been dead several hours."

"I saw him, the whole medical profession notwithstanding!" said Anderson succinctly. With that he turned to go.

It was the doctor's, turn to scowl. Police Officer Kelly chewed his bottom lip and looked bothered. The pair stared at each other.

"Say, Jeff, did Hawkins look any different from usual?" Jeff lounged back, considered a moment, said, "Only that his face fungus was yellow."

"Yellow!" ejaculated Lanigan. "What color is it usually?"

"Brown," answered Jeff Anderson. "A dirty, tobacco brown." He swivelled on one heel, made off with an air of finality.

Again the pair in the car gaped at each other. Utter bafflement showed on both men's faces.

After a while, Kelly remarked slowly and thoughtfully,

"Jeff's no speechmaker, but he's got good, sharp eyes. If he says they were yellow, then they were yellow."

"Well?"

"And the bush on Josh's dead face was stained a nice, ripe, fruity brown. You saw those whiskers yourself!"

Lanigan began to breathe words in a soft, low voice, then he said, more loudly, "Hawkins tried to clean up his beard for the first time in donkey's years. He turned it yellow. Then he came down to the village and caught a charabanc. After that, he returned home, carefully stained his whiskers their former color and finished up by dying several hours after he was already dead. It's pure nightmare! Anderson's been drinking!"

"So early in the morning?" Kelly objected. "Besides, others saw Josh."

"Then you'd better get the opinion of another medical man," growled Lanigan. He accelerated his car with savage determination down the road to where Kelly's home bore the modest sign: POLICE. With a faint touch of sarcasm, he added, "Snoop around a bit and see if old Whiskers has a twin brother who'll inherit."

Kelly winced, heaving his brawny form out of the car. He noticed a familiar figure waiting by the gate. It was Art Calder, booking clerk at the local depot.

"What is it, Art?"

"The boys tell me you're asking questions about Josh," replied Art. "So I thought I'd better come down from the depot and say my piece." He blinked nervously, licked his lips. "Josh caught the eight-fifty-five express for London. I sold him his ticket. I saw him get on the train."

Despite his middle age, Doctor Lanigan was a healthy, active man. He proved it by the way he stopped his engine and vaulted from the car in one dexterous twist. He stood chest to chest with the uneasy Art, thrust forward an aggressive face.

"You are prepared to swear that it was Hawkins and no other?"

"Of course, Doc," Art assured. He fidgeted under his questioner's intent gaze. "I couldn't mistake that dodderer." Lanigan turned to Kelly. "You know Hawkins far better than I do. You positively identify that body as his?"

"I do," swore Kelly, certainty in his voice, and stupefaction on his face.

"Right!" Doctor Lanigan shoved thumbs into vest pockets, lumped his jaw and peered shrewdly at his puzzled companions. "I admit my error. Kelly, I want Hawkins and the dogs brought in for post mortem examination. It's going to be thorough and complete, believe me!" He turned to Art. "And I want you to phone along the line to the terminus, trying all intervening stations, and find out whether any collector has taken that ticket you issued."

"Sure," agreed Art. "It won't take long to get that information."

"You'd better report this to county headquarters," the physician told Kelly. "Evidently this affair isn't as simple as it looks. None of us really knows just what happened or how it happened." He looked from one to the other. "But to me it's mighty like murder."

"Ugh!" grunted Art Calder. He shuddered as he thought of a killer in his little office, with only the glass plate between them. He had pushed his hand through the hole in that glass. If death had clasped his hand…

The post mortem was official and, as Lanigan had promised, very, very thorough. Old Josh had been electrocuted as efficiently as any condemned gangster. So had his dogs. They had died in the night—two dogs first, Soldier later, old Josh last—somewhere between one-thirty and two-thirty in the dark hours before the haunted dawn. They had died beneath a funereal sky which had released no lightning, had done no more than spread its sable pall across the scene of agony. There the quartet had gasped their last and scented the air with their final burns, man and animals alike, in an oil-illuminated cottage a full seven miles from the nearest power lines.

It was impossible. Nevertheless, it had happened.

The dumbfounded investigators had just reached the conclusion that, since all the signs were those of electrocution, there was no other possible diagnosis, idiotic as that one might seem, when news came in about the ticket. It had been handed in at Euston Station by a well-groomed, prosperous-looking individual, presumably a business man.

Ten minutes after the ticket had been surrendered a questing porter found a corpse. It was reposing in one corner of an empty coach. It seemed to be asleep, and blissfully unconscious of its own complete nakedness. The porter nudged the cadaver, which promptly flopped over with all the horrible abandon of empty clay. By a most remarkable coincidence, it was that of a well-groomed, well-cared-for individual, presumably a business man. A twin, in fact, of the gentleman who had given up the ticket bought by the twin of old Josh. The twin of old Josh was not on the train.

Chief Inspector McKechnie was thinking about this mixture of twins as he sat at his desk in Scotland Yard and stared beneath bushy eyebrows at Doctor Lanigan and Police Officer Kelly. The inspector was big and shrewd: he looked like a bull buffalo with no illusions.

"I'm glad you two came along so promptly. The evidence you've been able to give shows clearly that there is some extremely mysterious but quite definite connection between the death of Hawkins and the body found at Euston."

He paused, thought a moment, then went on, "The body on the train has been identified as that of Wilson C. Fairbrother, a broker of some prominence. He appears to have died by electrocution, strange as that may seem."

"Ah!" exclaimed Lanigan.

"Something very much off-kilter links these two tragedies," McKechnie continued. He rested heavy elbows on his desk, propped his big jaw with hamlike fists. "Hawkins, by all accounts, got on that train but never got off it. Fairbrother's double got off it but we've failed to turn up any evidence that he ever got on it in the first place. So the conclusion to be drawn is childishly obvious: the man who caught the train while cleverly impersonating Hawkins was one and the same individual as the man who left the train in the guise of Fairbrother."

"But—" began Lanigan.

"Where is the motive?" said McKechnie, finishing the question for him. He spread his large, capable hands in a gesture of disgust. "There's the weak spot! Fairbrother was carrying little money, had no known enemies. And, according to you two, Hawkins was a harmless old fellow without a cent in the world. Added to which, I quite fail to see why any killer should chose to masquerade as his victims. It doesn't make sense."

"It's pointless," agreed Lanigan.

"You've hit the nail right on the head!" Chief Inspector McKechnie wagged an emphatic finger. "It's so crazy that that in itself is a lead. Until more satisfactory data come in, I'll make a rough guess that we're bedevilled by an insane actor, an unsuccessful individual who's overdue for the sanitarium, a would-be screen star with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex."

"Somehow," put in Lanigan, doubtfully, "I can't imagine any makeup artist as supremely good as this one would have to be. Why, he was positively identified as old Josh by folk who've known him for years. One of them was a smallholder to whom Josh had sold a dry cow, and down in the country you don't forget the man who sells you a big mouth and no milk. That's not mere acting ability—it's genius too good to believe!"

"I can hardly believe it myself," McKechnie retorted. "In fact I'll admit I've difficulty in converting myself to my own theory. But, at present, it appears to be the only one that'll fit the known facts. I'm wide open to receive a more plausible alternative."

"There isn't one, unless . . . unless . . ." Lanigan broke off, looked confused

"Unless what?" McKechnie prompted.

"Nothing, really. I was toying with notions of the supernormal. It's too foolish to be worthy of consideration." Lanigan pondered gloomily, then spoke up with a note of sudden defiance that surprised himself. "The more I think of the whole affair, the more I'm convinced that we're facing something never before faced in the history of crime."

"I've faced some damn' funny things in my time," said McKechnie reflectively, "but all the lot of them proved astonishingly straightforward after I'd traced them to the bitter end. Three times does concede that I've got a humdinger in hand directly something just as illogical links up with these two jobs."

Item number three came from Bermondsey, running along wires, through telephone exchanges, into the switchboard of Scotland Yard, thence to his desk. His 'phone demanded attention.

McKechnie whisked up the 'phone. holding the earpiece as it it were an underweight dumbbell. He listened briefly. "I'm busy—can't you deal with him? Oh, all right then, put him on." He sat for a moment, tapping his teeth with a silver pencil. "Yes, yes, go on, I'm listening." Then he uttered, "What!" several times, his voice rising one note higher each time. An expression of slow surprise crept into his normally phlegmatic features. Finally he said, "I'd like you to come up right away. How soon? In about half an hour—good!"

Breathing heavily, he cradled the 'phone. He ignored the others, searched hurriedly through the deep litter of papers on his desk. In the end he found what he sought in the pocket of his raincoat, hanging in one corner. It was the morning paper. Spreading it over the mess on his desk, he scanned it eagerly.

"When you opined that we're facing something too tough to laugh off, you were a paragon of veracity and the holiest of prophets," he informed Lanigan. He jerked a beefy finger at the paper, then at the 'phone. "We got Fairbrother identified by running his picture in the morning papers. Now this chap rings up and says, 'My name's Onions, and it ain't funny!' After which he says that he recognizes the photo as that of a man who made news yesterday afternoon, a mere half-hour after that train drew in at Euston."

"Made what news?" put in Kelly, curiously.

Holding up the sheet, McKechnie pointed to a small paragraph headed: FIRE VICTIM VANISHES.

"The caller says he was one of the several witnesses. He's coming here to tell precisely what he saw." He permitted himself an unofficial grimace.

Mr. Onions proved to be an emaciated individual with a staggling, black moustache and batlike ears. He had watery eyes that ne'er looked with love on anything other than booze. His derby hat was decidedly cute, his attire had plenty of zoot and exuded a faint smell of horses. McKechnie mentally classified him as a race-course tipster, a stable hanger-on or a bookie's tout.

"I was coming over Lambeth Bridge," reported the equineodored Mr. Onions, "when I saw this stallion whose picture's in the papers. He was trotting toward me, making a good pace, and I wouldn't have noticed him particularly if it hadn't been for his eves."

"What about his eyes?" encouraged McKechnie.

"So help me, they were awful!" said Mr. Onions fervently. "They made you feel as if all your insides were missing. Directly I noticed them I said to myself. 'There's a fiend straight from the guts of Hell!' "

Mr. Onions did not look capable of any thought so dramatically expressed, yet it was plain to see he had been considerably shaken. He eyed his listeners with the apprehensive air of a known liar who, for once, is voicing the gospel truth and doesn't expect to be believed.

"Directly I thought that to myself," Mr. Onions continued, "he stabbed me with a look I could feel. Then he busted into flames." He stopped, took a long breath, added, "Strike me dead if it ain't the truth!"

"And what then?"

"He flamed like a bale of hay. Half a dozen people came running. They were too late. There wasn't anything."

"What d'you mean, there wasn't anything?" prompted McKechnie.

"The flame just went. It puffed out. Then there was nothing. We all searched around but couldn't find even a pants button. A cop came along and took all our names. He searched around, too."

"Go on."

Onions licked his lips, beginning to look desperate. "Last night a kid reporter called at my house. He put all the stuff down in his book, grinning while he did it. I hope he backs all the sitters! Then he left, saying he'd interview the other witnesses. So they stuck that bit about it in the paper."

"We're very much obliged to you, Mr. Onions," said McKechnie, smoothly. He leaned back in his chair, let his speculative eye wander over the silent Lanigan and Kelly. Then he studied the ill-at-ease Onions. He continued the thoughtful and deliberate study so long that the subject began to fidget. Suddenly he said, "I've a firm idea that you've been holding something back. Don't be afraid to tell us—we won't laugh at you."

"It's crazy," protested Onions, not bothering to deny McKechnie's guess.

"My dear man, you couldn't recount anything crazier than the cases we're stuck with right now!"

Shufflinng his feet around, Onions was half ashamed, half apologetic. He hesitated, pulled at one of his batlike ears, met McKechnie's penetrating eyes, blinked his own uncertainly.

"It was only a delusion."

"Never mind—out with it."

"Well, just as this flame went out, I thought for a moment that it looked like the ghost of an old countryman with a beard."

"Hah!" snapped McKechnie.

"But it was only my fancy, because it was a flame. Then, for a second after the flame went, I thought I saw a big purple cabbage with squirming things like snakes sticking out from between its leaves." With astonishing bellicosity, Mr. Onions went red in the face and shouted, "See if you can believe that!"

"I do," McKechnie replied evenly.

Onions was dumbfounded by this ready acceptance. He stared around with the bewildered air of one who finds such faith far more surprising than the story.

"Did the other witnesses see the same?"

"No. I asked them. They thought I was drunk. But I was sober—cold sober." Then, in added justification, "I was much nearer than them. In fact there wasn't anything nearer than me except for a fool of a dog."

"A dog?" put in Lanigan. "Did you notice it before this incident happened?"

"Can't say I did," admitted Mr. Onions. "It was messing around my feet just afterward. It popped up in the general excitement, like dogs do."

"Thanks," approved McKechnie. He was about to add something more when a knock at the door silenced him. A uniformed policeman inserted his head and spoke in tones of mock solemnity.

"Inspector, a druggist out in Balham says he's caught a werewolf. "It's got his poet's bones, and he wants to know what we're going to do about it."

"Werewolf? Poet's bones?"

"Yes, sir."

McKechnie's heavy frame shuddered from head to feet. He stood up slowly, stared at the now grinning cop, the gaping Onions, the puzzled Kelly, and the apparently daydreaming Lanigan.

"Tell that guy in Balham we're on our way there. Get the car out."

"Yes, sir." The other's grin vanished. He gulped twice, departed dazedly.

"Werewolf!" muttered McKechnie wildly.

The druggist was Georges Papazoglous, a Greek. He lay prostrate in the room behind his small, unpretentious store. Perspiration beaded his plump, olive face which was being carefully fanned by a buxom wench bearing a strong resemblance to himself. He sat up as McKechnie's elephantine tread made the floor-boards squeak. McKechnie was wearing a deep scowl that boded ill for whoever was behind this sudden flood of twaddle, the like of which had never been known in the peculiar annals of Scotland Yard.

"In da yard," announced Papazoglous, waving a fat and sweaty hand. "I find him in da yard. I shut da door. I bolt da door. I lock da door. An' then I 'phone da police." He lay down again. The girl resumed her fanning. Papazoglous uttered a string of names of persons considered holy in the Levant. "You kill him, my god, such quick!"

McKechnie considered the fateful door. Werewolf, bunkum! Fine fool he'd have looked, coming along with a stake, a mallet, and the conventional bouquet of garlic. All that had brought him, in fact, was a queasy feeling behind which lay that incident concerning the "fool of a dog." Maybe it was the same dog.

It was the same dog. McKechnie's whim had not led him astray. He stood there with a mere couple of inches of wood between him and that eerie something that was neither human nor divine, that alien invader who was Spiro the Spy. Instinct did not warn him that the deadliest peril on Earth waited just beyond that door. Inwardly, he felt that he had been somewhat stupid in giving his personal attention to a futile happening that could have been investigated by the cop on the beat. But, having been stupid, he might as well be thorough about it.

With the uniformed driver of his car standing ready behind him, he unlocked, unbolted and opened the door. He went into the yard. It was a small, brick-floored yard holding a tumbledown fuel-shed, half a dozen skeleton crates marked: Non-returnable, three old and very dirty carboys with the word Acid faintly discernible through their grime, an ashcan stuffed with crumpled cardboard cartons, a greenish-black shrub-tub harboring a thing that looked like a weary castor-oil plant, and, finally, a rusty, neglected bicycle. Nothing else.

McKechnie snorted loudly, said, "Well, where's your blasted dog?"

Springs creaked as Papazoglous heaved himself off his sofa. He appeared at the door, his eyes wide and round. The eyes searched the yard cautiously, apprehensively. They went wider and rounder. Nothing! It took half a minute for the sheer nothingness to sink in. Then Papazoglous began to wave his hands to the accompaniment of a veritable flood of words in his native language. Disgusted, McKechnie went in, pushing past the excited Greek.

"Speak English," he said curtly.

"I finda man in my store," shouted Papazoglous, semaphoring frantically. "I catch him pokin' aroun', lookin' at da bottles, bustin' up da packets. I come at him an' shout, `Hey, you!' an' he run like hell t'rough to yard, me after him. When I get to yard, he is a dog." He crossed himself, mopped perspiration. "Maria, I swear it! He is a dog—so!" He lowered a flat hand to show the animal's height. "Wit' eyes like tiger. They burn. God, how they burn!"

"He's not there now."

"Doan' care. Was there when I 'phone! A werewolf; Christos yes! I lock door an' 'phone."

Pensively, Papazoglous gazed through the window at the silent, undisturbed yard. The girl who had fanned him came through with a bucket of water; she put it down while she opened the door to the yard.

"Helena," breathed Papazoglous, in a voice strangely low and tense, "from where have we got this plant in da yard?"

"Ain't no plant," contradicted Helena.

"Helena, you got eyes, hah?"

"Ain't our plant, anyway," declared the unruffled Helena. "Maybe somebody dumped it." To show her contempt for the subject under discussion she lifted her bucket, took aim, tried to douse the plant.

McKechnie shouted, "Great heavens!"

Papazoglous' scream echoed halfway down the street.

The water sloshed out in a sloppy, glistening arc. It never reached the plant. It merely curved toward it, the motion of the liquid column appearing absurdly slow by contrast with the speed of the amazing reaction.

Like some dreadful djinn released from a bottle after one thousand brooding years, the plant writhed its leaves, contorted itself in mock agony, then shot up to a height of ten feet. Here, for a moment almost too brief to register on the shocked vision of the onlookers, it poised and wavered in the form of a long, leering caterpillarish thing of extreme horror and supreme obscenity. Next, it was a flaming snake twisting grotesquely in mid-air a few feet above its former haunt. Even as the sluggish water splashed upon the now empty tub, the snake had closed in upon itself, solidified, hardened, become a large black cat with optics that were pools of extra-mundane hate.

Displaying all the agility characteristic of the feline tribe, the big cat ran along the top of the wall on which it stood, turned once to sear the watchers with the utter evil of its stare, then dropped from sight. Its black tail vanished, and for an instant something spawned beyond that wall, a leafy, rich-hued object that might have belonged to a huge, purple cabbage. But that, too, went—a vision so brief that it might have been only the figment of a sickly dream.

The clatter of Helena's bucket was the final shock to nerves already stretched to the limit. Even the steel-hard McKechnie jumped. Her face a ghastly white, Helena had flopped in the doorway, falling without a murmur. McKechnie picked her up, bore her indoors. Papazoglous was back on his sofa. He was incoherent, hysterical, and looked like a corpse. The driver who had brought McKechnie used a quarter of an hour and much sal volatile to get the Greek into talkative condition.

"Now," demanded McKechnie, firmly, "where do the poet's bones come in?"

"Da right finger bones of eternal Homer," moaned Papazoglous, dully. "So real, so true, what you call authentic. Mine family have them for centuries."

"That," declared McKechnie, contorting his face, "makes everything as plain as daylight. I see it all, now. It is a revelation to me." His voice went harsh. "What the devil have these tomfool relics of yours to do with the matter?"

Papazoglous winced, pointed a trembling finger at an ornately decorated silver casket standing on the sideboard.

"I put them in a place ver' safe, or so I t'ink. This man, he snatch da casket an' run. I chase. He drop it. I lock door, save bones, make call to you."

"So," said McKechnie, "he didn't know what the silver box contained. He took it because it appeared to hold the most valuable item in the place, such as . . . such as . . ."

"Such as which?" Papazoglous asked.

"I don't know." McKechnie's irefulness swiftly gave way to a morbid mood. "It's now obvious that we're trying to deal with something likely to have standards very different from ours, something with totally different notions of what is valuable and what is not. It might," he went on, with a touch of ghoulish satisfaction, "think blood more precious than gold."

"Maria!" shouted Papazoglous, frantically. "Take me from this accursed place!" He lay back and rolled his eyes until only the white showed, sweating from every pore.

The bulbous-browed experts ended their profound argument, not because the discussion was settled to the entire satisfaction of all, but for the better and peculiarly British reason that it was now time for tea. They claimed their black Homburg hats, and departed with pedantic dignity. War Minister Stevenson carefully folded the plans over which the dispute had raged, placed them in a small but exceedingly heavy steel box, double-locked the box, and handed it to the pair of watchers at his side.

The two accepted their charge and left the room, one cuddling the box in a beefy embrace, the other fondling a lump of metal in his righthand jacket pocket. Several floors below ground level a uniformed attendant swung aside an immense steel grille, permitting them to enter. They crossed a small, metal-sheathed room, and stopped before the great, circular door of an underground vault.

Producing a bunch of keys, the attendant selected four of them, inserted them in a certain order, twisted each of them to a certain degree. Then he pressed a hidden button, a concealed dynamo whined distantly, the door emitted the sounds of metal moving in a bath of oil. Then its seven-ton bulk swung ponderously open.

Carrying the box through the steel maw, the escort unlocked one of a long row of metal compartments, slid the box inside and locked it up again. The compartment bore a label inscribed with a seemingly meaningless code; but in another building near at hand, similarly barred and bolted from curious eyes, was a code-book in which this label was registered opposite a brief entry: Thorsen's Five Thousand Mile Atomic Rocket.

At ten o'clock in the evening, a large black cat slipped through a side door in the Ministry building, dodged a scrubwoman's mop, scampered past the police guard at the nearer end of a long passage, and sinuously evaded the guard at the other end. Like a sable shadow, unseen, unheard, it padded through a room in which the former guardians of the box were boredly perusing the evening papers. It reached the stairs, paused a moment, staring round with eyes that burned ferociously. Then it fled down the stairs.

Behind the grille, the relief attendant was settling down with his book. Some instinct made him lift his eyes: he saw the big cat trotting daintily along the passage towards him, and thought of the lethal current flowing through the grille. "Ssstz!" he hissed, dropping his book and trying to shoosh the animal away. The cat came nearer.

The cat reached the grille, hesitated, eyed it calculatingly, then snaked easily through the bars. Upstairs, a fuse exploded with a bang that brought the lounging guards to their feet. But the attendant did not see the invading cat on his side of the grille. He saw it sliding through the voltage-loaded bars, easily, unharmed, its flaring optics like tiny windows. Then the lights went out; the cat bulged, mixed and swirled in a veritable kaleidoscopic display of fantastic forms. It was a figure of indescribable horror when the strength went out of his legs and consciousness departed from his mind.

An old, old man pottered around in the gloom, a wrinkled gaffer with yellow-brown whiskers. He fiddled with the door of the vault, trying its dials and exploring its keyholes with strangely sensitive fingers that seemed to have ears at their ends. Once, he turned to the unconscious attendant, placed fingers on the man's forehead as if casually consulting the sleeping brains. Then he found the keys, inserted and turned them in the proper manner, turned the necessary dials and went through all the other functions in the correct way. Finally, he pressed the button. Nothing happened. The hidden dynamo refused to respond; the immense, air-tight door emitted no sounds, stirred not an inch.

At that point, one of the upstairs guards replaced the fuse, power returned, the lights sprang on. Another guard, following the prescribed routine, started down the stairs, his gun held slackly in one hand.

The living dummy of old Josh saw current rush back along the wires, gave the button another push. The door of the vault made its usual sounds and opened. He went inside, studied the steel compartments with an air suggesting that he could have looked them over just as easily in complete darkness. He was engrossed in the mysterious labels when the guard arrived.

Broad-shouldered and muscular, the newcomer was a tough individual constitutionally incapable of wild excitement. Keeping clear of the grille, his hard eyes took one swift look at the supine attendant, the open vault, the figure inside. Without batting an eyelid, without the slightest change of expression, he whipped up his heavy weapon and pulled the trigger. He did it with the slick motions and cool confidence of one who knows himself to be an excellent marksman. His bullets went blat-blat-blat, their echoes roaring throughout the confined space, thundering along the passage and racing up the stairs.

The missiles lanced through the body of the uncanny intruder, pinged off the walls of the vault. The target turner stared at the marksman, showing him a face from which the hairy fringe had vanished, a face—aye, even a figure and clothes—more resembling those of a prosperous business man. Or was it a squirming cabbage? Or a monstrous abortion resembling nothing in the tomes of terrestrial zoology? Or . . .

"God!" breathed the guard, suddenly. "He looks like me!" His struggling fingers got home the second clip he'd been trying to shove into his gun. But he had time to let only two rip before a hellish blast swept through the grille and took him into its terrible embrace.

Aroused by the uproar in the depths, a second guard cam, charging down the stairs, a uniformed policeman close upon his heels. Both held weapons ready in their hands. At a noisy gallop, they took three bends, descended three flights, and on the fourth bend met the guard who had first gone down.

He was racing upward at a speed which vied with their own. He passed them, gasping something they failed to catch. The two carried on, managing to increase their speed by a fraction. Reaching the passage, they dashed along it, and found the body lying outside the grille. Flat on its back, its brawny face wearing a queer flush, its eyes rolled upward under the lids, it was clay from which all life had gone.

"Gallaher!" oathed the plainclothes man. He gaped at his companion. "It's Gallaher!" His dazed gaze went around, found the attendant's sleeping form beyond the grille, the open door of the vault "But, damn it, we just passed Gallaher on the stairs!"

At that moment, the man who wasn't Gallaher strolled nonchalantly along the street, stepped into a dark doorway, and looked up at the starlit sky. The object of his attention was a low-hanging orb faintly tinged with pink. What thoughts lingered within his brain—if he had a brain—or what sensations filled his being—if he had any real being—could not be told.

Passers-by noted, without suspicion, the shadowy watcher in the gloom. An automobile sped down the street, its headlamps momentarily casting his reflection upon an adjacent window. The reflection was not that of the dead Gallaher, but of a mere nonentity, one who, that morning, had rubbed shoulders with a camouflaged thing from the unexplored void, and had passed on, blissfully unaware.

At the stroke of midnight, he was in Battersea Power Station. An engineer discovered him walking silently along the diamond-patterned steel plates of the overhead catwalk, pausing now and then to lean over the tubular side-rails and peer at the banks of huge turbo-alternators. This picture of polished metal and of enormous power held in control seemed to fascinate the intruder. The engineer spat on his hands, picked up the useful steel handle of a tube-cutter, sprinted up the gangway and faced the interloper on the catwalk.

"What the blazes are you doing here?"

Aggressively, he poked the other in the middle with the length of steel. The metal made contact. A terrific shock flashed through its length, lifted the engineer off his feet, floped him backward. He went down like a bundle of rags, his face contorted with agony.

No ordinary individual could have absorbed that torrent of force and lived. Electrical engineers aren't ordinary people. This one merely surrendered both strength and consciousness, feebly aware of what was happening, dimly realizing that what he had encountered was an electric eel in human shape. Absurdly enough, just as his brain was about to lapse into stunned sleep, he fancied that the eel looked more like an enormous flower, a huge, fleshy lily of flaming crimson which bowed and waved over his body in mockery of life.

At the entrance to the power station, two employees on night shift stood chatting. A big door eased open, letting into the cold air of night a smell of hot copper and a shrill whine of energetic machines. Through the door came a cat, a dirty, mangy, wary thing typical of back-alley vermin. It leered at them before it scuttled furtively into the night. The two watched it without interest. One sucked his cigarette. The other stared contemplatively into the darkness.

"Hey!" said the second, after a while. "That big door takes some shoving. How did that cat push it open?"

"Ever heard how, rats steal eggs?" asked the other. He launched into a lecture on the subject of animal tricks, drawing plentifully upon his imagination. He conceived nothing resembling the damnable thing which had just slunk into anonymity.

"Let's go over the data again," suggested Doctor Lanigan, imperturbably.

"All right." McKechnie lugged out a file and raked through the thick wad of papers it contained. "As you suggested, we got the cooperation of every leading news agency in the world. We asked them to give us as full details as possible of every reported incident that might come under the general headings of fantastic, supernatural or supernormal. Cutting out the resulting flood of spiritualistic stuff, and all the stunts of sensation seekers, we've plenty of interesting data left."

"In a mere couple of months," observed Lanigan.

"Yes, it's only a couple of months since Josh Hawkins became the first victim. Then Fairbrother. Why was he stripped naked? Why did we find his clothes miles back along the line? Then that Greek—his case converted me more than anything. I saw what I saw!" He looked hard at Lanigan. "And when you've seen something like that you're ready to believe almost anything."

"You've missed out Onions."

"Yes. His story ought to mean plenty. Then there was that raid on the War Ministry's documents. They'd been looked at, but none were taken. Not one document missing!" He leafed through his papers. "Next, that incident in Battersea. Afterwards, nothing more until that report from France about the vanishing man who was found inspecting the transmission system of Radio Lyons. Then that similar report of a strangely elusive spy in a certain aircraft factory. Later, the same uncapturable individual roaming around a famous armament plant."

"The same entity," opined Lanigan, positively. "The times and movements all link up nicely."

"Then that fool story from Portugal about the trespasser in an observatory. He wouldn't or couldn't explain himself. His captor started to drag him to the police station and, when part way there, found himself leading a horse. He let it go." McKechnie permitted himself an amused snigger. "Things have got very crazy when we have to admit that even that yarn might be true."

"Anything is possible," declared Lanigan.

"Now, apparently, he—or it—is back in England." McKechnie turned over more papers. "Caught last Wednesday enjoying a private tour through the Daily Courier plant. The reporter who challenged him is still in hospital." Slapping down the papers, he made an expression of deep disgust. "Which means more insane antics to drive me mad. Say your piece again—I like to hear my convictions made more convincing."

"He's a Martian," obliged Lanigan, speaking very seriously. "Nothing known on this world of ours has such perfect power of mimicry. His natural form might be anything. He's been seen masquerading as ten or more entirely different types of human beings, and as about six weird forms of life which obviously he is in the habit of imitating, but which are not native to this planet. I have a wild idea that he and his kind may have no such thing as a natural form of their own, and at every moment of their existence are imitating some form with which they are familiar, particularly those on which they prey."

"I'd like to see him mimic a corpse," said McKechnie.

"His uncanny but natural ability functions with such wonderful perfection," Lanigan continued, "that when he doubles as a human being his impression is perfect even to the clothes. He removed Fairbrother's attire and studied it for the sake of gaining perfection. He came very near to perfection at his first attempt, looking so like Hawkins that a close acquaintance saw only a slight difference in the color of the beard."

"Go on."

"He arrived, as far as we can discover, coincidentally with Mars' nearest approach to Earth. No other planet is in so favorable a position. Since then, Mars has been gaining distance rapidly. If he leaves it much longer, it'll be too late for him to return. I think he's making ready for departure."

"I agree," said McKechnie, his voice both reluctant and lugubrious. "What's turning my hair white is the problem of how to catch something that might be anything, and how to hang a man who's liable to turn into heaven-alone-knows-what while dangling in mid-air."

Downstairs was waiting a reporter with something on his mind that might save the bothered McKechnie's hair. With the fatalistic patience of newspapermen, he sat waiting for his interview and pondered the strange case of the vaudeville star who really and truly could give the public exactly what they wanted.

The pert, smartly tailored usherette conducted them to their seats, handed them a program apiece. Doctor Lanigan bent forward, gazed intently over the balcony edge to the empty stage, in front of which musicians were tuning up. Violins made vague half-tones; an oboe chortled. The trap drummer vibrated his sticks in an experimental roll, then put them down and looked bored.

McKechnie twisted his burly form within his inadequate seating space, and surveyed with slightly bellicose gaze the portion of the audience to the rear. He spotted a pair of abnormally muscular gentlemen squatting six rows back, favored them with a knowing nod. The recipients rewarded him with stares of disarming blankness.

"I'm afraid that reporter sold us a pup," he grunted. "We'll see," said Lanigan, philosophically.

Applause announced the arrival of the conductor. The orchestra broke into Blaze Away with fire and enthusiasm that contrasted strangely with their disinterested expressions. They finished. A peroxide blonde took the stage. More applause. The blonde sang My Heart Belongs to Daddy, at the same time giving the bald-headed occupants of the front stalls a taste of her libido. McKechnie sniffed his disgust.

The turn ended, leaving some of the stallholders with pepped glands. Three Orientals carne on, bowed deeply, politely, With well-drilled precision. They juggled with chromium-plated steel hoops. After a while, they combined acrobatics with the juggling. With a bowed farewell, they gave place to a second-rate comedian. McKechnie craned his neck to survey the pair of power persons sitting six rows behind him. They looked at him as if he were a pane of glass.

An hour later, the illuminated numbers placed at both sides of the stage glowed with the figure twelve.

"Now!" breathed Lanigan.

The manager took the center of the stage. He had expensive dentures, a carnation, and much suavity.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, very smoothly, "as already announced, Miss Mitzy la Monte, the Songbird of the South, is unable to appear tonight owing to an indisposition. I am sure that we all sympathize with Miss la Monte in her temporary trouble." He paused, registered reverent sorrow. "But, at extremely short notice"—another pause while he switched to pleasurable anticipation—"we have booked for you a single performance of the most remarkable exhibition ever to be shown upon the stage. A performance which has astounded the Continent!"—gestures of heavenly delight—"and now to be shown in this country for the first time!" Comporting himself with seemly mien, the manager reached the wings, turned, waved a dramatic hand at the empty stage. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said, loudly, "we have great pleasure in introducing to you—Spiro, the Master of Mystery!"

All the lights went out.

Feminine squeals saluted this sudden plunge into deep darkness. For ten seconds the stage was a silent area of deeper black within the general gloom. Then, with startling swiftness, a column of peculiarly scintillating light sprang from the center of the stage, bent itself into a vertical ring, whirled like a monster catherine wheel. The trap drummer rolled with gradually rising vigor. The catherine wheel spun, flickered, coruscated, then quickly fattened into globularity. The drum rolled louder.

The globe stood for a brief while, mysterious lights and shadows playing over its surface in baffling pursuit. Then the whole illumination sank into the sub-surface, the globe contracted slightly and vanished to the accompaniment of a tremendous bang from the bass drum. The lights sprang up. The audience blinked at the stage.

Spiro, the Master of Mystery, stood poised on the stage at the precise point where his display of light-magic had popped into nothingness. Cool, composed, he stood and studied his audience, his expression somewhat saturnine. He had all the assurance and self-possession of an accomplished and famous theatrical performer.

A girl joined him from the wings; a slender, shapely girl attired in scanty, attractive uniform of the kind usually favored by illusionists' assistants. Two stage-hands brought on a folding cabinet, opened it out, turned it round and round to give a complete view of all its sides, then erected it.

Doc Lanigan handed his opera glasses to McKechnie, saying, "Last heard of in Spain and Portugal, eh?" McKechnie leveled the glasses, had a look at the Master of Mystery. He saw a lean, handsome, sardonic face with olive skin, blue-black hair, jet-black eyes. It was a characteristic face, one that his astute mind has no difficulty in classifying.

"I see what you mean," he observed, shrewdly. "An Iberian type." Lanigan nodded silently. "Or maybe it's the girl," added McKechnie. He shifted the glasses, examined the girl's delicate features, noting that she, too, was of Spanish type.

Forcing himself halfway round in his seat, he lowered a significant eyelid. The burly couple sitting farther back suddenly found nothing to detain them, and left their seats, departing with the slightly sullen air of men who have yet to see something new."

On the stage, the girl assistant directed the attention of the audience to the cabinet. With impressive sangfroid, Spiro, the Master, walked into one side of the contraption and out the other side. Or was it the assistant who walked out? Deathly silence pervaded the theater while onlookers stared in amazement at the two girls now occupying the stage. Identical twins, identically dressed.

Somebody said, "Whoo-oo!" and broke the spell. The audience roared its applause.

The magical twin curtseyed gracefully, strolled back through the cabinet. Spiro emerged. The audience thundered. The stage-hands came back and pulled the cabinet to pieces in full view of the audience. Then they packed it flat and bore it off. They returned with a full-length mirror and stood it in the middle of the stage. Near it, they placed a brightly plated, tubular frame supporting a curtain of black velvet.

Spiro Went behind the curtain, becoming lost to the direct view of the audience, but his sardonic reflection still visible in the long mirror. His girl assistant waved a small glass stick, murmured some meaningless abracadabra in a low but audible voice. The reflection in the mirror, dissolved, became a wild medley of blurred colors and shapes, then, with astounding rapidity, resolved itself into the mirrored image of a rosebush laden with large, lush blooms.

The audience bellowed approval. McKechnie fidgeted around like a man hardly able to wait for a time not yet ripe. Lanigan sat in brooding silence, his eyes straining toward the stage.

More abracadabra, more changes. A prickly cactus which swiftly solidified into an ornate Chinese vase and then, before astonishment had time fully to register, just as swiftly became an Egyptian ewer of graceful design. A few more such demonstrations, then Spiro came from behind the curtain, waited for the frenzied clapping to die down. He spoke for the first time, his voice sharp and penetrating.

"The true explanation of these illusions is a very simple one. It is a discovery of my own which no other magician can duplicate." His features set in a hard grin as he uttered that last word. "But I am now going to attempt a feat considerably more difficult, a feat for which I require your cooperation." Again the grin. "Under cover of darkness, I shall try to offer for your inspection some miraculous reproductions of anything nominated by any member of the audience."

Somebody gasped, several clapped. Spiro bowed in mocking appreciation, and said, "Thank you!"

"Show me," challenged a skeptic in the stalls, "a roc's egg." The lights went out, came on. There was the egg—a huge one. "A giraffe," demanded another. Titters sounded in the following darkness. But he got his giraffe. The animal shuffled awkwardly on the stage, thrust its long neck high over the footlights, blinked at the audience.

"Seen them in the zoo," whispered Lanigan. Pulling out his big, white handkerchief, McKechnie nodded understandingly.
The excited audience continued to call its choice, getting in return a fantastic series of impressions ranging from a pedant's demand for a Brazilian ant-eater to a humorous call for "a five-foot cucumber." One ultra-rapid sample of mimicry was that of a famous political character in a typical pose. It brought deafening cheers.

McKechnie blew his nose, flourishing his handkerchief discreetly. Downstairs, in the left-hand aisle, a gentleman whose jacket almost creaked across his shoulders saw the handkerchief out of one corner of his eye. He turned his attention to Spiro, placed hairy hands to his mouth, and bull-bellowed a request that resounded all over the theater.

"Show me a Martian!"

The result was stupefying. Lanigan had expected that Spiro would retain his composure and ask the burly caller whether he'd recognize a Martian if he saw one. McKechnie had anticipated being fobbed off with a grotesque imitation of something that might be anything or, more probably, something that did not exist except in the alien invader's fertile mind.

What Spiro did do was to turn upon the burly baiter a face of such demoniacal hatred that men quailed and women screamed. His eyes became whirlpools of living fire. They seared, and one could almost hear the hiss of their flaming. With pantherish agility, he leaped headlong into the audience, and waded through shrieking people toward that impertinent Terrestrial who had dared to mention a Martian.

Back at the switchboard, the imperturbable electrician shifted his gum, pulled over a knife-switch, gave his wad another chew. Once more the theater was plunged into blackness, its lowermost portion becoming a sultry pit from which arose a bedlam of shouts, screams and oaths.

His face crimson with excitement, McKechnie bawled a series of violent orders. The voices in the pit rose crescendo. McKechnie plowed his way through the milling crowd, leaving behind his big, powerful form a wake wide enough to allow Lanigan to follow without discomfort.

They reached the manager's office just as that worthy got to the switchboard and restored the lights. There were three policemen outside the office.

McKechnie said, "Let nobody in! Nobody! Not even the manager! Not even my twin brother!" They nodded.

Inside the office waited the pair of muscle-bound individuals who had been seated behind McKechnie and Lanigan at the time the show commenced. They had between them a dark-haired, slender, tearful and very frightened girl.

"I think she's safe enough," McKechnie remarked. "He's abandoned her, in view of what's happened." He seated himself by hooking a thick thigh over one corner of the desk. "Now talk—and talk fast."

"He picked me up in Lisbon," said the girl fearfully, and in excellent English. "He said I was attractive and could have a job as his assistant. I would travel much and see the world. He was going to put on his first, experimental show here before commencing his tour abroad."

"Go on."

"He said he'd made a lifelong study of mass hypnosis. He said that the Indian Rope Trick was not a real performance, but merely mass hypnosis, and that anyone perfecting the art could far surpass the world's most famous illusionists, performing more spectacular feats, more easily, with less bother. He claimed he didn't need the complicated apparatus and expert trickery of ordinary magicians, and could get better results by sending his psychowaves along the optical nerves of a crowd, making them see whatever he chose to depict as vividly and convincingly as if it were with their eyes."

"Think there's anything in it?" asked McKechnie of Lanigan.

"I doubt it," responded the doctor, thoughtfully. "It is a very plausible explanation, and one well calculated to lull the girl's suspicions. But I've a hunch that his changes are real, physical ones."

"He was going to put on a show in Paris," the girl went on, "but it rained that night and he said he wouldn't go out. So he came to London. He visited Mitzy, and I think he bribed her to abandon one performance so that he could put on his show."

"Yes, a reporter told us about a few sample illusions he put over to clinch the booking." McKechnie turned to one of the guards. "What about you?"

"I dodged him in the general furore caused by the lights going out," answered the phlegmatic one. "Like you told me, I didn't bother about him, and concentrated on helping Bill to grab the girl and rush her here."

"Good," McKechnie approved. He turned an inquisitive eye upon Lanigan.

"This was his last quest," declared Lanigan, speaking very slowly, very deliberately. "I am doubtful about his alleged powers of mass hypnosis, but I think his last job was to make a study of mass psychology. He revealed some of his abilities Martian abilities, strange, extra-mundane talents the like of which don't exist in this world; and he got the human reaction to them—the reaction of humanity in the mob."

"Ah!" punctuated McKechnie, with a grunt.

"He is sensitive to human reactions," Lanigan persisted "Even the comparatively stupid Onions made him respond to suspicion. And he has a photographic mind." He studied his listeners. "That's why documents have been inspected but not taken away. Machines and apparatus have been examined but not drawn. He has gathered into his amazing intellect all the knowledge for which he came, including that of how we alien, two-legged creatures behave in herds."

He jerked a thumb toward the ceiling. "Up there a planet is moving rapidly upon its appointed path. It waits for no man, no thing."

"You mean he's about to go back with all he's got?"

"I'm convinced of it!" Lanigan let his hands rest gently on the girl's shoulders. "My dear, did this person, this creature, tell you when and from where he would take you abroad?"

"Why, yes." Her pale face went a shade paler. "He'd hired a private plane. We were going to Ireland, thence to America by Transatlantic Clipper." Her whisper was almost inaudible as she described the precise point of departure and the time.

"See," breathed Lanigan. "He even intended to take back a sample!"

A rabbit scuttled furtively across the space surrounded by small, insignificant shrubs. Overhead, the sky was heavy, brooding, and the color of molten lead.

From his hidden vantage-point on the side of the hill, Doctor Lanigan peered through powerful binoculars at the little knoll that made a lump in the middle of the valley. His glasses swept slowly across the field of view; he saw nothing. He might Have been alone, far from all human life, but he knew that around the locality were half a hundred anxiously waiting men, some of them concealed within a few yards of his own refuge.

Four hours of this, not to mention the long watch already put in by other patrols, lying and waiting for an event that might never come; silently, patiently, determinedly biding a culmination that perhaps was not to be. There were two and a half thousand million human beings in the world. There was one who wasn't human. And the defeat of an unimaginable menace rested solely upon the supposition that this one entity would appear at this one small spot within the limit of a certain time. On what a thin, vile thread could human fate and progress be suspended!

All the same, Doctor Lanigan felt that this eerie, elusive foe would be compelled to risk the trap. He, the enemy, had a rendezvous with Mars, and willy-nilly must make the connection or remain isolated for a long time upon, an awakened and hostile world. No planet could stand in its orbit even to save a faraway son. So, weary with the strain of waiting, but still full of confidence, Lanigan watched the valley and the knoll.

Half an hour later, a lonely figure wandered along the track toward the knoll. Its pace was indolent, careless, well calculated to disarm the suspicion of any concealed onlooker. At a range of a little over two hundred yards, Lanigan scanned the stroller carefully. He saw a nondescript man of medium build, attired like a farmhand. A sunburned face was partly exposed beneath a cap, the large peak of which effectively concealed the eyes. Did those hidden optics have the dull, disinterested stare of an idle, innocent mind? Or were they secretly blazing with the feral hatred of a hunted being?

Even as Lanigan wondered, the cap tilted when the wearer lifted his head, and for the briefest instant the watcher glimpsed a deep, boiling glow of crimson like that concealed within the heart of a ruby which bears a perpetual curse. It was enough! Lanigan jogged a field telegraph key lying in the moss at his side. A mile higher up the valley, a ready hand turned a waiting wheel, floodgates opened in a concrete dam, an artificial lake poured outward in glad release.

Spiro saw the wall of water rushing madly toward him, the white horses of its foaming crest like an irresistible charge of liquid cavalry. He looked to the left, but there was the swiftly flowing stream that fed the little valley, its volume already swollen, its surface rising rapidly. He looked to the right, glaring ferociously toward the hidden onlookers. But the knoll was his only link with the empire beyond the skies. He raced to the knoll, dashed madly up its slope. The raging waters surrounded the hillock just as he got clear. They swirled around its base, began swiftly to climb toward its crest.

The figure of the thing that was not a man changed as it fought up to the crest. It faded, lumped, distorted, became an upward-rolling ball obscenely fringed with quivering spines and gesticulating tentacles. Then a glowing, fiery python; then a humping, caterpillarish monstrosity of fast and disgusting motion. There were vague suggestions of other fearful forms during and in between its many changes.

"Go on," muttered Lanigan to himself, his eyes straining at the rising waters. "You hate water. You fear it as you fear nothing else in the whole of creation. There is little of it on Mars, and what little there is you'd rather be without—for it is death to you and your immaterial kind. All your exploits were in dry weather."

The swirling tide lapped within three feet of the crest which the fugitive had reached. He was a python again. Even now he could escape, even now there was an absurdly easy means of evading his fate—if only he could keep calm and think of it.

"Change as much as you like," said Lanigan in a tense whisper. His forehead was damp with excitement and anxiety. "You cannot be anything! You cannot be a fish! Nothing you can mimic will save you, except . . ." He sweated furiously in his frantic effort to suppress the dangerous suggestion. What if that susceptible creature picked up his thought, and promptly took the easy way out? He was betting entirely on its psychology being similar to the human in one cogent respect —it could be betrayed by its own utter fear, could be made the victim of its own panic. "You cannot escape, unless . . ." Again he had to kill the treacherous notion.

The flood lapped over the crest. With a sinuous motion, the form of scintillating snakiness escaped the watery grasp, floated momentarily a few feet above the surface. It writhed frantically in mid-air while far, far in the very depths of his mind Lanigan seemed to hear a weird, thoroughly abnormal susurration like a final wail of activated matter before it vanished forever from the burned-out cosmos. It was a horrible sound: a fundamental chord broadcast from the nethermost end of time and space. It was the voice of impending death!

Then the twirling, flaming shape fell back. It struck the hungry waters. They boiled and foamed as over sodium. The opposite hill shivered and quivered as Lanigan saw it through a column of released gases.

"Not true levitation," he said, "but temporary suspension. He made an ultra-slow jump! God, that I should have lived to see the like!"

Getting to his feet, he stared solemnly at the still violently disturbed waters, noting the wild, agitated bubbling as they continued to react viciously upon whatever was left of the thing that had no counterpart on Earth. McKechnie joined him, his ears filled with the termagant sounds and sizzlings from below.

Even as they stood, something plummeted through the sky, plunged headlong into the water-filled valley. Optical retention left them with a vague impression of a strange, egglike body builded of mist and random dreams. But it was real enough. It struck with a mighty splash, and the hungry waters reacted upon it ferociously.

"The mental connection was broken," observed Lanigan, meditatively. "He had it parked"—he gestured toward the silent, aghast sky—"somewhere up there. He died—and down it came."

"Humph!" said McKechnie. He fondled his heavy gun, glanced over the now visible group of watchers, most of them armed. His expression was regretful. "I'd have liked to have taken a pot at him."

"Without effect," Lanigan pointed out. "He's been shot at before, and a lot of good it did." He pondered a moment, looking to the north where, only a mile away, Josh Hawkins had kept a lonely vigil without avail. "We've learned a few useful things, I guess. We've learned, for instance, that Martians are as susceptible to fear as ourselves. Note that all his frantic changes were into unrecognizable and therefore undoubtedly Martian types. Under extreme pressure of fear, his mind followed a well-beaten track."

"I don't get the point," said McKechnie.

Lanigan smiled. "From what has happened, we can make a safe bet that there are no birds on Mars. Filled with fear, his mind became entirely Martian, forgetting all its acquired Terrestrialism. Think—he could have been a bird!"

MEMORIAL

Theodore Sturgeon

The Pit, in A. D. 5000, had changed little over the centuries. Still it was an angry memorial to the misuse of great power; and because of it, organized warfare was a forgotten thing. Because of it, the world was free of the wasteful smoke and dirt of industry. The scream and crash of bombs and the soporific beat of marching feet were never heard, and at long last the earth was at peace.

To go near The Pit was slow, certain death, and it was respected and feared, and would be for centuries more. It winked and blinked redly at night, and was surrounded by a bald and broken tract stretching out and away over the horizon; and around it flickered a ghostly blue glow. Nothing lived there. Nothing could.

With such a war memorial, there could be only peace. The earth could never forget the horror that could be loosed by war.

That was Grenfell's dream.

Grenfell handed the typewritten sheet back. "That's it, Jack. My idea, and—I wish I could express it like that." He leaned back against the littered workbench, his strangely asymmetrical face quizzical. "Why is it that it takes a useless person to adequately express an abstract?"

Jack Roway grinned as he took back the paper and tucked it into his breast pocket. "Interestin' question, Grenfell, because this is your expression, the words are yours. Practically verbatim. I left out the `er's' and `ah's' that you play conversational hopscotch with, and strung together all the effects you mentioned without mentioning any of the technological causes. Net result: you think I did it, when you did. You think it's good writing, and I don't."

"You don't?"

Jack spread his bony length out on the hard little cot. His relaxation was a noticeable act, like the unbuttoning of a shirt collar. His body seemed to unjoint itself a little. He laughed.
"Of course I don't. Much too emotional for my taste. I'm just a fumbling aesthete—useless, did you say? Mm-m-m‑yeah. I suppose so." He paused reflectively.

"You see, you cold-blooded characters, you scientists, are the true visionaries. Seems to me the essential difference between a scientist and an artist is that the scientist mixes his hope with patience.

"The scientist visualizes his ultimate goal, but pays little attention to it. He is all caught up with the achievement of the next step upward. The artist looks so far ahead that more often than not he can't see what's under his feet; so he falls flat on his face and gets called useless by scientists. But if you strip all of the intermediate steps away from the scientist's thinking you have an artistic concept to which the scientist responds distantly and with surprise, giving some artist credit for being deeply perspicacious purely because the artist repeated something the scientist said."

"You amaze me," Grenfell said candidly. "You wouldn't be what you are if you weren't lazy and superficial. And yet you come out with things like that. I don't know that I understand what you just said. I'll have to think—but I do believe that you show all the signs of clear thinking. With a mind like yours, I can't understand why you don't use it to build something instead of wasting it in these casual interpretations of yours."

Jack Roway stretched luxuriously. "What's the use? There's more waste involved in the destruction of something which is already built than in dispersing the energy it would take to help build something. Anyway, the world is filled with builders—and destroyers. I'd just as soon sit by and watch, and feel things. I like my environment, Grenfell. I want to feel all I can of it, while it lasts. It won't last much longer. I want to touch all of it I can reach, taste of it, hear it, while there's time. What is around me, here and now, is what is important to me. The acceleration of human progress, and the increase of its mass—to use your own terms—are taking humanity straight to Limbo. You, with your work, think you are fighting humanity's inertia. Well, you are. But it's the kind of inertia called momentum. You command no force great enough to stop it, or even to change its course appreciably."

"I have atomic power."

Roway shook his head, smiling. "That's not enough. No power is enough. It's just too late."

"That kind of pessimism does not affect me," said Grenfell, "You can gnaw all you like at my foundations, Jack, and achieve nothing more than the loss of your front teeth. I think you know that."

"Certainly I know that. I'm not trying to. I have nothing to sell, no one to change. I am even more impotent than you and your atomic power; and you are completely helpless. Uh —I quarrel with your use of the term 'pessimist,' though. I am nothing of the kind. Since I have resolved for myself the fact that humanity, as we know it, is finished, I'm quite resigned to it. Pessimism from me, under the circumstances, would be the pessimism of a photophobiac predicting that the sun would rise tomorrow."

Grenfell grinned. "I'll have to think about that, too. You're such a mass of paradoxes that turn out to be chains of reasoning. Apparently you live in a world in which scientists are poets and the grasshopper has it all over the ant."

"I always did think the ant was a stinker."

"Why do you keep coming here, Jack? What do you get out of it? Don't you realize I'm a criminal?"

Roway's eyes narrowed. "Sometimes I think you wish you were a criminal. The law says you are, and the chances are very strong that you'll be caught and treated accordingly. Ethically, you know you're not. It sort of takes the spice out of being one of the hunted."

"Maybe you're right," Grenfell said thoughtfully. He sighed. "It's so completely silly. During the war years, the skills I had were snatched up and the government flogged me into the Manhattan Project, expecting, and getting, miracles. I have never stopped working along the same lines. And now the government has changed the laws, and pulled legality from under me."

"Hardly surprising. The government deals rather severely with soldiers who go on killing other soldiers after the war is over." He held up a hand to quell Grenfell's interruption. "I know you're not killing anyone, and are working for the opposite result. I was only pointing out that it's the same switcheroo. We the people," he said didactically, "have, in our sovereign might, determined that no atomic research be done except in government laboratories. We have then permitted our politicians to allow so little for maintenance of those laboratories—unlike our overseas friends—that no really exhaustive research can be done in them. We have further made it a major offense to operate such a bootleg lab as yours." He shrugged. "Comes the end of mankind. We'll get walloped first. If we put more money and effort into nuclear research than any other country, some other country would get walloped first. If we last another hundred years—which seems doubtful—some poor, spavined, underpaid government researcher will stumble on the aluminum-isotope space-heating system you have already perfected."

"That was a little rough," said Grenfell bitterly. "Driving me underground just in time to make it impossible for me to announce it. What a waste of time and energy it is to heat homes and buildings the way they do now! Space heating—the biggest single use for heat-energy—and I have the answer to it over there." He nodded toward a compact cube of lead-alloys in the corner of the shop. "Build it into a foundation, and you have controllable heat for the life of the building, with not a cent for additional fuel and practically nothing for maintenance." His jaw knotted. "Well, I'm glad it happened that way."

"Because it got you started on your war memorial—The Pit? Yeah. Well, all I can say is, I hope you're right. It hasn't been possible to scare humanity yet. The invention of gunpowder was going to stop war, and didn't. Likewise the submarine, the torpedo, the airplane, and that two-by-four bomb they pitched at Hiroshima."

"None of that applies to The Pit," said Grenfell. "You're right; humanity hasn't been scared off war yet; but the Hiroshima bomb rocked 'em back on their heels. My little memorial is the real stuff. I'm not depending on a fission effect, you know, with a release of one-tenth of one percent of the energy of the atom. I'm going to disrupt it completely, and get all the energy there is in it. And it'll be more than a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, because I'm going to use twelve times as much explosive; and it's going off on the ground, not a hundred and fifty feet above it." Grenfell's brow, over suddenly hot eyes, began to shine with sweat. "And then—The Pit," he said softly. "The war memorial to end war, and all other war memorials. A vast pit, alive with bubbling lava, radiating death for ten thousand years. A living reminder of the devastation mankind has prepared for itself. Out here on the desert, where there are no cities, where the land has always been useless, will be the scene of the most useful thing in the history of the race—a never-ending sermon, a warning, an example of the dreadful antithesis of peace." His voice shook to a whisper, and faded.

"Sometimes," said Roway, "you frighten me, Grenfell. It occurs to me that I am such a studied sensualist, tasting everything I can, because I am afraid to feel any one thing that much." He shook himself, or shuddered. "You're a fanatic, Grenfell. Hyperemotional. A monomaniac. I hope you can do it."

"I can do it," said Grenfell.

Two months passed, and in those two months Grenfell's absorption in his work had been forced aside by the increasing pressure of current events. Watching a band of vigilantes riding over the waste to the south of his little buildings one afternoon, he thought grimly of what Roway had said. "Sometimes I think you wish you were a criminal." Roway, the sensualist, would say that. Roway would appreciate the taste of danger, in the same way that he appreciated all the other emotions. As it intensified, he would wait to savor it, no matter how bad it got.

Twice Grenfell shut off the instigating power of the carbon-aluminum pile he had built, as he saw government helicopters hovering on the craggy skyline. He knew of hard-radiation detectors; he had developed two different types of them during the war; and he wanted no questions asked. His utter frustration at being unable to announce the success of his space-heating device, for fear that he would be punished as a criminal and his device impounded and forgotten—that frustration had been indescribable. It had canalized his mind, and intensified the devoted effort he had put forth for the things he believed in during the war. Every case of neural shock he encountered in men had been hurt by war and despised it, made him work harder on his monument—The

Pit. For if humans could be frightened by war, humanity could be frightened by The Pit.

And those he met who had been hurt by war and who still hated the late enemy—those who would have been happy to go back and kill some more, reckoning vital risk well worth it—those he considered mad, and forgot them.

So he could not stand another frustration. He was the center of his own universe, and he realized it dreadfully, and he had to justify his position there. He was a humanitarian, a philanthropist in the word's truest sense, and was probably as mad as any other man who has, through his own efforts, moved the world.

For the first time, then, he was grateful when Jack Roway arrived in his battered old convertible, although he was deliriously frightened at the roar of the motor outside his laboratory window. His usual reaction to Jack's advent was a mixture of annoyance and gratification, for it was a great deal of trouble to get out to his place. His annoyance was not because of the interruption, for Jack was certainly no trouble to have around. Grenfell suspected that Jack came out to see him partly to get the taste of the city out of his mouth, and partly to be able to feel superior to somebody he considered of worth.

But the increasing fear of discovery, and his race to complete his work before it was taken from him by an hysterical public, had had the unusual effect of making him lonely. For such a man as Grenfell to be lonely bordered on the extraordinary; for in his daily life there were simply too many things to be done. There had never been enough hours in a day nor days in a week to suit him, and he deeply resented the encroachments of sleep, which he considered a criminal waste.

"Roway!" he blurted, as he flung the door open, his tone so warm that Roway's eyebrows went up in surprise. "What dragged you out here?"

"Nothing in particular," said the writer, as they shook hands. "Nothing more than usual, which is a great deal. How goes it?"

"I'm about finished." They went inside, and as the door closed, Grenfell turned to face Jack. "I've been finished for so long I'm ashamed of myself," he said intently.

"Ha! Ardent confession so early in the day! What are you talking about?"

"Oh, there have been things to do," said Grenfell restlessly. "But I could go ahead with the . . . with the big thing at almost any time."

"You hate to be finished.. You've never visualized what it would be like to have the job done." His teeth flashed. "You know, I've never heard a word from you as to what your plans are after the big noise. You going into hiding?"

"I . . . haven't thought much about it. I used to have a vague idea of broadcasting a warning and an explanation before I let go with the disruptive explosion. I've decided against it, though. In the first place, I'd be stopped within minutes, no matter how cautious I was with the transmitter. In the second place-well, this is going to be so big that it won't need any explanation."

"No one will know who did it, or why it was done."

"Is that necessary?" asked Grenfell quietly.

Jack's mobile face stilled as he visualized The Pit, sprewing its ten-thousand-year hell. "Perhaps not," he said. "Isn't it necessary, though, to you?"

"To me?" asked Grenfell, surprised. "You mean, do I care if the world knows I did this thing, or not? No; of course I don't. A chain of circumstances is occurring, and it has been working through me. It goes directly to The Pit; The Pit will do all that is necessary from then on. I will no longer have any part in it."

Jack moved, clinking and splashing, around the sink in the corner of the laboratory. "Where's all your coffee? Oh—here. Uh . . . I have been curious about how much personal motive you had for your work. I think that answers it pretty well. I think, too, that you believe what you are saying. Do you know that people who do things for impersonal motives are as rare as fur on a fish?"

"I hadn't thought about it."

"I believe that, too. Sugar? And milk. I remember. And have you been listening to the radio?"

"Yes. I'm . . . a little upset, Jack," said Grenfell, taking the cup. "I don't know where to time this thing. I'm a technician, not a Machiavelli."

"Visionary, like I said. You don't know if you'll throw this gadget of yours into world history too soon or too late—is that it?"

"Exactly. Jack, the whole world seems to be going crazy. Even fission bombs are too big for humanity to handle."

"What else can you expect," said Jack grimly, "with our dear friends across the water sitting over their push buttons waiting for an excuse to punch them."

"And we have our own set of buttons, of course." Jack Roway said: "We've got to defend ourselves."

"Are you kidding?"

Roway glanced at him, his dark brows plotting a V. "Not about this. I seldom kid about anything, but particularly not about this." And he—shuddered.

Grenfell stared amazedly at him and then began to chuckle. "Now," he said, "I've seen everything. My inconoclastic friend Jack Roway, of all people, caught up by a . . . a fashion. A national gastime, fostered by uncertainty and fed by yellow journalism—fear of the enemy."

"This country is not at war."

"You mean, we have no enemy? Are you saying that the gentlemen over the water, with their itching fingertips hovering about the push buttons, are not our enemies?"

"Well—"

Grenfell came across the room to his friend, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Jack—what's the matter? You can't be so troubled by the news—not you!"

Roway stared out at the brazen sun, and shook his head slowly. "International balance is too delicate," he said softly; and if a voice could glaze like eyes, his did. "I see the nations of the world as masses balanced each on its own mathematical point, each with its center of gravity directly above. But the masses are fluid, shifting violently away from the center lines. The opposing trends aren't equal; they can't cancel each other; the phasing is too slow. One or the other is going to topple, and then the whole works is going to go."

"But you've known that for a long time. You've known that ever since Hiroshima. Possibly before. Why should it frighten you now?"

"I didn't think it would happen so soon."

"Oh-ho! So that's it! You have suddenly realized that the explosion is going to come in your lifetime. Hm-m-m? And you can't take that. You're capable of all of your satisfying

aesthetic rationalizations as long as you can keep the actualities at arm's length!"

"Whew!" said Roway, his irrepressible humor passing close enough to nod to him. "Keep it clean, Grenfell! Keep your . . . your sesquipedalian polysyllabics for a scientific report."

"Touché!" Grenfell smiled. "Y'know, Jack, you remind me powerfully of some erstwhile friends of mine who write science-fiction. They had been living very close to atomic power for a long time—years before the man on the street—or the average politician, for that matter—knew an atom from Adam. Atomic power was handy to these specialized word-merchants because it gave them a limitless source of power for background to a limitless source of story material. In the heydey of the Manhattan Project, most of them suspected what was going on, some of them knew—some even worked on it. All of them were quite aware of the terrible potentialities of nuclear energy. Practically all of them were scared silly of the whole idea. They were afraid for humanity, but they themselves were not really afraid, except in a delicious drawing room sort of way, because they couldn't conceive of this Buck Rogers event happening to anything but posterity. But it happened, in their own sacrosanct lifetimes.

"And I will be dog-goned if you're not doing the same thing. You've gotten quite a bang out of figuring out the doom humanity faces in an atomic war. You've consciously risen above it by calling it inevitable, and in the meantime, leave us gather rosebuds before it rains. You thought you'd be safe home—dead—before the first drops fell. Now social progress has rolled up a thunderhead and you find yourself a mile from home with a crease in your pants and no umbrella. And you're scared!"

Roway looked at the floor and said, "It's so soon. It's so soon." He looked up at Grenfell, and his cheekbones seemed too large. He took a deep breath. "You . . . we can stop it, Grenfell."

"Stop what?"

"The war . . . the . . . this thing that's happening to us. The explosion that will come when the strains get too great in the international situation. And it's got to be stopped!"

"That's what The Pit is for."

"The Pit!" Roway said scornfully. "I've called you a visionary before. Grenfell, you've got to be more practical! Humanity is not going to learn anything by example. It's got to be kicked and carved. Surgery."

Grenfell's eyes narrowed. "Surgery? What you said a minute ago about my stopping it . . . do you mean what I think you mean?"

"Don't you see it?" said Jack urgently. "What you have here—total disruptive energy—the peak of atomic power. One or two wallops with this, in the right place, and we can stop anybody."

"This isn't a weapon. I didn't make this to be a weapon."

"The first rock ever thrown by a prehistoric man wasn't made to be a weapon, either. But it was handy and it was effective, and it was certainly used because it had to be used." He suddenly threw up his hands in a despairing gesture. "You don't understand. Don't you realize that this country is likely to be attacked at any second—that diplomacy is now hopeless and helpless, and the whole world is just waiting for the thing to start? It's probably too late even now—but it's the least we can do."

"What, specifically, is the least thing we can do?"

"Turn your work over to the War Department. In a few hours the government can put it where it will do the most good." He drew his finger across his throat. "Anywhere we want to, over the ocean."

There was a taut silence. Roway looked at his watch and licked his lips. Finally Grenfell said, "Turn it over to the government. Use it for a weapon—and what for? To stop war?"

"Of course!" blurted Roway. "To show the rest of the world that our way of life . . . to scare the daylights out of . . . to—"

"Stop it!" Grenfell roared. "Nothing of the kind. You think —you hope anyway—that the use of total disruption as a weapon will stall off the inevitable—at least in your lifetime. Don't you?"

"No. I—"

"Don't you?"

"Well, I—"

"You have some more doggerel to write," said Grenfell scathingly. "You have some more blondes to chase. You want to go limn over a few more Bach fugues."

Jack Roway said: "No one knows where the first bomb might hit. It might be anywhere. There's nowhere I . . . we . . . can go to be safe." He was trembling.

"Are the people in the city quivering like that?" asked Grenfell.

"Riots," breathed Roway, his eyes bright with panic. "The radio won't announce anything about the riots."

"Is that what you came out here for today—to try to get me to give disruptive power to any government?"

Jack looked at him guiltily. "It was the only thing to do. I don't know if your bomb will turn the trick, but it has to be tried. It's the only thing left. We've got to be prepared to hit first, and hit harder than anyone else."

"No." Grenfell's one syllable was absolutely unshakable.

"Grenfell—I thought I could argue you into it. Don't make it tough for yourself. You've got to do it. Please do it on your own. Please, Grenfell." He stood up slowly.

"Do it on my own—or what? Keep away from me!"

"No . . . I—" Roway stiffened suddenly, listening. From far above and to the north came the whir of rotary wings. Roway's fear-slackened lips tightened into a grin, and with two incredibly swift strides he was across to Grenfell. He swept in a handful of the smaller man's shirt front and held him half off the floor.

"Don't try a thing," he gritted. There was not a sound then except their harsh breathing, until Grenfell said wearily: "There was somebody called Judas—"

"You can't insult me," said Roway, with a shade of his old cockiness, "and you're flattering yourself."

A helicopter sank into its own roaring dust-cloud outside the building. Men pounded out of it and burst in the door. There were three of them. They were not in uniform.

"Dr. Grenfell," said Jack Roway, keeping his grip, "I want you to meet—"

"Never mind that," said the taller of the three in a brisk voice. "You're Roway? Hm-m-m. Dr. Grenfell, I understand you have a nuclear energy device on the premises."

"Why did you come by yourself?" Grenfell asked Roway softly. "Why not just send these stooges?"

"For you, strangely enough. I hoped I could argue you into giving the thing freely. You know what will happen if you resist?"

"I know." Grenfell pursed his lips for a moment, and then turned to the tall man. "Yes. I have some such thing here. Total atomic disruption. Is that what you were looking for?"

"Where is it?"

"Here, in the laboratory, and then there's the pile in the other building. You'll find—" He hesitated. "You'll find two samples of the concentrate. One's over there—" he pointed to a lead case on a shelf behind one of the benches. "And there's another like it in a similar case the shed back of the pile building."

Roway sighed and released Grenfell. "Good boy. I knew you'd come through."

"Yes," said Grenfell. "Yes—"

"Go get it," said the tall man. One of the others broke away.

"It will take two men to carry it," said Grenfell in a shaken voice. His lips were white.

The tall man pulled out a gun and held it idly. He nodded to the second man. "Go get it. Bring it here and we'll strap the two together and haul 'em to the plane. Snap it up."

The two men went out toward the shed.

"Jack?"

"Yes, Doc."

"You really think humanity can be scared?"

"It will be—now. This thing will be used right."

"I hope so. Oh, I hope so," Grenfell whispered.

The men came back. "Up on the bench," said the leader, nodding toward the case the men carried between them.

As they climbed up on the bench and laid hands on the second case, to swing it down from the shelf, Jack Roway saw Grenfell's face spurt sweat, and a sudden horror swept over him.

"Grenfell!" he said hoarsely. "It's—"

"Of course," Grenfell whispered. "Critical mass." Then it let go.

It was like Hiroshima, but much bigger. And yet, that explosion did not create The Pit. It was the pile that did—the boron-aluminum lattice which Grenfell had so arduously pieced together from, parts bootlegged over the years. Right there at the heart of the fission explosion, total disruption took place in the pile, for that was its function. This was slower. It took more than an hour for its hellish activity to reach a peak, and in that time a huge crater had been gouged out of the earth, a seething, spewing mass of volatilized elements, raw radiation, and incandescent gases. It was—The Pit. Its activity Curve was plotted abruptly—up to peak in an hour and eight minutes, and then a gradual subsidence as it tried to feed further afield with less and less fueling effect, and as it consumed its own flaming wastes in an effort to reach inactivity. Rain would help to blanket it, through energy lost in volatilizing the drops; and each of the many elements involved went through its respective secondary radioactivity, and passed away its successive half-lives. The subsidence of The Pit would take between eight and nine thousand years.

And like Hiroshima, this explosion had effects which reached into history and into men's hearts in places far separated in time from the catacylsm itself.

These things happened:

The explosion could not be concealed; and there was too much hysteria afoot for anything to be confirmed. It was easier to run headlines saying We Are Attacked. There was an instaneous and panicky demand for reprisals, and the government acceded, because such "reprisals" suited the policy of certain members who could command emergency powers. And so the First Atomic War was touched off.

And the Second.

There were no more atomic wars after that. The Mutants' War was a barbarous affair, and the mutants defeated the tattered and largely sterile remnants of humanity, because the mutants were strong. And then the mutants died out because they were unfit. For a while there was some very interesting material to be studied on the effects of radiation on heredity, but there was no one to study it.

There were some humans left. The rats got most of them, after increasing in fantastic numbers; and there were three plagues.

After that there were half-stooping, naked things whose twisted heredity could have been traced to humankind; but these could be frightened, as individuals and as a race, so therefore they could not progress. They were certainly not human.

The Pit, in A.D. 5000, had changed little over the centuries. Still it was an angry memorial to the misuse of great power; and because of it, organized warfare was a forgotten thing. Because of it, the world was free of the wasteful smoke and dirt of industry. The scream and crash of bombs and the soporific beat of marching feet were never heard, and at long last the earth was at peace.

To go near The Pit was slow, certain death, and it was respected and feared, and would be for centuries more. It winked and blinked redly at night, and was surrounded by a bald and broken tract stretching out and. away over the horizon; and around it flickered a ghostly blue glow. Nothing lived there. Nothing could.

With such a war memorial, there could be only peace. The earth could never forget the horror loosed by war. That was Grenfell's dream.

THE THING ON OUTER SHOAL
P. Schuyler Miller

The first shock must've come about half past nine. It was in between the parts of that Sunday night concert Martha always listens to, during the talking, and I was up on a chair the way I always am at that time, winding the clock. I felt the chair sort of twist under me, and then the clock jumped off the mantel right into my face, and the two of us came down together with a bang.

I must've laid there stunned for a minute before Martha got to me, and I remember the feeling was like being up on a masthead in a high sea. It was like the whole earth was being sucked out from in under me, and then poured back, slow, like mud running into the hole where your foot has been. She had me by the arm, and I was getting my feet under me again when the second shock hit and both of us went down in a heap.

That was the bad one that smashed things all up and down the coast. We had the least of it, and we were high enough to miss the wave that came after it. It was different from the first one—grating and hard, like a ship driving on the rocks. The house jarred until the dishes flew off the shelves in the china closet and Martha's pots and pans came clattering down in a mess on the kitchen floor. The cat came flying through the room like it had fits and went scattering up the garret stairs, and then there was one last drop that nearly had my stomach out of me, and it was over.

I've been in quakes before, in Chile, and one time in Japan when I wasn't much more than a shaver, and I had a sort of notion there was more to come. I tried to put up the window, but the twisting the house had had made it stick, so I opened the front door and went out, with Martha right after me.

The fog was in. For two-three days it had been standing off shore and now it was in it was likely to stay. You couldn't see your hand on the end of your arm, but I knew that up on the point the way we are we'd be above anything that was apt to come.

We heard it, and then right away we smelled it—rankfull of the rotten muck it had raked up off the bottom of the sea, where things have been dying and settling into the mud for thousands and thousands of years. It sounded like the wind roaring, far away but coming closer, and the smell was enough to make a man gag. I could hear the buoy over Wilbur's Shoal clanging like mad, and I knew from the sound that it was adrift. Then the wave hit shore and I swear the whole point shook. The spray from it showered over us where we stood by the door, and then it struck again, not so hard, and that was the last except for the smell. We had that with us for a time.

We went back inside, because like I told Martha then, if any more was to come it wouldn't matter where we were, and a solid stone house like ours is a pretty safe place to be in come wind or high water. There's not many like it in the entire State of Maine.

I knew the first news would come over the Coast Guard station, so I turned the radio to where they are on the dial and sure enough, they were at it already. It didn't make nice hearing. Aside from the earthquake, which was as bad as we've ever had in these parts, the wave had done a pile of damage all up and down the coast. Down through Massachusetts the big beaches had been swept clean, but it was after the main season and there wasn't many killed compared to what there might have been.

After a little they began to fit things together. The first quake had been pretty well out to sea—maybe twenty-thirty miles—and north of us, but the second one, the big one, was right off Phillipsport and close inshore. I've fished that bottom all my life, and I figured I could place it pretty close. There's a deep place—never sounded to my way of knowing—between Dorner's Bank and Outer Shoal, and the way it sounded that was where it was.

The fog was in and it stayed for three days. Fog don't bother me any, or Martha neither, so we went down to town next morning but there wasn't any news we hadn't heard on the radio. The Coast Guard plane was waiting for the fog to clear before it went up, and they were getting ready to make new soundings in case the bottom had changed. Up in Alaska there's places where whole mountains have come up out of the sea overnight, and then dropped back again.

The smell was everywhere—rotten fish and rotten seaweed —worse than a keg of lobster bait. We got used to it before the fog lifted. Between 'em the quake and the tidal wave had fetched up the ocean bottom for miles around, and it took a while to settle.

Along Wednesday afternoon you could begin to see a little. The sea off our point was milky, and kind of phosphorescent after sundown. There was all sorts of stuff piled up along the rocks—pieces of sunk ships, buoys, weed, shells, dead fish, lobster pots—every kind of thing. There were lobsters there bigger than any that's been caught in the State of Maine since my grandfather Phillips' time. There was halibut that would weigh up to six-seven hundred pounds, and every kind of fish that was ever in the sea. By Wednesday the smell it made was enough to drive us out, and Martha made me go down with a fork and bury what I could of it.

Wednesday night was clear as a bell, with the moon out full, and I heard the Coast Guard plane up a couple of times. Thursday morning I was up and out with the sun. There wasn't much to see. Clear out to the horizon the sea was chalky with the stuff that had been riled up off the bottom, and there were little black spots of drift that wouldn't likely come in for days. I got out my grandfather Waters' glass and went up on the roof, but it didn't do much good. The buoy was gone off Wilburs Shoal, like I thought, and so were all the channel markers. I heard in town that one of them fetched up on the veranda of the old Butler place, a good five miles back from the harbor up the inlet.

Out over Outer Shoal there was a kind of white cloud, and I watched it for a long time before I made out it was gulls—millions of 'em—swinging and swooping around over the shoal like they were following a school of mackerel. Then I heard the drone of a plane and picked it up, following the coast up from the south. It had Coast Guard markings, and pretty soon I heard our own plane sputter up off the water and swing over to meet it. They must've seen the gulls like I did, because they turned and circled out over the shoal. They were there a long time, swinging round and round like two big birds, and every now and then one of them would drop down to get a better look, but after a while they started back and I called to Martha and got my hat and went down to town to see what they had found out.

Well, sir, half the village was down to the Coast Guard station when I got there. The pilot from down the coast turned out to be a Phillipsport boy—Henry Anders' boy Jim—and when he saw me coming he let out a holler.

There was four-five people standing around the planes arguing—all of 'em men I'd been to sea with in my young days—and they were scratching their heads like chickens after corn. Fred Hibbard hailed me first.

"By gaggle," he shouted, "come down here! These boys has a puzzle none of us can answer. Tell him, Jim."

Jim grinned at me. He'd put on flesh since he joined up with the Coast Guard. "Hi there, Cap'n Waters," he said. "Maybe you can tell me more than these old salt-horses here. They claim what we saw on Outer Shoal isn't possible."

Tom Buck is our regular pilot here. "You were on the roof when I swung over," he put in. "Likely you saw the gulls over the shoal. We figured maybe a ship had gone aground and broken up, so we went out there, but it's no ship. We don't know what it is."

Old Colonel Phillips may be ninety and he's my own father's uncle, but he's the cussedest old fool in Phillipsport. He creaks like a rusty gate when he talks, and his store teeth don't fit him any better than you'd expect of a mail-order set, but he's never satisfied until he's had his say.

"Blasted young lubbers!" he piped up. "Smart-Alecs! taint no mystery to me, or no need for one! I remember twice in my life there's been a whale grounded on that shoal, and you look in the town records and you'll find plenty more. That wave'd fetch in anything afloat!"

"How do you feel about that?" I asked them.

Jim Anders scratched his head. He has tow hair like his father's folks. They were Swedes, wrecked here and settled, back in my father's time—first-class seamen, every one of them. "Well," he admitted, "I suppose it could be. But if it is, it's the strangest whale I ever saw."

"We couldn't see much," Tom Buck explained. "The gulls have settled on it like flies on a lobster pot, and we couldn't drive 'em off. But it's big—big as any whale I ever laid eyes on—and it's funny shaped. And—it's white."

"What'd I tell you?" Colonel Phillips was just about prancing. "It's a white whale. Seen 'em many a time!"

"Belugas don't grow that big, Colonel," Buck told him. "And—the shape's wrong."

"Pish! Ever hear about Moby Dick? Ever hear about Killer Ned? There's white whales same as any animal, and most always they're big and mean. How is it now? Pretty ripe, ain't it? Any salvage to it?"

"We couldn't see," Jim told him. "It's no place to set down a plane, with all the drift afloat around the shoal. That quake brought up every derelict this side of the Azores. We've got days of work ahead, locating them. But if you old sea-horses can stand the stench, you might be able to pick up a little tobacco money out there. Whale oil's high."

I could tell then it wasn't only the old men who liked the idea, and I could tell it wasn't going by the board. We may be over sixty, some of us, but there are a few left who have shipped on whalers and know what to do and how to do it. When I went up to the store Henry Anders and Fred Hibbard and Welsh Peters and one or two others were with me, and we found a couple-three more in Clem Potter's back room. Likewise, I saw that the younger men were drifting into Tony Spillani's garage across the street.

It was going to be a race for it, and I could feel my blood getting up at the thought. Likely the young fellers would try to hold off till night and then slip away. We couldn't pull out right in front of 'em, because they'd beat us hull down, but we had to get there first. Then we all of us thought of the colonel.

He knew it, too. He sat back there in Clem's old armchair with a satisfied smirk under his whiskers, waiting for us to ask him. But he couldn't wait long.

"Remembered me, ain't you?" he demanded. "Remembered I got three whaleboats off the old Minnie P, in my boathouse this minute, with engines in 'em and all the gear complete. Remembered I got casks and irons and everything you need, over the other side of the point where there can't nobody tell what you're up to. Want 'em, don't you? Well—owner's third!"

The old skinflint had us, and it didn't matter much to any of us. It wasn't the oil we were after. It was wondering about the thing that had washed up on Outer Shoal—beating the young bucks at a game they figured we were too old for—having the kind of adventure that we all had thought was over and done with. It disappointed him a little when we took him up so quick. He just snorted and handed over the keys to the boathouse. Then an idea tickled him and he let out a cackle like a guinea hen. He poked Clem in the ribs with his cane.

"I'll fix those young squirts for you!" he vowed. "I know the way they're figgerin'. That man at the old livery stable has him a big new launch, an' that's the boat they'll use. I hat an' maybe Peters' and Crandall's. You gimme five pounds of sugar . . . no, by Jake, make it ten pounds . . . an' I'll go down sun myself a mite on the wharf while you're gettin' up a blackberryin' party over to my place. An' don't tell the wimmen!"

The old sculpin! There wasn't one of us would have thought of sugaring their gasoline.

The younger men were still in the garage with their heads together when we came out of the store. We split up—the colonel with his sugar sacks in his coat pockets headed for the wharf, and the rest of us scattering to meet along after dinner at the colonel's boathouse. That would give us the afternoon.

He was a shipshape old devil. Those three boats were as good as the day he got 'em, and the engines were tuned up fit to run a clock. Like as not he had some feller from out of town come and do it so's he wouldn't let on he cared how they were. There wasn't a speck of rust on his whaling irons, and his rope was new—brand new, but with the stiffness worked out of it. It was good gear, all of it. My point hid us from town and would until we were a good two miles out. The colonel's sugar would have to take care of things after that.

We manned two of the three boats. I was steersman in the first and the colonel took the second. We could reach the whale, mark it, and maybe cut a little blubber before nightfall. It was all any of us wanted—except maybe the colonel—the young folks could have the rest with our blessing, after they'd been put in their place.

They'd started up a game of baseball by the time the colonel left town, just to keep our suspicions down, but they must have posted a watch or else someone's wife blabbed. We weren't more than half a mile off the point when we heard the launch start up, and there they came, three boats of them, swinging across to cut us off. I could see the grin on Fred Hibbard's face as he monkeyed with our engine and made it cough and splutter like it wasn't going good. Let 'em be cocky while they could.

They passed us hooting and hollering like wild Indians, and after a time we passed them, lying in the swell, tinkering with their engines. The three boats were strung out over a mile or so of sea, and some of the boys were turning a little green. By that time we could see the shoal.

The smell of the thing and the cackle of the gulls reached us long before we sighted it. It was ripe, but it didn't smell like whale to me. It had that seabottom rankness that the quake had brought up, and I began to remember yarns I'd heard about sea serpents and the like of that.

There must have been all the gulls in Maine over that reef. The sea was white with them, bobbing around in the oil slick that had spread from the thing on the shoal. They were stuffed too full to fly, but they covered the thing from the water's edge where it lay awash until it was one big, stinking mountain of white feathers, sixty feet long if it was a yard. From the boats we couldn't tell much about how it looked, but was—queer.

My boat was first, and we circled around it and came from the seaward side, down wind. The gulls didn't rise until the boat was almost touching it, and when they did, I looked at the men and they looked at me. Their faces were funny-colored and I guess mine was, too, because it was a man.

The gulls had been, at it for better than a day, but you could see it was a man. It was sixty feet from head to feet, more than fifteen feet across the shoulders, and it was a man. There was a layer of thick white blubber on it under a gray kind of skin. Big blue gills flared out where its neck should have been. And as the boat bumped against it a hand came floating up through the water beside me—wrinkled with the water, and webbed all the way to the tips of the fingers. It was a man.

A cloud had gone over the sun, and the wind was kind of cold on me. The smell of the thing choked me, and the screaming, wheeling birds overhead made my head swim. I reversed the engine and pulled us off a couple of lengths.

The gulls had been at it. All along its barrel of a body they had torn big, jagged holes through its skin and blubber and raw red meat, down to the white ribs. It lay-on its face on the shoal, its back, where there was skin left; dull, gray-white like a shark's belly. On its feet it would have looked kind of stubby, I guess, because it looked 'awl broad for its length, with big, powerful long arms made for swimming, and long, thick legs with webbed feet. Its face was under water, but it had no ears unless the gulls had torn them off, and its head was round and covered with stringy hair like a wad of dirty hemp.

It was a giant man out of deep part of the sea—the part that no man of our kind ever sees or hears tell of, except in sailors yarns. The earthquake had vomited it up out of the sea to die here on Outer Shoal. The marks of the deep were on it, in the way Nature had made it to stand the pressure down there thousands of fathoms below, and in the great round scars that were on its back and sides. I knew those marks, and so did most of the others with me—we'd seen them often enough on whales. The Kraken had left them—the giant white squid that lives down in the cold and the black of the sea bottom where only whales go—and things like this.

Then I heard the colonel shout. He had climbed up on the dead thing's body and stood there between its gnarled shoulders looking down at us. Another figure bobbed up alongside him—Doc Higbee—and the two of them stooped down to study the thing they were standing on. Then the colonel straightened up as if he'd had a kink in his back and I heard him screech.

We had pulled off into the deep water that goes down like the side of a mountain off Outer Shoal. We had all been watching the two on the thing's back, but now we turned to look.

Out of the water a hundred feet away rose a face. Long hanks of grizzled hair hung over it, and out between them stared two huge, black, goggling eyes. There was a smear of white flesh between them where it should have had a nose. Its mouth stretched halfway across its head right under those staring eyes, and it was filled with little sharp pegs of teeth. The gills began below—a purple frill of flesh, opening and closing as it breathed. As it rose higher its mouth gaped open to suck in air, and I could see it had no tongue.

It found footing on the shelving edge of the shoal, a boat's length away, before I had sense enough to move. Then I grabbed for the gas lever and we were hipering out of its way. But it didn't pay us any heed. The water was just under its armpits as it stood there, with its webbed hands floating on the water in front of it. It climbed higher—it was the seaman's mate come after him out of the deeps!

The two men on the carcass were scrambling down the other side into their boat. The colonel made it, but Higbee slipped and splashed into the water. By now the woman-thing was standing knee-deep in the sea beside her mate. I wondered how she could support that monstrous body out of water, but she had giant's muscles. Her great saucer eyes stared at the dead thing, and one webbed hand took it by the shoulder and turned it over.

Then she saw the other boat. It had waited to pick up the doctor, and the men were struggling frantically over the engine with the little colonel hopping and cursing in the bow. She made a lunge toward it and stumbled over the carcass of her mate. The wash as she smashed into the sea nearly overset the boat, but they righted it and suddenly we heard the engine start. It sputtered a moment and stopped.

Henry Anders was harpooner on my father's whaler and he was bow man in my boat now. He got to his feet, picking up the heavy blubber spade at his side, as we came within range of the thing. It was never meant for throwing, but he hurled that iron like a lance. It struck the sea-woman's shoulder and sliced deep into the thick flesh, so that I could see the purplish blood running. She stopped, shoulder deep, and turned to face us.

Then, close by the colonel's boat and almost within reach of her groping hand the sea went suddenly white and smooth. A great, twisting tentacle went snaking out over the surface of the water and touched its thwart. Like a flash it clamped over the bow, inches from the colonel. A second followed it, and then the monster's body rose slowly out of the waves —two evil black pools of ink for eyes—a great white parrot beak—and surrounding them a nest of corpse-white tentacles. The Kraken!

It gave of a sickly kind of scent, and the sea-woman smelled it. She seemed to hunch down into the sea. They stared at each other for the space of a minute, and I saw its huge arm uncoiling from around the boat as it watched her. It was wary, but there was no fear in it—or her. Then, like lightning, she pounced; like coiling ropes its tentacles twined round her body, biting deep in the blubber.

Her strength was terrible. Her webbed fingers dug into the Kraken's rubbery flesh; the muscles swelled along her arms and across her naked back, and she tore the monster's body in her hands as if she was tearing rags. But it had its grip; its tentacles sucking and ripping at her leathery skin. One arm was bound fast to her body, and the tip of one tentacle was prying at her heaving gills.

Her legs were spread, her back bent; the muscles under her coat of blubber stood up in long, low ridges across her back as she set her fingers in the great squid's flesh and tore it loose. Those webbed fingers closed over its staring eyes and gaping beak and squeezed, and the flailing tentacles went limp.

She stood there, thigh-deep in the bloody seat, staring at the dead thing in her hands. She dropped it and her bulbous eyes swung slowly from one boat to the other. Suddenly she lunged forward and the water closed over her head. Then panic struck us.

We may have made ten boat lengths before she reached us. Out of the sea at my elbow the curve of her enormous shoulder rose against the boat. Her groping hand closed over the bow and pulled it under, hurling us over the side into the sea. As I came up, struggling for breath, I could hear the wood splinter in her fist. She dropped it and looked around her for us.

I hadn't heard the plane till then. We were too close for Jim Anders to use his gun, but he zoomed up past her face and she flinched back and batted at him like a kitten at a string. Her head swung around on her shoulders to watch him, and as he dived again she began to flounder away toward the shoal and the body of her dead mate.

That gave him an idea. The rap of his machine gun sounded over the whine of the diving plane—every Coast Guard plane had been armed since that trouble off Nantucket. Gouts of flesh spurted where the bullets struck the dead thing's pulpy form. The sea-woman was swimming frantically away from us. She found her footing again and pulled herself erect, her arms stretched up at the attacking plane. And Jim Anders dived for the third time and shot her down.

There was enough life left in her even then to carry her back into the deep out of which she came. Sometimes it seems that I can see her, swimming painfully down into the blackness and the cold and the quiet, until the last of her life flows out of her and she sinks down into the everlasting darkness where she was born. It was too bad it had to happen like it did.

We came out of it all right. Not even the colonel had more than a week's layup with his blood pressure. Of course we had to take a tongue-lashing from the womenfolks, but we'd figured on that anyway.

The boys in the launches were scared stiff. They'd seen the whole thing, but they couldn't raise a finger to help. The colonel had done a bang-up job on that gasoline.

We don't talk about it much in Phillipsport. Everyone in town knows about it, and it's no secret, but we don't like to talk about it much. It wasn't the kind of thing that sets well with a man.

It happened, though—no mistake about that. I have the proof. The pictures Tom Buck made before they bombed the thing to bits and let the sea have it again didn't come out. The gulls were back, and you can't see much but the shape of it. Far as I know, I have the only other proof there is. I got that from Doc Higbee the winter before he died.

Doc had had time, when he and the colonel landed on the thing, to slice off a chunk of skin and blubber and a mite of the flesh underneath. He kept them by him, even in the water, and stowed them away in alcohol when he got back.

The pieces of skin he got shows one of the great round scars that the Kaken left. Maybe they feed on each other, down there miles under the sea where nothing but whales ever get to. Doc said it was human skin. He said the blood in it is human blood, only just about as salty as sea water is today. He showed me a book where it tries to figure out when our first ancestors crawled out of the sea, millions of years back, by measuring the amount of salt in our blood and figuring, the amount of salt there was in the sea then. He said they were supposed to match, otherwise things couldn't keep alive.

Suppose some of those things that turned into men stayed in the sea when our ancestors came out on land, Doc said. Suppose they went right on living in the, sea, changing the same way the things on land did, growing big enough and strong enough to stand the pressure and the cold down there. They might change into things like the Ones we saw, Doc said. There couldn't be many of them, he thought. There wouldn't be enough to eat, except for squids and whales and dead things that sank down from above.

There was a reporter from Boston, a year or two back, got wind of the story some way and tried to pump it out of us. He spent near a week here, I guess, talking to this one and that one. The way he had it, it was a sea serpent that was washed up on the shoal. Well, sir, after a while it got around to the colonel, and I never did hear the like of the yarn he told that man. It was too good. I guess the feller figured it was all lies, which it mostly was, and judged the rumor was the same. Anyway, we've never been bothered about it since—until now.

THE DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON

Murray Leinster

To this day nobody pretends to understand the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even differences of opinion about the end to which that devil came. Mr. Tedder is sure he was the fiend in question, and that he ceased to be fiendish when he rid himself of the pot over his head.

Other authorities believe that heavy ordnance did the trick, and point to a quarter-mile crater for proof. It takes close reasoning to decide.

But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that came out of Somewhere to Here, and caused all the catastrophes by his mere arrival—why—then the Devil was the Whatever-it-was in the leathery, hidelike covering on the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from the constable.

On that morning, Mr. Tedder ran like a deer—or as nearly like a deer as Mr. Tedder could hope to run. The resemblance was not close. Deer do not hesitate helplessly between possible avenues of escape. Deer do not plunge out of concealing thickets to scuttle through merely shoulder-high brush because a pathway shows. But Mr. Tedder did.

The constable, behind him, shouted wrathfully. There was a thirty-day jail-sentence waiting for someone for vagrancy —which is to say, for not having any money. Mr. Tedder was elected.

He would not gain any money by staying in jail, but the constable who arrested him and the justice of the peace who sentenced him would receive fees for their activity. That was why this township was notoriously a bad place for tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and itinerant workmen in need of a job.

"I can't go much further," Mr. Tedder thought. His heart thumped horribly. There was an agonizing stitch in his side. His breath was a hoarse, honking noise as it rushed in and out. Despair filled him as exhaustion neared.

He pounded, sobbing for breath, up a little ten-foot rise. His eyes tried to blur with tears. Then he lurched down the other side of the ridge and saw that he was in the neglected, broken-limbed orchard of an abandoned farm.

The house was partly collapsed and wholly ruined. A remaining shed leaned crazily. Vines climbed over a rail fence —three parts rotten—and went on along, a strand of barbed wire nailed to tree-trunks.

He could run no further. He looked, despairing, for a hiding place. His haggard, ineffectual face turned desperately. He saw something dark and large. To his blurred eyes it looked like a cow. He ran toward it. It shrank back, stirring…

There was a thin, high screaming noise, like gas escaping through a punctured tire, but a tire inflated to a monstrous pressure. There was a vast, foggy vaporousness. The dark shape made convulsive movements, but Mr. Tedder was too lost in panic to take note. He ran blindly toward it.

"Ug!" gasped Mr. Tedder.

The scream descended in pitch. A pungent, ammoniacal smell filled the air. Mr. Tedder ran into a wisp of fog which tore at his lungs. He choked and fell—which was fortunate, because the air was clearer near the ground. He lay kicking among dead leaves and dry grass-stems while a gray vapor spread and spread, and a very gentle breeze urged it sidewise among the unkempt trees of the orchard.

The noise died away in a long-continued moan which included gurglings. It still sounded like gas escaping from very high pressure.

The gurglings were like spoutings of liquid within.

But Mr. Tedder was in no mood to analyze. He had been breathless to begin with. He had been strangled on top of that. Now he writhed in the dry grass, ready to sob because the constable would presently lay hands on him and haul him to jail.

He heard the constable shout again, furiously. Then Mr. Tedder heard him cough. The constable bellowed, "Fire!" and fled.

He ran into a tendril of wispy, creeping vapor which did look a lot like smoke. He fell down, strangling. Again thy, air was clearer among the tangled stalks of frost-kills grasses. The constable coughed and wheezed.

Presently he staggered away to report that a vagabond had set fire to the woods to hinder pursuit. But there was no fire. The chill vapor which looked like smoke very gradually dissipated. A cursory glance would send the firefighters home again.

Mr. Tedder lay sobbing and gasping on the ground expecting at any instant to be seized. He panted in despair. But the constable did not reappear. He never returned. Mr. Tedder was alone, his escape good.

When he realized it, he sat up abruptly. His meek face expressed astonishment. He stared all about him. There was still a small space from which an ever-thinner gray vapor seeped away. There was a reek as of ammonia in the air—a highly improbable smell around an abandoned farmhouse.

Presently Mr. Tedder got to his feet. He brushed off the leaves and grass-stems which clung to his shabby garments. He was a few yards from a distinctly tumbledown woodshed and almost under a gnarled apple-tree to which a few leaves still clung, and where he could observe a single, dried-up apple clinging tenaciously to its parent bough.

The sight of the apple gave him pause. He hunted busily. He found windfalls. Untended, the apples would be wormy and small and belated at best. But Mr. Tedder had learned— not to be over-fastidious. He found a dozen or more scrubby objects which were partly eatable. He ate them.

It was then that he heard a bubbling noise, like something boiling in a pot. The sounds came from the place where the gray mist rose. He went to the spot, and wrinkled his nose. The smell of ammonia was stronger. It seemed to come from a collapsed object on the ground which was remotely like a deflated hide. A liquid came from a small rent in it and bubbled furiously to nothingness.

A student of physics would have said that it had an extraordinarily low boiling-point, like a liquefied gas. Mr. Tedder said nothing. He regarded the flaccid skin-like thing surprisedly. He had seen it a little while since, inflated and moving about.

There must have been something inside it to move it.

Mr. Tedder could see, of course, where it had a tiny tear. It had moved or been moved back against a single strand of barbed wire, hidden among vinestems. It had punctured, and there it was. But Mr. Tedder could never have imagined a creature which required an extremely cold gas like ammonia and hydrogen, mixed, at extremely high pressure, in order to live. He could not have conceived of such a creature wearing a flexible garment to contain that high-pressure, low-temperature gas for it to breathe. Assuredly he would never envision anything, beast or devil, which at released pressure and the temperature of a Vermont autumn day would melt to liquid and boil away to nothing.

"It don't make sense," he muttered, scratching his unkempt head.

So Mr. Tedder, who could not think comprehendingly, did not think at all. He saw something on the ground—no, two things. They were metal, and they smouldered and smoked like the flat thing, because they were cold. They were unbelievably cold. One looked like an aluminum pot. But pots do not have chilly linked-metal straps in the place of handles, nor hemispherical knobs, a good inch and a half in diameter, on one rim. The other object looked like a gun. Not a real gun, of course. But vaguely, approximately, like a gun just the same.

He picked up the pot. It was all of an inch and a half thick. It was very light for such a thickness. Mr. Tedder cheered suddenly. It was undoubtedly aluminum. There is a market for scrap aluminum. East Lupton was out of bounds, of course, but there might be a junk-dealer in South Lupton. This ought to be worth fifty cents, and he might get a quarter for it.

"Two bits is still two bits," he thought.

He touched the other thing gingerly. It was still bitterly cold, but the frost melted under the warmth of his finger. It would weigh fifteen pounds or so. Another twenty-five cents...

Mr. Tedder marched on happily. Then he came upon broken branches, freshly crushed down from trees. He saw another gray mist before him. He approached it cautiously. He saw where something had crashed down through the trees and knocked off the top of a six-inch maple. He pushed on inquisitively. . . .

The thing had ploughed into soft earth and almost buried itself. A foot-thick tree was splintered and had crashed to cover the object that had broken it. Mr. Tedder saw whiteness through the toppled branches. It seemed to be a sphere not much over ten feet in diameter, and it was completely covered with frost. A chilly mist oozed away from it. Mr. Tedder stared at it with the metal pot in one hand and the gun—if it was a gun—in the other.

There was silence save for the faintly sibilant whispering of the trees overhead. There was the lurid coloring of Vermont in the fall. A bird called somewhere, a long distance away. Then Mr. Tedder heard a motor running. It sounded very queer.

"Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thudCHUNK!" It was running in the frost-covered sphere under the fallen tree.

"I'll be darned!" he said aloud.

It occurred vaguely to Mr. Tedder that this and the deflated object back yonder were somehow connected. He picked his way cautiously around the smashed branches and shattered trees. Well away, he felt cheerful because he had escaped the law and picked up salable junk. The two objects were pretty heavy, too. The pot would fit on his head, though, and would be easier to carry so. He put it over his battered soft hat and drew the chain-link strap under his chin. Then he examined the thing like a gun. There was a knob on one side, an inch and a half in diameter. He tugged at it.

There was a sharp buzzing sound. Something that looked like flame came out of the end. It spread out in a precisely shaped, mathematically perfect cone, and blotted out brushwood, trees—everything.

Mr. Tedder jerked the knob back, startled, on the first sounding of the noise. The flame-like appearance lasted less than half a second. But where the flame had played upon foliage and brush there wasn't anything left. Nothing at all but a little fine ash, sifting down toward earth. And the grass and topsoil were eaten away as if a virulent acid had been spilled over them.

Mr. Tedder stood frozen for the tenth part of a heartbeat. Then in one motion he threw away the gun and fled. The pot flopped down over his eyes, blinding him. He hit his head a terrific blow against a low-hanging limb. Instantly, it seemed to him, the chain-link strap tightened. He went almost mad with terror. But when he got the pot back so he could see, he fled with the heavy thing bobbing and bumping on his head.

Presently, his own panting slowed him down. He remembered the knob on the rim of the pot. He stopped and fumbled with it. It came off in his hand with a crystalline fracture to show where it had broken in his first collision. He couldn't get the pot off.

He worked for a long time, sweating in something close to hysterical panic. He was terrified of the thing he had thrown away, and by transference, of the pot on his head. He desired passionately to be rid of it. He felt a sort of poignant desperation. But he would have to get somebody to cut the strap in order to be freed.

He came to the edge of the thicket beyond East Lupton. He looked out upon rolling country, undulating to the mountain's foot. There was a cluster of houses in the distance. Still terrified, and with the pot bumping on his head, Mr. Tedder struck out for the village.

He saw a tiny bundle of fur in his way. It was a dead rabbit. He passed on. He saw, very far ahead, a white dog running from a farmhouse to intercept him. But Mr. Tedder was not afraid of dogs. He was afraid of the pot on his head. Presently he saw the dog no more than ten feet away. It lay sprawled out, motionless. It looked dead. Then he saw the throb-throb of a heartbeat. It was asleep, or unconscious. He hastened on.

He came to the highway and ran toward a wagon for help. And there was a horse lying down between the shafts. The man in the wagon, too, had sagged limply. Both were alive, but both were unconscious.

"Something screwy here," he thought.

Mr. Tedder had his own terror, but this was an emergency even more immediate than his own. He tried to help the man. He did get him down to the road, and laid him solicitously on the dead-grass bank by the side of the road. He loosened his clothing and went on toward the village at a run to summon help. Afterward he would get the pot off his head.

But the village was unconscious, too, when he got there. Male and female, man, woman, child, and beast, the inhabitants of South Lupton lay in crumpled heaps.

He saw a small boy unconscious over a toy wagon. A woman had collapsed into a laundry-basket beside a clothesline. A little farther on, a mule lay with its legs spraddled absurdly. Then he saw two men flung headlong as if they had been running when weakness overtook them. It began to look as if alarm had come to the village.

People had thronged out of their houses to fall in heaps on the sidewalk, at their doors—everywhere. He saw a car that had run into a gas-pump, and just beyond another car which had run off the road and stalled on a hillside. Dogs, cats, chickens—the very pigeons and crows lay motionless on the ground.

Mr. Tedder felt a horrible panic, and the pot on his head bumped him, but he tried desperately to rise to the emergency this situation constituted. He tried to rouse the unconscious people lying in the street. He loosened clothing, he sprinkled water, he chafed hands—to no avail. His meek, normally apprehensive features went consciously stern and resolute.

Presently he tried to summon help by telephone, but there was a local exchange and the operator lay unconscious in her chair. In the end, and in desperation, Mr. Tedder commandeered a bicycle on which to seek aid.

The essential rightness of his character was shown by the fact that he rifled no purses. He looted nothing. The Bank of South Lupton lay open to him, and it did not occur to him to fill his pockets. He got on a bicycle and rode off like mad, the absurd pot bobbing on his head as he pedaled.

He came to a car that had smashed into a ditch and turned over. Flames licked at its gasoline-tank. Mr. Tedder leaped off the bicycle and dragged out an unconscious man and a little girl. He hauled them to safety and tried to put out the fire. He failed.

He pedaled on madly in quest of a doctor, when attempts to rouse these two people failed as had all the rest. He was in a new panic now, somehow. He remembered, though vaguely, talk of a broadcast of years before concerning the landing of Martians upon the earth. Mr. Tedder was not quite sure whether Martians had landed or not, but somehow it suddenly frightened him to remember the frost-covered globe which had smashed trees in landing.

"You'd think I was Orson Welles or somebody," he gulped.

He reached the town of West Lupton. The names of towns in Vermont are not good evidence of Yankee ingenuity. The town itself was a tiny place of five hundred people. As he pedaled into it, it looked like the scene of a massacre. Its inhabitants lay unconscious everywhere. There were not even flies in the air.

Mr. Tedder did not give up for two full hours, during which he pedaled desperately in quest of some other conscious human being. By now his fear had come to be for himself, and it grew until it made him almost unaware of the ill-fitting, bumping pot upon his head. But at long last his teeth chattered.

"M-maybe," said Mr. Tedder quaveringly to himself, "I’m the only man left alive in these parts . . ."

With the terror came an impulse to hide. It was then late afternoon. It would soon be dark. He did not want to be in a town filled with still, not-dead forms after dark! He pedaled down a side road. It became a cart-track and climbed. It dwindled to a footpath. He dived into the obscurity of woodland as the shadows grew deep.

He came at last to an empty, rocky hilltop. Sunset was over. Only a lingering dim red glow remained in the west. Presently stars shone down. He looked up at them, sweating.

If that frost-covered thing had come from the stars, something from it—a sort of devil—had stricken down the hundreds of unconscious people Mr. Tedder had seen. Maybe it was getting ready for more of its kind. He stared upward and imagined other spheres swinging down out of the darkness overhead to gouge long furrows in the ground. Maybe sich things were falling all over the world. . . .

But he could look across-country for miles. Presently he saw joyfully that there were electric lights. He saw motorcar headlights on the highways. In particular, he saw that the cry last town he had entered was now brightly lighted and here was traffic moving in and out...

"Well," he thought with relief. "Whatever it was, it ain't permanent." Come morning he would have somebody cut loose the pot from his head.

He could not find fuel to make a fire, but he snatched some fitful sleep toward dawn. He was bitterly cold when he woke, and at earliest daylight he made his way back toward town.

The dawn light was still gray and dreary when he reached it. The streets were empty. But there was a motor-truck stopped by a store, its motor purring. And there was a man tumbled in a heap above a bunch of big-city newspapers he had just put out of the truck for delivery. The man was alive, but unconscious. There was a cat in a motionless furry heap beside him, as if it had come out to rub against his legs and had collapsed without warning.

Mr. Tedder, shivering, turned the man over. He was insensible. He could not be roused. Mr. Tedder felt hysteria stirring within him. The pot hurt his head, now. The places where it rubbed most often were getting sore. Then he noticed the headlines.

DISASTER IN VERMONT—DEVIL
LOOSE, SAY VILLAGERS

Unexplained Mass Unconsciousness Strikes Countryside

In the gray twilight of dawn, with a softly purring truck behind him and before him an unconscious man, Mr. Tedder read.

"South Lupton struck by strange, creeping unconsciousness that moved like a wall or an invisible flood of oblivion… Entire villages insensible for half an hour. . . . Some inhabitants undisturbed where they fell, others hauled about. and pawed, but unharmed. . . . The same inexplicable insensibility moved along roads. . . . Man driving with his little daughter lost consciousness and came to to find his car overturned and burning, and himself and the little girl lying some distance away. . . . Farmers found their horses struggling up from unconsciousness. . . ."

Mr. Tedder's throat went dry. He looked around furtively. This town had borne the look of a shambles yesterday, when he was here. From the hilltop he had seen it alive. But now it was dead again. . . . Suddenly he remembered a white dog that had come running toward him across a wide pasture. When he got to the dog it was unconscious. . . .

"I wonder if . . ." He could not face the thought.

Mr. Tedder shivered. He almost whimpered. But after a little he picked up the unconscious man before him. He dragged him into the back of the truck. He drove clumsily and unaccustomedly out of the town. There was a long, straight stretch of road. Mr. Tedder went well out upon it. He stopped and let the unconscious man carefully down to the side of the road. He got back in the driver's seat and drove away. He watched through the back-view mirror.

When he was a little more than half a mile away, the still figure stirred, rolled over, and got dazedly upright.

Mr. Tedder swallowed noisily. He drove on a little way and found a place where he could turn. He headed back. The owner of the truck still stood bewildered in the road. Mr. Tedder drove toward him. When he was still half a mile away, the man crumpled up and lay in a heap on the road. He was a flaccid, limp, insensible figure when Mr. Tedder brought the truck to a stop and loaded him in again.

He turned once more and rode on toward South Lupton. Mr. Tedder's face was a sickly gray color. The meekness of his normal expression was replaced by an odd, fixed horror. He had found two things which he believed came from the frosted ten-foot sphere. One was a weapon which destroyed everything when a knob on its side was touched. The other was this pot, with a strap which now held it fast upon his head.

The pot was a weapon too. It did not affect the one who wore it. The tightening of the strap when it went on was to make sure—pure anguish sharpened Mr. Tedder's perceptions —that it could not fall off while it was operating. If it did, the person—or the devil—wearing it would fall a victim too. It did not fit a man because it was designed for the brain-case of something else, something Mr. Tedder had seen vaguely as a dark moving object backing into a rusty barbed wire strung between two trees. If the pot—or helmet—had been turned on then, Mr. Tedder would never have seen anything. He would have fallen unconscious a half-mile away.

He made a little sobbing noise in his throat. He drove unskillfully to South Lupton. One general store was open. He went into it and filled his pockets with canned food, a loaf of bread, and matches. He took two blankets from a shelf. He stepped carefully over the two clerks and four customers in the store. They were on the floor, of course. He walked out of the store and away from the little town.

"I got to get back there," he said unsteadily. "I got to!" A long while later he strode across rolling pasture-land. A white dog ran to intercept him. He saw it as a distant white speck. When he came up to it, it was a still, senseless heap. He went on to the woods and into them. It took him two hours to find the gash blasted in the woods by the gun-like thing. Then it took him another half-hour to find the gun.

He shivered when he picked it up, and carried it gingerly, but he noted that the metal was deeply pitted now. On the side that was next to the damp earth, the metal was eaten away to a depth of a quarter of an inch or more.

He found the abandoned orchard, and the half-collapsed and wholly ruined house. Then he sat down and stared dully at nothing, trying to think of a solution to his predicament.

Night fell but he sat in a sort of lethargy of despair for a long while. Ultimately he rolled up in the blankets. The pot on his head was horribly uncomfortable. It had not been made for a human head, and it did not fit. Twice during the night, also, he woke with a feeling of strangulation. He had stirred in his sleep and the tight chin-strap had choked him. The second time he found himself close to the metal gun. He had almost touched it. He made an inarticulate sound, such as a man might make who found himself about to step on a rattlesnake.

He got up and found the well of the abandoned farm. He dropped a clod of earth in it. It splashed. He dropped in the gun-like thing. Bubbling sounds followed. They lasted a long time.

He stayed at the abandoned farm for three days living on the canned stuff he had taken. His cheeks grew sunken and his eyes querulously pathetic. Also, a sore place started from the rubbing of the pot on his head. On the second day he found the frosted globe again. The motor in it still ran.

"Thud-thud-thud-thud-CHUNK! Thud-thud-thud-thudCHUNK!" There was no sign that anything had come out. Perhaps there had only been one Whatever-it-was in it, and that had succumbed to a rip in its artificial hide by a bit of barbed wire. No trace of that thing remained, now. It had evaporated.

"Jellyfish. Like jellyfish," he told himself.

Mr. Tedder did not think in scientific terms nor speculate from what planet or star the Whatever-it-was had come. If he had been told that on the planet Jupiter there was an atmosphere of ammonia and hydrogen under enormous pressure, it would have meant nothing to him. The suggestion that the specific gravity of the giant planet meant that only light metals like sodium, potassium, and lithium—all interacting readily with water—could exist there. . . . Such a suggestion would have had exactly no meaning at all.

His mind dwelt exclusively upon the fact that any human being who came within a half-mile of him must fall unconscious and remain so. To the human race he was a menace; a devil. And that if he should manage to get the thick and clumsy pot off his head, he too would fall unconscious and remain so. He was in the most horrible solitary confinement imaginable.

He was invulnerable, to be sure. He could rob with impunity and do murder without fear of any penalty. But nobody could speak to him. Ever.

On the fourth day he went into East Lupton for food.

On the fifth day aeroplanes flew overhead, back and forth. One suddenly went spinning, out of control, dipping down toward the treetops. It recovered, a bare few hundred feet up and three-quarters of a mile away. The planes disappeared.

On the sixth day bombs fell. The first racking explosions terrified him incomparably. He fled through the underbrush. He came out of it and saw soldiers. They made a cordon about an area of woodland probably two miles square. They toppled in unconscious heaps as. Mr. Tedder drew near them, and as if that were a signal there were distant boomings and artillery shells fell close to where he peered out. Mr. Tedder ran away. He dodged shells and bombs until night fell, then he ran, weeping bitterly to himself.

"I ain't done nothing wrong!" The thought beat through his imprisoned head.

Of course the troops could not stop him. He pelted through their lines, unheeding. Presently he reached the village of East Lupton. No figures moved in it. Desperate, he entered it. There were many soldiers among the heaps of shallow-breathing, staring-eyed folk who lay slackly wherever unconsciousness had overtaken them.

Mr. Tedder found food, and wolfed it. The store in which he found it was a country-village general store and sold everything. Mr. Tedder was half-mad, now. The thing he wore was an intolerable burden. One of the sore places on his head from its, rubbing was excruciatingly painful. It was infected.

Other sore places were developing. And he was a sort of devil, working havoc wherever he moved. He took weapons—for which he had no need—and metal-cutting tools he would not dare to use. . . . And he saw newspapers.

GUNS TO BLAST DEVIL OF EAST LUPTON

He read the news account. The one-mile circle of insensibility had been deduced. Its cause was not understood, but it was certain that some sensate thing was its center. It moved. It had made definite travels and returned to its starting-point. Troops now cordoned the place where it nested restlessly, and artillery was being massed. A barrage that nothing could survive would presently be poured in. . . .

Mr. Tedder looked at a powerful, sleek car. He could take it and go anywhere, and all of humanity was powerless to stop him—or to help him. Anyone who came near him would fall senseless. Even he, if he took off the thing on his head....

A motor-truck came rolling into the village, its driver stricken unconscious at the wheel. It seemed certain to roll on and on.

Mr. Tedder screamed at it. But something deflected its wheels. It curved sedately from the highway and ploughed across a sidewalk and crashed into the corner of a house.

When the sun rose, Mr. Tedder was back at the abandoned farm which for no reason at all he considered his headquarters. His eyes were red with bitter weeping. His meek expression was utterly woebegone. But his determination was made.

Great bombers roared high overhead, so high they were mere specks. Things dropped from them. Boomings began, all around the horizon. Shells struck and blasted. The tumult, once begun, was unending.

Mr. Tedder cringed. Shaken and battered, he filed at the chain-link strap which held the pot on his head. The metal was soft, but the links shifted under his fingers, which trembled uncontrollably.

A shell burst fifty yards away. Mr. Tedder was moved to sheer hysteria. He could do no such fine work as filing. He took the snips he had appropriated the night before. Once the thing was off his head, he would know nothing; no terror, no pain; nothing at all. The pot which had ridden him like the Old Man of the Sea would kill him. But he wanted to be rid of it. He did not want to be near it even in death. "Just get it off me!" he shouted. He was a little mad now.

The earth shook under him. Blast-waves beat at him. Half-deafened, sobbing, he crawled to the well. He pulled at the rotten boards. He hung his head over the noisome depth. He used the metal-snips—he had trouble getting them under the chain-link strap—to chew at the soft metal. The earth trembled under concussions. Bits of loose earth and rotted wood tumbled into the well from its edges.

The snips met triumphantly.... The pot tumbled down into the well and floated for a moment, rocking. Then it tilted and filled and sank. A thin, scummy veil of bubbles arose. Some light metals react readily with water. Potassium violently, sodium freely, lithium readily. The pot was of an alloy which would be highly useful where it was permanently too cold for water ever to turn liquid. But on earth …

Mr. Tedder sat up. He felt giddy; light-headed; incredibly relieved. But a shell fell thirty yards away, and a bomb exploded horribly just over the ridge, and something ripped through the half-collapsed house and exploded on beyond. There had been a devil in this woods. The devil of East Lupton, Vermont. The artillery searched for it, to exorcise it, but Mr. Tedder was not unconscious.

"It's gone!" he cried joyfully. "And I'm okay now."

It would never occur to him that designers of a weapon who planned for the tightening of a fastening-strap when it was turned on, so that it could not possibly make its own wearer a victim, would also arrange for it to be turned off if the fastening-strap should be broken or cut. It would be the most obvious of safety devices.

But Mr. Tedder's intellectual processes would never grasp such a thing. He simply knew that he was not unconscious and that the bombardment went on. It was overwhelming. It was maddening. Mr. Tedder put his hands over his ears and wept, cringing to the earth and awaiting death.

Then the earth seemed to buckle beneath him. It raised up and dealt him a violent blow. Over where the frosted sphere lay self-buried in the ground, there was a sudden, incredible, impossible flare. A shell had hit the enigmatic globe in which an untended motor had run so long. The sphere exploded.

The violence of the explosion suggested power much greater than anything human. The fuel-store of the sphere must have detonated. It made a crater a quarter-mile across, and every least fragment of the sphere itself was atomized and destroyed.

The explosion seemed to the military to mark the death of something spectacular. They stopped the barrage and explosions.

They found Mr. Tedder unconscious. He was sleeping as if drugged, from reaction to the end of strain. Near him there was a caved-in well which, of course, was not worth digging out.

It was assumed that Mr. Tedder had remained unconscious through all the career of the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. He was hospitalized, and kindly told what had happened, and ultimately turned loose with a new suit of clothes and a five-dollar bill. And Mr. Tedder disappeared into the vast obscurity of the world of tramps, bums, blanket-stiffs and itinerant workmen.

And to this day nobody pretends that they really understood anything about the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont. There are even marked differences of opinion concerning its ending. Mr. Tedder thinks he was the Devil, and that he somehow ceased to be fiendish when he got the pot off his head. Other authorities think that heavy ordnance destroyed the Devil, and point to a quarter-mile crater as proof.

But if by the Devil of East Lupton you mean the Whatever-it-was that came out of the Somewhere into the Here and caused all the catastrophes by his mere arrival. . . . Why, in that case, and strictly speaking, the Devil of East Lupton, Vermont, was the Whatever-it-was which was in a leathery, hidelike garment or pressure-suit the morning Mr. Tedder ran away from the constable. And that Devil was destroyed by a rusty barbed wire which was strung between two trees on an abandoned farm. And it was killed long before so much as the existence of a Devil in those parts was suspected.

CONQUERORS' ISLE

Nelson Bond

"You've got to believe this," said Brady. He spoke with tense, white-knuckled ferocity, his eyes intent on those of the older man. "It sounds utterly impossible, I know. It sounds —it sounds crazy. That's why I'm here. But it's the truth, and you've got to believe it! Got to—sir," he finished, belatedly acknowledging his listener's seniority.

Lieutenant Commander Gorham said quietly: "At ease, Lieutenant. I'm here to consult with you as a physician, not order your cure as a superior officer. Suppose we ignore the braid while you tell me about it?"

Joe Brady smiled. It was his first smile in weeks, and his face could not quite accomplish it. His lips twisted jerkily, but his eyes remained blank windows into torment.

He said: "Thank you, Doctor. Where would you like me to begin?"

Gorham shuffled the pages of the lieutenant's case history. Random excerpts telescoped three years of spotless if not spectacular service: Brady, Joseph Travers. . . . Age: 24. . . . Graduated, U.S.N.A., 1941. . . . Pre-Flight Training, Sarasota, 1941-2. . . . Assigned: U.S.S. Stinger. . . . Lieutenant (j.g.) 1942. . . . Group Citation. . . . Recommended for ......

"It's your story," said the doctor carefully. "You know what it is you want me to believe. The trouble began, I understand, on your last bombing mission?"

"That's right. Or rather, that's when my troubles began. The thing's been going on for longer than that—much longer. Years, certainly; perhaps decades." Brady's fingers were like talons on the desk top. "Someone's got to do something, Doctor! Time is racing by, and with every passing day they grow stronger. I've got to make people understand—"

"At the beginning?" suggested Gorham. "Suppose you start with that unfortunate last flight."

His calm matter-of-fact tone had a soothing effect on the younger man. Brady's voice lost its high note of hysteria.
"Yes, sir," he said. "Very good, sir. Well, then, it was this way. We accomplished our mission and started for him—"

We accomplished our mission (said Lieutenant Brady) and started home. "Home" was, of course, the Stinger. I can tell you, now that the war's over, where we were and what we were doing. We were cruising the South China Sea, roughly off Palawan, between the Philippines and Indo-China. Our job was to harass enemy shipping in that area, breaking the life line between the Straits and the Nipponese home islands. Our task force was in position to support any one of a dozen land invasions from Labuan to Hainan, and our air arm periodically feinted at concentration points to confuse the Japs.

Our latest target had been Songeau, and it was from this port we were returning when it happened.

We sighted a tramp beating her way up the coast, and I called the squadron leader for permission to unload a heavy I was carrying home undropped. He O.K.'d, and we peeled off. The freighter opened up on us with all she had as we came in, but she might as well have been throwing spit balls. We laid our egg down her aft stack, and she flew into pieces like one of those toys kids play with. You know—the kind you push a button, and blooie!

So that was that, and we were all talking it up and feeling pretty hot stuff when all of a sudden we discovered we were losing elevation like crazy. It seems the freighter had died like a rat, clawing in her death agony. A hunk of her exploding hide had slashed one of our wing tanks, and we were spraying gas all over the South China Sea.

Even then we weren't worried. The Navy watches out for its own, and we knew that an hour after we were forced to our life rafts, a rescue party would be out to pick us up. So we reported the bad news to the squadron leader and accepted his condolences philosophically; and with no great dismay watched the flight dwindle to black dots as we lurch along, coaxing every last possible mile out of our ruptured duck.

It would be annoying, we thought, and a nuisance. But it wouldn't be dangerous. That's what we thought.

That's what we thought, being logical guys. But in the South Pacific area you can toss logic and reason out the window.

About ten minutes after the flight had disappeared, and about one cupful of gas before we'd have to ditch, out of a bald, blue, breezeless nowhere came thundering mountains of cumulus, torrential cloudbursts of rain, and a shrieking hundred-mile gale that picked us up, and whirled us like the button on a hen-coop door.

How long we rode that thing, I haven't the faintest idea. I had no time for clock-watching; I had all I could do holding the Ardent Alice—that was our ship's name—holding the Ardent Alice's nose steady in the face of that blast. It grabbed us, and shook us, and lifted and dropped us, and spun us as if we weighed ounces instead of tons. We had no way of climbing above the storm, of course; we just had to sit there and take it. At least a dozen times I was sure we were going to be slammed into the sea, but each time the unpredictable wind jerked us upstairs again to play with us some more.

All three of us were nerve-tattered, bone-bruised, and dog-sick from the storm's beating, and not one but would have cheerfully given up a year's shore leave to be clear of this mess. And then, suddenly—as suddenly as it had sprung from nowhere—the typhoon passed. One minute we were standing on our ears in a maelstrom of wind and rain; the next, the skies were crystal clear and a benevolent sun beamed down on a blue tranquil sea, while under the shadow of our wing tips lay the pink-and-green sanctuary of a tropical island!

Gorham coughed politely, interrupting his patient. "Pardon me, Lieutenant. I'd like to make a note of that. It may be important. An island? What island?"

Brady shrugged helplessly.

"I don't know, sir. We had been twisted, battered, bounced around so badly, and for so long, that none of us had any idea where we were. We might have been one mile or fifty—or five hundred!—from where the typhoon struck us."

His voice strengthened with purpose. "But wherever it is, we've got to find that island again. Got to! Because it's Their island. Unless we find it, and destroy Them—"

"Suppose," suggested the doctor quietly, "you go on with your story? You reached this uncharted island. And you landed safely, I take it?"

"That's right, sir. We landed safely on a sandy strip of beach—"

We landed safely (continued 'Lieutenant Brady) on a sandy strip of beach. We were jubilant at having made a safe harbor but uncertain as to just how safe the harbor was. We didn't know, you see, whether we'd been carried into friendly or enemy territory. In that God-forsaken corner of the world there was also the possibility that the island's inhabitants, if any, might be technically neutral but still dangerous. In other words, head-hunting aborigines.

Imagine our pleasure and surprise, then, when a few minutes after we'd landed we heard a cheerful hail and looked up to find white men approaching us from the wall of tropical foliage that spanned the beach.

They were smiling and unarmed, and they welcomed us in English with courteous enthusiasm. They had seen us land, said the head of their party—a youngish chap who introduced himself as Dr. Grove—and had hurried out to meet us in case anyone needed medical assistance.

I assured him we were all right, and that we needed only food, rest, and a means of communicating our whereabouts to our comrades, who by this time were undoubtedly fanned out over half the South Pacific searching for us.

He nodded. "Food and rest you shall have," he said heartily. "As for the other—those things take time in this primitive country. But we shall see; we shall see."

"We have a radio in the plane—" I began, but Jack Kavanaugh, our radioman, shook his head at me.

"Did have, Skipper! It went out just as we sighted the island. Must have got whanged around a bit in the storm."

"But you can fix it?"

"I suppose so. If it's nothing serious. I'll tell you better after I've had a chance to look it over."

"Of course," nodded Grove. "But in the meantime, I hope you'll accent our humble hospitality? We don't have the pleasure of entertaining new guests here very often. It will be good to chat with you all. If you'll follow me—"

There was nothing else to do. Like sheep being led to the slaughter—blindly trusting and without a struggle—we followed him off the beach into a winding jungle path.

It was Tom Goeller, my gunner, who first intimated there might be something wrong about this setup. Even he did not really suspect anything; he was just puzzled. He wondered aloud as we pushed forward: "Where from? I don't get it!"

"Don't get what?" I asked him. "What do you mean—where from? What's biting you, Tom?"

"That Grove character," grumbled Tom. "He said they saw us land. Only—where from? Where the hell do they live? In the trees? I had a good look at this island just before we landed. A good, long look—from topside. And I didn't see a sign of anything that looked like a house."

I said: "By God, you're right! I didn't, either. I wonder if—

But my question was answered before I voiced it. We stopped, inexplicably, before a sort of concrete shelter under a sprawling banyan tree; a lean-to sort of business in mottled green and brown—so perfectly camouflaged to conform with its surroundings that you could hardly see it from ten yards away, much less from air.

Dr. Grove smiled and said: "Here we are, gentlemen." He touched a button, and the shelter door swung open. "If you will be good enough to enter—"

Kavanaugh spoke up roughly. "Enter what? That?"

Grove laughed pleasantly. "Don't be alarmed. It's merely an elevator. The entrance is from around level."

"An elevator!" I exclaimed. "In this jungle? What kind of monkey business is this, anyhow? Do you mean to tell me you live underground?"

"My dear Lieutenant," said the self-styled "Doctor" languidly, "I'll be glad to explain everything—later. It's all very simple. But first I must insist that you—"

"Oh!" I interrupted. "So now you are insisting, eh? And suppose we prefer not to step into your mysterious little parlor? Then what?"

"Then," sighed Dr. Grove, "I should be compelled—most regretfully—to enforce my request."

"That right?" I grunted. "Guess again, pal. There are more of you than us—but we happen to be armed." I took out automatic and held it on him level. "That's one detail you seem to have overlooked. Now—"

"I overlook no details, Lieutenant," answered Grove quietly. "Would you be kind enough to fire your gun? If you have qualms against killing a man in cold blood"—his lips curled mockingly—"you might fire into the air."

I stared at him, baffled. He wasn't stalling. You can feel things like that. He was amused, superior, contemptuous. Goeller said: "Watch yourself, Skipper; it's a trick! He wants you to shoot. The sound will bring help."

Grove smiled. "Wrong, my friend. I need no help." He slipped a hand into his breast pocket. "Very well. Since you won't accept my invitation—"

Shooting was risky, but I had no choice. "O.K.," I snapped. "You asked for it!" And I squeezed the trigger. I froze on it, waiting for the blast, and the sight of his body crumpling before me.

But nothing happened!

Gorham, listening to this recital, blinked. "You mean," he suggested, "the gun missed fire—that it jammed?"

"I mean," said Brady helplessly, "it just didn't go off; that's all. It didn't miss fire. It didn't jam. There wasn't a thing wrong with it, mechanically. Later I took it down piece by piece and examined it. It was perfect. But it just wouldn't fire on that island."

Gorham said slowly: "It wouldn't fire—on that island?" His eyes on the younger man were cautious, and he was doodling thoughtfully on the pad before him. "But that's incredible! Why not?"

"I soon found out," said Brady grimly, "about that. About that and a lot of other things—"

I stood there (said Brady) speechless. I couldn't understand. At first I thought—like you—that my gun had jammed. Then suddenly I discovered that the other men had drawn their guns too—and that they too were staring incredulously at utterly futile weapons.

"You see?" shrugged Grove. "Now, perhaps, you will be kind enough to step into the shaft?"

"Not on your life!" I blazed back. "I don't understand what's going on here. But whatever it is, I don't want any part of it. Come on, gang! Let's get out of here!"

"I'm sorry," said the doctor. "You force me to use harsh measures. Believe me, I do so reluctantly."

From his breast pocket he drew a slender tube about the size and shape of a fountain pen. He pointed it at me—at us, I should say, because from it suddenly flowed a silver cone of radiance.

I started to rush him, shouting something or other. But both shout and movement stopped abruptly as that curious, silvery radiance engulfed me. It wasn't a gas. It was odorless and tasteless; it did not bum or sting or cause pain in any way. But it was as though I had charged into an ocean of lambent cobwebs, to become enmeshed in a shroud of moonbeams. I could neither move nor speak; only my senses functioned.

As in a dream, I heard Dr. Grove bid his followers: "Place them in the shaft. Gently, please!" Then the feel of hands lifting, carrying me; they felt—how can I explain it?—they felt far away upon my body, as though layers of sponge rubber lay between their flesh and mine.

I could see, too, but only straight ahead of me, in the direction in which my pupils were fixed. I couldn't move my eyes. So I saw only that the interior of the elevator was of smooth, polished metal, anomalous in these surroundings. I heard the whine of an electric motor and sensed, rather than felt, the motion of our swift descent.

Dr. Grove leaned over me, thrusting himself into my line of vision.

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant," he said. "I sincerely regret having had to inconvenience you. But, you see, firearms won't work on this island. No explosions of any kind are permitted—unless by special arrangement. We have means of hampering your primitive mechanical devices. That is why your guns did not fire, and why your radio will not operate."

I was filled with a thousand questions, but I could not ask them, not even with my eyes. "What are these means?" I wanted to ask him. "And who, or what, are you that you should speak of a radio as a primitive mechanical device? Where are we going, and what are you planning to do with us? All these questions hammered at my brain, but my tongue was silent.

Then the sensation of movement stopped, I heard the elevator door slide open, and our captors lifted us again. I saw the metal ceilings of long, well-lighted corridors, and heard voices proclaiming the presence of many more persons in these subterranean vaults, and once was silent witness to a conversation between Grove and someone apparently his superior.

"Well, Frater?"

"I'm sorry, Frater Dorden. It was necessary. They would not come willingly."

"I see." A sigh. "Few of them do. Ah, well—put them in sleeping chambers until they recover. . . . And be gentle. They are frightened, poor devils."

And then our journey continued through a maze of clean-gleaming metal corridors, until finally I was carried through a doorway and placed tenderly on a cot. A light covering was thrown over me; its pleasant warmth made me realize how weary I was. I could not close my eyes, but the lights were dimmed slowly, and at last in utter darkness I forgot my troubles in sleep. . . .

I do not know whether the return of lights awakened me, or whether some unseen control automatically brought back the illumination when I awoke. At any rate, I roused from my slumber to find the room bright again.

Even more important was the fact that I could move. I leaped from my cot and sprang to the door at the other side of the room but, as I had expected, it was locked. So I gave up, for the time being, any idea of attempting to escape and set myself to a study of my surroundings.

For one thing, I was alone. Apparently our captors had assigned each of us to a separate chamber, or cell. This one was Spartan in its simplicity. Four walls of a dull gray metallic substance I could not immediately identify—a floor of some resilient rubber or plastic composition—a low ceiling of the same material as the walls. A cot, a chair, and a desk were the only furnishings. There were no decorations on the walls; no carpet covered the floor; and of course—since we were underground—there were no windows.

What amazed me most was that there were no lighting fixtures. I looked in vain for any source from which originated the pleasant, unflickering illumination that flooded the room. I found nothing. It was no jiggery-pokery of indirect lighting, either. The flow of light was constant and, oddly enough, there were no shadows!

I think that's when I started to get frightened. I don't mean flabby-lipped, knock-kneed scared, but cold. Cold and awed and numbed, like—well, the way a trapped rabbit must feel when it sees the hunter approaching.

These persons, these men who spoke with indifferent contempt of mankind's finest accomplishments, who regretfully and casually employed weapons and tools unknown to science —who were they? And why had we been separated? Where were my comrades—Kavanaugh and Goeller? Suddenly, desperately, I needed the reassurance of their presence.

I raised my voice and shouted. There was no reply. The impassive walls should have echoed the panic in my voice, being metal. But, like everything else in this strange place, it behaved unnaturally. It absorbed the sound, sopping it up as a sponge absorbs water.

I shouted again and again. Fruitlessly, I thought. But not fruitlessly. For suddenly I heard the faintest sound behind me and whirled. Dr. Grove was stepping through the wall.

Lieutenant Brady stopped abruptly, as if in anticipation of his listener's reaction. It came. Gorham, despite his training as a psychiatrist, stopped doodling and tossed a swift, anxious frown at the younger man.

With an obvious effort he erased the sudden pursing of his lips. He said quietly: "Through the wall, Lieutenant? Of course you mean through the door?"

"Through the wall," said Brady dully. "Through the wall, sir. The door was in front of me. But Dr. Grove stepped into my cell through the solid metal wall."

"You realize," said Gorham, "that what you are saying is impossible?"

"To us"—Brady's eyes were haggard—"it is. To Them, nothing is impossible. Nothing! Or very little. That is why we must act, and act now! Before it is too late. You must believe me, sir! This is man's last chance—"

"I'll do my best," promised Gorham. "Perhaps you'd better continue? This Dr. Grove stepped through the wall—"

I'll cut it short (said Brady wanly). I'll tell it as quickly as I can. I'm just wasting your time and mine. I can tell by your eyes that you don't believe me. But someone must. Somewhere, somehow, sometime—someone must. . . . Well, as I was saying, Dr. Grove stepped through the wall. And strange as it may sound, in that moment my panic ended. I still feared; yes. But I feared as a man fears a god, or a demon, or a raw and elemental force beyond his comprehension. I did not look on him with dread, as one watches a human foe charge upon him with flaming gun or bloodstained sword; I looked on him with awe, knowing him to be as far above and beyond me in the life scale as I am superior to a dog or a beast of burden.

So it was we talked—not as man to man, but as man to a lesser creature. And I was the lesser creature. He was the master, I the serf. And he told me many things. . . .

Has it ever occurred to you, Doctor, that we humans are an egotistic race? Our Darwins and our Huxleys have told us we are the product of a steady, progressive evolution—an evolution that started in primeval slime and has gradually developed to our present proud and self-proclaimed status as homo sapiens.

Homo sapiens—intelligent man! . . . But perhaps we are not so intelligent, at that. For in our blind folly we have assumed ourselves to be the final and glorious end product of Nature's eternal striving toward perfection!

Could we not guess that the same force which led the first lungfish from primordial ooze to solid earth—the force which evolved the Neanderthal man from his bestial, hairy ancestor, and developed from this rock-hurling cave man a race that works its destruction with atomic fission—could we not have guessed that this force would inevitably progress a step farther?

That is what has happened. There dwells upon earth today a race representing the next step in man's progress. A people to whom our thoughts are as immature and elementary as to us is the prattling of infants.

They begin where we leave off. Our vaunted physics and mathematics are their nursery ABC's; the hard-won learning of our best brains is theirs intuitively. They sense what we must study; and what they must study, we cannot even begin, to grasp. They are the new lords of creation—homo superior!

How they came to be, that is one thing even they do not know. There is a force called "mutation" which you, as a doctor, must understand better than I. By mutation a white rose appears among red, and the white breed true from that time on. The new men are mutants. They—or the first of them—were born of normal parents. But from the cradle they sensed that they were different. Having a telepathic instinct, they were able to discern their brothers in a crowd—or even over long distances—and they banded together.

Long ago—how long Dr. Grove did not tell me—the new men decided they must isolate themselves from us. It was a logical decision. They had no more in common with us than we have with our pets. Few men, by choice, dine with dogs or sleep in stables.

So they sought this secluded island in the Pacific, far from lesser man's civilization. They went underground to escape detection. There they live, and study, and learn, and wait with infinite patience for the day when they must emerge and take over the world which is theirs by inheritance—even as homo sapiens took it from his beetle-browed forebear, the ape man.

"We are few in number," Grove told me, "but we increase with each passing year. Some are born here; others come from the four corners of the earth, drawn to us by mental rapport. Soon we will be many enough, and strong enough, to accept the responsibility of government of all the earth."

"You mean," I said, "destroy man? And claim the entire world for yourselves?"

Grove said almost sadly: "How little you understand us, you humans. Do you destroy the animals of the field just because they are not your intellectual peers? Our obligation is to keep and protect you; to act as your friendly guardians in a world that will be strange to you, and frightening.

"Yes, frightening," he went on as I began some protest. "I saw the dread and horror in your eyes when I walked into the room. You did not understand how I passed through a wall that to you seems solid. Not understanding, you feared.

"Yet there is nothing supernatural or fearful about what I did; about what any of us can do at will. There is no such thing as a solid in a universe wherein all things—size and dimension and substance—are but relative. We know there is room and to spare for the molecules comprising our persons to pass unhindered through the molecules comprising these walls. We simply make a necessary mental adjustment and walk where we will. It is an ability as basic, as fundamental, to us as breathing is to a person like you."

"Then what," I asked him, "is your plan for man?"

"Your question should be," he replied gently, "what is Nature's plan for man? And I believe the question answers itself. The answer lies in history. What became of Nature's earlier experiments: the giant reptiles, the anthropoids, the men who dwelt in caves and trees?"

"They died out," I said. "Civilization passed them by. They fell before the onrush of higher life forms."

"Even so," Grove said regretfully. "Even so. But you have our pledge that we will be kind. We will be kind."

You see, that was the essence of the matter. These new men are intelligent, a thousandfold more intelligent than we. And being that great step farther along the path to perfection, they are born with the instinct to gentleness. That is why their weapons anesthetize, but do not harm. They will not, they cannot, kill.

I could go on for hours relating what I heard and saw during the three weeks I was prisoner in the subterranean refuge of the new men. I'll tell only a few things, because I can see you—like all the others—think I am mad. But there are some things you should know.

Those metal cells hold more than two hundred humans like you and me, men and women who have stumbled by accident upon the hideaway island and have been restrained there lest they go back and tell the world of the conquest to come.

They are comfortable, of course. They are well fed and housed, entertained and made as happy as possible—under the circumstances. Men do not ruthlessly destroy their pets. And on that island, men are the wards of supermen.

I could quote names that would amaze you. A famous author and traveler whose ship disappeared some years ago in the Pacific—a big-game hunter supposedly killed—an aviatrix for whom a dozen fleets sought in vain. They are there.

I could tell you something else that would make the small hairs creep on the back of your neck—if you dared let yourself believe it. They are here among us already, the new men. As their hour of ascendancy approaches, they are paving the way for their bloodless conquest. Some of them have left the island and taken their places in our world. You can see the master plan. A handful of them settled in key spots—here a politician, there are industrial magnate, there an author whose every word is gospel to his readers—what chance has a race of underlings to combat them when they strike?

And they will strike, and soon. When they do, that will be our end as the rulers of earth. For they cannot fail in anything they try. We, as a people, are strong. But They are omnipotent!

"That is why," concluded Brady, "you've got to make yourself believe me, no matter how crazy this sounds. You've got to, Doctor. From the broader point of view; perhaps it's better they should inherit the earth. But I am a human. And as a member of my race, I do not want to fall before a higher culture, no matter how superior.

"I want to live! And if we want to live, They must die. Their island must be destroyed, utterly and completely. An atomic bomb—"

"You have said," interrupted Dr. Gorham, "that they are omnipotent. You have called them wise with the wisdom of demigods. Yet you escaped from their island without outside help. Is that proof of their superhuman intelligence?"

Brady shook his head.

"It is proof of their great kindness, and my animal cunning.

"There is a chink in their armor. I took advantage of it. They cannot willfully cause any creature pain. Knowing this, I begged Grove to take me to the surface so I could get some things from the Ardent Alice one day. Some personal belongings, I told him. Pictures of my loved ones that I had hidden in a secret compartment of the plane.

"He agreed. We had been on friendly terms for some weeks, and he suspected no treachery. That is a human trait. They cannot conceive of guile or deceit.

"He was careless, and I was desperate. He turned to look when I cried out and pointed to something behind him; he never knew what hit him. I don't know whether my rock killed him or not. I hope not.

"The plane, of course, was useless. But there were self-inflating life rafts, and the water was only yards away. I paddled from that devil's shore with the strength of a madman. You know the rest: How my food and water ran out. How they found me raving deliriously days or maybe weeks lat bearded and sun-blistered and more than half dead."

Dr. Gorham nodded and quietly closed the memo book in which he had scratched only doodles.

"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes. It must have been a terrible experience."

He rose.

"Well, Lieutenant—" he said awkwardly.

Lieutenant Brady stared at him with hopeless eyes.

"You don't believe me, either," he said. "Do you?"

"It's been a pleasure listening to your story," the medico said. "I'll make a report to my superiors. Please be patient and try not to worry. Good day, Lieutenant."

"Go to hell!" said Lieutenant Brady dully. "Oh, go hell—" he added mechanically, "sir."

The doctor stiffened, then gazed compassionately at the younger man for an instant, shrugged, and left the narrow chamber.

Outside, another medical officer greeted him.

"Ah, there, Gorham! You've talked with him? What's the verdict?"

Gorham touched his forehead. "A clear case of persecution mania—an amazing form. I've never heard a tale so complete and logical, but—" He shrugged. "Do what you can for him. I'm afraid he's going to be here for a long time —perhaps for as long as he lives. Turned loose, he might be dangerous."

The other medical officer shook his head.

"Tough! A nice boy, too. But it does nasty things to a man, floating for weeks in a life raft. He was the only one of his crew to survive. Well, Doctor—will you lunch with me?"

"No, thanks," said Gorham. "I've got to run along. Have to turn in a report and a recommendation on this case."

"Of course. See you later, then."

The other medico disappeared down the spotless corridor of the mental ward. Gorham pondered briefly, orienting himself. He was in the west wing of the hospital, facing the street. His car stood at the curb just outside. He was very busy. There was so much work to be done; so much. And if he walked through the anteroom, some fool was sure to delay him, drag him into a longwinded discussion. He didn't feel a bit like talking. He wanted to get out of this place and forward his report—his report that the Brady case was closed. That there would be no more trouble from that source.

He glanced swiftly up and down the corridor. There was no one in sight. His senses told him the street was also deserted. There was no danger of his being seen. So—

So Dr. Gorham turned and walked quietly through the wall.

SOMETHING FROM ABOVE
Donald Wandrei

In themselves, the events had all the horror of a nightmare but a nightmare can be explained so that it ceases to oppress one's mind. The incidents at Norton in western Minneso were different, for now they may never be completely explained. It is not so much the things we know that terrify us as it is the things we do not know, the things that break all known laws and rules, the things that come upon us unaware and shatter the pleasant dream of our little world. The occurrence at Norton was of such a kind, a horror of so appalling and incredible a nature that no one concerned will ever be able to forget the day of madness.

Everything that might have any bearing on the explanation is included in the following narrative in order that the truth may not be overlooked through omission. It may be that some facts have not yet come to light, and perhaps there have been included a few details that do not really pertain to the affair. The incidents themselves may not be in the right order. If further information should be possessed by any one, the narrative will gladly be corrected, for anything that may help to explain will be eagerly welcomed by scientists and public alike. We walk in darkness with phantoms and specters we know not of, and our little world plunges blindly through abysses toward a goal of which we have no conception. That thought itself is a blow at our beliefs and comprehension. We used to content ourselves by thinking we knew all about our world, at least; but now it is different, and we wonder if we really know anything, or if there can be safety and peace anywhere in the wide universe.

The phenomena with which we are here concerned began with the blotting out of the stars, an astronomical riddle which was observed by three watchers: Professor Grill of Harvard; his assistant, Mr. Thorndyke; and an amateur astronomer in California, Mr. Nelson. An odd feature of the observation is that the two Easterners swear the blotting out occurred far down on the western horizon, whereas Mr. Nelson reported that it took place near Saturn. Are we to believe that one observation was inaccurate, or that there actually were two simultaneous phenomena in different parts of the heavens? In the light of former and after events, the latter conclusion seems more likely. Furthermore, Mr. Nelson's observation, made on the night of March 28, is apparently connected with one he had made on the preceding night. According to a note he had sent in to the Mount Wilson Observatory, he had been idly examining the planet Saturn on the night of March 27. The atmosphere was exceptionally clear, the observation perfect. The rings were so plain and the planet so impressive in its peculiar way that he stayed on watching it minute after minute. Thus it was that the unexpected happened even while he watched. Shortly after one o'clock, there appeared on its surface a spot of such blinding, dazzling radiance that he thought his vision must have been strained and he was merely seeing things. He looked away for a minute; when he resumed his watch at the eyepiece of his telescope, he discovered that where the spot of incandescent brilliance had been was now a dot of blackness. As he watched it in curiosity, he saw it grow lighter and lighter until finally the planet presented its normal appearance. Mr. Nelson might have ignored the matter altogether if he had not had sufficient scientific training to respect the cardinal principle of never overlooking any fact or data. Thus it was that he wrote down his observation and duly sent it in.

The blotting out of the stars on the night of March 28 was an even stranger phenomenon. In the act of training his telescope on Saturn again to look for a reappearance of the radiant spot, Mr. Nelson noticed a star suddenly flicker out and return, another vanish and shine bright again an instant later. He thought at first that he must be the victim of an optical illusion, but he kept on observing, and saw that the stars which disappeared and shone again were in a straight line which he computed to lie in the general path between Saturn and the Earth. It was a curious spectacle to watch, according to Nelson. It was just as if you were strolling down a street at noon, and stopped to look at a diamond on a black plush cushion in a jeweller's window; and then all at once the diamond wasn't there, even while you were looking at it; and then suddenly there was the diamond again, sparkling as ever. It was not as if a solid body had come between you and the diamond, but rather as if something invisible had crossed your field of vision, something you could not see but which intercepted light-rays. The observation of the two Harvard astronomers duplicated Nelson's, but they said that the blotting out took place down on the western horizon, far away from Saturn. Odder still is their statement that the stars vanished in a straight line that progressed in the general direction of the Earth.

No wide attention was paid to these unusual observations, and even the three watchers did not have much more than idle curiosity. For that reason, because every one was unprepared, the terror at Norton stalked out of night like a hideous dream, as overwhelming as madness itself. Perhaps the rest of the story should be told through the eyes of Lars Loberg, a stolid Norwegian farmer living some three miles from Norton, for it was around his farm that the terror centered, and he himself was a first-hand witness until he went insane and committed suicide.

He arose early as usual on the morning of March 30. It was cold in the farmhouse and he stepped outside to chop an armful of kindling wood. It was already light and snow was falling when he opened the door. He started to go through, then stopped just beyond the threshold and looked around with a blank, puzzled expression on his face. He carefully traced his steps to the room he had just left, and stood there, looking across the farmyard and open fields.

"Helga!" he called in a curious tone to his wife. "Come here!"

His wife came, and the two stood in the doorway looking at a sight such as they had never before seen. The whole air seemed to be oozing blood. Not a breath of wind was stirring, not a cloud hung in the sky, but a fine mist was falling, a substance that was neither snow nor dust nor blood but that had something of the nature of all three. The snowdrifts around the farmhouse that were not yet fully melted in the spring thaws were already covered with a mantle of brownish-red, and minute by minute, as the strange stuff kept falling from the sky, the layer on the ground grew thicker. The two of them stood there in the quiet of dawn with awe and a little fear, looking at the unusual downfall and a world that was bloody-red. There was a queer odor in the air, almost a stench. It reminded Lars of a two-days-dead cat he once stumbled on, and of a pig he had bled to death recently.

Lars stretched his arm out and caught some of the falling stuff in his hand.

"See!" he said simply to Helga. The stuff melted. It did not run off like water. It stayed in little oily globules of a color like old blood. Instead of having the fresh, earthly smell of snow or rain, it gave off an unpleasant odor that offensively suggested something dead.

Helga was superstitious. She shivered and drew back from Lars' outstretched palm. "Red snow!" she said uneasily. "It—it ain't natural—I don't like it. Oh. Lars, shut the door!"

Lars looked out somberly for a minute. "Yeah—red snow. Maybe it means a bad year for the crops." Then he shrugged his shoulders and half smiled at Helga. "But it's probably only dust in the air that got mixed up with the snow. Nothing to get scared about, and—"

"Listen!" broke in Helga sharply.

Lars left unfinished what he had started to say. Up to the house from the pig-sty drifted an uproar of grunting and mad squealing such as he had never heard. In the barn, the horses were neighing and whinnying shrilly, and he heard the wild clatter of trampling hooves. Above the racket of the frightened animals he heard the mournful, whimpering howl of Jerry, the Scotch collie.

Lars tore out of the house on a run. "You stay here!" he shouted back as Helga started to follow him. "I'll see what's after 'em and quiet 'em down!"

The red snow was still falling. Lars raced to the barn first but there were no tracks of any intruder around it in the new-fallen snow, nor could he find any evidence that man or beast had been prowling around the pig-pen. Lars ran back to the barn, slid open the doors, and did his best to quiet the plunging horses. Something had badly scared them, but he had little time to speculate on what it was. For the first time in his life, the animals paid hardly any attention to his efforts to calm them, and Lars became more puzzled and bewildered every moment. Then he heard Jerry howling nearer, the patter of racing feet came across the yard, and the dog leaped through the open door, shaking itself and tumbling around at his feet.

"There, Jerry, there, Jerry," Lars crooned, bending over to pat the dog. His hand came away wet with the snow, and then it struck him that the animals were afraid of the weird downfall.

There was nothing much he could do till the snow stopped, so he walked around among them talking to them and patting them until they became a little more quiet. About seven o'clock, the snow ceased falling. The horses were still nervous, but gradually ended their crazy bucking and whinnying. Lars decided it was safe to leave them now, and walked back to the farmhouse, mopping his brow.

Over bacon and eggs and steaming coffee, Lars and Helga discussed the phenomenon, but with these homely breakfast items before them and a-warm feeling inside, the strange snow became less mysterious and alarming to them.

"No wonder the pigs and hosses was scared!" said Lam, half in jest. "I guess anybody'd feel funny to see red snow instead of white. But it ain't anything to worry about. It's probably just dust in the air like I said."

"Maybe so," Helga answered doubtfully. "But where's there any red dust around here?"

The question stumped Lam. Ha knew Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, and Nebraska, but in none of those states was there anything with the peculiar color of the snow.

"I wish you'd stay around here today," Helga kept on slowly. "I don't feel right somehow. Things ain't natural like they ought to be."

"No need to worry," Lars answered briefly. "Everything's all right."

As if in mockery of his words, the whole house shook, the coffee slopped across the table, and a terrific crash burst on their ears from nearby.

Without a word Lars made another run for the door. Helga, with superstitious fear clutching heavy at her heart, stayed behind to straighten out the table. Some intuition warned her that something was wrong with the world. The red snow, and now this explosive crash—what could they mean? She heard Lars and Jerry walking around the farmhouse as they searched for the cause of the, disturbance, but when Lam re-entered the house ten minutes later, the frown on his face showed the futility of his search.

"What was it?" Helga asked.

"Nothing that I could find," he replied, puzzled and irritated. "Sounded like a tree or something fell on the barn, but there wasn't anything the matter. I guess maybe we're hearing things that ain't."

It was poor comfort. The two finished their breakfast in silence. At the conclusion of the meal, Lars said briefly, "I'm going up to the forty-acres to see how the ground's coming along. If you want me, shout and I'll hear you." Helga made no answer in spite of her fears—she knew the futility of arguing with Lars.

Her husband called Jerry and the two set off. The sun was up and the sky fairly clear. It was rapidly getting warmer. The red snow already looked soggy and the air had a bad smell, malodorous and stale.

A path led from the rear of the farmhouse down past the chicken coops and barn, cut across the hog-run, then ran across an open field and finally up a small hill, on the other side of which lay the forty-acres, a tract used for wheat. Lars walked down the path past the barn and across the hog-run. As they started across the open field, Jerry suddenly bristled. Lars heard him growl savagely. He looked around, but nothing unusual was in sight.

"C'mon, Jerry," he called and walked on. The dog lagged behind him, growling and whining. Then Lars stopped abruptly in surprise. Some ten yards ahead of him was a great gash in the wet earth. It must have been freshly made, for the earth bulged around its edges, and there was as yet no pool of water in it.

As Lars continued striding toward it after his momentary pause, Jerry set up a furious barking that ended in a lone whining howl, and refused to advance. "Stop that fool barking and come along." Lars swore irritably. His nerves were becoming frayed. But the collie absolutely would not come, and Lars went on, thinking that the dog would follow him if he took the lead.

He was a few feet from the edge of the gash when something he had not seen caught his ankle and he tripped forward. In one mad second of horror, the pit of hell seemed to open up before him. Something else he could not see hit him a great blow on his forehead, and his outstretched arms were bruised on a hard substance. He was leaning forward at a forty-five degree angle over the deep gash. He looked straight down, and saw its bottom a dozen feet below him, but he did not fall. He might have been resting on a steel platform, but there was absolutely nothing in sight.

A great bubbling of sweat broke out on him. The blood from the bruise on his forehead dripped down, but hung suspended in midair a few inches from his face. His eyes glazed with terror, Lars slowly pushed himself upright and stood trembling a moment. He put out his hand again, and his fingers felt the same stuff, hard as steel, colder than ice, with knobs here and there and strange grooves. There was one depression on the solid surface into which he put his fist, and the hand vanished from sight.

At that, sheer fright gripped him and he turned and ran with all his strength while Jerry whined along at his heels. The terrific crash remained a mystery no longer—would to God that it had! Something that never was of this earth had fallen in the midst of an open field, whether by accident or purpose. All the old folk-lore and witch legends of his race surged into his thoughts to increase his panic. But he thought of Helga too as he ran, and decided that he would say nothing which might alarm her more.

He stopped for a minute outside the farmhouse to get his breath. Then he walked in, trying to be his usual self.

"That you, Lars?" Helga called out. A moment later she entered the kitchen. When she saw him, she ran forward. "Why, Lars, your face is bleeding!"

"Yes, I—I tripped and fell."

Helga looked into his eyes that were yet wild and dilated, and the truth of intuition leaned into her heart.

"Lars! That crash—you know what it was! There was something in the field!"

"No," he answered deliberately, "no, there was nothing in the field."

It was a solemn pair that sat down at midday for lunch.

The oppressive weight of mystery and fear hung over the table, and stopped even the small talk that Lars and Helga ordinarily indulged in. By tacit consent, they said nothing further about the incidents of the morning.

Toward two o'clock, the sky began to cloud up, and it grew cooler outside; but the red snow had all melted in the warmth of the late morning, and around the farmhouse bung a putrid smell, stale and nauseating, the odor of a charnel-house or the grave.

Lars puttered around the kitchen and basement, doing odd jobs to pass time. He did not leave the house. His nerves were on the ragged edge, and he did not know what might happen next. The red snow and the thing in the field lay heavy on his heart. Nature had gone all wrong this day, the security and trust of a lifetime had vanished in a brief hour. What could he do in the presence of a mystery that seemed to have no explanation, and things that went against the laws of life he had relied on? As the great masses of leaden clouds piled up overhead, and gusts of chill wind whined around the yard and the house, the indefinable fear of the unknown hung over his thoughts. He had only one ray of hope: that the paper which the rural postman would leave in the afternoon would give some explanation of the mysterious snowfall. The thing in the field he vainly tried to put out of mind by pretending that it must be a new kind of comet.

It was about four o'clock when Lars, who was upstairs fixing a broken window-sash, heard the postman's whistle. He put down his hammer and nails, then walked down a short passage to the head of the stairs. From there, looking across the front bedroom and out its window, he could see the mailbox on its post where the country road ran by some ninety or a hundred yards in front of the house. There the familiar horse and buggy of the postman were halted. To his surprise, Helga with the mail in her hand was standing there too, talking with him but evidently on the point of returning to the house. She must have seen him coming down the road and gone out to meet him.

The sight of Helga made him curiously uneasy. He wished she had waited to let him go after the mail. As he started to descend the flight of steps, he decided he would ask her to stay inside for the next day or so. But all thoughts were driven from his head and black terror overwhelmed him in a sickening rush when he was half-way down.

For there came to his ears a sound that was yet many sounds. There was a strange, long zing-g-g, the mad whinny of a horse, and the sudden, piercing shriek of a woman. And then there came again that long, strange zing-g-g, and the noise of a great wind.

Lars cleared the rest of the steps in one leap and stumbled on a twisted ankle around the corner and to the front door and so outside. The blind fear which he had felt as he hung over the pit that morning suspended by a thing which he could not see was as nothing to the surge of horror that swept upon him now.

For there was no one in sight. The mail-box was deserted. The road stretched away to the left, bare of any human traveler for three-quarters of a mile, and to the right, just as empty for a half-mile. And in the field that stretched away on the other side of the road, not a living creature was to be seen. Helga and the postman with his horse and buggy had vanished as though they had never been.

But there was a curious thing: all around was gray from the clouds that obscured the sky, except in a round patch of blue perhaps a hundred yards in diameter through which sunlight was pouring above the mailbox. Lars mechanically looked up. High above was the single rift in the cloud-banks, a rift that the surging clouds were rapidly filling again. Even as he looked, some white things fluttered toward earth—letters and papers. Lars picked up a handful like one dazed or mad and stumbled back into the house. He was hardly conscious of the sudden roar of wind that came up, or the wall of sleet that drove in a wild slant from the clouds. In the same mechanical, irresponsible way, he turned again and went out into the half-darkness with the hopeless hope that his eyes and ears had played him a trick. He walked down the road in either direction, searched across the field, called and shouted till his voice was hoarse, but not a thing did he find, and no one answered his vain cries. Then at last when the sleet turned to a fine drizzle which ceased shortly, he went back to the farmhouse, still in that numbing daze.

The letters were lying on the floor where he had dropped them, and he automatically picked out of them the paper that he had thought might contain a news item of explanation. But he could not concentrate his thoughts, and they were only disjointed phrases that his eye picked out here and there. "Red snow falls—volcanic dust in upper atmosphere—dust clouds from western prairies—curious unknown organism puzzles scientists—chemist asserts he found traces of a substance like blood—" were the paragraph's explanations and comment that ran in a jumble through his thoughts; and somewhere else on the page, a few other phrases: "Strange display of Northern Lights—beams of red, green, violet, yellow—phenomenon observed over Norton—university astronomer offers no explanation—"

By nightfall of that day of madness, it was again partly clear outside. In the east still hung a low bank of clouds, but overhead and to the west, the stars were coming out.

Lars sat by a window looking dully into the night, as he had been sitting for the last three hours. His mind had become calmer while he brooded over mysteries he could not fathom, but there was a light in his eyes that had never been in them before. Only the stolidity of his race had thus far kept him from going mad. In his ears still rang that medley of sounds, and his horrified eyes held before them yet the vacant roadway, and the letters fluttering down. It was incredible, unthinkable; yet all his thoughts wound up with the explanation that was no explanation at all: somehow, the postman and Helga had been whirled up from the surface of earth. He had thought of a tornado, but nothing else had been disturbed and he had seen no telltale whirling in the sky. What was it that could reach down to earth all in a brief second or two and instantly vanish skyward with its prey? The cold sweat broke out on his forehead. Once as a child he had wondered how he would feel if he saw an apple fall from a tree and, instead of dropping to earth, sail toward the heavens. Now he knew that dreadful sensation, the feeling that nature had suddenly gone askew.

He stared again into the sky directly above, where the stars shone bright and cold, vainly hoping that he might draw a solution out of those fathomless deeps. Minutes ticked by. The Milky Way blazed out in its mysterious beauty, and the night was quiet with no wind.

When it was that he became conscious of something new, he could not say. But in back of his futile thoughts, a forgotten phrase groped for expression: Northern Lights—phenomenon—red, green, violet

Then he knew. High above him, so faintly that at first he could not be sure, beams of many-colored light stabbed and shot and pulsed across the stars. And it struck Lars with surprise and something of a new fear growing upon him that nowhere else was the display to be seen. In the past, he had frequently watched the Aurora Borealis creep down from the north, flaming brighter till streamers and cataracts of weird radiance played across all the northern sky. But he had never before seen it confined to so small a spot in the heavens. These flashing beams of green and violet, red and yellow did not seem as remote as the Northern Lights usually were, and it was strange that they occurred in so small an area, an area which looked no larger than a plate, though he knew it must be immensely larger out there in space. Sometimes only two beams would dance around each other, sometimes all would be gone, then a minute later rays of different colors leaped out against the starry velvet of night. And the strangest part of the display was the clearness and straightness of the beams; there was none of the vagueness and change and slow merging into other patterns and colors that the Aurora had; this resembled more the snapping on and off of giant flashlights.

For several minutes, Lars looked at the queer lights with the dullness of a mind dazed by too many shocks. And even as he watched them, he became aware of something yet newer: he seemed to see one or two black specks in the air between him and the lights, like the dancing specks before the eyes of some one who has been struck on the head; and there came to his ears a rush of wind, and two objects hurtled furiously past him to smash on the ground. A moment later, he thought he heard a thud down by the road and another from somewhere afar, but perhaps they were only echoes that he heard, or his ears may have been playing him tricks. He could not be sure, for he looked at the two in the farmyard and his eyes went wide and glary. Like a run-down

automaton he rose and stumbled downstairs out into the chill, quiet night.

There was something oddly familiar in that nearest object, and he went up to it with a far-away buzzing in his ears, and a wild swirl of insane dreams in his mind. He bent over the still form; a scorch odor came to his nostrils, he recognized the poor, broken body of Helga, the hideously white skin, he —crooned a word of grief and bent over to stroke the lifeless clay. And then he snatched his hand back again, for it burned like the fire of a furnace, but he knew it was no fire that he touched, nor any heat, but the biting; absolute cold of outer space. As Helga had vanished, in mystery and terror, so had she returned, but the horror for her was over. For him it kept on. The night was all silent, but that maddening buzz was louder in his brain. He shook his head to get rid of it, and his eyes fell upon the other object.

For a second that was as long as eternity, time and space and the world stood still for Lars. No eyes could look unchanged on that slimy blob of liquid flesh and fungus and ichor, With its loathly tentacles and beaks, its blackness of corruption, its monstrous mixture of all that was obscene in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and more horrible still, the thing's metallic core like brown quicksilver that still moved feebly with an appalling parody of life; and in its center a sickly, rotten bulb of a dead, blind eye that glared foully at Lars with its dying light.

The buzzing in his ears swelled to a grating, shrill din, something snapped, his teeth champed together, and the madness was upon him. He muttered crooning endearments to Helga, shrieked blasphemies at the slimy thing from above, burst out into peals of mirthless laughter and rasping sobs. His crazed mind went off on another tangent, and he stopped his muttering and shrieking as suddenly as he had begun; instead, he chuckled with insane cunning as though he had thought of a way to cheat his enemy. He backed slyly to the farmhouse, was gone for a minute, reappeared with a great armful of kindling wood. He returned to fetch another, till a heap of it lay on the ground. He made a rude pyre out of it, except for an armful or two; he dragged the body of Helga onto it though his hands burned as if in a white-hot furnace; he ran back, reappeared with a can, poured kerosene on the pyre. He lighted it with tears of madness and grief running down his face. Then fury entered his heart, and he threw the rest of the kindling on the obscene thing, and drenched it with the kerosene. As the flames flared up, he danced around with grief and hatred and insanity alternately writhing across his features. He ran back to the woodshed for more fuel. He was about to return with a load of cordwood when he heard the roar of a small explosion, saw a fountain of sparks and burning wood spew into the air. He stood agape for a second, then ran madly to the fires. The obscene monstrosity was no more—something in it or something it carried had exploded, and in two or three places burning chunks smoldered on the farmhouse roof. But Lars paid no attention to them or to the flames that were beginning to lick at the eaves, for some half-forgotten thing was pounding at the back of his thoughts.

The thing in the field! The thing in the field! The phrase sang through his head like a chant, and he burst out into another wild peal of maniacal laughter. He scarcely looked at the black smoke that surged up from Helga's funeral pyre, or the flames that consumed, as he turned and sped back to the pile of wood. He picked up all he could carry of the three-foot lengths and stumbled down the path, staggering under the weight. When he reached the gash in earth, faintly illuminated by the red glare that began to come from the burning roof of the farmhouse, he tossed his whole armful onto the invisible thing, and shouted madly again as the wood hung suspended in air over the gap. He returned again and again until all the wood was strewn around and over the thing that could not be seen. On his last trip, he brought two one-gallon cans of kerosene and poured them on as much of the wood as was within reach, then tossed them to the top of the pile and lighted the mass. A tongue of fire leaped out and raced over the pile, and a volume of thick black smoke issued up. The field around him was already made bright by a lurid glare from the farmhouse that was now entirely ablaze. Like a necromancer uttering his ritual of incantation and dark sorcery, Lars leaped and danced and howled around the great bonfire he had built. A tower of black smoke from the kerosene mounted almost straight up in the air from the flames, the wood crackled, the heat became scorching and blistering. And under the metamorphosis of fire, Lars saw a last, strange riddle shape itself before his eyes. There were outlines forming, the suggestion of a vast structure imbedded deeply in earth. He gibbered to the stars as he saw planes and angles and cubes that looked like spheres and the geometry of another dimension. His maniacal laughter rang out again as he looked through the glowing, transparent walls and saw objects he could not name, strangely mounted mechanical devices, fantastic articles that no mind on earth could have imagined or shaped. And lying around them were dozens of those hellish slimy things that were neither animal nor vegetable nor matter, but partook loathsomely of the nature of all three. He shouted in mirthless glee as he glimpsed briefly still other things—weird, gaseous substances on the floor that held their shape as rigidly as dead bodies.

There came a hiss like a great sigh, a rumble of warning, and Lars insanely flung his arms wide apart as if to embrace the cleansing fire. It was his last gesture, for earth and sky and life trembled and were blasted before the titanic explosion that wiped out the thing in the field.

On the afternoon of March 30, shortly after two P.M., Larry Greene took off from the Twin City flying-field with a special consignment of bank dispatches for Seattle. His 'plane was last seen at Elk Forks, twenty miles east of Norton, at approximately four o'clock. When nothing more was seen of him for several hours and no report was received, the importance of his cargo caused a searching-party to be sent out. Early in the morning of March 31, his airplane was found near the burned Loberg farmhouse. It was completely smashed, but the pilot's body was nowhere around. The searching-party continued to scour the area. An hour later, the missing flyer was picked up, wandering in a dazed condition through a field near Norton. His account of what had happened was so singular and fantastic that his sanity was questioned. When, however, he was discovered to be suffering Twin Cities for medical attention. All efforts to save his life were unavailing. He died of gangrenous infection several days later. Among his effects were found two significant items: a black object, and the following extraordinary communication, which was apparently written sometime during the first day of his confinement for medical care:

"To others I leave the task of deciding whether I have been the victim of insanity or hallucinations. Already I self doubt the testimony of my own eyes and ears. If it were not for the disk which I brought with me, I would belie the entire adventure to be a delusion or a dream, but unless the disk proves to be a figment of a deranged imagination, can not doubt the truth of what I have to say and the reality of what I saw.

"At two-ten P.M. on March 30 I took off from the Twin City flying-field with a bundle of bank dispatches for Seattle. I headed due west. Weather conditions were fair for the first hour and I kept at the relatively low flying level of two thousand feet. At this point, somewhat less than one hundred miles from the Twin Cities, I was nearing a region for which sleet or snow storms were forecast. Cloudbanks were piling up ahead, so I immediately began to climb for altitude. The last town I saw was Elk Forks. After that, the clouds below me obscured everything.

"I had climbed to six thousand feet, then seven thousand five hundred, and was now keeping to an altitude of nine thousand feet. I estimated that I must now be nearing Norton.

"Without a word of warning, the terror came.

"My plane was suddenly enveloped in a greenish light. The motor and propeller droned, but my progress was at a complete standstill. My altimeter showed eleven, thirteen, fifteen thousand feet so rapidly that I could hardly follow it. Nothing I could do had any effect on the 'plane or its incredible rise. The sensation was sickening. I had the motor wide open, but not a foot did we advance. Instead, the plane rose straight up like a balloon. I scarcely had time even to adjust my oxygen tank and turn on the current for the airtight electrically heated suit that I always wear in cold weather flying. The altimeter soared to forty thousand feet, then froze.

"Everything had happened so instantly that I was almost stunned. A few seconds at most could have elapsed between the moment the greenish light came and the altimeter froze.

"Through my suit, I began to feel an intense cold. I had no knowledge of how high I now was, but I knew that if my strange ascent were not quickly halted, I would perish in the absolute or almost absolute zero of the upper atmosphere. The motor now froze and went dead. Instead of falling, the airplane remained in its unnatural suspension, still bathed in green light. The sky above me had become so dark that I was certain I must be near the outer edge of earth's atmospheric blanket. The cold was more piercing than ever.

"At this moment, I thought I heard two faint clicks closely following each other. A few seconds later, they were repeated. The green light disappeared. Overhead, the stars went out. The effect was precisely as if I were looking through an invisible pane of glass but could see nothing. And only a few feet away from my 'plane there had suddenly appeared the bodies of a dead man and a woman. The intense cold rapidly lessened in severity, but had it been a thousand times as icy as it was, it could not have been as numbing as the strange horror of all that had happened to me in a brief minute. I was in the midst of a hellish nightmare infinitely more titanic and brain-shattering than any I had ever had. The terror and fear of nauseating mystery were upon me, I hardly knew whether I was dreaming or awake, alive or already beyond the borderland of death. And those two corpses hanging in the air near, me—their appearance was as ghastly as it was inexplicable.

"The whole thing was like a delirious vision. I felt as if I were confined, the terrific cold had ceased, yet there was not a star in the sky above me nor could I see the earth beneath. If it were not for the airplane and the two bodies, I would have believed that I had gone blind.

"I had hardly understood—or rather, realized my situation since I did not understand it at all—when there came to me again a faint click, from above, end I automatically looked up.

"I do not know what I expected to see, except anything or nothing. But it was no answer to any of the thousand questions in my mind that I saw, but mystery darker and deeper. There was cloud vapor a dozen feet above me—or was there? I have never before seen a gaseous substance hold its form and shape rigidly, but I did then, and with a sick, faint feeling, I realized that the cloud-like thing was alive. I had an impression of eyes burning into mine, but there were no eyes visible in it. My brain received a command, but my ears heard no sound. In some way that I could not comprehend, the monstrous living substance above me had put into my thoughts a picture of myself climbing from the cockpit, and ascending.

"Climb from the cockpit of an airplane heaven knows how many miles above earth? It was madness, suicide. I fought with all my strength to retain my seat. But I was powerless, and slowly I climbed over the side into empty space.

"I should have fallen, down, down like a dead weight. But I was standing as upright as if solid ground were beneath my feet. Where was the ultimate cold that should be freezing me? Why did I not fall? What was the meaning of all the eery events of the past few minutes? I was trembling violently, hot and cold sweat broke out on me, a deadly fear gnawed at my heart for the first time in my life.

"Then I thought I must have entered some queer, hypnotic state, for a sudden feeling of peace came over me, and in answer to another silent command I mounted what seemed to be a short ladder, and stepped off a moment later to another invisible floor. The gaseous thing retreated as I advanced, and now hung a few yards away from me. But I scarcely noticed it, for my eyes were bewildered by the sight around me, and a dim light of comprehension began to clear away the fog over my thoughts.

"Masses of intricate, gleaming machinery and delicate mechanism were everywhere about me, together with elaborate dials, controls, and other devices whose purpose I could not even conjecture. Around each device and control were grouped scores of the gaseous things. I dreamed for a moment that I was in an airship of some new kind, but there were no enclosing walls and I could see no floor beneath me. Yet the sky was devoid of stars.

"All this I noticed in a brief instant before my captor mutely commanded me to walk forward a few paces and seat myself. Too stunned and overwhelmed to offer any resistance, I did so. The thing drifted toward me and hung a few feet away. I looked at it, and again I had an impression of burning eyes that I could not see. But there came over me again that odd sensation of peace.

"How can I describe the strange terror and fascination of the scene, or what followed? Surely no man was ever before so suddenly jerked from the habits and thoughts of a lifetime as I was then. Without my realizing it until afterward, I must have been placed again under hypnotic or mental control, for the mechanism and gaseous shapes surrounding me suddenly faded away into blankness, and then, while I had the disembodied feeling of one who dreams, a succession of fantastic images and pictures were imposed on my imagination by the thing before me. No word passed between us, for neither could have understood the language of the other. By a kind of mesmeric thought-transference, I was made to understand all that had happened to me, and some things I had not known about, and some of which I shall probably never have any further knowledge to certify their truth.

"As I had begun to suspect, I was now in a space-flyer of utterly new type and construction to me. The being who hung a few yards away was Relelpa, director of an expedition from Saturn on a mission that meant existence or death to the solar system.

"For thousands of years, civilization had been progressing there until the inhabitants were now as far ahead of us as we are ahead of jungle apes. The life force which is persistent everywhere in an infinite variety of organisms produced on Saturn opaque, gaseous substances like Relelpa. Many years before our meeting, these eery inhabitants of Saturn had discovered deep in the bowels of their planet one of the rarest elements in all the universe. Saturn itself contained only a few thousand tons of the ore from which this element, Seggglyn, was extracted.

"Seggglyn resists cold even to absolute zero, but if exposed to sufficient heat it explodes. Its most curious and most valuable property is its imperviousness to gravitation. For instance, a lump of the pure element isolated under an open sky is immediately hurled skyward by the centrifugal force of the spinning planet, since gravitation has no effect on it. Until it finally breaks up into atomic particles, it hurtles forever through the universe, rebounding anew from any gravitational pull which it may chance to come near.

"In extracting the element and in experimenting with it, the Saturnian not only discovered how to control it but obtained by-products of inestimable value. Seggglyn is completely transparent, but nothing beyond it is visible—as if you looked through a pane of glass but could see nothing beyond. Perhaps I can make this clearer by saying that it is like a blind spot. If you put two black dots on a cardboard, hold the cardboard at arm's length, focus your eyes on one dot, and then draw the cardboard toward you, one of the dots will disappear when the cardboard is about a foot and a half from your eyes. Well, Seggglyn acts like a blind spot at any distance from the eye of the beholder.

"In extracting the element, the Saturnians found that the last impurity removed had the effect of counteracting the element; that is, until the impurity was taken out, Seggglyn was held by gravitational attraction. Thus, by putting the impurity back in, or coating Seggglyn with it, the element had only normal mineral properties.

"There was only a limited amount of the stuff on Saturn, and no trace of it was ever found in the spectrum of any star. What should be done with it? The Saturnian considered every possible use, and finally decided that it would be most valuable as an offense and defense against any danger; and so they built this vast space-flyer, and armed it with all their weapons and rays of destruction. The flyer could not be seen, nor its location guessed unless it crossed a star and shut out the light.

"On the outside of the flyer at one tip were placed dozens of thin plates of the impurity. These were, controlled by radio from inside the ship. They could be adjusted to any position on the outside, so that the ship's speed could be regulated, and just enough gravitational pull shut off or turned on to let the ship rise and land safely.

"With their space-flyer, the Saturnians had explored the solar system hundreds of years ago, and had even ventured out into the galaxy beyond, for there was apparently no limit to the speed which it could attain. If its rate of speed were constant when it left the gravitational influence of Saturn, it would keep on going at that rate. But if its speed were controlled so that it was constantly increasing at the point where it passed beyond Saturn's influence, its acceleration would continue at the same rate, and if it were worth the risk, a speed of hundreds of thousands of light-years per second could be reached.

"After their early explorations and experiments, the Saturnians kept the flyer idle, but always in readiness for any danger. They had discovered many disquieting matters on their trips, but so long as nothing happened, they preserved their policy of waiting in readiness.

"And out of night with no warning had suddenly come the one cataclysmic danger that they had not anticipated. From their great central observatory, the Saturnian kept up a constant survey of the heavens for astronomic and protective reasons. One week the observation had shown a normal view of the region of the evening star. And the next week, stars were disappearing momentarily in a straight line that travelled toward the solar system.

"They could not believe the explanation, but there was only one explanation possible. Some star or world beyond the reach of their farthest telescope had possessed the rare ore, and a space-ship made from Seggglyn, whether a scouting party or an expedition of invaders, was hourly leaping colossal stellar distances toward the solar system. Their surprise turned almost into panic when they discovered that instead of one, there were three space-flyers hurtling onward!

"So short was the warning that desperate measures had to be taken. Hasty calculations showed that the invaders were heading toward Earth first, perhaps to reconnoiter or to use Earth as a ricochet for reaching Saturn. Relelpa was summoned to lead the party. The need of reaching Earth before or not later than the invaders was desperate. It could not be accomplished even with the normal acceleration of the Saturnian space-flyer. In the crisis, at the moment when the nullifying plates were stripped from the outside of the flyer, Saturn's most powerful explosive was used to hurl it off in a blinding flash to give it the initial acceleration required.

"Over Earth, they met; and before the invaders realized that their coming was known, the red annihilation ray of the Saturn flyer stabbed out and the first ship from outside dissolved into brownish dust that drifted down. The red ray stabbed out again but missed; the second ship which used some other means than black plates of using gravitational pull as the first and third also did had dropped suddenly to escape the deadly ray; but the ship behind it had also dived and crashed into the tip of its own comrade, and as the bitter cold of space mowed down its occupants, the second ship hurtled to Earth. Some of its occupants spilled out into space, and from one of these who was instantly caught and swept to the Saturn-flyer by the green magnetic ray, the story of the invaders was found out.

"Where they came from is unknown, for their world lies beyond any galaxy or nebula known to astronomers of the solar system. They too had discovered Seggglyn on their world, and had discovered it at the last moment, for their world was dying and had almost reached its end. With their super-telescopes, they had found traces of Seggglyn in the spectrum of Saturn long before it was isolated on their own world. Time was priceless to these gruesome plant-animal-mineral creatures from the spaces beyond. They had built three ships, but these were not enough to transport all the inhabitants of their world before the end came. If they could obtain the ore from Saturn and build two more ships or even one great flyer, they would be saved.

"And so the three flyers started out, each loaded with a thousand of the loathly creatures. One ship was to land on the most habitable of the planets, Earth, and wipe out all life on it with the violet ray of terrific heat and the yellow ray that blasted anything it touched. The other two were to disgorge on Saturn, and while one band destroyed the inhabitants, the other would extract Seggglyn from the ore and build as many ships as possible. As soon as the three flyers had landed, they were to return to their world, empty except for the crews to man them, in order to bring back other thousands of the loathsome, obscene things.

"And their hellish plan would have succeeded if they had not neglected one possibility: they thought that the Saturnians were unaware of the property of Seggglyn, and that the ore was still unmined; or that in any case, their own three space-flyers would prove to be invicible. And so, all unprepared, in the very moment of their triumph the strength of the invaders was cut down by two-thirds.

"But now the third ship was warned; and all this day the Saturn-flyer had been engaged with it in a struggle on which the fate of worlds depended. If the Saturnians were defeated, Earth and Saturn were doomed, even though the invaders were unable to save all the inhabitants of their own world by transporting them across space.

"Relelpa showed me a great, metallic disk, on which the heavens were mirrored; since those inside the flyer could see nothing outside, television was necessarily employed for guidance. And there, close to the center of the disk which marked our position, I saw stars blotted out where the invaders hung.

"What can I do? Why do you want me? were the two silent questions that I asked Relelpa; and the answer came back, there was nothing I could do up here. Relelpa had sighted my airplane and ordered it picked up by the green ray. He had told me all he wanted to, and I was now about to be released to warn the people of my world in the event that the Saturnians were defeated.

"I had no willpower of my own beside this mental giant, I merely followed his directions. It would we been fatal to try using my airplane at this height, my parachute would probably have ripped from my shoulders with the force and speed of my fall when it finally opened. Relelpa gave me a curious black disk when he read my thoughts, and again by mental imagine showed me how to use it.

"Suddenly he flashed me the image that the final, desperate battle was near. At the same instant, he thrust me toward the outer chamber through which I had originally entered. I saw his strange, cloudlike form for the last time, I felt him wish me good luck as I in turn wished him success, and then the door clicked behind me. I held the disk over my head, manipulating it as he had explained, so that parts of the black covering slid off the Seggglyn. I heard another click, and then all at once I dropped, and my airplane twisted past me hurtling downward and after it the bodies of the two people who had been on earth in the path of the green ray when its magnetic power picked me up sped by me, and behind them the hideous monster which the Saturnians had captured.

"As I fell slowly, still feeling as if I had dreamed a horrible nightmare, I looked above me; and my eyes went wide when I saw red and green ray flashing against yellow and violet beam. Surely it was the strangest and most important battle ever witnessed by man! Sometimes all four rays darted and flamed out, sometimes only one or two; or both rays of one flyer would vanish only to reappear suddenly in another spot.

"I heard the wind whistle past me, I looked at earth far below, and a great fear took hold of me; but I was falling no faster than I would be with a parachute, and the mental picture of Relelpa came back to reassure me. Once more I looked upward. I saw only the red and the green rays leaping madly across the sky. . . .

"The doctor tells me that gangrene has set in. I guess I was more seriously frozen than I thought in those upper spaces. They think I am crazy and they won't believe what I tried to tell them last night. Maybe I am crazy, but I swear that I saw all the things I have written of as plainly as I see now my hospital cot or the skylight above me or the black disk under my pillow, Well, that ought to convince them if nothing else does.

"Larry Greene."

Underneath the pillow of the cot on which Larry Greene had died, a small disk was found. The nurse who discovered it looked at it in some curiosity, puzzled as to its purpose and wondering what to do with it. Finally she called the doctor who had vainly tried to save the pilot's life.

"What is it?" he inquired bruskly.

"I don't know."

The doctor took the object and scrutinized it closely. It was a black disk, slightly oval in shape, and approximately a foot in diameter. It was perfectly flat, with an unvarying thickness of a half-inch. On two sides it was indented, and at each indentation was a row of tiny knobs.

"H'mm," mused the doctor. "I've never seen anything quite like it." He fingered the knobs meditatively.

There was a faint click, and the black covering of the disk somehow seemed to slide off or collapse. And all at once, he found himself with nothing in his hands. He heard a sudden wind, the crash of shattered glass, a sound like the rush of air.

The dumfounded doctor looked at an amazed nurse, as bits of glass from the broken skylight dropped around them. The black disk which they had been examining a few seconds ago had vanished.

Symbiosis

Will F. Jenkins

Surgeon General Mors was out in the rural districts of Kantolia Province, patiently arguing peasants into allowing the vaccination of their pigs and the inoculation of their families, when the lightning occupation took place.

There was no declaration of war, of course. Parachutists simply began to drop out of a predawn sky an hour before sunrise; at the same time, jet planes sprayed the quiet empty streets of Stadheim, the provincial capital, with machine-gun bullets, which killed two dogs and a stray cat. Then roaring, motorized columns raced across the international bridge at Bait. Armed men rounded up the drowsy customs guards and held them prisoner while tanks, armored cars, and all the impressive panoply of war drove furiously into the still peacefully sleeping countryside. Then armored trains chuffed impressively across the international line, their whistles bellowing defiance to the switch engines and handcars in the Kantolian engine yards. A splendid, totally unheralded stroke of conquest began in the cold gray light of early morning.

When dawn actually arrived and the people of Kantolia began to wake in their beds, more than half of the province was already in enemy hands. The few enemy casualties occurred in a railroad wreck, which itself was due to the action of over-enthusiastic quislings who blew up a railroad bridge to prevent the arrival of defending troops. That action merely held up the invasion program by two hours and a half in that sector. By eight o'clock of a drowsy, sunny morning, the province of Kantolia had been taken over.

Surgeon General Mors heard about it at nine, while he stood beside a pigsty and patiently argued with a peasant who had so far refused to allow either his pigs or his family to be inoculated. Mors heard the news in silence. Then he turned heavily to the civilian doctor with him.

"I had not much hope, but it is very bad," he said. "War is always bad! And I hoped so much that we would finish our program of immunization! No nation before has ever achieved one hundred per cent inoculation. It would have been a very great achievement."

Standing beside the pigsty he wiped his forehead. "Now, of course, I shall have to go to Stadheim. That will be the enemy headquarters, no doubt. I hope, Doctor, that you will continue the inoculation program while you can. I beg you to do so! One hundred per cent immunization in even a single province would be a great feat! And after all, it is not as if the enemy would not be driven out. But even in ten days terrible damage can be done!"

He went to the small, battered car in which he had been making his rounds, arguing with stubborn peasants. He was a stocky little man with deep circles under his eyes, somehow officials of small nations located close to a large one with visions of military glory tend not to sleep well of nights. Surgeon General Mors had not slept well for a long time.

Perhaps, as a military officer, he should have tried to rejoin the defending army which so far had not fired a shot. But his presence in this region had been to further the inoculation program, and that program had locally been directed from Stadheim.

As his car bumped and whined along the highway toward the provincial capital, the occupation progressed all about him without actually touching him. Three times he heard flights of jet planes roaring through the clear blue sky above. He could not pick them out because of their speed. Once he saw a faraway cloud of dust which was an armored column racing for some strategic spot not yet taken over. The enemy acted as if Kantolia had bristled with troops and weapons, instead of being defended only by customs guards at the border and the fifteen-man police force of Stadheim.

The little car clanked and sputtered. The morning was quite perfect. Here and there a cotton wool cloud floated in the blue. All about were green tablelands, spread with lusty growing crops. Surgeon General Mors looked almost enviously at the unconcerned people of the rustic villages through which he passed. They bad no desire for war, and most of them did not yet know that it had come. He felt that any conceivable means was permissible for the defense of simple people like these against the alleged ideals of the enemy. But he looked very unhappy indeed.

Toward noon, he saw the steeples of Stadheim before him. But he turned abruptly aside as if to postpone the inevitable. He drove up a gentle, rolling incline until he came to the squat, functional building which housed the pumping station for the provincial city's water supply. The station and its surroundings seemed untouched, but when the engineer of the pumping station came out, the surgeon general could tell by his expression that he knew of the tragedy that had struck the country.

Surgeon General Mors got out of the car.

"They have not come here yet," he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice.

"Not yet," said the engineer. He ground his teeth. "I have carried out my orders," he said harshly. "Just as I was told."

Surgeon General Mors nodded.

"That is good." Then he hesitated. "I would like to look over the plant," he said almost apologetically. "It is very modern and clean. The enemy spent their money on guns. They might try to remove it for one of their cities."

The engineer stood aside Surgeon General Mors went through the little pumping plant. There were only twenty thousand people in Stadheim, so a large installation was not required, but it was sound and practical. There were the filters, and the chlorination apparatus, and the well-equipped small laboratory for tests of the water's purity. The people of Stadheim would always have good water to drink, if the invaders didn't wreck or remove this machinery.

"It is good," said the stocky little man unhappily, "to see things like this. It makes our people to be healthy, and therefore happy. Do you know," he added irrelevantly, "that our inoculation program was almost one hundred per cent complete? Ah, well," He paused. "I must go on to Stadheim. The invaders are there. I shall try to reason with them about our sanitary arrangements. Their soldiers will not understand how careful we are about sanitation. I shall try to get them not to make changes while they are here."

The engineer's eyes burned suddenly.

"While they are here!"

"Yes," Surgeon General Mors went on disconsolately. "They will not stay more than ten days. War is very terrible! It is everything that we doctors fight against all our lives. But so long as men do not understand, there must be wars." He drew a deep, unhappy breath. "It will indeed be terrible! May it be the last."

There was a sudden change in the engineer's eyes.

"Then we fight? My orders-"

"Yes," said Surgeon General Mors, reluctantly. "In our own way, we fight. In the only way a small nation can defend itself against a great one. We may need as long as ten days before we drive them out, and when it comes it will be a very terrible victory!"

He hesitated, and then spread out his hands in a gesture of helplessness. He walked out to the car and drove sturdily toward Stadheim.

Sentries stopped him at the outskirts of the city, to confiscate the car. But when he got out wearing the uniform of his country's military force, he was immediately arrested. He was marched toward the center of the city by a soldier who held a bayonet pressing lightly against the small of the little man's back. Mors, of course, was of the medical branch of his army and looked hopelessly unmilitary, and he carried no weapon more dangerous than a fountain pen. But the enemy soldier felt like a conqueror, and this was his first chance to act the part.

When the surgeon general of his country's army was taken to the general commanding the invading troops, the latter was already much annoyed. There had not been a single shot fired in the invasion, and this time the history books would place the credit where it belonged with the dull, anonymous men who had prepared timetables and traffic control orders, rather than with the combat leadership. General Vladek would go down in history, if at all, only as the nominal leader of an intricate cross-country troop movement. This he did not like.

An hour since, too, he had performed an impressive ceremony on a balcony of the provincial capitol building. With officers flanking him and troops drawn up in the square below, he had read a proclamation to the people of Kantolia. They had been redeemed, said the proclamation, from the grinding oppression of their native country; henceforth they would enjoy all the blessings of oppressive taxes and secret police enjoyed by the invaders. They should rejoice, because now they were citizens of their great neighbour, and anybody who did not rejoice was very likely to be shot. In short, General Vladek had read a proclamation annexing Kantolia to his own country, and he felt very much like a fool. It was not exactly a gala occasion. But the only witnesses outside of his own troops had been two gaping street sweepers and a little knot of twenty quislings who tried to make their cheers atone for the silence of the twenty thousand people who stayed away.

However, when Surgeon General Mors was brought to his office as a prisoner of war, General Vladek felt a little better. A general officer taken prisoner! This had some of the savor of traditional war! The prisoner, of course, was a stocky, short figure in a badly fitting uniform, and his broad features indicated peasant ancestry.

But General Vladek tried to make the most of the situation with military courtesy.

"I offer my apologies," said General Vladek grandly, "if you were subjected to any discourtesy at the time of your capture, my dear General. But after all," he smiled condescendingly, "this is war!"

"Is it?" asked Mors. He continued in a businesslike tone, "I was not sure. When was the declaration of war issued, and by whom?"

General Vladek blinked.

"Why, ah, no formal declaration was made by my government. There were military reasons for secrecy."

Surgeon General Mors sat down and mopped his face.

"Ah! I am relieved. If you invaded without a declaration of war, you have the legal status of a bandit. Naturally, my government would not regularize your position. Even as a bandit, however," he said prosaically, "you will understand that the local sanitary arrangements should not be interfered with. That was what I came to see you about. My country has the lowest death rate in all Europe, and any meddling with our health services would be very stupid. I hope you will give orders-"

General Vladek roared. Then he calmed himself, fuming. "I did not receive you to be lectured," he said stiffly. "So far as I am aware, you are the ranking officer of your army to be captured by my men. I make a formal demand for the surrender of all troops under your command."

"But there aren't any!" said Surgeon General Mors in surprise, "My government would not be so imbecilic as to leave soldiers in a province they were not strong enough to defend! They'd only have been killed in trumped-up fighting so you could claim a victory!"

General Vladek's eyes glittered. He pounced.

"Ha! Then your government knew that we intended to invade?"

"My dear man!" said Mors with some tartness. "Your government has been drooling at the mouth for years over the fact that the taxes from our richest province would almost balance its budget! Of course we suspected you would someday try to seize it! We are not altogether fools!"

"Yet," said General Vladek sardonically, "you did not prepare to defend it!"

Surgeon General Mors blinked at the slim, bemedaled figure of his official captor.

"When a peaceful householder hears a burglar in his house," he said shortly, "he may or may not go to fight himself, but he does not send his young sons! If he is sensible, he sends for the police."

"He sends for the police!" repeated Vladek incredulously. "My good Surgeon General Mors, do you expect the United Nations to interfere in this matter? The United Nations is run by diplomats, phrasemakers. They are aghast and helpless before an accomplished fact like our actual possession of Kantolia! My good sir."

"This talk is nonsense!" said Mors irritably. "I came to offer you the benefit of my experience in matters of military and public health. Do you have the welfare of your men actually at heart?"

There was a pause. General Vladek was slim and beautifully tailored. He did not belong in the office of the provincial governor of Kantolia, whose desk was still littered with papers concerning such local affairs as the price of pigs and crops and an outbreak of measles in the public schools. The office was slightly grubby, despite a certain plebeian attempt at elegance. General Vladek seemed fastidiously detached from his surroundings. And he was amused.

"I assure you," said General Vladek, "that I am duly solicitous of my men's health."

"If you are solicitous enough," said Surgeon General Mors curtly, "you will get them out of here as quickly as they came in! But I can hardly expect you to comply with that wish. What I have to say is that your troops had better have as little to do with the civilian population as possible, no communication of any sort that can possibly be avoided."

"You are ridiculous," said General Vladek, annoyed. "Kantolia is now part of my country. Its people are the fellow citizens of my troops. Isolate them? Ridiculous!"

Surgeon General Mors stood up and shrugged.

"Very well," he said heavily. "I advised you. Now, either I am a prisoner or I am not. If not, I would like a pass allowing me to go about freely. The sudden entry of so large an invading force introduces problems of public health."

"Which my medical corps," said General Vladek scornfully, "is quite able to cope with! You are a prisoner, and I think a fool!'Good day!"

Surgeon General Mors marched stolidly to the door.

Since the invasion was not yet one day old, there had been no time to build concentration camps. Surgeon General Mors was confined, therefore, in a school which had been closed to education that it might be taken over and used as a prison. He found himself in company with the provincial governor of Kantolia, with the mayor of Stadheim, and various other officials arrested by the invaders. There were private citizens in confinement, too, mostly people whom the small number of quislings in Kantolia had denounced. They were not accused of crimes, as yet. Even the invading army did not yet pretend that they had committed any offense against either military or civilian law. But most of them were frantic. It was not easy to forget tales of hostages shot for acts of resistance by conquered populations. They knew of places where leading citizens had been exterminated for the crime of being leading citizens, and educated men destroyed because they rejected propaganda that outraged all reason. The fate of Kantoha had precedents. If precedent were followed, those first arrested when the land was overrun were in no enviable situation.

Surgeon General Mors tried to reassure them, but he had not much success. The entire situation looked hopeless. The seizure of a single province of a very minor nation would appear to the rest of the world either as a crisis, or an affront to the United Nations, or as a rectification of frontiers, according to the nationality and political persuasion of the commentator. It would go on the agenda of the United Nations Council; deftly it would be intermixed with other matters so that it could not be untangled and considered separately. Ultimately it would be the subject of a compromise, one item in a complicated Great Power deal, which would leave matters exactly as the invaders wished them. Practically speaking, that was the prospect.

"But the fact," said Surgeon General Mors, "is that such things cannot continue forever. The life of humanity is a symbiosis, a living-together, in all its stages. It begins with the symbiotic relationship of members of a family, each of whom helps and is helped by all the rest. But it rises to the symbiotic relationship of nations, of which each is an organism necessary to the others, and all are mutually helpful."

"But there is parasitic symbiosis, in which one organism seeks to prey upon another as our enemy seeks to prey upon us," interjected an amateur naturalist who was a fellow prisoner.

"But a truly healthy organism finds ways to rid itself of parasites," Mors said calmly, "or at least to keep them in tolerable subjugation. Do you doubt that our country is a healthy organism?"

It was encouraging talk, but his fellow prisoners were not convinced. Most of them had been seized in their homes. Only one was fully dressed. The mayor had on an overcoat over his nightshirt; his hairy shanks and bare feet left him utterly without dignity. Other leading citizens were unshaven, uncombed, and in every possible stage of dishabille; all were certain their humiliation was a bad omen.

"To be sure," conceded Surgeon General Mors practically, "our country has only four million people, and our enemy has fifty. But we have planned our nation carefully. In nature, not all creatures defend themselves with tooth and claw. There is a specialized defense for every type of creature, as I myself pointed out to our president. There must be, as I insisted to him, some form of defense for every type of nation, so that it may survive. And I may say that be later told me that be considers our nation's survival certain. So, since this province is necessary if our nation is truly to survive, the invaders will have to be turned out of it."

"But when?" asked a prisoner despairingly.

"The wheat harvest should begin in three weeks," said Mors meditatively. "It will be a great blow to our country if our enemy seizes the wheat harvest. I should say that we must have victory for our country in less than three weeks. Probably within ten days."

His companions stared at him. But Surgeon General Mors did not look like someone envisioning a spectacular military triumph for his country. He looked like someone sick, at heart from some knowledge he concealed within him.

Depression stayed with the prisoners. They increased number as the day wore on. Typically, to the conquerors the conquered seemed somehow less than human. Many of the later prisoners had been beaten after their arrest. On the second day the schoolhouse was crowded. More of the new prisoners were beaten. On the third day there was a barbed-wire fence around the schoolhouse and food for the prisoners was contemptupusly dumped inside it in bulk for them to distribute themselves. Surgeon General Mors organized a committee for the purpose, and to protest against unnecessary ill-treatment and humiliations.

On the fourth day two men arrived so badly beaten that they were unconscious, and died even as Surgeon General Mors tried, without drugs or any equipment to revive them.

The newcomers reported conditions in the province. The invaders were methodically looting the captured territory. Their obvious purpose was to increase the riches of their country by impoverishing the province they had added to it. Machinery was being shipped back in a steady stream. Manufactured products were requisitioned from merchants. Kantolia had been the richest province in its small nation. When the invaders finished, it would be the most poverty-stricken in Europe.

That was not all. The troops of the invaders were quartered in private homes' as well as in public buildings. Nearly every Kantolian family had its quota of invaders, to be fed at the householder's own expense. And while the enemy troops were required to practice strict discipline in relation to their officers, no such strictness was enforced as regarded civilians. A citizen whose home was only looted was considered fortunate.

The outside world remained unconcerned. Of course no news went out from Kantolia. Censorship and a tightly sealed frontier took care of that. But what sparse, illicit radio news newcomers brought in to the prisoners indicated that the outside world was not too much disturbed by the rectification of an 'unimportant' frontier in a remote corner of Europe.

There was a diplomatic crisis among the Big Four powers. Surgeon General Mors' government had made a dignified protest and a formal appeal to the United Nations, but the achievement of atomic energy control by that organization had been so precarious a matter, and was maintained by so unstable a balance of bargains, that a controversial question like the seizure of Kantolia might wreck the entire framework of international accord if pressed at the present time. Consideration of the matter had been postponed. The invaders had an indefinite period in which forcibly to remold the province's citizenry nearer to their heart's desire, to teach them to clamor dutifully for the maintenance of their new nationality lest worse things befall.

Strangely, though, no new prisoners arrived after the fourth day. Almost the last to arrive told, sobbing, of the fact that fresh troops had been pouring into Kantolia almost from the instant of its seizure, and that now a monstrous army was ready to overwhelm the rest of the nation of which Kantolia had been a part.

But Surgeon General Mors counted on his fingers and said bleakly, "The invasion cannot last more than ten days! But it is very terrible!"

He had never been military in appearance. Now, five days without soap with which to wash, or a razor with which to shave, and with no change of garments at all, his looks were not imposing. He had torn up his undershirt to make bandages for beaten prisoners. The food was insufficient, and he had given of his own to those most terribly beaten and therefore weakest. The five days had told upon him. Yet he still possessed an odd dignity which could only have been the dignity of faith.

Then, on the afternoon of the fifth day, one of the sentries outside the barbed-wire enclosure staggered, dropped his rifle against a tree and then clung to that tree in a spasm of weakness. And Surgeon General Mors saw it.

He watched somberly until it was over. He looked heartsick and ill. But his eyes glowed doggedly as he turned and ran his eyes over the battered, dispirited figures in the concentration camp which was the first benefit conferred by the invaders.

"I must borrow a razor from someone," Mors told the mayor of Stadheim, who happened to be nearest him, "or a knife. At worst I shall have to break a pane of glass and try to shave with its edge. I am going to demand the surrender of the invading army."

He did not succeed in making the demand that day. It was late afternoon of the seventh day of the occupation before Surgeon General Mors was ushered into the presence of General Vladek. On the way from the schoolhouse, the stocky, untidy man had been marched through the streets of Stadheim. They were almost empty. They were dirty and unawept. Trash littered the sidewalks. He saw few civilians and no soldiers at all except his guard, until he arrived at the capitol building which was enemy headquarters.

He saw an invading soldier there, a sentry, lying on the sidewalk in a curiously shapeless heap. Surgeon General Mors knew at the first glance that the man was dead.

He looked more than ever sick at heart when he was ushered into the presence of General Vladek. The scene of this second interview was also the office of the provincial governor, but now the elegance of its furnishings had been corrected. Now it was a picture of efficiency. There were filing cabinets and wall maps, and an automatic facsimile machine in one corner hummed softly as it covered a slowly unreeling roll of paper with slightly out-of-register typed orders, queries, lists and the like.

General Vladek was slim and elegantly bemedaled as before. But now there was a nervous tic in his cheek. His face was queerly gray. He looked at Surgeon General Mors with a desperate grimness.

"You are going to be shot," he said with a terrifying quietness, "if you answer my questions truthfully. If you do not answer them, you will not be shot. But you will beg very pitifully for a chance to reconsider and earn a firing squad! Do you understand?"

Surgeon General Mors seated himself with great composure. His attempt at shaving had not been very successful. He was in every way a disreputable contrast to the invading general's dapper splendor.

"I asked for this interview," said Mors matter offactly, "to ask if you are prepared to surrender the troops under your command. You mentioned once that I was the ranking officer of my army in your hands. I doubt that you have captured any other. So I seem to be the person to make ihe demand."

General Vladek made a violent gesture. Then he composed himself. But he breathed quickly, and his cheek twitched, and his teeth showed when he smiled. He did not look conspicuously sane.

"What is this epidemic?" he demanded in a deadly quietness. "My men die at the rate of ten thousand a day! Your citizens do not! We have lost thirty-five thousand men in four days, and so far not more than six civilians native to Kantolia have been stricken! What is it, Mors?"

Surgeon General Mors leaned back in his chair. He showed no sigh of triumph.

"It would be an organism we developed," he said heavily. "The official designation is CK-211. I understand that it is an artificial mutation, a variation on a fairly common bacterium. I have been told that it could be described as a dwarf form of one of the diplococci. It is hardly larger than a virus molecule. You would not expect me to be more precise."

General Vladek's nostrils distended.

"Ah-h-h-h!" he said with deadly softness. "It is no normal plague! it is biological war! Too cowardly to fight as honorable men fight, your nation."

"There is no war between our countries," said Surgeon General Mors, prosaically, "and you invaded our country like a brigand, making your own rules for attack. So we made our own rules for defense. If you surrender the troops under your command, there is a good chance that we can save their lives. Have you given thought to the matter?"

General Vladek's cheeks twitched. His hands shook with hate.

"Tell me the truth," he said hoarsely, "and I will have you shot. I will concede so much! I promise that I will have you shot! But if you do not-"

"I think you are being absurd, General," said Mors stolidly. "As I recall the details, death occurs on the third day after infection, usually within a few hours of the appearance of the first noticeable symptoms. Sulfa, streptomycin, and penicillin are ineffective against this particular strain, which was especially bred up to be resistant to such drugs. Also, from my recollection, the patient is infectious aim ast from the instant of his own infection, I think you understate your losses. Moreover, in an epidemic of this sort, the death rate should mount geometrically until natural immunes and the lack of susceptibles lower it."

Mors paused, and said inquiringly, "You have ordered your men to abstain from all contact with the civil population?"

General Vladek panted with fury.

"I suspected intention when the plague began! My medical corps insisted that since only my men were infected, its cause must be contaminated supplies from home! I ordered my troops to subsist on local supplies and distributed our rations among the people, for revenge in case your spies in our supply system were responsible! But the rate of infection tripled! And your people do not die! My men die! Only my men."

Surgeon General Mors nodded. His eyes were sober, yet very resolute.

"That is natural," he observed. "Our population is immune." Then he said explanatorily. "We have immunized practically our entire population against certain formerly prevalent diseases. And included in the injection given to each citizen was a fraction of a very interesting formula which produces immunity to diplococci in a quite new fashion."

The dapper General Vladek sat frozen and speechless, in a rage so murderous that he seemed almost calm.

"It makes symbiosis possible," said Surgeon General Mors, in an interested tone. "It produces a condition under which the human body and the entire series of diplococci can live together. It does not produce the relationship. That requires the organisms, too. It merely makes the relationship possible. We have had practically no diplococci infections in our country for years back. Such diseases happen to be very rare among us. But the inoculation makes it possible for any of our inoculated citizens to establish a truly symbiotic relationship in case he encounters them. It is like the adjustment of intestinal flora and colon bacilli to us. They do not harm us, and we do not harm them. You follow the reasoning?"

General Vladek's voice was quite inhuman. "How were my men infected?" he demanded. His voice cracked. "Tell me, how were my men infected? My medical corps says-"

"We did not infect them," said Surgeon General Mors calmly. "We infected only our own population. On the morning of your invasion we spread the infection in the drinking water, in the food. We infected our own people, who could not be harmed by it-and then I came to you and warned you to keep your soldiers aloof from our people. I also advised you to get your troops out of our country for their own safety, but you would not believe me. Because you see", his tone was absolutely commonplace, "every citizen of our country is now a carrier of the plague of which your soldiers die. A carrier. Not suffering from it, but able to give it to anyone not immunized against it. You have heard of typhoid carriers. We are a nation of carriers, bearers of the plague which is destroying your army."

General Vladek looked like an image of frozen, despairing rage. His face was gray. His cheek twitched. He had led an invading army triumphantly into this province.

Then without one shot being fired, his army had ceased to be an army, and a sentry lay dead on the street before his headquarters.

"We did not, like to do it," said Surgeon General Mors, heavily. "But we had to defend ourselves. The soil of our nation is now deadly to your troops. If you murdered and burned every citizen of our country, our land would still be fatal to your men and to the settlers who might follow them. You cannot make use of Kantolia. You cannot make use of any of the rest of our country. And the loot you have sent back has spread infection in your cities. Couriers have carried it back and transmitted it before they died. The quislings you sent to your country to be rewarded for betraying their own, they were carriers, too. The plague must rage horribly in your nation. Other countries will close their frontiers in quarantine, if they have not already done so. You nation is destroyed unless you let us save it. I beg that you will give us the power."

Then Surgeon General Mors said very wearily: "I hope you will surrender your army, General Vladek. Your men, as our prisoners, will become our patients and we will cure them. Otherwise they will die. Permit us, and we will check the epidemic you created in your own country by invading us. We did not defend ourselves without knowing our weapon thoroughly. But you will have to give us the power to rescue you. You and your nation must surrender without conditions."

General Vladek stood up. He rang a bell. An officer and soldiers entered.

"Take him out," panted General Vladek hoarsely. Then his voice rose to a scream. "Take him out and kill him!"

The officer moved. Then there was a clatter. A rifle had dropped to the floor. One of the soldiers staggered. He reeled against one of the steel filing cases and clung there desperately. Sweat poured out on his face; he was ashen white. He knew, of course, what was the matter. He sobbed. He was already a dead man, though he still moved and breathed. Great tears welled out of his eyes. The other soldiers wavered and fled.

Surgeon General Mors stood beside a pigsty and argued patiently with a peasant who so far had stubbornly refused to permit the reinoculation of either his family or his cows. The dumpy little man in the badly fitting uniform said earnestly,

"It is a matter of living together, what learned men call symbiosis. We defended our country with the other inoculations. Now we must defend all mankind with these! We do not want our people to be feared or hated. We want visitors from other nations to come and live among us in peace and safety, to have no fears about doing business with us. If other nations are afraid of us, we will suffer for it!"

The peasant made fitful objections. Victory over the invaders, and the terms imposed upon them, had made him proud. But Surgeon General Mors' patient arguments were gradually wearing him down.

"Ah, but they made war on us. That was different! We do not want any more wars. When you and your family and your cows have been inoculated, we will be that much further along toward the understanding that nations which are at peace can live together," said Surgeon General Mors earnestly. "Nations which are at war only die together."

THE CURE
Lewis Padgett

When Dawson got back from his vacation in Florida, he was feeling no better. He hadn't expected a miraculous cure. In fact, he hadn't expected anything. Now he sat morosely at his desk, staring out at the tower of the Empire State and vaguely hoping it would topple.

Carruthers, his partner in the law firm, came in and requested a cigarette. "You look lousy, Fred," he said critically. "Why not go out and have a drink?"

"I don't want a drink," Dawson said. "Besides, it's too early. I had enough liquor in Florida."

"Maybe too much."

"No. What griped me was ... I dunno."

"Great psychoses from little acorns, grow," Carruthers said, his plump, pale face almost too casual.

"So now I'm nuts?"

"You could be. You could be. Give yourself time. Why this abnormal fear of psychiatrists, anyway? I got psychoanalyzed once."

"What happened?"

"I'm going to marry a tall, dark woman," Carruthers said. "Just the same, psychiatry isn't in the same class with astrology. Maybe you bit your grandmother when you were a child. Drag it out in the open. As long as you keep thinking, `What big teeth you have,' you'll dwell in a morass of mental misery."

"I'm not in a morass," Dawson said. "It's just—"

"Yeah. Just— Listen, didn't you go to college with a guy named Hendricks?"

"I did."

"I met him in the elevator last week. He's moved here from Chicago. Got offices upstairs, on the twenty-fifth floor. He's supposed to be one of the best psychiatrists in this country. Why not go see him?"

"What could I say?" Dawson asked. "I'm not followed by little green men."

"Lucky man," Carruthers said. "I am. Day and night. They drink my liquor, too. Just tell Hendricks you smell dead flies. You probably pulled the wings off an anopheles when you were a tot. It's as simple as that, see?" He rose from his chair, put his hand on Dawson's shoulder, and added quietly, "Do it, Fred. As a favor to me."

"Um. Well—O.K."

"Good," Carruthers said, brightening. He looked at his wrist-watch. "You're due at his office in five minutes. I made the appointment yesterday." He fled, ignoring the curse Dawson flung at his head. "Room twenty-five-forty," he called, and slammed the door.

Scowling, Dawson located his hat, left word with the receptionist as to his whereabouts, and rode the elevator up. He met a short, fat, cherubic man in tweeds emerging from twenty-five-forty. Mild blue eyes considered him through glistening contact lenses.

"Hello, Fred," the man said, "Don't know me now, eh?"

"Raoul?" Dawson's voice was doubtful.

"Right. Raoul Hendricks, somewhat fatter after twenty-five years, I'm afraid. You look the same, though. Look, I was just going down to your office. I didn't have a chance to eat breakfast this morning. What about a bite downstairs?"

"Didn't Carruthers tell you—"

"We can kick that around better over food." Hendricks steered Dawson back to the elevator. "There's a lot I want to ask you about. The college chaps. I didn't keep in touch. I was in Europe most of the time."

"I kept in touch," Dawson said. "Remember Willard? He's just been indicted in an oil mix-up—"

They talked over onion soup and through the entree. Hendricks listened, mostly. Sometimes he watched Dawson, though not pointedly. They were in an isolated booth, and, after coffee had been served, Hendricks lighted a cigarette and blew a smoke ring. "You want a snap diagnosis?" he asked.

"O.K."

"You're worried about something? Do you know what it is?"

"Certainly I know," Dawson said. "It's a sort of daydream. But Carruthers told you that."

"He said you smelled dead flies."

Dawson laughed. "On a windowpane. A dusty windowpane. Probably it isn't that at all. I just got the impression, no more than that. I never see anything. It's a sort of extension of sensory consciousness."

"It never occurs in your sleeping dreams?"

"If it does, I don't remember. It's always a flash. The worst part is that I know at the time that it's the windowpane that's real. Usually it happens when I'm doing some routine stuff. Suddenly I get this flash. It's instantaneous. I feel, very certainly, that whatever I happen to be doing at the time is a dream. And that really I'm somewhere smelling dead flies on a dusty windowpane."

"Like the Red King? You think somebody's dreaming you?"

"No. I'm dreaming—this." Dawson looked around the restaurant.

"Well," Hendricks said, "possibly you are." He stubbed out his cigarette. "We get into metaphysics at that point, and I'm lost. It doesn't matter which is the dream. The main thing is to believe in the dream while you're having it. Unless it's a nightmare."

"It isn't," Dawson said. "I've had a pretty good life so far."

"Then where are we? You don't know what's worrying you. The dream's merely a symbol. Once you realize what the symbol represents, the whole structure collapses, and any neuroses you may have are gone. As a general rule, anyway."

"Ghosts can't stand light, is that it?"

"That's it, exactly. Don't misunderstand me. Neuroses can build up eventually to true psychoses. You've got something like an olfactory hallucination. But there's no accompanying delusion. You know the windowpane isn't there."

"Yeah," Dawson said, "but there's something under my hand."

"Tactile hallucination? What does it feel like?"

"Cold and hard. I don't know what it is. If I move it, something will happen."

"Do you move it?"

After a long moment Dawson said "No," very softly.

"Then move it," Hendricks advised. He took out pencil and paper and adjusted his watch. "Let's have a jury-rigged word-association test. O.K.?"

"Well—why?"

"To find out the causation of your windowpane. If there's a mental block, if the censor's working, it'll show up. Spring cleaning. If you clean a house regularly, you save a lot of work later. No chance for cobwebs to accumulate. Whereas if you let the stuff pile up, you're apt to get a real psychosis, with all the trimmings. As I just said, it's a question of finding the cause. Once you locate that, you know it's a straw dummy, and it doesn't bother you any more."

"What if it isn't a straw dummy?"

"Then, at least, you've recognized it, and can take steps to get rid of the incubus."

"I see," Dawson said slowly. "If I'd been responsible for a man's death years ago, I could buy peace of mind by taking care of his orphaned children."

"Read Dickens," Hendricks said. "Scrooge is a beautiful case history. Hallucinations, persecution complex, guilt complex—and atonement." He glanced at his watch. "Ready?"

"Ready."

When they had finished, Hendricks blinked at the results. "Normal," he said. "Too normal. A few odd quirks—but it takes more than one test to get any definite result. We don't want to be empirical—though it's sometimes necessary. Next time you have that daydream, move the gadget under your hand."

"I don't know if I can," Dawson said.

But Hendricks only laughed. "Neural paralysis of the astral," he suggested. "I'm relieved, Fred. I'd rather gathered you were slightly off your rocker. But the layman always overestimates mental quirks. Your friend Carruthers has probably got you a bit worried."

"Maybe."

"So you've got a hallucinatory daydream. That isn't uncommon. Once we find the cause, you'll have nothing left to worry about. Come in tomorrow, any time—give me a call first—and we'll give you a physical checkup. More coffee?"

"No," Dawson said, and presently left Hendricks at the elevator. He was feeling irrationally relieved. Though he discounted a good deal of the psychiatrist's professional optimism, he felt that the man's argument held water. There was logic in it. And certainly it was illogical to let a daydream influence his moods so strongly.

Back in his office, Dawson stood at the window, staring out over the serrated skyline. The low, hushed roar of traffic mounted from the canyons below. In forty-two years he had come a long way, partner in a law firm, member of a dozen clubs, taking an active interest in a variety of matters—a long way, for a boy who had begun his career in an orphan asylum. He had married once, but there had been a divorce, amicable on both sides. Now it was more convenient to maintain a bachelor apartment near Central Park. He had money, prestige, power—none of which would help him if the hallucination developed.

On impulse he left the office and visited a medical library. What he found only confirmed Hendricks' remarks. Apparently, as long as he didn't believe in the real existence of the dusty windowpane, he was fairly safe. When he did, dissociation stepped in, and all but subjective, false logic would fall. Men have a vital need to believe they are acting rationally—and, since so many basic motives are too hidden and complicated to unscramble, they assign arbitrary meanings to their actions. But why a dusty windowpane

"Yeah," Dawson thought, thumbing through pages. "If I believed in this dream, I'd . . . uh . . . erect secondary delusions. I'd think of a good reason why there was a windowpane. Only there isn't any reason, luckily."

As he walked out of the library, and saw the stream of street traffic before him, he suddenly felt that he was dreaming. And the windowpane was back again.

He knew he was lying close against it, his nose almost touching the glass, inhaling dust with every breath, and the smothering, dreary, somehow brownish odor of dead flies. It was singularly horrid—that feeling of suffocation and dead despair. He could feel the hard something under his hand, and he knew with a sudden sense of urgency that unless he moved it—now—he was more than likely to smother there with his nose against the glass, smother from sheer inertia, inability to move. He knew he must not slip back into the dream of being Dawson. This was reality. There was nothing tangible about Dawson and his fool's paradise and his dream-city of New York. Yet he could lie here and die with the smell of dead flies in his nostrils, and Dawson would never suspect until that dreadful last moment between waking and death, when it was too late to move the . . . the hard object beneath his hand.

Traffic roared at him. He stood at the curb, white and sweating. The unreality of the scene before him was briefly shocking. He stood motionless, waiting until the hollow world had resumed its tangibility. Then, his lips tight, he hailed a taxi.

Two stiff shots of whiskey were comforting. He was able to contemplate working on the current brief, a liability case which presented no difficulties. Carruthers had gone to court, and he didn't see his partner that afternoon. Nor did the —hallucination—recur.

But, after dinner, Dawson telephoned his ex-wife, and spent the evening with her at a roof-garden. He didn't drink much. He was trying to recapture something of the vital reality that had existed during the early part of their marriage. But he wasn't too successful.

The next morning Carruthers came in, perched on Dawson's desk, and cadged a cigarette. "What's the verdict?" he wanted to know. "Do you hear voices?"

"Often," Dawson said. "I'm hearing one now. Yours."

"But is Hendricks any good, really?"

Dawson felt unreasonably irritated. "Do you expect him to wave a magic wand? All therapy takes time."

"Therapy, huh? What did he say was wrong?" "Nothing much." Dawson didn't want to discuss it. He opened a law book pointedly. Carruthers lit his cigarette, dropped the match into the wastebasket, and shrugged. "Sorry. I'd thought—"

"Oh, I'm all right. Hendricks is pretty good, really. My nerves are a bit shot."

Comforted, Carruthers said something and went back to his office. Dawson turned a page, read a few words, and felt things close in. The morning sunlight, slanting through the window, faded abruptly. Under his hand was a cold, hard object, and strong in his nostrils was the dusty smell of despair. And this time he knew it was reality.

It did not last long. When it had gone, he sat quietly staring at the hollow desk and the hollow wall beyond it. The sounds from the traffic below were dream-noises. The curl of smoke spiraling up from the wastebasket was dream-smoke.

"I hope you don't think you're real," Tweedledum said scornfully.

He noticed that the smoke had changed to orange flame. The curtain caught fire. Presently he would waken.

Someone screamed. Miss Anstruther, his secretary, stood in the doorway, pointing. After that, there was confusion, shouting, and the spurting of a fire extinguisher.

The flames died. The smoke vanished.

"Oh, dear," Miss Anstruther said, wiping a smudge from her nose. "It's lucky I came in when I did, Mr. Dawson. You had your nose in that book—"

"Yeah," Dawson said. "I didn't even notice. I'd better speak to Mr. Carruthers about throwing matches in the wastebaskets."

Instead, he telephoned Hendricks. The psychiatrist could see him in an hour. Dawson passed the time with a crossword puzzle, and, at ten, went upstairs and stripped. Hendricks used stethoscope, blood-pressure gadget, and other useful devices.

"Well?"

"You're all right."

"Sound as a nut, eh?"

"A nut?" Hendricks said. "Come on. Let's have it. What happened?"

Dawson told him. "It's like epilepsy. I don't know when I'll have these attacks. They've never lasted long so far, but they might. And afterwards—the dream-feeling hangs over. I knew very well that there was a fire in the wastebasket, but it wasn't a real fire."

"Daydreams are apt to carry over a bit. Reorientation isn't always instantaneous."

Dawson chewed on a fingernail. "Sure, but—suppose Carruthers was falling out of a window? I wouldn't have tried to stop him. Hell, I'd have walked off a roof myself. I'd have known it wouldn't have hurt me. It's a dream."

"Do you feel you're dreaming now?"

"No," Dawson said, "not now, of course! It's only during these attacks, and afterward—"

"You felt that hard object under your hand?"

"Yeah. And the smell. There was something else, too—"

"What?"

"I don't know."

"Move that object. It's a compulsion, in four-bit words. And don't worry about it."

"Not even if I walk off a roof?"

"Stay away from roofs for a while," Hendricks said. "Once you find out the meaning of this symbolism, you'll be cured?

"And if I don't, I'll get secondary delusions."

"You've been reading up on it, eh? Look. If you think you're the richest man in the world, and you haven't got a dime in your pocket, how'll you rationalize that?"

"I don't know," Dawson said. "Maybe I'm eccentric."

Hendricks shook his head, his plump cheeks bobbing. "No, you'll develop the logical delusion—a supplementary one—that you're the victim of an organized plot to rob you. Catch? Don't try to assign phony meanings to your dusty windowpane. Don't start thinking a little man named Alice is popping out of the woodwork with a windowpane tucked under his arm. Or that the glass-blowers' union wants to persecute you. Just find the real meaning behind the symbolism. As I told you. Move that gadget under your hand. Don't simply be passive about it."

"O.K.," Dawson said, "I'll move it. If I can."

He dreamed that night, but it was a typical dream. The familiar hallucination didn't emerge. Instead, he found himself standing on a gibbet, a rope about his neck. Hendricks came rushing up, waving a paper roll tied with a blue ribbon. "You're reprieved!" the psychiatrist shouted. "Here's your pardon! Signed by the governor." He thrust the roll into Dawson's hands. "Open it," he ordered urgently. "Untie the ribbon." Dawson didn't want to, but Hendricks kept insisting. He pulled at the ribbon. As he did, he saw that it was tied to a long cord that snaked across the platform and vanished from sight beneath it. A bolt clicked. He felt the trapdoor quiver under his feet. By puffing at the ribbon, he had opened the drop; he was falling.

He woke up, sweating. The room was dark and silent. Cursing under his breath, Dawson got up and took a cool shower. He had not had nightmares for years.

There were, after that, two more interviews with Hendricks. Each time the psychiatrist probed more deeply. But the refrain never altered. Recognize the symbol. Move your hand. Remember.

On the third day, as Dawson sat waiting in Hendricks' outer office, he remembered.

The familiar, leaden, sick inertia swept over him. Desperately he tried to focus on the buildings outside the window. But he could not battle the tide. At the last moment Hendricks' advice occurred to him, and, as he felt the cold, hard object under his palm, he made a tremendous effort to move his hand.

To the left, something told him. To the left.

It was hard to battle that lethargy, that smothering, dusty suffocation of despair. And it was hard to move. But he strained to send the impulse down his arm, into stiff fingers, and the effort told. He felt something click into place, and ... and…

He remembered.

The last thing before…

Before what?

"Vital therapy," a voice said. "We grow fewer yearly. And we must guard against that plague."

Karestly ran an eight-fingered hand over his sweating, bald head. "The tests show you need it, Dawson."

"I hadn't—"

"You wouldn't know of course. It'd be imperceptible except by the instruments. But you need the therapy, that's certain."

"I can't spare the time," Dawson said. "The simplification formulas are just beginning to clear up. How long must I stay in the vorkyl?"

"Half a year," Karestly said. "It doesn't matter." "And Pharr went in last month."

"He needed it."

Dawson stared at the wall, made a mental signal, and opaqueness faded to translucence and transparency. He could see the City.

Karestly said, "You'd never vorkylled before. You're one of the youngest. It isn't bad. It's stimulating, curative, and necessary."

"But I feel normal."

"The machines don't lie. The emotion factor is wrong.

Listen to me, Dawson. I'm a great deal older than you, and I've been in the vorkyl twelve times."

Dawson stared. "Where to?"

"Different eras each time. The one best fitted for my particular warp. Once it was Brazil in 1890. Another time, Restoration London. And the Second Han Empire. I had plenty to do. I spent ten years in Brazil, building a rubber empire."

"Rubber?"

Karestly smiled. "A substance—it was important at that time. I kept busy. It's fine therapy. In those days, the only therapy they knew involved painting, construction—visual and tangible, not the emotional and psychic therapy we use. 'However, their minds weren't developed."

"I hate the idea of being shut up in a five-sensed body," Dawson said.

"You wouldn't know any better. There's the artificial mnemonic angle. Your life-force will take possession of the body that's created for you at the therapic epoch we choose, and you'll have a full set of false memories, created especially for that period. You'll probably begin as a child. There may be temporal compression, so you'll be able to live thirty or forty years in a half-year of our time."

"I still don't like it."

"Time travel," Karestly said, "is the best therapy known today. You live in a new environment, with a new set of values. And that's the vital part. You get away from the current herd instinct that's caused all the trouble."

"But—" Dawson said, "but! Only four thousand of us still sane, in all the world! And unless we work fast—"

"We're not immune. The whole trouble is that for hundreds of generations the race has followed false values, which conflicted with the primary instincts. Over-complication plus over-simplification, both in the wrong places. We haven't kept pace with our growing mentality. There was a man Clemens—who owned a mechanical typesetter that was perfect except for one thing. It was too _complicated. When it worked, it was ideal, but it kept breaking down."

"Old stuff," Dawson said. "I know the trouble. The machines are so enormously complicated now that humans can't keep up with them."

"We're solving it," Karestly said. "Slowly, but surely. There are four thousand of us. And we know the right therapy now.

After you've had six months in the vorkyl, you'll be a new man. You'll find temporal therapy is foolproof and absolutely certain."

"I hope so. I want to get back to my work."

"If you went back to it now, you'd be insane in six months," Karestly pointed out. "Temporal travel is like preventive serum shots. You'll be occupied; we'll send you back to the twentieth century—"

"That far back?"

"That period's indicated, in your case cell be given a complete set of artificial memories, and, wale you're in the past, you'll have no consciousness of reality. Of this reality, I mean."

"Well—" Dawson said.

"Come on." Karestly rose and floated toward the transporter-disk. "The vorkyl's ready for you. The matrix is set. All you have to do is—"

Dawson got into the case. It closed behind him. He took a last look at Karestly's friendly face and tightened his hand on the control. He moved it toward the right.

Then he was Fred Dawson, with a complete set of artificial memories, in the orphan asylum in Illinois.

But now he lay in the vorkyl, his nose against dusty glassocene that smelled of dead flies, and the vitiated air tore at his throat as he tried to breathe. All was in gray semi-darkness around him. He sent out a frantic thought-command.

Somewhere light grew. The distant wall faded to transparency. He could see the City.

It had changed. It was older. And a heaped pile of dust made a canopy atop the vorkyl in which he rested.

The immense red sun washed the city in bloody gloom. There was no sign of organized activity. Figures moved here and there in the ruins. He could not make out what they were doing.

He looked for Administration Building, the last stronghold of the race. It had altered, too. A long time must have passed since he had entered the vorkyl. For ruin had touched the great tower, and the white, naked shapes that crawled up and down the structure showed no sign of intelligence. The last light had gone out, then. The tide of madness had engulfed the four thousand.

He used his seventh sense of perception, and his guess was confirmed. In all the world, there was no sanity. The herd instinct had triumphed.

And he could not breathe. That suffocating horror was a reality now. The last oxygen left in the sealed case was rapidly being absorbed by his now active lungs. He could, of course, open the vorkyl—

To what?

Dawson moved his hand. The control swung to the right again.

He was sitting in the psychiatrist's outer office. The receptionist was at her desk, scribbling something; she didn't look at him. The white light of morning sunshine made patterns on the rug.

The reality—

"You may go in now, Mr. Dawson."

Dawson stood up and walked into Hendricks' sanctum. He shook hands, muttered something, and sank into a chair.

Hendricks referred to his charts. "O.K., Fred," he said. "Feel up to another word-association test? You're looking a bit better."

"Am I?" Dawson said. "Maybe I know what the symbol represents now."

Hendricks looked at him sharply. "Do you?"

"Maybe it isn't a symbol at all. Maybe it's a reality."

Then the familiar sensation came back, the dusty, suffocating claustrophobia, and the windowpane, and the brownish, dry smell, and the sense of terrible urgency. But there was nothing to be done about it now, nothing at all. He waited. In a moment it was gone again, and he looked across the desk at Hendricks, who was saying something about the danger of secondary delusions, of rationalizing.

"It's a matter of finding the right sort of therapy," insisted the hollow man.

THE END