Acknowledgments “Somewhere a Voice” from Other Worlds, January, 1953, published by Clark Publishing Company, Evanston, Illinois.

“U-Tum” from Astounding Science Fiction, April 1950, published by Street & Smith Publications Inc., New York.

“Seat of Oblivion” from Astounding Science Fiction, November 1941, published by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., New York.

“Tieline” from Astounding Science Fiction, July 1955, published by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., New York.

“Displaced Person” from Weird Tales, September 1948, published by Weird Tales, New York.

“Dear Devil” from Other Worlds, May 1950, published by Clark Publishing Company, Evanston, Illinois.

“I Am Nothing” from Astounding Science Fiction, July 1952, published by Street & Smith Publications Inc., New York.

Somewhere A Voice

They crawled, walked, tottered or jumped out of the battered little lifeboat, each according to his or her mental or physical condition. There were nine of them. The lifeboat had been designed to carry twenty but only nine emerged and only two remained within it.

All around towered the tangled jungle of a world notoriously hostile to their kind. High above burned the intense blue furnace of a sun that lent their faces a ghastly glow and made them peer through lids narrowed to the minimum. The air was thick, cloying, full of vegetable smells and vaguely reptilian but unidentifiable stenches. The jungle brooded in utter silence, waiting, waiting, waiting.

First Officer Alex Symes automatically took charge. Nobody disputed his right. Tall, grey-haired, laconic, he was the senior-ranking member of the party. Not that rank counted for much in these dire circumstances; or if it did it wouldn’t be for long. A corpse has no promotional status. Facing the others, he informed, “Near as I can make out, this is Valmia, sixth planet of ZM17.” He threw a brief, narrow-eyed glance at the fiery orb above them. “Don’t take it we’re lucky. There are a million far better places in the cosmos.”

“We’re alive,” put in Max Kessler, captain of the third watch. “That’s something.”

“The problem is to stay alive,” countered Symes. “And that’s something else.” His gaze went over them, studying, estimating. “Valmia has a rescue-station under a dome on the fortieth parallel. Our only hope lies in reaching it.” He waited a bit for that to sink in, then said, “I reckon we’ve between seventeen hundred and two thousand miles to go.”

“Say forty miles a day,” hazarded Kessler. “Fifty days. We’ll make it.”

“Tvorty milers!” echoed Mrs. Mihailovik, her broad, pud-deny face suffused with dismay. She felt for and grasped her husband’s hand. “Grigor, ve nod able are to do tvorty milers.”

The dumpy and equally pudden-faced Grigor patted her thick fingers. “Is best for to vait und tsee.”

Watching the pair of them, Bill Mallet decided that fate could and should have arranged things much better. To his mind, salvation functioned on too haphazard a basis to leave room for common justice. A lot of real people had given up the ghost when that superfast lump of rock had smacked the Star Queen and split her open from end to end. A hell of a crash and a vast whoof of air and they were all gone. Ainsworth, Alcock, Banks, Balmer, Blundell, Casartelli, Casey, Corrigan, a battalion of them, all one hundred percent people.

And look at some of the rabble that had got away. Only three of them amounted to anything. Four if you counted Feeny, the late Captain Ridgeway’s Irish terrier. As deputy engineer of the first watch and two hundred pounds of lavishly tattooed muscle to boot, he, Bill Mallet, had some call to be picked for survival by. whoever or whatever did the .choosing. The same applied to Symes and Kessler, both good men and true, skilled, white and literate.

As for the rest, well, there were infinitely more deserving cases now floating bloated and lifeless in space. These Mihailoviks, for instance. Refugees from some village of mud hovels to which they’d been no ornaments. Squat, myopic and stupid. Mere earth-tillers, elderly, ugly and without visible merit. Not even able to speak plain English.

On the first day out he had passed Mrs. Mihailovik in a corridor just as a whirr and a thump had startled her and she’d demanded in panic, “Vot ist dot?”

“Dot,” he had informed with contempt she’d been too dimwitted to detect, “ist der vater pvumps vot pvumps der vater.”

“Ah, tso?” she’d said, idiotically relieved. “Mine t’anksl”

“Tsink of it nozzings,” he had snorted.

A choice pair to be snatched from the very maw of death and granted life denied to others. The universe would never have missed them. Now they’d be a serious handicap on the long march, an unwanted liability, whereas any two of the doomed crew would have been an asset. Destiny had a mighty poor notion of the proper way in which to arrange things.

Another survivor was Hannibal Paton, a lanky, soft-voiced Negro, former engine-room hand of the third watch. The only darkie aboard the vessel. He’d had a miraculous escape while more able men had been swept clean out of the scheme of things. It didn’t seem right somehow.

One could feel pretty much the same way about the yellow-faced monkey known as Little Koo. A spindly, thin-limbed, emaciated creature who once had performed some kind of lowly, unskilled task in the officers’ mess. A sliteyed, toothy, apologetic specimen who kept his silences and spoke only when spoken to. Quiet and secretive. Nobody knew his real name. Probably Kwok Sing, or something like that. But always he had been called Little Koo.

Lastly there was Sammy Finestone, youngish, swarthy, black-haired, flashily dressed, a passenger from Earth and said to be a petty trader in rare crystals. A typical Hebe, in Bill Mallet’s estimation. One that had never soiled his hands with honest work. No doubt Sammy had been first in the lifeboat when the big bang came, grabbing the safest seat and clutching his bag of diamonds with an eager, claw like grip.

Veritably a motley mob characteristic of those who crawl like lice over every space-going vessel bound for faraway and supposedly better parts. Space-hardened crewmen learn to waste no time upon them, to avoid them, steer clear of them—unless compelled by disaster to consort with them cheek by jowl.

Symes was still talking. “All I know about Valmia consists of odd items dragged up from my memory. The total doesn’t amount to much. We’ve no reference books, nothing else to go upon.” He looked around in half-hearted hopelessness. “Is there anyone who happens to be well-informed about this planet?”

They were glumly silent except for Mallet, who grunted, “Never so much as heard of the place until now.”

“All right.” Frowning to himself, Symes went on, “What I

remember is that it has a rescue-station, as I mentioned before. Also that this world has never been assigned for settlement. That means it’s considered unsuitable for human habitation.”

“Do you recall the reasons?”asked Kessler

“Unfortunately I don’t. I suppose they’re the usual ones: hostile life forms, inadequate or dangerous food supplies, an atmosphere that kills quickly or slowly, a sun that does little.”

You can’t say whether it’s just one of those features or the whole lot.”

“No, I can’t,” admitted Symes, lugubriously. “But the rescue-station is located under an airtight dome and that fact speaks for itself. They don’t go to all the trouble and expense of creating livable conditions within a shield unless they are unlivable outside of it.”

“So what you’re trying to tell us,” said Kessler, meeting him eye to eye, “is that our time is limited.”

“Yes.”

“And we don’t know for sure how many weeks, days or hours we’ve got?”

“No, we don’t.” Symes’ forehead was deeply corrugated as he strove to bring back Cogent facts that he’d never expected to need. “I have a slight idea that something is wrong with the atmosphere but I can’t swear to it. When you’ve been stuffed with information on ten thousand planets, most of which you’ll never live to see, you tend to forget nine-tenths of it. A man’s mind can hold only so much.”

“The air smells and tastes all right to me,” commented Bill Mallet, drawing a deep breath. “Bit thick and stuffy but that’s nothing to worry about.”

“You can’t tell by how it seems,” Symes said. “What you breathe may take six months to kill—or less.”

“Then the sooner we get out of this the better,” put in Sammy Finestone.

“That goes for everyone,” retorted Mallet, giving him the hard eye.

“He said ve und nod I” Mrs. Mihailovik pointed out.

“Tso vat?” said Mallet, giving her a share of his stare.

“Shut up, all of you,” ordered Symes, displaying irritation. “The time to squabble is when we get someplace good and safe. Until then we’ve better use for our energies.” He gestured toward the lifeboat. “First, we’ll bring out those two bodies and give them decent burial.”

They went silent. Max Kessler and Hannibal Paton entered the boat, reappeared with the bodies, laid them side by side on a carpet of purple moss. When Kessler had snatched them into an airlock five seconds before the lifeboat blew free they had been already beyond help ond were cold before the propulsion tubes grew hot. Now they lay upon the alien moss while the big blue sun scowled down and gave their complexions a horrid tinge of green.

One spade was included among the few emergency tools racked in the boat. Taking turns with this, they dug two graves in dark red soil that smelled like old iron far gone in rust. They composed the two in their last resting-places while Little Koo looked on expressionlessly and Mrs. Mihailovik snivelled noisily into a rag that helped to serve as a handkerchief.

With glossy-peaked cap held in one hand, Symes looked at the blazing sky and said, “Flaherty was a Roman Catholic. He died without a priest. You won’t hold that against him, will you, God? He had no choice about the matter.”

He stopped, embarrassed by his own role and by Mrs. Mihailovik’s loud and uncontrolled sobs, but he still kept his gaze above.

“As for Murdoch’s faith, he had none and said so. But he was a good man, the same as Flaherty. They were both fine, upstanding men. Please forgive them any little sins that may be recorded against them and grant them the last haven of good sailors.”

Mr. Mihailovik was comforting his wife, patting her shoulders and saying, “There, Momma, there, there!”

After a short pause, Symes finished, “Amen!” and put on his cap.

“Amen!” murmured the others.

“Amen!” lisped Little Koo with the air of one only too willing to do that which is decent and proper.

Feeny sniffed around the graves, went in turn to each of the silent watches and emitted a querulous whine.

“The lifeboats armament was hopelessly inadequate. Nobody could be saddled with the blame for this. The tiny vessel had been undergoing its weekly check-up at the moment of disaster. Much of its normal contents had been lying outside in the corridor when the Star Queen got clobbered. Even its fuel tanks had not received compensation for there loss by evaporation.

Feeny and Paton had been actually In the boat. Seven more still surviving In the shapeless lump that was one-third of the Star Queen’s tail-end had staggered to it with scaled lips, pinched noses and starting eyes. Two more had been dragged in, the pair now buried. And they’d blown free with what little they had.

No face masks. No oxygen cylinders. No portable ray projectors. Only one pocket compass and that with its face cracked. A radio that did not work because of some mysterious defect that Thomason might have cured in two minutes had he not been among the floaters in space. Three automatic pistols, a box of ammunition, a large quantity of iron rations and a few metal implements including half a dozen heavy, razor-edged machetes. Nothing more.

Already wearing a belt holding one of the automatics, Symes said, “I’ll keep this weapon and the compass. We’ll march in single file with me in front.” His attention shifted to Kessler. “If we walk into any serious trouble I’ll be the first to catch it. I may not get out of it alive. In that event, Max, you must take over the lead.” He tossed an automatic to him. “So you have this one. In the meantime keep to the end of the line and function as our rearguard.”

He surveyed the others, trying to decide who should have the third gun. Mallet needed it least, being of exceptionally powerful build and fully capable of making redoubtable use of a machete. The same applied to Paton, whose black body was well-muscled. As for the Mihailoviks, they could not be trusted to take straight aim in a crisis even if they knew how to fire a gun. Feeny could not use it even if he wanted to.

That left Sammy Finestone and Little Koo. The latter was by far the smaller and as a member of the crew must have had some training in handling firearms. Little Koo should know which way to point the thing when he pulled the trigger. He gave the third automatic to Little Koo.

“The rest of you take those broadswords,” he ordered, indicating the machetes. “Divide the rations, each of you taking as much as he can carry. Fill your water bottles from the boat’s reservoir and let’s get started.”

They did as instructed, humping their respective loads, looking with uneasy faces at the waiting jungle and reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the little ship. For most of a dreadful week the small metal cylinder had been home, a man-made fortress protecting them from the cosmos that so suddenly had raged against them. It seemed sheer ingratitude to abandon it now, leaving it to long-term corrosion and eternal silence.

Sensing this feeling because he shared some of it, Symes told them, “If we make it to the rescue-station they’ll send out a helicopter with a load of fuel and recover this boat. It’s too valuable to be left to rot.”

That soothed them slightly. They started out, heading northward and following a yard-wide path made by nobody knew what. Symes was in the lead, automatic in hand. Next came Hannibal Paton and Feeny. Then Little Koo, the Mihailoviks, Sammy Finestone, Bill Mallet and Max Kessler.

The jungle closed around, a riot of colours in which a dark and almost black green predominated. The malignant blue sun became shielded by overhead growths but still drove its rays through rare gaps, making brilliant shafts among massed foliage as if spotlighting unimaginable things lying in wait among the tree-trunks and shrubs.

They covered a mile, stumbling over roots and creepers, twisting comers, occasionally hacking at ropey things that straggled across the path. Some of the slashed vines writhed away like mutilated worms. The line halted and Symes called back.

“Watch out for this orchid-covered thing—it made a bite at me.”

“They shuffled on. The path took a sharp turn to the left and on the corner stood a huge growth bearing great crimson trumpeted flowers. Mullet could see Mrs. Mihailovik edging nervously around it, as far from it as she could get, her eyes wide, her steel rimmed spectacles halfway down her nose. Her husband was urging her on though no less wary himself.

“Is got by now Momma. Nod worry. You is got by.”

“Am trouble vor you, Grigor. Make hurry!”

Grigor edged round in exactly the same way, watching the plant every moment, trying to maintain as much distance as possible without putting himself nearer to some other danger behind. He made it, joined her and pushed on. Sammy Finestone approached the corner cautiously, neared it, rounded it in one mad dash.

Sniffing his disdain, Mallet marched brawnily up the path, machete poised in readiness. He could now see some of the crimson trumpets straining hungrily toward the path, pulling at their stalks in eagerness to get within reach. One lay on the ground, decapitated by Paton’s knife when it had made a stab at Symes.

Mallet came abreast, posed barely within reach and dared the plant to come on. A trumpet immediately lunged at him. He got a fragmentary glimpse of an enormous crimson maw armed with a thousand slender needles, then his gleaming machete struck it from its stem. The thing let out an eerie gasp as it fell.

Behind him, Kessler said dryly, “I wouldn’t have bothered.”

“Why not? I’m using no ammo.”

“You’re using strength and nervous tension. You made a tiny loss of both and may be praying for it before you’re through.”

“Tell that to Sammy. Notice the way he scuttled around it? Like a frightened hare!” He gave a loud laugh and chopped a piece of vine which promptly coiled and coiled again. “Sammy’s only worry is Mrs. Finestone’s little boy— and his bag of diamonds.”

“Has he got a bag of diamonds?” asked Kessler in open surprise.

“Ever know of a Yid who hadn’t?”

“Sh-h-hl—he’ll hear you.”

“So what?” Speeding his pace, Mallet caught up with the subject of the conversation. Sammy was waiting on the next turn of the trail, his dark eyes anxious.

“For a moment I thought something had happened.”

“Fat lot you did about it,” Mallet gave back.

“I was just about to return for a look when I heard your voices.”

“Did your ears bum?” asked Mallet, grinning.

“No.” Sammy showed puzzlement. “Should they have

done?”

“Maybe. We were having fun about the way you cornered on two wheels past that—”

From somewhere well ahead Symes bawled, “What’s the hold-up back there?”

“Coming!” yelled Kessler.

They moved on in silence.

Death came at night when the blue sun had given way to three midget moons one of which trailed a hazy wisp behind it like a pale spectre prowling in thin drapes. The stars were distorted and sickly in a sky that refused to be black and insisted on retaining faint traces of the searing globe below the horizon.

The nine had built a fire within a small clearing. Seven sat around it while two remained on their feet and kept constant watch on the semi-visible surroundings. Feeny tried in vain to sleep, first resting head on paws and blinking at the flames, dozing for less than a minute then perking upright, eyes alert, ears twitching. His obvious restlessness added to the uneasiness of the others.

A moodiness lay over them. The general estimate of the day’s progress came to somewhere between eight and ten miles. Allowing for the frequent zig-zagging of the path, which rarely ran straight for more than a hundred yards, their northward gain could not be more than five or six miles. At that rate it would take them most of an Earth-yrar to reach the fortieth parallel—if they lived that long.

Nor could they be sure of arriving within easy distance of

the rescue station with the aid of a pocket compass and one man’s memory. There might be quite a distance to cover along the parallel itself, assuming that they’d know when they’d reached it.

If only the lifeboat had held a little more fuel, say enough for one circumnavigation of the planet. If only its radio had functioned on landing so that it could send out its repeated Mayday call until the rescue-station got a true bearing on it. If only Thomason or one of the junior radio operators had been among the survivors, able to repair the apparatus and enable them to stay by the boat until picked up.

It was a long and miserable list of “ifs.” In fiction are characters who know everything about everything. In fact, few if any people are like that. The expert engineer knows little or nothing about space-navigation; the trained navigational officer knows little or nothing about radios. Each must do his best with what he has got. He can do no more.

But what had Hannibal Paton got other than a big, fat mouth with which to eat into the precious rations? What had the Mihailoviks got other than weary legs and tired feet to slow down the whole party? What had Sammy got, or Little Koo? Not even a fragment of knowledge helpful in finding the way out; nothing but the willingness to be nurse-maided into safety—if it could be done.

Bill Mallet lay on his side pondering these sour thoughts and futilely inviting slumber that refused to come. Lit up by the flames, he could see the half-naked dancing girl tattooed on his hairy forearm. He twitched his muscles a few times and made her wiggle seductively. Close by his outstretched fingers reposed his machete, sharp and shining.

On his right two small red spheres lit up every now and again as Feeny opened and closed his eyes. Immediately across from the fire Mallet could see the Mihailoviks clumsily sprawling together, eyes shut, mouths open. But for the continual crackle and splutter of the fire he might have been able to hear their snores. Just like pigs, he thought, waddling around in the hope of eventually arriving at the trough.

Kessler sneaked quietly out of the half-dark, laid more brushwood and a couple of rotten logs on the fire. Sparks flew around as damp wood hissed and spat. He went back to keep guard in the shadows. Time crawled on while two of the moons sank low and the third dragged its veil more sluggishly across the zenith.

Something made sibilant rustling noises deep in the vegetation. A faint but pungent odour oozed out of the jungle, strengthening as the almost unbearable sounds crept nearer. The smell was somewhat like that of goats sweating in a summer’s day. The creaking, slithering sounds reached from near to far away, suggesting that the cause of them was something immensely large.

Silence awhile except for the spitting and snapping of the fire and whines of suspicion from Feeny. Non-visual senses surreptitiously reached out of the gloom, surveyed the clearing, examined the fire, the sleepers, the watchers. The thing in the shadows reached a decision.

Came a fierce forward lunge, the brittle break of an impeding branch, flailing of bushes, a frantic yell from Kessler and the sharp, hard crack of an automatic. Trees swayed, undergrowth whipped sideways from the edge of the clearing to a point three hundred yards away.

It wasn’t until he found himself standing dazedly on his feet, machete in hand, that Mallet realized he must have succeeded in going to sleep. He could remember waking up with a violent start as somebody bellowed the alarm and fired a shot. An instant later a lean, black body had hurtled over him, bush-knife in fist. That had been Paton going into action.

He jumped the same way himself, toward the fracas in the jungle, without looking to see what anyone else was doing. A gun exploded again and again, making thin flashes of pale yellow flame in the dark. Out of the night came a hoarse coughing accompanied by a breaking of wood and thrashing of leaves.

Then like one in a nightmare Mallet became aware of Symes standing beside him holding a torch of blazing twigs. In the flickering light they could see monster coils four feet thick swiftly sliding back into the greater darkness beyond. I The coils moved with horrid sinuosity, hauling a great eyeless head vaguely resembling a warty pumpkin. Milk-white pus slopped from holes and gashes in the head.

A few paces in front of them was Kessler, cursing vigorously and slumping over the limp form of Paton. He took the body by the shoulders, Mullet by the legs, and they took it back to the fireside. Symos knelt beside it and examined it.

” The devil sneaked up and grabbed me,” said Kessler, waving his gun around and still pretty jumpy. “I yelled and fired into its ugly head as it tried to drag me away. Hanny leaped over the fire and everyone else and went for it as if he’d gone crazy. He tried to hack its head off. It let go of me, belted him twenty yards and backed out fast. I gave it two more, right in what it calls a face, but it didn’t seem to make much difference.” He mopped his forehead and fresh sweat promptly beaded out. “By now I’d be a mile away and fifty yards down its gnta if Hanny hadn’t come on the way he did.”

Mrs. Mihailovik started bandaging a wide gash in Paton’s right arm. Where she had found the wrapping was a mystery. It wasn’t from the first-aid pack. Probably a strip tom from her underdress. She rocked to and fro and crooned over the black figure as she performed her self-appointed task.

Nudging her gently, Symes said, “I’m terribly sorry, but you’re wasting your time. He’s dead. I think his neck is broken.”

She came up slowly, looking first at him and then at the body. The eyes behind her thick-lensed glasses registered incredulity until suddenly the tears welled up. She tried to control herself but couldn’t. She took off her glasses, wiped her eyes repeatedly and said nothing. Taking her arm, Symes led her back to her place by the fire. Mallet watched them, turned to Kessler.

“Lucky escape, eh?”

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” said Kessler. He got the spade and started digging a hole beneath a tall tree.

They searched Hannibal Paton for the identities of his next of kin and then laid him to rest. Kessler cut a crude wooden cross and fixed it over the grave. Symes stood cap in hand and asked the sky to accept one of its own children.

Mallet growled, “Amen!”

Little Koo echoed it.

So did the others.

Mrs. Mihailovik sniveled again.

Next day the path started wandering westward. Perforce they turned onto another track that ran more to the north. After a while it widened slightly and they made better time along it. Quietened by the previous night’s tragedy they kept closer together and marched in the same order as before except that Feeny now attached himself to Symes, sharing the leading position.

The route climbed slowly but persistently. The jungle remained as thick and menacing as ever but had a smaller proportion of spreading trees. Overhead gaps became wider and more frequent, letting the blue sun scald them as they passed through. Perspiration made their hair lank, dampened their backs. Atmosphere became stuffier than ever, seeming to thicken with altitude instead of thinning as it should have done.

Shortly before mid-day Mrs. Mihailovik gave up. She seated herself upon a fallen tree-trunk, her spectacles dimmed with moisture, her face full of dull resignation. “Mine feet.”

“Harting your feet is, Momma?” enquired Grigor with great concern.

“Mine feet is done.” Kicking her shoes off, she let go a deep sigh. “No more can go.”

Kessler caught up from the rear and Symes came back from the front. The whole group clustered around.

“What’s the matter?” asked Symes.

“Says she’s crippled,” responded Mallet.

“We’ll rest awhile,” Symes decided, carefully hiding his worry over this delay. “Perhaps we’ll get along better if we stop more often.”

“Is mooch better vizoud me,” remarked Mrs. Milhailovik with the air of one making an incontrovertible point “You go on I stay.”

“What, and leave you here by youself?”

“Not by herself,” denied Grigor. He sat firmly beside her, I stay too.”

Symes said mordantly. “You’d be waiting for certain death.”

“Together,” retorted Grigor, as if that settled it.

Her thick fingers fondled his hand. “Stay nod vor me, Grigor. Is silly. You go on.”

“I stay.” Insisted Grigor.

We’ll all slay,” said Symes, brooking no argument. He consulted his watch. “We’ll see how we feel in another hour’s lime. Meanwhile we can have something to eat.” His gaze wandered over the group, settled on Mallet. After a short while, he snapped, “Well, what’s giving you the fidgets? Out with it, manl Don’t stand there tottering on the verge!” Mallet shifted uncomfortably as several pairs of eyes studied him expectantly. “I… I—”

Symes said, “Look, Bill, if it’s useful, let’s have it. If it’s a gripe, keep it to yourself.”

More embarrassed than ever, Mallet blurted out. “Back in the old gymnasium days I was considered a good masseur.”

“What of it?”

Carefully avoiding Mrs. Mihailovik’s gaze, he said in a rush, “I can do things with exhausted feet.”

“Can you?” Symes’ face cleared, gaining new hope. “By God, that’s a help. Think you can do something for Mrs. Mihailovik?”

“If she’ll let me try.”

“Of course she will.” Symes looked at her. “Won’t you?”

“Won’t you, Momma?” urged Grigor, nudging her.

“Is mooch trobble vor me,” she protested.

“It’s a darned sight more trouble to be squatting aimlessly around when we could be making progress,” Symes pointed out. He turned back to Mallet. “Do what you can for her, Bill.”

“I need some lukewarm water fdr a start,” said Mallet. “Guess we’ll—”

Sammy Finestone chipped in. “There’s plenty in that stream three or four hundred yards back.” He pawed among their dumped packs and found the canvas bucket. “I’Jl go get some.”

“Not by yourself you don’t!” contradicted Symes with sudden sharpness. “A bucket of water isn’t worth a life and you can’t do much for yourself with only a machete. You need a gun.” He switched to Kessler. “Go with him, Max, just in case.”

They departed, came back in short time with a couple of gallons of water ready-warmed by the heat of the day. Mrs. Mihailovik shyly submerged her swollen feet and let them soak for twenty minutes. Then she dried them self-consciously, let Mallet grip a foot between his knees as if she were a horse about to be shod.

Flexing his fingers, Mallet got to work, bending and twisting the foot, expertly thumbing ligaments and muscles.

It took quite a time before he was satisfied and dealt similarly with the other one.

“Who’s got the first-aid kit?”

“I have.” Sammy handed it over.

Unzipping its waterproof casing, Mallet scrabbled among packets, wrappers, cans and sealed bottles, found the ether, swiftly swabbed a little of it over both feet.

“Ach!” She sucked in a quick breath. “Is colt—like ice.”

“Evaporation,” he explained.

Opening a can of petroleum jelly, he took her thick-soled shoes, rubbed the stuff well in, vigorously beat the impregnated leather with a smooth club of wood, rubbed in more jelly, flexed and again flexed the footwear until he could easily bend toe to heel. He handed the shoes to her.

“Try them on now. Don’t tie them tightly. Let them fit a little loosely.”

Doing as instructed, she stood up, trudged experimentally around. Her eyes beamed with surprised delight and for the first time Mallet noticed that they were a clear, china blue like those of a doll.

“Is beautiful!” she informed. More steps taken with childish pleasure as if she’d miraculously acquired new feet. “Mine t’anks!”

“Mine also,” said Grigor, vastly relieved.

“Heck,” said Mallet, “it’s nothing.”

A couple of days ago he’d have retorted, “Tsink of it nozzings.” Somehow he couldn’t say that sort of thing now; it didn’t seem right. There was that pathetic gratitude on Grigor’s broad, peasant face. And there were various phrases running round and round within his own mind.

“Luck had nothing to do with it.”

“A bucket of water isn’t worth a life.”

“Is mooch better vizoud me.”

“I stay.”

Yes, they’d been willing to stay, alone in the jungle but together, awaiting the bitter end.

Education.

Day number four, five, six, seven. Total distance not known. Northward progress guessed-at as somewhere about fifty miles. They’d now been toiling along for a week but it seemed like a month, more than a month. The abandoned lifeboat could just as well be on another planet. The sleeping-places of Murdoch and Flaherty and Hannibal Paton were mistily pictured mounds set in wild spots unreachably afar.

And with the eighth dawn Symes urged them to an early start mercifully unaware that his own turn came next. Again he switched to a side-path determined by compass as more suitable than the one they’d been following. Moving at fair pace they tried to cover maximum ground before the sun reached its zenith and scalded them anew.

During the mid-day meal Little Koo paused in his eating, shifted from under the shade of their tree and tried to look into the unbearably brilliant sky.

At the same time Feeny sat up, ears perked forward, and whined querulously.

“Anything wrong?” asked Symes, his hand closing on his automatic.

“Hear tiny sound high up.” Returning to the tree, Little Koo sat down and impassively continued with his meal. “Think I hear him before, day or two ago. Not sure.”

“What kind of a sound?”

“Whuyoum, whuyoum, whuyoum!” Little Koo demonstrated.

“Eh? Do it again.”

“Whuyoum, whuyoum!” he obliged.

“I’ve never noticed it,” Symes said.

“Me, neither,” Kessler contributed. “Perhaps his ears are sharper than ours.”

“Ears plenty good,” Little Koo assured.

Bill Mallet went out, stared upward through shading fingers, came back defeated. “Sounded to me as if he were imitating a helicopter.”

“Just what I thought.” Symes searched as much of the sky as his eyes could endure to look at, which wasn’t much.

“Don’t tell me we’re developing hallucinations,” said Kessler. “Why should a ’copter be zooming around? The station picked up no emergency signals from us. We weren’t able to send any.”

“Do you suppose that Thomason did manage to shoot a Mayday from the Star Queen before his transmitter spread itself seventeen different ways?”

“Not a chance. Not the slightest chance whatever. That rock belted him into a pink haze without one tenth of a second’s warning.”

“I don’t think it was a ‘copter,” decided Symes, settling down to his meal.

“Neither do I.”

“Hear sound,” insisted Little Koo. “Whuyoum, whuyoum.!” They let the subject drop. The sound did not come again or if it did they failed to hear it. Bill Mallet gave Mrs. Mihailovik’s feet another spell of treatment that by this time had become a daily ritual. Sammy was always ready with water, jelly, ether. Grigor always rewarded Mallet with his eyes. Mrs. Mihailovik’s own reaction never varied.

“Beauti-full Mine t’anksl”

In the late afternoon the onward marching line suddenly and unexpectedly halted at a point where surrounding growths were especially thick and tangled. Feeny was barking his head off. Both Symes and the dog were out of sight around a sharp bend with Little Koo stalled on the corner. “What’s the matter, Alex?” shouted Kessler from the rear. Symes’ voice came back, doubtful and wary. “Feeny’s acting up. Dancing around in front of me.” Then in higher tones, “Down, down, you daft bastard—you’ll tear the leg off my pants.”

“Be careful, Alex. That dog is no fool.”

“I know. But I can’t make out what’s exciting him.’’ “Nothing visible ahead?”

“Not a thing. I can see all the way to the next bend and the path is clear.”

“Well, we can’t go back,” called Kessler. “We’ve got to go on. You stay where you are. We’ll bunch up to you and meet it in a lump—whatever it is.”

“No use,” Symes’ voice came back. “There isn’t room on the path. I’ve got to deal with this myself.”

“Maybe it’s gone,” suggested Kessler hopefully. “Feeny is quiet now.”

A wild flurry of agitated barks promptly contradicted him.

Symes said with some grimness, “Hear that? It was when I tried to take a step forward.”

“Nod like,” announced Mrs. Mihailovik, displaying much apprehension. “Is better for to—”

She shut up as Symes again spoke, this time addressing Little Koo, the only one who could see him. “You keep me covered. I’m going to step out whether Feeny likes it or not.” Feeny immediately barked with unaccustomed frenzy, ended with a spine-tingling howl of canine woe. At the same time they heard a strange crunching, crumbling sound and a short, muffled exclamation from Symes. Then all was silent except for Feeny’s whimpers.

Gun in hand, Little Koo glanced back from the comer and said, “Fallen down hole.”

Handing Sammy his automatic, Kessler rasped, “You stay put and keep watch behind us.”

He pushed past the others, Mallet going with him, and rounded the corner. Four or five yards farther on a yawning black hole extended the full width of the path. Feeny was to-and-froing along the nearer edge, emitting a curious mixture of moans and growls. His eyes were red-rimmed, his ruff standing up.

Dropping his machete, Mallet lay on his belly and edged carefully toward the ragged rim. “Hold onto my legs, will you?” He inched farther, used a heavy arm to push Feeny aside, reached the edge some of which crumbled under his weight. Looking down, he could see nothing but stygian darkness.

“Alex!”

No reply.

“Alex.!”

Silence.

Louder still, “Alex, are you all right?”

Nothing but a faint, indefinable clattering coming from a long way down. Feeling to one side he found a pebble, dropped it into the hole and counted slowly. It seemed a long time before he heard it land. The clunk of stone was at once followed by more clattering, scuttling noises. It made him think of something huge and chitinous. A colossal crab.

“He may have knocked himself out,” ventured Kessler, two yards back and clinging to Mallet’s boots.

“Afraid it’s worse than that.”

“Dead?”

“I hope so.”

“Are you mad? What d’you mean, you hope he’s dead?” “This hole goes deep,” said Mallet. “It’s been specially made. It’s a trap. There’s something monstrous waiting at the bottom.”

Kessler breathed heavily. “You sure of that?”

“I can hear it shuffling around.”

“Hear him too,” confirmed Little Koo, his flat, olive face expressionless. “Go clatty-clat.”

Hauling on the boots Kessler drew the other back. Mallet stood up and dusted himself.

“We need a very large coil of rope to get down there.” Flattening himself on the path, Kessler said, “You hold me.” He crept forward, got his head over the gap, bawled downward, “Alex! Alex! Can you hear me?”

There was no answer from the ghastly depths. Only faraway noises of armoured movement. Kessler came back, regained his feet, mopped his face. He was like a man having a bad dream.

“We can’t just walk away and do nothing about this.”

“Tie vines and make long rope,” suggested Little Koo. “I go down.”

Mallet scowled at him. “You couldn’t kick your way out of a paper bag. If anyone goes down it’ll be me.”

“Much weight,” asserted Little Koo looking unawed at the other’s broad and hairy chest. “Too big.”

“He’s right,” said Kessler. “You’ve twice his bulk. Whoever goes down that hell-hole will have to be our lightest member.”

“Me,” claimed Little Koo, contemplating the prospect with bland indifference.

Troubled almost to distraction, Kessler went on, “If Alex is dead I’m now the leader. I’m far from sure that we ought to let him go down.”

“Why not?” asked Mallet.

“We might be throwing one casualty after another. Besides, if something menacing is at the bottom he cannot be expected to face it with no more than a bush-knife. He’ll have to take his gun. We’ve lost one weapon already. It’s down there with Alex. If we lose another—”

“There’ll be only one left,” prompted Mallet. “The one you’ve lent to Sammy.”

Kessler nodded miserably. “One gun and no compass. It would reduce our already small chances to practically nil.”

“Have compass,” informed Litde Koo, producing the instrument in question. “Fall outside hole. I pick him up.”

The sight of it soothed Kessler enough to enable him to reach a decision. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. We’ll send him down with a torch just far enough to see what’s there. After that we’ll consider whether anything effective can be done.”

In sweaty haste the three set to, hacking and dragging thin but tough lengths of vine from the jungle. It took more time than they liked because they had to select the supine variety, sorting it out from very similar ones whose sliced pieces wriggled and writhed around. The Mihailoviks wanted to join in but Kessler made them remain on the path guarded by Sammy. One worry at a time was quite sufficient.

With a loop of vine around his waist, Little Koo went over the edge, his automatic ready in his right hand, a long, tight bunch of burning reeds in his left. His features revealed nothing whatever of his inward feelings. For all one could tell he did this sort of thing twice a day and three times on Sundays.

The vine paid out slowly, emitting creaking noises showing a threatening tendency to fray around the knots. The flickering torch sank into the gloom while Feeny prowled around the rim, occasionally growling and baring his teeth as his sensitive ears detected the motions of the unknown creature far below.

By mutual consent they ceased lowering, called down, “See anything yet?”

“All dark,” responded Little Koo’s unemotional tones, echoing hollowly. “Must drop more.”

Cautiously they paid out more vine, their apprehension building up with every yard that creaked and strained over the edge.

“Quicker!” urged the voice from beneath. “Flame burning down. Getting near fingers.”

Six or seven yards slid over. With nerve-racking suddenness an ultra-rapid volley of shots reverberated up the hole. Sixteen of them: the full magazine.

Mallet and Kessler hauled for all they were worth, the Mihailoviks grabbing the end of the vine and pulling with them. Kessler’s face dripped sweat and Mallet’s muscles bulged mightily as they strove to whisk Little Koo to the surface in the shortest possible time. Pieces of vine stripped themselves by friction as they came tautly over the edge. Fibrous strands snapped and parted company with the main stalk. Together they tugged and prayed breathlessly that the impromptu rope would hold, would not give way at the last moment.

All at once Little Koo popped up like a jack-in-the-box. Discarding the loop around him, he ejected the empty magazine from his gun, clipped in a full one. It could not be said that his manner was strangely quiet because it was strangely quiet most of the time.

“Alex?” demanded Kessler.

“No head,” said Little Koo matter-of-factly. “Thing down there have bite him.”

Looking a bit sick, Kessler asked, “Could you see what was at the bottom?”

Little Koo nodded. “Big thing. Red all over and with heavy shell. Many arms, like spider. Two eyes—so!” He held his hands eighteen inches apart. “Bad eyes. Look at me as if I am more meat.” He surveyed his automatic with gratification. “I blow out eyes.”

“You killed it?”

“No, only blow out eyes.” He gestured toward the hole. “Feeling around now. Listen!”

They did so, heard clanks, thumps and scrabblings as of something clumsy and cumbersome trying to climb up the hole and repeatedly falling back.

“What an end!” exclaimed Kessler, sad and frustrated. “What an end!” Savagely he kicked a lump of dry and rotten wood into the hole. An idea struck him as he watched it plunge down. “We can offer the dead nothing but vengeance.”

“Have given that,” said Little Koo, mildly. “Blow out eyes.”

“It isn’t enough. Blind or not, it can still squat there and feed on Alex. We must kill it.”

“How?”

“Let’s dump a lot of dry reeds, then a lighted torch and a pile of brushwood. We could roast it alive.”

“What if it has another way out, an emergency escape tunnel?” enquired Mallet.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Kessler admitted. “We can’t waste time searching for another hole. Let’s drop a bonfire on it and hope we’ve got it bottled.”

“There’s a better way,” suggested Mallet. He pointed to a big boulder half hidden in a mass of growths. “If we can shift that and roll it over the rim we might flatten that red devil before it has a chance to get out from under.”

Working with furious energy they cut away the twining obstructions, got behind the rock, braced themselves and heaved in unison. The rock shuddered, tilted and turned over. A dozen fat and bright yellow grubs squirmed in the bare earth.

Another simultaneous thrust and the boulder rolled to within a foot of the gap. They listened to make sure the quarry was still there. Subterranean scratchings and bum-blings continued to echo up the hole. The rock went over accompanied by a shower of dirt. It seemed to take a surprising time to go down but in the end they heard it wallop with a harsh, splintering sound coinciding with a squashy splatter. After that there was silence.

Kessler ceremoniously brushed his hands as if to say, “That is that!” Me glanced at the compass, went round the corner to summon the others. Mallet and Little Koo heard him ask sharply, “Well, what’s she crying for now?”

“Symes,” came back Sammy’s voice. “It takes a woman to cry for men.”

Thereafter Kessler took the lead with Feeny at his aide ready to give warning that next time would be heeded. Little Koo followed, then the Mihailoviks, then Sammy Finestone. Bill Mallet functioned as rearguard, complete with machete.

Toward evening on the tenth day Mrs. Mihailovik collapsed. She did it without sound or warning, one moment stumping along the trail with her usual thickset, heavy gait, the next moment lying on the path like a discarded bundle of rags.

Grigor’s agonized call of, “Momma!” brought the line to a halt.

They grouped around her, bore her into a little clearing, raked hurriedly through the first-aid kit. Her eyes were closed, her broad, big-boned peasant face had a faint purplish tinge. There was no evidence that she was breathing. Kessler held her wrist and found himself unable to detect her pulse. They stared at each other in glum impotence; not a doctor among the lot.

Someone draped over her forehead a rag soaked in water. Another held an aromatic vial under her nostrils. Another patted her cheeks and rubbed her stubby-fingered, toil-worn hands. Desperately they tried to summon her back to the weary world she’d so abruptly left but their efforts were in vain.

Finally Kessler took off his cap and said to the pale, dumb Grigor, “I’m sorry! I’m terribly sorry!”

“Momma!” murmured Grigor in heart-rending tones. “Oh, mine poor, tired—” He switched into guttural language that the others could not understand, went down on his knees, put his arms around her shoulders, clasped her tightly. Her spectacles lay on one side, trampled, broken and ignored while he hugged her to him as though he could never, never let her go. “Mine little Gerda! Oh, mine—”

The others moved off a little way, faced the jungle with weapons ready while Grigor bade a broken farewell to half his life, half his soul, half his very being. Then very gently they drew him away and buried her under a shady tree and gave her a lonely cross to gleam amid the alien jungle.

Two hours later and seven miles farther on they made camp for the night. By that time Grigor had not uttered a word. He’d marched along the trail like an automaton, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, neither knowing nor caring where he was going or whether he got there.

In the bright, comforting glow of the fire, Sammy Finestone leaned over and said to him, “Don’t take it so hard. She wouldn’t like it.”

Grigor offered no reply. He stared fixedly into the flames and failed to see a single gleam.

“She went quickly and peacefully, in the best way of all,” soothed Sammy. “It was her heart, wasn’t it?” Getting no response, he continued, “Several times while following close behind I noticed her go short of breath and hold her side. Every now and again she had difficulty in getting along. I thought perhaps she was bothered by a stitch. But it was her heart. She must have been in pain. Why didn’t she say?”

“Nod like to make trobble,” said Grigor, dully. These were the first words he’d voiced.

They were also the last.

He never spoke again.

By four o’clock in the morning he had gone. Two moons rode high with the third far down when Kessler became bored with standing still while on guard, quietly circled the camp, found Grigor’s sleeping-place deserted. He did not sound an immediate alarm; rest and sleep were too badly needed to interrupt without second thoughts. So he stepped cautiously over slumbering forms, searched the camp and the nearby surroundings.

No Grigor.

The jungle brooded threateningly. Something wide-winged and phosphorescent flitted through the tree-tops, a silent ghost. Kessler considered the position. How and when Grigor had sneaked away there were no means of telling. He might have been gone for an hour or more. He might be miles away by now—if still alive.

But where he had gone was an easy guess. What to do about it? If he, Kessler, took off in solitary pursuit he’d first have to awaken someone to relieve him as guard. Then for a time the small party would be split into two groups, doubling their chances of being attacked by any thing or things that may have been watching and biding such an opportunity these last eleven days, also reducing their ability to resist. In this sorry fix unity was strength. Disunity meant eventual disaster.

With great reluctance he was forced to solve the problem in the only possible way—by waking the lot.

“Grigor’s gone back.”

“When?”

“I don’t know. Either he crawled out in complete silence while my back was turned or perhaps he’d already gone when I took over the watch and I failed to notice it.” He gloomed at the fire. “We can’t leave him to fend for himself in this menacing maze. We’ll have to go back for him.”

“I’ll go fetch him myself,” volunteered Sammy, picking up his machete.

“We can’t afford to take the risk of sacrificing ourselves one at a time,” declared Kessler, waving him down. “We’ll stick together regardless of whether we go forward or backward.”

Bill Mallet came to his feet, heaved his heavy pack onto his back, yawned widely and grasped his bush-knife. “That settles it then. We all go back. It’s only about seven miles. What’s seven miles?” He yawned again and answered the question for them. “At this time of night it’s more like seventy. So what? Come on!”

Shouldering their possessions, they set off, guns and machetes held ready. The glow of the fire died away behind them. The moons sent down just sufficient light to make the path a vaguely mottled streak winding through the shapes and shadows. Feeny trotted at the head, sniffing suspiciously every now and again, growling in his belly at intervals.

Grigor lay in the clearing, on his side, body curled convulsively, legs drawn up, a bottle from the first-aid kit half-empty in his left hand. His right arm sprawled protectively across the fresh mound. The wooden cross posed close by his head.

They got the spade and put him down in the dark alongside mine little Gerda, where he wanted to be. This was the goal toward which he had wended his way through the alien night.

He had thought it over, had Grigor, during ‘those few hours without her. And he’d made up his mind. He was not leaving her.

And he didn’t.

Kessler made a note in his diary. “Day number thirteen. Northward progress estimated at something over one hundred miles. Moving faster the last couple of days.”

He did not mention why they had speeded up. Everyone knew there were two reasons. Firstly they had got rid of the slow-movers. Secondly, at the rate they’d been going the supplies would not last out in spite of the fact that they had acquired the rations of the dead. A hundred-odd miles in thirteen days. It wasn’t enough. Would this accursed jungle never end?

Breaking a pack of concentrated food, Kessler gave it to Feeny, opened another for himself, ate slowly. “There’s one consolation, if you can call it that. The load goes down a fraction eveiy time we have a meal.”

“There are plenty of roots and fruits around,” remarked Mallet. “I know rule number one: eat nothing not definitely known to be edible. The penalty of disobedience can be more than awful—but sooner or later we’ll have to chance it.” “Not eat—die slowly,” Little Koo pointed out. “Eat wrong thing—die quickly.”

“And, man, you can be really glad to die quickly,” Mallet topped. “On other planets some luscious-looking fruits can make you peg out with your toes tucked tightly into your armpits.”

“You’d need a shorter grave in that attitude,” observed Sammy Finestone. “It would save about half the labour. You could call it economical expiration.”

Mallet eyed him carefully. “I’d have laid bets against any humour from you, ghoulish or otherwise.”

“Why?”

“I figured that by this time you’d be a nervous wreck or cold stone dead.”

“I am a nervous wreck,” said Sammy. “Takes all I’ve got to cling to life.”

“That’s the boy!” approved Mallet. “Keep on clinging and you’ll get through.”

Pulling irritatedly at the thick beard he’d acquired, Kessler said to Sammy, “Don’t think you’re alone in having to drive yourself along. It’s the same for all of us.” He felt for and fondled a pair of canine ears. “Except Feeny, perhaps.” Hearing his name mentioned, Feeny agitated the stump he used for a tail.

Sammy commented, “It beats me how he manages to detect traps like the ones Symes fell into. He’s warned us of four to date. But for him another of us might be down a shaft feeding a crimson thingumabob.”

Kessler rubbed the ears, stroked the furry back and offered no answer. But he was thinking. By now the original party had been cut in half. They’d lost four of their members. Each one of these casualties had been a real, genuine loss deeply felt by those who remained.

If by any chance Feeny were doomed to go it would be decidedly serious. Feeny was only a speechless, mediumsized dog but nevertheless a person and a necessary one. Without him they’d have to cut long sticks and probe the path every step of the tortuous way, slowing themselves down to a quarter of their former pace. The pace and the distance to be covered created a problem bad enough in itself. Feeny was wanted, needed. Everyone was wanted, those who had gone and those who survived.

He stood up, knowing it was futile to pile tomorrow’s

troubles on top of yesterday’s woes. What was to be would be—and they’d have to face it.

“Let’s get going.”

They moved off, Kessler and Feeny in front, Mallet at the rear. Though neither knew it, the first and last man had been pondering along similar lines. Similar but not the same because Mallet was still busy with mental readjustments.

As rearguard Mallet could see all the others as often as twists and turns in the path permitted. He. was therefore deeply aware of how many marched ahead. The distance from front to back had been twice as long when first they’d started this dreadful pilgrimage. Longer because others had marched between. Symes, for instance. A good, efficient character. A first-class spaceman. Did he feel their lack of numbers solely because of Symes?

No.

He also missed a buck nig.

And a pair of Balkan boneheds.

If destiny struck again he was just as surely going to miss a Hebe.

And a wizened little Chink.

And a prick-eared, hairy barker.

He was going to miss the rabble.

“Don’t you forget all this, Mallet!” he growled to himself. “Not ever!”

Sammy glanced backward over his shoulder. “Say something?”

“I’m metaphorically kicking my pants,” Mallet informed.

“Do you do that too?” Sammy showed surprise. “I’ve worn mine out the same way.”

This confession filed itself in Mallet’s mind along with other recently acquired data. Other people found cause to punish their own behinds, just like he did. Other folk made mental errors and had the grace to regret them.

Surprising how much everyone has in common.

The proper thing is to live in tolerance and die with dignity. He was learning to do the first. It remained to be seen if he could manage the second.

The path crawled over a bare-topped hill and for the first time since starting out they had a clear view for miles around. In every direction it was the same, a solid, unbroken mass of vegetation except to the east where a range of mountains rose black and stark against the burning sky.

Wiping a rag over his streaming face, Kessler griped, “When down in the jungle I wished myself to the devil out of it. Now I want to get back. It provided some shade if nothing else.”

“Noise,” announced Little Koo, pointing north-west. “Over there. Whuyoum, whuyoum!”

“I don’t hear anything.” Shading his eyes, Kessler stared in the direction indicated. “Can’t see anything either.” He glanced at the others. “Do you?”

“Not a thing,” Sammy admitted.

“Thought for a moment I saw a black speck high up,” said Mallet, doubtfully. “But I’m not sure. It might be just my imagination.”

“Is it still there?”

“No. It seemed to float into view and then fade from sight.”

“I refuse to get excited about it,” declared Kessler. He mopped his features again. “Another hour under this infernal sun and we’ll breed delusions a lot crazier.” He moved onward. “Let’s get down to some shade.”

Feeny barked and bristled at an adjacent rock. Kessler slowed, edged toward it with his gun held forward. Feeny rushed around the rock and roared like a lion. A thing like a ten-limbed lizard promptly bolted with long, undulating leaps and vanished over the rise. Feeny came back rumbling his disappointment.

“Eight feet long and half of it teeth.” Kessler sniffed his contempt. “And it runs when a dog barks.” ‘

“Perhaps it’s allergic to harsh noises,” suggested Sammy. “If Feeny had kept quiet it might have taken him at one gulp.”

“That’s something I hate about this lousy world,” informed Kessler. “Its eerie silence. Back on Earth there’d be continual pandemonium in a jungle like this. Cicadas clicking, monkeys chattering, parrots screaming and all that. Here, nothing makes a sound that might give it away. Big snaky things slide around in complete quiet. Gigantic red spiders wait down holes and make no noise. When on watch night-times I’ve seen or sensed many things that sneaked by without the crack of a twig or a rustle of leaves. It isn’t natural. It gets me down.”

“Let’s sing then,” offered Sammy. “It’ll keep up our spirits and scare off everything else.”

“Sing what?” invited Kessler.

Sammy gave the matter serious consideration and came up with, “How about There’s A Long, Long Trail A-Wind- ing?’

They bawled it as they trudged onward, all except Little Koo who didn’t know a word of it. They turned to Roll Me Over In The Clover and the Song Of The Legionnaires and half a dozen more. It speeded their pace down into and through the trees. Mallet gave a solo in a hoarse, unmusical bass, an Australian outback ditty called Clancy’s Gone A-Droving Down The Cooper.

Finishing it, he picked on Little Koo. “Weve not heard a squeak out of you. How about giving us a song of your own, huh?”

Little Koo looked sheepish.

“Come on,” urged Mallet, impatiently. “You can’t sound any worse than I do.”

Self-consciously and with great reluctance Little Koo obliged, producing a chronic and unmelodious series of shrill, wailing half-tones that made them think of a cat being violently sick. It went on for some time before the agony broke off, apparently in the middle of a bar.

“What’s all that about?” demanded Mallet, waggling his eyebrows.

“The petals drift down like snowflakes and gently rest upon the pale arm of my loved one,” explained Little Koo with sudden and surprising fluency.

“Jeez!” said Mallet. “Very pretty.”

Fancy Little Koo having someone about whom to sing. The thought had not occurred to him before. He tried to picture her in his mind. Probably she was olive-faced, almond-eyed, plump, given to giggles, a good cook and the mother of seven fat kids. Probably she was twice the size of Little Koo, bossed him and his household with a firm, efficient hand and had a name like Sublime Fragrance.

“Very pretty!” he repeated to Little Koo’s shy gratification.

“How about Marching Through Georgia?’ suggested Sammy, willing to bellow anew.

“I’m out of breath.” Kessler hacked viciously at a waist-high sprawl of vines across the path. “The one in the lead gets all the work.”

“And takes all the risks,” Sammy pointed out. “Don’t you think we should take turns at being front man?”

“It’s an idea.” Kessler stepped through the gap while raw ends of vine writhed around. “I’ll consider it. Remind me of it in a couple of months’ time.”

There was no need for anyone to do so.

He did not last that long.

Three days later they encountered the mysterious path-makers. What had created the jungle trails had puzzled them many times. It certainly wasn’t the huge snaky things like the one Hannibal Paton had tried to carve. They had caught glimpses of dozens of those to date but none had attacked and none had shown themselves upon the path.

The smaller lizard-like creatures weren’t responsible either. They were too few in numbers, too light in bulk. It had been apparent from the start that the tortuous trails must have been made by rarer and very weighty users. Parts of these firm, hard tracks were overgrown, being slowly reclaimed by the jungle, but long portions remained bare and—except where crimson trappers lurked—were really solid as if pounded down by monstrous feet.

About to round a bend, Kessler stopped as a distant rumble reached his ears. The others heard it simultaneously, halted close behind. Feeny twitched his ears and displayed great uneasiness.

The sound came strangely in a world of such deathly silence. It suggested the sudden abolition of a natural law.

Noise! Low-pitched and heavy, with a sort of earth-shaking quality about it, like that made by fifty thousand buffalo on the rampage. A dull but intense and gradually nearing thunder as of an army of huge things beating tremendously upon the ground.

Feeny yelped agitatedly, ran round in tight circles, and Kessler said, “I’ve a feeling we’d better get off this path.” He examined the jungle. The noise grew louder. “There!” Indicating a part of the surrounding maze that looked not quite as thick and tangled as the rest, he started to hack his way through.

The rest chopped and sliced with him, got thirty yards from the trail when the sound roared around the corner. Mallet snatched up Feeny, held a hairy, sweat-soaked hand over his muzzle to keep him quiet. Their shirts were glued to their backs as they stood in the depths of the alien hell and watched.

Sixty or seventy immense creatures charged one behind the other along the path in the manner of runaway locomotives. They had thick, dark hides, three-homed heads of appalling ugliness and small, piggish eyes. Their weight seemed to be completely out of proportion to their great size, as if fifty tons of bone and muscle had been squeezed into twenty tons of bulk. Each one’s four pairs of elephantine feet stamped vines and all other obstacles deep into the earth, remaking the route for a couple of months to come.

One could feel the reverberation of their passing even from thirty yards away. The thudding of it resounded through the earth and ran up the tree-trunks and made top branches quiver. Watching them go by making no noise other than the snorting of nostrils and thunder of feet, Kessler thought of gigantic rhinoceroses armed with triple horns.

The things went past at a clumsy but irresistible gallop and were gone, flattening everything in their way, smashing down the camouflaged doors of spiderlike entities which, when the danger had passed, would have to clamber up their holes and repair the damage with earth and spittle.

Emerging from their hiding-place, the watchers in the green gloom listened carefully for indications of a second onrush from the north, but nothing was to be heard other than the muted dum-dumming of those just gone.

Staring at his big automatic, Kessler commented ruefully, “Fat lot of use this would have been. Nothing less than a seventy-five millimeter bazooka could have made one of those pause in its pace.”

“Know what they were?” enquired Mallet, dumping Feeny on the path.

“Haven’t the vaguest notion. Alex was the only one who knew anything about this planet and what he could remember wasn’t very much.” Following the bend, Kessler came to a two-way split, consulted the compass, pointed to the left. “That track.”

It brought them to a river. The path led straight to the bank at a point well trampled for a hundred yards upstream and downstream. A drinking-place of the three-horned monsters.

The waters were cloudy, yellow and fast running, making a barrier thirty yards wide and of unknown depth. According to the compass the opposite bank lay dead north.

Frowning at the swift current, Kessler opined, “I would not care to try to swim that. It may have pretty strong currents under the surface.” He wiped perspiration, surveyed without enthusiasm the greenish glitters produced by blue sunlight on yellow water. The river smelled strongly of rotten apples and something else pungent but not identifiable. “It’s much too risky.”

“The alternative is to traipse back to that fork and continue along the other branch,” said Mallet. “It was running westward but maybe it turns north again farther on.”

“I’d rather we didn’t do that if it can be avoided. Too many detours could be the end of us.” Kessler’s eyes searched both banks and the trees. “A captive log floated at the end of a vine might get us across.”

“If we can find a suitable log in less than a week,” countered Mallet, waving his hand to indicate the complete lack of anything in view.

“Just so.” He thought a while. “In the jungles on Earth the natives build liana bridges and throw them up quickly. Anyone know how to make such a bridge?”

Nobody had the vaguest idea.

Mallet ventured, “I imagine they have people on both sides of the river for that sort of job. So we’d have to get across to build a bridge to get ourselves across.”

Little Koo said, “Swing over like monkey.”

“You must be telepathic,” declared Kessler. “I was stewing that very notion.” He had another and closer look at the trees. “If we can find a useful rope—”

They sought some way along the bank and discovered what they wanted. Of the numerous trees that arched partway across the river there was one bearing half a dozen big vines dangling almost to water level.

Bringing one of them into the bank wasn’t too difficult. They cut a long, thin liana out of the jungle, tied an oval stone to its end, whirled it like a bolas and got it around their objective at the tenth try. They drew it in. Because of its arc as it swung to the bank its end arose out of hand-reach and Mallet had to climb the tree-trunk to secure it.

“I’ll go first.” Kessler transferred the stone to the dangling vine, swung it across, pulled it back with the thin liana. It swept a mere two feet above the opposite and higher bank. Satisfied, he tightened the straps of his pack, made sure that his weapon and ammunition were secure, handed the compass to Mallet. “If I get over all right swing this across to me by itself. It’s too precious to lose.”

Unconscious of being grimly prophetic, he allowed them to boost him a few feet up the tree. Taking hold of the vine he heaved on it with all his strength, testing its grip and its toughness.

“The stone got a hefty shove,” remarked Sammy, showing anxiety. “That’s more than you’ll have. What if you don’t quite reach the other side?”

“I will. This vine’s suspended at least five feet off centre toward the other bank and the level over there is quite a piece higher. I’ll make it easily.”

Bracing himself, he shoved off with both feet and swooped outward. Under his one-eighty-pounds weight the vine creaked in protest, did not break, but did tear away from its hold on the overhead branch. It fell with him into midstream. At once there showed a long, violent eddy as of something moving swiftly under water.

Standing nearest the river’s verge, Sammy Finestone let out a yelp as Kessler hit with a shower of yellow spray and the curious eddy appeared. Flinging off his pack, he raised his arms above his head.

“No, you fool!” shouted Mallet, racing from his place by the tree with the intention of grabbing the other. “You don’t know what’s—”

He was too late. Ignoring him, Sammy dived.

There was a wild swirl in mid-river. Kessler’s head bobbed up in a froth of disturbed water and went down again. The water heaved itself, foamed and became tinged with pink.

Sammy reappeared, flung backward by the sheer violence of the sub-surface upheaval. Came another great agitation accompanied by a small waterspout. An arm came momentarily into view, protruded from the foam in a last dreadful and bloody gesture before Kessler vanished forever. Sammy, still battling the current near the bank, gave a sudden gasp.

Racing downstream to keep pace with him, Mallet sprang waist-deep into the water, grabbed Sammy by the hair and drew him into the bank. Bending, he grasped him under the arms and lugged him clear of the river.

Or part of him, all but the lower legs. There was nothing below his knees but pulses of blood from severed vessels.

“Oh, God!” he breathed, feeling sick in the pit of his stomach.

Gently lowering the other he got the first-aid kit, scanned its contents with a sense of terrible helplessness. It held no surgical instruments and if there had been any he would not have known how to use them. There was a hypodermic syringe and needle. Also phials of drugs, liquid and solid. Exactly how does one fill and use a syringe? Which drug should best be employed? Just where should one inject?

Sammy stirred, tried to sit up, white-faced and dreamy like one still miles from reality.

“Maxie?” he whispered. “Is he—?”

“Him gone,” informed Little Koo, studying him sliteyed.

“You lie still.”

“Me? Why?” He strained further, seeking command of his nether limbs, looked down.

Mallet returned and Little Koo said, “Him faint.”

“Just as well. This stuff in the kit is all we can use for him. Quick, raise his right stump.”

Working swiftly, he used thin plastic tubes to link up the main blood vessels, coated them and the raw flesh with dollops of sealing goo. The stuff was not easy to apply for it set glasshard within seconds of daubing it on. The first layer closed the flesh, and firmly held the tubes. More layers hardened over it, one upon another, until the wound was encased in a solid, protective mould. Then the same with the other leg.

As a rough but swift technique for coping with a grave emergency it would pass muster. But it was no ultimate solution. It was barely good enough to hold a patient together until he could reach more competent hands and up-to-date surgical facilities.

Mallet reached for bandages and soft pads, not that they were needed for the wounds but because they might provide some cushioning and comfort. He let his hand stay outstretched as Little Koo whipped out his automatic—now their only remaining weapon—and spoke calmly.

“Water devil!”

Glancing over his shoulder, Mallet saw a great, flat, heart-shaped head sticking out of the river. It was the size of a small boat and had two white saucer like eyes that stared at them, cold and unblinking. Thin strings of water-weed dangled from horny projections on the outlandish face. Its jaws were munching slowly as though enjoying a rare delicacy to the last.

The automatic spat savagely again and again. One of the saucer eyes exploded and a thick green liquid spurted from where it had been. The head ducked under water and the river went wild as the thing thrashed around on the bed.

Brought round by the hard cracks of the gun, Sammy stirred, looked at them. “My legs! Something nipped off my legs!” In childish wonderment, he added, “And I hardly felt it. Just a slight stab of pain like cramp. But it took my legs!”

“You’ll be all right.” Mallet continued with his bandaging.

“No, I won’t. Not in this place.” He gave a brief shiver as if sensing a queer coldness within the jungle heat. “I’ve had it. You’d better leave me.”

Mallet harshed, “The fact that you’re temporarily indisposed doesn’t give you the right to talk a lot of nonsense. So shut up!”

Giving him a thin smile, Sammy said, “You can’t fool me, talking like that. I know I’m next for the spade.”

“We’re going to carry you,” Mallet retorted. “It will be quite a change. I’m fed up with digging holes. Get it out of your stupid head that you can wangle me into digging another!”

Now taking charge, Mallet decided that the river must be regarded as an impassable barrier at this particular point. Had there been only the two of them, Little Koo and himself, he’d have risked a swing on one of the other vines or on three or four if a bunch could be found anchored sufficiently near together.

But with Feeny to boost across and with Sammy to handle the job became too difficult. It was easier to turn back to the westward path and seek some other branch that might turn north. This meant adding unknown mileage to the seemingly endless journey ahead. Nevertheless it had to be faced. Obstacles that cannot be surmounted must be detoured.

They trimmed a pair of straight, tough branches and Little Koo shaped between them a flexible mattress of woven reeds. The deftness with which his long, skinny fingers worked was a revelation to the on looking Mallet. It was obvious that Little Koo had an aptitude for this kind of task, for the job was done with speed and dexterity that Mallet could never hope to match.

Sammy rode on this impromptu but effective litter, protesting weakly for a while and then giving up as he found no notice being taken. His machete lay at his side. There was not the slightest chance of his making use of it in any circumstances but they were reluctant to abandon the weapon. Besides, its mere presence had some small psychological effect upon the man being carried: it implied the others’ belief that he remained a worthy part of their armed strength. Nobody knew better than he how little justified was such a notion. A man with half-legs is like a fly without wings unless and until he can be fitted with mechanical appendages not available on wild and lonely worlds.

But the shining blade reposed there by his side, winking and blinking under rare shafts of blue sunlight and seeming to say to him, “You’re all right, Sammy boy. I’d be wasting my time waiting here if you were no good. I’m the fighting extension of a strong right arm and you’ve still got arms, haven’t you, Sammy boy?”

So he lay helplessly on the litter and caught the continually reassuring gleams of the blade and watched branches drift overhead and bit his bottom lip in silent pain and tried to ignore the fierce burning in his severed limbs. He was losing no blood, the glassy seals ensured that much. Neither could germs penetrate them to get at his raw flesh. The bacteria swarming in the yellow river were a different proposition. They had got at him early, while he was still vulnerable, and they were shut in behind the seals there to battle with his white corpuscles.

The burning was hip-high by the middle of the second night. Unable to sleep because of it, Sammy lay between the fire and the recumbent form of Little Koo. Nearby, patrolling round and round, was Bill Mallet doing his spell of watch. Feeny was whining in his dreams while sprawled atop their packs. Sammy sighed, forced himself partway up toward sitting position. Reflections of the flames flickered in his dark eyes. Mallet came across, knelt beside him, whispered so as not to disturb Little Koo.

“How’re you doing?”

“Not so good. I—”

“Half a sec.” Mallet went to his pack, carefully edged it from under Feeny, foraged inside and came back. “I took these from the boat. Thought I’d save—”

Sammy said, “What boat?”

“The one that brought us here.”

Sammy screwed up his eyes, collected his thoughts, and said, “Oh, yes, that boat. God, that was a million years ago.” “Thought I’d save them for the glorious moment when the dome of the rescue-station came in sight.” Mallet exhibited a small can of cigarettes. “But we won’t need all of them now.”

“Keep them,” breathed Sammy. He tried to suppress a gasp but failed. “Shame to open the can right now. They won’t keep for months once the air gets at them.”

“Little Koo doesn’t smoke. There’s only we two.” Mallet broke the vacuum and flipped the lid up. He gave Sammy a cigarette, lit it for him and another for himself. “Could you do with a shot of morphine?”

“Know how?”

“No.”

Propping himself on one hand, Sammy leaned awkwardly toward him and spoke in lower tones. “You two have lugged me for two days. How far have you gone?”

“About seven miles,” Mallet hazarded.

“Three and a half miles per day. Not much, is it? Every time you meet a tangle you have to put me down while you hack a way through it. Then you have to pick me up again. You have got only two hands, not six. You haven’t got indestructible legs either. You can’t go on this way for ever.”

“What of it?” asked Mallet, eyeing him.

“Little Koo has a gun.”

“What of it?” repeated Mallet without slightest change of expression.

“You know!”

Mallet squirted a thin stream of smoke and watched it disperse. “I look a bum. Perhaps you think I am a bum. And perhaps you’re right. But I’m not a murderer.”

“Don’t see it in that manner,” pleaded Sammy. He winced again. There were shining beads on his forehead. “You know I’ll go under sooner or later. It’s only a matter of time. I’m asking you to make it easy for me. I’d much rather—” “What you really mean is that you want us to make it easy for ourselves,” interrupted Mallet. He spat into the fire which promptly hissed back at him. “For two pins I’d knock your witless head off!”

Leaning on one elbow, Sammy grinned weakly. “One thing you excel at, Bill, is comforting a fellow’s ego in a menacing way.”

“I’ll go get that morphine.”

Tramping to the other side of the fire, he pawed among their supplies. Bill, he thought. It was about the first time that Sammy had called him by his first name. It might have been the same with the others if they’d lasted this long.

Paton, for instance. Perhaps by now they’d have grown out of, “Here, pick this up, Paton” and, “Yes, Mr. Mallet.” Perhaps they’d be talking differently with, “Catch this, Hanny,” and “Okay, Bill.”

Maybe Mrs. Mihailovik would be calling him “Beel” and he’d be addressing her as Gerda or Mom or something stupid like Tootsie. Once upon a time this notion would have embarrassed him beyond measure. More than that: it would have irked him into unconcealed sourness. But not now, not now. Times change. People change with them.

A cockeyed rhythm kept running through his mind, repeating itself again and again as he sought for the morphine. “Sammy is a Sheeny, Sammy is a Yid, Sammy now is dying because of what he did.”

He got rid of the nagging poem with an underbreath, “God damn!” and was glad to see the last of it. Sammy had dived after Kessler without a moment’s thought or hesitation and now he was asking them to use their gun to remove the burden he’d placed upon them. Paton had dashed in where angels fear to tread, his only idea being that of diverting peril from others. Gerda and Grigor had been willing to die alone rather than handicap the others. Even Feeny would take on one of those fifty-ton gallopers in effort to save them from being trampled underfoot. All had shown courage of various kinds, hot or cold, instinctive or calculated, according to their characters.

And what had he, Mallet, got? A dancing girl tattooed on his forearm and a spray of shooting stars across his broad back. A wad of hair on his chest. A bull body and the tough constitution to plod on until he dropped.

All the rest was ignorance. His expert knowledge of reactive engineering now was so much useless lumber. He knew nothing about surgery and little about the use of drugs. He lacked Feeny’s sharp ears and supersensitive nose. He hadn’t got Little Koo’s agile fingers or his phlegmatic mentality and bland acceptance of the future. He couldn’t even swim, like Sammy. In fact he wasn’t much bloody good at anything.

Except for comforting people in a menacing sort of way. Yes, that was a mite in his favour, a very small chalk-mark to put against his name.

Like most persons deeply exercised about their own misapprehensions he was going to absurd lengths to underrate himself. It was a swing of the psychic pendulum which dives to the opposite extreme before it settles down to a position of moderation. There was a reason for this. Deep down inside him—or was it outside, and far, far away?— somewhere a voice was calling.

He came back, holding the needle. “I’m taking it for granted that one filling represents one maximum dose and I hope I’m right. Want to chance it?”

“Yes,” Sammy’s face twisted in pain. He dropped his halfsmoked cigarette. “Anything, anything to make this more bearable.”

“I think the thighs might be best. They’re nearer the source of the trouble. Like to try a half-shot in each one?”

Sammy agreed. Kneeling beside him, Mallet administered the stuff. He’d never felt more shaky in his life but his big hairy fingers were made firm and gentle by sheer willpower.

He stood up. “Feel better?”

“Not yet. Probably takes a minute or two.” Sammy lay back sweating profusely. After what seemed an age, he said,

“It’s going off. It’s easing a lot.” He closed his eyes. “Thanks, Bill.”

Pale light from the second moon angled through a tree-gap, illuminating his face with a ghostly aura. Mallet waited a while, bent over him, listened to his breathing. Satisfied that he was asleep, he resumed his lonely vigil.

In the mid-morning as they were mounting a slight rise Mallet felt a pull on the litter, looked back. Little Koo had stopped and was lowering his end of the shafts. Mallet put his down likewise.

“What’s the matter?”

“Not look. Not move. Nearly roll off. Think him dead,” said Little Koo, doubtfully.

Feeny went stiff-legged to the body, sniffed, let go a thin, reedy howl. Mallet had a look, feeling Sammy’s wrist, listening to his chest. He reached for the spade.

When he had finished by patting shape and firmness into the little mound he became aware of the other standing near holding a newly-cut cross and making ready to utter the inevitable, “Amen!”

“I don’t know that he wants that,” said Mallet.

“Not want?” Little Koo stared aghast at his own workmanship, his air that of one who in his appalling ignorance has committed an unknown enormity.

“I’m not sure. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t— but somehow I don’t think so.”

“Him not say?” enquired Little Koo.

“Shut up—let me think a minute.”

Mallet chivvied his mind in effort to make it produce hazy fragments of memory, one of those worthless oddities of information one picks up from time to time and never expects to use. Why is it that people know so little about people?

Finally he said, “I fancy I’ve got it. If I’m wrong he’ll forgive me.”

Ramming the cross into the opposite side of the path, he cut and trimmed half a dozen straight branches, fastened them into two triangles, fixed them together, mounted the assembly on the grave. Then he looked at the sky.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Good feller,” suggested Little Koo, fearful of making yet another blunder.

“Yes, that will do. One cannot say more.”

Picking up their packs and weapons they moved onward, leaving the Star of David to stand amid the trees.

Two men and a dog.

Day number thirty-two, or was it thirty-six or fifty-six? Nobody knew and nobody cared. They had lost count, there being no point in keeping it. About the only crumb of comfort was that they had crossed the river where it was narrow and had big rocks that served as stepping-stones. They were heading northward once more.

Mileage was anyone’s guess. Perhaps three hundred, perhaps four hundred. At the very most a mere quarter of the way to the rescue-station, assuming that Symes’ estimate had been correct. They had several times their distance still to go.

A man, a Chink and a dog.

Eh?

Three men.

Three men named Mallet, Little Koo and Feeny. One was built like a bull. One was small, skinny, with almond eyes. One had four legs and could not speak. But what of it? They were three men on the march to death or salvation-three men and a spade.

They had finished their noon meal and by accident Mallet picked up Little Koo’s pack. The packs looked pretty much the same but the moment he lifted this one he knew it was not his own. Putting it down without remark, he took the other pack, heaved its straps over his shoulders and grasped his machete.

From that moment onward he kept surreptitious watch on Little Koo. It did not take him long to discover what the other was up to. The technique was quiet and cunning; he would never have noticed it had not his suspicions been aroused.

At meal-times they took turns breaking a food-pack for Feeny. Little Koo was straightforward about this matter, but not when he came to break another for himself. He had an open one which he’d produce, going through the motions of unfastening and then pretending to eat. The supposedly empty container never got thrown away. The flat box went back into his pack still full, in readiness for the next pantomime. Since his pack felt twenty percent heavier than Mallet’s, he must have been playing this trick for the last six or seven days.

Yet Little Koo was not starving. He was eating by night during his turns on guard. Keeping one eye open as he reposed by the fire, Mallet saw him gorging himself on the fruits, roots and berries of the jungle, filling himself in readiness for the next day. The motive was obvious and Mallet objected to it. He raised the matter immediately he had discovered the facts.

“Not enough food, eh? It will give out before we’re halfway to the dome, eh?”

“Not know.”

“You know bloody well! Don’t give me that! You’ve worked it out in your sneaky little mind. You’ve decided that we can never make it unless we live on the jungle. Somebody has to be the-guinea-pig for that and you’ve figured it might as well be you.”

“Not understand,” protested Little Koo, his black eyes inscrutable.

“Bunkum!” Mallet studied the other as if he’d found him guilty of a major crime. “Unknown foods can be highly dangerous. There’s no telling what they can do to a man. So you argue that if you can get away with this it’ll prove the solution of our problems. But if you don’t get away with it, and if you kill yourself’—he tapped his pack irefully—“there will remain so much more food for Feeny and me.”

“Not care, if dead,” said Little Koo, thwarting him with true Oriental logic.

“I care!” shouted Mallet. “I can’t sit and talk to your blasted pack after you’re gone. I can’t use it for company. Neither can it take its turns at night-watch. Who’s going to stand guard while the other sleeps?”

“Nice dog,” suggested Little Koo, glancing at Feeny.

“He’s not enough.” He prodded the other in the chest, his manner tough, authoritative. Completely unaware of the imbecility of what he was saying, he informed, “If you ldll yourself I’ll murder you! I’m the boss of what’s left of this outfit and I forbid you to die on me, see?”

“Not yet,” agreed Little Koo—and faithfully kept his promise for ten days.

The first sign that he was about to renege came when he fell flat on his face, clawed momentarily at the earth, forced himself to his feet and stumbled on. After ten yards he caught up with the waiting Mallet, and refused to let himself fall again. The result was peculiar.

He stood swaying like a windblown reed as he faced Mallet, his features the colour of old ivory. His knees bent slowly, ever so slowly as they were pulled down in spite of all his efforts to prevent them. In this manner he reached kneeling position, murmured apologetically, “Cannot help,” and bowed forward into Mallet’s ready arms.

Stripping him of gun, ammunition-belt and pack, Mallet laid him on a mossy bank while Feeny circled around whining anxiously. The blue sun poured through a leaf-gap and burned the back of his neck while he stooped over Little Koo and tried to bring him round.

“Don’t skip out, d’you hear?” An urgent, imperative shake. “Don’t go away like all the others did. I’m not going to make a hole for you. I refuse to do it.” He snatched the spade and hurled it into the jungle. A pulse was throbbing in his forehead. “See, I’ve thrown the damn thing away. It’s not going to be used again. Never, never, never. Neither for you nor for me.” He patted the ivory cheeks. “Wake up, will you? Come on, wake up!”

Little Koo obeyed, woke up, rolled onto his side and vomited. When he had finished, Mallet lugged him to his feet and held him upright.

“All right now?”

“Plenty sick.” Little Koo slumped in his grasp.

“We’ll sit a while.”

Lowering the other, he squatted on the bank, took Little Koo’s head in his lap. Feeny barked an agitated warning as huge, sinuous coils showed among the growths forty yards away. Mallet snatched the automatic, fired a burst of five shots. The coils slid rapidly away, not fearing the bullets but hating the noise. He continued to nurse Little Koo, cursing his own impotence and appealing to the head on his lap.

“Make a fight for it, little feller. There’s a long, long way to go but we’ll make it if we stick together. We’ve come a long, long way already. You’re not going to give in, now, are you? Make a fight for it, I tell you!”

The sun sank into the horizon and Feeny whined and darkness came down until the three moons appeared to shed a dim, hazy light. Still Mallet sat holding Little Koo and occasionally making appeals to ears that did not hear. It seemed to him that the great blue sun had churned up his own mind, making his thoughts muddled and out of control.

It seemed to him that he was holding in his protective arms not only Little Koo but also all the others who once had tramped along these alien trails. Symes and Paton, Sammy and Kessler and the Mihailoviks. Aye, and all those who had shared his life in earlier times when there had existed a big silvery cylinder called the Star Queen.

And it seemed to him that the voice was calling, calling more strongly and insistently than ever—though for the life of him he could not determine precisely what it was trying to say.

With the dawn he was sitting in dew-soaked clothes, his eyes baggy and red-rimmed. Little Koo was still alive but senseless and incapable of response. Apparently in a complete stupor, as if drugged.

This reminded Mallet that people like Little Koo were alleged to be persistent opium addicts. Perhaps Little Koo had a secret cache of the stuff either in his pack or on his person. He searched both and made a thorough job of it. No opium. An unknown number of days ago he had searched Sammy in the same way. No diamonds. Looked as though nobody went around with the junk they were generally reputed to carry.

In some ways, he concluded, the world of life is a great big damnable lie. In some ways the moment of death is the moment of truth. Little Koo had nothing worthy of note except a cracked and faded picture of a tipsy-roofed village with mountains in the background. Just that. Nothing more. His paradise, his heaven upon earth.

“I’ll get you there,” swore Mallet. “I’ll get you there if it takes ten years.”

Buckling his gun and ammo-belt to his waist, he stuffed one pack with as much as it would hold, fastened it in reverse so that it sat upon his chest instead of his back. Part of the first-aid kit he crammed into his pockets, the rest he left upon the bank. Sticking his machete point-first into the ground so that its handle could be grasped without bending for it, he hoisted Little Koo onto his back, gripped his two skinny wrists in a hairy paw, took the machete in the other hand and set off.

Much relieved by this renewed activity Feeny pranced ahead, sniffing here and there, glancing behind at frequent intervals to make sure he was being followed. Half an hour’s march, five minutes’ rest; half an hour’s march, five minutes’ rest. It was a good thing that the fates had given him a big, powerful body while ordaining that Little Koo should be a shriveled wisp of a man.

Mallet began to talk as he toiled along. Sometimes to Little Koo who hung limp and silent over one broad shoulder. Sometimes to Feeny who with incomparable loyalty accepted any and every eccentricity as the most natural thing in the world. And sometimes he spoke to nobody at all, uttering angry phrases born of the blue sun, the alien atmosphere. He was still functioning physically but breaking mentally and did not know it.

At the eighth rest period Little Koo made a faint rattling sound in his throat, opened his black eyes for the first time since yesterday and whispered, “So sorry.”

Then in his own quiet manner he slipped away to wherever Little Koos go. And Mallet could not see that he had gone. He picked him up, bore him through the green hell, put him down, picked him up, carried him onward mile after weary mile, hour after burning hour. Often he talked to him and most times Little Koo answered pleasantly and fluently.

“We’re getting there, little feller. We’re making progress. Done fifty miles today. What d’you think of that?”

“Very good,” the dead face would say encouragingly.

“Maybe we’ll do a hundred tomorrow. Under the blue sun. It’s trying to bum me down but I won’t let it. It stabs right into my brain and says, ‘Drop, damn you, drop!’ but I won’t drop, see? That’s Bill Mallet for you. I spit upon the blue sun.” Then he’d spit to demonstrate while Little Koo lay stiff with admiration. “Next Thursday week we’ll arrive at the dome. They’ll fix up new legs for Sammy. Next Tuesday we’ll be outward bound for Earth.” He’d snort in triumph. “Home for Christmas, eh?”

“You bet!” Little Koo would respond with suitable enthusiasm.

“Beef bones for Feeny,” Mallet would add, speaking to the dog. “How’d you like that?”

“I can hardly wait,” Feeny would say, running eagerly ahead.

It is so wonderful to have true comrades in what otherwise would be a dreadful solitude.

To hear them speak—they and the voice that kept calling, calling.

He’d turned east in his delirium. The compass lay where it had been dropped two days ago, miles away under a beautiful orchid that stank. He did not know east from west, north from south, but his big body kept on going like a crazy machine that stubbornly refuses to run down. And all the time Feeny remained a jump in advance, steering him away from underground traps daytimes, watching over him by night.

His face was scalded brick-red and etched with deep lines blackened by dust and sweat. A coarse and ragged beard straggled onto his chest. His eyeballs were bloodshot, his pupils dilated, but his body kept on going with robotic single mindedness.

Once in a while he rammed the point of his machete into the earth, snatched out his gun and fired more or less in the direction of things that would not have been deterred from attacking had the weapon been silent, but fled because they could not bear the sonic blasts accompanying the bullets. A couple of times he shot at dragons that existed only in his fevered imagination. Every time he stopped for a rest he chatted with Little Koo and Feeny, threw brilliant witticisms at them and invariably got the most amusing replies.

Strangely enough he never forgot to feed the dog. Now and again he became so engrossed in their three-sided conversations that he completely overlooked the need to do some eating himself but he never failed to open a food-pack for Feeny.

The ground rose considerably as he hit the end spur of a range of mountains. The jungle thinned and shrank away from the rocks so that in due time he was tramping where the path had petered out and the overhead orb burned without hindrance.

Higher, still higher insisted what he was using for a mind. He mounted steep slopes, slid and skidded around treacherous outcrops but still toiled on. Try up the pass, the old man said, the Star Queens lifting overhead, who said Bills among the dead? Excelsior!

Up a mile, a yard or an inch or whatever it was. Then a rest and a chat. Up another mile, yard or inch. His breath was being drawn spasmodically. His vision somehow lacked focus so that sometimes the ground reared itself unexpectedly higher or went dead flat and his feet were caught unaware by these swift changes of angle.

There were two boney wrists pulling tremendously on his left hand and something dark and noisy dodging around in front of his stumbling boots. There were sounds all around and high in the sky and deep inside him, blasting this world of silence, converting it into one of confusing uproar.

Oh, the barking and yelping of the thing in front and the whuyoum-whuyoum throbbing from somewhere near that bitter furnace of a sun. And the voice now sounding thunderously inside him so that for once he could hear what it was saying.

“Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heavy laden.”

He didn’t care a tinker’s damn for the voice. He never had done. Perhaps it existed, perhaps it didn’t. But it used one word that interested him. Just one word.

All, it said.

It wasn’t particular.

It had no preferences.

It said, all.

“Quite right too!” he approved and promptly plunged forward like a stricken bull and lay among the hot rocks while the brown thing licked his face and whimpered and the blue sun seared the alien soil.

The whuyoum-whuyoum lowered from its place in the sun and dropped a thin line with something like a fat, black spider on its end. The spider touched earth, split in two, became a pair of drab-uniformed men wearing tiny filters in their nostrils.

Stumpy tail vibrating furiously. Feeny sprang at the first of them and tried to lick the skin off his face. The victim picked him up, held him, pulling his ears and patting.

The other bent over the bodies, went back to the line, spoke into a small instrument dangling from it.

“Take credit for super sharp eyes, Al. You were right. It was one fellow carrying another.” A pause followed by, “They can’t be from anywhere else but that lifeboat. Pity they didn’t stay by it seeing we picked up its trace as it came down.”

“Took us ten days to locate it even then,” came back the pilot’s voice from above. “They’d have lost patience and taken to the jungles just the same.” He mused a moment, went on, “I’ll call the dome on the short-wave and get them to send a patrol along the route from here to the boat. If there are any more survivors they’ll be bushwhacked somewhere on that line.”

“What d’you mean, any more? These two are decidedly dead. The only survivor is a dog.”

“We’d better have a look all the same.”

“All right.” Leaving the line, the speaker returned to his companion.

“The big bruiser pegged out recently,” informed the latter.

“It was a miracle he made it this far. We were too late by minutes. The other one has been dead four or five days.” “Then why the devil was he carrying him?”

“Don’t ask me. Perhaps it was his best pal.”

“What, a dried-up little Chink? Don’t be silly!”’

He’d never had reason to hear a voice.

All, it says.

He came slow-footed from the spaceport’s ramp with one thought recurrent in his mind: We are scientific and highly civilised—therefore I am going to die.

Nearby officials gave him no more than the usual cursory glances as he wandered across the landing area toward the exit gates. Outside, he stood at the verge of the city street and surveyed it with eyes half-blinded by thought.

We are scientific and highly civilised—therefore I am going to die. His teeth chewed around lightly with the tip of his tongue. It will be easy. They will make it easy for me. Afterward I shall neither know nor care. I have been nonexistent before. 1 was dead before I was born and my nonexistence didn’t bother me then.

His gaze shifted to the overcast sky, the dull grey Earth-sky so different from that of Mars. Rain was falling in a steady torrent but none touched him, not a drop. The great plastic roof above the street caught it and bore it all away. The street remained warm, dry, dustless, dirt less, germless. It was a street of the sanitary age, designed for cleanliness, comfort and total independence of the elements.

An electro-taxi hummed smoothly along the road, the silver balls of its antenna spinning almost to invisibility as it sucked at power broadcast from faraway. He waved to it, his hand moving as though stubborn determination had overcome his own inherent unwillingness. The cab sighed as it stopped. Its driver regarded him impassively.

“Where to, mister?”

Climbing in, he said, “Life Terminal Building.”

Lips parted in readiness to repeat the instructions, the cabbie changed his mind, firmed his mouth, said nothing. Switching power, he started off, covering ground at little better than a crawl while he brooded solemnly over the wheel. He did not like passengers for Life Terminal; they reminded him too much that man has little way to go and little time in which to do it.

His passenger endured the snail’s pace without reproof and exhibited the fatalistic patience of one whose mind is made up and who has never been known to unmake it. Several sleek electro-sportsters flashed past at speed that made air-blasts rock the creeping vehicle but failed to shake the driver from his morbid mood.

Reaching the great marble entrance to Life Terminal, the passenger watched the machine depart at swifter pace. He had another look at the sky, the street, the even, architectural line of high roofs between the two. Then he mounted the forty steps leading to the crystal doors, starting off with a reluctant right foot, followed by a reluctant left, gradually overcoming the pedal inertia and increasing his pace until he arrived at the top practically at a run.

Beyond the doors lay a circular floor flowered in mosaics

from the centre of which arose a gigantic hand of sparkling granite five or six times the height of a man. One mighty forefinger was raised in warning. Imprisoned within the hand was a vibratory command which resounded in the depths of his brain like a telepathic cry.

“Stop! Think! What have you left unfinished?”

He walked steadily around the hand toward the far counter, his rubberoid feet-pads moving silently. Behind the counter a young, sweet-faced girl in white uniform came erect as he neared. Her full lips parted.

“Can I help you, sir?”

He gave her a wry smile. “I’m afraid you can.”

“Oh!” Her clear blue eyes registered understanding. “You are not here for information? You wish to … to—?”

“Yes,” he said. It echoed hollowly around the hall and made a solemn sound in the overhead cupola. “Yes.”

The granite hand vibrated. “Stop! Think! What have you left unfinished?”

“Third door on the right,” she whispered.

“Thank you!”

She watched him all the way to the door, watched him as he shoved it open and passed through. Even after he had gone she continued to survey the door as if she wanted no part of it whatever.

The man occupying the room behind the third door bore no resemblance to an official executioner. He was plump, jovial, quick to rise at his visitor’s entrance, swift to shake his hand and offer him a seat. Resuming his own chair, he slid a bunch of forms into convenient position on his own desk, held his pen poised in readiness, eyed the other enquiringly. “Your name?”

“Douglas Mason.”

He wrote it down, said, “Resident on Terra?”

“Mars.”

“Mars, h’m - What is your age?”

“Two hundred and eighty-seven.”

“Ah, then you will have had your third rejuvenation?” “Yes.” Mason fidgeted. “Do we have to fill up forms even for this?”

“Not at all.” The official studied him carefully, found him tall, slender, grey-suited, tired-eyed. “A civilized state makes no claim upon the life of any individual citizen. Anyone has the unalienable right to end his life for any reason he considers adequate or for no reason at all, even at the merest whim, providing that the method of accomplishing the said ending does not cause danger, discomfort or distress to fellow citizens.”

“I know my rights,” assured Mason.

“Therefore,” the official went on in the manner of one reciting an oft-repeated rite, “we must accept your choice regardless of whether or not you see fit to co-operate in this matter of’ form-filling. If you do not care to answer our questions it will not make the slightest difference—but the data we need is very useful and we would appreciate your help. It isn’t much to ask when as far as you’re concerned there is little left to be asked.”

“Help?” echoed Mason, rubbing his chin. He gave the same wry smile as he had bestowed upon the girl outside. “I am under the impression that I can no longer be of help to anyone.”

“Many have that idea. Usually they are wrong. In fact,” continued the plump man, waxing still more jovial, “I have officiated here for twenty years and have yet to meet the individual who is completely useless.”

Mason said, “I suspect you of trying to talk me out of this.” His tones became hard. “My mind is made up!”

“Would you care to tell me on what grounds?” “There’s no reason why I should. If a person decides to die he has reasons that seem good and sufficient to himself. But for the sake of informing you I’ll say that my best reason is that I do not fear death.”

“Nor life?” put in the official. His fat face suddenly seemed not so fat. It had taken on a deep shrewdness.

“Nor life,” confirmed Mason without hesitation. He carried on, “When all one’s plans have been accomplished, all one’s purposes achieved, all one’s ambitions realised, all one’s friends long departed, and one has to retire for sheer lack of anything further to do, life ceases to be life. It becomes mere existence, a waiting-time. I can stand only so much of that.”

The official shrugged resigned shoulders. “It is not for me to argue your motives much as I would like to.” He indicated the forms. “May I fill these up now or do you refuse to oblige?”

“Oh, go ahead with the rigmarole,” said Mason.

The other took up his pen. “Married?”

“Never found the time, much of it as I’ve had.”

“Really?” He noted it with a faint air of incredulity. “No children then?”

“What d’you mean by that?”

“You have never functioned as a donor?”

Mason snapped, “I disapprove of such practices even if they are embodied in our civilisation.”

“They are necessary because they are helpful to someone,” the other retorted. “The driving-force behind our present-day science is the need to help people. Would you rather have it as it was in the barbaric ages when science was prostituted and knowledge was misapplied?”

“I’m not so sure I wouldn’t. Things were messier but a damn sight livelier.”

“You prefer them lively?”

“At this stage, yes.” Mason continued as if he were pondering aloud rather than talking. “I have an alabaster villa with a forty-acre cactus garden on Mars. It represents the ne plus ultra of something or other. In many ways it is also a mausoleum. Within it I can suffer the nagging pain of acute boredom in absolute comfort. What little real work has still to be done is reserved for younger ones, the first and second rejuvenations. Earth is civilised. Venus is civilised. So is Mars. So is the Moon underneath its various domes. Everywhere is civilised, orderly, regulated, under control.” “Everywhere?” queried the official, raising his eyebrows. “Even the jungles are artificial ones designed for the edification of the curious and the coddled,” Mason went on, a hint of contempt in his voice. “Full of carefully cultivated plants and cunningly doctored animals. The lion at last lies down with the lamb. Pah!”

“You don’t like that?” said the official.

Mason gave back, “For centuries the Chinese used an ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times!’ It isn’t a curse any more. It’s a blessing. We’re scientific and civilised. We’ve got so many rights and liberties and freedoms that one can yearn for chains for the sheer pleasure of having something to fight against and break. I reckon life would be more interesting if there were any chains left to bust.”

“I doubt that,” the official asserted. “People are very happy until eventually the frustration of idleness overcomes them. With most folk it’s a long, long time before that occurs.” He pointed his pen at his papers. “On your own showing it has taken you nearly three centuries to reach this stage.”

“Yes,” admitted Mason, “because I had a good spell of plenty to do. Now I’ve got nothing. Eventually I’ll be due for yet another rejuvenation. What will be the use of it? A man can hang around too long.” He leaned forward, hands on knees, face taut. “Know what I think? I think science has overdone it.”

“Not necessarily.”

“It has,” Mason insisted. “I’m telling you that science has us all trapped between its accomplishments and its failures. It has got us all the way out to Venus and Mars. It can get us no farther. The outer planets are completely beyond reach of any human being in any human-built spaceship. No rocket-fuel concoctable and no propulsive system design-able can cope with a gap like that. It’s been admitted time and time again. Science has taken us right up to the last frontier—and I’ve got a press-button, fully automatic alabaster villa on that frontier. Science can go no farther, so it has turned inward and civilised what it’s got. Result is we’re pinched and confined in absolute freedom and made so darned happy that we could burst into tears.”

The official pulled a face expressive of polite but unvoiced disagreement, remarked pointedly, “Isn’t it rather incongruous that one so condemnatory of science should seek its aid in escaping from it?”

“In finding my way out I conform to the conventions,”

Mason retorted. “Besides, I readily admit that science has its uses. But I don’t consider it above criticism.”

“You may have something there,” conceded the other, enigmatically. “I often wonder where it’ll stop.”

“It has stopped to all intents and purposes. Anything that fails to expand has stopped.”

“That is an opinion to which you as a citizen are fully entided.” The offidal’s manner made his own opinion clear. Shuffling his forms, he selected one. “Having made the finality of your decision most obvious, I have no choice but to sign your warrant.”

“Ye Gods, so I must have a warrant!” Mason bent forward, took it after it had been signed, waved it around like a white flag. “What do I do with this?”

Nodding toward the door, the official said, “Take it through there and give it to the attendant arranger. He will consult you about the manner of your passing.”

“You put it so prettily,” said Mason. He waved the flag again. “Well, thanks for everything. See you in the next world.”

“The meeting will take place only when my constitution can stand no further rejuvenations,” promised the other.

The arranger proved to be tall, thin, bald and taciturn. He took the warrant and scanned it with care.

“Do you prefer it swiftly or slowly?”

“Holy smoke, what a question! Who on earth would want to die slowly?”

In funereal tones the arranger said, “I am not talking about the process of expiring but about the condition of death. Do you wish it to occur soon or after an interval?”

“Better make it soon, with minimum delay.” Mason added with grim humour, “Otherwise I might weaken and change my mind.”

“That has happened.”

“So?”

“Often,” confirmed the arranger.

“That’s news to me,” Mason confessed. “I’ve never heard of anyone getting this far and living to tell the tale.”

“Nobody tells the tale. Silence is the price of freedom.” “In that case I can change my mind at any time up to the final moment and walk straight out provided I swear to say nothing?”

“You don’t have to swear.”

“Why not?”

“You would not care to advertise your moral cowardice.” “How right you are!” said Mason.

The other looked him over. “Somehow I don’t think you will change your mind. Unless your reactions are extremely fast you’re likely to be one of the many who’ve put off their mind-changing until it becomes too late.”

“I get you. Let me tell you I’ve already weakened six times in the last two years. I’m not going to soften a seventh time.” He examined the room. Except for a desk and hanging calendar, it was bare. “Mind telling me how it will hit?” “Unawares.”

“I know that much, but how?”

The arranger said, “The method is adapted to suit the individual case.”

“I’m only curious.”

“You won’t be—afterward,” promised the other. He went on, “The procedure is that you go through that door over there and take the automatic elevator to the Life Terminal hotel where you can select any room you please. They are all most comfortable and—”

“Take the elevator to where?” asked Mason loudly.

“The hotel,” repeated the arranger. “You will reside there, well-served, entertained, happy in the company of others, until the culmination which will occur only when you are completely off guard and thoroughly at ease. That may mean hours or days before the end, according to the psychology of the subject, but as a method it is merciful.”

“So I’ll just sit around and wait for it?”

“There are adequate diversions. Nobody broods, nobody mopes. Indeed, there is no cause for apprehension since the subject either weakens and changes his mind or stubbornly sees it through.”

“You can’t tell me any more than that?”

“Right now I cannot imagine you caring very much.” “Which I don’t,” Mason assured. “Not a hoot. Do I get on with the job or are there further indispensable bureaucratic preliminaries?”

The other winced. “There are two forms I’m supposed to fill. If you’re in such a hurry I’ll let them go blank.” He pointed to the nearer of the two internal doors. “You can take your choice. That is the way out.” He indicated the other. “That also is the way out.”

Mason went boldly to the first, opened it and looked through. Beyond lay the mosaic-floored hall with its great granite hand.

“Stop! Think! What have you left unfinished?”

He tried the other door. Behind stood the elevator, bare, metal-lined, with a red button in one wall.

Stepping inside, he peered out and said with a touch of ghastliness, “Going down?” Then he closed the door and rammed his thumb on the red button and instantly realised that this was it!

The button sank under his thumb while he stared at it fascinatedly and lacked the power to release his pressure. It appeared to sink in with an awful slowness born of a time-sense distorted by peril. The approach to death is difficult, the contact tremendously breath-taking. His pores were wide open, his body tense, his heart thudding, his mind whirling when the button closed a circuit and the mock-elevator performed its designed function.

There was only a pale blue luminescence in the air and a split second of immense agony during which his body seemed to be tom into a million pieces and further dispersed to its last molecule.

Voices murmured deep in a blank, colourless haze. Slow-mouthing voices that advanced upon him and receded and came back again. They sounded close to his ears and whispered away through illimitable distances and returned. There was a peculiar rhythm to this vocal coming and going, like the steady swing of a sonic wave-form through positive and negative amplitudes enormously stretched in terms of time.

It was quite a while before he could distinguish comprehensible words.

“Three in succession. That plays hob with the odds.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The odds take account of rare runs. You’re holding too short a view.”

“Or maybe they’re improving at the other end?”

“I’d like to think so but I can’t see it yet.”

Mason sat up and held his head. The voices ran away, ran back. “Give him a shot … yes, just there.” Someone stuck a pin in him.

He opened his eyes, snapped at a greybearded man, “Go easy, will you? I’ve got a fat nut.”

“You’re lucky,” commented a second, heavily built man standing close by his side. “Some get through with only half a nut, others none at all.”

“Some never use more than half anyway,” said Mason. He ceased nursing his head, braced his hands on the floor and helped himself upright. The room whirled wildly awhile before it steadied.

The greybeard eyed him speculatively, hitched a blued-steel, long-snouted gun more comfortably over one hip, went behind a roughwood desk. Sitting down, he pawed a printed form into position, licked the end of a primitive pencil, looked at Mason again. “Name?”

Mason teetered, felt the bulky man’s hand steadying him, protesting hoarsely, “Holy smoke! Do we have to go through all that again?”

“What we want,” informed the greybeard, “are three items: your name, your remaining rejuvenation-run and your qualifications.”

“Douglas Mason, twenty-four, suicide,” Mason gave succinctly.

The bulky man chipped in with, “Hah-hah!” When Mason turned to look at him, he added, “You’ve been foxed.” “Shut up, Corlett.” The greybeard registered mild annoyance. “I have told you repeatedly that arrivals must be cushioned against mental shock.” He showed white teeth and his beard waggled as he concluded, “You’re no cushion.”

“And I’m no hothouse flower,” Mason said. “Neither of you need be afraid of me wilting.”

Corlett again said, “Hah!” and added, “Hear that, Dexter? He doesn’t want cushioning.”

The greybeard named Dexter leaned over his desk, spoke sharply to Mason.

“Just what do you mean?”

“It was like this,” explained Mason, “I’d got nothing left to do but sit around and think. For a while. I thought of all sorts of things, most of them futile. I had become a useless cog in a big, complicated machine and all I could do was wait my time to be discarded.”

“I know,” assured Dexter. “I’ve had some of that myself.”

“Then one day a lecturer on the video sent me off on a new tack. He’d been praising our civilisation, its scientific exactitude, its perfection. It worked so wonderfully, he said, because every man had his place and every place its man. All the cogs interlocked, the big and the small, mutually necessary. His speech was a supposed morale-lifter, the old it-all-depends-on-you technique.”

“Well?” prompted Dexter.

“Then he blundered. He opined that our inability to reach the outer planets was a blessing in disguise. He said our world-wide civilisation was so intricate and highly organised that a sudden rush of cogs elsewhere might make it fall apart. There could be chaos. The machine of supercivilisation could not run effectively if losing its parts faster than they could be replaced.”

“That makes sense,” contributed Corlett. “But what of it?” “I stewed it over in my alabaster villa on Mars.” Mason glanced enquiringly at Corlett. “Do you know that there is no alabaster on Mars?”

“No.”

“Well, there isn’t. Not an -ounce, not a grain. It set me back a small fortune to transport the lot from Earth more than a century ago. And it wasn’t ship-borne. It was shot across space by vibro-transference in loads of two thousand pounds which, at that time, represented the limit per boost over that distance. They had to send a good deal more than was needed because three-quarters of it reintegrated wrongly at the focal point and ceased to be alabaster. That’s the big, big trouble with vibro-transference. As a process it is ultraswift, but darned temperamental.’’

“Go on!” urged Dexter, watching him.

“Human beings make the Earth-Mars run by rocket-ship. It’s slow but certain. They get across alive, in one piece, and still in human shape.” Mason paused and rubbed his head which still contained a faint but persistent fizzing. “Just for the hell of it I spent four years working out the odds on a human being getting himself dumped alive and kicking on an outer planet by means of vibro-transference. I found the load-limit per boost would be something over two hundred pounds.”

“Two-eighty-four,” corrected Dexter.

“And I calculated that the odds were appallingly low. No more than three chances in a thousand.”

“Seven,” said Dexter.

“As good as that? Efficiency must have improved.”

“It has. There is improvement all the time no matter how gradual it may be.”

“Anyway,” Mason went on, “the odds against success stood so murderously high that obviously it was a technique to be reserved exclusively for lunatics or would-be suicides. Or, in other words, for the few cogs who became superfluous on their own showing.”

“Of which you were one?” said Dexter. He stroked his beard, cast a thoughtful look at Corlett, returned his gaze to Mason.

Mason nodded agreement. “There’d be a big scramble for new frontiers if everyone knew they were available and within reach. There is no similar enthusiasm for the death-house. The self-confessed superfluous can be handled where the downright adventurous cannot; their numbers are small and they don’t matter much.”

“So you put two and two together?”

“And made it four. I thought of the basic rights of individuals craftily established by law, of occasional puffs of publicity for Life Terminal’s facilities, and of the fact that as far as further rocket efforts are concerned the experts don’t seem to be really trying. Yet scientists are notorious fidgets even in their sleep. Why should they give up trying? Answer: because they’ve got there!”

Dexter gave a brief chuckle. “There’s one flaw in your complaint about scientific secrecy. If you can think this out all on your ownsome, why shouldn’t a million others do likewise—and start the dreaded rush?”

“Because the conclusion can be no more than a suspicion until one obtains positive proof.” Mason looked lugubrious. “That is where the powers-that-be did have me foxed. I put over my best act from the moment I left Mars and stepped on Earth, I bet my life on those seven chances in a thousand and I got through pure, white and uncontaminated. I was born lucky. I got the proof I wanted.”

“And now you’re stuck with it,” Corlett interjected. “There are eight hundred of us here. At the rate that newcomers reintegrate in living and recognisable form, it will be a long, long time before we’re eighty thousand much less eight millions. So right now we haven’t got much. No aeroplanes, no rocket-ships, no video, no rejuvenation-plant, no dream-gardens, no alabaster villas, no vibro-boosters. You cannot go back. You cannot return from the dead triumphantly waving your evidence.”

“I know it.” Mason pursed his lips, made a sucking sound. He let his eyes linger on the blue sheen of Dexter’s gun. “The big brains have created a tricky set-up, a very neat play. This is life after death and nobody can return to say that it isn’t. The stunt cannot be exposed or busted until we have grown big enough and powerful enough to build a civilisation of our own.”

“You said it!” agreed Corlett, with special emphasis.

“But it doesn’t worry me. I wanted proof for my own satisfaction alone. I’ve done a u-tum. I’ve turned right round and gone back to where I started—at the bottom with a shovel in my hands.n

“You’ll need more than that,” promised Dexter. He patted the weapon at which Mason was still looking. “This planet isn’t as amiable as it might be.”

“So much the better. Chains were made to be broken. There will be no more rejuvenation in my time and I haven’t got long. Give me a gun and a shovel and let me get started.”

They found both for him, took him outside. He leaned on the shovel, sniffed the heavy air, looked at a small group of crude stone houses standing nearby. His gaze swung from there, studied the great red spot on the monstrous thing hanging in the heavens. His feet shuffled around in queer purple grass.

He said, “As one Callistrian to a couple of others, that’s a mighty fine sight!”

Neither of the pair knew Jensen was behind that door. If for a single instant they had suspected that an interloper was there, stretching his ears in the darkness beyond, they’d have been less inclined to talk out loud and more to take effective action. But they suspected nothing. Jensen was too soft-footed and shadowy to betray himself by as much as the hiss of an indrawn breath. So the two talked on, or rather argued, their voices loud with the emphasis of contradictory and irreconcilable opinions.

In the deep gloom of the passage Jensen stood with his ear near to the inch-wide crack of light flowing past the almost closed door. His hearing was directed toward that crack but his hard and somewhat bloodshot eyes kept watch in the direction whence he had come. There was complete silence in all the rest of the house but he was taking no chances on the sudden appearance of a servant as cat-footed as himself.

He must not be caught. In no circumstances must he be captured again. The jail-crazy Hammel had killed one guard as they made the break and although he, Jensen, had not fired the shot he was an accomplice before and after the fact. Not that another killing made much difference. He’d been in the death-cell for one and could not be executed twice for two. He wasn’t going to be taken back to the death-cell, not ever. He had brains in his head and fellows with brains do not get hanged.

Cold and callous determination showed in his eyes as they flickered warily around while he continued to listen. There was a fat, middle-aged man in that room. He was chewing the problem of something-or-other with a white-haired, underfed looking character who was reluctant to see reason. The subject of the debate was a machine.

Fatty’s name was Blenkinsop and he addressed the other sometimes as Wane, sometimes as Doctor. The machine, of which Jensen had managed to catch a momentary glimpse through the crack, was a highly polished and complicated affair that bore slight resemblance to a computer-panel surmounted by a hair-dryer. It was fitted to a high-backed chair and a thick cable connected it with the electric mains.

“All right, Wane,” oozed Blenkinsop. “I’ll accept your statement that original life-force is an all-pervading radiation that you can amplify and control. I’ll also accept your claim that that gadget can spray the same life-force as easily and as simply as a sunray lamp can spray healthful rays.” He patted his very large stomach, sucked his cigar until his plump cheeks went hollow. “So what?”

“I’ve told you repeatedly,” complained Wane. “The immense growth of spiritual strength permits liberation of the psyche.”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Blenkinsop burned a half-inch of cigar with one suck. He blew the product over the apparatus. “I’ve heard of similar stunts being pulled by mystics; rajahs, khamas, lamas, swamis and all that lot. I once knew one personally. Called himself Raj Swami Alajar. Claimed he could release his astral body and zoom around like a jet-plane. It was a lot of ordure and his real name was Joe

O’Hanlon.” He made four chins with his grin. “But with a gadget developed by a highly qualified research worker such as yourself, I won’t deny that it might be possible.”

“It is possible,” asserted Wane aggressively.

“Keep cool,” Blenkinsop advised. “I’m quite willing to grant your claim without test.” Airily he waved a fat hand. A large diamond on .the middle finger scintillated brilliantly and drew an answering gleam from the eye near the door-crack. “I’m your backer. I’m just a plain, honest, hardworking and thoroughly deserving exploiter of other people’s brains. My company makes bets on your ability to produce things worthy of financial support. Knowing this, you must appreciate that there can be a considerable difference in our viewpoints.”

“Don’t mention it,” said Wane. “We’ve had dealings be-fore.”

“To our mutual advantage,” Blenkinsop pointed out. “Now me, I look at this thing of yours and accept it as your latest brainwave. I also accept your statements about what it does. Finally, I accept that it has cost me money and will cost me a lot more to put into production. Therefore the big question is: can it show a modest return on my outlay?” He switched his calculating gaze from Wane to the machine and back to Wane. “Well, can it?”

“Money, money, money,” complained Wane, looking fed up. “Is accomplishment to be judged only by the standard of what profit it can drag in?”

“Yes.”

“But this can liberate the psyche of any person. It’s a major break-through.”

“Who wants to liberate his psyche? Who’11 pay to have it done and how much will he pay? Hell, pigs can fly these days so what’s the use of an automatic psyche-liberator? If I go to see Maisie in the south of France, I go in person, flesh, blood, clothes and all. What would be the sense of sending her my astral body? She couldn’t have fun with a ghost.”

“You forget,” said Wane, his voice rising, “that the gain in life-power is so great that the affected personality can escape and literally take over any other living body it desires, ejecting the natural owner forever—unless, of course, the owner happens to have received treatment giving him power equal or greater.”

“That’s body-snatching,” defined Blenldnsop with another obese grin. “You’ve developed three or four excellent things in your time but now you’ve slipped up. I can’t make two percent out of a mechanical body-snatcher and I’m not interested in the thing.”

“You go off at irrational angles,” Wane protested. “I only contemplate the legal transfer of bodies.”

“Legal?” Blenldnsop choked as he tried to laugh with a chestful of cigar smoke. “Whose bodies can be confiscated legally? And for whose benefit?” He prodded Wane’s middle with a thick finger. “Who’s going to pay for the transfer, who’s going to get the money and where do I come in?” Eyeing him with unconcealed distaste, Wane said frigidly, “Last Thursday, Collister died. He was the world’s leading cancer specialist. On the same day they executed Bats Maloney, a criminal. Collister’s brain remained alive to the last but he was physically worn out by a lifetime of service to humanity. Maloney died as an incurably warped and antisocial psyche inhabiting a coarse but strong and healthy body.”

“I get it,” Blenldnsop conceded. He reached for his hat. “If you’d had your way you’d have shoved Collister into Maloney’s carcass. I won’t argue the scientific aspect because I believe you could have done it. But I know my legal oats. I haven’t spent my life messing around with gadgetry. I’ve spent it in this wide and naughty world. Take some advice from a miserable sinner: you won’t get legislation to cover a trick like that if you agitate for it from now until the crack of doom.”

“But-”

“Be your age!” ordered Blenldnsop, displaying lack of patience. “You’re too idealistic to be outside a nursery. I can’t market and sell a starry-eyed ideal for cigar-money, much less for a stack of gold.” The eye behind the door gleamed and vanished even as his podgy hand reached for the door handle. “I suggest you have another go at that stereoscopic television you’ve been fooling around with for long enough. There’s a very big packet to be got out of that. The public wants it and who are we to deny the public what it wants? But if you offer me another fatheaded gadget like this one, I’ll die laughing!”

Then he went out laughing.

And died.

Jensen said to Wane, “There ain’t much of you but you’re a brainy old geezer and you’ve got some funny ideas.” He studied the other and noted that the eyes, though tired, were sharp and full of inward fire.

This white-haired character, he decided, had a peculiar toughness of his own, a kind of mental hardihood that he could sense and respect. Wane would recognise the futility of trying to break free by violence and would not bother to attempt it. He’d just stay put thinking, thinking, thinking. And if he, Jensen, didn’t keep his wits about him he might find himself eventually out-thought.

“For your own good as well as mine,” Jensen warned him, “there are some facts of life you ought to know. The first one is that I busted out of the death-cell last night. I’m a few jumps ahead of the cops and I’m never going back.” He shoved his listener’s shoulder. “Never!”

“I knew you were a wanted fugitive,” said Wane. His gaze wandered from the bonds around his body to the shining machine and thence to the other’s harsh features. “Your picture was in this morning’s papers along with those of three others.”

“Yes, that was me, Hammel, Joule and Krast. We split up. If I never see them again it’ll be too soon.”

“You were described as Henry Meynell Jensen,” Wane went on. “They said you were dangerous and that you had committed two murders.”

“It’s three now. I’ve just done Porky.”

“Ah, Blenkinsop—you’ve killed him?”

“That’s right. I’ve shut his trap for keeps. It was easy.”

Wane brooded in silence awhile, then said, “Without a doubt you will be punished for that.”

“Hah!” said Jensen. He leaned forward. “Listen Pop or Professor or whatever you like to be called, I’ve heard all about this contraption of yours. Porky was no fool and he was ready to believe it really works. I could tell that you knew it does really work. That’s fine! That’s topnotch! You are going to be my fairy godmother.”

“In what way?”

“You’re going to help me get a nice new body.”

“I’ll see you in hell first,” said Wane.

“Now don’t try to get hard. You’re in a pretty poor position to get hard, anyway.” Jensen examined the other’s bonds, bent and fingered the rope that held his victim’s legs to the chair. “What the screws are after is my body, just that and no more. They want to see it dangle from a rope. They’ll know it when they see it because it’s got a face and fingerprints and other identifiable trimmings. You’re the one chump in the world who can let them have what they want and let me have what I want and make everyone pleased and happy. All I need is a good, part-worn, well-fitting body in which the cops ain’t interested. Don’t you want to make people happy?”

“You can stay stuck with the body you’ve got,” Wane said. “I’m far from young and no longer afraid to die. You can add another crime to the burden on your conscience—if you have a conscience—but it will get you nowhere.” “Listen, Grandpa,” ordered Jensen, his eyes growing icy, “you can be as stubborn as you like but it won’t thwart me. Back in the days when I was dopey enough to believe in honest work I became a fully qualified electrician and I’ll deserve to swing if I can’t learn to use this gadget with a little bit of co-operation from elsewhere.”

“What d’you mean?”

“I’ll snatch somebody’s precious lad and try it out on him. If it works, whoopee! If it doesn’t, well, there are plenty more guinea-pigs playing around the back streets. I may have to take two, I may have to take ten, but I’ll get there in the end. So it’s your life against theirs.”

“You wouldn’t dare to use children.”

“Wouldn’t I? Grandpa, I’d dare anything. What have I got to lose? They can’t hang me a dozen times much as they’d like to. They aren’t going to do it at all if I can help it. Neither am I going to spend all my life on the run. I can think of better things to do than keep eternal watch for lousy cops. You bet there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to get rid of them once and for all!”

Wane thought it over, his gaze remaining contemplatively on the other. This machine of his had never been tried on a human subject but he knew it would operate precisely as predicted. He knew it as certainly as any scientist knows that a given array of conditions must produce a given result. He shuddered at the thought of trying it out on a living person at the behest of this arrogant criminal. Pretended argument might gain him time. On the other hand a blank refusal most certainly would profit him nothing and might cost half a dozen innocent lives.

“I’ll help you,” he decided, “as far as I feel compelled to and as far as my conscience will permit.”

“That’s horse sense,” approved Jensen. He stood up, towering over the bound and seated figure. “Play with me and I’ll play with you and we’ll do each other lots of good—but God help you if you try to play a big-brain trick on me.” He put on a cold, ferocious stare like a villain in a cheap melodrama. “You’ve a car in the garage. I saw it when I was snooping around. We’ll take it. And we’ll take your gadget with us. We’ll fix it up in a nice, quiet place that I have in mind. When it’s done its stuff and made me not the man I was, I’ll break it up and let you go.” His listener offered no comment, so he carried on, “I stole these crummy duds from a farmhouse and I could do with something better.” His chuckle was ghoulish. “But why should I worry? The new body will have suitable clobber already fitted.”

Still Wane offered no remark. He sat there, his ankles fastened to the legs of the chair, his bound wrists tied to his knees. Unwaveringly his eyes watched Jensen while his white hair gleamed in the artificial light.

Mooching across to the silent apparatus, Jensen looked at the seat against which it was fastened. “Reminds me of the thing other fellows are said to sit on. What the Yanks call the hot squat. Quite a joke, isn’t it? I’ll use the seat of the mighty to escape the seat of oblivion.” He was quite taken by his own wit, repeated it with relish a couple of times, then turned to Wane. “Where d’you keep your notes?”

“In the top drawer.” Wane nodded toward a tall steel filing cabinet.

Extracting the papers, Jensen looked through them. His brief comments showed him to have more intelligence than Wane had supposed and he betrayed a surprising grasp of scientific theories. Finally, he shoved the papers into a pocket.

“All right, let’s get going.”

The hideaway house was a large, once solidly built but now tumbledown affair made offensive by years of neglect. It stood in a commanding position on a crossroads in a heavily populated but rapidly degenerating area. A dull mausoleum of a house past which people hurried without a glance and at which only an occasional furtive figure knocked invariably after dark.

The chatelaine of this senile edifice was a blowsy female with an enormous bosom and the knowing eyes of a pig that has learned to count. Wane recalled that when they’d appeared two days ago this woman had received Jensen with grim acceptance and no surprise. Evidently the dump was a rat-hole known to the underworld if not to the police. Pig-eyes knew how to hold her tongue, she needed the business but wasn’t too fond of the risks.

Standing in the shadow behind an open window, his attention fixed on the crossroads and Wane’s notes held loosely in his hand, Jensen said, “I reckon I’ve got the hang of it now. I can’t trespass on different species, meaning animals and suchlike. Who’d want to be an animal, anyway?” He glanced at the notes, returned his gaze to the outside and showed especial interest in various pedestrians. “If I

make a change I’ve got to make it fast because the power starts dissipating immediately I leave a body. That right?” “Yes,” said Wane, reluctantly.

“Which means I can’t jump straight from one chump to another, eh? I’d have to get myself recharged each time I wanted to make a change? Oh, well, right now one swap will be enough. I’ll stick here and pick on the specimen I like best. Might as well be choosy while I’m at it. No sense in me taking over any bum.”

“Look here, Jensen, can’t you drop this dangerous stunt and—”

“Shut upl I’m dropping nothing because I’m not going to be dropped myself. They can have the body and welcome, once I’ve got rid of it.” Jensen again consulted the notes. “All I have to do is concentrate my gaze on the lucky character who is going to get me. Immediately I find myself free I jump into him and shove him out of his own carcass.” A thought struck him and he turned to Wane. “If I kick him out is there any chance of him taking over my own body instead?”

. “None whatever. Only a living body can be taken over. A dead one is impossible to occupy.” Wane did not offer any reason and Jensen did not ask for one.

The criminal’s attention was now fixed on a corner of the crossroads. With binoculars to his eyes he was making close study of his subject. His general attitude was one of strained excitement. He dropped the glasses and dashed to the chair against which they had fixed the life-force projector.

“That’s him! Just the mug I want!” Sitting back, he exposed his teeth. “Put on the fluence and be sharp about it!” Sick at heart, Wane socketed the power-plug and moved the switch. There was nothing else he could do. The desperate Jensen would be conscious and in full possession of his faculties right up to the very moment of release, after which action would come too late. There was nothing to do but comply—and pray for a failure at Jensen’s cost.

His face paler than usual he did pray silently for the utter and complete failure of his life-force projector, his mind sadly forming the words even as the apparatus sprang into efficient operation. No light radiated from the complicated headpiece, no visible emanations to indicate that the device was functioning, but its instrument-needles swung over and Wane knew that it should now be pouring its output into the eager, wolfish figure beneath.

Motionless in the chair, Jensen sat with his eyes staring through the open window. The look in them slowly changed to a hypnotic glare. For half a minute he squatted with that feral light in his optics while the fingers of his hands twisted in nervous spasms.

Then with eerie suddenness his face slumped into blank indifference, his hands stilled, his mouth drooped open and there was no light in his eyes.

Wane gloomed at the limp thing in the seat. Hope and fear and incredulity circulated through his mind while his ears did not note that the walker in the street had turned into the path, stamped hard-heeled up the steps and even now was hammering upon the front door. He was still brooding over the body as Pig-eyes slopped along the passage and opened the door with a bellicose, “Well?”

A brief rumble of conversation sounded at the front door. Footsteps approached his room. Wane passed weary hands through white locks and knew that his frantic prayer had not been answered. His apparatus workedl

He switched it off and turned to face the newcomer. The figure entering the room was that of a man some years younger than Jensen, broader in the shoulders, heavier in the jaw, easier in the carriage. He was wearing a well-cut suit, a slouch-brim hat and handmade shoes of mellow sheen. He looked like somebody who had it made and never lacked a crust.

“How d’you like me, Gramp?” said this person. He struck an attitude and revolved slowly like a mannequin displaying an evening gown.

“You’re… you’re… Jensen?”

“Correct. Sir Henry, that’s me.” Blithely stepping to the chair by the machine he had a close look at the figure flopped therein. The self-satisfied expression fled from his face, was replaced by a mixture of awe and distaste. “Jeez, it’s an awful thing to see yourself stone cold dead. It gives me the creeps.”

“You can never go back.”

“Don’t want to. I can now see myself as others saw me and I wasn’t such a charmer. There was plenty of room for improvement and I’ve done the improving. Look at me nowl”

“What was the change like?” asked Wane, speaking with an effort.

“Bloody grim. It was like doing a job that nobody should do, not even me. I got bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger. Then all of a sudden there was a sort of ghastly snap and I was right outside of myself and right inside him. Yes, really inside him, walking on his legs, seeing through his eyes, hearing through his ears and battling him for his brain. He struggled like a maniac before I got him out.” The new Jensen had sobered himself by his own recital. He shivered. “He went with a wail like a dying cat.”

“That,” declared Wane, “was psychic murder. Someday you’ll answer for it in a court higher than any in this country.” He stared at the dapper personage who, almost unbelievably, was Jensen. “And I share the guilt. I’m an accessory before and after the fact.”

“Don’t give me that holy stuff,” scoffed Jensen. “I grew out of it when I was in short pants.” He had another uneasy look at the body he once had owned. “You say I can never take this back?”

“Never. It is dead. You cannot reclaim a corpse. In fact you can occupy a living body only by taking command before or instantaneously with its rightful owner’s release. It’s like changing drivers in a speeding car; the feat is very risky but it can be accomplished as long as one steady hand continues to hold the wheel. There must be constant control by one or the other.”

“Yes, that’s the way it was. He staggered around a bit before I pushed him out. The car skidded a bit, eh?” A new thought intrigued him. “Now he’s gone, where’s he gone?” “The whole world would like to know the answer to that It would solve the mystery of life.”

“All right. Guess you can’t be expected to know everything.” Taking a thin dress watch from his pocket, Jensen consulted it admiringly. “A fifty quid ticker. And there’s a stack in his wallet. My wallet. Did all right for myself, didn’t I?”

Wane said nothing.

“Now to work,” Jensen went on. “I’m going to dump my body where the cops will find it and raise a happy cheer. It will carry evidence solving the fat boy’s murder for them and that’s a big laugh too. Cripes, who’d have thought I’d have started my new life by doing the cops a good turn?” His attention turned to Wane. “I’m going to keep your gadget and your notes. I’ll let you go when I’m on my way to wherever I’m going.”

“You mean you intend to release me?”

“You bet! Why not? I’m a reformed character, ain’t I? You can talk your head off if you want. See if you’re believed.” He gave a loud, self-satisfied chuckle. “Even if you tell them the whole story and force them to swallow it, what good will it do them? Where will they go from there? Describe me to them as I am right now. Take a photograph of me and give it to them. Give them my paw-prints as well. How can they nab me? They won’t know who I’ll be tomorrow or next Sunday week.”

“But you said you’d smash the projector.”

“Who, me? Kill the golden goose? I’m not that crazy!” Buttoning his jacket, he swaggered around and carefully avoided seeing the body in the chair. “I can go where I like, do what I like, let any number of witnesses positively identify me and not give a single damn. Before the flatties can wake up and get moving, I’ll be somebody else.” He slapped a thigh with delight as his thoughts went further. “Jeez, I could make a takeover bid for the chief of police and preside over the search for myself. I could become the King of Siam or the President of the United States.”

Wane’s mind went cold as he realised the full truth of the other’s boastful remarks. Here was something well-nigh invincible for the forces of law and order to struggle against in vain, something that he, Wane, unwittingly had presented to the field of international crime. No doubt Jensen would keep the secret of his power entirely to himself, jealously hiding it from others of his lawless world. But he remained a fearful menace as an individual—or as a possible one of any thousand elusive individuals.

The subject was still troubling his mind ten hours later. He climbed out of the car, stood on the grass verge of a lonely, seldom used side-road, watched the still dapper and openly gloating Jensen race away info complete and unbreakable freedom. Jensen could have killed him with as little compunction as he had slain others; for unknown reasons he had not done so. Perhaps the criminal wanted to enjoy the malicious satisfaction of letting the powers-that- be get warning of a problem impossible to solve. Or possibly he feared a future breakdown of the projector and wanted Wane alive to put it right.

The car shot off with a trail of dust and a hum of tyres. Wane watched it shrink into the distance while a phrase kept beating upon his brain. “I could make a takeover bid for the chief of police.” Despondently he commenced to trudge to the nearest village.

“He could be anybody,” he murmured to himself. “Anybody at all.” He kept on repeating this theme until it became tedious. Then, just for variation, he said, “Somebody.” It halted him in his tracks. He gazed at the sky, then at the far horizon, and saw neither because he was so engrossed in his thoughts. “Somebody … by heavens, that’s an ideal Somebody!”

During his twenty years of hectic and lawless experience Henry Meynell Jensen had done a goodly number of slick and criminally efficient jobs, his second murder being his only and near-fatal blunder. He had learned plenty from other and older lags and was recognised in the underworld as an experienced man. Now he was an old hand in a young body, knew all the outlaw tactics, the most effective methods, and was automatically responsive to the circumstances of crime.

He was giving himself full credit for these aptitudes as he strolled toward the little bank. This money-dump among the yokels might have been specially designed for the benefit of a lone-wolf gunman. All he had to do was use a few menacing gestures and pull the trigger if necessary. It was as simple as that. What made the feat a pleasure and a joy were the unique touches with which he was now able to decorate the coming performance.

For example, there was to be no spectacular getaway and no movie stunt of outdistancing police cars in a hundred mile chase. Neither need he indulge in so melodramatic a mannerism as wearing a mask. He’d walk in, take it, walk out and dump it. That was all.

Which is precisely what he did. He walked in twenty seconds before closing time, noted that the place was devoid of clients, showed the cashier the hole in the end of what he’d pulled from his pocket. The cashier looked down the hole and went white.

“Don’t let out a squeak, youl I’m just a local boy making good.” Jensen edged his weapon a fraction nearer by way of emphasis, found himself wondering whether his face could look as tough and desperate as the face he used to have. “Wrap it up and i’ll take it with me. Put a move on and give no lip. If I like your service I may come again.”

Like one in a dream the cashier shoved bundles of notes together. The amount was not enormous; Jensen hadn’t expected a big haul in this little two-man dump. But it was an easy take and it’d serve to keep him going until he was ready for bigger and better ventures. Backing a few steps, he booted the door of the manager’s office. That worthy emerged under full steam, was shown the hole, comprehended it without difficulty, closed his mouth and elevated his hands.

Two minutes later Jensen came out, carefully shutting the main door behind him. The pair were locked in the manager’s office but he had not bothered to bind them. They could not use the phone, he’d seen to that. It would take them a full five minutes to break out. Five were plenty for his purpose.

Unhurriedly he got into his car, drove for two minutes, locked his loot in the boot of another car. Then he went to his one-room apartment, sat himself near the open window and waited awhile. The helmet of the Wane projector hung over his head, the switch stood within his reach. His full attention was on the street.

The hue and cry had already started when he put out his hand and turned the switch.

He got the projector away all right. That, above all, was the most important thing. The precious device must be given first consideration and preserved at all costs. Nothing must cause him to lose it, nothing must deprive him of the use of it. If ever he had to take his choice between abandoning the machine or his loot, then the loot must go west.

Now it amused him to walk casually along the street while wearing another and somewhat inferior guise. His hands were stuffed into his rough, homespun pockets, his clodhopper boots clanked on steel nails, his lips were pursed in a silent whistle. Funny the way he felt: sort of happy and horrified at one and the same time. Here he was on top of the world—with that mental kill-the-cat wail still sounding in his mind.

An excited group had clustered on the corner, their mouths working with staccato babblings. “Yes, yes, I remember when … nothing like it in this place before … always said they’d get held up someday … as cool as you like … just stepped in and helped himself while the cashier fainted … time these banks took better precautions … if I’d been there I’d have socked him with an ink-well.”

“What’s the matter, fellows?” asked Jensen, showing rural amiability.

“Bank robbery,” informed a lanky individual. “We were just in time to miss it. There was only one robber. He got away. Don’t know how much he took but it must have been a nice packet.”

“Ah!” Jensen studied the other with what he hoped was a plausible air of country cunning. He scratched the back of his head, tilting his cap over his brow to do it. “There’s a big green station-wagon parked by the chapel two roads further down.”

“What of it?”

“I remember seeing it standing near the bank earlier on. It was there for nearly an hour. There was a fellow at the wheel, a smart, slick type. Perhaps he noticed something that might help the police. Somebody ought to find him and ask him—he mightn’t yet know there’s been a hold-up.”

“That’s an idea,” the lanky one agreed, eager to play the clever detective. He glanced at his companions. They nodded. “Coming?” he asked Jensen.

“No, I’ve got to catch a bus. You can’t mistake that car. It’s the green one outside the chapel.”

He mooched off. After a hundred yards he looked back, found the others had vanished in pursuit of the station-wagon. The rest wasn’t difficult to imagine. They’d find it and tell the cops. The cops would make enquiries, pick up a lead to his former landlady’s address and ask if the car’s owner were in. She’d show them up to his room or perhaps she’d go up there herself. In either event they’d find the body of the bank robber. The manager and the cashier would identify it positively. They’d search the room and the entire house and they’d browbeat the landlady—but they’d never get the cash.

Grinning to himself, he returned to his second car, got into the driver’s seat. The money was behind him, still locked in the boot. The projector lay hidden in its crate on the back seat. As for the car itself, it could not be linked with his former identity and he had nothing to worry about on that score.

Yes, this had been the perfect crime. He had got away with it and now was absolutely untraceable. Moreover, he could do it again and again and again. The forces of law and order could run around in circles and get nowhere.

The only snag was that he didn’t know whose body he was wearing. Regardless of his physical form he was always Jensen with Jensen’s mind and Jensen’s memories. The evicted personality left him the brain but never its private contents. Seemed as if memory was partly a spiritual faculty rather than a material record in the cerebellum. Scientists would find great interest in that fact.

He felt around in the pockets of his jacket, looking for papers that might provide data on who he was supposed to be. He’d get some information about his new self before he started the car and headed for another hunting ground. “Hey, Sam, where’d you get the limousine?”

The voice sounding suddenly at his side took him by surprise. A horsy, phlegmatic face looked at him through the open window, dully curious. Its owner’s jaws moved rhythmically as he chewed on his gums and awaited a reply.

So he was Sam Somebody-or-other. Jensen’s mind moved fast. If he tried to fall in with the spirit of the occasion he’d surely trip up. Denial was the safest course.

It wasn’t so flexible, this present face of his, but he did his best to give it some distortion as he turned it into full view of the other and replied, “It’s my own car. And I ain’t Sam.” “What?” The long jaw stopped on the upstroke, the mouth hung half open and revealed the pink ridges of bare gums. “You ain’t Sam?”

“That’s what I said. You’ve made a mistake. I’d like to meet Sam sometime. We may be doubles. You’re about the tenth who’s mistaken me for him.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said the other. “You’re the dead spit of him.”

“I’m nobody’s spit and I’m far from dead!” Jensen retorted. With that he started the car and drove away, leaving Horseface still standing open-mouthed.

This was one flaw in the body-snatching racket. The odds frequently were in favour of picking on a local character and thus becoming involved in complications. In future, Jensen decided, he’d better weigh up his intended victims as thoroughly as his jobs. Strangers to a given district would be his best bet any time, any place. Newcomers to the country would be even better. But the flaw was there; he’d have to keep it in mind and watch his step.

Jensen always got a kick out of reading the daily papers. He liked the touch of mystery, starkness and drama with which these journalists invested their descriptions of newsworthy crimes.

Here they were, at it again, dealing with his sixth successful exploit. According to them, the character who had carried out the last bank robbery was a person of almost saintlike disposition with a lily-white record to suit. He’d been found dead. His loot had not been discovered. The great mystery was why somebody of unsullied reputation had suddenly committed so desperate a crime, exactly why he had died and where he had hidden the proceeds of his feat.

“Hahl” chortled Jensen, his gaze following the columns of print.

All the same, sometimes a journalist could show a trace of shrewdness. The writer of this particular report, a fellow using the initials A.K.D., had linked this crime with the previous one. He’d enlarged on their common factors: bank robberies employing the same technique, done by people of unimpeachable character who in due course were found dead, sans loot. Concluding, he’d recalled the official destruction of a large and healthy crop of Indian hemp and hinted darkly at the insidious spread of the drug traffic in outwardly respectable circles.

“What a joke!” Jensen said to himself appreciatively. Then he spotted the advertisement. It was a small one in the personal column, given a little prominence by being boxed. He read it slowly.

H.M.J. Get in touch with me. Willing to buy device for cash. Genuine offer. Wane.

Jensen thought it over. It looked like a trap in which Wane himself was functioning as the bait. On the other hand, cash was mentioned and might really be there. It should be well within Jensen’s power to swipe the cash without springing the trap. What’s the use of brains if one doesn’t use them?

He motored into town and used a public phone. “This is you-know-who. I’m not waiting to be picked up so talk fast.”

“Listen,” came Wane’s reedy voice, speaking rapidly. “I’ve found a foreign backer who believes the machine could be put to a worthy purpose in his own country. He’s willing to buy it.”

“Then why not build one for him?”

“I can’t afford to. I’ve got to produce before I see his

money. And another device would take me two years to complete. The offer has to be accepted within reasonable time. Jensen, this buyer is young and extremely wealthy—” “I’ll think it over,” snapped Jensen. He rang off without giving Wane time to finish.

Twenty-four hours later Jensen decided to dicker. It was to his advantage. His present body was of no interest to the law, he was well plastered with the proceeds of various exploits, but was perfectly willing to grab a wad from Wane— without surrendering the projector. He had a bright idea about how to do this, a real whizzbang of an idea.

Calling from another booth in a different town, he informed, “I might play. It depends.”

Wane said, “How much do you want for the device?”

“How much,” countered Jensen, “is this boob willing to

pay?”

“I don’t know. He certainly would not quibble about a high price but might do so if it were extortionate. Name your figure. If you want to sell you’ll have to make a start somewhere.”

The other’s obvious confidence in his backer’s spending power was too much for Jensen’s curiosity. “Who is this character, anyway?”

Despite his efforts to tone it down, Wane’s voice took on an eager note. “He’s a European in his thirties and a very, very wealthy man. He’s engaged to one of the season’s leading beauties who, I believe, is also wealthy. I cannot reveal his identity at this stage but I can assure you he’s got more money and influence than any man I’ve ever met.”

“All right. I’ll deal with him myself.”

“But-”

“No funny business,” warned Jensen, harshly. “I’m cutting off. I’ve been here long enough. Sometime I’ll call you again. Meanwhile, fix up a meeting. And tell him the price will be sky-high.”

His grin was broad as he hung up. A foreigner rolling in lolly and pledged to wed a society stunner. This was going to be good!

The set-up proved that it was going to be good. The window of the opposite apartment was only fifty yards away, directly across the street. It was on the third floor and Jensen could look right into it from his window on the same level.

Of course, the place could be an elaborate trap—but the way in which he planned to enter it would make it a farce. Wane’s tale about his wealthy buyer could be a calculated lie. On the other hand, it might be genuine. Either way he, Jensen, had much to gain and nothing to lose.

Yes, so far as he was concerned the gamble would be a simple, clear-cut one based on the question of whether, in abandoning his present body, he’d acquire the brawny carcass of some smart detective waiting to shoot him on sight or the patrician form of a foreigner stinking with riches.

Verily, Jensen had brains. Villains with brains never get hanged. He had even the intelligence and imagination to anticipate that Wane himself might use his own brains to guess how Jensen would try to spring the trap. For instance, Wane could be cunning enough to bait the opposite apartment with a dummy or a corpse, enticing Jensen to break loose and find nothing to be taken over, leaving him frantic and disembodied while his power swiftly dissipated. It’s wise not to underestimate an opponent and Jensen was the essence of wisdom.

So for some time he’d studied through powerful binoculars as much as he could see of the apartment. The fellow hanging around behind that other window was real and living, no doubt of that. He was a fidgety customer who every now and again went to his own window and peered cautiously into the street, giving Jensen an excellent view of his face and figure.

The intended victim was pretty much as described by Wane, thirtyish, burly, dressed in slightly flashy style. He had an air of garish opulence and the diamond on the middle finger of his left hand was a veritable blinder. His carefully slicked hair and tough-looking face made a vaguely familiar picture. Jensen concluded that he had seen this fellow’s photo somewhere or other, perhaps in a glossy magazine arm in arm with a high-class dame or posing with his foot on a dead tiger.

Anyway, his general appearance was much to Jensen’s taste. Selecting a suitable body was no different from choosing an attractive overcoat—and the chooser was beginning to get fastidious. The corpus now on display was fashionable, hard-wearing and a bargain at the price. Jensen was not the one to face a gift-horse and spit in its eye.

Vaguely he wondered if the victim had a snooty butler who would address him as, “Yes, milord!” and “No, milord!” and “Certainly, milord!” He, Jensen, would enjoy that to the utmost. Which reminded him, he’d have to get rid of various unfortunate habits such as that of saying, “Naw, it ain’t.” He’d have to get in some practice at pronouncing in toffy-nosed tones, “No, Simmonds, it is not.”

Slick-hair was back again at the window, having a careful look at an automobile which had parked at the kerb below. He turned away, spoke briefly to somebody hidden in the farther shadows of the room, brought his attention back to the street.

Jensen had an equally cautious look, let his gaze drift past the silent vehicle until it discovered the slight, silvery-haired figure of Wane as that worthy came trotting along with his usual preoccupied air. Without any hesitation or so much as a brief glance around, Wane entered the doorway immediately beneath Slick-hair’s apartment. The latter was still watching the motionless car.

Now was the time! Diving for the chair, Jensen plonked himself in it and switched on the projector. Practice made perfect although familiarity had not bred contempt. The seat and its weird helmet never failed to look ominous, somehow reminding him that all good things come to an end.

Fundamental force flooded his ego while he sat there and glared at the man behind the open window just across the street. Jensen was sharp enough to have improved upon the work of the undoubtedly brainy Wane. He leaned slightly forward in his seat so that when his deserted body slumped it would knock a second switch and shut off the projector. A Jensen refinement, that one. He was proud of it.

Within thirty seconds he was free. He was also across the street, in that room, in that other body, the ungodly transference taking place with its usual rapidity.

A sense of mighty triumph and overwhelming power animated his nonmaterial fibre as he fought to eject the other’s stubborn psyche. This victim proved a tough specimen; even though taken completely by surprise his resistance to expulsion was far stronger, more determined and infinitely more desperate than that of anyone the invader had yet tackled. To retain his hold on life he struggled with all the ferocity and tenacity of a prehistoric reptile.

For most of a minute the disputed body staggered drunk-enly around the room while two personalities fought for complete ownership. It was like a diamond-decorated spastic. A couple of times it gasped and made peculiar gesticulations. Once it fell, rolled over with eerie writhings, retched nothing, awkwardly clambered onto its uncertain feet.

Already Jensen’s power was beginning to fade for sheer lack of physical possession but still his spiritual force was abnormal. He knew now that he could never have subdued this tigerish character unaided by the strength gained from the projector. But he did conquer. The body teetered wildly and almost collapsed as with a tremendous effort he expelled its owner from the sphere of material life. Again he heard the terrible susurration of a life-spark fleeing into nothingness.

Perspiration beaded his new form as Jensen leaned against a wall and breathed with heavy sobbing sounds. His legs felt weak but he had triumphed. It had been a hard and bitter battle but he had won it. Cheers! He showed Wane a very satisfied grin as that person opened the door, stood framed in the gap and looked at him.

“Too bad,” said Wane imperturbably.

“What is?”

“You’ve left your gun across the road. You’ve heard the old saying—you can’t take it with you?”

“My gun?”

“Jensen’s.”

“So you’ve guessed it.” Jensen seated himself on the corner of the desk and looked happy. He felt a lot better now. Dynamic, that was the word for it. Full of confidence. “You certainly are a shrewd old cuss. But not clever enough to figure all the possibilities of your own invention. You thought I’d sell it, eh?” He laughed, was momentarily surprised at the deep, sneering sound of his new voice, then laughed again. “I’d be a fool to flog the key to immortality.”

Still standing in the doorway, Wane said, “Ah, yes, immortality. No sum is large enough to buy that.” He smoothed back his thin white hair. “My device is excellent. I have no cause to be ashamed of it. Its only fault is that it has come many centuries too soon. Humanity is not ready for it.” His eyes seemed tired as they gazed at Jensen’s jeering ones. “I have decided to destroy it.”

“Like hell you will!” informed Jensen. He made an imperative gesture. “Don’t pose there like a dummy. Come inside. I want all the information you can give about the important character I’ve become.”

“Of course,” agreed Wane, speaking gently. He entered the room. Four tall, broad-shouldered and efficient-looking individuals followed him. “You are,” said Wane, “no less a person than Enrico Rapalli.”

A hellish photomontage flamed in Jensen’s mind: the long and bloody list of Rapalli’s crimes. Much of this record had been made while Jensen was in jail and he’d seen the master criminal’s picture only once. No wonder that hard face looked familiar, no wonder that psyche had fought so tigerishly.

“I went to the authorities and reported everything,” Wane went on. “As happened, they had just located Rapalli and were planning to take him. They agreed to my suggestion and held off while I used him as bait. My advertisement appeared in a score of papers for ten days before you swallowed the hook. I then made the appointment on which you insisted. I made it here, at Rapalli’s hide-out, and the powers-that-be kindly arranged to have the facing room across the street made vacant. Immediately you rented it and moved in with the projector we knew we’d got you where we wanted you.” Again he brushed back his white hair. His expression was tired. “Now I shall destroy my device.”

“Come along, Rapalli,” growled one of the four. He clamped a powerful hand on Jensen’s forearm.

“I’m not Rapalli,” shouted Jensen, his features livid. “I’m… I’m—”

“Well, who are you?” The questioner registered a craggy smile. “You’ve got Rapalli’s face and fingerprints. You’ve got his body and that’s all the law wants, all the law intends to punish.”

“Damn you!” yelled Jensen as the cuffs clicked on his wrists. His infuriated eyes discovered Wane going out through the door; he struggled violently, tugging and kicking and using obscene language.

Wane turned, gazed at him with academic interest, said mildly, “Rapalli, I’m really Starry for you. Undoubtedly you will get what you deserve. That will be bad enough—if death means complete dissolution.” There was a slight pause before he finished. “If it doesn’t, your soul will go somewhere and find others waiting. I cannot imagine what will happen to you then!”

TIELINE

He watched the needle of the output meter jump, wiggle and fall back. Thirty seconds later the same again, a rise, quiver and drop. Thirty seconds later the same again. It had been going on for weeks, months, years.

Outside the fused-stone building a lattice mast rose high into the sky and pointed a semispherical metal cup at the stars. And from the cup at half-minute intervals there squirted a soundless, long-range voice.

“Bunda One. Eep-eep-bopl Bunda One. Eep-eep-bopI”

From eight synchronised repeater stations on lonely islands around the planet’s belly the same call went forth, radiating like the spokes of a monster wheel as slowly the world turned on its axis.

Out there in the inter-nebular chasm where darkened bodies lurked devoid of parent suns, an occasional ship would hear the voice, change course on its own horizontal or vertical plane and thunder steadily onward.

How often that happened he’d no way of telling. He remained in awful solitude, pointing the way to those who never said, “Thanks!” Too small and fleeting ever to be seen, their flame-trails flickered briefly in the gap between starwhorls and then were gone. Ships that pass in the night.

Bunda One. A lighthouse in space. A world with Earthlike atmosphere but little land. A sphere of vast oceans dotted with small and craggy islands on which lived nothing that was company and comfort for anything in human form. A veritable paradise for fish and other marine creatures.

This very island was the largest solid foothold in a world of watery wastes. Twenty-two miles long by seven wide. A continent in Bunda-terms. No trees, no animals, no birds, no flowers. There were low, twisted shrubs, lichens and tiny fungi. There were fifty species of amphibious insects that maintained balance by warring upon each other. And nothing else.

Over all the planet lay a dreadful silence. That was the real horror of it, the silence. Winds were gentle, consistent, never descended to a sigh or raised to a howl. The seas heaved lazily up the rocks, slid ten inches down without a thump, splash or rattle of flung spray. The insects were noiseless, without a squeak or chirp among the lot. The pale lichens and distorted shrubs stood unmoving like bizarre entities paralysed by eternal quiet.

Behind the building lay a garden. When first the beacon-constructors had set up the place they had dessicated half an acre of hard rock, turning it into cultivatable dirt, planting Earthborn roots and seeds therein. No flowers had come up, not one, but some vegetables had fought successfully for life. Beetroot, spinach and broccoli, he had fifty rows of those. And he had onions the size of footballs.

At no time did he eat an onion. He detested the smelly things. But he kept them in existence along with the rest, tending them carefully for the sake of a change in routine, for the pleasure of hearing the gritty thrust of a spade and the shuffle of a hoe.

The needle jumped, wiggled, fell back. If watched too often and too long its effect became hypnotic. There were times when he developed an insane desire to change its characteristic fluctuations into something idiotic but refreshingly new, to tear out the great transmitter’s master-code and substitute an imbecility that the cup would squirt at the astounded stars.

“Wossop na bullwhacka. Bammer-bam-whop! Wossop na bullwhacka. Bammer-bam-whop!”

It had happened before and someday would happen again. Wasn’t so long since a light cruiser had bolted to a Wolfgroup station after its beacon had lapsed into incoherencies. One man’s madness had endangered a space-liner carrying two thousands. Put out the light and there is stumbling in the dark.

To join the Beacon Service was to accept ten years of solitary confinement for very high pay and the satisfaction of fulfilling an important public need. The prospect looked enticing when young, adaptable and still standing foursquare upon good old Mother Earth. The reality was grim, forbidding and had proved too much for some. Man was not meant to live alone.

“So you’re from the Western Isles, eh? Just the sort of fellow we want! We’ve a station called Bunda. One that’s made to measure for you. You should be able’to tolerate it far better than most. Not much different from being marooned on Benbecula. City types are useless for a place like that, no matter how excellent their technical qualifications. Sooner or later they tend to go cracked for sheer lack of the bright lights. Yes, a man from the Western Isles is cut to size for Bunda One. You won’t miss what you’ve never had. Bunda One’s got all the things you’re used to: rocky islands and great seas, just like home!”

Just like home.

Home.

Down there on the waveless beach were pebbles and pretty shells and creeping things slightly like tiny crabs. In the ocean swayed acres of seaweed through which darted shoals of fish, big and small, exactly like the fish of Earth. He knew because he had cast lines from the shore, caught them, unhooked them and thrown them back to the freedom that he lacked.

But no worn stone jetty projected into the green waters, no tough and rusty little steamers rolled and dipped across the bay, nobody on the beach busied themselves with tar-spots or mended nets. No barrels rolled and clattered from the cooperage, no shining blocks slithered out of the ice-plant, no silver horde flopped and jerked under the hatches of full holds. And at Sunday eventide no voices prayed for those in peril on the seas.

Back on Earth the scientific big brains excelled when it came to dealing with purely technical problems. The Bunda One master-station was semi-automatic, its eight slave-beacons fully automatic, and they drew power from atomic generators that could run untended for a century or more.

The strength of the warning voice was enough to boost it across a mighty chasm between clusters of uncountable suns. All that was needed to achieve one hundred per-cent efficiency was a watching eye backed by knowledge, ability and initiative, an emergency-mechanism that in effect could make the beacon a self-servicing unit. In other words, one man.

That’s where their ingenuity fell short. One man. A man is not a gadget. He cannot be assessed as a gadget, be processed like one, be made to function like one.

Somewhat belatedly they had recognised this fact after the third lunatic had been removed from his post. Three mental breakdowns in an organisation numbering four hundred isolated stations is not a large proportion. Less than one per-cent. But it was three too many. And the number might increase as time caught up with those slower to crack. They’d cogitated the problem. Ah! they’d exclaimed^ preconditioning is the answer.

So the next candidates had been put through a tedious, scientifically designed mill, a formidable long-term course calculated to break the breakable and leave a tough, hard residue deemed suitable for service. It hadn’t worked out. The need for men was too great, the number of candidates too few and they had broken too many.

After that they had tried half a dozen other theories with no better luck. Precept and practice don’t always accord. The bigbrains could have done with a taste of reality themselves.

Their latest fad was the tieline theory. Ah! they said— they were very fond of ahl—man is born of Earth and needs a tieline to Earth. Give him that and he’ll be fastened to sanity. He can hang on through ten years of solitary confinement and never eat his nails.

What is a tieline?

Cherchez la femme, suggested one, looking worldly-wise over the tops of his spectacles. They’d discussed it and dismissed it on a dozen counts. Imaginable complications ranged all the way from murder to babies. Besides, it would mean the periodic long-haul of supplies doubled in mass for the sake of a non-technical entity.

A dog, then? All right for those few worlds on which a dog could fend for itself. But what of other places such as Bunda? Space-loads were precious and the time had not yet come for shipping dogfood around the cosmos for the benefit of single, widely scattered mongrels.

The first attempted tieline was makeshift, wholly mechanical, and did have the virtue of countering the silence that was the curse of Bunda. The annual supply ship dropped its load of food along with a recorder and fifty tapes.

For the next couple of months he had noise, not only words and music but also characteristic Earth-sounds: the roar of holiday traffic along a turnpike, the rumble of trains, the chimes of church bells, the high-pitched chatter of children pouring out of school, the aural evidence of life in the far, far away. At first hearing he was delighted. By the twelfth he was bored. At the twentieth he was glum. There was no thirtieth time.

The output needle jumped, wiggled, fell back. “Bunda One. Eep-eep-bop!” The recorder stood abandoned in a corner. Out there in the star-mists were his lonely brothers. He could not talk to them or listen to them. They were out of communicable reach and their worlds turned like his. He sat and watched the needle and was encapsulated in an awful hush.

Eight months ago, Earth-time, the supply ship had brought evidence that they were still fooling around with the tieline theory. It had dropped the annual stores with a little box and a small notebook before flaring away into the chasm.

Detaching the box from its tiny parachute, he’d opened it and found himself confronted by a bug-eyed monster. The thing had turned its triangular head and stared at him with horrid coldness. Then it had stirred long, awkward limbs and tried to clamber out. Hurriedly he had shut the box and consulted the book.

This informed that the new arrival’s name was Jason, that it was a praying mantis, tame, harmless and fully capable of fending for itself. Jason, apparently, had been diet-tested on several species of Bunda insects and had eaten them avidly. In some parts of Earth, the notebook encouragingly said, the mantis was a pet of children.

That showed how the bigbrains’ stubbornly objective minds worked. They had now decided that the tieline must be a living creature, a natural-born Earthling, capable of sustaining itself on an alien world. But being in comfortable armchairs and not lost in the starfield, they had overlooked the essential quality of familiarity. They’d have done better to have sent him an alley cat. He didn’t care much for cats and there was no milk but at least the seas were full of fish. Moreover, cats make noises. They mew and purr and yowl. The thing in the box was menacing and completely silent.

Who in the Western Isles had ever encountered a praying mantis? He’d never seen one in his life before and was in no great hurry to see another. It resembled the nightmare idea of a midget Martian.

He never handled it once. He kept it in its box where it stood on long legs, eerily turning its head, watching him icy-eyed and never uttering a sound. On the first day he gave it a Bunda hopper caught among the lichens, was sickened by the way it bit off the victim’s head and chewed. A couple of times he dreamed of a gigantic Jason towering over him, mouth open like a big, hungry trap.

After a couple of weeks he’d had enough. Taking the box six miles to the north, he opened it, tilted it, watched Jason scuttle into the shrubs and lichens. It bestowed one basilisk stare before it disappeared. There were two Earthlings on Bunda and they were lost to each other.

“Bunda One. Eep-eep-bop!”

Jump, wiggle, fall. No word of acknowledgment from an assisted ship fleeing through the distant dark. No sounds of life save those impressed upon imported tapes. No reality within an alien reality daily growing more dreamlike and elusive.

Might be worth sabotaging the station for the sake of repairing it and getting it back into action and thus creating pretended justification for one’s own existence. But a thousand lives might pay the penalty out there among the stars. The price of monotony-busting amusement was far too high.

Or he could spend off-duty hours making a northward search for the tiny monster, calling, calling and hoping not to find it.

“Jason! Jason!”

And somewhere among the crags and crevices a pointed, bulgy-eyed head turning towards his voice but making no reply. If Jason had been capable of chirruping like a cicada maybe he could have endured the creature, grown to love it knowing that its clicks and squeaks were mantis-talk. But Jason was as grim and silent as the hushed, forbidding world of Bunda.

He made final check of the transmitter, monitored its eight slaves bawling around the world, went to bed and lay there wondering for the thousandth time whether he would see the ten years through or was he doomed to crack before the end.

If ever he did go crazy the scientists on Earth would promptly use him as a guinea-pig, a test-piece with which to experiment in effort to determine cause and cure. Yes, they were clever, very clever. But there were some things about which they weren’t so smart. With that thought he fell into uneasy sleep.

Seeming stupidity sometimes proves to be expertness compelled to take its time. All problems can be worked out given weeks, months or years instead of days, minutes or seconds. The time for this one was now.

The tramp-ship Henderson rolled out of the starfield, descended on wheezy antigravs, hung momentarily two thousand feet above the master-beacon. It lacked power reserves to land, take off and still make its appointed rounds. It merely paused for the minimum time, dropped the latest tieline thought up by the bigbrains and plunged back into the pit of night. The cargo swirled down into the darkness of Bunda like a flurry of big grey snowflakes.

At dawn he awoke unconscious of the visit. The supply ship was not due for another four months. He glanced bleary-eyed at his bedside clock, frowned with bafflement over what had caused him to waken so early. Something, a vague something had intruded in his dreams.

What had it been?

A sound. A noise?

He sat up, listened. There again, outside, muffled by walls and by distance. The wail of an abandoned cat. No, not that. More like the cry of a lost baby.

Imagination. The cracking process must be starting already. He’d lasted four years. Some other willing hermit would be called upon to put in the other six. He was hearing things when there was nothing to be heard and that’s a sure sign of mental unbalance.

Again the sound.

Getting out of bed, he dressed himself, studied himself in the mirror. It was not an idiot face that looked back at him. A little strained perhaps, but otherwise normal. He frowned at the face as faintly the lost baby cried again. He went to the control-room, eyed the instrument-board. Jump, wiggle, fall.

“Bunda One. Eep-eep-bop!”

Everything all right there. Returning to his own room, he stretched his ears and listened. Somebody—some thing— was out there wailing in the dawnlight by the swelling waters.

What?

Unfastening the door with nervous fingers, he flung it wide and looked out. The sound boosted, poured around him, all over him, saturated his soul. He stood there a long time, trembling. Then gathering himself together he raced to the storeroom, stuffed his pockets with biscuits, filled both hands.

He stumbled with sheer speed as he bolted through the doorway. He ran headlong to the shingly beach, loaded hands held out, his breath coming in glad gasps.

And there at the lazy ocean’s edge he stood with shining eyes, arms held wide as seven hundred seagulls swirled around, took food from his hands, strutted between his feet.

All the time they screamed the hymn of the lonesome isles, the song of the everlasting sea, the wild, triumphant music that was truly Earth’s.

He glided out of the gathering dusk and seated himself at the other end of the bench and gazed absently across the lake. The setting sun had dribbled blood in the sky. Mandarin ducks paddled through crimson streaks on the waters. The park held its usual eventide hush; the only sounds were the rustle of leaves and grasses, the murmuring of secluded lovers and the muted tootings of distant cars.

When the bench quivered its announcement of company I had glanced along it half-expecting to find some derelict hoping to cadge the price of a bed. The contrast between the anticipated and the seen was such that I looked again, long, carefully, out of the corners of my eyes so that he wouldn’t notice it.

Despite the grey tones of twilight what I saw was a study in black and white. He had thin, sensitive features as white as his gloves and his shirt-front. His shoes and suit were not quite as black as his finely curved eyebrows and well-groomed hair. His eyes were blackest of all: that solid, supernal blackness that can be no deeper or darker. Yet they were alive with an underlying glow.

He had no hat. A slender walking-stick of ebony rested casually against his legs. A black, silk-lined cloak hung from

his shoulders. If he had been doing it for the movies he could not have presented a better picture of a distinguished foreigner.

My mind speculated about him in the way minds do when momentarily they have nothing else to occupy them. A European refugee, it decided. Possibly an eminent surgeon or sculptor. Or perhaps a writer or painter, more likely the latter.

I stole another look at him. In the lowering light the pale profile was hawk like. The glow behind the eyes was strengthening with the dark. The cloak lent him a peculiar majesty. The trees were stretching their arms toward him as if to give aid and comfort through the long, long night.

No hint of suffering marked that face. It had nothing in common with the worn, lined features I had seen elsewhere, countenances wearing forever the memories of the manacles, the whip and the horror camp. On the contrary, it held a mixture of boldness and serenity, of confidence in the belief that one day the tide must turn. Impulsively I decided that he was a musician. I could imagine him conducting a tremendous choir of fifty thousand voices.

“I am fond of music,” he said in low, rich tones.

His face turned toward me, revealing a pronounced peak in his glossy black hair.

“Really?” The unexpectedness of his remark caught me at a disadvantage. Without knowing it I must have voiced my thoughts aloud. Rather feebly I asked, “Of what kind?”

“This.” He used his ebony stick to indicate the world at large. “The sigh of ending day.”

“Yes, it is soothing,” I agreed.

“It is my time,” he said. “The time when the day ends— as all things must end.”

“That’s true,” I said for lack of anything better.

We were silent awhile. Slowly the horizon soaked the blood from the sky. The city put on its lights and a wan moon floated over its towers.

“You’re not a native of this place?” I prompted.

“No.” Resting long, slender hands upon his stick, he gazed meditatively forward. “I have no country. I am a displaced person.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,’ he said.

I couldn’t just sit there and leave him to stew in his own juice. The choice was to continue the conversation or depart. There was no need to go. So I continued.

“Care to tell me about it?”

His head came round and he studied me as if only now fully aware of my presence. That weird light in his orbs could almost be felt. He smiled gradually and tolerantly, showing perfect teeth.

“Should I?”

“You don’t have to. But sometimes it helps to get things off one’s mind.”

“I doubt it. Besides, I would be wasting your time.”

“Not at all. I’m wasting it anyway.”

Smiling again, he used his stick to draw unseeable circles in front of his black shoes.

“In this day and age it is an all too familiar story,” he said. “A leader became so blinded by his own glory that he considered himself incapable of making blunders. He rejected all advice and resented all criticism. He developed delusions of grandeur, posed as the final arbiter on everything from birth to death, and thereby brought into being a movement for his overthrow. He created the seeds of his own destruction. It was inevitable in the circumstances.”

“And rightly so,” I supported. “To hell with dictators!”

The stick slipped from his grasp. He picked it up, juggled it idly, resumed his circle drawing.

“The revolt didn’t succeed?” I suggested.

“No.” He looked at the circles and struck a line through them. “It proved too early and too weak. It was crushed with the utmost ruthlessness. Then came the purge.” His glowing eyes surveyed the sentinel trees. “I created that opposition. I still think it was justified. But I dare not go back. Not yet.”

“A fat lot you should care about that. You’re in a good country now and you can fit into it comfortably.”

“I don’t think so. I’m not especially welcome here.” His voice was deeper. “Not wanted—anywhere.”

“Oh, nonsense!” I retorted. “Everybody is wanted by someone, somewhere. Cheer up. Don’t be morbid. After all, it’s worth a lot just to be free.”

“No man is free until he’s beyond his enemy’s reach.” He glanced at me with an irritating touch of amusement, almost as if he considered that I had yet to learn the facts of life. “When one’s foe has gained control of every channel of information and propaganda, when he uses them to present his own case and utterly suppress mine, when he offers calculated lies as truth and damns the truth as a lie, there is little hope for me.”

“Well, that’s your way of looking at things. I cannot blame you for feeling bitter about bygone experiences. But you’ve got to forget them. Here, you’re living in a different world. We’ve free speech. A man can say what he likes, write what he likes.”

“If only that were true.”

“It is true,” I asserted, slightly annoyed. “Here you can call the Rajah of Bam an arrogant and overfed parasite if you wish. Nobody can prevent you from doing so, not even the police. Were free, as I’ve told you.”

He stood up, towering amid embracing trees. From my sitting position his height seemed enormous. The moon lit his face in pale ghastliness.

“Your faith is comforting but baseless.”

“No!” I denied.

He turned away. His cape swung behind him and billowed in the night breeze until it resembled mighty wings. “My name,” he murmured softly, “is Lucifer.”

After that there was only the whisper of the wind.

The first Martian vessel descended upon Earth with the slow, stately fall of a grounding balloon. It did resemble a large balloon in that it was spherical and had a strange buoyancy out of keeping with its metallic construction. Beyond this superficial appearance all similarity to anything Terrestrial ceased.

There were no rockets, no crimson venturi-tubes, no external projections other than several solaradiant distorting grids which boosted the ship in any desired direction through the cosmic field. There were no observation-ports. All viewing was done through a transparent band running right around the fat belly of the sphere. The blue-skinned, somewhat nightmarish crew were assembled behind that band and surveying the world through great multi-faceted eyes.

They gazed through the viewing-strip in utter silence as they examined this world which was Terra. Even if they had been capable of speech they would have said nothing. But none among them had a talkative faculty in any sonic sense. At this quiet moment none needed it.

The scene outside was one of untrammeled desolation. Scraggy blue-green grass clung to tired ground all the way to a horizon scarred by ragged mountains. Dismal bushes struggled for life here and there, some with the pathetic air of striving to become trees as once their ancestors had been. To the right a long, straight scar through the grass betrayed a sterile lumpiness of rocks at odd places. Too rugged and too narrow ever to have been a road, it suggested no more than the desiccated remnants of a long-gone wall. And over all this loomed a ghastly sky.

Captain Skhiva eyed his crew, spoke to them with his sign-talking tentacle. The alternative was contact-telepathy which required physical touch.

“It is obvious that we are out of luck. We could have done no worse had we landed on the empty satellite. However, it is safe to go outside. Anyone who wishes to explore for a little while may do so.”

One of them gesticulated back to him. “Captain, don’t you wish to be the first to step upon this new world?”

“It is of no consequence. If anyone deems it an honour, he is welcome to it.” He pulled the lever opening both airlock doors. Thicker, heavier air crowded in and pressure went up a few pounds. “Beware of over-exertion,” he warned as they went out.

Poet Fander touched him, tentacles tip to tip as he sent his thoughts racing through their nerve-ends. “This confirms what we could see on the approach. A stricken planet far gone in its death throes. What do you suppose might have caused it?”

“I have not the remotest idea. I would give a lot to know. If it has been smitten by natural forces what might they do to Mars someday?” His troubled mind sent a throb of worry up Fander’s contacting tentacle. “A pity that this planet had not been farther out instead of closer in; we might then have observed the preceding phenomena from the surface of our own world. It is so difficult properly to view this one against the glare of the Sun.”

“That applies still more to the next planet, the misty one,” remarked Poet Fander.

“I know it and I am beginning to fear what we may find there. If it proves to be equally dead, then we are stalled until we can make the big jump outward.”

“Which won’t be in our lifetimes.”

“I doubt it,” agreed Captain Skhiva. “We could move fast with the help of able friends. We shall be slow—going it alone.” He turned to watch his crew as they poked and probed around the grim landscape. “They find it good to be on firm ground. But what is a world without life and beauty? In short time they will become tired of it. They will be glad to leave.”

Fander said thoughtfully, “Nevertheless, I would like to see more of it. May I take out the lifeboat?”

“You are a songbird and not a pilot,” reproved Skhiva. “Your function is to maintain morale by entertaining us, not to go roaming around in a lifeboat.”

“But I know how to control it. Every one of us has been trained to handle it. Let me take it that I may see more.”

“Haven’t we seen enough even before we landed? What else is there to see? Cracked and distorted roads about to dissolve into nothingness. Ages-old cities, tom and broken, crumbling into dust. Shattered mountains and charred forests and craters little smaller than those upon the Moon. No sign of any superior life-form still surviving. Only the grass, the shrubs and various small animals, two or fourlegged, that flee at our approach. Why do you wish to see more?”

“There is poetry even in death,” said Fander.

“Possibly so—but it remains repulsive.” Skhiva gave a brief shiver. “All right, have your own way. Take the lifeboat. Who am I to question the weird workings of the nontechnical mind?”

“Thank you, Captain.”

“It is nothing. See that you are back by dusk.” Breaking contact, Skhiva went to the lock, curled himself snalashly on its outer rim and brooded, still without bothering to touch the strange new world. So much attempted, so much done— for so poor reward.

He was still pondering the futility of effort when the lifeboat broke free and soared. Expressionlessly his multi-faceted eyes watched the energized grids change angle as the boat swung into a curve and floated away like a little bubble. Skhiva was sensitive to futility.

The crew came in well before darkness. A few hours were enough. Just grass and shrubs and child-trees straining to grow up. One had discovered a grassless oblong that once might have been the site of a dwelling-place. He brought back a small piece of its foundation, a lump of perished concrete that Skhiva put by for later analysis.

Another had found a small, brown, six-legged insect, but his nerve-ends had heard it cry when he picked it up so hastily he had put it down and let it go free. Small, clumsily moving animals had been hopping in the distance but all had dived down holes in the ground before any Martian could get near. All the crew were agreed upon one thing: the silence and solemnity of a people’s passing was unendurable.

Fander beat the sinking of the Sun by half a time-unit. His bubble drifted under a great black cloud, sank to ship-level and came in. The rain started a moment later, roaring down in a frenzied torrent while they stood behind the transparent band and marvelled at so much water.

After a while Captain Skhiva told them, “We must accept what we find. We have drawn a blank. The cause of this world’s condition is a mystery to be solved by others with more time and better equipment. We are explorers rather than investigators. It is for us to abandon this graveyard and push on to the misty planet. We’ll take oS early in the morning.”

None commented. Fander followed him to his room, made contact with a tentacle-touch.

“One could live here, Captain.”

“I am far from sure of that.” Skhiva coiled on his couch, suspending his tentacles on its limb-rests. The blue sheen of him was reflected by the back wall. “In many places the rocks emit alpha-sparks. They are dangerous.”

“I know, Captain. But I can sense them and avoid them.”

“You?” The other stared up at him.

“Yes, Captain. I wish to be left here.”

“What?—in this place of appalling dreariness?”

“It has an all-pervading air of ugliness and despair,” admitted Poet Fander. “All destruction is ugly. But by accident I have found a little beauty. It heartens me. I would like to seek its source.”

“To what beauty do you refer?” Skhiva demanded.

Fander tried to explain the alien in non-alien terms. It proved impossible.

“Draw it for me,” ordered Skhiva.

Fander drew it carefully, gave him the picture and said, “There!”

Gazing at it for a long time, Skhiva handed it back, spoke along the other’s nerves. “We are individuals with all the rights of individuals. As an individual I don’t think that picture sufficiently beautiful to be worth the tail-tip of a domestic aralan. However, I will admit that it is not ugly, even that it is pleasing.”

“But, Captain—”

“As an individual,” Skhiva went on, “you have an equal right to your opinions strange though those may be. If you really wish to stay, I cannot refuse you. I am entitled only to think you a little crazy.” He eyed Fander again. “When do you hope to be picked up?”

“This year, next year, sometime, never.”

“It might well be never,” Skhiva reminded. “Are you prepared to face that prospect?”

“One must always be prepared to face the natural consequences of his own actions,” Fander pointed out.

“True.” Skhiva was reluctant to surrender. “But have you given the matter serious thought?”

“I am a nontechnical component. I am not guided by thought.”

“Then by what?”

“By my desires, emotions, instincts. By my inward feelings.”

Skhiva said fervently, “The twin moons preserve us!” “Captain, sing me a song of home and play me the tinkling harp.” “Don’t be silly. I have not the ability.”

“Captain, if it required no more than careful thought you would be able to do it?”

“No doubt,” agreed Skhiva, seeing the trap but unable to avoid it.

“There you are,” said Fander pointedly.

“I give up. I cannot argue with someone who casts aside the accepted rules of logic and invents ones of his own. You are governed by lopsided notions that defeat me.”

“It is not a matter of logic or illogic,” Fander told him. “It is merely a matter of viewpoint. You see certain angles whereas I see others.”

“For example?”

“You won’t pin me down in that way. I can find examples. For instance, do you remember that formula for determining the phase of a series tuned circuit?”

“Of course I do.”

“I felt you would. You are a technician. You have fixed it in your mind as a matter of technical utility.” He paused, looked musingly at Skhiva. “I know that formula too. It was mentioned to me, casually, many years ago. It is of not the slightest use to me. Yet I have never forgotten it.”

“Why?”

“Because it holds the beauty of rhythm. It is a poem.” Skhiva sighed and said, “That’s news to me.”

“One upon R into omega L minus one upon omega C,” recited Fander, showing mild amusement. “A perfect hexameter.”

After a while, Skhiva conceded, “It could be sung. One could dance to it.”

“Now I have seen this.” Fander exhibited his sketch. “It holds beauty of a strange and alien kind. Where there is beauty there once was talent—and for all we know there may still be talent. Where talent abides one may find the seeds of greatness. In the realms of greatness are or will be powerful friends. We need such friends.”

“You win.” Skhiva made a gesture of surrender. “In the morning we shall leave you to your self-chosen fate.”

“Thank you, Captain.”

That same streak of stubbornness which made Skhiva a worthy commander induced him to take one final crack at Fander shortly before departure. Summoning him to his room, he eyed the poet calculatingly.

“You are still of the same mind?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Then does it not occur to you as strange that I should be so content to abandon this planet if, as you suggest, it holds the remnants of greatness?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Skhiva stiffened slightly.

“Captain, I think you are a little afraid because you suspect what I suspect.”

“And what do you suspect?”

“That there was no natural disaster. That they did this themselves—to themselves.”

“We have no proof of it,” said Skhiva uneasily.

“No, Captain.” Fander posed there without desire to add more.

“If this is their own sad handiwork,” Skhiva commented at length, “what is our chance of finding friendship among people so much to be feared?”

“Poor,” admitted Fander. “But that is the product of cold thought. As such, it means little to me. I am animated by warm hopes.”

“There you go again, blatantly disregarding reason in favour of an idle dream. Hoping, hoping, hoping—to achieve the impossible.”

Fander said, “The difficult can be done; the impossible takes longer.”

“Your opinions make my orderly mind befuddled. Every remark of yours is a flat denial of something that makes sense.” Skhiva transmitted the sensation of a lugubrious chuckle. “Oh, well, so be it!” He came forward, moving closer to the other. “All your supplies are assembled outside. Nothing remains save to bid you farewell.”

They embraced in the Martian manner. Leaving the airlock, Poet Fander watched the big sphere shiver and glide upward. It soared without a sound,, shrinking steadily until

it became a mere dot about to enter a cloud. A moment later it had gone.

He remained there looking at the cloud for a long, long time. Then he turned his attention to the load-sled holding his supplies. Climbing into its exposed front seat, he shifted the control that energised the floating-grids, let it rise a few feet. The higher the rise the greater the expenditure of power. He wished to conserve power as much as possible; there was no knowing how long he might need it. So at low altitude and gentle pace he let the sled glide in the general direction of the thing of beauty.

Later, he found a small, dry cave in the hill on which his objective stood. It took him two days of careful, cautious raying to enlarge it, square its walls, ceiling and floor, plus half a day with a powered fan driving out silicate dust. After that he stowed his supplies at the back, parked the sled at the front, set up a curtaining force-screen across the entrance. The hole in the hill was now home.

Slumber did not come easily that first night. He lay within the cave, a ropey, knotted thing of glowing blue with enormous bee-like eyes, and found himself listening for harps that played sixty million miles away. His tentacle-tips twitched in involuntary search of the telepathic-contact songs that would go with the harps, and they twitched in vain.

Darkness grew deep and all the world a monstrous stillness held. His hearing organs craved for the eventide flip-flop of sand-frogs but there were no frogs. He wanted the homely drone of night-beetles but none droned. Except for once when something faraway howled its heart at the sallow Moon, there was nothing, nothing.

In the morning he washed, ate, took out the sled and explored the site of a small town. He found little to satisfy his curiosity, no more than mounds of shapeless rubble on ragged, faintly oblong foundations. It was a graveyard of long-dead domiciles, rotting, weedy, rapidly degenerating into complete oblivion. A view from five hundred feet up gave him only one piece of information: the orderliness of the outlines showed that these people had been tidy and methodical.

But tidiness is not beauty in itself. He came back to the top of his hill and sought solace by contemplating the thing that did have beauty.

His explorations continued, not systematically as Skhiva would have conducted them, but in accordance with his own mercurial whims. At times he saw many animals, singly or in groups, none resembling any life-form seen on Mars. Some scattered at full gallop when his sled swooped over them. Some dived down holes in the ground, showing as they disappeared a brief flash of white, absurd tails. Others, four-footed, long-faced, sharp-toothed, hunted in gangs and bayed at him in concert with harsh, menacing voices.

On the seventieth day, in a deep, shadowed glade to the north, he spotted a small number of new shapes slinking along in single file. He recognised them at a glance, knew them so well that his searching eyes transmitted a thrill of triumph to his mind. They were ragged, dirty and only part-grown, but the thing of beauty had told him what they were.

Hugging the ground low, he swept around in a wide curve that brought him to the farther end of the glade. He could see them better now, even the dirt-streaked pink of their thin legs. The sled sloped slightly down into the drop as it entered the glade. They were moving away from him, showing fearful caution as they watched for enemies ahead. His silent swoop from behind gave them no warning.

The rearmost one of this stealthy file fooled him at the last moment. Fander was leaning over the side of the sled, long tentacles outstretched in readiness to snatch the end one with the wild mop of yellow hair when, responding to some sixth sense, the intended victim threw itself flat. His grasp shot past a couple of feet short and he got a glimpse of frightened grey eyes a second or so before a dexterous side-tilt of the sled enabled him to make good his loss by grabbing the less wary next in line.

This one was dark-haired, a bit bigger and sturdier. It fought madly at the holding limbs while the sled gained altitude. Then, suddenly becoming aware of the peculiar nature of its bonds, it writhed around and looked straight at Fander. The result was unexpected: it lost facial colour and closed its eyes and went completely limp.

It was still limp when he bore it into the cave but its heart continued to beat and its lungs to draw. Laying it carefully on the softness of his bed, he moved to the cave’s entrance and waited for it to recover. Eventually it stirred, sat up, gazed confusedly at the facing wall. Its black eyes moved slowly around, taking in the surroundings. Then they saw Fander limned in outer light. They widened and their owner began to make high-pitched, unpleasant noises as it tried to back away through the solid wall. It made so much noise in one rising throb after another that Fander slithered out of the cave, right out of sight, and sat in the cold wind until the sounds died away.

A couple of hours later he made cautious reappearance to offer food but the reaction was so swift, hysterical and heart-rending that he dropped his load and hid himself as if the fear were his own. The food remained untouched for two full days. On the third, a little was eaten. Fander ventured within.

Although the Martian did not go near to him, the boy cowered away murmuring, “Devil! Devil!” His eyes were red, with dark discolouration beneath them.

“Devil!” thought Fander, quite unable to repeat the alien word and wondering what it meant. He used his sign-talking tentacle in valiant effort to convey something reassuring. The attempt was wasted. The other watched its writhings half in fear, half with distaste, and showed complete lack of comprehension. He let the tentacle gently slither forward across the floor, hoping to make thought-contact The other recoiled from it as if from a striking snake.

“Patience,” he reminded himself. “The impossible takes longer.”

Periodically he showed himself with food and water. Nighttimes he slept fitfully on coarse damp grass beneath lowering skies while the prisoner who was his guest enjoyed the comfort of the bed, the warmth of the cave, the security of the force-screen.

Time came when Fander displayed unpoetic shrewdness by using the other’s belly to estimate the ripeness of the moment. When on the eighth day he noted that his food offerings were being taken regularly, he took a meal of his own at the edge of the cave, within plain sight, and observed that the other’s appetite was not spoiled. That night he slept just within the cave, close to the force-screen and as far as possible from the boy. There was no unpleasant reaction. The boy stayed awake late watching him, intently watching him, but gave way to slumber in the small hours.

A fresh attempt at sign-talking brought results no better than before and the other still refused to touch his offered tentacle. All the same, he was making progress. His overtures still were rejected but with less revulsion. Gradually, ever so gradually, the Martian shape was becoming familiar, almost acceptable.

The sweet taste of success was Fander’s in the middle of the next day. The boy had displayed several spells of emotional sickness during which he’d laid on his front with shaking body and emitted low noises while his eyes watered profusely. At such times the Martian felt strangely helpless and inadequate. On this occasion, during another attack, he took advantage of the sufferer’s lack of attention and slid near enough to snatch away the box by his bed.

From the box he extracted his tiny electro-harp, plugged its connectors, switched it on, touched its strings with delicate affection. Slowly he began to play, singing an accompaniment inside himself for he had no voice with which to sing and only the harp could make sounds for him.

The boy ceased his quiverings and sat up, all his attention upon the dexterous play of the tentacles and the music they conjured forth. And when he judged that at last the listener’s mind was captured, Fander ceased with easy, quietening strokes, gently offered him the harp. The boy showed interest and reluctance. Careful not to move nearer, not an inch nearer, Fander offered it at full tentacle length. The boy had to take four steps to get it. He took them.

That was the start. They played together day after day and sometimes a little into the night while almost imperceptibly the distance between them became reduced. Finally they sat side by side, and the boy had not yet learned to laugh but no longer did he show unease. He could now extract a simple tune from the instrument and was pleased with his own aptitude in a solemn sort of way.

One evening as darkness grew and the things that sometimes howled at the Moon were howling again, Fander offered his tentacle-tip for the hundredth time. Always the gesture had been unmistakable even if its motive had not been clear, yet always it had been rebuffed. But now, now, five fingers curled around it in shy desire to please.

With a fervent prayer that human nerves would function exactly like Martian ones, Fander poured his thoughts through, swiftly, lest the warm grip be loosened too soon.

“Do not fear me. I cannot help my shape any more than you can help yours. I am your friend, your father, your mother. I need you as much as you need me.”

The boy let go of him, began quiet, half-stifled whimpering noises. Fander put a tentacle on his shoulder, made little patting motions that he imagined were wholly Martian. For some inexplicable reason this made matters worse. At his wit’s end what to do for the best, what action to take that might be understandable in human terms, he gave up the problem, surrendered to his instinct, put a long, ropey limb around the boy and held him close until the noises ceased and slumber came. It was then that he realised that the child he had taken was much younger than he’d estimated. He nursed him through the night.

Much practice was necessary to make conversation. The boy had to learn to put mental drive behind his thoughts for it was beyond Fander’s power to suck them out of him.

“What is your name?”

Fander got a picture of thin legs running rapidly.

He returned it in question form. “Speedy?”

An affirmative.

“What name do you give to me?”

An unflattering montage of monsters.

“Devil?”

The picture whirled around, became confused. There was a trace of embarrassment.

“Devil will do,” assured Fander, open-minded about the matter. He went on, “Where are your parents?”

More confusion.

“You must have had parents. Everyone has a father and mother, haven’t they? Don’t you remember yours?”

Muddled ghost-pictures. Grown-ups abandoning children. Grown-ups avoiding children as if they feared them.

“What is the first thing you remember?”

“Big man walking with me. Carried me a while. Walked again.”

“What happened to him?”

“Went away. Said he was sick. Said he might make me sick too.”

“Long ago?”

Confusion.

Fander changed his aim. “What about those other children—have they no parents either?”

“All got nobody.”

“But you’ve got somebody now, haven’t you, Speedy?” Doubtfully, “Yes.”

Fander pushed it farther. “Would you rather have me or those other children?” He let it rest a moment before he added, “Or both?”

“Both,” said Speedy with no hesitation whatever. His fingers toyed with the harp.

“Would you like to help me look for them tomorrow and bring them here?”

“Yes.”

“And if they are scared of me will you tell them not to be afraid?”

“Sure!” said Speedy, licking his lips and sticking his chest out.

“Then perhaps you’d like to go for a short jaunt with me today. You’ve been too long in this cave. A little exercise would do no harm. Will you come for a walk with me?”

“Yes.”

Side by side they went out, one trotting rapidly along,

the other slithering. The child’s spirits perked up with this trip in the open; it was as if the sight of the sky, the feel of the wind and the smell of the grass made him realise that he was not exactly a prisoner. His formerly solemn features became animated, he made exclamations that Fander could not understand, and once he laughed at nothing for the sheer joy of it. On two occasions he grabbed a tentacle-tip In order to tell Fander something, performing the action as if it were in every way as natural as his own speech.

The next morning they got out the load-sled. Fander took the front seat and the controls; Speedy squatted behind with hands gripping the other’s harness belt. With a shallow soar they headed for the glade. Many small whitetailed animals bolted down holes as they passed over.

“Good for food,” remarked Speedy, touching him and speaking through the contact-point.

Fander felt slightly sick. Meat-eaters! It was not until a queer feeling of shame and apology came back at him that he knew Speedy had sensed his revulsion. He wished he’d been quick to blanket that reaction before the boy could detect it—but he could not be blamed for the effect of so bald a statement taking him so completely unaware. However, it had produced another step forward in their mutual relationship; Speedy desired his good opinion.

Within fifteen minutes they struck lucky. At a point half a mile south of the glade Speedy let out a shrill yell and pointed downward. A small, golden-haired figure was standing there atop a slight rise and staring fascinatedly at the phenomenon in the sky. A second tiny shape with red but equally long hair was partway down the slope and gazing upward in a similar wonderment. Both came to their senses and turned to flee as the sled turned, tilted and plunged toward them.

Ignoring the yelps of excitement right behind him, and the violent pullings upon his belt, Fander swooped, got one and then the other. The double burden in his grip made it none too easy to right the sled and zoom for height. If the victims had fought he’d have had his work cut out to make it. They did not fight. They shrieked as he snatched them and then relaxed with closed eyes.

The sled climbed and glided a mile at five hundred feet Fander’s attention was divided between his limp prizes, the controls and the horizon when suddenly a thunderous rattling sounded on the underside of the sled, the entire framework shuddered, a strip of metal flew from its leading edge and things made whistling, whining sounds toward the clouds.

“Old Greypate!” bawled Speedy, jigging around but keeping away from the rim. “He’s shooting at us!”

The spoken words meant nothing to the Martian and he could not spare a limb for the contact the other had forgotten to make. Grimly levelling the sled, he gave it full power. Whatever damage it had suffered had not affected its efficiency; it shot forward at a pace that set the red and golden hair of the captives streaming in the wind. Perforce his landing by the cave was a little clumsy. The sled bumped down and lurched across forty yards of grass.

First things first. Taking the quiet pair into the cave he made them comfortable upon the bed, came out and examined the sled. There were half a dozen deep dents in its metal base and two bright furrows angling across one rim. He made contact with Speedy.

“What were you trying to tell me?”

“Old Greypate shot at us.”

The mind-picture burst upon him vividly and with electrifying effect, a vision of a tall, white-haired, stern-faced old man with a tubular weapon propped against his shoulder while it spat fire upward. A white-haired old man. An adult!

His grip was tight on Speedy’s fingers. “What is this oldster to you?”

“Nothing much. He lives near us in the shelters.”

Picture of a long, dusty concrete burrow, badly damaged, its ceiling marked with the scars of a lighting system long rotted away to nothing. The old man living hermitlike at one end, the children at the other. The old man was sour, taciturn, kept his distance from the children, spoke to them seldom but was quick to react whenever they were menaced.

He had guns. Once he had killed many wild dogs that had eaten two children.

“People left us near shelters because Old Greypate was there and had guns,” informed Speedy.

“But why doesn’t he consort with the children? Doesn’t he like them?”

“Don’t know.” He mused a moment. “Once he told us that old people could get very sick and make young ones sick too—and then we’d all die. Perhaps he’s afraid of making us die.” Speedy wasn’t very sure about this.

So there was some much-feared disease going around, something highly contagious to which adults were peculiarly susceptible. Without hesitation they abandoned their young at the first onslaught, hoping that at least the children would survive. Sacrifice after sacrifice to keep the race alive. Heartbreak after heartbreak as elders chose death in solitude rather than death in company.

Yet Greypate himself was depicted as very old. Was this an exaggeration of the child-mind?

“I must meet Greypate.”

“He will shoot,” declared Speedy positively. “He knows by now that you took me away. He saw you take the others. He will wait for you and shoot you first chance he gets.”

“We must find some way to avoid that.”

“How?”

“When these two have become my friends, just as you have become my friend, I will take all three of you back to the shelters. You can find Greypate for me and tell him I am not as ugly as I look.”

“I don’t think you’re ugly,” denied Speedy.

The picture Fander got along with that remark gave him the weirdest sensation. It was of a vague, shadowy and considerably distorted body with a clear human face.

The new prisoners were female. Fander knew it without being told because they were daintier than Speedy and had the warm, sweet smell of females. That meant complications. Maybe they were mere children and maybe they did live together in the shelters, but he was permitting none of that while they remained in his charge. Fander might be outlandish by other standards but he had a certain primness. Forthwith he cut another and smaller cave for Speedy and himself.

Neither of the girls saw him for four days. Keeping well out of their sight he let Speedy take them food, talk to them, soothe them, prepare them for the shape of the thing to come. On the fifth day he presented himself for inspection at a distance. Despite forewarnings they went white, clung together but uttered no distressing sounds. He played his harp a while, withdrew, came back later and played for them again.

Encouraged by Speedv’s constant and self-assured flow of propaganda, one of them grasped a tentacle-tip next day. What came along the nerves was not an intelligible picture so much as an ache, a desire, a childish yearning. Fander backed out of the cave, found wood, spent the whole night using the slumbering Speedy as a model and fashioned the wood into a tiny, jointed semblance of a human being. He was no sculptor but he did possess a natural delicacy of touch while the poet in him ran through his limbs and expressed itself in the model. Making a thorough job of it, he clothed it in what he conceived to be Terrestrial fashion, coloured its face, fixed upon its features the pleasure-grim- ace that humans call a smile.

He gave her the doll the moment she awakened in the morning. She took it eagerly,’ hungrily, with wide, glad eyes. Hugging it to her unformed bosom she crooned over it —and he knew that the strange emptiness within her had gone.

Though Speedy was openly contemptuous of this manifest waste of effort, Fander set to and made a second manikin. It did not take quite as long. Practice on the first had made him swifter, more dexterous. He was able to present it to the other child by mid-afternoon. Her acceptance was made with shy grace; she clutched the doll close as if it meant more to her than the whole of her sorry world. In her thrilled concentration upon the gift she did not notice his nearness, his closeness, and when he offered a tentacle-tip she took it absentmindedly.

He said simply, “I love you.”

Her mind was too untrained to drive a response but her great eyes warmed.

Fander sat on the grounded sled at a point a mile east of the glade and watched the three children walk hand in hand toward the hidden shelters. Speedy was the obvious leader, hurrying them onward, bossing them with the noisy assurance of one who has been around and considers himself sophisticated. In spite of this the girls paused at intervals to turn and wave to the ropey, beeeyed thing they’d left behind. And Fander dutifully waved back, always using his signal-tentacle because it had not occurred to him that any tentacle would serve.

They sank from sight behind a rise of ground. He remained on the sled, his multi-faceted gaze going over his surroundings or studying the angry sky now threatening rain. The ground was a dull, dead grey-green all the way to the horizon. There was no relief from that drab colour, not one shining patch of white, gold or crimson such as dotted the meadowlands of Mars. There was only the eternal grey-green and his own brilliant blueness.

Before long a sharp-faced, four-footed thing revealed itself in the grass, raised its head and howled at him. The sound was an eerily urgent wail that ran across the grasses and moaned into the distance. It brought others of its kind, two, ten, twenty. Their defiance increased with their numbers until there was a large band of them encouraging each other with yaps and snarls, slowly edging toward him with lips drawn back and fangs exposed. Then came a sudden and undetectable group-command which caused them to cease their slinking and spring forward like one, slavering as they came. They did it with the hungry, red-eyed frenzy of animals motivated by something akin to madness.

Revolting though it was, the sight of creatures craving for meat—even strange blue meat—did not alarm Fander. He slipped a control-lever one notch, the flotation-grids radiated, the sled soared twenty feet. So calm and easy an escape so casually performed infuriated the wild-dog pack beyond all measure. Arriving in a ferocious cluster beneath the sled, they made futile springs upward, fell back upon one another, leaped again and again. The pandemonium they set up was insane in the extreme. They exuded a pungent odour of dry hair and animal sweat.

Reclining upon the sled in a maddening pose of disdain, Fander let them rave below. They raced around in tight circles shrieking insults at him and biting each other. This went on for some time and ended with a spurt of ultra rapid cracks from the direction of the glade. Eight dogs fell dead. Two flopped and struggled to crawl away. Ten yelped in agony and made off on three legs. The unharmed ones flashed away to some place where they could ambush and make a meal of the escaping limpers. Fander lowered the sled.

Speedy stood on the rise with Greypate. The latter restored his weapon to the crook of his arm, rubbed his chin thoughtfully, ambled forward.

Stopping five yards from the Martian, the old Earthman again rubbed his chin-bristles and said, “Doesn’t look natural to me. I’d call him a bad dream.”

“No use talking at him,” Speedy advised. “You’ve got to hold an end of him, like I told you.”

“I know, I know.” Greypate waved him down with elderly impatience. “All in good time. I’ll touch him when I’m ready.” He stood there staring at Fander with eyes that were pale grey and very sharp. Once or twice he muttered something under his breath. Finally he said, “Oh, well, here goes,” and offered a hand.

Fander placed a tentacle-tip in it.

“He’s cool,” commented Greypate, closing his grip. “Colder than a snake.”

“He isn’t a snake,” Speedy contradicted fiercely.

“Be quiet—I didn’t say he is.”

“He doesn’t feel like one either,” persisted Speedy who had never felt a snake in his life and had no desire to.

Fander boosted a thought through. “I come from the fourth planet. Do you know what that means?”

“I’m not ignorant,” snapped Greypate aloud.

“There is no need to reply vocally. I receive your thoughts exactly as you receive mine. Your responses are much stronger than the boy’s and I can understand you easily.” “Humph!” said Greypate, unimpressed.

“I have been anxious to find and talk with an adult because the children cannot tell me enough. I would like to ask you some questions. Are you willing to answer them?” “Depends,” said Greypate, becoming leery.

“Never mind. Answer them if you wish. My only desire is to help you.”

“Why?” asked Greypate, searching for a percentage.

“We need intelligent friends.”

^Why?”

“Because our numbers are small and our resources poor. In visiting this world and the misty one we’ve come near to the limit of our ability. But with assistance we could go farther, we could reach the outer planets. I think that if we were to help you today, you could help us tomorrow.”

Greypate pondered it cautiously, quite forgetting that the inward workings of his mind were wide open to the other. Chronic suspicion was the keynote of his thoughts, suspicion based on life experiences and recent history. But inward thoughts ran both ways and his own mind detected the sincerity in Fander’s.

So he said, “Fair enough. Say more.”

“What caused all this?” enquired Fander, waving a limb at the world.

“War,” said Greypate sourly. “The last war we’ll ever have. The entire planet went crazy.”

“How did that come about?”

“You’ve got me there.” Greypate gave the problem grave consideration. “I reckon it wasn’t just any one thing. It was a multitude of things sort of piling themselves up.”

“Such as.”

“Differences in people. Some were coloured differently in their bodies, others in their minds, and they couldn’t get

along. Some bred a damn sight faster than others, wanted more room, more food. There wasn’t any more room or any more food. The world was full and nobody could shove in except by pushing another out. My old man told me plenty before he died and he always maintained that if folk had had the horse sense to keep their numbers down there, might not—”

“Your old man?” interjected Fander. “You mean your parent, your father? Didn’t all this occur in your own lifetime?”

“It did not. I saw none of it. I’m the son of the son of the son of a survivor.”

“Let’s go back to the cave,” put in Speedy, bored with this silent contact-talk. “I want to show him our harp.”

They took no notice and Fander went on, “Do you think there might be many others still living?”

“Hard to say.” Greypate was moody about it. “There’s no way of telling how many are wandering around on the other side of the globe, maybe still killing each other, or starving to death, or dying of the sickness.”

“What sickness is this?”

“I don’t remember what it’s called.” Greypate scratched his head confusedly. “My old man told me several times but I’ve long forgotten. Knowing the name wouldn’t do me any good, see? He said his father told him it was part of the war, it got invented and was spread deliberately—and it’s still with us.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“You go hot and dizzy. You get black swellings in the armpits. In forty-eight hours you’re thoroughly dead and nothing can be done to prevent it. Old ones usually catch it first. The kids then get it unless they’re put out of reach of the victims pretty fast.”

“It is nothing familiar to me,” said Fander, unable to recognize cultured neo-bubonic plague. “In any case, I’m not a medical expert.” He eyed Greypate. “But you seem o have avoided it.”

“Sheer luck,” opined Greypate. “Or perhaps I can’t catch it. There was a story going around in the long ago that a few people are immune to it, darned if I know why. Could be that I’m one of the fireproof ones—but I don’t care to count on it.”

“So as much as possible you keep your distance from these children?”

“That’s right.” He glanced at Speedy. “I shouldn’t really have come along with this kid. He’s got a poor enough chance as it is without me increasing the odds.”

“That is thoughtful of you,” Fander put over softly. “Especially seeing that you must be lonely.”

Greypate bristled and his thought-flow became aggressive. “I’m not grieving for company. I can look after myself like I have done ever since my old man went away to curl up and die. I’m on my own feet and so is everybody else.”

“I believe you,” said Fander. “You must pardon me. I am a stranger here. I judged you by my own feelings. Now and again I get lonely.”

“How’s that?” demanded Greypate, looking at him with surprise. “D’you mean they dumped you and left you on your own?”

“They did.”

“Manl” exclaimed Greypate, fervently.

Man! It was a picture resembling Speedy’s conception, a vision elusive in form but firm and human in face. The oldster was reacting to what he considered a predicament rather than a free choice and the reaction came on a wave of sympathy.

Fander struck promptly and hard. “You see the fix I’m in. The companionship of wild animals is nothing to me. I need someone intelligent enough to like my music and forget my looks, someone intelligent enough to—”

“I’m not so sure we’re that smart,” Greypate chipped in. He let his gaze swing morbidly around the landscape. “Not when I see this graveyard and think how it was said to look in my great-grandfather’s days.”

“Every flower blooms from the dust of former flowers,” said Fander.

“What are flowers?”

It shocked the Martian. He had projected a mind-picture of a trumpet-lily, crimson and shining, and Greypate’s brain had juggled it around in aimless manner, not recognising it as fish, flesh or vegetable.

“Growths of this kind.” Fander plucked a few blades of blue-green grass. “But bigger, full of colour and sweet-scented.” He transmitted the brilliant vision of a mile-square field of trumpet-lilies, red and glowing.

“Glory be!” said Greypate. “We’ve nothing like those.”

“Not here,” agreed Fander. “Not here.” He gestured toward the horizon. “Elsewhere there may be plenty. If we got together we could be company for each other, we could learn things from each other. We could pool our efforts and our ideas and search for flowers far away—as well as for more people.”

“Folk just won’t get together in large bunches. They stick to each other in family groups until the plague breaks them up. Then they abandon the kids. The bigger the crowd the bigger the risk of someone contaminating the lot.” He leaned on his gun, gazing steadily at the other, his thought-forms shaping themselves in dull solemnity. “When someone gets the sickness he crawls away and takes his last breath alone. His end is a personal contract between him and his God, with no witnesses. Death’s a pretty private affair these days.”

“What, after all these years? Don’t you think that by this time the disease may have run its course and exhausted itself?”

“Nobody knows. And nobody’s gambling on it.”

“I would gamble.”

“You can well afford to. You aren’t like us. You’re different. You might not be able to catch it.”

“Or perhaps I might get it and die more slowly, more painfully.”

“Maybe,” admitted Greypate, doubtfully. “Anyway, you are looking at it from a personal angle. You’ve been marooned here on your ownsome. What have you got to lose?”

“My life,” said Fander.

Greypate flinched as if from a light blow. “Well, yes, that’s a gamble. A fellow can’t bet any heavier. All right, I’ll take you up on that. You come here and live with us.” His grip on his gun tightened, his knuckles showing white. “On this understanding: the moment you go sick you get out fast and for keeps. If you don’t, I’ll knock you off and drag you away myself even if that makes me get it too. The kids come first, see?”

The shelters were far roomier than the cave. There were eighteen children living in them, all skinny with their prolonged diet of roots, edible herbs, and an occasional rabbit. The youngest and most sensitive of them ceased to be terrified of Fander after about ten days. Within four months his slithering shape of blue ropeyness had become a normal adjunct of their small, limited world.

Six of the youngsters were males older than Speedy, one of them much older but not yet adult. Fander beguiled them with his harp, teaching them to play and now and again giving them ten-minute rides on the load-sled as a special treat. He made dolls for the girls and queer, cone-shaped little houses for the dolls and fan-backed chairs of woven grass for the houses. None of these toys were wholly Martian in design and none were Terrestrial. They represented a pathetic compromise within his imagination; the Martian notion of what Terrestrial models might have looked like had there been any in existence.

But surreptitiously, without seeming to give any lesser attention to the younger ones, he directed his main efforts upon the six older boys and Speedy. To his mind these were the hope of what was left of the world. At no time did he bother to ponder that the nontechnical brain is not without its virtues or that there can be times and circumstances in which it is worth discarding the short view of what is remotely possible.

So as best he could he concentrated upon the older seven, educating them through the dragging months, stimulating their minds, encouraging their curiosity and continually impressing upon them the idea that fear of disease and death can become a folk-separating dogma unless they conquered it within their souls.

He taught them that death is death, a natural process to be accepted philosophically and met with dignity—and there were times when he suspected that he was teaching them nothing, he was merely reminding them, for deep in their growing minds was the ancestral strain of Terrestrial-ism which had mulled its way to the same conclusions ten or twenty thousand years before. Still, he was helping to remove this disease-block from the path of the stream and was driving child-logic more rapidly toward an adult outlook. In this respect he was satisfied. He could do little more.

In time they organised group concerts, humming and making singing noises to the accompaniment of the harp, now and again improvising lines to suit Pander’s tunes, arguing the respective merits of chosen words and phrases until by process of elimination they had a complete song. As songs grew to a repertoire and singing became more adept, more polished, Old Greypate displayed interest, came to one performance and then another until by custom he had established himself in the role of a one-man audience.

One day the oldest boy, who was named Redhead, came to Fander and grasped a tentacle-tip. “Devil, may I operate your food machine?”

“You mean you would like me to show you how to work it?”

“No, Devil, I know how to work it.” The boy gazed self-assuredly into the other’s great beeeyes.

“Then how is it operated?”

“You fill its container with the tenderest blades of grass, being careful to exclude all roots. You are equally careful not to turn a switch before the container is full and its door completely closed. You then turn the red switch for a count of three hundred, reverse the container, turn the green switch for a count of sixty. You then close both switches, empty the container’s warm pulp into the end moulds and apply the press until the biscuits are firm and dry.”

“How have you discovered all this?”

“I have watched you make biscuits for us many timek This morning, while you were busy, I tried it myself.” He extended a hand. It held a biscuit. Taking it from him,

Fander examined it carefully. Finn, crisp, well-shaped. He tasted it. Perfect.

Redhead became the first mechanic to operate and service a Martian lifeboat’s emergency premasticator. Seven years later, long after the machine had ceased to function, he managed to repower it, weakly but effectively, with dust that gave forth alpha sparks. In another five years he had improved it, speeded it up. In twenty years he had duplicated it and had all the know-how needed to turn out premasticators on a large scale.

Fander could not have equalled this performance for as a nontechnician he had no better idea than had the average Terrestrial of the principles upon which the machine worked, nor did he know what was meant by radiant digestion and protein enrichment. He could do no more than urge Redhead along and leave the rest to whatever inherent genius the boy possessed—which was plenty.

In similar manner Speedy and two youths named Blacky and Bigears took the load-sled out of his charge. On rare occasions, as a great privilege, Fander had permitted them to take up the sled for one-hour trips alone. This time they were gone from dawn to dusk. Greypate mooched restlessly around, loaded gun under one arm and a smaller one stuck in his belt, going frequently to the top of the rise and scanning the sides in all directions. The delinquents swooped in at sunset, bringing with them a strange boy.

Fander summoned them to him. They held hands so that his touch would give him simultaneous contact with all three.

“I am rather worried. The sled has only so much power. When it is used up there will be no more.”

They eyed each other aghast.

“Unfortunately I have neither the knowledge nor .the ability to energise the sled once its power is exhausted. I lack the technical wisdom of friends who left me here—and that is my shame.” He paused, watching them dolefully, then went on, “All I do know is that its power does not leak away. If not used much the power-reserve will last for many years.” Another pause. “And in a few years you will be full-grown men.”

Blacky said, “But, Devil, by that time we’ll be much heavier and the sled will use proportionately more energy.” “How do you know that?” Fander asked, sharply.

“More weight, more power needed to sustain it,” opined Blacky with the air of one whose logic is incontrovertible. “It doesn’t need thinking out. It’s obvious.”

Slowly and softly Fander said, “You’ll do.”

“Do what, Devil?”

“Build a hundred sleds like this one or better—and explore the whole world.”

From that time onward they confined their trips to one hour at a time, making them less frequently than of yore and doing a lot of poking and prying around the sled’s insides.

Greypate changed character with the slow reluctance of the aged. Leastways, as two years and then three rolled past he gradually came out of his shell, was less taciturn, more willing to mix with those swiftly growing up to his own height. Without fully understanding what he was doing he joined forces with Fander, gave the children’ the remnants of Earthly wisdom passed down from his father’s father’s father. He taught the boys how to use the guns of which he had as many as eleven, some maintained mostly as a source of spares for others. He took them shell-huitting, digging deep beneath rotting foundations into stale, half-filled cellars in search of ammunition not too corroded for use.

“Guns are no use without shells and shells don’t last forever.”

Even less do buried shells. They found not one.

Of his own wisdom Greypate stubbornly withheld but a single item until the day when Speedy and Redhead and Blacky chivvied it out of him. Then like a father facing the hangman he told them the truth about babies. He made no comparative mention of bees because there were no bees, nor of flowers because there were no flowers. One cannot analogise the non-existent. Nevertheless he managed to explain the matter more or less to their satisfaction, after which he mopped his forehead and went to Fander.

“These youngsters are getting too darned nosey for my comfort. They’ve been asking me how children are brought along.”

“Did you tell them?”

“Sure did!” He sat down, staring at the Martian, his pale grey eyes bothered. “I don’t mind giving in to the boys when I can’t beat ’em off any longer. But nobody’s going to make me tell the girls, not ever. I draw the line at that.”

Fander said, “I have been asked about this several times already. I could not tell much because I was by no means certain whether you breed precisely as we breed. But I did tell them how we breed.”

“The girls too?”

“Of course.”

“God!” Greypate mopped his forehead again. “How did they take it?”

“Just as if I’d told them why the sky is blue or why water is wet.”

“Must’ve been something in the way you put it to them,” opined Greypate.

“I told them it was poetry between persons.”

Throughout the course of history, Martian, Venusian or Terrestrial, some years are more noteworthy than others. The twelfth one after Fander’s marooning was outstanding for its series of events each of which was pitifully insignificant by cosmic standards but loomed enormously in this small community life.

To start with, on the basis of Redhead’s improvements to the premasticator, the older seven—now bearded men— contrived to repower the exhausted load-sled and again took to the air for the first time in forty months. Experiments showed that the Martian contraption was now slower and could bear less weight but had far longer range. They used it to visit the ruins of distant cities in search of metallic junk suitable for the building of more sleds and by early summer they had constructed another one much bigger than the original, clumsy to the verge of dangerousness, but still a sled.

On several occasions they failed to find metal but did discover people, odd families living in sub-surface shelters, clinging grimly to life and to passed-down scraps of knowledge. Since all these new contacts were upon a strictly human-to-human basis, with no weirdly tentacled shape to scare off the parties of the second part, and since many were finding the fear of plague more to be endured than their terrible loneliness, many families returned with the explorers, settled in the shelters, accepted Fander, added their surviving skills to the community’s riches.

Thus local population swiftly grew to seventy adults and four hundred children, many of the latter being parentless. They compounded with their plague-fear by spreading through the shelters, digging through half-wrecked and formerly unused expanses and moving apart to form twenty or thirty lesser communities each one of which could be isolated from the others should death reappear.

Growing morale born of added strength and confidence in numbers soon resulted in four more sleds, still big and clumsy but a little less dangerous to handle. There also appeared the first rock house actually above ground, standing four-square and solidly under the surly skies, a defiant witness that mankind still considered itself several cuts above the rats and rabbits. The community presented the house to Blacky and Sweetvoice, who had announced their desire to associate. An elderly adult who claimed to know the conventional routine spoke solemn words over the happy couple before many witnesses, while Fander attended the groom as best Martian.

Towards summer’s end Speedy returned from a solo trip of many days, bringing on his sled one old man, one boy and four girls, all of strange, outlandish countenance. They were yellow in complexion, had black hair, black, almond-shaped eyes, and spoke a language that none could understand. Until these newcomers had picked up the local speech, Fander had to act as interpreter, for his mind-pictures and theirs were independent of vocal sounds. The four girls were quiet, modest and very beautiful. Within a month Speedy had married the one whose name was a gentle clucking sound that meant Precious Jewel Ling.

After this wedding Fander sought Greypate, placed a tentacle-tip in his right hand. “There were differences between the man and the girl, distinctive features wider apart than any we know upon Mars. Are these the differences that caused your war?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen one of these yellow folk before. They must live a mighty long way off.” He rubbed his chin to help his thoughts along. “I only know what my old man told me and his old man told him. There were too many people of too many different kinds.”

“They can’t be all that different if they can fall in love.” “Maybe not,” agreed Greypate. -

“Supposing most of the people still in this world could assemble here, breed together and have less different children, and the children bred others still less different— wouldn’t they eventually become all much the same, just Earth-people?”

“They might.”

“All speaking the same language, sharing the same culture? If they then spread out slowly from this central source, remaining always in contact by load-sled, continually sharing the same knowledge, same progress, would there by any room for new differences to arise?”

“I don’t know,” said Greypate evasively. “I’m not as young as I used to be and I can’t dream as far ahead as I used to do.”

“It, doesn’t matter so long as the young ones can dream it.” Fander mused a moment. “If you’re beginning to think of yourself as a back number, you’re in good company. Things are getting out of hand as far as I am concerned. The onlooker sees the most of the game and perhaps that’s why I’m more sensitive than you to a certain peculiar feeling.” “To what feeling?” asked Greypate, eyeing him.

“That this planet is on the move once more. There are now many people where once there were few. A house has been built and more are to be erected. They talk of six more. After the six they will talk of sixty, then six hundred, then six thousand. Some are planning to haul up sunken conduits and use them to pipe water from the northward lake. Sleds are being built. Premasticators soon will be built and protective force-screens likewise. Children are being taught. Less and less is being heard of your much-feared plague and so far no more have died of it. I feel a dynamic surge of energy and ambition that may grow with appalling rapidity until it becomes a mighty flood. I feel that I, too, am a back number.”

“Bunkum!” said Greypate. He spat on the ground. “If you dream often enough you’re bound to have a bad one now and again.”

“Perhaps it is because so many of my tasks have been taken over and done better than I had been doing them. I have failed to compensate by seeking new tasks. Were I a technician I’d have discovered a dozen jobs by now. Unfortunately I have no especial skills. I think this may be as good a time as any to turn to a personal task with which you can help me.”

“What is that?”

“A long, long time ago I made a poem. It was for the thing of beauty that first persuaded me to stay here. I do not know exactly what its maker had in mind, nor whether my eyes see it as he wished it to be seen, but I have made a poem to express what I feel when I look upon his work.” “Humph!” said Greypate, not very interested.

“There is an outcrop of solid rock beneath its base which I can shave smooth and use as a plinth on which to inscribe my words. I would like to put them down twice: in the script of Mars and the script of Earth.” Fander hesitated a moment and then went on, “I hope nobody will think this presumptuous of me. But it is many years since I wrote for all to read—and my chance may never come again.”

Greypate said, “I get the idea. You want me to put down your notions in our writing so that you can copy it?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your stylus and pad.” Taking them, Greypate squatted on a nearby rock, lowering himself stiffly because he was feeling the weight of his years. Resting the pad on his knees, he held the writing instrument in one hand while the other continued to grasp a tentacle-tip. “All right—go ahead.”

He started drawing thick, laborious marks as Fander’s mind-pictures came through, enlarging the letters and keeping them well separated. When he had finished he handed over the pad.

“Asymmetrical,” decided Fander, gazing at the queer angular letters and wishing for the first time that he had taken up the study of Earth-writing. “Can’t you make that part balance with that and this with this?”

“It’s what you said.”

“It is your own translation of what I said. I would prefer more of a visual balance. Do you mind if we try again?”

They tried again. They made fourteen successive attempts before Fander was satisfied with the outward appearance of letters and words that he could not understand.

Taking the paper, he found his ray-gun, went to the base-block of the beautiful thing and sheared the whole front to a flat, even surface.’ Adjusting his beam to cut a V-shaped channel one inch deep, he inscribed his poem upon the rock in long, unpunctuated lines of neat Martian curlicues. With less confidence and much greater care he repeated the verse in Earth’s awkward, angular hieroglyphics. The task took him quite a time and fifty people were watching when he reached the end. They said nothing. In utter silence they read the poem and looked at the beautiful thing and were still standing there brooding solemnly when he went away.

In ones and twos and little groups the rest of the community visited the site next day, coming and going with the air of pilgrims attending an ancient shrine. All stood there a long time looking, just looking, and all returned without comment. Nobody praised Fander’s work, nobody damned it, nobody reproached him for alienising something wholly Earth’s. The only effect, too subtle to be noteworthy, was a greater and still growing grimness and determination that boosted the already swelling Earth dynamic.

In this respect, Fander had wrought far better than he knew.

A plague-scare came in the fourteenth year. Two sleds had brought back families from afar and within a week of their arrival the children sickened, became spotted.

Metal gongs sounded the alarm, all work ceased, the affected section of the shelters was cut off and guarded, the majority prepared to flee. It was a threatening reversal of all the things for which many had toiled so long; a destructive scattering of the tender roots of new civilisation.

Fander found Greypate, Speedy and Blacky armed to the teeth, facing a drawn-faced and restless crowd.

“There’s most of a hundred people in that isolated section,” Greypate was telling the mob. “Not all of them have got it. Maybe they won’t get it. If they don’t it’s not so likely that you’ll get it either. We ought to wait and see what happens. Let’s stay put a while.”

“Listen who’s talking,” invited a voice in the crowd. “If you weren’t immune you’d have been planted fifty years ago.”

“The same goes for most folk here,” snapped Greypate. He glared around, his gun held in the crook of his arm, his pale eyes bellicose. “I’m a fat lot of good at speechifying so I’m just saying right out that nobody goes before we learn if this really is the plague.” He brought his gun up to the ready. “Anyone fancy himself at beating a bullet?”

The heckler in the audience forced his way to the front. He was a swarthy man of muscular build and his dark eyes stared challengingly into Greypate’s. “While there’s life there’s hope. If we get out of here we’ll live to come back when it’s safe to come back, if ever—and you know it. So I’m calling your bluff, see?” Squaring beefy shoulders he began to walk off.

Greypate’s gun was already levelled when he felt Fander’s touch upon his arm. For a few moments he stood in a fixed pose, as if listening. Then he lowered the weapon and called after the escapee.

“I’m going into that cut-off section and the Devil is going with me. We’re running into things and not away from them. We’ll never cope with anything by running away.” Part of the audience fidgeted, murmured approval. “So we’ll find out for ourselves just what’s wrong. We mightn’t be able to put it right but at least we’ll learn what the trouble is.”

The walker paused, turned, eyed him and Fander and said, “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“You may catch it yourselves. Much use you’ll be when you’re dead and stinking.”

“What, and me immune?” said Greypate.

“The Devil may get it,” hedged the other.

“Who gives a damn about that?” invited Greypate.

It caught the other off-balance. He fumbled embarrassedly within his own mind, avoided looking at the Martian, said lamely, “I don’t see any reason for anyone to take risks.”

“He’s taking them because he does give a damn,” Greypate fired back. “I’m no creaking hero—I’m taking them because I’m too old and useless to care a hoot.”

With that he stepped down and marched stubbornly toward the isolated section, Fander slithering at his side. The muscular one who wished to flee stayed put, gazing after them. The crowd shuffled uneasily, seemed in two minds whether to remain and accept the situation or to rush Greypate and Fander and drag them away. Speedy and Blacky made to follow the pair but were ordered off.

No adult sickened, nobody died. Children in the affected section went one after another through the same routine of liverishness, high temperature and spots until the epidemic of measles had died out. Not until a month after the last case had’ been cured by something within its own constitution did Greypate and Fander emerge.

The innocuous course and eventual disappearance of this suspected plague gave the pendulum of confidence a push, swinging it farther. Morale boosted itself almost to the verge of arrogance. More sleds came into being, more mechanics serviced them, more pilots rode them. More people flowed in and more oddments of past knowledge came with them.

Humanity now was off to a flying start with the salvaged seeds of past wisdom and the urge to do. The tormented ones of Earth were not primitive savages but surviving organisms of a greatness nine-tenths destroyed but still remembered, each contributing his mite of know-how to restore at least some of those things which had been boiled away in atomic fires.

When in the twentieth year Redhead duplicated the premasticator, there were eight thousand stone houses standing around the hill. A community hall seventy times the size of a house, with a great green dome of copper, reared itself upon the eastward fringe. A dam held the lake to the north. A hospital was going up in the west. The nuances and energies and talents of fifty races had built this town and were still building it. Among them were ten Polynesians and four Icelanders and one lean, dusky child who was the last of the Seminoles.

Farms spread wide. One thousand heads of Indian com rescued from a valley in the Andes had grown to ten thousand acres. Water buffaloes and goats had been brought from afar to serve in lieu of the horses and sheep that would never be seen again—and no man knew why one species had survived while another had died out. The horses had disappeared while the water buffaloes lived on. The canines hunted in ferocious packs while the felines had departed from existence. The small herbs, some tubers and a few seedy things could be and were reclaimed and cultivated for hungry bellies. But there were no flowers for hungry minds. Humanity carried on, making do with what was available. No more than that could be done.

Fander was a back number. He had nothing left for which to live save his songs and the affection of others. In everything but his harp and his songs the Earthlings were way ahead of him. He could do no more than give of his own affection in return for theirs and wait with the fatalistic patience of one whose work is done.

At the end of the year they buried Greypate. He died in his sleep, age unknown, passing away with the undramatic casualness of one who is not much use at speechifying.

They put him to rest on a knoll behind the community hall and Fander played his mourning song and Precious Jewel, who was Speedy’s wife, planted the grave with sweet herbs.

In the spring of the following year Fander summoned Speedy and Blacky and Redhead. He was coiled on his couch, blue and shivering. They held hands so that through his touch he could speak to them simultaneously.

“I am about to undergo my amafa.”

He had great difficulty in putting it over in understandable thought-forms, for this was something quite beyond their Earthly experience.

“It is an unavoidable change of age during which my kind must sleep undisturbed.” They reacted as if the casual reference to “my kind” were a strange and startling revelation, a new aspect previously unthought-of. He continued, “I must be left alone until this hibernation has run its natural course.”

“For how long, Devil?” asked Speedy with anxiety.

“It may stretch from four of your months to a full year, or—”

“Or what?” Speedy did not wait for a reassuring reply. His agile mind was swift to sense the spice of danger hidden far back in the Martian’s thoughts. “Or it may never end?”

“It may never end,” admitted Fander reluctantly. He shivered again, drew his tentacles around himself. The brilliance of his blueness was fading visibly. “The possibility is small but it is there.”

Speedy’s eyes widened as his mind strove to adjust itself to the idea that Fander might not be a fixture, established for all time. Blacky and Redhead were equally aghast.

“We Martians do not last for ever,” Fander pointed out, gently. “All creatures are mortal, here and there. He who survives his amafa has many happy years to follow—but some do not survive. It is a trial that must be faced as everything from the beginning to the end must be faced.”

“But-”

“Our numbers are not large,” Fander went on. “We breed slowly and some of us die halfway through our normal span.

By cosmic standards we are a weak and foolish people much in need of the support of the clever and the strong. You are clever and strong. Always remember that. Whenever my people visit you again, or any other much stranger people come, you must greet them with the confidence of the clever and the strong.”

“We shall do that,” assured Speedy. His gaze roamed around to take in the thousands of roofs, the copper dome, the thing of beauty on the hill. “We are strong.”

A prolonged shudder went through the ropey, beeeyed creature on the couch.

“I do not wish to be left here, an idle sleeper in the midst of life, posing like a bad example to the young. I would rather rest within the cave where first we made friends and grew to know and understand each other. Wall it up and fix a door for me. Forbid anyone to touch me or to let the light of day fall upon me until such time as I emerge of my own accord.” Fander stirred sluggishly, his limbs uncoiling with noticeable lack of sinuousness. “I regret that I must ask you to cany me there. Please forgive. I have left it a little late and cannot … cannot … make it myself.”

Their faces were pictures of alarm and their minds bells of sorrow. Running for poles, they made a stretcher, edged him onto it, bore him to the cave. A long, silent procession was following by the time they reached it. As they settled him comfortably and began to wall up the entrance, the crowd watched with the same grim solemnity with which it had looked upon his verse.

He was already a tightly rolled ball of dull blueness, with filmed eyes, when they fitted the door, closed and locked it, leaving him to darkness and a slumber that might be eternal. Next day a tiny, brown-skinned man, with eight children all hugging dolls, came to the door. While the youngsters looked on, he fixed upon the door a two-word name in shiny metal letters, taking great pains over his self-imposed task and making a neat job of it.

The Martian vessel came from the stratosphere with the slow, stately fall of a grounding balloon. Behind the transparent belly-band its bluish, nightmarish crew were assembled and looking with great, multi-faceted eyes at the upper surface of the clouds. The scene resembled a pink-tinged snowfield beneath which the planet remained concealed.

Captain Rdina could feel this as a tense, exciting moment even though his vessel had not the honour of being the first to make this approach. One Captain Skhiva, now long retired, had done it many, many years before. Nevertheless this second venture retained its own exploratory thrill.

Someone stationed a third of the way around the ship’s midriff came writhing at top pace toward him as their drop brought them near to the pinkish clouds. The oncomer’s signalling tentacle was jiggling at a seldom used rate.

“Captain, we have just seen an object swoop across the horizon.”

“What sort of an object?”

“It looked like a gigantic load-sled.”

“It couldn’t have been.”

“No, Captain, of course not—but that is exactly what it appeared to be.”

“Where is it now?” demanded Rdina, gazing toward the side from which the other had come.

“It dived into the mists below.”

“You must have been mistaken. Long-standing anticipation can encourage the strangest delusions.” He stopped a moment as the observation-band became shrouded in the vapour of a cloud. Thoughtfully he watched the grey wall of fog slide upwards as his vessel continued its descent. “That old report says definitely that here is nothing but desolation and wild animals. There is no intelligent life except some fool of a minor poet whom Skhiva left behind. It’s twelve to one that he’s been dead for years. The animals may have eaten him.”

“Eaten him? Eaten meat?” exclaimed the other, thoroughly revolted.

“Anything is possible,” assured Rdina, pleased with the extreme to which his imagination could be stretched. “Except a load-sled. That is plain silly.”

At which point he had no choice but to let the subject drop for the simple and compelling reason that the ship emerged from the base of the cloud and the sled in question was floating alongside. It could be seen in complete detail and even their own instruments were responding to the powerful output of its numerous flotation-grids.

The twenty Martians aboard the sphere sat staring beeeyed at this enormous thing which was half the size of their own vessel. And the forty humans on the sled stared back with equal intentness. Ship and sled continued to descend side by side while both crews studied each other with dumb fascination that persisted until simultaneously they touched ground.

It was not until he felt the slight jolt of landing that Captain Rdina recovered sufficiently to look elsewhere. He saw the army of houses, the green-domed building, the thing of beauty poised upon its hill, the many hundreds of Earth-people streaming out of the town and toward his vessel.

He noted that none of these queer, two-legged life-forms betrayed the slightest sign of revulsion or fear. They came galloping to the tryst with a bumptious self-confidence such as he had never expected from anything of radically different shape or appearance.

It shook him slightly and he said to himself, “They’re not scared—why should you be?”

He went out personally to meet the first of them, suppressing his own apprehensions and ignoring the fact that many of them were bearing what appeared to be weapons. The leading Earthman, a big-built, spade-bearded two-legger, grasped his tentacle-tip as to the manner bom.

A picture of swiftly moving limbs. “My name is Speedy.”

The ship emptied itself within minutes. No Martian would stay inside who was free to breathe his fill of fresh air. Their first visit, in a slithering bunch, was to the thing of beauty. Rdina stood quietly looking at it, his crew clustered in a half circle around him, the Earth-folk a silent audience behind.

It was a great rock statue of a female of Earth. She was broad-shouldered, full-bosomed, wide-hipped, and wore voluminous skirts that came right down to her heavy-soled shoes. Her back was a little bent, her head a little bowed and her face was hidden in her hands, deep in her toilwom hands. Rdina tried in vain to catch some glimpse of the tired, peasant features behind those concealing fingers. He looked at her a long while before his eyes lowered to read the script beneath, ignoring the Earth-lettering and running easily over the flowing Martian curlicues:

Weep, my country, for your sons asleep,

The ashes of your homes, your tottering towers.

Weep, my country, O, my country, weep!

For birds that cannot sing, for vanished flowers,

The end of everything,

The silenced hours.

Weep! my country.

There was no signature. Rdina mulled it through many minutes while the others remained passive. Then he turned to Speedy, pointed to the Martian script.

“Who wrote this?”

“One of your people. He is dead.”

“Ah!” said Rdina. “That songbird of Skhiva’s. I have forgotten his name. I doubt whether many remember it. He was only a very small poet. How did he die?”

“He ordered us to enclose him for some long and urgent sleep he had to have, and—”

“The amafa,” Rdina put in comprehendingly. “And then?” “We did as he asked. He warned us that he might never come out.” Speedy gazed at the sky, unconscious that Rdina was picking up his sorrowful thoughts. “He has been there more than two years and has not emerged.” The eyes came down to Rdina. “I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but he was one of us.”

“I think I do understand.” Rdina thought awhile and asked, “How long is this period you call more than two years?”

They managed to work it out between them, translating it from Terrestrial to Martian time-terms.

“It is long,” pronounced Rdina. “Much longer than the usual amafa. But it is not unique. Occasionally, for no known reason, someone takes even longer. Besides, this is not Mars.” He became swift, energetic as he addressed one of his crew.

“Physician Traith, we have a prolonged amafa case. Get your oils and essences and come with me.” When the other had returned, he said to Speedy, “Take us to where he sleeps.”

Reaching the door to the walled-up cave, Rdina paused to look at the two-word name fixed upon it in neat but incomprehensible letters. They read: DEAR DEVIL.

“I wonder what that means,” said Physician Traith.

“Do not disturb,” guessed Rdina carelessly. Opening the door, he let Traith enter first, closed it behind him to keep all the others outside.

They reappeared an hour later. The total population of the city seemed to have congregated outside the cave. Rdina was surprised that the crowd had not satisfied its curiosity with the ship and the crew. Surely there could not be much interest in the fate of one small poet. Thousands of eyes were upon them as they came into the sunlight, carefully closed and locked the cave’s door.

Stretching himself in the light as if reaching toward the sun, Speedy bawled the news to the crowd. “He’s alive, alivel He’ll be out again within twenty days!”

At once a mild form of madness overcame the two-leggers. They ‘made pleasure-grimaces and piercing mouth-noises and some went so far as to beat each other.

Twenty Martians felt like joining Fander that same night. The Martian constitution is peculiarly susceptible to mass emotion.

David Korman hasped, “Send them an ultimatum.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“But what?”

“It may mean war.1

“What of it?”

“Nothing, sir.” The other sought a way out. “I merely thought—”

“You are not paid to think,” said Korman, acidly. “You are paid only to obey orders.”

“Of course, sir. Most certainly.” Gathering his papers, he backed away hurriedly. “I shall have the ultimatum forwarded to Lani at once.”

“You better had!” Korman glowered across his ornate desk, watched the door close. He voiced an emphatic, “Bah!” A lickspittle. He was surrounded by lickspittles, cravens, weaklings. On all sides were the spineless ready to jump to

his command, eager to fawn upon him. They smiled at him with false, obsequious smiles, hastened into specious pseudo-agreement with every word he uttered, gave him exaggerated respect that served to cover their inward fears.

There was a reason for all this. He, David Korman, was strong. He was strong in the myriad ways that meant full and complete strength. With his broad, heavy body, big jowls, and hard, challenging eyes he looked precisely what he was: a creature of considerable power, mental and physical.

It was good that he should be like this. It was a law of Nature that the weak must give way to the strong. A thoroughly sensible law. Besides, this world of Morcine needed a strong man. Morcine was one world in a cosmos full of potential competitors, all of them born of some misty, long-forgotten planet near a lost sun called Sol. Morcine’s duty to itself was to grow strong at the expense of the weak, to follow the natural law.

His heavy thumb found the button on his desk, pressed it, and he said into the little silver microphone, “Send in Fleet Commander Rogers at once.”

There came a knock on the door and he snapped, “Come ini” Then when Rogers had reached the desk he informed, “We are sending an ultimatum.”

“Really, sir? Do you suppose they will accept it?” “Doesn’t matter whether they do or don’t,” Korman declared with an air of finality. “In either event we’ll get our own way.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is the fleet disposed in readiness exactly as ordered?” “It is, sir.”

“You are quite certain of that? You have checked it in person?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. These are my orders: the fleet will observe the arrival on Lani of the courier bearing our demands. It will allow twenty hours for the receipt of a satisfactory reply.”

“And if one does not come?”

“It will attack in full strength one minute after the time of grace has expired. Its immediate task will be to capture and secure an adequate ground-base. Having gained it, the land forces will be poured in and the territorial conquest of the planet can proceed.”

“I understand, sir.” Rogers prepared to leave. “Is there anything more?”

“Yes,” said Korman. “I have one especial order. When you are about to seize this base my son’s vessel must be the first to land upon it.”

Rogers blinked and protested nervously, “But sir, as a young lieutenant he commands a small scoutship bearing twenty men. Surely one of our heavy battleships should be—”

“My son lands first!” Standing up, Korman leaned forward over his desk. His eyes were cold. “The knowledge that Reed Korman, my only child, was in the forefront of the battle will have an excellent psychological effect upon the ordinary masses here. I give it as a firm order.”

“What if something happens?” murmured Rogers, aghast. “What if he should become a casualty, perhaps might be killed?”

“That,” Korman pointed out, “would enhance the effect.” “All right, sir.” Rogers swallowed hard and hurried out, little relishing the situation.

Had the responsibility for Reed Korman’s safety been placed upon his own shoulders? Or was that character behind the desk genuine in his opportunist and dreadful fatalism? He did not know. He knew only that Korman could not be judged by ordinary, everyday standards.

Blank-faced and precise, the police escort posed rigidly while Korman got out of the huge official car. He gave them his usual austere look-over while the chauffeur waited, his hand holding the door open. Then Korman mounted the steps to his home, heard the car door close at the sixth step. Invariably it was the sixth step, never the fifth or seventh.

Inside, the maid waited on the same corner of the carpet, her hands ready for his hat, gloves and cloak. She was stiff and starched and never looked directly at him. Not once in fourteen years had she met him eye to eye.

With a disdainful grunt he brushed past her, went into the dining-room, took his seat, studied his wife across a long expanse of white cloth covered with silver and crystal.

She was tall and blonde and blue-eyed and once had seemed supremely beautiful. Her willowy slenderness had made him think with pleasure of her writhing in his arms with the sinuosity of a snake. Now, her slight curves had gained angularity, her breasts were flat, her submissive eyes wore crinkles that were not marks of laughter.

“I’ve had more than enough of Lani,” he announced. “We’re precipitating a showdown. An ultimatum has been sent.”

“Yes, David.”

That was what he had expected her to say. He could have said it for her. It was her trade-mark, so to speak; always had been, always would be.

Long ago, a quarter century back, he had said with becoming politeness, “Mary, I wish to marry you.”

“Yes, David.”

She had not wanted it, not in the sense that he had wanted it. Her family had pushed her into the arrangement and she had gone where shoved. Life was like that: the pushers and the pushed. Mary was of the latter class. The fact had taken the spice out of their romance. The conquest had been too easy. Korman insisted on conquest but he liked it big. Not small.

Later on, when he’d deemed the proper time had come, he had told her, “Mary, I want a son.”

“Yes, David.”

She had arranged it exactly as ordered. No slips, no mistakes. No presenting him with a fat and impudent daughter by way of hapless obstetrical rebellion. A son, eight pounds, subsequently named Reed. He had chosen the name.

A faint scowl lay over his heavy features as he informed, “Almost certainly it means war.”

“Does it, David?”

It came without vibrancy or emotion. Dull-toned, her pale oval face expressionless, her eyes full of nunlike humility. Now and again he wondered whether she hated him with a fierce turbulent hatred so explosive that it had to be held in check at all costs. He could never be sure of what went on behind that opposing mask. Of one thing he was certain: she feared him and had done from the very first.

Everyone feared him. Everyone without exception. Those who did not at the first meeting soon learned to do so. He saw to that in one way or another. It was good to be feared. It was an excellent substitute for other emotions one has never had, never known.

When a child he had feared his father long and ardently. Also his mother. Both of them so greatly that their passing had come as a vast relief. Now it was his turn. That, too, was a natural law, fair and logical. What is derived from one generation should be passed on to the next. What is denied likewise should be denied.

Justice.

“Reed’s scoutship has joined the fleet in readiness for action.”

“I know, David.”

His eyebrows lifted. “How do you know?”

“I received a letter from him an hour ago.” She passed it across to him.

He was slow to unfold the stiff sheet of paper. He knew only too well what the first two words would be. Getting it open, he found it upside-down, reversed it and looked.

“Dear Mother.”

That was her revenge.

“Mary, I want a son.”

So she had given him one—and then taken him away.

Now there were letters, perhaps two in one week or one in two months according to the ship’s distance and location. Always they were written as if intended for both, always they contained formal love to both, formal hope that both were keeping well.

But always they began, “Dear Mother.”

Never, “Dear Father.”

Revenge!

Zero hour came and went. Morcine was in a fever of excitement and preparation. Nobody knew what was happening far out in space, not even Korman. There was a time-lag due to sheer distance. Beamed signals from the fleet took many hours to come in.

The first word went straight to Konnan’s desk where he posed ready to receive it. It said the Lanians had replied with a protest and what they called an appeal to reason. In accordance with instructions the fleet commander had rejected this as unsatisfactory. The attack was on.

“They plead for reasonableness,” he growled. “That means they want us to go soft. Life is not made for the soft.” He threw a glance forward. “Is it?”

“No, sir,” agreed the messenger with alacrity.

“Tell Bathurst to put the tape on the air at once.”

“Yes, sir.”

When the other had gone he switched on his midget radio and waited. It came within ten minutes, the long, rolling, grandiloquent speech he’d recorded more than a month before. It played upon two themes: righteousness and strength, especially strength.

The alleged causes of war were elucidated in’ detail, grimly but without ire. This lack of indignation was a telling touch because it suggested the utter inevitability of the present situation. It also suggested that the powerful have too much justified self-confidence to emote.

As for the causes, he listened to them with boredom. Only the strong knew there is but one cause of war. All the other multitudinous reasons recorded in the history books were not real reasons at all. They were nothing but plausible pretexts. There was but one root cause that persisted right back to the days of the jungle. When two monkeys want the same banana, that is war.

Of course, the broadcasting tape wisely refrained from putting the issue so bluntly and revealingly. Weak stomachs require pap. Red meat is exclusively for the strong. So the great antenna of the world network comported themselves accordingly and catered for the general dietary need.

After the broadcast had finished on a heartening note about Morcine’s overwhelming power and close relationship with God, he leaned back in his chair and thought things over. There was no question of bombing Lani into submission from the upper reaches of its atmosphere. All the cities cowered beneath bombproof domes. Even if they had been wide open he would not have ordered their destruction. It is empty victory to win only a few mounds of rubble.

He’d had enough of empty victories. Instinctively his gaze Strayed toward the bookcase on which stood the photograph he seldom noticed and then no more than absently. For years it had been there, a subconsciously observed, taken for granted object like the inkpot or the radiant heat panel, but less useful than either.

She wasn’t like her picture now. Come to think of it, she hadn’t been really like it then. She had given him fear and obedience before he had learned the need for those in lieu of other needs. At that time he had wanted something else that had not been forthcoming. So long as he could remember, right back to the earliest years of his childhood, it had never been forthcoming, not from anyone, never, never, never.

He jerked his mind back to the subject of Lani. The location of that world and the nature of its defences determined the pattern of conquest. A ground-base must be won, constantly replenished with troops, arms and all auxiliary services. From there the fighting forces of Morcine must expand and, bit by bit, take over all unshielded territory until at last the protected cities stood alone in fateful isolation. The cities could then be permitted to sit under their domes until starved into surrender.

Acquisition of enemy territory was the essential aim. This meant that despite space-going vessels, force-shields, nuclear explosives and all the other redoubtable gadgets of ultramodernism, the ordinary foot soldier remained the final arbiter of victory. Machines could assault and destroy. Only men could take and hold.

Therefore this was going to be no mere five-minute war. It would run on for a few months, perhaps even a year, with spasms of old style land-fighting as strong points were attacked and. defended. There would be bombing perforce limited to road-blocks, strategic junctions, enemy assembly and regrouping areas, unshielded but stubborn villages.

There would be some destruction, some casualties. But it was better that way. Real conquest is over real obstacles and not over imaginary ones. In her hour of triumph Morcine would be feared. Korman would be feared. The feared are respected and that is proper and decent.

If one can have nothing more.

Pictorial records in full colour and sound came at the end of a month. Their first showing was in the privacy of his own home to a small audience composed of himself, his wife, a group of government officials and assorted brass-hats.

Unhampered by Lanian air defences, weak from the beginning and now almost wiped out, the long black ships of Morcine dived into the constantly widening ground-base and unloaded great quantities of supplies. Troops moved forward against tough but spasmodic opposition, a growing weight of armoured and motorised equipment going with them.

The recording camera trundled across an enormous bridge with thick girders fantastically distorted and with great gaps temporarily filled in. It took them through seven badly battered villages which the enemy had either defended or given cause to believe they intended to defend. There were shots of crater-pocked roads, skeletal houses, blackened barns and bloated cattle lying with their legs in the air.

And an action-take of an assault on a farmhouse. A patrol, suddenly fired upon, dug in and radioed back. A metal monster on huge, noisy tracks answered their call, rumbled laboriously to within a couple of hundred yards of the objective, spat violently and lavishly from its front turret. A great splash of liquid fell on the farmhouse roof, burst into roaring flame. Figures ran out, seeking cover of adjacent

thickets. The sound-track emitted rattling noises. The figures fell over, rolled, jerked, lay still.

The reel ended and Korman said, “I approve it for public exhibition.” Getting up from his seat, he frowned around, added, “I have one criticism. My son has taken command of a company of infantry. He is doing a patriotic job like any other soldier. Why wasn’t he featured?”

“We would not depict him except with your approval, sir,” said one, apologetically.

“I not only approve—I order it. Make sure that he is shown next time. Not predominantly. Just enough to let the people see for themselves that he is right there sharing the hardships and the risks.”

“Very well, sir.”

They packed up and went away. He strolled restlessly on the thick carpet in front of the electric radiator.

“Do them good to know Reed is among those present,” he insisted.

“Yes, David.” She had taken up some knitting, her needles going click-click.

“He’s my son.”

“Yes, David.”

Stopping his pacing, he chewed his bottom lip with irritation. “Can’t you say anything but that?”

She raised her eyes. “Do you wish me to?”

“Do I wish?” he echoed. His fists were clenched as he resumed his movements to and fro while she returned to her needles.

What did she know of wishes?

What does anyone know?

By the end of four months the territorial grip on Lani had grown to one thousand square miles while men and guns continued to pour in. Progress had been slower than expected. There had been minor blunders at high level, a few of the unforeseeable difficulties that invariably crop up when fighting at long range, and resistance had been desperate where least expected. Nevertheless progress was being made.

Though a little postdated, the inevitable always remained inevitable.

Korman came home, heard the car door snap shut at the sixth step. All was as before except that now a part of the populace insisted on assembling to cheer him indoors. The maid waited, took his things. He stumped heavily to the inner room.

“Reed is being promoted to captain.”

She did not answer.

Standing squarely before her, he demanded, “Well, aren’t you interested?”

“Of course, David.” Putting aside her book, she folded long, thin-fingered hands, looked toward the window. “What’s the matter with you?”

“The matter?” The blonde eyebrows arched as her gaze settled on him. “Nothing is the matter with me. Why do you ask?”

“I can tell.” His tones became harsher. “And I can guess. You don’t like Reed being out there. You disapprove of me sending him away from you. You think of him as your son and not mine. You—”

She faced him calmly. “You’re rather tired, David. And worried.”

“I am not tired,” he denied with unnecessary loudness. “Neither am I worried. It is the weak who worry.”

“The weak have reason.”

“I haven’t.”

“Well, you must be hungry.” She took her seat at the table. “Have something to eat. It will make you feel better.” Dissatisfied and disgruntled, he got through his evening meal. Mary was holding something back, he knew that with the sureness of one who had lived with her for half his lifetime. But he did not have to force it out of her by autocratic methods. When and only when he had finished eating she surrendered her secret voluntarily. The way in which she did it concealed the blow to come.

“There has been another letter from Reed.”

“Yes?” He fingered a glass of wine, felt soothed by food and drink but was reluctant to show it. “I know he’s happy, healthy and in one piece. If anything went wrong I’d be the first to learn of it.”

“Don’t you want to see what he says?” She took it from a walnut bureau, offered it.

He eyed it without reaching for it. “Oh, I suppose it’s all the usual chitchat about the war.”

“I think you ought to read it,” she persisted.

“Do you?” Taking it from her hand, he held it unopened, surveyed her curiously. “Why should this particular missive call for my attention? Is it any different from the others? I know without looking that it is addressed to you. Not to me. To you. Never in his life has Reed written a letter specifically to me.”

“He writes to both of us.”

“Then why can’t he start with, “Dear Father and Mother?” “Probably it just hasn’t occurred to him that you might feel touchy about it. Besides, its cumbersome.”

“Nonsense!”

“You might as well look at it as argue about it unread. You’ll have to know sooner or later.”

That last remark stimulated him into action. Unfolding it, he grunted as he noted the opening words, then went through ten paragraphs descriptive of war service on another planet. It was the sort of stuff every fighting man sent home. Nothing especial about it. Turning the page, he perused the brief remainder. His face went taut and heightened in colour.

“Better tell you I’ve become the willing slave of a Lanian girl. Found her in what little was left of the village of Blue-lake which had taken a pretty bad beating from our heavies. She was all alone and as far as I could discover seemed to be the sole survivor. Mother, she’s got nobody. I’m sending her home on the hospital ship Istar. The captain jibbed but dared not refuse a Korman. Please meet her for me and look after her until I get back.”

Flinging the letter onto the table, he swore lengthily and with vim, finishing, “The young imbecile!”

Saying nothing, Mary sat watching him, her hands clasped together.

“The eyes of a whole world are on him,” he raged. “As a public figure and as the son of his father he is expected to be a prime example. And what does he do?”

She remained silent.

“Becomes the easy victim of some calculating little bitch who is quick to play upon his sympathies. An enemy female. A Lanian tart.”

“She must be pretty,” said Mary.

“No Lanians are pretty,” he contradicted in what came near to a shout. “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

“No, David.”

“Then why make such a stupid remark? One idiot in the family is more than enough.” He punched his right fist into the palm of his left hand. “At the very time when anti-Lanian sentiment is at its height I can well imagine the effect upon public opinion if it became known that we were giving a home to a specially favoured enemy alien, pampering some painted and powdered huzzy who has dug her claws into Reed. I can see her mincing conceitedly around, one of the vanquished who became a victor by making use of a dope. Reed must be out of his mind.”

“Reed is twenty-four,” she observed.

“What of it? Are you asserting that there is a specific age at which a man has a right to make a damn fool of himself?”

“David, I did not say that.”

“You implied it.” More hand-punching. “Reed has shown an unsuspected strain of weakness. It doesn’t come from me.”

“No, David, of course it doesn’t.”

He stared at her, seeking the thought hidden behind that meek agreement. It eluded him. His mind was not her mind. He could not think in her terms. Only in his own.

“I’ll bring this madness to a drastic stop. If Reed lacks strength of character, it is for me to provide it.” He found the telephone, remarked as he picked it up, “There are thousands of intelligent, attractive girls on Morcine. If Reed feels that he must have romance he can find it at home.”

“He’s not home,” Mary mentioned. “He’s far away.”

“For a few months. A mere nothing.” The phone whirred and he barked into it, “Has the Istar left Lani yet?” He held on a while, then racked the instrument and rumbled aggrie-vedly, “I’d have had her thrown off but it’s too late. The Istar departed soon after the mailship that brought Reed’s letter.” He made a face and it wasn’t pleasant. “The girl is due here tomorrow. She’s got a nerve, a blatant impudence. It reveals her character in advance.”

Facing the big, slow-ticking clock that stood against the wall, he gazed at it as if tomorrow were due at any moment. His mind was working on the problem so suddenly dumped in his lap. After a while he spoke again.

“That scheming baggage is not going to carve herself a comfortable niche in my home no matter what Reed thinks of her. I will not have her, see?”

“I see, David.”

“If he is weak, I am not. So when she arrives I’m going to give her the roughest hour of her life. By the time I’ve finished she’ll be more than glad of a passage back to Lani on the next ship. She’ll get out in a hurry and for keeps.”

Mary remained quiet.

“But I’m not going to indulge a sordid domestic fracas in public. I won’t allow her even the satisfaction of that. So I want you to meet her at the spaceport, phone me immediately she has landed and bring her to my office. I’ll cope with her there.”

“Yes, David.”

“And don’t forget to call me beforehand. It will give me time to clear the place and gain some privacy.”

“I will remember,” she promised.

It was three-thirty in the following afternoon when the call came through. He shooed out a fleet admiral, two generals and an intelligence service director, hurried through the most urgent of his papers, cleared the desk and mentally prepared himself for the distasteful task to come.

In short time his intercom squeaked and his secretary’s voice announced, “Two people to see you, sir. Mrs. Mary Korman and Miss Tatiana Hurst.”

“Show them in.”

He leaned backward in his chair, face suitably severe. Tatiana, he thought. An outlandish name. It was easy to visualise the sort of hoyden who owned it: a flouncy, overbusted thing, aged beyond her years and with a sharp eye to the main chance. The sort who would make easy meat of someone young, inexperienced and impressionable like Reed. No doubt she had supreme confidence that she could butter-up the old man with equal effectiveness and no trouble whatsoever. Hah, that was her mistake.

The door opened and they came in and stood before him without speaking. For perhaps half a minute he studied them while his mind did side-slips, repeatedly strove to co-ordinate itself, and a dozen expressions came and went on his face. Finally, he came slowly to his feet and spoke to Mary, his tones frankly bewildered.

“Well, where is she?”

“This,” informed Mary with unconcealed and inexplicable satisfaction, “is the young lady.”

He flopped back into his chair, looked incredulously at Miss Tatiana Hurst. She had skinny legs exposed to knee height. Her clothing was much the worse for wear. Her face was a pale, hollow-cheeked oval from which a pair of enormous dark eyes gazed in an off-focus, introspective manner as if she continually kept watch within her rather than upon things outside. One small white hand held Mary’s, the other arm was around a large and brand new teddy-bear gained from a source at which he could guess. Her age was seven or eight, certainly no more than eight.

It was the eyes that got him most; terribly solemn, terribly grave and peculiarly unwilling to see. There was a coldness in his stomach as he observed them. She was not blind. She could look at him all right—but she looked without really perceiving. The great dark orbs could turn toward him and register the mere essential of his existence while all the time they saw only the secret places within herself. It was eerie in the extreme and more than discomforting.

Watching her fascinatedly, he tried to analyse and define the strange quality in these optics. He had expected daring, defiance, impudence, passion, anything of which the predatory female is capable. Here, in these radically altered circumstances, one could expect childish embarrassment, self-consciousness, shyness. But she was not shy, he decided. It was something else, something more difficult to grasp. In the end he recognised the elusive factor as absentness. She was here but somehow not with them. She was somewhere else, deep inside a tiny world of her own.

Mary chipped in with a sudden, “Well, David?”

He started at the sound of her voice. Some confusion still cluttered his mind because this culmination differed so greatly from his preconceptions. Mary had enjoyed an hour or so in which to accommodate herself to the shock. He had not. It was still fresh and potent.

“Leave her with me for a few minutes,” he suggested. “I’ll call you when I’ve finished.”

Mary departed, her manner that of a woman enjoying something deep and personal, an unexpected satisfaction long overdue. He watched her go, sensing her attitude and baffled by it.

Korman said with unaccustomed mildness, “Come here, Tatiana.”

She moved toward him slowly, each step deliberate and careful, touched the desk and stopped.

“Round this side, please, near to my chair.”

With the same almost robotic gait she did precisely as instructed, her dark eyes looking expressionlessly to the front. Arriving at his chair, she waited in silence.

He drew in a deep breath. It seemed to him that her reactions were born of a tiny voice insisting, “I must be obedient. I must do as I am told. I can do only the things I am told to do.”

So she behaved as one compelled to accept all the things she had no means of resisting. It was surrender to every demand in order to keep one hidden and precious place intact. There was no other way.

Rather appalled, he said, “You’re able to speak, aren’t you?”

She nodded, slightly and only once.

“But that isn’t speech,” he pointed out.

There was no desire to contradict or to provide proof of ability. She accepted his statement as obvious and left it at that. Silent and immensely grave, she clung to her teddy-bear and patiently waited for Korman’s world to cease troubling her own.

“Are you glad you’re here, or sorry?”

No reaction. Only inward contemplation. Absentness.

“Well, are you glad then?”

A vague half-nod.

“You’re not sorry to be here?”

An even vaguer shake.

“Would you rather stay than go back?”

She looked at him, not so much to see him as to ensure a that he could see her.

He rang his bell and said to Mary, “Take her home.”

“Home, David?”

“That’s what I said.” He did not like the exaggerated sweetness of her tone. It meant something but he couldn’t discern what.

The door closed behind the pair of them. His fingers tapped restlessly on the desk as he pictured those eyes. Something small and bitterly cold was in his insides.

During the next couple of weeks his mind seemed to be filled with more complicated problems than ever before. Like many men of his calibre he had the ability to ponder several subjects at once—but not the insight to detect when one was gaining predominance over the others. On the first two or three of these days he ignored the | pale intruder in his household. Yet he could not deny her presence. She was always there, quiet, obedient, self-effacing, hollow-cheeked and huge-eyed. Often she sat around for long periods without stirring, like a discarded doll.

When addressed by Mary or one of the maids she remained deaf to inconsequential remarks, responded to direct and imperative questions or orders. She would answer with minimum head movements or hand gestures whenever these sufficed, spoke monosyllabically in a thin little voice only when speech was unavoidable. During that time Korman

did not speak to her at all—but was compelled to notice her fatalistic acceptance of the fact that she was no part of his busy life.

After lunch on the fourth day he caught her alone, bent down to her height and demanded, “Tatiana, what is the matter with you? Are you unhappy here?”

One brief shake of her head.

“Then why don’t you laugh and play like other—?” He ceased abruptly as Mary entered the room.

“You two having a private gossip?” she enquired.

“As if we could,” he growled.

That same evening he saw the latest pictorial record from the fighting front. It gave him little satisfaction. Indeed, it almost irked him. The zip was missing. Much of the thrill of conquest had mysteriously evaporated from the pictures.

By the end of a fortnight he’d had more than enough of listening for a voice that seldom spoke and meeting eyes that did not see. It was like living with a ghost and it could not go on. A man is entitled to a modicum of relaxation in his own home.

Certainly he could kick her back to Lani as he had threatened to do in the first place. However, that would amount to admission of defeat. Korman just could not accept defeat at anyone’s hands least of all those of a brooding child. She was not going to edge him out of his own home or persuade him to throw her out. She was a challenge he had to overcome in a way thoroughly satisfactory to himself.

Summoning his chief scientific adviser to the office he declaimed with irritation, “Look, I’m saddled with a maladjusted child. My son took a fancy to her and shipped her here from Lani. She’s getting in my hair. What can be done about her?”

“Afraid I can’t be of much help, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I’m a physicist.”

“Then can you suggest anyone else?”

The other thought a bit, said, “There is nobody in my department, sir. But science isn’t solely concerned with the production of gadgets. You need a specialist in things less tangible.” A pause for further thought. “The hospital authorities might be able to put you on to somebody suitable.”

He tried the nearest hospital and got the answer, “A child psychologist is your man.”

“Who’s the best one on this planet?”

“Dr. Jager.”

“Contact him for me. I want him at my house this evening, not later than seven o’clock.”

Fat, middle-aged and jovial, Jager fell easily into the role of a casual friend who had just dropped in. He chatted a lot of foolishness, included Tatiana in the conversation by throwing occasional remarks at her, even held a pretended discussion with her teddy-bear. Twice in an hour she came into his world just long enough to register a fleeting smile-then swiftly she was back in her own.

At the end of this he hinted that he and Tatiana should be left by themselves. Korman went out, convinced that no progress was being or would be made. In the lounge Mary glanced up from her seat.

“Who is our visitor, David? Or is it no business of mine?” “Some kind of mental specialist. He’s examining Tatiana.” “Really?” Again the sweetness that was bitter.

“Yes,” he rasped. “Really.”

“I didn’t think you were interested in her.”

“I am not in the least bit interested,” he asserted. “But Reed is. Now and again I like to remind myself that Reed is my son.”

She let the subject drop. Korman got on with some official papers until Jager had finished. Then he went back in to the room, leaving Mary immersed in a book. He looked around.

“Where is she?”

“A maid took her. Said it was her bedtime.”

“Oh.” Korman took a seat and waited to hear more. Leaning against an edge of the table, Jager explained, “I have a playful little trick for dealing with children who are reluctant to talk. It works nine times out of ten.”

“What is it?”

“I persuade them to write. Strangely enough they will often do that, especially if I make a game of it. I cajole them into writing a story or essay about anything that created a very great impression upon them. The results can be most revealing.”

“And did you—?”

“A moment, please, Mr. Korman. Before I go further I must impress upon you that children have an inherent ability many authors must envy. They can express themselves with remarkable vividness in simple language, with great economy of words. They create telling effect with what they leave out as much as by what they put in.” He eyed Korman speculatively. “You know the circumstances in which your son found this child?”

“Yes, he told us in a letter.”

“Well, bearing those circumstances in mind I think you’ll find this something exceptional in the way of horror stories.” He held out a sheet of paper. “She wrote it unaided.” He reached for his hat and coat.

“You’re going?” questioned Korman in surprise. “What about your diagnosis? What treatment do you recommend?”

Doctor Jager paused, hand on door. “Mr. Korman, you are an intelligent person.” He indicated the sheet the other was holding. “I think that is all you require.”

Then he departed. Korman eyed the sheet. It was not filled with words as he’d expected. For a story it was mighty short. He read it.

I am nothing and nobody. My house went bang. My cat was stuck to a wall. I wanted to pull it off. They wouldn’t let me. They threw it away.

The cold thing in the pit of his stomach swelled up. He read it again. And again. He went to the base of the stairs and looked up toward where she was sleeping.

The enemy he had made nothing.

Slumber came hard that night. Usually he could compose his mind and snatch a nap anytime, anywhere, at a moment’s notice. Now he was strangely restless, unsettled.

His brain was stimulated by he knew not what and it insisted on following tortuous paths.

The frequent waking periods were full of fantastic imaginings wherein he fumbled through a vast and cloying greyness in which was no sound, no voice, no other being. The dreams were worse, full of writhing landscapes spewing smoky columns, with things howling through the sky, with huge, toadlike monsters crawling on metal tracks, with long lines of dusty men singing an aeons-old and forgotten song.

“You’ve left behind a broken doll.”

He awakened early with weary eyes and a tired mind. All morning at the office a multitude of trifling things conspired against him. His ability to concentrate was not up to the mark and several times he had to catch himself on minor errors just made or about to be made. Once or twice he found himself gazing meditatively forward with eyes that did not see to the front but were looking where they had never looked before.

At two-thirty in the afternoon his secretary called on the intercom, “Astroleader Warren would like to see you, sir.” “Astroleader?” he echoed, wondering if he had heard aright. “There’s no such title.”

“It is a Drakan space-rank, sir.”

“Oh, yes, of course. I can tend to him now.”

He waited with dull anticipation. The Drakans formed a powerful combine of ten planets at great distance from Morcine. They were so far away that contact came seldom. A battleship of theirs had paid a courtesy call about twice in his lifetime. So this occasion was a rare one.

The visitor entered, a big-built youngster in light green uniform. Shaking hands with great cordiality, he accepted the indicated chair.

“Quite a surprise for you, Mr. Korman?”

“Very much so.”

“We came in a devil of a hurry but a trip like that can’t be done in a day. Distance takes time unfortunately.”

“I know.”

“The position is this,” explained Warren. “A long time ago we received from Lani a call relayed by intervening planets. The Lanians said they were involved in a serious dispute and feared war. They appealed to us to negotiate as disinterested neutrals.”

“So that’s why you’ve come to see me?”

“Yes, Mr. Korman. We knew that the chance of arriving in good time was rather remote. There was nothing for it but to come as quickly as we could and hope for the best. The role of peacemaker appeals to those with any claim to be civilised.”

“Does it?” said Korman with a touch of acid.

“It does to us.” Leaning forward, Warren met him eye to eye. “We have called at Lani on the way here. They still want peace. It seems obvious to us that they are losing the battle. Therefore we want to know only one thing.”

“That is—?”

“Are we too late?”

Ah, that was the leading question: Are we too late? Yes or no? Korman stewed it unconscious of the fact that not so long ago his answer would have been prompt and automatic. Today, he thought it over.

Yes or no? Yes meant military victory, power and fear. No meant—what? Well, no meant a display of reasonableness in lieu of stubbornness. No meant a considerable change of outlook. It struck him suddenly that one must possess redoubtable force of character to throw away a long-cherished viewpoint and adopt a new one. It required moral courage. The weak and the faltering could never achieve it.

“No,” he replied slowly. “It is not too late.”

Warren stood up, his expression showing that this was not the answer he’d expected. “You mean, Mr. Korman—” “Your journey has not been in vain. You may negotiate.” “On what terms?”

“The fairest to both sides that you can contrive.” He switched his microphone and spoke into it. “Tell Rogers that I order our forces to cease hostilities forthwith. Troops will guard the perimeter of the Lani ground-base pending peace negotiations. Citizens of the Drakan Confederation will be permitted unobstructed passage through our lines in either direction.”

“Very well, Mr. Korman.”

Putting the microphone aside, he continued with Warren. “Though far off in mere miles, Lani is quite close to us as cosmic distances go. It would please me if the Lanians agreed to some sort of economic union with us. But I do not insist upon it. I merely express a wish—knowing that some wishes never come true.”

“The matter will be given serious consideration all the same,” assured Warren. He shook hands with enthusiasm. “You’re a big man, Mr. Korman.”

“Am I?” He gave a wry smile. “Right now I’m trying to do a bit of growing in another direction. The original one kind of got used up.”

When the other had gone he tossed a wad of documents into a drawer. Most of them were useless now. Strange how he seemed to be breathing better than ever before, his lungs drawing more fully.

In the outer office he informed, “It’s early yet but I’m going home. Phone me there if anything urgent comes along.” The chauffeur closed the car door at the sixth step. A weakling, thought Korman as he went into his house. A lamebrain lacking the strength to haul himself out of a selfcreated rut. One can stay in a rut too long.

He asked the maid, “Where is my wife?”

“She went out about ten minutes ago, sir. She said she’d be back in half an hour’s time.”

“Did she take—?”

“No, sir.” The maid glanced toward the lounge.

Cautiously he entered the lounge, found the child resting on the big settee, head back, eyes closed. A radio played softly nearby. He doubted whether she had turned it on of her own accord or was listening to it. More likely someone else had left it running.

Tiptoeing across the carpet, he cut off the faint music. She opened her eyes and sat upright. Going to the settee, he picked up her teddy-bear and put it to one side, positioned himself next to her.

“Tatiana,” he asked with rough gentleness, “why are you nothing?”

No answer. No change.

“Is it because you have nobody?”

Silence.

“Nobody of your own?” he persisted, feeling a queer kind of desperation. “Not even a kitten?”

She looked down at her shoes, her huge eyes partly shielded under pale lids. There was no other reaction.

Defeat. Ah, the bitterness of defeat. It set his fingers fumbling with each other like those of one in great and unbearable trouble. Phrases tumbled through-his mind.

“I am nothing.”

“My cat … they threw it away.”

His gaze wandered blindly over the room while his mind ran round and round her wall of silence seeking a door it could not find. Was there no way in, no way at all?

There was.

He discovered it quite unwittingly.

To himself rather than to her he murmured in a hearable undertone, “Since I was very small I have been surrounded by people. All my life I’ve been among lots of people. But none were mine. Not one was really mine. Not one. I, too, am nothing.”

She patted his hand.

The shock was immense. Startled beyond measure, he glanced down at the first touch, watched her give three or four comforting little dabs and hastily withdraw. There was heavy pulsing in his veins. Something within him rapidly became too big to contain.

Twisting sideways, he snatched her onto his lap, put his arms around her, buried his nose in the soft part of her neck, nuzzled behind her ear, ran his big hand through her hair. And all the time he rocked to and fro with low crooning noises.

She was weeping. She hadn’t been able to do so before. She was weeping, not as a woman does, softly and subdued, but like a child, with great racking sobs that she fought hard to suppress.

Her arm was around his neck, tightening, clinging and tightening .more while he rocked and stroked and called her “Baby” and “Honey” and uttered silly sounds and wildly extravagant assurances.

This was victory.

Not empty.

Full.