INCOMMUNICADO

by Katherine MacLean

Of Katherine MacLean’s origins and present doings I can find out literally nothing, except that she is married and has a literary agent named, beautifully enough, Sidney Porcelain. Of personal knowledge I can say that Katie is a completely delightful, thoroughly fey lady, whom I have not seen for more years than I care to think about. To all intents and purposes she seems to have stopped writing s-f, although her agent tells me she still submits occasional manuscripts.

Of “Incommunicado,” I can say more. It was her third published science-fiction story, having appeared in June, 1950. I anthologized her first two in previous collections of mine, and have been struggling manfully against the unified opposition of a whole set of non-comprehending editors ever since to get the present story between covers, too. Admittedly, it is not an easy, simple tale for those who read on the run. You have to sit and think about what you’re reading-not actually because it is overloaded with novel ideas, but rather because it is so tightly, deviously, and complexly plotted-and also because its basic thesis is so far out in left field. It is to me an unsurpassed notion, one I only wish could come true today or tomorrow, although it won’t, I am afraid: but it certainly is fun to read about it. However, let me warn you again, read with care, hang on to seemingly discarded plot elements, watch out for innocent-looking byways that are nothing but traps-and you will come out with one of the most extraordinary pieces of “pure” science fiction-science extrapolation at its best, I think-that has come down the pike in years.

The solar system is not a gentle place. Ten misassorted centers of gigantic pulls and tensions, swinging around each other in ponderous accidental equilibrium, filling space with the violence of their silent battle. Among these giant forces the tiny ships of Earth were overmatched and weak. Few could spend power enough to climb back to space from the vortex of any planet’s field, few dared approach closer than to the satellite spaceports.

Ambition always overreaches strength. There will always be a power shortage. Space became inhabited by underpowered private ships. In a hard school of sudden death new skills were learned. In understanding hands the violence of gravitation, heat, and cold, became sustenance, speed, and power. The knack of traveling was to fall, and fall without resistance, following a free line, using the precious fuel only for fractional changes of direction. To fall, to miss and “bounce” in a zigzag of carom shots-it was a good game for a pool shark, a good game for a handball addict, a pin-ball specialist, a kinetics expert.

“Kinetics expert” is what they called Cliff Baker.

At the sixth hour of the fourth week of Pluto Station project he had nothing more to worry about than a fragment of tune which would not finish itself. Cliff floated out of the master control room whistling softly and looking for something to do.

A snatch of Smitty’s discordant voice raised in song came from a hatch as he passed. Cliff changed direction and dove through into the star-lit darkness of a glassite dome. A rubbery crossbar stopped him at the glowing control panel.

“Take a break, Smitty. Let me take over for a while.”

“Hi, chief,” said Smitty, his hands moving deftly at the panel. “Thanks. How come you can spare the time? Is the rest of the circus so smooth? No emergencies, everything on schedule?”

“Like clockwork,” said Cliff. “Knock wood.” He crossed fingers for luck and solemnly rapped his skull. “Take a half hour, but keep your earphones tuned in case something breaks.”

“Sure.” Smitty gave Cliff a slap on the shoulder and shoved off. “Watch yourself now. Look out for the psychologist.” His laugh echoed back from the corridor.

Cliff laughed in answer. Obviously Smitty had seen the new movie, too. Ten minutes later when the psychologist came in, Cliff was still grinning. The movie had been laid in a deep-space construction project that was apparently intended to represent Pluto Station project, and it had been commanded by a movie version of Cliff and Mike; Cliff acted by a burly silent character carrying a heavy, unidentified tool, and Mike Cohen of the silver tongue by a handsome young actor in a wavy pale wig. In this version they were both bachelors and wasted much time in happy pursuit of a gorgeous blonde. The blonde was supposed to be the visiting psychologist sent up by Spaceways. She was a master personality who could hypnotize with a glance, a sorceress who could produce mass hallucinations with a gesture. She wound up saving the Earth from Cliff. He was supposed to have been subtly and insanely disarranging the Pluto Station orbit, so that when it was finished it would leave Pluto and fall on Earth like a bomb.

Cliff had been watching the movie through an eyepiece-earphone rig during a rest period, but he laughed so much he fell out of his hammock and tangled himself in guide lines, and the others on the rest shift had given up trying to sleep and decided to play the movie on the big projector. They would be calling in on the earphones about it soon, kidding him.

He grinned, listening to the psychologist without subtracting from the speed and concentration of handling the control panel. Out in space before the ship, working as deftly as a distant pair of hands, the bulldog construction units unwrapped floating bundles of parts, spun, pulled, magnetized, fitted, welded, assembling another complex perfect segment of the huge Pluto Station.

“I’d like to get back to Earth,” said the psychologist in a soft tenor voice that was faintly Irish, like a younger brother of Mike. “Look, Cliff, you’re top man in this line. You can plot me a short cut, can’t you?” The psychologist, Roy Pierce, was a slender dark Polynesian who seemed less than twenty years old. During his stay he had floated around watching with all the innocent awe of a tourist, and proved his profession only in an ingratiating skill with jokes. Yet he was extremely likable, and seemed familiar in some undefinable way as if one had known him all his life.

“Why not use the astrogator?” Cliff asked him mildly.

“Blast the astrogator! All it gives is courses that swing around the whole rim of the System and won’t get me home for weeks!”

“It doesn’t have to do that,” Cliff said thoughtfully. The segment was finished. He set the controls of the bulldogs to guide it to the next working sector and turned around, lining up factors in his mind. “Why not stick around? Maybe someone will develop a split personality for you.”

“My wife is having a baby,” Pierce explained. “I promised I’d be there. Besides, I want to help educate it through the first year. There are certain things a baby can learn that make a difference later.”

“Are you willing to spend four days in the acceleration tank just to go down and pester your poor kid?” Cliff floated over to a celestial sphere and idly spun it back and forth through the planetary positions of the month.

“Of course.”

“O.K. I think I see a short cut. It’s a little risky, and the astrogator is inhibited against risk. I’ll tell you later.”

“You’re stalling,” complained Pierce, yanking peevishly at a bending crossbar. “You’re the expert who keeps the orbits of three thousand flying skew bodies tied in fancy knots, and here I want just a simple orbit for one little flitter. You could tell me now.”

Cliff laughed. “You exaggerate, kid. I’m only half the expert, Mike is the other half. Like two halves of a stage horse. I can see a course that I could take myself, but it has to go on automatic tapes for you. Mike can tell me if he can make a computer see it, too. If he can, you’ll leave in an hour.”

Pierce brightened. “I’ll go pack. Excuse me, Cliff.”

As Pierce shoved off toward the hatch, Mike Cohen came in, wearing a spacesuit unzipped and flapping at the cuffs, talking as easily as if he had not stopped since the last conversation. “Did you see the new movie during rest shift, Cliff? That hulking lout who played yourself—” Mike smiled maliciously at Pierce as they passed in the semidark. “Hi, kid. Speaking of acts, who were you this time?”

“Michael E. Cohen,” said the youth, as he floated out. He looked back to see Mike’s expression, and before shoving from sight added maliciously, “I always pick the character for whom my subject has developed the greatest shock tolerance.”

“Ouch!” Mike murmured. “But I hope that I have no such edged tongue as that.” He gripped a crossbar and swung to a stop before Cliff. “The boy is a chameleon,” he said, half admiringly. “But I wonder has he any personality of his own.”

Cliff said flatly, “I like him.”

Mike raised his villainous black eyebrows and spread his hands, a plaintive note coming into his voice. “Don’t we all? It is his business to be liked. But who is it that we like? These mirror-trained sensitives—”

“He’s a nice honest kid,” Cliff said. Outside, the constructor units flew up to the dome and buzzed around in circles waiting for control. Another bundle of parts from the asteroid belt foundry began to float by. Hastily Cliff seized a pencil and scrawled a diagram on a sheet of paper, then returned to the controls. “He wants to go back to Earth. Could you tape that course? It cuts air for a sling turn at Venus.”

An hour later Mike and Cliff escorted the psychologist to his ship and inserted the control tapes with words of fatherly advice.

Mike said cheerfully: “You will be running across uncharted space with no blinker buoys with the rocks, so you had better stay in the shock tank and pray.”

And Cliff said cheerfully, “If you get off course below Mars, don’t bother signaling for help. You’re sunk.”

“You know, Cliff,” Mike said, “too many people get cooked that way. Maybe we should do something.”

“How about Mercury?”

“Just the thing, Cliff. Listen, kid, don’t worry. If you fall into the Sun, we’ll build a rescue station on Mercury and name it after you.”

A warning bell rang from the automatics, and the two pushed out through the air lock into space with Cliff protesting. “That’s not it. About Mercury I meant—”

“Hear the man complaining,” Mike interrupted. “And what would you do without me around to finish your sentences for you?”

Eight hours later Mike was dead.

Some pilot accidentally ran his ship out of the assigned lanes and left the ionized gas of his jets to drift across a sector of space where Mike and three assistants were setting up the nucleus of the station power plant.

They were binding in high velocities with fields that put a heavy drain on the power plants of distant ships. They were working behind schedule, working fast, and using space gaps for insulation.

When the ionized gas drifted in everything arced.

The busy engineers in all the ring of asteroids and metal-work that circled Pluto saw a distant flash that filled their earphones with a howl of static, and at the central power plants certain dials registered a sudden intolerable drain, and safety relays quietly cut off power from that sector. Binding fields vanished and circular velocities straightened out. As the intolerable blue flash faded, dull red pieces of metal bulleted out from the damaged sector and were lost in space. The remainder of the equipment began to drift in aimless collisions.

Quietly the emergency calls came into the earphones of all sleeping men, dragging them yawning from their hammocks to begin the long delicate job of charting and rebalancing the great assembly spiral.

One of the stray pieces charted was an eighty-foot asteroid nugget that Mike was known to have been working on. It was falling irrevocably toward Pluto. For a time a searchlight glinted over fused and twisted metal which had been equipment, but it came no closer and presently was switched out, leaving the asteroid to darkness.

The damage, when fully counted, was bad enough to require the rebalancing of the entire work schedule for the remaining months of the project: subtracting the work hours of four men and all work on the power plant that had been counted done; a rewriting of an intricate mathematical jigsaw puzzle of hours; skills; limited fuel and power factors; tools; and heavy parts coming up with inexorable inertia from the distant sunward orbits where they had been launched over a year ago.

No one took the accident too hard. They knew their job was dangerous, and were not surprised when sometimes it demonstrated that point. After they had been working a while Cliff tried to explain something to Danny Orlando—Danny Orlando couldn’t make out exactly what, for Cliff was having his usual amusing trouble with words. Danny laughed, and Cliff laughed and turned away, his heavy shoulders suddenly seeming stooped.

He gave only a few general directions after that, working rapidly while he talked over the phone as though trying to straighten everything singlehanded. He gave brief instructions on diverting the next swarm of parts and rocks coming up from the asteroid belt foundries, and then he swung his small tug in a pretzel loop around Pluto that tangented away from the planet in the opposite direction from Pluto’s orbital swing. The ship was no longer in a solar orbit at balance, solar gravity gripped it smoothly and it began to fall in steady acceleration.

“Going to Station A,” Cliff explained over the general phone before he fell out of beam range. “I’m in a hurry.”

The scattered busy engineers nodded, remembering that as a good kinetics man Cliff could jockey a ship through the solar system at maximum speed. They did not wonder why he dared leave them without co-ordination, for every man of them was sure that in a pinch, maybe with the help of a few anti-sleep and think-quick tablets, he could fill Cliffs boots. They only wondered why he did not pick one of them to be his partner, or why he did not tape a fast course and send someone else for the man.

When he was out of beam range a solution was offered. “Survival of the fittest,” said Smitty over the general phone. “Either you can keep track of everything at once or you can’t. There is no halfway in this co-ordination game, and no one can help. My bet is that Cliff has just gone down to see his family, and when he gets back he’ll pick the man he finds in charge.”

They set to work, and only Cliff knew the growing disorder and desperation that would come. He knew the abilities of the men on his team-the physicists, the field warp specialists, the metallurgists. There was no one capable of doing co-ordination. Without perfect co-ordination the project would fall apart, blow up, kill.

And he was leaving them. Gross criminal negligence.

Manslaughter.

“Why did you leave the project?” Spaceways Commission would ask at the trial.

“I would be no use there.” Not without Mike.

He sat in the stern of his ship in the control armchair and looked at the blend of dim lights and shadows that picked out the instrument panel and the narrow interior of the control dome. Automatically the mixture analyzed for him into overlapping spheres of light blending and reflecting from the three light sources. There was no effort to such knowledge. It was part of sight. He had always seen a confusion of river ripples as the measured reverberations of wind, rocks, and current. It seemed an easy illiterate talent, but for nineteen years it had bought him a place on Station A, privileged with the company of the top research men of Earth who were picked for the station staff as a research sinecure, men whose lightest talk was a running flame of ideas. The residence privilege was almost an automatic honor to the builder, but Cliff knew it was more of an honor than he deserved.

After this the others would know.

Why did you leave the project? Incompetence.

Cliff looked at his hands, front and back. Strong, clumsy, almost apelike hands that knew all the secrets of machinery by instinct, that knew the planets as well as if he had held them and set them spinning himself. If all the lights of the sky were to go out, or if he were blind he could still have cradled his ship in any spaceport in the system, but this was not enough. It was not skill as others knew skill, it was instinct, needing no learning. How hard to throw a coconut—how far to jump for the next branch-no words or numbers needed for that, but you can’t tape automatics or give directions without words and numbers.

All he could give would be a laugh and another anecdote to swell the collection.

“Did you see Cliff trying to imitate six charged bodies in a submagnetic field?”

Sitting in the shock tank armchair of the tug, Cliff shut his eyes, remembered Brandy’s remarks on borrowing trouble, and cutting tension cycles, and with an effort put the whole subject on ice, detaching it from emotions. It would come up later. He relaxed with a slightly lopsided grin. The only current problem was how to get Archy and himself back up to Pluto before the whole project blew up.

He left his ship behind him circling the anchorage asteroid at a distance and speed that broke all parking rules, but Cliff had made the rules, and he knew how much drain the anchorage projectors could take. They could hold the ship in for two hours, long enough for him to get Archy and tangent off again with all the ship momentum intact.

High speeds are meaningless in space, even to a lone man in a thin spacesuit. There was no sense of motion, and nothing in sight but unmoving stars, yet the polarized wiring of his suit encountered shells of faint resistance, shoves and a variety of hums, and Cliff did not need his eyes. He knew the electromagnetic patterns of the space around Station A better than he knew the control board of the tug. With the absent precision of long habit he touched the controls of his suit, tuning its wiring to draw power from the station carrier wave. As he tuned in, the carrier was being modulated by a worried voice.

“Can’t quite make out your orbit. Would you like taxi service? Answer please. We have to clear you, you know.”

Cliff wide-angled the beam of his phone and flashed it in the general direction of Station A for a brief blink of full power that raised it to scorching heat in his hand. The flash automatically carried his identification letters.

“Oh, is that you, Cliff? I was beginning to wonder if your ship were heaving a bomb at us. O.K. clear. The port is open.” In the far distance before him a pinpoint of light appeared and expanded steadily to a great barrel of metal rotating on a hollow axis. With the absent-minded competence of a skier on a slope Cliff cut his speed, curved and went through the dark mouth of the axis. Inside, invisible forces matched his residual velocity to the station and deposited him gently in a storage locker.

Cliff passed through the ultraviolet and supersonic sterilizing stalls to the locker room, changed his sterilized spacesuit for clean white shorts, and stepped out onto the public corridors. They were unusually deserted, he managed to reach the library without exchanging more than a distant wave with someone passing far down a corridor.

There was someone in the reading room, but Cliff passed hurriedly, hoping the man would not turn and greet him or ask why he was there, or how was Mike-Hurriedly he shoved through a side door, and was in the tube banks and microfiles where the information service works were open to Archy’s constant tinkering.

Cliff tapped the seated figure on the shoulder and extended a hand as the man turned. “My name is Cliff Baker. I’m one of the engineers of this joint. Can I be of any help to you?”

The man, a small friendly Amerind, leaped to his feet and took the hand in a wiry nervous clasp, smiling widely. He answered in Glot with a Spanish accent.

“Happy to meet you, sir. My name is McCrea. I am the new librarian to replace Dr. Reynolds.”

“It’s a good job,” said Cliff. “Is Archy around?”

The new librarian gulped nervously. “Oh, yes, Dr. Reynolds’ son. He withdrew his application for the position. Something about music I hear. I don’t want to bother him. I am not used to the Reynolds’ system, of course. It is hard to understand. It is sad that Dr. Reynolds left no diagrams. But I work hard, and soon I will understand.” The little man gestured at his scattered tools and half drawn tentative diagrams, and gulped again. “I am not a real, a genuine station research person, of course. The commission they have honored me with is a temporary appointment while they—”

Cliff had listened to the flow of words, stunned. “For the luvva Pete!” he exploded. “Do you mean to say that Archy Reynolds has left you stewing here trying to figure out the library system, and never raised a hand to help you? What’s wrong with the kid?”

He smiled reassuringly at the anxious little workman. “Listen,” he said gently. “He can spare you ten minutes. I’ll get Archy up here if I have to break his neck.”

He strode back into the deserted library, where one square stubborn man sat glowering at the visoplate of his desk. It was Dr. Brandias, the station medico.

“Ahoy, Brandy,” said Cliff. “Where’s Archy? Where is everybody anyhow?”

Brandy looked up with a start. “Cliff. They’re all down in the gym, heavy level, listening to Archy give a jazz concert.” He seemed younger and more alert, yet paradoxically more tense and worried than normal. He assessed Cliff’s impatience and glanced smiling at his watch. “Hold your horses, it will be over any minute now. Spare me a second and show me what to do with this contraption.” He indicated the reading desk. “It’s driving me bats!” The intonations of his voice were slightly strange, and he tensed up self-consciously as if startled by their echo.

Cliff considered the desk. It sat there looking expensive and useful, its ground glass reading screen glowing mildly. It looked like an ordinary desk with a private microtape file and projector inside to run the microfilm books on the reading screen, but Cliff knew that it was one of Reynolds’ special working desks, linked through the floor with the reference files of the library that held in a few cubic meters the incalculable store of all the Earth’s libraries, linked by Doc Reynolds to the service automatics and the station computer with an elaborate control panel. It was comforting to Cliff that a desk should be equipped to do his calculating for him, record the results and photograph and play back any tentative notes he could make on any subject. Reynolds had made other connections and equipped his desks to do other things which Cliff had never bothered to figure out, but there was an irreverent rumor around that if your fingers slipped on the controls it would give you a ham sandwich.

“Cliff,” Brandy was saying, “if you fix it, you’re a life saver. I’ve just got the glimmering of a completely different way to control the sympathetic system and take negative tension cycles out of decision and judgment sets, and—”

Cliff interrupted with a laugh, “You’re talking out of my frequency. What’s wrong with the desk?”

“It won’t give me the films I want,” Brandy said indignantly. “Look, I’ll show you.” The doctor consulted a list of decimal index numbers on a note pad, and rapidly punched them into the keyboard. As he did so the board gave out a trill of flutelike notes that ran up and down the scale like musical morse. “And all that noise-” Brandy grumbled. “Doc kept turning it up louder and louder as he got deafer and deafer before he died. Why doesn’t somebody turn it down?” He finished and pushed the total key to the accompaniment of a sudden simultaneous jangle of notes. The jangle moved into a high twittering, broke into chords and trailed off in a single high faint note that somehow seemed as positive and final as the last note of a tune.

Cliff ignored it. All of Reynolds’ automatics ran on a frequency discrimination system, and Doc Reynolds had liked to hetrodyne them down to audible range so as to keep track of their workings. Every telephone and servo in the station worked to the tune of sounds like a chorus of canaries, and the people of the station had grown so used to the sound that they no longer heard it. He looked the panel over again.

“You have the triangulation key in,” he told Brandias, and laughed shortly. “The computer is taking the numbers as a question, and it’s trying to give you an answer.”

“Sounds like a Frankenstein,” Brandy grinned. “Everything always works right for engineers. It’s a conspiracy.”

“Sure,” Cliff said vaguely, consulting his chrono. “Say, what’s the matter with your voice?”

The reaction to that simple question was shocking; Dr. Brandias turned white. Brandy, who had taught Cliff to control his adrenals and pulse against shock reaction, was showing one himself, an uncontrolled shock reaction triggered to a random word. Brandy had taught that this was a good sign of an urgent problem suppressed from rational calculation, hidden, and so only able to react childishly in irrational identifications, fear sets triggered to symbols.

The square practical looking doctor was stammering, looking strangely helpless. “Why… uh… uh… nothing.” He turned hastily back to his desk.

The news service clicked into life. “The concert is over,” it announced.

Cliff hesitated for a second, considering Brandias’ broad stooped back, and remembering what he had learned from the doctor’s useful lessons on fear. What could be bad enough to frighten Brandy? Why was he hiding it from himself?

He didn’t have time to figure it out, he had to get hold of Archy. “See you later.” Poor Brandy. Physician, heal thyself.

People were streaming up from the concert.

He strode out into the corridor and headed for the elevator, answering the hails of friends with a muttered greeting. At the door of the elevator Mrs. Gibbs stepped out, trailing her husband. She passed him with a gracious: “Good evening, Cliff.”

But Willy Gibbs stopped. “Hi, Cliff. Did you see the new movie? You fellows up around Pluto sure get the breaks.” Oddly the words came out in a strange singsong that robbed them of meaning. As Cliff wondered vaguely what was wrong with the man, Mrs. Gibbs turned and tried to hurry her husband with a tug on his arm.

Willy Gibbs went on chanting. “There wasn’t even an extra to play me in this one.” The ecologist absently acknowledged his wife’s repeated nudge with an impatient twitch of his shoulder. The shoulder twitched again, reasonlessly, and kept on twitching as the ecologist’s voice became jerky. “It’s… risks… that… appeal to… them. Maybe I… should… write… an article… about… my… man… eating… molds… or reep beep tatatum la kikinoo stup.”

Mrs. Gibbs glared icily at her husband, and Willy Gibbs suddenly went deep red. “Be seeing you,” he muttered and hurried on. As the elevator door slid closed Cliff thought he heard a burst of whistling, but the door shut off his view and the elevator started softly downward.

He found Archy in the stage rehearsal room at 1.6 G. As he opened the door a deep wave of sound met him.

Eight teen-age members of the orchestra sat around the room, their eyes fixed glassily on the drummer. Archy Reynolds sat surrounded by drums, using his fingertips with an easy precision, filling the room with a vibrating thunder that modulated through octaves like an impossibly deep passionate voice.

“Archy,” he said, pitching his voice to carry over the drums. The cold eyes in the bony face flickered up at him. Archy nodded, flipped the score over two pages, and the drumbeat changed subtly. A girl in the orchestra lifted her instrument and a horn picked up the theme in a sad intermittent note, as the drumbeat stopped. Archy unfolded from his chair and came over with the smallest drum still dangling from one bony hand. Behind him the horn note rose up instantly and a cello began to whisper.

He had grown tall enough to talk to Cliff face to face, but he read Cliff’s expression with a curiosity that was preoccupied, and as remote as a telescope.

“What is it, Mr. Baker?”

“Brace yourself, Jughead.” Cliff said kindly, wondering how Archy would take the shock. The kid had always wanted to go along on a project. It was funny that now he would go to help instead of watch. He paused, collecting words. “How would you like to go up to Pluto Station and be my partner for a while?”

Archy looked past him without blinking, his bony face so preoccupied that Cliff thought he had not heard. He began again. “I said, how would you like—”

The horn began to whimper down to a silence, and the orchestra stirred restlessly. Archy shifted the small drum under his arm and laid his fingertips against it.

“No,” he said, and walked back to his place, his fingers making a shuffling noise on the drum that reminded Cliff of a heart beating. The music swelled up again, but it was strange. Cliff could see someone striking chords at the piano, a boy with a flute-all the instruments of an orchestra sounding intermittently, but they were unreal. The sound was not music, it was the jumbled voices of a dream, laughing and muttering with a meaning beyond the mind’s grasp.

A dull hunger to understand began to ache in his throat, and he let his eyes half close, rocking on his feet as the dreamlike clamor of voices surged up in his mind.

Instinct saved him. Without remembering having moved he was out in the hall, and the clean slam of the soundproofed door cut off the music and left a ringing silence.

At Pluto Station a field interacted subtly with fields out of its calculated range, minor disturbances resonated and built, and suddenly the field moved. Ten feet to one side, ten feet back.

“Medico here,” said Smitty on a directed beam, tightening the left elbow joint of his spacesuit with his right hand. He was using all the strength he had, trying to stop the jet of blood from where his left hand had been. Numbly he moved back as the field began to swing toward him again. He hummed two code notes that switched his call into general beam, and said loudly and not quite coherently: “Oscillation build up, I think. Something wrong over here. I don’t get it.”

The hall was painted soberly in two shades of brown, with a faint streak of handprints running along the wall and darkening the doorknobs. It looked completely normal. Cliff shook his head to shake the ringing out of his ears, and snorted, “What the sam hill!” His voice was reassuringly sane, loud and indignant. Memory came back to him. He said no. He said no!

What now? He strode furiously toward the public elevator. Watch your temper, he cautioned himself. For Pete’s sake! Stop talking to yourself. Archy will listen when it’s explained to him. Wait till he’s through. Eight more minutes. They were only going over a flubbed phrase from the concert.

A snatch of the tune played by the flute came back to him, with a familiar ring. He whistled it tentatively, then with more confidence. It sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics running through its frequency selection before giving service. The elevator stopped at the gym level and loaded on some people. They crowded into the elevator, greeted Cliff jerkily, and then stood humming and whistling and twitching with shame-faced grins, avoiding each other’s eyes. They all sounded like the Reynolds’ automatics, and all together they sounded like the bird cage at the zoo.

“What the devil,” muttered Cliff as the elevator loaded and unloaded another horde of grinning imbeciles at every level. “What’s going on!” Cliff muttered, beginning to see the scene through a red haze of temper. “What’s going on!”

At 1 G he got off and strode down the corridor, cooling himself off. By the time he reached the door marked Baker he had succeeded in putting it out of his mind. With a brief surge of happiness he came into the cool familiar rooms and called, “Mary.”

Bill, his ten-year-old, charged out of the kitchen with a half-eaten sandwich in his hand, shouting.

“Pop! Hey, I didn’t know you were coming!” He was grabbed by Cliff and swung laughing toward the ceiling. “Hey! Hey! Put me down. I’ll drop my sandwich.”

Laughing, Cliff threw him onto the sofa. “Go on, you always have a sandwich. It’s part of your hand.”

Bill got up and took a big bite of the sandwich, fumbling in his pocket with the other hand. “Hm-m-m,” he said unintelligibly, and pulled out a child’s clicker toy, and began clicking it. He gulped, and said, in a muffled voice. “I’ve got to go back to class. Come watch me, Pop. You can give that old teacher a couple of tips, I bet.”

There was something odd about the tones of his voice even through the sandwich, and the clicker clicked in obscure relation to the rhythm of his words.

Cliff tried not to notice. “Where’s your mom?”

Bill swayed up and down gently on his toes, clicking rapidly, and singing, “Reeb beeb. At work, Pop. The lab head has a new lead on something, and she works a lot. Foo doo.”

Cliff exploded.

“Don’t you click at me! Stand still and talk like a human being!”

Bill went white and stood still.

“Now explain!”

Bill swallowed. “I was just singing,” he said, almost in-audibly. “Just singing.”

“It didn’t sound like singing!”

Bill swallowed again. “It’s Archy’s tunes. Tunes from his concerts. Good stuff. I… we sing them all the time. Like opera, sort of.”

“Why?”

“I dunno, Pop. It’s fun, I guess. Everybody does it.”

Cliff could hear a faint singsong note in the faltering voice. “Can you stop? Can anyone stop?”

“I dunno,” Bill mumbled. “For Pete’s sake, Pop, stop shouting. When you hear tunes in your head it doesn’t seem right not to sing them.”

Cliff opened the door and then paused, hanging on to the knob.

“Bill, has Archy Reynolds done anything to the library system?”

“No.” Bill looked up with a wan smile. “He’s going to be a great composer instead. His pop’s tapes are all right. You know, Pop, I just noticed, I like the sound of automatics. They sound hep.”

“Hep,” said Cliff, closing the door behind him, moving away fast. He had to get out of there. He couldn’t afford to think about mass insanity, or about Bill, or Mary, or the Reynolds’ automatics. His problem was to get Archy up to Pluto Station. He had to stick to it, and keep from thinking questions. He looked at his chrono. The first deadline for leaving was coming too close. No use mincing words with Archy. He’d let him know that he was needed.

Archy was not at the rehearsal room. He was not at the library. Cliff dialed the Reynolds’ place, and after a time grew tired of listening to the ringing and hung up. The time was growing shorter. He picked up the phone again and looked at it. It buzzed inquiringly in his hand, an innocent looking black object with an earphone and mouthpiece, which was part of the strange organization of computer, automatic services, and library files which Doc Reynolds had left when he died. Cliff abandoned questions. He did not bother to dial.

“Ring Archy Reynolds, wherever he is,” he demanded harshly. “Get me Archy Reynolds. Understand? Archy Reynolds.” It might work.

The buzz stopped. The telephone receiver trilled and clicked for a moment in a whisper, playing through a scale, then it started ringing somewhere in Station A. Waiting, Cliff tried to picture Archy, but could bring back only an image of a thin twelve-year-old kid who tagged after Mike and him, asking questions, begging to be taken for space rides, looking up at him worshipfully.

The sound of Archy’s voice dispelled the images and brought a clear vision of a preoccupied adult face. “Yes?”

“Archy,” Cliff said, “you’re needed up at Pluto Project. It’s urgent. I haven’t time to explain. We have ten minutes to get going. I’ll meet you at the spacelock.”

He didn’t call Cliff “Chief” any more.

“I’m busy, Mr. Baker,” said the impersonal voice. “My time is taken up with composing, conducting and recording.”

“It’s a matter of life and death. I couldn’t get anyone else in time. You can’t refuse, Jughead.”

“I can.”

Cliff thought of kidnaping. “Where are you?”

The click of the phone was final. Cliff looked at the receiver in his hand, not hanging up. It was buzzing innocently. The intonations of Archy’s voice had been an alien singsong. “Where is Archy Reynolds?” Cliff said suddenly.

He gave the receiver a shake. It buzzed without answering. Cliff hung up jerkily. “How did you know?” he asked the inanimate phone.

Abruptly Cliff’s chrono went off, loudly ringing out the deadline. A little later, eighteen miles away in space his ship would automatically begin to apply jet brakes. After that moment there would not be another chance to take off for Pluto Station for seven hours. It was too late to do anything. There was no need to hurry now, no need to restrain questions and theories; he could do what he liked.

The Reynolds’ tapes. He was moving, striding down the hall, knowing he had himself under control, and his expression looked normal.

Someone caught hold of his sleeve. It was a stranger, meticulously dressed, looking odd in a place where no one wore much more than shorts.

“What?” Cliff asked abruptly, his voice strained.

The stranger raised his eyebrows. “I am from the International Business Machine Corporation,” he stated, being politely reproving. He stroked his brief case absently. “We have heard that a Martin Reynolds, late deceased, had developed a novel subject-indexing system—”

Cliff muttered impatiently, trying to move on, but the business agent was persistent. Presumably he was tired of being put off with jibbering. He gripped Cliff’s arm doggedly, talking faster.

“We would like to inquire about the patent rights—” The agent was brought to a halt by a sudden recognition of the expression on Cliff’s face.

“Take your hand off my arm,” Cliff requested with utmost gentleness, “I am busy.” The I.B.M. man dropped his hand hurriedly and stepped back.

Ten minutes later, McCrea, the South American, stuck his head into the reading room and saw Cliff sitting at a reference desk.

“Hi,” Cliff called tonelessly, without altering the icy speed with which he was taking numbers from a Reynolds decimal index chart and punching them into the selection panel. The speaker on the wall twittered unceasingly, like a quartet of canaries.

“Que pasa? What happens, I mean,” asked the librarian, smiling ingratiatingly.

Cliff hit the right setting. Abruptly all twittering stopped. Smiling tightly, Cliff reached for the standard Dewey-Whitehead index to the old library tapes. They were probably still latent in the machine somewhere. It wouldn’t take much to resurrect them and restore the station to something resembling a normal inanimate machine with a normal library, computer, and servomech system. Whatever was happening, it would be stopped.

The wall speaker clicked twice and then spoke loudly in Doc Reynolds’ voice.

“Sorry. You have made a mistake,” he said. But Doc Reynolds was dead.

In the next fraction of a second Cliff began and halted three wild incomplete motions, and then gripped the edge of the desk with both hands and made himself listen. It was only a record. Doc Reynolds must have set it in years before as a safeguard.

“This setting is dangerous to the control tapes,” said the recorded voice kindly. “If you actually need data on Motive-320 cross symbols 510.2, you had better consult me for a safe setting. If I’m not around you can get some help from either Mike Cohen or the kid. If you need Archy you’ll find him back in the tube banks, or in the playground at .5 G or—”

With a violent sweep of his arm, Cliff wiped the panel clean of all setting, and stood up.

“Thanks,” said the automatics mechanically. There was no meaning in the vodar voice. It always switched off with that word.

The little American touched his arm, asking anxiously, “Que pasa? Que tiene usted?”

Cliff looked down at his hands and found them shaking. He had almost wiped off the Reynold’s tapes with them. He had almost destroyed the old librarian’s life work, and crippled the automatic controls of Station A, merely from a rage and a wild unverified suspicion. The problem of the madness of Station A was a problem for a psychologist, not for a blundering engineer.

He used will in the right direction as Brandy had shown all the technicians of the station how to use it, and watched the trembling pass. “Nada,” he said slowly. Absolutamente nada. Go take in a movie or something while I straighten this mess out.” He fixed a natural smile on his face and headed for the control room.

Pierce was due to be passing the station in beam range.

Cliff had preferred taking the psychologist at face value, but now he remembered Pierce’s idle talk, his casual departure, apparently leaving nothing done and nothing changed, and added to that Spaceway’s known and immutable policy of hiring only the top men in any profession, and using them to their limit.

The duty of a company psychologist is a simple thing, to keep men happy on the job, to oil the wheels of efficiency and co-operation, to make men want to do what they had to do. If there were no visible signs of Pierce having done anything, it was only because Pierce was too good a craftsman to leave traces—probably good enough to solve the problem of Station A and straighten Archy out.

In the control room Cliff took a reading on Pierce’s ship from blinker buoy reports. In four minutes the station automatics had a fix on the ship and were trailing it with a tight light beam. “Station A calling flitter AK 48 M. Hi, Pierce.”

“Awk!” said a startled tenor voice from the wall speaker. “Is that Cliff Baker? I thought I left you back at Pluto. Can you hear me?” Behind Pierce’s voice Cliff could hear a murmur of other voices.

“I hear too many.”

“I’m just watching some stories. I’ve been bringing my empathy up with mirror training. I needed it. Association with you people practically ruined me as a psychologist. I can’t afford to be healthy and calm; a psychologist isn’t supposed to be sympathetic to square-headed engineers, he’s supposed to be sympathetic to unhealthy excitable people.”

“How’s your empathy rating now?” Cliff asked, very casually.

“Over a hundred per cent, I think,” Pierce laughed. “I know that’s an idiotic sensitivity, but it will tone down later. Meanwhile I’m watching these stereos of case histories, and living their lives so as to resensitize myself to other people’s troubles.” His voice sharpened slightly. “What did you call for?”

Cliff dragged the words out with an effort. “Something strange is happening to everybody. The way they talk is… I think it is in your line.”

“Send for a psychiatrist,” Pierce said briskly. “I’m on my vacation now. Anna and I are going to spend it at Manhattan Beach with the baby.”

“But the delay—”

“Are they in danger?” Pierce asked crisply.

“I don’t know,” Cliff admitted, “but they all—”

“Are they physically sick? Are they even unhappy?”

“Not exactly,” Cliff said unwillingly. “But it’s in a way it’s holding up Pluto Project.”

“If I went over now, I couldn’t reach Earth in time.”

“I suppose so,” Cliff said slowly, beginning to be angry, “but the importance of Station A and Pluto Station against one squealing baby—”

“Don’t get mad,” said Pierce with unexpected warmth and humor. “Anna and I think this is a special baby, it’s important too. Say that every man’s judgment is warped to his profession, and my warp is psychology. My family tree runs to psychology, and we are working out ways of raising kids to the talent. Anna is a first cousin; we’re inbreeding, and we might have something special in this kid, but he needs my attention. Can you see it my way, Cliff?” His voice was pleading and persuasive. “Communication research is what my family runs to, and communication research is what the world needs now. I’d blow up Pluto Station piece by piece for an advance in semantics! Cultural lag is reaching the breaking point, and your blasted space expansion and research are just adding more rings to the twenty-ring circus. It is more than people can grasp. They can’t learn fast enough to understand, and they are giving up thinking. We’ve got to find better ways of communicating knowledge in this generation, before it gets out of hand.” Pierce sounded very much in earnest, almost frightened. “You should see the trend curves on general interest and curiosity. They’re curving down, Cliff, all down.”

“Let’s get back to the subject,” Cliff said grimly. “What about your duty to Pluto Station?”

“I’m on my vacation,” said Pierce. “Send to Earth for a psychiatrist.”

“I thought you were supposed to be sympathetic! Over a hundred per cent you said.”

“Eye empathy only,” Pierce replied, a grin in his voice. “Besides, I’m still identified with the case in the stereo I’m watching, a very hard efficient character, not sympathetic at all.”

Cliff was silent a moment, then he said, “Your voice is coming through scrambled. Your beam must be out of alignment. Set the signal beam dial for control by the computer panel, and I’ll direct you.” Enigmatic scrapings and whirrings came over the thousands of mile beam to Pierce.

With a sigh he switched off the movie projector and moved to the control panel, where Cliff’s voice directed him to manipulate various dials.

“O.K. You’re all set now,” Cliff said. “Let’s check. You have the dome at translucent. Switch it to complete reflection on the sun side and transparency on the shadow side, turn on your overhead light and stand against the dark side.”

“What’s all this rigmarole?” Pierce grumbled. With the blind faith of a layman before the mysteries of machinery, he cut off the steady diffused glow of sunlight, and stood back against the dark side, watching the opposite wall. The last shreds of opacity faded and vanished like fog, and there was only black space flecked with the steady hot brightness of the distant stars. The bright shimmer of the parabolic signal-beam mirror took up most of the view. It was held out and up to the fullest extension of its metallic arm, so that it blocked out a six-foot circle of sky. Pierce looked at it with interest, wondering if he had adjusted it correctly. Its angle certainly looked peculiar.

As he looked, the irregular shimmering light began to confuse his eyes. He suddenly felt that there were cobwebs forming between himself and the reflector. Instinctively Pierce reached out a groping hand, squinting with the effort to see.

His eyes found the focus, and he saw his hand almost touching a human being!

The violence with which he yanked his hand back threw him momentarily off balance. He fought for equilibrium while his eyes and mind went through a wrenching series of adjustments to the sight of Cliff Baker, only three feet high, floating in the air within reach of his hand. The effort was too great. At the last split second he saved himself from an emotional shock wave by switching everything off. A blank unnatural calm descended, and he said:

“Hi, Cliff.”

The figure moved, extending a hand in a reluctant pleading gesture. Under the brilliant overhead light its expression looked strained and grim. “Pierce, Pierce, listen. This is trouble. You have to help.” There was no mistaking the sincerity of the appeal. To the trained perception of the psychologist the relative tension of every visible muscle was characteristic of tightly controlled desperation, but to the intensified responsiveness of his feelings the personality and attitude of Cliff Baker burned in like hot iron, shaping Pierce’s personality to its own image. Instinctively Pierce tried to escape the intolerable inpour of tension by crowding back against the wall, but the figure followed, expanding nightmarishly.

Then abruptly it vanished. It had been some sort of a stereo, of course. For a long moment the psychologist leaned against the curved wall with one hand guarding his face, waiting for his heart to find a steady beat again, and his thoughts to untangle.

“Over a hundred… a hundred per cent. Cliff, you don’t—What kind of a—”

“The projection?” The engineer’s voice spoke cheerfully from the radio. “Just one of the things you can do with a tight-beam parabolic reflector. Some of the boys thought it up to scare novices with, but I never thought it would be useful for anything.”

“Useful! Cliff!” Pierce protested. “You don’t know what you did!”

The engineer chuckled again. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said kindly. “I was trying something else. Eye empathy you said—How do you feel about finding out what’s wrong at Station A?”

“How do you expect me to feel?” Pierce groaned. “Go on, tell me what to do!”

“Come find out what it is, and cure them. And work on Archy Reynolds first.”

There was a long pause, and when Pierce spoke, his voice had changed again. “No, blast it! You can’t have me like that. I can’t just do what you want without thinking! It’s phony. No station full of people goes crazy together. I don’t believe it.”

“I saw it,” Cliff answered grimly.

“You say you saw it. And you force me to go to cure them—without explanation, without saying why it is important. What has it to do with Pluto Station? It isn’t like you to force anybody to do anything, Cliff. It’s not in your normal pattern! It isn’t like you to cover and avoid explanations.”

“What are you driving at?” Cliff said uneasily. “Let me tell you how to set the controls to head for Station A. You have to get here fast!”

“Covering up something. There’s only one situation I know of that would make you try to cover.” Pierce’s voice sharpened with determination. “It must have happened. Listen, Cliff, I’m going to give this to you straight. I know the inside of your head better than you do. I know how you feel about those fluent fast-talking friends of yours at the station and on the job. You’re afraid of them-afraid they’ll find out you’re just a dope. Something has happened at Pluto Station project, and it is still happening-something bad, and you think it is your fault, you don’t know it, but you feel guilty. You’re trying to cover up. Don’t do it. Don’t cover up!”

“Listen,” Cliff stammered, “I—”

“Shut up,” Pierce said briskly. “This is shock treatment. One level of your personality must have cracked. It would under that special stress. You had an inferiority complex a yard wide. You’re going to reintegrate fast on another level right now. File away what I said and listen for the next shock. You aren’t a dope. You’re an adjustable analogue.”

“A what?”

“An adjustable analogue. You think with kinesthetic abstractions. Other people are arithmetic computers. They think with arbitrarily related blocks of memorized audiovisual symbols. That’s why you can’t talk with them. Different systems.”

“What the devil—”

“Shut up. You’ll get it in a minute. I ought to know this. I was matched into your feelings for half an hour at a time at Pluto Station. It took me four days to figure out what happened. Your concepts aren’t visual, they are kinesthetic. You don’t handle the problems of dynamics and kinetics with arbitrary words and numbers related by some dead thinker, you use the raw direct experience that your muscles know. You think with muscle tension data. I didn’t dare follow you that far. Who knows what primitive integration center you have reactivated for it? I can’t go down there. My muscle tension data abstracts in the forebrain. That’s where I keep my motives and my ability to identify with other people’s motives. If I borrowed your ability, I might start identifying with can openers.”

“What the—”

“Pipe down,” said Pierce, still talking rapidly. “You’re following me and you know it. You aren’t stupid but you’re conditioned against thinking. You don’t admit half you know. You’d rather kid yourself. You’d rather be a humble dope and have friends, than open your eyes and be an alien and a stranger. You’d rather sit silent at a station bull session and kick yourself for being a dope, than admit that they are word-juggling, talking nonsense. Listen, Cliff-you are not a dope. You may not be able to handle the normal symbol patterns of this culture, but you have a structured mind that’s integrated right down to your boots! You can solve this emergency yourself. So what if your personality has been conditioned against thinking? Everybody knows the standard tricks for suspending conditioning. Put in cortical control, solve the problem first, whatever it is, and then be dumb afterward if that’s what you want!”

After a moment Cliff laughed shakily. “Shock treatment, your all it. Like being whacked over the head with a sledge hammer.”

“I think I owed you a slight shock,” Pierce said grimly. “May I go?”

“Wait a sec, aren’t you going to help?”

Pierce sounded irritable. “Help? Help what? You have more brains than I have, solve your own problems: Pull yourself together, Cliff, and don’t give me any more of this raving about a whole station full of people going bats! It’s not true!” He switched off.

Cliff sat down on the nearest thing resembling a chair, and made a mental note never to antagonize psychologists. Then he began to think.

Once upon a time the New York Public Library shipped a crate of microfilm to Station A. The crate was twenty by twenty by twenty and contained the incredible sum of the world’s libraries. With the crate they shipped a librarian, one M. Reynolds to fit the films into an automatic filing system so that a reader could find any book he sought among the uncounted other books. He spent the rest of his life trying to achieve the unachievable, reduce the system of filing books to a matter of perfect logic. In darker ages he would have spent his life happily arguing the number of bodiless angels that could dance on the point of a pin.

They became used to seeing him puttering around, assisted by his little boy, or reading the journal of symbolic logic, or, temporarily baffled, trying to clear his mind by playing games of chess, and cards, in which he beat all comers.

Once he grew excited by the fact that computers worked on a numerical base of two, and sound on the log of two. Once he grew interested in the station’s delicate system of automatic controls and began to dismantle it and change the leads. If he had made a wrong move, the station would have returned to its component elements, but no one bothered him. They remembered the chess games, and left the automatics to him. They were satisfied with the new reading desks, and after a while there was a joke that if you made a mistake they would give you a ham sandwich, and a joke that the automatics would deliver pretty girls and blow up if you asked for a Roc’s egg, but still no one realized the meaning of Doc Reynolds’ research.

After all, it was simply the proper classification of subjects, and a symbology for the library keyboard that would duplicate the logical relations of the subjects themselves. No harm in that. It would just make it easier for the reader to find books.

Once again Cliff stood under the deep assault of sound. This time it was tapes of two of Archy’s best jazz concerts, strong and wild. Once again the rhythms fitted themselves into the padded beat of his heart, the surge of blood in his ears, and other, more complex rhythms of the nerves, subtly-altering and speeding them in mimicry of the pulse of emotions, while flute notes played with the sound of Reynolds’ automatics, automatics impassioned, oddly fitting and completing the deeper surges of normal music.

Cliff stood, letting the music flow through him, subtly working on the pattern of his thought. Suddenly it was voices, a dreamlike clamor of voices surging up in his mind and closing over him in a great shout, and then passing, and then the music was just music, very good music with words. He listened calmly, with enjoyment.

It ended, and he left the room and went whistling down the corridor walking briskly, working off some energy. It was the familiar half ecstatic energy of learning, as if he had met a new clarifying generalization that made all thought much simpler. It kept hitting him with little sparks of laughter as if the full implication of the idea still automatically carried their chain reaction of integration into dim cluttered corners of his mind releasing them from redundancy and the weariness of facts.

He passed someone he knew vaguely, and lifted a hand in casual greeting.

“Reep beeb,” he said.

It was a language.

The people of Station A did not know that it was a language, they thought they were going pleasantly cuckoo, but he knew. They had been exposed a long time to the sound of Reynolds’ machines. Reynolds had put in the sound system and brought it down to audible range to help himself keep track of the workings of it, and the people of Station A for five years had been exposed to the sounds of the machine translating all their requests into its own symbolic perfect language, reasoning aloud with it, and then stating the answer in its own language before translating it back into action, or service, or English, or mathematics.

It had been an association in their minds, and latent, but when Archy included frequency symbol themes in his jazz, they had come away humming the themes, and it had precipitated the association. Suddenly they could not stop humming and whistling and clicking, it seemed part of their thought, and it clarified thinking. They thought of it as a drug, a disease, but they knew they liked it. It was seductive, irresistible, and frightening.

But to Cliff it was a language, emotional, subtle and precise, with its own intricate number system. He could talk to the computers with it.

Cliff sat before the computer panel of his working desk. He did not touch it. He sat and hummed to himself thoughtfully, and sometimes whistled an arpeggio like a Reynolds’ automatic making a choice.

A red light lit on the panel. Pluto had been contacted and had reported. Cliff listened to the spiel of the verbal report first as it was slowed down to normal speed. “I didn’t know you could reach us,” said the medico’. “Ole is dead. Smitty has one hand, but he can still work. Danny Orlando—Jacabson—” rapidly the doctor’s weary voice went through the list, reporting on the men and the hours of work they would be capable of. Then it was the turn of the machinery and orbit report. The station computer translated the data to clicks and scales and twitters, and slowly the picture of the condition of Pluto Station project built up in Cliffs mind.

When it was complete, he leaned back and whistled for twenty minutes, clicking with a clicker toy and occasionally blowing a chord on a cheap harmonica he had brought for the use, while the calculator took the raw formulas and extrapolated direction tapes for all of Pluto Station’s workers and equipment.

And then it was done. Cliff put away the harmonica, grinning. The men would be surprised to have to read their instructions from direction tapes, like mechanicals, but they could do it.

Pluto Station Project was back under control.

Cliff leaned back, humming, considering what had been done, and while he hummed the essentially musical symbology of the Reynolds’ index, sank deeper and deeper into his thoughts, translating their natural precision into the precision of pitch, edging all his thinking with music.

On Earth teemed the backward human race, surrounded by a baffling civilization, understanding nothing of it, neither economics nor medicine or psychology, most of them baffled even by the simplicity of algebra, and increasingly hostile to all thought. Yet through their days as they worked or relaxed, the hours were made pleasant to them by music.

Symphony fans listened without strain while two hundred instruments played, and would have winced if a single violin struck four hundred forty vibrations per second where it should have reached four hundred forty-five. Jazz fans listened critically to a trumpeter playing around with a tune in a framework of six incommensurable basic rhythms whose relative position shifted mathematically with every note. Jazz, symphony or both, they were all fans and steeped in it. Even on the sidewalks people walked with their expressions and stride responding to the unheard music of the omnipresent earphones.

The whole world was steeped in music. Saturated in music of a growingly incredible eloquence and complexity, of a precision and subtlety that was inexpressible in any other language or art, a complexity whose mathematics would baffle Einstein, and yet it was easily understandable to the ear, and to the trained sensuous mind area associated with it.

What if that part of the human mind were brought to bear on the simple problems of politics, psychology and science?

Cliff whistled slowly in an ordinary non-index whistle of wonderment. No wonder the people of Station A had been unable to stop. They hummed solving problems, they whistled when trying to concentrate, not knowing why. They thought it was madness, but they felt stupid and thick headed when they stopped, and to a city full of technicians to whom problem-solving was the breath of life, the sensation of relative stupidity was terrifying.

The language was still in the simple association baby-babbling stage, not yet brought to consciousness as a Language, not yet touching them with a fraction of its clarifying power-but it was raising their intelligence level.

Cliff had been whistling his thoughts in index, amused by the library machine’s reflex bookish elaboration of them, for its association preferences had been set up by human beings, and they held a distinct flavor of the personalities of Doc Reynolds and Archy. But now, abruptly the wall speaker said something absolutely original, phrased with brilliance and dogmaticism. “Why be intelligent? Why communicate when you are surrounded by cows? It would drive you even more bats to know what they think.” The remark trailed off and scattered in abstract references to nihilism, consensus, eternity and Darwin, which were obviously association trails added by the machine, but the central remark had been Archy himself. Somewhere in the station Archy was tinkering idly and unhappily with the innards of his father’s machine, whistling an unconsciously logical jazz counterpoint to one of the strands of twittering that bombarded his ears.

It was something like being linked into Archy’s mind without Archy being aware of it. Cliff questioned, and suggested topics. The flavor of the counterpoint was loneliness and anger. The kid felt that Cliff and Mike had deserted him in some way, for his father had died when he was in high school, and Cliff and Mike had long given up tutoring him and turned him over to his teachers. His father had died, and Cliff and Mike were not around to talk with or ask advice, so leaving Archy to discover in one blow of undiluted loneliness that his mental immersion in science and logic was a wall standing between him and his classmates, making it impossible to talk with them or enjoy their talk, making it impossible for his teachers to understand the meaning of his questions. Archy had reacted typically in three years of tantrum, in which he despairingly hated the world, hated theory and thinking, and sought opiate in girls, dancing, and a frenzied immersion in jazz.

He had not even noticed what his jazz had done to the people who listened.

Cliff smiled, remembering the abysmal miseries of adolescence, and smiled again. Everyone else in the station was miserable, too. There was Dr. Brandias, who should have been trying to solve the problem of the jazz madness, miserably turning over the pages of a light magazine in the next cubical, pretending not to notice Cliff’s strange whistling and harmonica blowing.

“Brandy.”

The medico looked up and flushed guiltily. “How are you doing, Cliff?”

“Come here. I’ve something to tell you.”

It began with a lesson tour, pointing and describing in index. It became a follow-the-leader with each action in turn described in index-and progressed.

The I.B.M. man doggedly looking for Archy Reynolds through the suddenly deserted station at last wandered into the huge gym at 1.3 G and was horrified to see Archy Reynolds and Cliff Baker leading the entire staff of Station A in a monstrous conga line. Archy Reynolds was beating a drum under one arm and clicking castanets with the other, while the big sober engineer blew weird disjointed tunes on a toy harmonica and the line danced wildly. The I.B.M. man shut his eyes, then opened them grimly.

“Mr. Reynolds,” he called. He was a brave man, and tenacious. “Mr. Reynolds.”

Archy stopped and the whole dance stopped with him in deadly silence, frozen in mid step.

“What can I do for you?”

The I.B.M. man pulled three reels of tape from his brief case. “Senor McCrea showed me Dr. Reynolds’ basic tapes, and I took a transcription. Now about the patent rights-” He took a deep breath and swung his glance doggedly across the host of watching faces back to the lean impassive face of the young man who held the rights to the Reynolds’ tapes. “Could we discuss this in private?”

Instead of replying, the young man exchanged a glance with Cliff Baker, and they both began whistling rapidly, then Archy Reynolds stepped back with a gesture of dismissal and Cliff Baker turned, smiling.

“One condition,” he said, the intonations of his deep, hesitant voice as alien as the voices of all others of the station, although earlier in the hall he had sounded comparatively sane to the I.B.M. man. “Only one condition, that I.B.M. leave the sound-frequency setup Reynolds has in his plans at audible volume, no matter how useless the yeeps seem to an engineer. Except for that, it’s all yours.” He smiled oddly and began whistling again, and the people in the lines behind him began restlessly swaying from one foot to another. Archy Reynolds began to pound on his drum.

“What?” gasped the I.B.M. man.

“You can have the patent rights,” Cliff replied over the din. “It’s all yours!”

The dance was beginning again, the huge line slowly mimicking the actions of the leaders. As the I.B.M. man hesitated at the door, staring back at the strange sight, Cliff Baker was showing his wife some intricate step, and the others mimicked in pairs.

The big engineer glanced toward the door, hesitated and hummed, clicked and whistled weirdly in a moment of complete stillness, then threw back his head and laughed. All eyes in the assemblage swiveled and came to rest on the I.B.M. man, and all through the hall there was a slow chuckle’ of laughter growing toward a howl.

Madness!

He stumbled through the door and fled, carrying in his brief case a new human race.

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