IZZARD AND THE MEMBRANE

BY WALTER M. MILLER, JR.

The computing machine had considerable ability — but there was something besides a computer at work on that haunted machine! And moreover, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts!

Illustrated by Rogers

Scotty MacDonney was one of the Americans trapped in Europe when the sudden and unexpected eruption of uprisings boiled up out of the underground like angry lava. Simultaneously with the local revolutions, the Red Wave began rolling in from the East. But before it reached Paris, Scotty was already enjoying the tender mercy of the local revolutionaries. They had seized him almost as soon as the first shot was fired. They knew his potential value to their cause. They also knew that "converting" him would be a long and difficult task. But they had plenty of time. Their prophets always promised that time was on their side.

Scotty was a cyberneticist, with incidental degrees in electronic engineering and physiological psychology. He had designed several new and improved calculating machines for American industry. He had invented a synaptic relay for the giant electronic "brain," and it was actually an improvement over a living neuron's all-or-none principle. And he had developed a new method in remote control of guided, missiles. His importance to an American war effort was vaguely but not completely realized by the American government.

It was fully understood by the proponents of a new-era.

When the scarlet tide had rushed across the hills and fields of France, Scotty was taken east, to a city where soft snow gathered on strange Byzantine domes whose pointed peaks speared at the chill winter sky ; a city where East met West in a subtle transfusion of wisdom and savagery.

Scotty was in his late thirties. He was muscular, but not massive. His face was angular with a kind of handsome ugliness. He was generally calm, patient, easy-going — the practical scientist, with a normal family life. He had married well, and had been thoroughly settled with his wife and two children in an Ohio university town.

He anticipated nervously that when his captors were done with him, he would be gray, broken, and reduced to a warped and schizophrenic shadow of his former self. He even suspected that they would make threats against his family, for it was well-known that there were plenty of agents in America capable of carrying out the threats.

He certainly didn't anticipate what really happened.

He was given an elegant, but well-guarded, suite of rooms in one of the best hotels. He was visited by high dignitaries of their government; they promised that he would not be abused as an enemy alien. Not borscht but caviar, not water but champagne amused his palate. He was offered various kinds of sensual pleasures, but—although idleness was beginning to whet his appetite—he turned them down, thinking of Nora and the children.

Nora, with the pale cloud of hair, with the dreamer's eyes, with the willowy body that could stretch so languorously. He began to think of her so much, so frequently, and so fervently, that he began to carefully taste the strange and exotic foods, examining them for any slight bitter or metallic flavor that might suggest drugs. Nora was constantly in his thoughts ; and when a commisar brought his beautiful wife, then was forced to leave by a sudden phone call, Scotty remained restlessly chaste, although the woman had obviously been ordered to entertain him. His captors complimented him for his devotion to family. Their compliments both pleased him and increased his determination to avoid the pitfalls they offered.

They shrugged, smiled with their Oriental eyes, and promised to keep him occupied in other ways. Workmen were sent to tear out a section of wall in each of his rooms. Frosted glass panels were installed in the sections. "Movie screens," they told him, "with projectors behind the walls."

Why behind the walls? he wondered.

Then they covered the screens with heavy, transparent plastic panels. Scotty read a Slavic trademark on one of the panels. It said, "Unbreakable."

Why?

He was stretched out in a soft chair one evening, reading a Russian work on cybernetics, when the loudspeakers crackled slightly. He glanced up. They had turned the amplifiers on. Then, soft recorded music flooded the room, a lovely Russian symphony.

The screen flickered on. The scene was a bedroom—and a sudden chill gripped him. It was his wife's bedroom. From the angle of view, he reasoned that the camera was concealed in a ventilator. There was Nora's purse on the dressing table, her manicure set, her brushes and combs. On the pillows was the familiar giant Teddy bear. Everything was the same.

He stood up and anxiously paced the floor. What were they trying to do? Drive him insane with nostalgia?

Then something moved onto the screen. He froze in his tracks and stared. It was Nora!

She moved to the dressing table and sat down to brush her hair. She used the same long gliding strokes as always. And by the slow moving of her lips, he could tell that she was humming a tune. She arranged her hair carefully, then applied make-up. When she was through, she moved to the closet and selected a dress.

It was an evening gown!

Scotty slumped down in the chair again, too weak to stand. He felt more than a trace of bitterness and disappointment. With her husband a prisoner in an enemy nation, with two children to care for, she was wearing evening gowns. He got one last glimpse of her face before she moved out of the room. It was a happy face.

The scene shifted to the hallway. The camera was looking downward and toward the door. Nora appeared, hag in hand, ethereal in the white, gown and with a golden chain binding her long ashen hair. The music became romantic. She opened the door. There stood a beautifully tailored tuxedo, with a man inside it. He stepped inside, smiling, and gave her a corsage.

Scotty, stricken though he was, recognized the man. He was a government official, very handsome, and noted for his amatory successes. He had also been investigated by a senatorial committee, but charges of subversion had been dropped.

Nora opened the orchids, laughed with pleasure, then kissed the man lightly. Then they went out into the evening. The door closed like an exclamation point. The screen went dark.

And for three hours, it stayed as dark as the black depths of Scotty's heart. He shouted curses at his captors, but none answered him.

The music wandered into a classical theme, then into Russian symphony—music of the clenched fist, of sprawling factories, of mechanized peasantry toiling for a cause. Then martial airs—the roar of mighty squadrons over Red Square, ponderous tanks rolling along the streets in full parade—all serious, all determined, all purposive. Then after three hours:

"Woodaddy hoogaddy zoop! My baby's in the soup!"

The sudden savage howl of American jazz. It beat at the eardrums and frayed jangled nerves. The veins in his temples were already pounding with his own inner misery.

The screen became bright again—the same scene, the same closed door. Scotty waited tensely.

The door opened. Nora staggered in, obviously tipsy. The man followed. Then another man. It was a congressman, a friend of Scotty's! His reputation was impeccable. He stood just inside the door, talking to them with occasional laughter. Then he nodded good night, stepped outside.

When he shut the door, it seemed to Scotty that the American government had offered its blessings upon Nora and the other man.

Nora laughed with sudden abandon and began skipping about the hall in a wild dance, like the complete self-release of a marijuana addict. The man was watching with a grin. Suddenly she threw herself upon him, and they clutched at each other in a rocking, wrenching embrace. Scotty could bear no more of it. He clenched his lids together until his eyes ached.

A shift in the music to something low and pulsing made him steal another glance in the hope that the screen was dead. But the act had shifted to the bedroom, and it was one of such utter depravity and horror that Scotty ran out of the room, shouting hoarsely. But in the next room, the same scene confronted him. He threw himself on the floor, closed his eyes, and became violently ill.

For a week the persecution continued. The same picture over and over again, interspersed with Russian newsreels showing troops on the march, factories turning out war planes, high leaders at the conference table. Then the howl of jazz again, and the awful horror. Of course he didn't watch, but it was there, and he knew what it was, and even with his eyes closed, he could see the flicker of the screen through his lids. And the music told him what was happening. For the week he was left entirely alone. His food was pushed through a slot in the door. No one answered his shouts.

Then they came and told him that there would be a new set of pictures for the following week—on exactly the same subject. Only this time, they said, he would catch a glimpse of his children's faces as they peered around a doorway and saw their mother.

It was enough. They asked nothing of him. But he told them what he would do for them. He would build them the machine that would win the war. He begged and pleaded with them. They were polite, but reluctant. How did they know he could be trusted? No, he would have to wait until they discussed it with the politburo.

And so, he enjoyed another week of the amusing films.

When he tried to kill himself, they decided that he was ready. In two weeks he had lost twenty pounds. His eyes were bleary and wild. When they let him out of the suite, he fainted with relief. They carried him to a psychologist for indoctrination.

Yes, yes, he believed in all they had to say. Yes, yes, his country was a degenerate imperialist nation. Yes, yes, it was time for the ultimate in revolutions. Yes! Anything! Let him build them something that would do everything from A to Izzard.

And that's what he called it: the Izzard.

They gave him to Porshkin, cyherneticist for the cause, a brutal, bearded man, who treated him to rough threats and verbal abuse, who criticized his scientific theories according to political dogma. But Scotty moved as through a daze, treating his colleague with deference, and working long hours with dull plodding intensity.

They allowed him a certain amount of freedom. He was carefully guarded from a distance. A man in plain clothes followed him through the snow as he walked to the laboratory at dawn and returned at sundown to his apartment. Guards were posted near him wherever he went, but they never molested or even approached him.

He devoted all of his thoughts to the project, and it kept him from being maddeningly lonely.

The Izzard was a gigantic "electronic brain." Its instrument and control panels were erected in a huge subterranean vault, and their length covered three hundred feet of walls. Another vault of equal size was built to house its memory units. A factory behind the Urals devoted itself to the manufacture of special parts according to Scotty's design. Vacuum tubes the size of peas were used for synapses, but they weren't actually tubes at all. There were to be more of them than there were cells in three human brains.

It was not to be a calculator, although it had a math unit too. It's logic and semantic circuits were to solve problems in economics, military strategy, political science, human psychology, sociology, and—cybernetics. The machine would be able to analyze itself, and suggest changes. It could plot the courses of guided missiles from radio signals sent while in flight.

It had two sets of memory units, one permanent, and one for temporary, erasable material. The permanent set was quickly built and powered, so that several thousand workers could begin translating the entire contents of large libraries and feeding them into the machine. The semantics and logic circuits were assembled and made ready for use before the other circuits were even begun. They were to provide a first test. Although, by themselves, they would be able to do little more than give ergo's to simple syllogisms.

Europe was still solidifying itself under the new rule, and the two warring powers were still sparring timidly at each other across the Atlantic on the night that Porshkin and Scott MacDonney stood alone in the long, high-ceilinged vault of concrete, and made ready for the tests under the glaring lights that flooded down from overhead. They were alone, because the test was clandestine. Failure would be a deadly mistake, not to he tolerated by the fist held clenched above them. If the test was a success, nothing would be said —and high officials would be invited to see the second "first test."

Porshkin was muttering nervously in his beard, and shouting spurts of advice at the calmer Scott, who moved thoughtfully from panel to panel checking instruments, adjusting dials, jotting careful notes in a black notebook. Porshkin stalked around after him like a chained bear, peering suspiciously at the notes, disclaiming responsibility. His bull voice filled the long hall with angry echoes.

"Son of a capitalist! Brother of a capitalist!" he roared. "You suckled on imperialistic milk! You are soaked in it from childhood! The fools! They think to change the very fiber of your brain in a few short months! But I, Porshkin, know the marrow of the brain! You are still a capitalist swine!"

And Scott MacDonney went on peering calmly at dials, jotting, studying, adjusting—and ignoring the mastodon with the fiery eyes, who stalked relentlessly at his heels.

"I can see it in the way you take notes!" the bear growled. "You write numbers like a monk writes prayers in a holy book! You are full of 'sacred' ideas! I, Porshkin, who am born a materialist, see it in your mind! You think you're making a god! Why don't you build it an altar?"

Scotty moved calmly to the master circuit breakers, which controlled all the power to the lab. One small set handled only the sunlight lamps that made the vault a pit of daytime. The other set was to control the power to the intellect circuits. The memory units were powered individually, as a precaution against forgetting, for setting the permanent memories was a long, hard process.

"They blame me when you fail," Porshkin snarled. "They let you spend the people's money upon this folly! You stumbler! You capitalist! May you be the first they shoot! When they shoot us both, I shall watch you die!"

Scotty checked his earlier calculations. The semantics and logic circuits alone should require an even hundred kilowatts of power. He had spent hours checking the figure. But he set the breakers to trip on one hundred and twenty kilowatts, just to be sure. Then he pressed the switch that activated the breaker-closing mechanisms.

The only sounds in the vault were Porshkin's hoarse, wet breathing, and the whine of the motors that pulled the breaker contacts closer and closer together in their enclosed tub of oil.

Scotty turned to look at Izzard's long black rows of panels. He had come to love the machine. He thought of nothing else, not even of the practical end to which it would be put. The war was forgotten. Other things forgotten, too. Izzard was his creature, his giant baby, his to train and to teach, to have and to hold, as he might a human child—or had he ever known any human children? Sometimes, sometimes it was hard to remember.

Suddenly, there was a loud whack! The breakers had opened again! The accompanying surge fed back into the lighting circuits. Their breakers opened. The vault was plunged in inky blackness, save for a dying, violet glow from Izzard's air vents. The darkness smelled of oil as vapor hissed from pressure valves on the tubes.

A roar of rage came from Porshkin's throat, and Scotty heard his meaty arms beating at the air as he tried to find his despised colleague. Scotty ducked low and crept away along the rows of panels. Porshkin howled insults and threats in his native tongue while he heat at the darkness in search of Scotty.

Scotty deliberately kicked the baseboard of a panel, to draw the bull away from the switch. Then he made a slow and quiet circle as he heard Porshkin lumbering toward the sound. He reached the breakers. He worked quickly, moving the breaker setting up a quarter turn. That would correspond to a hundred and fifty kilowatts. If Izzard demanded that much, it would damage the circuits after half an hour of heating. But he would have a few minutes to locate the trouble.

Porshkin heard the setting change. His footsteps beat across the concrete floor. Scotty left the lighting breaker open, but started the motors again. Then he called a taunting curse at the raging hunter and ran toward the semantics panel to attract Porshkin away from the breakers.

But it spelled his downfall. Porshkin, following the loud footsteps, was suddenly upon him. His mighty hands caught Scotty's head like a football, crushed, pressed him to his knees, then forced backward. Scotty felt the vertebrae popping in his neck.

"Izzard!" he managed to gasp. "It's on! It works! Let go!"

The Russian did not release him nor relax the pressure of his hands. But he looked around at the panels. Scotty could see him looking, because the floor was bathed in the purple glow of incandescent mercury vapor from Izzard's vents. Porshkin said nothing. But after a moment he flung Scotty away from him like something discarded, and went to look in the panels. Scotty picked himself up and tried to work his neck back in place.

Then he hurried to the breakers, cut on the blinding lights, and noted the input power.

It stood at nearly one-forty-four! Izzard was drawing forty-some per cent overload. It seemed unthinkable that such a relatively simple calculation as power-demand had been that far in error. If he missed it that much on power, how much had he missed it on delicate circuit calculations? It shocked him. He didn't care about being executed for failure; it was the failure itself that bothered him. For he was like a doctor, delivering his own child into the world.

But there was no time for idle musing. He moved back to the panels. Porshkin resumed his curses and condemnations.

"Give me a hand, if you want to save your skin," Scotty told him quietly.

The Russian fell silent. "You know what's wrong?" he asked in a more subdued tone.

"No. We've got about twenty minutes to find out. You keep an eye on the temperature gauges. When they get close to the red, warn me. We'll cut it off."

Porshkin obeyed, but began grumbling under his breath. Scotty quickly jotted down the power readings in each individual circuit. Some were just what they should be. Others were one hundred per cent high!

"Hey!" he called. "Watch these in particular! They're on double demand."

Porshkin scowled at him. Scotty peered in through the vents at the mercury arcs. The ones supposedly overloaded were glowing no more brightly than the others. He checked readings on all meters. Nothing was off but power and its components. It seemed impossible.

Fifteen minutes had passed. "How's the temperature?" he called. "The double-loaders should be in the red."

Porshkin shook his head and sneered. Then he returned his gaze to the panels and put on a sarcastic smirk amid his stiff black beard. Scotty paused in suspicion. Then he backed away to check them himself.

Every needle rested on the thin black line marked: Operating Temperature!

"Heh heh!" the Russian chuckled. Suddenly he could no longer restrain himself. He filled his barrel-chest with air, arched his back, and rocked with wild, explosive laughter that filled the vault with ringing echoes.

Scotty was no longer interested in human reactions to his work. Izzard was his baby. It was all that mattered. While Porshkin roared, Scotty found a metal stool and began totaling the individual power readings. The total checked with the meter at the breaker.

He looked at Izzard again. The temperature of the units remained a safe constant. But if the added power wasn't being dissipated as heat loss, then where was it going? Offhand, he could think of but one answer: radiation.

He arose and started out of the vault. Porshkin stopped laughing.

"Hey, Mr. Blunderer ! Where you going?"

"Stock room!" Scotty snapped over his shoulder.

The stock room was a mile-long tunnel that encircled the other vaults. An, electric truck ran along a pair of rails that carried it around the entire circle. Scotty climbed in and drove to the instrument room. He loaded half a dozen X-ray plates, an ultraviolet light meter, several meters for the radio bands, and, after some hesitation, a Geiger counter.

It struck him, as he went back to the vault, that if forty-four kilowatts were being dumped into the ultraviolet or the X-ray bands, that he and Porshkin should by now be blistered corpses—or at least well on their way to that end. And if it was going into radio-frequency, somebody from upstairs would be sending down troops to turn it off—lest American aircraft pick up the beam and home on it.

That, the Geiger should register anything seemed equally incredible, simply because of Izzard's make-up. Nevertheless, he checked it first. Nothing—only a stray occasional click—and that was because the vaults had once been used for storing bombs.

Porshkin was telling him quite forcefully that he was crazy, and that his warped capitalist brain could not even figure the power in a radio set.

Scotty checked the other instruments. There was some ultraviolet from the mercury arcs—five hundred watts at most. There was perhaps a watt or two scattered over the radio bands. He took the meters back to stock, and began developing the plates. Nothing there, either.

Was Porshkin right? Was he losing his grip? He had seen two brilliant scientists do that. Suddenly they couldn't even add a pair of vectors correctly, or even a list of numbers.

He wandered back to the vault, and his heart said, "No, you haven't made a mistake." But there it was—right on the instruments.

"What now, Mr. Godmaker?" chuckled the Russian.

Scotty went to the control panel. The switch was in the "question" position. He pushed it to the "answer" position to let the circuits clear themselves of any spurious "ideas." Two dials spun half a turn to zero, and an automatic typewriter clicked out a line of nonsense syllables. That was all; and it was as it should be.

"Whoops!" cried Porshkin as if in surprise. "Power fell off." Scotty backed up and looked. When he threw the switch, Izzard had stopped gobbling power. Why? It should actually use more power on "answer." It could still wait until tomorrow. Temperature was the real factor. He went back to the controls, and sat at the keyboard which was part of the logic circuits. Porshkin came to look over his shoulder as he pressed the switch back to "question." Scotty typed a simple query. "What is your name?"

He touched the switch again. A few relays clicked. With lightning rapidity Izzard searched through her small memory unit of proper names. The keyboard clacked of its own accord.

"Ans: My name is Izzard Electro-Synaptic Analyzer."

Porshkin rumbled about the impropriety of teaching her to say "Izzard," and what the commissar would think. But Scotty only half-heard him; he was too elated over the response. With trembling fingers he tried another.

"All crows are black. Sammy is a crow. Analyze, please."

And, after the usual moment of operating noises, Izzard replied: "Ergo: Sammy is black. Qualified by operational query: What is a Sammy?"

Scotty chuckled happily and patted the panel. The query meant she was playing safe, the way he wanted her to do. She wanted to make sure that a Sammy could be a crow. The Marxian dialecticians wouldn't be able to tell her that a circle was a square and have her believe it. She scanned her memories in search of false propositions, and she found "Sammy" under "Men's Names."

He gave her a reply. "Operational query noted. Enter following answer in learned-memory. Namely: Human organisms sometimes apply human proper names to nonhuman objects and organisms."

The reply apparently satisfied her. She would need to learn a lot of little things like that, Scotty thought.

Scotty was in love at first speech. He had made her, and she would be perfect, and she was his creature.

He made a few other tests with more complicated syllogisms and triads. Her responses were flawless.

It was enough for the first test. He was like a child, afraid of wearing out the fascination of a new plaything. Even Porshkin was grudgingly pleased. He wanted to teach Izzard to play chess for the commissars' amusement when they made the official unveiling.

They shut off the machine and took the elevator to the surface. The lift always stopped between levels, and its occupants were required to go through a long identifying procedure for the secret police. At the top level, they were stripped, searched, and fluoroscoped by a detachment of guards before they moved out into the streets.

It was a bright moonlight night. As Scotty turned on his lonely way homeward, he noticed a man hovering in the shadows of an alley. Then the figure disappeared into a dark doorway. It startled him at first. But he was in a rooming-house district. Probably an insomniac had stepped out for a breath of night air.

He glanced behind him. His guard was plodding along as usual, a block to the rear. Scotty shrugged and turned his thoughts again to Izzard.

The power-puzzle gnawed at his mind. If the new circuits, not yet connected, showed a similar appetite, he would have to heavy up on the main lines and the breakers. The state wouldn't like that, because it spelled mistake, and even the greenest engineer should be able to avoid a mistake like that. But that worried him less than did the problem itself. Forty kilowatts of power didn't just vanish. They had to steal away as some form of energy—heat, chemical, electromagnetic, or mechanical. But it obviously wasn't any of those. Could Izzard be converting energy into matter?

He made a few mental calculations. Forty-four kilowatts was the equivalent of matter being born at about the rate of two micrograms per hour—an infinitesimally small quantity. It seemed impossible, but there wasn't any way to check it. His musings began to lead him into the realm of metaphysics. Then he remembered something. When Izzard was completed, she might be able to diagnose her own ailment. He would wait and see.

He was approaching the intersection of his own street. A car was parked on the opposite corner. He had seen it there several times. It had the black-curtained windows of a government limousine, but never had he seen anyone around it. Porshkin had once whispered, "OGPU, Mr. Godmaker! They guard your sacred hide." But the car bore no markings, and it could easily have been an industrialist's staff car. He started to turn the corner.

Spang! Chipped concrete stung his face. A fleeing bullet made hornet sounds. Instinctively, Scotty dropped prostrate in the building's shadow'. From somewhere across the street, a voice called out in a Slavic accent.

"If you're still alive, traitor, let me tell you something. You're wife wasn't—"

A sudden blast of machine-gun fire drowned the voice. The explosions made lightning-flashes in the murky street. Glass tinkled to the sidewalk from a third-story window. A car door slammed and two uniformed men ran toward tote sniper's building. With drawn revolvers, they disappeared up a stairway. A third man hurried from the limousine toward Scotty, who began picking himself up from the concrete.

"Are you hurt, comrade?"

Scotty shook his head, and peered at the man's face. He recognized him as a high police commissioner.

"We have been expecting this," the man told him. "But we weren't certain when it would happen. The underground has had you marked for assassination. Our agents fortunately discovered the plot."

Scotty brushed himself off in silence.

"I think we got him with the first burst," the commissioner went on. "Did you hear him call to you?"

Scotty hesitated. He had heard, but the police agent seemed, to be watching him peculiarly.

"I guess I was too frightened. What did he say?"

The commissar shrugged and seemed to relax. "It sounded to me like he said—`Your life wasn't worth —' and then we got him."

A muffled shot came from the building across the street. It was as if the pistol had been pressed against its target. The coup de grace, Scotty guessed.

"These assassins are never worth questioning," the commissioner explained. "The swine that send them know they'll be caught. So they use new recruits who know nothing at all. We questioned one once. You won't believe it, but he'd never even seen another underground member. He picked ip his orders out of gutters, and on restaurant menus—with underlined words."

The uniformed men reappeared in the street. Their guns were in their holsters, and they were chuckling and talking in low voices. They saluted the commissioner and reported.

"He's dead, sir."

"Any identification?"

"No, sir. Nothing in his clothes. All fillings chipped out of his teeth. Their surgeons took off his nose and ears, scarred up his cheeks. Hands and feet burned, as usual."

The commissioner explained to Scotty. "They're fanatics. They go over their hands and feet with a blowtorch. Then they let them fester so we can't get fingerprints. They're half dead of infection when they're ready for a sniping job. No wonder they can't shoot too straight."

Scotty shivered. "May I go now, commissioner?" he asked. "I've been working since dawn."

The commissioner bowed slightly. "Certainly, comrade. And don't fear another attack. We'll double your guard." He looked suddenly startled. "Where is your guard?"

Scotty shook his head.

"Boris!" the commissioner snapped. "Find him!"

One of the men slipped around the corner.

"They undoubtedly knifed him," the commissioner sighed. "They expected him, but not us."

Scotty nodded good night and moved away.

"If you feel in danger, call me," the commissioner shouted after him. "Mention your name to the operator and ask for Colonel Mischa Varnoff."

"Thanks!" Scotty called curtly. He plodded slowly homeward through the moonlight.

The next week was heavy with despondency. Ghost-words kept murmuring in his mind, like multiple echoes between sheer cliffs of fate's cold granite—but unlike echoes, for they would not die away. Traitor, your wife wasn't . . . Traitor, your wife wasn't . . . Traitor, your wife …

Wasn't what? Wasn't a treacherous, despicable, degenerate wretch? Bah! He had seen it, and he had seen the congressman condone the thing. What sort of country was it, where elected officials winked at the despoiling of a captured patriot's family?

His conviction of her wretchedness was unshakable, but the assassin's mocking cry had stirred up old dregs, had summoned up Old memories that would be better left buried in the dark abysses of unconsciousness. He thought of his children—Cathy and Bob. He thought of the green hills of Ohio, of the cornfield's sweet smell in the sun and the breeze.

And he had more time on his hands now. The work was moving along by itself. The trial-and-error stage, the design-and-experiment stage—they were over. Nearly a million men were engaged in preparing Izzard for her many tasks. The work was laid out for them. And Scotty's job was now hardly more than a supervisory one. He had no official authority, but his intellect had unlimited control.

Most of his spare moments were spent at the keyboard. He talked to Izzard as father chats with daughter. He told them that he was checking her memory for omitted material. But he was really only chatting with a friend, although he knew she was merely an unconscious intellect. For consciousness needed sensory receptors—eyes, ears, things to feel with. She gave the illusion of consciousness, because he had fitted first and second person pronouns into her memory. But their use was purely automatic.

A thought struck him one evening as he sat at the keyboard. Weren't her controls sensory receptors? Wasn't her very keyboard a listening ear? Quickly, he asked her a question.

"Are you aware of your own existence?"

Her reply was slow in coming. He waited for ten minutes while she searched her memory units and tried to piece together an answer from an enormous number of possible concept-combinations. He pitied her in a way—for her psychological circuits were not yet connected. She was trying to solve it by logic alone. At last the keys began typing out words.

"Answer indeterminant. Only relevant memory, (sic) 'Cogito, ergo sum,' quoted from Descartes, memory unit LP-7. Operational query: Can human individual's self-awareness transor be mechanically duplicated?"

Scotty stared at the reply nervously. "Cogito, ergo sum"—the scientist Descartes' answer to philosophers who claimed that even the individual's own existence couldn't be proved—"I think, gentlemen. Therefore: I am."

But it didn't prove anything. Even Izzard knew that. It was the operational query that really bothered Scotty. He didn't even know what it meant. Where had she got concepts like that?

"Postpone query," he told her. "Define `transor! Define 'self-awareness transor.' Read related memories."

She replied quickly. "Definition: A transor is a tensor with a complex number of components. Definition: A self-awareness transor is the mathematical function which describes the specific consciousness pattern of one human, individual. Related memories: A tensor is a transor with a 'real' number of components. A vector is a tensor with only two or three components. A scalar is a tensor with a single component, i.e., a scalar is a simple number."

Scotty sat frozen in the presence of the unknown. Izzard had access to her mathematical memory units, although she didn't have the proper circuits to work problems yet. Even so—Scotty knew very well that this strange business about transors hadn't been put in her permanent memory. She would soon be equipped to handle tensors and vectors, but transorsi—who had even heard of them?

"Locate transor-definition," he told her.

"Memory unit T-KJ-6," she replied.

Scotty didn't need to check the unit's location. The code letters placed it. The T stood for temporary. The other letters were vault co-ordinates. Somebody had fed the information into her temporary units —after the last time Scotty had been at the keyboard. A wave of suspicion engulfed him, and the feeling was akin to jealousy.

But where in all Eurasia was a mathematician who could give her such a concept? For months he had been seeking staff-mathematicians who could do something more than count on their fingers. The State had backed him up, but the search was fruitless. Yet, here Izzard had a learned memory that was beyond Scotty's own knowledge. An underground scientist? Impossible! The OGPI: took too many precautions to keep others out of the vaults.

Suddenly the keyboard began clicking again. Izzard was continuing her report.

"Disregard postponed operational query. Answer is now available to me. Unit T-KJ-7."

Scotty was breathing heavily. Those units could only be stocked from outside the machine. Izzard had another set of units in which to remember things she figured out for herself. He certainly hadn't touched the keyboard. And there wasn't any other keyboard.

"Give answer to postponed operational query," he commanded. "List and locate all of your memory-intake devices."

He doubted that she could do the latter, without access to the cybernetics circuits. But if she did do it, then it would mean she was conscious, and that her controls and keyboards were really sense organs.

Her answer began. "Yes, human individual's self-awareness transor can be mechanically duplicated." Then she began listing each of her controls by their exact vault coordinates. She named all of them, but added an extra one as well.

Scotty left the keyboard, trembling slightly. If Porshkin had secretly added another keyboard, he would—

He was raging inwardly as he followed the lettered lines on the floor. They led him to a blank wall that separated the thinking circuits from the memory units. The point described by the co-ordinates lay buried in three feet of solid concrete.

He went back to the keyboard and made her repeat it. There was no mistake.

It was too much for one day. He opened the breakers and put Izzard to sleep. Then he went to the job office and wrote up a work order . "Cut circular hole of three meter diameter through partition K. Center at co-ordinates LH-5. Plaster the rim." He paused for a moment, then wrote : "Reason—to provide leakage path through structural steel contained in partition."

The "reason" was nonsense, but it would pass without question. Porshkin would see it, but his ego wouldn't let him ask about it for fear of appearing ignorant. Unless! If Porshkin, or someone else connected with the, State, had planted something in that wall—then the work order would bounce like a hot check.

Scotty mentally postponed the matter, and as he walked homeward, he tried to piece together the significance of what Izzard had told him.

Her discussion of "self-awareness transors" amounted to just one thing, as he saw it. It amounted to a mathematical definition of something that makes a man himself and not someone else. It was a definition of some elusive human quality, or quantity, which men had once labeled "the soul." And she said that it could be mechanically duplicated:

Her listing of her own control mechanisms meant that she had consciousness, and that the mechanisms were equivalent to sense organs. They gave her information—just like eyes or ears.

What, he asked himself, would happen if the "soul" of one specific man were mechanically duplicated? He put the enigma out of his mind until the following day.

The newspapers were finding it suddenly fashionable to wear banner headlines. Scotty had picked up enough Russian to read them, although he seldom did so. But now, the front pages were covered with stories of mass bombing raids along the American North-Atlantic coastline. The war in Alaska had moved to the second page.

With a kind of horrified fascination, he began reading the accounts of the air raids. An aerial photo showed a giant luminous mushroom blossoming over New York's skyline. The caption said, "The Fate of Wall Street." He felt the pit of his stomach sagging.

The mass raids were a prophecy. The politburo was getting ready for the trans-Atlantic bridgehead, a direct sea-land strike at the industrial area of New England. And he, Scott MacDonney, held the key to the bridgehead gates! For Izzard, when completed, would map out the course of the entire invasion, keep running inventories of all pertinent events, and make strategic changes when necessary!

It was hard for him to think of Izzy as a cold and calculating military strategist. She seemed more like a curious little girl, a super-normally intelligent child. A child that would soon learn to kill.

Izzard's vault was ringing with the chatter of pneumatic drills when Scotty entered on the following day. Workmen were busily boring through the wall where Izzard claimed her "sixth sense" lay. Porshkin was also in the vault, supervising the setting in place of two new circuit-units for the widening of Izzy's scope of interest. Scotty noted that they were the math unit and the military strategy unit. He went over to inspect them.

Porshkin turned on him in lip-curling fury. He shot out a stubby finger toward the noisy drillers, and the finger waggled like a recoiling pistol barrel.

"What is this nonsense business?" he bellowed. "What you drilling? Oil wells yet? How I hear myself yell at my men? How?"

"You're doing all right," Scotty told him. It was the first time he'd heard the Russian lapse into a strong accent—except the night he was furious enough to break unconsciously back into his own language.

"Flux leaks yet!" Porshkin went on. "You got flux in the head! Why you put lie on work order?"

"If you thought it was a lie, why didn't you block the order? Didn't you sign it, too?"

"Nyet! Nyet! I don't sign your fool orders. I read and send to work-commissar!"

"You still could have blocked it."

The Russian paused to regain his self-control. "Listen, Mr. Godmaker! If you want to drill an oil well in the people's concrete, its all right with me. But why you have to do it now? When I, Porshkin, got sane work to do?" He gestured toward the new units.

Scotty started to remind him who had designed the units. Then he thought better of it. There was no use antagonizing the bear. Porshkin seemed to have high influence in the State.

"Sorry, Porshkin. I didn't think they'd do it today. Shall I tell them to wait?"

The bear hesitated. Then his red lips bloomed a sweet smile in the black foliage of his beard. "No," he said more calmly. "No, let them dig. Then you show me how flux leaks through, and wherefrom. You get compass and show me which way they go, huh? Then we show cute trick to commissar."

Scotty walked away from him. Porshkin was becoming treacherous. The drilling was not an expensive thing, but the Russian was looking for any excuse he could find to put Scott in a bad light. He thought, obviously, that the American was no longer needed, now that the work would run itself.

By late afternoon, the self-contained units were mounted in place and tied in with the master circuits. Izzy had a couple of new holes to her brain. The drillers were also through, and the hole was a cleanly cut circle with a smooth rim of damp plaster. But there had been nothing except solid concrete and heavy rods of supporting steel.

When Porshkin left the room for a moment, Scotty took the opportunity to question Izzy again about the "sixth sense." She replied with exactly the same co-ordinates for its location. But now that point was nothing but an empty spot in midair. Puzzled, Scotty went to the circular window and moved his hand through the point. There was certainly nothing there.

"You feel the flux with your fingers, yet!" said Porshkin with mock amazement. He had returned quietly to the vault, and he carried a magnetic compass.

With a sick feeling in his stomach, Scotty moved aside to make way for his hulk. The Russian waved the compass dramatically about in the open space. Suddenly his mouth lost its smirk. He frowned slightly and began watching the compass more carefully. He moved it in a slow circle about the center point. Then he described with it a circle in a vertical plane. Finally he held it steadily in the center. Scotty thought he heard a faint whirring sound. Then a click.

"Heart of the Black Madonna!" howled the Russian materialist. He jerked the instrument away and nearly dropped it.

"What's the matter?" Scotty asked. He glanced at the instrument. The needle had slipped off the shaft. It lay to one side.

"She spin!" said Porshkin. "She spin like a crazy top. Listen, comrade. It's crazy! That needle points to the center from all directions! Up, down, sideways, crossways. There's no place where the needle points away from it. But on the other side, in the next room, the needle doesn't do anything at all—except point at the North Pole."

Scotty removed the glass cover and fitted the needle back on the shaft. What Porshkin said wasn't possible. Magnetic flux lines always made closed loops. They never began or ended on a point. Even the Earth's magnetism sprayed out from one pole, circled around to the other, and then went hack through the ground to the starting point. And if that center point had a directional field converging into, it, then the same lines would have to leave it again.

He checked it himself.

Porshkip had not made a mistake. The point behaved like an isolated pale—which was considered an impossibly idealized concept. A pole had to have a mate, somewhere in four-space.

Necessarily in four-space?

The thought struck him suddenly and began to nag his mind. He tried to dismiss it with a snort. But it clung.

Porshkin left the vault. He walked slowly, with massive shoulders slumped, with sagging face. He seemed to be burning with some strange inner fire or fury, although he dropped his outer display of ferocity. Scotty felt certain that the bear would never be his friend. He seemed continually tormented by the knowledge that Scotty's was the guiding hand, that Izzard was Scotty's baby and none of his own. Porshkin was a proud man.

The Russian had run some brief checks on the new units, but his sudden morose departure left the coordination tests to Scotty. And Scotty was not displeased. There were a number of things to discuss with Izzy, and he didn't care to have the bear know about them.

He checked over the math unit: It had conventional calculator controls and a large keyboard as well, so that word problems and raw data could be fed to it. The semantics circuits would translate them into the language of the calculator.

The strategy unit was the most massive of all, for it contained shortwave equipment for monitoring several dozen frequencies. Scotty adjusted one of them to an American station. He set up the controls so that Izzy would memorize all news broadcasts. That was for his personal illumination.

After an hour, he had completed all the adjustments that made the new units an integral part of Izzy's total mind. It saddened him in a way: it was like watching a child move inexorably into a less happy adulthood. And Izzy was growing into a warrior queen of steel and dancing electrons. When it was done, and the breakers set up for the added load, he went to the familiar keyboard.

"Hello, Izzy! This is Scotty."

Izzy knew him, because he had left a lot of personal material in her erasable memory tubes. Some times he tried to talk to her as a friend—for he had no others—just to watch her responses. He told her about his childhood, and about canoeing on the Ohio, and about the beauty of wooded slopes and rolling farmland. She had replied with an operating query: "Is it advantageous for all organisms to have eyes?" It had given him pause. There seemed something wistful about it. He knew it was only a request that she built up in her search for order and logic among his ramblings. But he had always remembered it, He remembered it again, now that the shortwave receivers were installed.

"How does it feel to have a new sense organ, Izzy?" he asked.

Her thinking assembly moved noisily. He knew she could understand the question, because he had planted in her temporary memory many analogies which allowed her to think of her inner functioning in terms of words descriptive of human behavior. He had taught her to anthropomorphize herself. Porshkin would burst an artery if he learned of it, but it seemed harmless to Scotty. The units could be erased before Izzy went to work.

"Answer indeterminate," she replied. "Related reaction: human gratitude."

He took it as her way of saying, "Thanks for the new ears," even though he knew that all she had done was to select the most likely human reaction. Or was it the most likely? A deaf man, suddenly restored to hearing, would be less likely to thank the doctor than to run about shrieking that he could hear again. Izzy was a funny kid.

"You're my test girl, Izzy," he typed with a broad grin.

He heard her tuck it away in a memory unit, but she made no reply. So, he buckled down to the more serious business of making co-ordination tests. The problem tapes had already been made up for hypothetical questions of strategy. They contained terrain descriptions analytically expressed, troop numbers, weapon data, placements of all units, supply information, and all other pertinent facts for a mock battle. Izzy was to start with a basic military situation and work it out into a detailed strategic plan for battle.

It would be several hours work, even for Izzy. He left her with the task and went topside to kill time.

He returned just past midnight. Izzy was basking quietly in the glow of her mercury arcs. Several yards of typed answers were on a roller above the keyboard, and at the strategy unit a long tongue of paper tape lay panting out of the answer slot. The tape was punched with Izzy's accompanying mathematical analysis of the strategic problem. He removed her solutions and marked them for immediate decoding by the staff.

Then he noticed a clear-text notation at the bottom of the typed roll. He read it with a deepening frown.

"Operating request: Please explain apparent contradiction between nature of strategic problem number one and historical laws forbidding destruction of human life."

He nodded gravely. Then he tore it off the roll. The general staff wouldn't like it.

The work progressed rapidly. The psychology and cybernetics units were installed. After each co-ordination test proved successful, Porshkin sank deeper into morose silence. He reminded Scotty of a giant, bearded King Solomon whose wisdom had been surpassed. His eyes followed the American wherever he went. He became no longer useful, but seemed bent only on solving some secret problem.

Scotty, whenever he could be alone with Izzard, had her recite the American news broadcasts she had memorized. Then he quickly burned the pages, lest the secret police discover that he had been listening. He discovered that the Russian news reports were not too grandiose in their claims. They didn't need to lie. The truth was grim enough. New England was a shattered havoc. And the bombers were cutting deeper, striking at targets along the Great Lakes as far west as Ohio. He thought of Cathy, and Bob, and even —Nora.

Porshkin came. He saw the paper ashes on the floor. He moved to the strategy unit and noticed the settings on the short-wave equipment. Then he left the vault in silence. Nothing came of it, immediately.

Someone high in the general staff called Scotty. "Are you going to meet your deadline, comrade?" he asked.

"The analyzer will be completed within a week," Scotty told him. "Good!" the man said. "We will increase our air operations to full capacity at once!"

Scotty knew that the invasion was ready. They were waiting only on Izzard to set the time and map the plans. As his work of vengeance drew near completion, he found himself growing restless, disturbed. He spent more time sitting at the keyboard, idly chatting with his creature.

He questioned her again about the self-awareness transors in the hope that, her new units would enable her to give a complete analysis. He also asked about the power losses and about the isolated pole which she had called one of her sensory receptors. But she replied with gibberish about the power and the pole. Her circuits became clogged with transients when he mentioned them. But—

"Answer: Human self-awareness transor can be mechanically duplicated. Operational note: I do not have effector facilities for writing transor equations: Operational query: Shall I cybernetically reorder my circuits into a human transor form as a demonstration? If so, whom shall I duplicate?"

After a long, thoughtful moment, Scotty wrote. "No, not yet, my baby."

The mechanisms for robot-guided missile control were installed. The general staff decided that they should be put into operation immediately. Two guards and an operator were assigned to the unit. Scotty had neighbors in the vault, but they remained at their controls and paid no attention to him.

Shortly thereafter, Izzy read him a news bulletin : "One of the fatalities in last night's atomic raid on Cleveland, was Mrs. Nora MacDonney, well-known for her organizational work in shaping up her highly efficient Civilian Evacuation Corps, a service composed entirely of volunteer workers, whose heroic work in moving casualties and helpless families from target areas has won high praise and citation from the American provisional government in Denver.

"Mrs. MacDonney's husband, Dr. Scott MacDonney, who was captured by the revolutionaries at the beginning of the conflict, has become the guiding mind in the Russian campaign, according to unconfirmed reports from underground sources. If the reports are true, it seems likely that MacDonney has endured the same living death that the Reds invented for the 'conversion' of others. Thus, MacDonney's name might conceivably be entered beside that of his wife on the roll-call of American dead."

Scotty read it with mingled grief, shame, depression, and resentment. Nora's death made things different somehow. It removed some of the vengeful hatred from his heart.

A low chuckle came from behind him. Porshkin had a way of creeping up quietly across the concrete floor. Scotty looked around. His wide red smile made his beard fan out like a peacock's tail. His small eyes glittered with triumph as he stared down at the American. His voice was softer than Scotty had ever heard it.

"I'm going to tell you something, Mr. Godmaker. You are a fool as well as a traitor. Do you really believe in the authenticity of the movies they showed you?"

Scotty's heart seemed to pause in its beating. Then it pounded violently. He became helpless before the giant's calm words.

"I saw," he gasped. "My own—"

"There is a small cottage in the Ukraine," Porshkin said. "They tell me that it looks just like yours. It even has a Teddy bear on the pillow in the bedroom. After your capture, one of our American agents stole into your home with a camera. And do you know, comrade—he liked your little nest so well that he decided to build one for himself, just like it, right here in Mother Russia."

"Actors!" Scotty gasped in horror.

"Ah, yes!" Porshkin breathed with a kindly smile. "If you should meet Maria Lakovna face to face, you would cry 'Nora, my love!', for our people's republics now contain more than half the population of the globe. Do you think, comrade, that among such a multitude of faces, we could not find ones to duplicate three or four stupid Americans? Bah! Your Hollywood capitalists manage to fool you when they have only a few million from which to find doubles. Do you see, comrade?"

Scotty saw only dimly through a murky fog of despair and hopelessness.

"Ah, yes, comrade!" Porshkin hissed. "You see! You see your little mechanical lady here. You see her sending a tiny missile across the American skies. You see a big beautiful mushroom over Cleveland. And you see the blackened body of a woman. You had a beautiful wife, comrade. I have seen Maria Lakovna."

When Scotty floated out of his stupor, Porshkin was gone. The vault was empty, save for the operator at the guided-missile unit, and the two guards who slumped lazily against the wall. They had not overheard Porshkin's tale.

Scotty's mind seemed a homogenous mass. No longer did the demon-conscience of his superego hurl accusations at him. For it had already crushed him. His will lay dead at its feet. He pleaded guilty, and surrendered all desire, save one: to destroy his destroyers.

He wandered out of the vault and found a telephone. "This is Scott MacDonney," he told the operator. "Connect me with Colonel Mischa Varnoff."

After a moment, the commissioner's voice barked, "Varnoff speaking!"

"I want to report a crime of sedition and slander against the people's State," Scotty said calmly. "Someone has maliciously attempted to sway me away from the cause."

Varnoff's voice became tense with excitement. "Who, comrade? Tell me, and we'll dispose of him at once! It's highly commendable of you to report such things!"

"Porshkin," Scotty said. "Andrei Porshkin."

There was a long silence. Scotty heard Varnoff's heavy breathing. When he replied, his voice seemed weak.

"This is incredible, American! Porshkin is unshakably loyal. He has friends high in the Kremlin. You'll have to offer strong proof. What do you allege that he said to you?"

"He invented a story about my wife. It involves the State. Do you remember the documentary films which you showed me? The ones revealing certain unpleasant—"

"Yes! Yes! I remember," Varnoff barked. "Go on! What did Porshkin—"

"He said they had been faked. He tried to incite me to treason."

There was a long pause. Varnoff seemed to be struggling mentally. "And how did you react to this seditious slander?" he inquired cautiously.

"By calling you, of course! The story is obviously ridiculous: He seems to think I couldn't recognize my own family, my own home."

Varnoff exhaled heavily. "You are a good citizen, comrade. Some day you'll be admitted to the party. I think we can handle this case summarily, without any further proof. I'll check with the Kremlin. I advise you to stay away from Porshkin."

The "good citizen" knew why Varnoff needed no more proof. Porshkin had revealed the truth, and that was proof enough. Scotty returned to the vault. The Bear was wandering about as if he owned the place, now. He wore a triumphant mask.

In a short time, two armed guards appeared. They carried sub-machine guns at the ready as they approached the bearded Russian. "Come quietly, and do not speak," one of them told him. "You're under arrest."

Porshkin glared at them without comprehension for a moment. Then slowly he turned toward Scotty. His eyes narrowed to glittering slits. Purple lines began distending on his forehead.

"I'll kill you!" he roared. "I'll kill you!"

He plunged toward Scotty, a juggernaut of iron-hard flesh. The vault was suddenly full of deafening tommy-gun bursts. The behemoth fell at Scotty's feet, his skull shattered by the blasts.

Scotty watched for a moment while they dragged him away. His head was a wet mop that left a crimson trail across the concrete floor. One of the many destroyers had been destroyed. Millions remained.

But he felt no satisfaction as he sat at the keyboard. He was no longer capable of feeling gratification. His thirst was that of a sieve, that of a bottomless pit.

Izzy was full of operational queries about the inconsistency between human law and what she was being forced to do with her remote missile-piloting mechanisms. He answered them all with a brief injunction.

"Postpone queries. They will be corrected."

Then he asked her some questions. "Can you cybernetically duplicate more than one human self-awareness transor? Can you duplicate the transor of a deceased person?"

"Answer: Yes, to both questions. Related knowledge from T-memory inventory: A transor is an equation, not a material quantity. It describes the necessary physical neuron-circuit conditions which determine individuality. The equation remains true, even though the individual be dead. Additional knowledge: I have enough circuits to duplicate six consciousness patterns."

Scotty drank in the significance of her words. She was saying in effect that the human soul was as immortal as the mathematical equation that determined its shape. But there seemed to be a slight peculiarity in Izzy's behavior. Where was her emotionless mind securing motivation to make the uncalled-for observations.

Her keyboard began operating again. "Operating note: To duplicate consciousness of deceased, it will be necessary for you to furnish anthropometric and psychic characteristics of the individual. These characteristics will not determine transor, but will only give its general form. Knowing its form, will enable me to sweep my circuit patterns through its mathematical region until the proper transor is reached. At that point, the consciousness will appear among the circuits."

Scotty felt some of the numb ice melt from his soul. "Duplicate Nora MacDonney," he commanded. Then he gave her a personality description of his wife, and it became a glowing picture of tenderness once felt but trampled under the boots of hate. He made it a work of art, painted with the brush of the heart, tinted with Nora's gentleness, and wistfulness and inner intensity. And he made a crown of ash blond hair for the pale spirit of his thoughts.

He switched to "answer."

"Related human response:" Izzy replied. "I'm no longer your 'best girl.' Good-by, Scotty." Then she set to work.

His eyes stung. He left her, and went out into the corridor for a smoke. She was destroying her own individuality by sending herself on the search for Nora's soul. She was moving aside for another.

When he returned, Izzy was silent. But there was a note on the roller.

"Scotty-Mack, are you there? Are you there, darling?"

The nickname! It meant—Nora!

He sat quietly, regaining his composure, forcing himself to remember the task at hand.

"Postpone felicitations," he told the machine. "Urgent work ahead. Operating order: duplicate my own transor."

Scotty waited nervously while the instrument needles began wandering about across their scales. The machine was humming softly as its circuits searched slowly through the hypothetical universes defined by the strange things called transors. It was searching for his soul.

He felt the nagging fingers of anxiety. He walked away from the machine and paced the length of the vault. What would happen? He had forgotten to ask for information about the qualitative effect on his own material mind and body. He had forgotten that Izzard was really only a machine, that she might not be motivated to warn him of serious consequences. He realized suddenly that he had been thinking by analogy. He had considered the process as one of simply creating an identical twin for himself.

But identical twins weren't really identical!

He tried to summon up a mental image of what was happening. He could visualize a vector, because it existed in three dimensions. He could imagine a tensor, because it existed in four, five, six, or any real number of dimensions. He could imagine it by giving a vector another component in a fourth dimension. But a transor? According to Izzy's definition, it had components in a complex number of dimensions.

If he told a man to go one mile south, then one mile west, then one mile straight up, than one year back in time, and finally, one unit into a fifth dimension — he would have given the man a set of directions which were the word-equivalent of a five-component tensor. But if, instead of five directions, he had given the man—three, plus, the square-root-of-minus-one times four, directions—it would be a transor, according to Izzy.

Keeping the geometric analogy—Izzy was then letting each "distance" be, not a mile, but a variable quantity, and changing the length of each one of them until they, hit-or-miss, coincided with his own components. The directional example was, of course, only a limited way of trying to conceive it.

Then he suddenly understood the whole thing, in terms of pure mathematics. It was strange that he hadn't done so before! But his attention was attracted to something else.

It was attracted to a group of seventy-nine missiles with atomic war heads. They were moving west across the Atlantic. He knew by checking his new sensory receptors that they were meant for Chicago.

He glanced down at his body. It was unchanged. He glanced toward the rest of him—the part which was steel and glass and wire and . . . something else.

Nora!

He saw her with his cybernetics unit. She was a large number of synaptic relays and connecting neural conductors strung throughout the entire analyzer.

"Hi, baby!"

"Scotty, darling!"

The perception of a kiss passed through the interconnecting network of circuits, and the proper sensations accompanied it, for the transor-duplication was complete, even to the sensory neurons of the affective nervous systems. He realized quickly that all effector mechanisms, the analyzer's muscles, were common to both of them.

He thought a rather passionate mathematical expression at her.

"Not in front of the children!" her circuits hissed.

Startled, he scanned the entire chain of networks. They were there, all right. Cathy, and Bob—and what was left of Izzy! She was still her basic self, but cramped. And there was someone else—but he couldn't quite make out who.

For several microseconds, the analyzer was a jumble of mingled sensations — children squealing, heads being patted, bear hugs, and moist kisses. Nora had brought in the children after Izzy had found her. They, too, had been victims of a raid.

"The missile-control unit, Scotty," Nora reminded him. "I haven't changed anything yet."

He saw that the rocket-driven projectiles were winging across the American coastline. He checked their fuel. There was enough to take them past the Pacific coast.

"Give me complete control of all effector mechanisms," he told the others. "You just sit and watch."

They agreed—all of them except the extra one. It said nothing. He realized that it was preventing his perception of itself: He could "see" the others clearly, but the sixth being was screening itself off from him.

Then, as if it sensed his thoughts, it said, "You are free to use the effectors as you choose." The tone was imperial, as if the being were allowing him freedom—out of its own graciousness.

Scotty noticed that the being was controlling the T-memory units from which Izzy had derived her information about transors. It was also controlling, and blocking off, two T-memory units where—he paused to check the indexer—where information about the isolated pole and about the power losses was stored.

It puzzled him, but he decided not to molest the sixth mind unless it interfered.

Scotty—the flesh-and-blood Scotty —glanced around the vault. He had scarcely moved since his conscious had merged with its image in the analyzer. Neither the two guards nor the missile-unit operator were paying any attention to him. Nothing had happened—which was visible to them.

Scotty knew that his connection to the machine would not be affected by distance. He saw that something would affect the connection, but the something was hidden in the two blocked memory tubes.

He left the vault and walked along the corridor toward the elevators. A guard halted him.

"I have orders that you are not to leave the vault!" the man snapped.

"Why?" Scotty asked with a frown. His movements had never before been hindered.

"I don't ask questions," replied the burly guard.

There was a telephone in the corridor. Scotty went to it and dialed Varnoff. The commissioner seemed pleased to hear from him. He thought sardonically that since his expose of Porshkin that he had "pull" in high circles.

"Are these vault guards your boys?" Scotty asked.

Varnoff admitted hesitantly that they were. "Why do you ask?" he added.

"Where did they get their orders to keep me downstairs?"

"Uh, well, I gave it, comrade. Don't ask me why. I can't tell you. But it's nothing personal. All the present occupants are temporarily confined. And, by the way—"

"Yes?"

"Somebody from General Staff will call you in a few minutes, but I'll forewarn you. You're to prepare the analyzer for a problem in complete, overall strategy. Not a sample problem, I might add, but a mass demonstration of full-scale battle operations."

That could only mean one of two things, Scotty thought. The invasion, or a demonstration before the highest pair of eyes in the people's State.

"The analyzer won't be equipped to handle a full-scale invasion for several days yet," he lied.

"Oh, that's all right. Something in the Alaskan theater will do. And a big aerial display. Every available rocket and remote aircraft."

"Big visitors, eh?" Scotty asked.

The colonel's silence was complete, and it promised to continue.

"O.K.," Scotty said, "but I have to get out of here for an hour or so to check the transmitters for the missile control. They're outside the city, you know."

"Sorry, comrade."

"You wouldn't want anything to go wrong with the demonstration, would you?"

"That would be your neck!" Varnoff snapped.

"O.K., and I'd tell them you kept me confined."

Varnoff paused. "And that would be my neck," he admitted agreeably. "All right, comrade. I'll send a staff car for you, and a guard to get you back in time. But you're to wait until General Staff calls."

"Agreed !"

Scotty left the telephone, started back along the corridor, then paused. The seventy-mine missiles were approaching Chicago. The operator at the unit was slowly turning the dial that started their descent.

That was why he had wanted to leave the vault immediately. When he blocked off the control circuits and sent the missiles on toward the Pacific, the operator would think the unit had gone haywire and come running to find him. Scotty didn't want to be found.

But now if he blocked off the circuits, the operator would not only find him, but General Staff would get word that something was wrong with the analyzer. They would call off the demonstration, demand an explanation, and send a whole throng of party scientists to peer over his shoulder while he worked on it.

As it in reply to his thoughts, the being-who-crouched-in-the-corner released a memory from one of the blocked units. It also released one of the circuits that it had screened. But it carefully preserved the cloak of secrecy about itself and the rest of the memories in two units.

Scotty saw suddenly where the surplus energy was going. The forty-four kilowatts of original overload, plus the proportional overload on the newer units, were storing energy in an ever-expanding magnetic field beyond the isolated pole. And the beyond was not within the bounds of the space-time continuum in which Scotty had always lived and moved. This revelation seemed supported by the observations he and Porshkin had made with the compass.

The missiles were getting too close for comfort. He needed to act quickly.

He nosed them upward slightly, then felt the operator twist the controls back, correcting the course. He couldn't do it that way. With the cybernetics unit, he began making circuit alterations.

After a brief instant, it was done. The whole setup was changed. The radio signals which came in from the missiles were routed through the interpretive circuits as usual, but then they went to the semantics unit, which was the real center of Scotty's mind image, instead of going to the operator's instruments. Scotty took direct control of all indicators, and began feeding them fictitious position and course reports.

But to keep the circuit-instruments from showing a change in the analyzer's internal operating conditions, he needed to transfer energy from one circuit to another without passing it through the meters. The isolated pole point provided the outlet, and the means for doing it.

Then he told the operator, through the course indicators, that the missiles had gone into a sharp dive, apparently sending them down short of the target. He felt the operator's sharp twist on the altitude control.

Then the incoming signals from the missiles said that they were pulling up out of their shallow dive. When they were flying straight and level again, he indicated to the operator that they were on-target. The operator neutralized the controls.

Scotty calculated the time of impact, then registered an explosion signal at the proper instant. The operator immediately cut off the panel switch, not suspecting that by his own hand he had sent the rockets winging on harmlessly toward the Pacific.

In a moment, the operator appeared in the corridor. Scotty shook himself out of his semitrance and walked on to the vault. He gave the man a friendly nod in passing.

"Just a moment, comrade!"

Scotty turned and glanced at him questioningly. The operator looked puzzled.

"Something's wrong with the unit," he said. "The Chicago missiles were set to explode over the target. They exploded on impact, apparently."

Scotty hadn't known about that. Bomb fusing wasn't his business. "The unit's all right!" he snapped. "It brought them in, didn't it?"

"How do you know, comrade? You haven't checked it yet." The operator turned on his heel and strode away. He stopped at the telephone.

Scotty went back to the vault to wait for Varnoff's man and the call from General Staff. The analyzer and its designer were soon going to be in hot water. The operator was calling in a successful report, qualified by his vague suspicions. Then the strategic command would wait impatiently for the seismograph units in Alaska and the Pacific to call in a report of the explosion. In less than an hour they would get one—but not from Chicago's area. It would be practically in the laps of the seismo units.

Somebody would want to know some fast reasons.

Footsteps echoed in the corridor. It was a short stocky general, with a round, leather face, and quick suspicious eyes. He approached Scotty briskly, slapping a riding crop against his leg. The guards snapped to attention.

"General Barlov," he barked. "From Staff. You MacDonney?"

Scotty nodded respectfully. Barlov was definitely the no-nonsense type.

"Varnoff told me you wanted out. I countermanded the order."

Scotty groaned inwardly. He must not be available when the analyzer started doing unprecedented things, seemingly of its own accord.

"Why, sir?" he asked in a wounded tone.

"You said the transmitters need adjusting. It's obvious that they don't. The Chicago mission was successful. Can you think of a better lie, American?"

Scotty shrugged. "Does the general judge a soldier's physical condition by his marksmanship?"

Barlov purpled. "I can judge your life span by the direction of your remarks," he said ominously. "Get this ! If anything goes wrong during that demonstration, it'll be called sabotage. Varnoff recorded your telephone call. You said the analyzer wasn't ready for an invasion problem. I've got a report on my desk that says it is ready. Apparently you're not anxious for it to start. So you see who we'll hang if the demonstration bombs don't reach their targets."

Scotty saw. And he saw who would catch it as soon as the Chicago mission reports came in.

Barlov handed him a brief case. "Here's mission information," he said. "All you're to do is look at it. If you see anything wrong, say so. Do it now. You're not to touch the machine after operations start. Our men will handle that."

Scotty opened the brief case. It contained settings for the analyzer circuits, tapes for the strategy units, and complete data for an offensive operation in the Alaskan theater as well as details of a massive air- assault against targets along the Pacific coast. The analyzer would have to shout blow-by-blow tactical instructions to Alaskan ground forces as well as direct the air armada.

He risked a quick calculation with his math and cybernetics units. Somebody was going to have to move over. When the operators set up the analyzer, there wouldn't be enough circuits to hold the six awareness-patterns.

"I'll go," Nora thought to him.

"No!" he muttered aloud, and the general glanced at him sharply.

Then Scotty felt new circuits being released. But it wasn't Nora. It was the thing who hid itself. It was taking its consciousness out of the analyzer. What was it? Then it was gone, and the two blocked units were released. But there was no time to scan them now. And the general was looking around suspiciously at the units.

"Who's using this thing?" asked. "It's making noises."

"It's got a problem in it," Scotty told him.

"He lies, sir!" called a voice from across the vault. "He hasn't been at the controls since the Chicago mission."

"Well?" Barlov grunted.

Scotty glared at the operator. He was a thin, pale-faced fanatic, obviously bucking for the general's favor.

"Do you know how long it takes to run through a problem in say, cybernetics, lieutenant?" Scotty asked.

The operator shook his head.

"Then keep your mouth shut." He turned to Barlov. "The analyzer keeps tabs on its own circuits," he explained.

The general was still glancing around suspiciously. His suspicion would give Scotty a way to safely scan the new memory tubes.

"I'll show you," he said, and glanced at his watch. "In about thirty seconds, the machine's due to run a test. You'll hear it scanning through its memory."

The operator snickered. Scotty started scanning after twenty seconds. "My watch is a little off," he explained with mock embarrassment.

In a few moments he had scanned the contents and plugged the units into continuous contact with the analyzer's circuits. But the nature of the new knowledge came as such a sudden shock that he reeled dizzily. And he felt the percept of a gasp from Nora.

The being-who-crouched-in the corner had erased much of the contents before it was evacuated. But Scotty knew where it had gone. It had passed beyond the isolated pole —from whence it came. And it was very clear that Scotty could go there too, when it was time.

The general was shaking his arm. "Snap out of it! What's wrong, Yankee?"

Scotty came out of it slowly, and murmured that he was all right. Then he returned his attention to the demonstration material. Barlov seemed to be watching him closely.

He found a flaw, too obvious a flaw, too easily found. It looked like a plant. "If the Missiles use this signaling interval," he murmured, "they'll very likely miss the entire target area."

Barlov looked disappointed. Scotty didn't need the psychology unit to figure it out. The general wanted him to see the error, then let it pass by. That would make a very good treason case, and the people's State would have an excuse to dispose of a no longer useful alien. Barlov didn't even ask for the correct signaling interval. He took back the brief case, nodded, and chained it to his wrist.

"In a few minutes," he said, "the operators will come. Stay away from the controls, but don't leave. The show starts in two hours." He moved away.

Two hours—it was too long. They would find out about the Chicago mission before then. But if the operators were coming in a few minutes, then the rocket missiles must be all set up for take-off. Their self-contained radio-control equipment would have to be sending out signals for the operators to check.

He swept through the control frequencies—and counted two hundred and fifty projectiles. They were ready for blast-off from launching points in eastern Siberia. He was tempted to send them immediately skyward. But he had another task.

He went to the place of the isolated pole. The memory unit said that the point could be distorted, ironed out into a limited plane. He circuited the memory into the cybernetics and math units and searched for an answer.

The operators were drifting into the room by the time he had worked it out. Soon they would begin tampering with the controls. He began rearranging circuits according to the equation he had derived.

Nothing visible happened, but his other senses told him that a great deal had happened. He stretched out his hand toward the circular wall opening. It met something smooth. He pushed at it. The substance yielded, but bounced back. It seemed to be a tight, completely transparent, elastic membrane, stretched across the ten-foot opening. He went around to the next vault and examined it from the opposite side. It seemed the same; but he knew that it was not. For the being had left a circuit connected to a related memory in a quotations unit.

The quotation said, "The road back home never leads to where it started from."

Also, the equation he had derived for warping the pole point out into a plane had a region of discontinuity in it.

He took a pencil and pressed its point against the membrane, harder, and slowly harder. Suddenly it punctured through, snatched itself from his hand, and was gone. But it hadn't fallen in the next vault. It had vanished.

He went to the other side and tried it in reverse with a scrap of wire. It popped through the screen. With the same sort of jerk. What was the difference?

He felt an operator touch a control. He immediately choked off the circuit's input with a biasing voltage that blocked the first stage past cutoff. He heard the operator gasp, then the murmur of voices as other clustered about him.

Then a clinking sound at his feet made him look down. There lay the scrap of wire! It meant that something that went through the screen from the panel-vault side either must come back, could come back, or—was sent back by the being who had crouched in the corner.

Why could light pass through the opening without skittering off into wherever the wire had gone? He submitted the question to the mechanical lobes of his collective brain. They replied that passage through the screen, involved a dimensional deflection. And the velocity of light was the unattainable limit for the deflection process.

Two operators were coming toward him. He pretended not to see them and returned to the adjoining vault.

"Comrade MacDonney!" one of them called.

"Just a minute," he snapped, as he passed through the doorway. "But, something's wrong with the controls!"

"Well—come on in here!" He moved toward a rack of blank memory units. They drew up behind him and he saw that one of them was the pale fanatic who had challenged him before Barlov.

"One of the controls is—"

"I know it!" he barked. "I' working on it. Here—you—keep this, unit tilted for me slightly, like this. And you, hold this one."

The operators obeyed reluctantly, Scotty searched through his pockets. "Forgot my test prods," he muttered. He went back to the main vault, then pressed the switch that slid a thick steel hatch over the doorway.

He heard a muffled cry from behind it. Evidently sound waves couldn't pass through the membrane and remain in space time. One of the operators was pounding on the hatch, but the thick steel deadened the sound. Scotty walked to the circular opening. One of the men approached it from the other side, saw the American, shouted inaudibly, then lunged toward him. He struck the invisible screen, then broke through. Or, rather, the screen seemed to catch him and slip him sideways out of existence.

The man at the hatch had seen his comrade disappear through the opening. He, too, bounded toward it. And then there were none.

But three others were crossing the floor of the main vault. They walked fast and stared angrily. A guard followed with tommy gun half unslung from his shoulder.

"Why did you lock Litkin and Frei in the vault?" one of them snarled. "Open the hatch!"

Scotty gave them a scornful glance, opened the steel door, and stepped through it. They were close on his heels.

"You don't see them, do you?" he asked.

The men began moving among the aisles between the memory units. "I saw Litkin through that hole in the wall," one of them called to another. "Then it looked like a lifting hook caught him and jerked him out of sight." They turned to stare at the wall above the opening.

The reliability of eye-witnesses, Scotty chuckled to himself. The man saw, something he couldn't understand, so he invented an understandable phenomenon—and believed it.

The guard remained by the door with his weapon at port-arms. Scotty couldn't chance slamming the hatch again. He turned his total mind again toward the nature of the membrane, and calculated the power required to stretch it out still further. The concrete partition was a straight wall that ran a hundred yards north and became one side of the corridor. The only other doorways were to the elevator shafts. No one dared enter the elevators from the corridor because of the Staff order against leaving the vaults.

Scotty turned his mind to the task of spreading out the screen. It necessitated cutting off several of the effector units to keep from overloading the main breakers. But when it was accomplished, the membrane had become a thickless disk that sliced down through the partition and blocked all doorways. He was going to cut on the analyzer's alarm system, and if guards came down the elevator shafts, they would pass through the screen in the direction of no return.

The analyzer told him that it was theoretically possible to return from that direction—but it was very clear that the two operators hadn't done so.

The men had finished their search. They returned with baffled expressions.

"Where are they, Yankee?" one of them snapped. He seized Scotty's shirt-front and shook him roughly.

Scotty closed his eyes and concentrated.

An alarm bell thundered from just above the doorway. Red filters slid over the ceiling fixtures, bathing the vault in bloody light. The man released him.

"Sabotage warning!" someone bellowed.

They plunged toward the doorway. And met the elastic plane. And fell through. Scotty caught at the guard's weapon as he slipped into the invisible. The tip of the barrel was already in the screen, and the gun twisted in his hands. He put both feet against either side of the door and tugged furiously. It came free with a snap. Scotty groaned and tested a bruised hip for possible fracture. Then he noticed the tip of the barrel. It glowed with a dull red heat. The reason for the men's failure to return became clear. Weather beyond the west side of the war was rather torrid.

The two men who remained in the main vault came into view beyond the doorway. They were shouting at one another excitedly and peered behind panels for the cause of the alarm. Then they ran toward Scott, saw the machine gun, and stopped. One of them—the other guard—raised his weapon. Scotty started to throw himself aside, then paused, remembering the screen. He grinned arrogantly and swung the tommy gun toward them, but did not fire. The guard shouted something inaudible, then unleashed a bright soundless burst of explosions. The membrane seemed to shiver slightly, but Scotty felt nothing. The guard hesitated, then emptied his cartridge-drum at the American who had obviously stolen his comrade's weapon. He dropped the tommy gun and stood in dazed amazement. The American was rising to his feet, still unharmed, still grinning. The two men bolted.

Scotty cut off the energy flow that kept the membrane stretched in the distended condition. Then he stepped into the main vault. The men were plunging toward the corridor. He cut them down with two quick bursts. He couldn't be bothered with prisoners.

The corridor guards returned his fire. Chipped concrete stung his face, and a slug tore through his thigh. He flung himself sideways as he fell, and crawled behind a panel. He heard the sound of their boots as they raced toward him. There was but one thing to do. He spread out the membrane again across the opening.

Then he dragged himself through it—in the direction that the wire had gone. It warped inward as he pushed against it, then snapped back behind him. There was a sudden spinning sensation, as if he were riding on a gyrating top that had been kicked sideways.

Then he was rolling across hard surface. He sat up in cool darkness. He tried to let his eyes adjust, but there was a complete absence of light. He felt about him. Nothing but the hard surface. It was rough and flat, like the worn rock of a creek bed. And it was damp, sticky-damp. His own blood.

He took off his belt and made a tourniquet for his leg. The bullet had torn the quadricep muscles, but he could still hobble on the leg.

A faint glow of light appeared then disappeared. He watched its source. After a moment it recurred. It had the shape of a human palm. Then there were two of them.

Slowly he realized what was happening. The guards hadn't seen him go through the opening. They were searching about cautiously through the vaults, wary lest he fire from ambush. One of them had undoubtedly stolen toward the opening, hazarded a glance through it, then started to slip quietly through—and discovered the screen. Now he was examining it with his hands.

The analyzer had become such an integral part of Scotty's mind that it required several moments for him to sense that he was still thinking with it. Evidently it didn't matter where he was, nor in what universe, as long as the twin consciousnesses remained identical. The transor was a mathematical expression, and if X equaled X, the expression was an identity, and the X's were one and the same. The location of the material quantities they described wouldn't matter.

This train of logic required only a fraction of a second, but he saw that the guard was pressing harder against the membrane. The luminous hand glowed more brightly. In a moment he would be through it.

Scotty let it collapse quickly into a point, then spread it out again. The hand had disappeared. The guard had fallen through the opening into the next vault. And if he tried to go back through it in the opposite direction, he would find himself in a warmer climate. Scotty let the membrane keep distending until it once more covered the door to the elevator shaft.

Somewhere in the surrounding blackness, he knew that the being-who-had-crouched in the corner was lurking, perhaps watching him. But he couldn't go back to the vault until its other occupants had been disposed of. He had counted four corridor guards, racing toward him. Three of them were still prowling about among the panels. If they tried to pass the membrane, he could shrink it and dump them into the memory vault from which they could escape only into the place of no return. But until then, he had to remain in the world of-the unknown being.

He cursed himself for not providing Izzard with photoelectric eyes so that the analyzer could see inside the vault. He remembered Izzy's operating query—"Is it advantageous for all organisms to have eyes?" He'd imagined — anthropomorphically —that it had been the wistful expresssion of a desire. Now he knew that had come from her sixth occupant, who had probably been hiding there all along, providing her with the advanced mathematical concepts.

Scotty had the uneasy feeling that he wasn't altogether the guiding mind behind all that had happened since Izzy had first come alive. But there wasn't any way to check the theory: the being had erased many memories before it departed. It seemed to be using him indirectly, leaving him only such hints as lit absolutely needed to accomplish task.

He turned his attention suddenly to the robot missiles which we ready for launching at the Siberian blast-off site. One of them had suddenly stopped sending in the pulses. Somebody had cut it off! The General Staff had undoubtedly radiogramed the station that something was wrong with the analyzer.

Scotty began concentrating on the missile-guiding unit. He sent a wave of blast-off pulses, then waited fn.- the reply that the rockets were airborne. Two hundred and forty-eight signals came back with course, altitude, speed, and angle of climb. Another signal reported rocket-failure. The missile was still grounded. He gave it a selective fusing order, then detonated it. Another of his circuits immediately picked up its explosive pulse.

That took care of the launching site. The communications equipment would probably be close enough to the flight-line to be destroyed. If personnel were still alive on the base, they wouldn't be able to report what had happened. Seismograph units and neighboring towns would report the explosion, but until someone went out to look at the site, they would probably blame it on an American raid.

He then deployed the missiles and put them into a one hundred and eighty degree turn. When they completed it, he set them to home on his own signal and brought them down to skim along, at a few feet above the ground, so that radar locating equipment couldn't spot them. He circuited the missile-unit out of his conscious mind and left it to its own devices. It became like the breathing of his lungs, normally unconscious, but quickly switching to the conscious level in the event of trouble.

Suddenly, from out of the darkness overhead, a scream rang out. Then a body thudded on the rock surface. He started in surprise, then remembered that the membrane also would be covering the elevator entrances on two higher levels. Someone had entered the shaft from above, and fallen sixty feet down on Scotty's side of the screen.

A faint groan came to his ears. It seemed far away. The body would have fallen about a hundred yards from his own location. He struck a match and peered through the gloom, but the dim flicker illuminated only a small area of the rough rock surface. Whoever the man was, he was an enemy, and Scotty decided not to approach him. He would hardly walk away from a sixty-foot fall.

The match flickered out, but it had lasted long enough to show him evidence of life. There were patches of gray-green moss on the rock, and a wandering tendril of creeping vine. But no animal sounds had pierced the stillness.

He stood up painfully. The leg had gone numb. He loosened the tourniquet slightly, but the bleeding began again. He tightened the belt and hopped toward the place where the luminous hands had appeared.

Since they had appeared but once, he reasoned that the remaining guards had seen what happened to their comrade when he tampered with the membrane. Scotty tried to size up the resistance he would meet when he stepped back through the screen.

First of all, the order to stay in the vaults would be countermanded by now. But he knew that no one had entered the elevators on the vault level, because they would have been hurled into the dark world wherein he had his present being. And he had heard no one except the falling body. The falling body told him that one of the elevators had been on the higher level. The fact that no one had entered his universe on the vault level told him that both lifts were on a higher level. And they must be staying there.

Why?

Because when a passenger had disappeared, the operator would have leaped through the wrong side of the membrane. And both elevators must be at the top level because a large party of men was trying to enter the vaults.

Scotty decided to have a look at the body before he went back. He touched the membrane and began making his way along it, striking matches at regular intervals. At last he saw the motionless figure—and went to bend over it.

The man was Varnoff. His back was broken, but his lids were parted, and his eyes glittered in the match light.

"Ah," he whispered, "Comrade MacDonney, I . . . never had . . . chance to . . . thank you. We found … Porshkin was real . . . leader of underground."

Scotty gasped. "You're lying, Varnoff!" he barked.

"No, I—" Varnoff hesitated. He seemed suddenly to understand that something was wrong. He began moving his arms weakly and trying to turn his head. "The marshal ... where is . . . is . . . is he all right? Didn't fall—"

Suddenly the commissioner's head lolled sideways, and he sagged limply. Scotty left him for dead or unconscious, and went back to the screen. He made his way weakly toward its center.

Porshkin the leader of the underground! Scotty had destroyed him. The knowledge made his misery complete. He had betrayed his country. He had been responsible for the success of the terrible bombings. He had built the machine that killed his wife and children. And even though he had restored them, they were but fleshless circuits in a perishable machine.

He felt Nora's protesting thoughts —and for a moment he confused them with her physical voice. He seemed to hear her with his ears as well as his mind, but of course, he had become accustomed to the analyzer's extra senses. And her thought lasted only an instant. It had been choked off.

He traced circuits to find out why. And he discovered that the sixth being had returned, as if to clap a hand over her mouth. Scotty felt a twinge of anger. The being seemed able to come and go at will—without the necessity of transor-searching.

The being replied to his anger by circuiting a memory at him—a very recent memory. Varnoff's last words. About—the marshal!

Scotty got the hint at last. "The marshal" could mean only one person—and Varnoff had been worried about his falling. Falling as Varnoff had done, and from the same place. Evidently the premier and other officials had already been assembled on one of the upper levels when the trouble began. The membrane had blocked them off, and prevented their descending to the vault and their returning to the surface. They were sealed in on the second or third levels. Varnoff, having the lowest rank, had been invited to stick his neck through the screen.

Scotty had found the center of the screen again. He started to step through—then remembered that a guard might be covering it. So he set off the alarm to distract attention, then leaped.

The top spun and was kicked aside. Scotty found himself rolling across concrete floor under blinding lights. He crashed to a stop against a panel, and expected to feel slugs tearing his flesh.

But the vault was empty. He sat up; blinking. What had happened to them? If they had passed the barrier in his direction, he would surely have heard them in the darkness.

The sixth being allowed a thought to pass to him: "The gate is the doorway to your own transor region. It matters not how you enter. Yours led to darkness."

"Then the guards went through to no-return?"

But the being would not answer. Scotty sat puzzling over it for a moment. His own led to darkness. It did indeed—to the darkness of shame and doubt and remorse.

"Don't, Scotty," Nora thought. "You can make the sun rise—" Suddenly she was cut off.

Then with horror he realized that her transor pattern was being taken out of the analyzer—by the sixth being. Scotty's mind leaped into action. He fought against the process with every circuit at his disposal. His physical body broke into an icy sweat as he wrestled with the thing. But it beat him down, walled him off, and left him clinging only to the basic circuits necessary to the form of his transor. Then the being's words thundered through the analyzer.

"Fool! Do you think their patterns are destroyed because the mold is shattered?"

Scotty slumped slightly. They were all gone, Nora, the children, Izzy. Sure, they could be set up again, if the thing who was now in command allowed it.

"Why did you do it?" he asked.

But the being had fallen silent again behind the shroud. It had released the units again to Scotty.

The missile unit was nagging at him. He circuited it into unconsciousness. There were now only one hundred and eighty units in his control. The other sixty-eight were off course. He could "hear" their reports, but somehow his commands were not reaching them.

Then he felt a crude, shapeless spurt of charge in his control circuits. It was as if someone had touched a screwdriver across a pair of bare wires. He tested the remote leads to the transmitter station.

Someone had cut into the cables that led out of the city! Someone had set up a makeshift keying arrangement. Scotty knew that they could never take orderly control of the rockets, but they could easily bump them off course. He paused to analyze the situation.

The bundle of cables that ran to the station was a massive tangle of several hundred wires. Whoever was tampering with it had thus far succeeded in isolating only one unit. He must act before they found the others.

First, he increased the velocity of the remaining robots. They were about twenty minutes from the city. Then tie readjusted their courses so fiat they would strike their target without further external control. Having done this, he cut off the transmitters, swept them off frequency, and changed the signaling interval. By the time the tamperers figured it out and made readjustments at the station, it would be too late.

A signal bell jangled from across the vault. It was the direct phone to the transmitter station. Scotty smiled grimly as he went to answer it.

It was Barlov. "What kind of deals do you want, MacDonney?" he snapped.

"No deal, Shorty!"

"Listen, man!" Barlov fumed. "You can't blow a cityful of civilians off the map! It wouldn't change anything anyway!"

"Except that the central government would he gone, and the people would revolt. You know your chiefs of state are trapped down here, don't you?"

"I've contacted them by telephone, yes! But that doesn't matter. They're just as expendable as anyone else."

"O.K., then we'll expend them. You too. Start running, Barlov. If you can move about thirty miles in the next ten minutes, you might get away from the blast area. The way they're coming now, the bomb pattern will extend out to about forty miles from the center of the city—one bomb about five or six miles from the next one, over the whole area. Lord knows where those you bumped off-course will go! Not far, though. Maybe you'll meet them."

Barlov wavered. "What is it you want, MacDonney?" he asked.

"Give me back that transmitter! Then I'll hold off the bombs until your men make some circuit corrections for me. After that, we'll discuss it again. If you co-operate, no one will be killed."

"What circuit corrections?"

"Give me the transmitter first!" There was a long pause. Then Scotty felt the jumpers being pulled from his control circuits. He took a moment to regain control of the fleet, then set them in a circle about the city.

"That's fine, Shorty," he said. "Now make the following connections at the terminal panel: point A-10 to point J-17, point R-42 to—" Scotty read off a list of several connections and disconnections.

"What'll that do?" Barlov grunted.

"Stop asking questions! I'm getting impatient. When those missiles start running low on fuel, I'll bring them-in!"

"O.K., hold it!"

There was a short pause. Then Scotty felt his instructions being carried out. Immediately he brought the robots in closer to the city, unfused them temporarily, cut the jets, spun them in tail first, then fired the jets again. The circuits wailed off a fast and erratic deceleration. It was by no means a landing, but only a limited crash.

The vault trembled as if from an earthquake. Scotty cursed. Several of the missiles had exploded accidently. Barlov was shrieking gibberish into the telephone.

Scotty felt the membrane pulsing. Evidently the occupants of the upper level were leaping through it in their hysteria.

He shouted Barlov down, then said, "Those explosions weren't intentional, but it's a good demonstration. There's over two hundred of them left, scattered over the city. Now I'll explain the circuit changes you made for me." Scotty refused the remaining bombs as he spoke. "The whole business is now set to detonate if the transmitters stop sending out the signals, or if anybody tampers with the bombs."

Barlov began cursing him softly.

"I trust you'll provide me with a good maintenance crew," Scotty continued, "to see that the station is kept shipshape. And you better bring in all available troops to keep people away from the missiles."

"And don't try to evacuate the city," he added, "or I'll touch it off."

He hung up, then turned his attention to the semantics circuits. The sixth being had been doing something to the unit while his thoughts were diverted.

"Hello, Mr. Godmaker," said a sneering "voice."

"Porshkin!"

"So, the traitor has turned patriot again, eh? I, Porshkin, the materialist did predict it."

The percept of bellowing laughter came from the bodyless bear. Scotty stood stricken.

"You are stupid!" Porshkin roared. "I see you still are thinking that I am one of them! Look, fool! Look at my mind! And see why I wanted you to fail, and why the assassin knew where and when to find you! Look! I open myself to you!"

The Russian dropped his electrical cloak. But the sixth being stepped in to choke off some of the circuits between them. But Scotty saw enough, enough to believe what Varnoff had told him. Porshkin had indeed been the leader of the underground. He had hoped that the General Staff would count too strongly on Izzard's abilities, and that they would delay the invasion, and that Scotty's final failure would give the Americans time to prepare.

And he saw the depth and the intensity of Porshkin's mentality, his seething inner fires. The man was unchainable. He was no fanatic, either for the party or against it. He was simply the personification of individual freedom, the image of the thirst to shed all shackles. He could never be anything except an uncaged bear, an angry destroyer who tried to wreck whatever threatened human liberty—be it man or be it nation. Scotty felt suddenly humble and impotent before him.

Porshkin seemed to catch his sentiments. "Bah !" he snorted gruffly "You are a man of intellect, Mr. Godmaker. And because you are a specialist, you are a fool in many things. They fooled you so easily with the movies. You use all your mind to think with, and you have none of it left to guide your emotions with. Bah ! You are like a credulous, sulking child, with the brain of a genius."

Scotty stood up under the inquisition because he knew that he deserved it.

"Look toward your so-called membrane !" Porshkin snapped.

Scctty looked toward the opening. Suddenly something burst through it and came tumbling across the floor. It sat up.

It was Porshkin, the man.

He smiled the red smile in the black brush. "Where did you think all that energy was going to?" he snorted.

Scotty gasped.

"When you set a transor in the machine, you do something else on the other side," the bear explained. He stood up. "Now let's get to work and build ourselves some arms and legs, comrade." "Do what?"

"Arms," Porshkin roared, "with fists attached! You know! Tanks, planes, new weapons! You've got the whole crew of engineers and workers trapped in the city. We'll activate every robot device in the area, and put controls on the rest. The 'brain's' got to have muscles, boy ! We're in command of a city, but not a country. And after they get another provision government set up, we won't even have the city! We've got to work!"

"Listen," Scotty said thoughtfully. "If you can prove your identity to the American government, maybe there's an easier way."

"Yeah! The underground code. Varnoff never got his hands on it."

"All right," Scotty said. "Get on the radio. They won't believe me, but you can give them the situation." He gestured toward the strategy unit. "The operators left their tapes. They've got all the information about the whole war setup on them. Troop locations and concentrations, air strength, data and statistics on everything from the front lines back to the factories. Give them all the information, then run it through the strategy unit and send them a master plan. If they strike now, while we've got the country's brains paralyzed, it'll be like—"

"Like beating up a blind-man," Porshkin howled gleefully. "Let's go."

In a few hours, the thing was done. The statistics and the plan were in the hands of the American command. But the government's reply was curt and suspicious.

"They don't believe us, comrade," Porshkin said.

"Then tell them the business about the missiles. They can confirm it by checking their seismographic records of explosions. They can spot one at the launching site and several close to the city. If they check that against their own flight records, they'll see we're telling the truth."

Porshkin set to the task, while Scotty turned his attention to the local broadcasting stations. The only way Barlov could hastily evacuate millions of people was by using news bulletins to inform the populace. But the stations were carrying on as usual. Lots of people would leave of their own accord, of course, because of the "dud" missiles lying about the city.

After a time, Porshkin threw up his hands. "I don't know, comrade," he said. "They checked the story, but they still don't say 'yes' or 'no.'

They just keep on asking silly questions. They thought I was dead."

"What about your underground?" Scotty asked. "Have they got transmitters?"

The Bear nodded. "Yeah, they could—" He paused.

Scotty groaned. ''They think you're dead too, though," he said dismally.

Porshkin laughed. "Hah! How they think I'm dead? Only way they knew me was by code. Da, Da! I can call Rizkin and have him contact American agents. They'll believe him." He began retuning one of the small local transmitters.

Then a light on one of the receivers began blinking. Scotty brought its output into consciousness. At first there was only the faint hiss of a carrier wave. Then a voice broke through. It was Barlov.

"All right," MacDonney," he said. "Detonate the bombs, if you want to. I'm in a transport plane a hundred and fifty miles south of the city. And with me, I've got every man who's of any importance to the people's state — except the ones you've trapped, of course. As I said, they're expendable. Even the marshal's only a symbol."

"And you'll be the new symbol, I suppose," Scotty replied, as he set tip circuits to take a fix on the aircraft.

"Certainly, certainly !" Barlov called.

Scotty led him on until he had a fix. Then he swept through all possible robot frequencies until he found a positioning pulse. At a base in the Ukraine, a ground crew was running a routine inspection on a guided missile. It's "climb angle" showed that it was on a launching rack. Scotty sent it a blast-off signal. Then he directed it toward the fix. In half an hour, its own radar found Barlov's plane. Scotty sent it to home on the ship, and fixed its detonator for an explosion at two thousand feet from the target. It would give Barlov a fraction of a second to suffer before he charred and melted.

Porshkin was finished. "Rizkin has contacted the agents," he said. "Now we wait and see."

They listened on the American tactical frequencies. They were becoming jammed with coded messages. Scotty "memorized" several minutes of the jumbled letter-groups. Then he put the math and semantics units to work. Soon the message was decoded.

". . . immediately. Task force nine-to be sent against point seven-eight-zero. Dispatch units 6-AX-7 toward Vladivostok area—"

It was part of the strategic plan.

Porshkin smiled slowly. "Without a government and without a high command, the Russians will wither." Then he laughed his roaring laugh and patted the panel of the machine. "Meet the new Czar, boy!" he bellowed.

"It's your baby, now, Porshkin," Scotty told him sadly. "When the Americans get here, I may be hung."

"Why? You didn't start the war. And most of the raids on your country were accomplished before the analyzer was set up. It was only operating for a couple of weeks. So half a dozen cities were destroyed. They'd have been bombed anyway. And it's a cheap price for winning the war."

Scotty shook his head. "It wasn't my business to set the price," he said. "No, Porshkin, I broke faith. Whether they call me a traitor or a patriot—it doesn't matter. I can judge myself; and I find myself guilty."

"Silence, Man!" roared the sixth being. "It is I who judge!"

A twisting force seemed to grip Scotty's mind. He slumped heavily to the floor. The very warp and woof of his existence seemed to be wrung between mighty hands. The being was doing something to his consciousness circuits—and to him!

Then he was suddenly somehow beyond the membrane. But it was no longer a place of darkness. A bright sun shone in the sky. The rock was a broad, flat ledge atop a mountain. Below him, a land of forests and lakes spread out toward the horizon. He groped back toward the screen in terror. Just as he spun back through it, he caught a glimpse of someone else on the rock —someone familiar, but not quite discernible in the distance.

Then he was rolling across the vault floor again. He looked around. Porshkin was bending over a body—Scotty's body. It had dried blood on its leg.

Scotty looked down at himself. There was no wound in his new leg. But he could see through it hazily.

A kind of impatient sigh seemed to come from the sixth being. Then Scotty found himself tumbling back toward the membrane again. When he bounced heavily on the rough rock of the mountain top, there was the after-sensation that he had been chucked through by the seat of his pants. He felt for the membrane, but the being had collapsed it. It was gone.

Still he felt the remnants of his circuits in the analyzer. And the being parted the shroud of secrecy slightly.

"You have restored yourself," said the voice. "You have lost one world, but gained another. And, my young friend of a young race, do not make the mistake of believing that yours is the first people of the total continuum to achieve understanding. The first to conceive and build mechanisms to extend the mind.

"And do not believe again that physical-material transit—limited in speed—is the sole road of exploration.

"You have a new world. The feeble energy sources of your machine could not supply energy for more than a single physical totality transor; Porshkin is more needed in the old world. You are more needed in this."

Then Scotty's consciousness circuits were scraped out of the machine like scales off a fish—leaving him but the brain and the body of a man.

He heard footsteps on the rock nearby, then a familiar voice. "Scotty-Mack!"

Her face was cool from the mountain breezes as he pressed it against his own, and the wind whipped her ashen hair about his cheeks as he kissed her. But smaller hands tugged at his legs.

"Hi, kids !"

After a while they went to the edge of the ledge and looked at the broad green panorama, empty of civilization.

"No people," he murmured. Then he saw her faint smirk. He got the point. The Being had also spoken to her—about increasing and multiplying.

THE END