MESMERICA

I had counted on twelve well-earned months amid the
soothingly familiar surroundings of Earth, but this was
another simple. sum that added up wrong. Some infernal
nosey-poke in an observatory saw fit to convince the powers-
that-be that possible pay-dirt existed in the region of
Cassiopeia. Whereupon a fist-full of telegrams went to all
the tried and trusted suckers requesting the pleasure of
their heart's blood.

Mine came at three o'clock in a warm, mellow afternoon
when I was busily occupied rocking on the verandah. Let
me tell you that's no sort of time or place in which to view
with approval an invitation to throw away one's arms and
legs. I felt like telling the bearer where to put his message
except that it wasn't his fault. So I read it and tore it up
and said to hell with it and went on rocking with my eyes
closed. Next day I packed and departed east to swallow the
bait solely because I lacked the moral courage to refuse it.
I hadn't enough guts to be a coward.

So that's why for the umpteenth time I stood by a port
moodily watching a new world swell into gigantic view.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm the sight became so absorbing 
that I almost forgot to jump into harness before the
Marathon played its Flettner trick preparatory to landing.
As it was, I made it in the nick of time. Came the
usual feeling of being turned inside-out and we were there.

My proper post was in the armoury, and there I stayed
while in the main cabin they chose the names of those
whose backsides were to be offered for any alien kicks that
might be coming. After previous experiences there wasn't
quite the same bumptious enthusiasm for hitting the dirt
without care, permission or weapons. Leastways, nobody
beat McNulty to the mark by crawling out through the
tubes this time.

The nearest observation-port framed a mass of vegetable
growths of every imaginable description. They had one
uncommon feature that struck me immediately, namely,
that nothing was tangled around anything else. Tall or
short, slender or wide-spreading, each growth stood in its
own appropriate plot of ground and let a thin spray of
sunlight reach the earth between its neighbours and itself.
A jungle that wasn't a jungle. One could stroll through it
without trouble so far as obstacles to one's feet were 
concerned, though there might well be other and more 
effective forms of opposition.

Green was the predominant colour with here and there
an odd patch of yellow or brown. The chlorophyll reaction
seems common to vegetation in most parts of the cosmos
where quality of solar radiation favours it. The sun's rays
showed golden where they struck through gaps between
growths. This world's primary closely resembled Old Sol
but was a trifle hotter because a little nearer.

I felt a bit uneasy as I studied the scene outside. This
strange live-and-let-live orderliness of plant-life registered
with an eerie touch of artificiality. I could distinguish no
organised regularity among the growths themselves, no
neat patches of one type or tidy rows of another. Nevertheless 
I had a strong impression that they had been cultivated by 
some thing or things with ideas radically different
from our own. It looked rather as though an alien agriculturalist 
had mooched around with a sack of widely assorted
seeds, setting them at random just as his hand found them,
but carefully spacing them according to each one's individual 
need. Like a man planting an oak twenty feet from a cabbage.

Brennand came along, remarked, "There appears to be a
deceitful law governing other worlds, to wit: that they look
completely innocent while making ready to bite your nut
off."

"You think this one is preparing some mayhem?"

"I don't know. But I'll lay no bets on it being a Garden
of Eden."

"Would you bet on it being a garden of some sort?"
"What d'you mean?" He eyed me curiously.

I pointed through the port. "Where's the usual battle for
living-space?"

He had a look outside. "That's an easy one. The ground
is poor hereabouts. It lacks fertility. So growth is sparse."

" How's that for being sparse? " I inquired, indicating a
hairy, cactus-like object half the size of the Marathon.

"The stuff grows too haphazardly, anyway," he evaded.

"You don't plant a carrot next to a gooseberry bush."
"Somebody else might."

"Why?

"Oh, heck!" I said, wearily. "Ask a simpler one. Ask
me why I'm here when I could be taking it happily and
comfortably at home."

" I know the answer to that," he gave back. "There's no
morning mail on the Marathon."

"So what?"

"Mail contains bills, threatening letters, even irate
missives from plump blondes asking what you're going to
do about it."

"Hah!" I eyed him carefully. "Judging others by yourself, 
eh? I've often wondered why you shoot away from
Earth like a guy out of a cold bath. So you're being
hunted?"

"We are not talking about me," he pointed out. "We are
discussing you and your possible motivations. Mine are
simple - I like heavy money. These trips provide it"

A nice retort for that one lay ready on my tongue but
didn't get voiced. Two engineers named Ambrose and
MeFarlane arrived at the armoury and demanded their
stuff."

"Where are the others?" I inquired, handing out
needlers; first-aid packs, emergency rations and so forth.

"There aren't any others."

"Mean to say McNulty is sending out only the pair of
you?"

"That's right. Two can handle a lifeboat."

"The old boy is cautious," Brennand commented." He
becomes jumpier every trip.

"You fellows want spacesuits?"

"No." Ambrose nodded toward the port. "It's thirteen
pounds and has a faint fragrance of old goat, but it's
healthy."

"So that's what I've been smelling all along." I jerked
a suitably contemptuous thumb toward Brennand. "I
thought it was him."

"You thought it was he," said Brennand. "Where's
your grammar? "

McFarlane, a thin, wiry, ginger-haired individual, strapped
on his needler, flexed his arms, invited, "In case I don't
come back does anyone want to kiss me goodbye?" Then
he made a face, said, "Oh, well ---" and stamped out.

A couple of minutes later the lifeboat blew free, shot
westward and hammered into the distance. I could hear
the faraway noise of it for quite a time after it had gone
from sight.

Mooching along to see Steve Gregory, I found him squatting 
in his cubby-hole and sucking his teeth.

"Anything doing, Steve?"

He ran a dismal eye over his instruments. "All I get is
a sizzle-pop." Then he gestured toward a thick book lying
near his right hand. " According to this Radio Koran it is
the characteristic discharge of a sun called Zem 27,
presumably the one burning outside."

"Nothing else?"

"Nary a thing:' Bending forward, he flipped a switch,
spoke toward a box. "Speak up, lifeboat we want to hear
from you."

A squeaky voice I couldn't recognise as either Ambrose's
or McFarlane's answered, "Forty-four west and eight
thousand up."

"See anything?"

"Nothing remarkable."

"Okay. Listening out." He leaned back. "I was under
the delusion that my last trip was my last trip. I was all
set to take it easy and bake my corns on the stove."

"Same here," I said. Maybe there's a curse on me. I
oughtn't have grabbed that guppy's opal."

"What guppy's opal? " He perked up, raised his eyebrows.

"Never mind. I've a dirty deed contaminating my past."

"Who hasn't? " he retorted. "Back in the good old days
on Venus I traded my birth certificate for a ---"

Something dinged amid his dials and meters. He flipped
a switch.

A voice said a bit louder than before, "Lifeboat here.
Seventy west and four thousand up. Circling over a large
lake. There's what looks like an encampment on the shore."

"Stand by a moment." Steve worked another switch, said
to his mike, "Captain, I've got Ambrose on. He thinks he's
found local life."

"Put him through to me," McNulty ordered.

Steve made the connection. We could hear ensuing 
conversation through the intercom.

"What is it, Ambrose?"

"A camp on the shore of a lake."

"Ah! Who or what is occupying it?"

"Nobody," said Ambrose.

"Nobody? You mean it's deserted?"

"Wouldn't go so far as to say that, but that's how it looks
from up here. There are about a hundred small pyramidical
huts arranged in four concentric circles. Can't see anything
moving around between them." A pause, followed by; "How
about us landing and taking a closer look, Captain?"

McNulty didn't like it. The long silence showed him to be
mulling it over. Undoubtedly he was trying to think up a
way of getting the suggested closer look without going
closer to get it. I've never known a man so unwilling to
place bets on anything but a one hundred per cent
certainty. Finally his voice sounded with reduced volume
as he spoke in an aside to someone else.

"They want to land. What d'you think of it?"

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," answered Jay Score's
deep tones.

"Yes, I suppose so, but" Another pause, then he
came louder over the intercom. "Look, Ambrose, is there
room for the Marathon to sit in that place?"

"Not without burning ten acres of bush or flattening half
the huts."

"Humph!" I'll tell you what : try zooming close over the
roofs a couple of times. That ought to bring them out
running."

Ambrose sighed and said; "Okay, Captain; we'll try it -
but I don't think there's anyone in the place to be brought
out" Silence for a long while before he came back with,
"No soap."

"They didn't appear?"

"No. We almost brushed the roofs off and our air-blast
shook the entire place. It's empty."

"Very well, then. Make your landing and see what you
can discover but be mighty careful:" His tones drifted away
again as he continued, "I tell you, Jay, that after this trip
some other commander can"

Steve cut the switch, said, " He's got the same trouble as
you and me. He's hankering for the Upsydaisy and the
regular Venus-run. We were in a nice comfortable rut
there."

"Somebody has to do the heroics," I said.

"I know, I know. But the glory ought to be shared
around. It can come one way too often."

He scowled at his instruments and Ambrose's voice came
out of them dulled by a steady drumming noise.

"Easy does it, Mac. Watch that row to starboard. Yes,
we'll just about make it. Brakes, quick! There!"

The drumming ceased. Then followed a long conversation 
too much off the mike to hear in full detail until their
voices rose and they started shouting at each other. Seemed
they were arguing about which one went out and which
stayed with the boat. Seemed that McFarlane wanted to
toss for it and Ambrose wanted to examine the coin he 
proposed to use.

Becoming slightly red in the face, Steve operated a stud
that made loud dinging noises and succeeded in attracting
the attention of the distant debaters.
"Now see here, you two cretins," he said without courtesy, 
"each of you pulls a hair from the other's scalp. The
one who gets the longest goes out. The short one stays in."

That brought a long silence ended by the sound of an
opening and closing airlock.

After a while, Steve snapped impatiently, "Well, who
was it?"

"McFarlane," informed Ambrose surlily. He went away
from his mike, leaving the channel open. For a time we
could hear his boots clumping restlessly to and fro within
the little boat. Probably he was absorbing an eyeful of the
outside through various ports and enviously watching
McFarlane strolling around enjoying the country.

After a bit he gave an annoyed grunt, muttered something 
indistinguishable. His heavy space boots tramped
farther away. The airlock opened and we heard his distant
voice bawl out of it.

"Well, what d'you want, Bighead?"

The reply from outside couldn't reach the mike, so we
didn't know what McFarlane said. There sounded an
extremely faint thump as of somebody jumping out the airlock
and onto thick grass. Then all went quiet. The minutes
crawled by, each one an age.

Steve started to fidget. Later on his eyebrows commenced
oscillating. When his large ears also got the jittering jerks
it was more than I could stand.

"Look," I said. "Let's not fall to pieces, shall we? Let's
say something to Ambrose if it's only to swap naughty
limericks."

Giving me the ugly eye he reached for his stud, dinged
the far-off receiver a dozen times, listened vfor a response.
Ambrose didn't reply. Neither did McFaTiane. The boat
remained as silent as the grave though a faint and steady
hum showed that its transmitter was still active and holding
the channel open.

Taking his mike, Steve hoarsed intb it, "Lifeboat! Are
you there, lifeboat? We're calling you! Answer us, lifeboat!"

Silence.

"Ambrose!" he howled into the mike. "AMBROSE!
Are you there?"

No response.

"Maybe he's gone to pay a visit," I suggested uneasily.

"What for?" asked Steve, acting stupid.

"To trim his moustache or something. People pay visits,
don't they? That's what the little room is for."

"Not at this time," he said.

"What the heck has that got to do with it? He goes by
his bowels, not by his watch."

"He could pick a better time than this," he persisted.
Then he waggled the eyebrows a bit and added, "Anyway,
I'll give him another ten minutes."

At the end of that period he dinged and bawled and did
everything he knew.

The lifeboat gave back its low hum and nothing more.

We had to tell McNulty, of course. He foamed and
fumed and discussed it with Jay. They decided it couldn't
yet be taken for granted that anything untoward had 
happened at the other end. Possibly Ambrose's curiosity had
overcome his caution and he'd left the boat to look at 
some-thing his partner had found. Or maybe he'd had to go out
to help haul aboard something that needed two men's
strength to handle. But he ought to have said so first. He
ought to have reported his intentions and the reasons for
them before leaving. There would be harsh words about
this omission when he returned.

Meanwhile we'd sit tight and listen out. We'd give them
at least another hour before taking alarm. So I left Steve
to sit and wait, went to the galley and gave myself a 
meditative meal. Young Wilson was there swilling coffee.

"How's the boat doing?" he inquired.
"That's the current mystery." I bolted a wad, filled a
mug of black java.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning it has squatted in a village and shut up. Steve
can't get a squeak out of it"

"A village? What sort of creatures are inhabiting it?"

"No sort. It's empty. So Ambrose and McFarlane have
gone in and made it emptier."

"They've disappeared?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You wouldn't be surprised, either," he suggested, giving
me a leery look.

"No, I would not"
"Hey, hey!" He made a face at the wall. "Here we go
again" Then he went on, "What's McNulty doing about it?"

"Nothing just yet"

"Heck, those two guys may be cooked and eaten while
we hang around resting our fannies."

"Or maybe they're cooking and eating something worth
having while we're trying to masticate this dog-food." I
poked the rest of the wad away, finished the java, got up.

"See you in somebody's oven."

Spent most of the next hour busy in the armoury, then
let the remainder of the work wait. I was too restless to
concentrate on it because I had to know what was going on.
So back I went to Steve's place.

"Any ---?"

"Sh-h-h!" He held a warning finger to his lips. "Not a
sound up to now but it's just started coming through."

He turned up the volume. There came the characteristic
crack of an airlock door closing. Then something like the
clunk of boots shuffling around at the tail-end of the distant
lifeboat. Steve put out a finger, prodded the stud. Back
came the loud ding of the faraway receiver's call-bell.

It was followed immediately by a peculiar sound from
the opposite end of the boat. A kind of hiss or spit. Gave
me the eerie impression of something non-human startled
by the ding. The boot sounds didn't repeat. No tramping
forward to answer the summons, as we had expected. Just
the sharp spit and silence.

Frowning, Steve dinged again. No answer. Yet somebody 
was in the boat, of that we had no doubt. He dinged
half a dozen times in quick succession, making it urgent
and ifeful. He might as well have been trying to line up
three lemons for all the good it did.

"What the blazes has come over them?" he demanded.

"Try some bad language," I offered. "That loudspeaker
of theirs can be heard from nose to tail."

Taking the mike, he bellowed, "Hey!"

The response to that was a louder hiss like a railroad 
locomotive letting go a squirt of surplus steam, also a swift
clatter of bootlike noises followed by the crash of the 
airlock door. Then nothing. Whatever had been in the boat
had gone out, and hurriedly.

Steve gaped at me, his face a mixture of emotions. "What
d'you think of that? "

"I don't like it"

"Neither do I" He stared doubtfully at his microphone.
"Do you suppose they're acting up because they don't want
to be ordered back just yet?"

"Could be," I admitted. "Nothing of which the
human mind can conceive is impossible. So by a
million to one chance they may have stumbled across
a cosmic cocktail bar run by a pair of voluptuous
brunettes. But I don't think so. That radio talks trouble
to me."

"Me, too. I'm going to tell McNulty." Changing intercom 
lines, he got the captain, said, "Somebody's just been
in that lifeboat and wouldn't answer."

"You're sure of that?"

"Positive, Captain. I could hear the movements as plain
as the nose on my face."

"You couldn't put it more convincingly," said McNulty.

"It wasn't Ambrose or McFarlane?"

Steve hesitated, said, "If it was, they've gone deaf on us.
They won't respond to the call-bell. And when I yelled,
'Hey!' they beat it"

"This is ominous," decided NcNulty. "We had better
move fast and ---" He ceased as the loudspeaker in our
little cubby-hole suddenly squawked, "Hey!" Then he said
in startled tones, "What was that?"

"The lifeboat" With his ears trying to go fourteen ways
at once, Steve juggled with switches. "I'll put it through to
you."
"Now look here, Ambrose," began McNulty, authoritatively 
pompous. "What's the game?"

"Now look here, Ambrose," sneered the lifeboat in
peculiarly stilted tones. "What's the game?"

"This is Captain McNulty talking!" roared that worthy,
his blood pressure beginning to rise.

"This is Captain MeNulty talking," squealed the lifeboat
in outrageous imitation.

McNulty breathed heavily, then inquired in a low, almost
unhearable voice, " Steve, are you playing tricks with me?"

"No, sir;" said Steve, shocked at the notion.
The other bellowed afresh. "Ambrose, I order you to
return forthwith and by hokey ---!" He broke off. There
was a pause while the lifeboat repeated this in high-pitched
and penetrating mockery. Then a new voice took his place.

"Who's there? " asked Jay Score, calmly and self-possessed.

"Who's there?" inquired the lifeboat.

"Yimmish vank wozzeneck," said Jay, in sheer nonsense.

"Yimmish vank wozzeneck," echoed the lifeboat, as
though one language were equally as good as another.

Jay said decisively, "Close the line, Steve. We'll send
out the pinnace to look into this."

Steve closed the line, said to me, "I think Ambrose has
bought himself a parrot"

"Or a cut throat." I slid a finger across my gullet, made
a gurgling sound.

He didn't like it.

Eight of us went in the pinnace, all Terrestrials. A couple
of the Martians were reluctantly willing to leave their 
chessboards but there was no reason to suppose we'd need their
help and they'd take up too much room in the boat. Jay
Score didn't join the party either, which was a pity in view
of the peculiar circumstances. He'd have been useful in
ways we had yet to realise.

Bannister did the piloting. The pinnace boomed away
from the Marathon's side, went up to ten thousand feet.
Clouds spread thin and high on this world, so that visibility
remained pretty good in all directions. Looking through the
port beside my seat I could see sparsely wooded landscape
stretching for miles, with rivers and streams here and there
and long, rolling hills in the distance. There didn't seem
to be any outstanding evidence of intelligent life, leastways,
not around these parts.

Sitting next to me, young Wilson nursed a camera that
was smothered with gadgets and had a greenish filter over
its lens. He kept staring out the port on his side, then at
the sun, and licking his lips. In front, alongside Bannister,
a blue-jowled character named Veitch was talking to Steve
through a larynx-mike.

The pinnace hammered on for quite a while before it
went into a wide starboard turn and lost height. Bannister
and Veitch leaned forward scanning the lie of the land
through their windshield. Soon we could see the cleared
patch by the river, the concentric circles of huts and the
lifeboat lying nearby. We went lower, still turning. It
became evident that there wouldn't be room to land without 
bashing up something; the grounded lifeboat fitted
neatly into the only available space.

Perforce we droned beyond clear sight of this layout,
being unable to turn in a circle small enough to keep going
round its edge. We lost a lot more height, came back,
crossed the camp at no more than five hundred feet, saw
Ambrose and McFarlane lounging by the boat and staring
up at us. I could hardly believe it, they looked so casual.
We flashed past them in about two seconds, with Wilson
snapping his camera at them through the port.

I hadn't got a very good view of the pair on the ground,
what with Wilson confiscating most of the seeing space, but
I gained the impression that both were unharmed and 
perfectly at ease. Also that Ambrose was nursing something
that looked like a basket of fruit: It annoyed me more
than somewhat. I had the notion that the pair of them had
wandered around pandering to their guts while panic hit
the Marathon and brought the pinnace out. Fat lot they
cared so long as they could stuff their bellies. But they'd
pay for it: McNulty would skin them alive in due time.
We made another U-turn, came over in a second run.
Bannister made menacing gestures at them from behind
the windshield. McFarlane waved back airily, as though
he were on a Sunday school outing. Wilson snapped him
doing it.

Veitch was saying into his mike, "They're all right. The
lifeboat must have developed a radio fault to account for
the stuff you heard."

I don't know what the Marathon answered to that, but
Veitch finished, "All right. We'll drop them a note and
come straight back."

He scribbled on paper, attached it to a weighted message-
streamer and slung it through the base-trap at the next run
over. I saw its long ribbon go fluttering down twenty yards
from the pair of beachcombers below. Then we thrummed
beyond view and headed back to the mother ship.
Was on my way to the armoury when Steve spotted me
from his cubby-hole and called me in. He surveyed me as
if trying to decide whether I were drunk or sober.

After a bit, he said, "You sure those two bums are okay?"

"I saw them with my own eyes. Why?"

"Well ... well --- " He swallowed, gloomed at his
meters and switches, shifted back to me. "Their boat
could develop a fault. Nothing is perfect and that goes for
radio apparatus as much as anything else."

"So what?"

"I've never heard of a defect that causes messages to be
bounced back word for word as spoken."

"You have now!" I said. "There's always a first time."

"It's contrary to theory," he insisted.

"So's my Aunt Martha. She has ten toes."

"Everybody has," he said.

"Yes, but not two on one foot and eight on the other."

He scowled slightly and maintained, "I'm not interested
in circus freaks. I'm telling you there can be no such thing
as a fault producing echo-symptoms."

"Then how d'you explain it?"

"I can't" He let go a deep sigh. "That's just the hell of
it. I heard what I heard and there's nothing wrong with my

ears and it wasn't a radio fault. I tell you, somebody was
giving us the yah-boo and I don't think it funny."

"Ambrose wouldn't be so childish," I said

"No, he wouldn't," he agreed meaningfully.

"McFarlane is no juvenile delinquent, either."

"No, he isn't," he said in the same way.

"Then who else?"

"Yeah!" He eyed me peculiarly. "Who?"

"Oh, shut up - I don't believe in poltergeists."

With that I continued on my way, feeling rather unsettled
but refusing to show it. Steve knew his stuff all right. None
better. He was the boat's radio expert. And he was so
certain of himself about this matter.

So somebody had slung MeNulty's words back in his
teeth. It wasn't Ambrose. It wasn't McFarlane. It couldn't
be anyone else. Yet none of us had imagined it. The more
one thought of this phenomenon the more inexplicable it
became. Yet nothing is completely inexplicable so far as
alien planets are concerned.

Reassured by the pinnace's report, McNulty relaxed
sufficiently to let a few men exercise their legs outside. No
more than a dozen, with strict orders to retain their needlers
ready to hand and not to go more than half a mile from the
ship. The lucky dozen were picked from a hat and did not
include yours truly.

They came for their weapons. One of them was Jepson,
the guy who'd gotten himself all gummed up last trip.
I cracked, " What are you letting yourself in for this
time?"

"Nothing if I can help it," he assured with some fervour.
Molders, the big Swede; took a projector; remarked, "I'm
keeping my distance from you, anyway. I've had enough of
sticking together."

They went out. The sky showed they wouldn't have long
to ramble around because the sun already was low and
there wasn't much more than another hour to nightfall.

The first shades had drawn long and dark when McNulty
got the willies again. Half a dozen of the liberty boys had
returned of their own accord, having found nothing outside
to detain them. The ship's siren sounded with a horrid
moan, recalling the others. There was some excitement up
at the bow end and I noticed the pom-pom crew checking
one of their multi-barrelled weapons. Something was 
brewing sure enough and Steve was the man likeliest to know
the cause. I went to see him.

"What's up now?"

"The pinnace dropped a message to the lifeboat, didn't
it?" he said.

"It did. I watched it go down."

"Well, they've taken no notice of it" He jerked a thumb
at the nightshrouded observation port on his left. "It's
gone sundown and they're still sitting tight. Neither are
they responding to my radio calls. I've dinged until I'm sick
of it. I've bawled at them until I'm hoarse. The lifeboat's
generator is still running and the channel remains open, but
Ambrose and McFarlane might be the other side of the
cosmos for all I can tell."

"Can't understand it " I was frankly puzzled. "I saw
them myself, taking it easy outside their airlock. Nothing
wrong with either of them. And the boat itself was
undamaged."

"I don't care," he asserted stubbornly. "I told you before
that there's something mighty fishy about this and I say so
again."

There wasn't anything useful I could add, so I mooched
off, lay in my bunk and tried to read but found I couldn't
concentrate no matter haw I tried. The feeling that we'd
had a fast one pulled on us in some mysterious way grew
stronger and stronger, I became jumpier the more I thought
about it but for the life of me couldn't conjure up a 
satisfactory explanation.

Outside, darkness now was complete save for light from
the stars faintly illuminating surrounding vegetation. I was
still stewing the problem of the apparently mutinous pair
with the lifeboat, trying to decide what could keep them
there despite all orders to the contrary, when a knock
sounded on the door of my cabin and Wilson came in.

The look on his face made me sit up quick. He had the

appearance of one who has unwittingly shaken hands with
a ghost.

"What's eating you?" I demanded. "Got the collywobbles 
or something? If so, don't you be sick over me!"

"I don't know what I've got" He sat on the edge of the
desk, tried to compose himself but didn't succeed very well.

"I'm on my way to see McNulty about it. But first I'd like
you to check up and assure me that I'm not nuts."

"Check up? on what?"

"On these." He tossed three half-plate photographs into
my lap.

I gave them a cursory glance, noted that they were the
pics he'd taken from the pinnace. Considering the awkward
circumstances in which they'd been made they'd turned
out pretty good. He must have snapped at one-thousandth
of a second or even less, and with his lens open wider than
a Venusian guppy's mouth. No blurs attributable to the
pinnace's fast motion. Sharp and clear as though taken
from a standstill.

"Nice work," I complimented. "You certainly know how
to handle a camera."

He stared at me with a slight touch of incredulity, then
said, How about taking a closer look. See if you can
find the zipper on Ambrose's hug-me-tight."

Obediently I took a closer look. Then I shot headlong
out of the bunk, switched on my powerful desk-light and
had another gander beneath its revealing brilliance. My
bowels turned over and went all wishy-washy. A long, thin
icicle substituted itself for my spine.

There wasn't any Ambrose.
There wasn't any McFarlane.

Precisely where they had stood outside the lifeboat's air-
lock were two repulsive objects resembling tangled masses
of thick, black, greasy rope.

"Well?" inquired Wilson, watching me.

I shoved the pics into his hands. "You'd better take
these to bow cabin at the double. I'm going to lay out
the needlers and stuff-they'll be wanted before long!"
The general alarm sounded ten minutes later. I was expecting 
it and went forward on the run. We gathered in the main
cabin, silent and full of anticipation. McNulty strutted in
with Jay Score following right behind, huge and shiny-eyed.

McNulty said with a trace of bitterness, "We have made
contact with this planet's highest life-form some hours ago
but not realised it until now. They're hostile and they've
gained the edge of us. The first loss is ours: We're already
down by four men."

"Four?" I ejaculated involuntarily.

His eyes strayed to me a moment, went back over the
others. "I permitted twelve to go out. Only ten have 
returned. Jepson and Painter have not answered the recall
siren. Neither do Ambrose and McFarlane respond to my
orders to return. It leaves me no choice but to regard those
four as probable casualties." His voice hardened. "We
must suffer no more!"

The men fidgeted a bit. By my side Kli Yang leaned to
whisper to me and Brennand.

"He is counting the pieces without detailing the moves.
How can one analyse the trend of the game with 
insufficient --- ?"

He shut up as McNulty continued. "The true nature of
the opposition is not yet fully understood but it is evident
that they have mesmeric power not to be despised. Doubtless 
they used it to entice Ambrose from the lifeboat, making
him think he was being summoned by McFarlane. That
will give you some idea of what we're up against"

Brennand, who didn't know the half of what had been
going on, asked, "What d'you mean by mesmeric power,
Captain?"

"In fullest sense that is something we have yet to discover," 
responded McNulty, making it sound ominous.

"All we do know is that they can delude you into thinking
you see what they want you to see-and maybe they can
take it farther than that! We're facing a mental weapon of
considerable potency and we've got to watch our step!"

"Does that apply to Jay?" inquired Brennand. "Can he
be kidded too?"
It was a good question. Those brilliant eyes didn't
function organically like ours. Their optic nerves were thin
veins of silver and the brain behind was electronically
unique. Wilson's camera hadn't been fooled and for the
same reasons I couldn't see how Jay could be, either.
But Jay merely smiled and said, "I have yet to face a
test"

Kli Yang chipped in with irritating superiority. "That
also applies to us Martians." He made his saucer eyes look
two ways at once, pointing them at almost opposite
extremes. It gave me the heebies to watch him do it. "As
is evident, our optics are superior to Terrestrial organs."

"Nuts!" said Brennand.

"It doesn't matter what sort of eyes you've got so long as
the brain can be deceived," Jay Score pointed out.

"That won't be so easy either," declared Kli Yang. He
waggled a tentacle by way of emphasis. " Because as is
well known, the Martian mind ---"

Waving him down in mid-sentence, McNulty said sharply,
"This is no time to argue the respective merits of different
forms. We're taking action to determine the fate of the
missing men and rescue them if still alive. The Marathon
will remain here while a search-party under Jay Score hunts
for Jepson and Painter. At the same time ten men and one
Martian will take the pinnace to the lifeboat, burn down
an adequate landing-space nearby and look for Ambrose
and McFarlane. I want volunteers for both parties."

Ten men and one Martian would overload the pinnace
with a vengeance. But the boat hadn't far to go and it
certainly was the quickest way to get a rescue party there -
the stronger in number, the better. I guessed the Martian
had been included despite his greater weight because
McNulty hoped there might be something in Kli Yang's
claim to see straight when he was most cockeyed. The
Marathon's party was being put under Jay Score for a
similar reason: that they'd have the benefit of a leader 
who couldn't be deluded.

I volunteered to go with the pinnace. So did Bannister,
Brennand, Kli Yang, Molders, Wilson, Kelly and several
others. Sending the rest of the crew back to their posts
until he was ready to organise their outing, McNulty dealt
with us first.

"Six men and one Martian will conduct the search," he
ordered. "You will keep close together at all times and not
permit yourselves to be separated even for a moment. The
remaining four will stay in the pinnace and not leave it in
any circumstances whatsoever." He stared hard at us,
added firmly, "I want that to be thoroughly understood.
The four in the boat do not leave the vessel even if the
search-party reappears and begs on bended knees for them
to come out - because by that time the search-party may
not be what it looks to be!"

"Suppose they don't beg us to come out?" asked the
lavishly tattooed Kelly. I noticed that he was dangling an
outsized spanner from one fist.

McNulty saw the tool at the same time, remarked acidly,
"You can leave that object behind. A needler will be more
useful." He sniffed his disdain and continued, "It will be
all right, of course, if they don't try tempt you to emerge.
The problem then doesn't arise."

"So we let them in?" said Kelly, pointedly.

Hah! The skipper's face was a picture worth seeing. He
opened his mouth, shut it, went pink and then red. He
turned to Jay Score, making tangled motions with his hands.

"He's raised an issue there, Jay. If the party has been
long out of sight, how are those in the pinnace to know
whether it's safe to admit them "

jay thought it over. "The simplest solution is to use
passwords, a different one for each man. The one who
can't or won't give it gets needled on the spot. That'll be
tough on anyone with a lousy memory but we can't afford
to take chances."

The skipper didn't care overmuch for that idea and
neither did we. Something more positive, more watertight
would have been better. If these alien creatures could fool
us visually it was remotely possible that they could also kid
us audibly, making us imagine that they were saying the
right words at the right moment. I had an unpleasant feel-
ing that they might be able to persuade us to draw up a last
will and testament in their favour, in the dumb belief that
they were our natural heirs.

However, none of us could think up anything better on
the spur of the moment. Blood tests would have been an
ideal solution, but you can't take samples and subject them
to microscopic examination in circumstances where the
people being tested may be trying to get aboard six jumps
ahead of a pursuing army. A man could die helplessly
and messily while we were trying to prove beyond doubt
that he was a man!

Leaving McNulty to summon and get on with his briefing
of the Marathon's own search-party, we hastened with the
task of stripping the pinnace of all surplus weight and 
re-placing it with other things more likely to be needed. Being
a sort of triple-sized lifeboat, the pinnace normally carried
bulky items that wouldn't be wanted on a local trip, such
as a ton of emergency rations, enough water to last its crew
for two months, oxygen flasks, spacesuits, a cosmic compass,
a long-range beam radio and so forth. Dragging all that out,
we installed a pom-pom and extra ammo, a gas projector,
a case of bombs and a few other unfriendly gifts to natives.

I was staggering past the port airlock with a couple of
pom-pom ammo belts draped around me when I noticed
that one of the grease monkeys on duty there had operated
the door-wind and the plug was rotating inward along its
worm. The other grease monkey leaned against the facing
wall, picking his teeth and watching the plug glassy-eyed.
Both of them had the casual air of stevedores about to 
preside over the loading of twenty sacks of Venusian 
marshpods.

Generally I mind my own business because it's the only
way to get along when a bunch of you are confined in a
bottle and likely to tread on each other's necks if not
careful. Perhaps recent events had made me touchy,
because this time I stopped dead with the ammo clattering
around me.

"Who ordered you to open up?"

"Nobody," informed the tooth picker.  Painter's come
back and he wants in."

"How d'you know that?"

"Because we can see him standing outside." He gave me
one of those what-the-hell's-it-got-to-do-with-you looks and
added, " He banged on the door. Maybe something's
happened to Jepson and he's come to get help."

"Maybe," I said, shucking off the ammo belts and groping
for my needler. "And maybe not!"

The door reached the end of its worm while he gaped at
me as if I'd taken leave of my senses. It swung aside, 
revealing a great hole in the dark. Painter clambered into the
hole as though a thousand devils were after him and
started walking along the cut-out in the worm.

I said loudly, "Stand where you are!"

He did not take the slightest notice. Neither did he
answer. He knew me well enough to come back with,
"What the heck's eating you; Sergeant?" or something like
that, and if he had done he'd have got away with it: But
he didn't say a word.

For a split second I watched him, unable to credit the
evidence of my own eyes, because I could actually see that
he was Painter from the hobnails on his boots to the
widow's peak in his black hair. He was accurate in every
detail, clothes and all. So utterly perfect that I had a
horrible fear I was about to commit a cold-blooded murder.

I needled him. The ray caught him square in the guts
before he d come a yard inward.

What happened then stirred my back hairs and made the
pair of onlookers feel sick. Something seemed to go click
back of my eyes, the vision of Painter disappeared as
though cut off from a suddenly extinguished epidiascope.
In its place was a violently squirming mass of black rope
that tried to tie itself into a million knots. Ends and loops
stuck out of the tangle, throbbing and vibrating. There
weren't any eyes, nose, ears or other recognisable organs;
nothing but a ball of greasy coils like a dozen pythons
knotted in one agonised lump. It rolled backward, fell out
just as my ray spiked it again.

"Quick!" I bawled, a trickle of sweat running down my
back. "Shut that door!"

They did it sluggishly, like men in a dream. One lugged
the lever, the door swung across began to wind into its
worm. I stayed there until it had gone all the way and
rotation had ceased. There was a faint stink in the airlock,
making me think of the time some guppies had roasted a
goat without taking the hide off.

Jay Score came along as I was dragging the ammo belts
off the floor and heaving them onto my shoulders. He
sampled the air, had a look at the self-conscious grease
monkeys and knew without being told that there had been
dirty work at the crossroads.

"What's been going on?" he demanded.

"Painter came back," I informed. "Only it wasn't
Painter."

"You let him in?"

"Yes. And he was Painter beyond all argument. I knew
him better than I know my own mother."

"And so?"

"But he wouldn't or couldn't talk. He wouldn't answer
back. So I took a chance." I thought of it and felt another
bead of sweat going down between my shoulder blades.
"I rayed him amidships and he turned into something out
of a nightmare."

"H'm! Pity I wasn't here myself - it would have provided 
an opportunity to check on whether I see the same
as you see." He thought awhile, went on, " By the looks of
it they aren't capable of speech nor of deluding us that
they can speak. That simplifies matters a little. Ought to
make things easier."

"They were easier on the Venus-run," I remarked with
unashamed nostalgia.

Taking no notice, he went on, "We also know that they've
actually got Painter and probably Jepson as well, else they
wouldn't be able to put over a plausible picture of one of
them." He turned to the pair on duty in the lock. " Don't
open that door again without first getting permission from
the skipper. That's an order!"

They nodded glumly. Jay continued on his way and I
went mine. The pinnace was ready within the hour. We
piled in, a tight-fitting little mob with no room to dance
around. Kli Yang sat with his head-and-shoulder piece
exhausted to three pounds pressure, his long, rubbery tentacles 
sprawling across half a dozen laps. One of his tips
rested on my knees, half turned to expose a sucker
the size of a small saucer. I had a crazy desire to spit
in it for no other reason than because it was sure to
annoy him.

The pinnace boomed away into the dark, Bannister piloting 
as before. Despite intense gloom of night it wasn't
difficult to steer a direct course to the lifeboat. We had a
powerful searchlight in the bow, a full quota of blindflying 
instruments. What helped most was the fact that the 
lifeboat's generators continued to function and its radio
channel remained open: all we had to do was pick up the
background noise and follow it to its source.

Pretty soon we roared across the alien encampment with
our beam making the grounded lifeboat shine like a silver
cylinder at one side. The glimpse we got of the collection
of pyramidical huts was extremely brief, but I fancied I saw
a few dark, shapeless things moving about the camp.
Couldn't be sure of it, though.

Bannister let go a string of tiny jelly-bombs just as we
cleared the camp. They flopped in a straight line covering
four or five hundred yards, burst into fierce, all-consuming
flame. We thundered onward, giving the blaze time to
work itself out, then made a wide circle that took us over
some hills, back across the lake. Finally we topped the huts
at a height of fifty feet, shaking every roof in the place,
and belly-slid to a landing along the ashy path cleared by
the bombs.

Four were picked to stay with the boat and hold it against
all comers-which included those going out if they happened 
to be forgetful! The stayers made careful note of our 
passwords. Mine was nanifani, which is a rude word on Venus. 
Being just an ordinary space-sailor, and no intellectual, I 
learn all the rude words first and remember them
longest. But I never thought the day would come when
vulgarity would be a survival-factor.

Those preliminaries over, we checked needlers, pocketed
a bomb apiece. Brennand opened the airlock, went out,
followed by Molders, Kelly, myself, then Kli Yang and
Wilson, in that order. I remember staring at the dancing
girl tattooed on Kelly's arm as he made his jump to ground.
He had parted from his inevitable spanner and had a
needler in his fist for a change. Then I jumped down and
the over-eager Kli Yang landed on top of me, rolling me
around in a mess of tentacles. Somehow I wriggled out
from under him, making suitable remarks about the Red
planet's facility for producing imbeciles.

Darkness was stygian. One could barely discern the
skeletal shapes of unharmed trees and bushes beyond the
area of ash. We had powerful hand-beams but didn't use
them lest they make us targets for unknown weapons. When
you're up against a strange enemy you have to use a
modicum of caution, even if it means feeling around like
a blind man.

But we knew where the encampment lay with reference
to the pinnace, and all we needed to do was follow the
ash-track back to its beginning. The first and most logical
place to seek Ambrose and McFarlane -or their bodies-
was among those huts. So we made toward them, moving
quietly and warily, in single file.

Trouble started at the end of the ash-track and within
twenty jumps of the camp. Before us stood a patch of
bushes and trees over which the first jelly-bomb had
skipped, and beyond those were some of the outer ring of
huts faintly visible in the starlight. I don't think we could
have recognised the queer shapes as huts had we not been
expecting them and been plodding through the gloom
long enough for our eyes to get adjusted.

Brennand stepped cautiously through the first of the trees
with Molders a couple of yards behind. Next instant there
sounded a dull thunk! and a startled exclamation from
Molders. The big Swede paused a second or two, his eyes
seeking Brennand who seemed to have vanished. Then he
took a few tentative steps forward, peering into the black-
ness, and we heard a second thunk!

The third in line was Kelly, who stopped and whispered
hoarsely, "Bejasus, there's something indacent around here.
I'm going to show a light"

We crowded up to him as he aimed his hand-beam
straight ahead. Its circle of brilliant illumination revealed
Brennand and Molders sprawling in the undergrowth like
kids gone to sleep in the hay. There was nothing whatever
to indicate what had conked them, no sign of alien life, no
surreptitious sounds in the dark. For all one could tell
they'd both decided to drop dead. But even as we looked,
Molders sat up, tenderly felt the back of his turnip, his
expression stupified. Brennand twitched a couple of times
and let go a bubbling noise.

Blinking into the strong light, Molders complained, "I
got slugged!" He struggled upright, stared around, became
filled with sudden fury and exclaimed, "I think it was that
damn tree!"

So saying, he needled a five-foot growth standing alongside. 
I thought he'd gone crazy. Next instant I wondered
whether I'd become a bit cracked myself.

The tree posed there, a nondescript object with long,
thin, glossy leaves; manifestly and beyond all doubt a
genuine one hundred per cent. vegetable. Molders' needleray 
hit it squarely in the trunk and at once it disappeared
like a fragmentary dream. In its place was one of those
horribly knotted balls I'd seen before.

Right behind the irate Molders stood another, similar
growth. Despite the intensity of my concentration upon
what was happening, one corner of my eye saw this second
object quiver as if about to do something. I don't think I've
ever pulled a needler faster. I had it out and flaring in less
time than it takes to sniff. And that tree also flashed into a
greasy black sphere of madly writhing rope.

I kept the needler going and Molders did likewise. There
were two features of these squirming bunches of outlandish
life that gave me the willies. Firstly, they took the rays in
utter silence, without so much as a yelp. Secondly, I sliced
off loose ends and projecting loops, whereupon the main
body continued to wriggle as though unconscious of its
loss while the severed bits jumped and twisted hither and
thither with an eerily independent life of their own.

Well, we sliced them up into a couple of hundred pieces
that continued to hump around like sections of giant black
worm. Nothing chipped in to stop us and other treelike
things nearby stood impassive, unmoving. Maybe they were
real trees. Of that, I'll never be sure.

By the time we'd finished, Brennand was on his feet and
delicately fingering an egg on his cranium: He took a poor
view of the situation, was inclined to be liverish about it.

Giving Kli Yang the sour eye, he said, "You saw these
things." He motioned at the squirming pieces. "How did
they look to you?"

"I regret to say that they resembled trees," admitted Kli
Yang, resenting being duped along with mere Terrestrials.
"Shows the functional superiority of swivel-eyes, doesn't
it? " commented Brennand, acidly. He felt his head again,
kicked aside a six-inch length of writhing rope. "Come
on!"

For some reason or other we broke into a run, reached
the first hut and crowded into it together. The edifice
proved a lot bigger than it looked from the air: about three
times the size of an average room in an Earth-house. It
wasn't subdivided but it was furnished according to 
somebody's outlandish ideas.

The walls and roof were made of reeds woven in complicated 
patterns so close that they were reasonably windproof and 
watertight, the whole being mounted on a frame of tough, 
resilient poles resembling bamboo. The floor was completely 
covered by a thick grass mat also woven in a theme of 
repeated curlicues. At one side stood three circular tables 
a foot high by four in diameter. I call them tables but 
they might have been chairs or beds for all I know. 

A number of peculiar utensils hung from the roof's 
crosspoles, some of them carved out of solid wood, others of
dull, lead-coloured metal. Most of these had thin, curved
spouts pierced with a fine hole about large enough to be
stoppered with an ordinary pin. Seemed to me that the
creature who used these things would suck at them with a
mouth as small as a vest button.

What drew our united attention as Brennand's beam
focused upon it was an instrument on the wall opposite
the door. It had a circular dial marked around the edge
with forty-two dots. Another disc bearing one dot on its
rim was mounted over this, and while we watched it shifted
with almost imperceptible slowness, gradually aligning its
own dot against one on the outer circle. Obviously some
kind of clock, though we could not hear it ticking or detect
any sound from it at all. However, it served to prove one
thing : that we were up against things higher than mere
savages, things with a certain amount of cerebral ingenuity
and manual dexterity.

Nobody occupied this hut. It stood devoid of inhabitants
while its alien clock silently measured alien hours upon the
wall. Our beams went over the whole place, not missing a
corner, and manifestly it was deserted. At that moment
I'd have taken my most binding oath that the hut was
vacant, completely vacant-though I did notice a faint
goatish smell which I attributed to the stinky atmosphere
or maybe the effluvia of the late tenants.

Hut number two proved the same. Empty of aliens. It
held a bit more furniture differently arranged and had five
of the circular tables or beds. Also two clocks. But no
owners. We gave it a thorough once-over with six pairs of
eyes including Kli Yang's independently swivelling optics,
and there wasn't a living thing in evidence.

By the time we'd completed our search of the outer
circle by examining hut number thirty, it appeared certain
that the encampment's occupants must have beaten it into
the bush when first the pinnace roared over, but had left
a couple of guards to test our capabilities. Well, we'd
shown them a thing or two.

All the same, I didn't feel any too happy about this
unopposed stroll around somebody else's home town.
Creatures who could make metal utensils and clocklike
instruments ought to be able to construct weapons a good
deal more formidable than bows and arrows. And that
meant that perhaps we'd yet to get a taste of what they
had to offer.

Why the delay in kicking our pants? Thinking it over,
I realised that one could pick haphazardly on umpteen
Terrestrial villages that didn't hold a soldier or a gun.
When troops are needed they're summoned by telephone
or radio. Maybe we had landed on a bunch of comparative 
hicks who'd run for help from someplace else. In that
event, the fun had yet to come.

I was wrong there. We were having our hair pulled
and didn't know it.

Exiting moodily from the thirtieth hut, Brennand said,
"I reckon we're wasting our time here."

"You took the words out of my mouth," endorsed Wilson.

"Just what I was thinking," added Molders.

"Me, too," agreed Kelly.

I didn't put in my spoke. It wasn't necessary, with them
voicing my own sentiments. I stepped out of the hut and
into the dark convinced that all this fiddling around was
futile, that it would be best to return to the pinnace and
take it away.

"What about the lifeboat?" asked Kli Yang.

"Let it lay," said Brennand, indifferently.

"Well, what about Ambrose and McFarlane?" persisted
the Martian, his goggle eyes staring at two of them 
simultaneously.

"Two needles in a planet-sized haystack," declared
Brennand. " We could fumble around for them until we'd
got white beards a yard long. Let's go back."

Kli Yang said, "Then what'll we tell McNulty?"

"That we can't find them because they aren't here."

"We don't know that"

"I do!" asserted Brennand, peculiarly positive.

"Do you?" There was a pause while Kli Yang stewed
this over. Then he asked the others, "Do you feel the same
way?"

We all nodded. Yes, me with them - like the dope I am.

"That's strange," observed Kli, slowly and with emphasis.
"Because I don't!"

"So what?" said Kelly, toughly.
Kli Yang turned to him. "My mind is different from
yours. My eyes can be fooled - but not something else!"

"What else?"

"Whatever part of my mind is non-visual."

Brennand chipped in with, "Look, what are you trying
to say?"

Holding his needler ready in one tentacle-tip and a hand-
beam in another, Kli glanced warily around and said, "We
came solely to find? Ambrose and McFarlane, if they can be
found. Now all of a sudden you say the hell with it. You
are of one accord." His eyes again tried to probe the
night. "Remarkable coincidence, is it not? I think the
desire to throw up the search is being imposed upon you -
and that means somebody's here!"

Boy, it gave me a major jolt! For a couple of heartbeats 
my mind went into a confused whirl as it tried to
cope with two violently opposing concepts. I couldn't see
the others' faces more than dimly, but Wilson stood near
enough to give me a picture of a man in a mental tangle.
Further search was useless : I knew that as surely as I knew
I'd got boots on my feet. We were being kidded that
further search was useless: I knew that too, with equal
certainty.

Then came a kind of snap in my brain as fact triumphed
over fancy. It must have happened to the rest at precisely
the same moment because Molders let out a loud snort of
self-disgust, Kelly voiced a hearty curse and Brennand
spoke in irritated tones.

"We'll rake through every hut in this place!"

So without further delay we started on the next inner
circle. It would have been a good deal quicker if we had
dealt with a hut apiece, thus inspecting them six at a time,
but we had strict orders to stick together and were beginning 
to learn sense. A couple of times I found myself on
the point of suggesting that we speed up the business by
splitting, but on each occasion I bit the words back because
the notion might not be truly my own. If I could help it
I wasn't taking orders from ropey monstrosities lurking
nearby in the dark.

We reached the twelfth hut of this inner row and
Brennand went in first, his hand-beam shining ahead of
him. By this time we were well-nigh conditioned to expect
nobody inside but still held ourselves ready to be proved
wrong. Somehow I'd become last in the patrol. I was
about to follow Wilson into the hut when from the deep
gloom on my right there came a faint sound. I stopped at
the door, aimed my beam rightward.

It revealed Ambrose outside the third hut farther along.
He waved at my light though it must have been impossible
for him to see who was holding it. He didn't seem mussed
up in any way and posed there for all the world as if he'd
married the daughter of a chief and decided to go native.
Of course I let out a yelp of excitement and called to
those in the hut, "One of them is out here."

They poured through the door; got an eyeful of what my
beam was showing.

"Hi, Ammy!" called Brennand, starting forward.
"Hi!" said Ambrose, clearly and distinctly, then turned
and went into his hut.

Needless to say we went to that edifice at the double,
meanwhile wondering whether Ambrose had his hands full
with a sick or badly injured McFarlane. It looked like it,
the way he'd gone inside instead of coming to join us. I
was so sure of finding McFarlane laid out on the floor that
instinctively I felt for my first-aid pack. Reaching the hut,
we went in. Our six hand-beams flooded the place with
light.

And nobody was there.

Nobody!

The walls were firm and tight, devoid of any other exit.
Brennand's beam had been steadily focused on the only
door from the moment we started toward it. We went over
the inside pretty thoroughly, yelling for Ambrose at 
intervals, and couldn't find room to hide a rat.

We stood there beaten, and feeling more than liverish,
when Molders became smitten with a brainwave. "Why
were we lured into this hut? Answer: to make us skip the
last two!"

"Hell's bells!" breathed Brennand, startled. He jumped
for the door. "Never mind orders: we'll divide into threes
and take both together."
Molders, Kelly and I charged expectantly into hut
number thirteen: Empty. Furnished more or less similarly
to all the others but with nobody in occupation. The other
two didn't waste time. Satisfied that they had picked the
wrong dump, they chased out to join Brennand's gang next
door and I was about to follow when I heard or thought I
heard a choking sound behind me.

Turning in the doorway, I lit up the interior, couldn't
see anything that might have caused the noise. But even
as I looked, it came again, followed by a series of dull,
muted thumps as of something beating upon the thick grass
carpet.

More illusions, I thought. Though they were normally
silent I knew that at least a few of the more talented aliens
could make us hear things. I could have sworn Ambrose
had said " Hi ! " when he'd replied to Brennand. Then it
struck me that there must be ropey things clever enough
to imitate real speech because somebody had parroted
McNulty over the radio and that had been no delusion. It
had been an actual voice.

Stupidly I called, "Who's there?" and made ready to
needle whatever part of the hut jeeringly echoed, "Who's
there?" No voice came back but the choking and thumping
sounds responded with greater vigour.

My mind argued with itself. "You've allowed yourself
to become separated from the others even if only by a few
yards. They're all in the next hut, unable to see what
happens to you - and something wants you to go to that
corner and get bopped."

Curiosity pulled me - one way, caution the other. .And
just then Kelly returned to see what was keeping me. That
settled the matter.

"Half a second," I said. "You stand by and cover me -
there's something funny here."

With that I went into the hut, beam in one hand, needler in 
the other, traced the noises to the farther left-hand corner.
They got loud as I neared, as if to tell me I was warm
in this daffy game of blind man's buff. Now I could hear
them almost as clearly as the Marathon's bellow when she
goes over to boost-point. Feeling more than silly in front
of the onlooking Kelly, I dumped the beam on the floor,
knelt beside it, felt around and put my hand on a heavy
boot.

The next instant Kelly rapped out an extremely indecent
word and squirted his needle-ray about three inches over
the back of my neck. The heat of it scorched the hairs just
above my collar. Something moved closely and violently
behind me, a couple of metal utensils clattered as they got
thrown across the room, and a four-inch section of jerky
rope hunched in front of my bended knees. At the same
instant, Ambrose appeared under my extended hand.

He might have come out of sheer nothingness, as though
produced by a super-magician. I was feeling around in
empty space, seeking the source of the sounds, when I
touched an invisible boot and Kelly's needler spouted across
my neck and something promptly went haywire at back
of me and there was Ambrose, flat on his back, bound and
gagged. In my state of mind I was so unwilling to accept
the evidence of my eyes that I tore off the gag, aimed my
needler at him and spoke to the point.

"Maybe you are Ambrose and maybe you aren't. So
don't echo my words. Pick a few of your own and say them
quick."

I'll say he was a selective picker! What he gave forth
made my ears jerk and struck Kelly dumb with admiration.
It was fast and fluent and uttered with considerable passion.
Usually he was a quiet sort of individual and no one would
suspect that he had it in him thus to enrich the language
of invective. One thing became certain beyond all doubt :
no creature born of this crazy world could have put up such
a performance.

Well, I carried on with the job of hacking his bonds
which were made of a very tough kind of woven grass,
while he continued to voice vitriolic afterthoughts and
bring up words he'd previously overlooked. Bits of greasy
cable wormed around aimlessly, going nowhere. There
were now five faces gaping in the doorway, the others
having joined Kelly.

Slinging away his severed bonds, Ambrose stood up, felt
himself all over, said to the five, "Have you found Mac?"

"Not yet," replied Wilson.

"Ten to one he's in the next igloo," said Ambrose.

"You lose that bet," Wilson informed. "We've just cased
it and he ain't"

"How did you go through it?" I chipped in. "Did you
nose all over the floor?"

Looking at me as if I were daffy, Wilson asked, "Why the
heck should we do that? "

"It'd be a good idea," interjected Kelly, hefting his
needler and wetting his lips.

"Look," I said. "You see what you're told to see. And
if you're told to see nothing whatsoever "

"Listen to me," said Ambrose. "These lumps of snakes
could kid you into embracing the pillow on your honeymoon. 
He stepped forward. Let s have another look through that 
hut"

Back we traipsed to number fourteen. Six beams lit it
up from wall to wall, from floor to roof. Vacant. Empty.
Darn it, you could see that nobody was there!

Standing in the centre of the single room, Ambrose called
"Mac, can you make a noise, any sort of a noise?"

No answer.

It looked loony, him standing there appealing to somebody 
less visible that a ghost. I tried to imagine McFarlane
lying nearby, straining mightily against his bonds in effort
to create a hearable response, while he remained completely 
hidden by our own short-circuited optic nerves, kind
of buried deep in the blind spot in our brains.

Just then a notion hit me in a way I conceived to be a
real spark of genius. The hand-beams pointing in six 
directions - they illuminated the place much too well!

"Hey!" I said. "Let's aim these lights 'all the same way."

"What for?" asked Molders.

"Because," I informed, enjoying beating them with
applied science, "we're drowning out shadows and if anyone 
is here they ought to throw shadows."

"Yes, that's right," agreed Wilson, openly admiring my
I.Q. "So they should."

Ambrose waved an impatient hand and put me down for
the count by saying, "A waste of time. You're as blind to
shadows as you are to what causes them. When you're
taken for suckers you're taken good and proper."

"Ugh!" grunted Brennand, little liking this assurance.
He fondled his pate on which a small bump had risen.

Again addressing the room, Ambrose declaimed, "All
right, Mac, if you can't let out a squeak maybe you can roll.
I'll stay here. See if you can roll up against my legs. He
waited a while, looking down at his boots. Time seemed to
suspend itself. Then he gave up, glanced around, caught
my inquiring gaze. "I'm going to feel the floor alongside
the wall at this end. You do the same at the other end.
The rest of you keep tramping around the mid-space. If
you kick or knock anything, grab it!"

Dropping onto hands and knees, he commenced crawling
beside the wall with one hand seeking forward. I did the
same at my end. Having already found Ambrose in some-
what similar a manner it wasn't so eerie an experience for
me as it would have been for the others. Nevertheless it
still gave me a slight touch of the heebies: There's something 
upsetting in not being genuinely blind yet knowing
that one's eyes can't be depended upon. I'm tallang about
the effect, of course, not the cause. Nothing was wrong with
our eyes either structurally or functionally; the trouble lay
farther back where false vision was being imposed and
accepted by the brain.

While the others stooged around in the middle I came to
a corner, turned and fumbled along the adjoining wah,
reached the next corner, made stroking motions through
thin air and - whahoo! - I touched something invisible,
grabbed it, got a handful of cold and slimy rubber pipe. I
couldn't let go. The shock of it kind of paralysed me so that
I couldn't let go. It made a powerful squirm to get away,
hauled me violently forward and I fell on my face.

Kelly used his brains. He'd a slight advantage over the
rest, having witnessed the performance next door, Seeing
me plunge onto my pan, he directed his needler a foot
ahead of my extended fist and let it blast. In half a second
there was uproar. I found myself clinging with one hand
to a madly sinuous tangle of black rope which strove to
lug me toward the door while Kelly cut pieces off it and
Brennand rayed its middle.

Ambrose was yelling for someone to give him a knife to
cut McFarlane loose. Kli Yang tried to snatch up the alien
in a powerful tentacle but couldn't risk losing a lump of
himself to a needler. Wilson did a war-dance in the middle
of the floor, his weapon fully activated as he aimed it
sloppily and let go one flare that somehow passed an eighth
of an inch under Kelly's fat rear and another eighth over
my hair and burned in the wall a hole the size of a dinner
plate. I don't know how he achieved this feat: his ray
must have bent a couple of times contrary to every known
law.

I let go what I was holding and it left a greyish, smelly
slime on my hand. The thing was in little bits by now, with
the needlers slicing it smaller and smaller. No matter how
much the sections were cut up they still humped around,
their raw ends moist and black with little white strings in
them: I estimate that in its original knotted-ball form the
thing had been about four feet in diameter and weighed
one hundred fifty pounds or more.

In the opposite corner MeFarlane busied himself casting
off lengths of grass cord with which he'd been bound. His
expression was sour.

Finishing freeing himself, he griped at Ambrose, "Why
didn't you stay in the boat and yell for help?"

"Because your twin brother appeared and beckoned me
out as if it were urgent and wouldn't keep," Ambrose in-

formed. "And because I didn't know then what I know
now. So full of misplaced faith I jumped out of the lock
and got myself all tied up." He sniffed, added, "I've
learned my lesson. I won't do it again even if they extract
your plumbing right under an observation-port. I'll sit
tight while you die in agony."

"Thanks," said McFarlane. "Someday I'll do as much for
you." He spat on what looked like a piece of snake trying
to loop itself into a circle near his boot. " Well, do we stand
here gabbing all night? "

"It's you who's chewing the fat," said Brennand. He went
to the door, pointed his hand-beam the way we'd come.

"We'll take you two to the lifeboat. Lift it and get back to
the Marathon without delay. You can do all your squabbling
when ---"

His voice cut off, his hand-beam quivered, then he
snatched at a side pocket and rapped, "A hundred of 'em!
Flat!" He threw something while I buried my face in the
floor for the second time.

The night lit up briefly but with intense brilliance. The
ground gave a twitch and the roof of the hut took off skyward 
like one of those ancient airplanes. A second or two
later wriggly bits rained down from the stars, bounced on
the floor, commenced their eternal squirming.

Even if they could make metal things and instruments,
the creatures of this world didn't seem to have developed
the manufacture of what we regard as weapons. Possibly
they'd overlooked this line of progress while spending a
million years perfecting their power of deception. Anyway,
our powers must have been as alien and unfamiliar to them
as theirs were to us -- and this latest demonstration of still
greater power probably knocked the stuffing out of them.

We rushed out to take full advantage of confusion caused
by the bomb, dashed past huts either roofless or slapped
cockeyed, and held ourselves ready to sling another bomb
should anything real or illusionary appear en masse. But
no enemy host saw fit to bar our way, no herd of imaginary
dinosaurs was planted in our path.

I wondered about the latter as I hustled through the dark
with the rest. If I had the ability to make people see things
I'd get a guy on the run from a thought-up rogue elephant.
But then I realised that the true strength of this power lay
in confusing us with familiar things-and these aliens
couldn't dig up many items we'd regard as familiar. Any
stock illusions they used to maintain mastery over this
planet's lesser life-forms would be completely alien to our
minds and liable to have a bomb tossed at it. Yes, in dealing 
with us they were severely limited by lack of knowledge
and experience of our particular kind. But if someday they
gained" a complete understanding of humanity from feet
to hair ...!

Undoubtedly this was their motive in snitching Ambrose
and McFarlane. Rule one: get to know the creatures you
wish to control. The four men already grabbed were intended
to provide necessary data on the strength of which
they hoped to take the lot of us. Maybe they could do it
too, given the chance. I doubted it, being what I am, but
didn't feel inclined to underestimate the opposition.

By this time we were well beyond the encampment and ought 
to be fairly close to the lifeboat. What with the darkness 
and the circular arrangement of the huts it hadn't been easy 
to tell one direction from another. So far as I'm concerned, 
I'd been content merely to follow the others like a
sheep, but Brennand had struck along this line without
hesitation and seemed to know where he was going. I
started pondering the notion that Brennand might have
been impetuous and misled the entire gang. Our pace
slowed, became hesitant, as if the same thought had
occurred to the others. Surely the lifeboat hadn't been
planted as far out as this?

Then Brennand's beam swung round in a searching arc
and revealed the lifeboat's tail-end shining metallically on
our left. Evidently we must have slanted a few degrees off-
track. We went toward it.

Standing by its ladder, Ambrose blinked into our lights,
said, "Thanks, fellows. We'll go straight back and see you
at the other end."

With that he grabbed the ladder in both hands, made a
couple of curious leg motions like a guy riding a non-
existent bicycle and dived onto his beak. This looked
purposeless and rather silly to me. It's the sort of irrational
action that doesn't get you anywhere. Then I became aware
that the lifeboat had blanked out as though it had never
been and that Ambrose had taken a run at a ladder that
wasn't there.

Kli Yang said a word in high-Martian for which there is
no Terrestrial equivalent, directed his beam circularly in an
effort to find the creature or creatures responsible for this
booby-trap. That one or more were within mental range
was self-evident-but what was their mental range? Ten
yards or a thousand? Anyway, he found nothing but bushes
and small trees or objects convincingly like bushes and
trees. There was no way of telling short of spending
valuable hours burning every individual growth.

Lugging Ambrose to his feet, McFarlane remarked with
a touch of malice, "Do you have to fall for them every
time?"

Thoroughly riled, Ambrose snapped back, "Shut up
before I bust you one!"

"You and which other three?" inquired McFarlane,
quickIy preparing himself for some horsing around.
Shoving between them; Brennand growled, "You two
more than anyone else should have the sense to know that
by beating each other up you may be playing somebody
else's game."

"That's true enough," supported Molders, seeing the
point. "Hereafter if any of us gets a sudden desire to knock
somebody's block off, he postpones it until we get back to
the ship."

"Maybe you've got something," admitted McFarlane,
slightly sheepish. He made a gesture. "Anyway, we've
something more to worry about. Where's the boat? "
" Can't be far away," I opined. " A hundred of them
couldn't pick up that tonnage and carry it out of sight"

We'll circle from this point," Brennand decided. "We're
bound to hit it even if we go most of the way round." He
gazed in one direction and then the other, temporarily
uncertain which best to take.

"Try leftward," suggested Kelly, and thoughtfully added
his reason. "I'm turned that way already."

We went left, maintaining our bearing from a faint view
of the outer ring of huts barely visible when all our hand-
beams were turned toward them. It didn't occur to me that
at this stage the huts might be as illusionary as the lifeboat
had proved, with the real huts standing unnoticed someplace 
else. I reckon we could have been persuaded to roam round 
in rings for the next hundred years. Or even to go in a 
straight line, thinking we were circling, until we
were miles deep into the bush.

Perhaps that bomb had bumped off the sharpest witted
of the enemy leaving the duller ones to miss up chances,
for the huts were genuine enough and we found the lifeboat 
after going four hundred yards. This time Ambrose
felt the ladder, went carefully all the way up, fingered the
rim of the airlock door, patted the vessel's hull.

"Well, as I was saying before, thanks fellows!"

He unlocked the door and went in, McFarlane following.
Shows you how dopey even the cleverest can be at times,
because the entire six of us stood there giving them the
sweet goodbye with nothing on our minds but that we'd
beat it to the pinnace immediately they closed that door.
McFarlane did close it, but immediately opened it again,
looked down upon us with the superior air of one who
occasionally employs his think-box.

Giving us the same sort of pitying smile one bestows on
a Venusian guppy, he said, "I suppose none of you want
a hitch? "

Brennand gave a little jump and mentioned what should
have been too obvious to overlook, "Jeepers, we don't have
to use the pinnace to go back!"

With that, he bolted up the ladder. The rest followed,
me next to last with only Wilson behind. I had to wait a
bit to let Kli Yang haul himself inside and get clear of the
smallish lock which he'd fill to capacity without help from
anyone else. Then I mounted, entered the lock, heard
Wilson take the ladder over-eagerly and slip down a couple
of steps. Being metal, the treads were liable to toss you onto
your nut if you treated them with hurried contempt. Out
in the dark I saw his hand-beam wave wildly around and
extinguish. He had a second go at the ladder while I stood
by the closing mechanism.

"You can climb like a giraffe," I jibed as he reached the
top and got into the lock.

He didn't choose to crack back, which was unusual to
say the least. As I made ready to operate the ladder-fold
and shift the door-closing lever, he strolled past me with
a fixed expression and exuded a strong smell of grey slime.
There are moments when one must cast aside finer feelings 
and compunctions. So I kicked him smack in what
ought to have been his belly.

And in a flash I had a tangled ball on my hands, rolling
and tugging six ways at once, trying to trap my hands in
contracting loops, coiling loose ends around my ankles to
trip me up and lay me flat. The wild energy in it might
have run a dynamo for a week. What with its greasiness
and the violence of its movements, I couldn't hold it.
Neither could I drag out my needler: it kept me too busy.
I'd just gained the grim realisation that I was going to get
the worst of this struggle when Kli Yang shoved a tentacle
into the lock, snatched up my opponent, smacked him
twenty times on the metal floor and slung him out through
the still open door.

Without pausing to voice gratitude, I picked up my
hand-beam, got a good grip on my needler and went down
the ladder in double-quick time. Three or four yards away
Wilson was rolling around with two dollops of active rope.
Evidently his captors were striving to aim their attention
two ways at once, like Martian eyes, but weren't quite able
to make it. They were trying to nail Wilson down and fool
any would-be rescuers at the same time. Wilson spoiled it
by using more than his fair share of their mental concentration 
and the result was peculiar.

The vision of the struggle kept snapping on and off as if
projected by an intermittent movie-dingus. For a couple
of seconds I could see them. Then I couldn't. Then they
were back again in plain view. I snapped a neat blast at
one black thing during a momentary appearance and
severed the loop it had wound round Wilson's face. Then
Kli Yang fell off the ladder, belted me aside and joined
the hooley.

He was especially well fitted to deal with the situation.
Ignoring the visual play of here we are and here we aren't;
he curved great tentacles around the area of combat and
scooped up the lot, gripping them with powerful suckers.
Next he sorted them out, accidentally handing Wilson a
thick ear in the process. With one tentacle he dumped
Wilson halfway up the ladder while he employed a couple
of others to hammer the rope balls upon the ground. He
kept this up for quite a while, once or twice changing
rhythm to show he wasn't in a rut. Finally he held them in
mid-air and walloped them together. By this time the
visual switching had ceased. Kli's victims had become
decidedly democratic, having no desire to pretend that they
were anything else but what they were. He pitched them
over a dozen trees.

That done, he followed me up the ladder, squeezed himself 
into the lock immediately I'd vacated it, closed the
door and sealed the boat. I went forward to tell Ambrose
we were all aboard, shipshape and watertight, and that he
could blast off.

McFarlane was squatting beside Ambrose in the tiny
control-cabin and talking by radio to the pinnace.

"What d'you mean, you'll shoot us down if we take off
first?"

The voice from the pinnace said, "If you're returning
to the Marathon we must be there ahead of you."

"Because we have the list of passwords and they've got
to be recited. How do we know who you are?"

Scowling at the instrument board, McFarlane answered,
"Yes, yes, that's fair enough-but look at it the reverse
way."

"What d'you mean?"

"You bums haven't got any passwords. How will those on
the Marathon know who you are?"

"We haven't left the boat," declared the voice with some
show of indignation.

"Hah!" sneered McFarlane, perversely enjoying the
argument. "We've only your word for that"

There was a splutter at the other end, followed by,
"Those six agreed to return here. They haven't done so.
You say they're on your boat-and we've only your word
for that!"

Glancing over his shoulder, McFarlane growled at me,
"Speak to these crummy boneheads, Sergeant. Tell them
you're here complete with a seat in your pants."

It was overhead at the pinnace, for the voice put in
sharply, " That you, Sergeant? What's your own pass
word?"

"Nanifani," I elocuted with relish.

"Who else is there?

"All of us."

"No casualties?"

"No."

A pause for cogitation, then, "All right, we're going
back. You follow us. Land after us.

Not liking authoritative instructions from a lower rank,
McFarlane bristled. "Listen, I don't take orders from
you!"

"Yes you do," contradicted the other, not fazed in the
least. "Because this boat is armed and that one isn't. Try
anything funny and we blast you wide open. The skipper
will kiss us for it!"

Defeated by the truth of that last remark, McFarlane
cut off the radio with a savage flip of his thumb and sat
glowering into the night. Half a minute later the darkness
ahead was split by a crimson streak as the pinnace boosted
upward. We watched the flame-trail diminish at about ten
thousand feet, then I grabbed the nearest grips and hung
on as Ambrose fired the tubes and took her away.

Contrary to expectations our return didn't cause any
panic while they tried to decide whether we really were
what we looked to be. I wouldn't have been surprised if
they'd subjected me to a series of tests designed to prove
absolute and indisputable Terrestrialism. Fingerprints,
blood-checks and so forth. But they had reduced it to a
technique far simpler and easier than that. All we had to
do was walk aboard and pause in the lock while Jay Score
gave us the once-over.

Inside the Marathon it was obvious that the ship, was
held ready for departure. We weren't staying long. Going
to the washroom, I had a hard job getting grey slime off
my hands: it smeared and smelled and tended to kill the
foam on the soap. Next I made a quick check of the
armoury, found everything in order. If we took off before
long things would be busy for a while, so now was the time
to get the latest information from Steve or anybody willing 
to gossip. Couple of yards along the passage I met
Jepson and gave him the sinister haha.

"So you're still in a state of animation. What happened?"

"I got picked on," he said without pleasure.

"Natch. You ought to be used to it by now."

He sniffed and commented, "I'd have some hopes of
getting used to it if it occurred the same way each time.
It's the variety of methods that gets me down."

 How'd it come this time?"

"I was mooching through the woods with Painter. We
were separated from the others but not far from the ship.
Painter saw or thought he saw what looked like a kind of
metal ornament on the ground and he dropped a few steps
behind as he stopped to pick it up. According to him, his
fingers closed around nothing."

"And then?"

"Somebody cracked his nut while he was bending. I
heard him flop, turned around. I swear I saw him still
standing there and holding whatever he'd found. So back
I went for a look and - bam!"

"Same treatment as he got."

"Yes. Painter says a tree did it, but I don't know. I
came around, found myself bound hand and foot, with a
wad of grass strapped over my kisser. I was being dragged
head-first through the bush by a couple of slimy nightmares." 
He made a face." They had to be seen to be believed."

"I've seen 'em," I assured.  But it wasn't until they took
off their pyjamas."

"They dumped me, went away, brought back Painter similarly 
fastened. Then they beat it toward the boat, presumably 
for more clients. We lay there helpless until lights
flashed, needlers flared, there was a bit of a hullabaloo and
the search party found us. The boys said they'd destroyed
half a dozen things that looked like trees to them but not
to Jay Score. Jay strode around and picked them out for
gunning."

"Old Camera-eyes, eh?"

"That's the way he is - and it's lucky for us we've got
him aboard. Prize mugs we could be if we had to go
around with no choice but to accept whatever we saw."

"A means will be found to combat it," I assured. "They
milk me of taxes to support bulgy-brains in laboratories and
I'm not chancing my neck around the cosmos for nothing.
So if they want my hard-earned dough they'll have to build
me a wire-hat or some other contraption that'll stop me
going dreamy in a place like this."

"The next crew to land here will need wire hats all
right!" he indorsed, then continued on his way.

I found Steve gnawing a dog biscuit in his cupboard and
asked, " What's doing? If you know. And you know 
everything, Bigears."

"Don't you know?" he retorted. "Of course you don't.
You know nothing, Peabrain."

"Okay." I leaned on his doorjamb. "Now that the
formal introductions are over, what's the dope?"

"We're zooming when everybody's safe aboard and
MeNulty has viewed their reports."

"So soon? We haven't been here more than a day."

"Want to stick around? " He cocked an inquiring eye.

"Heck, no!"

"Me, neither. Quicker I get back, the quicker a nice,
thick wad will be pushed at me."

"We haven't found out so darned much though," I
objected.

"The skipper thinks we've got as much as is wanted," he
gave back. Putting his feet up on the rim of his radio desk,
he settled himself comfortably and went on, "Certain
smarties on Earth pick a planet by the simple expedient of
shutting their eyes and throwing a dart at a star-map. They
say that's where high-life may lurk and we'd better go take
a look. All we need to discover is whether the dart scored
a hit and what the high-life is like. Those two items we now
know - so home we go before heads are torn off and insides
pulled out"

"Suits me with one reservation," I told him. "And that
is expressible in two words, namely, never again!"

"Hey-hey! You said that last time."

"Maybe I did, but ---"

The ship howled, I cut off the conversation, took it on
the run to my harness and just managed to survive the
departure. I'd never become used to the way the Marathon
came and went even if I experienced it a thousand times. A
secret desire of mine was to subject Flettner to a few stiff
doses of his own inventive ability.

We were some twenty million miles out when Bannister
stuck his head into the armoury and inquired, "What was
eating Mac when he yapped from the lifeboat? He sounded
like I'd no right to speak to him."

"This is a guess, but I think he was being egged on to
cause trouble. The old divide and rule gag on an alien
plane. But it didn't work because he was too civilised to
carry it that far."

"H'm!" I hadn't thought of that" He scratched his head,
looked impressed. "Ingenious, weren't they?"

"Too much for my liking."

"I support that sentiment. I'd hate to dream that any of
them were on board. Imagine being bottled with a bunch
of guys or not-guys or maybe-guys and you can't tell who
from which."

"The idea can be developed further and more intimately,"
I said, having already given it much thought. "That is if
you care to scare yourself."

He gave me a funny sort of grin, half humorous, half
apprehensive, and finished, "I can scare easier by watching
those educated spiders in the starboard lock."

With that he departed and I continued with various jobs.
Now that he'd mentioned them, my mind shifted to the
Martians, a tentacular life-form fully as alien as anything
we d met. But we were thoroughly accustomed to them, so
much so that we'd miss them if they dropped dead. Yes,
the Martians were good guys. Everybody liked them.
Nobody was scared of them.

Then why Bannister's strange remark? And why his
uneasy, lopsided smirk? Seemed to me he was drawing
my attention to some illegal capers now taking place in the
Martian refuge from thick air. This thought grew on me,
giving me the fidgets, until I had to drop what I was doing
and go take a look.

What I saw when I applied my eyes to the small spy-
hole made my back hairs jerk erect. The Red Planet gang
were clustered as usual around a chess-board, all except
Sug Farn who lay snoring in one corner. At one side of the
board was Kli Dreen, his saucerish attention on the chess
pieces as if his eyes were joined to them by invisible
thread. I noticed that he was playing white.

Facing him, a big ball of greasy black rope put out an
end of itself, touched a black bishop but didn't move it.
The Martians took in a deep breath as though something
had actually happened.

Yowee! I didn't wait to see more. I went toward the
bow so fast my heel-plates struck sparks as I skidded round
corners. The last bend I took the same time as Jay Score
coming the opposite way, with the result that I cannoned
into him full tilt. It felt like divi.ng into a cliff. He grasped
me with one powerful hand, turned brilliant eyes upon me.

"Something wrong, Sergeant?"

"You bet?" I absorbed the five-fingered feel of his grip
to reassure myself that he matched his looks and I wasn't
being kidded. I said, slightly breathless, "They're on
board."

"Who are?"

"Those oily, coily hypnotists. Or one of them, anyway.
It's fooling the Martians."
"How?"

"It's duping them at the chess-board."

"I doubt it," he said, evenly and undisturbed. "It hasn't
had sufficient time to learn the game."

"You mean?" I gaped at him. "You know it's here?"

"Of course. I captured it myself. Then Kli Morg begged
it off me, pointing out that it couldn't escape from their
double-locked low-pressure joint: That's quite correct,
though it wasn't his real reason."

"No?" I felt considerably deflated. "What was his reason?"

"You should guess it, knowing that crowd. They think
they may get a run for their money at chess from a thing
that can visibly move one piece but actually move another."
He mused a moment. " That means they'll have to regard
every apparent move with suspicion and try identify the
real one as a logical probability. It should bring a new
element into the game and lend it a certain extra fascination."

"Do you really think so?"

"Most certainly."

I gave up. If the Red Planet gang had a crazy obsession,
he shared it enough to understand it and actually connive
in it. Someday he'd win himself a Martian championship
vase of violent colour and revolting shape that I wouldn't
stand beside my rocking chair as a gobboon.

Space-conquerors, bah! Nutty, all of them, just like
you and me!

THE END