by Isaac Asimov

GALLEY SLAVE

When you have reached the point where one of your inventions, or stories, or concepts, or what-have-you, is referred to generically, as a matter of common knowledge and without your name attached, you may be said truly to have arrived. Holders of trademarks like Victrola and Frigidaire don't particularly like this, of course, and I wonder if Isaac Asimov minds that Kingsley Amis, in his book on science-fiction trends, New Maps of Hell, discusses the Three Laws of Robotics without mentioning Asimov. (He invented them.) Anyhow, the modern robot is truly an Asi-movian development, differing from the "robot" of Capek in that the latter turns out to be a self-reproducing android! (How confusing can you get?) In any event, for those wanting more background on the history of the U. S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc., I would suggest reading Asimov's book I, Robot. And meanwhile, for those who want to know about Dr. A. himself, let the following quotation from this distinguished Ph.D.'s potted (and potty?) biography suffice: .

"Isaac Asimov, after an undistinguished birth in the Soviet Union, was gingerly brought to the United States at the age of 3 and allowed to become a citizen at the age of 8. He is currently Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine. Mainly, however, he writes. Beginning at 18 as a juvenile delinquent, he wrote science fiction ... and at the moment has published twenty fiction titles. In addition, he has more recently been writing popular science books for the general public, having published a dozen so far with another half dozen in press. Queried about his hobbies, Asimov listed two. Only one had better be listed here. It is writing."

The United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Inc., as defendants in the case, had influence enough to force a closed-doors trial without a jury.

Nor did Northeastern University try hard to prevent it. The trustees knew perfectly well how tie public might react to any issue involving misbehavior of a robot, however rarefied that misbehavior might be. They also had a clearly visualized notion of how an anti-robot riot might become an anti-science riot without warning.

The government, as represented in this case by lustice Harlow Shane, was equally anxious for a quiet end to this mess. Both U. S. Robots and the academic world were bad people to antagonize.

Justice Shane said, "Since neither press, public nor jury is present, gentlemen, let us stand on as little ceremony as we can and get to the facts."

He smiled stiffly as he said this, perhaps without much hope that his request would be effective, and hitched at his robe so that he might sit more comfortably. His face was pleasantly rubicund, his chin round and soft, his nose broad and his eyes light in color and wide-set. All in all, it was not a face with much judicial majesty and the judge knew it.

Barnabas H. Goodfellow, Professor of Physics at Northeastern U, was sworn in first, taking the usual vow with an expression that made mincemeat of his name.

After the usual opening-gambit questions, Prosecution shoved his hands deep into his pockets and said, "When was it, Professor, that the matter of the possible employ of Robot EZ-27 was first brought to your attention, and how?"

Professor Goodfellow's small and angular face set itself into an uneasy expression, scarcely more benevolent than the one it replaced. He said, "I have had professional contact and some social acquaintance with Dr. Alfred Lan-ning, Director of Research at U. S. Robots. I was inclined to listen with some tolerance then when I received a rather strange suggestion from hini on the 3rd of March of last year—"

"Of 2033?"

"That's right."

"Excuse me for interrupting. Please proceed." The professor nodded frostily, scowled to fix the facts in his mind, and began to speak.

Professor Goodfellow looked at the robot with a certain uneasiness. It had been carried into the basement supply room in a crate, in accordance with the regulations governing the shipment of robots from place to place on the Earth's surface.

He knew it was coming; it wasn't that he was unprepared. From the moment of Dr. Lanning's first phone call on March 3, he had felt himself giving way to the other's persuasiveness, and now, as an inevitable result, he found himself face to face with a robot.

It looked uncommonly large as it stood within arm's reach.

Alfred Lanning cast a hard glance of his own at the robot, as though making certain it had not been damaged in transit. Then he turned his ferocious eyebrows and his mane of white hair in the professor's direction.

"This is Robot EZ-27, first of its model to be available for public use." He turned to the robot. "This is Professor Goodfellow, Easy."

Easy spoke impassively, but with such suddenness that the professor shied. "Good afternoon, Professor."

Easy stood seven feet tall and had the general proportions of a man—always the prime selling point of U. S. Robots. That and the possession of the basic patents on the posiironic brain had given them an actual monopoly on robots and a near-monopoly on computing machines in general.

The two men who had uncrated the robot had left now and the professor looked from Lanning to the robot and back to Lanning. "It is harmless, I'm sure." He didn't sound sure.

"More harmless than I am," said Lanning. "I could be goaded into striking you. Easy could not be. You know the Three Laws of Robotics, I presume."

"Yes, of course," said Goodfellow.

"They are built into the positronic patterns of the brain and must be observed. The First Law, the prime rule of robotic existence, safeguards the life and well-being of all humans." He paused, rubbed at his cheek, then added, "It's something of which we would like to persuade all Earth if we could."

"It's just that he seems formidable."

"Granted. But whatever he seems, you'll find that he is useful."

"I'm not sure in what way. Our conversations were not very helpful in that respect. Still, I agreed to look at the object and I'm doing it."

"We'll do more than look, Professor. Have you brought a book?"

"I have."

"May I see it?"

Professor Goodfellow reached down without actually taking his eyes off the metal-in-human-shape that confronted him. From the briefcase at his feet, he withdrew a book.

Lanning held out his hand for it and looked at the back-strip. "Physical Chemistry of Electrolytes in Solution. Fair enough, sir. You selected this yourself, at random. It was no suggestion of mine, this particular text. Am I right?"

"Yes."

Lanning passed the book to Robot EZ-27. The professor jumped a little. "No! That's a valuable book!"

Lanning raised his eyebrows and they looked like shaggy coconut icing. He said, "Easy has no intention of tearing the book in two as a feat of strength, I assure you. It can handle a book as carefully as you or I. Go ahead, Easy."

'Thank you, sir," said Easy. Then, turning its metal bulk slightly, it added, "With your permission, Professor Goodfellow."

The professor stared, then said; "Yes—yes, of course."

With a slow and steady manipulation of metal fingers, Easy turned the pages of the book, glancing at the left page, then the right; turning the page, glancing left, then right; turning the page and so on for minute after minute.

The sense of its power seemed to dwarf even the large cement-walled room in which they stood and to reduce the two human watchers to something considerably less than life-size.

Goodfellow muttered, 'The light isn't very good." "It will do."

Then, rather more sharply, "But what is he doing?" "Patience, sir."

The last page was turned eventually. Lanning asked, "Well, Easy?"

The robot said, "It is a most accurate book and there is little to which I can point. On line 22 of page 27, the word 'positive' is spelled p-o-i-s-t-i-v-e. The comma in line 6 of page 32 is superfluous, whereas one should have been used on line 13 of page 54. The plus sign in equation XIV-2 on page 337 should be a minus sign if it is to be consistent with the previous equations—"

"Wait! Wait!" cried the professor. "What is he doing?"

"Doing?" echoed Lanning in sudden irascibility. "Why, man, he has already done it! He has proofread that book."

"Proofread it?"

"Yes. In the short time it took him to turn those pages, he caught every mistake in spelling, grammar and punctuation. He has noted errors in word order and detected inconsistencies. And he will retain the information, letter-perfect, indefinitely."

The professor's mouth was open. He walked rapidly

away from Lanning and Easy and as rapidly back. He folded his arms across his chest and stared at them. Finally he said, "You mean this is a proofreading robot?"

Lanning nodded. "Among other things."

"But why do you show it to me?"

"So that you might help me persuade the university to obtain it for use." "To read proof?"

"Among other things," Lanning repeated patiently. The professor drew his pinched face together in a kind of sour disbelief. "But this is ridiculous!" "Why?"

"The university could never afford to buy this half-ton— it must weigh that at least—this half-ton proofreader."

"Proofreading is not all it will do. It will prepare reports from outlines, fill out forms, serve as an accurate memory-file, grade papers—"

"All picayune!"

Lanning said, "Not at all, as I can show you in a moment. But I think we can discuss this more comfortably in your office, if you have no objection."

"No, of course not," began the professor mechanically and took a half-step as though to turn. Then he snapped out, "But the robot—we can't take the robot. Really, Doctor, you'll have to crate it up again."

"Time enough. We can leave Easy here."

"Unattended?"

"Why not? He knows he is to stay. Professor Goodfellow, it is necessary to understand that a robot is far more reliable than a human being."

"I would be responsible for any damage—" "There will be no damage. I guarantee that. Look, it's after hours. You expect no one here, I imagine, before tomorrow morning. The truck and my two men are outside. U. S. Robots will take any responsibility that may arise. None will. Call it a demonstration of the reliability of the robot."

The professor allowed himself to be led out of the storeroom. Nor did he look entirely comfortable in his own office, five stories up.

He dabbed at the line of droplets along the upper half of his forehead with a white handkerchief.

"As you know very well, Dr. Lanning, there are laws against the use of robots on Earth's surface," he pointed out.

"The laws, Professor Goodfellow, are not simple ones. Robots may not be used on public thoroughfares or within public edifices. They may not be used on private grounds or within private structures except under certain restrictions that usually turn out to be prohibitive. The university, however, is a large and privately owned institution that usually receives preferential treatment. If the robot is used only in a specific room for only academic purposes, if certain other restrictions are observed and if the men and women having occasion to enter the room co-operate fully, we may remain within the law."

"But all that trouble just to read proof?"

'The uses would be infinite, Professor. Robotic labor has so far been used only to relieve physical drudgery. Isn't there such a thing as mental drudgery? When a professor capable of the most useful creative thought is forced to spend two weeks painfully checking the spelling of lines of print and I offer you a machine that can do it in thirty minutes, is that picayune?"

"But the price—"

"The price need not bother you. You cannot buy EZ-27. U. S. Robots does not sell its products. But the university can lease EZ-27 for a thousand dollars a year—considerably less than the cost of a single micro-wave spectograph continuous-recording attachment."

Goodfellow looked stunned. Lanning followed up his advantage by saying, "I only ask that you put it up to whatever group makes the decisions here. I would be glad to speak to them if they want more information."

"Well," Goodfellow said doubtfully, "I can bring it up at next week's Senate meeting. I can't promise that will do any good, though."

"Naturally," said Lanning.

The Defense Attorney was short and stubby and carried himself rather portentously, a stance that had the effect of accentuating his double chin. He stared at Professor Goodfellow, once that witness had been handed over, and said, "You agreed rather readily, did you not?"

The Professor said briskly, "I suppose I was anxious to be rid of Dr. Lanning. I would have agreed to anything."

"With the intention of forgetting about it after he left?"

"Well—"

"Nevertheless, you did present the matter to a meeting of the Executive Board of the University Senate." "Yes, I did."

"So that you agreed in good faith with Dr. Lanning's suggestions. You weren't just going along with a gag. You actually agreed enthusiastically, did you not?"

"I merely followed ordinary procedures."

"As a matter of fact, you weren't as upset about the robot as you now claim you were. You know the Three Laws of Robotics and you knew them at the time of your interview with Dr. Lanning."

"Well, yes."

"And you were perfectly willing to leave a robot at large and unattended."

"Dr. Lanning assured me—"

"Surely you would never have accepted his assurance if you had had the slightest fear that the robot might be in the least dangerous."

The professor began frigidly, "I had every faith in the word—"

"That is all," said Defense abruptly.

As Professor Goodfellow, more than a bit ruffled, stood down, Justice Shane leaned forward and said, "Since I am not a robotics man myself, I would appreciate knowing precisely what the Three Laws of Robotics are. Would Dr. Lanning quote them for the benefit of the court?"

Dr. Lanning looked startled. He had been virtually bumping heads with the gray-haired woman at his side. He rose to his feet now and the woman looked up, too—ex-pressionlessly.

Dr. Lanning said, "Very well, Your Honor." He paused as though about to launch into an oration and said, with laborious clarity, "First Law: a robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."

"I see," said the judge, taking rapid notes. "These Laws are built into every robot, are they?"

"Into every one. That will be borne out by any roboticist."

"And into Robot EZ-27 specifically?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"You will probably be required to repeat those statements under oath."

"I am ready to do so, Your Honor." He sat down again.

Dr. Susan Calvin, robopsychologist-in-chief for U. S. Robots, who was the gray-haired woman sitting next to Lanning, looked at her titular superior without favor, but then she showed favor to no human being. She said, "Was Goodfellow's testimony accurate, Alfred?"

"Essentially," muttered Lanning. "He wasn't as nervous as all that about the robot and he was anxious enough to talk business with me when he heard the price. But there doesn't seem to be any drastic distortion."

Dr. Calvin said thoughtfully, "It might have been wise to put the price higher than a thousand."

"We were anxious to place Easy."

"I know. Too anxious, perhaps. They'll try to make it look as though we had an ulterior motive."

Lanning looked exasperated. "We did. I admitted that at the University Senate meeting."

"They can make it look as if we had one beyond the one we admitted."

Scott Robertson, son of the founder of U. S. Robots and still owner of a majority of the stock, leaned over from Dr. Calvin's other side and said in a kind of explosive whisper, "Why can't you get Easy to talk so we'll know where we're at?"

"You know he can't talk about it, Mr. Robertson."

"Make him. You're the psychologist, Dr. Calvin. Make him."

"If I'm the psychologist, Mr. Robertson," said Susan Calvin coldly, "let me make the decisions. My robot will not be made to do anything at the price of his well-being."

Robertson frowned and might have answered, but lus-tice Shane was tapping his gavel in a polite sort of way and they grudgingly fell silent.

Francis J. Hart, head of the Department of English and Dean of Graduate Studies, was on the stand. He was a plump man, meticulously dressed in dark clothing of a conservative cut, and possessing several strands of hair traversing the pink top of his cranium. He sat well back in the witness chair with his hands folded neatly in his lap and displaying, from time to time, a tight-lipped smile.

He said, "My first connection with the matter of the Robot EZ-27 was on the occasion of the session of the University Senate Executive Committee at which the subject was introduced by Professor Goodfellow. Thereafter, on the 10th of April of last year, we held a special meeting on the subject, during which I was in the chair."

"Were minutes kept of the meeting of the Executive Committee? Of the special meeting, that is?"

"Well, no. It was a rather unusual meeting." The dean smiled briefly. "We thought it might remain confidential."

"What transpired at the meeting?"

Dean Hart was not entirely comfortable as chairman of that meeting. Nor did the other members assembled seem completely calm. Only Dr. Lanning appeared at peace with himself. His tall, gaunt figure and the shock of white hair that crowned him reminded Hart of portraits he had seen of Andrew Jackson.

Samples of the robot's work lay scattered along the central regions of the table and the reproduction of a graph drawn by the robot was now in the hands of Professor Mi-nott of Physical Chemistry. The chemist's lips were pursed in obvious approval.

Hart cleared his throat and said, "There seems no doubt that the robot can perform certain routine tasks with adequate competence. I have gone over these, for instance, just before coming in and there is very little to find fault with."

He picked up a long sheet of printing, some three times as long as the average book page. It was a sheet of galley proof, designed to be corrected by authors before the type was set up in page form. Along both of the wide margins of the galley were proofmarks, neat and superbly legible. Occasionally, a word of print was crossed out and a new word substituted in the margin in characters so fine and regular it might easily have been print itself. Some of the corrections Were blue to indicate the original mistake had been the author's, a few in red, where the printer had been wrong.

"Actually," said Lanning, "there is less than very little to find fault with. I should say there is nothing at all to find fault with, Dr. Hart. I'm sure the corrections are perfect, insofar as the original manuscript was. If the manuscript against which this galley was corrected was at fault in a matter of fact rather than of English, the robot is not competent to correct it."

"We accept that. However, the robot corrected word order on occasion and I don't think the rules of English are sufficiently hidebound for us to be sure that in each case the robot's choice was the correct one."

"Easy's positronic brain," said Lanning, showing large teeth as he smiled, "has been molded by the contents of all the standard works on the subject. I'm sure you cannot point to a case where the robot's choice was definitely the incorrect one."

Professor Minott looked up from the graph he still held. "The question in my mind, Dr. Lanning, is why we need a robot at all, with all the difficulties in public relations that would entail. The science of automation has surely reached the point where your company could design a machine, an ordinary computer of a type known and accepted by the public, that would correct galleys."

"I am sure we could," said Lanning stiffly, "but such a machine would require that the galleys be translated into special symbols or, at the least, transcribed on tapes. Any corrections would emerge in symbols. You would need to keep men employed translating words to symbols, symbols to words. Furthermore, such a computer could do no other job. It couldn't prepare the graph you hold in your hand, for instance."

Minott grunted.

Lanning went on. "The hallmark of the positronic robot is its flexibility. It can do a number of jobs. It is designed like a man so that it can use all the tools and machines that have, after all, been designed to be used by a man. It can talk to you and you can talk to it. You can actually reason with it up to a point. Compared to even a simple robot, an ordinary computer with a nonpositronic brain is only a heavy adding machine."

Goodfellow looked up and said, "If we all talk and reason with the robot what are the chances of our confusing it? I suppose it doesn't have the capability of absorbing an infinite amount of data."

"No, it hasn't. But it should last five years with ordinary use. It will know when it will require clearing, and the company will do the job without charge."

'The company will?"

"Yes. The company reserves the right to service the robot outside the ordinary course of its duties. It is one reason we retain control of our positronic robots and lease rather than sell them. In the pursuit of its ordinary functions, any robot can be directed by any man. Outside its ordinary functions, a robot requires expert handling, and that we can give it. For instance, any of you might clear an EZ robot to an extent by telling it to forget this item or that. But you would be almost certain to phrase the order in such a way as to cause it to forget too much or too little. We would detect such tampering, because we have built-in safeguards. How_Tever, since there is no need for clearing the robot in its ordinary work, or for doing other useless things, this raises no problem."

Dean Hart touched his head as though to make sure his carefully cultivated strands lay evenly distributed and said, "You are anxious to have us take the machine. Yet surely it is a losing proposition for U. S. Robots. One thousand a year is a ridiculously low price. Is it that you hope through this to rent other such machines to other universities at a more reasonable price?"

"Certainly that's a fair hope," said Lanning.

"But even so, the number of machines you could rent would be limited. I doubt if you could make it a paying proposition."

Lanning put his elbows on the table and earnestly leaned forward. "Let me put it bluntly, gentlemen. Robots cannot be used on Earth, except in certain special cases, because of prejudice against them on the part of the public. U. S. Robots is a highly successful corporation with our extraterrestrial and space-flight markets alone, to say nothing of our computer subsidiaries. However, we are concerned with more than profits alone. It is our firm belief that the use of robots on Earth itself would mean a¹ better life for all eventually, even if a certain amount of economic dislocation resulted at first.

"The labor unions are naturally against us, but surely we may expect co-operation from the large universities. The robot, Easy, will help you by relieving you of scholastic drudgery—by assuming, if you permit it, the role of galley slave for you. Other universities and research institutions will follow your lead, and if it works out, then perhaps other robots of other types may be placed and the public's objections to them broken down by stages."

Minott murmured, "Today Northwestern University, tomorrow the world."

Angrily, Lanning whispered to Susan Calvin, "I wasn't nearly that eloquent and they weren't nearly that reluctant. At a thousand ,a year, they were jumping to get Easy. Professor Minott told me he'd never seen as beautiful a job as that graph he was holding and there was no mistake on the galley or anywhere else. Hart admitted it freely."

The severe vertical lines on Dr. Calvin's face did not soften. "You should have demanded more money than they could pay, Alfred, and let them beat you down."

"Maybe," he grumbled.

Prosecution was not quite done with Professor Hart. "After Dr. Lanning left, did you vote on whether to accept Robot EZ-27?"

"Yes, we did."

"With what result?"

"In favor of acceptance, by majority vote." "What would you say influenced the vote?" Defense objected immediately.

Prosecution rephrased the question. "What influenced you, personally,/in your individual vote? You did vote in favor, I think."

"I voted in favor, yes. I did so largely because I was impressed by Dr. Lanning's feeling that it was our duty as members of the world's intellectual leadership to allow robotics to help Man in the solutions of his problems."

"In other words, Dr. Lanning talked you into it."

"That's his job. He did it very well."

"Your witness."

Defense strode up to the witness chair and surveyed Professor Hart for a long moment. He said, "In reality, you were all pretty eager to have Robot EZ-27 in your employ, weren't you?"

"We thought that if it could do the work, it might be useful."

"If it could do the work? I understand you examined the samples of Robot EZ-27's original work with particular care on the day of the meeting which you have just described."

"Yes, I did. Since the machine's work dealt primarily with the handling of the English language, and since that is my field of competence, it seemed logical that I be the one chosen to examine the work."

"Very good. Was there anything on display on the table at the time of the meeting which was less than satisfactory? I have all the material here as exhibits. Can you point to a single unsatisfactory item?"

"Well—"

"It's a simple question. Was there one single solitary unsatisfactory item? You inspected it. Was there?"

The English professor frowned. "There wasn't."

"I also have some samples of work done by Robot EZ-27 during the course of his 14-month employ at Northeastern. Would you examine these and tell me if there is anything wrong with them in even one particular?"

Hart snapped, "When he did make a mistake, it was a beauty."

"Answer my question," thundered Defense, "and only the question I am putting to you! Is there anything wrong with the material?"

Dean Hart looked cautiously at each item. "Well, nothing."

"Barring the matter concerning which we are here engaged, do you know of any mistakes on the part of EZ-27?"

"Barring the matter for which this trial is being held, no."

Defense cleared his throat as though to signal end of paragraph. He said, "Now about the¹ vote concerning whether Robot EZ-27 was to be employed or not. You said there was a majority in favor. What was the actual vote?"

"Thirteen to one, as I remember."

"Thirteen to one! More than just a majority, wouldn't you say?"

"No, sir!" All the pedant in Dean Hart was aroused. "In the English language, the word 'majority' means 'more than half.' Thirteen out of fourteen is a majority, nothing more."

"But an almost unanimous one." "A majority all the same!"

Defense switched ground. "And who was the lone holdout?"

Dean Hart looked acutely uncomfortable. "Professor Simon Ninheimer."

Defense pretended astonishment. "Professor Ninheimer? The head of the Department of Sociology?"

"Yes, sir."

"The plaintiff?"

"Yes, sir."

Defense pursed his lips. "In other words, it turns out that the man bringing the action for payment of $750,000 damages against my client, United States Robot and Mechanical Men, Incorporated, was the one who from the beginning opposed the use of the robot—although everyone else on the Executive Committee of the University Senate was persuaded that it was a good idea."

"He voted against the motion, as was his right."

"You didn't mention in your description of the meeting any remarks made by Professor Ninheimer. Did he make any?"

"I think he spoke."

"You think?"

"Well, he did speak."

"Against using the robot?"

"Yes."

"Was he violent about it?" Dean Hart paused. "He was vehement." Defense grew confidential. "How long have you known Professor Ninheimer, Dean Hart?"

"About twelve years." "Reasonably well?" "I should say so, yes."

"Knowing him, then, would you say he was the kind of man who might continue to bear resentment against a robot, all the more so because an adverse vote had—"

Prosecution drowned out the remainder of the question with an indignant and vehement objection of his own. Defense motioned the witness down and Justice Shane called luncheon recess.

Robertson mangled his sandwich. The corporation would not founder for loss of three-quarters of a million, but the loss would do it no particular good. He was conscious, moreover, that there would be a much more costly long-term setback in public relations.

He said sourly, "Why all this business about how Easy got into the university? What do they hope to gain?"

The Attorney for Defense said quietly, "A court action is like a chess game, Mr. Robertson. The winner is usually the one who can see more moves ahead, and my friend at the prosecutor's table is no beginner. They can show damage; that's no problem. Their main effort lies in anticipating our defense. They must be counting on us to try to show that Easy couldn't possibly have committed the offense—because of the Laws of Robotics."

"All right," said Robertson, "that is our defense. An absolutely air-tight one."

"To a robotics engineer. Not necessarily to a judge. They're setting themselves up a position from which they can demonstrate that EZ-27 was no ordinary robot. It was the first of its type to be offered to the public. It was an experimental model that needed field-testing and the university was the only decent way to provide such testing. That would look plausible in the light of Dr. Lanning's strong efforts to place the robot and the willingness of U. S. Robots to lease it for so little. The prosecution would then argue that the field-test proved Easy to have been a failure. Now do you see the purpose of what's been going on?"

"But EZ-27 was a perfectly good model," argued Robertson.

"It was the 27th in production."

"Which is really a bad point," said Defense somberly. "What was wrong with the first 26? Obviously something. Why shouldn't there be something wrong with the 27th, too?"

"There was nothing wrong with the first 26 except that they weren't complex enough for the task. These were the first positronic brains of the sort to be constructed and it was rather hit-and-miss to begin with. But the Three Laws held in all of them! No robot is so imperfect that the Three Laws don't hold."

"Dr. Lanning has explained this to me, Mr. Robertson, and I am willing to take his word for it. The judge, however, may not be. We are expecting a decision from an honest and intelligent man who knows no robotics and thus may be led astray. For instance, if you or Dr. Lanning or Dr. Calvin were to say on the stand that any positronic brains were constructed 'hit-and-miss,' as you just did, Prosecution would tear you apart in cross-examination. Nothing would salvage our case. So that's something to avoid."

Robertson growled, "If only Easy would talk."

Defense shrugged. "A robot is incompetent as a witness, so that would do us no good."

"At least we'd know some of the facts. We'd know how it came to do such a thing."

Susan Calvin fired up. A dullish red touched her cheeks and her voice had a trace of warmth in it. "We know how Easy came to do it. It was ordered to! I've explained this to counsel and I'll explain it to you now."

"Ordered by whom?" asked Robertson in honest astonishment. (No one ever told him anything, he thought resentfully. These research people considered themselves the owners of U. S. Robots, by God!)

"By the plaintiff," said Dr. Calvin.

"In heaven's name, why?"

"I don't know why yet. Perhaps just that we might be sued, that he might gain some cash." There were blue glints in her eyes as she said that.

"Then why doesn't Easy say so?"

"Isn't that obvious? It's been ordered to keep quiet about the matter."

"Why should that be obvious?" demanded Robertson truculently.

"Well, it's obvious to me. Robot psychology is my profession. If Easy will not answer questions about the matter directly, he will answer questions on the fringe of the matter. By measuring increased hesitation in his answers as the central question is approached, by measuring the area of blankness and the intensity of counter-potentials set up, it is possible to tell with scientific precision that his troubles are the result of an order not to talk, with its strength based on First Law. In other words, he's been told that if he talks, harm will be done a human being. Presumably harm to the unspeakable Professor Ninheimer, the plaintiff, who, to the robot, would seem a human being."

"Well, then," said Roberston, "can't you explain that if he keeps quiet, harm will be done to U. S. Robots?"

"U. S. Robots is not a human being and the First Law of Robotics does not recognize a corporation as a person the way ordinary laws do. Besides, it would be dangerous to try to lift this particular sort of inhibition. The person who laid it on could lift it off least dangerously, because the robot's motivations in that respect are centered on that person. Any other course—" She shook her head and grew almost impassioned. "I won't let the robot be damaged!"

Lanning interrupted with the air of bringing sanity to the problem. "It seems to me that we have only to prove a robot incapable of the act of which Easy is accused. We can do that."

"Exactly," said Defense, in annoyance. "You can do that. The only witnesses capable of testifying to Easy's condition and to the nature of Easy's state of mind are employees of U. S. Robots. The judge can't possibly accept their testimony as unprejudiced."

"How can he deny expert testimony?"

"By refusing to be convinced by it. That's his right as the judge. Against the alternative that a man like Professor Ninheimer deliberately set about ruining his own reputation, even for a sizeable sum of money, the judge isn't going to accept the technicalities of your engineers. The judge is a man, after all. If he has to choose between a man doing an impossible thing and a robot doing an impossible thing, he's quite likely to decide in favor of the man."

"A man can do an impossible thing," said Lanning, "because we don't know all the complexities of the human mind and we don't know what, in a given human mind, is impossible and what is not. We do know what is really impossible to a robot."

"Well, we'll see if we can't convince the judge of that," Defense replied wearily.

"If all you say is so," rumbled Robertson, "I don't see how you can."

"We'll see. It's good to know and be aware of the difficulties involved, but let's not be too down-hearted. I've tried to look ahead a few moves in the chess-game, too." With a stately nod in the direction of the robopsychologist, he added, "With the help of the good lady here."

Lanning looked from one to the other and said, "What the devil is this?"

But the bailiff thrust his head into the room and announced somewhat breathlessly that the trial was about to resume.

They took their seats, examining the man who had started all the trouble.

Simon Ninheimer owned a fluffy head of sandy hair, a face that narrowed past a beaked nose toward a pointed chin, and a habit of sometimes hesitating before key words in his conversation that gave him an air of a seeker after an almost unbearable precision. When he said, "The Sun rises in the-—uh—east," one was certain he had given due consideration to the possibility that it might at some time rise in the west.

Prosecution said, "Did you oppose employment of Robot EZ-27 by the university?" "I did, sir." "Why was that?"

"I did not feel that we understood the—uh—motives of U. S. Robots thoroughly. I mistrusted their anxiety to place the robot with us."

"Did you feel that it was capable of doing the work that it was allegedly designed to do?"

"I know for a fact that it was not"

"Would you state your reasons?"

Simon Ninheimer's book, entitled Social Tensions Involved in Space-Flight and Their Resolution, had been eight years in the making. Ninheimer's search for precision was not confined to his habits of speech, and in a subject like sociology, almost inherently imprecise, it left him breathless.

Even with the material in galley proofs, he felt no sense of completion. Rather the reverse, in fact. Staring at the long strips of print, he felt only the itch to tear the lines of type apart and rearrange them differently.

Jim Baker, Instructor and soon to be Assistant Professor of Sociology, found Ninheimer, three days after the first batch of galleys had arrived from the printer, staring at the handful of paper in abstraction. The galleys came in three copies: one for Ninheimer to proofread, one for Baker to proofread independently, and a third, marked "Original," which was to receive the final corrections, a combination of those made by Ninheimer and by Baker, after a conference at which possible conflicts and disagreements were ironed out. This had been their policy on the several papers on which they had collaborated in the past three years and it worked well.

Baker, young and ingratiatingly soft-voiced, had his own copies of the galleys in his hand. He said eagerly, "I've done the first chapter and they contain some typographical beauts."

"The first chapter always has them," said Ninheimer distantly.

"Do you want to go over 'it now?"

Ninheimer brought his eyes to grave focus on Baker. "I haven't done anything on the galleys, Jim. I don't think I'll bother."

Baker looked confused. "Not bother?"

Ninheimer pursed his lips. "I've»asked about the—uh— workload of the machine. After all, he was originally—uh— promoted as a proofreader. They've set a schedule."

"The machine? You mean Easy?"

"I believe that is the foolish name they gave it."

"But, Dr. Ninheimer, I thought you were staying clear of it!"

"I seem to be the only one doing so. Perhaps I ought to take my share of the—uh—advantage."

"Oh. Well, I seem to have wasted time on this first chapter, then," said the younger man ruefully.

"Not wasted. We can compare the machine's result with yours as a check."

"If you want to, but—"

"Yes?"

"I doubt that we'll find anything wrong with Easy's work. It's supposed never to have made a mistake."

"I dare say," said Ninheimer dryly.

The first chapter was brought in again by Baker four days later. This time it was Ninheimer's copy, fresh from the special annex that had been built to house Easy and the equipment it used.

Baker was jubilant. "Dr. Ninheimer, it not only caught everything I caught—it found a dozen errors I missed! The whole thing took it twelve minutes!"

Ninheimer looked over the sheaf, with the neatly printed marks and symbols in the margins. He said, "It is not as complete as you and I would have made it. We should have entered an insert on Suzuki's work on the neurological effects of low gravity."

"You mean his paper in Sociological Reviews?"

"Of course."

"Well, you can't expect impossibilities of Easy. It can't read the literature for us."

"I realize that. As a matter of fact, I have prepared the insert. I will see the machine and make certain it knows how to—uh—handle inserts."

"It will know."

"I prefer to make certain."

Ninheimer had to make an appointment to see Easy, and then could get nothing better than fifteen minutes in the late evening.

But the fifteen minutes turned out to be ample. Robot EZ-27 understood the matter of inserts at once.

Ninheimer found himself uncomfortable at close quarters with the robot for the first time. Almost automatically, as though it were human, he found himself asking, "Are you happy with your work?"

"Most happy, Professor Ninheimer," said Easy solemnly, the photo-cells that were its eyes gleaming their normal deep red.

"You know me?"

"From the fact that you présent me with additional material to include in the galleys, it follows that you are the author. The author's name, of course, is at the head of each sheet of galley proof."

"I see. You make—uh—deductions, then. Tell me—" he couldn't resist the question—"what do you think of the book so-far?"

Easy said, "I find it very pleasant to work with."

"Pleasant? That is an odd word for a—uh—a mechanism without emotion. I've been told you have no emotion."

"The words of your book go in accordance with my circuits," Easy explained. "They set up little or no counter-potentials. It is in my brain-paths to translate this mechanical fact into a word such as 'pleasant.' The emotional context is fortuitous."

"I see. Why do you find the book pleasant?"

"It deals with human beings, Professor, and not with inorganic materials or mathematical symbols. Your book attempts to understand human beings and to help increase human happiness."

"And this is what you try to do and so my book goes in accordance with your circuits? Is that it?"

"That is it, Professor."

The fifteen minutes were up. Ninheimer left and went to the university library, which was' on the point of closing. He kept them open long enough to find an elementary text on robotics. He took it home with him.

Except for occasional insertion of late material, the galleys went to Easy and from him to the publishers with little intervention from Ninheimer at first—and none at all later.

Baker said, a little uneasily, "It almost gives me a feeling of uselessness."

"It should give you a feeling of having time to begin a new project," said Ninheimer, without looking up from the notations he was making in the current issue of Social Science Abstracts.

"I'm just not used to it. I keep worrying about the galleys. It's silly, I know."

"It is."

"The other day I got a couple of sheets before Easy sent them off to—"

"What!" Ninheimer looked up, scowling. The copy of Abstracts slid shut. "Did you disturb the machine at its work?"

"Only for a minute. Everything was all right. Oh, it changed one word. You referred to something as 'criminal'; it changed the word to 'reckless.' It thought the second adjective fit in better with the context."

Ninheimer grew thoughtful. "What did you think?"

"You know, I agreed with it. I let it stand."

Ninheimer turned in his swivel-chair to face his young associate. "See here, I wish you wouldn't do this again. If I am to use the machine, I wish the—uh—full advantage of it. If I am to use it and lose your—uh—services anyway because you supervise it when the whole point is that it requires no supervision, I gain nothing. Do you see?"

"Yes, Dr. Ninheimer," said Baker, subdued.

The advance copies of Social Tensions arrived in Dr. Ninheimer's office on the 8th of May. He looked through it briefly, flipping pages and pausing to read a paragraph here and there. Then he put his copies away.

As he explained later, he forgot about it. For eight years, he had worked at it, but now, and for months in the past, other interests had engaged him while Easy had taken the load of the book off his shoulders. He did not even think to donate the usual complimentary copy to the university library. Even Baker, who had thrown himself into work and had steere clear of the department head since receiving his rebuke at their last meeting, received no copy.

On the 16th of June that stage ended. Ninheimer received a phone call and stared at the image in the 'plate with surprise.

"Speidell! Are you in town?"

"No, sir. I'm in Cleveland." Speidell's voice trembled with emotion.

"Then why the call?"

"Because I've just been looking through your new book! Ninheimer, are you mad? Have you gone insane?"

Ninheimer stiffened. "Is something—uh—wrong?" he asked in alarm.

"Wrong? I refer you to page 562. What in blazes do you mean by interpreting my work as you do? Where in the paper cited do I make the claim that the criminal personality is nonexistent and that it is the tow-enforcement agencies that are the true criminals? Here, let me quote—"

"Wait! Wait!" cried Ninheimer, trying to find the page. "Let me see. Let me see ... Good God!"

"Well?"

"Speidell, I don't see how this could have happened. I never wrote this."

"But that's what's printed! And that distortion isn't the worst. You look at page 690 and imagine what Ipatiev is going to do to you when he sees the hash you've made of his findings! Look, Ninheimer, the book is riddled with this sort of thing. I don't know what you were thinking of—but there's nothing to do but get the book off the market. And you'd better be prepared for extensive apologies at the next Association meeting!" "Speidell, listen to me—"

But Speidell had flashed off with a force that had the 'plate glowing with after-images for fifteen seconds.

It was then that Ninheimer went through the book and began marking off passages with red ink.

He kept his temper remarkably well when he faced Easy again, but his lips were pale. He passed the book to Easy and said, "Will you read the marked passages' on pages 562, 631, 664 and 690?"

Easy did so in four glances. "Yes, Professor Ninheimer."

"This is not as I had it in the original galleys."

"No, sir. It is not."

"Did you change it to read as it now does?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why?"

"Sir, the passages as they read in your version were most uncomplimentary to certain groups of human beings. I felt it advisable to change the wording to avoid doing them harm."

"How dared you do such a thing?"

"The First Law, Professor, does not let me, through any inaction, allow harm to come to human beings. Certainly, considering your reputation in the world of sociology and the wide circulation your book would receive among scholars, considerable harm would come to a number of the human beings you speak of."

"But do you realize the harm that will come to me now?"

"It was necessary to choose the alternative with less harm."

Professor Ninheimer, shaking with fury, staggered away. It was clear to him that U. S. Robots would have to account to him for this.

mand on the sheaf of papers under his hand. "—Well, what comes first, Tom, the chicken or the egg? All eggs and no hens, it just won't work."

The General stopped to chuckle, and the Colonel followed suit.

"The thing is, now we've got the bastards—and I mean no disrespect to my uniform, Colonel, I'm using that word literally—now we've got 'em, what're we going to do with 'em?"

His fingers continued to tap on the pile of reports, not impatiently, but with emphasis.

"I don't say it's your fault, Tom, you've done fine on the other end, but if you're going to bounce everybody who can pass the physicals, and if everyone who gets by you is going to get blacked out by the medics, well—I don't know, maybe the specs were set too high. Maybe you've got to—well, I don't want to tell you how to do your job, Tom. I don't kid myself about that; I know I couldn't fill your shoes if I tried. All I can do is put it squarely up to you. You've got the figures there in front of you. Cold figures, and you know what they mean."

He stopped tapping long enough to shove a neatly typed sheet an inch closer to the other man. Neither of them looked at the sheet; both of them knew the figures by heart. "Out of three hundred and thirty-six applicants so far, we've accepted thirty-eight. We've had twenty-one successful Sections to date," the General intoned. "And six of those have been successfully transported to Moon Base. Three have already come to term, and been delivered, healthy and whole and apparently in good shape all around.

"Out of one hundred and ninety-six applicants, we have so far accepted exactly three—one, two, three—foster parents. Only one of those is on the Base now. She's been on active duty since the first delivery—that was August 22, if I remember right, and that makes twenty-five days today that she's been on without relief.

"Mrs. Kemp left on the rocket this morning. She'll be on Base—let's see—" He shuffled rocket schedules and Satellite-Moon Base shuttles in his mind. "—Wednesday, day after tomorrow. Which makes twenty-seven days for Lenox. If Kemp's willing to walk in and take over on a strange job, Lenox can take a regular single leave at that point; more likely she'll have to wait for the next shuttle—thirty-one days on duty, Tom, and most of it carrying full responsibility alone. And that's not counting the two days she was there before the first delivery, which adds up to—let's see— thirty-three altogether, isn't it?"

The Colonel nodded soberly. It was hard to remember that the General happened to be right, and that the figures he was quoting were meaningful, in terms of human beings. Carefully, he lowered mental blinds, and managed to keep track of the recital without having to hear it all. He knew the figures, and he knew the situation was serious. He knew it a good deal better than the General did, because he knew the people as well as how many there were ... or weren't.

More women on more rockets would make the tally-sheet look better, but it wouldn't provide better care for the babies; not unless they were the right women. He waited patiently for a break in the flow of arithmetic, and tried to get this point across. "I was thinking," he began. "On this leave problem—couldn't we use some of the Army nurses for relief duty, till we catch up with ourselves? That would take some of the pressure off and I'd a lot rather have the kids in the care of somebody we didn't know for a few days than send up extra people on one-year contracts when we do know they're not adequate."

"It's a last resort, Tom. That's just what I'm trying to avoid. I'm hoping we won't have to do that," the General said ominously. "Right now, this problem is in our laps, and nobody else's. If we start asking for help from the Base staff, and get their schedules fouled up—I tell you, Tom, we'll have all the top brass there is down on us."

"Of course," he said. "I wasn't thinking of that angle ..." But he let it go. No sense trying to make any point against the Supreme Argument.

"Well, that's my job, not yours, worrying about things like that," the General said jovially. But all the time, one ringer, as if with an independent metronomic existence of its own, kept tapping the pile of psych reports. "But you know as well as I do, we've got to start showing better results. I've talked to the Medics, and I'm talking to you. Maybe you ought to get together and figure how to ...

"No, I said I wouldn't tell you how to do your job, and I won't. But we've got to have somebody on that December 8 rocket. That's the outside limit, and it means you've got three weeks to find her. If nobody comes up, I don't think we'll have any choice but to reconsider some of the rejects, and see if .we can settle on somebody between us."

The General stood up; so did the Colonel. "I won't keep you any longer, Tom. I believe there's a young—lady?— outside waiting for you." He shook his head. "It's good thing / don't have to talk to them," the General said feelingly.

The Colonel, again, agreed. They both smiled.

The intercom phone on the Wac's desk buzzed; The girl sat up straight, watching. The Wac picked up the receiver and listened and said crisply, "Yes, sir," and hung up and pushed back her chair and went through the door behind the desk, into the Colonel's office.

The girl watched, and when the door closed, her eyes moved to the wall mirror over the long table on the opposite wall, and she wondered if she would ever in her life achieve the kind of groomed smartness the Wac had. She was pretty; she knew that without looking in the mirror. But it seemed to her that she was bulky and shapeless and unformed. Her hair was soft and cloudy-brownish, where the Wac's was shiningly coifed and determinate in color; and where the Wac was trim and tailored, the contours of her own body, under the powder-blue suit, were fluid and vaguely indistinct.

It's just a matter of getting older, she thought, and she wondered what the Wac would do in the spot she was in.

But it wouldn't happen. A woman like that wouldn't let it happen. Anybody who could keep each hair in place that way could keep a hold on her emotions, too; or at least make sure it was safe, ahead of time.

The door opened, and the Wac smiled at her. "You can go in now, Mrs. Barton," she said, a little too kindly.

She knows! The girl could feel the heat flame in her cheeks. Of course! Everybody here would know what was the matter with the girls who went in to see Colonel Edgerly. She walked stiffly past the other woman, without looking at her.

"Mrs. Barton?" The Colonel stood up, greeting her. He was too young. Much too young. She could never talk to him about—there was nothing to talk about. She didn't have to tell him about anything. Only he should have been older, and not so nice-looking.

He pulled up a chair for her, and went through all the ordinary gestures of courtesy, getting her settled. He was wearing a Colonel's uniform all right, but he didn't look like one, and he didn't act like one. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his desk drawer, offered her one, and lit it for her. All that time, she didn't have to say anything; and by then, she was able to talk.

The application form was a necessary formality. He wrote down the name and address she gave, and a little doubtfully, after age, nineteen. She surprised him by claiming student as her occupation, instead of the conventional housewife, but everything else went according to expectations. She had had measles and mumps, but no chicken pox or scarlet fever or whooping cough. No operations, 1310 previous pregnancies, no congenital conditions. He checked down the list rapidly, indifferently. When she'd had her physical, they'd know the accurate answers to all these things. Meantime, the girl was answering familiar questions that she had answered a hundred times before, in less frightening places, and they were getting near the bottom of the sheet.

He looked over at herj smiling a little, frowning a little, and his voice was apologetic with the first personal, and pertinent, question. "Have you had a medical examination yet?"

"No, they said the interview was first... Oh! You mean for ... ? Yes. Yes, of course."

"Do you know how far along you are?" His eyes were on the form, and he scribbled as he talked.

She took a deep breath. "Eleven weeks," she said. "The doctor said last week it was ten, so—so I guess it's eleven now/' she finished weakly.

"Do you think your husband would be willing to come down for a physical? We like to get records on both parents if we can..." There was no answer. He looked up, and she was shaking her head; her face was white, and she wasn't breathing at all.

"You're quite sure?" he said politely. "It's not necessary; but it does work to the advantage of the child, if we have as much information as possible."

"I'm sorry," she said tightly. "He—" She paused, and made up her mind. "He doesn't know about it. We're both still in school, Colonel. If I told him, he'd think he had to quit, and start working. I can't tell him."

It sounded like the truth, almost, but her face was too stiffly composed, and the pulse in her temple beat visibly against the pale mask. Her words were too precise, when her breath was coming so quickly. She wasn't used to lying.

"You realize that what you're doing here is a real and important contribution, Mrs. Barton? Don't you think he might see it that way? Maybe if I talked to him ... ?"

She shook her head again. "No. If it's that important, I guess I better ..." The voice trailed off, almost out of control, and her lips stayed open a little, her eyes wide, frightened, not knowing what the end of that sentence could possibly be.

The Colonel pushed the printed sheet away from him, and looked at her intently. It was time for the last question.

"Mrs. Barton— What do people call you, anyway? Ce-cille? Cissy? Ceil? Do you mind ... ?"

"No, that's all right Ceil." It was a very small smile, but she was obviously more comfortable.

"All right, Ceil. Now look—there's a line on the bottom there that asks your reason for volunteering. I wish it wasn't there, because I don't like inviting lies. I know, and everybody connected with this project knows, that it takes some pretty special motivation for a woman to volunteer for something like this. Occasionally we get someone in here who's doing it out of pure and simple—and I do mean simple—patriotism, and then I don't mind asking that question. I don't think that applies to you ... ?"

She shook her head, and tried a smile.

"Okay. I wanted to explain my own attitude before I asked. I don't care why you're doing it. I'm damn glad you are, because I think you're the kind of parent we want You'll go through some pretty rugged tests before we accept you, but by this time I can usually tell who'll get through, and who won't. I think you will. And it's in the nature of things that if you are the right kind, you'd have to have a pretty special personal reason for doing this ... ?"

He waited. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. She tried again, and when she swallowed, he could almost feel in his own throat the lump that wouldn't let her lie come out. He pulled the application form closer to him, and wrote quickly in the last space at the bottom, then shoved it across, so she could see:

/ think I'm too young to raise a child properly, and I want to help out.

"All right?" he asked gently. She nodded, and there were tears in her eyes. He opened the top drawer and got her some Kleenex. Again she started to say something, and swallowed instead; then the dam broke. He wheeled his chair over to her, and reached out a comforting hand. Then her head was on his shoulder, and she was crying in loud snuffly childish sobs. When it began to let up, he gave her some more Kleenex, and got his chair back in position so he could kick the button under the desk and dim the
light a little. v

"Still want to go through with it?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Want to tell me any more?"

She did; she obviously wanted to very much. She kept her lips pressed firmly together, as if the words might get out in spite of herself.

"You don't have to," he said. "If you want to, you understand it stops right here. The form is filled out already. There's nothing else I have to put on there. But if you feel like talking a little, now that we're—" he grinned, and glanced at the damp spot on his shoulder, "—now that we're better acquainted—well, you might feel better if you spill some of it."

"There's nothing to tell," she said carefully. "Nothing you don't already know." Her face was expressionless; there was no way to tell what she meant.

"All right," he said. "In that case, sit back and get comfortable, because I've got some things to tell you. The Colonel is about to make a speech." She smiled, but it was a polite smile now; for a minute, she had warmed up, now they were strangers again.

He had made the same speech, with slight variations, exactly 237 times before. Every girl or woman who got past him to the medics heard it before she went. The wording and the manner changed for each one, but the substance was the same.

All he was supposed to do was to explain the nature and purposes of the Project. Presumably, they already knew that when they came in, but he was supposed to make sure. He did. He made very sure that they understood, as well as each one was able, not only the purposes, but the nature: what kind of lives their children might be expected to lead.

It never made any difference. He knew it wouldn't now. Just once, a woman had come to them because she had been warned that carrying a child to term would mean her death and the baby's, both. She had listened and understood, and had asked soberly whether there were any similar facilities available privately. He had had to admit there were not. The process was too expensive, even for this purpose, except on a large-scale basis. To do it for one infant would be possible, perhaps, for a Rockefeller or an Aga Khan—not on any lesser scale. The woman had listened, and hesitated, and decided that life, on any terms, was better than no life at all.

But this girl with her tremulous smile and her frightened eyes and her unweathered skin—this girl had not yet realized even that it was a human life she carried inside herself; so far, she understood only that she had done something foolish, and that there was a slim chance she might be able to remedy the error without total disaster or too much dishonor.

He started with the history of the Project, explaining the reasons for it, and the thinking behind it: the psychosomatic problems of low-grav and null-weight conditions; the use of hypnosis, and its inadequacies; the eventual recognition that only those conditioned from infancy to low-grav conditions would ever be able to make the Starhop ... or even live in any comfort on the Moon.

He ran through it, but she wasn't listening. Either she knew it already, or she just wasn't interested. The Colonel kept talking, only because he was required to brief all applicants on this material.

"The problem was how to get the babies to the Base. So far, nobody has been able to take more than four months of Moon-grav without fairly serious somatic effects, or else a total emotional crackup. It wasn't practical to take families there, to raise our crop of conditioned babies, and we couldn't safely transport women in their last month of pregnancy, or new-born babies, either one."

She was paying attention, in a way. She was paying attention to him, but he could have sworn she wasn't hearing a word he said.

"The operation," he went on, "was devised by Dr. Jordan Zamesh, of the Navy..."

"I'm sorry," she said suddenly, "about your uniform." , "Uniform... ?" He glanced at the spot on his shoulder. "Oh, that's all right. It's almost dry, anyhow. Dacron." Damn! He'd miscalculated. She was too young to stew over a brief loss of control this way—but she'd been doing it anyhow, and he hadn't noticed. Which was what came of worrying about your boss when you were supposed to have your mind on the customers. Damn! And double it for the General. She might have been ready to talk, and he'd rushed into his little speech like an idiot while she sat there getting over the sobbing-spell. All by herself. Without any nice sympathetic help from the nice sympathetic man.

"I guess," she was saying, "I suppose you're used to that?"

"I keep the Kleenex handy," he admitted.

"Does everybody—?"

"Nope. Just the ones who have sense enough to know what they're doing. The high-powered patriots don't, I guess. All the others do, sooner or later, here or some place else." He looked at her, sitting there so much inside herself, so miserably determined to sustain her isolation, so falsely safe inside the brittle armor of her loneliness. She had cried for a minute, and cracked the armor by that much, and now she hated herself for it.

"What the hell kind of a woman do you think you'd be?" he said grimly. "If you'll pardon my emphasis—what the hell kind of woman could give a baby away without crying a little?"

"I didn't have to do it on your uniform."

"You didn't have to, but I'm glad you did."

"You don't have to feel..." She caught herself, just in time, and the Colonel restrained a smile. She had almost forgotten that there wasn't any reason to feel sorry for Mrs. Barton.

She smoothed out her face, regained a part of her composure. "I'm sorry," she said. "All I do is apologize, isn't it? Now I mean I'm sorry, because I wasn't really listening to you. I was too embarrassed, I guess. I'll listen now."

He'd lost her again. For a moment, there had almost been contact, but now she was gone, alone with her shell of quiet politeness. The Colonel went on with his speech.

"... the operation is not dangerous," he explained, "except insofar as any operation, or the use of anesthesia, is occasionally dangerous to a rare individual. However, we have managed to cut down on even that narrow margin; the physical exams you'll get before the application is approved will pretty well determine whether there is any reason why you should not undergo operative procedure.

"Essentially, what we do is a simple Caesarian section. There are modifications, of course, to allow the placenta and membrane to be removed intact, but these changes do not make the operation any more dangerous.

"There is a certain percentage of loss in the postoperative care of the embryos. Occasionally, the nutritive surrogate doesn't 'take,' whether because of miscalculations on our part, or unknown factors in the embryo, we can't tell, but for the most part, the embryos thrive and continue to grow in normal fashion, and the few that have already been transported have all survived the trip—"

"Colonel... ?"

He was relieved; he hadn't entirely misread her. She was a nice girl, a good girl, who would be a good wife and mother some day, and she interrupted just where she ought to.

"Yes?" He let himself smile a little bit, and she took it the right way.

"Does— Is— I mean, you said, the operation isn't dangerous. But what does it do as far as—having babies later goes?"

"To the best of our knowledge, it will not impair either your ability to conceive or your capacity to carry a baby through a normal pregnancy. Depending on your own healing potential, and on the results of some new techniques we're using, you may have to have Caesarians with any future deliveries."

"Oh!"

As suddenly as it had happened before, when she cried, the false reserve of shame and pride and worry fell away from her. Her eyes were wide, and her tongue flickered out to wet her upper lip before she could say, "There'll be a scar! Won't there? This time, I mean?"

There were two things he could say, and the one that would comfort her would also seal her away again behind the barrier of proper manners and assumed assurance. He spoke slowly and deliberately:

"Perhaps you'd better tell your husband beforehand, Ceil...."

She stared at him blankly; she'd forgotten about the husband again. Then she sat up in her chair and looked straight at him. "You know I'm not married!" she said. She was furious."

The Colonel sat back and relaxed. He picked up the application blank he had filled out, and calmly tore it down the center.

"All right," she said tiredly. She stood up. "I'm sorry I wasted your time."

"You didn't," he said quietly. "Not unless you've changed your mind, that is."

Halfway to the door, she turned around and looked at him. She didn't say anything, just waited.

He took a fresh form out of his drawer, and motioned to the chair. "Sif down, won't you?" She took a tentative half-step back toward him, and paused, still waiting. He stood up, and walked around the desk, carefully not going too close to her. Leaning on the edge of the desk, he said quietly, in matter-of-fact tones:

"Look, Ceil, right now you're confused. You're so angry you don't care what happens, and you're feeling so beat, you haven't got the energy to be mad. You don't know where you're going, or where you can go. And you don't see any sense in staying. All right, your big guilty secret is out now, and I personally don't give a damn—except for one thing: that it had to come out before we could seriously consider your application."

\ He watched the color come back to her face, and her eyes go wide again. "You mean—?" she said and stopped. Looked at the chair; looked at the door; looked at him, waiting again.

"I mean," he said, "bluntly, that I used every little psychological trick I know to get you to make that Horrible Admission. I did it because what we're doing here is both important and expensive, and we don't take babies without knowing what we're getting. Besides which, I think you're the kind of parent we want. I didn't want to let you get away. I hope you won't go now." He reached out and put a hand on her arm. "Sit down, won't you, Ceil? It won't hurt to listen a while, and I think we can work things out."

This time he pretended not to notice the tears, and gave her a chance to brush them away, and get settled in the chair again, while he did some unnecessary rummaging around in his closet. After that it went smoothly. They stuck to the assumed name, Barton, but he got her real name as well, and the college she was going to. She lived at school; that would make the arrangements easier.

"We can't do it till the fifth month," he explained. "If everything goes all right till then, we can probably arrange for an emergency appendectomy easily enough. You'll come in for regular check-ups meanwhile; and if things start to get too—obvious, we'll have to work out something more complicated, to get you out of school for a while beforehand. The scar is enough like an appendix scar to get away with," he added.

The one thing he had really been disturbed about was her age, but she insisted she was really nineteen, and of course he could verify that with the school. And the one thing she wouldn't break down about was the father's name. He decided that could wait. Also, he left out the unfinished part of his speech: the part about the training the children would have. For this girl, it was clear, the only realities were in the immediate present, and the once-removed direct consequences of present acts. She was nineteen; the scar mattered, but thé child did not. Not yet.

He took her to the outer office and asked Helen, at the desk, to make an appointment for her with Medical and to give her the standard literature. Helen pushed a small stack of phone messages over to him, and he riffled through. Just one urgent item, a woman in the infirmary with a fit of postoperative melancholia. They're all in such a damn hurry to get rid of the babies, he thought, and then they want to kill themselves afterward! And this nice girl, this pretty child, would be the same way....

Helen had Medical on the phone. "Tell them I'll be right down," he told her, "for Mrs. Anzio. Ten-fifteen minutes."

She nodded, confirmed the time and date for Ceil's appointment, and repeated the message, then listened a minute, nodding.

"All right, I'll tell him." She hung up, pulled a prepared stuffed manila envelope out of her file, and handed it to the girl. "Four-fifteen, Friday. Bring things for overnight. You'll be able to leave about Sunday morning." She smiled professionally, scribbling the time on an appointment-reminder slip.

"I'll have to get a weekend pass—to stay overnight," the girl said hesitantly.

"All right. Let us know if you can't do it this weekend, and we'll fix it when you can." The Colonel led her to the door, and turned back to his secretary inquiringly.

'They said no rush, but you better see her before you leave today. They're afraid it might get suicidal."

"Yeah. I know." He looked at her, smart and brisk and shiny, the perfect Lady Soldier. She had been occupying that desk for three weeks now, and he had yet to find a chink or peephole in the gleaming wall of her efficiency. And for an old Peeping Tom like me, this is going some! The thought was indignant. "You know what?" he said.

"Sir?"

"This is a hell of a way to run an Army!"

"Yes, sir," she said; but she managed to put a good deal of meaning into it.

"I take it you agree, but you don't approve. If it will make you feel any better, I have the General's word for it. He told me so himself. Now what about this Browne woman?"

"Oh. She called twice. The second time she told me she wants to apply for FP. I told her you were in conference, and would call her back. She was very—insistent."

"I see. Well, you call her back, and make an appointment for tomorrow. Then ..."

"There's another FP coming tomorrow afternoon," she reminded him. "A Mrs. Leahy."

"Well! Two in one day. Maybe business is picking up. Put Browne in first thing in the morning. Then call the Dean of Women at Henderson, and make an appointment for me—I'll go there—any time that's convenient. Sooner the better. Tell her it's the Project, but don't say what about." There were three more messages; he glanced at them again, and tossed them back on her desk. "You can handle these. I better go see that Anzio woman."

"What shall I tell General Martin, sir?" She picked up the slip with the message from his office, and studied it with an air of uninformed bewilderment.

The Perfect Lady Soldier, all right, he decided. No bucks passed to her. "Tell his secretary that I had to rush down to Medical, and I'll ring him back when I'm done," he said, and managed to make it sound as if that was what he'd meant all along.

In the morning, very slightly hung over, he checked first with the Infirmary, and was told that Mrs. Anzio had been quiet after he left, had eaten well, and had spent the night under heavy sedation. She was quiet now, but had refused breakfast.

"She supposed to go home today?"

"That's right, sir."

"Well, don't let her go. I'll get down when I have a chance, and see how she sounds. Who's O.D. down there? Bill Sawyer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, tell him I'd suggest stopping sedation now." "Yes, sir."

He hung up and buzzed Helen. "You can send Miss Browne in now."

Miss Browne settled her bony bottom on the edge of the visitors' chair. She was dressed in black, with one smart-looking gold pin on her lapel to show she was modern and broad-minded—and a mourning-band on her sleeve, to show she wasn't too forgetful of the old-fashioned proprieties. She spoke in a faintly nasal whine, and used elegant, refined language and diction.

It took about 60 seconds to determine that she could not be seriously considered for the job. It took another 60 minutes to go through the formality of filling out an application blank, and hearing her reasons for wanting to spend a year at Moon Base in the service of the State. It took most of the rest of the morning to compose a report that might make clear to the General just why they could not use an apparently healthy woman of less than thirty-five years, with no dependents or close attachments (her father had just died, after a long illness, during which she had given up "everything" to care for him), with some nursing experience, and with a stated desire to "give what I can for society, now that there is nothing more I can do for my beloved father."

Give, he thought. Give till it hurts. Then give a little more, till it hurts as much as possible. It was inevitable that this sort of job should attract the martyr types; inevitable, but still you wondered, when nine-tenths of the population had never heard of the Project, just how so many of this kind came so swiftly and unerringly to his waiting room.

He wrote it down twice for the General: once with psychological jargon, meant to impress; and again with adjectives and examples, and a case history or two, meant to educate. When he was done, he had little hope that he had succeeded in making his point. He signed the report and handed it to Helen to send up.

Mrs. Leahy, in the afternoon, was a surprise.

She walked into his office with no sign of either the re-luctance-and-doubt or the eagerness-and-arrogance that marked almost every applicant who entered there. She sat down comfortably in the visitors' chair, and introduced herself with a friendliness and social ease that made it clear she was accustomed to meeting strangers.

She was a plump—not fat—attractive woman, past her first youth, but in appearance not yet what could be called middle-aged. He was startled when she stated her age as forty-seven; he was further startled when she stated her occupation.

"Madam," she said, and chuckled with pleasure when he couldn't help himself from looking up sharply. "You don't know how I've been waiting to see your face when I said that," she explained, and he thought wearily, I should have known. Just another exhibitionist. For a few minutes, he had begun to think he had one they could use.

"Do you always show your feelings all over your face like that?" she asked gleefully. "You'd think, in your job— The reason I was looking forward to saying it was—well, two reasons. First, I figured you'd he one of these suave-faced operators, professionally unshockable, and I wanted to jolt you."

"You did, and I am," he said gravely. "Usually."

She smiled. "Second, I'm not often in a position to pull off anything like that. People would disapprove, and what's worse, they'd refuse to wait on me in stores, or read me lectures,, or—anyhow, it seemed to me that here I could just start out telling the truth, seeing that you'd find out anyhow. I don't suppose the people you accept get sent up before you've checked them?"

"You're right again." He pushed his chair back, and decided to relax and enjoy it. He liked this woman. "Tell me some more."

She did, at length and entertainingly. She was a successful businesswoman. She had proved that much to her own satisfaction, and now she was bored. The house ran itself, almost, and was earning more money than she needed for personal use. She had no real interest in expanding her operations; success for its own sake meant nothing to her. She had somehow escaped the traditional pitfalls of Career; maybe it was the specialized nature of her business that never let her forget she was a woman, and so preserved her femininity of both viewpoint and personality.

It was harder to understand how she had managed to escape the normal occupational disease of her world: the yearning for respectability and a place in conventional society. Instead she wanted new places, new faces, and something to do that would make use of her abilities and give scope to her abundant affections.

"I've never had children of my own," she said, and for
the first time lost a trace of her aplomb. "I—you realize, in
my business, you don't start out at the top? A lot of the girls
are sterile to start with, and a lot more get that way. Since
I started my own place, the girls have been almost like my
own—some of them, the ones I keep—but... I think I'd
like to have some real babies to take care of." Her voice
came back to normal: "Getting to grandmother age, I
guess." «

"I see." He sat up briskly, and finished the official form, making quick notes as she parried his questions with efficient quiet answers. When he was done, he looked up and met her eyes, unwillingly. "I may as well be frank with you, Mrs. Leahy—"

"Brush-off?" she broke in softly.

He nodded. "I'm afraid so." She started to get up, and he reached out a hand, involuntarily, as if to hold her in her seat. "Don't go just yet. Please. There's something I'd like to say."

She sat still, waiting, the bitterness behind her eyes veiled with polite curiosity.

"Just..." He hesitated, wanting to pick the right words to get through her sudden defenses. "Just that, in my personal opinion, you're the best prospect we've had in six months. I haven't got the nerve to say it in so many words, when I make my report. But I didn't fill out that form just to use up more of your time. If it were up to me, you'd be on your way down for a physical exam right now. Unfortunately, I am not the custodian of moralities in this Army, or even on Project.

"What I'm going to do is send in a report recommending that we reserve decision. Pll tell you now in confidence that we're having a hard time getting the right kind of people. The day may come—" He broke off, and looked at her almost pleadingly. "You understand? I can't recommend you, and if I did, I'd be overruled. But I wish I could, and if things change, you may still hear from us."

"I understand." She stood up, looking tired; then, with an effort, she resumed her cheerful poise, and took his offered hand to shake good-by. "I won't wish you bad luck, so— good-by."

"Good-by. And thank you," he said with sincerity, "for coming in."

Then he wrote up his report, went down to see the An-zio woman, cleared her for release, and went home where a half-empty bottle waited from the night before.

There was no summons from the General waiting for him in the morning, and no friendly, casual visit during the hour before he left to see Dean Lazarus at Henderson. He didn't know whether to regard the silence as ominous or hopeful; so he forgot it, temporarily, and Concentrated on the Dean.

He approached her cautiously, with generalizations about the Project, and the hope that if she were ever in a position to refer anyone to them, she would be willing to co-operate, etc., etc. She was pleasant, polite, and intelligent for half an hour, and then she became impatient.

"All right, Colonel, suppose we come to the point?"

"What point did you have in mind?" he countered warily.

"I have two students waiting outside to see me," she said, "and I imagine you also have other business to attend to. I take it one of our girls is in what is called 'trouble'? She came to you, and you want to know whether I'll work with you, or whether the kid will get bounced out of school if I know about it. Stop me if I'm wrong." "Go on," he said.

"All right. The answer is, it depends on the girl. There are some I'd grab any chance to toss out. But I'd guess, from the fact that she wound up coming to you, she either isn't very experienced or she is conscientious. Or both."

"I'd say both, on the basis of our interview."

She looked him over thoughtfully. Lousy technique, he thought, and had to curb a wicked impulse to ham up his role and confuse her entirely; it wasn't often he had a chance to sit in the visitors' chair.

That studying look of hers would put anybody on the defensive, he thought critically, and then realized that maybe it was meant to do just that. Her job didn't have the same requirements as his.

"Let me put it this way," she said finally. "I'm here to try to help several hundred adolescent females get some education into their heads, and I don't mean just out of books. I'm also here to see to it that the College doesn't get a bad reputation: no major scandals or suicides, or anything like that. If the girl is worth helping, and if you want my cooperation in a plan that will keep things quiet and respectable, and make it possible for her to continue at school— believe me, you'll have it."

That left it squarely up to him. Was the girl "worth helping"? or rathef: would Dean Lazarus think so?

"I think," he said slowly, "I'll have to ask you to promise me first—since your judgment and mine may not agree —that you won't use any information you get from me against the girl. If you don't want to help, when you know who it is, you'll just sit back. All right?"

She thought that over. "Providing I don't happen to acquire the same information from other sources," she said.

"Without going looking for it," he added.

"I'm an honest woman, Colonel Edgerly."

"I think you are. I have your word?"

"You do."

"The girl's name is Cecille Chanute. You know her ... ?"

"Ceil! Oh, my God! Of course. It's always the ones you don't worry about! Who's the boy? And why on earth don't they just get married, and ... ?"

He was shaking his head. "I don't know. She wouldn't say. That's one thing I thought you might be able to help me with...."

He left very shortly afterward. That part, at least, would be all right. Unless something unexpected turned up in the physical, the only problem now was getting the necessary data on the father.

When he got back to the office, the memo from the General was on his desk.

TO: Edgerly , FROM: Martin

[No titles. Informal. That meant it wasn't the death-blow yet.

Not quite.]

RE: Applicants for PN's and FP positions.

After reading your reports of yesterday, 9/16, and after giving the matter some thought, bearing in mind our conversation of 9/15, it seems to me that we might hold off on accepting any further PN's until the FP situation clears up. Suggest you defer all further interviews for PN's. Let's put our minds to the other part of the problem, and see what we can do. This is urgent, Tom. If you have any suggestions, I'll be glad to hear them, any time.

It was signed, in scrawly pencil, H. M. Just a friendly note. But attached to it was a detailed schedule of PN acceptances, operations, shipments, and deliveries to date, plus a projected schedule of operations, shipments, and theoretical due dates for deliveries. The second sheet was even adjusted for statistical expectations of losses all along the line.

What emerged, much more clearly than it had in the General's solemn speechmaking, was that it would be necessary not only to have one more Foster Parent trained and ready to leave in less than three months, but that through January and February they would need at least one more FP on every biweekly rocket, to take care of the deliveries already scheduled.

Little Ceil didn't know how lucky she was. Just in under the wire, kid. She was lucky to have somebody like that Lazarus dame on her side, too.

And that was an idea. People like Lazarus could help.

He buzzed Helen, and spent most of the rest of the day dictating a long and careful memo, proposing a publicity campaign for Foster Parent applications. If the percentage of acceptances was low, the logical thing to do about it was increase the totals, starting with the applications. Now that he'd have more time to devote to FP work, with the curtailments on PN, he might fruitfully devote some part of it to a publicity campaign: discreet, of course, but designed to reach those groups that might provide the most useful material.

The Colonel was pleased when he had finished. He spent some time mapping out a rough plan of approach, using Dean Lazarus as his prototype personality. Social workers, teachers, personnel workers—these were the people with the contacts and the judgment to provide him with a steady stream of referrals.

Five women to find in two months—with this program, it might even be possible.

The reply from the General's office next morning informed him that his suggestion was being considered. For some weeks, apparently, it continued to be considered, without further discussion. During that time, the Colonel saw Ceil Chanute again, after her Med report came through okayed, and then went to see Dean Lazarus once more.

Neither of them had had any luck finding out who the boy was. They worked out detailed plans for Ceil's "appendectomy," and the Dean undertook to handle the girl's family. She felt strongly that they should not be told the truth, and the Colonel was content to let her exercise her own judgment.

At the end of the two weeks, another applicant came in. The Colonel tried his unconscientious best to convince himself the woman would do; but he knew she wouldn't. This time it took less than an hour for an answer from the General's office. A phone call, this time.

"... I was just thinking, Tom, until we start getting somewhere on the FP angle—I notice you've got six PN's scheduled that aren't processed yet. Three-four of them, there are loopholes. I think we ought to drop whatever we can ... ?"

"If you think so, sir."

"Well, it makes sense to me. There's one the Security boys haven't been able to get a complete check on; something funny there. And this gal who won't tell us the father's name. And the one who was supposed to come in last week and postponed it. We can tell her it's too late now... ?"

"Yes, sir. I'll have to see them, of course. These women are pretty desperate, sometimes. They—well, I think it would be better to consider each case separately, talk to each one— There's no telling what some of them might do. We don't want any unfavorable publicity," he said, and waited for some response to the pointed reminder.

There was none. "No, of course not. You use your judgment, Tom, that's all, but I'd like to have a report on each one—just let me know what you do about it. Every bit of pressure we can get off is going to help, you know."

And that was all. Nothing about his Memo. Just a gentle warning that if he kept on being stubborn, he was going to be backed up a little further—each and every time.

He got the file folders on the three cases, and studied two of them. The "Barton" folder he never even opened.

He found he was feeling just a little more stubborn than usual.

Sergeant Gregory came in, and he dictated a letter of inquiry to the woman who had failed to keep her appointment, then instructed the Sergeant to call the other one, and make an appointment for her to come in and see him. "But first," he finished, "get me Dean Lazarus at Henderson, will you?"

Waiting out there in the room with the Wac and the mirror was almost as it had been the first time. Something was wrong. Something had happened to spoil everything. It had to be that, or he couldn't have got her called out of class. Not unless it was really important. And how did he explain it to Lazar anyhow?

She sat there for five minutes that seemed like hours, and then the door opened and he came out with a welcoming smile on his hps, and all of a sudden everything was all right.

"Hi. You made good time, kid. Come on in."

"I took a cab. I didn't change or anything." It couldn't be very bad; if he looked so calm.

"Well, don't change next time either," he said, closing the door behind them. "Jeans are more your speed. And a shirt like that coming in here once in a while does a lot to brighten up my life."

The main thing was, he had said next time. She let out a long breath she didn't know she'd been holding, and sat down in the big chair.

"All right," he said, as soon as he had gone through the preliminary ritual of lighting cigarettes. "Now listen close, kid, because we are in what might be called a jam. A mess. Difficulties. Problems."

"I figured that when you called." But she wasn't really worried any more. Whatever it was, it couldn't be very bad. "I was wondering—what did you tell the Dean?"

"The Dean... ? Oh, I told her the truth, Ceil. About two days after you first came in."

"You what?" Everything was upside down; nothing made sense. She had been asked to one of Lazar's teas yesterday. The old girl had been sweet as punch today about the call, and excusing her from classes. "What did you say?" she asked again.

"I said, I told her the truth, away back when. Now, listen a minute. You're nineteen years old and you're a good girl, so you still respect Authority. Authority being people like Sarah Lazarus and myself. Only it just so happens that people like us are human beings too. I don't expect you to believe that, just because I say it, but try to pretend for a few minutes, will you?" There was a smile playing around the corners of his mouth. She didn't know whether to be angry or amused or worried. "I went in to see Mrs. Lazarus in the hope that she'd co-operate with us in planning your 'appendectomy.' It turned out she would. She thinks a lot of you, Ceil, and she was glad to help."

"You took an awful chance," she said slowly.

"No. I made sure of my ground before I said anything. A lot surer than I am now. I think when you get back, you better go have a talk with the lady. And after that, you better remember that she's keeping her mouth shut, and it would be a good idea if you did the same. You realize the spot she'd be on, if other girls found out... ?"

She flushed. "I'm not likely to do much talking," she reminded him, and immediately felt guilty, because Sally knew. It was Sally who had sent her to that doctor....

"Everybody talks to somebody," he said flatly: "When you feel like you have to talk, try to come here. If you can't, just be careful who it is."

His voice was sharp and edgy; she'd never heard him talk that way before. I didn't do anything, she thought, bewildered. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded more normal.

"All right, we've got that out of the way. Now: the reason I asked you to come in such a hurry—well, to put it bluntly, and without too much detail, there've been some policy changes higher-up here, and there's pressure being put on me to drop as many of the PN's coming up as I can find excuses for."

PN's? she wondered, and then realized—PreNatal.

"... I didn't want to do this. I hoped you'd tell me in your own time." She'd missed something; she tried to figure it out as he went along. "If you didn't—well, we've handled two-three cases before where the father could not be located."

Oh!

"Till now," he went on, "I thought if we couldn't convince you that it was in the best interests of the child for* you to let us know, we might be able to get by without insisting. But now I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to tell me whether you want to or not. I'll promise to use every bit of tact and discretion possible, but—"

"I can't," she broke in.

"Why not?"

"Because... I can't." If she told the reason, it would be as bad as telling it all.

"Not even if it means you can't have the operation?"

That's not fair! There was nothing she could say.

"Look, Ceil, if it's just that you don't want him to know, we might be able to work it that way. Most people have physical exams on record one place or another, and the little bit more that we like to know about the father, you can probably tell us—or we can find out other ways. Does that change the picture any?"

She bit her lip. Maybe they could get all the information without—not without going through the Academy, they couldn't. It was there, that was true enough. Charlie wouldn't have to know at all—not till they kicked him out of school, that is! She shook her head.

"Look," he said. He was pleading with her now. Why didn't he just tell her to go to hell and throw her out, if it was all that important? Why should it matter to him? "Look, I'm supposed to be sending you a regretful note right now. But the fact is, if I can put in a report that you came in today, before I could take any action, and that you voluntarily cleared up the problem... do you understand?" "Yes," she said. "I think I do."

"You're thinking that this is a trick? I tricked you once before, so that you told me what you didn't mean to. Now I'm doing it again? Is that it?"

"Aren't you?"

"No." His eyes met hers, and held there. She wanted to believe him. He had admitted it the other time—but not till after he found out what he wanted to know.

"Maybe I don't know," she said spitefully. That was silly, a childish thing to say. Suddenly she realized he hadn't spoken since she said it, and—

Migod! Suppose he believes it! She looked up swiftly, and found a smile on his lips.

"Why on earth would you tell me a thing like that?" he asked mildly. "Are you feeling wicked today?"

All right, she thought, you win. But she needed a few minutes; she had to think it out. "Thank you," she said/ stalling, but also because she meant it.

"You're welcome I'm sure. What for?"

"At the doctor's I went to—they asked 'me if I knew who it was."

The Colonel smiled. "You're a nice girl, Ceil. Don't forget it. You're a nice girl, and it shows all over you, and anybody who can't see it is crazy. That doctor should have his head examined."

"It wasn't the doctor. It was the nurse."

"That explains it." When he grinned like that, he seemed hardly any older than she was.

"You mean she was just being—well, catty?"

"That's one way of putting it." He opened his bottom desk drawer, and pulled out a round shaving mirror, with a little stand on it. She took the mirror hesitantly, when he handed it to her. Jonathan Jo had a mouth like an O, And a wheelbarrow full of surprises ... or a desk drawer. She held the mirror gingerly, not sure what it was for.

"I'm sorry," she giggled. "I don't shave yet. I'm too young."

He smiled. "Take a look."

She didn't want to. She looked quickly, and tried to hand it back, but he didn't take it. He left it lying on the desk. "All right," he said. "Now: do you remember what the other lady looked like? The nurse?"

"She was blond," Ceil recalled slowly. "Dyed-blond, I mean, and her skin was sort of—I guess she had too much powder on. But she was kind of good-looking."

"Was she? How old do you think she was?"

"Oh, maybe, I don't know—forty?"

"And: why do you suppose she was working in a place like that?"

She sat there, and tried to think of an answer. What kind of reason would a woman have for working for that kind of a doctor? All she could think of was what her mother would have said: Well, you know, dear, some people just don't care. I don't suppose she thinks about it, just so long as she earns a living. They're well paid, you know.

That's what was in the back of her own mind, too—until she stopped to think about it; and then she couldn't figure out an answer. She couldn't think of any reason that could make her do it.

She looked at him hopelessly, like a child caught unprepared in grammar school, and she saw he was grinning at her again. Not in a mean way; it was more as if he were pleased with her for trying to answer than making fun because she couldn't.

Maybe the important thing was just to try. That's what he'd been trying to tell her. That was the way he thought about people, all the time.

"I can't tell you his name," she said, and took a deep breath and let out a rush of words with it, all run together: "He's-a-cadet-at-the-Space-Academy-they'd—" She had to stop and breathe again. "They'd throw him out."

"I don't think so," he said thoughtfully. "I think we could manage it so they..." His voice trailed off.

"You don't know how tough they are there—" she insisted, and then stopped herself. "I guess you do."

He was silent for a moment, and then he said unexpectedly, "Nope. You're right." His voice was bitter. "That's exactly what they'd do." He sat and thought some more; then he smiled, looking very tired. "All right. All we really care about with the father is the physical exam. If you want to get in touch with him yourself, and ask him to come in, using any name he wants, that would do it. Or if you'd rather, you can tell me, off the record, and I'll get in touch. But either way, you have my word his name won't get any farther than this chair without your permission."

She thought about that. She ought to do it herself, but... "I'd trust you," she said. "If that's all right. If you don't mind. I'd—just as lief not—I don't really want to see him, if I don't have to."

"Any way you want it, kid." He wrote down the name, when she told him, on a piece of paper from his memo pad: Charles Bolido. He drew a line slowly under the two words; then he looked up at her, and down at the pad again, and drew another line, very dark and swift, beneath the first.

"Look, Ceil, it's none of my business if you don't want to talk about it, but—well, are you sure you know what you want to do? Before I get in touch with the boy—well, put it this way: are you giving him a fair break? I gather you're not on very good terms any more, and you say he doesn't know about the baby. Maybe—"

"No," she said.

He smiled. "Okay, kid. It's your life, not mine. Only one thing: what do I do if he wants to see you? Suppose he wants to quit school and get married?"

"He won't," she said, but she had to clear her throat before the words came out right. "He won't." And she remembered....

... the grass was greener than any grass had ever been, and the water was bluer, and the sky was far and high above and beyond while he talked about the rockets that would take him on top of the fluffed-out clouds, and away beyond the other side of the powder-puff daytime moon. The sun trailed across the vaulting heaven, and the shade of the oak tree fell away from them. They were hot and happy, and he jumped up, and took her hands, and she stood up into his arms.

"Love you, babe," he whispered in her ear.

She leaned back and looked up at him and in the streaming sunlight he seemed to be on fire with beauty and strength and youth and she said, "1 love you, Charlie," savoring the words, tasting them, because she had never said them before.

She thought a frown crossed his face, but she wouldn't believe it, not then. He took her hand, and they ran together down into the water.

It wasn't till later, in the car, that she had to believe the frown; that was when he began explaining carefully, in great detail, what his plans were, what a Spaceman's life was like, and why he could not think about marriage, not seriously about any girl.

He never even knew it had been the first time for her, the only time....

She couldn't explain all that. She sat still and looked at the man across the desk, the man with the nice smile and the understanding eyes and the quiet voice. Charlie has wavy black hair, she remembered; the Colonel's was sandy-colored and straight, crew-cut. Charlie had broad shoulders and his skin was bronzed and he had a way of tilting his head so that he seemed to be looking off into the distance, too far for her to see. The Colonel was nice enough looking, but his skin was pale and his shoulders a little bit round— from working indoors, at a desk, all the time, she supposed. Only, when he looked at you, he saw you, and when he listened, he understood. She couldn't explain the whole thing, but of course she didn't have to... not to him.

"He won't want to," she said quietly; she had no trouble talking now. "If he says so, he won't really mean it. He— he couldn't give up the Space school. That's all he ever wanted. It's the only thing that matters to him." She said it evenly, in a detached objective way, just the way she wanted to, and then she sat absolutely still, waiting for what he'd say.

He tapped his pencil, upside down, on the top of the desk. She couldn't see his face at all. Then he looked up, and he had a made-up smile on his face this time, a smile he didn't mean. He nodded his head a little. "I see." Then he stood up, and came around to the side of the desk where she was sitting, and put both his hands on her shoulders, and with his thumbs against the sides of her jaw, he tilted her face up, so she was looking straight at him.

"You're a good girl, Ceil." He meant that. "You're a hell of a good girl, and the chances are Charlie is a lot better than you give him credit for. Thereiox—" He laughed, and let go of her shoulders, and leaned back against the desk. "... I am not going to give you the fond paternal kiss I had in mind a moment ago. You might misunderstand." He grinned. "Or you might not."

He wanted her to go now. She stood up, but there was a feeling of something more she had to say. "I wish you had," was what she said, and she was horrified. She hadn't even thought that.

"All right," he said. "Let's pretend I did. Didn't you wear a coat?"

"I had a jacket. I guess I left it outside."

He had the door open. "I'll let you know how it turns out," he promised her, and then he turned around and started talking to the Wac.

He didn't even see her out the other door.

Once each month, on the average, a Miracle came to pass, and a woman entered Colonel Edgerly's office who seemed, in his judgment, emotionally fit to undertake a share of the job of giving 200 homeless, motherless, wombless infants the kind of care that might help them grow up to be mature human beings.

He had thought the Miracle for this month was used up when Mrs. Leahy came in. It was a Major Miracle, after all, when one of these women could also pass the Medical and Security checks, as well as his own follow-ups with the formal psych tests. To date, in almost nine months of interviewing, there had been only three such Major Miracles.

Mrs. Serruto, the colonel suspected, was not going to be the fourth. But if she failed, it would likely be in Medics; meantime, he could have the satisfaction at least of turning in one more favorable preliminary report.

She came in the morning after his interview with Ceil, without an appointment, and totally unexpected—a gift, he decided, "directly from a watchful Providence to him. Virtue had proved an inadequately self-sufficient reward through a restless night; but surely Mrs. Serruto had been Sent to make recompense.

Little girls with big blue eyes should keep their transferences out of my office, he wrote rapidly on a crisp sheet of white paper. He underlined it, and added three large exclamation points. Then he filed it neatly in his bottom desk drawer—the same one that held his unpublished article— and turned to Mrs. Serruto with a smile. She was settled and comfortable now, ready to talk; and so was he. He pulled over an application pad, and began filling things in, working his way to the bottom, and the important personal questions.

He paused a moment at occupation—but it couldn't happen twice. It didn't. "Housewife," she said quietly; then she smiled and added, "but I think I'm out of a job; That's why I came."

He listened while she told him about herself and her family, and he actually began to hope. Her son was in the Space Service already, on the Satellite. He'd just passed his year of Probationary, and now the daughter-in-law had qualified for a civilian job up there. The young wife and the two grandsons had been living with her; the grandmother kept house, while the mother went to school, to learn astronomical notation.

Now the girl was going up to be with her, husband and to work as an Observatory technician and secretary; the boys would go to Yuma, to the school SpaServ maintained for just that purpose.

"We weren't sure about the boys," Mrs. Serruto explained. "We talked it over every which way, whether they'd be better off staying with me, or going to Yuma, but the way they work it there, the children all have a turn to go up Satellite on vacations, and they have an open radio connection all the time. And of course, if s .such a wonderful school.... It was just they seemed awfully young to be on their own, but this way they'll be closer to their own parents than if they were with me."

"What made you decide on a Foster Parent job, Mrs. Serruto?" Let her just answer right once more, he prayed, to whatever Providence had sent her there. Just once more... "Most of the applicants here are a good deal younger than you are," he added. "It's unusual to find a woman of your age willing to start out in a strange place again." He smiled. "A very strange place."

"I— Oh, it's foolish for me to try to fool you, isn't it? You're a trained psychologist, I guess? Well, all the reasons you'd think of are part of it: I'm not young, but I still have my strength, thank the Lord, and I kind of like the idea of something new. Lots of people my age feel that way; look at all the retired people who start traveling. And keeping house in the same town for thirty-two years can kind of give you a yen to see the world. But if you want the honest answer, sir, it's just that I heard, I don't know if it's true, but I heard that if you get one of these jobs, you spend your leaves on Satellite ...?"

She was watching him anxiously; he had to restrain his own satisfaction, so as not to mislead her. She wasn't in yet, by a long shot—but he was going to do everything he could to get her there.

"That's right," he told her. "In theory, you get four days off out of every twenty. The shuttle between Base and Satellite is on a four-day schedule, and one FP out of every five is supposed to have leave each trip. Actually, that only gives you about 45 hours on the Satellite, allowing for shuttle-time. And at the beginning, you may not get leave as regularly as you will later on." He realized'what he was doing, and stopped himself, switching to a cautious third-person-impersonal. 'There's been a good deal of research done on what we call LGT, Mrs. Serruto—that's short for Low Gravity Tolerance. We don't know so much yet about no-grav, but they're collecting the data on that right now. There's a pamphlet with all the information we have so far; you'll get a copy to take home with you, and then if you still want to apply, and if you can pass the tests, there's a two-months' Indoctrination Course, mostly designed to prepare the candidate for the experience of living under Moon-grav conditions.

"The adjustment isn't easy, no matter how much we do to try and simplify it. But the leave schedule we're using has worked out, for regular SpaServ personnel. That is to say, we've cut down thé incidence of true somatic malfunctions—"

She made a funny despairing gesture with hands and shoulders. He smiled. "Put it this way: Low-grav and no-grav do have some direct—call it Mechanical effects on_the function of the human body. But most of these problems are cumulative. It takes—let's see, at Moon-grav, which is about one-sixth of what you're used to, it takes from ten to twelve months, in the average case, for any serious mechanical malfunctions to show up—I should have let you read the pamphlet first," he said. "They've got it all explained there, step by step."

He paused hopefully, but she obviously didn't want to wait; she wanted to hear it now. "Anyhow," he went on, "we found, by experimenting, that the total tolerance could be extended considerably by breaking up the period. To put it as simply as possible: the lower the gravity, the shorter the time before serious 'structural' malfunctions begin to appear—you understand? When I say 'structural' I mean not only that something isn't working right, but that there's been actual physical damage done to the body in some way, so that it can't work right."

The faint frown went away, and she nodded eagerly.

"All right. The lower the gravity, the quicker the trouble. Also, the shorter the time-span, the more you can take. That is, a person whose total tolerance at any particular low gravity is, say, six weeks—taken at a stretch—can take maybe ten or twelve weeks if he does it a few days at a time, with leaves spent at normal, or at least higher, gravity.

"The reason for this last fact is that even before the structural malfunctions begin to appear, most people start suffering from all kinds of illnesses—usually not serious, at first, but sometimes pretty annoying—and these are psychogenic. ..."

He looked at her inquiringly, and she nodded, a little uncertainly.

"Very few of the body functions actually depend on gravity," he explained. "I mean internal functions. But all of us are conditioned to performing these functions under a normal Earth-gravity. A person's digestive system, for instance, or vase—circulatory system, will work just as well with low gravity, or none; but it has to work a little differently. And the result is a certain amount of confusion in the parts of the brain that control what we call 'involuntary' reflexes: so that the heart, for instance, tries to pump just as hard as it should to suit the environment it's in—and at the same time it may be getting messages from the brain to pump just as hard as it's used to doing.

"When that happens you may—or anyone may—develop a heart condition of some kind; but it's just as likely that the patient might come up with purely psychological symptoms. Or any one of the various psychogenic diseases that result from ordinary internal conflicts, or anxiety states, may develop instead—"

Now she was shaking her head in bewilderment again.

"Look," he said. Enough was enough. "This is all in the reading matter you'll get when you leave today. And it's a lot clearer than I can make it. For now, just take my word for it, on account of the psych end of it, four months has been set as the limit of unbroken Moon duty. However, we've found that people can take up to a year there with no bad effects at all, if they get frequent enough leave. That's why it's set up the way it is now."

"You mean one year is all?" she asked quickly. "That's the most?"

He shook his head. "No. That's the standard tour of duty on the present leave system. Here's how it works: You sign a year's contract, which is really for sixteen months, except the last four months are Earth leave. During the twelve months on the moon, you get twenty per cent Satellite leave. That means you spend one-fifth of your time at a higher gravity. Not Earth-normal: the Satellite's set at three-quarters—you know that?"

She shook her head. "I didn't know. I knew it was less than here on Earth, but the way Ed described things there, I thought it was a lot less than that."

"It probably would be," he told her, "if we didn't use the Satellite for leaves for Base personnel and people from the asteroid stations. Down to about one-half-grav, the bad effects are hardly noticeable, and there are technical reasons why we'd prefer to have to maintain less spin on Satellite. But three-quarters is just about optimum for the short leaves: high enough to restore your peace of mind, and low enough to make it comparatively easy to readjust each time.

"We used to have less frequent longer leaves on Earth— usually a fifty percent system, one month there, one here. We changed it originally so as to avoid having our LG people constantly exposed to high-grav in acceleration, as well as to save rocket space, and travel time, and things like that. Afterward, we found out that we were getting much easier adjustments back to LG after the short leave at three-quarters, instead of the longer one on Earth."

"That makes sense," she said thoughtfully. "If you were picking the people who could take the low gravity best, they'd maybe have the most trouble with the acceleration."

"Yes and no. Strictly, physiologically, it tends to work that way; psychologically it's just the opposite, usually. And all this is in the prepared literature too." He smiled at her, and determinedly changed the subject. "Now what we've got to do is arrange for your physical. If it's all right with you, I'd like to get an appointment set up right away, for as soon as possible. Frankly, that's going to be your toughest hurdle here. If you get past that, I don't think we'll have too much more to worry about. But don't kid yourself that it's going to be easy."

"I'm pretty healthy, Colonel." She smiled comfortably. "My people were farmers, over there and over here; I think they call it 'peasant stock'? And I've been lucky. I always lived good."

"For fifty-two years," he reminded her gently. "That's not old—but forty is old in SpaServ. Remember, the whole reasoning behind this Project is that if we catch 'em young enough, we think we can train the kids to get along under no-grav conditions. And at your age, even acceleration can be a problem. Anyhow—"

He stood up, and she started gathering her coat and purse together. She was wonderful, he thought, almost unbelievable, after most of the others who came in here: a woman, no more, no less—a familiar, likable, motherly, competent, womanly kind of woman. When it came to psych tests (if it got that far, he had to remind himself, as he'd been trying to remind her), he knew she'd come up with every imaginable symptom and psychic disorder ... in small, safe quantities. A little of this, and a little of that, and the whole adding up to the rare and "balanced" personality.

"Anyhow," he said, "there's no sense talking any more till after you see the Medics." He led her out to Helen's desk, got her appointment lined up, and made sure she was provided with duly informative literature. Then he saw her out, and went back to his desk, to plot.

The routine report he kept routine. That was no place to urge special allowances or special treatment. He mentioned the SpaServ connections, of course, but did not emphasize them. If the General read carefully, that would be enough. But he had to be sure.

He laid out his strategy with care, and found two items pending in his files that would serve his purpose: neither very urgent, either capable of assuming an appearance of immediate importance. Satisfied, he went out to lunch, and from there over to Henderson College to see the Dean again. He outlined to her his conversation with Ceil the day before—or at least some of it. The only part of that interview that concerned Sarah Lazarus was in connection with the young man at the Academy.

"When I thought it over," he explained, "it seemed to me it might cause some embarrassing questions all around if I were to approach the boy myself. I'm not in a position to say, 'Personal,' and not be asked any more. So I wondered if you..." He let it slide off, waiting to see what she'd offer.

"What was it exactly you wanted me to do?" she hedged.

"Write to him. That's all that would be necessary. They don't censor incoming mail there. Or if you'd rather not have anything down on the record, a phone call could do it."

She nodded thoughtfully. "I suppose..." she began slowly, then made up her mind. "Of course. I'll take care of it. What's the young man's name?"

"I'm afraid," he smiled, "we'll have to get Ceil's permission before I tell you that. I made some powerful promises yesterday."

"I know," she said, and he looked at her, startled. "Cecille came in to see me yesterday evening," she explained, enjoying her moment of superior knowledge. "She said she wanted to thank me for—for 'being so wonderful,' I think she said. I* believe she meant for not tossing her out on her ear as soon as I had heard the awful truth."

"She comes from a—rather old-fashioned family?"

"That's one way of putting it. Her father is a very brilliant man in his line of work, I understand—something technical. He is also a boss-fearing, Hell-fearing, foreigner-fearing, bigoted, narrow-minded, one-sided, autocratic, petty, self-centered domestic tyrant. He spoils his wife and daughter with pleasure, as long as they abide by his principles—and his wife is a flexible, intelligent, family-loving woman who decided a long time ago that his principles had better be hers. Yes—I'd say it was an old-fashioned family. A fine family, if you stick to the rules."

He nodded. "That's about the way I figure it."

The Dean cleared her throat. "Anyhow, Cecille spent an hour or more with me last night, and after she got done telling me how wonderful I was, she started on what really interested her."

"She's already told you about him? Well, good. That makes it easier."

"No."

Again he was startled, but only for an instant. He knew what was coming now, and he had time to cover his responses. Her technique was still lousy—but maybe it worked on her students.

"No," she said. "The rest was all about you." She was watching him closely—of course. "I suppose," she asked thoughtfully, "that happens fairly often? A girl in trouble comes to see you, and finds you a sympathetic savior, and promptly decides she's in love?"

"Sometimes," he admitted. "I didn't think Ceil had quite reached that stage yet. I was even hoping she might avoid it."

"She didn't put it that way herself."

"It's annoying most of the time," he told her. "Sometimes, it's flattering as all hell." He grinned, and refused further comment; when she laughed, he thought he detected a note of relief. He hoped he had said enough, and not too much.

"If you want to wait a minute," she said, "I'll get her up here now, and we can get this settled."

He glanced at his watch. "Fine!" And it was. Ceil came up, looked in horror from one to the other, and, as soon as she could breathe out again, asked, pleading, "What's wrong?"

His own laughter and the Dean's mingled, and when the girl had gone again, much relieved, the faint edge of doubt or suspicion between the man and the woman was gone too. He promised to get in touch with her as soon as he heard from the boy, and got back to his own office in plenty of time for the afternoon's carefully mapped campaign.

About 3:30, and for an hour afterward, there was usually a lull in the General's afternoon. At 3:45, the Colonel went upstairs with his knotty-looking little problem, and got his expected sequence of responses: irritation at being bothered when no bother was looked-for, followed by gratification at having so easily solved a really minor difficulty the Colonel had apparently been unable to untangle for himself.

"Takes the organizational mind, Tom," the General said jovially. "I guess you have to get older, though, before you begin to get the broad view most of the time." He took his 4 o'clock cigar from the humidor, and offered one to the Colonel.

"No thanks. I think I'll have to get older to appreciate those, too." He lit himself a cigarette, and held the lighter for the other man.

"You'll get there," the General puffed. "See you finally broke down," he added, grunting around the fat cigar. "Let one of those ladies get past you."

"I got tired of saying no. I'm afraid she won't get too far, though."

The General raised an inquiring eyebrow. "Haven't studied the report yet, but looked okay, quick glance." Fragrant smoke rolled over the words, and swallowed up some of them.

"She's not young," the Colonel said hesitantly. "I—well, frankly, I was making some allowance for the fact that her son and daughter are stationed in Satellite—"

"Oh? SpaServ?" He was interested now.

"You know, I never thought of that!" The doctor chuckled. "Hey! Remember that babe you were all steamed up about? Canadian. She'd lost her forearm ... ?"

"Yeah, Buonaventura. And I still don't see what damn difference sixteen inches of good honest plastic and wire instead of flesh and blood could make on the Moon."

"Regulations, son, regulations. That's what I was thinking about. Maybe if you could fix it for her to get a son into SpaServe ..."

"About twenty years from now, you mean?"

"Well, she wasn't exactly a knockout, but she wouldn't be hard to take. Maybe I'd co-operate myself."

"Leave those little things to us bachelors," the Colonel said sternly. "No married man should have to sacrifice that way for the Service."

The waiter came with fresh drinks, and they concentrated * on refreshing themselves for a short time. "Just the same," Edgerly said seriously, "I wish we could get more young ones like that.... I guess it's six of one and you-know-what of the other. The young ones wouldn't want to stay more than a year or maybe two... this Buonaventura gal, for instance. You know, her husband was killed in the same accident where she lost her arm. Honeymoon and all that. So she wanted to go be real busy for a while, till she could start minking about another man. But any young woman who was healthy enough in the head to trust up there would just be putting in time, the same way..."

"Okay, but these grandmas you're sending up aren't going to be able to take it more than one or two tours, anyhow," Sawyer put in.

"That's what I meant. You can't win."

"What you need," said the doctor, "is a drink."

"You know, that's an idea_______ "

For a little while, there was the illusion that things were improving, all around. Tuesday, the same day Serruto was winding up her 38-hour session in Medic, there was a letter from one Adam Barton, asking if an appointment for the necessary examinations could be arranged sometime between November 27 and 30. Thanksgiving leave, the Colonel realized, and phoned down himself to set it up. They'd been trying to keep the weekend free for the staff, but this one would have to go through.

He managed to keep himself from asking about Mrs. Serruto; they wouldn't have a final answer till late afternoon. Then, on impulse, he phoned Sarah Lazarus, and asked her to have lunch with him.

"Celebration. Space Service owes you something," he explained.

"More than you know," she replied, but wouldn't say any more on the phone, except to suggest that in her own opinion she was entitled to a good lunch.

Over hors d'oeuvres, and the remains of a ladylike Dubonnet, she explained: she had neither written nor telephoned to Barton-Bolido; she had gone to see him instead.

"When I thought it over, it seemed too awkward any other way," she said. "It's only about a three-hour drive, and I understood they had visiting Sunday afternoon."

"We can reimburse you for the expense," the Colonel offered. "We have a special fund for that kind of thing...."

"So do we," she said. "The expense was the least of it. If you could reimburse me for the—what do they call it— 'mental agony'... ?"

"I take it you had something of a heart-to-heart talk?" He was very genuinely curious. "Is Ceil's impression of him anywhere near accurate?"

"I don't know what Ceil's impressions are," she said drily. "Which kind of evens the score, doesn't it?" She attacked a casserole of beef-burgundy saute, with apparent uninterest in continuing the conversation.

"All right," he laughed. "I surrender-. One betrayal deserves another. He wouldn't be very likely to talk to me, you know." He told her what the girl had said, and she nodded.

"That's about it—except he happens to be crazy about her, so this bit of news has really got him in a tizzy. He'd managed to 'forget' about her, he said, since the summer— convincing himself that it was best to let the whole thing drop—don't see her any more, don't write—you know? And it makes sense. He does have his handsome little heart set on SpaServ—see, I'm learning the lingo? I'll have the pastry," she told the waiter, with no change of tone or tempo. "Anyhow, he can't marry for the next two years, till he graduates. And after that, there's a four-year ... hitch?"

He nodded soberly.

"Hitch, before he can even hope to get permission to have his family with him, wherever he is—provided it's some place where he can have a family."

"It will be," he told her. "Policy is shaping up that way. They're encouraging wives to go up Satellite now, and any station with enough gravs for moderate good health will be opened for families as fast as possible. The boys seem to last longer that way, and work better."

She was interested. He would have liked to hear more about Charles, but that was personal curiosity, which would in any case be satisfied later on. There was more urgent business for this luncheon, and it was already getting late. He answered her questions, more or less completely but always with a direction in mind, and eventually they came round to the Foster Parent problem.

"I'm sweating one out today," he told her. "Maybe that's why I decided to use you as an excuse for a good lunch. It's not easy to find the right people, and half the time, when I do get someone I'm satisfied with, she can't get past the Medics. Stands to reason: the kind I want are likely to have led pretty busy lives, and mostly they run to older women—old, that is, in SpaServ terms—forty and fifty. The one I'm waiting to hear about is fifty-two. If her heart will stand up to blast-off acceleration, she may make it. But you never know what kind of ruination those boys can pull out of their infernal machines."

"What you need is a good old-fashioned diagnostician," she said, laughing. "The kind that looked you over and told you in five minutes what was wrong—and turned out to be right."

He shook his head sadly. "We're not even allowed to db that in psych clinics any more. If you can't tab it up on IBM or McBride cards, it just ain't so." He sipped at his coffee, which was cold, but—by design—not yet empty. "I'll tell you what we do need, though," he said seriously.

"What?"

"More Foster Parents."

She gave him that studying look again. "Just what is it you're trying to tell me, Colonel?"

"Nothing at all," he said steadily, returning her look. "Just chit-chat over lunch. I did have a notion about how to publicize our problem in the quarters where it might do the most good: educators, social workers, people like that. But I haven't been able to get official authorization for it yet, so..."

Deliberately, he paused and sipped again at the cold coffee. ". .. so naturally, this is all just idle talk. I'm not trying to tell you anything; I'm just answering your questions."

She was sipping her own coffee when he tried to get a look at her face. When he dropped her off at the College, she hadn't revealed any reaction. They said a friendly good-by, and he thanked her again for her efforts with the young man, then drove back fast. It was mid-afternoon already, and the report on Mrs. Serruto—

The report was on his desk when he got back. He read it through, and sank back in his chair to find out what it felt like to relax.

The General had given him till October 9 to find a satisfactory FP. Today was the seventh.

He swiveled his chair around to look out the window, at the wide sweep of the mountain range, the dark shapes, green-blue and purple, pushing up into the pale-blue sky of the mesa country. Life was good. For some minutes, he did nothing at all but fill his vision with color and form, and allow his excellent lunch to be digested. Finally he turned back to the desk and riffled through papers in the Hold basket till he found the Schedule that had come with the General's last memo.

Mrs. Serruto would be ready for the rocket on December 9. They didn't have to have another one till January 6. After that, one on each biweekly shipment, at least through February.

January 6, less two months' training, left him 30 days. Serruto had been blind luck; he couldn't count on that again. He buzzed Helen, and dictated a brief memo for the General, asking for a conference, soon, on his proposals about publicity. Halfway through, the phone rang in the outer office. He picked it up on his desk, and it was Sarah Lazarus.

God is on my side, he thought. He had hardly expected to hear from her so soon, after her stubbornly noncommittal silence during lunch.

She had enjoyed the luncheon, she said, and wanted to thank him again.

"You earned it," he told her. "Besides which, the pleasure was at least half mine." Or will be, when you get around to what's on your mind...,

"The other thing I wanted to ask you about," she said, "was whether Thanksgiving weekend would be all right for our girl's visit?"

Not with the Medics it wouldn't, but he assured her it would. They had the boy coming in that Friday anyhow. The Colonel mentally apologized to God for his presumption. .

"You said five days, I think?"

"Fi—oh, for the... visit. Yes. She ought to be here two days ahead of time, and then it's usually best to wait at least two days afterward."

"Well—maybe she'd better come in at the beginning of the week. That will give her a chance to get dramatically ill in class. And it will work out better when I tell her parents, I think."

"Any way you want it," he assured her. "It's far enough ahead so the schedule's pretty open. Especially with our
present curtailments " He waited.

"Oh, yes," she said. 'That's right. I'd forgotten." Then, very sweetly, she asked him if he would care to come to dinner at her home on Saturday evening.

It's your deal, lady, he thought; all he could do was pick up the cards and play them as they came.

"Cocktails start at six," she said, and gave him an address. He hung up, trying to remember whether he had ever heard any reference to a Mr. Lazarus. That cocktail-chatter sounded like a big, party, but her tone of voice didn't. He shrugged, and turned back to his secretary, who was waiting with an inevitable expression of intelligent detachment.

"Make a note, Sergeant. Remind me to buy a black tie. I'm in the social whirl now."

She made the note, too. Nothing he could do now would save him from being reminded. He favored the Perfect Lady Soldier with a look of mingled awe, horror, and affection, and got on with the business of dictating his reminder to the General....

Brigadier General Harlan Foley Martin, U.N.S.S., resplendent in full uniform, with the blazing-sun insigne of SpaServ shining on his cap, was conducting a party of visitors through his personal domain: the newest, cleanest, finest building in the entire twenty-seven acres that made up the North American Moon Base Supply Depot—which was beyond doubt the biggest, cleanest, fastest and generally best-est Depot anywhere on Earth.

It was of particular importance that these (self-evident) facts should be brought to the attention of the visitors, against the time when they returned to their respective Depots in South Africa, North Asia, and Australia, to establish similar centers in which to carry out their share of the important and inspiring work of Project Nursemaid.

Half a dozen duly humble, seekers after knowledge followed at his heels (metaphorically speaking; in actual practice, the General politely ushered them ahead of him through doors and narrow passageways), drinking in wisdom, observing efficiency, and uttering appropriate expressions of admiration.

The General felt it was time for a bit of informality, and there was no better way than in a display of that indifference to rank and protocol for which the Normerican Section was famous. Accordingly, he headed straight for the office of his Psychological Aide, Colonel Edgerly. There were times when it was possible to place a good deal of faith in the Colonel's judgment and behavior.

Edgerly rose to the occasion. He showed them through his Department, explained the psych-testing equipment in three languages, and excused himself from accompanying them further on account of the press of his own work.

In the waiting room, as they took leave of the Colonel, the General drew the attention of the visiting gentlemen away from the admirable example of Normerican soldiery behind the reception desk with a typical display of typical Normerican informality.

"Oh, by the way, Tom, before I forget it—I've been too busy the last day or two, but I saw your memo on that idea of yours, and I want the two of us to get together some

time and talk it over. Some time soon_______ " He smiled, and

the Colonel smiled back.

"Well, let's set up a date now." Edgerly turned to the Sergeant behind the desk.

"Oh, no need for that, Tom. Just give me a ring, or I'll drop in on you. Any time, any time at all...."

The General and his party proceeded to examine the hospital facilities on a lower floor.

Colonel Edgerly reknotted his tie, adjusted the angle of his cap, and stepped out of his car in front of one of the city's better apartment houses. A doorman led him to the proper elevator, and pushed the appropriate button for him. He stepped out into a foyer done in walnut wood and cream-colored plaster. As the elevator door closed, a chime rang softly in a room behind the floral-printed draperies, and he had hardly time to savor the nostalgia the decor had produced before his hostess pulled the drapes aside and asked him in.

She was wearing a black dinner dress that displayed, among other things, a rather different personality from the one she wore in her office. However, there was a Mr. Lazarus, and five or six other guests besides.

They drank cocktails and engaged in party conversation until one more couple arrived. The dinner was well-cooked and well-served, and eaten to the accompaniment of some remarkably civilized table talk, plus an excellent wine and subdued background music. Afterward, three more couples came in, and by the time the last of them arrived, the Colonel's opinion of his hostess—already improved by her home, her dress, her food and drink—had reached a peak of admiration and appreciation. Out of thirteen persons present that evening, every one except three escorting husbands—every other one was an upper-echelon executive of some social service agency, woman's club, child care organization, or adult educational center.

The Colonel did not proselytize, nor did he mention any specific difficulties the Project was having. There was no need to do either. The guests that evening had come specifically to meet him, because they were curious and interested and felt themselves inadequately informed about Project Nursemaid. He had nothing to do but answer eager intelligent questions put to him by alert and understanding people— and in the course of answering, it took no more than an occasional shift of emphasis to convey quite clearly that the Project's capacity for handling PN's must necessarily depend in large part on its success in finding satisfactory Foster Parents.

"Did you say before that you preferred older women for these jobs, Colonel?" He looked around for the questioner: a slim tailored woman with a fine-drawn face and clean, clear skin; she looked as though she belonged on a country estate with dogs and horses and a prize-winning garden. For the moment, he couldn't remember her name, or which outfit she was connected with.

"No. Not at all. If I mentioned anything like that, it should have been by way of complaint. The fact is that most of the people who satisfy our other requirements are older women—older in SpaServ terms, anyhow. Most of our candidates are, for that matter. Women under the age of forty, if they're healthy, well-balanced personalities, are either busy raising their own families, or else they're even busier looking for the right man to get started with. From the Medical viewpoint, we'd a lot rather get younger people. And for that matter, I think they might suit our purposes better all around—the right kind, that is."

"I see. I was particularly interested, because we've been doing some intensive work lately on the problem of jobs for women over thirty-five, and I thought if we knew just what you wanted... ?" She let it drift off into a pleasant white-toothed smile, one feathery eyebrow barely raised to indicate the question-mark at the end. He remembered now— Jane Somebody, from Aptitudes, Inc., the commercial guidance outfit. He struggled for the last name.

"I think Miss Sommers has a good point there, Colonel." This was the dumpy little woman with the bright black eyes, sitting on the hassock across from him. Sommers, that's right! Next time I'll put Sergeant Gregory in my pocket to take notes. "I hate to pester you so much on your night out, but I think several of us here might be able to send you people occasionally, if we knew a little more about just what you want."

This one he remembered: she was the director of the Beth Shalom Family Counseling Service. "Believe me, Mrs. Goldman, I can't think of any way I'd rather be pestered. I just wish I'd known beforehand what I was getting into. I'd have come prepared with a mimeographed list of requirements to hand out at the door." With complete irrelevance, the thought flashed through his mind that the Sergeant never had reminded him about that black tie. You're slipping, old girl!" he thought, and smiled at Mrs. Goldman. "As it is— well, it takes about a week to complete the testing of an applicant. If I tried to tell you in detail what we want, Mrs. Lazarus might get tired of our company after a while. I think you probably know in general what personality types are suitable for that kind of work. Beyond that, probably it would work better for you to ask any specific questions you have in mind, and let me try to answer them."

"Well, I was wondering—are you only taking women, or are you interested in men too? There's one couple I had in mind; they're young and healthy and what psychological problems they've got are all centered on the fact that they can't have any kids of their own, and because he's a freelance artist with no steady income, they can't adopt one. I think they might like to go, for a year or two... ?"

There was no point in telling her that the chances were a thousand to one they'd never pass the psychs. Nobody had ever proved that most cases of sterility were psychogenic, but the Project had, so far, built up some fascinating correlations between certain types of sexual fears and childlessness; and then the "free-lance artist"... He satisfied himself with answering the question she'd asked, and the other important one implied in her last sentence.

"We'd be delighted to have couples, if we can get them. We haven't taken any men so far, but we've got a couple on our reserve list. We want them later on, but for the immediate future, we need women in the nursery. One other point, though... what you said about 'a year or two.'

"We're signing people up for one-year contracts. One year's duty, and four months' leave, that is. We're doing it that way for several reasons: we want to be able to retest everyone medically before we renew contracts; and we want to check actual records of behavior on duty and psychosomatic responses against our psych tests. A few other things, too, but all of 'em boil down to the fact that we think we know what we're doing, but we're not sure yet. However—

"If it weren't for the special problems of LGT, we'd— well, obviously, if it weren't for those problems, the Project wouldn't be necessary at all—but since it is necessary, we're still hampered by the same limitations. We'd like to provide permanent Foster Parents for each group of children. We can't do that, for the same reason we can't just send whole families up there: the adults can't take it that long. Even with the present leave system, five years is probably going to be the maximum—five years duty, that is, with four-month intervals on Earth between each tour.

"Right at this point, we're just not in a position to insist that anyone who goes should agree to put in the maximum number of tours—I mean whatever maximum the Medics decide on for the individual person. We can't do it, because it's more important just to get people up there. But we would if we could."

He broke off, uncomfortably aware that he was monopolizing the floor. "I'm sorry. I seem to be making a speech."

"Well, go ahead and make it," Mrs. Lazarus said easily. "It's a pretty good one."

"I'm just letting off steam," he laughed. "This is my pet frustration. Right now, the Project, or our division, has the specific job of supplying personnel, and we're not supposed to worry about the continuation of the Project five or ten years from now. But I'm the guy who's supposed to pick the right people to do the job—and I can't pick them without thinking in terms of what will happen to those kids when they're five years old and fifteen and twenty."

"I think I understand your difficulty a little bit, Colonel." It was a quiet, very young-sounding voice from across the room. "We have something of the same problem to face." He picked) her out now: the nun, Mother Mary Paul. One of the orders specializing in social work; Martha...? Yes: Order of Martha of Bethany. "Some of the children who come to us are orphans; others are from homes temporarily unable to care for them; some are day students; some are students who live in the convent. Most of them, in one way or another, are from homes where they have not received— well, quite as much as one might hope a happy home could provide. We want to give them the feeling of having a home with us—and yet, we know that most of them will be leaving us and going to their own families, or adopted families, or other schools. It's—rather a harder job, I think, to give a small child a sense of security and of belonging, when you know yourself that the time will come when the child must be handed over to someone else's care. I know I tend to demand a good deal more of the sisters going into orphanage work than of a family qualifying for adoption."

"You've said that better than I could have—" What were you supposed to call her? Not Sister; he gathered she was too high up in her order. Mother? Your Reverence? He compromised by omitting any title, and hoped the omission was not an offense. "About the sense of belonging. Ideally, of course, the children should be in families, with permanent adoptive parents. But we have to juggle the needs of the children against the limitations of the adults. The kids need permanence; but the grownups just can't last long enough under the conditions. So to even up the books, an FP, Foster Parent, has to be something pretty special: a mature woman with tríe health of a young girl—a sane and balanced personality just sufficiently off keel to want to go to the Moon—someone with the devotion of a nun, who has no very pronounced doctrinal beliefs... I could go on and on like that, but what it all comes down to is that the kind of people we want are useful and productive right here on Earth, and mostly much too busy to think about chasing off to the Moon."

There was a general laugh, and people started moving about, shifting groups, debating the wisdom of one more drink. The Colonel debated not at all. He took a refill happily, and turned away from the bar to find himself being converged upon. Mrs. Goldman, Mother Mary Paul, and a Dr. Jonas Lutwidge, pastor of the local Episcopal Church, and a big wheel of some kind in the city's interdenominational social welfare organization.

They did not exactly all speak at once, but the effect was the same: What, they wanted to know, had he meant by "no pronounced doctrinal beliefs"?

, The Colonel drank deeply, and began explaining, grateful that this had come up, if it had to, in a small group, and equally glad that he had thoughtfully provided himself with a double shot of whisky in this glass.

The broad view first: "... you realize that there will be, altogether, one thousand babies involved in this Project. Two hundred of them will come through our Depot. The rest will be from every part of the world, from every nationality, every faith, every possible variation of political and social background. The men and women who care for them, and who educate them, will not necessarily be from the same backgrounds at all...." And world governments being still new, and human beings still very much creatures of habit and custom, there was no guarantee that bias and discrimination could be ruled out in the Project except by the one simple device that would make anything of the sort impossible.

From the individual viewpoint: "These kids are going to grow up in an environment almost entirely alien, from the Earth viewpoint. They'll spend their time half on Moon Base, and half on the no-grav training ship. They won't have parents, in the sense in which we use the term, or families, or any of the other factors that go to forming the human personality. Maybe we could grow us a thousand supermen this way, but frankly we don't want to find out. We might not like them; they might even not like us...." Therefore every effort was going to be made to provide a maximum of artificial "family" life. The babies would be assigned, shortly after birth, to a group of five "brothers and sisters"; Foster Parents in the group would necessarily change from time to time, but whenever a contract was renewed, the parent would go back to the same group. There would be a common group-designation, to be used as a last name; even first names were to be given by the first FP to assume the care of each baby. "It's all part of what you were saying before, Mother," he pointed out. "We want the Foster Parents to feel and act as much as possible as if these were their own children; unfortunately, the physical setup is such that the opportunities to create such situations are few enough. We have to use every device we can."

Obviously, under these circumstances, religious training could not be given in accordance with the child's ancestry. The solution finally decided upon had been to invite all religious groups to select representatives to participate in the children's education. They would all be exposed to every form of religious belief, and could choose among them. A compromise at best—and one that could work only by a careful system of checks and balances, and by making certain, insofar as possible, that the proselytizing was done only by the official representatives, and not by evangelical Foster Parents.

Mother Mary Paul and Mrs. Goldman both seemed tentatively satisfied with the explanation. Dr. Lutwidge was inclined to argue, but Sarah Lazarus came to the Colonel's rescue with a polite offer of coffee which drew their attention to the noticeable absence of the other guests.

It was almost one o'clock when Edgerly got home, in a glow of pleased excitement, and in no mood for bed. He stalked through the four rooms of his bachelor cottage, surveying everything with profound distaste, and sat up for an hour more, making sketches and notes about the improvements he meant to effect. Next morning, on his way to work, he stopped at a florist's for the brown jug and yellow roses that he had felt, all evening, should have been on the table in that foyer. Briefly, he debated drawing on the Special Account to cover the cost, and decided against it; he had made his gesture now toward Better Living, and could leave his own home alone.

Within a week, the number of FP applicants in his office began to increase; within three weeks, he had another successful candidate. His working day, which had for a short time been quiet and peaceful, resumed its normal pace, an hour or two behind schedule. And if the General still had failed to authorize the publicity campaign which the Colonel had already unofficially initiated, at least the Old Man had done nothing to impede it, and was showing a remarkable tendency to stay entirely out of the Psych Dept.'s hair.

This was good, up to a point. But by the middle of November, when the first rush of applicants referred by the Dean's friends had begun to dimmish and he had found only one more acceptable candidate, the Colonel began to feel the need of an official authorization that would make it possible to carry his campaign farther abroad. The people he'd met were all local; some had state-wide influence, others only in the immediate area. The Depot represented a territory that covered all of what had once been Canada, Alaska, and the U. S. A., plus part of Mexico.

The Colonel chafed a while, then sent another memo, asking for a conference on his suggestions of five weeks ago. For some days afterward, he watched and waited for a response. Then another satisfactory applicant turned up, and he was busy with psych-tests and briefing interviews for the better part of a week. He checked off the second January rocket on his schedule, and offered up a brief prayer to whatever Deity had been looking out for him, that another such woman should come his way before the third of December.

And then it was Thanksgiving week. 6

Monday afternoon, Ceil Chanute was admitted to the Project infirmary. Tuesday morning, Dean Lazarus called to report that she had informed the girl's family of her illness, and had successfully headed off any efforts at coming out to visit her. Wednesday morning, the day her operation was scheduled, the Colonel came in early and had breakfast with Ceil in the Med staff room. He saw no reason to tell her that this was standard practice whenever possible, and when he went upstairs he was basking in the glow of her evident pleasure at what she thought a special attention.

He spent most of the morning dealing swiftly and efficiently with correspondence; the only time he hesitated was over one handwritten letter, from a town a hundred miles away. This he read carefully, then slid it into his pocket, to handle personally later on.

At 4:30 that afternoon Ruth Mackintosh came in. She was the most recent of his successful candidates, now in her first week of regular training, and part of the process was a daily hour in his office, mostly to talk over any problems or questions of hers—partly to allow him continuous observation of her progress and her attitudes.

At five-oh-four the Sergeant, out at the desk, buzzed him with the news that the operation on the Chanute girl was completed, without complications, and she would be coming out of anesthesia shortly. The Colonel repeated the news for his visitor's benefit, explaining that he might have to leave in a hurry, if Ceil began to wake up.

"Oh, of course—maybe you'd rather go down now?"

He would. For some idiotic reason, he said instead; "It'll be ten or fifteen minutes anyhow."

"I wish I'd known," she said. "I was going to ask you if I could see an operation before I went up."

That was a new one. "Have you ever watched an operation before?"

"Well, I used to be a practical nurse; I've seen plenty of home deliveries, and I saw a Caesarian done once—oh, you mean, will it upset me? No." She laughed. "I don't think so."

That wasn't what he'd meant. "Why do you want to see it?" he asked slowly. With some people the best way to get an answer was to ask a direct question.

"I don't know—I just want to see as much as I can, know as much as I can about the babies and what's happened to them already, and where they come from, and—if you people weren't so obviously oriented in the opposite direction, I'd want to meet the mothers, too, as many as I could."

Wonderful—if true. He scribbled a note to check over certain of her tests for repressed sadistic leanings, and told her, "We're not oriented the other way entirely. In fact, we've changed our feeling about that several times already. Just now, I don't think it would be possible for you to meet any of the parents, but I think we can manage a pass to see a section performed. Ill check."

He reached for the phone, but it buzzed before he could get to it. He listened, and turned back to Mrs. Mackintosh.

"I'm afraid I am going to have to run out on you." He stood up. "The kid downstairs is coming out of it now— you understand?"

"Of course." She stood up, and followed him to the door. "Do you want me to wait, or... ?"

"If you'd like to. Check with Sergeant Gregory here. She'll give you all the dope about getting that pass. And if you want to wait, that's fine, unless the Sergeant says I'm going to be busy. She knows better than I do." He wanted to get out the other door and downstairs. The feeling of urgency was unreasonable, but it was there. "Helen," he said briskly, "you get things worked out with Mrs. Mackintosh. I'll be downstairs if you want me. Sorry to rush off like this," he told the other woman again. "Helen'll set up another appointment for us. Or wait if you want." Thafs the third time I said that, he thought irritably, and stopped trying to make sense, or to say anything at all.

He had the satisfaction, at least, as he went out the door, of one quick glimpse of the Perfect Lady Soldier, out of control. Helen was flabbergasted... and it showed.

Waiting for the elevator, he wondered what she thought. Going down in the elevator, he was sure he knew. And striding down the corridor on the hospital floor, he was dismayed to consider that she might possibly be right.

He had some news for Ceil Chanute, tucked away in his jacket pocket—news he had withheld all morning, uncertain what effect it might have on her, and therefore unwilling to deliver it before the operation. True enough, he ought to be on hand when she woke up; it might be what she'd want to hear. True, but not true enough—not enough to warrant his indecent haste.

He made himself slow down before he reached the nurse's cubicle outside the Infirmary. When he went inside, he had already made up his mind that his concern about his own behavior was ridiculous anyhow. An occasional extra show of interest in an individual case—any case—was not necessarily the same thing as an unprofessional personal involvement.

Not necessarily, echoed a sneaky, cynical voice in the back of his mind.

He reached the bed, and abandoned introspection. She was awake, not yet entirely clear-minded, but fully conscious. He sat down on the chair right next to her head, and picked up her limp hand.

"How's the girl?"

"I'll live." She managed a sort of a smile.

"Feeling bad?"

"All right..."

"Hungry?"

She shook her head.

"Thirsty?" She hesitated, then nodded. "Water? Tea? Lemonade? Ginger ale?" She just smiled, fuzzily. The nurse, standing at the foot of the bed, looked to him for decision. "Tea," he said, but the girl shook her head. "Something cold," she murmured.

The nurse went away, and the Colonel leaned back in the chair, to an angle where he could watch her face without making her uncomfortably aware of it. "I've got some news for you," he said.

She turned her head to look at him, suddenly worried.

"Take it easy, kid. If it was anything bad, I wouldn't tell you now. Just that you'll have some company tonight—if you want to."

"Company... ?" Her eyes went wide, and she seemed to come out of the postoperative daze entirely. "Not my" mother!"

"Nope. Gentleman who gave his name as Adam Barton."

It took her a moment to connect; then she gasped, and said uneasily, "How did he know—? But how could he get here tonight? Isn't he at school? How—"

"One at a time. He's coming for his physical on Friday. I guess Dean Lazarus told him you were being operated on today. I had a note from him this morning.'' He took it out of his pocket, and held it out, but she shook her head in vigorous refusal. "Look, kid: he's leaving there at five this evening; left already. He'll be here about eight, and he's going to phone when he gets in. He'd like to see you."

She didn't say anything, but he could see the frowning intensity of her face. "Do you want to see him, Ceil? It's up to you, you know. I thought—in case you wanted to, you might like to know about it right away, when you woke up. But..."

"No!"

"Whatever you want, gal. I wouldn't decide right away, if I were you. Hell phone when he gets in. I'll tell the nurse to check with you then."

"No," she said again, less violently, but just as certainly. "No. She doesn't have to ask me. Just tell him no."

"Okay. If you change your mind, tell her before eight. Otherwise, she'll tell him no, just like the lady said. Here's your drink." He took the cold glass from the nurse's hand, and put it on the table. "Can you sit up?" She tried. "Here." He lifted her head, cradling her shoulders in his arm, and helped her steady the glass with his other hand. It didn't feel like anything special. She was female, which was nice, and well-shaped, which was better. Otherwise, he couldn't find any signs of great emotion or excitement in himself. He eased her down gently, and stood up.

"Ill be around till six if you want me," he said. "Anything you get a yen for, tell the nurse. If she can't fix you up, she'll call Colonel Edgerly, of the Special Services Dept. We aim to please. The patient is always right. If you want to get sat up some more, you can use the nurse, but it's more fun if I do it"

She giggled weakly, and the nurse produced a tolerant smile. Out in the hall, he left instructions about the phone call. "She may change her mind," he finished. "Nobody says no that hard unless they meant to say yes at the same time. Let me know if she has any sudden change of mood—up or down. I'll be at my home phone all evening, if you want me —or if she does."

Going back in the elevator, he didn't worry about his own emotions; he pondered instead on what "Adam Barton's" must be.

She lay flat on her back in the neat hard white bed, and felt nothing at all. Delicately, she probed inside herself, but there was no grief and no gladness; not even anger; not even love. It was all over, and here she was, and that was that. After a while, she'd be getting up out of the bed, and everything would be just the same as before.

No. Not quite everything. They had taken out more than the—the baby. She thought the words, thought them as words. Baby. They had taken out more than that, though. Whatever it was Charlie had meant, that was gone too. Out. Amputated. Cut away.

She couldn't see him, because he would be a stranger. She didn't know him. She wouldn't know what to say to him, or how to talk. What had happened long ago had happened to a different girl, and to some man she didn't know.

Adam Barton!

Her hand came down hard on the mattress, and jarred her, so that she became aware of pain. That was a relief. At least she could feel something. She saw the clenched fist of the hand, and was astonished: it hadn't fallen on the bed; she'd hit the mattress with her fist!

Why?

She couldn't remember what she was thinking about when she did it The pain in her pelvis was more noticeable now, too, and no longer something to be grateful for.

She didn't remember calling the nurse, but somebody in a white uniform handed her a pill, and lifted her head so she could sip some water.

He was right. It was more fun when he did it. She wished he would come back. She wanted him to stroke her head, the way her daddy used to do when she was very little, and then she was waking up, and very hungry.

The nurse came in right away; she must have been watching through the glass at the end of the room. But when she brought the tray, there was nothing on it except some junket and a glass of milk. When she insisted she was still hungry, the nurse agreed doubtfully to some orange juice. Then she lay there with nothing to do but dream about a full meal, and try to sort out memories: The terrible moment when they put the cone over her face in the operating room— the dazed first wakening—the Colonel...

"Nurse!"

The white uniform popped through the door. "What time is it?" "Seven twenty-four."

"Oh. Is— Colonel Edgerly wouldn't be here now, would he?"

"No. But he left word for us to call if you wanted him."

"Oh, no. It's not important. It can wait." It wasn't important; it wasn't even anything. It was just—just wanting to know if he was there. No, it wasn't, because she felt better now. It was wanting to know he hadn't forgotten about her. Well, he didn't! she scolded herself happily. He wouldn't, either. He wasn't the kind of man who took on responsibilities and then walked out on them, like...

Like I did, she thought suddenly.

The telephone out in the nurse's room was ringing. It cut off halfway through the second ring. She listened, but you couldn't hear the nurse's voice through the wall. He could be calling to find out how she was. Or her father—if her father knew...

She giggled, because her father would bawl her out for -daydreaming and "woolgathering." That's what he called it when he talked to her, but she'd heard him telling her mother once, when he didn't know she could hear, "Mental masturbation, that's all it is! Poking around inside herself till she wears herself out. There's no satisfaction in it, and all it does is make you want more of the same. Plenty of good men, men with ability, starving to death right now because they couldn't stop themselves from doing just that." It was funny how she remembered the words, and just the way he'd said them; it was years and years ago, and she'd hardly understood it at the time. "If that girl spent half the time thinking about what she's doing that she does worrying about what she already did and dreaming about what she's going to do," he'd finished indignantly, "then I wouldn't worry about her at all!"

He was right, she thought tiredly, and a moment later she thought it again, more so, because she remembered that it was Charlie who had called. She should have talked to him; she could have done that much, at least. She'd been lying here thinking he was the kind of person who walked out on his responsibilities, and that wasn't fair, because she didn't know what he would have done if she'd told him.

Well, why didn't I tell him? she wondered, and...

Stop it! she told herself. // you have a toothache, you won't make it better by worrying it with your tongue all the time.

Her father had said that, too, she remembered, and suddenly she was furious. Thafs not what I was doing, she told him coldly, but she didn't try to explain, not to him. Only there was a difference. She wasn't just worry-warting or daydreaming now; she was trying to find out why—a lot of why's.

That was the way he thought, all the time: Why? It was thinking that way that made him the kind of person he was....

She giggled again. Every time she thought about him, she thought he, and never a name. Colonel didn't fit at all, and Mister wasn't right, and just plain Edgerly was silly, and she didn't dare think Tom.

The nurse came to give her a pill.

"Is that to make me go to sleep?" she asked warily.

"It's a sedative," the nurse said, as if that was different.

"I slept all day," she said. "Will it bother anybody if I read a while?" She didn't want to read, especially, but she didn't want to sleep yet either. The nurse handed her the pill, and held out the water, and obediently, because she didn't know how to argue about it, she lifted her head and swallowed twice. When she moved like that, she remembered what it was she was trying so hard not to think about. It didn't hurt so much any more, but there was a kind of empty-ache.

The nurse turned on her bed light, and got some magazines from the table across the room. "If you want anything, the bell's in back of you," she said.

Ceil let her hand be guided to the button, but there was something she wanted right now. "Was it—" she started, and tried again. "What was it?"

"It's a boy," the nurse said, and laughed. "Or anyhow, it will be, we think. You can't always tell for sure so soon."

Is___ will he ...

Her head was swimming, from the pill probably. Not was. Will be.

It's alive, she thought, ƒ didn't kill it. She smiled, and sank back into the pillow, but when she woke up she was crying, and she couldn't stop.

The phone woke him at 3:43, according to the luminous figures on the dark clock-face. By the same reckoning, he had had exactly one hour and fifty-eight minutes of sleep. It was not enough.

He drove down to the Depot at a steady thirty-five, not trusting his fuzzy reflexes for anything faster; he made up for it by ignoring stop signs and traffic signals all along the way. The streets were empty and silent in the darkest hour of a moonless night; in the clear mountain air, the rare approach of another set of headlights was visible a mile or more away. He drove with the window down and his sports shirt opened at the neck, and by the time he got there he was wide awake.

They had taken her out of the infirmary into one of the consultation rooms, where the noise would not disturb the other woman who was waiting for an operation the next day. She was crying uncontrollably, huddled under a blanket on the couch, her shoulders trembling and shaking, her face turned to the wall, her fingers digging into the fabric that covered the mattress.

He didn't try to stop her. He sat on the edge of the couch, and put a hand on her shoulder. She moved just enough to throw it off. He waited a moment, and rested the same hand on her head. This time there was a hesitation, a feeling of preparation for movement again, and then she stayed still and went on crying.

After a little while he began stroking her head, very softly, very slowly. There was no visible or audible reaction, yet he felt she wanted him to continue. He couldn't see his watch. The dial was turned down on the arm that was stroking the girl's hair, but he thought it must have been a long time. He began to feel overwhelmingly sleepy. The sensible thing would have been to lie down next to her, and take her in his arms, and both of them get some sleep....

No, not sensible. Sensible was what it wouldn't be. What it would be was pleasant and very reasonable—but only within the limits of a two-person system of logic. From the point of view of the Depot, the General, the nurse, the Space Service's honor, and the civilized world in general, it would be an unpardonable thing to do. If I were in uniform, he thought sharply, it would never have occurred to me!

She hadn't quite stopped crying yet, but she was trying to say something; the words got lost through the sobs and the blanket, but he knew what they would be. Apologies, embarrassment, explanations. He stood up, opened the door, called down the corridor for the nurse and asked for some coffee.

If I were in uniform, she'd have said, "Yes, sir!" clickety, clack.

When he turned back, Ceil was sitting up on the couch,
the blanket wrapped around her, covering everything but
her face, which was a classical study in tragicomedy: tear-
stained and grief-worn, red-nosed and self-consciously
ashamed. .

"I—I'm sorry. I don't know what—I don't know what was the matter."

He shrugged. "It happens." When the coffee came, he could try to talk to her some, or get her to talk. Now he was just tired.

"They woke you up, didn't they?" She had just noticed the sports shirt and slacks; she was looking at him with real interest. "You look different that way. N—" She cut it off short.

"Nicer?" he finished for her. "How do? My name is Tom. I just work here."

"I'm sorry I made you get out of bed," she said stiffly.

No you're not. You feel pleased and important and self-satisfied. He shrugged. 'Too much sleep would make me fat."

"What time is it?"

He looked at his watch. 'Ten to five." The nurse came in with a tray. 'Time for breakfast. Pour some for me, will you? I'll be right back."

He followed the nurse down the corridor, out of earshot of the open door. "Did the kid call last night—Barton?"

"Not since I've been on; that was midnight."

He walked back to the little cubicle with her and found the neat notation in the phone log at 2003 hours, with a telephone number and extension next to the name. He turned to the nurse, changed his mind, and picked up the phone himself. There was a distinct and vengeful satisfaction in every twirl of the dial; and a further petty pleasure when the sleepy, resentful voice at the other end began to struggle for wakefulness and a semblance of military propriety as soon as he said the word "Colonel."

"I'm not certain," he said briskly, "but if you get out here fast, Ceil just might want to see you this morning."

"Yes, sir."

"You have a car?"

"Yes, sir, I dr—"

"Well, it should be about twenty minutes from where you axe. Come to the main gate at the Depot. You have any identification, Mister Barton?"

"I... no, sir. I didn't think about..."

"All right. Use your driver's license."

"But that has my own na—"

"Yeah, I know. You're permitted civies on leave, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Okay. You ask for me. Personal visit. I'll leave word at
the gate where they can find me. You know how to get out
here?" '

"I think so, sir."

"Well, let's make sure." He gave careful instructions, waited for the boy to repeat them, and added a final reminder: "You'll only need identification to get in the main gate. Understand?"

"Yes, sir."

The Colonel hung up and picked up the other phone, the inside system. He left word at the gate that he was expecting a visitor, and could be found in the Infirmary. Then he went quickly back to the little room where Ceil waited, before the creeping dark edge of a critical conscience could quite eclipse the savage glow of his ego.

With a cup of coffee steaming in his hands and the comfort of an armchair supporting him, he decided it was certainly unjust, but not at all unreasonable, for a man who had barely napped all night to take a certain irritable delight in awakening another man at five—even if there was no element of masculine competition—which of course there wasn't, really. This last'point he repeated very firmly to himself, after which he could give his full attention to what Ceil was saying.

She was talking in a rambling steady stream; words poured through the floodgates now with the same compulsive force that had produced the violent tears and wracking sobs of an hour earlier. He didn't have to answer; he didn't even have to listen, except to satisfy his own interest. She had to talk; and she would have to do a lot more of it, too. But not all at once, he thought drowsily, not all of it at five o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes it happened this way. A single shock—and having one's abdomen cut open is always a shock—was enough to jolt an individual over a sudden new threshold of maturity. Ceil had been crying for a double loss: her own childhood, as well as the baby she hadn't known she wanted till it was gone. Now she had to discover the woman she was becoming. But not all in the next half-hour.

The nurse came to the door with a meaningful look. He stood up, realizing he had waited too long to tell the girl, uncertain now which way to go. The nurse retreated from the doorway, and he stepped over to the couch, sat down on the edge, and put his hand on Ceil's arm.

"Look, kid, I have to go see somebody now_______ "

"Oh, I'm sorry!" She didn't look sorry; she looked relaxed and almost radiant, under the tousled hair and behind the red eyes. "That other woman... she's being operated on today, isn't she?"

"Yes." And he'd damn near'forgotten that himself. "Yes, but that's not... There's somebody here to see you, really."

This time she didn't think first of parents. This time she knew.

"Charlie...!"

"Adam." He smiled.

"I don't... I don't know ... ?"

He didn't smile, but it was an effort. "Well, you'll have
to decide. I've got to go talk to him anyhow." He stood up
and reluctantly left his half-full second cup of coffee on the
tray. At the door he turned back and grinned at her. "While
you're making up your mind—we might be a few minutes
—you'd have time to comb your hair a little if you wanted
to, and things like that______ "

He watched her hands fly, dismayed, to her head, and saw her quick horrified glance in the wall mirror. Her mind was made up....

The boy was in the waiting room, at the end of the corridor, standing with his back to the door, staring out of the window. He was tall—taller than Edgerly—and built big; even in rumpled tweeds there was an enviable suggestion of the heroic in his stance and the set of his shoulders. Empathy, the Colonel decided, was going to be a bit harder to achieve than usual. He took a step into the room, a quiet step, he thought, but the boy turned immediately, stepped forward himself, then paused.

Eagerness turned to uncertainty in his eyes, and then to disappointment. He started to turn back to the window.

"Barton?" the Colonel asked sharply, and as the boy started forward again, the man was suddenly genuinely annoyed with himself. Of course the kid didn't know who he was; you don't spring to attention and salute a lounging figure in wrinkled slacks and open-necked shirt. For that matter, they were both in civies. His irritation had been based on something else altogether.

"I'm Colonel Edgerly," he said, and was gratified to hear the trained friendliness of his own voice. "I've been looking forward to meeting you." A little stiff, but all right... He extended a hand, and the boy took it, doubtfully at first, then with increasing eager pressure.

"It's a pleasure to meet you, sir. Mrs. Lazarus told me about you and how much you'd done for—for Ceil. I was hoping I'd get to see you while I was here."

"Nothing much to see now but an empty shell." The Col-
onel produced a smile. "Ceil will see you in a few minutes,
I think. Might as well sit down and take it easy mean-
while___ " He dropped into an overstuffed chair, and waved

the boy to another. "I've been in there with her since three o'clock, or somewhere around there. You'll have to excuse it if I'm not at my brightest." Sure, excuse it. Excuse me for being fifteen years older and two inches shorter. Excuse her for being seductive as all hell with a red nose. Excuse you for being so damn handsome! Excuse it, please....

"Is she... is everything all right?" The kid was white under his tan. "They said last night she was resting comfortably. Did anything... ?"

"She's fine. She had a fit of the blues. It happens. Better

it happened so quickly, while she was still here__________ " He

hesitated, not sure what to say next. The boy on the other chair waited, looking polite, looking concerned, looking intelligent.

A regular little nature's nobleman! the Colonel thought angrily, and gave up trying to generate any honest friendliness; he would be doing all right if he could just keep sounding that way.

"Now look," he said, "there are a couple of things I ought to tell you before you go in. First of all, she didn't ask to see you. It was my own idea to call you. I thought if you were here, she'd be—glad."

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.''

Quite all right. No favors intended. As long as he allowed himself full inner consciousness of his resentment, he could maintain a proper surface easily. "I don't know how she'll act when you go in. She's been having a kind of crying jag, and then a talking spell. If she wants you to stick around, you can stay as long as the nurse lets you, but you ought to bear in mind that she didn't have much sleep last night, and she needs some rest. It might be better if you just checked in, so to speak, and let her know you're available, and come back later for a real visit—if she wants it. You'll have to decide that for yourselves. She..."

He stopped. There was so much the boy ought to know, so much more, in quality and subtlety both, than he could convey in a short talk in the impatient atmosphere of a hospital waiting room—or perhaps more than he could possibly convey to this particular person in any length of time anywhere. And he was tired—much too tired to try.

"Look," he said. "There's another patient I have to see while I'm here. The nurse will come and get you as soon as Ceil's ready for company. Just—sort of take it easy with her, will you? And if I'm not around when you're done, ask the nurse to give me a ring. I'd—like to talk to you some more."

"Yes, sir." The boy stood up. There was an easy grace in his movements that the Colonel couldn't help enjoying. "And—well, I mean, thank you, sir."

The Colonel nodded. "I'll see you later."

He spent half an hour being professionally reassuring at Nancy Kellogg's bedside, while she ate her light preoperative meal. With a clinical ear, he listened to her voice more than her words, and found nothing to warrant the exertion of a more personal and demanding kind of listening. As soon as he could, he broke away and went upstairs to his office, striding with determined indifference past the little room where Ceil and Charlie were talking.

There was a spare uniform in his closet. He showered and shaved in the empty locker room at the Officers' Club, and emerged feeling reasonably wide-awake and quite unreas-sonably hungry. It was too early yet for the Depot cafeteria to be open—not quite seven.

The Infirmary had its own kitchen, of course---------- So that's

it! More understandable now, why he was so hungry. He usually got along fine on coffee and toast till lunch; and lunch was usually late—a good deal more than four or five hours after he woke up.

He stood undecided in the chill of the mountain-country morning, midway between the Officers' Club, the Nursemaid building, and the parking lot. All he had to do was get into his car and drive downtown to a restaurant. Not even downtown: there was an all-night joint half a mile down the road.

On the other hand, he ought to be around, for the Kellogg
woman as much as Ceil_____

The Psychologist, the Officer, the Man, and a number of identifiable voices held a brisk conference, which came to an abrupt conclusion when the Body decided it was too damn cold to argue the matter out. The composite individual thereupon uttered one explosive word, and Colonel Edgerly headed for the Jhfirmary.

The nurse said, Yes, sir, they could get him some breakfast. Yes, sir, Mrs. Barton had seen Mr. Barton, and she was now back in bed, asleep or on her way to it. Yes, sir, Mr. Barton was waiting. In the waiting room. She had tried to call the Colonel, but he was not in his office. Mr. Barton had decided to wait.

"I told him you'd probably gone home, sir, and I didn't know if you'd be back today or not, but..."

Home? There was more about the boy insisting that the Colonel wanted to see him, but he lost most of it while the realization dawned on him that it was Thanksgiving Day. He was officially not on duty at all. He could have ...

He could have gone away for the weekend; but not having done so, he couldn't have refused the call in the middle of the night; nor could he leave now, with Young Lochinvar waiting to see him, and Nancy Kellogg expecting him to be around when she was done in the operating room.

"... anything in particular you'd like to have, sir?"

Breakfast, he remembered. He smiled at the nurse. "Yeah. Ham and eggs and pancakes and potatoes and a stack of toast. Some oatmeal maybe. Couple quarts of coffee." She finally smiled back. "Anything that comes easy, but lots of it," he finished, and went off to find Barton.

Colonel Edgerly put his coffee cup down, lit a cigarette, and sank back into the comfortable chair, savoring the fragrance of the smoke, the flavor of food still in his mouth, the overall sense of drowsy well-being.

On the edge of the same couch where Ceil had huddled under a blanket earlier the same morning, Ceil's young man sat and talked, with almost the same determined fluency. ' But this time, the Colonel had no desire at all to stop the flow.

He listened, and the more he heard, the harder it got to maintain his own discomfort, or keep his jealous distance from the boy. Barton-Bolido was a good kid; there was no way out of it. And Ceil, he thought with astonishment, was another. A couple of good kids who had bumped into each other too soon and too hard. In a couple of years—

No. That's how it could have been, if they hadn't met when they did, and if the whole train of events that followed had never occurred. The way it was now, Charlie would be ripening for marriage in two or three more years; but Ceil had just this early morning crossed into the country of maturity—unaware and unsuspecting, but no longer capable of turning back to the self-centered innocence of last summer or last week.

Briefly, the Colonel turned his prying gaze inside himself and noted with irritation, but no surprise, that the inner image of the Ceil-child was still vividly exciting while the newer solider Ceil evoked no more than warm and pleasant thoughts. Well, it wasn't a new problem, and unless he started slapping teen-age rumps, it wasn't a serious one. He returned his attention to the young lady's young man, and waited for a break in the flow of words to ask:

"I take it you and Ceil are on ... speaking terms again?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good. It was important for her, I think." "How do you mean, sir?" The boy looked vaguely frightened now.

"Just—oh, just knowing that you came, that you give a
damn____ "

"I guess she had a pretty low opinion of me," the boy said hesitantly.

"I wouldn't put it that way," the Colonel told him, professionally reassuring.

"Well, she did. And I'm not so sure she was wrong. Frankly, sir, I'm glad it turned out the way it did. I mean, if she had to—to get pregnant, I'm glad she came here. I don't know what I would have..."

"Well, we're glad too," the Colonel interrupted. "And right now, it doesn't really matter what you would have done, if things worked out any other way. You could be a blue-dyed skunk or a one-eyed Martian and the only thing that would make any real difference is what Ceil thought you were. She's gone through a tough experience, and her own
opinion of herself, her ability to pull out of this thing, is going
to depend a lot on whether it all seemed worthwhile—which
means, in part, her opinion of you." He stood up. "Well, I
suppose as long as I'm here, I might as well get some work
done "

"I didn't mean to take up so much of your time, sir."

"You didn't take it. I donated it. You going back to the hotel, or stick around here?"

"I'd like to stay around if it's all right."

"All right with me. Major Sawyer—Dr. Sawyer to civilians like you, boy—should be in soon. If he kicks you out, you'll have to go. Otherwise, don't get in the nurse's way, and I don't imagine anyone will care. I'll be down later myself."

He was in the doorway, when the boy called, "Colonel ..."

He turned back.

"Colonel Edgerly, I just wanted to say—I guess I said it before, but—I want to thank you again. In case I don't see you later. Ceil—Ceil told me how much you've done for her, and how you arranged for Dean Lazarus to get in touch with me, and—well, I want you to know I appreciate it, sir."

"Aw 'twarn't nothin'." The Colonel grinned, and added; "After all, that's what I'm here for." He went on down the corridor to the elevators, and up to his office, comfortably aware of a full, stomach and a fully distended sense of virtue. Everybody would live happily ever after, and to top it all, he had a full day ahead to catch up on the neglected* paper work of months behind.

The phone was ringing when he entered the office. He had heard it all the way down the corridor, buzzing with tireless mechanical persistence.

"Hello. Edgerly speaking."

"Oh, Tom. Good. They told me you were in, but switchboard couldn't find you. Told 'em to keep ringing till they got you. Could you run up for a minute? Couple things to talk over."

"Yes, sir. I'm free now, if you'd like..." "Fine. Come right up."

The Colonel looked at the overstuffed Hold basket, and smiled. The paper work could wait. He didn't know what the General was doing there on Thanksgiving Day, and he didn't care. This conference was long past due.

The General was doing the talking; the Colonel sat in stunned silence, listening. Not the smallest part of his shock was the realization that the General not only sounded, but really was, sincere.

"... when you're running an outfit like this, Tom, the biggest thing is knowing who to put the pressure on and when to ease up. You're a psychologist. You're supposed to be able to see something like this, even when you're the one who's concerned. These last couple months, now, you had a pretty free hand. You realize that?"

The Colonel nodded. It was true. He hadn't thought of it that way. He'd been champing at the bit, waiting for some kind of recognition. But it was true.

"Okay, I think I did the right thing. I told you what we had to have, and I told you I wasn't going to tell you how to do it. I put some pressure on, and then I left you alone. I got the results I wanted. We had three successful applicants the first nine months, and three more in less than nine weeks afterward.

"I didn't ask how you were doing it, and I didn't want to know. It's your job, and the only time I'll mess around with what you're doing is when you're not getting results. The only trouble was, I didn't ask for enough, or I didn't do it soon enough. I should have allowed for a bigger margin of safety, and I didn't. That was my fault, not yours—but we're both stuck with it now."

Again the Colonel nodded. There were questions he should ask, ideas he should generate, but all he could feel at the moment was overpoweringly sleepy.

The General surprised him again.

"I take if you had a rough night. Suppose you take a copy of the transcript with you. Look it over. If you get any ideas, I'll be right here. I've got to have an answer Monday morning, and it better be a good one."

The Colonel took the stapled set of onionskins, and stood up.

"Sorry to spoil your holiday," the General rumbled. The Colonel shrugged. "At least the holiday gives us a few days to figure things out."

The'General nodded, and they both forgot to smile.

Back in his office, with a container of coffee getting cold on his desk, the Colonel read the transcript of the telephone conversation all the way through, carefully, and then through again.

The call had been put through to the General's home phone at 7:28 that morning, from the Pentagon in Washington. Apparently there had been some sleepless nights on that end too, after the arrival of the Satellite Rocket the evening before.

The conversation ran to seven typed pages. The largest part of it was a gingerbread facade of elaborately contrived informalities and irrelevancies. Behind the facade of jovial threats and ominous pleasantries, the facts were these:

For reasons as yet unknown, there had been three "premature" deliveries of PN's on the Base: that is, the babies had come to term and been delivered from their tanks, healthy and whole, several weeks in advance of the expected dates. The three "births," plus two that were expected, had all occurred within a 36 hour period, at a time when only two or three FP's were on Base. Mrs. Harujian was on Satelleave; and to complicate matters, Mrs. Lenox, the first one to go up, was suffering at the time from an attack of colitis, a lingering after-effect of her first long unrelieved spell of duty.

Army nurses had had to put in extra time, spelling the two women in the nursery. The extra time had been sufficient to foul up the Satelleave schedule for the regular Army staff on Base. A four-star General who had gone on the rocket to Satellite, for the especial purpose of conferring with a Base Captain, whose leave was canceled without notice, inquired into the reasons therefor, and returned on the rocket without having accomplished the urgent business for which he had submitted his corpulent person to the discomforts of blast-off acceleration.

The rocket had hardly touched ground, before the voice of the four stars was heard in the Pentagon. Channels were activated. Routine reports were read. Special reports analyzing the reports were prepared—and somewhere along the line, it became known that the PN schedule at the Depot was not what it should be.

The phone call to General Martin therefore informed him that on Monday morning a small but well-starred commission would set forth from Washington to determine the nature of the difficulties at the Depot, and make suggestions for the improvement of conditions there.

For some time the Colonel sat in his office digesting these pieces of information. At noon he went down to the infirmary; said hello to Ceil, who was awake and looking cheerful; spent half an hour talking to Mrs. Kellogg, who was being prepared for the operating room; left word that he would be with the General, if not in his own office, when she came out of anesthesia; declined, with thanks, an invitation from the staff to join them in Thanksgiving dinner; and went upstairs to see his boss.

The conference was shorter than he had expected. The General had also been doing some thinking, and had arrived at his conclusions.

"We took a gamble, and we lost, that's all," he said. "I figured by the time the shipments began to fall off enough so anybody would notice, we'd be back on a full schedule of operation again. Somebody noticed too soon, that's all. Now we have to get back to schedule right away. As long as we do that, there won't be any heads rolling....

"Now this Serruto woman is ready to go on the next trip, that right?"

The Colonel nodded, waiting.

"Then you've got, what's-er-name, Breneau? She's scheduled for January 6, that right? And Mackintosh just started training, she goes January 20? Okay, I want those two accelerated. I'll give you any facilities or help you need, but I want them ready for December 23 and January 6 instead."

The Colonel did some quick figuring, and nodded. "We can manage that."

"Okay. The next thing is, I want somebody else started right away. You got a back file of maybe nineteen-twenty names that are open for reconsideration. Couple of 'em even had medicals already. I want one started next week. She goes up with Mackintosh January 6."

"You realize, sir, you're asking me to send up a woman I've already rejected as unsatisfactory, and to do it with only five weeks' training instead of two months?"

"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. That's an order, Colonel. You'll get it in writing tomorrow."

"Yes, sir."

"Oh, hell, Tom, take it easy, will you? I'm sorry I had to put it that way, but I'm taking responsibility for this. You don't have to agree; all you have to do is produce. You give me what I want, I give them what they want, and after things settle down, you can get things going more the way you want 'em."

"May I say something, sir? Before I start doing what I'm told?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

"You were talking about a margin of safety. I'm worried about the same thing. You want to make sure we have enough people up there to handle a normal scheduled flow of shipments. I want to see the same thing. But sending up ten or twenty or fifty unqualified women isn't going to give us any margin ... sir.

"I'd tell the Pentagon boys what we're doing, and why, and stick with it. I wouldn't start more PN's till we're sure we have enough FP's. And I'd start doing some scouting around for the FP's."

"Oh, we got back to that? The publicity campaign?"

"I still think it's a good idea."

"Okay, Tom, let's get a couple of things straight. You made a suggestion, and I didn't pay any attention, and you went ahead and tried it out anyhow. Yeah, sure I know about it. What do you think I meant this morning about knowing when to put on pressure? You did it the right way. You were discreet and sensible, and it worked—a one-man campaign, fine.

"But what you could do that way wasn't enough, so you sent me another little note, because you wanted to get it set up officially, and expand it. Well, look, Tom, I don't want to sound insulting. I know you know a lot about people, that's your job. But you know 'em one-at-a-time, Tom, and it's been my business for a hell of a long time to know them all-in-a-bunch, and believe me—

"You start a big full-scale publicity campaign on this thing, and we'll be out of business so fast, you won't know what hit you. The American people won't stand for it, if they know what's going on here." ,

'They know now, sir. We're not Secret."

"Yeah. They know. If they subscribe to The New York Times and read the science column on page thirty-six. Sure we're not Secret; the Project is part of the knowledge of every well-informed citizen. And how many citizens does that include? Look at the Satellite itself, Tom. It was no secret. The people who read the small print knew all about it way back some time in the 1940's when it was mentioned in a congressional budget. But it sure as hell surprised the 1 citizens when it got into the sky—and into the headlines. We can't risk the headlines yet. If people knew all about us ... well, probably we could win over a good majority. But if all they see is the headlines and the lead paragraphs and the editorials in the opposition papers ... and don't think they aren't going to make it sound as if the government was running a subsidized abortion ring! Does that make it any clearer?"

"Yes, sir. A lot clearer."

"Okay. I'll get official orders typed up in the morning, and a new schedule for trainees. Now you might as well knock off, and enjoy what's left of the holiday. Start worrying tomorrow...."

Colonel Edgerly sat in a chair by the head of a hospital bed and listened to fears and complaints, and was grateful that Nancy Kellogg'was really married, and had three children and a husband at home, and was not going to go off any deep ends in the immediate future. He made little jokes and reassuring noises, and held the little pan for her when she was sick the second time.

With the surface of his mind he listened to everything she said and could have repeated a perfect catalogue of all her aches and pains. When she moved onto the subject of previous deliveries, he asked interested questions at appropriate intervals. She wanted to talk, and that was fine, because as long as he kept the top surface busy he didn't have to pay attention to what was going on farther down.

When she began to get sleepy, he went and found Ceil, who was watching television out in the staff room. She turned off the set and started a stream of nervous small talk, from which he could gather only that she had been doing some heavy thinking and had a lot to say, but didn't know how to say it. Whatever it was, it did not seem to be particularly explosive or melancholy; when the nurse came to tell her it was time to be back in bed, he ignored the girl's hopeful look, and said he would see her next day. i He started off up the corridor, knowing what he was heading for and hoping something or someone would stop him, Nothing and nobody did. He stepped through the wide door at the far end of the hall, and waited while the student nurse encased him in sterile visitor's coverall's. Inside, he wandered up and down the rows of tanks, stopping Occasionally to stare through a glassed top as if he could see through the membrane and the liquids, or even perhaps through pale flesh and cartilage and embryonic organs, to some secret center of the soul, to the small groupings of undeveloped cells that would some day spell mind and psyche in the walking, living, growing, feeling, thinking bodies of these flat-faced fetal prisoners.

Charlie, the Kaydet, had said to him wistfully, "I wish the
kid could have my name." To carry to the stars, he meant.
But not right now, not here on Earth, oh no, that would be
too embarrassing_____

On the tanks there were no names: just numbers. And in the office down the hall, a locked file case contained a numbered folder full of names and further numbers and reports and charts and graphs of growth and in every folder of the 37, one name at least appeared. His own.

They're not my babies, he thought angrily, and with reluctance: Yes they are.

You need to get married, he told himself clinically. Have one of your own....

That would be an answer, one kind of answer. But not an answer to the problem now at hand. It was an answer for girls like Ceil, and later for boys like Charlie—for the people who had listened to his promises and pledges, and walked away, and left their babies here.

They walked out. So can I.... The job the Generals wanted done was not a job that he could do. So quit! It could be done. The typed-out request for a transfer was in his pocket now. Quit now, and let them find him a job that wasn't too big for a merely human being. Get married, have some kids. Let somebody else...

He couldn't.

If he knew which somebody, if there were a Colonel Ed-
gerly to talk to him and reassure him and promise him, so
he'd believe it, that his babies would be cared for_______

He laughed, and the vapor forming on the face-plate of the sterile suit made him aware that he was uncomfortably warm and had been in there too long. He went out and stripped off the coveralls. His uniform was wet with sweat, and he smelled of it. Through empty halls he went upstairs, avoiding even the elevator, grateful to meet no one on the way. In his own office, he stood and stared out of the window at the faint edge of sunset behind the mountains, no more than a glow of red shaping the ridges against a dark sky.

He took the wilted sheet of paper from his pocket and would have torn it up, but instead he opened the bottom desk drawer and filed it with all the other unfulfilled acts of rebellion.

The parents of these children could walk out, and had done so. But the man who had eased the responsibility from their shoulders, who had used his knowledge of human beings and his trained skill in dealing with them to effect the transfer of a living human embryo from its natural mother to a tank of surrogate nutrient, the man who had dared to determine that one particular infant, as yet technically unborn, would be one of the thousand who would grow up not-quite-Earthmen, to become the representatives of Earth over as-yet-uncoverable distances—the man who had done all this could not then, calmly, doff his Godhead, hand it to another man, and say, "I quit," and walk away.

He changed his clothes and got his car from the near-empty parking lot and drove. Not home. Anywhere else. He drove toward the mountains, off the highway, onto winding dirt roads that needed his full attention in the dark. He kept the window down and let the night wind beat him and when, much later, he got home, he was tired enough to sleep.

The blessing of the Army, he thought, as he slid from wakefulness, was that there was always someone over you. Whatever authority you assumed, whatever responsibility came with it, there was always some higher authority that could relieve you of a Godhead you could not surrender.

In the morning, he felt calm and almost cheerful. His own personal decision was made, and the consequences were clear to him, but the career that had mattered very much at one time seemed comparatively unimportant at this juncture.

He checked off the list of appointments for the day— Kellogg, Barton, Mackintosh, two new names, FP applicants; he read the mail, and read the typed orders and schedule that came down from the General's office; he went efficiently through the day's routine, and whenever there was ten minutes to spare, he worked on the report the General required for Monday morning.

Saturday was an easier day. He talked to Ceil in the morning, and signed her release, and told her to come see him any time she felt she wanted to. Then he went upstairs, and finished the report. Read it through, and tore it up, half-angry and half-amused at the obvious intent of his defiance. Making sure you get fired is not at all different from quitting.

He went carefully through the card-file of rejects and selected half a dozen names, then started the report again. Along toward mid-afternoon, he buzzed the Sergeant to order a belated lunch sent up, and not till after he had hung up did he stop to wonder what she was doing at her desk. She was supposed to go off duty at noon on Saturdays. He picked up the phone again.

"Hey, Sarge—didn't you hear the noon whistle?"

"Noon...? Oh. Yes, sir."

"You don't have to stick around just because I do, you know. They don't pay overtime in this man's Army any more."

"I___ don't mind, sir. There's nothing special I have to

do today. I thought if I stayed to answer the phone, you could ... you'll want that report typed when you're finished, won't you, sir?"

Well, I'll be damned! He was surprisingly touched by her thoughtfulness. "It was good of you to think of it, Helen." As soon as the words were out, he realized how wrong they were. Too formal, and then her first name—it didn't sound like what he meant. "I appreciate it," he added, even more stiffly.

"That's all right, Colonel. I really don't mind. I didn't have anything special to do, and I just thought..."

He put the receiver down, got up quickly, and opened the connecting door. She was sitting there, still holding her phone, looking slightly baffled and faintly embarrassed. He grinned, as the click of the door-latch startled her. "You're a good kid, Sarge, but there's no sense hanging onto a phone with nobody on the other end."

She flushed, and replaced the receiver on its hook. Apparently anything he said was going to be wrong—but this was hardly surprising when, after four months of almost daily association, he suddenly found a person instead of a uniform sitting at the outside desk.

"Tongue-tied schoolboy, that's me," he said defiantly. "I just never learned how to say Thank You politely. Even when I mean it. I think it was damned decent of you to stay, and I appreciate what you've done so far, but I'm not going to let you toss away the whole weekend just because I'm stuck in the mud. Look... did you order that stuff yet?"

"No... no, sir."

"Could you stand to drink a cup of coffee?" He grinned. "With a superior officer, I mean?"

Almost, she smiled. The Almost Perfect Lady Soldier, he thought with relief.

"Yes, sir, I think I could."

"All right. Pick up your marbles and let's get out of here. I could use a break myself. After that," he finished, "you're going home. I'll tell the switchboard I've gone myself, and let them take any calls. And as far as the typing goes, I don't know when I'm going to have this thing finished. It could be three o'clock in the morning... and I can always get one of the kids from the pool to type it up tomorrow, if I'm too lazy to do it myself."

She frowned faintly; then her face smoothed out again into its customary unruffled surface of competence. "You're the boss." She smiled and shrugged almost imperceptibly. "Let's go!"

He had thought he wanted company. A short break would be good. Generalized conversation—enforced refocusing of attention—sandwich and coffee—twenty minutes of non-concentration. Fine. But all the way to the commissary he walked in silence, and when they found a table and sat down, it took only the simplest query—"How's it coming?" —to set him off.

He talked.

For an hour and a half, while successive cups of coffee cooled in front of him, he talked out all he meant to say. Then when he finally looked at the clock and found it read almost five, he said, abashed, "Hey—didn't I tell you to go home?"

"I'm glad I didn't," she said.

There was a note of intensity in the saying of it that made him look more closely. She meant it! It wasn't a proper secretarial remark.

"So am I," he told her with equal seriousness. "I got more done yakking at you here than I would have in five hours, crumpling up sheets at my desk. Thanks."

He smiled, and for an instant he thought the uniform would slip away entirely, but the answering smile was only in her eyes. At least, he thought, she'd refrained from giving him her standard Receptionist's Special....

He didn't do any more that day. Sunday morning, he went into the office early, and started all over again, this - time knowing clearly what he meant to say, and how. When the phone rang, at eleven, he had almost completed a final draft.

"This is Helen Gregory, sir. I thought I'd call, and find out if you wanted that report typed up today... ?"

Bless you, gall "As a matter of fact, I'm just about done with it now," he started, and then realized he had almost been betrayed by her matter-of-fact tone into accepting the sacrifice of the rest of her weekend. "It's not very long," he finished, not as he'd planned. "I'll have plenty of time to type it up myself. Take yourself a day off, Sarge. You earned it yesterday, even if you didn't have it coming anyway."

"I... really don't mind." Her voice had lost its easy certainty. "I'd like to come in, if I can help."

Ohmigod! He should have known better than to crack a surface as smooth as hers. Yesterday afternoon had been a big help, but if she was going to start playing mama now...

"That's very kind of you, Helen," he said. "But there's really no need for it."

"Whatever you say..." She sounded more herself again —or her familiar self—but still she left it hanging, clearly not content. He pretended not to notice.

"Have a good day," he said cheerfully. "Tomorrow we maybe die. And thanks again."

"That's all right, sir. I really— I suppose I'm just curious to see how it came out, really."

"Pretty good, I think. I hope. I'll leave a copy on your desk to read in the morning. Like to know what you think— Hey! where do you keep those report forms?"

"Middle drawer on the left. The pale green ones. They're quadruplicate, you know—and onionskin for our file copy is in the top drawer on that side."

"It's a good thing you called. I'd have had the place upside down trying to figure that out. Thanks, Sarge—and take it easy."

He hung up thoughtfully; then shook his head and dismissed the Sergeant, and whatever problems she might represent, from his immediate universe. He spent another half-hour changing and rewording the final paragraph of the report, and when he was satisfied that he at least could not improve it further, found the forms and carbon sheets neatly stacked where she'd said. A hell of a good secretary, anyhow. Nothing wrong in her wanting to mother-hen a little bit. He was the one who was over-reacting....

The father-pot calling the mother-kettle neurotic, he thought bitterly. And that was natural enough too. Who could possibly resent it more?

He stacked a pile of sheets and inserted them in the type-
writer, wishing now he'd been rational enough to trade on
the girl's better nature, instead of rejecting so hard. It
would take him a couple of hours to turn out a decent-look-
ing copy. She could have done it in thirty minutes________

The phone jangled at his elbow; he hit two keys simultaneously on tht machine, jamming it, and reached for the receiver.

"Colonel Edgerly ... ?"

Excited young female type. Not the Lady Soldier. "Speaking."

"Oh... Tom. Hello. This is Ceil." She didn't have to tell him; he knew from the breathless way she said his first name. "I tried to call you at home, but you weren't there. ... I hope I'm not busting into something important?"

"Well, as a matter of fact—" Whatever it was she wanted, this wasn't his day to give it out. "Look, kid, will it keep till tomorrow? I've got a piece of work here I'm trying to finish up—" Maybe she could type, he thought, and reluctantly abandoned the idea.

"... really what I wanted anyhow," she was saying. He had missed something and, backtracking, missed rhore. "... only time we're both free, and I wanted to check with you ahead of time..." Who was both? Charlie maybe? Coming to ask for his blessing?

I'm getting hysterical, he decided, and managed to say good-by as calmly as if he knew what the call had been about. Tomorrow. She'd come in tomorrow, and then he'd find out.

One isolated phrase jumped out of the lost pieces: "... called yesterday ..." The Sergeant had been turning away calls all day, and he hadn't looked at the slips when he left, because he thought he was coming back.

He found them on her desk, neatly stacked. Ceil had called twice: no message. A Mrs. Pinckney of the local Child Placement Bureau wanted to speak with him about a matter of importance; he dimly remembered meeting her at the Lazarus' party. Two candidates for FP had made appointments for next week. The rest were interdepartmental calls, and the Sarge had handled them all.

His hand hesitated briefly over the phone as he considered calling Sergeant Gregory and giving them both the gratification of allowing her to do the typing for him. Then he took himself firmly in hand, and headed back to the inner office and the typewriter. No need to pile up future grief just to aVoid a couple of hours of tedium.

He settled down, unjammed the stuck keys, and started again with a fresh stack of paper.

In the morning, over his breakfast coffee, he read again through the carbon copy he had brought home, and decided it would do. He had managed to give the General what he'd asked for, and at the same time state his own position, with a minimum of wordage and—he hoped—a maximum of clarity.

The report began by complying with the specific request of the General. It listed the names of six rejected candidates who might be reconsidered. The first three, all of whom he recommended, included Mrs. Leahy, the madam; Mrs. Buonaventura, who had failed to be sent through for further testing because she had only one arm; and a Mr. George Fitzpatrick, whose application had been deferred, rather than rejected, since they planned to start sending men later.

He pointed out that in the first two cases the particular disabilities of the ladies would not, in practice, make any difference to their effectiveness; and in the case of the man—if the program were to be accelerated other ways, why not this way too?

There followed a list of three names, conscientiously selected as the least offensive of those in his file who might be expected to qualify on Medic and Security checks; in these three cases he undertook, as Psychological Officer, to qualify any or all for emergency appointments of two months, but added that he could not, in his professional capacity, sign his name to full-term contracts for any one of them.

The next section was a single page of figures and statistics, carefully checked, recommending a general slow-down for the Project, based on the percentage of acceptable FP candidates encountered so far. A semi-final paragraph proposed an alternate plan: that if the total number of applicants for FP positions could be increased, by means of an intelligently directed publicity program, the number of acceptable candidates might be expected to be large enough to get the Project back to its original schedule in three months.

And then the final paragraph:

"It should be remembered, in reviewing this situation, that on this Project we are dealing with human beings, rather than inanimate objects, and that rigid specifications of requirements must in each individual case be interpreted by the judgment of another human being. As an Officer of the Space Service, whose duty it is to make such judgments, I cannot, in all conscience, bring myself to believe that I should include in my considerations any extraneous factors, no matter of what degree of importance. My official approval or rejection of any individual can be based only on the qualifications of that individual."

He read it through, and drove to work, wondering what the chances were that anyone besides the General would ever see'it.

The day was routine, if you discounted the charged air of suspense that circulated through the building from the time the three star-studded Washingtonians drove into the parking lot and disappeared into the General's office. The Colonel conducted the usual number of interviews, made minor decisions, emptied a box of Kleenex, and replaced it.

For the Colonel, there was a feeling of farce in every appointment made for the future and every piece of information carefully elicited and faithfully recorded. But the Sergeant, at least, seemed to have come back to normal, and played the role of Lady Soldier with such conviction that the whole absurd melodrama seemed, at times, almost real.

She complimented him gravely on the report when she handed him his list of appointments; thereafter, the weekend and its stresses seemed forgotten entirely in the familiar routine of a Monday morning.

At 10:30, Mrs. Pinckney called again. It seemed she was going to a social welfare convention in Montreal next month; would the Colonel like to work with her on part of a paper she meant to present there, in which she could "plug" the Project?

He couldn't tell her, through the office switchboard, that the boss had rapped his knuckles and threatened to wash his mouth with soap if he kept talking about indelicate matters outside the office. He suggested that they get together during the week; he'd call her when he saw some free time. She hung up, obviously chagrined at the coolness of his tone, and immediately the phone buzzed again.

This time it was the Sergeant. "I just remembered, sir, there were some phone slips from Saturday that you didn't see."

"Thanks. I picked 'em up yesterday." "Oh. Then you know Mrs. Barton called? She seemed very eager—"

"Yuh. She called again yesterday. That's what made me check the slips. Oh, yes. She's coming in today, sometime." "She didn't say when, sir?"

"No. Or I'm not sure. If she did, I don't remember." And what difference did it make?

"Shall I call her back and check, sir?"

"I don't see why." It was getting irritating now. Appar-endy, the Sergeant was going to remain slightly off-keel about anything connected with the weekend. Well, he thought, one could be grateful at least for small aberrations —if they stayed small. "She'd be in class now, anyhow," he added sharply.

"Yes, sir. It's just that I understand you'll probably be going up to the Conference right after lunch. So if it was important..."

"It wasn't," he said with finality. "If I'm busy when she comes in, she can wait." "Yes, sir."

He hung up, wondered briefly about the exact nature of the rumor channels through which the secretaries of the Depot seemed always to know before the decisions were actually made just what was going to happen where and when, gave it up as one of the great insoluble mysteries, and went back to the ridiculous business of carrying on the normal day's work.

At noon, the General's secretary informed Sergeant Gregory that the General and his visitors were going out to lunch and that the Colonel's presence was requested when they returned, at 1330 hours. The Sergeant reported the information to her superior. He thanked her, but she didn't go away. She stood there, looking uncomfortable.

"Something else?"

"Yes, sir, there is. It's ... not official."

There was an urgency in her tone that drove away his first quick irritation. He focused on her more fully, and decided that if this was more of the mothering act, it was bothering her even more than it did him. "Sit down, Sergeant," he said gently. "What's on your mind?"

"No, thanks. I... all right." She sat down. "I... just wanted to tell you, sir... just wanted to tell you, sir ... I mean I thought I ought to let you know before you go up ..."

"Yes?" he prompted. And where has my little Lady Soldier gone?

"It's about your report. I can't tell you how I know, sir, but I understand the General turned it over to the other officers. Maybe I should have ..."

"Excuse me." He was beginning to feel a burst of excitement. His first reaction to the idea of being included in the Conference at all had been a sinking certainty that Edgerly was going to play Goat after all. But if they'd seen his report... "I won't ask you how you know, but I do want to find out just how reliable your source is," he said eagerly. It was possible, just barely possible, that his ideas might be given some serious consideration by the Investigating Committee!

"It's reliable," she said tightly and paused, then went on with quick-worded determination: "Perhaps I should have said something before, when I read it, but it was too late by then to make any changes, so I... I mean, if you'd agreed with me, sir. But the way you wrote the report, it does—excuse me, sir, but it makes such a perfect out for the General! 7 know you've been co-operating with him, and he knows it, but anyone who just read the report..." She stood up, not looking at him, and said rapidly, "I just thought I ought to let you know before you go up, the way it looks to me, and how it might look to them. I'm sorry if I should have spoken up sooner."

She turned and almost ran for the door.

'That's all right, Sarge," he said, almost automatically. "It wouldn't have done any good to tell me this morning. I should have let you come in yesterday... ¹ Just before the door closed, he had a glimpse of a shy smile in which gratitude, apology, and sympathy merged to warm friendliness. But the marvel of this, coming from the Sergeant, was lost entirely in the hollowness of his realization that he was going to get what he wanted. He was going to get fired. The General had passed the buck with expert ease, and Tom Edgerly would be quietly relieved of a post that was too big for him, and—

He felt very very sick.

The two girls walked in through the open door, just how much later he didn't know. He'd been sitting with his back to the desk, staring out the window, remembering the care he had taken to write that report in such a way as to defeat his own acknowledged weakness, and marveling bitterly at the subconscious skill with which he had composed the final document

He heard the noise behind him, a hesitant cough-and-shuffle of intrusion, and turned, realizing that Helen would have gone out for lunch and left the doors open.

It was Ceil; the other girl with her was the last PN before her. They had met in the Infirmary, he supposed; Janice had gone home last Tuesday; Ceil came in Monday. Yeah.

They both looked very intense. Not today, kids. Some other time. He stood up, and smiled, and began rehearsing the words to get rid of them.

Ceil stepped forward hesitantly. "Was this a bad time to come? If you're busy, we could make it tomorrow instead. It's just lunch hour is the only time we're both free, and we wanted to come together. Jannie works late...."

She was chattering, but only because she had sensed something wrong.

"It's not a good day," he said slowly, and glanced at his watch and back at the girls, and knew defeat again. Whatever it was, it was important—to them.

"Well, we can come in tomor—"

"You're here now," he pointed out, and formed his face into a smile. "I have some time now, anyhow." The time didn't matter to him. He had more than half an hour yet before he had to go upstairs and get put to sleep in the mess of a bed he had made. "Sit down," he said, and pulled the extra chair away from the wall over to the desk.

They sat on the edge of their seats, leaning forward, eager, and both of them started talking at once, and then both stopped.

"You tell him," Ceil said. "It was your idea first."

"You can say it better," the other one said.

For God's sake, one of you get to it! "Spit it out," he said brusquely.

They looked at each other, and Ceil took a deep breath, and said evenly, "We want to apply for Foster Parent positions."

He smiled tolerantly. Then he stopped smiling. It was impossible, obviously. A couple of kids—

"Why?" he asked, and as a jumble of answers poured out, he thought, with mounting elation, Why not?

"My mother acts like I committed a sin...." That was Janice.

"In two years, Charlie can get married...." "... maybe I did, but if I helped to take care of some of them ..."

"... I'd know more about how to manage in a place like that, in case we did ..." Ceil.

"... even if it wasn't my own..."

That was the catch, of course. They'd play favorites. They'd—if they didn't know—Mrs. Mackintosh had said, if you weren't so obviously oriented in the opposite direction ...

Janice—she was the one who'd had an affair with her
boss. He was going to marry her of course, but when she
found out she was pregnant, it turned out he already had a
wife. No job, no man. He would pay for her to get rid of
it—but she wouldn/t. She couldn't. And she couldn't stay
home and have it; it would kill her mother, she said____________

Ceil—Ceil came in as a child, not knowing, not understanding, and downstairs, in a hospital bed, she grew up.

A couple of kids, sure. But women, too. Grown women, with good reason for wanting to do a particular job.

He heard the Sergeant come in, and flew into a whirlwind of activity. It was 1:15. By 1:27, they had both applications neatly filled out and the already-completed Medical and Security checks out of the folders. The psych tests for FP's were more comprehensive than the ones they'd had, but he knew enough to figure he was safe.

He took another twenty seconds to run a comb through his hair and straighten his tie. Then he went upstairs.

The Colonel sat at his desk, and filled in an application form neatly and quickly. He signed his name at the bottom and stood up and looked out the big window and laughed without noise, till he realized there was a tear rolling down his cheek.

It was all over now, but it would all begin again tomorrow morning, and the next day, and the next. The visiting Generals had accomplished their purpose, which was to goose Nursemaid into action, and had gone back home. The resident General had come through without a blot on his record, because it was all the Colonel's fault. The Colonel had come through with a number of new entries in his record, and whether they shaped up to a blot or a star he could not yet tell.

The interview had been dramatic, but now the drama was done with and the last piddling compromise had been agreed on: the two new candidates; plus the man, Fitz-patrick; plus consideration for men from now on; plus reviewing the backfiles of PN's to see how many more were willing; plus the trickle that could be expected from this source in the future; plus an over-all 20 per cent slowdown in the original schedule; plus policy conferences in Washington on the delicate matter of publicity; plus a reprimand to the Colonel for his attitude, and a commendation to the ( Colonel for his work....

He pushed the buzzer, and the Sergeant came in.

"Sit down," he told her.

She sat.

"It just occurred to me," he said, "that the—uh—dramatic statements on those applications you typed up were ... extraordinarily well put." He kept the smile back, with a great effort.

"What statements did you mean, sir?" The Perfect Lady Soldier had her perfect deadpan back.

"The last questions, Sergeant. You know— 'Why do you desire to ...' The answers that were all about how Colonel Edgerly had inspired the applicants with understanding, patriotism, maternal emotion, and—similar admirable qualities."

"I—" There was a faint, but not quite repressed, glint in the Sergeant's eye. "I'm afraid, sir, I suggested that they let me fill that in; it would be quicker, I thought, than trying to take down everything they wanted to say."

"Sergeant," he said, "are you aware that those applications become a part of the permanent file?"

"Yes, sir." Now she was having trouble not looking smug.

"And are you also aware that it is desirable to have truthful replies in those records?"

"Yes, sir." She didn't feel smug now, and for a moment he was afraid he'd carried the joke too far. He meant to thank her, but ... "Yes, sir," she said, and looked directly at him, not hiding anything at all. "I wrote the truth as I saw it, sir."

The Colonel didn't answer right away. Finally he said, "Thanks. Thanks a lot, Sergeant."

"There's nothing to thank me for." She stood up. "I hope it—helped?"

"I'm sure it did."

She took a step, and stopped. "I'm glad. I think—if you don't mind my saying so, sir, I think they'd have a hard time finding anybody else to do the job you're doing. I mean, to do it as well."

He looked at her sharply, and then at the filled out form on his desk.

"I guess I have to say Thank You again." He smiled, and realized her embarrassment was even greater than his own.

"I'll—is there anything else you want, sir? I was just going to leave when you buzzed—" Her eyes were fixed one foot to the right of his face, and her cheeks were red.

"Yes," he said. "There is something else—unless you're in
a hurry. It can wait till tomorrow, if you have a date or
anything." r

"No, sir. I'm free."

"All right, then. What do you like to drink, and where would you prefer to eat? I have lousy taste in perfume, and I owe you something, God knows—besides which, it's about time we got acquainted; we may be working together for a while after all."

She was still embarrassed, but she was also pleased. And his quick glimpse before had not fully prepared him for

by Clifford D. Simak

FINAL GENTLEMAN

What is it that makes the world the way it is? The obvious answer is, of course, us. People. And it's probably the true one. Yet even among people there is an infinity of chances, and the question arises: why does this happen instead of that? Clifford Simak, one of the quality old-timers in the science-fiction business, here looks into some of the possibilities behind that "What?" and comes out with an uncommonly fascinating story. It is amazing to me how many changes this old pro (and when I say old, I mean exactly my age, and there are times when I can tell you that that means old, with bells on!) is able to ring on the standard science-fiction themes. He treats of some of the oldest in the business in the present story, mixing them in a brilliantly plotted and circumstantially vivid narrative that rates among his best, even including his famed "City" series. One of the reasons for the story's enduring quality is, I think, the care he has paid to the development of his hero, and another is the fact that it has a news background—and Cliff Simak has been a professional newspaperman for most of his life.

Simak was born, as I was, in 1904, majored in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, and has been City Editor of one of the Minneapolis-St. Paul dailies for many years. He lives in the nomenclaturally inspiring town of Excelsior, Minn., withhis charming family. He started writing science fiction (admittedly at first of a corny and juvenile type) almost thirty years ago (twenty-eight to be exact), and has kept at it intermittently ever since. Right now he is in one of his more productive phases, which is extremely fortunate for us, as the following tale will indicate.

After thirty years and several million words there finally came a day when he couldn't write a line.

There was nothing more to say. He had said it all.

The book, the last of many of them, had been finished weeks ago and would be published soon and there was an emptiness inside of him, a sense of having been completely drained away.

He sat now at the study window, waiting for the man from the news magazine to come, looking out across the wilderness of lawn, with its evergreens and birches and the gayness of the tulips. And he wondered why he cared that he would write no more, for certainly he had said a great deal more than most men in his trade and most of it more to the point than was usual, and cloaked though it was in fictional garb, he'd said it with sincerity and, he hoped, convincingly.

His place in literature was secure and solid. And, perhaps, he thought, this was the way it should be—to stop now at the floodtide of his art rather than to go into his declining years with the sharp tooth of senility nibbling away the bright valor of his work.

And yet there remained the urge to write, an inborn feeling that to fail to write was treachery, although to whom it might be traitorous he had no idea. And there was more to it than that: An injured pride, perhaps, and a sense of panic such as the newly blind must feel.

Although that was foolishness, he told himself. In his thirty years of writing, he had done a lifetime's work. And he'd made a good life of it. Not frivolous or exciting, but surely satisfying.

He glanced around the study and thought how a room must bear the imprint of the man who lives within it—the rows of calf-bound books, the decorous neatness of the massive oaken desk, the mellow carpet on the floor, the old chairs full of comfort, the sense of everything firmly and properly in place.

A knock came. "Come in," said Harrington.

The door opened and old Adams stood there, bent shoulders, snow-white hair—the perfect picture of the old retainer.

"It's the gentleman from Situation, sir."

"Fine," said Harrington. "Will you show him in?"

It wasn't fine—he didn't want to see this man from the magazine. But the arrangements had been made many weeks before and there was nothing now but to go through with it.

The man from the magazine looked more like a businessman than a writer, and Harrington caught himself wondering how such a man could write the curt, penetrating journalistic prose which had made Situation famous.

"John Leonard, sir," said the man, shaking hands with Harrington.

"I'm glad to have you here," said Harrington, falling into his pat pattern of hospitality. "Won't you take this chair? I feel I know you people down there. I've read your magazine for years. I always read the Harvey column immediately it arrives."

Leonard laughed a little. "Harvey," he said, "seems to be our best-known columnist and greatest attraction. All the visitors want to have a look at him."

He sat down in the chair Harrington had pointed out.

"Mr. White," he said, "sends you his best wishes."

"That is considerate of him," said Harrington. "You must thank him for me. It's been years since I have seen him."

And thinking back upon it, he recalled that he'd met Preston White only once, all of twenty years ago. The man, he remembered, had made a great impression upon him at the time—a forceful, driving, opinionated man, an exact reflection of the magazine he published.

"A few weeks ago," said Leonard, "I talked with another friend of yours. Senator Johnson Enright."

Harrington nodded. "I've^v known the senator for years and have admired him greatly. I suppose you could call it a dissimilar association. The senator and I are not too much alike."

"He has a deep respect and affection for you." "And I for him," said Harrington. "But this secretary of state business. I am concerned..." "Yes?"

"Oh, he's the man for it, all right," said Harrington, "or I would suppose he is. He is intellectually honest and he has a strange, hard streak of stubbornness and a rugged constitution, which is what we need. But there are considerations ..."

Leonard showed surprise. "Surely you do not..."

Harrington waved a weary hand. "No, Mr. Leonard, I am looking at it solely from the viewpoint of a man who has given most of his life to the public service. I know that Johnson must look upon this possibility with something close to dread. There have been times in the recent past when he's been ready to retire, when only his sense of duty has kept him at his post."

"A man," said Leonard positively, "does not turn down a chance to head the state department Besides, Harvey said last week he would accept the post."

"Yes, I know," said Harrington. "I read it in his column."

Leonard got down to business. "I won't impose too much upon your time," he said. "I've already done the basic research on you."

"It's quite all right," said Harrington. 'Take all the time you want. I haven't a single thing to do until this evening, when I have dinner with my mother."

Leonard's eyebrows raised a bit. "Your mother is still living?"

"Very spry," said Harrington, "for all she's eighty-three. A sort of Whistler's mother. Serene and beautiful."

"You're lucky. My mother died when I was still quite young."

"I'm sorry to hear of it," said Harrington. "My mother is a gentlewoman to her fingertips. You don't find many like her now. I am positive I owe a great deal of what I am to her. Perhaps the thing I'm proudest of is what your book editor, Cedric Madison, wrote about me quite some years ago. I sent a note to thank him at the time and I fully meant to look him up someday, although I never did. I'd like to meet the man."

"What was it that he said?"

"He said, if I recall correctly, that I was the last surviving gentleman."

"That's a good line," Leonard said. "I'll have to look it up. I think you might like Cedric. He may seem slightly strange at times, but he's a devoted man, like you. He lives in his office, almost day and night."

Leonard reached into his briefcase and brought out a sheaf of notes, rustling through them until he found the page he wanted.

"We'll do a full-length profile on you," he told Harrington. "A cover and an inside spread with pictures. I know a great deal about you, but there still are some questions, a few inconsistencies."

"I'm not sure I follow you."

"You know how we operate," said Leonard. "We do exhaustive checking to be sure we have the background facts, then we go out and get the human facts. We talk with our subject's boyhood chums, his teachers, all the people who might have something to contribute to a better understanding of the man himself. We visit the places he has lived, pick up the human story, the little anecdotes. It's a demanding job, but we pride ourselves on the way we do it."

"And rightly so, young man."

"I went to Wyalusing in Wisconsin," said the man from the magazine. "That's where the data said that you were born."

"A charming place as I remember it," said Harrington. "A little town, sandwiched between the river and the hills." "Mr. Harrington." "Yes?"

"You weren't born there." "I beg your pardon?"

"There's no birth record at the county seat. No one remembers you."

"Some mistake," said Harrington. "Or perhaps you're joking."

"You went to Harvard, Mr. Harrington. Class of '27." "That is right. I did." "You never married, sir." "There was a girl. She died." "Her name," said Leonard, "was Cornelia Storm." 'That was her name. The fact's not widely known." "We are thorough, Mr. Harrington, in,our background work."

"I don't mind," said Harrington. "It's not a thing to hide. It's just not a fact to flaunt." "Mr. Harrington." "Yes."

"It's not Wyalusing only. It's all the rest of it. There is no record that you went to Harvard. There never was a girl named Cornelia Storm."

Harrington came straight out of his chair.

"That is ridiculous!" he shouted. "What can you mean by it?"

"I'm sorry," Leonard said. "Perhaps I could have found a better way of telling you than blurting it all out. Is there anything—"

"Yes, there is," said Harrington. "I think you'd better leave."

"Is there nothing I can do? Anything at all?"

"You've done quite enough," said Harrington. "Quite enough, indeed."

He sat down in the chair again, gripping its arms with his shaking hands, listening to the man go out.

When he heard the front door close, he called to Adams to come in.

"Is there something I can do for you?" asked Adams. "Yes. You can tell me who I am."

"Why, sir," said Adams, plainly puzzled, "you're Mr. Hollis Harrington."

"Thank you, Adams," said Harrington. "That's who I thought I was!"

Dusk had fallen when he wheeled the car along the familiar street and drew up to the curb in front of the old, white-pillared house set well back from the front of wide, tree-shaded grounds.

He cut the engine and got out, standing for a moment to let the sense of the street soak into him—the correct and orderly, the aristocratic street, a refuge in this age of materialism. Even the cars that moved along it, he told himself, seemed to be aware of the quality of the street, for they went more slowly and more silently than they did on other streets and there was about them a sense of decorum one did not often find in a mechanical contraption.

He turned from the street and went up the walk, smelling in the dusk the awakening life of gardens in the springtime, and he wished that it were light, for Henry, his mother's gardener, was quite famous forhis tulips.

As he walked along the path, with the garden scent, he felt the strange sense of urgency and of panic drop away from him, for the street and house were in themselves assurances that everything was exactly as it should be.

He mounted the brick steps and went across the porch and reached out his hand for the knocker on the door.

There was a light in the sitting room and he knew his mother would be there, waiting for him to arrive, but that it would be Tilda, hurrying from the kitchen, who would answer to his knock, for his mother did not move about as briskly as she had.

He knocked and waited and as he waited he remembered the happy days he'd spent in this house before he'd gone to Harvard, when his father still was living. Some of the old families still lived here, but he'd not seen them for years, for on his visits lately he'd scarcely stirred outdoors, but sat for hours talking with his mother.

The door opened, and it was not Tilda in her rustling skirts and her white starched collar, but an utter stranger. "Good evening," he said. "You must be a neighbor." "I live here," said the woman.

"I can't be mistaken," said Harrington. "This is the residence of Mrs. Jennings Harrington."

"I'm sorry," said the woman. "I do not know the name. What was the address you were looking for?"

"2034 Summit Drive."

"That's the number," said the woman, "but Harrington —I know of no Harringtons. We've lived here fifteen years and there's never been a Harrington in the neighborhood."

"Madam," Harrington said, sharply, "this is most serious—"

The woman closed the door.

He stood on the porch for long moments after she had closed the door, once reaching out his hand to clang the knocker again, then withdrawing it. Finally he went back to the street.

He stood beside the car, looking at the house, trying to catch in it some unfamiliarity—but it was familiar. It was the house to which he'd come for years to see his mother; it was the house in which he'd spent his youth.

He opened the car door and slid beneath the wheel. He had trouble getting the key out of his pocket and his hand was shaking so that it took a long time for him to insert it in the ignition lock.

He twisted the key and the engine started. He did not, however, drive off immediately, but sat gripping the wheel. He kept staring at the house and his mind hurled back the fact again and yet again that strangers had lived behind its walls for more than fifteen years.

Where, then, were his mother and her faithful Tilda? Where, then, was Henry, who was a hand at tulips? Where the many evenings he had spent in that very house?" Where the conversations in the sitting room, with the birch and maple burning in the fireplace and the cat asleep upon the hearth?

There was a pattern, he was reminded—a deadly pattern —in all that had ever happened to him; in the way that he had lived, in the books that he had written, in the attachments he had had and, perhaps, more important, the ones he had not had. There was a haunting quality that had lurked behind the scenes, just out of sight, for years, and there had been many times he'd been aware of it and wondered at it and tried to lay his fingers on it—but never a time when he'd ever been quite so acutely aware of it as this very moment.

It was, he knew, this haunted factor in his life which kept him steady now, which kept him from storming up the walk again to hammer at the door and demand to see his mother.

He saw that he had stopped shaking, and he closed the window and put the car in gear.

He turned left at the next corner and began to climb, street after street.

He reached the cemetery in ten minutes' time and parked the car. He found the topcoat in the rear seat and put it on. For a moment, he stood beside the car and looked down across the town, to where the river flowed between the hills.

This, he told himself, at least is real, the river and the town. This no one could take away from him, or the books upon the shelf.

He let himself into the cemetery by the postern gate and followed the path unerringly in the uncertain light of a sickle moon.

The stone was there and the shape of it unchanged; it was a shape, he told himself, that was burned into his heart.,He knelt before it and put out his hands and laid them on it and felt the moss and lichens that had grown there and they were familiar, too.

"Cornelia," he said. "You are still here, Cornelia."

He fumbled in his pocket for a pack of matches and lit three of them before the fourth blazed up in a steady flame. He cupped the blaze between his hands and held it close against the stone.

A name was graven there. It was not Corneila Storm.

Senator Johnson Enright reached out and lifted the decanter.

"No, thanks," said Harrington. '"This one is all I wish. • I just dropped by to say hello. I'll be going in a minute."

He looked around the room in which they sat and now he was sure of it—sure of the thing that he had come to find. The study was not the same as he had remembered it. Some of the bright was gone, some of the glory vanished. It was faded at the edges and it seemed slightly out of focus and the moose head above the mantel was somehow just a little shabby, instead of grand and noble.

"You come too seldom," said the senator, "even when you know that you are always welcome. Especially tonight. The family are all out and I'm a troubled man."

"This business of the state department?"

Enright nodded. "That is it exactly. I told the President, yes, I would take it if he could find no one else. I almost pleaded with him to find another man."

"You could not tell him no?"

"I tried to," said the senator. "I did my best to tell him. I, who never in my life have been at a loss for words. And I couldn't do it. Because I was too proud. Because through the years I have built up in me a certain pride of service that I cannot turn my back upon."

The senator sat sprawling in his chair and Harrington saw that there was no change in him, as there had been in the room within which they sat. He was the same as ever— the iron-gray unruly mop of hair, the woodchopper face, the snaggly teeth, the hunched shoulders of a grizzly.

"You realize, of course," said Enright, "that I have been one of your most faithful readers."

"I know," said Harrington. "I am proud of it."

"You have a fiendish ability," said the senator, "to string words together with fishhooks hidden in them. They fasten into you and they won't let loose and you go around remembering them for days."

He lifted up his glass and drank.

"I've never told you this before," he said. "I don't know if I should, but I suppose I'd better. In one of your books you said that the hallmark of destiny might rest upon one man. If that man failed, you said, the world might well be lost."

"I think I did say that. I have a feeling..." "You're sure," asked the senator, reaching for the brandy, "that you won't have more of this?" "No, thanks," said Harrington.

And suddenly he was thinking of another time and place where he'd once gone drinking and there had been a shadow in the corner that had talked with him—and it was the first time he'd ever thought of that. It was something, it seemed, that had never happened, that could not remotely have happened to Hollis Harrington. It was a happening that he would not—could not—accept, and yet there it lay, cold and naked in his brain.

"I was going to tell you," said the senator, "about that line on destiny. A most peculiar circumstance, I think you will agree. You know, of course, that one time I had de- cided to retire."

"I remember it," said Harrington. "I recall I told you that you should."

"It was at that time," said the senator, "that I read that paragraph of yours. I had written out a statement announcing my retirement at the completion of my term and intended in the morning to give it to the press. Then I read that line and asked myself what if I were that very man you were writing of. Not, of course, that I actually thought I was."

Harrington stirred uneasily. "I don't know what to say. You place too great a responsibility upon me."

"I did not retire," said the senator. "I tore up the statement."

They sat quietly for a moment, staring at the fire flaming on the hearth.

"And now," said Enright, "there is this other thing."

"I wish that I could help," said Harrington, almost desperately. "I wish that I could find the proper words to say. But I can't, because I'm at the end myself. I am written out. There's nothing left inside me."

And that was not, he knew, what he had wished to say. / came here to tell you that someone else has been living in my mother's house for more than fifteen years, that the name on Cornelia's headstone is not Cornelia's name. I came here to see if this room had changed and it has changed. It has lost some of its old baronial magic....

But he could not say it. There was no way to say it. Even to so close a friend as the senator it was impossible.

"Hollis, I am sorry," said the senator.

It was all insane, thought Harrington. He was Hollis Harrington. He had been born i» Wisconsin. He was a graduate of Harvard and—what was it Cedric Madison had called him—the last surviving gentleman.

His life had been correct to the last detail, his house correct, his writing most artistically correct—the result of good breeding to the fingertips.

, Perhaps just slightly too correct. Too correct for this world of 1982, which had sloughed off the final vestige of the old punctilio.

He was Hollis Harrington, last surviving gentleman, famous writer, romantic figure in the literary world—and written out, wrung dry of all emotion, empty of anything to say since he had finally said all that he was capable of saying.

He rose slowly from his chair.

"I must be going, Johnson. I've stayed longer than I should."

"There is something else," said the senator. "Something I've always meant to ask you. Nothing to do with this matter of myself. I've meant to ask you many times, but felt perhaps I shouldn't, that it might somehow..."

"It's quite all right," said Harrington. "I'll answer if I can."

"One of your early books," said the senator, "A Bone to Gnaw, I think."

"That," said Harrington, "was many years ago."

"This central character," said the senator. "This Neanderthaler that you wrote about. You made him seem so human."

Harrington nodded. "That is right. That is what he was. He was a human being. Just because he lived a hundred thousand years ago—"

"Of course," said the senator. "You are entirely right. But you had him down so well. All your other characters have been sophisticates, people of the world. I have often wondered how you could write so convincingly of that kind of man—an almost mindless savage."

"Not mindless," said Harrington. "Not really savage. A product of his times. I lived with him for a long time, Johnson, before I wrote about him. I tried to put myself into his situation, think as he did, guess his viewpoint. I knew his fears and triumphs. There were times, I sometimes think, that I was close to being him."

Enright nodded solemnly. "I can well believe that. You really must be going? You're sure about that drink?"

"I'm sorry, Johnson. I have a long way to drive."

The senator heaved himself out of the chair and walked with him to the door.

"We'll talk again," he said, "and soon. About this writing business. I can't believe you're at the end of it."

"Maybe not," said Harrington. "It may all come back."

But he only said it to satisfy the senator. He knew there was no chance that it would come back.

They said good night and Harrington went trudging down the walk. And that was wrong—in all his life, he'd never trudged before.

His car was parked just opposite the gate and he stopped beside it, staring in astonishment, for it was not his car.

His had been an expensive, dignified model, and this one was not only one of the less expensive kinds, but noticeably decrepit.

And yet it was familiar in a vague and tantalizing way.

And here it was again, but with a difference this time, for in this instance he was on the verge of accepting unreality.

He opened the door and climbed into the seat. He reached into his pocket and found the key and fumbled for the ignition lock. He found it in the dark and the key clicked into it. He twisted, and the engine started.

Something came struggling up from the mist inside his brain. He could feel it struggle and he knew what it was. It was Hollis Harrington, final gentleman.

He sat there for a moment and in that moment he was neither final gentleman nor the man who sat in the ancient car, but a younger man and a far-off man who was drunk and miserable.

He sat in a booth in the farthest, darkest corner of some unknown establishment that was filled with noise and smell and in a corner of the booth that was even darker than the corner where he sat was another one, who talked.

He tried to see the stranger's face, but it either was too dark or there was no face to see. And all the time the faceless stranger talked.

There were papers on the table, a fragmented manuscript, and he knew it was no good and he tried to tell the stranger how it was no good and how he wished it might be good, but his tongue was thick and his throat was choked.

He couldn't frame the words to say it, but he felt it inside himself—the terrible, screaming need of putting down on paper the conviction and belief that shouted for expression.

And he heard clearly only one thing that the stranger said. "I am willing," said the stranger, "to make a deal with you."

And that was all there was. There was no more to remember.

And there it stood—that ancient, fearsome thing—an isolated remembrance from some former life, an incident without a past or future and no connection with him.

The night suddenly was chilly and he shivered in the chill. He put the car in gear and pulled out from the curb and drove slowly down the street.

He drove for half an hour or more and he was still shiv-
ering from the chilly night. A cup of coffee, he thought,
might warm him and he pulled the car up to the curb in
front of an all-night quick-and-greasy. And realized with
some astonishment that he could not be more than a mile or
two from home. •

There was no one in the place except a shabby blonde who lounged behind the counter, listening to a radio.

He climbed up on a stool;

"Coffee, please," he said and while he waited for her to fill the cup he glanced about the place. It was clean and cozy with the cigarette machines and the rack of magazines lined against the wall.

The blonde set the cup down in front of him.

"Anything else?" she asked, but he didn't answer, for his eye had caught a line of printing across the front of one of the more lurid magazines.

"Is that all?" asked the blonde again.

"I guess so," said Harrington. "I guess that's all I want."

He didn't look at her; he was still staring at the magazine.

Across the front of it ran the glaring lines:

THE ENCHANTED WORLD OF HOLLIS HARRINGTON!

Cautiously he slid off the stool and stalked the magazine. He reached out quickly and snatched it from the rack before it could elude him. For he had the feeling, until he had it safely in his hand, that the magazine would be like all the rest of it, crazy and unreal.

He took it back to the counter and laid it down and stared at the cover and the line stayed there. It did not change; it did not go away. He extended his thumb and rubbed the printed words and they were real enough.

He thumbed swiftly through the magazine and found the article and staring out at him was a face he knew to be his own, although it was not the kind of face he had imagined he would have—it was a somewhat younger, darker face that tended to untidiness, and beneath that face was another face that was without a doubt a face of great distinction. And the caption that ran between them asked a question: Which one of these men is really Hollis Harrington?

There was as well a picture of a house that he recognized in all its ramshackleness and below it another picture of the same house, but highly idealized, gleaming with white paint and surrounded by neatly tended grounds—a house with character.

He did not bother with the reading of the caption that ran between the houses. He knew what it would say.

And the text of the article itself:

Is Hollis Harrington really more than one man? Is he in actuality the man he thinks he is, a man he has created out of his own mind, a man who moves in an incredibly enchanted world of good living and good manners? Or is this attitude no more than a carefully cultivated pose, an exceptional piece of perfect showmanship? Or could it be that to write in the manner that he does, to turn out the sleekly tailored, thoughtful, often significant prose that he has been writing for more than thirty years, it is necessary that he create for himself another life than the one he really lives, that he has forced himself to accept this strange internal world of his and believe in it as a condition to his continued writing....

A hand came out and spread itself across the page so he could not read and* he looked up quickly. It was the hand of the waitress and he saw there wsas a shining in her eyes that was very close to tears. "Mr. Harrington," she said. "Please, Mr. Harrington. Please don't read it, sir." "But, miss..."

"I told Harry that he shouldn't let them put in that magazine. I told him he should hide it. But he said you never came in here except on Saturdays."

"You mean," asked Harrington, "that I've been here before?"

"Almost every Saturday," she told him, surprised. "Every Saturday for years. You like our cherry pie. You always have a piece of our cherry pie."

"Yes, of course," he said.

But, actually, he had no inkling of this place, unless, good God, he thought, unless he had been pretending all the time that it was some other place, some gold-plated eatery of very great distinction.

But it was impossible, he told himself, to pretend as big as that. For a little while, perhaps, but not for thirty years. No man alone could do it unless he had some help.

"I had forgotten," he told the waitress. "I'm somewhat upset tonight. I wonder if you have a piece of that cherrv pie."

"Of course," the waitress said.

She took the pie off the shelf and cut a wedge and slid it
on the plate. She put the plate down in front of him and
laid a fork beside it. i

"I'm sorry, Mr. Harrington," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't hide the magazine. You must pay no attention to it —or to anything. Not to any of the things that people say or what other people write. All of us around here are so proud of you."

She leaned across the counter toward him.

"You mustn't mind," she said. "You are too big to mind."

"I don't believe I do," said Hollis Harrington.

And that was the solemn truth, for he was too numb to care. There was in him nothing but a vast wonderment that filled his being so there was room for nothing else.

"I am willing," the stranger in the corner of the booth had told him many years ago. T am willing to make a deal with you."

But of the deal he had no recollection, no hint of terms or of the purpose of it, although possibly he could guess.

He had written for all of thirty years and he had been well paid for it—not in cash and honor and acclaim alone—but in something else as well. In a great white house standing on a hill with a wilderness of grounds, with an old retainer out of a picture book, with a Whistler's mother, with a romantic bittersweetness tied to a gravestone symbol.

But now the job was done and the pay had stopped and the make-believe had ended.

The pay had stopped and the delusions that were a part of it were gone. The glory and the tinsel had been stripped out of his mind. No longer could he see an old and battered car as a sleek, glossy machine. Now, once again, he could read aright the graving on a stone. And the dream of a Whistler's mother had vanished from his brain—but had been once so firmly planted that on this very evening he actually had driven to a house and an address that was a duplicate of the one imprinted on his imagination.

He had seen everything, he realized, overlain by a grandeur and a luster out of story books.

But was it possible, he wondered. Could it be made to work? Could a man in all sanity play a game of make-believe for thirty years on end? Or might he be insane?

He considered it calmly and it seemed unlikely, for no insanity could have written as he had written; that he had written what he thought he had was proved by the senator's remarks tonight.

So the rest had been make-believe; it could be nothing else. Make-believe with help from that faceless being, whoever he might be, who had made a deal with him that night so long ago.

Although, he thought, it might not take much help. The propensity to kid one's self was strong in the human race. Children were good at it; they became in all reality all the

he have actual talent or had he merely written the thoughts that lay in other minds? Had he had help in writing as well as in pretending? Might that be the reason now he felt so written out?

But however that might be, it was all over now. He had done the job and he had been fired. And the firing of him had been as efficient and as thorough as one might well expect—all the mumbo-jumbo had been run in competent reverse, beginning with the man from the magazine this morning. Now here he sat, a humdrum human being perched upon a stool, eating cherry pie.

How many other humdrum humans might have sat, as he sat now, in how many ages past, released from their dream-life as he' had been released, trying with no better luck than he was having to figure out what had hit them? How many others, even now, might still be living out a life of make-believe as he had lived for thirty years until this very day?

For it was ridiculous, he realized, to suppose he was the only one. There would simply be no point in running a one-man make-believe.

How many eccentric geniuses had been, perhaps, neither geniuses nor eccentric until they, too, had sat in some darkened corner with a faceless being and listened to his offer?

Suppose—just suppose—that the only purpose in his thirty years had been that Senator Johnson Enright should not retire from public life and thus remain available to head the state department now? Why, and to whom, could it be so important that one particular man get a certain post? And was it important enough to justify the use of one man's life to achieve another's end?

Somewhere, Harrington told himself, there had to be a clue. Somewhere back along the tangled skein of those thirty years there must be certain signposts which would point the way to the man or thing or organization, whatever it might be.

He felt dull anger stirring in him, a formless, senseless, almost hopeless anger that had no direction and no focal point.

A man came in the door and took a stool one removed from Harrington.

"Hi, Gladys," he bellowed.

Then he noticed Harrington and smote him on the back. "Hi, there, pal," he trumpeted. "Your name's in the paper."

"Quiet down, Joe," said Gladys. "What is it that you want?"

"Gimme a hunk of apple pie and a cuppa coffee."

The man, Harrington saw, was big and hairy. He wore a Teamsters badge.

"You said something about my name being in the paper."

Joe slapped down a folded paper.

"Right there on the front page.'The story there with your picture in it."

He pointed a grease-stained finger. ,

"Hot off the press," he yelped and burst into gales of laughter.

"Thanks," said Harrington.

"Well, go ahead and read it," Joe urged boisterously. "Or ain't you interested?" "Definitely," said Harrington. The headline said:

NOTED AUTHOR WILL RETIRE

"So you're quitting," blared the driver. "Can't say I blame you, pal. How many books you written?" -"Fourteen," said Harrington.

"Gladys, can you imagine that! Fourteen books! I ain't even read that many books in my entire life...."

"Shut up, Joe," said Gladys, banging down the pie and coffee.

The story said:

Hollis Harrington, author of See My Empty House, which won him the Nobel prize, will retire from the writing field with the publication of his latest work, Come Back, My SouL

The announcement will be made in this week's issue of Situation Magazine, under the byline of Cedric Madison, book editor.

Harrington feels, Madison writes, that he has finally, in his forthcoming book, rounded out the thesis which he commenced some thirty years and thirteen books ago....

Harrington's hand closed convulsively upon the paper,
crumpling it. i

"Wassa matter, pal?" "Not a thing," said Harrington.

"This Madison is a jerk," said Joe. "You can't believe a thing he says. He is full of..."

"He's right," said Harrington. "I'm afraid he's right."

But how could he have known? he asked himself. How could Cedric Madison, that queer, devoted man who practically lived in his tangled office, writing there his endless stream of competent literary criticism, have known a thing like this? Especially, Harrington told himself, since he,' himself, had not been sure of it until this very morning.

"Don't you like your pie?" asked Joe. "And your coffee's getting cold."

"Leave him alone," said Gladys, fiercely. "I'll warm up his coffee."

Harrington said to Joe, "Would you mind if I took this paper?"

"Sure not, pal. I'm through with it Sports is all I read." "Thanks," said Harrington. "I have a man to see."

The lobby of the Situation building was empty and sparkling—the bright, efficient sparkle that was the trademark of the magazine and the men who made it

The twelve-foot globe, encased in its circular glass shield, spun slowly and majestically, with the time-zone clocks ranged around its base and with the keyed-in world situation markers flashing on its surface.

Harrington stopped just inside the door and glanced around, bewildered and disturbed by the brightness and the glitter. Slowly he oriented himself. Over there the elevators and beside them the floor directory board. There the information counter, now unoccupied, and just beyond it the door that was marked:

HARVEY

Visiting Hours 9 to 5 on Week Days

Harrington crossed to the directory and stood there, craning his neck, searching for the name. And found it.

CEDRIC MADISON 317

He turned from the board and pressed the button for the elevator.

On the third floor the elevator stopped and he got out of it and to his right was the newsroom and to his left a line of offices flanking a long hall.

He turned to the left and 317 was the third one down. The door was open and he stepped inside. A man sat behind a desk stacked high with books, while other books were piled helter-skelter on the floor, and still others bulged with shelves upon the walls.

"Mr. Madison?" asked Harrington and the man looked up from the book that he was reading.

And suddenly Harrington was back again in that smoky, shadowed booth where long ago he'd bargained with the faceless being—but no longer faceless. He knew by the aura of the man and the sense of him, the impelling force of personality, the disquieting, obscene feeling that was a kind of psychic spoor.

"Why, Harrington!" cried the faceless man, who now had taken on a face. "How nice that you dropped in! It's incredible that the two of us..."

"Yes, isn't it," said Harrington.

He scarcely knew he said it. It was, he realized, an automatic thing to say, a putting up of hands to guard against a blow, a pure and simple defense mechanism.

Madison was on his feet now and coming around the desk to greet him, and if he could have turned and run, Harrington would have fled. But he couldn't run; he was struck and frozen; he could make no move at all beyond the automatic ones of austere politeness that had been drilled into him through thirty years of simulated aristocratic living.

He could feel his face, all stiff and dry with the urbane deadpan that he had affected—and he was grateful for it, for he knew that it would never do to show in any way that he had recognized the man.

"It's incredible that the two of us have never met," said Madison. "I've read so much of what you've written and liked so much everything I've read."

"It's good of you to say so," said the urbane, unruffled part of Harrington, putting out his hand. "The fault we have never met is entirely mine. I do not get around as much as I really should."

He felt Madison's hand inside his own and closed his fingers on it in a sense of half-revulsion, for the hand was dry and cold and very like a claw. The man was¹ vulture-like—the tight, dessicated skin drawn tight across the death's-head face, the piercing, restless eyes, the utter lack of hair, the knifelike slash of mouth.

"You must sit down," said Madison, "and spend some time with me. There are so many things we have to talk about."

There was just one empty chair; all the others overflowed with books. Harrington sat down in it stiffly, his mouth still dry with fear.

Madison scurried back behind the desk and hunched forward in his chair.

"You look just like your pictures," he declared.

Harrington shrugged. "I have a good photographer—my publisher insists."

He could feel himself slowly coming back to life, recovering from the numbness, the two of them flowing back together into the single man.

"It seems to me," he said, "that you have the advantage of me there. I cannot recall I've ever seen your picture."

Madison waved a waggish finger at him. "I am anonymous," he said. "Surely you must know all editors are faceless. They must not intrude themselves upon the public consciousness."

"That's a fallacy, no doubt," Harrington declared, "but since you seem to value it so much, I will not challenge you."

And he felt a twinge of panic—the remark about editorial facelessness seemed too pat to be coincidental.

"And now that you've finally come to see me," Madison was saying, "I fear it may be in regard to an item in the morning papers."

"As a matter of fact," Harrington said smoothly, "that is why I'm here."

"I hope you're not too angry."

Harrington shook his head. "Not at all. In fact, I came
to thank you for your help in making up my mind. I had
considered it, you see. It was something I told myself I
should do, but..." \

"But you were worried about an implied responsibility. To your public, perhaps; perhaps even to yourself."

"Writers seldom quit," said Harrington. "At least not voluntarily. It didn't seem quite cricket."

"But it was obvious," protested Madison. "It seemed so appropriate a thing for you to do, so proper and so called-for, that I could not resist. I confess I may have wished somewhat to influence you. You've tied up so beautifully what you set out to say so many years ago in this last book of yours that it would be a shame to spoil it by attempting to say more. It would be different, of course, if you had need of money from continued writing, but your royalties—"

"Mr. Madison, what would you have done, if I had protested?"

"Why, then," said Madison, "I would have made the most abject apology in the public prints. I would have set it all aright in the best manner possible."

He got up from the desk and scrabbled at a pile of books stacked atop a chair.

"I have a review copy of your latest book right here," he said. 'There are a few things in it I'd like to chat about with you."

He's a clue, thought Harrington, watching him scrabble through the books—but that was all he was. There was more, Harrington was sure, to this business, whatever it might be, than Cedric Madison.

He must get out of here, he knew, as quickly as he could, and yet it must be done in such a manner as not to arouse suspicion. And while he remained, he sternly warned himself, he must play his part as the accomplished man of letters, the final gendeman.

"Ah, here it isl" cried Madison in triumph.

He scurried to the desk, with the book clutched in his hand.

He leafed through it rapidly.

"Now, here, in chapter six, you said..."

The moon was setting when Harrington drove through the massive gates and up the curving driveway to the white and stately house perched upon its hill.

He got out of the car and mounted the broad stone steps that ran up to the house. When he reached the top, he halted to gaze down the moon-shadowed slope of grass and tulips, whitened birch and darkened evergreen, and he thought it was the sort of thing a man should see more often—a breathless moment of haunting beauty snatched from the cycle that curved from birth to death.

He stood there, proudly, gazing down the slope, letting the moonlit beauty, the etching of the night soak into his soul.

This, he told himself, was one of those incalculable moments of experience which one could not anticipate, or afterwards be able to evaluate or analyze.

He heard the front door open, and slowly turned around.

Old Adams stood in the doorway, his figure outlined by the night lamp on the table in the hall. His snow-white hair was ruffled, standing like a halo round his head, and one frail hand was clutched against his chest, holding together the ragged dressing gown he wore.

"You are late, sir," said Adams. "We were growing a bit disturbed."

"I am sorry," said Harrington. "I was considerably delayed."

He mounted the stoop and Adams stood aside as he went through the door.

"You're sure that eveiything's all right, sir?"

"Oh, quite all right," said Harrington. "I called on Cedric Madison down at Situation. He proved a charming chap."

"If it is all right with you, sir, I'll go back to bed. Knowing you are safely in, I can get some sleep."

"It's quite all right," said Harrington. "Thanks for waiting up."

He stood at the study door and watched Adams trudge slowly up the stairs, then went into the study, turning on the lights.

The place closed in around him with the old familiarity, with the smell of comfort and the sense of being home, and he stood gazing at the rows of calf-bound books, and the ordered desk, the old and homelike chairs, the worn, mellow carpet.

He shrugged out of his topcoat and tossed it on a chair and became aware of the folded paper bulging in his jacket pocket.

Puzzled, he pulled it out and held it in front of him and the headline hit him in the face.

The room changed, a swift and subtle changing. No longer the ordered sanctuary, but a simple workroom for a writing man. No longer the calf-bound volumes in all their elegance upon the shelves, but untidy rows of tattered, dog-eared books. And the carpet was neither worn nor mellow; it was utilitarian and almost brand new.

"My God!" gasped Harrington, ahnost prayerfully.

He could feel the perspiration breaking out, along his forehead and his hands suddenly were shaking and his knees like water.

For he had changed as well as the room had changed; the room had changed because of the change, in him.

He was no longer the final gentleman, but that other, more real person he had been this evening. He was himself again; had been jerked back to himself again, he knew, by the headlines in the paper.

He glanced around the room and knew that it finally was right, that all its starkness was real, that this had been the way the room had always been, even when he had made it into something more romantic.

He had found himself this very evening after thirty years and then—he sweat as he thought about it—and then he had lost himself again, easily and without knowing it, without a twitch of strangeness.

He had gone to see Cedric Madison, with this very paper clutched within his hand, had gone without clear purpose— almost, he told himself, as if he were being harried there.

And he had been harried for too long. He had been harried into seeing a room different than it was; he had been made to read a myth-haunted name upon a strange gravestone; he had been deluded into tlnnking that he had supper often with a mother who had long been dead; he had been forced to imagine that a common quick-and-greasy was a famous eatery—and, of course, much more than that.

It was humiliating to think upon, but there was more than mere humiliation—there was a method and a purpose and now it was important, most immediately important, to learn that method and that purpose.

He dropped the paper on the floor and went to the liquor cabinet and got a bottle and a glass. He sloshed liquor in the glass and gulped it

You had to find a place to start, he told himself, and you worked along from there—and Cedric Madison was a starting point, although he was not the whole of it. No more, perhaps, than a single clue, but at least a starting point.

He had gone to see Cedric Madison and the two of them had sat and talked much longer than he planned, and somewhere in that talk he'd slid smoothly back into the final gentleman.

He tried to drive his mind and memory along the pathway of those hours, seeking for some break, hunting for the moment he had changed, but there was nothing. It ironed out flat and smooth.

But somewhere he had changed, or more likely had been changed, back into the masquerade that had been forced upon him long years in the past.

And what would be the motive of that masquerade? What would be the reason in changing a man's life, or, more probably, the lives of many men?

A sort of welfare endeavor, perhaps. A matter of rampant do-goodism, an expression of the itch to interfere in other people's lives.

Or was there here a conscious, well-planned effort to change the course of world events, to so alter the destiny of mankind as to bring about some specific end-result? That would mean that whoever, or whatever, was responsible possessed a sure method of predicting the future, and the ability to pick out the key factors in the present which must be changed in order effectively to change that future in the desired direction.

From where it stood upon the desk the phone snarled vi: ciously.

He swung around in terror, frightened at the sound. The phone snarled a second time. He strode to the desk and answered. It was the senator. ■ "Good," said the senator. "I did not get you up." "No. I was just getting ready to turn in. "You heard the news, of course."

"On the radio," said Harrington. "The White House called ..." "And you had to take it." "Yes, of course, but then.. ."

There was a gulping, breathing sound at the other end as if the senator were on the verge of strangling. "What's the matter, Johnson? What is going—" 'Then," said the senator, "I had a visitor." Harrington waited.

"Preston White," said the senator. "You know him, of course."

"Yes. The publisher of Situation."

"He was conspiratorial," said the senator. "And a shade dramatic. He talked in whispers and very confidentially. As if the two of us were in some sort of deal."

"But what—"

"He offered me," said the senator, almost strangling with rage, "the exclusive use of Harvey—"

Harrington interrupted, without knowing why—almost as if he feared to let the senator go on.

"You know," he said, "I can remember, many years ago—I was just a lad—when Harvey was installed down in the Situation office."

And he was surprised at how well he could remember it —the great hurrah of fanfare. Although at that time, he recalled, no one had put too much credence in the matter, for Situation was then notorious for its circulation stunts. But it was different now. Almost everyone read the Harvey column and even in the most learned of circles it was quoted as authority.

"Harvey!" spat the senator. "A geared-up calculator! A mechanical predictor!"

And that was it, Harrington thought wildly. That was the very thing for which he had been groping!

For Harvey was a predictor. He predicted every week and the magazine ran a column of the predictions he spewed out.

"White was most persuasive," said the senator. "He was

very buddy-buddy. He placed Harvey at my complete disposal. He said that he would let me see all the predictions that he made immediately he made them and that he'd withhold from publication any that I wished."

"It might be a help, at that," said Harrington.

For Harvey was good. Of that there was no question. Week after week he called the shots exactly, right straight down the line.

"I'll have none of it!" yelled the senator. "I'll have no part of Harvey. He is the worst thing that could have happened so far as public opinion is concerned. The human race is entirely capable, in its own good judgment, of accepting or rejecting the predictions of any human punditi But our technological society has developed a conditioning factor that accepts the infallability of machines. It would seem to me that Situation, in using an analytical computer, humanized by the name of Harvey, to predict the trend of world events, is deliberately preying upon public gullibility. And I'll have no part of it. I will not be tarred with—"

"I knew White was for you," said Harrington. "I knew he favored your appointment, but—"

"Preston White," said the senator, "is a dangerous man. Any powerful man is a dangerous man, and in our time the man who is in a position to mold public opinion is the most powerful of them all. I can't afford to be associated with him in any way at all. Here I stand, a man of some forty years of service, without, thank God, a single smudge upon me. What would happen to me if someone came along and pegged this man White—but good? How would I stand then?"

"They almost had him pegged," said Harrington, "that time years ago when the congressional committee investigated him. As I remember, much of the testimony at that time had to do with Harvey."

"Hollis," said the senator, "I don't know why I trouble you. I don't know why I phoned you. Just to blow off steam, I guess."

"I am glad you did," said Harrington. "What do you intend to do?"

"I don't know," said the senator. T threw White out, of course, so my hands theoretically are clean, but it's all gone sour on me. I have a vile taste in my mouth."

"Sleep on it," said Harrington. "You'll know better in the morning."

"Thanks, Hollis, I think I will," said the senator. "Good night."

Harrington put up the phone and stood stiff beside the desk.

For now it all was crystal clear. Now he knew without a doubt exactly who it was that had wanted Enright in the state department.

It was precisely the kind of thing, he thought, one could expect of White.

He could not imagine how it had been done—but if there had been a way to do it, White would have been the one to ferret out that way.

He'd engineered it so that Enright, by reading a line out of a book, had stayed in public life until the proper time had come for him to head the state department.

And how many other men, howmany other situations, stood as they did tonight because of the vast schemings of one Preston White?

He saw the paper on the floor and picked it up and looked at the headline, then threw it down again.

They had tried to get rid of him, he thought, and it would have been all right if he'd just wandered off like an old horse turned out to pasture, abandoned and forgotten. Perhaps all the others had done exactly that. But in getting rid of him, in getting rid of anyone, they must have been aware of a certain danger. The only safe and foolproof way would have been to keep him on, to let him go on living as the final gentleman until his dying day.

Why had they not done that? Was it possible, for example, that there were limitations on the project, that the operation, whatever its purpose, had a load capacity that was now crammed to its very limit? So that, before they could take on someone else, they must get rid of him?

If that were true, it very well could be there was a spot here where they were vulnerable.

And yet another thing, a vague remembrance from that congressional hearing of some years ago—a sentence and a picture carried in the papers at the time. The picture of a very, puzzled man, one of the top technicians who had assembled Harvey, sitting in the witness chair and saying: "But, senator, I tell, you no analytical computer can be anywhere near as good as they claim Harvey is."

And it might mean something and it might not, Harrington told himself, but it was something to remember, it was a hope to which to cling.

Most astonishing, he thought placidly, how a mere machine could take the place of thinking man. He had commented on that before, with some asperity, in one of his books—he could not recall which one. As Cedric Madison had said this very evening ...

He caught himself in time.

In some dim corner of his brain an alarm was ringing, and he dived for the folded paper he had tossed onto the floor.

He found it, and the headline screamed at him and the books lost their calf-bound elegance and the carpeting regained its harsh newness, and he was himself once more.

He knelt, sobbing, on the floor, the paper clutched in a shaky hand.

No change, he thought, no warning!

And a crumpled paper the only shield he had. |

But a powerful shield, he thought.

Try it again! he screamed at Harvey. Go ahead and try!

Harvey didn't try.

If it had been Harvey. And, he told himself, of course he didn't know.

Defenseless, he thought, except for a folded paper with a headline set in 18-point caps.

. Defenseless, with a story that no one would believe even
if he told it to them. _v

Defenseless, with thirty years of eccentricity to make his every act suspect.

He searched his mind for help and there was no help. The police would not believe him and he had few friends to help, for in thirty years he had made few friends.

There was the senator—but the senator had troubles of his own.

And there was something else—there was a certain weapon that could be used against him. Harvey only had to wait until he went to sleep. For if he went to sleep, there was no doubt he'd wake the final gentleman and more than likely then remain the final gentleman, even more firmly the final gentleman than he'd ever been before. For if they got him now, they'd never let him go.

He wondered, somewhat 'vaguely, why he should fight against it so. The last thirty years had not been so bad; the way they had been passed would not be a bad way, he admitted, being honest with himself, to live out the years that he had left in him.

But the thought revolted him as an insult to his very humanness. He had a right to be himself, perhaps even an obligation to remain himself, and he felt a deep-banked anger at the arrogance that would make him someone else.

The issue was straightly drawn, he knew. Two facts were crystal clear: Whatever he did, he must do himself; he must expect no help. And he must do it now before he needed sleep.

He clambered to his feet, with the paper in his hand, squared his shoulders and turned toward the door. But at the door he halted, for a sudden, terrible truth had occurred to him.

Once he left the house and went out into the darkness, he would be without his shield. In the darkness the paper would be worthless since he would not be able to read the headline. He glanced at his watch and it was just after three.

There were still three hours of darkness and he couldn't wait three hours.

He needed time, he thought. He must somehow buy some time. Within the next few hours he must in some way manage to smash or disable Harvey. And while that, he admitted to himself, might not be the whole answer, it would give him time.

He stood beside the door and the thought came to him that he might be wrong—that it might not be Harvey or Madison or White. He had put it all together in his mind and now he'd managed to convince himself. He might, he realized, have hypnotized himself almost as effectively as Harvey or someone else had hypnotized him thirty years ago.

Although probably it had not been hypnotism.

But whatever it might be, he realized, it was a bootless thing to try to thresh out now. There were more immediate problems that badly needed solving.

First of all he must devise some other sort of shield. Defenseless, he'd never reach the door of the Situation lobby.

Association, he thought—some sort of association—some way of reminding himself of who and what he was. Like a string around his finger, like a jingle in his brain.

The study door came open and old Adams stood there, clutching his ragged robe together.

"I heard someone talking, sir."

"It was I," said Harrington. "On the telephone."

"I thought, perhaps," said Adams, "someone had dropped in. Although it's an unearthly time of night for anyone to call."

Harrington stood silent, looking at old Adams, and he felt some of his grimness leave him—for Adams was the same, Adams had not changed. He was the only thing of truth in the entire pattern.

"If you will pardon me," said Adams, "you shirt tail's hanging out."

"Thanks," said Harrington. "I hadn't noticed. Thanks for telling me."

"Perhaps you had better get on to bed, sir. It is rather late."

"I will," said Harrington, "in just another minute."

He listened to the shuffling of old Adams' slippers going down the hall and began tucking in his shirt tb.il.

And suddenly it struck him: Shirt tails—they'd be better than a string I

For anyone would wonder, even the final gentleman would wonder, why his shirt tails had a knot in them.

He stuffed the paper in his jacket pocket and tugged the shirt tails entirely free. He had to loosen several buttons before there was cloth enough to make a satisfactory knot

He made it good and hard, a square knot so it wouldn't slip, and tight enough so that it would have to be untied before he took off the shirt.

And he composed a silly line that went with the knotted shirt tails:

/ tie this knot because I'm not the final gentleman.

He went out of the house and down the steps and around the house to the shack where the garden tools were kept.

He lighted matches until he found the maul that he was looking for. With it in his hand, he went back to the car.

And all the time he kept repeating to himself the line:

/ tie this knot, because I'm not the final gentleman.

The Situation lobby was as brilliant as he remembered it and as silent and deserted and he headed for the door that said harvey on it.

He had expected that it would be locked, but it wasn't, and he went through it and closed it carefully behind him.

He was on a narrow catwalk that ran in a circle, with the waH behind him and the railing out in front. And down in the pit circled by the catwalk was something that could be only Harvey.

Hello, son, it said, or seemed to say, inside his brain.

Hello, son. I'm glad that you've come home again.

He stepped forward to the railing eagerly and leaned the maul against it and gripped the railing with both hands to stare down into the pit, enveloped in the feel of father-love that welled up from the thing that squatted in the pit —the old-pipe, tweed-coat, grizzled-whisker love he'd forgotten long ago.

A lump came in his throat and tears smarted in his eyes and he forgot the barren street outside and all the lonely years.

The love kept welling up—the love and understanding and the faint amusement that he should have expected anything but love from an entity to which he had been tied so intimately for all of thirty years.

You did a good job, son. I am proud of you. Tm glad that you've come home to me again.

He leaned across the railing, yearning toward the father squatting in the pit, and one of the rails caught against the knotted shirt tail and shoved it hard against his belly.

Reflexes clicked within his brain and he said, almost .automatically: / tie this knot because I'm not...

And then he was saying it consciously and with fervor, like a magic chant.

I tie this knot because I'm not the final gentleman. I tie this knot because I'm not... He was shouting now and the sweat streamed down his face and he fought like a drunken."man to push back from the railing, and still he was conscious of the father, not insistent, not demanding, but somewhat hurt and puzzled by this ingratitude.

Harrington's hand slipped from the top rail and the fingers touched the handle of the maul and seized and closed upon it and lifted it from the floor to throw.

But even as he lifted it, the door catch snicked behind him and he swung around.

Cedric Madison stood just inside the door and his death's-head face wore a look of utter calm.

"Get him off my back!" yelled Harrington. "Make him let loose of me or I will let you have it."

And was surprised to find that he meant every word of it, that a man as mild as he could find it in his heart to kill another man without a second thought.

"All right," said Madison, and the father-love was gone and the world stood cold and hard and empty, with just the two of them standing face to face.

"I'm sorry that this happened, Harrington. You are the first..."

"You took a chance," said Harrington. "You tried to turn me loose. What did you expect I would do—moon around and wonder what had happened to me?"

"We'll take you back again. It was a pleasant life. You can live it out."

"I have no doubt you would. You and White and all the rest of—"

Madison sighed, a very patient sigh. "Leave White out of this," he said. "The poor fool thinks that Harvey..."

He stopped what he meant to say and chuckled.

"Believe me, Harrington, it's a slick and foolproof setup. It is even better than the oracle at Delphi."

He was sure of himself, so sure that it sent a thrill of apprehension deep through Harrington, a sense of being trapped, of being backed into a corner from which he never could escape.

They had him cold, he thought, between the two of them—Madison in front and Harvey at his rear. Any second now Harvey would throw another punch at him and despite all that he had said, despite the maul he gripped, despite the knotted shirt tails and the silly rhyme, he had grave doubts that he could fight it off.

"I am astonished that you are surprised," Madison was saying smoothly. "For Harvey has been in fact a father to you for all these many years, or the next thing to a father, maybe better than a father. You've been closer to him, day and night, than you've ever been to any other creature. He has watched over you and watched out for you and guided you at times and the relationship between the two of you has been more real than you can ever guess."

"But why?" asked Harrington and he was seeking furiously for some way out of this, for some defense that might be more substantial than a knotted shirt.

"I do not know how to say this so you will believe it," Madison told him earnestly, "but the father-feeling was no trick at all. You are closer at this moment to Harvey and perhaps even to myself than you can ever be to any other being. No one could work with you as long as Harvey worked with you without forming deep attachments. He, and I, have no thought but good for you. Won't you let us prove it?"

Harrington remained silent, but he was wavering—even when he knew that he should not waver. For what Madison had said seemed to make some sense.

"The world," said Madison, "is cold and merciless. It has no pity for you. You've not built a warm and pleasant world and now that you see it as it is no doubt you are repelled by it. There is no reason you should remain in it. We can give you back the world you've known. We can give you security and comfort. Surely you would be happy then. You can gain nothing by remaining as you are. There is no disloyalty to the human race in going back to this world you love. Now you can neither hurt nor harm the race. Your work is done...."

"No!" cried Harrington.!

Madison shook his head. "Your race is a queer one, Harrington."

"My race!" yelled Harrington. "You talk as if—" "There is greatness in you," id Madison, "but you must be pushed to bring it out. You must be cheered and coddled, you must be placed in danger, you must be given problems. You are like so many children. It is my duty, Harrington, my sworn, solemn duty to bring out the greatness in you. And I will not allow you nor anyone to stand against the duty."

And the truth was there, screaming through the dark, dread corridors of belated recognition. It had been there all the time, Harrington told himself, and he should have seen it.

He swung up the maul in a simple reflex action, as a gesture of horror and revulsion, and he heard his screaming voice as if it were some other voice and not his own at all: "Why, damn you, you aren't even human!"

And as he brought the maul up in its arc and forward, Madison was weaving to one side so that the maul would miss, and his face and hands were changing and his body, too—although changing was perhaps not the word for it. It was a relaxing, rather, as if the body and the face and hands that had been Madison were flowing back again into their normal mold after being held and prisoned into human shape. The human clothes he wore ripped apart with the pressure of the change and hung on him in tatters.

He was bigger, or he seemed to be, as if he had been forced to compress his bigness to conform to human standards, but he was humanoid and there was no essential change in his skull-like face beyond its taking on a faintly greenish cast.

The maul clanged to the floor and skidded on the steel face of the catwalk and the thing that had been Madison was slouching forward with the alien sureness in it. And from Harvey poured a storm of anger and frustration—a father's storming anger at a naughty child which must now stand in punishment. And the punishment was death, for no naughty child must bar the great and solemn duty of a sworn and dedicated task. In that storming fury, even as it rocked his mind, Harrington sensed an essential oneness between machine and alien, as if the two moved and thought in unison.

And there was a snarling and a coughing sound of anger and Harrington found himself moving toward the alien thing with his fingers spread and his muscles tensed for the seizing and the rending of this enemy from the darkness that extended out beyond the cave. He was shambling forward on bowed and sturdy legs and there was fear deep-rooted in his mind, a terrible, shriveling fear that drove him to his work. But above and beyond that fear there was as well the knowledge of the strength within his own brute body.

For a moment he was aghast at the realization that the snarling and the coughing was coming from himself and that the foam of fighting anger was dripping from his jaws. Then he was aghast no longer, for he knew with surety who he was and all that he might have been or might ever have thought was submerged and swept away in sheer bestiality and the driving urge to kill.

His hands reached out and caught the alien flesh and tore at it and broke it and ripped it from the bones, and in the wild, black job of killing scarcely felt or noticed the raking of the other's talons or the stabbing of the beak.

There was a screaming somewhere a piercing sound of pain and agony from some other place, and the job was done.

Harrington crouched above the body that lay upon the floor and wondered at the growling sounds which still rumbled in his throat.

He stood erect and held out his hands and in the dim light saw that they were stained with sticky red, while from the pit he heard Harvey's screams dwindle into moaning.

He staggered forward to the railing and looked down into the pit and streams of some dark and stringy substance were pouring out of every crack and joint of Harvey—as if the life and intelligence were draining out of him.

And somewhere a voice (a voice?) was saying: You fool! Now look at what you've done! What will happen to you now?

"We'll get along," said Harrington—ordinary Harrington, not the final gentleman, nor yet Neanderthaler.

There was a gash along one arm and the blood was oozing out and soaking the fabric of his torn coat and one side of his face was wet and sticky, but he was all right.

We kept you on the road, said the dying voice, now faint and far away. We kept you on it for so many ages....

Yes, thought Harrington. Yes, my friend, you're right.

Once the Delphian oracle and how many eons before that? And clever—once an oracle and in this day an analytical computer. And where in the years between—in monastery? in palace? in some counting house?

Although, perhaps, the operation need not have been continuous. Perhaps it was only necessary at certain crisis points.

And what the actual purpose? To guide the toddling foot-
steps of humanity, make man think as they wanted him to
think? Or to shape humanity to the purpose of an alien race?
And what the shape of human culture if there had been no
interference? i

And he, himself, he wondered—was he the summer-up, the man who had been used to write the final verdict of the centuries of patterning? Not in his words, of course, but in the words of these other two—the one down in the pit, the other on this catwalk. Or were there two of them? Might there have been only one? Was it possible, he wondered, that they were the same—the one of them no more than an extension of the other? For when Madison had died, so had Harvey.

"The trouble with you, friend," he said to the thing lying on the floor, "was that you were too close to human in many ways yourself. You got too confident and you made mistakes."

And the worst mistake of all had been when they'd allowed him to write a Neanderthaler into that early story.

He walked slowly toward the door and stopped at it for a moment to look back at the twisted form that lay huddled on the floor. They'd find it in an hour or two and think at first, perhaps, that it was Madison. Then they'd note the changes and know that it could not be Madison. And they'd be puzzled people, especially since Madison himself would have disappeared. They'd wonder, too, what had happened to Harvey, who'd never work again. And they'd find the maul!

The maul! Good God, he thought, I almost left the maul!

He turned back and picked it up and his mind was churning with the fear of what might have happened had he left it there. For his fingerprints would be all over it and the police would have come around to find out what he knew.

And his fingerprints would be on the railing, too, he thought. He'd have to wipe them off.

He took out his handkerchief and began to wipe the rail-
ing, wondering as he did it why he went to all the trouble,
for there would be no guilt associated with this thing he'd
done. '

No guilt? he asked himself.

How could he be sure?

Had Madison been a villain or a benefactor?

There was no way, he knew, that anyone could be sure.

Not yet, at least. Not so shortly after. And now perhaps there'd never be any way to know. For the human race had been set so firmly in the track that had been engineered for it, it might never deviate. For the rest of his days he'd wonder about the Tightness and the wrongness of this deed he'd done.

He'd watch for signs and portents. He'd wonder if every piece of disturbing news he read might have been averted by this alien that now lay upon the floor. He'd come fighting out of sleep at night, chased by nightmares of an idiot doom that his hand had brought about.

He finished polishing the railing and walked to the door. He polished the knob most carefully and shut the door behind him. And, as a final gesture, he untied the shirt tails.

There was no 6ne in the lobby and no one in the street, and he stoed looking up and down the street in the pale cold light of morning.

He cringed against it—against the morning light and against this street that was a symbol of the world. For there seemed to him to be a crying in the street, a crying of his guilt.

There was a way, he knew, that he could forget all this— could wipe it from his mind and leave it all behind him. There was a path that even at this hour led to comfort and

by Aigis Budrys

CHAIN REACTION

One of the supreme, though unfortunately fairly rare, delights of modern science fiction is that in it you actually can, at times, find Ideas!—real, live, pulsating, coruscating Ideas. Some of them may be on the lame side, but that's not really important; they still are signs that Someone Has Been Thinking Here. Rare indeed is this phenomenon! And in the following story some really hefty and non-lame thinking has been done on the nature and ambience of the word "Freedom." Let me warn you, friends: I think this story will stop you in your tracks, if you give it your full attention. It presents modern man with one of his most embarrassing problems. So—give it your full attention, please; I think that you will find the rewards are sizable.

The author is almost as remarkable a phenomenon as his story. Algirdas Jonas Budrys was born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia, in 1931 (oh, dear, four years after I graduated from college!) and is the son of a diplomat representing the Free Lithuanian government. He has been in America since 1936. He made his first sale in 1952, and in the ensuing eight years has sold (hold your breath) about 200 short stories, plus five novels, principally but not exclusively science fiction. In my opinion, the present story is an example of an absolutely first-rate mind and imagination at work, and all the more remarkable in that it is part of such an enormous spate of wordage as its author produces annually.

Budrys lives here under a diplomatic passport, retains his Free Lithuanian citizenship, is married to a lovely American girl, and has two sons. For most of his income he currently writes technical articles for automotive magazines, and rather enjoys it.

Dahano the village Headman squatted in the doorway of his hut, facing the early sun with his old face wrinkled in thought. Last night he'd seen omens in the sky.

For good or for bad? Dahano considered both sides of the question. Two days ago, the Masters had made an example of Borthen, his son. They'd ordered him to die, and when he'd died they hung his body on a frame in the slave village square. Dahano'd cut him down last night.

He cremated him in the hollow where generation after generation of villagers had burned. There, on the ashen ground, Dahano'd traced out the old burning-ritual signs and sang the chant. The dirge had been taught to him by his father, from his grandfather and his greatgrandfather. It had been remembered faithfully from the old, great days when men had lived as they ought to live. Harsh, constricted in Dahano's dried old throat, the chant had keened up to the sky:

Here is a dead person. Take him, Heaven People—give him food and drink; shelter him. Let him live among you and be one of you forever; let him be happy, let him rest at the end of his day's labor, let him dwell in his own house, and let him have broad fields for his own. Let his well give sweet water, and let his cattle be fat. Let him eat of the best, and have of the best, and give him the best of your women to wive. Here is a dead person. Let him live with you.

Then Dahano'd told the Heaven People how Borthen had come to die before his time. In the days when people lived as they ought to, the reason might have been any one of many: a weak soul, bad luck that brought him to drown in a creek or be killed by a wild beast, or death in war. But since a time gone so long ago that it came before Dahano's grandfather, there'd been only one such reason to give the Heaven People:

He was killed for breaking the Masters' law.

Which is not the proper law for people, Dahano'd added in bitterness and in the slow, nourished anger his father'd taught him along with the stories of the times before the Masters.

Take him, Heaven People. Take him, shelter him, for ƒ can do no more for him. Let him live among you forever, for he can no longer live here in the village with me. Take Bor-then up among you—take my only son.

In bitterness, in fresh anger and in old, the chant had gone up. It made no difference that the Masters could hear Dahano if they wanted to. Anger they let a person keep, so long as he followed their law. Some day, in some way, that anger would rise and tear down their golden city, but the Masters with their limitless power couldn't help but laugh at the thought.

Perhaps they were right. But last night, as the smoke of Burthen's pyre rose to mingle his soul with those that had gone before it into the sky, Dahano'd seen lights that weren't stars, and faint threads reaching down toward the Masters' golden city on the plain. It was as though the souls of all the people who had burned in funeral hollows behind the villages were stirring at last.

So now Dahano sat in his doorway, the last of his line, waiting until it was time to go out and work in the hated fields and wondering if perhaps the golden buildings would come crashing down at last, and the Masters die, and the people of the villages be free again.

But it wasn't a new hope with him or with any of the other villagers. Sometimes a person was driven to believe he could overcome the Masters; rage or thoughts turned too long inward clouded his reason. He rebelled; he cursed a Master or disobeyed a command, and then his foolish hope only caused him to be commanded to die, to die, and to hang in the square. Sometimes a person in cool thought wondered how close a watch the Masters kept. He stayed in his hut when the time came to work, or stayed awake at sleeping time in the hope that the Masters didn't see into quite every person's head. These, too, were always proved mistaken and died.

Dahano kept his omens to himself. An old person learns a great deal of patience. And the Headman of a village learns great caution along with his great anger. He would wait and see, as all his life had taught him. He knew a great number of things; the proper ways to live, the ways of keeping his people as safe as a person could, and all the other things he had learned both from what his father had passed on to him and what he had thought out for himself. But most of all, he knew a slow, unquenchable, immovable waiting.

In the hut next door, he heard Gulegath clatter his cook-pot noisily back down on the oven. Dahano's expression sharpened and he listened closely, trying to follow the younger person's movements with his ears.

Gulegath was an angry one. All the villagers were angry, but Gulegath was angry at everyone. Gulegath wouldn't listen to wiser persons. He kept to himself. He was too young to realize how dangerous he was. He was often rude, and never patient.

But Dahano was Headman of the village, and every vil-
lager was his concern. It was a Headman's duty to keep his
people as safe as possible—to keep the village whole, to
protect the generations that weren't yet born—in the end, to
protect that generation which would some day come and be
free. So, every person—even Gulegath—must be kept safe.
Dahano didn't like Gulegath. But this was unimportant, for
he was Headman first and Dahano second, and a Headman
neither likes nor dislikes. He guards the future, remembers
the things that must be remembered and passed on, and he
protects. \

Gulegath appeared in his doorway—a slight, quick-move-mented person who seemed younger than he really was.

Dahano looked toward him. "Good day, Gulegath."

"Good day, Headman," Gulegath answered in his always bitter voice, shaping the words so they sounded like a spiteful curse. He was still too young to be a man; coming from his thin chest, the sound of his voice had no depth, only an edge.

Dahano couldn't quite understand the source of that constant, overpowering bitterness that directed itself at everyone and everything. It was almost a living thing of its own, only partly under Gulegath's control. No one had ever injured him. Not even the Masters had ever done anything to him. He'd burned no sons, had never been punished, had never known more sorrow than every villager was born to. This seemed to make no difference to the special beast that went everywhere with him and made him so difficult to live with.

"How soon before we go out to work, Headman?"

Dahano looked up at the sun. "A few more moments."

"Really? They're generous, aren't they?"

Dahano sighed. Why did Gulegath waste his anger on trifles? "I burned my son last night," he said to remind him that others had greater injuries.

Gulegath extended him no sympathy. He'd found a target for his anger—for now. "Some day, I'll burn them. Some day I'll find a way to strike fast enough. Some day I'll hang their bodies up for me to look at."

"Gulegath." This was coming too close to self-killing folly.

"Yes, Headman?"

"Gulegath, you're still too young to realize that's a fool's attitude. Things like that aren't to be said."

"Is there a person who doesn't think the same way? What difference if I put it in words? Do you think fear is a wise quality?" Gulegath spoke like a person looking deep inside himself. "Do you think a person should give in to fear?"

"It's not that." Slowly—slowly, now, Dahano told himself. A Headman has a duty to his people. His anger can't keep him from fulfilling it. Be patient. Explain. Ignore his lack of respect for you. "No, Gulegath. It's what too much of that kind of talk can do to you. You must try to discipline yourself. A thought once put in words is hard to change. This anger can turn over and over in your mind. It'll feed on itself and grow until one day it'll pass beyond words and drive you into self-destruction. If you die, the village has lost by that much." If I let you die, I've failed my duty by that much.

Gulegath smiled bitterly. "Would you grieve for me?" His mouth curled. "Let me believe that some day they'll pay for all this: Get up at a certain time, work in these fields, tend these cattle, stop at a certain time, eat again when the Masters command and sleep when the Masters tell you. Be slaves—be slaves all your aching lives or die and hang in the square to cow the others!" Gulegath clenched his thin fists. "Let me believe I'll end that—let me think I'll find a way and some day burn them in their city. Let me suppose I'll be free."

"Not as soon as that, youngster. No person can rebel against the Masters. They see our thoughts, they come and go as they please, appearing and disappearing as they can. They command a hut to appear and it's there, with beds, with its oven, with a fire in the oven. They command a man to die and he dies. What would you do against persons like that? They aren't persons, they are gods. How can we do anything but obey them? Perhaps your some day'U come, but I don't think you or I will bring it."

"What're we to do, then? Rot year after year in this village?"

"Exactly, Gulegath. Year after year after year. Rot, save ourselves, and wait. And hope." He was thinking of the lights in the sky, and wondering.

The particular Master who oversaw this village was Chugren. He was only a medium-tall person, too heavy for his bones, with a pasty face and red-laced eyes. Dahano had never seen him without a sodden breath or a thickness in his tongue. Any person who wasn't a Master ought to have collapsed long ago under the poisons he seemed to swill as thirstily as a villager gulping water from the bucket in the fields. His visits to the village were only as frequent as they had to be. If he thought very often at all about the village, he was too lazy and too uncaring to come and see to it properly. He contented himself with watching it from his palace among the golden spires of the Masters' city on the plains. Watching it with his drunken, stupored mind.

But this morning he was here. The villagers were just leaving their huts to go to the fields when Dahano saw the Master step out into the middle of the square and stand looking around him.

So, Dahano thought. Last night there were lights in the sky, and today Chugren comes for the first time in months.

The villagers had stopped, clustered in their doorways, and everyone looked impassively at Chugren. Then the Master's gaze reached Dahano, and he beckoned as he always had. "Come over here, Dahano."

Dahano bowed his head. "I hear, Chugren." He shuffled forward slowly, stooping, taking on a slowness and age that were feebler than his own. A slave has weapons against his master, and this was one of them. It seemed like such a trifle, making Chugren wait an extra moment before he reached him. Enough of a trifle so the Master would feel foolish in making an issue of it. But, nevertheless, it was a way of gnawing at the foundation of his power. It meant Dahano was not wholly crushed—not wholly a slave, and never would be.

Finally, Dahano reached Chugren and bowed again. "It is almost time for us to go to work in the fields," he muttered.

"It'll wait," Chugren said.

"As ,the Master wishes." Dahano bowed and hid a thin smile. Chugren was discomfited. Somehow, the slave had scored against the Master once more, simply by reminding him that he was an attentive slave.

"There's time enough for that." Chugren was using a sharp tone of voice, and yet he was speaking slowly. "This village is a disgrace! Look at it—huts falling apart and not a move made to repair them; a puddle of sewage around that broken drain there ... don't you people do anything for yourselves?"

Why should we? Dahano thought.

"All right," Chugren went on. "If you people can't clean up after yourselves, I suppose I'll have to do it for you. But if it happens again, you'll see how much nonsense I'll tolerate!" He jerked his arm in quick slashes of motion at the huts. He repaired the drain. In a moment, the village looked new again. 'There. Now keep it that way!"

Dahano bowed. His twisted, hidden smile was broader. Another victory. It had been a long time since the last time Chugren gave in on the matter of the huts and drains. But he had given in at last, as Dahano had known he must. It was his village, built by him. His slaves had no wish to keep it in repair for him. This was an old, old struggle between them—but the slaves had won again.

He looked up at Chugren's face. "I hear, Chugren." Then he looked more closely.

He couldn't have said what signs he saw in the Master's face, but he had known Chugren for many years. And he saw now that Chugren's hesitant wordings didn't come from a dulled brain. The Master was sober for the first time in Dahano's experience. He sounded, instead, like a child who's not yet sure of all his words.

Dahano's eyes widened. Chugren glanced at him sharply as the Master saw what he knew. Nevertheless, Dahano put it in words:

"You aren't Chugren," he whispered.

The Master's expression was mixed. "You're right," he admitted in a low voice. He looked around with a rueful lift to the corners of his mouth. "I see no one else has realized that. I'd appreciate it if you continued to keep your voice down." The look in his eyes was now both discomfited and unmistakably friendly. V

Dahano nodded automatically. He and Chugren stood silently looking at each other while his brain caught up with its knowledge.

Dahano was not a person to go rushing forward into things he understood imperfectly. "Would the Master condescend to explain?" he asked finally, carefully.

Chugren nodded. "I think I'd better. I think it might be a good idea, now I've met you. And we might as well start off right—I'm not your master, and don't want to be."

"Will you come to my house with me?"

Chugren nodded. Dahano turned and motioned the other villagers out into the fields. As the crowd broke up and drifted out of the square, glancing curiously at the Master and the Headman, Chugren followed Dahano toward his hut. Gulegath brushed by them with a pale look at the Master, and then they were in the hut, and Dahano took a breath. "You don't want to be our Master?" His hands were trembling a little bit.

"That's right." It was odd to see Chugren's features smile at him. "Your old Masters are gone for good. My men and I took their places last night. As soon as possible, we're going to set you people completely free."

Dahano squatted down on the floor. It was Chugren's voice and face, though nothing like Chugren's manner. He studied the person again. He saw Chugren, dressed in Chugren's usual loose, bright robe, with his dough coloring and pouched eyes. And under them was a sureness and firm self-possession quite different from the old Master's drunken, arbitrary peevishness. Dahano was not sure this was somehow an illusion, or where this false Chugren had come from. But he knew he would find out if he had patience.

"I saw lights in the sky last night. Was that you?"

Chugren looked at him with respect. "You've got sharp eyes, Headman. We had to take the screen down for an instant so we could get through—but, still, I didn't think anyone would spot us." "Screen?"

"I'd better start at the beginning." Chugren made chairs for them, and when they were both sitting, the Master leaned forward. "I wish I knew how much of this will come through. I've been trying to build up a vocabulary, but there are so many things we have and do that your people don't have words for."

Dahano was curious. How could that be? There was a word for everything he knew. It was possible there were words he hadn't learned—but. no words at all? He mulled the idea over and then put it away. There were more important things to busy himself with.

Chugrenwas still preoccupied with that problem. "I wish I could explain all this direcdy. That'd be even better. But that's out, too."

Dahano nodded. This part was understandable to him. "The Masters told us. Their minds are made differently than ours. They could not even see into ours clearly unless we were angry or excited."

"You're not organized to send messages direct. I know. We used to think it was our instruments, but we ran into it no matter how we redesigned."

"Instruments?"

Chugren pulled up the sleeve of his robe. Strapped to his upper arm were two rows of small black metal boxes. "We weren't born Masters. We use machines—like a person uses a mill instead of a pestle to grind his grain—to do the things a Master does with his mind. Only we can do them better that way. That's how we were able to surprise your Masters last night and capture them."

Dahano grunted in surprise.

"You see," Chugren said, "there aren't any Masters and slaves where I and my men come from. Any man can be a Master, so no one can enslave anyone else. And of what conceivable use is a slave when you can have anything you want just by making it?"

Dahano shook his head. "We have thought on that."

Chugren's nod was grim. "We thought about it, too. We've been watching this world from our... our boat... for weeks. We couldn't understand what your Masters wanted. They didn't eat your grain or cattle, they didn't take you for personal servants—they never took you to their city at all. Not even your women. Why, then?"

"For pleasure. We thought on it for a long time, and there is no other answer." Dahano's eyes were sunk back in their sockets, remembering Borthen's body hanging on its frame in the village square. "For pleasure."

Chugren grimaced. "That's the conclusion we reached. They won't come back here ... re-education or no re-education ... sick or well, Dahano—ever."

Dahano nodded to himself, staring off at nothing. "Then it is true—you're here to free us."

"Yes." Chugren looked at him with pity in his eyes. "You've gotten out of the habit of believing what a Master tells you, haven't you?"

"If what he says is not another of his commands, yes. But I don't think you are like our Masters."

"We're not. We come from a world called Terra, where we have had masters of our own, from time to time. But not for a long time, now. We're all free, and one of the things a free man does is to pass his freedom on to anyone who needs it."

"Another world?"

Chugren spread his hands. "See? There are some things I can't explain. But— You see the stars in the sky. And you see the sun. Well, this world is part of your sun's family. All those stars you see are suns, too—so far away that they look little. But they're as big as yours, and each of them has worlds in its family, some of them pretty much like yours. Some of them have people living on them. We have a boat that let's us travel from one to another."

Dahano thought about that. When he decided he had it clear in his mind, he asked: "Other people. Tell me—what do you look like when you don't resemble Chugren? Do you look like us? Does everyone?"

Chugren smiled. "Not too different. I can show you." He stood up and touched his .arm to his body. His robe flowed into different colors and two parts, one of which loosely covered his legs and hips while the other hugged his upper body, leaving his arms bare. He changed his face, and the color of his hair and eyes.

He was shorter than the usual person, and the shape of his ears and eyes was odd. His hands were too broad. He looked a good deal like a usual person or Master, except that he was possibly physically stronger, for he looked powerful. Not too different.

Still, Dahano said "Thank you," rather quickly. It was unsettling to look at him, for anyone could see at a glance that he was not born of any female person on this world.

The Terr an nodded in understanding, and was Chugren again. "You see why I didn't come here as myself?"

Dahano could picture it The villagers would have been frightened and upset. More than that, they would never have dared listen to him.

But there was something else Dahano wanted to clear up. He returned to his point: "Other worlds and other people. Tell me, have you ever been to the world where our Heaven People live?"

"Heaven People?" Chugren frowned, and Dahano knew ' he was trying to grasp the meaning from his mind.

"The souls of our dead persons," Dahano explained. "I had thought at first that you might be one of them, but I can see you aren't. I thought perhaps, in your boat, you might have visited them." He stopped Mmself there. A person does not inflict his grief on those who have no share in it.

But his mind had welled up, and Chugren saw his thought. He shook his head, slowly. "No, I'm sorry, Dahano. I didn't meet your son.''

Dahano looked down. "At least there will be no more." He thought of all the persons who had burned because of the Masters, and all the souls that had gone into the sky. Somewhere, on one of those worlds Chugren spoke of, there were many persons who had waited for this day to come. It was good to know that they had a home much like this world, which only the Masters had spoiled. It was good to know that some day his own soul would be there with them, and that he would be with his son again.

He remembered the long hours with Borthen, passing on to him the old ways he had learned from his father—the ways of having land of a person's own, and a house, and cattle; the remembered things, saved and kept whole from the days before the Masters were here, coming suddenly from their one village in the faraway mountains.

Many things had been lost, but they were only unimportant things that would be of no use; persons' names, and the memory of persons' lives. A person lived, died, and his sons remembered him for their lives, but then he began to fade, and his grandsons might never remember him.

The important things had lived on. Dahano knew that had been a great effort. There were always persons who were willing to let themselves forget, and simply live out what lives they had. But always there were persons who would not forget; who waited for the day when the villagers could claim the world for their own again, and need to know how to live without anyone's commanding them.

So, in all the villages, fathers taught their sons, and the sons remembered.

Dahano's face wrinkled in grief as he thought of his dead son. Borthen had remembered—perhaps too well. He had still been a young man, with a young man's fire in his blood. So he tested Chugren's power, and Chugren—the old Chu-gren—had commanded him to die for not tending the cattle properly.

Two more days—two more days of patience, Borthen, and I would have my son. I would not be alone. Some day you would have been Headman.

Dahano raised his eyes slowly. There were things to be done, and he was Headman in this village.

"What are you going to do?" he asked Chugren. "Are you going to make us all Masters?"

Chugren shook his head. "No. Not for a long time. And then it's going to be your own people who make themselves

by Damon Knight

RULE GOLDEN

The socially sensitive writers of our time seem to me to have assembled under the banner of science fiction, where they send forth message, after message warning us of our folly and of the Furies we seem about to awake. One of the most devastating devices for showing these follies to us in science-fantasy form is to import a being from another, far-distant civilization, a being that has powers of one sort or another to make us see what horrible fools—what criminal fools— we are. In "Rule Golden," Damon Knight—one of the most perceptive and astringent of science fiction's writers and critics—takes the deceptively simple device of inverting the Golden Rule in the hand of an "alien" with strange powers, and putting it to work. Mr. Knight carries out his fable with relentless logic until you fairly squirm with reflected anguish. Believe me, it's good for youl

This is one unswerving fact about Damon Knight: as a moralist as well as a writer, he is unbendingly honest, relentlessly logical. For this reason he is, and probably always will be, a poor man. Knight was born in Oregon in 1922, and as a young man spent a few unremunerative years as a commercial artist. He then shifted to pulp editing, and then, in his words, "was chained to an oar in a reading-fee literary agency." He finally began writing full time in 1950. In 1956 Damon received a "Hugo" (science fiction's imitation of the movie "Oscar") as the best s-f critic of the year. He has written over sixty stories and two novels, and has fathered three children, all with the same wife.

A man in Des Moines kicked his wife when her back was turned. She was taken to the hospital, suffering from a broken coccyx. So was he.

In Kansas City, Kansas, a youth armed with a .22 killed a schoolmate with one shot through the chest, and instantly dropped dead of heart-failure.

In Decatur two middleweights named Packy Morris and Leo Oshinsky simultaneously knocked each other out.

In St. Louis, a policeman shot down a fleeing bank robber and collapsed. The bank robber died; the policeman's condition was described as critical.

I read those items in the afternoon editions of the Washington papers, and although I noted the pattern, I wasn't much impressed. Every newspaperman knows that runs of coincidence are a dime a dozen; everything happens that way—plane crashes, hotel fires, suicide pacts, people running amok with rifles, people giving away all their money; name it and I can show you an epidemic of it in the files.

What I was actually looking for were stories originating in two places: my home town and Chillicothe, Missouri. Stories with those datelines had been carefully cut out of the papers before I got them, so, for lack of anything better, I read everything datelined near either place. And that was how I happened to catch the Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur and St. Louis items—all of those places will fit into a two-hundred-mile circle drawn with Chillicothe as its center.

I had asked for, but hadn't got, a copy of my own paper. That made it a little tough, because I had to sit there, in a Washington hotel room at night—and if you know a lonelier place and time, tell me—and wonder if they had really shut us down.

I knew it was unlikely. I knew things hadn't got that bad in America yet, by a long way. I knew they wanted me to sit there and worry about it, but I couldn't help it.

Ever since La Prensa, every newspaper publisher on this continent has felt a cold wind blowing down his back.

That's foolishness, I told myself. Not to wave the flag too much or anything, but the free speech tradition in this country is too strong; we haven't forgotten Peter Zenger.

And then it occurred to me that a lot of editors must have felt the same way, just before their papers were suppressed on the orders of an American President named Abraham Lincoln.

So I took one more turn around the room and got back into bed, and although I had already read all the papers from bannerlines to box scores, I started leafing through them again, just to make a little noise. Nothing to do.

I had asked for a book, and hadn't got it. That made sense, too; there was nothing to do in that room, nothing to distract me, nothing to read except newspapers—and how could I look at a newspaper without thinking of the Herald-Star?

■ My father founded the Herald-Star—the Herald part, that is, the Star came later—ten years before I was born. I inherited it from him, but I want to add that I'm not one of those publishers by right of primogeniture whose only function consists in supplying sophomoric by-lined copy for the front page; I started on the paper as a copy boy and I can still handle any job in a city room.

It was a good newspaper. It wasn't the biggest paper in the Middle West, or the fastest growing, or the loudest; but we'd had two Pulitzer prizes in the last fifteen years, we kept our political bias on the editorial page, and up to now we had never knuckled under to anybody.

But this was the first time we had picked a fight with the U. S. Department of Defense.

Ten miles outside Chillicothe, Missouri, the Department had a little hundred-acre installation with three laboratory buildings, a small airfield, living quarters for a staff of two hundred and a one-story barracks. It was closed down in

1968 when the Phoenix-bomb program was officially abandoned.

Two years and ten months later, it was opened up again. A new and much bigger barracks went up in place of the old one; a two-company garrison moved in. Who else or what else went into the area, nobody knew for certain; but rumors came out.

We checked the rumors. We found confirmation. We published it, and we followed it up. Within a week we had a full-sized crusade started; we were asking for a congressional investigation, and it looked as if we might get it .

Then the President invited me and the publishers of twenty-odd other anti-adrninistration dailies to Washington. Each of us got a personal interview with The Man; the Secretary of Defense was also present, to evade questions.

They asked me, as a personal favor and in the interests of national security, to kill the Chillicothe series.

After asking a few questions, to which I got the answers I expected, I politely declined.

And here I was.

The door opened. The guard outside looked in, saw me on the bed, and stepped back out of sight. Another man walked in: stocky build, straight black hair turning gray; about fifty. Confident eyes behind rimless bifocals.

"Mr. Dahl. My name is Carlton Frisbee."

"I've seen your picture," I told him. Frisbee was the Under Secretary of Defense, a career man, very able; he was said to be the brains of the Department.

He sat down facing me. He didn't ask permission, and he didn't offer to shake hands, which was intelligent of him.

"How do you feel about it now?" he asked.

"Just the same."

He nodded. After a moment he said, "I'm going to try to explain our position to you, Mr. Dahl."

I grinned at him. 'The word you're groping for is 'awkward.' "

"No. It's true that we can't let you go in your present state of mind, but we can keep you. If necessary, you will be killed, Mr. Dahl. That's how important Chillicothe is."

"Nothing," I said, "is that important."

He cocked his head at me. "If you and your family lived in a community surrounded by hostile savages, who were kept at bay only because you had rifles—and if someone proposed to give them rifles—well?"

"Look," I said, "let's get down to cases. You claim that a new weapon is being developed at Chillicothe, is that right? It's something revolutionary, and if the Russians got it first we would be sunk, and so on. In other words, the Manhattan Project all over again."

"Right."

"Okay. Then why has Chillicothe got twice the military guard it had when it was an atomic research center, and a third of the civilian staff?"

He started to speak. «

"Wait a minute, let me finish. Why, of the fifty-one scientists we have been able to trace to Chillicothe, are there seventeen linguists and philogists, three organic chemists, five physiologists, twenty-six psychologists, and not one single physicist?"

"In the first place—were you about to say something?"

"All right, go ahead."

"You know I can't answer those questions factually, Mr. Dahl, but speaking conjecturally, can't you conceive of a psychological weapon?"

"You can't answer them at all. My third question is, why have you got a wall around that place—not just a stockade, a wall, with guard towers on it? Never mind speaking conjecturally. Now I'll answer your question. Yes, I can conceive of psychological experimentation that you might call weapons research, I can think of several possibilities, and there isn't a damn one of them that wouldn't have to be used on American citizens before you could get anywhere near the Russians with it."

His eyes were steady behind the bright lenses. He didn't say, "We seem to have reached a deadlock," or "Evidently it would be useless to discuss this any further"; he simply changed the subject.

"There are two things we can do with you, Mr. Dahl; the choice will be up to you. First, we can indict you for treason and transfer you to a Federal prison to await trial. Under the revised Alien and Sedition Act, we can hold you incommunicado for at least twelve months, and, of course, no bail will be set. I feel bound to point out to you that in this case, it would be impossible to let you come to trial until after the danger of breaching security at ChiUicothe is past. If necessary, as I told you, you would die in prison.

"Second, we can admit you to Chillicothe itself as a press representative. We would, in this case, allow you full access to all nontechnical information about the ChiUicothe project as it develops, with permission to publish as soon as security is lifted. You would be confined to the project until that time, and I can't offer you any estimate of how long it might be. In return, you would be asked to write letters plausibly explaining your absence to your staff and to close friends and relatives, and—providing that you find Chillicothe to be what we say it is and not what you suspect— to work out a series of stories for your newspaper which will divert attention from the project."

He seemed to be finished. I said, "Frisbee, I hate to tell you this, but you're overlooking a point. Let's just suppose for a minute that ChiUicothe is what I think it is. How do I know that once I got inside I might not somehow or other find myself writing that kind of copy whether I felt like it or not?"

He nodded. "What guarantees would you consider sufficient?"

I thought about that. It was a nice point. I was angry enough, and scared enough, to feel like pasting Frisbee a good one and then seeing how far I could get; but one thing I couldn't figure out, and that was why, if Frisbee wasn't at least partly on the level, he should be here at aU.

If they wanted me in ChiUicothe, they could drag me there.

After a while I said, "Let me call my managing editor and tell him where I'm going. Let me tell him that I'll call him again—on a video circuit—within three days after I get there, when I've had time to inspect the whole area. And that if I don't call, or if I look funny or sound funny, he can start worrying."

He nodded again. "Fair enough." He stood up. "I won't ask you to shake hands with me now, Mr. Dahl; later on I hope you will." He turned and walked to the door, unhurried, calm, imperturbable, the way he had come in.

Six hours later I was on a westbound plane.

That was the first day.

The second day, an inexplicable epidemic broke out in the slaughterhouses of Chicago and surrounding areas. The symptoms were a sudden collapse followed by nausea, incontinence, anemia, shock, and in some cases, severe pain in the occipital and cervical regions. Or: as one victim, an A. F. of L. knacker with twenty-five years' experience in the nation's abbattoirs, succinctly put it: "It felt just like I was hit in the head."

Local and Federal health authorities immediately closed down the affected slaughterhouses, impounded or banned the sale of all supplies of fresh meat in the area, and launched a sweeping investigation. Retail food stores sold out their stocks of canned, frozen and processed meats early in the day; seafood markets reported their largest volume of sales in two decades. Eggs and cheese were in short supply.

Fifty-seven guards, assistant wardens and other minor officials of the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, submitted a group resignation to Warden Hermann R. Longo. Their explanation of the move was that all had experienced a religious conversion, and that assisting in the forcible confinement of other human beings was inconsonant with their beliefs.

Near Louisville, Kentucky, neighbors attracted by cries for help found a forty-year-old woman and her twelve-yearold daughter both severely burned. The woman, whose clothing was not even scorched although her upper body was covered with first and second degree burns, admitted pushing the child into a bonfire, but in her hysterical condition was unable to give a rational account of her own injuries.

There was also a follow-up on the Des Moines story about the man who kicked his wife. Remember that I didn't say he had a broken coccyx; I said he was suffering from one. A few hours after he was admitted to the hospital he stopped doing so, and he was released into police custody when X-rays showed no fracture.

Straws in the wind.

At five-thirty that morning, I was waking up my managing editor, Eli Freeman, with a monitored ong-distance call—one of Frisbee's bright young men waiting to cut me off if I said anything I shouldn't. The temptation was strong, just the same, but I didn't.

From six to eight-thirty I was on a plane with three taciturn guards. I spent most of the time going over the last thirty years of my life, and wondering how many people would remember me two days after they wrapped my obituary around their garbage.

We landed at the airfield about a mile from the Project proper, and after one of my hitherto silent friends had finished a twenty-minute phone call, a limousine took us over to a long, temporary-looking frame building just outside the wall. It took me only until noon to get out again; I had been fingerprinted, photographed, stripped, examined, X-rayed, urinanalyzed, blood-tested, showered, disinfected, and given a set of pinks to wear until my own clothes had been cleaned and fumigated. I also got a numbered badge which I was instructed to wear on the left chest at all times, and an identity card to keep in my wallet when I got my wallet back.

Then they let me through the gate, and I saw Chillicothe.

I was in a short cul-de-sac formed by the gate and two walls of masonry, blank except for firing slits. Facing away from the gate I could see one of the three laboratory buildings a good half-mile away. Between me and it was a geometrical forest of poles with down-pointing reflectors on their crossbars. Floodlights.

I didn't like that What I saw a few minutes later I liked even less. I was bouncing across the flat in a jeep driven by a stocky, moon-faced corporal; we passed the first building, and I saw the second.

There was a ring of low pillboxes around it. And their guns pointed inward, toward the building.

Major General Parst was a big, bald man in his fifties, whose figure would have been more military if the Prussian corset had not gone out of fashion. I took him for a Pentagon soldier; he had the Pentagon smoothness of manner, but there seemed to be a good deal more under it than the usual well-oiled vacancy. He was also, I judged, a very worried man.

"There's just one thing I'd'like to make clear to you at the beginning, Mr. Dahl. I'm not a grudge-holding man, and I hope you're not either, because there's a good chance that you and I will be seeing a lot of each other during the next three or four years. But I thought it might make it a little easier for you to know that you're not the only one with a grievance. You see this isn't an easy job, it never has been. I'm just stating the fact: it's been considerably harder since your newspaper took an interest in us." He spread his hands and smiled wryly.

"Just what is your job, General?"

"You mean, what is Chillicothe." He snorted. "I'm not going to waste my breath telling you."

My expression must have changed.

"Don't misunderstand me—I mean that if I told you, you wouldn't believe me. I didn't myself. I'm going to have to show you." He stood up, looking at his wristwatch. "I have a little more than an hour. That's more than enough for the demonstration, but you're going to have a lot of questions afterward. We'd better start."

He thumbed his intercom. "I'll be in Section One for the next fifteen minutes."

When we were in the corridor outside he said, 'Tell me something, Mr. Dahl: I suppose it occurred to you that if you were right in your suspicions of Chillicothe, you might be running a certain personal risk in coming here, in spite of any precautions you might take?"

"I considered the possibility. I haven't seen anything to rule it out yet."

"And still, I gather that you chose this alternative almost without hesitation. Why was that, if you don't mind telling me?"

It was a fair question. There's nothing very attractive about a Federal prison, but at least they don't saw your skull open there, or turn your mind inside out with drugs. I said, "Call it curiosity."

He nodded. "Yes. A very potent force, Mr. Dahl. More mountains have been moved by it than by faith."

We passed a guard with a T44, then a second, and a third. Finally Parst stopped at the first of three metal doors. There was a small pane of thick glass set into it at eye-level, and what looked like a microphone grill under that. Parst spoke into the grill: "Open up Three, Sergeant."

"Yes, sir."

I followed Parst to the second door. It slid open as we, reached it and we walked into a large, empty room. The door closed behind us with a thud and a solid click. Both sounds rattled back starlingly; the room was solid metal, ■ I realized—floor, walls and ceiling.

In the opposite wall was another heavy door. To my left was a huge metal hemisphere, painted the same gray as the walls, with a machine-gun's snout projecting through a horizontal slit in a deadly and impressive manner.

Echoes blurred the General's voice: "This is Section One. We're rather proud of it. The only entrance to the central room is here, but each of the three others that adjoin it is covered from a gun-turret like that one. The gun rooms are accessible only from the corridors outside."

He motioned me over to the other door. "This door is double," he said. "It's going to be an airlock eventually, we hope. All right, Sergeant."

The door slid back, exposing another one a yard farther in; like the others, it had a thick inset panel of glass.

Parst stepped in and waited for me. "Get ready for a shock," he said.

I loosened the muscles in my back and shoulders; my wind isn't what it used to be, but I can still hit. Get ready for one yourself, I thought, if this is -what I think it is.

I walked into the tiny room, and heard the door thump behind me. Parst motioned to the glass pane.

I saw a room the size of the one behind me. There was a washbasin in it, and a toilet, and what looked like a hammock slung across one corner, and a wooden table with papers and a couple of pencils or crayons on it.

And against the far wall, propped upright on an ordinary lunch-counter stool, was something I couldn't recognize at all; I saw it and I didn't see it. If I had looked away then, I couldn't possibly have told anyone what it looked like.

Then it stirred slightly, and I realized that it was alive. I saw that it had eyes. I saw that it had arms. I saw that it had legs.

Very gradually the rest of it came into focus. The top about four feet off the floor, a small truncated cone about the size and shape of one of those cones of string that some merchants keep to tie packages. Under that came the eyes, three of them. They were round and oyster-gray, with round black pupils, and they faced in different directions. They were set into a flattened bulb of flesh that just fitted under the base of the cone; there was no nose, no ears, no mouth, and no room on the flesh for any.

The cone was black; the rest of the thing was a very dark, shiny blue-gray.

The head, if that is the word, was supported by a thin neck from which a sparse growth of fuzzy spines curved down and outward, like a botched attempt at feathers. The neck thickened gradually until it became the torso. The torso was shaped something like a bottle gourd, except that the upper lobe was almost as large as the lower. The upper lobe expanded and contracted evenly, all around, as the thing breathed.

Between each arm and the next, the torso curved inward to form a deep vertical gash.

There were three arms and three legs, spaced evenly around the body so that you couldn't tell front from back. The arms sprouted just below the top of the torso, the legs from its base. The legs were bent only slightly to reach the floor; each hand, with five slender, shapeless fingers, rested on the opposite-number thigh. The feet were a little like a chicken's ...

I turned away and saw Parst; I had forgotten he was there, and where I was, and who I was. I don't recall planning to say anything, but I heard my own voice, faint and hoarse:

"Did you make that?"

"Stop it!" he said sharply.

I was trembling. I had fallen into a crouch without realizing it, weight on my toes, fists clenched.

I straightened up slowly and put my hands into my pockets. "Sorry."

The speaker rasped.

"Is everything all right, sir?"

"Yes, Sergeant," said Parst. "We're coming out." He turned as the door opened, and I followed him, feeling all churned up inside.

Halfway down the corridor I stopped. Parst turned and looked at me.

"Ithaca," I said.

Three months back there had been a Monster-from-Mars scare in and around Ithaca, New York; several hundred people had seen, or claimed to have seen, a white wingless aircraft hovering over various out-of-the-way places; and over thirty, including one very respectable Cornell professor, had caught sight of something that wasn't a man in the woods around Cayuga Lake. None of these people had got close enough for a good look, but nearly all of them agreed on one point—the thing walked erect, but had too many arms and legs....

"Yes," said Parst. 'That's right. But let's talk about it in my office, Mr. Dahl."

I followed him back there. As soon as the door was shut I said, "Where did it come from? Are there any more of them? What about the ship?"

He offered me a cigarette. I took it and sat down, hitting the chair by luck.

"Those are just three of the questions we can't answer," he said. "He claims that his home world revolves around a sun in our constellation of Aquarius; he says that it isn't visible from Earth. He also—"

I said, "He talks—? You've taught him to speak English?" For some reason that was hard to accept; then I remembered the linguists.

"Yes. Quite well, considering that he doesn't have vocal cords like ours. He uses a tympanum under each of those vertical openings in his body—those are his mouths. His name is Aza-Kra, by the way. I was going to say that he also claims to have come here alone. As for the ship, he says it's hidden, but he won't tell us where. We've been searching that area, particularly the hills near Cayuga and the lake itself, but we haven't turned it up yet. It's been suggested that he may have launched it under remote control and put it into an orbit somewhere outside the atmosphere. The Lunar Observatory is watching for it, and so are the orbital stations, but I'm inclined to think that's a dead end. In any case, that's not my responsibihty. He had some gadgets in his possession when he was captured, but even those are being studied elsewhere. Chillicothe is what you saw a few minutes ago, and that's all it is. God knows it's enough."

His intercom buzzed. "Yes."

"Dr. Meshevski would like to talk to you about the technical vocabularies, sir."

"Ask him to hold it until the conference if he possibly can."

"Yes, sir."

"Two more questions we can't answer," Parst said, "are what his civilization is like and what he came here to do. I'll tell you what he says. The planet he comes from belongs to a galactic union of highly advanced, peace-loving races. He came here to help us prepare ourselves for membership in that union."

I was trying hard to keep up, but it wasn't easy. After a moment I said, "Suppose it's true?"

He gave me the cold eye.

"All right, suppose it's true." For the first time, his voice was impatient. 'Then suppose the opposite. Think about it for a minute."

I saw.where he was leading me, but I tried to circle around to it from another direction; I wanted to reason it out for myself. I couldn't make the grade; I had to fall back on analogies, which are a kind of thinking I distrust.

You were a cannibal islander, and a missionary came along. He meant well, but you thought he wanted to steal your yam-fields and your wives, so you chopped him up and ate him for dinner.

Or:

You were a West Indian, and Columbus came along. You treated him as a guest, but he made a slave of you, worked you till you dropped, and finally wiped out your whole nation, to the last woman and child.

I said, "A while ago you mentioned three or four years as the possible term of the Project. Did you—?"

"That wasn't meant to be taken literally," he said, "It may take a lifetime." He was staring at his desk-top.

"In other words, if nothing stops you, you're going to go right on just this way, sitting on this thing. Until What'shis-name dies, or his friends show up with an army, or something else blows it wide open." "That's right."

"Well, damn it, don't you see that's the one thing you can't do? Either way you guess it, that won't work. If he's friendly—"

Parst lifted a pencil in his hand and slapped it palm-down against the desk-top. His mouth was tight. "It's necessary," he said.

After a silent moment he straightened in his chair and spread the fingers of his right hand at me. "One," he said, touching the thumb: "weapons. Leaving everything else aside, if we can get one strategically superior weapon out of him, or the theory that will enable us to build one, then we've got to do it and we've got to do it in secret."

The index finger. 'Two: the spaceship." Middle finger. "Three: the civilization he comes from. If they're planning to attack us we've got to find that out, and when, and how, and what we can do about it." Ring finger. "Four: Aza-Kra himself. If we don't hold him in secret we can't hold him at all, and how do we know what he might do if we let him go? There isn't a single possibility we can rule out. Not one."

He put the hand flat on the desk. "Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, infinity. Biology, psychology, sociology, ecology, chemistry, physics, right down the line. Every science. In any one of them we might find something that would mean the difference between life and death for this country or this whole planet."

He stared at me for a moment, his face set. "You don't have to remind me of the other possibilities, Dahl. I know what they are; I've been on this project for thirteen weeks. I've also heard of the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, and the Constitution of the United States. But this is the survival of the human race we're talking about."

I opened my mouth to say "That's just the point," or something equally stale, but I shut it again; I saw it was no good. I had one argument—that if this alien ambassador was what he claimed to be, then the whole world had to know about it; any nation that tried to suppress that knowledge, or dictate the whole planet's future, was committing a crime against humanity. That, on the other hand, if he was an advance agent for an invasion fleet, the same thing was true only a great deal more so.

Beyond that I had nothing but instinctive moral conviction; and Parst had that on his side too; so did Frisbee and the President and all the rest. Being who and what they were, they had to believe as they did. Maybe they were right.

Half an hour later, the last-thought I had before my head hit the pillow was, Suppose there isn't any Aza-Kra? Suppose that thing was a fake, a mechanical dummy?

But I knew better, and I slept soundly.

That was the second day. On the third day, the front pages of the more excitable newspapers were top-heavy with forty-eight-point headlines. There were two Chicago stories. The first, in the early afternoon editions, announced that every epidemic victim had made a complete recovery, that health department experts had been unable to isolate any disease-causing agent in the stock awaiting slaughter, and that although several cases not involving stockyard employees had been reported, not one had been traced to consumption of infected meat. A Chicago epidemiologist was quoted as saying, "It could have been just a gigantic coincidence."

The later story was a lulu. Although the slaughterhouses had not been officially reopened or the ban on fresh-meat sales rescinded, health officials allowed seventy of the previous day's victims to return to work as an experiment. Within half an hour every one of them was back in the hospital, suffering from a second, identical attack.

Oddly enough—at first glance—sales of fresh meat in areas outside the ban dropped slightly in the early part of the day ("They say it's all right, but you won't catch me taking a chance"), rose sharply in the evening ("I'd better stock up before there's a run on the butcher shops").

Warden Longo, in an unprecedented move, added his resignation to those of the fifty-seven "conscience" employees of Leavenworth. Well-known as an advocate of prison reform, Longo explained that his subordinates' example had convinced him that only so dramatic a gesture could focus the American public's attention upon the injustice and inhumanity of the present system.

He was joined by two hundred and three of the Federal institution's remaining employees, bringing the total to more than eighty per cent of Leavenworth's permanent staff.

The movement was spreading. In Terre Haute, Indiana, eighty employees of the Federal penitentiary were reported to have resigned. Similar reports came from the State prisons of Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, and from city and county correctional institutions from Kansas City to Cincinnati.

The war in Indo-China was crowded back among the stock-market reports. Even the official announcements that the first Mars rocket was nearing completion in its sublunar orbit—front-page news at any normal time—got an inconspicuous paragraph in some papers and was dropped entirely by others.

But I found an item in a St. Louis paper about the policeman who had collapsed after shooting a criminal. He was dead.

I woke up a little before dawn that morning, having had a solid fifteen hours' sleep. I found the cafeteria and hung around until it opened. That was where Captain Ritchy-loo tracked me down.

He came in as I was finishing my second order of ham and eggs, a big, blond, swimming-star type, full of confidence and good cheer. "You must be Mr. Dahl. My name is Ritchy-loo."

I let him pump my hand and watched him sit down. "How do you spell it?" I asked him.

He grinned happily. "It is a tough one, isn't it? French. R, i, c, h, e, 1, i, e, u."

Richelieu. Ritchy loo.

I said, "What can I do for you, Captain?"

"Ah, it's what I can do for you, Mr. Dahl. You'fe a VIP around here, you know. You're getting the triple-A guided tour, and I'm your guide."

I hate people who are cheerful in the morning.

We went out into the pale glitter of early-morning sunshine on the flat; the floodlight poles and the pillboxes trailed long, mournful shadows. There was a jeep waiting, and Ritchy-loo took the wheel himself.

We made a right turn around the corner of the building and then headed down one of the diagonal avenues between the poles. I glanced into the firing slit of one of the pillboxes as we passed it, and saw the gleam of somebody's spectacles.

"That was B building that we just came out of," said the captain. "Most of the interesting stuff is there, but you want to see everything, naturally, so we'll go over to C first and then back to A."

The huge barracks, far off to the right, looked deserted; I saw a few men in fatigues here and there, spearing stray bits of paper. Beyond the building we were heading for, almost against the wall, tiny figures were leaping rhythmically, opening and closing like so many animated scissors.

It was a well-policed area, at any rate; I watched for a while, out of curiosity, and didn't see a single cigarette paper or gum wrapper.

To the left of the barracks and behind it was a miniature town—neat one-story cottages, all alike, all the same distance apart. The thing that struck me about it was that there were none of the signs of a permanent camp—no borders of whitewashed stones, no trees, no shrubs, no flowers. No wives, I thought.

"How's morale here, Captain?" I asked.

"Now, it's funny you should ask me that. That happens to be my job, I'm the Company B morale officer. Well, I should say that all things considered, we aren't doing too badly. Of course, we have a few difficulties. These men are here on eighteen-month assignments, and that's a kind of a long time without passes or furloughs. We'd like to make the hitches shorter, naturally, but of course you understand that there aren't too many fresh but seasoned troops available, just now." "No."

"But, we do our best. Now here's C building."

Most of C building turned out to be occupied by chemical laboratories: long rows of benches covered by rank growths of glassware, only about a fifth of it working, and nobody watching more than a quarter of that

"What are they doing here?" I "Over my head," said Ritchy-loo cheerfully. "Here's Dr. Vitale, let's ask him."

Vitale was a little sharp-featured man with a nervous blink. "This is the atmosphere section," he said. "We're trying to analyze the atmosphere which the alien breathes. Eventually we hope to manufacture it."

That was a point that hadn't occurred to me. "He can't breathe our air?"

"No, no. Altogether different."

"Well, where does he get the stuff he does breathe, then?"

The little man's lips .worked. "From that cone-shaped mechanism on the top of his head. An atmosphere plant that you could put in your pocket. Completely incredible. We can't get an adequate sample without taking it off him, and we can't take it off him without killing him. We have to deduce what he breathes in from what he breathes out. Very difficult." He went away.

All the same. I couldn't see much point in it. Presumably if Aza-Kra couldn't breathe our air, we couldn't breathe his—so anybody who wanted to examine him would have to wear an oxygen tank and a breathing mask.

But it was obvious enough, and I got it in another min-
ute. If the prisoner didn't have his own air-supply, it would
be that much harder for him to break out past the gun
rooms and the guards in the corridors and the. pillboxes
and the floodlights and the wall_______

We went on, stopping at every door. There were storerooms, sleeping quarters, a few offices. The rest of the rooms were empty.

Ritchy-loo wanted to go on to A building, but I was being perversely thorough, and I said we would go through the barracks and the company towns first. We did; it took us three hours, and thinned down Ritchy-loo's stream of cheerful conversation to a trickle. We looked everywhere, and of course we did not find anything that shouldn't have been there.

A building was the recreation hall. Canteen, library, gymnasium, movie theater, PX, swimming pool. It was also the project hospital and dispensary. Both sections were well filled.

So we went back to B. And it was almost noon, so we had lunch in the big air-conditioned cafeteria. I didn't look forward to it; I expected that rest and food would turn on Ritchy-loo's conversational spigot again, and if he didn't get any response to the first three or four general topics he tried, I was perfectly sure he would begin telling me jokes. Nothing of the kind happened. After a few minutes I saw why, or thought I did. Looking around the room, I saw face after face with the same blank' look on it; there wasn't a smile or an animated expression in the place. And now that I was paying attention I noticed that the sounds were odd, too. There were more than a hundred people in the room, enough to set up a beehive roar; but there was so little talking going on that you could pick out individual sentences with ease, and they were all trochaic—Want some sugar? No, thanks. Like that.

It was infectious; I was beginning to feel it now myself— an execution-chamber kind of mood, a feeling that we were all shut up in a place that we couldn't get out of, and where something horrible was going to happen. Unless you've¹ ever been in a group made up of people who had that feeling and were reinforcing it in each other, it's indescribable; but it was very real and very hard to take.

Ritchy-loo left half a chop on his plate; I finished mine, but it choked me.

In the corridor outside I asked him, "Is it always as bad as that?"

"You noticed it too? That place gives me the creeps. I don't know why. It's the same way in the movies, too, lately—wherever you get a lot of these people together. I just don't understand it." For a second longer he looked worried and thoughtful, and then he grinned suddenly. "I don't want to say anything against civilians, Mr. Dahl, but I think that bunch is pretty far gone."

I could have hugged him. Civilians! If Ritchy-loo was more than six months away from a summer-camp counsellor's job, I was a five-star general.

We started at that end of the corridor and worked our way down. We looked into a room with an X-ray machine and a fluoroscope in it, and a darkroom, and a room full of racks and filing cabinets, and a long row of offices.

Then Ritchy-loo opened a door that revealed two men standing on opposite sides of a desk, spouting angry German at each other. The tall one noticed us after a second, said, " 'St, 'st," to the other, and then to us, coldly, "You . might, at least, knock."

"Sorry, gentlemen," said Ritchy-loo brightly. He closed the door and went on to the next on the same side. This opened onto a small, bare room with nobody in it but a stocky man with corporal's stripes on his sleeve. He was sitting hunched over, elbows on knees, hands over his face. He didn't move or look up.

I have a good ear, and I had managed to catch one sentence of what the fat man next door had been saying to the tall one. It went like this: "Nein, nein, das ist bestimmt nicht die Klaustrophobie; Ich sage dir, es ist das dreifiissige Tier, das sie storrt."

My college German came back to me when I prodded it, but it creaked a little. While I was still working at it, I asked Ritchy-loo, "What was that?"

"Psychiatric section," he said

"You get many psycho cases here?"

"Oh, no," he said. "Just the normal percentage, Mr. Dahl. Less, in fact."

The captain was a poor liar.

"Klaustrophobie" was easy, of course. "Dreifilssige Tier" stopped me until I remembered that the German for *'zoo" is "Tiergarten." Dreifilssige Tier: the three-footed beast. The triped.

The fat one had been saying to the tall one, "No, no, it is absolutely not claustrophobia; I tell you, it's the triped that's disturbing them."

Three-quarters of an hour later we had peered into the last room in B building: a long office full of IBM machines. We had now been over every square yard of Chillicothe, and I had seen for myself that no skulduggery was going forward anywhere in it. That was the idea behind the guided tour, as Ritchy-loo was evidently aware.

He said, "Well, that just about wraps it up, Mr. Dahl. By the way, the General's office asked me to tell you that if it's all right with you, they'll set,up that phone call for you for four o'clock this afternoon."

I looked down at the rough map of the building I'd been drawing as we went along. "There's one place we haven't been, Captain," I said. "Section One."

"Oh, well that's right, that's right. You saw that yesterday, though, didn't you, Mr. Dahl?"

"For about two minutes. I wasn't able to take much of it in. I'd like to see it again, if it isn't too much trouble. Or even if it is."

Ritchy-loo laughed heartily. "Good enough. Just wait a second, I'll see if I can get you a clearance on it." He walked down the corridor to the nearest wall phone.

After a few moments he beckoned me over, palming the receiver. "The General says there are two research groups in there now and it would be a little crowded. He says he'd like you to postpone it if you think you can."

"Tell him that's perfectiy all right, but in that case I think we'd better put off the phone call, too."

He repeated the message, and waited. Finally, "Yes. Yes, uh-huh. Yes, I've got that. All right."

He turned to me. 'The General says it's! all right for you to go in for half an hour and watch, but he'd appreciate it if you'll be careful not to distract the people who're working in there."

I had been hoping the General would say no. I wanted to see the alien again, all right, but what I wanted the most was time.

This was the second day I had been at Chillicothe. By tomorrow at the latest I would have to talk to Eli Freeman; and I still hadn't figured out any sure, safe way to tell him that Chillicothe was a legitimate research project, not to be sniped at by the Herald-Star—and make him understand that I didn't mean a word of it.

I could simply refuse to make the call, or I could tell him as much of the truth as I could before I was cut off—two words, probably—but it was a cinch that call would be monitored at the other end, too; that was part of what Ritchy-loo meant by "setting up the call." Somebody from the FBI would be sitting at Freeman's elbow... and I wasn't telling myself fairy tales about Peter Zenger any more.

They would shut the paper down, which was not only the thing I wanted least in the world but a thing that would do nobody any good.

I wanted Eli to spread the story by underground channels—spread it so far, and time the release so well, that no amount of censorship could kill it.

Treason is a word every man has to define for himself.

Ritchy-loo did the honors for me at the gun-room door, and then left me, looking a little envious. I don't think he had ever been inside Section One.

There was somebody ahead of_xme in the tiny antechamber, I found: a short, wide-shouldered man with a sheepdog tangle of black hair.

He turned as the door closed behind me. "Hi. Oh—you're Dahl, aren't you?" He had a young, pleasant, meaningless face behind dark-rimmed glasses. I said yes.

He put a half-inch of cigarette between his lips and shook hands with me. "Somebody pointed you out. Glad to know you; my name's Donnelly. Physical psych section— very junior." He pointed through the spy-window. "What do you think of him?"

Aza-Kra was sitting directly in front of the window; his lunch-counter stool had been moved into the center of the room. Around him were four men: two on the left, sitting on folding chairs, talking to him and occasionally making notes; two on the right, standing beside a waist-high enclosed mechanism from which wires led to the upper lobe of the alien's body. The ends of the wires were taped against his skin.

"That isn't an easy question," I said.

Donnelly nodded without interest. "That's my boss there," he said, "the skinny, gray-haired guy on the right. We get on each other's nerves. If he gets that setup operating this session, I'm supposed to go in and take notes. He won't, though."

"What is it?"

"Electroencephalograph. See, his brain isn't in his head, it's in his upper thorax there. Too much insulation in the way. We can't get close enough for a good reading without surgery. I say we ought to drop it till we get permission, but Hendricks thinks he can lick it. Those two on the other side are interviewers. Like to hear what they're saying?"

He punched one of two buttons set into the door beside the speaker grill, under the spy-window. "If you're ever in here alone, remember you can't get out while this is on. You turn on the speaker here, it turns off the one in the gun room. They wouldn't be able to hear you ask to get out."

Inside, a monotonous voice was saying, "... have that here, but what exactly do you mean by..."

"I ought to be in physiology," Donnelly said, lowering his voice. "They have all the fun. You see his eyes?"

I looked. The center one was staring directly toward us; the other two were tilted, almost out of sight around the curve of that bulb of hlue-gray flesh.

"... in other words, just what is the nature of this energy, is it—uh—transmitted by waves, or ..."

"He can look three ways at once," I said.

"Three, with binocular," Donnelly agreed. "Each eye can function independently or couple with the one on either side. So he can have a series of overlapping monocular images, all the way around, or he can have up to three binocular images. They focus independently, too. He could read a newspaper and watch for his wife to come out of the movie across the street."

"Wait a minute," I said. "He has six eyes, not three?"

"Sure. Has to, to keep the symmetry and still get binocular vision."

"Then he hasn't got any front or back," I said slowly.

"No, that's right. He's trilaterally symmetrical. Drive you crazy to watch him walk. His legs work the same way as his eyes—any one can pair up with either of the others. He wants to change direction, he doesn't have to turn around. I'd hate to try to catch him in an open field."

"How did they catch him?" I asked.

"Luckiest thing in the world. Found him in the woods with two broken ankles. Now look at his hands. What do you see?"

The voice inside was still droning; evidently it was a long question. "Five fingers," I said.

"Nope." Donnelly grinned. "One finger, four thumbs. See
how they oppose, those two on either side of the middle
finger? He's got a better hand than ours. One hell of an
efficient design. Brain in his thorax where it's safe, six eyes
on a stalk—trachea up there too, no connection with the
esophagus, so he doesn't need an epiglottis. Three of every-
thing else. He can lose a leg and still walk, lose an arm and
still type, lose two eyes and still see better than we do. He
can lose—" ,

I didn't hear him. The interviewer's voice had stopped, and Aza-Kra's had begun. It was frightening, because it was a buzzing and it was a voice.

I couldn't take in a word of it; I had enough to do absorbing the fact that there were words.

Then it stopped, and the interviewer's ordinary, flat Middle Western voice began again.

"—And just try to sneak up behind him," said Donnelly. "I dare you."

Again Aza-Kra spoke briefly, and this time I saw the flesh at the side of his body, where the two lobes flowed together, bulge slightly and then relax.

"He's talking with one of his mouths," I said. "I mean, one of those—" I took a deep breath. "If he breathes through the top of his head, and there's no connection between his lungs and his vocal organs, then where the hell does he get the air?"

"He belches. Not as inconvenient as it sounds. You could learn to do it if you had to." Donnelly laughed. "Not very fragrant, though. Watch their faces when he talks."

I watched Aza-Kra's instead—what there was of it: one round, expressionless, oyster-colored eye staring back at me. With a human opponent, I was thinking, there were a thousand little things that you relied on to help you: facial expressions, mannerisms, signs of emotion. But Parst had been right when he said, There isn't a single possibility we can rule out. Not one. And so had the fat man: It's the triped that's disturbing them. And Ritchy-loo: Ifs the same way ... wherever you get a lot of these people together.

And I still hadn't figured out any way to tell Freeman what he had to know.

I thought I could arouse Eli's suspicion easily enough; we knew each other well enough for a word or a gesture to mean a good deal. I could make him look for hidden meanings. But how could I hide a message so that Eli would be more likely to dig it out than a trained FBI cryptologist?

I stared at Aza-Kra's glassy eye as if the answer were there. It was going to be a video circuit, I told myself. Donnelly was still yattering in my ear, and now the alien was buzzing again, but I ignored them both. Suppose I broke the message up into one-word units, scattered them through my conversation with Eli, and marked them off somehow— by twitching a finger, or blinking my eyelids?

A dark membrane flicked across the alien's oyster-colored
eye. .

A moment later, it happened again.

Donnelly was saying, "... intercostal membranes, apparently. But there's no trace of ..."

"Shut up a minute, will you?" I said. "I want to hear this."

The inhuman voice, the voice that sounded like the articulate buzzing of a giant insect, was saying, "Comparison not possible, excuse me. If (blink) you try to understand in words you know, you (blink) tell yourself you wish (blink) to understand, but knowledge escape (blink) you. Can only show (blink) you from beginning, one (blink) Utile, another little. Not possible to carry aU knowledge in one hand (blink)."

If you wish escape, show one hand.

I looked at Donnelly. He had moved back from the spy-window; he was Ughting a cigarette, frowning at the match-flame. His mouth was suUen.

I put my left hand flat against the window. I thought, I'm dreaming.

The interviewer said querulously, "... getting us nowhere. Can't you—"

"Wait," said the buzzing voice. "Let me say, please. Ignorant man hold (blink) burning stick, say, this is breath (blink) of the wood. Then you show him flashlight—"

I took a deep breath, and held it.

Around the alien, four men went down together, folding over quietly at waist and knee, sprawling on the floor. I heard a thump behind me.

Donnelly was lying stretched out along the wall, his head tilted against the corner. The cigarette had fallen from his hand.

I looked back at Aza-Kra. His head turned slightly, the dark flush crinkling. Two eyes stared back at me through the window.

"Now you can breathe," said the monster.

I let out the breath that was choking me and took another. My knees were shaking. "What did you do to them?"

"Put them to sleep only. In a few minutes I will put the others to sleep. After you are outside the doors. First we will talk."

I glanced at Donnelly again. His mouth was ajar; I could see his lips fluttering as he breathed. "All right," I said, "talk."

"When you leave," buzzed the voice, "you must take me with you."

Now it was clear. He could put people to sleep, but he couldn't open locked doors. He had to have help.

"No deal," I said, "You might as well knock me out, too."

"Yes," he answered, "you will do it. When you understand."

"I'm listening."

"You do not have to agree now. I ask only this much. When we are finished talking, you leave. When you are past the second door, hold your breath again. Then go to the office of General Parst. You will find there papers about me. Read them. You will find also keys to open gun room. Also, handcuffs. Special handcuffs, made to fit me. Then you will think, if Aza-Kra is not what he says, would he agree to this? Then you will come back to gun room, use controls there to open middle door. You will lay handcuffs down, where you stand now, then go back to gun room, open inside door. I will put on the handcuffs. You will see that I do it. And then you will take me with you."

... I said, "Let me think."

The obvious thing to do was to push the little button that turned on the audio circuit to the gun room, and yell for help; the alien could then put everybody to sleep from here to the wall, maybe, but it wouldn't do any good. Sooner or later he would have to let up, or starve to death along with the rest of us. On the other hand if I did what he asked —anything he asked—and it turned out to be the wrong thing, I would be guilty of the worst crime since Pilate's.

But I thought about it, I went over it again and again, and I couldn't see any loophole in it for Aza-Kra. He was leaving it up to me—if I felt like letting him out after I'd seen the papers in Parst's office, I could do so. If I didn't, I could still yell for help. In fact, I could get on the phone and yell to Washington, which would be a hell of a lot more to the point.

So where was the payoff for Aza-Kra? What was in those papers?

I pushed the button. I said, "This is Dahl. Let me out,
will you please?" •

The outer door began to slide back. Just in time, I saw Donnelly's head bobbing against it; I grabbed him by the * shirt-front and hoisted his limp body out of the way.

I walked across the echoing outer chamber; the outermost door opened for me. I stepped through it and held my breath. Down the corridor, three guards leaned over their rifles and toppled all in a row, like precision divers. Beyond them a hurrying civilian in the cross-corridor fell heavily and skidded out of sight.

The clacking of typewriters from a near-by office had stopped abruptly. I let out my breath when I couldn't hold it any longer, and listened to the silence.

The General was slumped over his desk, head on his crossed forearms, looking pretty old and tired with his polished bald skull shining under the light. There was a faint silvery scar running across the top of his head, and I wondered whether he had got it in combat as a young man, or whether he had tripped over a rug at an embassy reception.

Across the desk from him a thin man in a gray pin-check suit was jackknifed on the carpet, half-supported by a chair-leg, rump higher than his head.

There were two six-foot filing cabinets in the right-hand corner behind the desk. Both were locked; the drawers of the first one were labeled alphabetically, the other was unmarked.

I unhooked Parst's key-chain from his belt. He had as many keys as a janitor or a high-school principal, but not many of them were small enough to fit the filing cabinets. I got the second one unlocked and began going through the drawers. I found what I wanted in the top one—seven fat manila folders labeled "Aza-Kra—Armor," "Aza-Kra— General information," "Aza-Kra—Power sources," Aza-Kra—Spaceflight" and so on; and one more labeled "Directives and related correspondence."

I hauled them all out, piled them on Parst's desk and pulled up a chair.

I took "Armor" first because it was on top and because the title puzzled me. The folder was full of transcripts of interviews whose subject I had to work out as I went along. It appeared that when captured, Aza-Kra had been wearing a light-weight bullet-proof body armor, made of something that was longitudinally flexible and perpendicularly rigid— in other words, you could pull it on like a suit of winter underwear, but you couldn't dent it with a sledge hammer.

They had been trying to find out what the stuff was and how it was made for almost two months and as far as I could see they had not made a nickel's worth of progress.

I looked through "Power sources" and "Spaceflight" to see if they were the same, and they were. The odd part was that Aza-Kra's answers didn't sound reluctant or evasive; but he kept running into ideas for which there weren't any words in English and then they would have to start all over again, like Twenty Questions.... Is it animal? vegetable? mineral? It was a mess.

I put them all aside except "General information" and "Directives." The first, as I had guessed, was a catch-all for nontechnical' subjects—where Aza-Kra had come from, what his people were like, his reasons for coming to this planet: all the unimportant questions; or the only questions that had any importance, depending on how you looked at it.

Parst had already given me an accurate summary of it, but it was surprisingly effective in Aza-Kra's words. You say we want your planet. There are many planets, so many you would not believe. But if we wanted your planet, and if we could kill as you do, please understand, we are very many. We would fall on your planet like snowflakes. We would not send one man alone.

And later: Most young peoples kill. It is a law of nature, yes, but try to understand, it is not the only law. You have been a young people, but now you are growing older. Now you must learn the other law, not to kill. That is what I have come to teach. Until you learn this, we cannot have you among us.

There was nothing in the folder dated later than a month and a half ago. They had dropped that line of questioning early.

The first thing I saw in the other folder began like this:

You are hereby directed to hold yourself in readiness to destroy the subject under any of the following circumstances, without further specific notification:

1, a: If the subject attempts to escape.

1, b: If the subject kills or injures a human being.

1, c: If the landing, anywhere in the world, of other members of the subject's race is reported and their similarity to the subject established beyond a reasonable doubt....

Seeing it written down like that, in the cold dead-alive-ness of black words on white paper, it was easy to forget that the alien was a stomach-turning monstrosity, and to see only that what he had to say was lucid and noble.

But I still hadn't found anything that would persuade me to help him escape. The problem was still there, as insoluble as ever. There was no way of evaluating a word the alien said about himself. He had come alone—perhaps— instead of bringing an invading army with him; but how did we know that one member of his race wasn't as dangerous to us as Perry's battleship to the Japanese? He might be; there was some evidence that he was.

My quarrel with the Defense Department was not that they were mistreating an innocent three-legged missionary, but simply that the problem of Aza-Kra belonged to the world, not to a fragment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States—and certainly not to me.

... There was one other way out, I realized. Instead of calling Frisbee in Washington, I could call an arm-long list of senators and representatives. I could call the UN secretariat in New York; I could call the editor of every major newspaper in this hemisphere and the head of every wire service and broadcasting chain. I could stir up a hornet's nest, even, as the saying goes, if I swung for it.

Wrong again: I couldn't. I opened the "Directives" folder again, looking for what I thought I had seen there in the list of hypothetical circumstances. There it was:

1, f: If any concerted attempt on the part of any person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, or' to aid him in any way, is made; or if the subject's existence and presence in Defense Department custody becomes public knowledge.

That sewed it up tight, and it also answered my question about Aza-Kra. Knocking out the personnel of B building would be construed as an attempt to escape or as a concerted attempt by a person or group to remove the subject from Defense Department custody, it didn't matter which. If I broke the story, it would have the same result. They would kill him.

In effect, he had put his life in my hands: and that was why he was so sure that I'd help him.

It might have been that, or what I found just before I left the office, that decided me. I don't know; I wish I did.

Coming around the desk the other way, I glanced at the thin man on the floor and noticed that there was something under him, half-hidden by his body. It turned out to be two things: a grey fedora and a pint-sized gray-leather briefcase, chained to his wrist.

So I looked under Parst's folded arms, saw the edge of a thick white sheet of paper, and pulled it out.

Under Frisbee's letterhead, it said:

By courier.

Dear General Parst:

Some possibility appears to exist that A. K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area; please give me your thought on this as soon as possible—the decision can't be long postponed.

In the meantime you will of course consider your command under emergency status, and we count on you to use your initiative to safeguard security at all costs. In a crisis, you will consider Lieut. D. as expendable.

Sincerely yours,

CARLTON FRISBEE

cf/cf/enc.

"Enc." meant "enclosure"; I pried up Parst's arms again and found another sheet of stiff paper, folded three times, with a paperclip on it.

It was a First Lieutenant's commission, made out to Robert James Dahl, dated three days before, and with a perfect forgery of my signature at the bottom of it.

If commissions can be forged so can court-martial records.

I put the commission and the letter in my pocket. I didn't seem to feel any particular emotion, but I noticed that my hands were shaking as I sorted through the "General information" file, picked out a few sheets and stuffed them into my pocket with the other papers. I wasn't confused or in doubt about what to do next. I looked around the room, spotted a metal locker diagonally across from the filing cabinets, and opened it with one of the General's keys.

Inside were two .45 automatics, boxes of ammunition several loaded clips, and three odd-looking sets of handcuffs, very wide and heavy, each with its key.

I took the handcuffs, the keys, both automatics and all the clips.

In a storeroom at the end of the corridor I found a two-wheeled dolly. I wheeled it all the way around to Section One and left it outside the center door. Then it struck me that I was still wearing the pinks they had given me when I arrived, and where the hell were my own clothes? I took a chance and went up to my room on the second floor, remembering that I hadn't been back there since morning.

There they were, neatly laid out on the bed. My keys, lighter, change, wallet and so on were on the bedside table. I changed and went back down to Section One.

In the gun room were two sprawled shapes, one beside the machine-gun that poked its snout through the hemispherical blister, the other under a panel set with three switches and a microphone.

The switches were clearly marked. I opened the first two, walked out and around and laid the three sets of handcuffs on the floor in the middle room. Then I went back to the gun room, closed the first two doors and opened the third.

Soft thumping sounds came from the loudspeaker over the switch panel; then the rattling of metal, more thumps, and finally a series of rattling clicks.

I opened the first door and went back inside. Through the panel in the middle door I could see Aza-Kra; he had ¹retreated into the inner room so that all of him was plainly visible. He was squatting on the floor, his legs drawn up. His arms were at full stretch, each wrist manacled to an ankle. He strained his arms outward to show me that the cuffs were tight.

I made one more trip to open the middle door. Then I got the dolly and wheeled it in.

"Thank you," said Aza-Kra. I got a whiff of his "breath"; as Donnelly had intimated, it wasn't pleasant.

Halfway to the airport, at Aza-Kra's request, I held my breath again. Aside from that we didn't speak except when I asked him, as I was loading him from the jeep into a limousine, "How long will they stay unconscious?"

"Not more than twenty hours, I think. I could have given them more, but I did not dare, I do not know your chemistry well enough."

We could go a long way in twenty hours. We would certainly have to.

I hated to go home, it was too obvious and there was a good chance that the hunt would start before any twenty hours were up, but there wasn't any help for it. I had a passport and a visa for England, where I had been planning to go for a publishers' conference in January, but it hadn't occurred to me to take it along on a quick trip to Washington. And now I had to have the passport.

My first idea had been to head for New York and hand Aza-Kra over to the UN there, but I saw it was no good. Extraterritoriality was just a word, like a lot of other words; we wouldn't be safe until we were out of the country, and on second thought, maybe not then.

It was a little after eight-thirty when I pulled in to the curb down the street from my house. I hadn't eaten since noon, but I wasn't hungry; and it didn't occur to me until later to think about Aza-Kra.

I got the passport and some money without waking my housekeeper. A few blocks away I parked again on a side street. I called the airport, got a reservation on the next eastbound flight, and spent half an hour buying a trunk big enough for Aza-Kra and wrestling him into it.

It struck me at the last minute that perhaps I had been counting too much on that atmosphere-plant of his. His air supply was taken care of, but what about his respiratory waste produced—would he poison himself in that tiny closed space? I asked him, and he said, "No, it is all right. I will be warm, but I can bear it."

I put the lid down, then opened it again. "I forgot about food," I said. "What do you eat, anyway?"

"At Chillicothe I ate soya bean extract. With added minerals. But I am able to go without food for long periods. Please, do not worry."

All right. I put the lid down again and locked the trunk, but I didn't stop worrying.

He was being too accommodating.

I had expected him to ask me to turn him loose, or take him to wherever his spaceship was. He hadn't brought the subject up; he hadn't even asked me where we were going, or what my plans were.

I thought I knew the answer to that, but it didn't make me any happier. He didn't ask because he already knew— just as he'd known the contents of Parst's office, down to the last document; just as he'd known what I was thinking when I was in the anteroom with Donnelly.

He read minds. And he gassed people through solid metal walls.

What else did he do?

There wasn't time to dispose of the limousine; I simply left it at the airport. If the alarm went out before we got to the coast, we were sunk anyhow; if not, it wouldn't matter.

Nobody stopped us. I caught the stratojet in New York at 12:20, and five hours later we were in London.

Customs was messy, but there wasn't any other way to handle it. When we were fifth in line, I thought: Knock them out for about an hour—and held my breath. Nothing happened. I rapped on the side of the trunk to attract his attention, and did it again. This time it worked: everybody in sight went down like a rag doll.

I stamped my own passport, filled out a declaration form and buried it in a stack of others, put a tag on the trunk, loaded it aboard a handtruck, wheeled it outside and took a cab.

I had learned something in the process, although it certainly wasn't much: either Aza-Kra couldn't, or didn't, eavesdrop on my mind all the time—or else he was simply one step ahead of me.

Later, on the way to the harbor, I saw a newsstand and realized that it was going on three days since I had seen a paper. I had tried to get the New .York dailies at the airport, but they'd been sold out—nothing on the stands but a lone copy of the Staten Island Advance. That hadn't struck me as odd at the time—an index of my state of mind—but it did now.

I got out and bought a copy of everything on the stand except the tipsheets—four newspapers, all of them together about equaling the bulk of one Herald-Star. I felt frustrated enough to ask the newsvendor if he had any papers left over from yesterday or the day before. He gave me a glassy look, made me repeat it, then pulled his face into an indescribable expression, laid a finger beside his nose, and said, " 'Arf a mo.'" He scuttled into a bar a few yards down the street, was gone five minutes, and came back clutching a mare's-nest of soiled and bedraggled papers.

" 'Ere you are, guvnor. Three bob for the lot."

I paid him. "Thanks," I said, "very much."

He waved his hand expansively. "Okay, bud," he said. "T'ink nuttin' of it!"

A comedian.

The only Channel boat leaving before late afternoon turned out to be an excursion steamer—round trip, two guineas. The boat wasn't crowded; it was the tag-end of the season, and a rough, windy day. I found a seat without any trouble and finished sorting out my stack of papers by date and folio.

British newspapers don't customarily report any more of our news than we do of theirs, but this week our supply of catastrophes had been ample enough to make good reading across the Atlantic. I found all three of the Chicago stories —trimmed to less than two inches apiece, but there. I read the first with professional interest, the second skeptically, and the third with alarm.

I remembered the run of odd items I'd read in that Washington hotel room, a long time ago. I remembered Fris-bee's letter to Parst: "Some possibility appears to exist that A.K. is responsible for recent disturbances in your area...."

I found two of the penitentiary stories, half smothered by stop press, and I added them to the total. I drew an imaginary map of the United States in my head and stuck imaginary pins in it. Red ones, a little cluster: Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis. Blue ones, a scattering around them: Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute.

Down toward the end of the cabin someone's portable radio was muttering.

A fat youth in a checkered jacket had it. He moved over
reluctantly and made room for me to sit down. The crisp,
controlled BBC voice was saying, "... in Commons today,
declared that Britain's trade balance is more favorable than
at any time during the past fifteen years. In London, cere-
monies marking the sixth anniversary of the death_______ "I let

the words slide past me until I heard:

"In the United States, the mysterious epidemic affecting stockyard workers in the central states has spread to New York and New Jersey on the eastern seaboard. The President has requested Congress to provide immediate emergency meat-rationing legislation."

A blurred little woman on the bench opposite leaned forward and said, "Serve 'em right, too! Them with their beefsteak a day."

There were murmurs of approval.

I got up and went back to my own seat.... It all fell into one pattern, everything: the man who kicked his wife, the prizefighters, the policeman, the wardens, the slaughterhouse "epidemic."

It was the lex talionis—or the Golden Rule in reverse: Be done by as you- do to others.

When you injured another living thing, both of you felt the same pain. When you killed, you felt the shock of your victim's death. You might be only stunned by it, like the slaughterhouse workers, or you might die, like the policeman and the schoolboy murderer.

So-called mental anguish counted too, apparently. That explained the wave of humanitarianism in prisons, at least partially; the rest was religious hysteria and the kind of herd instinct that makes any startling new movement mushroom.

And, of course, it also explained Chillicothe: the horrible blanketing depression that settled anywhere the civilian staff congregated—the feeling of being penned up in a place where something frightful was going to happen—and the thing the two psychiatrists had been arguing about, the pseudo-claustrophobia... all that was nothing but the reflection of Aza-Kra's feelings, locked in that cell on an alien planet.

Be done by as you do.

And I was carrying that with me. Des Moines, Kansas City, Decatur, St. Louis, Chicago, Leavenworth, Terre Haute—New York. After that, England. We'd been in London less than an hour—but England is only four hundred-odd miles long, from Spittal to Lands End.

I remembered what Aza-Kra had said: Now you must learn the other law, not to kill.

Not to kill tripeds.

My body was shaking uncontrollably; my head felt like a balloon stuffed with cotton. I stood up and looked around at the blank faces, the inward-looking eyes, every man, woman and child living in a little world of his own. I had an hysterical impulse to shout at them, Look at you, you idiots! You've been invaded and half conquered without a shot fired, and you don't know it!

In the next instant I realized that I was about to burst into laughter. I put my hand over my mouth and half-ran out on deck, giggles leaking through my fingers; I got to the rail and bent myself over it, roaring, apoplectic. I was utterly ashamed of myself, but I couldn't stop it; it was like a fit of vomiting.

The cold spray on my face sobered me. I leaned over the rail, looking down at the white water boiling along the hull. It occurred to me that there was one practical test still to be made: a matter of confirmation.

A middle-aged man with rheumy eyes was standing in the cabin doorway, partly blocking it. As I shouldered past him, I deliberately put my foot down on his.

An absolutely blinding pain shot through the toes of my right foot. When my eyes cleared I saw that the two of us were standing in identical attitudes—weight on one foot, the other knee bent, hand reaching instinctively for the injury.

I had taken him for a "typical Englishman," but he cursed me in a rattling stream of gutter French. I apologized, awkwardly but sincerely—very sincerely.

When we docked at Dunkirk I still hadn't decided what to do.

What I had had in mind up till now was simply to get across France into Switzerland and hold a press conference there, inviting everybody from Tasi to the UP. It had to be Switzerland for fairly obvious reasons; the English or the French would clamp a security lid on me before you could say NATO, but the Swiss wouldn't dare—they paid for then-neutrality by having to look both ways before they cleared their throats.

I could still do that, and let the UN set up a committee to worry about Aza-Kra—but at a conservative estimate it would be ten months before the committee got its foot out of its mouth, and that would be pretty nearly ten months too late.

Or I could simply go to the American consulate in Dunkirk and turn myself in. Within ten hours we would be back in Chillicothe, probably, and I'd be free of the responsibility. I would also be dead.

We got through customs the same way we'd done in London.

And then I had to decide.

The cab driver put his engine in gear and looked at me over his shoulder. "Un hotel?"

"... Yes," I said. "A cheap hotel. Un hdtel a bon marche."

"Entendu." He jammed down the accelerator an instant before he let out the clutch; we were doing thirty before he shifted into second.

The place he took me to was a villainous third-rate commercial-travelers' hotel, smelling of mine and dirty linen. When the porters were gone I unlocked the trunk and opened it.

We stared at each other.

Moisture was beaded on his blue-gray skin, and there was a smell in the room stronger and ranker than anything that belonged there. His eyes looked duller than they had before; I could barely see the pupils.

"Well?" I said.

"You are half right," he buzzed. "I am doing it, but not for the reason you think."

"All right; you're doing it. Stop it. That comes first. We'll stay here, and I'll watch the papers to make sure you do."

"At the customs, those people will sleep only an hour."

"I don't give a damn. If the gendarmes come up here, you can put them to sleep. If I have to I'll move you out to the country and well live under a haystack. But no matter what happens we're not going a mile farther into Europe until I know you've quit. If you don't like that, you've got two choices. Either you knock me out, and see how much good it does you, or I'll take that air-machine off your head."

He buzzed inarticulately for a moment. Then, "I have to say no. It is impossible. I could stop for a time, or pretend to you that I stop, but that would solve nothing. It will be—it will do the greatest harm if I stop; you don't understand. It is necessary to continue."

I said, "That's your answer?"

"Yes. If you will let me explain—"

I stepped toward him. I didn't hold my breath, but I think half-consciously I expected him to gas me. He didn't. He didn't move; he just waited.

Seen at close range, the flesh of his head seemed to be continuous with the black substance of the cone; instead of any sharp dividing line, there was a thin area that was neither one nor the other.

I put one hand over the fleshy bulb, and felt his eyes retract and close against my palm. The sensation was indescribably unpleasant, but I kept my hand there, put the other one against the far side of the cone—pulled and pushed simultaneously, as hard as I could.

The top of my head came off.

I was leaning against the top of the open trunk, dizzy and nauseated. The pain was like a white-hot wire drawn tight around my skull just above the eyes. I couldn't see; I couldn't think.

And it didn't stop; it went on and on_______ I pushed myself

away from the trunk and let my legs fold under me. I sat on the floor with my head in my hands, pushing my fingers against the pain.

Gradually it ebbed. I heard Aza-Kra's voice buzzing very quietly, not in English but in a rhythm of tone and phrasing that seemed almost directly comprehensible; if there were a language designed to be spoken by bass viols, it might sound like that.

I got up and looked at him. Shining beads of blue liquid stood out all along the base of the cone, but the seam had not broken.

I hadn't realized that it would be so difficult, that it would
be so painful. I felt the weight of the two automatics in my
pockets, and I palled one out, the metal cold and heavy in
my palm l .. but I knew suddenly that I couldn't do that
either. •

I didn't know where his brain was, or his heart. I didn't know whether I could kill him with one shot.

I sat down on the bed, staring at him. "You knew that would happen, didn't you," I said. "You must think I'm a prize sucker."

He said nothing. His eyes were half-closed, and a thin whey-colored fluid was drooling out of the two mouths I could see. Aza-Kra was being sick.

I felt an answering surge of nausea. Then the flow stopped, and a second later, the nausea stopped too. I felt angry, and frustrated, and frightened.

After a moment I got up off the bed and started for the door.

/ "Please," said Aza-Kra. "Will you be gone long?"

"I don't know," I said. "Does it matter?"

"If you will be gone long," he said, "I would ask that you loosen the handcuffs for a short period before you go."

I stared at him, suddenly hating him with a violence that shook me.

"No," I said, and reached for the door-handle.

My body knotted itself together like a fist. My legs gave way under me, and I missed the door-handle going down; I hit the floor hard.

There was no sensation in my hands or feet. The muscles of my shoulders, arms, thighs, and calves were one huge, heavy pain. And I couldn't move.

I looked at Aza-Kra's wrists, shackled to his drawn-up ankles. He had been like that for something like fourteen hours. He had cramps.

, "I am sorry," said Aza-Kra. "I did not want to do that to you, but there was no other way."

I thought dazedly, No other way to do what?

"To make you wait. To listen. To let me explain."

I said, "I don't get it." Anger flared again, then faded under something more intense and painful. The closest English word for it is "humility"; some other language may come nearer, but I doubt it; it isn't an emotion that we like to talk about. I felt bewildered, and ashamed, and very small, all at once, and there was another component, harder to name. A ... threshold feeling.

I tried again. "I felt the other pain, before, but not this. Is that because—"

"Yes. There must be the intention to injure or cause pain. I will tell you why. I have to go back very far. When an animal becomes more developed—many cells, instead of one—always the same things happen. I am the first man of my kind who ever saw a man of your kind. But we both have eyes. We both have ears." The feathery spines on his neck stiffened and relaxed. "Also there is another sense that always comes. But always it goes only a little way and then stops.

"When you are a young animal, fighting with the others to live, it is useful to have a sense which feels the thoughts of the enemy. Just as it is useful to have a sense which sees the shape of his body. But this sense cannot come all at once, it must grow by a little and a little, as when a surface that can tell the light from the dark becomes a true eye.

"But the easiest thoughts to feel are pain thoughts, they are much stronger than any others. And when the sense is still weak—it is a part of the brain, not an organ by itself— when it is weak, only the strongest stimulus can make it work. This stimulus is hatred, or anger, or the wish to kill.

"So that just when the sense is enough developed that it could begin to be useful, it always disappears. It is not gone, it is pushed under. A very long time ago, one race discovered this sense and learned how it could be brought back. It is done by a class of organic chemicals. You have not the word. For each race a different member of the class, but always it can be done. The chemical is a catalyst, it is not used up. The change it makes is in the cells of all the body— it is permanent, it passes also to the children.

"You understand, when a race is older, to kill is not useful. With the change, true civilization begins. The first race to find this knowledge gave it to others, and those to others, and now all have it. All who are able to leave their planets. We give it to you, now, because you are ready. When you are older there will be others who are ready. You will give it to them."

While I had been listening, the pain in my arms and legs had slowly been getting harder and harder to take. I reminded myself that Aza-Kra had borne it, probably, at least ten hours longer than I had; but that didn't make it much easier. I tried to keep my mind off it but that wasn't possible; the band of pain around my head was still there, too, a faint throbbing. And both were consequences of things I had done to Aza-Kra. I was suffering with him, measure for measure.

Justice. Surely that was a good thing? Automatic instant retribution, mathematically accurate: an eye for an eye.

I said, "That was what you were doing when they caught you, then—finding out which chemical we reacted to?"

"Yes. I did not finish until after they had brought me to Chillicothe. Then it was much more difficult. If not for my accident, all would have gone much more quickly."

"The walls?"

"Yes. As you have guessed, my air machine will also make other substances and expel them with great force. Also, when necessary, it will place these substances in a— state of matter, you have not the word—so that they pass through solid objects. But this takes much power. While in Chillicothe my range was very small. Later, when I can be in the open, it will be much greater."

He caught what I was thinking before I had time to speak. He said, "Yes. You will agree. When you understand."

It was the same thing he had told me at Chillicothe, almost to the word.

I said, "You keep talking about this thing as a gift but I notice you didn't ask us if we wanted it. What kind of a gift is that?"

"You are not serious. You know what happened when I was captured."

After a moment he added, "I think if it had been possible, if we could have asked each man and woman on the planet to say yes or no, explaining everything, showing that there was no trick, that most" would have said yes. For people the change is good. But for governments it is not good."

I said, "I'd like to believe you. It would be very pleasant to believe you. But nothing you can say changes the fact that this thing, this gift of yours could be a weapon. To soften us up before you move in. If you were an advance agent for an invasion fleet, this is what you'd be doing.".

"You are thinking with habits," he said. "Try to think with logic. Imagine that your race is very old, with much knowledge. You have ships that cross between the stars. Now you discover this young race, these Earthmen, who only begin to learn to leave their own planet. You decide to conquer them. Why? What is your reason?"

"How do I know? It could be anything. It might be something I couldn't even imagine. For all I know you want to eat us."

His throat-spines quivered. He said slowly, "You are partly serious. You really think ... I am sorry that you did not read the studies of the physiologists. If you had, you would know. My digestion is only for vegetable food. You cannot understand, but—with us, to eat meat is like with you, to eat excretions."

I said, "All right, maybe we have something else you want. Natural resources that you've used up. Some substance, maybe some rare element."

"This is still habit thinking. Have you forgotten my air machine?"

"—Or maybe you just want the planet itself. With us cleared off it, to make room for you."

"Have you never looked at the sky at night?"

I said, "All right. But this quiz was your idea, not mine. I admit that I don't know enough even to make a sensible guess at your motives. And that's the reason why I can't trust you."

He was silent a moment. Then: "Remember that the substance which makes the change is a catalyst. Also it is a very fine powder. The particles are of only a few molecules each. The winds carry it. It is swallowed and breathed in and absorbed by the skin. It is breathed out and excreted. The wind takes it again. Water carries it. It is carried by insects and by birds and animals, and by men, in their bodies and in their clothing.

"This you can understand and know that it is true. If I die another could come and finish what I have begun, but even this is not necessary. The amount of the catalyst I have already released is more than enough. It will travel slowly, but nothing can stop it. If I die now, this instant, still in a year the catalyst will reach every part of the planet."

After a long time I said, "Then what did you mean by saying that a great harm would be done, if you stopped now?"

"I meant this. Until now, only your Western nations have the catalyst. In a few days their time of crisis will come, beginning with the United States. And the nations of the East will attack."

I found that I could move, inchmeal, if I sweated hard enough at it. It took me what seemed like half an hour to get my hand into my pocket, paw all the stuff out onto the floor, and get the key-ring hooked over one finger. Then I had to crawl about ten feet to Aza-Kra, and when I got there my fingers simply wouldn't hold the keys firmly enough.

I picked them up in my teeth and got two of the wrist-cuffs unlocked. That was the best I could do; the other one was behind him, inside the trunk, and neither of us had strength enough to pull him out where I could get at it.

It was comical. My muscles weren't cramped, but my nervous system was getting messages that said they were—so, to all intents and purposes, it was true. I had no control over it; the human body is about as skeptical as a God-smitten man at a revival meeting. If mine had thought it was burning, I would have developed simon-pure blisters.

Then the pins-and-needles started, as Aza-Kra began to flex his arms and legs to get the stiffness out of them. Between us, after a while, we got him out of the trunk and unlocked the third cuff. In a few minutes I had enough freedom of movement to begin massaging his cramped muscles; but it was three-quarters of an hour before either of us could stand.

We caught the mid-afternoon plane to Paris, with Aza-Kra in the trunk again. I checked into a hotel, left him there, and went shopping: I bought a hideous black dress with imitation-onyx trimming, a black coat with a cape, a feather muff, a tall black hat and the heaviest mourning veil I could find. At a theatrical costumer's near the Place de l'Opera I got a reasonably lifelike old-woman mask and a heavy wig.

When he was dressed up, the effect was startling. The tall hat covered the cone, the muff covered two of his hands. There was nothing to be done about the feet, but the skirt hung almost to the ground, and I thought he would pass with luck.

We got a cab and headed for the American consulate, but halfway there I remembered about the photographs. We stopped off at an amusement arcade and I got my picture taken in a coin-operated machine. Aza-Kra was another problem—that mask wouldn't fool anybody without the veil —but I spotted a poorly-dressed old woman and with some difficulty managed to make her understand that I was a crazy American who would pay her five hundred francs to pose for her picture. We struck a bargain at a thousand.

As soon as we got into the consulate waiting-room, Aza-Kra gassed everybody in the building. I locked the street \ door and searched the offices until I found a man with a little pile of blank passport books on the desk in front of him. He had been filling one in on a machine like a typewriter except that it had a movable plane-surface platen instead of a cylinder.

I moved him out of the way and made out two passports; one for myself, as Arthur James LeRoux; one for Aza-Kra, as Mrs. Adrienne LeRoux. I pasted on the photographs and fed them into the machine that pressed the words "Photograph attached U. S. Consulate Paris, France" into the paper, and then into the one that impressed the consular seal.

I signed them, and filled in the blanks on the inside covers, in the taxi on the way to the Israeli consulate. The afternoon was running out, and we had a lot to do.

We went to six foreign consulates, gassed the occupants,
and got a visa stamp in each one. I had the devil's own time
filling them out; I had to copy the scribbles I found in
legitimate passports at each place and hope for the best. The
Israeli one was surprisingly simple, but the Japanese was a
horror. ^N

We had dinner in our hotel room—steak for me, water and soy-bean paste, bought at a health-food store, for Aza-Kra. Just before we left for Le Bourget, I sent a cable to Eli Freeman:

Big story will have to wait spread this now all stockyard so-called epidemic and similar phenomena due one cause step on somebody's toe to see what I mean.

Shortly after seven o'clock we were aboard a flight bound for the Middle East.

And that was the fourth day, during which a number of things happened that I didn't have time to add to my list until later.

Commercial and amateur fishermen along the Atlantic seaboard, from Delaware Bay as far north as Portland, suffered violent attacks whose symptoms resembled those of asthma. Some—who had been using rods or poles rather than nets—complained also of sharp pains in the jaws and hard palate. Three deaths were reported.

The "epidemic" now covered roughly half the continental United States. All livestock shipments from the West had been canceled, stockyards in the affected area were full to bursting. The President had declared a national emergency.

Lobster had disappeared completely from east-coast menus.

One Robert James Dahl, described as the owner and publisher of a Middle Western newspaper, was being sought by the Defense Department and the FBI in connection with the disappearance of certain classified documents.

The next day, the fifth, was Saturday. At two in the morning on a Sabbath, Tel Aviv seemed as dead as Angkor. We had four hours there, between planes; we could have spent them in the airport waiting room, but I was wakeful and I wanted to talk to Aza-Kra. There was one ancient taxi at the airport; I had the driver take us into the town and leave us there, down in the harbor section, until plane time.

We sat on a bench behind the sea wall and watched the moonlight on the Mediterranean. Parallel banks of faintly-silvered clouds arched over us to northward; the air was fresh and cool.

After a while I said, "You know that I'm only playing this your way for one reason. As far as the rest of it goes, the more I think about it the less I like it."

"Why?"

"A dozen reasons. The biological angle, for one. I don't like violence, I don't like war, but it doesn't matter what I like. They're biologically necessary, they eliminate the unfit."

"Do you say that only the unfit are killed in wars?"

"That isn't what I mean. In modern war the contest isn't between individuals, it's between whole populations. Nations, and groups of nations. It's a cruel, senseless, wasteful business, and when you're in the middle of it it's hard to see any good at all in it, but it works—the survivors survive, and that's the only test there is."

"Our biologists do not take this view." He added, "Neither do yours."

I said, "How's that?"

"Your biologists agree with ours that war is not biological. It is social. When so many are killed, no stock improves. All suffer. It is as you yourself say, the contest is between nations. But their wars kill men."

I said, "All right, I concede that one. But we're not the only kind of animal on this planet, and we didn't get to be the dominant species without fighting. What are we supposed to do if we run into a hungry lion—argue with him?"

"In a few weeks there will be no more lions."

I stared at him. "This affects lions, too? Tigers, elephants, everything?"

"Everything of sufficient brain. Roughly, everything above the level of your insects."

"But I understood you to say that the catalyst—that it took a different catalyst for each species."

"No. All those with spines and warm blood have the same ancestors. Your snakes may perhaps need a different catalyst, and I believe you have some primitive sea creatures which kill, but they are not important."

I said, "My God." I thought of lions, wolves, coyotes,
house-cats, lying dead beside their prey. Eagles, hawks and
owls tumbling out of the sky. Ferrets, stoats, weasels________

The world a big garden, for protected children.

My fists clenched. "But this is a million times worse than I had any idea. It's insane. You're upsetting the whole natural balance, you're mocking it cross-ways. Just for a start, what the hell are we going to do about rats and mice? That's—" I choked on my tongue. There were too many images in my mind to put any of them into words. Rats like a tidal wave, filling a street from wall to wall. Deer swarming out of the forests. The sky blackening with crows, sparrows, jays.

"It will be difficult for some years," Aza-Kra said. "Perhaps even as difficult as you now think. But you say that to fight for survival is good. Is it not better to fight against other species than among yourselves?"

"Fight!" I said. "What have you left us to fight with? How many rats can a man kill before he drops dead from shock?"

"It is possible to kill without causing pain or shock....

You would have thought of this, although it is a new idea for you. Even your killing of animals for food can continue. We do not ask you to become as old as we are in a day. Only to put behind you your cruelty which has no purpose."

He had answered me, as always; and as always, the answer was two-edged. It was possible to kill painlessly, yes. And the only weapon Aza-Kra had brought to Earth, apparently, was an anesthetic gas....

We landed at Srinager, in the Vale of Kashmir, at high noon: a sea of white light under a molten-metal sky.

Crossing the field, I saw a group of white-turbaned figures standing at the gate. I squinted at them through the glare; heat-waves made them jump and waver, but in a moment I was sure. They were bush-bearded Sikh policemen, and there were eight of them.

I pressed Aza-Kra's arm sharply and held my breath.

A moment later we picked our way through the sprawled line of passengers to the huddle of bodies at the gate. The passport examiner, a slender Hindu, lay a yard from the Sikhs. I plucked a sheet of paper out of his hand.

Sure enough, it was a list of the serial numbers of the passports we had stolen from the Paris consulate.

Bad luck. It was only six-thirty in Paris now, and on a Saturday morning at that; we should have'had at least six hours more. But something could have gone wrong at any one of the seven consulates—an after-hours appointment, or a worried wife, say. After that the whole thing would have unraveled.

"How much did you give them this time?" I asked.
"As before. Twenty hours." \

"All right, good. Let's go."

He had overshot his range a little: all four of the hack-drivers waiting outside the airport building were snoring over their wheels. I dumped the skinniest one in the back seat with Aza-Kra and took over.

Not for the first time, it occurred to me that without me or somebody just like me Aza-Kra would be helpless. It wasn't just a matter of getting out of Chillicothe; he couldn't drive a car or fly a plane, he couldn't pass for human by himself; he couldn't speak without giving himself away. Free, with no broken bones, he could probably escape recapture indefinitely; but if he wanted to go anywhere he would have to walk.

And not for the first time, I tried to see into a history book that hadn't been written yet. My name was there, that much was certain, providing there was going to be any history to write. But was it a name like Blondel... or did it sound more like Vidkun Quisling?

We had to go south; there was nothing in any other direction but the highest mountains in the world. We didn't have Pakistan visas, so Lahore and Amritsar, the obvious first choices, were out. The best we could do was Chamba, about two hundred rail miles southeast on the Srinager-New Delhi line. It wasn't on the principal air routes, but we could get a plane- there to Saharanpur, which was.

There was an express leaving in half an hour, and we took it. I bought an English-language newspaper at the station and read it backward and forward for four hours; Aza-Kra spent the time apparently asleep, with his cone, hidden by the black hat, tilted out the window.

The "epidemic" had spread to five Western states, plus Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba, and parts of Mexico and Cuba ... plus England and France, I knew, but there was nothing about that in my Indian paper; too early.

In Chamba I bought the most powerful battery-operated portable radio I could find; I wished I had thought of it sooner. I checked with the airport: there was a flight leaving Saharanpur for Port Blair at eight o'clock.

Port Blair, in the Andamans, is Indian territory; we wouldn't need to show our passports. What we were going to do after that was another question.

I could have raided another set of consulates, but I knew it would be asking for trouble. Once was bad enough; twice, and when we tried it a third time—as we would have to, unless I found some other answer—I was willing to bet we would find them laying for us, with gas masks and riot guns.

Somehow, in the few hours we were to spend at Port Blair, I had to get those serial numbers altered by an expert.

We had been walking the black, narrowj dockside streets for two hours when Aza-Kra suddenly stopped. "Something?"

"Wait," he said. "... Yes. This is the man you are looking for. He is a professional forger. His name is George Wheelwright. He can do it, but I do not know whether he will. He is a very timid and suspicious man."

"All right. In here?"

"Yes."

We went up a narrow unlighted stairway, choked with a kitchen-midden of smells, curry predominating. At the second-floor landing Aza-Kra pointed to a door. I knocked.

Scufflings behind the door. A low voice: "Who's that?"

"A friend. Let us in, Wheelwright."

The door cracked open and yellow light spilled out; I saw the outline of a head and the faint gleam of a bulbous eye. "What d'yer want?"

"Want you to do a job for me, Wheelwright. Don't keep us talking here in the hall."

The door opened wider and I squeezed through into a cramped, untidy box of a kitchen. A faded cloth covered the doorway to the next room.

Wheelwright glanced at Aza-Kra and then stared hard at me; he was a little chicken-breasted wisp of a man, dressed in dungarees and a striped polo shirt. "Who sent yer?"

"You wouldn't know the name. A friend of mine in Calcutta." I took out the passports. "Can you fix these?"

He looked at them carefully, taking his time. "What's wrong with 'em?"

"Nothing but the serial numbers."

"What's wrong with them?"

"They're on a list."

He laughed, a short, meaningless bark.

I said, "Well?"

"Who'd yer say yer friend in Calcutter was?"

"I haven't any friend in Calcutta. Never mind how I knew about you. Will you do the job or won't you?"

He handed the passports back and moved toward the door. "Mister, I haven't got the time to fool with yer. Perhaps yer having me on, or perhaps yer've made an honest mistake. There's another Wheelwright over on the north side of town. You try him." He opened the door. "Good night, both."

I pushed it shut again and reached for him, but he was a yard away in one jump, like a rabbit. He stood beside the table, arms hanging, and stared at me with a vague smile.

I said, "I haven't got time to play games, either. I'll pay you five hundred American dollars to alter these passports—" I tossed them onto the table—"or else I'll beat the living tar out of you." I took a step toward him.

I never saw a man move faster: he had the drawer open and the gun out and aimed before I finished that step. But the muzzle trembled slightly. "No nearer," he said hoarsely.

I thought, Five minutes, and held my breath.

When he slumped, I picked up the revolver. Then I lifted him—he weighed about ninety pounds—propped him in a chair behind the table, and waited.

In a few minutes he raised his head and goggled at me dazedly. "How'd yer do that?" he whispered.

I put the money on the table beside the passports. "Start," I said.

He stared at it, then at me. His thin lips tightened. "Go ter blazes," he said.

I stepped around the table and cuffed him backhand. I felt the blow on my own face, hard and stinging, but I did it again. I kept it up. It wasn't pleasant; I was feeling not only the blows themselves, but Wheelwright's emotional responses, the shame and wretchedness and anger, and the queasy writhing fear: Wheelwright couldn't bear pain.

At that, he beat me. When I stopped, sickened and dizzy, and said as roughly as I could, "Had enough, Wheelwright?" he answered, "Not if yer was ter kill me, yer bloody barstid."

His voice trembled, and his face was streaked with tears, but he meant it. He thought I was a government agent, trying to bully him into signing his own prison sentence, and rather than let me do it he would take any amount of punishment; prison was the one thing he feared more than physical pain.

I looked at Aza-Kra. His neck-spines were erect and quivering; I could see the tips of them at the edges of the veil. Then inspiration hit me.

I pulled him forward where the little man could see him, and lifted the veil. The feathery spines stood out clearly on either side of the corpse-white mask.

"I won't touch you again," I said. "But look at this. Can you see?"

His eyes widened; he scrubbed them with the palms of his hands and looked again.

"And this," I said. I pulled at Aza-Kra's forearm and the clawed blue-gray hand came out of the muff.

Wheelwright's eyes bulged. He flattened himself against the back of the chair.

"Now," I said, "six hundred dollars—or I'll take this mask off and show you what's behind it."

He clenched his eyes shut. His face had gone yellowish-pale; his nostrils were white.

"Get it out of here," he said faintly.

He didn't move until Aza-Kra had disappeared behind the curtain into the other room. Then, without a word, he poured and drank half a tumblerful of whisky, switched on a gooseneck lamp, produced bottles, *pens and brushes from the table drawer, and went to work." He bleached away the first and last digits of both serial numbers, then painted over the areas with a thin wash of color that matched the blue tint of the paper. With a jeweler's loupe in his eye, he restored the obliterated tiny letters of the background design; finally, still using the loupe, he drew the new digits in black. From first to last, it took him thirty minutes; and his hands didn't begin to tremble until he was done.

The sixth day was two days—because we left Otaru at 3:30 p.m. Sunday and arrived at Honolulu at 11:30 p.m. Saturday. We had lost four and a half houijs in traversing sixty-two degrees of longitude—but we'd also gained a day by crossing the International Date Line from west to east.

On the sixth day, then, which was two days, the following things happened and were duly reported:

Be Done By As Ye Do was the title of some thousands of sermons and, by count, more than seven hundred frontpage newspaper editorials from Newfoundland to Oaxaca. My cable to Freeman had come a little late; the Herald-Star's announcement was lost in the ruck.

Following this, a wave of millennial enthusiasm swept the continent; Christians and Jews everywhere feasted, fasted, prayed and in other ways celebrated the imminent Second (or First) Coming of Christ. Evangelistic and fundamentalist sects garnered souls by the million.

Members of the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, the Pentecostal Fire Baptized Holiness Church and numerous other groups gave away most or all of their worldly possessions. Others were more practical. The Seventh Day Adventists, who are vegetarians, pooled capital and began an enormous expansion of their meatless-food factories, dairies and other enterprises.

Delegates to a World Synod of Christian Churches began arriving at a tent city near Smith Center, Kansas, late Saturday night. Trouble developed almost immediately between the Brethren Church of God (Reformed Dunkers) and the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestinarían Baptists—later spreading to a schism which led to the establishment of two rump synods, one at Lebanon and the other at Athol.

Five hundred Doukhobors stripped themselves mother-naked, burned their homes, and marched on Vancouver.

Roman Catholics in most places celebrated the Feast of the Transfiguration as usual, awaiting advice from Rome.

Riots broke out in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia and New York. In each case the original disturbances were brief, but were followed by protracted vandalism and looting which local police, state police, and even National Guard units were unable to check. By midnight Sunday property damage was estimated at more than twenty million dollars. The casualty list was fantastically high. So was the proportion of police-and-National-Guard casualties— exactly fifty per cent of the total....

In the British Isles, Western Europe and Scandinavia, the early symptoms of the Western hemisphere's disaster were beginning to appear: the stricken slaughterers and fishermen, the unease in prisons, the freaks of violence.

An unprecedented number of political refugees turned up on the East-German side of the Burnt Corridor early Saturday morning.

Late the same day, a clash between Sikh and Moslem guards on the India-Pakistan border near Sialkot resulted in the annihilation of both parties.

And on Sunday it hit the fighting in Indo-China.

Allied and Communist units, engaging at sixty points along the tight-hundred-mile front, fell back with the heaviest casualties of the war.

Red bombers launched a successful daylight attack on Luangprabang: successful, that is, except that nineteen out of twenty planes crashed outside the city or fell into the Nam Ou.

Forty Allied bombers took off on sorties to Yen-bay, Hanoi and Nam-dinh. None returned.

Nobody knew it yet, but the war was over.

Still other things happened but were not recorded by the press:

A man in Arizona, a horse gelder by profession, gave up his business and moved out of the county, alleging ill health. So did a dentist -in Tacoma, and another in Galveston. In Breslau an official of the People's Police resigned his position with the sanie excuse; and one in Buda; and one in Pest.

A conservative Tajik tribesman of Indarab, discovering that his new wife had been unfaithful, attempted to deal with her in the traditional manner, but desisted when a critical observer would have said he had hardly begun; nor did this act of compassion bring him any relief.

And outside the town of Otaru, just two hundred and fifty miles across the Sea of Japan from the eastern shore of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic, Aza-Kra used his anesthetic gas again—on me.

I had been bone-tired when we left Port Blair shortly before midnight, but I hadn't slept all the long dark droning way to Manila; or from there to Tokyo, with the sun rising half an hour after we cleared the Philippines and slowly turning the globe underneath us to a white disk of fire; or from Tokyo north again to Otaru, bleak and windy and smelling of brine.

In all that time, I hadn't been able to forget Wheelwright except for half an hour toward the end, when I picked up an English-language broadcast from Tokyo and heard the news from the States.

The first time you burn yourself playing with matches, the chances are that if the blisters aren't too bad, you get over it fast enough; you forget about it. But the second time, it's likely to sink in.

Wheelwright was my second time; Wheelwright finished me.

It's more than painful, it's more than frightening, to cause another living creature pain and feel what he feels. It tears you apart. It makes you the victor and the victim, and neither half of that is bearable, i

It makes you love what you destroy—as you love yourself—and it makes you hate yourself as your victim hates you.

That isn't all. I had felt Wheelwright's self-loathing as his body cringed and the tears spilled out of his eyes, the helpless gut-twisting shame that was as bad as the fear; and that burden was on me too.

Wheelwright was talented. That was his own achievement; he had found it in himself and developed it and trained himself to use it. Wheelwright had courage. That was his own. But who had made Wheelwright afraid? And who had taught him that the world was his enemy?

You, and I, and every other human being on the planet, and all our two-legged ancestors before us. Because we had settled for too little. Because not more than a handful of us, out of all the crawling billions, had ever had the will to break the chain of blows, from father to daughter to son, generation after generation.

So there was Wheelwright; that was what we had made out of man: the artistry and the courage compressed to a needle-thin, needle-hard core inside him, and that only because we hadn't been able to destroy it altogether; the rest of him self-hatred, and suspicion, and resentment, and fear.

But after breakfast in Tokyo, it began to seem a little more likely that some kind of a,ease could be made for the continued existence of the human race. And after that it was natural to think about lions, and about the rioting that was going on in America.

For all his moral nicety, Aza-Kra had no trouble in justifying the painful extinction of carnivores. From his point of view, they were better off dead. It was regrettable, of course, but...

But, sub specie aeternitatis, was a man much different from a lion?

It was a commonplace that no other animal killed on so grand a scale as man. The problem had never come up before: could we live without killing?

I was standing with Aza-Kra at the top of a little hill that overlooked the coast road and the bay. The bus that had brought us there was dwindling, a white speck in a cloud of dust, down the highway toward Cape Kamui.

Aza-Kra sat on a stone, his third leg grotesquely bulging the skirt of his coat. His head bent forward, as if the old woman he was pretending to be had fallen asleep, chin on massive chest; the conical hat pointed out to sea.

I said, "This is the time of crisis you were talking about, for America."

"Yes. It begins now."

"When does it end? Let's talk about this a little more. This justice. Crimes of violence—all right. They punish themselves, and before long they'll prevent themselves automatically. What about crimes of property? A man steals my wallet and runs. Or he smashes a window and takes what he wants. Who's going to stop him?"

He didn't answer for a moment; when he did the words came slowly and the pronunciation was bad, as if he were too weary to attend to it. "The wallet can be chained to your clothing. The window can be made of glass that does not break."

I said impatiently, "You know that's not what I mean. I'm talking about the problem as it affects everybody. We solve it by policemen and courts and prisons. What do we do instead?"

"I am sorry that I did not understand you. Give me a

moment.___ "

I waited.

"In your Middle Ages, when a man was insane, what did you do?"

I thought of Bedlam, and of creatures with matted hair chained to rooftops.

He didn't wait for me to speak. "Yes. And now, you are more wise?"

"A little."

"Yes. And in the beginning of your Industrial Revolution, when a factory stopped and men had no work, what was done?"

"They starved."

"And now?"

"There are relief organizations. We try to keep them alive until they can get work."

"If a man steals what he does not need," Aza-Kra said, "is he not sick? If a man steals what he must have to live, can you blame him?"

Socrates, in an onyx-trimmed dress, three-legged on a
stone. i

Finally I said, "It's easy enough to make us look foolish, but we have made some progress in the last two thousand years. Now you want us to go the rest of the way overnight. It's impossible; we haven't got time enough."

"You will have more time now." His voice was very faint. "Killing wastes much time.... Forgive me, now I must sleep."

His head dropped even farther forward. I watched for a while to see if he would topple over, but of course he was¹too solidly based. A tripod. I sat down beside him, feeling my own fatigue drag at my body, envying him his rest; but I couldn't sleep.

There was really no point in arguing with him, I told myself; he was too good for me. I was a savage splitting logic with a missionary. He knew more than I did; probably he was more intelligent. And the central question, the only one that mattered, couldn't be answered the way I was going at it.

Aza-Kra himself was the key, not the doctrine of non-violence, not the psychology of crime.

If he was telling the truth about himself and the civilization he came from, I had nothing to worry about.

If he wasn't then I should have left him in Chillicothe or killed him in Paris; and if I could kill him now, that was what I should do.

And I didn't know. After all this time, I still didn't know.

I saw the bus come back down the road and disappear towards Otaru. After a long time, I saw it heading out again. When it came back from the cape the second time, I woke Aza-Kra and we slogged down the steep path to the roadside. I waved as the bus came nearer; it slowed and rattled to a halt a few yards beyond us.

Passengers' heads popped out of the windows to watch us as we walked toward the door. Most of them were Japanese, but I saw one Caucasian, leaning with both arms out of the window. I saw his features clearly, narrow pale nose and lips, blue eyes behind rimless glasses; sunlight glinting on sparse yellow hair. And then I saw the flat dusty road coming up to meet me.

I was lying face-up on a hard sandy slope; when I opened my eyes I saw the sky and a few blades of tough, dry grass. The first thought that came into my head was, Now I know. Now I've had it.

I sat up. And a buzzing voice said, "Hold your breath!"

Turning, I saw a body sprawled on the slope just below me. It was the yellow-haired man. Beyond him squatted the gray form of Aza-Kra.

"All right," he said.

I let my breath out. "What—?"

He showed me a brown metal ovoid, cross-hatched with fragmentation grooves. A grenade.

"He was about to aim it. There was no time to warn you. I knew you would wish to see for yourself."

I looked around dazedly. Thirty feet above, the slope ended in a clean-cut line against the sky; beyond it was a short, narrow white stripe that I recognized as the top of the bus, still parked at the side of the road.

"We have ten minutes more before the others awaken."

I went through the man's pockets. I found a handful of change, a wallet with nothing in it but a few yen notes, and a folded slip of glossy white paper. That was all.

I unfolded the paper, but I knew what it was even before I saw the small teleprinted photograph on its inner side. It was a copy of my passport picture—the one on the genuine document, not the bogus one I had made in Paris.

On the way back, my hands began shaking. It got so bad that I had to put them between my thighs and squeeze hard; and then the shaking spread to my legs and arms and jaw. My forehead was cold and there was a football-sized ache in my belly, expanding to a white pain every time we hit a bump. The whole bus seemed to be tilting ponderously over to the right, farther and farther but never falling down.

Later, when I had had a cup of coffee and two cigarettes in the terminal lunchroom, I got one of the most powerful irrational impulses I've ever known: I wanted to take the next bus back to that spot on the coast road, walk down the slope to where the yellow-haired man was, and kick his skull to flinders.

If we were lucky, the yellow-haired man might have been the only one in Otaru who knew we were here. The only way to find out was to go on to the airport and take a chance; either way, we had to get out of Japan. But it didn't end there. Even if they didn't know where we were now, they knew all the stops on our itinerary; they knew which visas we had. Maybe Aza-Kra would be able to gas the next one before he killed us, and then again maybe not.

I thought about Frisbee and Parst and the President— damning them all impartially—and my anger grew. By now, I realized suddenly, they must have understood that we were responsible for what was happening. They would have been energetically apportioning the blame for the last few days; probably Parst had already been court-martialed.

Once that was settled, there would be two things they could do next. They could publish the truth, admit their own responsibility, and warn the world. Or they could destroy all the evidence and keep silent. If the world went to hell in a bucket, at least they wouldn't be blamed for it.... Providing I was dead. Not much choice.

After another minute I got up and Aza-Kra followed me out to a taxi. We stopped at the nearest telegraph office and I sent a cable to Frisbee in Washington:

HAVE SENT FULL ACCOUNT CHILLICOTHE TO TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WITH INSTRUCTIONS PUBLISH EVENT MY DEATH OR DISAPPEARANCE. CALL OFF YOUR DOGS.

It was childish, but apparently it worked. Not only did we have no trouble at Otaru airport—the yellow-haired man, as I'd hoped, must have been working alone—but nobody bothered us at Honolulu or Asuncion.

Just the same, the mood of depression and nervousness that settled on me that day didn't lift; it grew steadily worse. Fourteen hours' sleep in Asuncion didn't mend it; Monday's reports of panics and bank failures in North America intensified it, but that was incidental.

And when I slept, I had nightmares: dreams of stifling-dark jungles, full of things with teeth.

We spent twenty-four hours in Asuncion, while Aza-Kra pumped out enough catalyst to blanket South America's seven million square miles—a territory almost as big as the sprawling monster of Soviet Eurasia.

After that we flew to Capetown—and that was it. We were finished.

We had spiraled around the globe, from the United States to England, to France, to Israel, to India, to Japan, to Paraguay, to the Union of South Africa, trailing an expanding invisible cloud behind us. Now the trade winds were carrying it eastward from the Atlantic, south from the Mediterranean, north from the Indian Ocean, west from the Atlantic.

Frigate birds and locusts, men in tramp steamers and men in jet planes would carry it farther. In a week it would have reached all the places we had missed: Australia, Micronesia, the islands of the South Pacific, the Poles.

That left the lunar bases and the orbital stations. Ours and Theirs. But they had to be supplied from Earth; the infection would come to them in rockets.

For better or worse, we had what we had always said we wanted. Ahimsa. The Age of Reason. The Kingdom of God.

And I still didn't know whether I was Judas, or the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

I didn't find out until three weeks later.

We stayed on in Capetown, resting and waiting. Listening to the radio and reading newspapers kept me occupied a good part of the time. When restlessness drove me out of doors, I wandered aimlessly in the business section, or went down to the harbor and spent hours staring out past the castle and the breakwater.

But my chief occupation, the thing that obsessed me now, was the study of Aza-Kra.

He seemed very tired. His skin was turning dry and rough, more §ray than blue; his eyes were blue-threaded and more opaque-looking than ever. He slept a great deal and moved little. The soy-bean paste I was able to get for him gave him insufficient nourishment; vitamins and minerals were lacking.

I asked him why he didn't make what he needed in his air machine. He said that some few of the compounds could be inhaled, and he was making those; that he had had another transmuter, for food-manufacture, but that it had been taken from him; and that he would be all right; he would last until his friends came.

He didn't know when that would be; or he wouldn't tell me.

His speech was slower and his diction more slurred every day. It was obviously difficult for him to talk; but I goaded him, I nagged him, I would not let him alone. I spent days on one topic, left it, came back to it and asked the same questions over. I made copious notes of what he said and the way he said it.

; I wanted to learn to read the signs of his emotions; or failing that, to catch him in a lie.

A dozen times I thought I had trapped him into a contradiction, and each time, wearily, patiently, he explained what I had misunderstood. As for his emotions, they had only one visible sign that I was able to discover: the stiffening and trembling of his neck-spines.

Gestures of emotion are arbitrary. There are human tribes whose members never smile. There are others who smile when they are angry. Cf. Dodgson's Cheshire Cat.

He was doing it more and more often as the time went by; but what did it mean? Anger? Resentment? Annoyance?

The riots in the United States ended on the 9th and 10th when interfaith committees toured each city in loudspeaker trucks. Others began elsewhere.

Business was at a standstill in most larger cities. Galveston, Nashville and Birmingham joined in celebrating Hallelujah Week: dancing in the streets, bonfires day and night, every church and every bar roaring wide open.

Russia's delegate to the United Nations, who had been larding his speeches with mock-sympathetic references to the Western nations' difficulties, arose on the 9th and delivered a furious three-hour tirade accusing the entire non-Communist world of cowardly cryptofascistic biological warfare against the Soviet Union and the People's Republics of Europe and Asia.

The new staffs of the Federal penitentiaries in America, in office less than a week, followed their predecessors in mass resignations. The last official act of the wardens of Leavenworth, Terre Haute and Alcatraz was to report the "escape" of their entire prison populations.

Police officers in every major city were being frantically urged to remain on duty.

Queen Elizabeth, in a memorable speech, exhorted all citizens of the Empire to remain calm and meet whatever might comewith dignity, fortitude and honor.

The Scots stole the Stone of Scone again.

Rioting and looting began in Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin.

The Pope was silent.

Turkey declared war on Syria and Iraq; peace was concluded a record three hours later.

On the 10th, Warsaw Radio announced the formation of a new Polish Provisional Government whose first and second acts had been, respectively, to abrogate all existing treaties with the Soviet Union and border states, and to petition the UN for restoration Of the 1938 boundaries.

On the 11th East Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia,

Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania followed suit, with variations on the boundary question.

On the 12th, after a brief but by no means bloodless putsch, the Spanish Republic was re-established; the British government fell once and the French government twice; and the Vatican issued a sharp protest against the ill-treatment of priests and nuns by Spanish insurgents.

Not a shot had been fired in Indo-China since the morning of the 8th.

On the 13th the Karelo-Finnish S. S. R., the Estonian S. S. R., the Byelorussian S. S. R., the Ukrainian S. S. R., the Azerbaijan S. S. R., the Turkmen S. S. R. and the Uzbek S. S. R. declared their independence of the Soviet Union. A horde of men and women escaped or released from forced-labor camps, the so-called Slave Army, poured westward out of Siberia.

On the 14th, Zebulon, Georgia (pop. 312), Murfrees-boro, Tennessee (pop. 11,190) and Orange, Texas (pop. 8,470) seceded from the Union.

That might have been funny, but on the 15th petitions for a secession referendum were circulating in Tennesee, Arkansas, Louisiana and South Carolina. Early returns averaged 61% in favor.

On the 16th Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia and—incongruously—Rhode Island and Minnesota added themselves to the list. Separatist fever was rising in Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador. Across the Atlantic, Catalonia, Bavaria, Moldavia, Sicily and Cyprus declared themselves independent states.

And that might have been hysteria. But that wasn't all.

Liquor stores and bars were sprouting like mushrooms in dry states. Ditto gambling halls, horse rooms, houses of prostitution, cockpits, burlesque theaters.

Moonshine whisky threatened for a few days to become the South's major industry, until standard-brand distillers' cut their prices to meet the competition. Not a bottle of the new stocks of liquor carried a Federal tax stamp.

Mexican citizens were walking across the border into Arizona and New Mexico, swimming into Texas. The first shipload of Chinese arrived in San Francisco on the 16th.

Meat prices had increased by an average of 60% for every day since the new control and rationing law took effect. By the 16th, round steak was selling for $10.80 a pound.

Resignations of public officials were no longer news; a headline in the Portland Oregonian for August 15th read:

WILL STAY AT DESK, SAYS GOVERNOR.

It hit me hard.

But when I thought about it, it was obvious enough; it was such an elementary thing that ordinarily you never noticed it—that all governments, not just tyrannies, but all governments were based on violence, as currency was based on metal. You might go for months or years without seeing a silver dollar or a policeman; but the dollar and the policeman had to be there.

The whole elaborate structure, the work of a thousand years, was coming down. The value of a dollar is established by a promise to pay; the effectiveness of a law, by a threat to punish.

Even if there were enough jailers left, how could you put a man in jail if he had ten or twenty friends who didn't want him to go?

How many people were going to pay their income taxes next year, even if there was a government left to pay them to?

And who was going to stop the landless people from spilling over into the nations that had land to spare?

Aza-Kra said, "These things are not necessary to do."

I turned around and looked at him. He had been lying motionless for more than an hour in the hammock I had rigged for him at the end of the room; I had thought he was asleep.

It was raining outside. Dim, colorless light came through the slotted window blinds and striped his body like a melted barber pole. Caught in one of the bars of light, the tips of two quivering neck-spines glowed in faint filigree against the shadow.

"All right," I said. "Explain this one away. I'd like to hear you. Tell me why we don't need governments any more."

"The governments you have now—the governments of nations—they are not made for use. They exist to fight other nations."

"That's not true."

"It is true. Think. Of the money your government spends, in a year, how much is for war and how much for use?"

"About sixty per cent for war. But that doesn't—"

"Please. This is sixty per cent now, when you have only a small war. When you have a large war, how much then?"

"Ninety per cent. Maybe more, but that hasn't got anything to do with it. In peace or wartime there are things a national government does that can't be done by anybody else* Now ask me for instance, what."

"Yes. I ask this."

"For instance, keeping an industrial country from being dragged down to coolie level by unrestricted immigration."

"You think it is better for those who have much to keep apart from those who have little and give no help?"

"In principle, no, but it isn't just that easy. What good does it do the starving Asiatics if we turn America into another piece of Asia and starve along with them?"

He looked at me unwinkingly.

"What good has it done to keep apart?"

I opened my mouth, and shut it again. Last time it had been Japan, an island chain a little smaller than California. In the next one, half the world would have been against us.

'The problem is not easy, it is very difficult. But to solve it by helping is possible. To solve it by doing nothing is not possible."

"Harbors," I said. "Shipping. Soil conservation. Communications. Flood control."

"You do not believe these things can be done if there are no nations?"

"No. We haven't got time enough to pick up all the pieces. It's a hell of a lot easier to knock things apart than to put them together again."

"Your people have done things more difficult than this. You do not believe now, but you will see it done."

After a moment I said, "We're supposed to become a member of your galactic union now. Now that you've pulled our teeth. Who's going to build the ships?

"Those who build them now."

I said, "Governments build them now."

"No. Men build ships. Men invent ships and design ships. Government builds nothing but more government."

I put my fists in my pockets and walked over to the window. Outside, a man went hurrying by in the rain, one hand at his hat-brim, the other at his chest. He didn't look around as he passed; his coffee-brown face was intent and impersonal. I watched him until he turned the corner, out of sight.

He had never heard of me, but his life would be changed by what I had done. His descendants would know my name; they would be bored by it in school, or their mothers would frighten them with it after dark.

Aza-Kra said, "To talk of these things is useless. If I would lie, I would not tell you that I lie. And if I would lie about these things, I would lie well; you would not find the truth by questions. You must wait. Soon you will know."

I looked at him. "When your friends come."

"Yes," he said.

And the feathery tips of his neck-spines delicately trembled.

They came on the last day of August—fifty great roti-form ships drifting down out of space. No radar spotted them; no planes or interceptor rockets went up to meet them. They followed the terminator around, landing at dawn: thirty in the Americas, twenty in Europe and Asia, five in Africa, one each in England, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan.

Each one was six hundred feet across, but they rested lightly on the ground. Where they landed on a sloping land, slender curved supporting members came out of the doughnut-shaped rim, as dainty as insect's legs, and the fat lozenge of the hub lowered itself on the five fat spokes until it touched the earth.

Their doors opened.

In twenty-four days I had watched the nations of the Earth melt into shapelessness like sculptures molded of silicone putty. Armies, navies, air forces, police forces lost their cohesion first. In the beginning there were individual desertions, atoms escaping one at a time from the mass; later, when the pay failed to arrive, when there were no orders or else orders that could not be executed, men and women simply went home, orderly, without haste, in thousands.

Every useful item of equipment that could be carried or driven or flown went with them. Tractors, trucks, jeeps, bulldozers gladdened the hearts of farmers from Keokuk to Kweiyang. Bombers, small boats, even destroyers and battleships were in service as commercial transports. Quartermasters' stores were carried away piecemeal or in ton lots. Guns and ammunition rusted undisturbed.

Stock markets crashed. Banks failed. Treasuries failed. National governments broke down into states, provinces, cantons. In the United States, the President resigned his office on the 18th and left the White House, whose every window had been broken and whose lawn was newly landscaped with eggshells and orange rind. The Vice-President resigned the next day, leaving the Presidency, in theory, to the Speaker of the House; but the Speaker was at home on his Arkansas farm; Congress had adjourned on the 17th.

Everywhere it was the same. The new Governments of

Asia and Eastern Europe, of Spain and Portugal and Argentina and Iran, died stillborn.

The Moon colonies had been evacuated; work had stopped on the Mars rocket. The men on duty in the orbital stations, after an anxious week, had reached an agreement for mutual disarmament and had come down to Earth.

Seven industries out of ten had closed down. The dollar was worth half a penny, the pound sterling a little more; the ruble, the Reichsmark, the franc, the sen, the yen, the rupee were waste paper.

The great cities were nine-tenths deserted, gutted by fires, the homes of looters, rats and roaches.

Even the local governments, the states, the cantons, the counties, the very townships, were too fragile to stand. All the arbitrary lines on the map had lost their meaning.

You could not say any more, "Japan will—" or "India is moving toward—" It was startling to realize that; to have to think of a sprawling, amorphous, unfathomable mass of infinitely varied human beings instead* of a single inclusive symbol. It made you wonder if the symbol had ever had any connection with reality at all: whether there had ever been such a thing as a nation.

Toward the end of the month, I thought I saw a flicker of
hope. The problem of famine was being attacked vigorously
and efficiently by the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, and
thousands of local volunteer groups: they commandeered
fleets of trucks, emptied warehouses with a calm disregard of
legality, and distributed the food where it was most needed.
It was not enough—too much food had been destroyed and
wasted by looters, too much had spoiled through neglect,
and too much had been destroyed in the field by wandering,
half-starved bands of homeless—but it was a beginning; it
was something. ,

Other groups were fighting the problem of these wolf-packs, with equally encouraging results. Fanners were forming themselves into mutual-defense groups, "communities of force." Two men could take any property from one man of equal strength without violence, without the penalty of pain; but not from two men, or three men.

One district warned the next when a wolf-pack was on the way, and how many to expect. When the pack converged on a field or a storehouse, men in equal or greater numbers were there to stand in the way. If the district could absorb say, ten workers, that many of the pack were offered the option of staying; the rest had to move on. Gradually, the packs thinned.

In the same way, factories were able to protect themselves from theft. By an extension of the idea, even the money problem began to seem soluble. The old currency was all but worthless, and an individual's promise to pay in kind was no better as a medium of exchange; but promissory notes obligating whole communities could and did begin to circulate. They made an unwieldly currency, their range was limited, and they depreciated rapidly. But it was something; it was a beginning.

Then the wheel-ships came.

In every case but one, they were cautious. They landed in conspicious positions, near a city or a village, and in the dawn light, before any man had come near them, oddly-shaped things came out and hurriedly unloaded boxes and bales, hundreds, thousands, a staggering array. They set up sun-reflecting beacons; then the ships rose again and disappeared, and when the first men came hesitantly out to investigate, they found nothing but the beacon, the acre of carefully-stacked boxes, and the signs, in the language of the country, that said:

THIS FOOD IS SENT BY THE PEOPLES OF OTHER WORLDS TO HELP YOU IN YOUR NEED. ALL MEN ARE BROTHERS.

And a brave man would lift the top of a box; inside he would see other boxes, and in them oblong pale shapes wrapped in something transparent that was not cellophane. He would unwrap one, feel it, smell it, show it around, and finally taste it; and then his eyebrows would go up.

The color and the texture were unfamiliar, but the taste was unmistakable! Tortillas and beans! (Or taro; or rice with bean-sprouts; or stuffed grape leaves; or herb omelette!)

The exception was the ship that landed outside Capetown, in an open field at the foot of Table Mountain.

Aza-Kra woke me at dawn. "They are here."

I mumbled at him and tried to turn over. He shook my shoulder again, buzzing excitedly to himself. "Please, they are here. We must hurry."

I lurched out of bed and stood swaying. "Your friends?" I said.

"Yes, yes." He was struggling into the black dress, pushing the peaked hat backward onto his head. "Hurry."

I splashed cold water on my face, and got into my clothes. I pulled out the top dresser drawer and looked at the two loaded automatics. I couldn't decide. I couldn't figure out any way they' would do me any good, but I didn't want to leave them behind. I stood there until my legs went numb before I could make up my mind to take them anyhow, and the hell with it.

There were no taxis, of course. We walked three blocks along the deserted streets until we saw a battered sedan nose into view in the intersection ahead, moving cautiously around the heaps of litter.

"Hold your breath!"

The car moved on out of sight. We found it around the corner, up on the sidewalk with the front fender jammed against a railing. There were two men and a woman in it, Europeans.

"Which way?"

"Left. To the mountain."

When we got to the outskirts and the buildings began to thin out, I saw it up ahead, a huge silvery-metal shelf jutting out impossibly from the slope. I began to tremble. They'll cut me up and put me in a jar, I thought. Now is the time to stop, if I'm going to.

But I kept going. Where the road veered away from the field and went curving on up the mountain the other way, I stopped and we got out. I saw dark shapes and movements under that huge gleaming bulk. We stepped over a broken fence and started across the dry, uneven clods in the half-light.

Light sprang out: a soft, pearl-gray shimmer that didn't dazzle the eye although it was aimed straight toward us, marking the way. I heard a shrill wordless buzzing, and above that an explosion of chirping, and under them both a confusion of other sounds, humming, droning, clattering. I saw a half-dozen nightmare shapes bounding forward.

Two of them were like Aza-Kra; two more were squat things with huge humped shells on top, like tortoise-shells the size of a card table, with six long stump-ended legs underneath, and a tangle of eyes, tentacles, and small wriggly things peeping out in front; one, the tallest, had a long sharp-spined column of a body rising from a thick base and four startlingly human legs, and surmounted by four long whiplike tentacles and a smooth oval head; the sixth looked at first glance like an unholy cross between a grasshopper and a newt. He came in twenty-foot bounds.

They crowded around Aza-Kra, hurnming, chirping, droning, buzzing, clattering. Their hands and tentacles went over him, caressingly; the newt-grasshopper thing hoisted him onto its back.

They paid no attention to me, and I stayed where I was, with my hands tight and sweating on the grips of my guns. Then I heard Aza-Kra speak, and the tallest one turned back to me.

It reeked: something like brine, something like wet fur, something rank and indescribable. It had two narrow red eyes in that smooth knob of a head. It put one of its tentacles on my shoulder, and I didn't see a mouth open anywhere, but a droning voice said, "Thank you for caring for him. Come now. We go to ship."

I pulled away instinctively, quivering, and my hands came out of my pockets. I heard a flat, echoing crack and a yell, and I saw a red wetness spring out across the smooth skull; I saw the thing topple and lie in the dirt, twitching.

I thought for an instant that I had done it, the shot, the yell and all. Then I heard another yell, behind me: I whirled around and heard a car grind into gear and saw it bouncing away down the road into town, lights off, a black moving shape on the dimness. I saw it veer wildly and slew into the fences at the first turn; I heard its tires popping as it went through and the muffled crash as it turned over.

Dead, I thought. But the next time I saw two figures come erect beyond the overturned car and stagger toward the road. They disappeared around the turn, rurining.

I looked back at the others, bewildered. They weren't even looking that way; they were gathered around the body, lifting it, carrying it toward the ship.

The feeling—the black depression that had been getting stronger every day for three weeks—tightened down on me as if somebody had turned a screw. I gritted my teeth against it, and stood there wishing I Were dead.

They were almost to that open hatch in the oval hub that hung under the rim when Aza-Kra detached himself from the group and walked slowly back to me. After a moment one of the others—a hump-shelled one—trundled along after him and waited a yard or two away.

"It is not your fault," said Aza-Kra. "We could have prevented it, but we were careless. We were so glad to meet that we did not take precautions. It is not your fault. Come to the ship."

The hump-shelled thing came up and squeaked something, and Aza-Kra sat on its back. The tentacles waved at me. It wheeled and started toward the hatchway. "Come," said Aza-Kra.

I followed them, too miserable to care what happened. We went down a corridor full of the sourceless pearl-gray light until a doorway suddenly appeared, somehow, and we went through that into a room where two tripeds were waiting.

Aza-Kra climbed onto a stool, and one of the tripeds began pressing two small instruments against various parts of his body; the other squirted something from a flexible canister into his mouth.

And as I stood there watching, between one breath and the next, the depression went away.

I felt like a man whose toothache has just stopped; I probed at my mind, gingerly, expecting to find that the feeling was still there, only hiding. But it wasn't. It was gone so completely that I couldn't even remember exactly what it had been like. I felt calm and relaxed—and safe.

I looked at Aza-Kra. He was breathing easily; his eyes looked clearer than they had a moment before, and it seemed to me that his skin was glossier. The feathery neck-spines hung in relaxed, graceful curves.

... It was all true, then. It had to be. If they had been conquerors, the automatic death of the man who had killed one of their number, just now, wouldn't have been enough. An occupying army can never be satisfied with an eye for an eye. There must be revenge.

But they hadn't done anything; they hadn't even used the gas. They'd seen that the others in the car were running away, that the danger was over, and that ended it. The only emotions they had shown, as far as I could tell, were concern and regret—

Except that, I remembered now, I had seen two of the tri-peds clearly when I turned back to look at them gathering around the body: Aza-Kra and another one. And their neck-spines had been stiff....

Suddenly I knew the answer.

Aza-Kra came from a world where violence and cruelty didn't exist. To him, the Earth was a jungle—and I was one of its carnivores.

I knew, now, why I had felt the way I had for the last three weeks, and why the feeling had stopped a few minutes ago. My hostility toward him had been partly responsible for his fear, and so I had picked up an echo of it. Undirected fear is, by definition, anxiety, depression, uneasiness—the psychologists' _t Angst. It had stopped because Aza-Kra no longer had to depend on me; he was with his own people again; he was safe.

I knew the reason for my nightmares.

I knew why, time and again when I had expected Aza-Kra to be reading my mind, I had found that he wasn't. He did it only when he had to; it was too painful.

And one thing more:

I knew that when the true history of this time came to be written, I needn't worry about my place in it. My name would be there, all right, but nobody woufd remember it once he had shut the book.

Nobody would use my name as an insulting epithet, and nobody would carve it on the bases of any statutes, either.

I wasn't the hero of the story.

It was Aza-Kra who had come down alone to a planet so "•deadly that no-one else would risk his life on it until he had softened it up. It was Aza-Kra who had lived for nearly a month with a suspicious, irrational, combative, uncivilized flesh-eater. It was Aza-Kra who had used me, every step of of the way—used my provincial loyalties and my self-interest and my prejudices.

He had done all that, weary, tortured, half-starved... and he'd been scared to death the whole time.

We made two stops up the coast and then moved into Algeria and the Sudan: landing, unloading, taking off again, following the dawn line. The other ships, Aza-Kra explained, would keep on circling the planet until enough food had been distributed to prevent any starvation until the next harvests. This one was going only as far as the middle of the North American continent—to drop me off. Then it was going to take Aza-Kra home.

I watched what happened after we left each place in a vision device they had. In some places there was more hesitation than in others, but in the end they always took the food: in jeep-loads, by pack train, in baskets balanced on their heads.

Some of the repeaters worried me. I said, "How do you know it'll get distributed to everybody who needs it?"

I might have known the answer: "They will distribute it. No man can let his neighbor starve while he has plenty."

The famine relief was all they had come for, this time. Later, when we had got through the crisis, they would come back; and by that time, remembering the food, people would be more inclined to take them on their merits instead of shuddering because they had too many eyes or fingers. They woUld help us when we needed it, they would show us the way up the ladder, but we would have to do the work ourselves.

He asked me not to publish the story of Chillicothe and the month we had spent together. "Later, when it will hurt no one, you can explain. Now there is no need to make anyone ashamed; not even the officials of your government. It was not their fault; they did not make the planet as it was." *

So^lthere went even that two-bit chance at immortality.

It was still dawn when we landed on the bluff across the river from my home; sky and land and water were all the same depthless cool gray, except for the hairline of scarlet in the east. Dew was heavy on the grass, and the air had a smell that made me think of wood smoke and dry leaves.

He came out of the ship with me to say good-by.

"Will you be back?" I asked him.

He buzzed wordlessly in a way I had begun to recognize; I think it was his version of a laugh. "I think not for a very long time. I have already neglected my work too much."

"This isn't your work—opening up new planets?"

"No. It is not so common a thing, that a race becomes ready for space travel. It has not happened anywhere in the galaxy for twenty thousand of your years. I believe, and I hope, that it will not happen again for twenty thousand more. No, I am ordinarily a maker of—you have not the word, it is like porcelain, but a different material. Perhaps some day you will see a piece that I have made. It is stamped with my name."

He held out his hand and I took it. It was an awkward grip; his hand felt unpleasantly dry and smooth to me, and I suppose mine was clammy to him. We both let go as soon as we decently could.

Without turning, he walked away from me up the ramp. I said, "Aza-Kral"

"Yes?"

"Just one more question. The galaxy's a big place. What happens if you miss just one bloodthirsty race that's ready to boil out across the stars—or if nobody has the guts to go and do to them what you did to us?"

"Now you begin to understand," he said. "That is the

question the people of Mars asked us about you________ twenty

thousand years ago."

The story ends there, properly, but there's one more thing I want to say.

When Aza-Kra's ship lifted and disappeared, and I walked down to the bottom of the bluff and across the bridge into the city, I knew I was going back to a life that would be a lot different from the one I had known.

For one thing, the Herald-Star was all but done for when I came home: wrecked presses, half the staff gone, supplies running out. I worked hard for a little over a year trying to revive it, out of sentiment, but I knew there were more important things to be done than publishing a newspaper.

Like everybody else, I got used to the changes in the world and in the people around me: to the peaceful, unwor-ried feel of places that had been electric with tension; to the kids—the wonderful, incredible kids; to the new kind of excitement, the excitement that isn't like the night before execution, but like the night before Christmas.

But I hadn't realized how much I had changed, myself, until something that happened a week ago.

I'd lost touch with Eli Freeman after the paper folded; I knew he had gone into pest control, but I didn't know where he was or what he was doing until he turned up one day on the wheat-and-dairy farm I help run, south of the Platte in what used to be Nebraska. He's the advance man for a fleet of spray planes working out of Omaha, aborting rabbits.

He stayed on for three days, lining up a few of the stiff-necked farmers in this area that don't believe in hormones or airplanes either; in his free time he helped with the harvest, and I saw a lot of him.

On his last night we talked late, working up from the old times to the new times and back again until there was nothing more to say. Finally, when we had both been quiet for a long time, he said something to me that is the only accolade I am likely to get, and oddly enough, the only one I want.

"You know, Bob, if it wasn't for that unique face of yours, it would be hard to believe you're the same guy I used to work for."

I said, "Hell, was I that bad?"

"Don't get shirty. You were okay. You didn't bleed the help or kick old ladies, but there just wasn't as much to you as there is now. I don't know," he said. "You're—more human."

More human.

Yes. We all are.

by Katherine MacLean

INCOMMUNICADO -

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

Of "Incommunicado," I can say more. It was her third published science-Action story, having appeared in June, 1950.1 anthologized her first two in previous collections of mine, and have been struggling manfully against the unified opposition of a whole set of non-comprehending editors ever since to get the present story between covers, too. Admittedly, it is not an easy, simple tale for those who read on the run. You have to sit and think about what you're reading—not actually because it is overloaded with novel ideas, but rather because it is so tightly, deviously, and complexly plotted—and also because its basic thesis is so far out in left field. It is to me an unsurpassed notion, one I only wish could come true today or tomorrow, although it won't, I am afraid: but it certainly is fun to read about it. However, let me warn you again, read with care, hang on to seemingly discarded plot elements, watch out for innocent-looking byways that are nothing but traps—and you will come out with one of the most extraordinary pieces of "pure" science fiction—science extrapolation at its best, I think—that has come down the pike in years.

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

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

"Kinetics expert" is what they called Cliff Baker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why not use the astrogator?" Cliff asked him mildly.

"Blast the astragator! All it gives is courses that swing around the whole rim of the System and won't get me home for weeks!"

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

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

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

."Of course."

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

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

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

Pierce brightened. "I'll go pack. Excuse me, Cliff."

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

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

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

Cliff said flatly, "I like him."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How about Mercury?"

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

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

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

Eight hours later Mike was dead.

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

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

When the ionized gas drifted in everything arced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And he was leaving them. Gross criminal negligence.

Manslaughter.

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

"I would be no use there." Not without Mike.

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

After this the others would know.

Why did you leave the project? Incompetence.

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

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

"Did you see Cliff trying to imitate six charged bodies in
a submagnetic field?" ,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a good job," said Cliff. "Is Archy around?"

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

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

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

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

"Ahoy, Brandy," said Cliff. "Where's Archy? Where is everybody anyhow?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sounds like a Frankenstein," Brandy grinned. "Everything always works right for engineers. It's a conspiracy."

"Sure," Cliff said vaguely, consulting his chrono. "Say, what's the matter with your voice?"

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

The square practical looking doctor was stammering, looking strangely helpless. "Why ... uh ... uh ... nofhing." He turned hastily back to his desk.

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

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

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

People were streaming up from the concert.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it, Mr. Baker?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cliff tried not to notice. "Where's your mom?"

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

Cliff exploded.

"Don't you click at me! Stand still and talk like a human being!"

Bill went white and stood still. "Now explain!"

Bill swallowed. "I jvas just singing," he said, almost in-audibly. "Just singing."

"It didn't sound like singing!"

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

"Why?"

"I dunno, Pop. It's fun, I guess. Everybody does it."

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

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

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

"Bill, has Archy Reynolds done anything to the library

system?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't call Cliff "Chief" any more.

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

"It's a matter of life and death. 1 couldn't get anyone else in time. You can't refuse, Jughead."

"I can."

Cliff thought of kidnaping. "Where are you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" Cliff asked abruptly, his voice strained.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I hear too many."

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

"How's your empathy rating now?" Cliff asked, very casually.

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

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

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

"But the delay—"

"Are they in danger?" Pierce asked crisply.

"I don't know,". Cliff admitted, "but they all—"

"Are they physically sick? Are they even unhappy?"

"Not exactly," Cliff said unwillingly. "But it's ... in a way it's holding up Pluto Project."

"If I went over now, I couldn't reach Earth in time."

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

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

"Let's get back to the subject," Cliff said grimly. "What about your duty to Pluto Station?"

"I'm on my vacation," said Pierce. "Send to Earth for a psychiatrist."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hi, Cliff."

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

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

"Over a hundred... a hundred per cent. Cliff, you don't— What kind of a—"

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

"Useful! Cliff!" Pierce protested. "You don't know what you did!"

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

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

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

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

"I saw it," Cliff answered grimly.

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

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

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

"Listen," Cliff stammered, "I—" _v

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

"A what?"

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

"What the devil—"

"Shut up. You'll get it in a minute. I ought to know this. I was matched into your feelings for half an hour at a time at Pluto Station. It took me four days to figure out what happened. Your concepts aren't visual, they are kinesthetic.

You don't handle the problems of dynamics and kinetics with arbitrary words and numbers related by some dead thinker, you use the raw direct experience that your muscles know. You think with muscle tension data. I didn't dare follow you that far. Who knows what primitive integration center you have reactivated for it? I- can't go down there. My muscle tension data abstracts in the forebrain. That's where I keep my motives and my ability to identify with other people's motives. If I borrowed your ability, I might start identifying with can openers." "What the—"

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

After a moment Cliff laughed shakily. "Shock treatment, you call it. Like being whacked over the head with a sledge hammer."

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

"Wait a sec, aren't you going to help?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again Cliff stood under the deep assault of sound. This time it was tapes of two of Archy's best jazz concerts, strong and wild. Once again the rhythms fitted themselves into the padded beat of his heart, the surge of blood in his ears, and other, more complex rhythms of the nerves, subtly ¹altering and speeding them in mimicry of the pulse of emotions, while flute notes played with the sound of Reynolds' automatics, automatics impassioned, oddly fitting and completing the deeper surges of normal music.

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

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

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

"Reep beeb," he said.

It was a language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then it was done. Cliff put away the harmonica, grin-
ning. The men would be surprised to have to read their in-
structions from direction tapes, like mechanicals, but they
could do it. • j

Pluto Station Project was back under control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was something like being linked into Archy's mind without Archy being aware of it. Cliff questioned, and suggested topics. The flavor of the counterpoint was loneliness and anger. The kid felt that Cliff and Mike had deserted him in some way, for his father had died when he was in high school, and Cliff and Mike had long given up tutoring him and turned him over to his teachers. His father had died, and

Cliff and Mike were not around to talk with or ask advice, so leaving Archy to discover in one blow of undiluted loneliness that his mental immersion in science and logic was a wall standing between him and his classmates, making it impossible to talk with them or enjoy their talk, making it impossible for his teachers to understand the meaning of his questions. Archy had reacted typically in three years of tantrum, in which he despairingly hated the world, hated theory and thinking, and sought opiate in girls, dancing, and a frenzied immersion in jazz.

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

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

"Brandy."

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

"Come here. I've something to tell you."

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

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

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

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

"What can I do for you?"

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

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

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

"What?" gasped the I.B.M. man.

"You can have the patent rights," Cliff replied over the din. "It's all yours!"

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

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

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

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