Pacific Book of Australian SF

Ten years ago, the American science fiction writer Robert Bloch addressed a verse to the sf fans of Australia. The body of this work has since, perhaps mercifully, been lost, but a final couplet remains in the memory of some local readers. “Tell me now, you folks down under,” Bloch asked, “Do you have a sense of wonder?”

It was a fair question. Nobody has ever been able adequately to define the dimension and effect of the sense of wonder; like a trace element, it is only noticeable when it is not there. One could be sure, however, that Australia did not have it. The science fiction produced here was weak stuff, feeble, derivative, lacking the spark of imagination, of wonder, which enlivened that written in Britain and the United States. Worse, there was no strong national character in what was produced. It might as well have been written by people from another planet as about them.

That was ten years ago. In the intervening decade, Australian artistic life has renewed itself in a wave of innovation and experiment. Patrick White, Sidney Nolan, Richard Meale and Judith Wright have provided us for the first time with a legitimate national voice, interpreting us to the world and to ourselves. The stimulus of their work has penetrated into many areas, one of the most unexpected of them being science fiction. The boost this renaissance gave to local sf has pushed it up among the most active and coherent in the world.

This anthology, however, is no summa. Australian science fiction is still in its formative stages, searching for a characteristic imagery and style. There is a colony of new and imaginative writers, a mild climate of acceptance, and a measure of support both here and abroad, but that is all. To be a science fiction writer in Australia today is still to be something of a freak, while the interest of some readers does not reflect an acceptance on the part of the public as a whole. If anything, this book is a progress report, pointing to what might be possible in time.

The barriers to progress are fewer than they were a decade ago, but still formidable. We have, as yet, no professional Australian science fiction magazine, surprising when one considers that the local market currently buys half-a-dozen United States publications, as well as an increasingly large number of British and American paperbacks. It is almost impossible to read intelligent criticism of science fiction in any Australian newspaper or magazine, and certainly none by writers of sf. Of local science fiction on television or radio, nothing need be said; the few glimmers raised by men like Colin Free do little to drive back the impenetrable dark.

This local apathy has led to a situation in which Australian sf writers, though popular overseas, can number on the fingers of one hand the markets to which they can sell in this country. Some authors have sold dozens of stories and novels in Britain and the United States, but are unknown in their own cities. In perhaps the oddest twist, the enterprising Melbourne-published Australian Science Fiction Review was nominated in 1967 to receive an award at the International Science Fiction Convention for the best amateur magazine of the year, the first time an Australian publication has been so honoured. It is distressing, however, that this nomination came, not from local readers, but the magazine’s international audience, far more vociferous and enthusiastic than its Australian following.

To the reader not familiar with modern science fiction, some of the stories in this anthology will come as a surprise. It has its share of straightforward pieces, but the ruling concept in choosing material has been to find stories which were intriguing and experimental rather than merely entertaining. Many are violent and bizarre. “Now and then,” H. G. Wells said, “the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace.” There are many “hideous grimaces” among the stories collected here, but their grotesquerie is considered and relevant, designed not so much to shock as to disturb.

More disturbing still, one hopes, will be the way in which the writers use characteristic language and imagery and, perhaps more important, deal with themes that are central to modern Australian thinking. In this they follow the trend in Britain and the United States, where attention to national psychoses and preoccupations has replaced the fabrication of fancy plots. Writers like Brian Aldiss have shown that it is pointless to tell readers about the properties of helium in subzero temperatures unless they are better for the information. The corollary seems to be that a story which tells us that a rose is a rose and explains why is far more worthwhile than one which states that E equals MC² and leaves it at that. For this reason, you will find few “predictions” in these stories; the emphasis is on insight rather than intelligent guessing.

Australian science fiction has a long way to go, and a great deal to learn, but the first giant step has been taken. Local writers of sf need no longer apologize for their profession, either to the public or to themselves. Australians are beginning to understand that science fiction can be as viable a means of commenting on life in Australia as poetry or painting, and in some ways a better one. It is a process one would like to see continued in the future.

John Baxter

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* * * *

Burning Spear

KIT DENTON

Though not specifically national in setting or character, this story somehow captures the essence of the Australian autumn. A brief fantasy with psychological overtones, its atmosphere is both calm and threatening. The image of the boy picking up sunlight is memorable, but its integration into the story’s structure makes it only one of the many striking experiences which “Burning Spear” offers.

Kit Denton is well known in Australian television and radio circles as a writer and commentator, and has been active for many years as a free-lance journalist and author. This is his only published work of fantasy fiction. Source: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1964.

* * * *

“I don’t think you could call him a fanciful boy,” she said. “Imaginative, yes, but not fanciful. And then he comes up with this weird idea.”

“The business of picking up sunlight?” He was only slightly interested, the interest of a not-too-close brother. “I don’t know…kids do get ideas in their heads, don’t they? And I suppose the more you tell them they’re silly or wrong or mad, the more likely they are to hang on to them.”

She made an odd grimace. “Oh, it’s not that I think there’s anything wrong ... I’ve told him a hundred times I don’t mind his making up stories, as long as he realizes that’s all they are. But I won’t take lies, and he’s handing them out wholesale! And then, he gets so wound up and intense over things, and he won’t let go. Last year it was model ships! Did I tell you I found him working on one of them at three o’clock one morning? And the only word he’d give me was that it was necessary for him to finish the job! Necessary! For a twelve-year-old boy? As though there was nothing else of importance in the world.”

“Perhaps there was nothing else of importance.” His tone was less casual, more abrupt. “After all, he doesn’t see much of you, does he?”

The colour crept up her face and drained back again, a spring tide of anger. “Look, don’t throw that up at me again. The fact that I spend my days working has nothing to do with you, and the boy’s not alone ... he’s at school during the day, and I’m with him in the evenings. He’s not lonely.”

Upstairs, Tim sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on knees, wrists slack, hands swinging. He was lonely.

The brother, the uncle, snorted. “You don’t have to work, you’ve enough money and to spare. You don’t have to be away from the house. If you want my opinion, I think the kid’s starved for a bit of old-fashioned mollycoddling, a bit of love. But of course you don’t want my opinion. You only got me here to listen to yours.”

Now her anger was open, dull-red and spiked. She knew he was right, of course, but she was damned if she was going to admit it! “Perhaps you think you could do better? You haven’t got a grain of imagery in your thick head, and you’d never come within worlds of really understanding a boy like Tim…He’s a dreamer, sensitive. But he has to have a man’s hand every now and then. I’d thought perhaps you were the one to speak to him, but I can see I was terribly wrong. I’m sorry I even thought of asking.”

His hand slid through an accustomed weary movement, cancelling what she had said, refusing what she had implied, denying the need for further talk. “All right,” he said, “all right... if you’re going to hit that old trail again, I give in. I surrender. I’ll talk to him.”

The noise of the footsteps walked up the stairs ahead of the man, and Tim moved from the bed to the table under the window so that when the door opened his hands were busy about the balsa wood of a small-scale aircraft and his dark head was bent. The afternoon sun fell slantwise across his face ... snub nose, brown eyes, mouth compressed and the tip of his tongue edging from his lips as he concentrated on the sliver of wood in his fingers. Only when the neat cut was done did he look up, brown eyes, wide-set and deep in shadow.

“Hello uncle.” That was all. The mouth shut as the open eyes were shut on the inside.

“Hi, Tim. Your own design?”

“Uhuh.” Nothing. No conversation, no lead, no spark.

“Will it fly?”

“I expect so.” Flat statement.

“Even without wings, Tim?” He was interested in spite of himself. “It’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“We-e-ell . . .” The boy eased the word out. “Well, maybe I only think it’ll fly. Maybe it won’t do anything but look good.”

The uncle stood a moment longer, then folded himself onto the bed. “Tim, what’s this stuff about picking up sunlight? Your mother’s worried…She says it’s becoming an—an obsession with you, that you refuse to give up the story.”

“It’s not a story!” The boy’s face had darkened. “It’s the truth, but she won’t believe me because she doesn’t understand! Nobody does, except me!” He stopped sharply, afraid that the sob would leap out of his throat and quiver in his mouth. He swallowed and went on, “I told her because I thought she’d be glad to know, because I was glad and I wanted her to be pleased with me. I thought it was pretty terrific, but all she would say was ‘Yes, dear’ and then ‘You must stop making up these strange stories, dear’. She doesn’t understand. Nobody does, except me.”

In the still room the last words bounced off the walls, off the furniture, the ceiling, the walls, dismal and alone. Nobody ... except me.

The man felt cold; no child should be this sad, this grown-up lonely. His voice was quiet. “Look, Tim . . . would it help if you wrote it all down and made a real story out of it... something that we could sell perhaps and have published in a magazine? I’d help.”

Tim looked at him and through him and all round the inside of him, and he was glad that he’d meant what he’d said. But then, “No, uncle. You see, people would think it was just something I’d made up, and it’s not. It’s true.”

Lighting a cigarette gave the uncle time to choke back the impatience, the irritation. A long draw, and then, the voice controlled, “Tim, I’m not doubting you, but you don’t give a fellow much to go on, do you? You dash in on a quiet Sunday morning and tell your mother you’ve picked up a piece of sunlight and expect her to believe it—just like that! Look, no one picks up pieces of sunlight... or at least, not little boys. I dare say scientists can do something like it, somehow, but you’re no scientist, are you? And you won’t let your mother see whatever it was you picked up, and you insist on going on with the story. Don’t you see that it doesn’t add up? Either you’re inventing it all, or you’re being pretty silly . . . and if you’re not, then you’ve got to give proof. You can’t just do nothing but be unhappy, and make other people unhappy, too.” It was off his chest; he felt relieved.

Tim sat back in his chair. The outside of him was there and was listening and thinking, but the inside of him was away on a Sunday, morning, three weeks ago. In bed. He knew it was just about six o’clock although he hadn’t a watch or a bedside clock. He just knew, in the same way he’d have known it was Sunday, even without a calendar or the knowledge of the day before. Sunday had a special feel, and six o’clock on Sunday morning had a feel and a taste, like honey and toast and dark chocolate. And a smell . . . iron water and leaves. It was autumn, and that made it feel and taste and smell better, and the long spokes of morning sun turned in at his window and wheeled and angled across the room, bending cleverly up the face of the wardrobe, and neatly folding down the side of the chair. And on such a morning, you just got up—sat up and swung and stood and you were at once part of the morning which touched all your world and all the things in it, right to the edge of some one else’s night-time. Jeans and a sweater and soft shoes. Downstairs to the kitchen and the crisp noise of the frig door snicking open. Milk was white and cold and sweet, and better than a shower for waking you up, and it was thick enough to stay in your mouth for whole autumn minutes. And outside, outside, enough breeze to make all the grass and flowers grow sideways. Enough birds to fill just one corner of your head with chirps and whistles. Enough dew to sparkle, not enough to soak. Enough crisp, singing air to slice up your nostrils and down the back of your throat and into your lungs and belly and feet and make you broaden and widen and get taller and leap! And sunlight ... a great broad plate-glass sheet of it lying on the lawn, and two planks of it leaning up against the side of the house. A cataract of sunlight pouring over the roof and sluicing down the wall, and an empty box of it in the corner between the house and the garage. And all along the path, where the picket fence stood, a catwalk of sunlight, slats of it like a ladder lying down. His feet led him, one-toe, two-toe, along the rungs to the end, jump and spin and back again, and there, where the end of the fence joined the side of the garage, a different sort of space had let through a different sort of sunlight.

A spear of it.

A long shaft with a slim leaf of a blade at its head, lying aslant the path like a great compass needle.

One foot in the air he stopped and looked and admired. He let his foot down slowly so as not to shake the ground, and stepped high and careful round the brilliant spear, toeing the path near the golden blade. And then he bent down and picked it up.

The uncle was saying, “Either you’re inventing it all or you’re just being silly”, and Tim’s outside was listening, but his inside was holding the spear of sunlight that he’d lifted from the ground, holding it out level with his face. An autumn Sunday morning, and he, Tim, had picked up a piece of sunlight made like a splendid spear, the sort of spear Ulysses might have carried, or Hercules or Richard the Lion-Hearted. He felt it in his hands, cold steel sunlight, prickling with heat; he felt his shoulders widen and his chest deepen, and felt the broad leather belt studded with bronze about his waist. He knew his legs were lengthening and knew that packs and knots of muscles were moving on his arms and body, and he felt his eyes go golden as he looked. Striding tall and brown and muscled, he took the spear at the point of balance and went into the house, the hall a box of radiance and the stairway blazing about him. First to his bedroom, the walls coruscating, the ceiling a sky of light, the floor a pool of molten gold. And then to his mother, empty-handed now, but with the strength of the sunlight upon him. To his mother…

Tim realized that his uncle had stopped speaking. He had decided nothing, but he knew what had to be done. Proof, they wanted proof.

“All right, uncle,” he said.

“Good boy, Tim! You’ll cut it out, then? There’s really no need to go on with it, is there, and your mother will be very relieved.”

His eyes swung with the boy’s body as it moved to the closet in the corner of the room.

Tim stopped, his hand on the door. He hadn’t looked in this narrow cupboard since that Saturday morning. He’d lived with the thought in him that perhaps he’d dreamed it or imagined it, but he couldn’t yield the dream, the image. The tears were stinging the corner of his mouth, and a hard-edged sob jerked from his throat as he swung back the closet door.

The uncle saw, briefly, the comet colours in the closet; saw, for one instant, the brilliance and the fire; saw, for a fraction of time, the great burning spear of sunlight. And the last thing he saw before the blaze curtained his eyes with blackness was the boy reaching in to take out the spear and hold it lovingly in his hands.

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* * * *

It Could Be You

FRANK ROBERTS

Australian readers will understand better than anyone the wry pun of the title, though Roberts’s savage satire on modern television has international relevance, as witness the wide reprinting of this story overseas. Despite its American smoothness, the story has a suspense and contained ferocity that mark it as especially original.

Frank Roberts is well known as a short story writer, his most recent distinction in this field being the 1967 Henry Lawson Award. He is a professional journalist on the staff of the national weekly, the Bulletin. Source: The Bulletin.

* * * *

Erl Kramer awoke from a bad dream which had twin origins in too much Instant Vigor late at night and a World War II movie on television. In the film he had seen people killed in the mass in the most gruesome ways, and with his and millions of other families he had thanked Heaven it was history, and from a barbarous age.

Lying in bed half-awake, Kramer wondered how the present times would look to the viewers of future years, when perhaps all atavistic elements had been drained from the race.

“Hey, what time is it?” he asked his wife.

“Nearly seven. Better switch on.”

He did, and there was the usual picture of Hip Jones sprawled on his desk, sleeping to soft music. The music quickened, and Mr Invig appeared on the screen, with his usual leer at Hip Jones, and the world. “What a night he must have had,” Mr Invig said. “What a night you must have had! Never mind, what a lovely day it’s going to be in a few moments, thanks to Instant Vigor. Got your tablets ready?”

He put one yellow tablet into Hip Jones’s mouth while four bubble dancers crossed in front singing the Invig song. The instant he’d swallowed, Hip Jones sprang up and looked a hundred years younger.

“Are you with me?” he called brightly. “All together then, swallow!”

Erl Kramer and Melanie popped the tablets in their mouths, and took the surge lying down. That was when Hip Jones on the screen cried, “Well, who’s it going to be today, good people?” Then, as one of the outside cameras zoomed through a bedroom window and caught a man yawning, Hip’s voice called, “It could be you, Mr Joe Barratt of King Vale! But don’t worry, it isn’t. We were just seeing if you were awake.”

“Will you look at the look on the poor boob’s face?” said Erl, laughing with everyone else at Joe Barratt of King Vale.

“Well, how would you feel?” Melanie said. “It can be anyone, anywhere, any time. I think I’d drop dead with sheer fright if they sprang a camera at me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Erl said grimly, and Melanie reached out and gripped his arm, and they stared at one another a second while Hip Jones shouted, “This is the Invig Show, a day-long adventure brought to you by the Invig Corporation, your hosts for that loving-to-be-alive kind of living.”

Then the camera showed a door, and tracked along a passage, and Hip Jones’s voice asked, “Who’s it gonna be?” And then as he said “It could be you ...” they pulled the switch on him and took the cameras into the studio and focused on Hip Jones, who yelled in not altogether mock surprise, “Mr Hip Jones, care of the Invig Corporation. Hey fellers, that’s me!”

Melanie and Erl laughed with the other million viewers, and Hip cried, “Oh no, not old Hip. All you lovely people out there, you wouldn’t want that, would you? They’re only kidding—I think.”

“He doesn’t sound too sure,” Erl said, laughing. “Wouldn’t it be a joke if it did turn out to be him some time? If his rating fell, for instance.”

“Here we go again,” Hip cried. “It could be you, Mrs Zella Ignacio of Moonstone. But it isn’t. No, I’ve been authorized to say it’s a man today. That makes the odds 987,000 to one for you men, or something even more astronomical.”

“They had a woman yesterday,” Melanie said.

“Did you watch?”

“You know I never do. Only until they give the name, and I’m sure it isn’t you, or someone I know.”

She had breakfast ready when he came out dressed for work. And Hip Jones on the morning-room screen cried, “It could be you, Mr Logan Ross of Satin Plains,” The cameras zoomed to a middle-aged man alighting from an inter-urban Hovercraft. He stopped in midstride and almost fell over. Hip Jones said, “Remember, the prize all this week is £100,000. Is it Mr Ross, now? Is it? No,” he said, “it isn’t, because the man today never wears a hat. Of course, he might go out and buy one as soon as the stores open. We can’t stop him doing that, can we?”

Erl already had taken his I.C.B.Y. book of statistics from his pocket, and Melanie looked over his shoulder. “Three hundred and thirteen thousand men usually hatless,” he reported, and Melanie said, “Will Central Stores ever sell a few hats this morning!”

Erl laughed and said, “I’m glad I’m not in hats. I haven’t got over the rush to get rid of grey suits last week. We sent over 3000 to the dumps, and all the other stores likewise. Hey, remember the time it was a cat-lover, and they all threw their cats out into the streets?”

Melanie remembered.

“You’ve got to hand it to them,” Erl said. “I.C.B.Y. shifts goods. It must have been a genius who started the show even in its original form, way back there. And I’d better get to work.” He tested his portable, kissed Melanie good-bye, and hurried to the transit station. He was not alone. There were plenty of hatless men on the station and more in the car when it arrived.

He listened to the Invig News and the World Hit Parade on the way in, leaving the video off so that he could read yesterday’s main story in the morning papers. The next I.C.B.Y. clue was due at nine o’clock, but sometimes they inserted one unexpectedly.

Hip Jones was there, even larger than life, on the Central Stores screens when Erl arrived at work. Hip had just selected the winner of the daily Invig Holiday, a heavyweight woman who had won a trip to Spain, and a free course of Inslim.

“There’s something happening all the time on the Invig Show,” Hip proclaimed. “And now for the next clue in our day-long adventure, ‘It Could Be You!’”

At Central Stores the door has been opened, and hatless men were streaming into the store as Hip said, “ ‘It Could Be You’ with eyes of blue. And according to my little data book, that brings us down to 90,000 possibilities. That’s still a lot, but keep looking in.” By this time most of the hatless had turned and walked out of the store. They had brown eyes, or carried coloured lenses for eye-colour days.

“Well, we’re part of the chosen band so far,” Erl said to his best friend Steve.

“Are we? Yes, I suppose we are. I never take much notice, I’ve been in the last thousand or so, dozens of times.”

“Lately? I didn’t think ...”

“No, when I was in the Force. They had a long run on outdoor workers at one stage, and it was often a cop or a postie.”

Hip cried, “It could be you, Mr Wu,” and on the screen was a Chinese shelling shrimp, and grinning at the cameras. “Mr Wu scents a blue,” Hip remarked. “A blue-eyed Chinaman? Well, hardly. No, we just threw him in for luck and he wasn’t a bit worried, was he? Lovely. Keep watching. More cluey coming up, chop chop.”

“Aren’t there really any blue-eyed Chinese?” Erl asked, and Steve shook his head.

Hip was handed a slip of paper, and cried, “He has black hair.” And the cameras roved a crowd and hovered over a bald head.

“It certainly couldn’t be him,” Erl chuckled. Invig made everyone good humoured in the mornings. Both Erl and Steve had black hair.

“Thirty-two thousand, now,” Steve read from the statistics. “I’ll split the prize with you.”

“Oh, sure. Me too.” Erl could see three customers approaching. “I suppose you’ve worked out what you’d do with it.”

“Many times,” Steve said. “And also if it was me.”

Erl hadn’t. He’d never been among even the last 100,000 before. But now he had no time to think about it because suddenly there seemed to be a rush on suits. It was more than an hour before he and Steve could exchange a word again.

“I missed a couple of the clues,” Erl said. “I got the early thirties one, and the business suit.”

“You only missed one then, man. Sun-tanned complexion. They’re clever, the way they string it out. It’s still only down to 8000.”

“And we’re still in,” Erl said. “But 8000 is a lot.”

Steve shrugged. He was watching two women who were pretending to examine a suit special, but were covertly looking at Erl and him. It had started. “Yes, we’re still among the 8000,” Steve said, loud enough for them to hear. But quietly he said, “I have a damn feeling.”

Erl walked over to the women and said to the nearest, “Can I help you, madam?”

“We’re just looking,” the other one said. They wandered away, but did not leave the level.

On the screen Mr Invig appeared again to see that Hip Jones and everyone else took their midday booster tablet. It made Hip hilarious, and after the bubble dancers had finished the Invig Song he produced a huge pin and threatened to burst their bubbles.

Then Hip sobered up, and said, “Let’s see what’s going on outside. Ah yes, it could be you, Mr Darrell Darling, down in Dent Street.” The cameras zoomed to a man struggling with three youths while other people were running towards them. Darling was punching and kicking and shouting, “Let me alone.” One of the youths fell down.

“Hey, there’s some excitement down in Dent Street,” Hip said coolly. “But it isn’t Mr Darling. No siree. He’s left-handed, and you’re looking for a right-handed man.”

Darling must have heard it from a set near by, because he rushed at the youths and banged two of their heads together. Other people kicked and punched at them, and they turned and ran for their lives.

“It doesn’t do to be impetuous,” Hip cried. “There’s some way to go yet. We’ve only narrowed the number down to 6803. But from here on, watch any man with black hair, blue eyes, early thirties, business suit, sun-tanned complexion, and—here comes another clue—he works right in the heart of the city. How about that?”

Steve said, “Hey, that’s a big cut, down to 3200.”

“Right in the city,” Hip cried, “and he’s worth maybe £100,000 to you or you or you. Oh, I can see you rushing in by the thousands, now—all you ladies from the suburbs. And I’ll tell you this. If you don’t get your man you will get value in the city. If you don’t win you’ll certainly save.”

Erl said, “The city stores must have bought participation today. But the rush shouldn’t trouble us much. They won’t be buying suits.”

And Steve growled, “They’ll buy anything, if they think he’s close. And I tell you, I’ve got a feeling.”

Erl felt his spine prickle. Steve was a lot bigger and harder than he. Erl played it cool, shrugged and said, “The more we sell, the more bonus. I’m going to circulate. It’s no use hiding.”

“See you,” Steve said, and almost put out his hand, but changed the direction and put it in his pocket and turned away.

Those two women were moving back towards suits, and more people were arriving by escalator. In no time Erl was in the centre of a crowd, selling suits like hot cakes, with two men from other departments sent in to help him. But by the grapevine he learned it was the same in socks, shoes, underwear, and sports goods. People in the crowd had to rely on intuition, and many who looked at Erl rejected him and went to another department, or to other stores.

There was a hush as the screens showed Hip Jones about to give another clue, and suddenly then Melanie slipped through the tight circle of bodies and reached Erl’s side.

“We’re all in the city now,” Hip Jones cried. “And it could be you, Arthur Lonigan of Lonigan and Sons.” This was a killer, and the crowd shrieked with laughter. Even Erl laughed. The cameras had gone smashing through a window into an office where the boss was being held by his staff, ten people evidently willing to share the prize. Lonigan was shouting, “I’ll fire every last one of you.”

And Hip cried, “You do that, Mr Lonigan, because it isn’t you. Our man today never wears glasses, and I see a pair on your desk.” There was an instant melee in Lonigan’s office, and the cameras dwelt on it just long enough for laughs and then cut away.

“They were taking a silly risk, weren’t they?” Hip cried. “For we still have 2500 candidates, or so. There’s plenty of time. Hey, I’ve got something here, wouldn’t you like to have?” And he showed the back of a photograph. “That’s right, I’ve got his picture here.”

“Erl, I’m so afraid,” Melanie said.

“You shouldn’t be here. Please go home. There’s nothing you could do.”

“Steve’s still in it too, isn’t he?”

He was most upset because she was there. “Steve’s used to it,” he said. “He’s been close before. Do go home.”

“Make way for Insur!” a man called at the back of the crowd, and Erl saw the opportunity. “I won’t sign unless you go,” he said.

“All right, dear, you know best.” Melanie stepped back and went into the parting the Insur man had made in the crowd, but she did not get far, although everyone was very nice. Some of the women patted her, and others took out their handkerchiefs and dabbed.

“Sign here,” the Insur man told Erl. “Let’s see, it’s down to 2000 isn’t it? There’s such a mob in town, or I’d have found you when the odds were better. The premium’s—let’s see—I’ll write a receipt.”

“Did you get Steve Barclay?” Erl asked him.

“He’s having a rough time, but I’ll get him in a minute,” the man said.

“They ought to give more clues at this stage,” Erl said. “It’s sadistic to drag it out.”

“Well, they have to give us time to get around, for one thing. You wouldn’t want to miss on your Insur, would you? Anyway, it’s more exciting.”

“I suppose so,” said Erl. The screens were showing crowd scenes from various parts of the city. It was certainly exciting, and these shots created much indecision among the people around Erl. Even he felt it. Some of the candidates on the screens made his pulse jump with certainty.

But, after all, he was employed to sell suits. “What about you, madam?” he asked a fat woman with green glasses. “What size is your husband?”

“Insignificant, honey. You got anything for an insignificant man?” she said, and the crowd laughed.

Erl persisted. He took a suit from the rack, and held it in front of her. “It’s in the new style. You wouldn’t know it’s the same man.”

“I should buy him a new suit?” the fat woman said. “Honey, if I win today, I’ll buy me a whole new husband. Then for sure he won’t be the same man.” She was about to go on, but something on the screens caught everyone’s attention.

It was Hip with an Invig Sudden Death jackpot. That meant there would be another contest in the afternoon, running right up to the other channel’s night show, “You Bet Your Life.”

“Here it is, then!” Hip cried. “Are you in Central Stores? Because our man is. Don’t make any mistakes now, remember all the clues—and don’t forget the penalties. There are fifteen possibles in Central Stores—and please, good people, don’t wreck the joint.”

Fifteen? Erl fought his way to a counter, and jumped onto it, trying to sight Steve. But Steve was in a bigger crowd than Erl. There were only the two of them on that floor. People were fighting to hold Erl’s legs, hitting and pushing and shouting at one another. They pulled him down into the mass of gaping faces with, he was sure, Melanie’s among them.

“He’s in suits,” they screeched, taking it from Hip Jones. Erl fought his way upright, shouting, “There’s two of us.”

Then he saw that Steve had got onto a counter, with a heavy steel coat-hanger in his hand. He was threatening them with it, and none had a right to touch Steve until he was named, if it were to be he.

The crowd was growing every moment. Steve made a wild jump over the nearest heads, and the crowd opened to let him fall on his feet. He was big, and the hanger was heavy. He ran to the big windows, with all of them surging after him, and he smashed the glass with one blow and climbed through, or started to, but they got him and pulled him back, cutting him badly. He still had the hanger, and flailed around with it, sending them back. Nearly everyone thought it was Steve because Steve thought so, but a few dozen diehards clung to Erl.

“I’m going to tell you which one in suits,” Hip cried on the screen. “But wait for it, good people. Don’t make any hasty mistakes, the penalties are terrible if you do.”

Erl braced himself, and Hip cried, “It’s the big fellow, Steve Barclay.”

Then there were terrible screams.

Erl read next day that Steve took three with him, and hurt many more. That was silly. The game was necessary, a scientific outlet, everyone knew that. And if it was your turn, just too bad. The fat woman with the green glasses won the £100,000. No one bothered to find out whether she bought a new husband. There was another contest and another winner in the afternoon.

But in the store, bruised and bleeding, Erl was not quite so philosophical in the heat of the moment. He shook off the last of those around him and looked for Melanie.

When he saw her he went to her and took her handbag and opened it and looked inside. Of course it contained her I.C.B.Y. contest knife with her name and number engraved in gold.

“Wouldn’t the Insur have been enough for you?” he asked her.

“Dear, it wouldn’t have meant anything. You know it wouldn’t have.”

He handed the bag back to her and said, “Christ, what have they done to us?”

“There’s no need to be blasphemous,” Melanie said.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

The Evidence

LEE HARDING

The degree to which a human being is responsible for his actions is a key factor in modern philosophical thinking, and it is this question which Lee Harding examines in this story. His analysis is, however, neither specific nor glib. The reader is encouraged to discover for himself who the central character is, and in what his relevance to the situation lies. Lee Harding’s considerable reputation in overseas science fiction circles stems directly from his ability, rare in the field, to deal with complex philosophical and metaphysical distinctions with clarity and directness, and to generalize about them without melodrama or sermonizing.

A professional photographer in his late twenties, Lee Harding is probably Australia’s best-known writer of science fiction, though his reputation rests on only a handful of stories and novelettes. He hopes, however, to complete his first novel some time in the next year. As well as writing sf, Harding contributes to Australian Science Fiction Review, which he was instrumental in establishing.

This story has not previously been published in this form.

* * * *

He is the One Who Watches.

I have seen him many times. Standing idly upon a street corner unconcerned with the flow of pedestrians about him, or insidious within a darkened doorway, a vague figure like crumpled newspapers. And at night I have seen him below my window, barely visible in the half-light beyond the street lamp, merging mysteriously with the monotonous monochrome of night. Everywhere I go I feel the cold appraisal of his dispassionate eyes and I have often wondered if they see through this clumsy subterfuge of human flesh and study the corruptible region of the soul.

Why does he haunt my days when his form belongs to the comfortable ambiguity of nightmare?

It is difficult to recall a time when my movements have not been subjected to his silent scrutiny. He may have been there all my life, unobserved until now when the intensity of his watchfulness has intruded upon my thoughts, content to have been but a hazy shadow hovering around the fringes of my world.

But surely there must have been a first time, a moment from out of the wreckage of my past when I first noticed his intrusion into my life? But it is useless to try to remember. Fear has soaked up what remains of my sanity like a ragged piece of blotting paper, and it has become increasingly difficult to recall even the most prosaic details of my day-to-day existence.

One cannot ignore him. God knows I’ve tried! If only he would move, or say something, perhaps even smile. Then I would know that he is a fellow traveller in this confused continuum. But never once has an expression passed between us, no thought has ever disturbed the smooth pattern of his vigil. More and more I am forced to think of him as one ... apart.

If only he would cease this maddening silence and walk up to me, address me as an equal! Do anything other than this wordless surveillance. But it is useless to expect miracles. He is much too concerned with his task to scatter some crumb of human kindness.

* * * *

Consider this: your life passes from day to day in a pattern of ordered chaos you manage to make sense out of. Minor details vary but the routine is essentially the same from one day to the next. And then you realize that you are being watched.

At first you are not really terrified—that comes later. You have learned to live with Security and while you may feel uneasy you know that there is no cause for alarm. Your File is clean. But on the other hand ...

One never can be really sure of what is going on at any given time. Yesterday’s good deed so easily becomes tomorrow’s crime. Such is the climate of our world.

So you begin to worry. You pay more attention to your Watcher. Details become important. A picture begins to take shape:

Of a small, dark-complexioned man in a long, grey overcoat and a sallow, expressionless face with very bright eyes, staring like an over-fast lens on a Japanese press camera. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this man. His face has been sculpted from the same general anonymity as those around him. It is the nature of his work that puts him apart: he watches. Only me. Never anyone else, that I can see.

Oh, but it is all so wretched!

Can it be Security? It hardly seems so—they would never be so obvious. This character looks like somebody dredged out of one of those old B-movies. Except for his eyes. Except for ... his eyes.

* * * *

In restaurants, he is always at a corner table, discreetly taking notes.

In the mornings he may be glimpsed at any intersection. He may be the pedestrian I invariably and narrowly miss knocking over when I am hurrying home in the evening.

I have even seen him lurking amongst the floodlit gardens when I have looked down from the towering Presidential chambers in the long hours of the night.

He manages to be everywhere I am, and this in itself is puzzling, for there cannot be many people with a Clearance allowing such freedom. Not even the President himself moves half so freely.

If not from Security then, from where!

There seems to be no logical explanation. And so I am under siege to an emotionless statue, a mindless automaton who never moves or speaks or smiles or utters my name or waves a hand in friendship.

I discard the thought of Analysis. My position is difficult. Word of my consultation might eventually creep through to the President or one of his aides, and I fear for the pressure that would be brought to bear upon those already weary shoulders.

But there was a choice: if I could not discover the reason for this stranger’s thoughtless vigil then I must accept him. Or rather, ignore him. Go about my life as if he did not exist. Pay no attention to his observation, pretend that he was only a figment of an overworked and overburdened mind, a phantasm thrown up from out of the dross of consciousness by the great and unseen tides sweeping across the face of the earth.

Either accept him, and ignore him, or go mad. There did not seem to be any alternative, and with this decision a great load seemed to lift from my mind.

I no longer worried at the true nature of his surveillance. I went about my work and tried to pretend that he was not there, that my life was safe from his burning eyes and that what I did was no concern of his and that somewhere there was a reason for all this and, most important of all, that my File was clean. There was no smirch to be found.

And for a while all was well again. But have you ever tried to ignore someone who seems to know you more intimately than you have ever known yourself?

Why do I feel myself drowning in a mirror whenever I look at him? And why should I fear something without a voice?

Wild grew my fancies. I imagined myself the victim of an elaborate and subtle attempt to discredit me in the eyes of the President and the Unoccupied World. A deliberate illusion was being foisted upon my mind for the purpose of reducing me to a gibbering lunatic.

Oh, devious and cruel are the ways of the Enemy!

A sop, then, to my tormented psyche. A week, perhaps two, of relative calm, of cocking a mental snook at my Watcher, of thinking again of the future.

A reprieve, but not, alas, a remedy. The seeds of madness have been sown, and I find that rational thinking becomes difficult. Perhaps not the Enemy at all. Some insidious rivalry within the Party?

Ah, the difficulty of living under the Games. Each day it becomes more difficult to define one’s adversaries.

* * * *

Gradually my world darkened. It became a succession of nights and days devoid of character, numb exteriors while my mind wrestled with figures too proud to be ploughed under. Whatever my infernal Watcher thinks my work must go on because I ... I am important because of my work and only because of that. It is the measure of an Age. And I will not.,. I would not. . . be distracted from my purpose. The President waited upon my report. The Conference would take place—

When?

Thursday the tenth. In two days time. My report would have to be ready. Oh God, give me time . . . time ...

On the morning of the conference, I saw him again.

The occasion was as unspectacular as always. I have stopped at a pavement cafe for some hot chocolate before going on to the Presidential centre. The air is quite chill and I have need of a bracing drink before I go on.

I find him standing a little farther down the counter. For once his eyes are averted. They are focused upon a little black notebook on the counter where one white hand writes industriously.

My hand shakes as I accept the warm carton of chocolate and I continue watching him from out of the corner of my eye, feeling the cold beads of sweat bring painful stigmata to my flesh and my breath quicken.

I take a warm mouthful of the liquid. It is warm but . . . tasteless. He does not look up. I wonder to what task he now so studiously applies himself. With his cold eyes averted he does not seem half so fearful, and this makes my curiosity impetuous: I must know what it is he writes!

Only then does he look up. And into my own astonished eyes. And an icy wind scours my mind. The chocolate spills from my hand and there comes a sound from a million miles away as the plastic container bounces upon the sidewalk. Everything is swept away to another corner of the universe and we are locked together, this stranger and I, in our own private hell.

And still he does not speak. But stares. And says nothing.

We stare at each other, realities locked together. The universe has screamed to a stop and the fate of all time seems to hang upon those terse notes of his.

What are they?

He does not answer. He does not seem to care. Like a mindless machine programmed only to stare. And to record.

My fear became fury and I stepped forward and I reached out a hand and I tore that notebook from him.

The pages were covered with ridiculous shorthand or the inane scribblings of an idiot.

Incomprehensible.

Damn you!

I threw the book away, made a gift of it to the howling wind. All of my wrath, all of my indignation, all of my despair I turned upon my Watcher.

Only to find him no longer there. Only a void where he had been. No sign of him anywhere along the awakened street.

I searched frantically for the discarded notebook.

Unsuccessfully.

* * * *

The Conference was underground, deep in the Party’s stronghold. The press galleries were bare. This secrecy would not be faulted. Great deeds might be done this day, but none would know save those who had need to know, and that, too, was the measure of an Age.

With the bare walls’ mute witness some semblance of sanity returned to my life. I pushed the earlier confrontation aside and tried to concentrate on my report. It was the nature of my work to be lucid and concise. No shilly-shallying. No siree.

But the hours dragged by and I sat there with my briefcase full of death and waited for my turn. The faces of the learned men around me were devoted and intense, and it would be some time before they left this Chamber of Horrors.

Strange, that I had never before considered it so.

So I sat there, trying to hang onto some vestige of sanity while my mind wandered fitfully in the half-light of nightmare. During a short break in the proceedings the President remarked, casually, that I looked rather pale. I made an excuse of migraine and fell to studying papers.

When I was finally called upon to table my report it was only with the greatest difficulty that I managed to stand up and arrange my thoughts in some sort of order. The papers in my hands seemed suddenly meaningless, and I did not know why this should be so.

The room swam dizzily out of focus a number of times, but I doggedly pressed on. Each sentence seemed to weigh several tons, drawn from my lips by the greatest effort I had ever known.

Slowly the figures tumbled down upon the ears of those present.

The destructive potential of the anti-matter bombs. Our narrow margin of development. The rapid deterioration of the African Federation and the Russian Free States. The growing insolvency of Latin America. Despair. Trade barriers. The decision. The caves, deep, deep in the mountains—for the Few. Percentages of survival. Estimated loss in mega-millions. Cultural loss: incalculable. Best to forget that. Wisest course.

Yes, said the President, nodding. We must begin anew. Start Afresh.

Concurring. Concurring. Concurring. A great undercurrent of genocide sweeping the silent room.

There was more to come, but there was nothing more to be said, for in that blighted moment I saw him.

Overhead, in the distance, in the long empty arcs of the press gallery, a solitary figure was industriously taking notes.

My Watcher.

An exclamation escaped before I could prevent it, and I stood there open-mouthed like a fish gasping at the air. My legs collapsed and I fell back into my seat. The chamber reeled around me, and for a moment I could not see.

They were soon around me, soothing, consoling, some even concerned.

It is nothing, I said. Nothing at all. Just. . . migraine.

I did not care if they believed. I allowed the Vice-President to help me to my feet and leaned heavily upon his shoulder as he helped me out of the room and down to the Dispensary.

At the doorway I looked around but saw no sign of my Watcher. He had vanished to whatever secluded portion of the world contained his idle moments, and of late it had seemed there were precious few of those.

He had become my constant companion.

I collapsed on the way down the corridor and they had to carry me the rest of the way to the Dispensary, where they pumped me full of sedatives and called for a chauffeur to take me home to rest for a few hours.

Where I could only wait.

There was nothing more to be done. My paper was finished and had been presented. Other minds than mine must now apply themselves to the decisions to be made.

A great peace descended over me. For the first time in many long months— or had it been years?—I knew what it was like to rest and to lie in bed and watch the daylight fade from the bald sky and feel the cool of the evening presage change. And see the lights come on one by one and know that there was peace at last in the comfort of the night.

* * * *

They came for me in the early hours of the morning, as I had always known they would. Came like officious public servants but without any insolence. It seemed, then, that I had been expecting them all my life, and I greeted them with relief.

There were three of them and they were kind and considerate as they helped me out of bed and into my uniform. They had remembered my rank if not my calling, and they stood around patiently while I made my toilet and shaved and brushed my hair.

Three young men in grey dustcoats with an air of urgency, well-tempered by politeness.

I nodded that I was ready, and the senior of the group motioned me out of the room. The other two fell into step behind us.

It did not seem out of place to step out into a great long corridor nor to walk in silence for many, many miles before we came to another door. We walked in silence with the walls bare and bright and uncommitted.

The senior attendant opened the door and helped me through. The room on the other side was bare except for a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet. And a door on the other side.

I was led over to the desk where an equally officious young woman asked me my name.

I told her.

Without hesitation.

Occupation?

Tactical Advisor.

In what capacity?

The application of Games Theory to thermo-nuclear and allied warfare.

She looked up. Only the suggestion of an emotion sparked her dispassionate eyes.

Oh. We’ve been waiting for you.

She pressed a rubber stamp down against a slotted card that bore my name and dropped it into a chute. There was an air of finality in the movement.

She nodded, and waved me towards the other door.

My escorts had disappeared, but even as I temporized the door opened and another grey-coated official motioned me forward.

Into a vast auditorium. So huge that my mind reeled at the distances involved. The galleries disappeared into a blur of light beyond which nothing further could be seen.

This way.

The official led me to a narrow gateway in a shoulder-high railing and motioned me through and closed it again behind me. I took up my position calmly, feeling no sense of crush, being part of the great crowd of people arranged together in this vast dock.

Towards the centre of the auditorium three figures sat before a long, low table.

Only for a moment did I allow my attention to wander to the people close by, all staring steadily ahead without purpose, as though the awkward engines of their lives had been stilled for some great occasion.

I saw many familiar faces and that made sense. We were all of us here today, or whatever time existed in this strange place, and were all arraigned here for the same purpose.

I looked back to the centre of the room in time to see a familiar figure in a long grey coat deposit a small black notebook down upon the long table. It took up a position with an incalculable number of identical black tomes, and the three faces nodded, carefully, and a hushed air descended upon the auditorium.

As my Watcher walked to take up his position among the long rows of similarly clad officials, all with the same dispassionate eyes and uncommitted stares, I leaned forward through the railing and grabbed his arm.

He swung around to face me. And for the first time I seemed to detect some powerful emotion quivering in his eyes. But I did not recognize it.

What’s in it? I asked. What’s in the book?

Why, he answered, the evidence, of course.

And turned aside to join his fellows.

I turned around and faced the three figures at the table and the great golden light that had suddenly grown up around them.

Only then did I understand the nature of the court now in session, and who were the accused.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

An Ounce of Dissension

MARTIN LORAN

This is a light, satirical science fiction story based on a theme close to most Australian writers—literary censorship. It attempts, by removing the problem to an imaginary situation where it is distorted and some of the basic inconsistencies considerably expanded, to see the phenomenon of censorship in a social and cultural context. The fact that this story appeared in the top-paying and world’s top-ranking sf magazine indicates that, as a story at least, it came off.

“Martin Loran” is the pen-name of a team of two local magazine writers. They have so far sold two novelettes in the same series as “An Ounce of Dissension”, both of them to Analog magazine, and anticipate the sale of a novel on this theme later. This story is something of a landmark; Australian writers had never previously placed material in this magazine nor penetrated so decisively the highly competitive American market.

Source: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1966.

* * * *

Stephen Quist switched on the last of the transparencies and began listing details in the book before him.

7. General view, inhabitant Dubhe IV. Aquatic, tentacular.

Classification 6—B—114p. Social structure . . .

The statistics went on for another eight lines. As he wrote, the green eyes looked down at him in a long frozen stare. It was a three-dimensional image, and a convincing one. Most men might have felt uneasy with such a creature watching them, even as a mere photograph, but not Quist. He had seen every imaginable type of life, experienced every possible biological permutation. There was no being in the whole huge bestiary of the universe weird enough to suprise a Librarian.

He noted down the last row of figures in his neat round hand, put the quill pen into the ink pot and leaned back. His muscles ached with the strain of an hour spent painstakingly writing by hand, but he didn’t mind that. He could have used a voice writer or even had all the data processed and filed automatically, but there was something particularly satisfying about having done it himself.

The ship trembled slightly as one of the ion jets made a slight adjustment in its course, and the feather of his pen quivered briefly. Quist smiled, glancing down at the ink-stained first finger of his right hand. If the Controller could see him now! There would be a lecture for him, at the very least—perhaps a fine. On Earth they were very sensitive about what they chose to call “reversion”. Would it help, Quist wondered, to explain that of all the writing implements available only the natural quill pen worked efficiently in null-gravity? He decided that it would not.

The heads of the Library Service on Earth had very little practical experience of spaceship life, and the Rule Book was written accordingly. For the first few months most Junior Librarians kept to the rules. They got up according to the book, catalogued and filed and serviced the machines according to the book. In the “afternoon” they followed one of the approved study courses and boned up on something interesting like “Tensor Mechanics” or “Ancient History (Earth)”. Then, at the proper time according to the book, they went to bed. Often they didn’t even dare to clear the view-port and look out at the stars unless the book told them to.

Naturally the system never lasted long, though as far as Quist or any of the other Librarians were aware none of the Earth Controllers knew this. Or perhaps they knew but didn’t really care. It wasn’t important. What was important was that the Librarians were allowed to handle their lives in their own way. They could play chess with the computer, or read, or just sleep. They could get drunk, read pornographic novels—or write them, if they wanted to. A few, like Quist, could spend their time picking up odd skills and bits of knowledge, such as handwriting, the only noticeable quality of which was that they were engagingly useless. Under these conditions, it wasn’t at all a bad life.

Quist boosted himself out of the chair and swam for the hand grip placed on the ceiling above his chair. There was no need to be on null-gravity. The twist of a knob and he could walk about as naturally as he did on Earth. But there was something particularly enjoyable in the sensation of floating. At the end of every trip, in the first dreadful days of readjustment to gravity, he made a resolution to act in future like a sensible adult human, and for the first few days of a new voyage he usually kept to it, clomping righteously around the ship, feeling glum and very clumsy. On the third or fourth day, he woke, reached muzzily for the hand grip, jerked, and landed on the floor with a bone-cracking thud. From then on, it was null-gravity until the last day in space.

The transparency was still projected on the screen. Hovering in the air before the image, he examined it critically. It was, he thought, exceedingly horrible—and yet, intellectually, he could find quite a few points worthy of praise. Those eyes, for instance. They had the melancholy wetness of a spaniel he had owned once, as a child. And the skin looked remarkably supple, like good synthetic leather. One might almost . . .

“Bookworm,” he called out.

There was no answer.

Quist boosted himself to the port wall and took a heavy volume from the thousands that covered it. It was a book of Carlyle’s essays. He had never liked Carlyle. Bracing himself against the wall he took aim and hurled the heavy volume at the panel of the computer whose banks occupied the greater part of the ship’s mass. He had thrown things at the computer before and knew just where to aim. The book sailed cleanly to its target and crashed into the machine in precisely the right place, just below the embossed legend “Bookworm, Mark 18”. The machine hiccupped once and its lights came on.

“Is there something wrong with your audio circuits again?” Quist asked.

The machine buzzed for a moment, then spoke.

“Sorry, Quist. I was thinking of something else.”

The Librarian wondered whether it had been a good idea to give the Bookworm such a strikingly academic voice. It always reminded him of an absent-minded bespectacled professor who had taught him Ancient English back in University. But it fitted the Bookworm’s rather vague “personality” and, in a way, that was important. It was better not to be reminded too often that the only other voice you heard for most of the trip was that of a machine and not another human being. He looked again at the transparency of the alien from Dubhe IV.

“Has anybody ever written a poem about an alien?” he asked.

The machine buzzed again.

“Of course,” it said. “What sort did you have in mind? Humanoid? Arachnid? Gestalt?”

“Aquatic,” Quist said, “and octopoid.”

The Bookworm considered for a moment. “I have one possible on file,” it said, a trifle doubtfully.

Quist was disappointed. Only one?

“Let’s hear it.”

The Bookworm began to recite in its dry old voice:

“Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,

Whence earnest to dazzle our eyes?

With thy bosom bespangled and banded

With the hues of the seas and the skies;

Is thy home European or Asian, O mystical monster marine?

Part Molluscous and partly Crustacean,

Betwixt and between.”

“That’s awful!” Quist said.

“Isn’t it?” the Bookworm agreed. “Actually, it’s supposed to be pretty horrible. It’s a parody by A. C. Hilton of the English poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) entitled ‘Octopus’. Swinburne, a minor poet of the late nineteenth century, is noted for ...”

“I know all about Swinburne,” Quist said.

“. . . popularizing the type of poetry known generally as Pre-Raphaelite imagist. His best poem is probably ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, written . . .”

Quist kicked the machine hard in the same spot at which he had thrown the book. It hiccupped again.

“... in 1854 and dedicated to . ..”

* * * *

While the dry old voice droned on about Swinburne, Quist went looking for his tool kit. The memory banks were jammed open again. It was a common fault, and one which the interference mechanism programmed to occur regularly at least once every trip. There was nothing wrong with the Bookworm. Somewhere inside the machine, in a case which even the most energetic and mechanically minded Librarian could not penetrate, there was a small mechanism devoted exclusively to the task of making things go wrong. The idea was to keep the Librarians active and their mechanical skills in good order by forcing them every few weeks to perform some trivial but complicated repair to the computer. There was no point in swearing about it. It had to be done, and the best way was to do it quickly so that it wouldn’t interfere with the more important work when it came.

Before he started tearing the machine down, Quist pressed the emergency answer button. There was a momentary pause in the machine’s monologue on English verse of the nineteenth century.

“Before I start taking you apart, how long before we reach the next system?”

“A day and a half. Thirty-four hours, to be precise.” The voice was distant. “The system is that of unnamed star NGC 5548, known locally as New Sol. The system has one colonized planet, occupying the fourth position in a roughly Earth-type orbit. It is known locally as Rayer, after its discoverer and first colonist. The colony has been out of touch with Earth for one hundred and forty-four years, but last reports indicated a degree of development roughly equal with that of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The climate is temperate and...”

“I know all about Rayer, too,” Quist said.

“. . . aside from unusually heavy rainfall in the wet season, Rayer enjoys ...”

Quist started undoing the computer’s main console panel. He wished he had stuck with Swinburne. He seemed to recall that the poet’s private life had been somewhat more interesting that the statistics on Rayer’s climate.

Some people think that all planets are the same, and so they are—in the sense that all people are the same. There is a ninety-nine per cent resemblance between all planets, but the remaining one per cent can vary enough to make each world completely distinguishable from its neighbour. Quist had seen more worlds than most, but he had yet to see two alike. He looked down on Rayer with a connoisseur’s eye, measuring it against his experience. Not an unattractive world, he decided. It had the deep green hue of all Earth-type planets, but the cloud pattern was unusually bright. Bands of white alto-cirrus flowed across the greenness like milky streaks in a white opal, now masking, now revealing the mottled surface. An opal world then, and yet something of the emerald…

The autopilot bonged twice.

“Check time,” the Bookworm said.

Quist turned from the viewport and switched on the check screen. On its grid surface he saw Rayer as a round black shadow striated with white lines. The radiation recorders were picking up all traces of electrical and nuclear energy escaping from the planetary atmosphere. There were many such traces, sticking closely to the traditional pattern. Rayer had apparently prospered since Earth had established a colony there. The main spaceports stood out as clear red patches, showing that the radioactive tracer compounds incorporated in their surface material had not been disturbed or built over. Quist checked the general population distribution as indicated by the degree of radiation in the various areas, chose the port nearest to the largest concentration and fed the details to Bookworm. Then he went back to the window and watched the green-white surface of Rayer rise towards him.

From the ground, Rayer looked less attractive than it had from a hundred miles up. The spaceport was like all spaceports, a bleak grey expanse of concrete with weeds sprouting from the cracks and weathered bits of paper scudding before the wind across its depressing surface. It was drizzling. Quist stood in the air-lock door and looked out at his opal planet. He felt cheated. In the distance he could see a city. It was an industrial complex with a forest of chimneys spouting rank black smoke. The road leading to the city was overgrown, but he could see two cars driving along it towards him. He went inside and waited for them to come. There was nothing to look at around the spaceport, and he needed time to think. He was already forming theories about the situation he would find on Rayer, but it would be a few minutes before any of them would be confirmed.

When he went to the door again, the delegation had already arrived. Five men were marching across the concrete towards him, their clothes plastered to their bodies by the wind and rain. In the background he could see their cars; blunt black vehicles with an unpleasant military look about them. The glass windows were thick; probably armoured. Yes, very unpleasant indeed. He studied the five walking towards him. The one in front was pale and thin. He had a beaky nose and old-fashioned spectacles on the end of it—a bureaucrat, Quist decided. The four others were easier to categorize. All carried guns, all wore metal helmets. Soldiers.

“Don’t come any closer,” Quist said, raising his voice to fight the wind.

The man in front looked up and sniffed, but kept walking. The others followed.

Quist waited until he was nearly to the foot of the ladder, then glanced down at the circle of concrete where the ship’s rockets had seared a smoking circle in the greyness. Small drops of rain landing on it hissed angrily. The bureaucrat was standing squarely on the hot area. Quist sniffed. There was a smell of burning. A second later the man winced, looked quickly down at the concrete and stepped back with alacrity. He left behind two neat footprints that smoked. The soldiers didn’t smile. That was a bad sign. Soldiers who didn’t laugh at the discomfort of a superior were too military for Quist’s liking.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“What are you doing here?” the thin man snapped. “We haven’t had a ship on Rayer for fifty years.”

Quist indicated the emblem of the Library Service on the side of the ship beside the air lock.

“Cultural Ambassador,” he explained. “Quist’s the name— Stephen Quist. We travel around the isolated colonial planets and keep them up to date on what’s going on back home. We distribute educational materials, art and reading matter, packaged libraries and such. It’s been a long time since we were last in this area, so perhaps you haven’t heard of us. It takes a great deal of subjective time to make a circuit.”

He turned his back to the men and put his foot on the top rung of the ladder.

“The idea is to pass on the—”

“If he takes one more step,” the thin man said, “shoot him.”

Quist stopped. Slowly he stepped back onto the air-lock platform and turned around, keeping his hands well away from his body. The four soldiers had their weapons leveled at him.

“Move back,” the thin man said.

Quist stepped into the air lock. He could run back into the ship if he wanted to, or close the air-lock door with one twist of the control on the wall beside him, but he did neither. Instead he stood in the lock and listened to the man’s feet scuffling on the rungs of the ladder. A moment later the thin face came into view and he boosted himself shakily onto the platform. There were more steps on the ladder. Apparently he didn’t trust Quist because soon one of the soldiers had joined him. Together they went into the ship.

The thin man looked around with interest at the cabin and at the books on the wall. The soldier didn’t move, but his eyes travelled restlessly along the ranked spines of Quist’s library. He seemed disturbed, and Quist was beginning to realize why. The thin man went to the shelves and took down a book. He riffled through it once, then stopped at one page and read a few lines. He nodded, and then dropped the book deliberately to the floor. It landed half open, with some of its pages crumpled under the weight of the rest. Quist bent automatically to pick it up, then stopped as the soldier moved his gun.

The man took the next book, riffled through it and dropped it to the floor—and the next—and the next. After the first six he merely glanced at each title, but they all ended up on the floor. At the end of the shelf he looked at the other shelves ranked up to the roof, and at the pile of books on the floor.

“Burn the lot,” he said to the soldier.

Quist smiled.

If the thin man had expected some other reaction, he did not show it. Picking up an armful of books, he walked to the air lock and dropped them out. At the foot of the ladder two soldiers picked up the fallen volumes and carted them almost to the edge of the landing field where they proceeded to build a large bonfire of them.

Quist watched them for a while, admiring the ant-like devotion to duty exhibited by all concerned. It made him feel lazy and rather superfluous to stand on the sidelines, taking no part in the activity. Choosing a moment when the regular procession to and from the shelves was temporarily interrupted, he grabbed an armful for himself, walked to the air lock and dropped the books on top of those already dumped there. One of the soldiers, halfway up the ladder when Quist dumped his load, looked up to curse the clumsy colleague who had nearly dropped Volume 86 of the Encyclopedia Galactica on his head, saw who had thrown it and nearly fell off in surprise. The other soldiers were equally astonished at Quist’s sudden participation in their labour but, glad of the assistance, they said nothing to the thin man.

* * * *

It took them twenty minutes to clear out all the shelves. When they were finished the pile was ten feet high and covered a large area. One of the soldiers lit a match and set it to a page. The flames licked up, but the rain soon quenched them. He lit another, and another. The same thing happened.

Quist wondered if he had ever seen such a sorry lot of book-burners and decided that, even by the dubious standards of that activity, the men of Rayer rated very low indeed. He went back into the ship and drew a quart of rocket fuel from the emergency rocket tank. Carrying it carefully down the ladder —a drop could have burned a hole in his clothes and probably his skin—he took it to the pile and dribbled it liberally over most of the books at ground level.

One of the soldiers nodded gratefully and, standing well back, tossed his match onto the pile. There was a sudden puff of flame and fire began to eat hungrily into the paper and cardboard. Inside three minutes there was nothing left but a pile of ash. The men stood around and looked with satisfaction at the remains.

Quist walked round the pile to where the thin man was surveying the results of his evening’s work. He cleared his throat with what he hoped was a deferential attempt to attract attention.

“Can I have permission to land now?” he asked.

The thin man turned over one last page with his foot and watched the smoldering ash devour it.

“No,” he said shortly. “You will depart at once.”

“That may take some time,” Quist said. “There’s the problem . . .”

“At once,” the man repeated. Motioning for the guards, he walked quickly towards the cars parked on the grassed edge of the field. A moment later they drove off.

Quist stood looking after them for a moment. Then he held out his hands to the ash and, when they were warmed, went back to the ship. It was bare without the books. The shelves looked like rifled graves. Quist rolled down the shutters that kept the books in place during planet fall. He couldn’t stand their accusing look.

“Did you get all that?” he asked.

“Every bit,” the Bookworm said. “Full colour and stereo. It isn’t every day you see a real honest-to-goodness book burning.”

The Bookworm sounded almost happy about what had just happened. Even Quist couldn’t help seeing its humorous side. Odd that some people still thought that when a book was burned the ideas in it were also destroyed.

Rummaging around in one of the lockers, he found a rain cloak and put it around his shoulders. Then he went out into the drizzle. From the air lock it had not looked a very great distance into the city, but once he stood on the concrete landing pad the mileage seemed to stretch alarmingly. He pulled the cloak about him, sealed it down the front and set off doggedly along the rutted dirt road.

* * * *

It was a miserable journey. After two miles the road became quite muddy and irregular. There were signs that big vehicles came by occasionally. From the width of the spiked tread and the way they had torn up the road, Quist guessed they were military vehicles—armored trucks perhaps. He looked around cautiously but there was no sign of anything bigger than a stunted tree. He was glad. The soldiers he had already seen were disconcertingly professional.

Another mile and he struck civilization, of a kind. A cluster of huts stood by the road, windblown and ramshackle. They seemed to have been cobbled together out of any material the owners could find; scraps of metal and wood, old tins, stones and rotting canvas. A child sat in front of one hut. It was the only human being in sight. Quist stopped for a moment, closing his nostrils against the stink of excrement and decay. The child was frail and dirty, its stomach distended from starvation. It looked at Quist incuriously and went back to its game in the mud. The Librarian filed the picture away in his mind and went on towards the city.

Within another mile he was in the suburbs, most of which were just vertical extensions of the huts he had seen earlier. They were the worst sort of slum, haphazard, dirty and grossly overcrowded. Nobody seemed to notice him as he walked steadily through the narrow unpaved streets. Nobody was curious on Rayer, though whether it was through fear or indifference Quist didn’t know. He guessed indifference. All the people he saw seemed to share the same air of acceptance. As he walked down the centre of the street they got out of his way automatically. Even when he accidentally splashed a man with muddy water his automatic apology was ignored. The man he had splashed seemed not even to realize anything had happened. He just didn’t care.

The centre of the city was little better than the outskirts. There was no planning of any kind. Factories with huge brick chimneys were crowded against houses and large public buildings without any regard for order. There were no footpaths. People brawled their way along the streets, fighting for space with noisy road vehicles, horse carts, dogs and children. It was like a mad combination of seventeenth and twentieth century London with the hygiene standards of the fifteenth thrown in. Quist had long since lost his capacity for despair, but twinges of it stirred inside him at the sight of this appalling mess.

To create some sort of order out of it all was a task which he realized was almost beyond him. But he had to start. His pride demanded it. Methodically he considered all the plans suggested by Central for situations of this sort, and equally methodically discarded the lot of them. There was, however, one approach of his own which might have some possibility of success. He looked over the crowd, seeking a suitable subject. He let two well-dressed men go by; there wasn’t anything he could offer the rich. He needed a poor man, but an intelligent one. Unfortunately Rayer seemed well endowed with poverty but poor in intelligence. He had to wait for almost ten minutes before a possible candidate came by.

He was a young man, thin, almost emaciated. His clothes were shabby but neat enough to suggest he had some pride in his appearance. Quist didn’t need to look for inkstains on his fingers to see that he spent a lot of time writing. A young clerk, perhaps, or a student, either one ideal for his purpose. Drawing back into an alley, Quist waited until the young man was within earshot. He plucked at his sleeve.

“Psst!” he said urgently. “Want to buy any filthy pictures?”

The young man froze in mid stride, turned and blinked.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“Filthy pictures,” Quist said. “Do you want to buy any? Smutty books? Pornography?”

The young man was baffled. “I don’t follow you,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”

Quist was beginning to have doubts about his plan and his choice of subject. The boy had looked intelligent enough, yet he was behaving with a denseness the Librarian had never encountered before. He had expected him to be ignorant of calculus, but even an idiot knew something about pornography.

“Filthy pictures,” Quist said again, only slower. “Erotic photographs, salacious literature. You understand?”

“Not really,” the other replied. “Well, I mean, I know what you’re talking about, but why should I want to buy them from you? I can get them in any shop. This sort of thing, you mean?”

He groped in his jacket and pulled out a wad of cards, handing them to Quist. He looked at the top one, then at the second, going on with rising interest to the last. Even Earth’s sophistication had produced nothing as bizarre as these. He looked at the back of one card. There was a printed legend on it. “Department of Information,” it said. “Education Division. Set 114.”

Quist handed them back, his mind working at top speed. Now that he thought about it, the idea of a government-published pornography was not surprising. Most totalitarian governments had used it at one time or another, usually to reinforce a particular drive against a specific enemy. The government of Rayer had merely carried it to its logical conclusion.

Then he had an idea.

“What about books?” he asked.

The young man’s reaction was the copybook one. He blushed, looked furtive and shuffled his feet.

“Have you got books?” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. “Where did you get them?”

Glancing keenly at Quist, he noticed for the first time the clothing under his cloak. His manner became more furtive still.

“You’re the Earthman!” he said. “I thought they ordered you off.”

“They did. After they burned all my books.”

The young man looked depressed. “I thought it was too good to be true,” he said. “They wouldn’t let books onto this planet.”

“How did you know about me?” Quist asked.

“The radio. It was announced that you had landed and been refused permission to stay. It’s government policy to have no contact at all with outside systems, and especially Earth.”

“I guess they wanted to drive their point home,” Quist said. “Don’t worry about it. I have a few more books up my sleeve. Are you really interested in getting hold of them?”

“Yes! I’ll do anything! There are a few books in circulation with the underground, but only a few. How many do you have?”

The underground. That sounded promising. Quist decided to explore further—if the boy was still around, of course. He was so excited that his eyes kept shifting in their sockets as if he were expecting a truck to come bearing down on him at any moment.

“About this underground,” Quist whispered. “Perhaps you could introduce me to your leader?”

The youth looked at him nervously.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s very dangerous. We’re not supposed ...”

“Books!” Quist said quietly. ‘You said you’d do anything.”

In the boy’s eyes duty fought a losing battle against greed.

“All right,” he said. “Meet me in the Alley of Kings in two hours.”

Quist watched him move off through the crowd. He was still not sure exactly what he had commited himself to, but the events of the last few minutes had borne out his theory about people. The forbidden was always attractive. Told not to do something, most people immediately went out of their way to disobey orders. He had been wrong about the sort of thing that was forbidden on Rayer, but not about the universal intransigence of the human race. He caught two people looking at him and checked his smile quickly. His expression assumed the disinterested and gloomy characteristics of the others in the crowd and he moved off quickly into the nearest side street.

* * * *

The Alley of Kings lived up to the combination of seediness and tattered grandeur that its name suggested. Once, the buildings had been luxurious, but now the street was dirty, crumbling and crooked. As he squeezed around a congested corner, Quist wondered what sort of maniac could have built a street so careless of the rules of town planning. It looked as if the plan had been drawn freehand and somebody had jiggled the artist’s elbow. Shouldering his way through the almost impenetrable crowds, the Earthman looked up with unease at the decaying buildings above him, each one apparently held up by its neighbours. Which one of these held the headquarters of the underground? It came to him, belatedly, that the boy had not told him where in the Alley of Kings to wait. Resigning himself to more discomfort, he pushed on, jostled by the crowds but, as he had come to expect by now, unnoticed.

It was ten minutes before the underground made itself known to him. As he passed a narrow passageway a whisper penetrated the mutter and shuffle of feet. He turned quickly and slipped into the dark alley. The passage was really a crack between two buildings where the walls had sagged apart with weariness. On one side there was some kind of warehouse, while the other held a dark and smoke-filled place that Quist, sorting about in his knowledge of ancient Earth customs, was able to identify tentatively and with distaste as a fish shop. Turning away from the smell of fat and old fish he quickly followed the dark shape in front of him down the passage, not without a twinge of unease. Still, the dealer in banned books must expect to indulge in activities of this sort.

At the end of the passage a flight of rickety wooden stairs led up to a door in the rear of the warehouse. The two men clattered up the steps and Quist’s guide pulled the door open. They slipped inside. The room was dimly lit. Behind a square burlap-covered table that might have been an overturned packing case sat a grim-faced man with black hair and an air of businesslike efficiency about him. The guide pushed back his hood, revealing the face of the young man he had met on the street. Quist smiled encouragingly, but the boy glanced nervously at the man at the table before essaying a wan grin.

There was no smile from the other man.

“You have books?” he said shortly.

Quist looked him over. About thirty years old, he guessed, and very thin. His face was narrow, seeming to come to a point at his large nose. He looked intelligent behind his scowl. He was probably nervous, Quist decided.

“Who are you?” Quist asked.

“We don’t give names here.”

“My name’s Quist. I’m a Librarian—Cultural Ambassador, really. Our young friend here suggested you might like to have some books and I’m in a position to supply them.”

“You’re from Earth,” the man broke in. “Why should you want to give us books?”

“It’s my job. I told you. I’m .. .”

“How much do you want for them?”

“Nothing. It’s a free service. If you just let me explain . . .”

“How do I know I can trust you?”

Quist leaned wearily against the edge of the table and discovered that it was a packing case. The setting was perfect. They were revolutionaries, true enough. He wondered if they made bombs in the back room. Though judging by their feeble tries at intrigue he wondered if they knew much about even so basic a rebel activity. Well, he could teach them that easily enough. He thumbed through the catalogue in his mind. Yes, Bell’s On Explosives would probably be the basic text. He made a note to look it up when he got back to the ship. But first, he had to establish just how far they would go, what sort of following they had, and how far they had gone already.

“Can we establish a few things first? For instance, you are plotting against the government, aren’t you?”

The dark man looked across at the youth standing by the door. They exchanged a glance that seemed to Quist to be rather odd.

“We’re interested in your books,” the man said. “We don’t have to discuss anything else.”

“You do if you want the books,” Quist said shortly. “Tell me why you’re against the government. What will you do if you get into power?”

The man rubbed his chin.

“Everyone is against the government,” he said cautiously. Or was it caution?

“Yes, but why?” Quist pressed.

“Because of Rogo.”

“Rogo?”

“The leader.”

“I see. And he’s a bad man?” Quist tried to keep his voice neutral, avoiding any hint of sarcasm.

“He’s a monster!” the man cried. His fist banged on the table and the youth stood straighter and scowled. “Everyone is poor because of him. Taxes are ruinous. We live like animals; no. Worse than animals, because our books are confiscated and burned, our movements watched all the time. We are slaves to Rogo.”

Quist nodded. “I see,” he said. “And what will you do when you succeed in overthrowing him?”

The man looked puzzled. “You mean—when he dies?”

“Well, yes. When you kill him, I mean.”

The thin man blinked as if he had been hit hard between the eyes.

“When we kill Rogo!” he said.

Quist looked carefully at him. He seemed intelligent enough. But if his reaction was not stupidity, then what was it? A suspicion began to form in his mind.

“What exactly does this underground movement of yours plan to do? What are your aims?”

“We circulate books. Didn’t Jonrad . . .” the name slipped out, “... uh, didn’t my friend explain the nature of our organization to you?”

Quist stared at him with what he hoped was not an insulting degree of disbelief. “You mean your underground is a circulating library?”

“Of course.” The man spread his hands and leaned back in his chair. Quist saw for the first time that it, too, was made from a small wooden crate. “That’s why we want those books you mentioned. It’s our duty to keep alive the individuality of the people of Rayer. Of course, we’re only a small group but there are members in many countries. Why, only last week .. .”

“But surely you have some political aims,” Quist said desperately. “Wouldn’t you like to overthrow the government, set up your own administration?”

“Certainly,” the man said, leaning forward. “But listen . . . about these books, can we really have them?”

Quist looked at the youth staring eagerly at him from across the room, then back to the expression on the face of the dark man.

“Yes,” he said. “You can have them.”

“Good,” the man said, unable to repress a smile. “Good.”

“There’s only one condition I’ll insist on,” Quist said.

“What’s that?”

Quist smiled grimly. “The selection,” he said, “will be mine.”

* * * *

It was cold crouching in the bushes at the edge of the spaceport. An icy wind flowed over the little group, flapping their cloaks against their chilled limbs. Quist eased his weight from one leg to the other and winced at the pain of his cramped knee.

“Don’t you think you’re being a little overcautious?” he whispered to Jonrad.

“Cassill thinks it best.”

“The place was empty when I left. And nobody could have got into the ship. They probably still think I’m inside.”

“It doesn’t do to take risks,” Jonrad said. “Cassill says . . .”

Quist reflected on what a sad lot of potential revolutionaries they were and settled down to wait.

Five minutes later Cassill, the dark man, wriggled back through the grove to their side.

“It’s lucky we checked,” he whispered. “There’s a whole platoon of guards on the ship.”

Quist started up, then sat back again.

“I told you something like this would happen,” Cassill said. “If Rogo ordered you off the planet, he expected you to go, and quickly.”

“Well, what now?” Jonrad asked.

“I don’t know,” Cassill replied. “It’s his ship.”

He turned to Quist.

“I don’t see how you can possibly expect to get past so many guards.”

The comment stung Quist. He had so far been more than smart enough to beat Rogo’s men. He would continue to be so, somehow.

“How many men are there?” he asked.

“Twenty, maybe twenty-five.”

“Officers with them?”

“A lieutenant, a couple of sergeants too.”

A lieutenant. That was a stroke of luck. Quist saw a plan forming already.

“How far to the edge of the landing ground?”

“Fifteen yards perhaps.”

“Right. Now I want you to wriggle as close as you can to the edge and stay there. Is there cover?

“If we stay well down,” Cassill said. “But why get closer?”

“Trust me,” Quist said, “and do exactly what I tell you.”

Two minutes later, the guards on the ship were surprised to see a figure emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field and walk briskly towards them. A light speared out towards the newcomer and blazed on his face.

“It’s the Earthman,” somebody said. “He’s not in the ship.”

The lieutenant ceased his tattoo on the wall of the ship and scrambled down the ladder as quickly as he could manage without losing his dignity. This necessitated a slow descent so that Quist had to wait a full ten seconds at the base of the ladder before confronting the superior officer. He used the time well, looking over the group of soldiers like a general inspecting a shabby contingent of civilian militia at a country outpost. He tried to make the inspection as cool as possible on the theory that gall succeeded where brains failed. With the soldiers, it worked. They straightened up visibly under his gaze.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked, superfluously, in view of the lieutenant now on the last few rungs of the ladder.

“I am,” the officer shouted, almost falling in his haste to take control once again of his troops. He was a young man, cast very much in the military mould with a stocky body and round hairless head. Quist knew immediately that here was an adversary hardly worth the trouble of deflating. The knowledge gave him confidence.

“Why are there armed guards on my ship?” he demanded. “I am an accredited representative of the Earth government and as such entitled to full diplomatic immunity. That also applies to my ship. Remove your men at once.”

Taken aback by this frontal attack, the lieutenant was at a disadvantage from the start.

“You were directed to be off this planet immediately,” he said. “Why are you still here?”

“That is entirely my business,” Quist said loftily. “But surely it must be evident even to you that there is a great deal involved in spacing-out a ship. Due to an unwarranted and illegal confiscation and destruction of certain goods from my ship this morning, it will be necessary for the entire balance of the ship to be altered. Cargo must be restacked, the engines re-set. As soon as this is done, it will be possible to leave.”

Faced with a choice between seeing Rogo’s orders obeyed and losing face before his men, the lieutenant made a decision, the speed of which was a tribute to the fear the dictator inspired in his minions.

“What must be done?” he asked.

“Well, if I remove some of the cargo and restore the balance…”

“Get on with it then,” the lieutenant ordered, stepping back and gesturing up the ladder. Quist went up as quickly as possible, hoping the officer would not change his mind. The plan, as he had expected, was working well.

The main lock had not been disturbed. He keyed it with his thumb-print, slipped inside and relaxed for the first time that day. Even the guard panting up the ladder behind him was only a slight dampener on his spirits. The ship was Quist’s home ground. Nobody could beat him here, and especially not a dumb dogface with a rifle.

He turned on the lights in the main cabin, checked the Bookworm’s console and threw the full emergency switch. Bookworm went into top efficiency, every memory bank quivering in anticipation of sophisticated and complex problems. But there was still the soldier to deal with. Quist opened the locker where he kept his food supplies and indicated the boxes of concentrate piled there.

“You,” he said, imitating as accurately as he could the lieutenant’s unpleasant tone. “Move these over to the edge of the landing field. I want them far away from the ship.”

The soldier, supremely weary, put down his rifle, picked up a box and exited. Quist almost ran to the Bookworm.

“Run me a full biblio on type 5 revolutionary procedures plus supplementary reading. Quick.”

Bookworm, for the first time Quist could remember, did not comment on the order. Circuits began closing with dizzying speed and a stream of tiny microbook templates poured into the receiving box. He left the machine bubbling to itself and hurried to the locker next to that where the food was stored. He had perhaps another thirty seconds before the lieutenant realized that his prisoner had been left unguarded and came to see what was happening. The estimate was a little off. It took him fifteen seconds to take out one of the portable kits from the stock of fifty that all Librarians carried, another twenty seconds to go to the Bookworm, take out the package of templates and put them into the kit, lock it and put it with the other loose equipment. When the lieutenant arrived, Quist was prepared. He picked up the kit, handed it to the officer, hefted a box of concentrates onto his own shoulder and walked past the lieutenant to the top of the ladder.

“Just follow me,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll show you where to put it. I must say I appreciate your co-operative attitude, old man.”

At the bottom of the ladder Quist passed the box to a soldier and pointed to the perimeter of the field.

“Over there somewhere, please,” he said.

Just then the lieutenant reached the ground, still holding the grey metal kit case. He did not quite seem to know what he was doing with it, but he was carrying the thing and that was all Quist wanted to see.

“Just put it with the others,” he said lightly as he passed the bemused man and went back up to the air lock.

At the top he drew back into the shadows and watched the officer walk to the edge of the field. He put the case down beside the box of concentrate already placed there and walked back towards the ship. As Quist watched, a long pale arm reached silently out, grabbed the case and dragged it into the bushes. There was no sound and no other movement.

Quist went back into the cabin and programmed the Bookworm for space-out.

“Scare those goons off,” he ordered.

A hooter roared, scattering the soldiers like frightened sheep. Relays clicked, bulkheads were sealed as the ship made ready to take off. Quist belted himself into his seat, hit the firing button and, as a last touch, pressed another smaller switch. Just before the ship rose slowly on its jets, a panel opened up near the nose and hundreds of sheets of paper were scattered by a small explosive charge over the crowd of terrified soldiers now distributed around the edge of the field.

The leaflets were a little touch of Quist’s which had proved very effective in other similar cases. As he went up through the atmosphere more of them would be thrown out until a large proportion of Rayer’s population would have a copy.

As the papers fluttered down around the troops, one soldier reached out and grabbed one. His lips moved painfully as he groped his way through the few printed words. It was a standard text.

“Hail... the ...” He turned to the lieutenant. “Excuse me, sir, but what’s a . . .” He consulted the paper again, “... a rev-o-lution?”

* * * *

It promised to be a good revolution. Possibly a bit amateurish, Quist conceded, but out of the best possible motives at least. Freedom, economic equality, political representation—the list was endless, the rhetoric universal. Undoubtedly it would succeed. Not immediately, of course, but that didn’t matter. The seeds had been sown, and Rayer would never be quite the same again.

Quist sat at the computer transcribing his written report. The computer would digest it and whirl it away to the section in its memory banks where all such things were kept, to be regurgitated later at the end of the circuit when the Board would examine the reports and call him in for commendation or, as was usual in Quist’s case, a stormy accounting. He gave all the details of his initial reception; his contact with the “underground”, and the final plot to smuggle the portable press and microbooks to Jonrad and his men. Although it was not strictly necessary, he included a list of the books with his report; a pointed reminder to the Board members that he had supplied them with only the standard texts on political and economic theory, revolutionary tactics and so on, together with the vital percentage of works on literature, religion and language. He said that he had not, as on one disastrous occasion a few years ago, smuggled in a quantity of westerns, ghost stories and mild erotica. They would be pleased to see that he had adhered to the approved line.

Fired with a kind of masochistic glee, he added the sort of terminal paragraph that Controllers dream about.

“In view of the facts listed heretofore, it is my conclusion that I have successfully implanted the seeds of creative thought and knowledge once more on this planet with the result that the creative dynamics of social change should now once more be allowed to function in what had become a stagnant society wasteful of human resources. This, after all, is the essential purpose of the Library Service.”

He laid the microphone down.

“They’ll love that, Bookworm,” he said.

“Yes, Quist,” the machine said. “I think you loved it a little yourself.”

Quist looked at the ceiling. There was always this moment at the end of a job, the turnaround when nostalgia met expectation in a misty limbo where everything was neat and clean, and the life of a Librarian seemed almost a desirable one.

“Bookworm, do we still have the old indoctrination tape? The ‘Ideas Are Dangerous’ thing?”

“I’ve got everything they ever put into me,” the machine said. “I’m the original junk yard.”

“Give me that first part again.”

In the machine, a relay closed and the tired old voice of the past trickled out into the ship.

“Remember that as Librarians you carry with you a sacred trust, the future of the human mind. It does not matter if the race lives forever if its ideals do not live with it. Those ideals will only live on if they are called continually into question, exercised, disputed, fought over and died for. Stasis is death. Never forget that.

“And never forget this: Ideas are dangerous. When you go out to the lost worlds, you are carrying with you a weapon more terrible than a plague bacillus, or a neutron bomb. The censors who try to suppress thought are perfectly right to do so. An idea can destroy a civilization as surely as any war. Remember all that separates you from the people who would enslave men’s minds is your conscience—and devotion to the ideals and ethics of the Library Service. Whether a race moves forwards or backwards, to glory or to the grave, is a decision that rests with you alone.”

Quist felt the familiar shiver along his spine. Then, abruptly, he jerked himself back to reality.

“O.K., Bookworm,” he said briskly. “File the report and…”

“I expect you to keep these precepts always in mind, gentlemen,” the old voice went on. “But, on a mundane level, I must also ask you to remember certain other matters, equally important. There has been an increasing tendency among young Librarians to ignore certain rules, such as those pertaining to switching off the gravity shields during flight, smoking on board ship, fraternizing with the inhabitants of certain worlds and other items. For your information I am now going to read you the relevant passages of the official regulations . . .”

“No, Bookworm!” Quist shouted. “Not the whole speech!”

“. . . pertaining to these matters, and I must ask you . . .”

Hurriedly, Quist reached for his tool kit. There were two whole hours of the speech. Two hours! This time he had to get those memory banks put right.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

The Weather in the Underworld

COLIN FREE

This is a slick, disturbing fantasy, very much in the American tradition, and had the distinction of being included in the collection, World’s Best SF for 1966. The approach is nihilistic, the setting and plot macabre, though Free never lets the grisliness take over. His picture of a doomed future earth where human feelings have decayed to unrecognizability is, in fact, one of the most effective of its kind ever published.

Colin Free is well known to Australian audiences as a writer for television and radio, as well as a playwright and author of short stories. His science fiction stories have been few, but all show an instinctive understanding of the genre and a genius for atmosphere.

Source: Squire, June 1965.

* * * *

The clock-voice chanted 37.05, 37.05. Humidity faded to a crisp 53 and the temperature steadied off at 68. It was night time.

“What shall I wear?” she said. “Tetraline or nothing?”

“Nothing,” he said. He was in the cradling arms of the cuddle chair and its soft caressing sensuality was easing him away from the pressures of the hour. He notched the controls into Maximum and the spines undulated all along his body. He sighed; kept sighing.

Then Ilda stabbed her hand through the contact beam and the chair stuttered and went dead.

He jerked his head around. “What did you do that for?”

“I said what shall I wear? You didn’t answer. You never do.”

“I did.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did. I did.” He heaved himself out of the chair and the old tensions throbbed again. “I said nothing, wear nothing. What more do you want?”

Ilda strode into the bedroom.

He walked across to the window and the cells of the U-Vu leaped alive with its impeccable panorama of sand, sea, cliffs and sky. Wind teased the pines and birds flew up. In a moment, a vintage rocket would crackle across the blue silence. In a moment, it did.

He shouted at the bedroom, “You haven’t changed the window.”

“You haven’t told me what you wanted, yet.”

It was true. She was right, always right. The U-Vu catalogue was still in the rack. He tried to control the tension that hammered behind his eyes and clamped his damp fingers across his face, but it was like wings within trying to break free. From habit he walked to the wall console which murmured its consideration, measured his discomfort and slammed out a wafer stimulant. He rejected it. Undaunted, the console offered him a sleep capsule, but he walked away.

It is New Year Seven, he recited, and the best place on earth is UnderEarth. But he could not feel the truth of it or give it the conviction that was presupposed.

The time-tube said 41.03, 41.03.

He swigged down a quick tranquilla and the tension took on a kind of palpitation, a dying fall, he thought.

“How much longer?” he said at the bedroom door.

“Plenty of time.”

“It’s nearly 45.”

“We’ll get there.”

He went in. The dressing closet was stencilling her body with long, sinuous diamonds so that her appearance, he thought, was unpleasantly reptilian.

“But it’s nearly 45,” he repeated.

She snapped on her waist belt and helmet, tossed the silver box into his unready hands. “Here. Plug in and shut up.”

He nursed its warm metal silkiness. “Let’s wait till we get to the Circuit-Way.”

“No. Plug in now.” She sat down, leaned forward, and the closet obediently teased and set her hair, dusting it with gentle phosphorescence. “Sometimes I think you need a visit to the mentalizer,” she said. “Do you?”

He knew but could not tell her. The disintegration of his memory pattern was incomplete; his therapy had failed and he was afraid. At sleep time, rejecting the prescribed capsule, thoughts came back: the familiar annihilation nightmare fuming up into his consciousness, then the moan and mutter of the earth as they burrowed down and down, and finally the long descent into the lull and comfort of the warming air. Or else his unbidden memory provided him with the sounds of air locks sucked vacuum-tight, and he heard again the howling of those outside, until the long cries were clipped short by the suction locks—and he wept again for those who could not come, the exiles, abandoned on the blue and bitter ice.

Yet here in the womb of UnderEarth, he too, was exiled if only by the clamouring chatter of those whose memories began at New Year One.

The tumblers fell and the thin voice rasped 45.00, 45.00.

He looked at Ilda’s bleached and stencilled body and was aggrieved in an ancient way, that he felt nothing. It had been assigned to him, or he to it, and there was no significance. It was merely an implicit fecundity motivated and geared by the mentalariums and change stations of the UnderWorld—but it was a mechanism without purpose, a body-machine of impotent perfection. He did not love her. He was not supposed to.

“You’re thinking,” she said.

“I’m not. What is there to think about?”

She put her hand on him, looked at him bleakly. “There’s something wrong with you. What is it?”

“I’m tired, that’s all.”

Softly she said, “What do you actually think about?”

“Nothing. I told you—nothing.”

He clipped the silver box at the base of his throat and the antennae activated immediately and pierced him through the implanted nodes and made prefrontal contact. For a moment there was a great throbbing zero, the profound nothing until his brain responded and he began to think the way a man ought to think.

The box throbbed warm against his skin, bleating out its approval and the knowledge that a night out with one’s woman was the best thing, the finest thing a man could hope for. He tingled with happiness. He laughed.

“Come on,” he said. “Come on, we’ll miss the CircuitWay.”

As the civic clocks piped 53, there were 12 points of prearranged golden rain which fell in lazy drifts across the crowded forum. It was enjoyed by all.

Ilda sat close to him on the chair float and they caressed each other. The whole audience was effervescent, simmering with lightly suppressed laughter for they were geared to Unit 5. Each box pulsed with irresistible titillations. The best place on earth was UnderEarth. It was good to be alive.

“Great to be alive!” she said.

His silver box bleated its response. “Absolutely!” he said.

She laughed hysterically, groping for her controls. It was the funniest thing she had ever heard.

His box dredged up the notion: why don’t you do this more often?

“We should do this more often,” he said.

She shrieked with laughter.

His box piped: as often as possible.

“We should do it all the time,” he said.

She flung her arms around him.

His box triggered off the prime edict and he began immediately, “The best place on earth . . .”

“Don’t. Don’t,” she gasped. “It hurts when I laugh all the…”

“... is the UnderEarth!” He finished on a chuckling exclamation. But even as his mood expanded and blossomed, the time-play began and he was caught midway in his reactions, seeing himself suddenly naked in his exile, imprisoned less by stone than by his own submission.

All at once, traumatically, he wrenched the antennae out of his head. Sweat glistened on him; fear dragged his eyes to the silver box which he clawed from his throat. He thought: my brain’s in there! it’s a murder box—and he recognized his own irrationality and rejoiced in it.

The box had a hot dampness in his hand; the metal was obscenely alive. It shuddered but he couldn’t let it go.

Ilda cried out between laughter, “Where . . . where are you going?”

He dropped down from the chair and stumbled back to the conditioning room, fell on to the suspension couch, fingers plucking at the studs, grinding his head into yielding foam. The box lay on the floor confused, unused to paradox.

He closed his eyes and sighed himself steadily towards the edge of sleep.

Then someone’s cool hand touched his shoulder and he looked up.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “No.”

“You look ill.”

He ignored the remark. “I came back for conditioning,” he said.

“So did I,” she said.

He sat up to study her, for there was an unfamiliar fire in her voice. She was some years younger than Ilda; her hair was not yet synthetic and she still affected briefs.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Vena.”

“Married?”

“Assigned. I have three circuits to wait.”

“I see.” He stood up and reached out and touched her, touched her arm and the cold dome of her shoulder, and her hair and her lips he touched them, as though from a hunger of blindness. His hand fell and the box at his feet rolled away, afraid.

She was gazing at him now, as though in recognition. “It would be safer to accept conditioning,” she said, “for both of us.”

He noted now that her own box was disconnected. “Come with me,” he said.

“No.”

“Come with me.”

“I don’t know, without the box, without ...”

He leaned down and picked up the silver-cased brain at his feet. For a moment it resisted in his hand, then died. He looked at Vena and she followed him out of the forum into the main-way and the autodoor said, “Thank you, call again.”

The civic clocks said 58.12, 58.12 and some silver rain fell at the appointed time.

They sat on the rim of the canal on the nightside of the UnderWorld. He took her hand, but did not speak.

The vertical leaves of the metalwork trees scissored above their heads, and the long blades of artificial grass made a sound in the false wind like fracturing glass.

“No one has ever held my hand before,” she said.

“Do you mind?”

“It seems pointless.”

He laid her hand gently and sadly to one side as though it were expiring, then threw himself backwards into the grass which shattered beneath him.

“What shall we do now?” she said.

“Nothing, I suppose.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure you don’t need a mentalizer?”

There was silence. He could feel the grass renewing itself under his body.

“I know,” she said, “let’s put our boxes on again.”

“I only use mine at public functions.”

“They’d like you to use them all the time.”

“Who’s ‘they’? Have you ever seen them?”

The question was unfair, for he knew that the omnipotent Controllers had been erased from her memory. But he knew that the idea was disconcerting.

“Let’s put our boxes on.”

He laughed. It was as humourless a sound as the scissoring leaves.

“I should get back to the forum,” she said.

“Why?”

“Let me go,” she said. But he was not holding her. “I’m...” she searched for the word that was almost beyond memory —”. . . frightened.”

“Of what?”

“Everything.”

He kissed her and she writhed under him and the grass broke with a wild chattering. She broke away.

“Why did you do that?” she said.

“It was just something I remembered.”

“It’s nothing I remember.”

“From another time,” he explained.

“When? When? Who are you?”

A sea breeze blew across them at the scheduled time, but there was no sea.

“I’m going to put my box on,” she said, “and find out what I really think of you.”

He had no argument with her, only the box. He grabbed an antenna at the point of insertion.

“You’re hurting her,” she pleaded. The box began to sing with a high thin note of alarm. She took it off.

He dropped his head and gazed into the mercury stillness of the canal. “I thought you might have understood,” he said. “I made a mistake.”

“Understood what?”

His fingers splintered the grass. “You don’t recall New Year One?”

“The beginning of the world?”

“The end of the world.”

“But in the first year...”

“The long shuffle and murmur of the queues at the selection depot, their anguished eyes, their hidden faces, and all the sobbing farewells that echoed across the ice. In the north, remember? the last rocket burned out and smeared the endless night ...”

“I don’t know.” She was shivering.

But he thought that she did know.

“Right through it all the moan of the people and the whine of the wind. Their eyes like chips of dead ice.” He held her fiercely now. “Why did we have to leave them behind?” He shook her. “What right did we have to leave them? All the aged, the lame and the blind. And the stunted children standing stiff with death on the ice?”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Did you hear them at the air locks? They pulped their hands trying to beat their way in. Remember? While we—yes!— huddled mother-tight in the dark of earth’s insides. And submitted ourselves to them. Remember?”

“What’s remember?” she asked.

“How could you forget?”

She tried to get up but he held her, and suddenly she rocked in his arms, but whether from despair or defeat he could not tell. Then suddenly he knew he wanted to fall in love, he knew at once what love was, the simplicity and the therapy of it, and the word itself floated into his mind like a crystal, he thought, like a heartbeat. Love. He said it to her: “Love.”

“What?” she said.

But his tongue could not yield the phrasing that he sought, the delicacies and seductions of another time, another age. “Love.” He uttered the sound of the word again as though it might generate some magic of its own, but all it did was bring a sting of tears to his eyes. He remembered love, its sensations and exhilarations, remembered that one might live, breathe, regenerate—but there was no one to show him the way. All that was left was the dull metal of a badly minted word, like lead on his tongue, impure and unliving.

She struggled and stood, adjusting the box. The antennae homed, quivering. Suddenly, she was one of them again. “You ought to be neutralized,” she said.

His hand grabbed her ankle with crippling force and she fell and the grass powdered. He grabbed the box at her throat and tightened his grip until the circuits shrieked. The sweating metal writhed in his hand and issued a dying discharge that jolted the length of his arm until he fell to his knees. He gave a sudden whimper. The wind stopped. The girl was dead.

The box sobbed and withdrew its antennae that glinted blood-wet in the light of the musk-coloured moon.

They applied the usual mentalizers, conditioners and even attempted total circuiting, but he was beyond repair. So, during sleep-time, they took him quietly to the air shaft, put him in a pellet and let him drift up to the world above. The air lock received him, passed him into the discharge chamber, and expelled him.

For a moment he thought the atmosphere had altered, for it was painful to breathe, but he soon adjusted and forced himself to walk. It was as dark as he remembered it, but the long-bedded ice glowed chill white, enough for him to see the pallor of his freezing hands.

The wind lamented the wasteland. Ice screeched with an endless shifting.

He fell down.

A drift of snow washed over him and burned his eyes. He knew without doubt that he was going to die. He got up and walked again. He fell again. He crawled for a few yards and then he could no longer feel his legs. He was without thought.

Then suddenly he looked up and saw them coming; he saw the three of them coming towards him.

He got up and tried to run. Seeing them pause, he waved again; he croaked out a cry to the three old men, the exiled men, bearded white and robed in the skin of animals. He shouted to them and they looked in his direction, shading their eyes against starlight. He tottered towards them, feet dancing on the crackling ground.

“Brother!” he shouted. “Brother!”

He fell at their feet and they took out short clubs and bludgeoned him to death.

They were so famished that they could not wait and the feasting began without further delay.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

All My Yesterdays

DAMIEN BRODERICK

Author Broderick’s early training in divinity shows itself in this irreverent, witty satire on about four themes, including immortality, religion and psychiatry. Like all his work, it is undisciplined, eccentric, gloriously individual, proving that if he had more patience with the medium Broderick would be one of Australia’s greatest writers of science fiction and fantasy.

Damien Broderick has a wide educational background, including a degree from Monash University. His writing activities have included many items for student newspapers, one of which he edited at university, a collection of sf stories and one excellent novelette, as well as free-lance fiction and articles for most Australian magazines.

Source: A Man Returned (Horwitz, 1965).

* * * *

“My advice to you,” said the psychiatrist, tapping his fingers on the polished top of his desk while he stared at the voluptuous Tiepolo on the far wall, “is a stiff dose of fornication.”

The small man shook his head.

“I’m sorry, but I believe in God.”

The psychiatrist injected a healthy trace of scepticism and a touch of contempt into his benign smile. He was a florid man with painted toes and he smoked a hashish stick in a manner at once debonair and disarming.

“Are you sure you believe in God?”

“Quite sure.” The little man was respectfully firm.

Behind his desk, in his huge wicker chair, the psychiatrist seemed lost in thought. He gently stroked a large phallic symbol with his thumb.

“Why are you sure?” he asked at last. “How do you know that your belief in God is not the result of childhood indoctrination, or perhaps a masochistic frustration symbol, or even an expression of every man’s hopeless yearning for happiness?” He was confident, brimming over with bonhomie, and the hook was twice as alluring in its naked openness. The little man was not deceived.

“I have lived long enough to know there is a God. He stops me from doing things I want to do. He lets me do things I don’t want to do—His permission amounts to an order. Oh, I know He’s there all right and He has forbidden fornication.”

The florid man had seized the cogent point, and clung to it.

“Then you still insist that you are thousands of years old. Surely this seems odd to you. Other people live and die, and they never live much beyond a hundred. How many thousand years did you say you’ve been alive?”

Agony marred the little man’s fine features and his composure swirled out of existence for an instant. He was a neat little man, and he did not look to be thousands of years old.

“This is the problem, of course. I can’t remember. I can only recall flashes, not only déjà vu but genuine memories of times gone by. When I check my memories later against old records, I invariably prove correct. Sometimes more correct than the history books, as investigation has shown in a couple of cases. But I keep forgetting things. In a fortnight’s time I probably won’t remember coming to you but if I see another psychiatrist then I’ll have an uneasy feeling that I’ve done it before. To tell the truth, I have that uneasy feeling now.”

He shifted more comfortably into the air cushions of the couch, and snapped his mouth shut. It was the florid man’s turn.

The florid man’s turn was in the pregnant stage and it took several minutes to hatch. He did not waste the time. He sucked smoke out of the stick, dribbled it into the air, and ogled the Rabelaisian painting on the far wall.

“Your problem,” he said, quietly, sanely, the wild good humour of a perfectly balanced individual skimming just beneath the surface of his words, “is sexual. Which is why I suggested a sexual remedy. You quite obviously hated your parents. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s part of the evolutionary progress. Indeed I believe your Saint Paul advises quite strongly to cast off the old man. In your case you have taken a path of least resistance and forgotten your parents, at the same time placing yourself in loco parentis by devising snatches of imaginary memories which would make you older than your parents.”

A lesser man would have sat back with a beam of self-congratulation, but the psychiatrist merely shifted his gaze to a voluptuously painted breast and chewed on his hashish stick.

The little man sighed sadly, and strangely enough the sigh did sound like a whistle of an ancient wind, dry and stale and sad across a couple of thousand years. He pulled himself to a sitting position, and was considerably buffeted in the process by the pneumatic couch whose internal stresses rippled the couch in an exhibition of dynamic forces. Heavier men had been ruffled in the past by the behaviour of the couch, and the little man was no exception. Flustered, he jumped on to the thick curdled-green pile of the carpet and waved his cheque book helplessly with one hand. The psychiatrist’s look was calculating, and a trifle tired, and he made no attempt to take advantage of the little man’s embarrassment.

“All right, then, you’re the paying customer.” The hashish stick had vanished, and the florid man peered over plump joined fingers. “If you don’t agree with my diagnosis, that’s your privilege—and your loss. The only thing I can suggest if you really are set against fornication is a spot of fishing. It’s the second-best thing for washing away those nasty pent-up pre-natal emotions. The receptionist will take the cheque. Good - afternoon - and - a - cheery - fixation.”

The polished maple door was open, the psychiatrist was standing beside it, teeth bared and hand extended, and in a scuttling moment the little man was borne into the receptionist’s office. Behind her desk she was wide and white-clad and motherly, and the little man almost waited to be picked up by the hind legs, smacked and deumbilicaled. His eyes closed, his throat moved convulsively, his signature formed on the blank cheque, and he fled.

Outside in the street the bright sunlight baffled his eyes. Snatches of incredible memories jumped in his mind, shouting a loud negative to the psychiatrist’s forceful facile answers. The little man was tossed and pushed by the eddying currents of humanity about him, but he was oblivious to the smart people and their towering skyscrapers and their ephemeral worries. Pictures, visions, sounds and smells swirled in his mind as the crowd carried him to the subway. Automatically he dropped his coin into a dispenser, took the token it ejected, and passed through a turnstile. His feet took him to the 50-mile-per-hour strip and he stood submerged in the mass of people about him.

But he was not longer in the bustle of the twentieth century. The myriad worlds of memory stood at his feet, and he trod them like a weary disillusioned god. Again, he walked along the great stone quays of Byblos, smelled the exotic smells of spices as heavy-limbed slaves unloaded them, caught his foot on a huge roughly hewn plank of cedar from Lebanon, cursed as a sweating soldier butted him with the haft of a short spear.

He gazed across the swelling storm waters of an unpredictable Mediterranean, sweltered in the flapping shade of a great white mainmast, fearful of the straining and grinding of the yard high above him.

He sat at the crude table of a monastery refectory, daintily picking at his food while the vulgar oafs around him wolfed down their meat with their hands and belched after their swill of wine.

He stood in one corner of a vast, elegant, over-decorated Victorian drawing-room, listening to a dandy sweep delicate white hands over ivory keys in a startlingly poignant evocation of Chopin’s Etudes.

The memories brought little satisfaction. In the blurred world of frustration and anguish about him on the speeding, creaking slideway, the little man gazed in unseeing misery. Ennui is a terrible disease, and the little man had been incubating it for several thousand years.

A large element of the little man’s misery was his feeling of being lost at sea. All around him the short-lived scurrying humans dashed in their search for material comfort, clogging their minds and pores with activity in the endless race to submerge their souls. They knew whence they came; they knew that the dust of the earth would take back their bodies in less than a century. Their lives were neatly packeted, their three score and ten deftly notched with a programme of sublimation which would carry them from first howl to last groan with the minimum of spiritual travail. But the little man’s world had no such handy parameters. It was a chaos of a hundred past lives, and a farrago of a million possible future ones.

Sometimes the little man thought he might be God.

Only sometimes, of course. He knew he was not God, because God was outside him and pushed him around. His thoughts of God were not bitter, though perhaps he had every right to be bitter about God. On the contrary, he was quite fond of Him. In the little man’s colossal boredom, the only pleasure remaining was to try to sneak a swift move past God’s eyes.

It hardly ever worked, though, and the little man came reluctantly up from his sea of memories to look about him for an opportunity to put one over God. A man sat a few feet from him, on the floor, lost in a celibate intellectual orgasm. Mescaliners were becoming more common as the mass mind endeavoured to lose itself in the disguise of looking for itself. Further along the strip a tart in an orange and purple striped bedouinnighty caught his eye. She wriggled her thin body, and when the little man nodded imperceptibly she sauntered up to him.

The little man derived a sad beaten masochistic pleasure in the anticipation of what would happen. God had forbidden fornication and if God was on the ball as He invariably was— there, with a look of frightened non-comprehension, the little tart backed off suddenly and disappeared in a swirl of translucent colour. Something in the little man’s face, something in the world, but certainly not of it, something an earlier age might have associated with burning fingers or floating Grails, something threw her back in terror. The little man followed her with his eyes, unhappily, and saw her break her leg as she stepped backwards on to a slow strip.

By the time the little man had left the strip and was making his way up an afternoon-lit suburban road, he had forgotten the psychiatrist and the thin tart had faded from memory. He walked up a quiet hill, a peaceful street of browned grass and old houses and ancient Scotty dogs. There were no children here to disturb the heavy meditative senile air, and the little man was grateful for that if nothing else. The great gables hung heavy, and ivy crept up the walls.

The little man was tired, tired to death, tired of life and the endless futile childish round of food and activity and sleep. He thought of the gilded Florentine palaces where he had slept, the nasal tones of Lorenzo de’ Medici, the nickering rapier which had taken off his left ear and made him look lopsided before the ear grew back. He thought of the dust-ridden Californian ranch which he had helped to build, when only a handful of white men had seen the Pacific from an American beach. He thought, and he thought, and he remembered the beer he had not been allowed to drink, and the women he could not touch because they walked away afeared, and the money he could never keep enough of to be rich, and he was tired.

Finally, his feet were still, and he pushed his key into the front door lock and with a slight click the door opened. The house was musty, cool, empty and heartbreaking. The little man paused at the refrigerator for a glass of lemonade, went to the back room and brought in to the kitchen a fine hemp rope. Between his fingers it felt good, rough and strong, and an inch thick. He looped it, tied the loop carefully into a hangman’s noose, and held it out proudly to survey it.

The kitchen was roofed with waxed boards, and a great cross plank stretched above the little man’s head. Carefully, he moved a chair over and stood on it. The other end of the rope went over the huge beam and the little man knotted it with delicate precision. He pulled it, swung on it, and the rope calmly held. He slipped the noose over his head, arranged the knot carefully behind the base of his skull, and peered for the last time around the room. But he was tired, bored, and unless he put an end to his thousands of years of life soon, he would be too bored to do even that. With a sigh of gratitude, he kicked away the chair and the rough fibres of the rope cut shockingly into his throat as he fell.

The rope broke, of course, and Lazarus skinned his knee.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

Final Flower

STEPHEN COOK

The possible permutations of life on other planets have always fascinated science fiction writers, but most of them have been content merely to describe odd life forms and use them as the basis of a conventional action plot. In this story, the bizarre “trapflower” becomes instead a focus for one man’s remembrance of things past.

One of the youngest and most promising Australian science fiction writers, Stephen Cook while in his middle twenties already had a reputation for individual and eccentric stories, erotically charged and enriched by a brilliant deployment of colour imagery. Their disturbing character indicates the seed of a major talent, now never to see maturity. In July 1967, Stephen Cook died at the age of 25.

This story, his last, has not previously been published.

* * * *

Sometimes a man sees something that he cannot help but watch. George Ryan stood with open eyes before the rose, the carnation, the thing of beauty, the huge non-flower in the cave, and knew the meaning of gratitude.

Large oval petals, overlapping, lapped gently against each other like ripples on sand. Subtle flows of movement ran out in concentric circles, washing out to the fringes and drifting back towards the centre. There were thousands of petals, millions of them, touching each other ... as cautiously as George, still innocent at fourteen, had once touched a finger to the lips of young Jenny Whiteford with her long fair hair, before she went away forever to a city on the other side of the world. Thousands of petals, and each ripple reminded his fingers of the feel of her lips. Some of the petals glowed for a moment with the same pastel orange, the soft shade of red that he seemed to remember. He would have given a great deal to see Jenny Whiteford’s lips again, to touch them without withdrawing and then perhaps to kiss them. But he had been a boy, younger at fourteen than Jenny at thirteen, too young to know what was possible in the world, and then Jenny had gone away forever.

There was also a voice: George! Oh, you stupid bastard— George! This way, for Christ’s sake!

He had seen sand rippling under water, but never as perfectly as the petals moved in the flower.

Once, on a cold planet, there had been a sunset over water. For a moment now he saw it again in a circle of hundreds of petals that took on the right colours in the very degree and proportion that he remembered. Gold and red at the top, melting down through blues and greens into a rich olive-grey in the lowest arc. The sphere of colours dropped down towards the water. Below it was the broken reflection that rose to meet it—in the flower, too, he could see it. There it was, slipping sideways upon itself, now this way and now that as the rippling petals carried it awry. In a moment the two images would move into invisibility. Over the violet sea there must have been an invisible haze, for before they could unite, the olive-grey arc had risen through the falling sun, fallen through the rising reflection, and blotted them both out against the olive-grey sky.

Deep amber sunlight came directly down into the clearing where he stood: midday light from a dying double sun. The flower stood back in the cave, half within and half beyond the outer fringes of the light. Its petals generated their own luminescence. The cave around and behind it glowed dimly with the reflection of its shifting colours.

What’s the matter with him? George, listen to me! Look this way!

It was less a cave than a deep hole in a pile of massive rocks. Now that he had moved closer, George found it beginning to open out around the flower, as if to give him a better view. He was grateful to the cave for protecting it, and grateful to his cold-eyed Fate, that had warmed to him at last. He was just a greaser, a half-educated space mechanic, a rowdy bum with dirty hands and old age creeping up around his knees ; he had been living without hope for a very long time.

There was beauty in the flower’s colour, in its undulation, in its depth and its width and height. It was as wide and tall as a man was long; he could plunge his arm into it up to the shoulder without coming to the end. Thousands of petals grew towards him and yet remained unseen, hidden by thousands more that grew on past them, still further out, and turned their tender oval tips around to face him—but were hidden, again and again, by thousands more that grew still further. And finally there were the petals that reached and formed the surface. They turned over against each other, lapping quietly, face by face, oval upon oval, beautiful beyond knowledge and almost beyond memory.

He had been in a satellite over Minerva when they dropped the sodium bomb that ended the Debrite Rebellion. The cloud of deadly golden gas had risen directly towards him, higher and higher. A thousand miles of airless space protected him, but at first he had been afraid. Then the cloud had begun to spread, still exploding as it expanded and tumbled outwards. The new clouds had risen further, still exploding and exploding. Puffs and bubbles of explosive smoke boiled across a whole green continent while George Ryan watched. He remembered it now as a beautiful thing, a wild driving chemical growth. The petals of the flower curved out from the centre like tiny clouds, and now they were golden, every last oval as golden as the thousands of poisonous puffs that he remembered.

It’s no good, Harry! That’s a trapflower he’s seeing in there.

George! He’s got to come out of there. Let me go get him; I’ve got to get him out of there!

It’s too late. We can’t do a thing without protection.

Five or six times in his life, George Ryan had known something so fine that nothing could soil the memory. Five or six times, he thought. A few months after Jenny Whiteford went away forever, he had lost his virginity to a girl who sold pronto leaves, and that night had seemed the finest in his life; but soon he had learnt that the leaves made her armpits stink when she sweated, and she had sworn when he couldn’t spend more money than he had. And there was a girl who had still been at school, who smiled when she was close to him and blushed when he touched her where nobody, she swore, had ever touched her before, and made him feel five times a king, and gave him a disease. But Jenny had let him touch her lips and then had gone away forever. The more dirty soil he piled around her memory, the more it grew. Like a flower in a bog, it rose higher.

In the cave, sheer beauty waved soft fronds like petals at him. It brought back Jenny, the golden cloud, the bottomless pit of Hudson IV, the sunset over the Calveranian Sea, the Fire Ceremony on the sulphurous slopes of Mount Sonora—and it brought back more, a simple song heard outside a party, a picture in a window, things he remembered and things he had never had the chance to know. Yet it was more than just memories of the past. It was here, it was now, and it was good to see for no other reason than these.

What else was here? Somewhere there were other memories ; and there was a voice. (George, please, it’s me, it’s Harry! They’re waiting for us, George, all the boys are waiting for us! Back in the bar! Remember the girls, George! Think of Olga!) He remembered a fat broad in a crowded, lonely bar. Olga laughed and kept him warm with her bawdy humour. The flower sparkled more brightly than the stars in black space, which had been such a disappointment after all he had heard about them. Somewhere there were hangovers, dead men, single bunks, double bunks, a drunk rolled in a lane, dogs that barked and bit, and his good, simple friend Harry. Even Harry must have known moments when he was more than a man. Even Harry would know what he was being granted, if he saw the flower.

Call a copter—bomb the thing! Isn’t there time for that?

He was close enough to see the immense, horny leaves that nestled around the flower. He understood them perfectly. Beauty needed protection. His memory of the golden clouds over Minerva was protected by several months of safe distance. It took that long before he met the crews that had gone down after the poison cleared, and heard their horrible stories. By then the clouds and the deaths were too far apart to touch.

The stupid bastard, he doesn’t know what he’s doing! What’s he thinking? It’s a Trapflower, George, it’s a f------g TRAPFLOWER!

He clambered over the first rock. Coruscating petals around the fringes of the flower dripped colour into the full red heart of it, feeding it with showers of tinsel flecks. And the scent. How could he have missed the scent? It had been so full in his nostrils that he had already forgotten what it was like to breathe anything else. Light and firm, like musk in a spring breeze, like the incense they burnt at the sacrificial altar near Mount Sonora, like Jenny Whiteford’s hair—like nothing he had ever known, sharing nothing, really, with hair or incense except for the simple fact of its magnificence.

He was close enough to hear the petals brushing against each other. The sound was yet another form of beauty; it took so many forms, why was it so rare?

Christ, he’s nearly out of sight in there! He doesn’t know what he’s doing!

Above and around him were the whispering petals, but before he could reach them he had to step across the first leaf. It lay upon the ground like a broad green mat. Crystal juices shimmered in its hollows. At the entrance to the temple, near Sonora, they had asked him to bathe his feet. Girls had placed bowls of perfumed water beside him, removed his boots and tended him as befitted an honoured guest. The juices would cleanse him while the spines darted from the leaves and made him still; then the petals would quietly lick his body until only the metals and plastics were left to be cast behind.

GEORGE!

He had given two months’ wages for one night with a six-limbed Feltian Whore. He had lost the thumb of his left hand in a fight over fifty dollars in a card game. He had sold his own teeth for three bundles of pronto leaf. Now he would give his life to end and protect the greatest, most worthwhile experience he had ever known. His body would help to feed this magnificent thing that had waited here so patiently for him to find it. Poor Harry, who would go back to live and die as a worn-out drifter, rather than live and die, here and now—as a man.

He stepped forward upon the leaf and thrust his arms into the petals up to the elbows. The plant let him caress it for almost a second before its spines painlessly broke his skin, made him quiet and held him close.

We’ll kill the bastard, George! We’ll get it for you!

<<Contents>>

* * * *

For Men Must Work

FRANK G. BRYNING

An example of solid, “mainstream” science fiction by an author who achieved considerable success on the British market during the fifties, this is one of the first stories by an Australian writer to reflect an acceptance of the “realist” tradition of American sf. It treats the tense moments of a space-ship disaster with reference more to character than action, and uses cross-cutting effectively to build up suspense. The ending is engagingly off-beat, if slightly sentimental.

Frank Bryning is a magazine editor/publisher in Brisbane, specializing in technical publications. Now in his sixties, he represents, to an extent, the tradition which modern sf writers are reacting against today, though his work is highly regarded by most authors.

Source: The Australian Journal, August 1955.

* * * *

Ferry Rocket Nine pointed her needle prow back along the orbit of Satellite Space Station Commonwealth Two, with which, for the time being, she circled Earth every ninety minutes. A silver torpedo, winged like a schoolboy’s paper dart, with a high, vertical tail fin, she hung apparently motionless against the star-spotted blackness of space, three chains to starboard of Vehicle 18, Space Terminal.

Suddenly her main jet spurted flame, and she shot rapidly astern of the Station. For seconds only she blasted, but when cut-off came she was invisible in the distance and the darkness. Stern first, she still trailed after SSSC2, but she no longer had velocity enough to stay in orbit. She had entered the long spiral that would take her down into the earth’s atmosphere, five hundred miles below.

Barbara Loney, abroad FR9, sighed with relief as Vehicle 18 disappeared from her viewport, and with it her contact with the Space Station. To her the limitless, black, star-studded void was harsh and menacing. She had been unable to see in it the wonder, the beauty, the ever-beckoning adventure, the great pioneering opportunity her husband saw there. His work, as Chief Maintenance Engineer, Rockets, for all his high-sounding title, special rate of pay, spaceman’s bonuses, and long earth-furloughs, had become for her a nightmare of hazardous escapades.

When Jim was on duty she would be either distracted from her own work as Librarian-Records Clerk in Vehicle 7— Residential-Recreation—or would stay cooped up in their comfortably equipped but nonetheless prison-like quarters, worrying and agonizing about his safety.

In short, as she had told herself for the hundredth time, she was not cut out to be a spaceman’s wife. She could not think of any space-going quarters as a home, even though she and Jim should cohabit there. She had finally told him so— and hated herself for the hurt it gave him.

She yearned for a bright blue sky every twelve hours instead of black and star-glitter all the time. She wanted the solid earth and the green grass underfoot instead of metal and plastic decking. She wanted constant, if heavy, earth-gravity instead of the centrifugal pressure which, according to how near you were to the centre of the spinning R-R Vehicle, varied from one gravity to absolute weightlessness. She wanted fresh, earth-scented, if germ-laden, sun-and-rain-cleared air instead of the aseptic, machine-washed and precipitron-cleared oxygen-helium mixture. She longed for a small cottage with windows to open and shut, a garden and—of all things—a picket fence. She wanted a real home.

So she had persuaded Jim to apply for the position of Superintendent, Rocket Maintenance, Woomera—a job for which he was well qualified although little inclined.

“Time enough when I’ve served my full stint out here and we’ve piled up more money in the bank,” he had protested. “And I’ll be better able to handle such a job when I’ve had more experience with operating conditions in space.”

“For men must work, and women must weep,” she had quoted rather bitterly in reply. “More important that you survive your stint in space. And the surest way to do that is not to stay too long! And it’s time we had a home we can call a home!”

* * * *

In the end she had had her way, and Jim was even now one hour ahead of her, in FR5, First Division of the Station-Woomera-Station Ferry for the day. By the time she landed he would, no doubt, be leaving their hotel room for his personal interview with the Appointments Board. Perversely, tears welled into her eyes in the midst of her hopes and rosy dreams, for she felt remorseful still at having forced Jim’s hand. If only she could be strong, and confident, as a spaceman’s wife should be! If only she were not the worrying kind…

* * * *

“I think it was very mean of them to separate us from our husbands,” complained newly-wed Jean Urquhart, placing a hand on Barbara’s arm.

“A tribute to our petite figures, my dear,” she replied comfortingly, “and to the solid worth of our husbands. They always pass a few pounds of mass from one Division to another at the last minute to even up the loads, and the easiest way is to exchange a few lightweight passengers for some heavyweights.”

“But since we’re all weightless, out here, I don’t see that it matters.”

“We’ll weigh plenty when the atmosphere drag is braking the ship,” said Barbara. “That’s when it counts—during deceleration and landing.”

“Well, they might have picked some of the unmarried ones.”

“They did with Beryl Sanders, over there—she’s not married. But of course they do it by arithmetic and not by sentiment. At such times, dear, you and I and our hefty husbands are only entries in the ‘Mass’ column on the passenger list.”

Jean grasped Barbara’s arm again as a gentle vibration began to make itself felt throughout the Ferry. “What’s that?” she gasped.

“Just the steering jets—swinging the nose of the ship around to point the way we are going. It wouldn’t do to enter the atmosphere tail first.”

It was about fifty minutes after leaving the Station and FR9 had gone nearly half way around the Earth when Barbara detected a slight tendency to slide forward against her seat belt.

“Better tighten your seat belt, Jean, and put on your chest belt,” she said, tapping her companion’s arm. “We’re entering the atmosphere now. The ship is beginning to feel the drag.”

Jean gave Barbara an almost worshipful look a minute later when the notice screen lit up with the message, “Please fix chest belts,” and the co-pilot came into the passenger cabin to check on every belt.

Soon the murmur of the rushing air outside pervaded the ship, minute by minute increasing in volume as they planed into the denser strata. The pressure of the belts grew greater, holding them back.

Wide-eyed, and gripping the arms of her seat, Jean strove to remain calm as the wind grew stronger, its rushing sound mounting to a roar as the ship tensed, with minor creakings and crepitations, all about her. Her tendency to slide forward off her seat drove her ever harder against the belts, and convinced her that she was no longer weightless.

It was her first trip down from the Station, planing, un-powered, through the atmosphere, and more trying than the short, fully powered rocket trip up, with all its muscle-wrenching acceleration. Later, when the roar became a howl, she watched with wary fascination the leading edge of the starboard wing grow cherry-red, and the colour slowly spread over all that part of the wing visible through the port.

Through darkness and daylight and darkness again they went in something more than two hours between leaving SSSC2 and gliding in over Western Australian to touch down at Woomera in mid-morning.

“I don’t see Harry,” complained Jean Urquhart a moment later, as they came out through the still warm hull into the desert air which Barbara sniffed with pleasure. Barbara had not expected to see Jim, who would be even now on his way to his interview.

Labouring a little in the full earth gravity they reached the public lounge of the spaceport, where Jean’s questing for her husband was cut short by the public address system.

“Paging Mrs James Loney and Mrs Henry Urquhart! Mrs James Loney and Mrs Henry Urquhart—please come to the Traffic Manager’s office. Paging Mrs . . .”

They were shown in at once, to be received by the young-middle-aged Traffic Manager as if he were handling eggshell china. Both girls began to feel alarmed as he moved the chairs under them with great solicitude. Behind his desk he remained standing. He buttoned his coat nervously, and placed his hands on the back of his swivel chair.

“I am afraid,” he began, “I must give you ladies some rather disturbing news. The fact is—well, I have to inform you that Ferry Rocket Five, which left the Station before your rocket, has not yet landed.”

“Harry!” cried Jean. “My husband—”

Too late! came the bitter thought to Barbara as a sick feeling hit her like a blow in the stomach. Too late! It has happened before we could get away!

Suddenly she realized that Jean was in her arms, sobbing, and kneeling on the floor. She, herself, had been sitting tense and unheeding for a long minute. The Traffic Manager was saying something unheard by Jean or herself. He was looking embarrassed. Barbara made an effort.

“I’m sorry,” she said, through set teeth. “I —we didn’t hear what you—”

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “Please don’t assume the worst. FR5 is disabled, but no one is injured—yet. She has been hit by a meteorite and is out of control in a new orbit between the orbit of the Station and the fringe of the atmosphere. Help is on the way from the Station. We hope it may be in time.”

* * * *

Ferry Rocket Five was tumbling raggedly through space with half her starboard wing and part of her tail fin torn away. She had a corkscrewing motion, the result of a tail-over-nose rotation about her short axis, but she was also spinning slowly around her long axis.

Fortunately the impact of the meteorite, which had been from behind and below on the starboard side, had accelerated her again, cancelled out much of the deceleration by which she had begun her journey down to Earth. Fortunate it was, for now there would be more time before she would enter the atmosphere—and in that time she might be saved.

Imperatively, if she were to be saved, it would have to be in that time. If, with her airfoils torn and distorted, and her outer skin breached as it was, she were to enter the atmosphere, she would go more wildly out of control. She would be tossed about with tremendous violence, and almost inevitably be torn apart.

If, by some miracle, she should hold together long enough to reach the denser air strata at a velocity between four and five miles a second, the hull would be heated to a dull red, and both her disrupted thermal insulation, and her refrigeration system, if still functioning, would be unable to keep the heat at bay.

These hazards had been promptly recognized by everyone as soon as FR5’s Captain had reported his predicament by jury-rigged radio. Help could come, in the time, only from SSSC2, and all the Station’s personnel who could help in the rescue were going all-out to do so. Particularly were they busy aboard Vehicles 16 and 17, Maintenance.

* * * *

A warning buzz from the wall near his desk informed the Traffic Manager to cut in the speaker.

Satellite Space Station Commonwealth Two was reporting that FR5 had been located by radar and two space tugs were on their way to assist her. Moon Rocket 8 had just arrived at Vehicle 18, Space Terminal, from the Moon, and was being re-fuelled and cleared of cargo to follow the tugs and take off passengers from FR5, if possible.

On FR5 a man had gone outside in a space suit to weld an air leak—a precarious feat with the ship tumbling and writhing as she was.

At this last item of news Barbara’s hands clenched and her lips drew into a tight line. She knew who that hero would be! James Loney, Chief Maintenance Engineer, Rockets, and trouble-shooter extraordinary!

When the radio confirmed her guess a few seconds later she accepted the near-homage of Jean as graciously as her mixed fear, pride, and desperate hope permitted. But down inside her she felt stark terror such as she had never felt when “out there” on the Station on similar occasions when she had known Jim was running special risks.

It felt very different here, on the ground—remote and excluded from any sense of contact with Jim. She was, in fact, no longer “with” him, either in space or, it seemed, in spirit. She found herself, in her turn, clutching Jean.

* * * *

At that same instant James Loney was clinging like a limpet to the plunging hull of FR5 as he finished off sealing the air leak. Down on magnetic knee-pads he held himself rigid by straining up against the two short lines fastened to the belt of his space suit and hooked into recessed hand-holds in the hull.

He kept his eyes on the skin of the ship, for space-hardened though he was, he could not look for long without getting dizzy at the wildly spiralling stars and the huge, greenish balloon of Earth, filling half the sky and looming unpredictably past from any direction.

Beneath him at one moment, the hull drove upwards, carrying him before it as it swung over like the sail of a windmill, and he had to brace himself against it or sprawl on his face. A few seconds later, as the sideways spin slowly turned the ship on its long axis, he was carried around behind the “windmill” movement and dragged after it, so that only the lines held him against the hull. Between thrust and drag and thrust again he had to hold the pressure on knees, toes, and the lashings to resist slipping sideways.

He was clawing his way back to the airlock, to stow the welding kit, when the searchlights of the two tugs flooded the hull of FR5 with light. By space-suit radio he made contact with them. The three men aboard each tug were of his own crew and all were ready in space suits. By tacit consent he took charge.

“Here’s the situation,” he told them. “We can’t take passengers out until we stop this ship flinging about. If we do that in time we won’t need to trans-ship passengers at all. You tugs can take her back to the Station.

“First, though, we must get about four bottles of oxygen into this airlock to keep them supplied inside. She’s lost too much air, and there might be a few smaller leaks than the one I’ve just sealed. Stacy and Adams—you break out that oxygen and bring it over. Acknowledge please.”

“Stacy acknowledging—four bottles of oxygen—coming.”

Adams in turn, repeated the words.

“Don’t try to come aboard yet,” said Loney. “Jet over and wait alongside at the pole of the short axis around which we’re rotating. I’ll meet you there.”

Stacy and Adams acknowledged together.

“Get started . . . Hobday?” Jim asked.

“Hobday acknowledging.”

“You break out one Mark Four reaction motor, with full fuel tank, and bring it to me at the short axis of rotation. Right?”

Hobday repeated his instructions.

“Go ahead . . . Miles?” Jim asked.

“Yes, Jim. Miles speaking.”

“You break out a full reserve fuel tank for Hobday’s Mark Four,” said Jim. “Also break out two Mark One reactors, fully fuelled. Stand by to bring them when asked for.”

As Miles repeated his instructions Loney took two coiled lines from the airlock. Clipping one to his belt he fastened the other just outside the airlock hatch, and, trailing it after him, worked his way from hand-hold to hand-hold thirty feet or so along the hull to the short axis about which the nose and tail of the hundred-and-twenty foot ship were rotating.

There he clung for a few moments, clipping his short belt lines on and adjusting himself to the motion, which here was much less violent than up near the nose where he had been welding.

Facing forward he got carefully to his feet, placing his magnetic oversoles firmly on the steel hull and keeping his belt lines—one in front and one behind—taut. Thus braced and guyed he stood like a stubby mast on the back of the Ferry Rocket.

As it somersaulted he went with it, and because it also spun slowly on its long axis, his upright figure followed a skewed and complex spiral which was compounded of two circular motions at right angles to one another and the orbital path of the ship.

By the time Stacy and Adams had come alongside, and adjusted their relative motions so as to hang stationary in relation to the short axis, they found that Loney’s head would swing diagonally past them at about fifteen-second intervals. First from one side, then from the other, he would come at them and swing away, passing sometimes within arm’s length and sometimes up to twenty feet away.

“Stacy,” said Loney as he swung past, “give your oxygen to Adams, and prepare to come aboard. Next time round I’ll throw you a line.”

Stacy was ready as soon as Loney’s head came into view again. At the same moment the line came at him like a white whiplash in the light from the tugs.

“Take a turn around your wrist and hold on,” said Jim Loney, taking in the slack as he came close.

When he began to recede he pulled gently, letting the line run a little through his heavily gloved hands to ease the initial strain.

Stacy came aboard like a game fish, striking the hull about ninety degrees around its circumference from Loney.

“Guy yourself with a line front and back, like mine,” instructed Loney. “Cast off my line as soon as you’re fast.”

Four circuits later Loney threw the line to Adams, who quickly clipped it into the hand-hold of one oxygen bottle. Loney led this like a kite until it floated gently alongside Stacy, who unhooked it.

Seeing Hobday approaching with the heavy reaction motor, Loney announced a change of procedure.

“Stand by, Adams, while we get that reactor aboard. Stacy —you get that bottle of oxygen inside the ship. They’ll be able to wait for the others if you give them that. We’ll get the rest aboard easier when we stop this spin. Leave your guy lines there.”

Stacy unhooked his lines and struggled with the oxygen bottle along the line Loney had laid down to the airlock.

At Loney’s direction Hobday relinquished the reaction motor to Adams, and was brought aboard to take Stacy’s place. Loney threw the line again to Adams, who hooked it on to the massive reaction motor. This was a much more sluggish item than either a man or an oxygen bottle, and Loney kept a short line on it until he had it moving.

The strain on his arms and body and belt lines almost tore him off the ship, but he had to prevent the motor swinging about and perhaps injuring Hobday. When he had it following nicely he eased off the line and let it come within Hobday’s reach.

“Hold it down until it matches motion with the ship,” he instructed. When this was done Loney drew the motor to him, and manoeuvred it around him until its jet pointed at right angles to the long axis of the ship—that is, into the direction of the ship’s spin. Then he switched on the powerful electromagnetic grips and it snapped tight against the hull.

“Grapples too?” enquired Hobday, crawling up alongside.

“Four,” agreed Loney. Then he called to Adams.

“Adams acknowledging.”

“Stand clear of blast!” said Jim.

Hobday ran two pairs of grappling claws on chains out to the nearest hand-holds in front of the reaction motor and hauled them tight while Loney checked and adjusted his controls.

“All secure!” reported Hobday.

“Is Stacy inside the airlock?”

“Yes. Airlock closed.”

“Adams standing clear?”

“Well clear.”

“Stand by for blast!”

Just as they rolled out of the glare of the searchlights Loney pressed the firing trigger and a brilliant white flame shot twenty feet into the blackness of space. Beneath them the ship vibrated. But through the emptiness around them no sound came from the flame which in an atmosphere would have roared like any rocket. There came instead a humming and a vibration through the substance of the motor, the hull, and their own flesh and bone.

Gradually Loney opened up the throttle, his eyes on the gauge. He held the needle steady, and then gave some attention to the alternation of light and darkness as the spin took them in and out of the searchlights.

“She’s slowing down,” called Hobday. “Circuit about nineteen seconds now.”

“We’ll have a bigger fight with the tumbling,” said Loney. “I’ll take this reactor up to the tail. You get Miles aboard with the other charges of fuel and both Mark One reactors. Leave Stacy and Adams to get that oxygen inboard.”

“Okay. I’ll call Miles now.”

“Getting slower,” remarked Loney a short time later. “How long’s the circuit?”

Hobday timed it. “Twenty-seven seconds.”

Shortly after that Loney began to taper off the blast, until, slowly, with the dying out of the flame, the spinning of the ship had stopped altogether. Her motion was now the less complex but still powerful tumbling.

Hobday released the grapples and wound them in.

“You had better stand out at the end of the short axis,” said Loney. “You’ll turn about like a top but you’ll stay in one position, and you’ll get your men aboard easily.”

“Don’t you need a hand first?”

“No thanks. Now that she’s not spinning I can stay in front of the swing all the time. The thrust will hold me on— and the reactor too. I’ll slide it along . . .”

* * * *

“Oh!” exclaimed Barbara, jumping to her feet as the Traffic Manager cut off his radio speaker. “I had forgotten!”

“What’s the matter?” pleaded Jean, alarm in her eyes.

“Jim’s interview! He had an interview with the Appointments Board—” Barbara looked at her watch, “it was for eleven thirty—seven minutes from now.” She turned to the Traffic Manager. “Could I—I mean, I think I should inform the Board —ask them to—to postpone—”

The Traffic Manager took up his telephone. “I’ll contact the Secretary of the Board now,” he said. “You can speak from here.”

“Thank you,” said Barbara, inwardly amazed that she was able to concern herself with an immediate practical matter while Jim was out there fighting for his life. Yet she felt that it was all the more important now—for both their sakes, if he survived—that he should not lose his chance of getting that ground job.

“I would like to make my request in person, to the Board, if I may,” she added.

Meanwhile, between the base of the tail fin and the damaged driving jet, Loney anchored his reaction motor with the magnetic clamps and the grapples. He swung the nozzle to point straight “upwards”—at right angles to the long axis of the ship and into the direction she was tumbling. Then he went to meet Hobday and Miles half-way from amidships. He took from them his refill tank of fuel.

“Hobday, take your Mark One out on the starboard wing, just two feet from the edge and aft as close as you can get to where the wing is twisted. Clamp on and aim at ninety degrees. Miles, you do the same on the port wing, matching Hobday’s position exactly. Lie down, both of you, with your feet towards the hull, and lash on.”

By the time Loney had returned to his reactor and lashed down his reserve fuel tank, Hobday and Miles reported ready.

“Stand by to compensate in case she starts spinning again,” Loney instructed. “Set jets at half throttle and be ready to fire when I tell you.”

Loney sat behind his reactor, one leg on either side wedged beneath a grapple chain. He took hold of the hand grips and sighted on the stars, which streamed up over the torn tail-fin like tracer bullets. He found the firing trigger with his forefinger.

“Stand by for blast!”

* * * *

The Chairman of the Appointments Board and his two fellow members stood behind their table as Barbara Loney entered the room. After introductions the Chairman led her to a chair.

“Mrs Loney,” he said, his expression solicitious. “Permit us to offer our best hopes that your husband is even now winning his splendid battle to save Ferry Rocket Five. We feel that in these circumstances we could not refuse to see you, or to tell you personally that your request for postponement of his interview would certainly be granted, if he should wish it.”

“ ‘If he should—’,” echoed Barbara. “I can assure you, Mr Chairman, there is no doubt—”

“There, there! Don’t let us rush things,” said the Chairman, in a fatherly manner. “I am sure we understand exactly how you feel at a time like this.” He had walked around the table to his own chair, and the three men took their seats. “This is not a formal meeting of the Board. Speak as freely as you like. We are glad of the opportunity to meet you.”

“Thank you, Mr Chairman—and gentlemen,” replied Barbara. “I—I feel, at this moment, that all I can really be concerned with is my husband’s safety. It’s all I should be concerned with. But since he cannot keep his appointment with you—”

“We understand, Mrs Loney. Your husband is a fortunate man to have a wife so resourceful. And in the circumstances, while he is fighting for the lives of himself and others, we could hardly fail to stretch a point, if necessary, on his behalf. However, the next bulletin from Station Two is almost due. Please stay while we hear it.”

* * * *

At that moment the star stream began to slant from port to starboard, and the greenish curve of Earth bulged in. Loney cut off his jet.

“Hobday—short blast! Three seconds.”

Flame spurted up from the starboard wing, and slowly FR5 responded to the pressure. Loney watched the shooting stars swing back towards the vertical, and Earth floated away like a balloon.

“Two seconds more,” he demanded. “Miles—stand by to compensate!”

As soon as the ship was trimmed she vibrated again under the heavy blast of Loney’s reactor. After some seconds it seemed—from their tendency to float away from the ship “beneath” them, and the slowing of the star movements— that the rotation was being retarded. Again the stars swung off to starboard, and a sector of the earth came into view.

“Hobday—blast seven seconds! Miles—stand by!”

There was a brief static hum.

Loney fired again, opening up to the fullest. This time he did not cut off before his fuel petered out. Now their lashings had definitely been needed to hold them back with the ship as its lessening thrust beneath them made it clear she was slowing down. And the stars could now be seen as discreet dots, swinging this time from starboard to port.

“Miles—blast five seconds!”

Loney released his empty fuel tank and laid hold of the reserve.

* * * *

“It appears. Gentlemen, that Chief Maintenance Engineer Loney has virtually succeeded in saving Ferry Rocket Five,” said the Chairman of the Appointments Board. “In which case do you think it premature to inform Mrs Loney, unofficially, of course, of what we have in mind?”

“Quite the appropriate time, I should think,” said the member on Barbara’s left.

The other nodded. “I agree. Since meeting Mrs Loney I am more than reassured that we are making the right decision. She is undoubtedly the right kind of wife for a space-going officer.”

“The fact is, Mrs Loney,” said the Chairman, “we had already decided not to appoint your husband Superintendent of Rocket Maintenance, Woomera, although he is well qualified. He is much too good a man in space to waste his talents in a ground job at his age.”

“But Mr Cha—”

“Now don’t underrate what I have to tell you,” pleaded the Chairman, hastily. “We have a much better post for him. He will outrank that ground job considerably—and we know it is something he will like much better. We have known his worth and his predilections for a long time, and his present valiant performance has confirmed to the hilt our estimate of him. We are going to appoint him Officer in Charge Maintenance, Satellite Space Station Commonwealth Two!”

He beamed, and the rest of the Board smiled indulgently at Barbara’s astonishment.

“But—but—Mr Chairman! The whole idea—I don’t know how—”

“Don’t try, my dear,” deprecated the Chairman. “No thanks are due to us. Your husband has more than earned his promotion, although it is several grades upwards in one move, both in rank and pay. We anticipate that he will not only do the job superlatively well, but that because of his age he will be able to give it the continuity of tenure which has been lacking in the past.”

“Continuity of tenure,” echoed Barbara, aghast.

“Yes. Until now, as you may know, our appointees to that position have all been men within three, or at most four, years of the age of retirement from active duty in space. Your husband should have a good ten years ahead of him.”

“Ten years!” gasped Barbara. “In space for ten more years.”

“By then, with yearly increments, you would be very nicely placed financially.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that, Mr Chairman,” said Barbara, faintly. “My husband’s application for the position of Superintendent of Maintenance, Woomera, would not have been made at all if—”

“If he had had any idea that he was in the running for this position,” the Chairman cut in. “You need not tell us. We know from his records and other sources that this main enthusiasm is for taking part in what is done out in space. If anyone knows that better than we do, that person will be you. Am I not right?”

Barbara looked at the three men in turn. She saw no way out. She realized she could not win her battle here and now.

“Perfectly right,” she acknowledged. “That is what he desires, above all.”

“Would you like to be the bearer of the good news? The appointment is yet two months off—due at the end of the furlough you are just beginning. You and your husband can keep it to yourselves?”

He paused at sight of Barbara sitting rigid, eyes closed. When she opened her eyes he saw that they were glittering with unshed tears.

“We can keep the secret, Mr Chairman,” she promised. “May I say on my husband’s behalf how delighted he—”

“Here is another bulletin,” said the member on Barbara’s right, and turned up the volume.

“Ferry Rocket Five has been stabilized by the efforts of Chief Maintenance Engineer Loney and his crew,” announced the radio, from SSSC2. “All aboard are now safe and unharmed. Two space tugs are lashed to the ferry and are accelerating back into the orbit of the Station. Passengers will be disembarked at the Station to await another ferry.

“This fortunate outcome has been mainly due to the heroism and skill of Chief Maintenance Engineer James Loney, who, not a moment too soon, handed over FR5 to his space tugs just as the first noticeable contact was made with the atmosphere. As a result of damage to the ferry’s airfoils it began to yaw and plunge before the tugs had warped in properly and made fast. Quick work by Loney with the lines again saved the situation, but he suffered injury when his left leg and arm were momentarily jammed between a tug and the tail fin of FR5. He was quickly rescued and taken inboard a tug. It is reported that both the leg and arm have been broken . . .”

White-faced, her eyes closed, Barbara sat gripping the table.

“But men must work, and women must weep,

Though storms be sudden, and waters deep,

And the harbour bar be moaning.”

The lines drove into her mind again—to mock, and yet to steady her, with the reminder that she was one with all womankind. The poet Kingsley had not had space-going vessels in mind, and there was no harbour bar, this time—unless it were that fringe of atmosphere in which FR5 had almost foundered. Yet the age-old axiom he had voiced held true on the new frontiers. And she and Jim were caught up in the ancient dilemma . . .

“Vehicle Eleven, Medical, at the Station, is alerted and ready to receive Chief Maintenance Engineer Loney for immediate attention,” continued the radio.

“Mr Chairman!” Barbara had sprung to her feet. “Can you secure me a berth on this afternoon’s ferry back to the Station?”

“First priority,” agreed the Chairman, picking up his telephone. “No doubt, too, you will want to send a radio?”

For some moments Barbara—a resigned and defeated though not altogether unhappy Barbara—pondered with pencil in hand over the radiogram form.

MY HERO, she printed, with a wry twist to her mouth. AM RETURNING TODAY’S ROCKET. SEE YOU 1740 HOURS. LOVE. BARBARA.

Yet she signed with a frown, and remained clicking the pencil against her teeth. Somehow it did not quite convey all she wanted to say to him. Then the pencil came back to the paper. She heaved a big sigh.

After RETURNING she inserted the word HOME and passed the message to the waiting operator.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

Beach

JOHN BAXTER

Nobody has yet written a truly Australian science fiction story, one which employs the symbols of life and nature in the way that Judith Wright and Brett Whiteley do in their own fields, to enlarge and expand one’s experience of the country. Science fiction is ideally suited to this kind of exploration, and it is to be hoped that in the future major writers may make use of science fiction’s techniques to investigate more fully the many basic questions of identity and relationship to nature which only a few creators have yet touched on. “Beach” is a first sketch of what an Australian sf story might be like, though its lack of a conventional plot puts it outside the stream of ordinary science fiction. One hopes, however, that even without an explanation of what these people are doing on the beach, the particular significance of their presence there will make itself clear.

This story has not previously been published.

* * * *

Mark lay in his burrow and waited for the sun to rise.

All over his naked body, down his right arm and leg, on his head, his ear, his neck, the soft sand weighed heavily, heavily. He knew that, if he were to move, the blanket of sand would split and slide, exposing him, and he was careful to remain perfectly still. It was a trick you learned after you had lived for a while on the beach.

From the weight of the sand, and the pressure in particular on the side of his head, he knew that it was damp. Perhaps it had rained last night (rain on the beach at night, drifting gently down in the perpetual silver light of the lamps?); perhaps it was the dew, silent as dead hands, that had dampened the sand, clumping it, making it heavy and chill.

In front of his eyes Mark sensed but did not see the pages of his Book. Folded tent-like over his head it kept the sand out of his eyes and gave him air to breathe. He knew it as an implement now, not a thing which had any meaning in itself, and if the words on the warped and fading pages had ever meant anything, they had long ago ceased to convey it to him. Mark had been on the beach for a year, long enough for the mind quietly to free itself of things like the ability to read. On the beach, one floated, the mind out of gear, disconnected.

Thinking about floating took a long time. When he had finished, there was a triangle of golden light on the sand under his eye, a pointer that tracked slowly across the plain bounded by his cheek, the sand piled around his face and the yellowing pages tented over his eyes. He watched the pointer while it inched for a few centimetres across the rippled sand, then closed his eyes and warily sat up. Sand spilled off him in thick clumps, like crumbling cake, as he stretched, turned and struggled to his knees, facing automatically towards the rising sun.

He was not the first awake. Further down the beach, about a hundred yards away, figures were walking towards the surf. As he watched there was a minor eruption beyond them, and another man reared up out of the sand, shook himself, stretched, stood up. Mark couldn’t place him. Perhaps he was a new man, wandered down from the empty city, or maybe an old one moving closer to the main group. It didn’t matter. Curiosity wasn’t forbidden; just too much trouble.

The sun’s disk was free of the horizon, balanced a little above the unmarred line of sea like some perfect abstract symbol. The water below it was a clean blue, shading to green in the shallows where, at the last few feet, it dissolved into white foam. Rolling in from the ocean in oily hummocks, the waves curled (striated undersides ribbed like muscles stretching), frothed and broke, effortless as were all things to do with the sea. The air, warming, lacquered it all with a shine of newness, polishing, cleaning. Each day was a new day on the beach, a slice of the future laid down clean and virgin with the promise of yet another tomorrow.

Mark dived and swam in the surf for a few minutes, treading water beyond the line of gentle breakers to look back towards the beach and sluice the sand from his hair and body. Under his pedalling feet, white and distorted through the water, he could see the sand falling, flecks of silica glinting back the first sunlight, until it landed on the white sandy floor. The fantasy always recurred at these times that he himself was dissolving, his body flaking away to join the sand of which he was so much a part. Ashes to ashes, sand to sand, until finally nothing remained but a crystal skeleton barbing out of the rippled white? Perhaps . . .

He blinked away the image, ducked his head under and swam back to shore. Mark didn’t understand what came over him at these moments. It was a sort of dreaminess compounded of the sun, the water, the sand, a drunkenness in the grip of which it didn’t matter what happened, or why. Some people got it badly. Waking one morning, they would swim out through the waves and not stop swimming. Occasionally their bodies would be washed up in the evening tide, stirring like sodden driftwood in the slushing froth. Always on their faces was the look of supreme ecstasy, the face of one who has seen God.

Mark went back to his book, the one object that gave him position in the desert of the beach. Everybody had a marker; a towel perhaps, frayed and bleached by the sun; a radio, long since run down but still treasured, wrapped perhaps in a plastic bag to keep out the sand, the bag scratched until it was almost opaque. Further up the beach, one man had—or did have, as far as Mark could remember—a huge beach umbrella, once bright with orange and yellow segments like a huge flower, now a rotted tree, the crooked trunk holding up a rusty framework to which a few shreds of cloth still clung.

There was movement in the surf. Mark shaded his eyes and looked down the shelving sand from which the sun was already blazing. A girl was coming out of the surf, moving steadily out of the waist-deep water, stiffening momentarily as each new wave thrust at her back, but turning the motion into power. She moved like all the beach people moved, as if they were part of the water, working in conjunction with it. Mark leaned on his elbow to watch.

The girl was beautiful. As she walked through the shallows, Mark admired her slim smooth body, browned as was his own until it was a coppered image, so dark that the nipples of her breasts stood out like light pink flowers against the unmarred colour of her skin. Her hair was bleached to a transparent blonde, strawlike on her head, that on her body soft as a nimbus. Only the faint glow over her limbs indicated that it was there at all, and Mark knew that, to the touch, it would be as feathery as the wind.

Knee-deep in the white foam, she shook the water from her body like a surfacing animal and, gathering her long hair in her hands, squeezed the water from it. Still wet, it fell in a smooth rope over her right shoulder, the ends pasted with water like fingers across one breast. Mark recognized her now. She was from the other end of the beach, a mile further up where the curve of the sand tightened and the point that separated this beach from the next thrust out into the ocean. What she was doing here he could not guess. Looking for a new place? Looking for a man? Mark toyed briefly with the idea of taking her, but discarded it. Almost as if she had read his mind, the girl looked towards him, turned, and moved back out through the surf, breasting the waves that now, with the turning tide, were moving in with new strength.

Mark watched her go, his eyes crinkled against the sun, and wondered why he had let her leave. She was beautiful, available. Normally he would not have paused for a moment before taking her, luxuriating in the thrust of her body, the heat of the sun on his back, the squeak of the sand under their weight. Even now, the idea moved him, but he still had no real desire to go through the motions of even so casual and cursory a formality as showing his interest.

Why? The idea irritated him. He stood up and looked out across the surf, wondering if he would see the girl, but her head had disappeared. The missed opportunity smarted now. He saw it in context, as one of many such chances not taken, actions left incomplete and wasted, water running into the sand. As if the idea goaded him into it, he lifted his eyes and looked along the curve of the beach to the house-covered hills that surrounded it. He squinted, looked closer, squinting again.

Houses.

Houses!

Incredible that he had never noticed them before, never looked at them. It was as if his mind was drifting up out of a haze, focusing for the first time in years. He began to see the shapes of the roofs, the glint of glass in the windows, the sharp edges of chimneys against the relentless blue of the sky. They clung, he saw, these houses, like bats to a cave wall, like monkeys crusted on their ledges, birds in a tree, all turned towards the beach, their eyes watching, their faces, impassive as those of the dead, staring down with flat disdain and an inconquerable pride in their status as matter.

We exist, they said. Mark had no answer to them, nor to the other questions that tumbled into his mind. How had they got there? Who had built them? Not the beach people, not them. Somebody else, or something . . . something that had gone, leaving them here alone.

He was seized by an uncontrollable impulse to run. Not to run and hide, not to flee, but to move, assert himself as a person in this suddenly inanimate landscape. He turned and, feet pistoning in the powder-soft hot sand, ran along the beach, skirting the sharp shadow of the concrete retaining wall that marked the beginning of the world. It was black, the shadow, and as his shadow feet flew horizontally towards it across the ruffled sand, he felt it begin to take shape and substance, to become part of the world. His feet touched it, his shadow moved him along the black wall.

The wall itself was crumbling concrete, yellowed by the sun until cracks radiated over its surface like dried veins. The posts set into it were rusting away, eaten through with red blight, cavities and ulcers gaping to let in the cancerous sun. He grabbed one, pulled his hand away as the acid heat of the sun bit into his flesh. But refusing to admit that it had mastered him as it had the others, Mark grabbed again and hauled himself up onto the concrete. Sprawled there on the baking surface, he looked at the world.

Shops—or he supposed they were shops—lined the road opposite. He saw their shattered windows through the bars of the pine trees planted with mathematical precision along the beach front. Under the trees, rotted pine fronds and cones were piled like pyres, waiting only a torch. Along the beach the trees were repeated, a mile of them, set like sentinels against the subtle assault of the wind, indomitable, irrelevant. Through their disarrayed crowns, the houses high on the cliffs looked down, staring.

The streets were not concrete, but asphalt. It had decayed more readily than the harder stuff, so that most of the streets were rivers of tarry slush that clung to the feet and separated into oily puddles under a yielding skin. Only in the shadows was it reasonably firm, and Mark stuck to the edges of the building line as he walked quickly along, paralleling the beach but refusing to look at it. He did not dare look at the beach again—not yet, not.. . yet. ..

From the beach, the hills rose sharply, streets surging up in long curves to breast the first rise, then twisting to zigzag higher. There was no longer an empty open seascape on one side to promise freedom. Houses closed in, fences enclosed, overgrown gardens thrust up ragged patches of vegetation as thick and impenetrable as hedges. Even the concrete footpaths were cracked, overgrown, grass and weeds probing up between the squares and shouldering them aside. Mark half ran, refusing to look at the houses, moving on up the hill to the point where, as the road met the top of the rise, a wedge of blue sky bit into the housescape. From there, he could see out, beyond the beach, to what lay around the curve of the headland.

Then he heard the music.

Mark didn’t know it was music. There was no music on the beach, no false sound, only the natural timbre of the sea and the wind, the cries of birds and, sometimes, in the night, a scream as some beast, perhaps a man, perhaps not, met the dark creature that lay in the shadows, and died. He had never heard a disciplined sound before, and he followed it up the hill to the last house in the street.

Time had beached the house in its place, deserting it on the hilltop like some ancient ark. Decades had left it untouched, as if time, like the sea, will brush a wreck and leave it dry of years, dry but for a rime of age that hangs like salt along the withered walls.

Mark approached it cautiously, wishing, without knowing why, not to touch the fence of wood and wire mesh that separated the overgrown footpath from the slightly more disciplined garden. In the centre of the fence a gate of tubular metal and mesh hung rustily open, though the path beyond it had disappeared beneath the grass that, seeded and self-seeded again, had engulfed the area. Nothing was visible above it except the remains of an ornamental bird-bath surmounted by what must once have been a plaster stork. Weather had worn the bird down to a wire skeleton to which clung a few decaying scraps of plaster and, on top of the metal bones, a beakless head whose single eye fixed Mark with an unblinking stare, one dot of perception in a mindless landscape.

The music went on, a thin continuity of notes hardly audible above the whisper of the grass. Without a sense of movement, Mark went through the gate and to the foot of the steps leading to the house’s veranda. The music was clearer there, a thin, bitter melody that the old dry house seemed itself to be playing on its withered tendons. Time had warped the boards of the veranda floor so that they twisted like ribs, parts of the carcass of the beached house. Mark moved quietly across them to the window. The glass was dirty. A lace curtain, here as a dream, drifted about his face.

Frightened, hearing the music thicken in the air around him, he looked in.

There was a girl. He sensed rather than saw her, a patch of movement on the dark. Slowly his eyes became used to the gloom and he picked her out, sitting directly across the room from him, her back to the window. In front of her was an ancient upright piano on which she played an old, forgotten tune. Mark saw only the movement of pale white arms and shoulders, a watered blue dress, hair so black that is disappeared into the shadows. She might have been a ghost.

The room was incredible. Above the piano and to both sides the one wall Mark could see was massed with pictures, ancient portraits and prints from an era before any he could name. Crazy faces, bearded and opaque, faded ladies in lace collars haloed in a milky oval or framed by a collar of gilt cardboard and an even more ornate plaster moulding, overdressed children staring with blind savagery at the camera ; the inhabitants of a dead age, their faces as rigid as icons, stared down in implacable disdain and rage at the one living person in the room, a pale girl in a blue dress playing some long-forgotten song on an out-of-tune upright piano.

She stopped playing.

Mark froze, watching her shoulders as they turned. He saw her face for the first time, a pale oval in which two eyes as luminous as those of a lemur provided the single evidence of life. Her mouth was pale, thin, bloodless, fixed with a terrible smile. She stood up, and came towards the window.

Scuttling back across the buckling boards, Mark backed down the steps, ran stumbling through the waste of garden to the street. His vision swam with the black dots of unaccustomed light; inside his head, his brain too seemed dazzled, too confused for any thought but a single obsession. Run.

The hill seemed to tilt under his feet as he ran, so that he scuttled like a desperate animal from side to side, the blind house fronts hemming him in, directing him always downwards, away from the sky, towards the beach.

From above, the beach and its encompassing promenade looked small and inconsequential, a meaningless variation in the smooth uniformity of the city that flowed down on it from the hills. He had never thought of the beach in that way before, as something small, grubby, insignificant. And he had never thought before about the houses, or noticed the way they surrounded the beach, totally cutting it off from everything but the sea, a crust of red brick and pine and bleached brown tile, anonymous and obscene in its remembrance of scabs and dried blood.

Under his feet the road was once again sticky, glutinous. He tore himself out of the muck, stumbled to the footpath and ran on. Now he was at the foot of the hill, but though the incline had disappeared he ran on, past the shattered shops, the shedding trees, the empty, echoing streets. The concrete began to crumble more . . . there was a handrail . . . through a blur of exhaustion he grabbed at it and vaulted towards the pale haze that he sensed somewhere below, a haze of gold. The sand, hot, dry, clean, exploded against his body. Panting, he lay face down, feeling under his hand the pristine innocence of silica, accepting like a sacrament the heat and light that glowed beyond his closed eyes.

The dusk woke him. His daze was so close to death that he was aware of no difference. A primal shock had blinded his mind as an explosion blinds the eye. Blinking, he sat up and looked around, the purple gloom lapping him like a tide. Dark ... the dark fell out of the air, rose from the sand, swam from the land and the sea. But the darkness was more than an absence of light. In it was the hidden soul of the sun, lingering on the empty land.

Faintly he heard the roar of the surf, saw the dim light of a fire further down near the water. He could hear voices, laughter, something like a song. Mark walked towards the fire.

Each night, there was a party on the beach. As the dark came on, people huddled together, close against the dark and the cold. Turning inwards, they played and laughed, then, when the fire had died, crept off to lie under the sand and sleep, if they could.

Mark moved through the outer part of the crowd, ignoring the talk, stepping cautiously around the possessions piled up in separate, secret heaps. Books, radios, towels, bottles whose sun-greened depths threw back the firelight. In the same light, skin and flesh looked pale, sickly. His own, he saw, glancing at his arm, was the same, almost like that of the girl he had seen . . . where was it? When? Years ago, he decided, in a distant place.

Close by the fire, a woman danced, the light making the threadbare veils of her beachcoat as transparent as silk. She danced unnoticed and alone. Beyond the fire there was talk, laughter. At Mark’s side another woman was drawing on an ancient swimming costume, so dried and ragged that the cloth was like the skin of a dead shark cast up and left to rot. As she pulled it over her thighs and hips, the cloth crackled.

Mark walked on, in a dream. Past the fire, there was nothing but the light fading slowly out, and the last lip of surf foam sliding up the beach, to retreat as it touched the fireglow. He walked forward, eager to see what it was, wondering what would hide out here, in the dark, in the silence and the cold. The water was around his waist now, surging up his chest as the waves came calmly on. He pushed off and swam, lazily turning over to let them slide under and around him. Then the breakers were past and he was in the smooth sea. Eyelashes heavy with water, he blinked against the weight, not wanting to close his eyes, not wanting to sleep. But as sleep came inexorably on he felt a slow gathering of understanding inside, a certainty he had never had before.

He had been wrong, he saw now, to leave the beach, wrong to seek absolution in the city’s doomed streets. There was nothing there for him, nor for any of the others ... the others that understood. Their flight from the outside world—how clear it all seemed—had been only part of the journey to grace, one step in a hegira but barely begun. On the beach men plucked up the courage necessary to take the next giant step, and most of them failed. Mark was proud to have found in himself the understanding that would let him leave, to enter the first stage of true identity. The ocean lapped his flesh, laving it quietly away in sparkles of phosphorescence while inside him life bloomed like a cold white tree.

Confidently, Mark swam on, not in the air, but down, into the dark, clean sea. His ears roared briefly, then he was in the ocean’s cold blood. Somewhere, below him, he knew his goal lay hidden, its light mantled in green, the sea creatures swirling down into the vast valley where it lay to worship at the unbelievable jewel gifted to them. Without fear, he swam towards the sea mountains, the peaks of which even now he could see gilded beyond the green. There, he knew, he would find his grail, the sunken, brooding sun.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

All Laced Up

BERTRAM CHANDLER

To the science fiction writer, anything is grist to the mill. Even the simplest object can be made the basis of a story; sf is, after all, a tool rather than a literary form. In “All Laced Up”, Bertram Chandler takes as the subject of a story the cast iron “lace” so common around Sydney’s older suburbs and currently much admired by decorators. His approach to the story is witty and imaginative, and at its centre there is the same glow of insight which motivates the best sf. From now on, we can never take iron lace for granted—nor, for that matter, anything else, no matter how prosaic it may seem.

Though born in Britain, Bertram Chandler has adopted Australia and been adopted by it. Captain of a freighter plying Australian coastal waters, he is undoubtedly the most successful writer of science fiction working in the country at the moment, with some dozens of novels to his credit and a career extending back to the early forties.

Source: New Worlds, November 1961.

* * * *

She said, “We must get some iron lace ...”

I looked up from the Sunday paper, regarded her. She was wearing the rather rapt expression that I have come to associate with inspiration. It becomes her—but it is an expression that I have learned almost to dread.

“Iron lace?” I asked cautiously.

“Yes. Iron lace. You know—or don’t you? That ancient cast-iron railing stuff that you see around the balconies of old terrace houses . . .”

“Hearts and flowers and whatever,” I amplified resignedly. “But what for? We haven’t got a balcony . . .”

“For interior decoration.”

“Interior decoration?”

“A space divider.”

“A space divider!”

“Don’t be so dim,” she told me. “This room—now that we’ve knocked three rooms, including the kitchen, into one— is rather long . . .”

“Like a railway carriage,” I agreed. “Or a railway tunnel...”

“Don’t be so funny!” she snapped. Then the rapt expression returned to her face. “I can see it. From the wall there, to about two thirds of the way across. Iron lace, painted black . . .”

“And picked out in gold . . .”

She looked at me suspiciously, then relaxed. “Yes, you’re right. Just a hint of gold. A sort of . .. shadowing . . .”

I began to catch her enthusiasm. “Subtle,” I contributed.

“Yes. Subtle. But dramatic.” She scooped the Sunday paper off my lap, substituted for it the Saturday one. A slim finger indicated a classified advertisement that she had already ringed with pencil. I read the ad. It had been inserted by the owner of a junkyard, his premises being situated on the outskirts of Parramatta. He had iron lace—sandblasted and ready for installation—for sale. He was open on Sunday.

* * * *

It wasn’t a bad day for a drive—a little on the chilly side, perhaps, but sunny. Swiftly and efficiently Sally piloted the Volkswagen through the city and the suburbs, out on to the Parramatta Road. I was acting as navigator, although at first the job was a sinecure. Instead of studying the road map I was able to keep a keen look-out to port and to starboard, to point out fine examples of the iron lacemaker’s art decorating the balconies of some of the old terrace houses that we passed.

And then I had to stop sight-seeing and start navigating. The junkyard was stuck away at the back of beyond, in the middle of a maze of dirt roads that nobody had yet got around to labelling. Sally was worrying about the springs of the car and I, who had given the brute its weekly wash that morning, was concerned about the paintwork and polish as we shuddered over the ruts, ploughed through the dust. But we found the place eventually. It looked like what it was. There was a ragged fence and beyond it were stacks of doors, heaps of old furniture, sad clusters of archaic baths and gas stoves. There was a neat enough fibreboard office from which, as soon as we stopped the car, the proprietor emerged.

He bade us good-day affably and asked what he could do for us. We said that we were just browsing. He left us to our own devices and, picking our gingerly way through the assorted debris, we browsed.

What was on display outside was just the rubbish. It was in a shed that we found the treasure. It was stacked high, panel after panel of the old iron lace, its delicacy of design revealed by the sandblasting, gleaming with the dull yet pleasant sheen of good cast iron.

The proprietor followed us into the shed.

“And would you be interested?” he asked.

I said that we should be interested.

Sally, fingering an intricate filigree of harps and shamrocks, asked, “How much?”

“Two pounds ten a panel, madam,” he replied.

“Two pounds ten?” she flared.

“Yes,” she was told firmly. “There’s the cost of the sandblasting. And one coat of primer . . .”

“Too much,” she said.

We turned to go.

He said, “Perhaps you might be interested in this . . .”

“No,” said Sally firmly just as I said, “Perhaps.”

The junkman lifted a rag of tarpaulin in a dim corner of the shed. Beneath it was a small stack of panels, of metal railing. It gleamed—but it wasn’t the gleam of cast iron, neither was it that of aluminium. There was something odd about it.

“I can let you have this cheaper,” said the proprietor. “A pound a panel.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Iron lace.”

“It’s not,” said Sally.

“It looks ... interesting,” I said.

I went to the corner, lifted one of the panels. It was heavy, but not as heavy as it would have been had it been iron. The metal felt strangely warm to my fingers. I stood it on its edge, propping it against the stack and the wall, stepped back to get the full effect.

The design was intricate enough—but there were no hearts and flowers, no harps and shamrocks. It was abstract—and yet it was vaguely familiar. I tried to decide what it was that it reminded me of. There were interlocking circles—but they were more than mere circles. There was that odd twist to them . . . I got it then. Mobius Strips.

“It ... It has something,” admitted Sally reluctantly.

“Most people don’t like it,” confessed the junkman, “but perhaps you . . .”

“I didn’t say that I liked it,” said Sally firmly. “Not at that price.”

“Fifteen shillings?”

“Ten.”

“All right. To you—twelve and six.”

“What do you think, Peter?” she asked me.

“It’s . . . It’s different,” I told her cautiously.

“All right. We’ll take six panels.”

“Now?” asked the junkman with a rather strange eagerness.

“No. You said in your advertisement that you delivered. My husband will give you the address.”

And that was that.

* * * *

We sat in our chairs and looked at our space divider. It had taken the coating of black matt paint well enough and we had decided that its design was sufficiently dramatic to make the use of gold trimming unnecessary. Dramatic? It was that all right. It was .. . disturbing.

I said, between sips of my drink, “I had a couple of beers with Fred at lunchtime today.”

“Oh? What’s new with him?”

“He’s settling down at the Courier. They’ve got him doing features now.”

“What sort of features?”

“Haunts. Poltergeists and such. The Courier always has been keen on the supernatural or the paranormal or whatever you care to call it.”

“Anything to build up circulation among the credulous.”

“They sent him out to investigate and write up a haunted junkyard, Parramatta way ...”

“A haunted junkyard?” she asked, with awakening interest.

“Was the junkman flogging old tombstones?”

“No. The haunting was in the shed where he kept his iron lace. It appears that every morning he’d find it flung all over the place.”

“What junkman was it?” she demanded sharply.

“He didn’t say . . .”

“And you didn’t ask. Of course.”

I was startled by the expression on her face. “What’s all the flap about, Sally?”

“But you don’t believe . . .”

“I’m an agnostic. I neither believe nor disbelieve.”

“Then why . . .?”

“Why was the junkman, our junkman, so keen to get rid of this iron lace?” she said, pointing.

“But you wanted it.”

“I didn’t really. It was just the price.”

I attempted to reason with her. “I’ve never heard of haunted iron lace. Besides, this stuff isn’t old. The design is . . . contemporary. Modern...”

“Too modern,” she said.

I began to get what she was driving at. That delicately wrought metal had an alien quality—but it was alien, somehow, in a temporal sense. I got up, refilled our glasses and then, when I was seated again, began to play with ideas, ludicrous ideas, hoping thereby to laugh Sally out of her disturbingly fey mood.

“I see it now,” I told her. “I can visualize those panels back where they belong—in the engine-room of a ship, an interstellar ship. They’re all part of the Interstellar Drive, the Space Warp. The ship must have crashed near here, and parts of her found their way into the junkyard. And even though there’s no power source, there’s enough residual energy for the wreckage of the Drive to try to warp Space, to try to sling us from here to Alpha Centauri in three seconds flat ...”

She grinned. “You read too much science fiction, Peter,” she told me.

“There’s no such thing as too much—not if it’s good stuff. And, anyhow, Interstellar Drives are far more credible than ghosts and hauntings.”

“They are not,” she stated firmly.

“They are” I stated more firmly.

And the resultant, quite enjoyable argument, lasted us through dinner and until bedtime.

* * * *

It was at three in the morning that I was awakened.

There was that odd, grating noise coming from the living room. It was too loud to be made by a mouse or a rat and, so far as we knew, there were no possums in this inner suburb. Sally was still sleeping. She liked her sleep and hated to be disturbed. So, carefully, I slid out from between the sheets on my side of the bed, thrust my feet into my slippers, picked up my dressing gown from the chair and got into it. Somehow the thought of human intruders did not cross my mind. There was nothing in the house to tempt a burglar. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding I was sure that I should find a possum in the living room. Or a family of possums.

I walked softly to the door, opened it.

There was moonlight coming through the front window, but its illumination was not necessary. The metal panels were glowing with their own light—a cold, blue luminescence. And they had torn themselves loose from their fastenings—that had been the noise that had disturbed me—and were moving, slowly, purposively.

I was afraid.

I was too afraid to cry out. All I could do was to stand there and watch the inanimate shockingly become animate, watch the panels slide and shift, stare as they arranged themselves into a hexagonal.

And then, immediately, the whining started—thin, high, almost supersonic at first. Thin and high it was and then, as it became louder, its tone deepened, and as it deepened so the colour of the moonlight changed, became more and more ruddy until the room was filled with rose-tinted shadows.

Inside the hexagon the shadows shifted and stirred, coalesced, took form.

There was a woman there.

Tall she was, breasts high and proud under the loosely fitting sweater, legs long and slim in their tight jeans. Her pale golden hair was pulled back in a pony tail. There was a glittering, complex bracelet on her left wrist and with her right hand she did something to it, made some adjustment. The humming died to a barely audible murmur. She stooped gracefully, slid one of the panels aside and stepped into the room.

“Made the scene, Dad,” she announced.

I gaped at her.

“Don’tcha dig, man?” she demanded.

“I do not,” I managed to say.

“A square,” she stated rather than asked.

“You could call me that,” I admitted.

Her wide, generous mouth displayed perfect teeth as she smiled. She said, “I was told that squares were a dying race in this period. It would seem that they are not.”

“Far from it,” I agreed.

She smiled again. “Let me introduce myself. I am Lorn Verrill. Doctor Lorn Verrill. The Time Warp is my invention.” She waved a hand airily towards the panels. “I had to send the cage back first, of course, but it was broken up before I could follow it. I have been trying to reassemble it by remote control. At last I succeeded.” She stood with her hands on her hips, surveying the room. “And so this is a typical twentieth century pad,” she remarked.

“Not so typical!” snapped a sharp female voice.

I turned, saw that Sally had come out of the bedroom. She had put on her robe, but since it was transparent rather than translucent and worn over nothing at all the effect was decorative but far from modest.

She demanded, “Peter, who is this woman?”

“Her name,” I said carefully, “seems to be Lorn Verrill. Doctor Lorn Verrill.” I babbled on. “A doctorate in physics, maybe, or philosophy . . .”

Lorn Verrill laughed pleasantly. “You assume too much, Peter. My degree is in one of the arts. D.I.D., if you must know.”

I said, “But you must be a scientist. That . . . That . . .” I gestured towards the broken hexagon. “That Time Warp ...”

“Just a flair for the higher mathematics,” she said modestly.

“Then what the hell does D.I.D. stand for?” demanded Sally crossly.

“Doctor of Interior Decorating, of course, duckie,” said Lorn.

Sally swore softly and then went to the bookcase that afforded stowage for all sorts of things in addition to books. She opened the bottle locker door, poured herself a stiff whisky. She strode to the nearest chair, plumped down into it, regarded us balefully over the rim of her glass.

She said, “This is rather much. This is rather too much. I am woken up at half past three in the bloody morning and I find my husband entertaining a blonde beatnik who says that she’s a D.D. . . .”

“Not D.D.,” I corrected her. “D.I.D.”

“So you’re on her side. You would be.” She lowered the level of the whisky in her glass appreciably. “How do you know she’s not a ghost? Or something worse? Like . . . Like a succubus ...”

“Whoever heard of a succubus wearing jeans?” I asked reasonably enough.

“There has to be a first time for everything. Anyhow, those jeans are so tight they might as well have been painted on.”

“I wore what I thought would be an appropriate costume for this century,” Lorn Verrill told her stiffly.

“It could be appropriate at that,” said Sally nastily.

“Your own attire,” snapped the time traveller, “is hardly decent.”

“This is my home,” said Sally, “and I wear what I damn’ well please inside these four walls. And if you don’t like it— there’s the door.”

I decided that it was time to pour oil—or alcohol—on the troubled waters. And I wanted a drink myself. I asked our visitor, “Whisky? Rum?”

“In that rig,” suggested Sally, “a glass of thick, treacly muscat might be the shot.”

“We haven’t got any,” I said shortly. Then, “Brandy? Sherry? Port?”

“Brandy, if I may,” said Lorn Verrill politely.

I poured two generous dollops into two snifters, handed one to Lorn Verrill. I refilled Sally’s glass. I said, “Here’s mud in your eye,” but the two women ignored me.

“And now,” said Sally, when gullets had been wetted, “perhaps you will favour us with an explanation. It had better be a good one.”

“But it’s all so simple,” said the other. “My name is Lorn Verrill. I am a Doctor of Interior Decorating, but my hobby is the study of mathematics. I stumbled upon the principle of the Time Warp and, naturally, decided to use the device for my own professional ends . . .”

“Which are?” demanded Sally suspiciously.

“In my century there is a craze for old things. Really old. Period stuff. And I thought that I might be able to pick up such items cheaply in the Past. My Past.”

Sally is a shrewd businesswoman. She said, “And how would you pay for your purchases?”

“Barter, of course. I shall have to operate through contacts who will give me what I want in return for what I give them. And they will be able to sell the merchandise from my century.”

“What sort of merchandise?” I asked.

She extended her left hand. On her wrist, above that intricate bracelet which we now recognized as a control panel in miniature, was a beautiful watch, a piece of personal machinery that was obviously of the highest quality.

“These timepieces,” she told us. “Atomic powered. Virtually everlasting.”

“What about something really good?” I asked her—although nobody could possibly have said that the watch was not good. “Anti-gravity, or the interstellar drive?”

“And shunt the world on to a different Time Track?” she countered. “No thanks. I like my world the way it is. I like me the way I am. But small luxury items will not influence the course of history.”

“They will,” I said, “if anybody opens ‘em up to see what makes ‘em tick.”

“They will never go wrong,” she assured me. “And they cannot be opened. And if anybody should try to break one open he will get no more than a blob of fused metal for his pains.”

“Miss Verrill has something,” said Sally thoughtfully.

“If she comes from the Future,” I said, suddenly dubious.

“Switch on all the lights, Peter,” ordered Sally. I obeyed her. “Look at that sweater,” she said.”Look at those jeans ...”

“What about them?”

“Men” said Sally scornfully. “It’s obvious to the trained eye that those fabrics are far superior to any that we have. Superior—and different. Very different. That sweater, for example .. .”

“Venusian spider silk,” Lorn Verrill told us.

“And the jeans?”

“Multicron.”

“You see? Or don’t you? Not that it matters.” She turned again to our visitor. “Now, Miss Verrill, we’re willing to go into business with you. Perhaps if you can give us some idea of what you want . . .”

“This is an exploratory trip, Mrs . . .”

“You can call me Sally.”

“This is an exploratory trip, Sally, and my time is limited.” She glanced either at the watch or the control panel on the bracelet, or at both. “But I have two hours in hand ...”

“Get dressed, Peter!” Sally snapped. “You’ll excuse us a few minutes, Lorn, won’t you?”

“Help yourself to another drink if you like,” I added.

* * * *

“This is the chance of a lifetime!” Sally whispered fiercely, inserting a shapely leg into one leg of her own jeans.

“It could be,” I agreed. “But what will she want?”

“Just what everybody is wanting now. Hurry up, you clot!”

I hurried, Sally hurried. Together we almost ran back into the living room, were relieved to find Lorn Verrill still there. We swept her out of the back of the house and into the car. I ran to open the driveway gate—and then had to run to get aboard the vehicle as it charged out into the street. Then there was delay, for which I was cursed, when Lorn Verrill was obliged to get out of the front seat to allow me to get into the back. But we got under way and in a very short time had embarked upon a moonlight tour of Paddington.

That old iron lace, on the old, reconditioned terrace houses, was good. With its bright new paint it stood out bravely in the light of our headlamps, in the light of the full moon. I could hear Lorn Verrill exclaiming, “But this is lovely! What couldn’t I do with that?” And I heard Sally say, “And the annoying part of it all is that only a few years ago this iron lace was regarded as rubbish. You could get it for nothing!” And then the drive was over and we were pulling to a stop outside our house. Lorn Verrill was anxious and impatient, brushing past me as I opened the front door, running to her hexagon of metal panels. She was inside the hexagon, pulling the open panel into place, as Sally came in.

“Sorry,” she called. “Time short. Can’t stay. Thank you!”

The deep humming swelled in volume and the moonlight, and the light of the one lamp that we had left burning assumed a ruddy tinge. And then the humming became a thin, intolerable whine, painful to the ears, and the tall form of our visitor inside the cage flickered and faded, flickered and faded and was gone. And the lights were back to normal, and the room was normal save for the hexagonal grouping of the panels and there was an oppressive silence broken by Sally, who said, “We’re on to a good thing, Peter, a good thing.”

She’s a good businesswoman, is Sally.

But interior decorators, even in this day and age, are good businesswomen too, and anybody with a Doctorate in that art or science must be an exceptionally good businesswoman.

We went back to bed to try to get some sleep—and surprisingly, we did sleep. And when the alarm clock awakened us we talked for a while to convince ourselves that we had not shared a particularly vivid dream.

Sally was first out of bed. I heard her cry out from the living room. I ran to see what it was that had excited and distressed her.

Our space divider was gone.

On the carpet, where its panels had been rearranged to form a hexagon, there were two parcels—a small one and a large one. And there was a very commonplace looking envelope addressed in a neat hand, Peter and Sally.

Sally tore open the envelope. Inside it was a single sheet of thick, creamy notepaper with an embossed letter heading. I read, over Sally’s shoulder, Lorn Verrill, D.I.D. Vegan Trust Building, Laurentian Square, Atlantia. Underneath the address had been written, The date doesn’t matter.

The letter itself was short and to the point.

Dear Peter and Sally,

Sorry to have to do this to you, but I’m not in business for my health and must buy in the cheapest market as well as selling in the dearest. But please accept the accompanying small tokens of my regard.

Sincerely,

Lorn Verrill.

The wrapping of the parcels was a thick plastic that, once the seal was broken, vapourised into a fragrant mist. In the small one, addressed to myself, was one of the watches. In the larger one addressed to Sally, was a sweater of the Venusian spider silk and a pair of the multicron jeans.

It’s a good watch. By any normal standards it’s a perfect watch. And that spider silk sweater washes and wears and wears and still looks as new as it did the day it was unpacked. And multicron is indeed a miracle fabric; if the simple directions on the leaflet that came with the jeans are followed the garment can be made to change colour, as desired, with every wash, and can be shrunk to form matador pants or shorts, or lengthened to make elegant tapered slacks. (An industrial chemist of our acquaintance to whom Sally gave a snipping for analysis told us crossly, after spending a frustrating month working on it, that he was a chemist and not a nuclear physicist and pleaded with us to tell him where we had obtained the material).

But there’s been no real pleasure from the gifts.

For one thing, we haven’t been able to replace our space divider; iron lace is more fantastically expensive with every passing day. And it’s vanishing. Have you noticed? On Thursday you might admire a terrace house with something especially elegant decorating its balcony, and on Friday that same terrace house will exhibit a glassed-in balcony, and that balcony will look as though it’s been there for years. And you’ll have the uneasy feeling that there’s something wrong somewhere, or somewhen, and then decide that your memory is playing tricks on you.

And there seems to be a growing number of expensive-looking wristwatches—watches without winding knobs, watches whose cases, although gleaming, show the subtle signs of years of wear. And Sally tells me that she is always spotting women, middle-aged or elderly women, wearing skirts or dresses obviously made from multicron.

There’s no doubt about it.

Somewhen in the Past that shrewd businesswoman from the Future has the game all laced up.

<<Contents>>

* * * *

Strong Attraction

RON SMITH

Australian science fiction seems characterized by its uneasiness, its refusal to accept as valid many of the basic conceptions about relationships and individuality. We have few writers celebrating the joy of living or the eternal adaptability of man; even stories of action and adventure have in them a melancholy streak. “Strong Attraction”, though written by American-born Ron Smith, is very much in this style. His story of sexual complexities on an alien planet seems a suitable companion piece to Stephen Cook’s “Final Flower” and the irreverent cynicism of “All My Yesterdays”. One searches unsuccessfully in these stories for any illusion left intact, any dream unshuttered.

Ron Smith left the United States some years ago, abandoning a substantial reputation as a publisher of “little magazines” and a short story writer. Since arriving here, he has become a well-known editor and free-lance writer, and is currently an executive in a large Sydney publishing firm.

This story has not previously been published.

* * * *

I was tired, although the day was only half over. More than tired, I missed the things of Earth, and with this homesickness I had become thoughtful and weary of work. The mood had come over me out in the field that morning. I had decided then to walk home for lunch, and now I was following the road that cut through the evenly furrowed fields which stood ready for planting. Ahead of me the sun had burnished the land with the heat of its passing. I knew that I would be glad when the day was finished.

Perhaps I wasn’t cut out to be a colonist. The idea had occurred to me before. But then, who is? The work is hard and you have to adjust to conditions and routines that no one would put up with for a minute back on Earth. The only reason you agreed to do it was the promise of your own land, the freedom to move about, to look from your house and see empty space and mountains and green fields growing, when the time came and they did grow, in place of endless buildings and people everywhere. It seemed like reason enough when you were on Earth. And so you took the chance even though the promised income was less than half what you were making. Then later you walked home through the fields and sometimes wondered why.

I looked at the distant hills, red and ochre in the sunlight. There, among the rocks and beyond, down to the roaring sea, lived the landors—the landies we called them. They were the natives of the planet, but I didn’t know too much about them. Only what I had read in the “Initial Orientation Report” supplied to us by the Interstellar Colonial Office, which said that the Anthropological Survey Team had found them to be primitive, with a culture at the food-gathering stage. They didn’t kill anything for food except small animals and fish. Completely harmless. In fact, we were considered to be such a potential threat to their survival that all colonists were forbidden to go any further west than the edge of the mountains. So we rarely saw them, except for the few who did wander down, although there were more of them lately than there had been at first. We spoke their language fluently—that had been one of the requirements of our training—but there wasn’t much communication because they were a very simple, unsophisticated people. That is, if you could call them “people”.

They were built like humans, of course. Two arms, two legs, a head, and so on. They weren’t mammals though. Laid eggs and the young fed themselves from birth, so far as we knew. No one had actually seen any real young ones, nor had they seen any females, not even the Survey Team. I didn’t know why exactly. They were around somewhere, no doubting that. But the males and females didn’t live together, didn’t share their camps or their food or anything. The males hung together in packs, more or less, but there wasn’t anything you might call an integrated culture. They were odd, the landies, from our point of view.

And they were ugly by our standards, as well. I remembered a few weeks after we had landed, when the first one showed up in the settlement. Where I was working helping build Andrew Bradford’s house, a number of the women took fright when they saw the landie and actually ran off. They were used to them now, though, and didn’t mind talking to them. In fact, my wife had mentioned a few times that she occasionally had a few words with one that came around. I figured Barbara’s curiosity had been bound to win out over the landie’s looks in the long run. I hadn’t spoken to one myself for months.

But about how ugly they were. I suppose they looked a little like snakes. Their skin, that is. Scaly, with a bright shine like a snake has that looks like slime only isn’t. Then their faces were sort of tough and leathery and instead of cheeks there were thick layers of scarlet-coloured skin that looked like birthmark blotches. They didn’t have any hair at all and they gave off an odour that was extremely annoying. You could smell them distinctly about six feet off. They didn’t wear any clothes either, which we didn’t like, but the Colonial Office said to leave them strictly alone, so we had to.

There were sixty-seven dwellings in the settlement, since almost all of the 138 colonists were married couples entitled to their own home. There were no children—yet. They would come later, when the colony was stabilized and self-supporting. Our house was the seventh on the left going down the main and only street towards the mountains. It had a fence around it and a yard, but there wasn’t anything growing in the yard. The grass and the flowers hadn’t come up yet. All the other houses had fences and yards like ours. It couldn’t be helped. Individuality was too expensive everywhere these days.

The street was very quiet. Most of the women were at work too, in the nearby fields, in the hydroponics building or in the library where the tapes still hadn’t all been catalogued. We didn’t have any housewives. Barbara was a radio technician and she didn’t have much to do yet, but she was probably over in the radio room fooling around with the equipment. If she wasn’t home for lunch, I planned on dropping around there.

I didn’t knock. You don’t when you enter your own house. To get to the kitchen I had to pass the bedroom door. It was closed but I could smell him. It was faint but I noticed it because the sharp, irritating aroma was unlike anything anyone has ever smelled on Earth.

It still took a few seconds for me to accept the realization of what it was. It was the last thing I would have expected. A native, a landor, in my bedroom. Why? It simply didn’t make sense. Even then my mind sought a reasonable explanation. There wasn’t one but I stood in a kind of stupor, not wanting to think about the possibility that he was in there invited. Maybe I should have continued to disbelieve my senses, gone on in the kitchen and forgotten about it. Maybe. I opened the bedroom door instead.

The native heard me but Barbara didn’t seem to, not at first. He leaped to his feet at the sound I made and stood staring at me.

I stared back. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. My God, it wasn’t possible. Barbara lay on the bed looking at me with a dazed, half-conscious expression, as if she was forcing herself to see me. She was naked and she had been making love with him. There wasn’t any doubt about that. I had seen her. It wasn’t rape.

The landor moved quickly to the bedroom window and stepped out of it. Standing on the ground below he looked back at us, his large round lidless eyes studying me emotionlessly. I could see no remorse, no guilt in those eyes. But how could I? What would those emotions mean to him?

Then he turned and was gone. I could have stopped him, I suppose. I could have tried. But I wasn’t thinking, my mind wasn’t functioning. It simply couldn’t be true; that was all that was in my head.

But it was true. Barbara was looking at me with wide eyes and I could see the pain in them, but she didn’t look like she was going to cry. She was holding her hand over her mouth in what I thought even then was a melodramatic gesture.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “Oh God, Jack, I’m sorry.”

It seemed funny somehow. That is probably what she would have said if I’d found her with Wilkes, the radio man, or some other Earthman. Under the circumstances, her saying that seemed ludicrous. Perhaps it was an emotional reaction on my part: I wanted to cry; I laughed instead.

She got up from the bed and started putting her clothes on. They were lying in a pile on the floor.

I turned without having said anything to her and walked to the back of the house. I stood in the kitchen looking out the back door, then I stepped outside and to my right I could look over the rocky ground that looked like a desert because the native plants were leafless and stood against the sky like thin white and grey tangles of string, and I could see the bright hills in the distance. That was where he would go.

I don’t know how long I stood looking at those hills. My mind was empty. All thought seemed to have been siphoned from it, but I realize that on a subconscious level I was planning. My emotions were tumbling around in the pit of my stomach and my mind was responding with a plan for relieving the pressure inside me. I wanted revenge. Some people might want to think of a better name for it, but when some thing you love is taken from you, along with your self-respect, it isn’t justice that you want.

Barbara came up behind me and whispered my name.

I turned and faced her.

“Can we talk about it?”

“Yes,” I said with effort. “Yes, you can talk about it.”

“Jack, you know me, don’t you? We’ve been married ten years, and you know me pretty well.”

“I guess I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. Look, darling, I’ve never been unfaithful to you. You know that. I never wanted to. I didn’t want to now. I’m happy with you, Jack, and all I ever wanted was our own place and then some kids and, Jack ...”

She started to cry after all. I thought about taking her in my arms, but to do so seemed to require too much effort. I couldn’t lift my arms. I couldn’t summon the will to lift them. I could only stand there and look at her sobbing and leaning her weight against the wall. Maybe she would fall down at my feet and sob for forgiveness and that would be worse. I wouldn’t be able to bend down and lift her up either. She seemed to exist in some other world, a strange being surrounded by a force field that I couldn’t penetrate.

“Remember Bill Myers, Jack?”

I nodded.

“And that drunken party we had and he wanted to make love to me and the only way you could cool him off was to dunk him in the bath? That was funny, wasn’t it?” Her voice pleaded with me to understand. I couldn’t even think what it was I was supposed to understand. “I could have gone to bed with him, Jack. I had to wake you up to help me, remember? I could have then. I could have lots of times. I never wanted to.”

She walked unsteadily back through the doorway. I saw her collapse into one of the tube chairs and lay her head on the kitchen table. When I followed, she lifted her head, her eyes clear and determined through the tears. “I don’t think I can explain it to you, Jack. I don’t understand myself, not really.” I noticed that even now, crying, with her long blonde hair all tangled, she was lovely, and I could remember, in an unreal haze dissociated from any sense of time, wanting her. “I could say he forced me or hypnotized me or something. I’m not saying that. To begin with he horrified me. When he first came around I had to force myself to sit and talk to him. And then after a while, just sitting and talking to him, having a simple conversation about his way of life, I began to feel attracted to him. I began to want him. I didn’t realize what was happening to me until . . . until it happened. And after the first time, after he left, I felt terrible. I hated myself. I thought of killing myself. I felt so disgusting and filthy I almost went out of my mind. But that has passed…Now, even when he is away, although I feel miserably guilty, I remember how I feel when he’s here ... Jack, it has something to do with his smell...”

I suppose if I hadn’t made a move then I might have hurt her. Maybe I realized it and that was why I left just then. I didn’t say anything to her. I simply walked out of the house. But in my mind I heard her voice, over and over, as if she hadn’t been a real person talking to me, only a record that had got stuck on a groove saying after the first time, after the first time, after the first time . . .

After the first time there was the second, and the third, and the fourth ... It wasn’t a mental aberration, she wasn’t crazy. The landor hadn’t forced her. My God, she had gone to bed with a dirty, stinking native lizard and she wasn’t even sorry any longer. She had wanted to spare my feelings, I suppose, but she hadn’t hidden the fact that she liked it.

I don’t remember walking the mile to where most of the men were working. I don’t remember thinking anything. But somehow I got there.

“Hey, you’re late,” Ralph Cannon called to me good-naturedly. “Don’t take you that long to eat your lunch, does it?”

I had to concentrate so that I wouldn’t walk up and hit him. I stood looking at them. Cal Brayson was driving the tractor, digging up the earth. A couple of dozen other men were spraying the first layer of chemical fertilizer. A few others were standing around. Altogether there were seventy men in the colony. Over half of them were here.

I had to force the words out. “I just found my wife in bed with someone,” I said.

They stared at me. Some of them were shocked, some embarrassed. Probably most of them felt I was a fool at that moment for saying what I’d said instead of forgetting about it and carrying on as if it hadn’t happened. Even in a colony where the men and women were about equal in number, jealousy was pretty foolish. All it could accomplish in the end was a lot of trouble. And of course, if it had been another man I would never have said anything about it.

“It was a native,” I said. “A landie.”

That got them. There was a chorus of gasps and exclamations and then they began dropping their equipment and gathering around me.

“A landie?”

“Jack, what are you------”

“It’s the heat. Jack, sit down.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Not Barbara, fellow. What is it, you have a fall or something?”

“I saw them,” I said. “The two of them. It’s true.”

They quieted down and just stood there watching me, to see if I would somehow betray the fact that I’d gone off my head. I had to be crazy. I could see them thinking that.

I would have hoped for the same thing if I’d been them.

“All right,” Cal said at last. He was a tall man, with black hair and a taste for running things. “What are we going to do about this?”

“I’m going after him,” I said. “I feel I have to.”

One of the men shook his head. “If the Colonial Office finds out we’ve hurt one of them, we’ll be shipped home for sure.”

Cal looked at him, then back at me. “Doesn’t matter. Jack is right. God knows how it happened. I mean—Jack, I’m sorry —I don’t know how Barbara could have done it. I wouldn’t have thought an Earthwoman could be that low—it doesn’t figure, does it? But it isn’t going to happen again. And we’ve got to go get him and set an example and then we’ll know it won’t happen again.”

There was a general murmur of assent. “Right,” Cal said, in full command now. “We’ll get every man in the place. Joe, Randy, Reg, you go around and tell everybody, but keep it away from the women. We’ll meet outside the settlement, on the side towards the mountains. Won’t be able to miss each other on that flat country. Okay, get going.”

“The rest of us will go get the weapons at the armoury,” I said. “Come on.”

There were plenty of weapons, though most of them were only sonic stun-guns, good for killing small game but only enough to knock a full-grown man down. Still, that would do to stop the landie long enough to get him. We had about a dozen needle guns. They’d kill a dragon.

Out on the rocky plain we waited for the rest of the men. After a while we counted sixty-eight. Two were staying behind at the settlement. Reg had told a few of the women who had been inquisitive that a tribe of landies had trampled one of our fields and we were going to catch them and have it out about which territory was taboo.

It took us an hour to reach the foothills. Nobody did much talking. We marched across that wind-washed plain like a storm cloud, full of fury, resentment and hate, carrying our lightning and our thunder with us.

There were a few whispered conversations and I heard Barbara’s name mentioned a few times, but I didn’t pay any attention. I hadn’t thought about her at all, not consciously. I didn’t want to.

Once in a while someone would give a cry, like “Shoot the first one you see!” or “Don’t kill him right off!” That’s the way a group of men can work themselves up when they let their emotions grip them, when they feel threatened. I don’t think anyone knew it, but there was a lot of fear in us as we made our way towards those mountains.

The foothills were steep and covered with a thick brush. We had to push our way through masses of thin, spidery branches. A few of the smaller plants had rudimentary leaves, with more red in them than green, but the larger ones had no leaves at all. Their mass of white limbs shone in the sunlight because of the silicon in them which trapped energy from the sun.

We had to watch out for cliffs and gullies because the brush was deceiving. Since you could see through the branches you tended to assume you could detect with ease any change in the terrain, but the brush was too thick for that. The hills were cut by sharp ravines, up to fifty feet deep, and it would have been easy to step over the edge of one. It was too easy to do, in fact.

That was how we found the landie.

Jim Hawthorne was over to the left of me about two hundred feet. We were both pushing up the same hill. I was walking along the lip of a gully. You could hardly see it because the brush covered it completely, growing down both sides and along the bottom. I figured it went straight up the hill, but it didn’t. About three-quarters of the way it cut to the left, probably to avoid hard rock under the ground at that point. Anyway, Jim didn’t see it and he walked over the edge. It was about twenty feet deep, but the brush broke his fall. He made quite a racket tumbling down, though.

When I saw him disappear and heard what was happening, I ran over as quickly as I could. I got scratched doing it and my pants were torn up pretty badly.

I got to the edge where he had gone over and scrambled down. When I got to the bottom he was picking himself up and was staring back up the wall of the gully. For a minute I thought he was in shock. His eyes were round ovals and he seemed in a daze.

“Up there,” he said and pointed halfway up the side. “I saw one.”

I whirled around and looked but could see nothing.

Jim raised his gun and started up. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a cave. He’s hiding in it.”

I grasped my needle gun tightly and we went up together. You couldn’t see the hole very clearly. It was covered with brush. But Jim had rolled right over it and limbs were smashed flat a bit so we could just see into the dark interior.

There was a landie in there all right. We both raised our guns.

“Come out,” Jim growled in the landor language. We were both in such a keyed-up state it’s a wonder one of us didn’t shoot into the hole without stopping to think about it. Instead, I poked my head down at the opening and peered in. Couldn’t see much. The hole went back about five feet and the landie was cowering at the back of it. The hole was narrow. That made the native pretty small. Smaller than I’d ever seen one.

I turned to Jim. “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Get some of the others.”

He looked at me quizzically but didn’t say anything. He turned and started off, yelling and waving his gun. “Hey, hey! Over here! We got him! Over here!”

It wasn’t long before a dozen of us were clustered around the opening in the rock. “One of us has to go in,” I said.

“To hell with that,” Ralph said. “Stick a stun gun in and let him have a few blasts and he’ll come out soon enough.” He cupped his hands together and yelled into the hole. “Come out of there, you, or we hit you with our lightning.” The natives knew about lightning, but not about guns.

I turned to him and shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’ll go in. We can’t shoot it. It’s a female.”

There was a murmur and they stared at me disconcertedly.

Ralph and Jim stuck their heads inside the opening. A few seconds later they straightened up.

“By God, I guess you’re right.”

“Female all right.”

“This is the first one anybody’s seen,” someone else said.

“Why’s it hiding out in the cave?” Cal asked. “Couldn’t be hiding from us, could it?”

“Well,” I said. “We speak the language, don’t we? I’ll go in and get her and we’ll ask.”

There was general agreement, so I started crawling in. I hadn’t got very far when she began screaming. It was a loud, piercing screech, especially disturbing in that small place. When I crawled to the end and spoke to her again it didn’t have any effect. She didn’t try to scratch me or hit me or anything. She just screamed.

I grabbed her leg and she didn’t struggle. I looked into her eyes, which were oval and black and lidless. There was an opaque film that slid over them when the landies wanted to shut their eyes, but hers were wide open. I noticed for the first time that the smell was different. The odour should have been noticeable from outside, I realized, but even in those close quarters there wasn’t any smell, except a mild sort of earthy aroma that didn’t bother me particularly.

This was a female landor all right. She didn’t have breasts, of course, and, except for her size and lack of aroma, looked very much like the male. If she hadn’t been naked you could never have been sure.

When I had pulled her all the way out by the ankles, she still hadn’t stopped screaming.

She sat flat against the rock wall looking up at us. “It’s odd,” I said. “She’s scared to death, but all she does is yell. No resistance in her at all.”

“Ugly damned thing,” Ralph commented.

“Be still,” I commanded her. She stopped screaming, but she continued a wailing sort of whimper for a time. She was looking at us carefully, her eyes darting from man to man. I could tell by her expression she was confused. I don’t think her mind could cope with what she was seeing—a group of aliens standing around her, whose appearance and clothing and weapons were beyond her comprehension. She had never seen one of us before, so her confusion wasn’t surprising. But something else about her was. I had an idea she wasn’t screaming because we were aliens, something horrible that was beyond her experience. Watching her now, I felt there was something else frightening her. The whole of her behaviour seemed like a reflex, like a mouse standing hypnotized when cornered by a snake. Not resisting, not running, the fear becoming a sort of weird ecstasy, a sacrifice ...

“Are you afraid of us?” I asked.

“Hell of a question,” someone behind me murmured, but I paid no attention. I figured it would be hard to get through to her, yet I wanted to try. I spoke as softly as I could, using the alien language, a harsh-sounding vocal pattern with no subtleties of expression to make the job of communication easier. I looked directly into her eyes and she returned the stare. As long as I spoke, her gaze never wavered from mine and she seemed to calm down rapidly.

“We won’t hurt you,” I said. “Do you think we will hurt you?” There was no response, no reaction.

“What do you think we would do with you? Why did you scream?”

“Hurt,” she mumbled and the puzzled look on her face deepened. She was trying to work something out. She expected something to happen and it wasn’t happening. I felt sure that was it.

“But we won’t hurt you,” I said. “We are men from far away. We don’t hurt landor women.” She probably wouldn’t understand the concept of men from far away, I realized. The notion of far away meant nothing more in her language than something that wasn’t “here”.

She reached out a hand and touched the leg of my trousers. She looked closely at them and now her quizzical expression was undeniable. The trance-like state of fear seemed to have passed. Finally she looked back at my face, but she didn’t say anything.

How could I explain clothes to her? I tried to think. “Covering,” I said. “From the wind. The sun. The rain.”

“You not male?” she asked.

“Yes. We all are. Our clothes cover . ..” The fear suddenly brushed the curiosity from her face and she opened her mouth to scream.

But she didn’t. She thought of something else and she sniffed. Her nostrils were only openings in the skin, without external cartilage, but they quivered noticeably.

“No smell,” she said, then considered the problem a few moments longer. “Little smell. Different. No want you.”

Before we could stop her she had turned and scrambled back into the hole.

The men cried out and Ralph started in after her, but I stopped him.

I shook my head. “No point in it,” I said. “She’s not what we’re after. Anyway, didn’t you hear? She doesn’t want us.”

A couple of the men smiled at that. I hadn’t said it as a joke.

We spent the rest of the day climbing over rocks and pushing our way through bush that didn’t improve our temper any. Once we saw a landor male—at least, we assumed it was a male —up on the slope of the mountain, but he quickly disappeared down a canyon cut between two large outcroppings of rock that looked like purple sandstone but was as hard as granite.

He was miles away from us and there was no chance of catching him.

We raced the sun across the plain leading to the settlement. We lost. It was dark when we got back.

There weren’t any lights on except in the radio shed and the armoury. That was the first thing that made me nervous. The other was the noise. There wasn’t any. We walked down the street and the men started rushing into their houses, but I knew what had happened before they started running back out again yelling in angry, frightened voices down the silent village street.

“She’s gone. My wife is gone! The women! Where are the women?” The cry was an echo, repeating itself behind me as I walked down the street, as if it were a single cry that I myself was yelling into the emptiness.

Gone. They were gone. Ralph came running out of the building where we held our weekly meetings. I guess you would call it our town hall.

“Brad and Phil,” he yelled. “They’re in here!” His short, broad frame was shaking and his brown, heavy-featured face was creased with confusion. Ralph knew about farming, but he didn’t understand this. He turned and ran back into the building.

I turned and walked in after him. Others came hurrying past me. I didn’t have the energy to run. I was already beaten. We all were.

The two men had been knocked on the head and tied up. Then they had been dragged into the main building where they would be easily found.

“Those dirty, slimy . . .” Ralph was muttering as he untied them. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go after them. And we’ll slaughter the lot. Females too. Wipe them out.”

There were mumbled assents from the men standing around him.

“They didn’t do it,” I said and everyone looked at me.

“What the hell do you mean?” Cal shouted in my face, taking a stance that meant he was again assuming the position of leader-spokesman. “What are you saying?” He was close to pounding me in the face. They were all wishing for something, someone, to take their rage and frustration out on at that moment. I was past that.

Brad was conscious now and looking up at me curiously. “Ask him,” I said, pointing.

Everyone looked at the two men on the floor, one sitting up now rubbing his head. “My wife,” Brad said. “We were talking out on the street. A lot of the women were standing around. Betty pointed behind me and said there was a landie coming. I turned around and ... Where is she? Why did she do it?”

He studied the faces around him and then without saying any more got up and ran out the door. His house was empty too, but he had to have a look.

Everyone was watching me now. Their faces were grim and probably some of them would have cried if they had been alone.

“How do you know it wasn’t a pack of landies came in here and attacked Brad and Phil and made off with the women? That’s what I think.”

I smiled at him sadly. “A pack of landies came in and carried off sixty-eight civilized, armed women? Besides, you heard Brad.”

“Maybe he doesn’t remember it right. Maybe ...”

I shrugged.

“Maybe the landies killed them,” someone said. “Maybe the bodies . . .”

I shook my head. “The report, remember? The landors aren’t violent, they have no weapons except sticks. It would be completely against their nature to kill anyone.”

“What do you think happened?” Cal asked angrily.

“I think Barbara told the other women what happened— that I had caught her and the landie—and they figured that meant they had to make a choice—us or the landies.”

“You mean they were all…”

“You bastard,” Cal spat at me. He clenched his fists and moved unsteadily on his feet. I didn’t move. They were all yelling and cursing and I waited until they were quiet again.

“Listen,” I shouted. “The truth is simply the truth and you can’t get away from it.”

In the quiet I went on: “No man likes to admit that some other guy is more attractive to his woman than he is. He can sometimes rationalize himself into believing anything just to avoid seeing that simple fact, the fact that her glands, her body, her sexual appetite respond to someone else more fully than to himself, that she likes sex with someone else more than with him. And, of course, the fact that in this case the guy looks and smells like a snake makes it a thousand times worse. Admitting this about Barbara tears me up emotionally, and you know it does. I hate even to think about it—but I know it’s true.”

“How the hell do you know it’s that?” Pounding his right fist into the palm of his hand, Cal stood on the brink of the small speaker’s platform, as if he were about to leap off and rush me. “It could be hypnotism, drugs—something we don’t know about... anything.”

“It’s the smell,” I said. “Look, have you asked yourselves why that female we discovered yesterday acted the way she did?” I looked around at faces, and I could see some of them had, though I could see, too, that most of them hadn’t spent any time doing what you could really call thinking. I could understand that. “Assume for a moment that the landor females hate intercourse and run from it whenever possible, because it is extremely painful, painful enough to make them want to avoid it unless they are powerfully motivated to want it. Then you can go on to suppose that natural selection has worked to make the landor male unusually attractive to the female. Assuming this, and what evidence we have supports it—though perhaps we are hampered at the moment by the lack of a biologist, since our three fully qualified biologists were women —then obviously the female does all she can to avoid the male, but when cornered by one his smell triggers hormones in her body which bring about an overwhelming response. She becomes aroused and wants him—forgetting the pain, momentarily, in her ecstasy. And she gets pregnant, lays her eggs, and so it goes . . .

“That’s how it works, I think. Now, along come sixty-eight Earthwomen. Good, honest, moral women, and they meet these ugly lizard men. They don’t want to be near the repulsive creatures, but their sense of fairness and politeness persuades them otherwise. They talk to the landies and then it happens. They react to the body smell in a way similar to the way female landies react. What is probably involved is the stimulation of an equivalent hormone, or combination of hormones, to a degree that is, for our women, highly abnormal. It shouldn’t be too difficult for a biologist to work it out. Anyway, they are attracted and they eventually, probably quickly, give in to their desires. And what happens? They’ve never had it like that before. Intercourse with a landie doesn’t hurt them. Never before have they been so fully aroused, nor sensually so completely satisfied. Remember, sight, particularly in the female, is not as erotically stimulating as smell and touch. Not by a long shot.

“As for the landies... well, what would you do if you found a woman who was crazy for you, who wanted you all the time, and there were no other women on the planet who could ever possibly react to you that way?”

“What does a goddam soil conservationist know about it?” someone shouted. In the confusion that followed—dozens of voices shouting at once, Cal yelling for order loud enough to be heard over the din, some of the men moving around forming groups, small knots of humanity tied together by the ravelled strands of excited invective—I retired from the stage. As I went out the door a few angry glances were cast in my direction, but no one made a move. They weren’t angry at me. Frustrate any man and he’ll find an object to take it out on— another man, his wife, a bottle, something, and, always, himself. If I stayed out of it each would work things out in his own way, and if there was violence and if some of them spent a useless year or two refusing to give way to the inevitable, refusing to turn frustration into knowledge, there was nothing I could do anyway. I’d learned my lesson and when I left the hall, glancing at the dozen or so men sitting silently in their seats, I knew some others had learned too.

I walked on down the lone street. I wasn’t going back to the house. Just walking. I hadn’t much to think about at the moment, nor anything to do. And, worst of all, I suppose, no place to go.

* * * *

It was a month before the supply ship came. I hadn’t done much work while I’d been waiting. The first week I spent in the fields, thinking that would keep my mind occupied. But I gave it up and in the end just sat around brooding and waiting for my ticket home to come sliding down the bright blue sky.

I had packed long before, but I stayed in the house until the last minute, wandering from room to room, looking around as if there might be something I had left behind.

I sat on the bed and looked out the window. In the distance they were finishing unloading the ship. Nineteen men were leaving on it with me. The rest would stay. Cal was staying.

He probably would be the last to leave. Some men never understand that trying hard not to be a coward sometimes makes you a fool. How many soldiers, for instance, in the days of mankind’s wars, who never gave way, who fought to the death—how many were heroes, how many were fools?

I got up and went out into the sunlight. I walked towards the ship. As I got closer to it, and in my mind felt the planet receding from me, as if I were already in free fall, felt suddenly that it was true that even these memories would dim and fade with time, I began to feel better. Not good, but better.

Anyway, I had been homesick. And what better cure for that than a trip home?

* * * *

Barbara looked up from her plodding feet as she heard the wet, snuffling sound of Brandor sniffing the wind. “Ocean,” he said, pointing across the rocky, rutted, brush-swept valley. His elevated arm indicated a spot above the rise of the bare, purplish-blue mountain that slanted upwards into the red glow of the late afternoon sky. “When sun there,” he said. “One time.”

To Barbara it seemed impossible that they could climb that height and descend the other side to the sea in one day, but that was what Brandor was saying and she was sure he was right, although he probably hadn’t taken into account the growing exhaustion of some of the women.

Looking around her, she saw what had all the aspects of a guerilla band, dispirited and defeated, being led in their retreat to the sea by faithful native guides . . .

The image was not irrelevant. They were defeated. She herself was troubled by her conscience, her conditioned moral judgment, her innate, unshakeable feeling of having betrayed her commitments, her responsibilities, her love . . .

And yet there was no other way. A woman is, after she has considered all the moral rationalizations to which she is heir, still a woman. To have stayed in the colony would have been crueller, more destructive, than their leaving. They had decided that, and not one of them had voted to stay.

There was, quite simply, no way of cancelling out their husbands’ knowledge of what they had done, no way of dealing with or avoiding the ultimate estrangement which that knowledge would create between them, and finally ... no way of avoiding the repetition of that which began it.

Each time was a seduction, but like all complete, sensually awakening, self-surrendering seductions, each time was inevitable. If she had stayed and fought herself, fought her body, fought her senses, herself, her soul, she would have forever been a burden to Jack, no matter the outcome.

Barbara wondered how many of the women felt as she did. She had talked to some, but not all. It was not easy to discuss these feelings. One could not be certain, wholly certain, of the correctness of one’s thoughts, and ultimately they did not matter. Whatever each of them thought, in whatever way they intellectualized what had happened to them, the fact was that they were here, and beyond them there was the mountain and the sea and a new, crude, primitive, unknowable, unpromising way of life that came to them as a strange mixture of freedom, which is fulfilment, and captivity, which is the very basic fact of being human .. .

She tracked on wearily, several yards behind Brandor. Thoughtfully she looked at the round, rough, reddish dome of his hairless head, at the tall, horny-skinned body, whose muscles rippled beneath scaly hide and, faintly, despite the evidence of her eyes, there began to grow within her body an answering ripple, a sensation, an expectation and, finally, a desire .. .

<<Contents>>

* * * *

There is a Crooked Man

JACK WODHAMS

One can only say of this story that it defies categorization. Nobody has ever written quite like Wodhams before. His stories seem to explode across the paper, their energy undirected, their style crazy, though close analysis always reveals a core of intriguing social comment at their centre. Ostensibly, this story is about crime, but on his way to the conclusion he has drawn, Wodhams gives us some incredible pictures and bizarre ideas. A new writer, he is undoubtedly the most promising talent to emerge from Australian science fiction in its history.

Jack Wodhams declines to reveal information about his background. It is known that he lives in a small Queensland town; other than that, he will say nothing. He remains an enigma, very much in keeping with the character of his stories.

Source: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, February 1967.

* * * *

“There is less crime than there used to be,” Sacpole, head of Co-Ord said. “On the other hand, the quality of the crimes committed has risen an unprecedented degree. The apprehension of wrongdoers in straightforward cases is virtually one hundred per cent. Those who commit common murder, burglary, theft, assault and the like, are easily detected and restrained. Generally speaking, potential criminals are discouraged sufficiently to ensure their social co-operation. This, and the unwarranted fear of the three-month mental reclamation course, have increasingly affected the downward trend on the per capita crime scale.

“Those members of the public who might be so inclined are thoroughly aware of Co-Ord’s formidable resources and know that the odds against successfully perpetrating a criminal act are very high. Take into account that offenders become model citizens after treatment, which eliminates the possibility of habituation, and it might seem that the dwindling of common malpractice places Co-Ord on the road to redundancy.

“This is not so. The ‘Common’ crime has become quite uncommon in recent times. But Co-Ord continues to expand. It needs to expand. It must expand. A whole new section is required to deal with Instravel alone . . .”

* * * *

Mr Frederic Traff looked down at himself and choked back a cry of dismay. He had been incorrectly re-assembled. His legs were on backwards and his toes pointed to the rear.

Mr Traff teetered unfamiliarly.

His arms did not feel right. He examined them. His elbows pointed forward, his palms faced outward from his sides.

“Oh, God,” he groaned unhappily. “Oh, God.”

A tear overflowed his eye and trickled down the back of his neck.

* * * *

The label round his wasted neck said that he was Obadiah Hoskings, forty-six years, one hundred twenty-two pounds, apathetic inadequate, opium degenerate.

“Excellent,” said the celebrated Dr Joynter, neuro-surgeon and Professor of Anatomy. “Perfect. I wonder where they found him? No matter.”

“Does the Psychotherapy Centre know just exactly how you intend to rehabilitate him?” Leslie asked.

“Their concern is not with ethics but results. I have their trust. I will justify that trust. . .”

* * * *

“It’s an encephalograph, a completely new type, superior to anything in use today.”

Frank was sceptical. “Small, isn’t it? Does it work?”

“It should do,” Clive Mossy said. “No reason why it shouldn’t.”

“You mean you haven’t tried it out yet?”

“It’s at the testing stage now. That’s why I invited you up.”

“Oh, yeah?” Frank said. “I’m no guinea-pig. I’ve had some of your bright ideas. I remember ‘Mossy’s Improved Electroconvulsive Machine’.”

“What was wrong with it?” Clive asked, nettled. “It worked, didn’t it? Steveson seemed glad enough to steal it and modify me out of it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Frank said. “I know all about it. So it was great, yeah, and you’re a genius. But that doesn’t stop me from twitching every time I think about it. No. No dice. Find yourself another boy.”

“But, Frank ...”

* * * *

“What’s his name?”

“Frederic Traff. Oslo to Vienna.”

“Outside interference?”

Rasulko frowned at the report. “Can’t be sure. Take a look and see what you think.”

Mauriss crossed to the plate-glass window and peered in at the unfortunate Mr Traff. “Hm-m-m. Not as mixed us as they usually are. Interesting. Check out Dispatch and Reception?”

“Co-Ord teams are there now.”

“Hm-m-m. Good. Should be a comparatively easy case. Shouldn’t take more than a week to straighten him out.”

* * * *

“You see how I have enlarged the brain cavity, Leslie? Eh? Excellent. Perfect. It fits beautifully.”

His bifocals flashed. Sharply he said, “Watch his temperature, Leslie! It’s gone up a degree.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Ha. Good.” He hummed. “Now for the intricate part. Da de dum-de-dum, da de dum-de-dum. Enlarger auto. Magnificent. Leslie, come look at this. What delicate tracery.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Keep an eye on the nutrient flow, Leslie,” the doctor warned.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hm-m-m. Ha. Marvellous. Now then. Controls responding? Good. Micro tissue welder satisfactory? Good. Are you ready, Leslie?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then we shall proceed with the vital fusion.”

* * * *

Coordinated Scientific Criminal Research. C.S.C.R., or, popularly, Co-Ord.

* * * *

The note informed Igor Bernhof that five thousand dollars had been placed in his Swiss account.

He smiled. It was easy for an Instravel operator to finely fumble the relays at a critical moment to ensure the incapacitation of a certain traveller.

Like Mr Traff, for instance.

* * * *

“Relax, Frank. You won’t feel a thing, I promise.”

“I’d better not feel a thing,” Frank said ominously.

Clive smiled. “There is nothing to be afraid of. It is a measuring device, that’s all. It’s only on thirty-two volt power.”

“O.K., O.K. Get on with it. Don’t take all night. I got things to do. And any minute I’ll start getting sensible and tell you to go to hell.”

Clive raised a reassuring hand. “O.K. Are you ready? Right.”

Clive switched on.

* * * *

Hoskings opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. Crisp sunlight angled through the bars and he thought, “Hell! They’ve got me in the jail house again.”

Then he thought, “But I’m a registered incurable.” He mulled this over. “Maybe I did some damage.” But this raised the objection, “What damage could I do in the dope area?”

He stared at the ceiling. He saw a fly preening its wings and rubbing its hands over a precious find.

With a suddenness that awakened his very toes, he became aware that his sight was startlingly keen. Without glasses. And... his tongue felt odd. But his mouth was uncommonly fresh. In fact... in fact he felt fresh. He felt fresh all over. In fact ... in fact he felt alive. Clear headed. Even alert. It was years since he felt so ... so conscious.

What bright sunlight! What a beautiful day! It would be a shame to waste such a day of vibrant promise.

He swung his legs off the bed and stared down at himself to discover the reason for his awkwardness: Short legs; long arms; a long-thumbed, long-palmed hand; and hair; thick black hair—all over.

Hoskings gazed in disbelief.

He had changed into some kind of monkey.

* * * *

“Instravel is one of the most exciting and important breakthroughs of this century,” Sacpole said. “Teams of scientists worked years to produce it and perfect it.

“Now we have Instravel, safe, sure and reliable; growing all the time, expanding; shorter than a straight line when it comes to moving an object from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’. A wonderful discovery, and currently the greatest single device to tax and absorb the talents of Co-Ord.

“Of those persons studying electrophysics on the libritape circuit, you can be sure that a small percentage are seeking knowledge purely in order to cheat the legitimate sponsors of their due in matters of personal and goods transport; or to attempt privately to smuggle forbidden items; or again, to make efforts to obtain a deliberate malfunction of a licensed Instravel container in order that the user might disappear permanently.

“Before Instravel came into operation, the method was exhaustively tested over and over again to establish beyond doubt its absolute safety-certainty. If Instravel fails, you can be sure that the failure is due to deliberately contrived outside interference.

“Remember ALSA-Ranns Transport, Inc. ran a shock pulsator that almost destroyed Instravel at its inception. A large company competitively threatened by Instravel, their criminally negative defensive tactics were fortunately quickly detected and nullified. However, this episode demonstrated that Instravel was not invulnerable to outside attention and, since that time, many attempts have been made to breach the Instravel frequency illegally . . .”

* * * *

“Ready, is it?”

The technician grinned knowingly and winked. “All set and rarin’ to go,” he said.

Sir Edgar Smith chilled at the implied familiarity. His nose rose. “Aligned correctly to Cairo Reception?” he said austerely.

Still grinning, the technician nodded. “Set it for auto any time you have to go there—on business.”

Sir Edgar viewed the man with well-bred distaste. The emphasis placed upon the word “business” was almost crude. It was distressing to have need of such people. “Very good,” he said without warmth.

He turned and led the way from the bedroom. “Your installation fee is ten thousand dollars, I believe? If you will follow me, I will give you a transfer slip.”

Cheekily the technician said, “Better make out half-a-dozen or so. Break it down. Doesn’t look so suspicious. I’ll give you the names to use.”

“Hm-m-m,” was how Sir Edgar acknowledged this blunt wisdom, and he quickened his pace, that the departure of his guest might be expedited.

* * * *

“That’s odd. I’m getting no reading.” Clive paused, perplexed. He bent over his encephalogram. “Hold it, Frank, I’ll just check the wiring.”

“Huh?” Frank said.

Clive looked up. “I said I’ll look over the circuits.”

Frank’s expression was most peculiar.

“Frank? Hey, Frank! What’s the matter?”

“Where . . . where am I? Where . . . who are you? What’s going on? Where am I?”

“You’re testing my machine. Relax, Frank.”

“Frank? Who’s Frank?” Abruptly Frank stood up. His breath coming faster, he gazed abstractedly around the room. His hand went to his forehead. “I ... I don’t know who I am. I ... I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything. What’s going on? What’s happened to me?”

Taken aback, Clive said, “Take it easy, boy.” He looked at his machine. “It seems I may have stumbled upon some kind of freak contingency . . .”

* * * *

“It came by Special Delivery this morning, sir,” she said. “What is it?” Dorphelmyer asked.

His secretary picked at the tag. “It’s from the Voyd Carpet Company,” she said.

“Can you tell who sent it?”

“It doesn’t say. Shall I get Brigg in to open it?”

The man who had been working on the radiant complex in the ceiling stepped down from his ladder. “May I help?” he asked.

“Oh,” Dorphelmyer turned. “Why, thank you. They wrap things so formidably these days. Have you anything to cut the wire?”

The handyman produced a pair of snips. Dorphelmyer had not the perception to detect the glint of mockery behind the heavy glasses. The man cast the wrappings aside and unfolded the carpet within.

“My word,” Dorphelmyer said. “My word.”

His secretary stood dumbly by.

“It’s a beauty,” the man said, brushing up his luxuriant old-fashioned moustache. “Goes with the decor perfectly.”

“Most peculiar,” Dorphelmyer said.

The man seemed dissatisfied. He looked about the office and pursed his lips. He moved his ladder. “It would look best about here, I think,” he said. He pulled the circular carpet in front of the desk, directly under the radiation complex.

“There. Don’t you think that is effective?”

Dorphelmyer was hesitant. “What is it? Is it a carpet, really? It looks ... It looks ... Is it there?”

The man smiled tightly. “Of course. The colour is called abyss-black; though, in actual fact, it is not black at all but a nonrefractive combination of pigmentations that deceive the eye.”

He took a few paces to the centre of the carpet. The secretary gave a small shriek, and Dorphelmyer gasped involuntarily.

“See?” the man said. “Firm and solid.”

“Amazing,” Dorphelmyer said. “You look as though you are standing on nothing.”

“Try it,” the man said.

Gingerly Dorphelmyer stepped onto the carpet. “Ha!” He looked down at his feet. “How odd. I’m standing on a hole in the floor. Ha! Remarkable. Quite remarkable.”

The man smiled dryly and turned to collect his ladder.

* * * *

“Not too much paci-gas, Leslie. Just enough to cool him into amenability . . .”

* * * *

Una Sayld stepped into the lab. “What is it you want, Richard?” she asked boredly. She glanced at her watch. “It’s nearly five and I have a dinner engagement tonight and I don’t intend to be late.”

Richard Baseman wiped his hands down his protective clothing. “It’ll only take a couple of minutes,” he said. He flipped a switch on the bench. “Do you mind sitting on the couch for a moment?”

She viewed him with mild disdain, one eyebrow raised.

She gave a slight shrug and moved to the couch. She seated herself, carefully pulled at her hemline, raised her chin and waited.

Richard closed the second set of contacts.

Una blinked. Her mouth partly opened, then her eyes closed and slowly her head went back. “Aaaaaaaaaah ...” she said.

Richard smiled shrewdly. “Good, huh?” He shut the lab. door and locked it.

She spread her arms on the couch. “What is it?” she said. “It feels so ... so glowing.” She raised her head and her eyes opened wide. “What is it?”

His grin was knowledgeably lopsided. “It’s a development from our electronic massage ray,” he said. “Feels good, doesn’t it? Clothes inhibit it a little. Take your coat off and feel it on your arms.”

She looked at him, her eyes large now, her breathing quickening. “Maybe I will,” she said.

She unbuttoned her coat and slipped from the sleeves. “Oh, my.” She flexed her arms, “Lovely.”

His lips twitched. He moved and knelt at her side. His fingers lightly pushed back the hem of her skirt. She did not seems to notice.

“The more you expose, the more wonderful you will feel,” he said softly.

“I tingle all over,” she said. “It’s lovely. It’s like bathing in concentrated sunlight.”

Being careful not to shield her with his body, Richard reached to undo her blouse. “It’s a tactitilator. It makes you feel vibrant and alive, doesn’t it?”

“It does, it does,” she panted. Then, “What are you doing?”

“I want you to know the full benefit,” he said with smooth insistence.

* * * *

“Peach Belle and Post Express are standing nicely now and ... They’re racing!

“And first to leave the barrier stalls is Demagogue, followed by Caveat, Dandy Boy and Musselman, with Co-Pilot hitting out for the inside. In behind him Peach Belle and Blue River with . . .”

Up on Peach Belle, jockey Squit Sheeter hit the catch at his belt and expanded helium hissed unnoticed into his billowing jacket. Powerful stuff. He gripped his knees into his special saddle and hung on ...

* * * *

“You see, Hoskings, we have done you no real harm, have we? Your human body was not exactly a desirable property, was it?”

Hoskings hung on the bars and shook his great head to clear it. “Uh, uh, uh,” he grunted. “Nut... ruht.” He had great difficulty with the unfamiliar vocal chords.

“Not right?” Dr Joynter said. “Was it right to let you rot away? To let your hopeless self-denigration put you in an early grave? What were you? A nobody. An outcast. And now? Now you have a fine body, young, virile and strong. You are unique.”

“A gorilla,” Hoskings panted through the bars.

“Is that so bad?” Dr Joynter asked. “Think about it. You are no longer a besotted husk of a man. You are fit, vital. You are magnificent, don’t you see?”

Hoskings frowned in concentration, his big ape’s nostrils flaring. “Dunno,” he managed.

“Just rest,” Dr Joynter said. “The more you think about it, the more you will see that I am right. You have a bright future. I envisage a brilliant career for you.”

Leslie entered with his dinner. She eyed Hoskings with open admiration.

Immediately conscious that his hair did not provide adequate concealment, Hoskings hastily turned his back, only to be aware that the fresh view was hardly more prepossessing.

He snatched a blanket from the bed and wrapped it round himself.

Leslie approached the bars. She smiled. “Would you like a banana, Mr Hoskings?” she asked sweetly.

* * * *

“What I tell you? What I tell you?” Sy Zadly said exuberantly. “Six length anna course record. An they dunno nothin’.”

He jammed his smokka back between his teeth only to tear it out again and wave it about. “I tell you, boy, we got it made. Who gonna find out? Nobody, that who. We gonna clean up.”

Wilf Waijer had his sober word of caution. “We’ve only got Peach Belle. Folk’ll get suspicious, she keeps on winnin’. Anyway, the odds’ll shorten an’ it won’t be worth the risk.”

Sy regarded him pityingly. “You got rock in your boot where your brain s’posed to be. You dumb? We fix it, Peach Belle lose, right? An’ who say Peach Belle only one? Anytime Sheeter ride we can fix, right? O.K.”

“You’ll need other jackets,” Wilf objected. “You’ll need a whole range of owners’ colours.”

Sy circled his smokka airily. “O.K. We gonna make money, hey? Already we even. Boy, you gotta ‘spectorate if you gonna ‘vacuate. Yes, sir.” With deep satisfaction he stuck the smokka into his mouth and braced his hands behind his back.

Expansively he surveyed his world.

* * * *

The cop waddled over from his jet scooter tagging his violation pad from his pocket. “O.K.,” he said. “I don’t have to tell you what you were doing wrong. You know the prescribed southbound height and the speed over dwelling areas. Let me see your licence.”

Clive Mossy reached affably for his wallet. The cop bent to peer through the window. His head came in line with what looked like a speaker, angled from the roof.

The cop looked puzzled.

Clive eased his foot from the control switch. “Can I do anything for you?”

The cop straightened up. “Where ... What...?”

Clive leaned over to the window. “Can I help you?”

“I... I don’t know. Where am I? What am I?”

Clive clucked sympathetically. “Lost, are you? Tut, tut. What you need is a policeman,” he said and, with a friendly wave, he lifted to fifty feet and continued south.

* * * *

“How beddy bore dibes?” Frederic Traff asked wearily.

“You’ll have to be patient, sir,” the technician glibly replied. “These things take time.”

Mr Traff sagged. “Well, ad leasd you cad dry do ged by dose the righd way ub dexd dibe. Blowig is bosed awkward.”

“One thing at a time, sir,” the technician said brightly. “You’re coming along nicely, don’t worry.”

Mr Traff ground his teeth, and winced with pain. He kept forgetting that his incisors had changed places with his molars.

* * * *

“It is human nature,” Sacpole said. “It is the nature of Man to use the machines of Man to bring about the destruction of Man.

“Did not a charioteer sometimes partially sever the harness of a rival’s rig? Have not men been sent to sea in boats cunningly patched with clay? Why, when we were younger, were bombs not put aboard airplanes; automobile brakes tampered with; bath water electrified?

“The continuing expansion of our technology greatly increases the variety of criminal ways and means . . .”

* * * *

“This drug is undetectable. At least, we have found no way of detecting it.

“You have seen its effect upon muscle tissue, and rigorous testing has failed to fault the product. Side effects are minimal and temporary. Undiscoverable safety.

“Gentlemen, used with discretion, Aktiv can make this the foremost athletic nation in the world. And open warfare being obsolete, I do not have to impress upon you the enormous prestige that can be won upon the international sporting field…”

* * * *

Dorphelmyer paced his office. “... forthcoming, reluctantly compelled to foreclose, Yours, et cetera, et cetera.”

He halted.

His secretary scribbled. He looked down at his feet—and centre of the rug. The illusion of standing on nothing still sent a thrill through him. “Walking on air.”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Eh? Oh, nothing.” He looked at his watch. “That will be all, I think, Miss Tolbar. If there is nothing more, you may go.”

“Very good, sir. I’ll have these ready by ten tomorrow.”

“Yes, yes, Goodnight, Miss Tolbar.”

She gathered her notes. “Goodnight, sir.”

She timidly skirted the rug, flushing a little at the amusement in her employer’s eyes. I don’t care, she thought, and her chin came up. It’s just not natural to walk on nothing.

And she closed the door and went home.

* * * *

Joe left his Instravel cubicle after a swift glance up and down the battery.

His bare feet made no sound as he ran to the curtain that cut off the women’s section. He drew the stiff folds to one side, peered cautiously and stepped through.

Very conscious of his nakedness, he hissed, “Anna? Anna, where are you?”

He opened one cubicle door with his slip key. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said, and hastily closed the door again.

“Joe! Joe! I’m in here.”

“Anna!” Quickly he released the catch and squeezed into the compartment with his girl.

“Oh, Joe, Joe,” she said, throwing her arms around him, “I thought you couldn’t make it.”

“So did I.”

They went.

* * * *

“I tell you I don’t want a hap-pill,” her husband snarled. “Can’t you get it through your head that I enjoy being miserable?”

* * * *

Kaminsky banked the lectrocorder and cried, “Ha!” Boisterously he turned to the witnesses. “You see, comrades? Do you see? Like a drosky on a glacier, hey?” He threw up his hands. “He clips seventeen seconds off the five thousand meters, and he is only a third-rank, broken down Kazkshtan blodder. What can a real runner do with a touch of Spert, hey?”

Kaminsky leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Comrades, an intelligent application of this drug will ensure that the Soviet Union gains complete ascendancy in the forthcoming Games.”

“Can the drug be detected?”

“It is undetectable,” Kaminsky said. “Pure, absorbed, used, gone.”

“It will need careful handling,” Bosborov said.

Kaminsky’s features stretched sideways, unaided by his fingers. “The utmost secrecy is being observed.”

Bosgorov nodded at the runner, who was now doing push-ups on the track. “What about him?”

Kaminsky turned. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his light-weight English thermo-coat. He shrugged carelessly. “From his performance, I think he is suffering from salt deficiency,” he said.

* * * *

“Ill let you out, if you’ll promise that you’ll behave,” Leslie said.

Hoskings leaned forward on his knuckles. “Errggh,” he said.

Taking this for assent, Leslie opened the door.

Hoskings shambled out.

“There,” Leslie said. “Now you have the run of the place.” She reached to stroke his hairy arm. Her eyes glowing, she breathed, “You’ll find that your change has its compensations…”

* * * *

“Co-Ord needs a full department to watch over Instravel alone,” Sacpole said. “Constant vigilance is required if we are to track the brief pulsations of unlicensed Instravel containers bringing in illegal migrants and undesirables; to track private installations of the OWTE (One Way Ticket to Eternity) type; to thwart any attempts made by outside parties who, for private or political reasons, administer dispersal jolt oscillations to bring about either the permanent disintegration of the traveller, or disorganize his re-grouping to an extent that requires months of permutated calibrations to re-establish.

“Then again, moving away from deliberate interference, we have to deal with the deliberate victim. The latest teen-age cult is mutual entirety. This is a serious prank where a boy and a girl endeavour to occupy the same container. Separating those who succeed in this enterprise again requires months of computer hours to divide, evaluate and correctly realign . . .”

* * * *

Mr Traff stared horrified as they wheeled the new admission past his door. It was a grotesque human octopus, two bodies fantastically fused. He shuddered at the incongruous grins on two teen-age faces.

A hand on his arm, “We’ll try and get your toenails up on top where they belong, Mr Traff.”

Mr Traff gestured down the corridor. “What... was that?”

“Uh? Oh, that. Just a couple of kids. That’s the third pair in two weeks. New craze they have. They call it togetherness.”

* * * *

“Where are we going?” Naomi asked.

“Over to my place,” Clive Mossy said.

“Your place? No thank you. I want to go home.”

“Just for a nightcap,” Clive said.

“No,” she said firmly. “I know you and your nightcaps. I’ve had some. Nothing doing. You just take me home. To my home.”

Clive made a face. “O.K.,” he said. His foot pressed the control switch.

Naomi frowned. She shook her head,

“What’s the matter, honey?” Clive asked.

She put her hands to her temples. “I ... I don’t know . . .”

“Headache? We’ll soon be home.”

“No,” she said. “Not a headache. It’s . . .” She turned an anguished face to him. “I can’t think. Funny. My mind ... My mind’s gone blank...”

Clive tut-tutted. “You’ve had too much excitement today, darling.” He grinned. “Here’s our home. We can put our feet up and rest, alone together at last.”

“Alone together? Wait a minute. Who are you? What’s happening?”

Clive brought the craft to a halt at his third-floor bay. He slipped his arm around her. “Darling, you must be joking,” he said. He kissed her. “Surely you remember that we were married this afternoon?”

“Married?” Naomi said weakly.

“Of course, sweetheart.” He brushed her shoulder. “Look. Confetti everywhere. Oh, darling, darling, you’re wonderful, wonderful . . .”

* * * *

“Mr Hoskings?” Dr Joynter called. “Oh, there you are. If you will come down here for a moment. The tailor is here to measure you.”

Hoskings swung out of the tree in two easy loops and came bounding over the grass, his outsize Bermuda shorts flapping.

The tailor yelped, dropped his bag, and took off.

* * * *

“What seems to be the trouble then?” Dr Cruss asked.

“My parents don’t seem to understand me. My father won’t let me read his newsflap, and my libritape is kept on the juvenile channel.”

“I see. I’ll speak to your parents about it.”

“I wish you would. I’m tired of pap.”

“Ill see what I can do,” Dr Cruss said. “Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of just now.”

“Very well. But do try to be patient with them, won’t you?”

Three-year-old Jerry Knowles sighed. Resignedly he said, “O.K.”

* * * *

“Naturally, every woman wants a super-child. It’s understandable. But the point is that we cannot inundate the world with genius. Despite automation, there are many jobs tolerable only to persons of mediocre intelligence. Also, if genius is to become standard, those of us not of like mental capacity must become substandard.

“No. In my opinion, the DNA adjustment process should be carefully restricted to selected persons. After all, how much genius can we use?”

* * * *

In a large room, the improved and modified Instravel containers were ready for critical testing.

Professor Muldible made one last adjustment to his project, wired the time delay, and stepped, fully clothed, into the dispatch cabinet.

He watched the clock tick the seconds away. “... Seven ... Six . . . Five . . .” Professor Muldible counted. “. . . Two . . . One . . . Zero . . . One? . Two? . . Three? . . .”

He stared blankly. Something had gone wrong. He had not moved. A wave of keen disappointment swept through him.

His Instravel unit cut out and a green all-clear flashed on.

Professor Muldible stepped from the receiver cabinet smiling broadly at his success as Professor Muldible stepped from the dispatch cabinet slowly shaking his head in perplexity . . .

* * * *

Senator Hardman stubbed out his nicolette and dropped it in the swalla box. “Should leave the kids mingled,” he said. “It would serve them right. Make an example of a couple. Put them on show even. That would stop them.”

Sacpole clucked disapprovingly. “That is a vengeful precept and exactly the kind of principle we are trying to eradicate from our society. We must try to be civilized, Senator, at all times.”

Hardman scowled. “It’s wasting good money on irresponsible kids.”

“You were young once yourself,” Senator Philson pointed out.

“Things were different then,” Hardman snapped back.

Philson grinned, “I guess so. Do you remember that Jameson girl, and the night you let her drive so that she could knock down that stuffed pedestrian? Boy, how you rigged that case. You had her eating out of your hand.”

Hardman looked suddenly sheepish. “It was just a lesson in applied psychology, that’s all. There was no need to bring that up here.”

“It’s a lesson in teen-age high spirits,” Philson said firmly, “and you know that it would be wrong to subject kids to harsh punishment for a juvenile escapade.”

Hardman avoided his eye. “O.K., O.K.,” he said. “You’ve made your point.. .”

* * * *

“What was that, Michael?” she said with fresh interest.

“I said, wouldn’t you like your child to be a genius?”

“Don’t tell me you have some DNA pills?”

He patted his pocket significantly and nodded.

She looked at him thoughtfully for some moments. ‘Where did you get them?”

“I know a man who knows a man.”

“How do you know that they are genuine?”

“They’re genuine, don’t worry about that,” he said confidently.

She stood up. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

He shrugged. “There are other women.”

She stopped. “You’re being very blunt, Michael,” she censured.

He smiled. “With these pills I can command a price for my services,” he said. “You I like. You appeal to me. You’ve got something.” He spread his hands. “O.K. To you for free. Just thought I’d let you know.”

He reached for his hat.

She made a quick decision. She caught his arm. “Don’t go,” she said. And then, “It might be fun. How long does it take for the pills to act?”

“Potency is after one hour through to the fifth.”

“Really?” she said brightly. “Arthur will not be home till eight. If you take one now . . .”

* * * *

“Are you sure no one will see you switching colours?” said Wilf Waijer doubtfully.

“Sure he sure,” Sy Zadly said, his paternal pat on the back straightening Squit Sheeter’s riding curve almost lethally. “What he got to worry? Who’s looking? He draw colour, he switch. He win. He switch back. Simple.” He enveloped Squit’s thin shoulders with his ample arm. “Ain’t that right?”

“Yeah,” the overpowered Squit said lugubriously. “Simple.”

* * * *

Advertisement in Male Telemag: No bachelor den should be without a Kress Tactitilator. Stimulating and safe, the Kress Seductobeam is a must for those candlelight moments. Revel in the sensational Glo! An Experience IN Experience!

* * * *

“All countries now spend large sums on top-secret projects and, while nearly all countries have diabolical weapons and frightening means at their disposal, they have reason to be afraid that their enemies may be even more formidably equipped. It is the fear of ignorance, of some awful and unexpected retaliation, that has kept the world at peace for so many years. We do not know exactly how advanced our neighbors are, and they, likewise, can only guess at our true strength. We are frightened that they may know some of the fantastic things we know, and they are frightened that we may have discovered the terrible forces that they have found. And we are all afraid that we might not know enough.

“Warfare today is as it should be, a non-violent mental conflict that will give a bloodless victory to those most fitted to rule, the wisely intelligent people.”

* * * *

“It is you that is the copy, not I,” Professor Muldible said. “I was in the dispatch box and never moved.”

“Nonsense,” Professor Muldible said. “The experiment went exactly as anticipated except that, for some reason—inverted compensatory diffraction perhaps—my duplicate formed instantaneously through reflectory ionization .. .”

“Rubbish,” Professor Muldible said. “I was molecularly assessed by the frequency atomizer, and some inhibitory factor, probably an inverse load on the quantum definitor, projected a facsimile grouping ...”

“No, no, no,” Professor Muldible said. “If that were the case, one of us would be insubstantial, a mere sho-scope image, whereas I, at least, am whole and complete ...”

“That is impossible. You feel whole and complete, maybe, but in reality you are a composition of photonic weld in static simulation,” Professor Muldible said. “Polarization would reduce your substance to a positive charge that.. .”

“Poppycock,” Professor Muldible said heatedly. “If such was the case, it would mean that if I tried to go through the machine again I would be dispersed, correct?” He snorted. “You are the one that would be absorbed, not I.”

“Oh, come, come, don’t be ridiculous,” Professor Muldible said. “Your self-realization is illusory. You are a carbon copy without carbon . . .”

“Oh? Oh, you think so, do you?” Professor Muldible activated the machinery and reset the time-delay. “We’ll see who disappears,” he said, stepping once again into the dispatch cabinet.

Professor Muldible scowled. “Go ahead,” he said. “Go on, go ahead. You’ll see ...”

* * * *

“If we ever do have another war that requires a human army, the stuff might come in handy,” Gregor said pessimistically. “Offhand, I can’t think where it might be employed in peacetime.” Perrimont sighed. “I thought it might be useful.” “We’ll keep it in reserve,” Gregor said, “with the rest. Carry on with your work.”

“Yes sir.” Perrimont left. “Kreepi-gas.” Gregor closed his eyes and shuddered.

* * * *

“Where . . . where am I?” Carol said, frightened. Her hand went to her mouth. “I’ve lost myself.”

Clive leaned over. “You’re not lost when you are with me, my darling.” He kissed her shocked cheek. “Till death do us part,” he murmured.

“What are you saying? Who are you?”

“Baby,” he said with mock seriousness, “don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your new husband already?”

“Husband?”

“Uh-huh. We were married this morning. Don’t pretend you can’t remember.” He brushed. “Why, look at all the confetti on your coat still...”

* * * *

Lady Violet Smith nestled closer to her lover. “What’s the matter, darling? You seem preoccupied.”

“I don’t know. I’m nervous, I guess. Are you sure Sir Edgar will be away some time?”

“Of course, darling. Eddy won’t be back till Wednesday at the earliest.”

His sixth sense persisted. “There’s something wrong. I don’t know what it is.”

“Not me, I hope,” she said, her voice frosting.

He was instantly contrite. “Oh, no, my rose. You are perfect . . . perfect.”

He kissed her but his eyes wandered about the air-conditioned four-poster.

“It’s this bed, I think,” he said. He stared at the enfolding plastic drapes. “It looks somehow familiar ...”

“Never mind that now.” Lady Violet pulled him to her. “Kiss me, kiss me, kiss me, Robert.”

Robert put his nagging hunch aside and obliged.

Sir Edgar cried, “Ha, you tramp!” and closed his personal Instravel circuit.

The couple on the bed disappeared.

Sir Edgar switched off his secret viewer. “If that doesn’t give me an uncontested divorce, I don’t know what will.”

Highly satisfied, he poured himself a brando and syfe.

* * * *

Loy Chi Fong never noticed the small metal disk that dropped into his pocket.

The festival was in full swing, the crowd jostling, the streamers blowing in the wind, the great dragon undulating across the road. Among the many firecrackers that popped and spat incessantly, one jumper was tossed by Gang Wa.

Bang! It jumped. Bang, bang, bang! It hopped across the road. Bang, bang! Two more jumps and it was at Loy Chi Fong’s feet.

Bang! The firecracker sprang at his pocket.

Loy Chi Fong lurched back too late.

Vooooooooomph!

Exit Loy Chi Fong.

* * * *

“Right you are, Mr Traff. Just sign these clearance papers, here, here, and here.”

“What am I signing?”

“It’s just to say that you are satisfied with the re-assembly job.”

“I see,” said Mr Traff. “I intend to claim damages, you know.”

“Of course, Mr Traff. That is expected in a case such as yours.”

“Ha. Well, I’m not signing anything till I see my lawyer and my own medical specialist.”

“Oh.” Into the foyer, on a wheeled trolley, came another conglomerated couple. “Where from, Sam?” the reception clerk queried.

“Cairo,” Sam said. “Came in on an illegal line, we think.”

“O.K.,” the clerk said. “Take ‘em on up to Five.”

Mr Traff watched the trolley wheel away. He shook his head. “They’re the oldest teen-agers I’ve ever seen,” he muttered.

* * * *

“Hosky, if you want me to tie your tie properly then you’ll have to hold your chin up higher,” Leslie said.

Hoskings lifted his chin. Leslie’s fingers worked deftly. Hoskings’ fingers worked less deftly.

“Aaaah!” She slapped his hand away. “Hosky, don’t be naughty. There’s a time and a place for everything.” She straightened her skirt. “Now come along and behave yourself.”

Meekly Hoskings took her hand and allowed her to lead him to the party.

* * * *

“What you mean, you lost it?” Sy Zadly said. “How you lost it? What you done?”

“I don’t know,” Squit Sheeter said helplessly. “I think an apprentice took them. I put ‘em on a hanger an’ was only away a couple minutes ...”

“Careless,” Sy snapped. He rolled his eyes. “What in heaven I got to deal with people?” He glowered at Squit. “How come someone take ‘em? What for? You been talking?” He bale-faced his ménage. “Anybody been talking?”

“I think an apprentice took ‘em,” Squit said unhappily. “See, young Donelli is on Costa this race, and that’s a Pocmint gee, too. Same colours. So, by mistake, he musta took my silks…”

Sy’s eyes widened. “What? You mean he’s out there in my special jacket?” He struck himself forcibly between the eyes. “Aye-yi-yi. What we do. What we do?”

The bell rang, and a voice droned, and they became aware that the race was on.

Of one accord they scrambled from the locker room to seek a point of vantage.

* * * *

“Your signature there, Mr Hoskings, please. And there also.”

Hoskings’s long ape fingers guided the pen expertly.

Dr Joynter beamed. “You see? I told you you would have a great future.” He clapped his hands. “A ten-year contract, with options.”

Hoskings smiled.

The lawyer blanched. “Please don’t do that,” he pleaded.

Dr Joynter rubbed his hands. “And my modest ten per cent should enable me to extend my laboratory.”

Velupta Orccid, his first leading lady, put a caressing hand on Hoskings’ shoulder and leaned sensuously forward. “I think we are going to be great . . . together,” she said, her husky voice throbbing with meaning.

In the background Leslie simmered and tried to catch his eye.

But Hoskings’ sensitive nostrils were arched to Velupta’s perfume, his small ocular balls beadily intent upon his leading lady.

An ape’s fingers tugged to loosen a constricting collar .. .

* * * *

“I told you there was something wrong,” Robert snarled.

“Oh, shut up, will you? Shut up. Shut up!” Lady Violet Smith said, her sweet voice lost in testy acid.

* * * *

Ferro-plastic. Easy to pour and work, gloss finish, hard and practically indestructible. But a disrupter-drill can destroy the adhesion of the magnetized steel particles, and could be used to soften quite a large area.

It is a trick that a handyman would know.

* * * *

“. . . the possessor of a new, powerful, three hundred pound body. In short, gentlemen, Hoskings adapted to his new form with surprising rapidity and soon regarded the surgeon, not with hate as an enemy, but with affection as a benefactor and friend.

“This attitude made Co-Ord’s prosecution of the case very difficult, and the State’s plaint lapsed for want of proof of malicious injury. Hoskings likes being a gorilla and there is little that Co-Ord can do except apply certain restraints upon the surgeon. On the other hand, had Hoskings not liked being a gorilla, the legal aspects would still have tangled sections of our judicial system.

“As it is, Hoskings has full human rights, and though we have tried to play down the facts of the case, as he is now in show business, our efforts have been somewhat ineffectual.

“We are afraid that this might create a demand for transplant by consent and give us a society interspersed with social monkeys and . . . and perhaps talking dogs. It can be done and, oddly enough, it has been assessed that few of those inclined to metamorphosis could be denied on the grounds of insanity.

“There are many features to consider ...”

* * * *

Expertly the thief broached the lock of the glidocar. He slid behind the control stick and ran through a half-dozen combinations before connecting with the correct starting range. He threw the switch.

Lock-bars thunked into the doors and windows, and a ner-froz capsule burst to fill the vehicle with paralyzing fumes.

In three seconds the thief was out cold and the signal bleep was sounding in the map room of the glidocar squad.

* * * *

“We can rule out Instravel, solidless and mattamulse. Dorphelmyer got into the ceiling in some way we don’t know about,” Cranston Beever said.

“And what have you worked out?” Gil Prober asked.

“Well, on analysis, his body is smashed, consistent with a high fall. He had grass stains and dirt on his clothing. I can only jump to the obvious conclusion: Somehow, by some disintegration or disorientation process, a vertical hole was made inside the building. Dorphelmyer stepped into it and fell to his death.”

“When the hole was restored again?”

“Yes. He fell from his own office. To be precise, he fell directly under a circular Voyd carpet that he had in front of his desk.”

“I see.”

“I thought you would,” Beever said. “We think the murder misfired. The dirt and grass stains suggest that Dorphelmyer landed on solid earth. This is quite a new block and, checking back, we found that they levelled a small hill to construct this building.”

“You’re working on a time-slot theory?”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense. I think the killer wanted Dorphelmyer to disappear, to be integrated in the foundations. He did not know about the hill. On the other hand, he might have hoped that the body would stay in the past. Whatever it was, I think he fouled it up.”

“Oh, brother,” Gil Prober said. “This is going to be a beauty.”

With unwarranted confidence, Beever said, “We’ll get him. We weren’t supposed to find the body. We have a few clues.”

Prober grimaced. “I admire your optimism,” he said.

* * * *

“Cut!” the director roared. “Cut! Cut! CUT!” Passionately he threw his script to the ground. “Hoskings, can’t you control yourself? What’s the good of Make-up making you decent, if you can’t control yourself?”

“I’m sorry,” the gorilla grunted, abashed.

“Sorry? Huh! We can’t take that. We’d be banned from every scope in the country. Whoever heard of an ape being so sensitive that he has to keep grabbing bunches of leaves to cover himself? You’re supposed to be threatening her like a wild animal.” He gestured wildly. “Something’s got to be done. Something’s got to be done.”

Velupta adjusted her negligible plastic deerhide costume. “As I feel I must be equally responsible,” she claimed throatily, “perhaps it might be better if he and I had a few days to adjust to one another.”

The director scowled at her. “Adjust?”

“Familiarize,” she said, her shallow eyes readily fathomable. “Say a week at my private retreat.”

“You mean that place you go for your honeymoons?”

She cast down her eyes with arch demureness. “Yes,” she said. “After all, the poor dear is obviously frustrated . . .”

* * * *

“Crime today is specialized and is raising problems that are more and more beyond the accepted bounds of normality.

“Organized crime tends to betray itself, and lately we have been concerned almost exclusively with skillful and intelligent amateurs. Co-Ord’s research and investigative facilities may seem to have a comprehensive variety fully adequate to deal with any contingency. This is not so.

“Every day, it seems, there are additions to the sum of human knowledge. And the public, generally, has access to this knowledge. It is inevitable that a percentage of our modern skills and discoveries should be misapplied, modified, and perhaps improved to suit a nefarious purpose. It is essential, therefore, that we be prepared to meet any novel circumstance, any challenge to our ingenuity ...”

* * * *

“... two ... one ... zero ... one ... two ...”

The green light flashed.

Professor Muldible triumphantly stepped from the receiver cabinet. “You see?” he said. “The same again.”

Professor Muldible stepped out of the dispatch cabinet. “Well, I wasn’t dispersed,” he said.

Professor Muldible stared at his double. “Good heavens! You must have been right.” He seemed stunned. “Most extraordinary,” he muttered. “Most extraordinary.”

“Yes, indeed,” Professor Muldible said. “It would seem that a reactive discharge, possibly through the meson tube, causes the pattern sequence to be ejected to its source, to take visible shape.”

“It is an unforeseen consequence,” Professor Muldible said, shattered. “That means that I ... ah ... we in the dispatch container are electrolytic representations, not truly life but cosmic creations without real substance.”

“A very interesting phenomenon,” Professor Muldible said clinically. “Your disintegration is inevitable. Even now you must be radiating irreplaceable energy and ...”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Professor Muldible said tartly. “We are doomed fabrications of tenuous consistency. Yet I do not feel like a mirage or a ghost. I came out of the receiver cubicle, re-entered the dispatch cubicle, and this time you came out of the receiver cubicle.”

“No, no, no. I came out of the receiver cubicle, re-entered the dispatch cubicle and, naturally, came out of the receiver cubicle again.”

“And it is your contention that if I activate this dispatch container again, that I would disappear?”

“I think you would be absorbed, yes,” Professor Muldible said. “You see, your form of existence is purely ...”

“You don’t have to explain to me,” Professor Muldible snarled. He closed the circuits and set the time-delay. He stepped into the dispatch container.

* * * *

“... And first to leave the stalls is Red Strutter and Maori Minstrel, followed by Gamely, Top Choice, Costa, Billakin, then War Whoop, Conspicuous ...”

Young Donelli kicked his heels and urged Costa over to the rails. His instructions were to stick with Top Choice. Don’t hesitate to use the whip, the trainer had said. Costa was lazy.

Top Choice was on the inside and getting away. War Whoop was hustling to fill the gap. Donelli flailed, and his whip-butt clipped a concealed release. Expanded helium bloated his colours and, much to his surprise, his body lifted gently from the saddle. Before he had the wit to exert pressure with his legs, he was clear of the horse entirely and bobbing like a balloon on the end of the reins.

In the Paddock, Sy Zadly lowered his binoculars and let the agony of disaster screw his features into misery. “Aye-yi-yi,” he groaned. “Aye-yi-yi.”

Floating on air, and feeling extremely foolish in his novel position, Donelli let go of the reins.

Not a very bright lad, Donelli.

* * * *

Incredibly the two runners put on speed. Already a full lap ahead of their nearest rivals, they turned into the straight and pulled out all the stops. Their legs pistoning to a blur, they both flashed through the tape, still accelerating.

In the Russian Bloc, Kaminsky tore off his hat and threw it against the wall. “Those Americans are cheating,” he grated furiously. “They are using drugs. I am going to demand an examination!”

In the American Bloc, Sol Hardy smashed his fist into the table. “They’re trying to be smart, huh? They’re trying to pull a fast one, hey? Well, we’ll see about that. We’ll get the medicos in...”

* * * *

“Surely you remember, Daphne,” Clive said. “Why, look at the confetti...”

* * * *

The specialist pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Mr Traff,” he said, “I know you are a generous man who gives readily to charity, but I have to tell you this: Your heart is not in the right place.”

Mr Traff nodded gloomily. “I guessed as much. That means that I have to go back?”

“The only place,” the specialist said.

* * * *

“Cut!” the director roared. “Cut! Cut! CUT!” He came to his feet with a snap that sent his chair flying. “You’re a gorilla, aren’t you? I could climb that tree faster myself.”

“I’m tired,” Hoskings mumbled.

“Boy!” the director cried. “Pep pills, quick!”

Hoskings yawned. “Had some,” he said lethargically.

The director looked hard at Velupta.

She shrugged her sleek shoulders. With amiable insouciance she said, “At least you’re getting no censorship problems ...”

* * * *

“We avoid sensationalism. For obvious reasons, we discourage emulation by minimizing the potential of the threat, and playing down the publicity, that our image as a competent and inescapable law force is strengthened. We try to ensure that the remarkable seems unremarkable, and to create the impression that our resources are inexhaustible, our knowledge complete and infinite.

“Unfortunately, this is not so. We have been tested to the limit of our ability, and have to be constantly on the alert. We literally do not know what might happen the next...”

* * * *

Advertisement in a newsflap: “Suffer from insomnia? The Goodlife Enervator induces swift and complete relaxation. Portable, no bigger than a strip-tube. Can be clipped by sucaps in any position desired ...”

* * * *

“What we want to know,” Officer Pyke said, “is where you get these second-hand parts.” He picked up a heart unit. “Look at this.”

“It’s in good shape,” DeCarlo said defensively. “Hardly used. Last for years yet.”

“I know,” Pyke said, “I know. That’s what I mean. How come the last owner parted with it? Surely he didn’t buy himself a new one? And this automatic liver. And this Mark III kidney filter. And this lung-air unit with a half-used refill. Where’d you get them? And what do you propose to do with them now that you’ve got them?”

“I have friends among the morticians.”

“You mean these parts are stolen from the dead?”

“They are artificial, not true parts,” DeCarlo argued.

“But what do you do with them?”

“The poor are still with us,” DeCarlo said. “They just cannot afford brand-new medical sophistications . . .”

* * * *

Headline: Costa rider losta.

“Last seen heading west and slowly gaining height, jockey Victor Donelli has been lost to sight in the twilight. Navy floaters are out with their scan pans and nets, and they welcome the diversion to indulge useful practical manoeuvres.

“An inquiry into the matter is already under way but, until Donelli is recovered, we can only speculate ...”

* * * *

The delightful tingle in her arms warned her that she was moving into a Kress area. It felt good. On low power it was little more than detectable. She smiled at him.

Confidently he smiled back.

She let her stole slip from her shoulders. Lovely. Massage by a million tiny hands. He sat carefully beside her. Under cover of the stole she fumbled in her bag. Her hand closed over her enervator. It took will power, but she stood up abruptly. “I must powder my nose,” she said. “How about getting me a drink?”

Surprised, he said, “Why, sure thing. What would you like?”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Nothing too strong.” She tripped away to the bathroom.

He moved across into the kitchen. She paused, pressed the enervator against the wall, focused it, and clicked it on.

Back on the couch she noticed that the Kress radiation was slightly stronger. Delicious. So easy to revel in.

Again he settled beside her. “Your drink, ma’am,” he said.

“Put it on the table, please. I’ll have it in a moment.”

Out of sight, his fingers turned the booster up. At the same time his other hand rose to cover a yawn.

She glowed. “Oh my, oh my.” The desire to expose more flesh directly to the source was irresistible. She wriggled from her dress.

He blinked. He yawned again and shook his head and tried to keep his eyes open. A strange ennui slacked his muscles and doped his senses. She rolled under the radiation, kicking her heels, bathing in it.

His eyelids would not stay open and he sagged limply against the back of the couch. She cavorted, enjoying herself thoroughly till, sated, she rolled out of range.

Recovered from her wild abandon, she dressed swiftly, combed her hair, checked her makeup. Then she went through the flat with professional skill, collecting the more readily portable valuables, letting her expert fingers finally go through the pockets of her snoring boy-friend.

A good haul.

Collecting her enervator, she left the flat.

* * * *

“I’ll never get used to it,” Hoskings said, not unhappily. “I can’t help being virile. It’s natural to me as I am. And they like me.”

The director stared at the repulsive face across the table. By what strange quirk did such ugliness magnetize women? Sans wig, teeth and corset, the director would admit that he himself was not particularly attractive. But he was not downright hideous.

His envy showed in his snarl. “We’re going to fix you. We’re going to make a comedy, and you’re going to wear clothes ...”

* * * *

“Well?” Superintendent of the Olympic Medical Committee, Brazilian Enrico Escola, tossed out the loaded one-word question.

Gruethner, Swedish specialist, wagged his head. “Nothing.”

Israeli Shylor Colom confirmed the negative with wry reluctance.

Other members of the team shrugged, or scowled annoyance at their defeat.

“So,” Escola said. “No evidence? Nothing?” Again he scanned their faces. He sighed. “Nothing.” He stood up and riffled the pages of his report.

“We know there is something,” Shylor Colom said. “We must find what it is, or sporting achievements become meaningless.” He scratched his ear. “I know it sounds foolish and naive,” he said, “but we can appeal to the sporting instinct, to the sense of fair play, of those countries obviously involved.”

“Aye-yi!” Escola said, and rolled his eyes.

Shylor’s lips twitched mirthlessly. “Anything for a laugh,” he said.

* * * *

“Why, Mr Traff. Welcome back, sir.”

Mr Traff glared at him.

* * * *

In a house ideally located in Brittany, in a direct line between New York and the Instravel receiver in Paris, 303 Spydor watched the clock with an intensity unmatched by any worker impatient for the knock-off whistle.

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .” He dripped sweat. He licked his lips. “... four ... three ... two ... ONE ...”

The synchronometer solenoid clacked sharply.

303 Spydor turned eagerly to the receiving cabinet.

He was there!

Triumphantly 303 Spydor ripped back the curtain. “Well, well,” he said, grimly jubilant, “if it isn’t Professor Sigstein Froymund. Welcome, Professor.”

The professor started back. “No! No!”

303 Spydor took a firm grip on his arm and dragged him into the room. “It’s no good, Professor, there’s nothing you can do.”

He jerked his head at 208 Spydor, who seized the professor’s other arm. “We would enjoy your company, Professor, but your presence is required elsewhere, and our time is limited. I’m sure you understand.”

The two agents bundled their protesting victim into a dispatch cabinet and locked the door.

For a moment 303 Spydor watched the professor hammer futilely on the hardened plastic. He nodded to 208. “The line is open and They will be waiting.”

208 Spydor connected and the professor disappeared.

303 allowed himself a sigh of satisfaction. Then, “Let’s get out of here.”

They sprayed the telltale equipment with generous quantities of mattamulse—careless of its disastrous effects upon the building—and in five minutes were in their glidocar, well away from the scene of their coup.

* * * *

When a drug has passed demanding preliminary trials and reached a stage where a human subject was required to experience and qualify its effects, the shrewd but punctilious biochemist, Dr Kurstead Schriff, refused the offers of his underlings. He felt that it was his duty to take whatever risk might be involved.

He settled himself comfortably on a settee. Dr Clothilde Bell dabbed Colded on his arm. His assistant, Mayberry, inserted the hypo and squeezed 2 cc. of catatonicine into his vein.

“Good,” Dr Schriff said. “Good.”

* * * *

“There are very few attempts at currency forgery these days. The disruptive influence of false currency was felt a few years ago, and the measures taken then have since been modified and constantly appraised in an effort to achieve perfection.

“The laminated shims that you carry in your pockets are works of art designed to protect you from the products of forgers. Every year you pay with your old shims and are issued new alloy-differentiated, code-pregnated, density radiated, intri-colored value shims.

“Under this system forgery is not impossible, but is very difficult. An issue of great importance is that this annual monetary rejuvenation has made hoarding an obsolete pastime and has ensured that no funds are undeclared. This makes disposal of illegally acquired monies a problem for the wrongdoer and, taxationwise, is most helpful.

“We are streamlining this method and . . .”

* * * *

“Oh, Hosky, Hosky! You beast! You brute! You . . .”

* * * *

Dr Joynter looked over his bi-focals. “A gorilla, hey? They’re expensive, you know.”

“I can pay,” the director said. “Will you do it?”

Dr Joynter pinched his underlip. “Well, I don’t know. You are aware that I have a ten per cent interest in Hoskings? Not as remunerative as I had hoped, though.”

“You can have ten per cent of me if you like,” the director said slyly.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to have two irons in the same fire,” the doctor mused. “Come on through to the sycan and I’ll run a fitness test on you ...”

* * * *

Sy Zadly tore the newsflap from the machine and crunched it into a ball. “Stupid bum,” he said sourly. “He should freeze, the dumkopf.” But young Donelli was not freezing. On the contrary, he was quite warm. No longer frightened, even enjoying his experience, he decided, at one thousand feet, to cool off in the night air. He loosened his jacket.

Not a very bright lad, Donelli.

* * * *

“Hm-m-m. So now we have a successful tissue-restitutant. This, with anesthetolin, will make our inculcation system well-nigh perfect. Without doubt our fighting services will be the most dedicated and fearless military in the world.”

The marshal’s aide frowned. “But will they ever be used, sir?”

“We have them,” the marshal said. “We are prepared, that is important . . .”

* * * *

“I’m the same as Hoskings, aren’t I? So why do you shudder? How is he different from me?”

“Hosky has charm,” Velupta said. “He’s basically shy, even timid. He’s glorious.” Her eyebrow lifted professionally. “You, on the other hand, are you in any skin. Hosky is a gentleman, but you, you have always been a gorilla . . .”

* * * *

“What have you got?” Cranston Beever asked.

The technician sat back. “Not a thing,” he said. “We’ve tried it every which way and all it does is radiate ...”

* * * *

“My husband thinks as I do, don’t you, George? And we agree that it would be most worthwhile. How many divorces are there every year? A growing number. And what is the cause? Lack of understanding, isn’t that right, George?”

“Yes, dear ... of course I do.”

Constance settled herself with assurance. “We are young, but even George and I do not understand one another. And can we ever? Can George ever understand a woman? Can I ever hope to understand a man? Of course not. But . . . suppose we could switch bodies? Would we not get to know each other in a way that would make each of us fully aware of the other? A deeper understanding. George, how did you put it the other night? A mutuality of ... of ...”

George coughed. “A consciousness of opposite requirements,” he said diffidently, “and ...”

“Exactly. You see, my husband feels as I do.”

“Only a temporary changeover, of course,” George said. “We . . .”

“Just a week or two. That could be done, couldn’t it? I mean, in the cause of better marital relations, this would be a great step, a unique opportunity for a woman to gain a masculine viewpoint, and for a man to begin to comprehend the complexities of female attitudes. Greater understanding, that is our aim.”

“A temporary changeover,” George said. “We . ..”

“To realize each other’s needs and feelings,” Constance said. “We hope to learn of means whereby we may promote greater compatibility between the sexes. This is not just a whim. We have discussed this matter very thoroughly, haven’t we, George? And we agree that our findings may be of great importance in regard to the conjugal happiness of married couples everywhere.”

“We intend to write a book,” George said. “We ...”

“What we learn we will give to the world. In the interests of science and happier homes, we are willing to give of ourselves, to use ourselves as ... as guinea-pigs. We are prepared ...”

Dr Joynter held up a hand. “Please,” he said, “if I may get a word in sideways ...”

* * * *

“My wife’s as cold as a deprived brass monkey,” the man said. “Have you got anything to warm her up?”

The pharmacist glanced up and down the counter. He leaned forward and brought up his cupped hand. “Have you tried this?” he asked.

The man looked down at the small bottle. “What is it?” he said.

“Krucheeger. Great stuff. Latest thing. Safe. Very popular.”

“Is it any good?”

“Guaranteed.” The druggist deftly plain-wrapped. He slid the small parcel across. “Forty-five bucks,” he said.

The man reached reluctantly for his wallet. “It’d have been cheaper to . . .”

* * * *

“Rent? Certainly,” Clive Mossy said. “Come in, won’t you? Have I been here three months already? My, they should never oil clocks. Take a seat.”

“Thanks.” The landlord seated himself.

“I have only large shims,” Clive said. “Do you have change?”

The landlord pulled out his wallet. “I think so,” he said, then found himself staring at the wallet and wondering how it came to be in his hands.

Clive’s finger left the button, and smoothly he took the wallet. “That’s real Morocco leather,” he said. “Old fashioned, maybe, but I like it. You noticed the feel of it?”

“Ah ... well... yes ...” the dazed landlord said.

Clive tucked the wallet into his pocket. “Well,” he said, “that’s settled then. Sorry that I’m unable to help you, but you do understand, don’t you?”

“I... well... uh ...”

“My advice is just relax. Take it easy.” Clive put a hand on the landlord’s arm and led him to the door.

“But.. .” the landlord said. “But. . .”

“You’ll be all right after a little rest,” Clive said reassuringly. “Goodnight.”

Helplessly the landlord stared at the closed door. “Wait.. . Here...” He looked about him. He was utterly lost. He turned and slowly walked away.

His eyes wide in search of familiarity, he groped down the corridor . . .

* * * *

“With the correct equipment, blowing up the area to make manipulation of the minitools easy, the operation immediately becomes less difficult,” Dr Joynter said.

His pupils listened respectfully.

“Here, you see, I cut and seal. Quite straightforward. A simple repetitive manoeuvre. Clifford, take over, will you, please?”

* * * *

“Can we legally prevent an individual from becoming, say, a lion in order to further a career in the entertainment world?

“Since Hoskings we have had two or three cases involving transplants. Already we cannot be sure of the number of transplants that have taken place. We frown on transplants, and discourage the practice, but active prevention—when the desire for a transplant is innocently motivated for research, for aesthetic reasons, or as a means of escape to personal freedom —is not possible.

“The issue is bound to grow more and more complex as time goes on, and Co-Ord is working hard to anticipate some of the legal and material problems that may arise ...”

* * * *

“Now then,” Professor Muldible said, “explain that, smart aleck.”

Professor Muldible stayed dumb.

Professor Muldible scratched his head.

Professor Muldible said, “It is most peculiar, isn’t it? You know, I think we may have been hasty.”

“How do you mean?” Professor Muldible asked.

“I can see what he’s getting at,” Professor Muldible said. “We have not been approaching this problem in a scientific manner.”

“You’re right,” Professor Muldible said. “Carried away by the simplicity of direct experimentation, I have multiplied myself by four.”

“Not you. Me. After all, I am the original.”

“What?” Professor Muldible cried. “Balderdash! Neither of you could possibly be the original, and it is likely that he is a copy, too.”

“Oh?” Professor Muldible said coldly. “And how do you arrive at this conclusion?”

“The first time I went through to the receiver, right? Leaving you, wasn’t it, in dispatch?”

Professor Muldible nodded.

“Good. You haven’t been through again, have you?”

Professor Muldible shook his head and smiled.

“So. I went through again, and again left a copy behind. The one left behind had been through once and therefore, failing the second time, is obviously a copy, right?”

“Ah . . . er . . . hm-m-m.” Professor Muldible thought it out. Then he nodded gloomily. “That would be right. And if I am a copy and I was in dispatch, the original could not have come out of the receiver.”

“Precisely. Which means that the original is either he or I. And I think that the odds favor me.”

Professor Muldible smiled again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You see, I have a gold tooth ...”

* * * *

Much more than cosmetic surgery, a most promising and rewarding field for development. Instravel Re-Creative Physical Perfectionizing.

Surgical technician Rasulko unsealed the door of the adjustment box and threw it open. “Hullo, there, Mr Wilt,” he said, and beamed. “There you are, your club foot and your legs equalized. How does it feel?”

Mr Wilt looked oddly unhappy, even agitated. “There’s something wrong,” he said.

“Wrong?” Rasulko said in surprise. “Wrong! We’ve given you five toes, haven’t we?” He checked.

“It’s not my feet,” Mr Wilt said. “They seem to be all right.” His voice broke. “It’s this arm.”

Rasulko looked. “What’s the matter with it? It seems a perfectly normal arm to me.”

“Normal?” Mr Wilt bit his lip. “It might be perfectly normal,” he said, “but it’s not mine!”

Rasulko raised his eyebrows. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure, you fool!” Mr Wilt choked. “Look at the difference in my arms. Long, skinny, white, the other strong, brown and thick!”

“Don’t shout, Mr Wilt, please. Er . . . we’ll do something about it, don’t you worry .. .”

* * * *

“You the guy that messes round with brains?” Sy Zadly asked bluntly.

“We do transplants here. Won’t you sit down? I am Clifford Downey, Dr Joynter’s chief assistant. He’s busy at the moment, so if you tell me what you have in mind ...?”

Sy grunted. He nodded to Wilf Waijer, who was holding the arm of a reluctant little man, and the trio became seated.

Over his clasped hands, Clifford said, “Well?”

“Yeah,” Sy said. “It like this. Our friend here wants to be a horse, O.K.?”

“A horse?” Clifford said unsurprised. “Do you have your own animal?”

The blasé response upset Sy’s speed. “Ah, sure. Sure, we got a horse. What else you want?”

“Not a great deal,” Clifford said. “We must establish your friend’s willingness to become a horse, test him for mental aberrations, and then, of course he must sign a responsibility waiver.”

“That all?”

“Just about.”

“He willing,” Sy said. He turned to the little man. “Ain’t you willing, Nye? ‘Course you are!”

The little man stuck out his chin obstinately. “I want my own body,” he said.

“Sure,” Sy said. “They keep your body on ice, right?”

Clifford said, “It depends on the duration of transfer. For short experience periods, yes, but for longer terms we use suspended Instravel.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sy said, “but he gets his body back when he wants it, right?”

“Oh, yes.”

“See? Nothin’ to worry ‘bout.”

Nye still looked doubtful.

“You’ll make million bucks.” Sy turned to Clifford. “Start fixing,” he said with impatient authority. “He like idea. He just nervous ...”

* * * *

Roy Halsey cleared 9’ 8” and Kaminsky glowered at Enrico Escola. “What? What? You see that? You see that?” He waved his hands angrily. “Don’t tell us. Tell them.” He pointed dramatically. “Tell them!”

“We have,” Escola said patiently.

“Ha!” Kaminsky said.

Vladimir Olafskayer cleared 9’ 9” . ..

* * * *

“Goodness gracious,” Dr Kurstead Schriff said. His closed eyes lent strangely to the wonderment on his face. “My goodness me…”

* * * *

“Constance, don’t do that. I’m tired and not in the mood.”

“Oh, George, you’re never in the mood. Oh, George, you’re never in the mood. I was never like that to you, was I?”

“Sometimes.”

“How am I going to know what a man feels like if you refuse to co-operate? You’re being most selfish, George. After all, it is my body . . .”

* * * *

Sy Zadly was irritated beyond measure. “Will you stop always complaining? All you think is yourself, yourself, yourself!”

“A maaaare!” Nye whinnied disgustedly. “A maaaaaaaare!”

“What the difference?” Sy cried. “You be mare forever? Huh? We fix. We make money. What the difference?”

Nye snorted and hung his head.

“We clean up. You go back. Why fuss? You do right,” Sy said ominously, “or you go to glue factory before.”

Nye’s head came up, ears pricked. Then the alarm died from his large wet eyes and he shuffled over to morosely nuzzle his hay. “A maaaaaare,” he said bitterly.

Sy thumped the stable door. “What for you horse?” he shouted passionately. “Sex life? You horse to fix race, got that?”

Nye turned his rear to the door. To point up his sentiment he began to relieve himself.

* * * *

“I only winked at her, George.”

“I don’t care,” George said stubbornly. “This experiment was just between us, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, of course,” Constance said, sweetly reasonable, “but I can’t help it if your body is roused by the sight of another female. It all helps toward greater understanding.”

“Huh!” George said. “I’ve had enough. The two weeks are over tomorrow. We’ve learned enough. We can change back.”

Constance stared at him in amazement. “But, George, darling, we can’t do that. We’ve hardly begun . . .”

* * * *

Cranston Beever reported:

Dorphelmyer received the rug anonymously. Checking back, we found it was sent in the name of Koyoka Shubishu, a junior employee at 17 Overton Heights, which is the Nipponese Embassy. Inquiries at the Embassy brought denials that the rug had been sent, or that any contact had been made with Dorphelmyer.

We know that Dorphelmyer spent some years in Nippon and returned to this country for no clearly defined reason. We are also painfully aware that Nipponese technology may be in advance of our knowledge in certain fields.

Keeping in mind the delicacy of international relations, the Nipponese Embassy and personnel are being kept under unobtrusive autovigil, and the investigation is proceeding . . .”

* * * *

“What we want is the feel of crime today,” Senator Hardman said. “Why is it so? Why do people commit crimes? And why, when organized crime is practically non-existent, when crime is now the province of the rare amateur, why should crime prevention cost more?”

“Co-Ord’s range is constantly being stretched,” Sacpole said. “For a standard crime we have a standard procedure, and the machinery of the law follows a tried path for moderate outlay. But dealing with a new type of crime calls for a new approach, calls possibly for extensive countermeasures. Large-scale preventive action may have to be undertaken. The crime has to be analyzed, documented, and the criminal action defined to ensure that it is indeed a criminal action . . .”

* * * *

“How much?” Constance said, aghast.

The sweet young thing wriggled back into her shift. “Fifty dollars,” she said demurely.

“Just for that?” Constance asked, astounded.

A brittle edge came to the young lady’s voice. “I’m not cheap, you know. And it was your idea . . .”

Mutely Constance counted out the money.

* * * *

“O.K., Molloy, grab her arm and drag her into the bushes. Careful now. O.K., hold it. Look up now, and lick your lips. Now sniff her all over. That’s it, that’s it. O.K. Now hit hard to draw blood, and rip her clothes. O.K., O.K. Good, Terrific. O.K., now start in to gnaw her. Great. Great. Great! Magnificent!

“O.K., O.K. Cut! Cut.”

Molloy stopped his simulated gnawing and began to lick instead. His rough tongue made the girl squeal with indescribable emotion.

Molloy’s new yellow eyes gleamed with satisfaction. From being a one hundred twenty-six pound weakling with a common nine to five job, he had, in one bold stroke, become a star. Buying a tiger to swap with was the best investment he had ever made.

* * * *

Clive Mossy had what looked like a portable radio on his shoulder. He stepped in front of Garrards’ pay clerk, who was on his way from the bank. The pay clerk had not time to do anything but gape.

“Don’t stand there like an idiot, man,” Clive said irritably. “Give me the bag.”

Dazedly the clerk looked down at the valise in his hand.

“Are you going to keep me waiting all day?” Clive said. He looked at his watch. “I’m fifteen minutes late already,” he fumed.

“I . . . I . . .” the bewildered pay clerk said.

“And when you go back, you can tell Mr Foster that I do not like to be kept waiting,” Clive said, putting out his hand.

The stupefied pay clerk handed him the bag.

“I should think so,” Clive said. He turned away, paused, and turned back. “Well, don’t just stand there, man. Get back to your work.”

“Yes,” the unfortunate man said. “I’m sorry, I . . .”

Clive walked smartly away.

* * * *

“What have you done to my arm?” Mr Frederic Traff said. “You’ve made it all short and hairy .. .”

* * * *

“Georgina. I like that name,” Charley said. He reached across and took George’s hand. “I’m glad you decided to have dinner with me tonight. Have you enjoyed yourself?”

“Immensely,” George said.

Charley seemed pleased. “Ah . . . how about rounding the evening off, Georgie, with a nightcap at my place?”

George smiled inwardly at the ill-concealed overtones. He tweaked Charley’s ear. “Charles, I like you very much. You’re very sweet. Later in the week, perhaps?”

Charley masterfully tried to hide his disappointment. “What about your husband?” he said.

“I can handle him,” George said. He gazed soulfully into Charley’s eyes. “Darling, be patient.”

“That’s not easy with you, Georgie.”

George laughed. He leaned forward and kissed Charley lightly and jumped out of the car. “I’ll call you in the morning, Charles?”

Charley nodded numbly.

* * * *

“It is the question of the withdrawal of your two countries, or the withdrawal of every other country,” the Olympic Chairman said to the Russian and American representatives. “That is the ultimatum supported by all other competing nations.

“Under the circumstances, the Committee hereby disqualifies both the U.S.S.R. and the U.SA. from further participation in these Games, and declares all results so far obtained null and void.”

“This is outrageous,” the Russian delegate spluttered. “You have no proof ...”

The chairman rose with great dignity. “The proof lies in the superhuman capabilities of your athletes. Such extravagant superiority renders competition farcical. We do not know what you employ, or how you employ it. But we do know.

“In consideration to the host nation we cannot abandon the Games. But we can, and do, take the strongest possible measures where we feel certain beyond doubt that the Olympic spirit is being violated and mocked!”

The Russian delegate glared back into the chairman’s fiercely reproving eye. “Ha!” he said.

The man from the United States looked uncomfortable. He felt sticky. “Ah, Mr Chairman,” he said diffidently, “before you take action, I ... ah ... on behalf of my country. . . ah ...” he squirmed. “Sometimes ... national pride ... blinds us ... and ... ah ... in this matter. Ah ... we have become aware ...” He took a hold of himself. “Mr Chairman, we will give you the facts and throw ourselves upon your mercy . . .”

* * * *

He sprang at her from the thicket. She screamed involuntarily, and thumbed her signalgard.

A silocar soundlessly swerved and homed on the stuttering blip.

* * * *

“Who told you about me?” Oliver Goldstick said. “No matter. They call me a crank. They say it can’t be done. I think differently.”

“How close are you to success?” Cranston Beever asked.

Goldstick shrugged. “I can’t say. Here you can see the physical paraphernalia of my prototype. I am constantly modifying.” He made a weary gesture. “If I had funds ... If I had backing from a large research organization . . . hrmph, who knows? But they laugh at me,” he said without rancour. “I am a crank ...”

Cranston was not encouraged, but he was desperate. He outlined the facts of the Dorphelmyer Case, then asked, “What do you think? Do you think that it would be possible to create such a time-slot?”

Goldstick smiled wanly. “My young friend, who is to say what is, and what is not, impossible?” Softly he said, “Time. Ah ... haaaa. Time is a challenge, a powerful and inexorable adversary. But there are weaknesses. For example, Time exists. It is measurable. Therefore, it must once have started. Thus we can make the logical assumption that Time cannot be infinite. Somewhere, somehow, the first second passed .. .”

“Yes,” Cranston Beever said, more curtly than he intended. “Thank you for your help. You will excuse me? I hope I didn’t bother you too much ...”

Cranston rudely took his leave, yet hating himself for the look of rejection he left on the older man’s face.

In the street he tried to rationalize his guilt. “He’s a nut. Sure, a nice old nut. But nevertheless he’s a nut...”

* * * *

George hummed a little tune as he let himself into the flat.

“Where have you been?” Constance cried.

“Out,” George said. “Having a ball.”

“Oh, George, how could you?” She came over and took his hands. “George, I needed you.”

George disengaged himself. “Did you? All you think about is yourself, isn’t it? Gadding about with other women. Well, two can play at that game.”

Constance was distressed. “I’m sorry, George, truly I am. I’ve been thinking, and you are right. This experiment has gone on long enough.” She paused. “I have made arrangements with Dr Joynter, and he has agreed to take up in tomorrow for changeback.”

George looked at her. He gave a short, nasty laugh. “Oh, you have, have you? When I have someone on a string who’s prepared to keep me in the manner to which I am unaccustomed—just beating his brains out to keep me happy? Oh, yeah. This is gravy. No more work for me. With my know-how I’ve got it made.”

Constance was shocked. “George!” she gasped. “George, what are you saying? You can’t mean that. We’ll change back.” Suddenly horrified, she said, “We have to change back!”

“Not me,” George said complacently, “I’m just beginning to like the way I am....”

* * * *

“Your name is Clive Mossy?”

Clive studied the stranger in his two-view. He had Co-Ord agent screaming from every fibre of his conservative bloc-suit.

“That’s right,” Clive said. He pressed the tube release. “Come on up.”

“Thanks.”

Clive made arrangements for the discomfort of his guest.

Shortly the stranger faced him. Deadpan he said, “There are a few questions I’d like to ask you, Mr Mossy. A certain pattern of incidents has brought me to you.”

“Oh?” Clive said. “Would you like a drink?”

“Uh-uh, no thanks,” the stranger said quickly.

“Not even coffee—”

“Uh-uh,” the stranger said positively.

Clive frowned, then shrugged. “OK.” he said. “Take a seat,” indicating an armchair opposite the one he settled into himself.

The stranger hesitated a second, then bent at the knees and sank into comfort.

“Now then,” Clive said pleasantly, “what’s on your mind?”

* * * *

“First visit to our country, I see?” the Immigration man said.

He stamped the visa of Carlich Nakaban. And so master-spy Alva Dakari, discovered, exposed, rejected, deported in disgrace, returned to the country of his denouement in a younger body, the sacrificial frame handpicked for perfect satisfaction.

* * * *

Judge Mercier gazed dispassionately at the protagonists. “As the law stands,” he said, “there is nothing to prevent willing parties, so inclined, from having their cerebral matter transplanted into whatever living vehicle they think fit. The law cannot be concerned in this matter with past agreements; each transplant, whether changeover or changeback, must accord with the wishes of both participants.

“In this case a state of unanimity is sadly absent, and it is the finding of this court that there is no legal redress where the matter cannot justly be decided without the mutual consent of both parties.

“I would like to add that those practising this form of medicine are under threat of legal action if they use force or coercion, or fail to supply authoritatively witnessed affidavits upon the mental state and precise requirements of each of their clients . . .”

George grinned, and winked at Constance.

Constance gnashed George’s teeth.

* * * *

“It looks like my arm, all right,” Mr Wilt said. “How’d he come to get it?”

“A technical malfunction in the de-synchronized closed circuit relays,” Rasulko said soothingly. “An errant overlap. The matter has been fully rectified.”

“It has, has it?” Mr Frederic Traff said angrily. “And what happens now? Another month of flips, I suppose?”

“Oh, no, no,” the medico said. “The transfer correction should not be difficult. There is nothing wrong with the arms, and the sequence flow for those members will be complete...”

* * * *

Dr Kurstead Schriff frowned in distress. “Oh, really! Oh, no.”

Dr Mayberry quizzed Dr Bell with his eyes.

“It seems he is going through the hallucinatory syndrome much as expected,” she said quietly.

“How is his heartbeat?”

“Regular.” Dr Bell checked. “Temperature normal, respiration steady.” She peered. “No irregularities in his brain pattern, either.”

Dr Mayberry nodded. “As anticipated.” He scribbled in his notebook. “Climactic envisioning disassociated from physical involvement, with no physical manifestations apart from facial expression and minor vocal comment...”

“Well, really,” Dr Schriff muttered. “What a thing to do ...”

* * * *

The Professors Muldible, now denned as PI, P2, P3, and P4, were talking.

“We are flesh and blood,” P3 said, “and we must have come from somewhere.”

“Obviously,” P2 said dryly.

“We look alike, talk alike, are fully conversant with this project, and have the same memories.”

P2 said, “We even have the same wife.”

They looked at one another. They brightened.

“I say, that’s true,” P3 said. “If we share her equally . . .”

“It would mean that we would only have to put up with her for a quarter of the time ...”

* * * *

“So,” Shylor Colom said with satisfaction, “it can be detected.”

“Sure,” Virgil replied, “provided you know what you are looking for. And provided you look for it before it can be used up by exertion ...”

Honest merit was back in the Olympics again.

* * * *

Mr Traff stared at the Instravel medico with undisguised malignancy.

The medico gazed in silent discomfort at Mr Traff’s two short, brown, hairy arms.

“Ah, yes,” Rasulko said at last. “You realize that electronic surgery is in its infancy. A great advance in medicine and we feel, ah ... We’ll set it up again,” he said hurriedly, and moved as briskly as he could to beyond the range of Mr Traff’s eyes.

* * * *

Dr Kurstead Schriff’s eyes snapped open. “Good heavens,” he said, “the cunning devils.”

He abruptly sat up.

“How do you feel, sir?” Dr Clothilde Bell asked.

“What was it like, sir?” Dr Mayberry said.

“Uh? What? Oh. Don’t bother me now.” Dr Schriff seemed preoccupied. He stood up. “You have the rest of the catatonicine here? Ah. Good.” He pocketed the bottle and the hypo. He strode to the door.

Without a backward glance he let himself out and moved purposefully away down the corridor.

* * * *

Was it feminine wiles that came to her aid?

“I’m glad you lost Charley,” Constance said. “It was he more than anything else.” She poured herself a whisky and splashed in some aerox.

“I’ll find somebody else,” George said confidently.

Constance looked miserable. “Do you have to?” Then, to his consternation, George saw his face crumple and big tears start to leak out of his eyes.

“Here, here,” he said, “don’t do that.”

“I... I c ... c ... can’t help it,” Constance sobbed. “I ... I’ve been such a f ... f ... fool, George, and I d ... d ... do love you so ...”

Embarrassed, George pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of the suit his body was wearing. “Here,” he said. “Here. Dry your eyes. There, there . . .”

Constance cried brokenly on his shoulder, her hands moving with a subtlety George did not suspect till it was too late.

Even so, why should he care?

He did not know that Constance had swapped his contraceptive pills for aspirin ...

* * * *

At Canberra Instravel Reception the clerk was speaking to two Co-Ord agents. “Three of them, one after the other. Just failed to arrive ...”

* * * *

“A Dr Kurstead Schriff to see you, sir.”

“Kurstead Schriff?” Gil Prober said. “What does he want? Has he got an appointment?”

“No, sir, but he says it’s urgent.”

“It always is. Who is he, anyway? Anybody important?”

“I have his card, sir. It says he is the Director of the Psychiatric Drug Development Division of Principle Chemicals.”

“Can’t the juniors handle him?”

“He insists on seeing someone in authority, sir.”

“What about?”

“He says about the disappearance of Sigstein Froymund, sir.”

“Oh, very well. Let him through the screen,” Gil Prober said petulantly, “but I’m warning you, if he’s another half-wit, I’m going to have you vaporized…”

* * * *

Clive Mossy opened the door to his flat, closed it and pressed the light button. Thus triggered, nerfroz gas capsules popped profusely in the hallway.

Clive spun frantically back to the door, clawed with putty fingers and collapsed.

* * * *

“Sorry, Mr Zadly, but we cannot allow your horse to run,” the Co-Ord agent said unapologetically.

“What? Why not? What I done?” Sy Zadly protested.

“That horse is a transplant,” the agent said. “You intend, between you, to influence the result of the race. To cheat, in other words.”

Sy gasped at him wordlessly.

“You withdraw the horse and restore him, and we will overlook the matter. If you persist in your attempts to defraud the racing public, proceedings will be taken against you.”

“Aye-yi-yi,” Sy said. “Don’t cover me with spit. I know when I’m licked…”

* * * *

“Come in, Cranston,” Sacpole said. “Take a seat. You look tired.”

To say Cranston Beever looked tired was the understatement of the year. He let his weary bones sag into a chair. Drained of his natural ebullience, an unaccustomed hopelessness shaded his troubled eyes, and his features were no longer boyish, but haggard and drawn.

“You’ve been working too hard, Cranston,” Sacpole said. “Driving yourself twenty-four hours a day.”

Cranston nodded glumly. Preliminary politeness, then, Sorry, Cranston, we’ll put somebody else on the case. Why else would he be before the big boss?

“Drink, Cranston?” Sacpole poured him one and took it over. “Here, you look as though you could do with it.”

“Thanks,” Cranston mumbled.

“Hear about Gil Prober picking up the fellow who was operating that amnesi-wave?”

“Yes,” Cranston said, morosely sipping his liquor.

“Co-Ord has been enjoying a run of good fortune lately,” Sacpole said. “We’ve caught four spies, brain-transplant boys, one of them an Alsatian dog. We’ve discovered and closed down thirty-seven illegal Instravel installations, and we’ve caught Mossy, the Memory Man.”

“Yes,” Cranston said shortly. “Everybody has been doing fine — but me.”

Sacpole put a hand on his shoulder. “Cranston, you are in the depths, aren’t you?” he said cheerfully. “What you need is a rest.”

Cranston Beever thought, Here it comes.

“Go home and have a nice hot bath, a good meal and a long sleep, and come back here again at ten tomorrow, eh?”

* * * *

The teleview buzzer sounded. The Professors Muldible looked at each other, commonly conjecturing.

“I’ll take it,” P1 said. He paused. “I think it would be best to present a singular appearance.”

P2, P3, and P4 grumbled, but moved out of teleview focus.

P1 depressed the answer switch.

Sir Clifton Gunfield, Managing Director of Instravel, Ltd. (Australia) filled the screen. “Hullo, Neil,” he said. “Hope I’m not disturbing you?” How’s the research coming?”

“Quite well, quite well,” P1 said.

“Good, good. Ah. Fact is, we’re having a spot of bother here in Canberra, Neil. Ah. You’re not very far away and I was wondering perhaps, ah, if you’d look into it?”

P1 looked doubtful. “I’m fairly busy at the moment. ..”

“I would deem it a great personal favour,” Sir Clifton said meaningly.

“Well,” P1 said, “I... er... What’s the trouble at Canberra?”

“A little over an hour ago. Something fishy,” Sir Clifton said. “Three people failed to arrive.”

“Failed to arrive? Have the interference recorders been checked.”

“Everything. It was a clear line. Nothing untoward at all. Very distressing. Some baggage, too. The chaps at Reception are most upset.”

P1 stared blankly. An alarming thought had crept into his mind.

“I say, have you thought of something, Neil?”

P1’s head did a very slow bob. “Yes, I’ve thought of something,” he said dully ...

* * * *

“Marvellous,” Mr Traff said, razor-sharp teeth on his biting sarcasm. “Absolutely brilliant. First, you gave me his arms; now you’ve given me his whole body ...”

* * * *

“Ah, Cranston. You took my advice. You look much better,” Sacpole said. “I want you to meet Dr Kurstead Schriff.”

Cranston shook hands with the doctor. It seemed expected.

“Come over here and sit down,” Sacpole said. “On the divan. That’s it. Now. I suppose you are wondering what this is all about?”

Cranston gave a non-committal nod.

Sacpole smiled. “Dr Schriff, would you care to explain?”

Dr Schriff cleared his throat. “In the course of my studies, I have discovered a certain drug, catatonicine. Basically an ataraxic, this drug was developed to relieve the psychoses of those suffering from schizophrenia. However, when I personally undertook initial testing of the drug, my reactions were remarkable. Remarkable indeed.”

“In what way?” Cranston asked.

“Well, you may remember that Professor Sigstein Froymund disappeared. He was a very good friend of mine, and his inexplicable exit upset me considerably.

“Now, under the influence of catatonicine, I gained some kind of super vision, and I saw clearly that he had been kidnapped. I saw the whole crime, was cognizant of every detail and could recognize the agents involved.”

“And it checked out,” Sacpole said contentedly.

Cranston frowned. “You mean you became clairvoyant?”

“Clairvoyance, E.S.P., what you will,” Sacpole said. “It works. Why do you think Co-Ord has been so successful lately?”

“You mean ...?’*

“Exactly. And that’s why you are here. Take off your coat and roll up your sleeve. You are steeped in the Dorphelmyer case. A shot of catatonicine and you’ll get the whole picture from beginning to end ...”

* * * *

“I used to work in Missing Persons,” Garvey said.

“So what’s that to me?” Sy Zadly said sourly. “I ain’t lost.”

“Listen, Sy,” Wilf Waijer pleaded, picking up the bottle and filling the glasses again, “he’s got something ...”

“Yeah,” Garvey said, a little drunk already, “I got something. And you know what I got? I got some of that stuff that put me out of work, that’s what I’ve got.”

“What’s he talking about?” Sy said. “Why you bring this bum here?”

“Sy, will you listen for a minute ... ?” Wilf begged.

Garvey tugged at his side pocket and produced a small bottle. He waved it at Sy. “See this?” he said. “Know what it is? No, ‘course you don’t. It’s Co-ord Especial, that’s what it is. ESPEC.” He glowered at the bottle. “Missing Persons,” he said, “was a good job. Good gang. Then suddenly, nobody’s missing any more. ‘Cept me.”

He put the small bottle down and turned back to his glass.

“An’ what so special about this stuff?” Sy asked sceptically.

“Not special,” Garvey said. “Especial.” He threw his arms in a wide gesture, and his drink slopped crazily. “ESPEC,” he said grandly. “Extra Sensory Perception Experience Control.” He slumped forward over the table again. “How about that?” he said. “A shot in the arm. Ha!” He began to laugh. “A real shot in the arm. Ha, ha, ha. How about that? ...”

* * * *

“What annoys me,” Cranston Beever said, “is that he made such a fool out of me.”

Gil Prober chuckled. “At some time we all get blinded by science.”

Cranston gazed at his beer. “What an idiot I have been. I’ve had every department in Co-Ord searching frantically for a time-manipulator. We took that radiation complex apart, piece by piece.” He smacked his palm down on the bar. “Dammit, Gil, he led me right up the garden path and drove me nearly crazy.”

Gil laughed and raised his finger to the bartender for refills.

“Right under my nose all the time. The most obvious suspect and I discarded him. Why? Because he didn’t have the know-how, the scientific background, the technical knowledge.” Cranston groaned.

“Don’t take it so hard,” Gil said lightly. “After all, you weren’t alone. Everyone at Co-Ord thought the same way you did.”

“But we didn’t think of anything else,” Cranston said. “We ran around in circles looking for a genius who didn’t exist. How he must have laughed!”

“Ah, now,” Gil said, “I wouldn’t say that the genius didn’t exist. On the contrary, he displayed the true genius of simplicity.”

“Hm-m-m. I suppose so,” Cranston said grudgingly. Then he exploded, “But what a setup to lead us astray! The radiation-complex, the Voyd rug, the exact perpendicular location. And the grass stains!” He smacked the bar again. “The obvious clue, and I didn’t even check the lawn just outside the door!”

“Under the circumstances, I wouldn’t have, either. He made you believe what he wanted you to believe. Anyway, he was a tidy worker and probably erased the signs.”

“We didn’t even notice that that section of the floor had only recently been laid.”

“Oh, that is a pardonable error,” Gil said. “The building is not very old and that honeycomb ferro-plastic weld joints itself undetectably. No, our builder’s handyman was a master. He knew what he was doing when he knocked Dorphelmyer out and dropped him out the window ...”

* * * *

“That Traff character is a jinx. Thousands of people use Instravel without fuss or trouble. Yet him,” he shook his head. “Oh, boy! You know, I know it sounds crazy, but do you know what I think? I think it’s an allergy. Instravel doesn’t bring him out in a rash, or anything; it just scrambles him a little.”

* * * *

“Pity we have had only negative results in our efforts to forecast the future,” Sacpole said. “However, that may come, eh?”

“A greater understanding of the drug is required,” Dr Kurstead Schriff said cautiously.

“Taken all round, I must say that your drug is the greatest single crime-preventive aid of the century,” Sacpole said. “With concentration and catatonicine I can see that there will be virtually no crime committed beyond our knowledge.

“We have closed the black market in D.N.A. pills, have much greater Instravel security, can detect antisocial transplants and, most importantly, are now able to halt the progress of those, like Clive Mossy, who abuse a novel technical advance to achieve their own ends.”

“Catatonicine can be abused, too,” Dr Schriff pointed out.

“Yes,” Sacpole said, “we are well aware of that. We need to employ strict controls on its supply and use. Most rigid controls.” He soughed. “Doctor, that is why you have been called here. The possibilities of this drug are incalculable. Already our Intelligence departments are demanding a higher quota. You can appreciate our desire for secrecy.

“I can indeed,” Dr Schriff said. “We can be thankful for industrial piracy. At Principle Chemicals we work under strict security. The product is safe and in few hands.”

Sacpole smiled. “I can see that you have a sound grasp of the situation,” he said.

Dr Schriff smiled back. “As a major shareholder in the company, my interest is profound — not superficial,” he said. “All we have need to discuss are the terms of a satisfactory agreement . ..”

* * * *

Sy Zadly came awake. “Gorrum,” he breathed.

He snapped upright. “Gorrum! I gorrum! I there. I see. I see plain!” He smacked his fat palms together. “We got it made. Quick! Write down before I forget.”

The pen trembled in Wilf Waijer’s fingers. “Go ahead,” he said eagerly. “Go ahead.”

“First race, Annabella, nina-two. Second race, Bubba, threeta-one. Inna third, Steamer Steven, twenny . . .” He stopped. For a moment his features retained a fixed parody of enthusiasm.

Wilf looked at him for reason, looked back to see what he had written. He felt himself begin to freeze as horror dawned.

With a bellow of rage, Sy Zadly sprang to his feet. “Yesterday already! I know yesterday!” Furiously he kicked the table with his stockinged foot.

Which did not help matters.

* * * *

Sir Clifton Gunfield looked at the Muldibles in dismay. “Are you sure that restoration is impossible?”

“The difficulties are insuperable,” P3 said.

“The nearest we could get would be a photographic likeness of a stranger,” P1 said.

The Professors Muldible were depressed and worried.

Sir Clifton turned to the Co-Ord agent. “Must there be publicity? Obviously it was an unfortunate accident. It won’t happen again. What is done cannot be undone. Surely it would be better if the matter were handled quietly.”

“It’s not for me to decide,” the agent said. “I only uncover the facts. I’ll put in my report to the Chief, and he’ll probably hand it over to the Legal Department to sort out. ..”

* * * *

“ESPEC makes much of Co-Ord redundant,” Sacpole said. “There is nothing beyond our comprehension. This has leaked out and is now general knowledge, which has had a marked effect upon the public consciousness. Crime, as such, can not occur without being brought to light for scrutiny.

“Now we can truly say, ‘Crime does not pay’...”

* * * *

“Everybody thinks that this guy Goldstick is a crackpot, but he’s a genius, not a screwball. I met him, and he made so much sense to me that I started working with him. Between us we have overcome practically every obstacle. We can create a chronomorphous state, and our main difficulty now is period selectivity.”

“All very interesting, Ray, but why have you called us in?”

Ray grinned. “Shortly we will be able to move around in Time. Do you know what that means?”

“Go ahead, elucidate.”

“I’ll explain it this way. Back in 1935, three men walked into the Cambridge and Citizens’ Bank and carted away over one million dollars worth of bullion. Got it?”

“I . . . uh . . .” He whistled.

“You got it. Some kind of fancy knock-out gas was used and the three men got clean away. The case is still in the Unsolved file,” Ray said happily. “It’s perfect. Handled with care, no one should get suspicious . . .”

* * * *

Carl Roeder was wondering how to murder his wife. He liked the idea of planting a crucial but natural posthypnotic suggestion, but the recent Irving Case had revealed that the least suspicion invited ESPEC. And if ESPEC saw nothing untoward, the obligatory truth session was an attendant check-out feature that could foil the most skilful histrionic performance.

Carl Roeder sighed. It had been much easier in the old days.

No suspicion. There must not be the least hint of suspicion.

A thought came to him and he sat up to help it mature. Why not use ESPEC itself? He could see Mayberry at the club. Maybe wangle some ESPEC with a good excuse. With a shot of ESPEC and a telekinetic booster ...

He rubbed his chin. It might work. He could envision her whereabouts and influence something to fall on her. Or perhaps give her a push. Or maybe put a glidocar out of control and . . .

* * * *

Col was breathing hard. He did not have much time.

Everything was in readiness. He put his forehead against his forbidden Mossy Memory Box. For some reason it successfully confused ESPEC culprit visualization. It was simple, but it had its disadvantages.

The shutter was on 1/50th, and he clicked it over.

Col stared blankly at the Memory Box. Stuck on it was a note that said: “See letter on table.”

Col turned, saw table and letter.

With agitated fingers he ripped the envelope open. He read: “Your memory will be gone for about a week. Don’t worry. You did it yourself for a very good reason. Take it easy and try to relax. There is plenty of food in the kitchen cupboard and...”

* * * *

Sy Zadly had learned something from his personal experience under the ESPEC drug, catatonicine. The picture came through clear and vivid, a startling presence, but too broad to cope with fine print. Also, the sound fell far short of hi-fi, and Sy laid his crafty plans accordingly.

Muffled unrecognizably, in a bare, undistinguished room, he made whiskered blank-screen teleview contact with an equally circumspect ex-marine sharpshooter.

And so it came about that later, in a room on the tenth floor, overlooking the racecourse, the pair were huddled, effectively masked, at the window, as the first race was in progress.

“There he go.” Sy hissed. “Yellow. Blue cap.”

“So you keep tellin’ me,” the sharpshooter breathed patiently.

As the horses approached the home turn, the ex-marine raised his powa-punch-pac and carefully sighted through its telescope.

The horses turned into the straight.

“Now!” Sy said hoarsely. “Now!”

The ex-marine squeezed the trigger. His threepy gave its curious 1/10th second full range whine, “weEoo,” and a low-surge bolt needled out to the rump of Sy’s selection.

“Again,” Sy whispered excitedly. “Again! ...”

Wilf Waijer, successfully disguised as a gentleman, watched the galvanized horse streak past the post, its frightened rider a blur of yellow.

He adjusted his monocle, twirled his cane, and contentedly went to collect . . .

* * * *

“You might say that we have discovered the Philosopher’s Stone,” Sacpole mused.

Sir Clifton Gunfield savoured his sherry. “You might say that.” He studied Sacpole. “You showed remarkable perspicacity, old chap.”

“I saw no reason why such a fortuitous discovery should become public property,” Sacpole said mildly. “Competition would destroy its value. Too many commodity-duplicators, and operating benefits would be marginal.”

“More sherry?” Sir Clifton filled his wineglass. “Odd, you know,” he said, “it never crossed my mind. The productive potential, I mean. Materials to goods. My main concern was the Instravel image.”

Sacpole laughed. “Luckily it was. It kept you quiet.”

“And, thanks to your extraordinary foresight and promptness, the affair has been most satisfactorily resolved.”

“Yes,” Sacpole said. He rolled the wineglass between his fingers. “If you pay generous compensation to the dependants of the irrecoverable travellers, and I take care to close Co-Ord interest, only the Muldibles remain. And they, with admirable co-operation, desire nothing more than privacy.”

They sat for a while, both reflecting upon the promise of the future.

Sir Clifton broke the silence. “You are a powerful man,” he said. “May I ask why you chose this course?”

Sacpole sighed. “Powerful, but not wealthy,” he said. “This golden egg will restore the family fortunes, yours and mine.” He raised his glass. “Cheers, eh?”

There is always a crooked man.

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