‘O MOON OF MY DELIGHT!’ Brian Aldiss MURRAGH lay on the ground to await consummation. It was now less than five minutes away and it would fall from the air. The alarms had sounded near and distant. Their echoes had died from the high hills of Region Six. Stretched full length on the edge of a grassy cliff, Murragh Harrison adjusted the plugs in his ears and laid his fume-mask ready by his side. Everything calm and silent now. The whole world silent. And in him: a growing tension, as strange and ever-delightful as the tensions of love. He raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered into the valley, where lay the Flange, that wide and forbidden highway down which the starships blazed. Even from his elevation, he could hardly discern the other side of the Flange; it ran East-West right round the equator of Tandy Two, unbroken and unalterable, an undeviating—he’d forgotten the figure—ten, was it, or twelve, or fifteen miles wide. In the sunlight, the innumerable facets of the Flange glittered and moved. His glasses picked out the mountains on the south side of the Flange. Black and white they were, picked as clear as a dead man’s ribs under the abrasion of total vacuum. ‘I must bring Fay here before she goes back to Earth,’ he said aloud. ‘Wonderful, wonderful. . . .’ Assuming a different tone, he said, ‘There is terror here on Tandy’s equator, terror and sublimity. The most awe-full place in the universe. Where vacuum and atmosphere kiss: and the kiss is a kiss of death! Yes. Remember that. “The kiss is a kiss of death.”‘ In his little leisure time Murragh was writing—and had been ever since I first met him—a book about Tandy Two as he experienced it. Yet he knew, he told me, he knew that the sentences he formed up there on the hill were too coloured, too big, too false. Under his excitement, more truthful images struggled to be born. While they struggled, while he lay and wished he had brought Fay with him, the starship came in. This! This was the moment, the fearsome apocalyptic moment! Unthinking, he dropped his glasses and ducked his head to the earth, clinging to it in desperate excitement with all his bones from his toes to his skull. Tandy Two lurched. The F.T.L. ship burst into normal space on automatic con trol, invisible and unheard at first. Boring for the world like a metal fist swung at a defenceless heart, it was a gale of force. It was brutality . . . and it skimmed the Flange as gently as lover’s cheek brushes lover’s cheek. Yet so mighty was that gentleness, that for an instant a loop of fire was spun completely round Tandy Two. Over the Flange a mirage flickered: a curious elongated blur that only an educated retina could take for the after-image of a Faster Than Light ship chasing to catch up with its object. Then a haze arose, obscuring the Flange. Cerenkov radiations flickered outwards, distorting vision. The transgravitic screens to the north of the Flange—on Murragh’s side of it, and ranged along the valley beneath his perch—buckled but held as they always held. The towering B.G.L. pylons were bathed in amber. Atmosphere and vacuum roared at each other from either side of the invisible screens. But as ever the wafer-thin geogravitics held them apart, held order and chaos separate. A gale swept up the mountain-sides. The sun jerked wildly across the sky. All this happened in one instant. And in the next instant it was deepest night. Murragh dug his hands out of the soft earth and stood up. His chest was soaked with sweat, his trousers were damp. Trembling, he clamped his fume-mask over his face, guard ing himself against the toxic gases generated by the F.T.L.’s passage. Tears still ran down his face as limply he turned to make his way back to the highland farm. ‘ “Kiss of death, embrace of flame . . .”‘ he muttered to himself as he climbed aboard his tractor; but still the elusive image he really wanted did not come. In a north-facing fold of hills lay the farmhouse, burrowed deeply into the granite just in case of accidents. Murragh’s headlights washed over it. Its outhouses were terraced below it, covered pen after covered pen, all now full of Farmer Doughty’s sheep, locked in as always during entry time; not a single animal could be allowed outside when the F.T.L.s came down. Everything lay still as Murragh drove up in his tractor. Even the sheep were silent, crouching mutely under the jack-in-a-box dark. Not a bird flew, not an insect sparked into the headlights; such life had almost died out during the four hun dred years the Flange had been in operation. The toxic gases hardly encouraged fecundity in nature. Soon Tandy itself might rise to shine down on its earth like second moon. The planet Tandy was a gas giant as big as Jupiter, a beautiful object when it rose into Tandy Two’s skies, but uninhabitable and unapproachable. Tandy One equally was not a safe place for human beings. But the second satellite, Tandy Two, was a gentle world with mild seasons and an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. People lived on Tandy Two, loved, hated, struggled, aspired there as on any of the multitudinous civilized planets in the galaxy, with this difference: that because there was something individual about Tandy Two, there was something individual about its problems. The southern hemisphere of Tandy Two was lifeless under vacuum; the northern existed mainly for the vast terminal towns of Blerion, Touchdown, and Ma-Gee-Neh. Apart from the cities, there was nothing but grass, grass and lakes and silicone desert stretching to the pole. And by courtesy an occasional sheep farm was allowed on the grasslands. ‘What a satellite!’ Murragh said, climbing from the tractor. Admiration sounded in his voice. He was a curious man, Murragh Harrison—but I’ll stick to fact and let you under stand what you will. He pushed through the spaced double doors that served the Doughty farmstead as a crude airlock when the gases were in the air. In the living-eating-cooking room beyond, Colin Doughty himself stood by the C.V. watching its colours absently. He looked up as Murragh removed his face-mask. ‘Good evening, Murragh,’ he said with heavy jocularity. ‘Great to see so nice a morning followed by so nice a night without so much as a bloody sunset in between.’ ‘You should be used to the system by now,’ Murragh mur mured, hanging his binoculars with his jacket in the A.-G. cupboard. After being alone in the overwhelming presence of Tandy, it always took him a moment to adjust to people again. ‘So I should, so I should. Fourteen years and I still see red to think how men have bollixed about with one of God’s worlds. Thank heaven we’ll all be off this crazy moon in an other three weeks! I can’t wait to see Earth now, I’m telling you.’ ‘You’ll miss the green grass and the open space.’ ‘So you keep telling me. What do you think I am? One of my bloody sheep! Just as soon-----’ ‘But once you get away-----’ ‘Just a minute, Murragh!’ Doughty held up a brown hand as he cocked his eye at the C.V. ‘Here comes Touchdown to tell us if it’s bedtime yet.’ Murragh had halted on the way upstairs to his room. Now he came back to peer into the globe with the shepherd. Even Hock the housedog glanced up momentarily at the assured face that appeared in the bright bowl. ‘C.V.A. Touchdown talking,’ the face said, smiling at its unseen audience. ‘The F.T.L. ship “Droffoln-Jingguring-Mapynga-Bill”—and I rehearsed its name beforehand!—has just made a safe and successful entry on the Flange some three hundred and twenty miles outside Touchdown station. As you can see from this live shot, passengers are already being met by helicopter and taken to the S.T.L. port in Touchdown. The “Droffoln-Jingguring-Mapynga-Bill” has come from Pyvries XIII in the Outer Magellans. You are looking at a typical Magellanic now. He is, as you observe, octopedal. ‘We hope to bring you news and interviews with passengers and crews in two hours’ time, when all the occupants of the F.T.L. have undergone the customary revival. You notice that at present they are still under Light-freeze. ‘Now we go over to Chronos-Touchdown for a new time check.’ The assured face gave way to a very shaggy one. Behind it, the untidy computing-room of this astronomical department greeted viewers. The shaggy face smiled and said, ‘As yet we have only a rough scheme for you. It will, as usual, take a little while to feed accurate figures into our machines, and some reports have still to come in. ‘Meanwhile, here is an approximate time check. The F.T.L. ship—I will not attempt its name—entered Flange influence at roughly 1219 hours 47-66 seconds on today, Seventeenday of Cowl Month. Inertia absorption thrust Tandy through ap proximately 108-75 degrees axial revolution in approximately 200 milliseconds. So the time at the end of that very short period became roughly 1934 hours 47-66 seconds. ‘Since that was about twenty-four and a half minutes ago, the time to which everyone in Touchdown zone should set their watches and clocks is . . . coming up . . . 1959 hours and 18 seconds. . . . Now! I repeat, the time is now 1959 hours, one minute to eight o’clock at night, plus 18 seconds. ‘It is still, of course, Seventeenday of Cowl. ‘We shall be back to bring you more accurate information on the time in another two hours.’ Doughty snorted and switched the globe off. It slid obedi ently out of sight into the wall. ‘Mucking about with the clocks!’ he growled. ‘Here I’ve just had my midday bite and there’s Bess upstairs putting the kids to bed!’ ‘That’s what happens on Tandy Two,’ Murragh said, edging from the room. Without wishing to seem rude, he was bored with Doughty’s complaints which occurred with little variation once a fortnight—whenever, in fact, a F.T.L. ship arrived. He ducked out of the room and almost scuttled up the stairs. ‘It may happen on Tandy Two,’ Doughty said, not averse to having only Hock to talk to, ‘but that don’t mean to say Colin Doughty has to like it.’ He squared his broad shoulders, thrust out his chest, and stuck his thumbs in his spunsteel jacket. ‘I was born on Earth where a man gets twenty-four hours to his day—every day.’ Hock thumped his tail idly twice as if in ironic applause. * * * * As Murragh got upstairs, Tessie marched past him on her way from the washing-room. She was absolutely naked. ‘High time the girl was taken to civilization and learnt the common rules of decency,’ Murragh thought, good-humouredly. The girl was several months past her thirteenth birthday. Perhaps it was as well the Doughty family were off back to Earth in three weeks; their departure and Tessie’s puberty were just about coincident. ‘Going to bed at this hour of the day!’ Tessie grunted, not deigning to look at her father’s help as she thumped past him. ‘It’s eight o’clock at night. The man on the C.V. has just said so,’ Murragh replied. ‘Poof!’ With that she disappeared into her bedroom. Murragh did the same into his. He took the time changes in his stride; on Tandy now the changes had to be considered natural, ‘for use can almost change the stamp of nature’. Life on the sheep farm was rigorous. Murragh, Doughty, and his wife rose early and slept early. Murragh planned to lie and think for an hour, possibly to write a page more of his book, and then to take a somnolizer and sleep till four the next morning. His thinking had no time to grow elaborate and deep. The door burst open and Fay rushed in, squealing with exuberance. ‘Did you see it? Did you see it?’ she asked. He had no need to ask to what she referred. ‘I sat on the top of the cliff and watched it,’ he said. ‘You are lucky! Gosh!’ She did a pirouette, and pulled an ugly grimace at him. “That’s what I call my Life-begins-at-forty face, Murragh; did it scare you? Oh fancy, to see one of those starships actually plonk down in the Flange. Tell me all about it!* She wore only vest and knickers. A tangle of arms and legs flashed as she jumped on to the bed beside him and began tugging his ears. She was six, gay, primitive, adorable, un­predictable. ‘You’re supposed to be going to bed. Your mother will be after you, girl.’ ‘Blow her, she’s always after me. Tell me about the starships and how they land and—oh, gummy, you know—all that crap you talk.’ ‘When you’ve wrenched my ears off I will.’ He was not easy with her leaning against him. Rising, he pointed out of his little window with its double panes. Since his room was at the front of the farmhouse, he had this view out across the valley. The girls slept in a room considered more safe, at the back of the house, tucked into solid granite (‘the living granite’, Doughty always called it)’ and without windows. ‘Outside there now, Fay,’ he said as the little girl peered into the dark, ‘are vapours that would make you ill if you inhaled them. They are breathed off by the Flange under the stress of absorbing the speed of the F.T.L. ships. The geogravitic screens on this side of the Flange undergo terrific pressures at such times and do very peculiar things. But the beautiful part is that when we wake in the morning the stinks will all have blown away; Tandy itself, this marvellous moon we live on, will absorb them and send us a fresh supply of clean mountain air to breathe.’ ‘Do the mountains have air?’ ‘We call the air on the mountains “mountain air”. That’s all it means.’ As he sat down beside her, she asked, ‘Do the vapours make it dark so quickly?’ ‘No, they don’t, Fay, and you know they don’t. ‘I’ve ex plained that bit before. The Faster-Than-Light ships do that.’ ‘Are the Vaster-Than-Light ships dark?’ ‘Faster-Than-Light. No, they’re not dark. They come in from deep space so fast—at speeds above that of light, be cause those are the only speeds they can travel at—that they shoot right round Tandy one and a half times before the Flange can stop them, before its works can absorb the ship’s momentum. And in doing that they twirl Tandy round a bit on its axis with them.’ ‘Like turntables?’ That’s what I told you, didn’t I? If you ran very fast on to a light wooden turntable that was not moving, you would stop but your motion would make the turntable turn. Transference of energy, in other words. And this twirling sometimes moves us round from sunshine into darkness.’ ‘Like today. I get you were scared out on the hillside when it suddenly got dark!’ He tickled her in the ribs. ‘No, I wasn’t, because I was prepared for it. But that’s why we have to get your Daddy’s sheep all safely under cover before a ship comes—otherwise they’d all be scared and jump over precipices and things, and then your Daddy’d lose all his money and you wouldn’t be able to go back to Earth.’ Fay looked meditatively at him. ‘Frankly speaking, these Vaster-Than-Light ships are rather a bloody nuisance to us, aren’t they?’ she said. Murragh hooted with laughter. ‘If you put it like that------’ he began, when Mrs. Doughty thrust her head round the door. ‘There you are, Fay, you little minx! I thought as much. Come and get into bed at once.’ Bess Doughty was a solid woman in her early forties, very plain, very clean. She of them all was the least at home on Tandy Two, yet she grumbled about it least; among all her many faults one could not include grumbling. She marched into Murragh’s room and seized her younger daughter by the wrists. ‘You’re killing me!’ Fay yelled in feigned agony. ‘Murragh and I were discussing transparency of energy. Let me kiss him good-night and then I’ll come. He is a lovely man and I wish he was coming to Earth with us.’ She gave Murragh an explosive kiss that rocked him back wards. Then she rushed from the room. Bess paused before following; she winked at Murragh. ‘Pity you don’t like us two to carry on a bit more in that style, Mr. Harrison,’ she said, and shut the door after her as she left. It was something of a relief to him that her crude physical advances were now replaced by nothing more trying than innuendo. Murragh put his feet up on the bed and lay back. He looked round the room with its sparse plastic furniture. This would be home for only three weeks more: then he would move on to work for Farmer Clay in Region Five. Nothing would he miss—except Fay, Fay who alone among all the people he knew shared his curiosity and his love for Tandy Two. A phrase of hers floated back to him. ‘The Vaster-Than-Light ships’. Oddly appropriate name for craft existing in ‘phase space’ where their mass exceeded ‘normal’ infinity! His mind began to play with the little girl’s phrase; reverie over came him, so that in sinking down into a nest of his own thought he found, even amid the complexity gathered round him, a comforting simplicity, a simplicity he had learnt to look for because it told him that to see clearly into his own inner nature, he had merely to crystallize the attraction Tandy held for him and all would be clear eternally; he would be a man free of shackles, or free at least to unlock them when he wished. So again, as on the cliff and as many times before, he plunged through the receptions of the imagination towards that wished-for truthful image. Perhaps his search itself was a delusion; but it led him tenderly to sleep. * * * * Murragh and Doughty were out early next morning, going wrapped into the cool hour before dawn. The air, as Murragh had predicted, was sweet to breathe again, although full of a light rain. Hock and the other dog—Pedro, the yard dog—ran with them as they whistled out the autocollies. Ten of them came pogoing into the open, light machines unfailingly obedient to the instructions from Doughty’s throat mike. Although they had their limitations, they could herd sheep twice as quickly as live dogs. Murragh unlocked the doors of the great covered pens. The autocollies went in to get the sheep out as he climbed aboard his tractor. As the sheep poured forth, bleating into the open, he and Doughty revved their engines and followed behind, watching as the flock fanned out towards the choicer grasslands. Then they bumped along in the rear, keeping the autodogs constantly on course. Dawn seeped through the eastern clouds and the rain stopped. Filmy sun created miracles of chiaroscuro over valley and hill. By then they had the sheep split into four flocks, each of which was established on a separate hillside for pasturing. They returned to the farmland in time to breakfast with the rest of the family. ‘Do they get miserable wet days on Earth like this?’ Tessie asked. ‘Nothing wrong with today. Rain’s holding off now,’ her father said. Breakfast was not his best meal. ‘It depends on what part of Earth you live, just as it does here, you silly girl,’ said her mother. ‘They haven’t got any weather in the south half of Tandy,’ Fay volunteered, talking round an epoch-making mouthful of mutton sausage, ‘ ‘cos it’s had to be vacuumized so’s the starships coming in at such a lick wouldn’t hit any molecules of air and get wrecked and without air you don’t have weather, isn’t that so, Murragh?’ Murragh, who had heard some of this sausage-and-sentence, agreed it was so. ‘Shut up talking about the Flange. It’s all you seem to think of, these days, young lady,’ Doughty growled. ‘I never mentioned the Flange, Daddy. You did.’ ‘I’m not interested in arguing, Fay, so save your energy. You’re getting too cheeky these days.’ She put both elbows on the plastic table and said with deliberate devilment, ‘The Flange is just a huge device for absorbing F.T.L. momentum, Daddy, as I suppose you know, don’t you? Isn’t it, Mr. Murragh?’ Her mother leant forward and slapped her hard across the wrist. ‘You like to sauce your dad, don’t you? Well, take that! And it’s no good coming crying to me about it. It’s your fault for being so saucy.’ But Fay had no intention of going crying to her mother. Bursting into tears, she flung down her spoon and fork and dashed upstairs howling. A moment later her bedroom door slammed. ‘Jolly well serve her right!’’ Tessie said. ‘You be quiet too,’ her mother said angrily. ‘Never get a peaceful meal now,’ Doughty said. Murragh Harrison said nothing. After the meal, as the two men went out to work again, Doughty said stiffly, ‘If you don’t mind, Harrison, I’d rather you left young Fay alone till we leave here.’ ‘Oh? Why’s that?’ The older man thrust him a suspicious glance, then looked away. ‘Because she’s my daughter and I say so.’ ‘Can’t you give me a reason rather than an evasion?’ A dying bird lay in the yard. Birds were as scarce as gold nuggets on Tandy Two. This one had evidently been overcome by the fumes generated in the previous day’s entry. Its wings fluttered pitifully as the men approached. Doughty kicked it to one side. ‘If you must know—because she’s getting mad on the Flange. Flange, Flange, Flange, that’s all we hear from the kid! She didn’t know or care a thing about it till this year when you keep telling her about it. You’re worse than Captain Rogers when he calls, and he has got an excuse because he works on the damn thing. So you keep quiet in future. Bess and me will leave here with no regrets. Tessie doesn’t care either way. But we don’t want Fay to keep thinking about this place and upsetting herself and thinking Earth isn’t her proper home, which it is going to be.’ This was a long speech for Doughty. The reasons he gave were good enough, but irritation made Murragh ask, ‘Did Mrs. Doughty get you to speak to me about this?’ Doughty stopped by the garage. He swung round and looked Murragh up and down, anger in his eye. ‘You’ve been with me in Region Six nigh on four years, Harrison. I was the man who gave you work when you wanted it, though I had not much need of you, nor much to pay you with. You’ve worked hard, I don’t deny-----’ ‘I can’t see-----’ ‘I’m talking, aren’t I? When you came here you said you were—what was it—”in revolt against ultra-urbanized planets”; you said you were a poet or something; you said-heck, you said a lot of stuff, dressed up in fine bloody phrases. Remember you used to keep me and Bess up half the night sometimes, until we saw it was all just blather!’ ‘Look here, if you’re-----’ The farmer bunched his fists and stuck out his lower lip. ‘You listen to me for a change. I’ve been wanting to say this for a long time. Poet indeed! We weren’t taken in by your blather, you know. And luckily it had no effect on your Tessie either. She’s more like me than her sister is—a quite sensible girl. But Fay is a baby. She’s silly as yet, and we reckon you’re having a bad influence on her-----’ ‘All right then, you’ve had your say. Now I’ll have mine. Leaving aside the question of whether you and your wife can understand any concept you weren’t born with------’ ‘You be careful now, Harrison, what you’re saying about Bess. I’m on to you! I’m not so daft as you think. Let me tell you Bess has had about enough of you giving her the glad eye and making passes at her as if she was just some------’ ‘By God!’ Murragh exploded in anger. ‘She tells you that? The boot’s on the other foot by a long chalk, and you’d better get that clear right away. If you think I’d touch—if I’d lay a hand on that dismal, salacious. . . . No, it’d make me sick.’ The mere thought of it took the edge off Murragh’s wrath. It had the opposite effect on Doughty. He swung his left fist hard at Murragh’s jaw. Murragh blocked it with his right forearm and counter-attacked in self-defence with his left. He caught Doughty glancingly on the ear as the farmer kicked out at him. Unable to step back in time, Murragh grabbed the steel-studded boot and wrenched it upwards. Doughty staggered back and fell heavily on to the ground. Murragh stood over him, all fury gone. ‘If I had known how much you resented me all these years,’ he said miserably, staring down at his employer’s face, ‘I’d not have stayed here. Don’t worry, I’ll say no more to Fay. Now let’s go and get the tractors out, unless you want to sack me on the spot—and that’s entirely up to you.’ As he helped the older man to his feet, Doughty muttered shamefacedly, ‘I’ve not resented you, man, you know that perfectly well. . . .’ Then they got the tractors out in silence. * * * * The result of Doughty’s fall was what he termed ‘a bad back’. He was—and when he said it he spoke with an air of surprise more appropriate to a discovery than cliché —’not as young as he was’. For a day or so he sat gloomily indoors by his C.V., letting Murragh do the outside work, and brooding over his lot. Tandy Two is a harder satellite than it seems at first—I know after two five-year spells of duty on it. Although in size it is only negligibly larger than Earth (its equatorial circum ference being one hundred and forty-six miles longer), its com position is denser, so that gravity exacts a noticeably heavier strain than on Earth. And the fortnightly time hop when the F.T.L.s enter takes a psychological toll. In the big towns like Touchdown and Blerion, civilization can compensate for these disadvantages. On the scattered sheep stations there are no compensations. Moreover, Colin Doughty had found his farming far less profitable than it had looked on paper from Earth fourteen years ago. Tandy Two offered the best grazing in a stellar region full of ready-made mutton markets: twenty hundred over-urbanized planets within twice twenty light years. But his costs had been stiff, the costs of transport above all, and now he counted himself lucky to be able to get away with enough brass saved to buy a small shop, a butcher’s, Earthside. As it was, margins were narrow: he was reckoning on the sale of farm and stock to buy passages home for himself and his family. Much of this I heard on my periodic tours through Region Six, when I generally managed a visit to the Doughtys. I heard it all again the next time I called, thirteen days after the scuffle between Doughty and Murragh. I looked in to see Bess, and found Doughty himself, sitting by a fire, looking surly. Having returned to work, he had again wrenched his back and was having to rest it. ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever known you to be off work. Cheer up, you’ve only got a week to go before you’re making tracks for home,’ I said, removing my coat. My truck was outside. Though only half a mile away by hill paths, the unit to which I was attached was at least ten miles off by the circuitous track round the mountains. ‘Look how long the flaming journey back to Earth takes when we do get off from Touchdown,’ he complained. ‘Pity we can’t get an F.T.L. ship to Earth—there are enough of them around.’ He spoke as if the F.T.L. ships were my responsibility, which in a sense they were. ‘You know by their nature they’re only fit for trans-galactic distances,’ I said, speaking as though to a child. ‘Earth’s too near—you have to catch a S.T.L. to get there. And even S.T.L.s are fast enough to make the subjective time of the journey no more than three or four months.’ ‘Don’t start explaining,’ he said. He waved his hand dismissively. ‘You know I’m only a simple farmer. I don’t grasp all that technical stuff.’ That is what I love about simple farmers. They practically invite you to give them explanations, they swallow them, then they say they do not want them. I often found it hard not to despise Doughty. The two girls Fay and Tessie were there, having just finished their C.V. lessons. Tessie was preparing lunch; eyeing me warily—she was a mistrustful creature—she told me that her mother was out helping Murragh with the flocks while Doughty was laid up. Both girls came over to the farmer to join in the discussion; I coaxed Fay up on to my knee. She wanted the whole business of how they got home explained to her. ‘You’re a Flange Maintenance Officer, Captain Rogers,’ she said. ‘Tell me all about it and then I’ll tell Daddy so’s he can understand.’ ‘You don’t have to understand,’ her father said. ‘We just take a ship and it’ll get us there eventually and that’s all there is to it, thank God. The likes of us don’t need to bother our heads about the technicalities.’ ‘I’m going to be educated,’ Fay replied. ‘It’s good for us to listen,’ Tessie said, ‘—though I under stand it all already. A child could understand it.’ ‘I’m a child and I don’t understand it,’ her sister said. ‘The universe is full of civilized planets, and in a week’s time you re all going to hop from one such to another such,’ I began. And as I sought for the simple words and the vivid pictures with which to put my explanation across to them, the wonder of the universe overcame me as if for a moment I too was a child. For the galaxy had grown up into a great and peaceful unit. War existed, but it remained planet-bound and never spread between planets. Crime survived, but did not flourish. Evil lived, but knowledge kept pace with it and fought it. Man prospered and grew kindlier rather than otherwise. Certainly his old vices were as green as ever, but he had devised socio logical systems that contained them better than had been the case in earlier epochs. The galaxy worked something like a clock, its parts inter dependent. Space ships formed its connecting links. Because of the varying distances that had to be covered between planets, some of them colossal, some relatively small, two main classes of space ships had been developed. Bridging all but the lesser distances were the F.T.L. ships, travelling in super-universes at multiple-light velocities. Bridg ing the lesser distances went the S.T.L., the Slower-Than-Light ships. And the two sorts of travel were, like the planetary economies themselves, interdependent. The F.T.L. ship, that ultimate miracle of technology, has one disadvantage: it moves—as far as the ‘normal’ universe is concerned—at only two speeds, faster than light and stationary. An F.T.L. ship has to stop directly it comes out of phase space and enters the quantitative fields of the normal universe. Hence bodies such as Tandy Two, spread throughout the galaxy; they are the Braking Planets or Satellites. An F.T.L. cannot ‘stop’ in space (a meaningless expres sion). Instead, its velocities are absorbed by the braking planets or, more accurately, by the inertial absorbers of the flanges which girdle such planets. The F.T.L.s burst in and are reduced to zero velocity within a time limit of about 200 milli seconds—in which time they have circuited the flange, gone completely round the planet, one and a half times. S.T.L.s then disperse the passengers to local star systems, much in the way that stratoliners land travellers who then disperse to nearby points by helicab. Though S.T.L.s are slow, relativistic time contractions shorten the subjective journeys in them to tolerable limits of months or weeks. So the universe ticks, not perfectly (or I’ll be accused of smugness!) but workably. And this is what I told Doughty and his daughters, as Fay snuggled against me, and Tessie kept her distance. ‘Well, I’d better go and finish your dinner, Daddy,’ Tessie said, after a pause. He patted her bottom and chuckled with approval. ‘That’s it, girl,’ he said. ‘Food’s more in our line than all this relativistic stuff. Give me a lamb cutlet any day.’ I had no answer. Nor had Fay, though I saw by her face that she was still thinking over what I had said, as she slid off my knee to go and help Tessie. How much did it mean to her? How much does it all mean to any of us? Though Doughty had little time for theory, I also relished the thought of the lamb cutlet. Before the food was ready, I took a turn outside with the farmer, who used his stick as support. ‘You’ll miss this view,’ I said, gazing over the great mys terious body of Tandy whose contours were clad in green and freckled here and there with sheep. I must admit it, I am fonder of the beauties of women than of landscape; for all that, the prospect was fine. In the voluptuous downward curve between two hills, Tandy the primary was setting. Even by daylight the banded and beautiful reds swirling over its oblate surface were impressive. Doughty looked about him, sniffing, admitting nothing. He appeared not to have heard what I said. ‘Rain coming up from somewhere,’ he observed. In my turn I ignored him. ‘You’ll miss this view back on Earth,’ I repeated. ‘Bugger the view!’ Doughty exclaimed and laughed. ‘I’m not a clever man like you and young Murragh, Captain; I get simple satisfaction out of simple things, like being in the place where I was born.’ Although I happened to know he was born eight layers under the sky-port in Birmingham, where they still had slot meters for your ration of fresh air, I made no answer. All he meant was that he valued his personal illusions, and there I was with him every time. Convictions or illusions: what matter if all conviction is illusion, so long as we hang on to it? You would never shift Doughty from his, fool though he was in many ways. I could never get under his skin as surely as I could with some people—Murragh, for instance, a more complicated crea ture altogether; but often the simplest person has a sort of characterless opacity about him. So it seemed with Doughty, and if I have drawn him flat and lumpy here, that was how I experienced him then. To produce talk between us, for his silence made me un easy, I asked after Murragh. Doughty had little to say on that subject. Instead he pointed with his stick to a tracked vehicle bumping southwards to wards us. ‘That’ll be Murragh with Bess now, coming home for a bit of grub,’ he said. He was mistaken. When the tractor drew nearer, we saw that only Bess was inside it. As we strolled forward, she drove round the covered pens and pulled up beside us. Her face was flushed, and—I thought —angry-looking, but she smiled when she saw me. ‘Hullo, Captain Rogers!’ She climbed down and clasped my hand briefly. ‘I was forgetting we’d be having your company today. Nice to see a strange face, though I’d hardly call yours that.’ She turned straight to her husband and said, ‘We got trouble up on Pike’s Brow. Two autocollies plunged straight down a crevasse. Murragh’s up there with them now trying to get them out.’ ‘What were you doing up on Pike’s Brow?’ he demanded. ‘I told you to keep number three flock over the other side while I was off—you know it’s tricky on Pike’s with all that faulting, you silly woman. Why didn’t you do as I told you?’ ‘It wouldn’t have happened if my throat mike hadn’t jammed. I couldn’t call the collies off before they went down the hole.’ ‘Don’t make excuses. I can’t take a day off without some thing going wrong. I——’ ‘You’ve had six days off already, Colin Doughty, so shut your trapper——’ ‘How’s Harrison managing?’ I asked, thinking an interrup tion was necessary. Mrs. Doughty flashed me a look of gratitude. ‘I tell you, he’s trying to get down the crevasse after the autocollies. Trouble is, they’re still going and won’t answer to orders, so they’re working themselves down deeper and deeper. That’s why I came back here, to switch off the juice; they work on beamed power, you know.’ I heard Doughty’s teeth grind. ‘Then buck up and switch off, woman, before the creatures ruin themselves! You know they cost money. What you wait ing for?’ ‘What? For some old fool to stop arguing with me, of course. Let me by.’ She marched past us, an aggressive woman, rather ugly, and yet still to my taste pleasing, as though the thickness of her body bore some direct if mysterious relationship to the adver sities of life. Going into the control shed, she killed the power and then came back to where we stood. ‘I’ll come with you, Mrs. Doughty, and see what I can do to help,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to get back to my outfit for another hour.’ A look of understanding moved across her face and I climbed on to the tractor with her after a brief nod to Doughty. There was some justification for this. If the situation was as she said it was, then the matter was one of urgency—for the next F.T.L. ship was due in under four hours and forty thousand sheep had to be herded under lock and key before that. Had to be: or darkness would be on them, they would stampede and kill or injure themselves on the rocky slopes, and Doughty’s hard-earned savings would be down to nil. If, that is, the situation was as Bess said it was. When we were out of sight of old Doughty and the farm, Bess stopped the tractor. We looked at each other. My whole system changed gear as we saw the greed in each other’s eyes. ‘How much of this story is a lie to get me alone and at your mercy?’ I asked. She put her hard broad hand over mine. ‘None of it, Vasco. We’ll have to shift back to Murragh as soon as possible, if he hasn’t already broken his neck down that crevasse. But with Colin hanging about the house I couldn’t have seen you alone if this opportunity hadn’t turned up—and this’ll be our last meeting, won’t it?’ ‘Unless you change your mind and don’t go to Earth with him next week.’ ‘You know I can’t do that, Vasco.’ I did know. I was safe. Not to put too fine a point on it, she’d have been a nuisance if she had stayed for my sake. There were dozens of women like Bessy Doughty—one on nearly every hill farm I visited, bored, lonely, willing, only too happy to indulge in an affair with a Flange Maintenance Official. It was not as if I loved her. ‘Then we’ll make it really good this last time,’ I said. And there was the greed again, plain and undisguised and sweet. We almost fell out on to the grass. That’s how these things should be: raw, unglamourized. That’s the way it must be for me. Bess and I never made love. We coupled. * * * * Afterwards, when we came to our ordinary senses, we were aware that we had been longer than we should have been. Scrambling back into the tractor, we headed fast and bumpy for Pike’s Brow. ‘I hope Murragh’s all right,’ I muttered, glancing at my arm watch. She neither liked nor understood my perpetual interest in Murragh Harrison. ‘He’s queer!’ she sneered. I didn’t ask her to elaborate her crudity. I had heard it before, and the pattern behind it was obvious enough: Mur ragh disliked her hungry advances—and why not? She was plain, solid, coarse . . . no, I do myself no justice saying all this—for though she was all that, Bess also had a pure peasant honesty that in my eyes excused everything—or so I told my self to justify the circumstances. There you are: I’m the kind that prefers bread to cake. At first when Murragh arrived at Doughty’s farm, I had been jealous, afraid that he would spoil my innocent little game. When it was clear he would do no such thing, that he was not a bread man, I grew interested in him for his own sake. Sometimes this had caused trouble between Bess and me—but enough of this; I am trying to tell Murragh’s tale, not mine. If I deviate, well, one life is very much tangled with the next man’s. We must have created some sort of speed record to the foot of Pike’s Brow. Then the terrain became so steep that we had to halt, leave the tractor, and climb on our own two feet. Bending our backs, we climbed. Sheep moved reluctantly out of our path, eyeing us with that asinine division of feature that marks a Tandy sheep’s face: all rabbity and timid about the eyes and nose, and as arrogant as a camel about the lower lip. Rain came on us with the unexpectedness it reserves for Region Six, as if a giant over the hump of the mountains had suddenly emptied his biggest bucket across our path. I re membered Doughty’s forecast as I turned up my collar. Still we climbed, watching little rivulets form among the short blades under our boots. After my recent exertions, I began to wish I hadn’t volunteered for this. At last we reached the crevasse. We scrambled along by its side towards the point where Murragh had climbed over into it, a point marked by the two live dogs, Hock and Pedro, who sat patiently in the rain, barking at our approach. The downpour was dying by now. We stood, pulled our backbones painfully upright, and breathed the damp air deep before bothering about Murragh. He was some twenty feet down into the crack, where it was so narrow that he could rest with his back to one side of it and his feet to the other. He was drenched from the water pouring over the edge; it splashed past him and gargled down into a ribbon of a stream a further thirty feet beneath his boots. One of the autocollies was wedged beside him, covered in mud, The other lay a little way and some feet lower down, upside down but seemingly unharmed. I noted the expression on Murragh’s face. It was blank, while he seemed to gaze into nothing, ignoring the rivulets that splashed round him. ‘Murragh!’ Bess called sharply. ‘Wake up. We’re back at last.’ He looked up at us. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Hello, Vasco! I was just communing with the great earth mother. She’s really swallowed me. . . . It’s funny, stuck down here in a fissure . . . like climbing between the lips of a whale.’ And there would have been more like that! Generally I had patience with his curious fancies, enjoyed them even, but not at such a moment, not with Bess standing there sneering, and the water running down my back, and a stitch in my side, and the time against us. ‘It’s raining, Dreamer Boy,’ I reminded him. ‘In case you didn’t notice, we’re all wet through. For God’s sake, stir your self.’ He seemed to pull himself together, dashing wet hair back from his face. Peering upwards rather stupidly, as if he were a fish regarding from a ditch his first humans, he said, ‘Fine day for mountaineering, isn’t it? If we’re not careful, the earth under this autocollie will crumble and the machine may get wedged or damaged. As it is, it is still in working order. Fling me the rope down, Bess. You and Vasco can haul it up while I steady it.’ She stared blankly into my face. ‘Damn it to hell, I left the bloody rope back in the tractor,’ she said. I remembered then. She’d unhooked it from her waist when we lay on the grass and later had not bothered in her haste to tie it on again, tossing it instead into the back of the vehicle. ‘For God’s sake go and get it then!’ Murragh shouted im patiently, as if suddenly realizing how long he had waited. ‘I can’t stay down here much longer.’ Again Bess looked at me. I gazed away down at my muddy boots. ‘Go and get it for me, Vasco,’ she urged. ‘I’m out of breath,’ I said. ‘I’ve got the stitch.’ ‘—you!’ she said. She started off down the hillside again without another word. Murragh looked sharply at me; I did not return his stare. It took her twenty-five minutes to return with the rope. In that time, the rain cleared entirely. I squatted by Pedro and Hock, gazing over the dull and tumbled terrain. Murragh and I did not speak to each other. The best part of another hour passed before we three bedraggled creatures had managed to haul the autocollies up safely. We could have done the job in half the time, had we not been so careful to preserve them from harm; we all knew the balance of the Doughty finances, and an autocollie can cost anything from twenty percentages to five parapounds. Panting, I looked at my arm watch. In two hours less six minutes the next F.T.L. was due for entry on Tandy Two. It was past the time I should have reported back to my unit for duty. I told Murragh and Bess that I must be going—told them curtly, for after missing my lunch, getting a soaking, and nearly wrenching my arms off rescuing the dogs, I was none too sweet-humoured. ‘You can’t leave us now, Vasco,’ Murragh said. ‘The whole flock’s in jeopardy, and not only this lot on the Brow. We’ve got to have every sheep under cover in two hours—and first of all someone must go back to the farm and switch the beam on again to get the dogs going. We want your help still.’ His eyes were as appealing as Bess’s. God, I thought, the way some people need people! He has his emotional requirements the way she has her physical ones. Whereas hers are crashingly simple, his I don’t understand; once these auto-dogs are running again, they will see the sheep home in no time, without help. Right then, I could not think of two people I would less like to be stuck on a mountain with. But all I said was, ‘I’m a maintenance officer, Murragh, not a shepherd. I’ve made my self late for duty as it is. Since my truck’s at the farm, I’ll have to go back to collect it, so when I get there I’ll tell Colin to beam the juice to you—but from then on you’re on your own.’ As I turned to go, Bess put her hand round my wrist. When I swung round on her, I saw her flinch from my expression. ‘You can’t just ditch us like this, Vasco,’ she said. ‘I’m ditching nobody. I helped you drag the collies out, didn’t I? I’ve got a job to do, and I’ll be in the shit for reporting back late as it is. Now let me go.’ She dropped my hand. I made off down the slope at a slow trot, digging in my heels as I went. Now and again I slipped, falling back on the wet grass. Before I got to the level, I saw another tractor approaching. Doughty was in it. He yelled at me as we drew nearer. ‘I came to see what you lot were doing all this time. You’ve been taking so long I thought you’d all fallen down the hole with the collies.’ Briefly I told him what was happening, while he climbed slowly out of the tractor, clutching his back. ‘So I’m borrowing Bess’s tractor to go back and switch on the juice, so that the autos can start herding as soon as possible,’ I finished. He fell to cursing, saying he was going to lose all his live stock, that they could never be driven under cover before the F.T.L. arrived. I tried to reassure him before going over to the other vehicle. As I climbed in he said, ‘When you get there, tell Tessie to come back here with the tractor. She can drive well enough, and we’ll need her help. The more hands here the better. And tell her to bring the signal pistols. They’ll get the sheep moving.’ ‘And Fay?’ ‘She’d only be in the damned way here.’ Giving him a wave, I stood on the acceleration and rattled back to the farm. By now the sun was bright and the sky free of cloud, which did not stop my boots squelching or my clothes from clinging to me like wet wallpaper. * * * * Directly I reached the farm buildings, I marched into the control shed, crossed to the appropriate board, and pushed the rheostat over. Power began its ancient song, that hum of con tent that sounds perpetually as if it is ascending the scale. Up on the pastures, the electronic dogs would be leaping into activity. Everything appeared in order, though Colin Doughty was not a man to keep his equipment spotless—and I reflected, not for the first time that day, that if he had cared to lay out an extra twenty parapounds or so he could have had switchboard-to-flock communication, which would have saved him valu able time on a day like this. Well, it was not my concern. In the living-eating-cooking room, Tessie was alone. She stood in her slip, cutting out a dress for Earthside, and I sur veyed her; she was developing well. As usual, she seemed displeased to see me—baffling creatures, adolescent girls; you never know whether they are acting or not. I gave her her father’s orders and told her to get out to Pike’s Brow as soon as she could. ‘And where’s Fay?’ I asked. ‘It’s none of your business, Captain Rogers.’ As if she felt this was a bit too sharp, she added, ‘and any how I don’t know. This is one of my great not-knowing days.’ I sniffed. I was in a hurry and anyhow it was, as she said, none of my business now, although I would dearly have liked a farewell word with the younger girl. Nodding to Tessie, I squelched out of the building, collected the maintenance truck, and drove fast back to my unit round the other side of the mountains. To perdition with all Doughtys! Murragh used to say that there wasn’t a more interesting job than mine on all Tandy. Though he was prepared to talk for hours about his feelings—’my Tandian tenebrosities’, he sometimes called them—he was equally prepared to listen for hours while I explained in minute detail the working of the Flange and the problems of repair it posed. He learnt from me any facts he filtered on to Fay. Maintaining the Flange is a costly and complicated busi ness, and would be even more so had we not costly and com plicated machines with which to operate. Between F.T.L. arrivals, my unit is working ceaselessly over the Region Six strip, testing, checking, replacing, making good. The complex nature of the Flange necessitates this. To start with, there is the Bonfiglioli Geogravitic Layer, marked by tall pylons, along the north of the Flange, which maintains all of Tandy Two’s atmosphere within its stress; were this to contract more than a minimum leakage, the lives of everyone on the planet would be in jeopardy. Before the B.G.L. comes the ‘fence’, which prevents any creature from entering the Flange zone, while after it come our equipment stores, bunkers, etc., before you get to the actual twelve-mile width of the Flange itself. If you want to learn how the beast works, you must mug it up in a technical publication. All I will say here is that the Flange is a huge shock absorber, three stories deep and gird ling the planet. It has to absorb the biggest man-made shock of all time, though it is a delicate instrument with an upper surface of free-grooved pyr-glass needles. Its functioning de pends first and foremost on the taubesi thermocouple, of which there is one to every square millimetre of surface; these detect an F.T.L. ship before it re-enters normal space and activate the rest of the system immediately. The rest of the system is, briefly, an inertia vacuum. The F.T.L. ship never actually makes contact with the Flange surface, of course, but its detectors mesh with the inertials and transfer velocities, stopping it, as was explained earlier, in milliseconds—the figure varies according to planetary and ship’s mass, but for Tandy Two is generally in the order of 201.5 milliseconds. The whole Flange is activated—switched on metre by metre of its entire twenty-five thousand miles length—two hours before an F.T.L. ship arrives (only the computers beneath the strip know precisely when the starship will materialize from phase space). At that time the various maintenance units give the whole system a final check-over, and the needle-like surface of the Flange looks first one way and then another, like stroked fur, as it searches for breakthrough point. I should have been back for that event. I had come down to the valleys by now. Over to my left ran the graceful B.G.L. pylons, with the Flange itself behind, already stretching itself like a self-activated rubber sheet; be yond it burned the dead half of Tandy, sealed off in vacuum, bleached dust-white in the sun. Less than a mile remained between me and the unit post. Then I saw Fay. Her blue dress shone clearly against the tawny ground. She was several hundred yards ahead of me, not looking in my direction and running directly towards the electrified ‘fence’ that guards the B.G.L. and the Flange itself. ‘Fay!’ I yelled. ‘Come back!’ Instinctive stuff! I was enclosed in the truck; had she heard my cry it would only have speeded her on her way. This was her last chance to see an F.T.L. ship enter before she went back to Earth. The absence of her father and mother had given her the chance to slip out, so she had taken it. In my head as I gunned my vehicle sharply forward, I heard again some of the silly sweet inquisitive questions she had asked me on my visits. ‘Can you see the ships when they land?’ ‘You do get an image of them, but it’s after they’ve passed because they’re moving fractionally faster than light.’ ‘Gosh, Captain Rogers, light is funny stuff when you come to think. Everything’s funny stuff when you come to think.’ And now she was darting towards the electrified fence, and that was not funny. ‘Fay!’ I yelled as I drove, letting my lungs shout because in my fear I could not stop them. The fence was built of two components, an ordinary strand fence with a mild shock to keep sheep away, and then, some yards beyond that, a trellis of high voltage designed simply and crudely to kill. Warning notices ran all the way between the two fences, one every three hundred and fifty yards, 125,714 of them right round the planet—and this kid in a blue frock ignoring every one. She dived through the strand fence without touching it. Now I was level with her. Seeing me, she began running parallel between the two fences. Beyond her the eyes of the needles of the Flange turned first this way then that, restless and expectant. I jumped from the truck before it stopped moving. ‘You’ll get killed, Fay!’ I bellowed. She turned then, her face half mischievous, half scared. She was running off course towards the second fence as she turned. Something she called out to me—I could not make out, still cannot make out what. As I ducked under the sheep strand after her, she hit the other fence. Fay! Ah, my Fay, my own sweet free-born daughter! She was outlined in bright light, she was black as a cinder, the universe screamed and yapped like a dying dog. My face hit the dust shrieking as I fell. Noise, death, heat, slapped me down. Then there was mind-devouring silence. Peace rolled down like a steam-roller, flattening everything, the eternal hush of damnation into which I wept as if the uni verse were a pocket handkerchief for my grief. Fay, oh Fay, my own child! Beyond the B.G.L., safe in vacuum, the Flange peered towards the heavens, twisting its spiked eyes. I rolled in the blistered dust without comprehension. How long I lay there I have no idea. Eventually the alarms roused me. They washed round me and through me until they too were gone and the silence came back. When my hearing returned, I heard a throbbing in the silence. At first I could not place it, had no wish to place it, but at last I sat up and realized that the motor of my truck was still patiently turning over. I stood up shakily on my two legs. The ill-co-ordinated action brought a measure of intelli gence back to my system. All that presented itself to me was that I had to return to the farm and tell Bess what had happened. Everything else was forgotten, even that the F.T.L. ship was due at any time. I got back somehow under the sheep fence, and into the cab. Somehow I kicked in the gears and we lurched into action. Fay, Fay, Fay, my blood kept saying. As I steered away from the Flange, from the burnt ground to grass again, a figure presented itself before me. Blankly I stopped and climbed out to meet it, hardly knowing what I did. It was Murragh, waving his arms like one possessed. ‘Thanks to your aid we got the flocks under cover in time,’ he said. ‘So I came down here to see the F.T.L. entry. You know for me to see an entry—well, it’s like watching the creation.’ He stopped, eyeing me, his face full of a private emotion. ‘It’s like the creation, is it?’ I said dumbly. My mouth felt puffy Fay, Fay, Fay . . . okay, I was all kinds of a cur, but I didn’t deserve that, that actually before my eyes----- ‘And Vasco, we’ve always been close friends, I don’t have to mind what I say to you, you know that this event once a fort night—it’s the excitement of all excitements for me. I mean ... well, it’s just that even something like sex palls beside watching an F.T.L. entry-----’ In the state I was in, I could not grasp what he was saying or meaning. It came back to me long after, like finding a private letter behind the wainscoting of an empty house: titillating, but all old history. ‘And I’ve got the image of Tandy Two I was after, Vasco. . . .’ His eyes were alight. Full of that divine inner fire of a poet: it lit him too well inside for him to see me. ‘Tandy’s a woman------’ There was no warning. The F.T.L. ship entered. Cerenkov radiations belched outwards, distorting our vision. For a second, Murragh and I were embedded in amber. Tandy was girdled in a noose of flame, most of which expanded south safely into vacuum. Then the giant fist of inertial reaction struck us. The sun plunged across the sky like a frightened horse. As we fell, day turned to night. * * * * For one of those long minutes that under their own weight can iron themselves into a small eternity, I lay on the ground with Murragh half on top of me. He moved before I did. Vaguely I realized he was fumbling round doing something. When it penetrated my mind that he was slipping a fume-mask on, I automatically did the same, without thinking, I had carried my mask from the vehicle with me. He had switched on a torch. It lay on the ground as we sprouted bug-eyed jumbo faces, and splashed a great carica ture of us up the mountain-side. In the sky, Tandy had appeared, near full and bright, a phantom. As ever it was impossible to believe it was not our moon rather than vice versa; facts have no power against the imagination. Sitting there stupidly, I heard the words of an old poet scatter through my head, half of his verse missing. O, moon of my delight who know’st no wane, Something, something once again. How oft hereafter rising shall she look Through this same garden after me—in vain! But I had no time to connect up the missing words; if I had thought of it, I preferred them missing to emphasize my sense of loss. But no rational thought came. All that came was the clash of two nightmares, Murragh’s and mine. It seemed that I kept crying ‘Fay is dead!’ that he kept crying ‘Tandy Two’s a woman!’ And we were fighting, struggling together while the ground steamed, I hating him because he did not care where I had expected him to care, he hating me because I had spoilt his vigil, ruined his climax. My mind ran in shapes, not thoughts, until I realized that I had begun to fight. When I went limp, Murragh’s fist caught me between the eyes. I do not have to say what I felt then, slumped on the ground—the place I hated and Murragh loved—for this is supposed to be his story, not mine, although I have become tangled up in it in the same directionless bindweedy way I became entangled in Bess’s life. Murragh—you have to say it—could not feel like ordinary people. When I heard from him again, he never even men tioned Fay; he had only used her to talk about his real obsession. When, a week later, the S.T.L. ship Monteith lit out for Earth from Tandy, Colin, Bess, and Tessie Doughty travelled in it. So did I. I lay in a bunk in the medical bay, classified under some obscure technical label that meant I was dull of mind and unfit for further service. The Doughtys came to see me. They were as cheerful as crickets. After all, they had made their packet and were about to begin life anew. Even Bess never referred to Fay; I always said she was hard and coarse. They brought me a letter from Murragh. It was elaborately overwritten. Wrapped in his own discoveries, he clearly mourned as little for Fay as did the Doughtys. His letter, in fact, displayed his usual sensitivity and his blindness where other humans were concerned. I had no patience with it, thought I later re-read the final passages (which he has since used in his successful book To my Undeniable Tandy). ‘. . . Yilmoff s twenty-third century Theory of Images reveals how places can hold for men deep psychic significances; we inherit an Experience of place as we do of (say) women. So when a planet exists with as distinct a personality—for the term in context is no exaggeration—as Tandy Two’s, the significance is increased, the effect on the psyche deepened. ‘I declare myself to be in love, in the true psychological sense of the word, with Tandy. She is my needful feminine, dwelling in my psyche, filling it to the exclusion of other needs. ‘So I give you my true portrait image of her: the planet-head of a girl, all sweet rich hair north, but the south face a skull, and bound round her brow a ribbon of flame. This is the portrait of my terrible lover.’ You may make of this what you will. Crazy, was he? Only Murragh of all mankind has his mistress perpetually beneath him.