Clifford D. Simak

All Flesh Is Grass

All Flesh is Grass

First published: 1965

1

When I swung out of the village street onto the main highway, there was a truck behind me. It was one of those big semi jobs and it was really rolling. The speed limit was forty-five on that stretch of road, running through one corner of the village, but at that time in the morning it wasn't reasonable to expect that anyone would pay attention to a posted speed.

I wasn't too concerned with the truck. I'd be stopping a mile or so up the road at Johnny's Motor Court to pick up Alf Peterson, who would be waiting for me, with his fishing tackle ready. And I had other things to think of, too — principally the phone and wondering who I had talked with on the phone. There had been three voices and it all was very strange, but I had the feeling that it may have been one voice, changed most wonderfully to make three voices, and that I would know that basic voice if I could only pin it down. And there had been Gerald Sherwood, sitting in his study, with two walls lined by books, telling me about the blueprints that had formed, unbidden, in his brain. There had been Stiffy Grant, pleading that I not let them use the bomb. And there had been, as well, the fifteen hundred dollars.

Just up the road was the Sherwood residence, set atop its hill, with the house almost blotted out, in the early dawn, by the bulking blackness of the great oak trees that grew all around the house. Staring at the hill, I forgot about the phone and Gerald Sherwood in his book-lined study with his head crammed full of blueprints, and thought instead of Nancy and how I'd met her once again, after all those years since high school. And I recalled those days when we had walked hand in hand, with a pride and happiness that could not come again, that can come but once when the world is young and the first, fierce love of youth is fresh and wonderful.

The road ahead was clear and wide; the four lanes continued for another twenty miles or so before they dwindled down to two. There was no one on the road except myself and the truck, which was coming up behind me and coming fairly fast.

Watching the headlights in my rear vision mirror, I knew that in just a little while it would be swinging out to pass me.

I wasn't driving fast and there was a lot of room for the truck to pass me, and there was not a thing to hit and then I did hit something.

It was like running into a strong elastic band. There was no thump or crash. The car began slowing down as if I had put on the brakes. There was nothing I could see and for a moment I thought that something must have happened to the car — that the motor had gone haywire or the brakes had locked, or something of the sort. I took my foot off the accelerator and the car came to a halt, then started to slide back, faster and faster, for all the world as if I'd run into that rubber band and now it was snapping back.

I flipped the drive to neutral because I could smell the rubber as the tires screeched on the road, and as soon as I flipped it over, the car snapped back so fast that I was thrown against the wheel.

Behind me the horn of the truck blared wildly and tires howled on the pavement as the driver swung his rig to miss me. The truck made a swishing sound as it went rushing past and beneath the swishing, I could hear the rubber of the tires sucking at the roadbed, and the whole thing rumbled as if it might be angry at me for causing it this trouble. And as it went rushing past, my car came to a halt, over on the shoulder of the road.

Then the truck hit whatever I had hit. I could hear it when it struck.

It made a little plop. For a single instant, I thought the truck might break through whatever the barrier might be, for it was heavy and had been going fast and for a second or so there was no sign that it was slowing down. Then it began to slow and I could see the wheels of that big job skidding and humping, so that they seemed to be skipping on the pavement, still moving forward doggedly, but still not getting through.

It moved ahead for a hundred feet or so beyond the point where I had stopped. And there the rig came to a halt and began skidding back. It slid smoothly for a moment, with the tires squealing on the pavement, then it began to jackknife. The rear end buckled around and came sideways down the road, heading straight for me.

I had been sitting calmly in the car, not dazed, not even too much puzzled. It all had happened so fast that there had not been time to work up much puzzlement. Something strange had happened, certainly, but I think I had the feeling that in just a little while I'd get it figured out and it would all come right again.

So I had stayed sitting in the car, absorbed in watching what would happen to the truck. But when it came sliding back down the road, jackknifing as it slid, I slapped the handle of the door and shoved it with my shoulder and rolled out of the seat. I hit the pavement and scrambled to my feet and ran.

Behind me the tires of the truck were screaming and then there was a crash of metal, and when I heard the crash, I jumped out on the grassy shoulder of the road and had a look behind me. The rear end of the truck had slammed into my car and shoved it in the ditch and now was slowly, almost majestically, toppling into the ditch itself, right atop my car "Hey, there!" I shouted. It did no good, of course, and I knew it wouldn't. The words were just jerked out of me.

The cab of the truck had remained upon the road, but it was canted with one wheel off the ground. The driver was crawling from the cab.

It was a quiet and peaceful morning. Over in the west some heat lightning was skipping about the dark horizon. There was that freshness in the air that you never get except on a summer morning before the sun gets up and the beat closes down on you. To my right, over in the village, the street lights were still burning, hanging still and bright, unstirred by any breeze. It was too nice a morning, I thought, for anything to happen.

There were no cars on the road. There were just the two of us, the trucker and myself, and his truck in the ditch, squashing down my car. He came down the road toward me.

He came up to me and stopped, peering at me, his arms hanging at his side. "What the hell is going on?" he asked. "What did we run into?"

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm sorry about your car," he told me. "I'll report it to the company.

They'll take care of it." He stood, not moving, acting as if he might never move again. "Just like running into nothing," he declared. "There's nothing there." Then slow anger flared in him.

"By God," he said, "I'm going to find out…" He turned abruptly and went stalking up the highway, heading toward whatever we had hit. I followed along behind him.

He was grunting like an angry hog.

He went straight up the middle of the road and he hit the barrier, but by this time he was roaring mad and he wasn't going to let it stop him, so he kept ploughing into it and he got a good deal farther than I had expected that he would. But finally it stopped him and he stood there for a moment, with his body braced ridiculously against a nothingness, leaning into it, and with his legs driving like well-oiled pistons in an attempt to drive himself ahead. In the stillness of the morning I could hear his shoes chuffing on the pavement.

Then the barrier let him have it. It snapped him back. It was as if a sudden wind had struck him and was blowing him down the road, tumbling as he rolled. He finally ended up jammed half underneath the front end of the cab.

I ran over and grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him out and stood him on his feet. He was bleeding a little from where he'd rubbed along the pavement and his clothes were torn and dirty. But he wasn't angry any more; he was just plain scared. He was looking down the road as if he'd seen a ghost and he still was shaking.

"But there's nothing there," he said.

"There'll be other cars," I said, "and you are across the road. Hadn't we ought to put out some flares or flags or something?" That seemed to snap him out of it.

"Flags," he said.

He climbed into the cab and got out some flags.

I walked down the road with him while he set them out.

He put the last one down and squatted down beside it. He took out a handkerchief and began dabbing at his face.

"Where can I get a phone?" he asked. "We'll have to get some help."

"Someone has to figure out a way to clear the barrier off the road," I said. "In a little while there'll be a lot of traffic. It'll be piled up for miles." He dabbed at his face some more. There was a lot of dust and grease.

And a little blood.

"A phone?" he asked.

"Oh, any place," I told him. "Just go up to any house. They'll let you use a phone." And here we were, I thought, talking about this thing as if it were an ordinary road block, as if it were a fallen tree or a washed-out culvert.

"Say, what's the name of this place, anyhow? I got to tell them where I am calling from."

"Millville," I told him.

"You live here?" I nodded.

He got up and tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket.

"Well," he said, "I'll go and find that phone." He wanted me to offer to go with him, but I had something else to do. I had to walk around the road block and get up to Johnny's Motor Court and explain to Alf what had happened to delay me.

I stood in the road and watched him plod along. Then I turned around and went up the road in the opposite direction, walking toward that something which would stop a car. I reached it and it stopped me, not abruptly, nor roughly, but gently, as if it didn't intend to let me through under any circumstances, but was being polite and reasonable about it.

I put out my hand and I couldn't feel a thing. I tried rubbing my hand back and forth, as you would to feel a surface, but there was no surface, there was not a thing to rub; there was absolutely nothing, just that gentle pressure pushing you away from whatever might be there.

I looked up and down the road and there was still no traffic, but in a little while, I knew, there would be. Perhaps, I told myself, I should set out some flags in the east-bound traffic lane to convey at least some warning that there was something wrong. It would take no more than a minute or two to set up the flags when I went around the end of the barrier to get to Johnny's Motor Court.

I went back to the cab and found two flags and climbed down the shoulder of the road and clambered up the hillside, making a big sweep to get around the barrier — and even as I made the sweep I ran into the barrier again. I backed away from it and started to walk alongside it, climbing up the hill. It was hard to do. If the barrier had been a solid thing, I would have had no trouble, but since it was invisible, I kept bumping into it.

That was the way I traced it, bumping into it, then sheering off, then bumping into it again.

I thought that the barrier would end almost any time, or that it might get thinner. A couple of times I tried pushing through it, but it still was as stiff and strong as ever. There was an awful thought growing in my mind.

And the higher up the hill I climbed, the more persistent grew the thought.

It was about this time that I dropped the flags.

Below me I heard the sound of skidding tires and swung around to look.

A car on the east-bound lane had slammed into the barrier, and in sliding back, had skidded broadside across both lanes. Another car had been travelling behind the first and was trying to slow down. But either its brakes were bad or its speed had been too high, for it couldn't stop. As I watched, its driver swung it out, with the wheels upon the shoulder, skinning past the broadside car. Then he slapped into the barrier, but his speed had been reduced, and he didn't go far in. Slowly the barrier pushed back the car and it slid into the other car and finally came to rest.

The driver had gotten out of the first car and was walking around his car to reach the second car. I saw his head tilt up and it was clear he saw me. He waved his arms at me and shouted, but I was too far away to make out what he said.

The truck and my car, lying crushed beneath it, still were alone on the west-bound lanes. It was curious, I told myself, that no one else had come along.

There was a house atop the hill and for some reason I didn't recognize it. It had to be a house of someone that I knew, for I'd lived all my life in Millville except for a year at college and I knew everyone. I don't know how to explain it, but for a moment I was all mixed up. Nothing looked familiar and I stood confused, trying to get my bearings and figure where I was.

The east was brightening and in another thirty minutes the sun would be poking up. In the west a great angry cloud bank loomed, and at its base I could see the rapier flickering of the lightning that was riding with the storm.

I stood and stared down at the village and it all came clear to me exactly where I was. The house up on the hill was Bill Donovan" s. Bill was the village garbage man.

I followed along the barrier, heading for the house and for a moment I wondered just where the house might be in relation to the barrier. More than likely, I told myself, it stood just inside of it.

I came to a fence and climbed it and crossed the littered yard to the rickety back stairs. I climbed them gingerly to gain the stoop and looked for a bell. There wasn't any bell. I lifted a fist and pounded on the door, then waited. I heard someone stirring around inside, then the door came open and Bill stared out at me. He was an unkempt bear of a man and his bushy hair stood all on end and he looked at me from beneath a pair of belligerent eyebrows. He had pulled his trousers over his pajama, but he hadn't taken the time to zip up the fly and a swatch of purple pajama cloth stuck out.

His feet were bare and his toes curled up a bit against the cold of the kitchen floor.

"What's the matter, Brad?" he asked.

"I don't know," I told him. "There is something happening down on the road."

"An accident?" he asked.

"No, not an accident. I tell you I don't know. There's something across the road. You can't see it, but it's there. You run into it and it stops you cold. It's like a wall, but you can't touch or feel it."

"Come on in," said Bill. "You could do with a cup of coffee. I'll put on the pot. It's time for breakfast anyhow. The wife is getting up." He reached behind him and snapped on the kitchen light, then stood to one side so that I could enter.

Bill walked over to the sink. He picked a glass off the counter top and turned on the water, then stood waiting.

"Have to let it run a while until it gets cold," he told me. He filled the glass and held it out to me. "Want a drink?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I told him.

He put the glass to his mouth and drank in great slobbering gulps.

Somewhere in the house a woman screamed. If I live to be a hundred, I'll not forget what that scream was like. Donovan dropped the glass on the floor and it broke, spraying jagged glass and water.

"Liz!" he cried. "Liz, what's wrong?" He charged out of the room and I stood there, frozen, looking at the blood on the floor, where Donovan's bare feet had been gashed by the broken glass.

The woman screamed again, but this time the scream was muffled, as if she might be screaming with her mouth pressed against a pillow or a wall.

I blundered out of the kitchen into the dining-room, stumbling on something in my path — a toy, a stool, I don't know what it was and lunging halfway across the room to try to catch my balance, afraid of falling and hitting my head against a chair or table.

And I hit it again, that same resistant wall that I'd walked into down on the road. I braced myself against it and pushed, getting upright on my feet, standing in the dimness of the dining-room with the horror of that wall rasping at my soul.

I could sense it right in front of me, although I no longer touched it.

And whereas before, out in the open, on the road, it had been no more than a wonder too big to comprehend, here beneath this roof, inside this family home, it became an alien blasphemy that set one's teeth on edge.

"My babies!" screamed the woman. "I can't reach my babies!" Now I began to get my bearings in the curtained room. I saw the table and the buffet and the door that led into the bedroom hallway.

Donovan was coming through the doorway. He was half leading, half carrying the woman.

"I tried to get to them," she cried. "There's something there — something that stopped me. I can't get to my babies!" He let her down on the floor and propped her against the wall and knelt gently beside her. He looked up at me and there was a baffled, angry terror in his eyes.

"It's the barrier," I told him. "The one down on the road. It runs straight through the house."

"I don't see no barrier," he said.

"Damn it, man, you don't see it. It just is there, is all."

"What can we do?" he asked.

"The children are OK," I assured him, hoping I was right. "They're just on the other side of the barrier. We can't get to them and they can't get to us, but everything's all right."

"I just got up to look in on them," the woman said. "I just got up to look at them and there was something in the hall…"

"How many?" I asked.

"Two," said Donovan. "One is six, the other eight."

"Is there someone you can phone? Someone outside the village. They could come and take them in and take care of them until we get this thing figured out. There must be an end to this wall somewhere. I was looking for it…"

"She's got a sister," said Donovan, "up the road a ways. Four or five miles."

"Maybe you should call her." And as I said it, another thought hit me straight between the eyes. The phone might not be working. The barrier might have cut the phone lines.

"You be all right, Liz?" he asked.

She nodded dumbly, still sitting on the floor, not trying to get up.

"I'll go call Myrt," he said.

I followed him into the kitchen and stood beside him as he lifted the receiver of the wall phone, holding my breath in a fierce hope that the phone would work. And for once my hoping must have done some good, for when the receiver came off the hook I could hear the faint buzz of an operating line.

Out in the dining-room, Mrs Donovan was sobbing very quietly.

Donovan dialed, his big, blunt, grease-grimed fingers seemingly awkward and unfamiliar at the task. He finally got it done.

He waited with the receiver at his ear. I could hear the signal ringing in the quietness of the kitchen.

"That you, Myrt? said Donovan. "Yeah, this is Bill. We run into a little trouble. I wonder could you and Jake come over…. No, Myrt, just something wrong. I can't explain it to you. Could you come over and pick up the kids? You'll have to come the front way; you can't get in the back.

Yeah, Myrt, I know it sounds crazy. There's some sort of wall. Liz and me, we're in the back part of the house and we can't get up to the front. The kids are in the front…. No, Myrt, I don't know what it is. But you do like I say. Them kids are up there all alone and we can't get to them…. Yes, Myrt, right through the house. Tell Jake to bring along an axe. This thing runs right straight through the house. The front door is locked and Jake will have to chop it down. Or bust a window, if that's easier…. Sure, sure, I know what I'm saying. You just go ahead and do it. Anything to get them kids. I'm not crazy. Something's wrong, I tell you. Something's gone way wrong. You do what I say, Myrt…. Don't mind about the door, just chop the damn thing down. You just get the kids any way you can and keep them safe for us." He hung up the receiver and turned from the phone. He used his forearm to wipe the sweat off his face.

"Damn woman," he said. "She just stood there and argued. She's a flighty bitch." He looked at me. "Now, what do we do next?"

"Trace the barrier," I said. "See where it goes. See if we can get around it. If we can find a way around it, we can get your kids."

"I'll go with you."

I gestured toward the dining-room. "And leave her here alone?"

"No," he said. "No, I can't do that. You go ahead. Myrt and Jake, they'll come and get the kids. Some of the neighbours will take Liz in. I'll try to catch up with you. Thing like this, you might need some help."

"Thanks," I said.

Outside the house, the paleness of the dawn was beginning to flow across the land. Everything was painted that ghostly brightness, not quite-white, not quite any other colour either, that marks the beginning of an August day.

On the road below, a couple of dozen cars were jammed up in front of the barrier on the east-bound lane and there were groups of people standing around. I could hear one loud voice that kept booming out in excited talk — one of those aggressive loudmouths you find in any kind of crowd. Someone had built a small campfire out on the boulevard between the lanes — God knows why, the morning was surely warm enough and the day would be a scorcher.

And now I remembered that I had meant to get hold of Alf and tell him that I wasn't coming. I could have used the phone in the Donovan kitchen, but I'd forgotten all about it. I stood undecided, debating whether to go back in again and ask to use the phone. That had been the main reason, I realized, that I'd stopped at Donovan" s.

There was this pile of cars on the east-bound lane and only the truck and my battered car on the west-bound lane and that must mean, I told myself, that the west-bound lane was closed, as well, somewhere to the east.

And could that mean, I wondered, that the village was enclosed, was encircled by the wall?

I decided against going back to make the phone call, and moved on around the house. I picked up the wall again and began to follow it. I was getting the hang of it by now. It was like feeling this thing alongside me, and following the feeling, keeping just a ways away from it, bumping into it only now and then.

The wall roughly skirted the edge of the village, with a few outlying houses on the other side of it. I followed along it and I crossed some paths and a couple of bob-tailed, dead-end streets, and finally came to the secondary road that ran in from Coon Valley, ten miles or so away.

The road slanted on a gentle grade in its approach into the village and on the slant, just on the other side of the wall, stood an older model car, somewhat the worse for wear. Its motor was still running and the door on the driver's side was open, but there was no one in it and no one was around. It looked as if the driver, once he'd struck the barrier, might have fled in panic.

As I stood looking at the car, the brakes began to slip and the car inched forward, slowly at first, then faster, and finally the brakes gave out entirely and the car plunged down the hill, through the barrier wall, and crashed into a tree. It slowly toppled over on its side and a thin trickle of smoke began to seep from underneath the hood.

But I didn't pay much attention to the car, for there was something more important. I broke into a run, heading up the road.

The car had passed the barrier and had gone down the road to crash and that meant there was no barrier. I had reached the end of it!

I ran up the road, exultant and relieved, for I'd been fighting down the feeling, and having a hard time to fight it down entirely, that the barrier might run all around the village. And in the midst of all my exultation and relief, I hit the wall again.

I hit it fairly hard, for I was running hard, sure that it wasn't there, but in a terrible hurry to make sure it wasn't there. I went into it for three running strides before it tossed me back. I hit the roadbed flat on my back and my head banged upon the pavement. There were a million stars.

I rolled over and got on my hands and knees and stayed there for a moment, like a gutted hound, with my head hanging limp between my shoulders, and I shook it now and then to shake the stars away.

I heard the crackle and the roar of flames and that jerked me to my feet. I still was fairly wobbly, but wobbly or not, I got away from there.

The car was burning briskly and at any moment the flames would reach the gas tank and the car would go sky high.

But the explosion, when it came, was not too spectacular — just an angry, muffled whuff and a great gout of flame flaring up into the sky. But it was loud enough to bring some people out to see what was going on. Doe Fabian and lawyer Nichols were running up the road, and behind them came a bunch of yelling kids and a pack of barking dogs.

I didn't wait for them although I had half a mind to, for I had a lot to tell and here was an audience. But there was something else that stopped me from turning back — I had to go on tracking down the barrier and try to find its end, if it had an end.

My head had begun to clear and all the stars were gone and I could think a little better.

There was one thing that stood out plain and clear: a car could go through the barrier when there was no one in it, but when it was occupied, the barrier stopped it dead. A man could not go through the barrier, but he could pick up a phone and talk to anyone he wanted. And I remembered that I had heard the voices of the men shouting in the road, had heard them very clearly even when they were on the other side. I picked up some sticks and stones and tossed them at the barrier. They went sailing through as if nothing had been there.

There was only one thing that the barrier would stop and that single thing was life. And why in the world should there be a barrier to shut out, or shut in, life?

The village was beginning to stir to life.

I watched Floyd Caldwell come out on his back porch, dressed in his undershirt and a pair of pants with the suspenders hanging. Except for old Doc Fabian, Floyd was the only man in Millville who ever wore suspenders.

But while old Doc wore sedate and narrow black ones, Floyd wore a pair that was broad and red. Floyd was the barber and he took a lot of kidding about his red suspenders, but Floyd didn't mind. He was the village smart guy and he worked at it all the time and it probably was all right, for it brought him a lot of trade from out in the farming country. People who might just as well have gone to Coon Valley for their haircuts came, instead, to Millville to listen to Floyd's jokes and to see him clown.

Floyd stood out on the back porch and stretched his arms and yawned.

Then he took a close look at the weather and he scratched his ribs. Down the street a woman called the family dog and in a little while I heard the flat snap of a screen door shutting and I knew the dog was in.

It was strange, I thought, that there'd been no alarm. Perhaps it was because few people as yet knew about the barrier.

Perhaps the few who had found out about it were still a little numb.

Perhaps most of them couldn't quite believe it. Maybe they were afraid, as I was, to make too much fuss about it until they knew something more about it.

But it couldn't last for long, this morning calm. Before too long, Millville would be seething.

Now, as I followed it, the barrier cut through the back yard of one of the older houses in the village. In its day it had been a place of elegance, but years of poverty and neglect had left it tumbledown.

An old lady was coming down the steps from the shaky back porch, balancing her frail body with a steadying cane.

Her hair was thin and white and even with no breeze to stir the air, ragged ends of it floated like a fuzzy halo all around her head.

She started down the path to the little garden, but when she saw me she stopped and peered at me, with her head tilted just a little in a bird-like fashion. Her pale blue eyes glittered at me through the thickness of her glasses.

"Brad Carter, isn't it?" she asked.

"Yes, Mrs Tyler," I said. "How are you this morning?"

"Oh, just tolerable," she told me. "I'm never more than that. I thought that it was you, but my eyes have failed me and I never can be sure."

"It's a nice morning, Mrs Tyler. This is good weather we are having."

"Yes," she said, "it is. I was looking for Tupper. He seems to have wandered off again. You haven't seen him, have you?" I shook my head. It had been ten years since anyone had seen Tupper Tyler.

"He is such a restless boy," she said. "Always wandering off I declare, I don't know what to do with him."

"Don't you worry," I told her. "He'll show up again."

"Yes," she said, "I suppose he will. He always does, you know." She prodded with her cane at the bed of purple flowers that grew along the walk.

"They're very good this year," she said. "The best I've ever seen them. I got them from your father twenty years ago. Mr Tyler and your father were such good friends. You remember that, of course."

"Yes," I said. "I remember very well."

"And your mother? Tell me how she is. We used to see a good deal of one another."

"You forget, Mrs Tyler," I told her, gently. "Mother died almost two years ago."

"Oh, so she did," she said. "It's true, I am forgetful. Old age does it to one. No one should grow old."

"I must be getting on," I said. "It was good to see you."

"It was kind of you to call," she said. "If you have the time, you might step in and we could have some tea. It is so seldom now that anyone ever comes for tea. I suppose it's because the times have changed. No one, any more, has the time for tea."

"I'm sorry that I can't," I said. "I just stopped by for a moment."

"Well," she said, "it was very nice of you. If you happen to see Tupper would you mind, I wonder, to tell him to come home."

"Of course I will," I promised.

I was glad to get away from her. She was nice enough, of course, but just a little mad. In all the years since Tupper's disappearance, she had gone on looking for him, and always as if he'd just stepped out the door, always very calm and confident in the thought that he'd be coming home in just a little while. Quite reasonable about it and very, very sweet, no more than mildly worried about the idiot son who had vanished without trace.

Tupper, I recalled, had been something of a pest. He'd been a pest with everyone, of course, but especially with me. He loved flowers and he'd hung around the greenhouse that my father had, and my father, who was constitutionally unable to be unkind to anyone, had put up with him and his continual jabber. Tupper had attached himself to me and no matter what I did or said, he'd tag along behind me. The fact that he was a good ten years older than I was made no difference at all; in his own mind Tupper never had outgrown childhood. In the back of my mind I still could hear his jaunty voice, mindlessly happy over anything at all, cooing over flowers or asking endless, senseless questions. I had hated him, of course, but there was really nothing one could pin a good hate on.

Tupper was just something that one had to tolerate. But I knew that I never would forget that jaunty, happy voice, or his drooling as he talked, or the habit that he had of counting on his fingers — God knows why he did it as if he were in continual fear that he might have lost one of them in the last few minutes.

The sun had come up by now and the world was flooded with a brilliant light, and I was becoming more certain by the minute that the village was encircled and cut off, that someone or something, for no apparent reason, had dropped a cage around us. Looking back along the way that I had come, I could see that I'd been travelling on the inside of a curve.

Looking ahead, the curve wasn't difficult to plot.

And why should it be us, I wondered. Why a little town like ours? A town that was no different from ten thousand other towns.

Although, I told myself; that might not be entirely true. It was exactly what I would have said and perhaps everybody else. Everyone, that is, except for Nancy Sherwood — Nancy, who only the night before had told me her strange theory that this town of ours was something very special. And could she be right, I wondered? Was our little town of Millville somehow set apart from all other little towns?

Just ahead was my home street and my calculations told me that it was located just inside the encircling barricade.

There was, I told myself, no sense in going farther. It would be a waste of time. I did not need to complete the circle to convince myself that we were hemmed in.

I cut across the backyard of the Presbyterian parsonage and there, just across the street, was my house, set within its wilderness of flowers and shrubs, with the abandoned greenhouse standing in the back and the old garden around it, a field of purple flowers, those same purple flowers that Mrs Tyler had poked at with her cane and said were doing well this season.

I heard the steady squeaking as I reached the street and I knew that some kids had sneaked into the yard and were playing in the old lawn swing that stood beside the porch.

I hurried up the street, a little wrathful at the squeaking. I had told those kids, time and time again, to leave that swing alone. It was old and rickety and one of these days one of the uprights or something else would break, and one of the kids might be badly hurt. I could have taken it down, of course, but I was reluctant to, for it was Mother's swing. She had spent many hours out in the yard, swinging gently and sedately, looking at the flowers.

The yard was closed in by the old-time lilac hedge and I couldn't see the swing until I reached the gate.

I hurried for the gate and jerked it open savagely and took two quick steps through it, then stopped in my tracks.

There were no kids in the swing. There was a man, and except for a battered hat of straw set squarely atop his head, he was as naked as a jaybird.

He saw me and grinned a foolish grin. "Hi, there," he said, with jaunty happiness. And even as he said it, he began a counting of his fingers, drooling as he counted.

And at the sight of him, at the sound of that remembered but long forgotten voice, my mind went thudding back to the afternoon before.

2

Ed Adler had come that afternoon to take out the phone and he had been embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Brad," he said. "I don't want to do this, but I guess I have to. I have an order from Tom Preston." Ed was a friend of mine. We had been good pals in high school and good friends ever since. Tom Preston had been in school with us, of course, but he'd been no friend of mine or of anybody else" s. He'd been a snotty kid and he had grown up into a snotty man.

That was the way it went, I thought. The heels always were the ones who seemed to get ahead. Tom Preston was the manager of the telephone office and Ed Adler worked for him as a phone installer and a troubleshooter, and I was a realtor and insurance agent who was going out of business. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to, because I was delinquent in my office phone bill and way behind in rent.

Tom Preston was successful and I was a business failure and Ed Adler was earning a living for his family, but not getting anywhere. And the rest of them, I wondered. The rest of the high school gang — how were they getting on? And I couldn't answer, for I didn't know. They all had drifted off. There wasn't much in a little town like Millville to keep a man around.

I probably wouldn't have stayed myself if it hadn't been for Mother. I'd come home from school after Dad had died and had helped out with the greenhouse until Mother had joined Dad. And by that time I had been so long in Millville that it was hard to leave.

"Ed," I had asked, "do you ever hear from any of the fellows?

"No, I don't," said Ed. "I don't know where any of them are." I said: "There was Skinny Austin and Charley Thompson, and Marty Hall and Alf. I can't remember Alf's last name."

"Peterson," said Ed.

"Yes, that's it," I said. "It's a funny thing I should forget his name. Old Alf and me had a lot of fun together." Ed got the cord unfastened and stood up, with the phone dangling from his hand.

"What are you going to do now?" he asked me.

"Lock the door, I guess," I said. "It's not just the phone. It's everything. I'm behind in rent as well. Dan Willoughby, down at the bank, is very sad about it."

"You could run the business from the house."

"Ed," I told him shortly, "there isn't any business. I just never had a business. I couldn't make a start. I lost money from the first." I got up and put on my hat and walked out of the place. The street was almost empty. There were a few cars at the curb and a dog was smelling of a lamp post and old Stiffy Grant was propped up in front of the Happy Hollow tavern, hoping that someone might come along and offer him a drink.

I was feeling pretty low. Small thing as it had been, the phone had spelled the end. It was the thing that finally signified for me what a failure I had been. You can go along for months and kid yourself that everything's all right and will work out in the end, but always something comes up that you can't kid away. Ed Adler coming to disconnect and take away the phone had been that final thing I couldn't kid away.

I stood there on the sidewalk, looking down the street, and I felt hatred for the town — not for the people in it, but for the town itself, for the impersonal geographic concept of one particular place.

The town lay dusty and arrogant and smug beyond all telling and it sneered at me and I knew that I had been mistaken in not leaving it when I'd had the chance. I had tried to live with it for very love of it, but I'd been blind to try. I had known what all my friends had known, the ones who'd gone away, but I had closed my mind to that sure and certain knowledge: there was nothing left in Millville to make one stay around. It was an old town and it was dying, as old things always die. It was being strangled by the swift and easy roads that took customers to better shopping areas; it was dying with the decline of marginal agriculture, dying along with the little vacant hillside farms that no longer would support a family. It was a place of genteel poverty and it had its share of musty quaintness, but it was dying just the same, albeit in the polite scent of lavender and impeccable good manners.

I turned down the street, away from the dusty business section and made my way down to the little river that flowed dose against the east edge of the town. There I found the ancient footpath underneath the trees and walked along, listening in the summer silence to the gurgle of the water as it flowed between the grassy banks and along the gravel bars.

And as I walked the lost and half forgotten years came crowding in upon me. There, just ahead, was the village swimming hole, and below it the stretch of shallows where I'd netted suckers in the spring.

Around the river's bend was the place we had held our picnics. We had built a fire to roast the wieners and to toast the marshmallows and we had sat and watched the evening steal in among the trees and across the meadows.

After a time the moon would rise, making the place a magic place, painted by the lattice of shadow and of moonlight. Then we talked in whispers and we willed that time should move at a slower pace so we might hold the magic longer. But for all our willing, it had never come to pass, for time, even then, was something that could not be slowed or stopped.

There had been Nancy and myself and Ed Adler and Priscilla Gordon, and at times Alf Peterson had come with us as well, but as I remembered it he had seldom brought the same girl twice.

I stood for a moment in the path and tried to bring it back, the glow of moonlight and the glimmer of the dying fire, the soft girl voices and the soft girl-flesh, the engulfing tenderness of that youthful miracle, the tingle and excitement and the thankfulness. I sought the enchanted darkness and the golden happiness, or at least the ghosts of them; all that I could find was the intellectual knowledge of them, that they once had been and were not any more.

So I stood, with the edge worn off a tarnished memory, and a business failure. I think I faced it squarely then, the first time that I'd faced it.

What would I do next?

Perhaps, I thought, I should have stayed in the greenhouse business, but it was a foolish thought and a piece of wishfulness, for after Dad had died it had been, in every way, a losing proposition. When he had been alive, we had done all right, but then there'd been the three of us to work, and Dad had been the kind of man who had an understanding with all growing things. They grew and flourished under his care and he seemed to know exactly what to do to keep them green and healthy. Somehow or other, I didn't have the knack. With me the plants were poor and puny at the best, and there were always pests and parasites and all sorts of plant diseases.

Suddenly, as I stood there, the river and the path and trees became ancient, alien things. As if I were a stranger in this place, as if I had wandered into an area of time and space where I had no business being. And more terrifying than if it had been a place I'd never seen before because I knew in a chill, far corner of my mind that here was a place that held a part of me.

I turned around and started up the path and back of me was a fear and panic that made me want to run. But I didn't run. I went even slower than I ordinarily would have, for this was a victory that I needed and was determined I would have any sort of little futile victory, like walking very slowly when there was the urge to run.

Back on the street again, away from the deep shadow of the trees, the warmth and brilliance of the sunlight set things right again. Not entirely right, perhaps, but as they had been before. The street was the same as ever. There were a few more cars and the dog had disappeared and Stiffy Grant had changed his loafing place. Instead of propping up the Happy Hollow tavern, he was propping up my office.

Or at least what had been my office. For now I knew that there was no point in waiting. I might as well go in right now and clean out my desk and lock the door behind me and take the key down to the bank. Daniel Willoughby would be fairly frosty, but I was beyond all caring about Daniel Willoughby.

Sure, I owed him rent that I couldn't pay and he probably would resent it, but there were a lot of other people in the village who owed Daniel Willoughby without much prospect of paying. That was the way he'd worked it and that was the way he had it and that was why he resented everyone. I'd rather be like myself, I thought, than like Dan Willoughby, who walked the streets each day, chewed by contempt and hatred of everyone he met.

Under other circumstances I would have been glad to have stopped and talked a while with Stiffy Grant. He might be the village bum, but he was a friend of mine. He was always ready to go fishing and he knew all the likely places and his talk was far more interesting than you might imagine. But right now I didn't care to talk with anyone.

"Hi, there, Brad," said Stiffy, as I came up to him. "You wouldn't happen, would you, to have a dollar on you?

It had been a long time since Stiffy had put the bite on me and I was surprised that he should do it now. For whatever else Stiffy Grant might be, he was a gentleman and most considerate. He never tapped anyone for money unless they could afford it. Stiffy had a ready genius for knowing exactly when and how he could safely make a touch.

I dipped into my pocket and there was a small wad of bills and a little silver. I hauled out the little wad and peeled off a bill for him.

"Thank you, Brad," he said. "I ain't had a drink all day." He tucked the dollar into the pocket of a patched and flapping vest and hobbled swiftly up the street, heading for the tavern.

I opened the office door and stepped inside and as I shut the door behind me, the phone began to ring.

I stood there, like a fool, rooted to the floor, staring at the phone.

It kept on ringing, so I went and answered it.

"Mr Bradshaw Carter?" asked the sweetest voice I have ever heard.

"This is he," I said. "What can I do for you?

I knew that it was no one in the village, for they would have called me Brad. And, besides, there was no one I knew who had that kind of voice. It had the persuasive purr of a TV glamour girl selling soap or beauty aids, and it had, as well, that dear, bright timbre one would expect when a fairy princess spoke.

"You, perhaps, are the Mr Bradshaw Carter whose father ran a greenhouse?"

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"You, yourself, no longer run the greenhouse?

"No," I said, "I don't." And then the voice changed. Up till now it had been sweet and very feminine, but now it was male and businesslike. As if one person had been talking, then had gotten up and gone and an entirely different person had picked up the phone. And yet, for some crazy reason, I had the distinct impression that there had been no change of person, but just a change of voice.

"We understand," this new voice said, "that you might be free to do some work for us."

"Why, yes, I would," I said. "But what is going on? Why did your voice change? Who am I talking with?" And it was a silly thing to ask, for no matter what my impression might have been, no human voice could have changed so completely and abruptly. It had to be two persons.

But the question wasn't answered.

"We have hopes," the voice said, "that you can represent us. You have been highly recommended."

"In what capacity?" I asked.

"Diplomatically," said the voice. "I think that is the proper…"

"But I'm no diplomat. I have no…"

"You mistake us, Mr Carter. You do not understand. Perhaps I should explain a little. We have contact with many of your people. They serve us in many ways. For example, we have a group of readers…"

"Readers?"

"That is what I said. Ones who read to us. They read many different things, you see. Things of many interests. The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Oxford dictionary and many different textbooks. Literature and history. Philosophy and economics. And it's all so interesting."

"But you could read these things yourself. There is no need of readers. All you need to do is to get some books…"

The voice sighed resignedly. "You do not understand. You are springing at conclusions."

"All right, then," I said, "I do not understand. We'll let it go at that. What do you want of me? Remembering that I'm a lousy reader."

"We want you to represent us. We would like first to talk with you, so that you may give us your appraisal of the situation, and from there we can…" There was more of it, but I didn't hear it. For now, suddenly, I knew what had seemed so wrong. I had been looking at it all the while, of course, but it was not until this moment that a full realization of it touched my consciousness. There had been too many other things — the phone when there should have been no phone, the sudden change of voices, the crazy trend of the conversation. My mind had been too busy to grasp the many things in their entirety.

But now the wrongness of the phone punched through to me and what the voice might be saying became a fuzzy sound.

For this was not the phone that had been on the desk an hour before.

This phone had no dial and it had no cord connected to the wall outlet.

"What's going on?" I shouted. "Who am I talking to? Where are you calling from?" And there was yet another voice, neither feminine nor male, neither businesslike nor sweet, but an empty voice that was somehow jocular, but without a trace of character in the fibre of it.

"Mr Carter," said the empty voice, "you need not be alarmed. We take care of our own. We have much gratitude. Believe us, Mr Carter, we are very grateful to you."

"Grateful for what?" I shouted.

"Go see Gerald Sherwood," said the emptiness. "We will speak to him of you."

"Look here," I yelled, "I don't know what's going on, but…"

"Just talk to Gerald Sherwood," said the voice.

Then the phone went dead. Dead, completely dead. There was no humming on the wire. There was just an emptiness.

"Hello, there," I shouted. "Hello, whoever you may be." But there was no answer.

I took the receiver from my ear and stood with it in my hand, trying to reach back into my memory for something that I knew was there. That final voice — I should know that voice. I had heard it somewhere. But my memory felled me.

I put the receiver back on the cradle and picked up the phone. It was, to all appearance, an ordinary phone, except that it had no dial and was entirely unconnected. I looked for a trademark or a manufacturer's designation and there was no such thing.

Ed Adler had come to take out the phone. He had disconnected it and had been standing, with it dangling from his hand, when I'd gone out for my walk.

When I had returned and heard the ringing of the phone and seen it on the desk, the thing that had run through my mind (illogical, but the only ready explanation), had been that for some reason Ed had reconnected the phone and had not taken it. Perhaps because of his friendship for me; willing, perhaps, to disregard an order so that I could keep the phone. Or, perhaps, that Tom Preston might have reconsidered and decided to give me a little extra time. Or even that some unknown benefactor had come forward to pay the bill and save the phone for me.

But I knew now that it had been none of these things. For this phone was not the phone that Ed had disconnected.

I reached out and took the receiver from the cradle and put it to my ear.

The businesslike voice spoke to me. It didn't say hello, it did not ask who called. It said: "It is clear, Mr Carter, that you are suspicious of us. We can understand quite well your confusion and your lack of confidence in us. We do not blame you for it, but feeling as you do, there is no use of further conversation. Talk first to Mr Sherwood and then come back and talk with us." The line went dead again. This time I didn't shout to try to bring the voice back. I knew it was no use. I put the receiver back on the cradle and shoved the phone away.

See Gerald Sherwood, the voice had said, and then come back and talk.

And what in the world could Gerald Sherwood have to do with it?

I considered Gerald Sherwood and he seemed a most unlikely person to be mixed up in any business such as this.

He was Nancy Sherwood's father and an industrialist of sorts who was a native of the village and lived in the old ancestral home on top of the bill at the village edge. Unlike the rest of us, he was not entirely of the village. He owned and ran a factory at Elmore, a city of some thirty or forty thousand about fifty miles away. It was not his factory, really; it had been his father's factory, and at one time it had been engaged in making farm machinery. But some years ago the bottom had fallen out of the farm machinery business and Sherwood had changed over to the manufacturing of a wide variety of gadgets. Just what kind of gadgets, I had no idea, for I had paid but small attention to the Sherwood family, except for a time, in the closing days of high school, when I had held a somewhat more than casual interest in Gerald Sherwood's daughter.

He was a solid and substantial citizen and he was well accepted. But because he, and his father before him, had not made their living in the village, because the Sherwood family had always been well-off, if not exactly rich, while the rest of us were poor, they had always been considered just a step this side of strangers. Their interests were not entirely the interests of the village; they were not tied as tightly to the community as the rest of us. So they stood apart, perhaps not so much that they wanted to as that we forced them to.

So what was I to do? Drive out to Sherwood's place and play the village fool? Go barging in and ask him what he knew of a screwy telephone?

I looked at my watch and it was only four o'clock. Even if I decided to go out and talk with Sherwood, I couldn't do it until early evening. More than likely, I told myself he didn't return from Elmore until six o'clock or so.

I pulled out the desk drawer and began taking out my stuff. Then I put it back again and closed the drawer. I'd have to keep the office until sometime tonight because I'd have to come to it to talk with the person (or the persons?) on that nightmare phone. After it was dark, if I wanted to, I could walk out with the phone and take it home with me. But I couldn't walk the streets in broad daylight with a phone tucked beneath my arm.

I went out and closed the door behind me and started down the street. I didn't know what to do and stood at the first street corner for a moment to make up my mind. I could go home, of course, but I shrank from doing it. It seemed a bit too much like hunting out a hole to hide in. I could go down to the village hall and there might be someone there to talk with.

Although there was a chance, as well, that Hiram Martin, the village constable, would be the only one around. Hiram would want me to play a game of checkers with him and I wasn't in the mood for playing any checkers.

Hiram was a rotten loser, too, and you had to let him win to prevent him from getting nasty.

Hiram and I had never got along too well together. He had been a bully on the schoolground and he and I had fought a dozen times a year. He always licked me, but he never made me say that I was licked, and he never liked me. You had to let Hiram lick you once or twice a year and then admit that you were licked and he'd let you be his friend. And there was a chance, as well, that Higman Morris would be there, and on a day like this, I couldn't stomach Higgy. Higgy was the mayor, a pillar of the church, a member of the school board, a director of the bank, and a big stuffed shirt. Even on my better days, Higgy was a chore; I ducked him when I could.

Or I could go up to the Tribune office and spend an hour or so with the editor, Joe Evans, who wouldn't be too busy, because the paper had been put out this morning. But Joe would be full of county politics and the proposal to build a swimming pool and a lot of other things of lively public interest and somehow or other I couldn't stir up too much interest in any one of them.

I would go down to the Happy Hollow tavern, I decided, and take one of the booths in back and nurse a beer or two while I killed some time and tried to do some thinking. My finances didn't run to drinking, but a beer or two wouldn't make me much worse off than I was already, and there is, at times, an awful lot of comfort in a glass of beer. It was too early for many people to be in the place and I could be alone.

Stiffy Grant, more than likely, would be there, spending the dollar that I had given him. But Stiffy was a gentleman and a most perceptive person. If he saw I wanted to be by myself, he wouldn't bother me.

The tavern was dark and cool and I had to feel my way along, after coming in from the brilliance of the street. I reached the back booth and saw that it was empty, so I sat down in it. There were some people in one of the booths up front, but that was all there were.

Mae Hutton came from behind the bar.

"Hello, Brad," she said. "We don't see much of you."

"You holding down the place for Charley?" I asked her. Charley was her father and the owner of the tavern.

"He's catching a nap," she said. "It's not too busy this time of day. I can handle it."

"How about a beer?" I asked.

"Sure thing. Large or small?"

"Make it large," I told her.

She brought the beer and went back behind the bar. The place was quiet and restful not elegant, and perhaps a little dirty, but restful. Up front the brightness of the street made a splash of light, but it faded out before it got too far, as if it were soaked up by the quiet dusk that lurked within the building.

A man got up from the booth just ahead of me. I had not seen him as I came in. Probably he'd been sitting in the corner, against the wall. He held a half-filled glass and he turned and stared at me. Then he took a step or two and stood beside my booth. I looked up and I didn't recognize him. My eyes had not as yet become adjusted to the place.

"Brad Carter?" he asked. "Could you be Brad Carter?"

"Yes, I could," I said.

He put his glass down on the table and sat down across from me. And as he did, those fox-like features fell into shape for me and I knew who he was.

"Alf Peterson!" I said, surprised. "Ed Adler and I were talking about you just an hour or so ago." He thrust his hand across the table and I grabbed it, glad to see him, glad for some strange reason for this man out of the past. His handclasp was firm and strong and I knew he was glad to see me, too.

"Good Lord," I said, "how long has it been?"

"Six years," he told me. "Maybe more than that." We sat there, looking at one another, in that awkward pause that falls between old friends after years of not seeing one another, neither one quite sure of what should be said, searching for some safe and common ground to begin a conversation.

"Back for a visit?" I inquired.

"Yeah," he said. "Vacation."

"You should have looked me up at once."

"Just got in three or four hours ago." It was strange, I thought, that he should have come back to Millville, for there was no one for him here. His folks had moved away, somewhere east, several years ago. They'd not been Millville people. They'd been in the village for only four or five years, while his father worked as an engineer on a highway project.

"You're going to stay with me," I said. "There's a lot of room. I am all alone."

"I'm at a motel west of town. Johnny's Motor Court, they call it."

"You should have come straight to my place."

"I would have," he said, "but I didn't know. I didn't know that you were in town. Even if you were, I thought you might be married. I didn't want to just come barging in."

I shook my head. "None of those things," I said.

We each had a drink of beer.

He put down his glass. "How are things going, Brad?" My mouth got set to tell a lie, and then I stopped. What the hell, I thought. This man across from me was old Alf Peterson, one of my best friends. There was no point in telling him a lie. There was no pride involved. He was too good a friend for pride to be involved.

"Not so good," I told him.

"I'm sorry, Brad."

"I made a big mistake," I said. "I should have gotten out of here. There's nothing here in Millville, not for anyone."

"You used to want to be an artist. You used to fool around with drawing and there were those pictures that you painted."

I made a motion to sweep it all away.

"Don't tell me," said Alf Peterson, "that you didn't even try. You were planning to go on to school that year we graduated."

"I did," I said. "I got in a year of it. An art school in Chicago. Then Dad passed away and Mother needed me. And there wasn't any money. I've often wondered how Dad got enough together to send me that one year."

"And your mother? You said you are alone."

"She died two years ago."

He nodded. "And you still run the greenhouse."

I shook my head. "I couldn't make a go of it. There wasn't much to go on; I've been selling insurance and trying to handle real estate. But it's no good, Alf. Tomorrow morning I'll close up the office."

"What then?" he asked.

"I don't know. I haven't thought about it." Alf signalled to Mae to bring another round of beers.

"You don't feel," he said, "there's anything to stay for."

I shook my head. "There's the house, of course. I would hate to sell it. If I left, I'd just lock it up. But there's no place I want to go, Alf, that's the hell of it. I don't know if I can quite explain. I've stayed here a year or two too long; I have Millville in my blood."

Alt nodded. "I think I understand. It got into my blood as well. That's why I came back. And now I wonder if I should have. Of course I'm glad to see you, and maybe some other people, but even so I have a feeling that I should not have come. The place seems sort of empty. Sucked dry, if you follow me. It's the same as it always was, I guess, but it has that empty feeling." Mae brought the beers and took the empty glasses.

"I have an idea," Alf said, "if you care to listen."

"Sure," I said. "Why not?"

"I'll be going back," he said, "in another day or so. Why don't you come with me? I'm working with a crazy sort of project. There would be room for you. I know the supervisor pretty well and I could speak to him."

"Doing what?" I asked. "Maybe it would be something that I couldn't do."

"I don't know," said All, "if I can explain it very logically. It's a research project — a thinking project. You sit in a booth and think."

"Think?"

"Yeah. It sounds crazy, doesn't it? But it's not the way it sounds. You sit down in a booth and you get a card that has a question or a problem printed on it. Then you think about that problem and you're supposed to think out loud, sort of talking to yourself, sometimes arguing with yourself. You're self-conscious to start with, but you get over that. The booth is soundproofed and no one can see or hear you. I suppose there is a recorder of some sort to take down what you say, but if there is, it's not in sight."

"And they pay you for this?"

"Rather well," said Alf. "A man can get along."

"But what is it for?" I asked.

"We don't know," said Alf. "Not that we haven't asked. But that's the one condition of the job — that you don't know what it's all about. It's an experiment of some sort, I'd guess. I imagine that it's financed by a university or some research outfit. We are told that if we knew what was going on it might influence the way we are thinking. A man might unconsciously pattern his thinking to fit the purpose of the research."

"And the results?" I asked.

"We aren't told results. Each thinker must have a certain kind of pattern and if you knew that pattern it might influence you. You might try to conform to your own personal pattern, to be consistent, or perhaps there'd be a tendency to break out of it. If you don't know the results, you can't guess at the pattern and there is then no danger." A truck went by in the street outside and its rumble was loud in the quietness of the tavern. And after it went past, there was a fly buzzing on the ceiling. The people up in front apparently had left — at least, they weren't talking any more. I looked around for Stiffy Grant and he wasn't there. I recalled now that I had not seen him and that was funny, for I'd just given him the dollar.

"Where is this place?" I asked.

"Mississippi. Greenbriar, Mississippi. It's just a little place. Come to think of it, it's a lot like Millville. Just a little village, quiet and dusty and hot. My God, how hot it is. But the project centre is air conditioned. It isn't bad in there."

"A little town," I said. "Funny that there'd be a place like that in a little town."

"Camouflage," said All. "They want to keep it quiet. We're asked not to talk about it. And how could you hide it better than in a little place like that? No one would ever think there'd be a project of that sort in a stuck-off village."

"But you were a stranger…"

"Sure, and that's how I got the job. They didn't want too many local people. All of them would have a tendency to think pretty much alike. They were glad to get someone from out of town. There are quite a lot of out-of-towners in the project."

"And before that?"

"Before that? Oh, yes, I see. Before that there was everything. I floated, bummed around. Never stayed too long in any spot. A job for a few weeks here, then a job for a few weeks a little farther on. I guess you could say I drifted. Worked on a concrete gang for a while, washed dishes for a while when the cash ran out and there was nothing else to do. Was a gardener on a big estate down in Louisville for a month or two. Picked tomatoes for a while, but you can starve at that sort of work, so I moved on. Did a lot of things. But I've been down in Greenbriar for eleven months."

"The job can't last forever. After a while they'll have all the data they need." He nodded. "I know. I'll hate to have it end. It's the best work I ever found. How about it, Brad? Will you go back with me?"

"I'll have to think about it," I told him. "Can't you stay a little longer than that day or two?"

"I suppose I could," said All. "I've got two weeks" vacation."

"Like to do some fishing?"

"Nothing I'd like better."

"What do you say we leave tomorrow morning? Go up north for a week or so? It should be cool up there. I have a tent and a camping outfit. We'll try to find a place where we can get some wall-eyes."

"That sounds fine to me."

"We can use my car," I said.

"I'll buy the gas," said All.

"The shape I'm in," I said, "I'll let you."

3

If it had not been for its pillared front and the gleaming white rail of the widow walk atop its roof, the house would have been plain and stark.

There had been a time, I recalled, when I had thought of it as the most beautiful house in the entire world. But it had been six or seven years since I had been at the Sherwood house.

I parked the car and got out and stood for a moment, looking at the house. It was not fully dark as yet and the four great pillars gleamed softly in the fading light of day. There were no lights in the front part of the house, but I could see that they had been turned on somewhere in the back.

I went up the shallow steps and across the porch. I found the bell and rang.

Footsteps came down the hall, a hurrying woman's footsteps. More than likely, I thought, it was Mrs Flaherty. She had been housekeeper for the family since that time Mrs Sherwood had left the house, never to return.

But it wasn't Mrs Flaherty.

The door came open and she stood there, more mature than I remembered her, more poised, more beautiful than ever.

"Nancy!" I exclaimed. "Why, you must be Nancy!" It was not what I would have said if I'd had time to think about it.

"Yes," she said, "I'm Nancy. Why be so surprised?"

"Because I thought you weren't here. When did you get home?"

"Just yesterday," she said.

And, I thought, she doesn't know me. She knows that she should know me. She's trying to remember.

"Brad," she said, proving I was wrong, "it's silly just to stand there. Why don't you come in." I stepped inside and she dosed the door and we were facing one another in the dimness of the hail.

She reached out and laid her fingers on the lapel of my coat.

"It's been a long time, Brad," she said. "How is everything with you?

"Fine," I said. "Just fine."

"There are not many left, I hear. Not many of the gang."

I shook my head. "You sound as if you're glad to be back home." She laughed, just a flutter of a laugh. "Why, of course I am," she said. And the laugh was the same as ever, that little burst of spontaneous merriment that bad been a part of her.

Someone stepped out into the hall.

"Nancy," a voice called, "is that the Carter boy?

"Why," Nancy said to me, "I didn't know that you wanted to see Father."

"It won't take long," I told her. "Will I see you later?"

"Yes, of course," she said. "We have a lot to talk about."

"Nancy!"

"Yes, Father."

"I'm coming," I said.

I strode down the hall toward the figure there. He opened a door and turned on the lights in the room beyond.

I stepped in and he closed the door.

He was a big man with great broad shoulders and an aristocratic head, with a smart trim moustache.

"Mr Sherwood," I told him, angrily, "I am not the Carter boy. I am Bradshaw Carter. To my friends, I'm Brad." It was an unreasonable anger, and probably uncalled for. But he had burned me up, out there in the hall.

"I'm sorry, Brad," he said. "It's so hard to remember that you all are grown up — the kids that Nancy used to run around with." He stepped from the door and went across the room to a desk that stood against one wall. He opened a drawer and took out a bulky envelope and laid it on the desk top.

"That's for you," he said.

"For me?"

"Yes, I thought you knew." I shook my head and there was something in the room that was very close to fear. It was a sombre room, two walls filled with books, and on the third heavily draped windows flanking a marble fireplace.

"Well," he said, "it's yours. Why don't you take it?" I walked to the desk and picked up the envelope. It was unsealed and I flipped up the flap. Inside was a thick sheaf of currency.

"Fifteen hundred dollars," said Gerald Sherwood. "I presume that is the right amount."

"I don't know anything," I told him, "about fifteen hundred dollars. I was simply told by phone that I should talk with you." He puckered up his face, and looked at me intently, almost as if he might not believe me.

"On a phone like that," I told him, pointing to the second phone that stood on the desk.

He nodded tiredly. "Yes," he said, "and how long have you had the phone?"

"Just this afternoon. Ed Adler came and took out my other phone, the regular phone, because I couldn't pay for it. I went for a walk, to sort of think things over, and when I came back this other phone was ringing."

He waved a hand. "Take the envelope," he said. "Put it in your pocket.

"It is not my money. It belongs to you." I laid the envelope back on top the desk. I needed fifteen hundred dollars. I needed any kind of money, no matter where it came from. But I couldn't take that envelope. I don't know why I couldn't.

"All right," he said, "sit down." A chair stood angled in front of the desk and I sat down in it.

He lifted the lid of a box on the desk. "A cigar?" he asked.

"I don't smoke," I told him.

"A drink, perhaps?"

"Yes. I would like a drink."

"Bourbon?"

"Bourbon would be fine." He went to a cellaret that stood in a corner and put ice into two glasses.

"How do you drink it, Brad?"

"Just ice, if you don't mind."

He chuckled. "It's the only civilized way to drink the stuff" he said.

I sat, looking at the rows of books that ran from floor to ceiling.

Many of them were in sets and, from the looks of them, in expensive bindings.

It must be wonderful, I thought, to be, not exactly rich, but to have enough so you didn't have to worry when there was some little thing you wanted, not to have to wonder if it would be all right if you spent the money for it. To be able to live in a house like this, to line the walls with books and have rich draperies and to have more than just one bottle of booze and a place to keep it other than a kitchen shelf.

He handed me the glass of whisky and walked around the desk. He sat down in the chair behind it. Raising his glass, he took a couple of thirsty gulps, then set the glass down on the desk top.

"Brad," he asked, "how much do you know?"

"Not a thing," I said. "Only what I told you. I talked with someone on the phone. They offered me a job."

"And you took the job?"

"No," I said, "I didn't, but I may. I could use a job. But what they whoever it was had to say didn't make much sense."

"They?"

"Well, either there were three of them — or one who used three different voices. Strange as it may sound to you, it seemed to me as if it were one person who used different voices." He picked up the glass and gulped at it again. He held it up to the light and saw in what seemed to be astonishment that it was nearly empty. He hoisted himself out of the chair and went to get the bottle. He slopped liquor in his glass and held the bottle out to me.

"I haven't started yet," I told him.

He put the bottle on the desk and sat down again.

"OK," he said, "you've come and talked with me. It's all right to take the job. Pick up your money and get out of here. More than likely Nancy's out there waiting. Take her to a show or something."

"And that's all?" I asked.

"That is all," he said.

"You changed your mind," I told him.

"Changed my mind?"

"You were about to tell me something. Then you decided not to."

He looked at me levelly and hard. "I suppose you're right," he said. "It really makes no difference."

"It does to me," I told him. "Because I can see you're scared." I thought he might get sore. Most men do when you tell them they are scared.

He didn't. He just sat there, his face unchanging.

Then he said: "Start on that drink, for Christ's sake. You make me nervous, just roosting there and hanging onto it." I had forgotten all about the drink. I had a slug.

"Probably," he said, "you are thinking a lot of things that aren't true. You more than likely think that I'm mixed up in some dirty kind of business. I wonder, would you believe me If I told you I don't really know what kind of business I'm mixed up in."

"I think I would," I said. "That is, if you say so."

"I've had a lot of trouble in life," he said, "but that's not unusual. Most people do have a lot of trouble, one way or the other. Mine came in a bunch. Trouble has a way of doing that." I nodded, agreeing with him.

"First," he said, "my wife left me. You probably know all about that. There must have been a lot of talk about it."

"It was before my time," I said. "I was pretty young."

"Yes, I suppose it was. Say this much for the two of us, we were civilized about it. There wasn't any shouting and no nastiness in court. That was something neither of us wanted. And, then, on top of that I was facing business failure. The bottom went out of the farm machinery business and I feared that I might have to shut down the plant. There were a lot of other small farm machinery firms that simply locked their doors. After fifty or sixty or more years as going, profitable concerns, they were forced out of business." He paused, as if he wanted me to say something. There wasn't anything to say.

He took another drink, then began to talk again. "I'm a fairly stupid man in a lot of ways. I can handle a business. I can keep it going if there's any chance to keep it going and I can wring a profit from it. I suppose that you could say I'm rather astute when it comes to business matters. But that's the end of it. In the course of my lifetime I have never really had a big idea or a new idea." He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and putting them on the desk.

"I've thought about it a lot," he said, "this thing that happened to me. I've tried to see some reason in it and there is no reason. It's a thing that should not have happened, not to a man like me. There I was, on the verge of failure, and not a thing that I could do about it. The problem was quite simple, really. For a number of good economic reasons, less farm machinery was being sold. Some of the big concerns, with big sales departments and good advertising budgets, could ride out a thing like that. They had some elbow room to plan, there were steps that they could take to lessen the effects of the situation. But a small concern like mine didn't have the room or the capital reserve. My firm, and others, faced disaster.

"And in my case, you understand, I didn't have a chance. I had run the business according to old and established practices and time-tested rules, the same sort of good, sound business practices that had been followed by my grandfather and my father. And these practices said that when your sales dwindled down to nothing you were finished. There were other men who might have been able to figure out a way to meet the situation, but not me. I was a good businessman, but I had no imagination. I had no ideas. Ad then, suddenly, I began to get ideas. But they were not my own ideas. It was as if the ideas of some other person were being transplanted to my brain.

"You understand," he said, "that an idea sometimes comes to you in the matter of a second. It just pops from nowhere. It has no apparent point of origin. Try as you may, you cannot trace it back to anything you did or heard or read. Somehow, I suppose, if you dug deep enough, you'd find its genesis, but there are few of us who are trained to do that sort of digging.

"But the point is that most ideas are no more than a germ, a tiny starting point. An idea may be good and valid, but it will take some nursing. It has to be developed. You must think about it and turn it around and around and look at it from every angle and weigh it and consider it before you can mould it into something useful.

"But this wasn't the way with these ideas that I got. They sprang forth full and round and completely developed. I didn't have to do any thinking about them. They just popped into my mind and I didn't need to do another thing about them. There they were, all ready for one's use. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have a new idea, a new mass of knowledge in my brain. I'd go for a walk and come back with another. They came in bunches, as if someone had sown a crop of them inside my brain and they had lain there for a while and then begun to sprout."

"The gadgets?" I said.

He looked at me curiously. "Yes, "the gadgets. What do you know about them?"

"Nothing," I told him. "I just knew that when the bottom fell out of the farm machinery business you started making gadgets. I don't know what kind of gadgets."

He didn't tell me what kind of gadgets. He went on talking about those strange ideas. "I didn't realize at first what was happening. Then, as the ideas came piling in on me, I knew there was something strange about it. I knew that it was unlikely that I'd think of any one of them, let alone the many that I had. More than likely I'd never have thought of them at all, for I have no imagination and I am not inventive. I tried to tell myself that it was just barely possible I might have thought of two or three of them, but even that would have been most unlikely. But of more than two or three of them I knew I was not capable. I was forced, finally, to admit that I had been the recipient of some sort of outside help."

"What kind of outside help?"

"I don't know," he said. "Even now I don't."

"But it didn't stop you from using these ideas."

"I am a practical man," he said. "Intensely practical. I suppose some people might even say hard-headed. But consider this: the business was gone. Not my business, mind you, but the family business, the business my grandfather had started and my father had handed on to me. It wasn't my business; it was a business I held in trust. There is a great distinction.

"You could see a business you had built yourself go gurgling down the drain and still stand the blow of it, telling yourself that you had been successful once and you could start over and be successful once again. But it's different with a family business.

"In the first place, there is the shame. And in the second place, you can't be sure that you can recoup. You were no success to start with. Success had been handed to you and you'd merely carried on. You never could be sure that you could start over and build the business back. In fact, you're so conditioned that you're pretty sure you couldn't."

He quit speaking and in the silence I could hear the ticking of a clock, faint and far off, but I couldn't see the clock and I resisted the temptation to turn my head to see if I could find it. For I had the feeling that if I turned my head, if I stirred at all, I'd break something that lay within the room. As if I stood in a crowded china shop, where all the pieces were precarious and tilted, fearing to move, for if one piece were dislodged, all of them would come crashing down.

"What would you have done?" asked Sherwood.

"I'd have used anything I had," I said.

"That's what I did," said Sherwood. "I was desperate. There was the business, this house, Nancy, the family name — all of it at stake. I took all of those ideas and I wrote them down and I called in my engineers and draughtsmen and production people and we got to work. I got the credit for it all, of course. There was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't tell them I wasn't the one who'd dreamed up all those things. And you know, strange as it may sound, that's the hardest part of all. That I have to go on taking credit for all those things I didn't do."

"So that is that," I said. "The family business saved and everything is fine. If I were you, I wouldn't let a guilt complex bother me too much."

"But it didn't stop," he said. "If it had, I'd have forgotten it. If there'd just been this single spurt of help to save the company, it might have been all right. But it kept right on. As if there might be two of me, the real, apparent Gerald Sherwood, the one sitting at this desk, and another one who did the thinking for me.

"The ideas kept on coming and some of them made a lot of sense and some made no sense at all. Some of them, I tell you, were out of this world, literally out of this world. They had no point of reference, they didn't seem to square with any situation. And while one could sense that they had potential, while there was a feeling of great importance in the very texture of them, they were entirely useless.

"And it was not only the ideas; it was knowledge also. Bits and bursts of knowledge. Knowledge about things in which I had no interest, things I had never thought of. Knowledge about certain things I'm certain no man knows about. As if someone took a handful of fragmented knowledge, a sort of grab-bag, junk-heap pile of knowledge and dumped it in my brain." He reached out for the bottle and filled his glass. He gestured at me with the bottle neck and I held out my glass. He filled it to the brim.

"Drink up," he said. "You got me started and now you hear me out. Tomorrow morning I'll ask myself why I told you all of this. But tonight it seems all right."

"If you don't want to tell me. If it seems that I am prying…"

He waved a hand at me. "All right," he said, "if you don't want to hear it. Pick up your fifteen hundred."

I shook my head. "Not yet. Not until I know how come you're giving it to me."

"It's not my money. I'm just acting as an agent."

"For this other man? For this other you?"

He nodded. "That's right," he said. "I wonder how you guessed." I gestured at the phone without a dial.

He grimaced. "I've never used the thing," he said. "Until you told me about the one you found waiting in your office, I never knew anyone who had. I make them by the hundreds…"

"You make them!"

"Yes, of course I do. Not for myself. For this second self. Although," he said, leaning across the desk and lowering his voice to a confidential tone, "I'm beginning to suspect it's not a second self."

"What do you think it is?"

He leaned slowly back in the chair. "Damned if I know," he said. "There was a time I thought about it and wondered at it and worried over it, but there was no way of knowing. I just don't bother any more. I tell myself there may be others like me. Maybe I am not alone — at least, it's good to think so."

"But the phone?" I asked.

"I designed the thing," he said. "Or perhaps this other person, if it is a person, did. I found it in my mind and I put it down on paper. And I did this, mind you, without knowing what it was or what it was supposed to do. I knew it was a phone of some sort, naturally. But I couldn't, for the life of me, see how it could work. And neither could any of the others who put it into production at the plant. By all the rules of reason, the damn thing shouldn't work."

"But you said there were a lot of other things that seemed to have no purpose."

"A lot of them," he said, "but with them I never drew a blueprint, I never tried to make them. But the phone, if that is what you want to call it, was a different proposition. I knew that I should make them and how many might be needed and what to do with them."

"What did you do with them?

"I shipped them to an outfit in New Jersey." It was utterly insane.

"Let me get this straight," I pleaded. "You found the blueprints in your head and you knew you should make these phones and that you should send them to some place in New Jersey. And you did it without question?"

"Oh, certainly with question. I felt somewhat like a fool. But consider this: this second self, this auxiliary brain, this contact with something else had never let me down. It had saved my business, it had provided good advice, it had never failed me. You can't turn your back on something that has played good fairy to you."

"I think I see," I said.

"Of course you do," he told me. "A gambler rides his luck. An investor plays his hunches. And neither luck nor hunch are as solid and consistent as this thing I have." He reached out and picked up the dialless phone and looked at it, then set it down again. "I brought this one home," he said, "and put it on the desk. All these years I've waited for a call, but it never came."

"With you," I told him, "there is no need of any phone."

"You think that's it?" he asked.

"I'm sure of it."

"I suppose it is," he said. "At times it's confusing."

"This Jersey firm?" I asked. "You corresponded with them?"

He shook his head. "Not a line. I just shipped the phones."

"There was no acknowledgement?"

"No acknowledgement," he said. "No payment. I expected none. When you do business with yourself…"

"Yourself! You mean this second self runs that New Jersey firm?"

"I don't know," he said. "Christ, I don't know anything. I've lived with it all these years and I tried to understand, but I never understood." And now his face was haunted and I felt sorry for him.

He must have noticed that I felt sorry for him. He laughed and said.

"Don't let me get you down. I can take it. I can take anything. You must not forget that I've been well paid. Tell me about yourself. You're in real estate."

I nodded. "And insurance."

"And you couldn't pay your phone bill."

"Don't waste sympathy on me," I said. "I'll get along somehow."

"Funny thing about the kids," he said. "Not many of them stay here. Not much to keep them here, I guess."

"Not very much," I said.

"Nancy is just home from Europe," he told me. "I'm glad to have her home. It got lonesome here with no one. I haven't seen much of her lately. College and then a fling at social work and then the trip to Europe. But she tells me now that she plans to stay a while. She wants to do some writing."

"She should be good at it," I said. "She got good marks in composition when we were in high school."

"She has the writing bug," he said. "Had half a dozen things published in, I guess you call them little magazines. The ones that come out quarterly and pay you nothing for your work except half a dozen copies. I'd never heard of them before. I read the articles she wrote, but I have no eye for writing. I don't know if it's good or bad. Although I suppose it has to have a certain competence to have been accepted. But if writing keeps her here with me, I'll be satisfied."

I got out of my chair. "I'd better go," I said. "Maybe I have stayed longer than I should."

He shook his head. "No, I was glad to talk with you. And don't forget the money. This other self, this whatever-you-may-call-it told me to give it to you. I gather that it's in the nature of a retainer of some sort."

"But this is double talk," I told him, almost angrily. "The money comes from you."

"Not at all," he said. "It comes from a special fund that was started many years ago. It didn't seem quite right that I should reap all benefit from all of these ideas which were not really mine. So I began paying ten per cent profits into a special fund…"

"Suggested, more than likely, by this second self?

"Yes," he said. "I think you are right, although it was so long ago that I cannot truly say. But in any case, I set up the fund and through the years have paid out varying amounts at the direction of whoever it may be that shares my mind with me." I stared at him, and it was rude of me, I know. But no man, I told myself, could sit as calmly as Sherwood sat and talk about an unknown personality that shared his mind with him.

Even after all the years, it still would not be possible.

"The fund," said Sherwood, quietly, "is quite a tidy sum, even with the amounts I've paid out of it. It seems that since this fellow came to live with me, everything I've touched has simply turned to money."

"You take a chance," I said, "telling this to me."

"You mean that you could tell it around about me?

I nodded. "Not that I would," I said.

"I don't think you will," he said. "You'd get laughed at for your trouble. No one would believe you."

"I don't suppose they would."

"Brad," he said, almost kindly, "don't be a complete damn fool. Pick up that envelope and put it in your pocket. Come back some other time and talk with me — any time you want. I have a hunch there may be a lot of things we'll want to talk about." I reached out my hand and picked up the money. I stuffed it in my pocket.

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"Don't mention it," he told me. He raised a hand. "Be seeing you," he said.

4

I WENT slowly down the hall and there was no sign of Nancy, nor was she on the porch, where I had half expected to find her waiting for me. She had said yes, that I would see her later, that we had a lot to talk about, and I had thought, of course, that she meant tonight. But she might not have meant tonight. She might have meant some other time than this. Or she might have wafted and then grown tired of waiting. After all, I had spent a long time with her father.

The moon had risen in a cloudless sky and there was not a breath of breeze. The great oaks stood like graven monuments and the summer night was filled with the glittering of moonbeams. I walked down the stairs and stood for a moment at their foot and it seemed for all the world that I was standing in a circle of enchantment. For this, I thought, could not be the old, familiar earth, this place of ghostly, brooding oaken sentinels, this air so drenched with moonlight, this breathless, waiting silence hanging over all, and the faint, other-world perfume that hung above the soft blackness of the ground.

Then the enchantment faded and the glitter went away and I was back once more in the world I knew.

There was a chill in the summer air. Perhaps a chill of disappointment, the chill of being booted out of fairyland, the chill of knowing there was another place I could not hope to stay. I felt the solid concrete of the walk underneath my feet and I could see that the shadowed oaks were only oaks and not graven monuments.

I shook myself, like a dog coming out of water, and my wits came back together and I went on down the walk. As I neared the car, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, walking around on the driver's side and opening the door.

I was halfway in the seat before I saw her sitting there, next to the other door.

"I thought," she said, "that you were never coming. What did you and Father find to talk so long about?

"A number of things," I told her. "None of them important."

"Do you see him often?"

"No," I said. "Not often." Somehow I didn't want to tell her this was the first time I had ever talked with him.

I groped in the dark and found the lock and slid in the key.

"A drive," I said. "Perhaps some place for a drink."

"No, please," she said. "I'd rather sit and talk." I settled back into the seat.

"It's nice tonight," she said. "So quiet. There are so few places that are really quiet."

"There's a place of enchantment," I told her, "just outside your porch. I walked into it, but it didn't last. The air was full of moonbeams and there was a faint perfume…"

"That was the flowers," she said.

"What flowers?

"There's a bed of them in the curve of the walk. All of them those lovely flowers that your father found out in the woods somewhere."

"So you have them too," I said. "I guess everyone in the village has a bed of them."

"Your father," she said, "was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I'd go walking past and he'd pick a flower or two for me." Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him.

And there had been that day he'd gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap.

He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father's special flowers.

"Those flowers of his," asked Nancy. "Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?"

"No," I said, "he didn't."

"He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he'd found."

"He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run."

"You didn't like it, Brad?"

"I didn't really mind it. I'd grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn't have the knack. Stuff wouldn't grow for me."

She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.

"It's good to be back," she said. "I think I'll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around."

"He said you planned to write."

"He told you that?"

"Yes," I said. "he did. He didn't act as if he shouldn't."

"Oh, I don't suppose it makes any difference. But it's a thing that you don't talk about — not until you're well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start."

"And when you write," I asked, "what will you write about?"

"About right here," she said. "About this town of ours."

"Millville?

"Why, yes, of course," she said. "About the village and its people."

"But," I protested, "there is nothing here to write about."

She laughed and reached out and touched my arm. "There's so much to write about," she said. "So many famous people. And such characters."

"Famous people?" I said, astonished.

"There are," she said, "Belle Simpson Knowles, the famous novelist, and Ben Jackson, the great criminal lawyer, and John M. Hartford, who heads the department of history at…"

"But those are the ones who left," I said. "There was nothing here for them. They went out and made names for themselves and most of them never set foot in Millville again, not even for a visit."

"But," she said, "they got their start here. They had the capacity for what they did before they ever left this village. You stopped me before I finished out the list. There are a lot of others. Millville, small and stupid as it is, has produced more great men and women than any other village of its size."

"You're sure of that?" I asked, wanting to laugh at her earnestness, but not quite daring to.

"I would have to check," she said, "but there have been a lot of them."

"And the characters," I said. "I guess you're right. Millville has its share of characters. There are Stiffy Grant and Floyd Caldwell and Mayor Higgy…"

"They aren't really characters," said Nancy. "Not the way you think of them. I shouldn't have called them characters to start with. They're individualists. They've grown up in a free and easy atmosphere. They've not been forced to conform to a group of rigid concepts and so they've been themselves. Perhaps the only truly unfettered human beings who still exist today can be found in little villages like this."

In all my life I'd never heard anything like this. Nobody had ever told me that Higgy Morris was an individualist. He wasn't. He was just a big stuffed shirt. And Hiram Martin was no individualist. Not in my book, he wasn't. He was just a schoolyard bully who had grown up into a stupid cop.

"Don't you think so?" Nancy asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I have never thought about it." And I thought — for God's sake, her education's showing, her years in an eastern college, her fling at social work in the New York welfare centre, her year-long tour of Europe. She was too sure and confident, too full of theory and of knowledge. Millville was her home no longer. She had lost the feel and sense of it, for you do not sit off to one side and analyse the place that you call your home. She still might call this village home, but it was not her home. And had it ever been, I wondered? Could any girl (or boy) call a bone-poor village home when they lived in the one big house the village boasted, when their father drove a Cadillac, and there was a cook and maid and gardener to care for house and yard? She had not come home; rather she had come back to a village that would serve her as a social research area. She would sit up here on her hilltop and subject the village to inspection and analysis and she'd strip us bare and hold us up, flayed and writhing, for the information and amusement of the kind of people who read her kind of book.

"I have a feeling," she said, "that there is something here that the world could use, something of which there is not a great deal in the world. Some sort of catalyst that sparks creative effort, some kind of inner hunger that serves to trigger greatness."

"That inner hunger," I said. "There are families in town who can tell you all you want to know about that inner hunger." And I wasn't kidding. There were Millville families that at times went just a little hungry; not starving, naturally, but never having quite enough to eat and almost never the right kind of things to eat. I could have named her three of them right off, without even thinking.

"Brad," she said, "you don't like the idea of the book."

"I don't mind," I said. "I have no right to mind. But when you write it, please, write it as one of us, not as someone who stands off and is a bit amused. Have a bit of sympathy. Try to feel a little like these people you write about. That shouldn't be too hard; you've lived here long enough."

She laughed, but it was not one of her merry laughs. "I have a terrible feeling that I may never write it. I'll start it and I'll write away at it, but I'll keep going back and changing it, because the people I am writing of will change, or I'll see them differently as time goes on, and I'll never get it written. So you see, there's no need to worry." More than likely she was right, I thought. You had to have a hunger, a different kind of hunger, to finish up a book. And I rather doubted that she was as hungry as she thought.

"I hope you do," I said. "I mean I hope you get it written. And I know it will be good. It can't help but be." I was trying to make up for my nastiness and I think that she knew I was. But she let it pass.

It had been childish and provincial, I told myself, to have acted as I had. What difference did it make? What possible difference could it make for me, who had stood on the street that very afternoon and felt a hatred for the geographic concept that was called the town of Millville?

This was Nancy Sherwood. This was the girl with whom I had walked hand in hand when the world had been much younger. This was the girl I had thought of this very afternoon as I'd walked along the river, fleeing from myself. What was wrong, I asked myself.

And: "Brad, what is wrong?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Is there something wrong?

"Don't be defensive. You know there's something wrong. Something wrong with us."

"I suppose you're right," I told her. "It's not the way it should be. It's not the way I had thought it would be, if you came home again." I wanted to reach out for her, to take her in my arms — but I knew, even as I wanted it, that it was not the Nancy Sherwood who was sitting here beside me, but that other girl of long ago I wanted in my arms.

We sat in silence for a moment, then she said, "Let's try again some other time. Let's forget about all this. Some evening I'll dress up my prettiest and we'll go out for dinner and some drinks." I turned and put out my hand, but she had opened the door and was halfway out of the car.

"Good night, Brad," she sad, and went running up the walk.

I sat and listened to her running, up the walk and across the porch. I heard the front door close and I kept on sitting there, with the echo of her running still sounding in my brain.

5

I told myself that I was going home. I told myself that I would not go near the office or the phone that was waiting on the desk until I'd had some time to think. For even if I went and picked up the phone and one of the voices answered, what would I have to tell them? The best that I could do would be to say that I had seen Gerald Sherwood and had the money, but that I'd have to know more about what the situation was before I took their job.

And that wasn't good enough, I told myself; that would be talking off the cuff and it would gain me nothing.

And then I remembered that early in the morning I'd be going fishing with Alf Peterson and I told myself, entirely without logic, that in the morning there'd be no time to go down to the office.

I don't suppose it would have made any difference if I'd had that fishing date or not. I don't suppose it would have made any difference, no matter what I told myself. For even as I swore that I was going home, I knew, without much question, that I'd wind up at the office.

Main Street was quiet. Most of the stores were closed and only a few cars were parked along the kerb. A bunch of farm boys, in for a round of beers, were standing in front of the Happy Hollow tavern.

I parked the car in front of the office and got out. Inside I didn't even bother to turn on the light. Some light was shining through the window from a street light at the intersection and the office wasn't dark.

I strode across the office to the desk with my hand already reaching out to pick up the phone — and there wasn't any phone.

I stopped beside the desk and stared at the top of it, not believing. I bent over and, with the flat of my hand, swept back and forth across the desk, as if I imagined that the phone had somehow become invisible and while I couldn't see it I could locate it by the sense of touch. But it wasn't that, exactly. It was simply, I guess, that I could not believe my eyes.

I straightened up from feeling along the desk top and stood rigid in the room, while an icy-footed little creature prowled up and down my spine.

Finally I turned my head, slowly, carefully, looking at the corners of the office, half expecting to find some dark shadow crouching there and waiting.

But there wasn't anything. Nothing had been changed. The place was exactly as I had left it, except there wasn't any phone.

Turning on the light, I searched the office. I looked in all the corners, I looked beneath the desk, I ransacked the desk drawers and went through the filing cabinet.

There wasn't any phone.

For the first time, I felt the touch of panic. Someone, I thought, had found the phone. Someone had managed to break in, to unlock the door somehow, and had stolen it. Although, when I thought of it, that didn't make much sense. There was nothing about the phone that would have attracted anyone's attention. Of course it had no dial and it was not connected, but looking through the window, that would not have been apparent.

More than likely, I told myself, whoever had put it on the desk had come back and taken it. Perhaps it meant that the ones who had talked to me had reconsidered and had decided I was not the man they wanted. They had taken back the phone and, with it, the offer of the job.

And if that were the case, there was only one thing I could do — forget about the job and take back the fifteen hundred.

Although that, I knew, would be rather hard to do. I needed that fifteen hundred so bad I could taste it.

Back in the car, I sat for a moment before starting the motor, wondering what I should do next. And there didn't seem to be anything to do, so I started the engine and drove slowly up the street.

Tomorrow morning, I told myself, I'd pick up Alf Peterson and we'd have our week of fishing. It would be good, I thought, to have old Alf to talk with. We'd have a lot to talk about — his crazy job down in Mississippi and my adventure with the phone.

And maybe, when he left, I'd be going with him. It would be good, I thought, to get away from Millville.

I pulled the car into the driveway and left it standing there.

Before I went to bed, I'd want to get the camping and the fishing gear together and packed into the car against an early start, come morning. The garage was small and it would be easier to do the packing with the car standing in the driveway.

I got out and stood beside the car. The house was a hunched shadow in the moonlight and past one corner of it I could see the moonlit glitter of an unbroken pane or two in the sagging greenhouse. I could just see the tip of the elm tree, the seedling elm that stood at one corner of the greenhouse. I remembered the day I had been about to pull the seedling out, when it was no more that a sprout, and how my dad had stopped me, telling me that a tree had as much right to live as anybody else. That's exactly what he'd said as much as anybody else. He'd been a wonderful man, I thought; he believed, deep inside his heart, that flowers and trees were people.

And once again I smelled the faint perfume of the purple flowers that grew in profusion all about the greenhouse, the same perfume I'd smelled at the foot of the Sherwood porch. But this time there was no circle of enchantment.

I walked around the house and as I approached the kitchen door I saw there was a light inside. More than likely, I thought, I had forgotten it, although I could not remember that I had turned it on.

The door was open, too, and I could remember shutting it and pushing on it with my hand to make sure the latch had caught before I'd gone out to the car.

Perhaps, I thought, there was someone in there waiting for me, or someone had been here and left and the place was looted, although there was, God knows, little enough to loot. It could be kids, I thought sonic of these mixed-up kids would do anything for kicks.

I went through the door fast and then came to a sudden halt in the middle of the kitchen. There was someone there, all right; there was someone waiting.

Stiffy Grant sat in a kitchen chair and he was doubled over, with his arms wrapped about his middle, and rocking slowly, from side to side, as if he were in pain.

"Stiffy!" I shouted, and Stiffy moaned at me.

Drunk again, I thought. Stiffer than a goat and sick, although how in the world he could have gotten drunk on the dollar I had given him was more than I could figure. Maybe, I thought, he had made another touch or two, waiting to start drinking until he had cash enough to really hang one on.

"Stiffy," I said sharply, "what the hell's the matter?" I was plenty sore at him. He could get plastered as often as he liked and it was all right with me, but he had no right to come busting in on me.

Stiffy moaned again, then he fell out of the chair and sprawled untidily on the floor. Something that clattered and jangled flew out of the pocket of his ragged jacket and skidded across the worn-out linoleum.

I got down on my knees and tugged and hauled at him and got him straightened out. I turned him over on his back. His face was splotched and puffy and his breath was jerky, but there was no smell of liquor. I bent close over him in an effort to make certain, and there was no smell of booze.

"Brad?" he mumbled. "Is that you, Brad?"

"Yes," I told him. "You can take it easy now. I'll take care of you."

"It's getting close," he whispered. "The time is coming dose."

"What is getting close?" But he couldn't answer. He had a wheezing fit. He worked his jaws, but no words came out. They tried to come, but he choked and strangled on them.

I left him and ran into the living-room and turned on the light beside the telephone. I pawed, all fumble-fingered, through the directory, to find Doc Fabian's number. I found it and dialled and waited while the phone rang on and on. I hoped to God that Doc was home and not out on a call somewhere.

For when Doc was gone, you couldn't count on Mrs Fabian answering. She was all crippled up with arthritis and half the time couldn't get around. Doc always tried to have someone there to watch after her and to take the calls when he went out, but there were times when he couldn't get anyone to stay.

Old Mrs Fabian was hard to get along with and no one liked to stay.

When Doc answered, I felt a great surge of relief.

"Doc," I said. "Stiffy Grant is here at my place and there's something wrong with him."

"Drunk, perhaps," said Doc.

"No, he isn't drunk. I came home and found him sitting in the kitchen. He's all twisted up and babbling."

"Babbling about what?"

"I don't know," I said. "Just babbling — when he can talk, that is."

"All right," said Doc. "I'll be right over." That's one thing about Doc. You can count on him. At any time of day or night, in any kind of weather.

I went back to the kitchen. Stiffy had rolled over on his side and was clutching at his belly and breathing hard. I left him where he was. Doc would be here soon and there wasn't much that I could do for Stiffy except to try to make him comfortable, and maybe, I told myself, he might be more comfortable lying on his side than turned over on his back.

I picked up the object that had fallen out of Stiffy's coat. It was a key ring, with half a dozen keys. I couldn't imagine what need Stiffy might have for half a dozen keys. More than likely he just carried them around for some smug feeling of importance they might give to him.

I put them on the counter top and went back and squatted down alongside Stiffy. "I called Doc," I told him. "He'll be here right away." He seemed to hear me. He wheezed and sputtered for a while, then he said in a broken whisper: "I can't help no more. You are all alone." It didn't go as smooth as that. His words were broken up.

"What are you talking about?" I asked him, as gently as I could. "Tell me what it is."

"The bomb," he said. "The bomb. They'll want to use the bomb. You must stop them, boy." I had told Doc that he was babbling and now I knew I had been right.

I headed for the front door to see if Doc might be in sight and when I got there he was coming up the walk.

Doc went ahead of me into the kitchen and stood for a moment, looking down at Stiffy. Then he set down his bag and hunkered down and rolled Stiffy on his back.

"How are you, Stiffy?" he demanded.

Stiffy didn't answer.

"He's out cold," said Doc.

"He talked to me just before you came in."

"Say anything?"

I shook my bead. "Just nonsense." Doc hauled a stethoscope out of his pocket and listened to Stiffy's chest. He rolled Stiffy's eyelids back and beamed a light into his eyes.

Then he got slowly to his feet.

"What's the matter with him?" I asked.

"He's in shock," said Doc. "I don't know what's the matter. We'd better get him into the hospital over at Elmore and have a decent look at him." He turned wearily and headed for the living-room.

"You got a phone in here?" he asked.

"Over in the corner. Right beside the light."

"I'll call Hiram," he said. "He'll drive us into Elmore. We'll put Stiffy in the back seat and I'll ride along and keep an eye on him." He turned in the doorway. "You got a couple of blankets you could let us have?"

"I think I can find some."

He nodded at Stiffy. "We ought to keep him warm."

I went to get the blankets. When I came back with them, Doc was in the kitchen. Between the two of us, we got Stiffy all wrapped up. He was limp as a kitten and his face was streaked with perspiration.

"Damn wonder," said Doc, "how he keeps alive, living the way he does, in that shack stuck out beside the swamp. He drinks anything and everything he can get his hands on and he pays no attention to his food. Eats any kind of slop he can throw together easy. And I doubt he's had an honest bath in the last ten years. It does beat hell," he said with sudden anger, "how little care some people ever think to give their bodies."

"Where did he come from?" I asked. "I always figured he wasn't a native of this place. But he's been here as long as I remember."

"Drifted in," said Doc, "some thirty years ago, maybe more than that. A fairly young man then. Did some odd jobs here and there and just sort of settled down. No one paid attention to him. They figured, I guess, that he had drifted in and would drift out again. But then, all at once, he seemed to have become a fixture in the village. I would imagine that he just liked the place and decided to stay on. Or maybe lacked the gumption to move on." We sat in silence for a while.

"Why do you suppose he came barging in on you?" asked Doc.

"I wouldn't know," I said. "We always got along. We'd go fishing now and then. Maybe he was just walking past when he started to get sick."

"Maybe so," said Doc.

The doorbell rang and I went and let Hiram Martin in. Hiram was a big man. His face was mean and he kept the constable's badge pinned to his coat lapel so polished that it shone.

"Where is he?" he asked.

"Out in the kitchen," I said. "Doc is sitting with him." It was very plain that Hiram did not take to being drafted into the job of driving Stiffy in to Elmore.

He strode into the kitchen and stood looking down at the swathed figure on the floor.

"Drunk?" he asked.

"No," said Doc. "He's sick."

"Well, OK," said Hiram, "the car is out in front and I left the engine running. Let's heave him in and be on our way." The three of us carried Stiffy out to the car and propped him in the back seat.

I stood on the walk and watched the car go down the street and I wondered how Stiffy would feel about it when he woke up and found that he was in a hospital. I rather imagined that he might not care for it.

I felt bad about Doc. He wasn't a young man any longer and more than likely he'd had a busy day, and yet he took it for granted that he should ride with Stiffy.

Once in the house again, I went into the kitchen and got out the coffee and went to the sink to fill the coffee pot, and there, lying on the counter top, was the bunch of keys I had picked up off the floor. I picked them up again and had a closer look at them. There were two of them that looked like padlock keys and there was a car key and what looked like a key to a safety deposit box and two others that might have been any kind of keys. I shuffled them around, scarcely seeing them, wondering about that car key and that other one which might have been for a safety box. Stiffy didn't have a car and it was a good, safe bet that be had nothing for which he'd ever need a safety deposit box.

The time is getting close, he'd told me, and they'll want to use the bomb. I had told Doc that it was babbling, but now, remembering back, I was not so sure it was. He had wheezed out the words and he'd worked to get them out. They had been conscious words, words he had managed with some difficulty. They were words that he had meant to say and had laboured to get said. They had not been the easy flow of words that one mouths when babbling. But they had not been enough. He had not had the strength or time.

The few words that he'd managed made no particular sense.

There was a place where I might be able to get some further information that might piece out the words, but I shrank from going there. Stiffy Grant had been a friend of mine for many years, ever since that day he'd gone fishing with a boy often and had sat beside him on the river bank all the afternoon, spinning wondrous tales. As I recalled it, standing in the kitchen, we had caught some fish, but the fish were not important. What had been important then, what was still important, was that a grown man had the sort of understanding to treat a ten-year-old as an equal human being. On that day, in those few hours of an afternoon, I had grown a lot. While we sat on that river bank I had been as big as he was, and that was the first time such a thing had ever happened to me.

There was something that I had to do and yet I shrank from doing it — and still, I told myself, Stiffy might not mind. He had tried to tell me something and he had failed because he didn't have the strength. Certainly he would understand that if I used these keys to get into his shack, that I had not done it in a spirit of maliciousness, or of idle curiosity, but to try to attain that knowledge he had tried to share with me.

No one had ever been in Stiffy's shack. He had built it through the years, out at the edge of town, beside a swamp in the corner of Jack Dickson's pasture, and he had built it out of lumber he had picked up and out of flattened tin cans and all manner of odd junk he had run across. At first it had been little more than a lean-to, a shelter from the wind and rain. But bit by bit, year by year, he had added to it until it was a structure of wondrous shape and angles, but it was a home.

I made up my mind and gave the keys a final toss and caught them and put them in my pocket. Then I went out of the house and got into the car.

6

A thin fog of ghostly white lay just above the surface of the swamp and curled about the foot of the tiny knoll on which Stiffy's shack was set.

Across the stretch of whiteness loomed a shadowed mass, the dark shape of a wooded island that rose out of the marsh.

I stopped the car and got out of it and as I did, my nostrils caught the rank odour of the swamp, the scent of old and musty things, the smell of rotting vegetation, and ochre coloured water. It was not particularly offensive and yet there was about it an uncleanliness that set one's skin to crawling. Perhaps, I told myself, a man got used to it. More than likely Stiffy had lived with it so long that he never noticed it.

I glanced back toward the village and through the darkness of the nightmare trees I could catch an occasional glimpse of a swaying street lamp. No one, I was certain, could have seen me come here. I'd switched off the headlights before I turned off the highway and had crawled along the twisting cart track that led in to the shack with no more than a sickly moonlight to help me on my way.

Like a thief in the night, I thought. And that, of course, was what I was — except I had no intent of stealing.

I walked up the path that led to the crazy door fashioned out of uneven slabs of salvaged lumber, dosed by a metal hasp guarded by a heavy padlock.

I tried one of the padlock keys and it fitted and the lock snicked back. I pushed on the door and it creaked open.

I pulled the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of the car out of my pocket and thumbed its switch. The fan of light thrust out, spearing through the doorway. There was a table and three chairs, a stove against one wall, a bed against another.

The room was clean. There was a wooden floor, covered by scraps of linoleum carefully patched together. The linoleum was so thoroughly scrubbed that it fairly shone. The walls had been plastered and then neatly papered with scraps of wallpaper, and with a complete and cynical disregard for any colour scheme.

I moved farther into the room, swinging the light slowly back and forth. At first it had been the big things I had seen — the stove, the table and the chairs, the bed. But now I began to become aware of the other things and the little things.

And one of these smaller things, which I should have seen at once, but hadn't, was the telephone that stood on the table.

I shone the light on it and spent long seconds making sure of what I'd known to start with — for it was apparent at a glance that the phone was without a dial and had no connection cord. And it would have done no good if it had had a cord, for no telephone line had ever been run to this shack beside the swamp.

Three of them, I thought — three of them I knew of. The one that had been in my office and another in Gerald Sherwood's study and now this one in the shack of the village bum.

Although, I told myself, not quite so much a bum as the village might believe. Not the dirty slob most people thought he was. For the floor was scrubbed and the walls were papered and everything was neat.

Me and Gerald Sherwood and Stiffy Grant — what kind of common bond could there be among us? And how many of these dialless phones could there be in Millville; for how many others of us did that unknown bond exist?

I moved the light and it crept across the bed with its patterned quilt — not rumpled, not messed up, and very neatly made. Across the bed and to another table that stood beyond the bed. Underneath the table were two cartons. One of them was plain, without any lettering, and the other was a whisky case with the name of an excellent brand of Scotch writ large across its face.

I walked over to the table and pulled the whisky case out from underneath it. And in it was the last thing in the world I had expected. It was not an emptied carton packed with personal belongings, not a box of junk, but a case of whisky.

Unbelieving, I lifted out a bottle and another and another, all of them still sealed. I put them back in the case again and lowered myself carefully to the floor, squatting on my heels. I felt the laughter deep inside of me, trying to break out — and yet it was, when one came to think of it, not a laughing matter.

This very afternoon Stiffy had touched me for a dollar because, he'd said, he'd not had a drink all day. And all the time there had been this case of whisky, pushed underneath the table.

Were all the outward aspects of the village bum no more than camouflage? The broken, dirty nails; the rumpled, thread-bare clothing; the unshaven face and the unwashed neck; the begging of money for a drink; the seeking of dirty little piddling jobs to earn the price of food — was this all a sham?

And if it were a masquerade, what purpose could it serve? I pushed the case back underneath the table and pulled out the other carton. And this one wasn't whisky and neither was it junk. It was telephones.

I hunkered, staring at them, and it now was crystal clear how that telephone had gotten on my desk. Stiffy had put it there and then had waited for me, propped against the building. Perhaps he had seen me coming down the street as he came out of the office and had done the one thing that would seem entirely natural to explain his waiting there. Or it might equally well have been just plain bravado. And all the time he has been laughing at me deep inside himself.

But that must be wrong, I told myself. Stiffy never would have laughed at me. We were old and trusted friends and he'd never laugh at me, he. would never do anything to fool me.

This was a serious business, too serious for any laughing to be done.

If Stiffy had put the phone there, had he also been the one who had come back and taken it? Could that have been the reason he had come to my place — to explain to me why the phone was gone?

Thinking of it, it didn't seem too likely.

But if it had not been Stiffy, then there was someone else involved.

There was no need to lift out the phones, for I knew exactly what I'd find. But I did lift them out and I wasn't wrong.

They had no dials and no connection cords.

I got to my feet and for a moment stood uncertain, staring at the phone standing on the table, then, making up my mind, strode to the table and lifted the receiver.

"Hello," said the voice of the businessman. "What have you to report?"

"This isn't Stiffy," I said. "Stiffy is in a hospital. He was taken sick."

There was a moment's hesitation, then the voice said, "Oh, yes, it's Mr Bradshaw Carter, isn't it. So nice that you could call."

"I found the phones," I said. "Here in Stiffy's shack. And the phone in my office has somehow disappeared. And I saw Gerald Sherwood. I think perhaps, my friend, it's time that you explained."

"Of course," the voice said. "You, I suppose, have decided that you will represent us."

"Now," I said, "just a minute, there. Not until I know about it. Not until I've had a chance to give it some consideration."

"I tell you what," the voice said, "you consider it and then you call us back. What was this you were saying about Stiffy being taken somewhere?"

"A hospital," I said. "He was taken sick."

"But he should have called us," the voice said, aghast. "We would have fixed him up. He knew good and well…"

"He maybe didn't have the time. I found him…"

"Where was this place you say that he was taken?"

"Elmore. To the hospital at…"

"Elmore. Of course. We know where Elmore is."

"And Greenbriar, too, perhaps." I hadn't meant to say it; I hadn't even thought it. It just popped into my mind, a sudden, unconscious linking of what was happening here and the project that Alf had talked to me about.

"Greenbriar? Why, certainly. Down in Mississippi. A town very much like Millville. And you will let us know? When you have decided, you will let us know?"

"I'll let you know," I promised.

"And thank you very much, sir. We shall be looking forward to your association with us." And then the line went dead.

Greenbriar, I thought. It was not only Millville. It might be the entire world. What the hell, I wondered, could be going on?

I'd talk to Alf about it. I'd go home and phone him now. Or I could drive out and see him. He'd probably be in bed, but I would get him up. I'd take along a bottle and we'd have a drink or two.

I picked up the phone and tucked it underneath my arm and went outside.

I closed the door behind me. I snapped the padlock shut and then went to the car. I opened the back door and put the telephone on the floor and covered it with a raincoat that was folded on the seat. It was a silly thing to do, but I felt a little better with the phone tucked away and hidden. I got behind the wheel and sat for a moment, thinking, Perhaps, I told myself; it would be better if I didn't rush into things too fast. I would see Alf tomorrow and we'd have a lot of time to talk, an entire week to talk if we needed it. And that way I'd have some time to try to think the situation out.

It was late and I had to pack the camping stuff and the fishing tackle in the car and Ishould try to get some sleep.

Be sensible, I told myself. Take a little time. Try to think it out.

It was good advice. Good for someone else. Good even for myself at another time and under other circumstances. I should not have taken it, however. I should have gone out to Johnny's Motor Court and pounded on Alf's door. Perhaps then things would have worked out differently. But you can't be sure. You never can be sure.

But, anyhow, I did go home and I did pack the camping stuff and the fishing gear into the car and had a few hours of sleep (I wonder now how I ever got to sleep), then was routed out by the alarm dock early in the morning.

And before I could pick up Alf I hit the barrier.

7

"Hi, there," said the naked scarecrow, with jaunty happiness. He counted on his fingers and slobbered as he counted.

And there was no mistaking him. He came clear through the years. The same placid, vacant face, with its frog-like mouth and its misty eyes. It had been ten years since I had seen him last, since anyone had seen him, and yet he seemed only slightly older than he had been then. His hair was long, hanging down his back, but he had no whiskers. He had a heavy growth of fuzz, but he'd never sprouted whiskers. He was entirely naked except for the outrageous hat. And he was the same old Tupper. He hadn't changed a bit. I'd have known him anywhere.

He quit his finger-counting and sucked in his slobber. He reached up and took off his hat and held it out so that I could see it better.

"Made it myself," he told me, with a wealth of pride.

"It's very fine," I said.

He could have waited, I told myself. No matter where he'd come from, he could have waited for a while. Millville had enough trouble at this particular moment without having to contend once again with the likes of Tupper Tyler.

"Your papa," Tupper said. "Where is your papa, Brad? There is something I have to tell him." And that voice, I thought. How could I ever have mistaken it? And how could I ever have forgotten that Tupper was, of all things, an accomplished mimic? He could be any bird he wanted and he could be a dog or cat and the kids used to gather round him, making fun of him, while he put on a mimic show of a dog-and-cat fight or of two neighbours quarrelling.

"Your papa!" Tupper said.

"We'd better get inside," I told him. "I'll get some clothes and you climb into them. You can't go on running around naked."

He nodded vaguely. "Flowers," he said. "Lots of pretty flowers." He spread his arms wide to show me how many flowers there were. "Acres and acres," he said. "There is no end to them. They just keep on forever. Every last one purple. And they are so pretty and they smell so sweet and they are so good to me." His chin was covered with a dampness from his talking and he wiped it with a claw-like hand. He wiped his hand upon a thigh.

I got him by the elbow and got him turned around, headed for the house.

"But your papa," he protested. "I want to tell your papa all about the flowers."

"Later on," I said.

I got him on the porch and thrust him through the door and followed after him. I felt easier. Tupper was no decent sight for the streets of Millville. And I had had, for a while, about all that I could stand. Old Stiffy Grant laid out in my kitchen just the night before and now along comes Tupper, without a stitch upon him. Eccentrics were all right, and in a little town you get a lot of them, but there came a time when they ran a little thin.

I still held tightly to his elbow and marched him to the bedroom.

"You stand right there," I told him.

He stood right there, not moving, gaping at the room with his vacant stare.

I found a shirt and a pair of trousers. I got out a pair of shoes and, after looking at his feet, put them back again. They were, I knew, way too small. Tupper's feet were all spraddled out and flattened. He'd probably been going without shoes for years.

I held out the trousers and the shirt.

"You get into these," I said. "And once you have them on, stay here. Don't stir out of this room." He didn't answer and he didn't take the clothes. He'd fallen once again to counting his fingers.

And now, for the first time, I had a chance to wonder where he'd been.

How could a man drop out of sight, without a trace, stay lost for ten years, and then pop up again, out of that same thin air into which he had disappeared?

It had been my first year in high school that Tupper had turned up missing and I remembered it most vividly because for a week all of the boys had been released from school to join the hunt for him. We had combed miles of fields and woodlands, walking slowly in line an arm's length from one another, and finally we had been looking for a body rather than a man. The state police had dragged the river and several nearby ponds. The sheriff and a posse of townspeople had worked carefully through the swamp below Stiffy's shack, prodding with long poles. They had found innumerable logs and a couple of wash boilers that someone had thrown away and on the farther edge of the swamp an anciently dead dog.

But no one had found Tupper.

"Here," I told him, "take these clothes and get into them." Tupper finished with his fingers and politely wiped his chin.

"I must be getting back," he said. "The flowers can't wait too long." He reached out a hand and took the clothes from me. "My other ones wore out," he said. "They just dropped off of me."

"I saw your mother just half an hour ago," I said. "She was looking for you." It was a risky thing to say, for Tupper was the kind of jerk that you handled with kid gloves. But I took the calculated risk and said it, for I thought that maybe it would jolt some sense into him.

"Oh," he said lightly, "she's always hunting for me. She thinks I ain't big enough to look out for myself." As if he'd never been away. As if ten years hadn't passed. As if he'd stepped out of his mother's house no more than an hour ago. As if time had no meaning for him — and perhaps it hadn't.

"Put on the clothes," I told him. "I'll be right back." I went out into the living-room and picked up the phone. I dialled Doc Fabian's number. The busy signal blurped at me.

I put the receiver back and tried to think of someone else to call. I could call Hiram Martin. Perhaps he was the one to call. But I hesitated.

Doc was the man to handle this; be knew how to handle people. All that Hiram knew was how to push them around.

I dialled Doc once more and still got the busy signal. I slammed down the receiver and hurried toward the bedroom. I couldn't leave Tupper alone too long. God knows what he might do.

But I already had waited too long. I never should have left. The bedroom was empty. The window was open and the screen was broken out and there was no Tupper.

I rushed across the room and leaned out of the window and there was no sign of him.

Blind panic hit me straight between the eyes. I don't know why it did.

Certainly, at that moment, Tupper's escaping from the bedroom was not all that important. But it seemed to be important and I knew, without knowing why, that I must run him down and bring him back, that I must not let him out of my sight again.

Without thinking, I stepped back from the window and took a running jump, diving through the opening. I landed on one shoulder and rolled, then jumped up to my feet.

Tupper was not in sight, but now I saw where he had gone.

His dewy tracks led across the grass, back around the house and down to the old greenhouse. He had waded out into the patch of purple flowers that covered the old abandoned area where once my father and, later, I myself had tended rows of flowers and other plants. He had waded out some twenty feet or so into the mass of flowers. His trail was clearly shown, for the plants had been brushed over and had not had time to straighten yet, and they were a darker hue where the dew had been knocked off them.

The trail went twenty feet and stopped. All about it and ahead of it the purple flowers stood straight, silvered by the tiny dewdrops.

There was no other trail. Tupper had not backed out along the trail and then gone another way. There was just the single trail that headed straight into the patch of purple flowers and ended. As if the man might have taken wing and flown away, or dropped straight into the ground.

But no matter where he was, I thought, no matter what kind of tricks he played, he couldn't leave the village. For the village was closed in by some sort of barrier that ran all the way around it.

A wailing sound exploded and filled the universe, a shrieking, terrible sound that reverberated and beat against itself. It came so suddenly that it made me jump and stiffen. The sound seemed to fill the world and to dog the sky and it didn't stop, but kept on and on.

Almost at once I knew what it was, but my body still stayed tense for long seconds and my mind was curdled with a nameless fear. For there had been too much happening in too short a time and this metallic yammering had been the trigger that had slammed it all together and made the world almost unendurable.

Gradually I relaxed and started for the house.

And still the sound kept on, the frantic, full-throated wailing of the siren down at the village hall.

8

By the time I got up to the house there were people running in the street — a wild-eyed, frantic running with a sense of panic in it, all of them heading toward that screeching maelstrom of sound, as if the siren were the monstrous tootling of a latter-day Pied Piper and they were the rats which must not be left behind.

There was old Pappy Andrews, hobbling along, cracking his cane on the surface of the street with unaccustomed vigour and the wind blowing his long chin whiskers up into his face. There was Grandma Jones, who had her sunbonnet socked upon her head, but had forgotten to tie the strings, which floated and bobbed across her shoulders as she stumped along with grim determination. She was the only woman in all of Millville (perhaps in all the world) who still owned a sunbonnet and she took a malicious pride in wearing it, as if the very fact of appearing with it upon her head was a somehow commendable flaunting of her fuddy-duddyness. And after her came Pastor Silas Middleton, with a prissy look of distaste fastened on his face, but going just the same. An old jalopy clattered past with that crazy Johnson kid crouched behind the wheel and a bunch of his hoodlum pals yelling, and cat-calling, glad of any kind of excitement and willing to contribute to it. And a lot of others, including a slew of kids and dogs.

I opened the gate and stepped into the street. But I didn't run like all the rest of them, for I knew what it was all about and I was all weighed down with a lot of things that no one knew as yet. Especially about Tupper Tyler and what Tupper might have had to do with what was happening. For insane as it might sound, I had a sneaky sort of hunch that Tupper had somehow had a hand in it and had made a mess of things.

I tried to think, but the things I wanted to think about were too big to get into mind and there were no mental handholds on them for my mind to grab a hold of. So I didn't hear the car when it came sneaking up beside me.

The first thing I heard was the click of the door as it was coming open.

I swung around and Nancy Sherwood was there behind the wheel.

"Come on, Brad," she yelled, to make herself heard above the siren noise.

I jumped in and closed the door and the car slid up the street. It was a big and powerful thing. The top was down and if felt funny to be riding in a car that didn't have a top.

The siren stopped. One moment the world had been filled to bursting with its brazen howling and then the howling stopped and for a little moment there was the feeble keening as the siren died. Then the silence came, and in the weight and mass of silence a little blot of howling still stayed within one's mind, as if the howling had not gone, but had merely moved away.

One felt naked in the coldness of the silence and there was the absurd feeling that in the noise there had been purpose and direction. And that now, with the howling gone, there was no purpose or direction.

"This is a nice car you have," I said, not knowing what to say, but knowing that I should say something.

"Father gave it to me," she said, "on my last birthday." It moved along and you couldn't hear the motor. All you could hear was the faint rumble of the wheels turning on the roadbed.

"Brad," she asked, "what's going on? Someone told me that your car was wrecked and there was no sign of you. What has your car to do with the siren blowing? And there were a lot of cars down on the road…"

I told her. "There's a fence of some sort built around the town."

"Who would build a fence?"

"It's not that kind of fence. You can't see this fence." We had gotten close to Main Street and there were more people. They were walking on the sidewalk and walking on the lawns and walking in the road. Nancy slowed the car to crawling.

"You said there was a fence."

"There is a fence. An empty car can get through it, but it will stop a man. I have a hunch it will stop all life. It's the kind of fence you'd expect in fairyland."

"Brad," she said, "you know there is no fairyland."

"An hour ago I knew," I said. "I don't know any more." We came out on Main Street and a big crowd was standing out in front of the village hall and more coming all the time. George Walker, the butcher at the Red Owl store, was running down the street, with his white apron tucked up into his belt and his white cap set askew upon his head. Norma Shepard, the receptionist at Doc Fabian's office, was standing on a box out on the sidewalk so that she could see what was going on, and Butch Ormsby, the owner of the service station just across the street from the hall, was standing at the kerb, wiping and wiping at his greasy hands with a ball of waste, as if he knew he would never get them clean, but was bound to keep on trying.

Nancy pulled the car up into the approach to the filling station and shut off the motor.

A man came across the concrete apron and stopped beside the car. He leaned down and rested his folded arms on the top part of the door.

"How are things going, pal?" he asked.

I looked at him for a moment, not remembering him at first, then suddenly remembering. He must have seen that I remembered him.

"Yeah," he said, "the guy who smacked your car." He straightened and reached out his hand. "Name is Gabriel Thomas," he said. "You just call me Gabe. We never got around to trading names down there." I shook his hand and told him who I was, then introduced Nancy.

"Mr Thomas," Nancy said, "I heard about the accident. Brad won't talk about it."

"Well," said Gabe, "it was a strange thing, miss. There was nothing there and you ran into it and it stopped you as if it had been a wall of stone. And even when it was stopping you, you could see right through it."

"Did you phone your company?" I asked.

"Yeah. Sure I phoned them. But no one will believe me. They think I'm drunk. They think I am so drunk I wouldn't dare to drive and I'm holing up somewhere. They think I dreamed up this crazy story as a cover-up."

"Did they say so, Mr Thomas?"

"No, miss," he said, "but I know how them jokers think. And the thing that hurts me is that they ever should have thought it. I ain't a drinking man. And I got a good record. Why, I won driving awards, three years in a row." He said to me, "I don't know what to do. I can't get out of here. There's no way to get out. That barrier is all around the town. I live five hundred miles from here and my wife is all alone. Six kids and the youngest one a baby. I don't know what she'll do. She's used to it, of course, with me off on the road. But never for longer than three or four days, the time it takes for me to make a run. What if I can't get back for two or three weeks, maybe two or three months? What will she do then? There won't be any money coming in and there are the house payments to be made and them six kids to feed."

"Maybe you won't be here for long," I said, doing my best to make him feel a little better. "Maybe someone can get it figured out and do something about it. Maybe it will simply go away. And even if it doesn't, I imagine that your company will keep your salary going. After all, it's not your…"

He made an insulting, disgusted noise. "Not that bunch," he said. "Not that gang of chisellers."

"It's too soon to start worrying," I told him. "We don't know what has happened and until we do…"

"I guess you're right," he said. "Of course, I'm not the only one. I been talking to a lot of people and I'm not the only one. I was talking to a guy down in front of the barber shop just a while ago and his wife is in the hospital over at — what's the name of that town?"

"Elmore," Nancy said.

"Yes, that was it. She's in the hospital at Elmore and he is out of his mind, afraid he can't go to visit her. Kept saying over and over that maybe it would be all right in a little while, that he could get out of town. Sounds like she may be pretty bad off and he goes over every day. She'll be expecting him, he says, and maybe she won't understand why he doesn't come. Talked as if a good part of the time she's not in her right mind.

"And there was this other fellow. His family is off on a vacation, out to Yellowstone, and he was expecting them to get home today. Says they'll be all tired out from travelling and now they can't reach their home after they have travelled all those miles to get back into it again. Was expecting them home early in the afternoon. He's planning to go out on the road and wait for them at the edge of the barrier. Not that it will do any good, meeting them out there, but he said it was the only thing he could do. And then there are a lot of people who work out of town and now they can't get to their jobs, and there was someone telling me about a girl here in town who was going to marry a fellow from a place called Coon Valley and they were going to get married tomorrow and now, of course, they can't."

"You must have talked to a lot of people," I said.

"Hush," said Nancy.

Across the street Mayor Higgy Morris was standing on the top step of the flight of stairs that led up to the village hall and he was waving his arms to get the people quiet.

"Fellow citizens," yelled Higgy in that phony political voice that makes you sick at heart. "Fellow citizens, if you'll just be quiet."

Someone yelled, "You tell "em Higgy!" There was a wave of laughter, but it was a nervous laugh.

"Friends," said Higgy, "we may be in a lot of trouble. You probably have heard about it. I don't know what you heard, for there are a lot of stories. I don't know, myself, everything that's happened."

"I'm sorry for having to use the siren to call you all together, but it seemed the quickest way."

"Ah, hell," yelled someone. "Get on with it, Higgy." No one laughed this time.

"Well, all right," said Higgy. "I'll get on with it. I don't know quite how to say this, but we've been cut off. There is some sort of fence around us that won't let anybody in or anybody out. Don't ask me what it is or how it got there. I have no idea. I don't think, right now, that anybody knows. There may be nothing for us to get disturbed about. It may be only temporary; it may go away."

"What I do want to say is that we should stay calm. We're all in this together and we got to work together to get out of it. Right now we haven't got anything to be afraid of. We are only cut off in the sense that we can't go anywhere. But we are still in touch with the outside world. Our telephones are working and so are the gas and electric lines. We have plenty of food to last for ten days, maybe more than that. And if we should run short, we can get more food. Trucks loaded with it, or with anything we need, can be brought up to the barrier and the driver can get out, then the truck can be pulled or pushed through the barrier. It doesn't stop things that are not alive."

"Just a minute, mayor," someone shouted.

"Yes," the mayor said, looking around to see who had dared to interrupt him. "Was that you, Len?" he asked.

"Yes, it was," said the man.

I could see now that it was Len Streeter, our high school science teacher.

"What did you want?" asked Higgy.

"I suppose you're basing that last statement of yours — about only non-living matter getting through the barrier — on the car that was parked on the Coon Valley road."

"Why, yes," said Higgy, condescendingly, "that is exactly what I was basing the statement on. What do you know about it?"

"Nothing," Len Streeter told him. "Nothing about the car itself. But I presume, you do intend to go about the investigation of this phenomenon within well restricted bounds of logic."

"That's right," said Higgy, sanctimoniously. "That's exactly what we intend to do." And you could tell by the way he said it he had no idea of what Streeter had said or what he was driving at.

"In that case," said Streeter. "I might caution you against accepting facts at their first face value. Such as presuming that because there was no human in the car, there was nothing living in it."

"Well, there wasn't," Higgy argued. "The man who had been driving it had left and gone away somewhere."

"Humans," said Streeter, patiently, "aren't the only forms of life. We can't be certain there was no life in that car. In fact, we can be pretty sure there was life of some sort in it. There probably was a fly or two shut up inside of it. There might have been a grasshopper sitting on the hood. It was absolutely certain that the car had in it and about it and upon it many different kinds of micro-organisms. And a micro-organism is a form of life, just the same as we are." Higgy stood up on the steps and he was somewhat flustered. He didn't know whether Streeter was making a fool of him or not. Probably never in his life had he heard of such a thing as a micro-organism.

"You know, Higgy," said a voice I recognized as Doc Fabian" s, "our young friend is right. Of course there would be microorganisms. Some of the rest of us should have thought of it at once."

"Well, all right, then," said Higgy. "If you say so, Doc. Let's say that Len is right. It don't make any difference, does it?"

"At the moment, no," said Doc.

"The only point I wanted to make," said Streeter, "is that life can't be the entire answer. If we are going to study the situation, we should get a right start at it. We shouldn't begin with a lot of misconceptions."

"I got a question, mayor," said someone else. I tried to see who it was, but couldn't.

"Go ahead," said Higgy, cordially, happy that someone was about to break up this Streeter business.

"Well, it's like this," said the man. "I've been working on the highway job south of town. And now I can't get to it and maybe they'll hold the job for me for a day or two, but it isn't reasonable to expect the contractor to hold it very long. He's got a contract he has to meet — a time limit, you know, and he pays a penalty for every day he's late. So he's got to have men to do the job. He can't hold no job open for more than a day or two."

"I know all that," said Higgy.

"I ain't the only one," said the man, "There are a lot of other fellows who work out of town. I don't know about the rest of them, but I got to have my pay. I ain't got any backlog I can fall back on. What's going to happen to us if we can't get to our jobs and there isn't any pay cheque and no money in the bank?"

"I was coming to that," said Higgy. "I know exactly what your situation is. And the situations of a lot of other men. There isn't enough work in a little town like this for everyone who lives here, so a great many of our residents have work outside of town. And I know a lot of you haven't too much money and that you need your pay cheques. We hope this thing clears up soon enough that you can go back and your jobs will still be there."

"But let me tell you this. Let me make a promise. If it doesn't clear up, there aren't any of you going to go hungry. There aren't any of you who are going to be turned out of your homes because you can't make your payments or can't manage to scrape the rent together. There won't nothing happen to you. A lot of people are going to be without jobs because of what has happened, but you'll be taken care of, every one of you. I am going to name a committee that will talk with the merchants and the bank and we'll arrange for a line of credit that will see you through. Anyone who needs a loan or credit can be sure of getting it." Higgy looked down at Daniel Willoughby, who was standing a step or two below him.

"Ain't that right, Dan?" he demanded.

"Yes," said the banker. "Yes. Sure, it's quite all right. We'll do everything we can." But he didn't like it. You could see he didn't. It hurt him to say it was all right. Daniel liked security, good security, for each dollar he put out.

"It's too early yet," said Higgy, "to know what has happened to us. By tonight maybe we'll know a whole lot more about it. The main thing is to keep calm and not start going off half- cocked.

"I can't pretend to know what is going to happen. If this barrier stays in place, there'll be some difficulties. But as it stands right now, it's not entirely bad. Up until an hour or so ago, we were just a little village that wasn't too well known. There wasn't, I suppose, much reason that we should have been well known. But now we're getting publicity over the entire world. We're in the newspapers and on the radio and TV. I'd like Joe Evans to come up here and tell you all about it." He looked around and spotted Joe in the crowd.

"You folks," he said, "make way, won't you, so Joe can come up here." The editor climbed the steps and turned around to face the crowd.

"There isn't much to tell so far," he said. "I've had calls from most of the wire services and from several newspapers. They all wanted to know what was going on. I told them what I could, but it wasn't much. One of the TV stations over in Elmore is sending a mobile camera unit. The phone was still ringing when I left the house and I suppose there are calls coming into the office, too.

"I think we can expect that the news media will pay a lot of attention to the situation here and there's no question in my mind that the state and federal governments will take a hand in it, and if I understand it rightly, more than likely the scientific community will have a considerable interest, as well."

The man who had the highway job spoke up again. "Joe, you think them science fellows can get it figured out?"

"I don't know," said Joe.

Hiram Martin had pushed his way through the crowd and was crossing the street. He had a purposeful look about hint and I wondered what he could be up to. Someone else was asking a question, but the sight of Hiram had distracted me and I lost the gist of it.

"Brad," said someone at my elbow.

I looked around.

Hiram was standing there. The trucker, I saw, had left.

"Yes," I said. "What is it?"

"If you got the time," said Hiram. "I'd like to talk with you."

"Go ahead," I said. "I have the time." He jerked his head toward the village hall.

"All right," I said.

I opened the door and got out.

"I'll wait for you," said Nancy.

Hiram moved off around the crowd, flanking it, heading for the side door of the hail. I followed close behind him.

But I didn't like it.

9

Hiram's office was a little cubbyhole just off the stall where the fire engine and ladder rig were housed. There was barely room in it for two chairs and a desk. On the wall above the desk hung a large and garish calendar with a naked woman on it.

And on the desk stood one of the dialless telephones.

Hiram gestured at it. "What is that?" he asked.

"It's a telephone," I said. "Since when did you get so important that you have two phones?"

"Take another look," he said.

"It's still a telephone," I said.

"A closer look," he told me.

"It's a crazy looking thing. It hasn't any dial."

"Anything else?"

"No, I guess not. It just doesn't have a dial."

"And," said Hiram, "it has no connection cord."

"I hadn't noticed that."

"That's funny," Hiram said.

"Why funny?" I demanded. "What the hell is going on? You didn't get me in here just to show me a phone."

"It's funny," Hiram said, "because it was in your office."

"It couldn't be. Ed Adler came in yesterday and took out my phone. For non-payment of my bill."

"Sit down, Brad," he said.

I sat down and he sat down facing me. His face was still pleasant enough, but there was that odd glitter in his eyes — the glitter that in the olden days I'd seen too often in his eyes when he'd cornered me and knew he had me cornered and was about to force me to fight him, in the course of which endeavour he would beat the living Jesus out of me.

"You never saw this phone?" he asked.

I shook my head. "When I left the office yesterday I had no telephone. Not this one or any other."

"That's strange," he said.

"As strange to me as to you," I told him. "I don't know what you're getting at. Suppose you try to tell me." I knew the lying in the long run would not get me anywhere, but for the moment it was buying me some time. I was pretty sure that right now he couldn't tie me to the telephone.

"All right," he said, "I'll tell you. Tom Preston was the man who saw it. He'd sent Ed to take out your phone, and later in the afternoon he was walking past your office and he happened to look in and saw the phone standing on your desk. It made him pretty sore. You can see how it might have made him sore."

"Yes," I said. "Knowing Tom, I presume he would be sore."

"He'd sent Ed out to get that phone and the first thing he thought of was that you'd talked Ed out of taking it. Or maybe Ed had just sort of failed to drop around and get it. He knew you and Ed were friends."

"I suppose, he was so sore that he broke in and took it."

"No," said Hiram, "he never did break in. He went down to the bank and talked Daniel Willoughby into giving him the key."

"Without considering," I said, "that I was renting the office."

"But you hadn't paid your rent for three solid months. If you ask me, I'd figure Daniel had the right."

"In my book," I told him, "Tom and Daniel broke into my place and robbed me."

"I told you. They didn't do any breaking. And Daniel had no part in it. Except giving Tom the extra key. Tom went back alone. Besides, you say you'd never seen this phone, that you never owned it."

"That's beside the point. No matter what was in my office, he had no right to take it. Whether it was mine or not. How do I know he didn't walk away with some other stuff?"

"You know damn well he didn't," Hiram told me. "You said you wanted to hear about this."

"So go ahead and tell me."

"Well, Tom got the key and got into your office and he saw right away that it was a different kind of phone. It didn't have a dial and it wasn't connected. So he turned around and started to walk out and before he reached the door, the phone rang."

"It what?"

"It rang."

"But it wasn't connected."

"I know, but anyhow, it rang."

"So he answered it," I said, "and there was Santa Claus."

"He answered it," said Hiram, "and there was Tupper Tyler."

"Tupper! But Tupper…"

"Yeah, I know," said Hiram. "Tupper disappeared. Ten years ago or so. But Tom said it was Tupper's voice. He said he couldn't be mistaken."

"And what did Tupper tell him?"

"Tom said hello and Tupper asked him who he was and Tom told him who he was. Then Tupper said get off this phone, you're not authorized to use it. Then the phone went dead."

"Look, Hiram, Tom was kidding you."

"No, he wasn't. He thought someone was kidding him. He thought you and Ed had cooked it up. He thought it was a joke. He thought you were trying to get even with him."

"But that's crazy," I protested. "Even if Ed and I had fixed up a gag like that, how could we have known that Tom would come busting in?"

"I know," said Hiram.

"You mean you believe all this?"

"You bet I believe it. There's something wrong, something awfully wrong." But his tone of voice was defensive. I had him on the run. He had hauled me in to pin me to the wall and it hadn't worked that way and now he was just a little sheepish about the entire matter. But in a little while he'd start getting sore.

He was that kind of jerk.

"When did Tom tell you all of this?"

"This morning."

"Why not last night? If he thought it was so important…"

"But I told you. He didn't think it was important. He thought it was a joke. He thought it was you getting back at him. He didn't think it was important until all hell broke loose this morning. After he answered and heard Tupper's voice, he took the phone. He thought that might reverse the joke, you see. He thought you'd gone to a lot of work…"

"Yes, I see," I said. "But now he thinks that it was really Tupper calling and that the call actually was for me."

"Well, yes, I'd say so. He took the phone home and a couple of times early that evening he picked up the receiver and the phone was alive, but no one answered. That business about the phone being alive puzzled him. It bothered him a lot. It wasn't tied into any line, you see."

"And now the two of you want to make some sort of case against me."

Hiram's face hardened. "I know you're up to something," he said. "I know you went out to Stiffy's shack last night. After Doc and I had taken Stiffy in to Elmore."

"Yes, I did," I said. "I found his keys where they had fallen out of his pocket. So I went out to his place to see if it was locked and everything was all right."

"You sneaked in," Hiram said. "You turned off your lights to go up Stiffy's lane."

"I didn't turn them off. The electrical circuit shorted. I got them fixed before I left the shack." It was pretty weak. But it was the best I could think of fast. Hiram didn't press the point.

"This morning," he said, "me and Tom went out to the shack."

"So it was Tom who was spying on me."

Hiram grunted. "He was upset about the phone. He got suspicious of you."

"And you broke into the shack. You must have. I locked it when I left."

"Yeah," said Hiram, "we broke in. And we found more of them telephones. A whole box full of them."

"You can quit looking at me like that," I said. "I saw no telephones. I didn't snoop around." I could see the two of them, Hiram and Tom, roaring out to the shack in full cry, convinced that there existed some sinister plot which they could not understand, but that whatever it might be, both Stiffy and myself were neck-deep in it.

And there was some sort of plot, I told myself and Stiffy and myself were both entangled in it and I hoped that Stiffy knew what it was all about, for certainly I didn't. The little I knew only made it more confused.

And Gerald Sherwood, unless he'd lied to me (and I was inclined to think he hadn't) knew little more about it than I did.

Suddenly I was thankful that Hiram did not know about the phone in Sherwood's study, or all those other phones which must be in the village, in the hands of those persons who had been employed as readers by whoever used the phones for communication.

Although, I told myself, there was little chance that Hiram would ever know about those phones, for the people who had them certainly would hide them most securely and would keep very mum about them once this business of the phones became public knowledge. And I was certain that within a few hours' time the story of the mystery phones would be known to everyone.

Neither Hiram nor Tom Preston could keep their big mouths shut.

Who would these other people be, I wondered, the ones who had the phones — and all at once I knew. They would be the down-and-outers, the poor unfortunates, the widows who had been left without savings or insurance, the aged who had not been able to provide for their later years, the failures and the no-goods and the hard-of-luck.

For that was the way it had worked with Sherwood and myself. Sherwood had not been contacted (if that was the word for it) before he faced financial ruin and they (whoever they might be) had not been concerned with me until I was a business failure and willing to admit it. And the man who seemed to have had the most to do with all of it was the village bum.

"Well?" asked the constable.

"You want to know what I know about it?"

"Yes, I do," said Hiram, "and if you know what's good for you…"

"Hiram," I told him, "don't you ever threaten me. Don't you even look as though you meant to threaten me. Because if you do…" Floyd Caldwell stuck his head inside the door.

"It's moving!" he yelled at us. "The barrier is moving!" Both Hiram and I jumped to our feet and headed for the door. Outside people were running and yelling and Grandma Jones was standing out in the middle of the street, jumping up and down, with the sunbonnet flapping on her head. With every jump she uttered little shrieks.

I saw Nancy in her car across the street and ran straight for it. She had the motor going and when she saw me, she moved the car out from the curb, rolling slowly down the street. I put my hands on the back door and vaulted into the back, then clambered up in front. By the time I got there the car had reached the drugstore corner and was picking up some speed.

There were a couple of other cars heading out toward the highway, but Nancy cut around them with a burst of speed.

"Do you know what happened?" she asked.

I shook my head. "Just that the barrier is moving." We came to the stop sign that guarded the highway, but Nancy didn't even slow for it. There was no reason that she should, for there was no traffic on the highway. The highway was cut off.

She slewed the car out onto the broad slab of pavement and there, up ahead of us, the eastbound lane was blocked by a mass of jam-packed cars.

And there, as well, was Gabe's truck, its trailer lying in the ditch, with my car smashed underneath it, and its cab half canted in the air. Beyond the truck other cars were tangled in the westbound lane, cars which apparently had crossed the centre strip in an effort to get turned around, in the process getting caught in another minor traffic jam before the barrier had moved.

The barrier was no longer there. You couldn't see, of course, whether it was there or not, but up the road, a quarter mile or so, there was evidence of it.

Up there, a crowd of people was running wildly, fleeing from an invisible force that advanced upon them. And behind the fleeing people a long windrow of piled-up vegetation, including, in places, masses of uprooted trees, marked the edge of the moving barrier. It stretched as far as the eye could see, on either side of the road, and it seemed to have a life of its own, rolling and tossing and slowly creeping forward, the masses of trees tumbling awkwardly on their outstretched, roots and branches.

The car rolled up to the traffic jam in the westbound lane and stopped.

Nancy turned off the ignition. In the silence one could hear the faint rustling of that strange windrow that moved along the road, a small whisper of sound punctuated now and then by the cracking and the popping of the branches as the uprooted trees toppled in their unseemly tumbling.

I got out of the car and walked around it and started down the road, working my way through the tangle of the cars. As I came clear of them the road stretched out before me and up the road the people still were running — well, not running exactly, not the way they had been. They would run a ways and then stand in little groups and look behind them, at the writhing windrow, then would run a ways and stop to look again. Some of them didn't run at all, but just kept plodding up the road at a steady walk.

It was not only people. There was something else, a strange fluttering in the air, a darting of dark bodies, a cloud of insects and of birds, retreating before this inexorable force that moved like a wraith across the surface of the land.

The land was bare behind the barrier. There was nothing on it except two leafless trees. And they, I thought — they would be left behind. For they were lifeless things and for them the barrier had no meaning, for it was only life that the barrier rejected. Although, if Len Streeter had been right, then it was not all life, but a certain kind, or a certain size, or a certain condition of life.

But aside from the two dead trees, the ground lay bare.

There was no grass upon it, not a single weed, not a bush or tree. All that was green was gone.

I stepped off the roadbed onto the shoulder and knelt down and ran my fingers along the barren ground. It was not only bare; it was ploughed and harrowed, as if some giant agricultural rig had gone over it and made it ready for new seed. The soil, I realized, had been loosened by the uprooting of its mat of vegetation. In all that ground, I knew, no single root existed, no fragment of a root, down to the finest rootlet. The land had been swept clean of everything that grew and all that once had grown here was now a part of that fantastic windrow that was being swept along before the barrier.

Above me a dull rumble of thunder rippled in the sky and rolled along the air. I glanced backward over my shoulder, and saw that the thunderstorm which had been threatening all morning now was close upon us, but it was a ragged storm, with wind-twisted clouds, broken and fragmented, fleeing through the upper emptiness.

"Nancy," I said, but she did not answer.

I got quickly to my feet and swung around. She had been right behind me when I'd started through the traffic tangle, but now there was no sign of her.

I started back down the road to find her and as I did a blue sedan that was over on the opposite shoulder rolled off down the shoulder and swung out on the pavement — and there, behind the wheel, was Nancy. I knew then how I'd lost her. She had looked among the cars until she had found one that was not blocked by other cars and with the key still in the lock.

The car came up beside me, moving slowly, and I trotted along to match its speed. Through the half-open window came the sound of an excited commentator on the radio. I got the door open and jumped in and slammed the door behind me.

"…called out the national guard and had officially informed Washington. The first units will move out in another — no, here is word just now that they have already moved out…"

"That," said Nancy, "is us he's talking about." I reached out and twisted the dial."… just came in. The barrier is moving! I repeat, the barrier is moving. There is no information how fast it's moving or how much distance it has covered. But it is moving outward from the village. The crowd that had gathered outside of it is fleeing wildly from it. And here is more — the barrier is moving no faster than a man may walk. It already has swept almost a mile…" And that was wrong, I thought, for it was now less than half a mile from its starting point.

"… question, of course, is will it stop? How far will it move? Is there some way of stopping it? Can it keep on indefinitely; is there any end to it?"

"Brad," Nancy said, "do you think it will push everyone off the earth?

Everyone but the people here in Millville?"

"I don't know," I said, rather stupidly.

"And if it does, where will it push them"? Where is there to go?"

"… London and Berlin," blared the radio speaker. "Apparently the Russian people have not as yet been told what is happening. There have been no official statements. Not from anywhere. Undoubtedly this is something about which the various governments may have some difficulty deciding if there should be a statement. It would seem, at first thought, that here is a situation which came about through no act of any man or any government. But there is some speculation that this may be a testing of some new kind of defence. Although it is difficult to imagine why, if it should be such, it be tested in a place like Millvile. Ordinarily such tests would take place in a military area and be conducted in the greatest secrecy." The car had been moving slowly down the road all the time we'd been listening to the radio and now we were no more than a hundred feet or so behind the barrier. Ahead of us, on either side of the pavement, the great windrow of vegetation inched itself forward, while further up the road the people still retreated.

I twisted around in the seat and glanced through the rear window, back toward the traffic snarl. A crowd of people stood among the cars and out on the pavement just beyond the cars. The people from the village had finally arrived to watch the moving barrier.

"…sweeping everything before it," screamed the radio.

I glanced around and we were almost at the barrier.

"Careful there," I warned. "Don't run into it."

"I'll be careful," said Nancy, just a bit too meekly.

"… like a wind," the announcer said, "blowing a long line of grass and trees and bushes steadily before it. Like a wind…" And there was a wind, first a preliminary gust that raised spinning dust devils in the stripped and denuded soil behind the barrier, then a solid wall of wind that slewed the car around and howled against the metal and glass.

It was the thunderstorm, I thought, that had stalked the land since early morning. But there was no lightning and no thunder and when I craned my neck to look out the windshield at the sky, there still were no more than ragged clouds, the broken, fleeing tatters of a worn-out storm.

The wind had swung the car around and now it was skidding down the road, pushed by the roaring wind, and threatening to tip over. Nancy was fighting the wheel, trying to bring the car around, to point it into the direction of the wind.

"Brad!" she shouted.

But even as she shouted, the storm hit us with the hard, peppering sound of raindrops splashing on the car.

The car began to topple and this time I knew that it was going over, that there was nothing in the world that could keep it from going over. But suddenly it slammed into something and swung upright once again and in one corner of my mind I knew that it had been shoved against the barrier by the wind and that it was being held there.

With one corner of my mind, for the greater part of it was filled with astonishment at the strangest raindrops I had ever seen.

They weren't raindrops, although they fell like raindrops, in drumming sheets that filled the inside of the car with the rolling sound of thunder.

"Hail," Nancy shouted at me.

But it wasn't hail.

Little round, brown pellets hopped and pounded on the car's hood and danced like crazy buckshot across the hard flatness of the pavement.

"Seeds!" I shouted back. "Those things out there are seeds!" It was no regular storm. It was not the thunderstorm, for there was no thunder and the storm had lost its punch many miles away. It was a storm of seeds driven by a mighty wind that blew without regard to any earthly weather; There was, I told myself, in a flash of logic that was not, on the face of it, very logical, no further need for the barrier to move. For it had ploughed the ground, had ploughed and harrowed it and prepared it for the seed, and then there'd been the sowing, and everything was over.

The wind stopped and the last seed fell and we sat in a numbing silence, with all the sound and fury gone out of the world. In the place of sound and fury there was a chilling strangeness, as if someone or something had changed all natural law around, so that seed fell from the sky like rain and a wind blew out of nowhere.

"Brad," said Nancy, "I think I'm beginning to get scared." She reached out a hand and put it on my arm. Her fingers tightened, hanging onto me.

"It makes me mad," she said, "I've never been scared, never my life. Never scared like this."

"It's all over now," I said. "The storm is ended and the barrier has stopped moving. Everything's all right."

"It's not like that at all," she told me. "It's only just beginning." A man was running up the road toward us, but he was the only one in sight. All the other people who had been around the parked cars were no longer there. They had run for cover, back to the village, probably, when the blast of wind had come and the seeds had fallen.

The running man, I saw, was Ed Adler, and he was shouting something at us as he run.

We got out of the car and walked around in front of it and stood there, waiting for him.

He came up to us, panting with his running.

"Brad," he gasped, "maybe you don't know this, but Hiram and Tom Preston are stirring up the people. They think you have something to do with what's happening. Some talk about a phone or something."

"Why, that's crazy!" Nancy cried.

"Sure it is," said Ed, "but the village is on edge. It wouldn't take too much to get them thinking it. They're ready to think almost anything. They need an explanation; they'll grab at anything. They won't stop to think if it's right or wrong."

I asked him: "What do you have in mind?"

"You better hide out, Brad, until it all blows over. In another day or two…"

I shook my head. "I have too many things to do."

"But, Brad…"

"I didn't do it, Ed. I don't know what happened, but I didn't have a thing to do with it."

"That don't make no difference."

"Yes, it does," I said.

"Hiram and Tom are saying they found these funny phones…" Nancy started to say something, but I jumped in ahead of her and cut her off, so she didn't have a chance to say it.»

"I know about those phones," I said. "Hiram told me all about them. Ed, take my word for it. The phones are out of it. They are something else entirely." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy staring at me.

"Forget about the phones," I said.

I hoped she'd understand and apparently she did, for she didn't say a thing about the phones. I wasn't actually sure that she'd intended to, for I had no idea if she knew about the phone in her father's study. But I couldn't take a chance.

"Brad," warned Ed, "you're walking into it."

"I can't run away," I told him. "I can't run somewhere and hide. Not from anyone, especially not from a pair like Tom and Hiram." He looked me up and down.

"No, I guess you can't," he said. "Is there anything I can do?"

"Maybe," I said. "You can see that Nancy gets home safely. I've got a thing or two to do." I looked at Nancy. She nodded at me.

"It's all right, Brad, but the car's just down the road. I could drive you home."

"I'd better take a short cut. If Ed is right, there's less chance of being seen."

"I'll stay with her," said Ed, "until she's inside the house." Already, in two hour's time, I thought, it had come to this — to a state of mind where one questioned the safety of a girl alone upon the street.

10

Now, finally, I had to do a thing I had intended to do ever since this morning — a thing I probably should have done last night — get in touch with Alf. It was more important now than ever that I get in touch with him, for in the back of my mind was a growing conviction that there must be some connection between what was happening here in Millville and that strange research project down in Mississippi.

I reached a dead-end street and started walking down it. There was not a soul in sight. Everyone who could either walk or ride would be down in the business section.

I got to worrying that maybe I'd not be able to locate Alf, that he might have checked out of the motel when I failed to get there, or that he might be out gawping at the barrier with a lot of other people.

But there was no need to worry, for when I reached my house the phone was ringing and Alf was on the line.

"I've been trying for an hour to get you," he said. "I wondered how you were."

"You know what happened, Alf?"

He told me that he did. "Some of it," he said.

"Minutes earlier," I said, "and I would have been with you instead of penned up in the village. I must have hit the barrier when it first appeared." I went ahead and told him what had happened after I had hit the barrier. Then I told him about the phones.

"They told me they had a lot of readers. People who read books to them…"

"A way of getting information."

"I gathered that was it."

"Brad," he said, "I've got a terrible hunch."

"So have I," I said.

"Do you think this Greenbriar project…?"

"That's what I was thinking, too." I heard him drawing a deep breath, the air whistling in his teeth."

"It's not just Millville, then."

"Maybe a whole lot more than Millville."

"What are you going to do now, Brad?"

"Go down into my garden and have a hard look at some flowers."

"Flowers?"

"Alf," I told him, "it's a long, long story. I'll tell you later. Are you staying on?"

"Of course I am," said Alf "The greatest show on earth and me with a ringside seat."

"I'll call you back in an hour or so."

"I'll stay close," he promised. "I'll be waiting for your call." I put down the phone and stood there, trying to make some head or tail of it. The flowers, somehow, were important, and so was Tupper Tyler, but they were all mixed up together and there was no place one could start.

I went out of the house and down into the garden by the greenhouse. The trail that Tupper had left was still plain and I was considerably relieved, for I had been afraid that the wind that brought the seeds might have blown it away, that the flowers might have been so beaten and so twisted that the trail could well be lost.

I stood at the edge of the garden and looked around, as if I were seeing the place for the first time in my life. It wasn't really a garden.

At one time it had been land on which we'd grown the stuff we sold, but when I quit the greenhouse business I'd simply let it go wild and the flowers had taken over. To one side stood the greenhouse, with its door hanging on the broken hinges and most of the panes gone from the windows. And at one corner of it stood the elm tree that had grown from seed — the one I'd been about to pull up when my father stopped me.

Tupper had talked wildly about flowers growing by the acre. All of them, he said, had been purple flowers and he had been most emphatic that my father should be told of them. The mystery voice, or one of the mystery voices on the phone had been well informed about my father's greenhouse and had asked if I still ran it. And there had been, less than an hour ago, a perfect storm of seeds.

All the little purple flower-heads with their monkey faces seemed to be nodding at me as if at a secret joke and I jerked my gaze away from them to stare up at the sky. Broken clouds still streamed across it, shutting out the sun. Although, once the clouds were gone, the day would be a scorcher.

One could smell the heat in the very air.

I moved out into the garden, following Tupper's trail. At the end of the trail I stopped and told myself that it had been a witless thing — this belief of mine that I would find something in this flower patch that would make some sense.

Tupper Tyler had disappeared ten years ago and he'd disappeared today and how he'd managed it no man might ever know.

And yet the idea still went on banging in my skull that Tupper was the key to all this screwy business.

Yet I couldn't, for the life of me, explain the logic of my thinking.

For Tupper wasn't the only one involved — if he was, in fact, involved.

There was Stiffy Grant as well. And I realized, with a start, that I had not asked anyone how Stiffy might be doing.

Doc Fabian's house was on the hill just above the greenhouse and I could go up there and ask. Doc might not be home, of course, but I could wait around a while and eventually he'd show up. At the moment there was nothing else to do. And with Hiram and Tom Preston shooting off their mouths, it might be a good idea not to be found at home.

I had been standing at the end of Tupper's trail and now I took a step beyond it, setting out for Doc's. But I never got to Doc's. I took that single step and the sun came out and the houses went away. Doc's house and all the other houses, and the trees as well, and the bushes and the grass.

Everything disappeared and there was nothing left but the purple flowers, which covered everything, and a sun that was blazing out of a cloudless sky.

11

I had taken that one step and everything had happened. So now I took another one to bring my feet together and I stood there, stiff and scared, afraid to turn around afraid, perhaps, of what I'd see behind me. Although I think I knew what I would see behind me. Just more purple flowers.

For this, I knew, in one dim corner of my curdled mind, was the place that Tupper had been telling me about.

Tupper had come out of this place and he'd gone back to this place and now I'd followed him.

Nothing happened.

And that was right, of course. For it seemed to me, somehow, that this would be the sort of place where nothing ever happened.

There were just the flowers and the sun blazing in the sky and there was nothing else. There wasn't a breath of wind and there was no sound. But there was a fragrance, the almost overpowering, cloying fragrance of all those little blossoms with their monkey faces.

At last I dared to move and I slowly turned around. And there was nothing but the flowers.

Millville had gone away somewhere, into some other world.

Although that was wrong, I told myself. For somewhere, in its same old world, there yet must be a Millville. It had not been Millville, but myself, that had gone away. I had taken just one step and had walked clear out of Millville into another place.

Yet, while it was a different place, the terrain seemed to be identical with the old terrain. I still was standing in the dip of ground that lay behind my house and back of me the hill rose steeply to the now non-existent street where Doc's house had stood and a half a mile away loomed the hill where the Sherwood house should be.

This, then, was Tupper's world. It was the world into which he had gone ten years ago and again this morning. Which meant that, at this very moment, he must still be here.

And that meant, I told myself with a sudden rush of hope, that there was a chance of getting out, of getting back to Millvile. For Tupper had gotten back again and thus must know the way. Although, I realized, one never could be sure. You never could be sure of anything with a dope like Tupper Tyler.

The first thing to do, of course, was find him. He could not be far off. It might take a while, but I was fairly confident that I could track him down.

I walked slowly up the hill that, back in my home village, would have taken me to Doc Fabian's place.

I reached the top of the hill and stopped and there, below me, lay the far sweep of land clothed by the purple flowers.

The land looked strange, robbed of all its landmarks, naked of its trees and roads and houses. But it lay, I saw, as it had lain. If there were any differences, they were minor ones.

There, to the east, was the wet and swampy land below the little knoll where Stiffy's shack had stood — where Stiffy's shack still stood in another time or place.

What strange circumstances, or what odd combination of many circumstances, must occur, I wondered, to make it possible for a man to step from one world to another.

I stood, a stranger in an unknown land, with the perfume of the flowers dogging not my nostrils only, but every pore of me, pressing in upon me, as if the flowers themselves were rolling in great purple waves to bear me down and bury me for all eternity. The world was quiet; it was the quietest place I had ever been. There was no sound at all. And I realized that perhaps at no time in my life had I ever known silence. Always there had been something that had made some sort of noise — the chirring of a lone insect in the quiet of a summer noon, or the rustle of a leaf. Even in the dead of night there would have been the creaking of the timbers in the house, the murmur of the furnace, the slight keening of a wind that ran along the eaves.

But there was silence here. There was no sound at all. There was no sound, I knew, because there was nothing that could make a sound. There were no trees or bushes; there were no birds or insects. There was nothing here but the flowers and the soil in which they grew.

A silence and the emptiness that held the silence in its hand, and the purpleness that ran to the far horizon to meet the burnished, pale-blue brightness of a summer sky.

Now, for the first time, I felt panic stalking me — not a big and burly panic that would send one fleeing, howling as he fled, but a little, sneaky panic that circled all about me, like a pesky, yapping dog, bouncing on its pipestem legs, waiting for a chance to sink its needle teeth in me. Nothing one could fight, nothing one could stand against — a little yapping panic that set the nerves on edge.

There was no fear of danger, for there was no danger. One could see with half an eye that there was no danger. But there was, perhaps worse than any danger, the silence and the loneliness and the sameness and the not knowing where you were.

Down the slope was the wet and swampy area where Stiffy's shack should be, and there, a little farther off, the silver track of river that ran at the edge of town. And at the place where the river bent toward the south, a plume of smoke rose daintily against the blue wash of the sky — so faint and far a trickle that one could barely make it out.

"Tupper!" I shouted, running down the slope, glad of a chance to run, of some reason I should run, for I had been standing, determined not to run, determined not to allow the little yapping panic to force me into running, and all the time I'd stood there I had ached to run.

I crossed the little ridge that hid the river and the camp lay there before me — a tiny hut of crudely woven branches, a garden full of growing things, and all along the river bank little straggling, dying trees, with most of their branches dead and bearing only a few tassels of green leaves at their very tops.

A small campfire burned in front of the hut and squatting by the fire was Tupper. He wore the shirt and trousers I had given him and he still had the outrageous hat perched on his head.

"Tupper!" I shouted and he rose and came gravely up the slope to meet me. He wiped off his chin and held out his hand in greeting. It still was wet with slobber, but I didn't mind.

Tupper wasn't much, but he was another human.

"Glad you could make it, Brad," he said. "Glad you could drop over." As if I'd been dropping over every day, for years.

"Nice place you have," I said.

"They did it all for me," he said, with a show of pride. "The Flowers fixed it up for me. It wasn't like this to start with, but they fixed it up for me. They have been good to me."

"Yes, they have," I said.

I didn't know what it was all about, but I went along. I had to go along. There was just a chance that Tupper could get me back to Millville.

"They're the best friends I have," said Tupper, slobbering in his happiness. "That is, except for you and your papa. Until I found the Flowers, you and your papa were the only friends I had. All the rest of them just made fun of me. I let on I didn't know that they were making fun, but I knew they were and I didn't like it."

"They weren't really unkind," I assured him. "They really didn't mean what they said or did. They were only being thoughtless."

"They shouldn't have done it," Tupper insisted. "You never made any fun of me. I like you because you never made any fun of me." And he was right, of course. I'd not made fun of him. But not because I hadn't wanted to at times; there were times when I could have killed him.

But my father had taken me off to the side one day and warned me that if he ever caught me making fun of Tupper, like the other kids, he would warm my bottom.

"This is the place you were telling me about," I said. "The place with all the flowers."

He grinned delightedly, drooling from both corners of his mouth "Ain't it nice?" he said.

We had been walking down the slope together and now we reached the fire. A crude clay pot was standing in the ashes and there was something bubbling in it.

"You'll stay and eat with me," invited Tupper. "Please, Brad, say you'll stay and eat with me. It's been so long since I've had anyone who would eat with me." Weak tears were running down his cheeks at the thought of how long it had been since he'd had someone who would stay and eat with him.

"I got corn and potatoes roasting in the coals," he said, "and I got peas and beans and carrots all cooked up together. That's them in the pot. There isn't any meat. You don't mind, do you, if there isn't any meat?"

"Not at all," I told him.

"I miss meat something dreadful," he confided. "But they can't do anything about it. They can't turn themselves into animals."

"They?" I asked.

"The Flowers," he said, and the way he said it, he made them a proper noun. "They can turn themselves into anything at all — plant things, that is. But they can't make themselves into things like pigs or rabbits. I never asked them to. That is, I mean I never asked them twice. I asked them once and they explained to me. I never asked again, for they've done a lot of things for me and I am grateful to them."

"They explained to you? You mean you talk with them."

"All the time," said Tupper.

He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the hut, scrabbling around for something, with his back end sticking out, like a busy dog digging out a woodchuck.

He backed out and he brought with him a couple of crude pottery plates, lopsided and uneven. He put them down upon the ground and laid on each of them a spoon carved out of wood.

"Made them myself," he told me. "Found some clay down in the river bank and at first I couldn't seem to do it, but then they found out for me and…"

"The Flowers found out for you?"

"Sure, the Flowers. They do everything for me."

"And the spoons?"

"Used a piece of stone. Flint, I guess. Had a sharp edge on it. Nothing like a knife, but it did the job. Took a long time, though." I nodded.

"But that's all right," he said. "I had a lot of time." He did a mopping job and wiped his hands meticulously on his trouser seat.

"They grew flax for me," he said, "so I could make some clothes. But I couldn't get the hang of it. They told me and they told me, but I couldn't do it. So they finally quit. I went around without no clothes for quite a spell. Except for this hat," he said. "I did that myself, without no help at all. They didn't even tell me, I figured it all out and did it by myself. Afterwards they told me that I'd done real good."

"They were right," I said. "It's magnificent."

"You really think so, Brad?"

"Of course I do," I said.

"I'm glad to hear you say so, Brad. I'm kind of proud of it. It's the first thing in my life I ever did alone, without no one telling me."

"These flowers of yours…"

"They ain't my flowers," said Tupper, sharply.

"You say these flowers can turn themselves into anything they want to. You mean they turned themselves into garden stuff for you."

"They can turn themselves into any kind of plants. All I do is ask them."

"Then, if they can be anything they want to be, why are they all flowers?"

"They have to be something, don't they?" Tupper demanded, rather heatedly. "They might as well be flowers."

"Well, yes," I said. "I suppose they might." He raked two ears of corn out of the coals and a couple of potatoes. He used a pot-lifter that looked as if it were fashioned out of bark to get the pot off the fire. He dumped the cooked vegetables that were in it out onto the plates.

"And the trees?" I asked.

"Oh, them are things they changed themselves into. I needed them for wood. There wasn't any wood to start with and I couldn't do no cooking and I told them how it was. So they made the trees and they made them special for me. They grow fast and die so that I can break branches off and have dry wood for fire. Slow burning, though, not like ordinary dry wood. And that's good, for I have to keep a fire burning all the time. I had a pocket full of matches when I came here, but I haven't had any for a long, long time." I remembered when he spoke about the pocket full of matches how entranced he had always been with fire. He always carried matches with him and he'd sit quietly by himself and light match after match, letting each burn down until it scorched his fingers, happy with the sight of flame. A lot of people had been afraid that he might bunt some building down, but he never did. He was just a little jerk who liked the sight of fire.

"I haven't any salt; said Tupper. "The stuff may taste funny to you. I've got used to it."

"But you eat vegetables all the time. You need salt for that kind of stuff."

"The Flowers say I don't. They say they put things into the vegetables that takes the place of salt. Not that you can taste it, but it gives you the things you need just the same as salt. They studied me to find out what my body needed and they put in a lot of stuff they said I needed. And just down the river I have an orchard full of fruit. And I have raspberries and strawberries that bear almost all the time." I couldn't rightly understand what fruit had to do with the problem of nutrition if the Flowers could do all he said they could, but I let the matter stand. One never got anywhere trying to get Tupper straightened out.

If you tried to reason with him, you just made matters worse.

"We might as well sit down," said Tupper, "and get started on this." I sat down on the ground and he handed me a plate, then sat down opposite me and took the other plate.

I was hungry and the saltless food didn't go so badly. Flat, of course, and tasting just a little strange, but it was all right. It took away the hunger.

"You like it here? I asked.

"It is home to me," said Tupper, solemnly. "It is where my friends are."

"You don't have anything," I said. "You don't have an axe or knife. You don't have a pot or pan. And there is no one you can turn to. What if you got sick?" Tupper quit wolfing down his food and stared at me, as if I were the crazy one.

"I don't need any of those things," he said. "I make my dishes out of clay. I can break off the branches with my hands and I don't need an axe. I don't need to hoe the garden. There aren't ever any weeds. I don't even need to plant it. It's always there. While I use up one row of stuff, another row is growing. And if I got sick, the Flowers would take care of me. They told me they would."

"OK," I said. "OK." He went back to his eating. It was a terrible sight to watch. But he was right about the garden. Now that he had mentioned it, I could see that it wasn't cultivated. There were rows of growing vegetables — long, neat rows without the sign of ever being hoed and without a single weed. And that, of course, was the way it would be, for no weed would dare to grow here. There was nothing that could grow here except the Flowers themselves, or the things into which the Flowers had turned themselves, like the vegetables and trees.

The garden was a perfect garden. There were no stunted plants and no disease or blight. The tomatoes, hanging on the vines, were an even red and all were perfect globes. The corn stood straight and tall.

"You cooked enough for two," I said. "Did you know that I was coming?" For I was fast reaching the point where I'd have believed almost anything. It was just possible, I told myself that he (or the Flowers) had known that I was coming.

"I always cook enough for two," he told me. "There never is no telling when someone might drop in."

"But no one ever has?"

"You're the first," he said. "I'm glad that you could come." I wondered if time had any meaning for him. Sometimes it seemed it didn't. And yet he had wept weak tears because it had been so long since anyone had broken bread with him.

We ate in silence for a while and then I took a chance. I'd humoured him long enough and it was time to ask some questions.

"Where is this place?" I asked. "What kind of place is it? And if you want to get out of it, to get back home, how do you go about it?

I didn't mention the fact that he had gotten out of it and returned to Millville. I sensed it might be something he would resent, for he'd been in a hurry to get back again — as if he'd broken some sort of rule or regulation and was anxious to return before anyone found out.

Carefully Tupper laid his plate on the ground and placed his spoon upon it, then he answered me. But he answered me in a different voice, in the measured voice of the businessman who had talked to me on the mystery phone.

"This," said Tupper, in the voice of the businessman, "is not Tupper Tyler speaking. This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers. What shall we talk about?"

"You're kidding me," I said, but it wasn't that I really thought I was being kidded. What I said I said almost instinctively, to gain a little time.

"I can assure you," said the voice, "that we are very much in earnest. We are the Flowers and you want to talk with us and we want to talk with you. This is the only way to do it." Tupper wasn't looking at me; he didn't seem to be looking at anything at all. His eyes had gone all bleak and vacant and he had an indrawn look.

He sat stiff and straight, with his hands dangling in his lap. He didn't look human, any more; he looked like a telephone.

"I've talked to you before," I said.

"Oh, yes," said the Flowers, "but only very briefly. You did not believe in us."

"I have some questions that I want to ask."

"And we shall answer you. We'll do the best we can. We'll reply to you as concisely as we know."

"What is this place?" I asked.

"This is an alternate Earth," said the Flowers. "It's no more than a clock-tick away from yours."

"An alternate Earth?"

"Yes, there are many Earths. You did not know that, did you?"

"No," I said, "I didn't."

"But you can believe it?"

"With a little practice, maybe."

"There are billions of Earths," the Flowers told me. "We don't know how many, but there are many billions of them. There may be no end to them. There are some who think so."

"One behind the other?"

"No. That's not the way to think of it. We don't know how to tell it. It becomes confused in telling."

"So let's say there are a lot of Earths. It's a little hard to understand. If there were a lot of Earths, we'd see them."

"You could not see them," said the Flowers, "unless you could see in time. The alternate Earths exist in a time matrix…"

"A time matrix? You mean…"

"The simplest way to say it is that time divides the many Earths. Each one is distinguished by its time-location. All that exists for you is the present moment. You cannot see into the past or future…"

"Then to get here I travelled into time."

"Yes," said the Flowers. "That is exactly what you did." Tupper still was sitting there with the blank look on his face, but I'd forgotten him. It was his lips and tongue and larynx that formed the words I heard, but it was not Tupper speaking. I knew that I was talking with the Flowers; that, insane as it might seem, I was talking with the purpleness that flowed all around the camp.

"Your silence tells us," said the Flowers, "that you find it hard to digest what we are telling you."

"I choke on it," I told them.

"Let's try to say it another way. Earth is a basic structure but it progresses along the time path by a process of discontinuity."

"Thanks," I said, "for trying, but it doesn't help too much."

"We have known it for a long time," said the Flowers. "We discovered it many years ago. To us it is a natural law, but to you it's not. It'll take you a little time. You cannot swallow at a single gulp what it took us centuries to know."

"But I walked through time," I said. "That's what's hard to take. How could I walk through time?"

"You walked through a very thin spot."

"Thin spot?"

"A place where time was not so thick."

"And you made this thin spot?"

"Let's say that we exploited it."

"To try to reach our Earth?"

"Please, sir," said the Flowers, "not that tone of horror. For some years now, you people have been going into space."

"We've been trying to," I said.

"You're thinking of invasion. In that we are alike. You are trying to invade space; we're trying to invade time."

"Let's just go back a ways," I pleaded. "There are boundaries between these many Earths?"

"That is right."

"Boundaries in time? The worlds are separated by time phases?"

"That is indeed correct. You catch on very neatly."

"And you are trying to break through this time barrier so you can reach my Earth?"

"To reach your Earth," they told me.

"But why?"

"To co-operate with you. To form a partnership. We need living space and if you give us living space, we'll give our knowledge; we need technology, for we have no hands, and with our knowledge you can shape new technologies and those technologies can be used for the benefit of each of us. We can go together into other worlds. Eventually a long chain of many Earths will be linked together and the races in them linked, as well, in a common aim and purpose." A cold lump of lead blossomed in my guts, and despite the lump of lead I felt that I was empty and there was a vile metallic taste that coated tongue and mouth. A partnership, and who would be in charge? Living space, and how much would they leave for us? Other worlds, and what would happen in those other worlds?

"You have a lot of knowledge?"

"Very much," they said. "It is a thing we pay much attention to — the absorption of all knowledge."

"And you're very busy collecting it from us. You are the people who are hiring all the readers?"

"It is so much more efficient," they explained, "than the way we used to do it, with results indifferent at best. This way is more certain and a great deal more selective."

"Ever since the time," I said, "that you got Gerald Sherwood to make the telephones."

"The telephones," they told me, "provide direct communication. All we had before was the tapping of the mind."

"You mean you had mental contact with people of our Earth? Perhaps for a good long time?"

"Oh, yes," they said, most cheerfully. "With very many people, for many, many years. But the sad part of it was that it was a one-way business. We had contact with them, but by and large, they had none with us. Most of them were not aware of us at all and others, who were more sensitive, were aware of us only in a vague and fumbling way."

"But you picked those minds."

"Of course we did," they said. "But we had to content ourselves with what was in the minds. We could not manage to direct them to specific areas of interest."

"You tried nudging them, of course."

"There were some we nudged with fair success. There were others we could nudge, but they moved in wrong directions. And there were many, most of them perhaps, who stubbornly remained unaware of us, no matter what we did. It was discouraging."

"You contact these minds through certain thin spots, I suppose. You could not have done it through the normal boundaries."

"No, we had to make maximum usage of the thin spots that we found."

"It was, I gather, somewhat unsatisfactory."

"You are perceptive, sir. We were getting nowhere."

"Then you made a breakthrough."

"We are not quite sure we understand."

"You tried a new approach. You concentrated on actually sending something physical through the boundary. A handful of seeds, perhaps."

"You are right, of course. You follow us so closely and you understand so well. But even that would have failed if it had not been for your father. Only a very few of the seeds germinated and the resultant plants would have died out eventually if he'd not found them and taken care of them. You must understand that is why we want you to act as our emissary…"

"Now, just a minute there," I told them. "Before we get into that, there are a few more points I want cleared up. The barrier, for instance, that you've thrown around Millville."

"The barrier," said the Flowers, "is a rather simple thing. It is a time bubble we managed to project outward from the thin spot in the boundary that separates our worlds. That one slight area of space it occupies is out of phase both with Millville and with the rest of your Earth. The smallest imaginable fraction of a second in the past, running that fraction of a second of time behind the time of Earth. So slight a fraction of a second, perhaps, that it would be difficult, we should imagine, for the most sophisticated of your instruments to take a measurement. A very little thing and yet, we imagine you'll agree, it is quite effective."

"Yes," I said, "effective." And, of course, it would be — by the very nature of it, it would be strong beyond imagination. For it would represent the past, a filmy soap bubble of the past encapsulating Millville, so slight a thing that it did not interfere with either sight or sound, and yet was something no human could hope to penetrate.

"But sticks and stones," I said. "And raindrops…"

"Only life," they said. "Life at a certain level of sentience, of awareness of its surroundings, of feeling — how do you say it?"

"You've said it well enough," I told them. "And the inanimate…"

"There are many rules of time," they told me, "of the natural phenomenon which you call time. That is a part, a small part, of the knowledge we would share with you."

"Anything at all," I said, "in that direction would be new knowledge for us. We have not studied time. We haven't even thought of it as a force that we could study. We haven't made a start. A lot of metaphysical mutterings, of course, but no real study of it. We have never found a place where we could start a study of it."

"We know all that," they said.

And was there a note of triumph in the way they said it? I could not be entirely sure.

A new sort of weapon, I thought. A devilish sort of weapon. It wouldn't kill you and it wouldn't hurt you! It would shove you along, herding you along, out of the way, crowding you together, and there wouldn't be a thing you could do about it.

What, Nancy had asked, if it swept all life from Earth, leaving only Millville? And that, perhaps, was possible, although it need not go that far. If it was living space alone that the Flowers were looking for, then they already had the instrument to get that living space. They could expand the bubble, gaining all the space they needed, holding the human race at bay while they settled down in that living space. The weapon was at once a weapon to be used against the people of the Earth and a protection for the Flowers against such reprisals as mankind might attempt.

The way was open to them if they wanted Earth. For Tupper had travelled the way that they must go and so had I and there was nothing now to stop them. They could simply move into the Earth, shielded by that wall of time.

"So," I asked, "what are you waiting for?"

"You are, on certain points, so slow to reach an understanding of what we intend," they said. "We do not plan invasion. We want co-operation. We want to come as friends in perfect understanding."

"Well, that's fine," I said. "You are asking to be friends. First we must know our friends. What sort of things are you?"

"You are being rude," they said.

"I am not being rude. I want to know about you. You speak of yourselves as plural, or perhaps collective."

"Collective," they said. "You probably would describe us as an organism. Our root system is planet-wide and interconnected and you might want to think of it as our nervous system. At regular intervals there are great masses of our root material and these masses serve — we suppose you'd call them brains. Many, many brains and all of them connected by a common nervous system."

"But it's all wrong," I protested. "It goes against all reason. Plants can't be intelligent. No plant could experience the survival pressure or the motivation to achieve intelligence."

"Your reasoning," they told me calmly, "is beyond reproach."

"So it is beyond reproach," I said. "Yet I am talking with you."

"You have an animal on your Earth that you call a dog."

"That is right. An animal of great intelligence."

"Adopted by you humans as a pet and a companion. An animal that has associated with you people since before the dawning of your history. And, perhaps, the more intelligent because of that association. An animal that is capable of a great degree of training."

"What has the dog to do with it?" I asked.

"Consider," they said. "If the humans of your Earth had devoted all their energies, through all their history, to the training of the dog, what might have been achieved?"

"Why, I don't know," I said. "Perhaps, by now, we'd have a dog that might be our equal in intelligence. Perhaps not intelligent in the same manner that we're intelligent, but…"

"There once was another race," the Flowers told me, "that did that very thing with us. It all began more than a billion years ago."

"This other race deliberately made a plant intelligent?"

"There was a reason for it. They were a different kind of life than you. They developed us for one specific purpose. They needed a system of some sort that would keep the data they had collected continually correlated and classified and ready for their use."

"They could have kept their records. They could have written it all down."

"There were certain physical restrictions and, perhaps more important, certain mental blocks."

"You mean they couldn't write."

"They never thought of writing. It was an idea that did not occur to them. Not even speech, the way you speak. And even if they had had speech or writing, it would not have done the job they wanted."

"The classification and the correlation?"

"That is part of it, of course. But how much ancient human knowledge, written down and committed to what seemed at that time to be safe keeping, is still alive today?"

"Not much of it. It has been lost or destroyed. Time has washed it out."

"We still hold the knowledge of that other race," they said. "We proved better than the written record — although this other race, of course, did not consider written records."

"This other race," I said. "The knowledge of this other race and how many other races?"

They did not answer me. "If we had the time," they said, "we'd explain it all to you. There are many factors and considerations you'd find incomprehensible. Believe us when we say that the decision of this other race, to develop us into a data storage system, was the most reasonable and workable of the many alternatives they had under study."

"But the time it took," I said, dismayed "My God, how much time would it take to make a plant intelligent! And how could they even start? What do you do to make a plant intelligent?"

"Time," they said, "was no great consideration. It wasn't any problem. They knew how to deal with time. They could handle time as you can handle matter. And that was a part of it. They compressed many centuries of our lives into seconds of their own. They had all the time they needed. They made the time they needed."

"They made time?"

"Certainly. Is that so hard to understand?"

"For me, it is," I told them. "Time is a river. It flows on and on. There is nothing you can do about it."

"It is nothing like a river," said the Flowers, "and it doesn't flow, and there's much that can be done with it. And, furthermore, we ignore the insult that you offer us."

"The insult?"

"Your feeling that it would be so difficult for a plant to acquire intelligence."

"No insult was intended. I was thinking of the plants of Earth. I can't imagine a dandelion…"

"A dandelion?"

"A very common plant."

"You may be right," they said. "We may have been different, originally, than the plants of Earth."

"You remember nothing of it all, of course."

"You mean ancestral memory?"

"I suppose that's what I mean."

"It was so long ago," they said. "We have the record of it. Not a myth, you understand, not a legend. But the actual record of how we became intelligent."

"Which," I said, "is far more than the human race has got."

"And now," said the Flowers, "we must say goodbye. Our enunciator is becoming quite fatigued and we must not abuse his strength, for he has served us long and faithfully and we have affection for him. We will talk with you again."

"Whew!" said Tupper.

He wiped the slobber off his chin.

"That's the longest," he said, "I have ever talked for them. What did you talk about?"

"You mean you don't know?"

"Of course I don't," snapped Tupper. "I never listen in." He was human once again. His eyes had returned to normal and his face had become unstuck.

"But the readers," I said. "They read longer than we talked."

"I don't have nothing to do with the reading that is done," said Tupper. "That ain't two-way talk. That's all mental contact stuff."

"But the phones," I said.

"The phones are just to tell them the things they should read."

"Don't they read into the phones?"

"Sure they do," said Tupper. "That's so they'll read aloud. It's easier for the Flowers to pick it up if they read aloud. It's sharper in the reader's brain or something." He got up slowly.

"Going to take a nap," he said.

He headed for the hut.

Halfway there, he stopped and turned back to face me. "I forgot," he said. "Thanks for the pants and shirt."

12

My hunch had been correct. Tupper was a key, or at least one of the keys, to what was happening. And the place to look for clues, crazy as it had sounded, had been the patch of flowers in the garden down below the greenhouse.

For the flower patch had led, not alone to Tupper, but to all the rest of it — to that second self that had helped out Gerald Sherwood, to the phone set-up and the reader service, to the ones who employed Stiffy Grant and probably to the backers of that weird project down in Mississippi. And to how many other projects and endeavours I had no idea.

It was not only now, I knew, that this was happening, but it had been happening for years. For many years, they'd told me, the Flowers had been in contact with many minds of Earth, had been stealing the ideas and the attitudes and knowledge which had existed in those minds, and even in those instances in which the minds were unaware of the prowlers in them, had persisted in the nudging of those minds, as they had nudged the mind of Sherwood.

For many years, they'd said, and I had not thought to ask them for a better estimate. For several centuries, perhaps, and that seemed entirely likely, for when they spoke of the lifetime of their intelligence they spoke of a billion years.

For several hundred years, perhaps, and could those centuries, I wondered, have dated from the Renaissance? Was it possible, I asked myself, that the credit for the flowering of man's culture, that the reason for his advancement might be due, at least in part, to the nudging of the Flowers?

Not, of course, that they themselves would have placed their imprint upon the ways of man, but theirs could have been the nagging force which had driven man to much of his achievement.

In the case of Gerald Sherwood, the busybody nudging had resulted in constructive action. Was it too much to think, I wondered, that in many other instances the result had been the same — although perhaps not as pronounced as it had been in Sherwood's case? For Sherwood had recognized the otherness that had come to live with him and had learned that it was to his benefit to co-operate. In many other cases there would not have been awareness, but even with no awareness, the drive and urge were there and, in part, there would have been response.

In those hundreds of years, the Flowers must have learned a great deal of humanity and have squirrelled away much human knowledge. For that had been their original purpose, to serve as knowledge storage units. During the last several years man's knowledge had flowed to them in a steady stream, with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of readers busily engaged in pouring down their mental gullets the accumulated literary efforts of all of humankind.

I got off the ground where I was sitting and found that I was stiff and cramped. I stretched and slowly turned and there, on every side, reaching to the near horizons of the ridges that paralleled the river, swept the purple tide.

It could not be right, I told myself. I could not have talked with flowers. For of all the things on Earth, plants were the one thing that could never talk.

And yet this was not the Earth. This was another Earth — only one, they'd said, of many billion earths.

Could one measure, I asked myself, one earth by another? And the answer seemed to be one couldn't. The terrain appeared to be almost identical with the terrain I had known back on my own Earth, and the terrain itself might remain the same for all those multi-billion earths. For what was it they had said — that earth was a basic structure?

But when one considered life and evolution, then all the bets were off.

For even if the life of my own Earth and this other Earth on which I stood had started out identically (and they might well have started out identically) there still would be, along the way, millions of little deviations, no one of which perhaps, by itself, would be significant, but the cumulative effects of all these deviations eventually would result in a life and culture that would bear no resemblance to any other Earth.

Tupper had begun to snore — great wet, slobbering snores, the very kind of snores that one might guess he'd make. He was lying on his back inside the hut, on a bed of leaves, but the hut was so small that his feet stuck out the doorway. They rested on his calloused heels and his spraddled toes pointed at the sky and they had a raw and vulgar look about them.

I picked up the plates and spoons from where they rested on the ground and tucked the bowl in which Tupper had cooked our meal underneath my arm. I found the trail that led down to the water's edge and followed it. Tupper had cooked the food; the least I could do, I told myself; was to wash the dishes.

I squatted by the river's edge and washed the awkward plates and pot, sluiced off the spoons and rubbed them clean between my fingers. I was careful with the plates, for I had the feeling they'd not survive much wetting. On both of them and on the pot there still were the marks of Tupper's great splayed fingers, where he had pressed them into shape.

For ten years he had lived and been happy here, happy with the purple flowers that had become his friends, secure at last from the unkindness and the cruelty of the world into which he was born. The world that had been unkind and cruel because he had been different, but which was capable of unkindness and of cruelty even when there was no difference.

To Tupper, I knew, this must seem a fairyland, for real. Here was the beauty and the simplicity to which his simple soul responded. Here he could live the uncomplicated and undisturbed sort of life for which he'd always yearned, perhaps not knowing that he yearned for it.

I set the plates and pot on the river bank and stooped above the water, scooping it up in my two hands, clasped together, drinking it. It had a smooth, clean taste and despite the heat of the summer sun, it had a touch of coldness.

As I straightened up, I heard the faint sound of crinkling paper and, with a sinking heart, suddenly remembered. I put my hand into my inside jacket pocket and pulled out the long, white envelope. I flipped back the flap and there was the sheaf of money, the fifteen hundred dollars that Sherwood had put on the desk for me.

I squatted there, with the envelope in my hand and I thought what a damn fool thing to do. I had meant to hide it somewhere in the house, since I intended leaving on the fishing trip with Alf before the bank had opened, and then, in the rush of events, had forgotten it. How in the world, I wondered, could one forget fifteen hundred dollars!

With a cold sweat breaking out on me, I ran through my mind all the things that could have happened to that envelope. Except for plain fool luck, I'd have lost it a dozen times or more. And yet, aghast as I might be that I should so utterly forget such a handsome sum of cash, as I sat there and looked at it, it seemed to have lost some of its significance.

Perhaps it was, I thought, a condition of Tupper's fairyland that I should not think so highly of it as I had at one time. Although I knew that if it were possible to get back into my world again it would assume its old importance. But here, for this little moment, a crude piece of pottery made out of river day was an important thing, a hut made out of sticks and a bed made out of leaves. And more important than all the money in the world, the necessity to keep a little campfire burning once the matches were gone.

Although, I told myself, this was not my world. This was Tupper's world, his soft, short-sighted world — and tied in with it was his utter failure to grasp the overwhelming implications of this world of his.

For this was the day about which there had been speculation — although far too little speculation and too little done about it because it seemed so distant and so improbable. This was the day that the human race had come into contact (or perhaps, collision) with an alien race.

All the speculation, of course, had concerned an alien out of space, an alien on, or from, some other world in space. But here was the alien, not out of space, but time or at least from behind a barrier in time.

It made no difference, I told myseIf. Out of either space or time, the involvement was the same. Man at this moment finally faced his greatest test, and one he could not fail.

I gathered up the pottery and went back up the trail again.

Tupper was still sleeping, but no longer snoring. He had not changed position and his toes still pointed at the sky.

The sun had moved far down the west, but the heat still held and there was no hint of breeze. The purple of the flowers lay unstirring on the hillsides.

I stood and looked at them and they were innocent and pretty and they held no promise and no threat. They were just a field of flowers, like a field of daisies or of daffodils. They were the sort of thing that we had taken for granted all our years on earth. They had no personality and they stood for nothing except a splotch of colour that was pleasing to the eye.

That was the hard thing about all this, I thought — the utter impossibility of thinking of the Flowers as anything but flowers. It was impossible to think of them as beings, as anything that had even a symbol of importance. One could not take them seriously and yet they must be taken seriously, for in their right they were as intelligent, perhaps more intelligent than the human race.

I put the dishes down beside the fire and slowly climbed the hill. My moving feet brushed the flowers aside and I crushed some of them, but there was no chance of walking without crushing some of them.

I'd have to talk to them again, I told myself. As soon as Tupper could get rested, I'd talk to them again. There were a lot of things that must be clarified, much to be explained. If the Flowers and the human race were to live together, there must be understanding. I ran through the conversation I'd had with them, trying to find the gentle threat that I knew was there.

But from what I could remember, there had been no threat.

I reached the top of the hill and stopped there, gazing out across the undulating purple swales. At the bottom of the slope, a small creek ran between the hills to reach the river. From where I was I could hear the silver babble of it as it ran across the stones.

Slowly I made my way down the hill toward it and as I moved down the slope I saw the mound that lay across the creek, at the foot of the opposite slope. I had not seen it before and I supposed that my failure to see it was because it had been masked by the slant of light across the land.

There was nothing special about it except that it appeared slightly out of character. Here, in this place of flowing swales, it stood by itself, like a hump-backed monstrosity left over from another time.

I came down to the creek and waded across a shallow place where the water ran no deeper than three inches over a shining gravel bar.

At the water's edge a large block of stone lay half-buried in the sharp rise of the bank. It offered a ready seat and I sat down upon it, looking down the stream. The sun glanced off the water, making diamonds out of every ripple, and the air was sprayed with the silver tinkle of the singing brook.

There was no creek here in the world where Millville lay, although there was a dry run in Jack Dickson's pasture, through which the swamp that lay back of Stiffy's shack sometimes drained. Perhaps there had been such a creek as this, I thought, in Millville's world before the farmer's plough and resultant erosion had reshaped the terrain.

I sat entranced by the flashing diamonds of the water and the tinkle of the stream. It seemed that a man could sit there forever, warm in the last rays of the sun and guarded by the hills.

I had put my hands on either side of me and had been idly rubbing them back and forth across the surface of the stone on which I sat. My hands must have told me almost instantly that there was something strange about the surface, but I was so engrossed with the sensations of sun and water that it took some minutes before the strangeness broke its way into my consciousness.

When it did, I still remained sitting there, still rubbing the surface of the stone with the tips of my fingers, but not looking at it, making sure that I had not been wrong, that the stone had the feel of artificial shaping.

When I got up and examined the block, there was no doubt of it. The stone had been squared into a block and there were places where the chisel marks could still be seen upon it. Around one corner of it still clung a brittle substance that could be nothing else than some sort of mortar in which the block had once been set.

I straightened up from my examination and stepped away, back into the stream, with the water tugging at my ankles.

Not a simple boulder, but a block of stone! A block of stone bearing chisel marks and with a bit of mortar still sticking to one edge.

The Flowers, then, were not the only ones upon this planet. There were others — or there had been others. Creatures that knew the use of stone and had the tools to chip the stone into convenient form and size.

My eyes travelled from the block of stone up the mound that stood at the water's edge, and there were other blocks of stone protruding from its face. Standing frozen, with the glint of water and the silver song forgotten, I traced out the blocks and could see that once upon a time they had formed a wall.

This mound, then, was no vagary of nature. It was the evidence of a work that at one time had been erected by beings that knew the use of tools.

I left the stream and clambered up the mound. None of the stones was large, none was ornamented; there were just the chisel marks and here and there the bits of mortar that had lain between the blocks. Perhaps, a building had stood here at one time. Or it may have been a wall. Or a monument.

I started down the mound, choosing a path a short way downstream from where I had crossed the creek, working my way along slowly and carefully, for the slope was steep, using my hands as brakes to keep myself from sliding or from falling.

And it was then, hugged close against the slope, that I found the piece of bone. It had weathered out of the ground, perhaps not too long ago, and it lay hidden there among the purple flowers. Under ordinary circumstances, I probably would have missed it. I could not see it well at first, just the dull whiteness of it lying on the ground. I had slid past it before I saw it and crawled back to pick it up.

The surface of it powdered slightly at the pressure of my fingers, but it did not break. It was slightly curved and white, a ghostly, chalky white.

Turning it over in my hand, I made out that it was a rib bone and the shape and size of it was such that it could be human, although my knowledge was too slight to be absolutely sure. If it were really humanoid, I told myself, then it meant that at one time a thing like man had lived here. And could it mean that something very similar to the human race still resided here?

A planet full of flowers with nothing living on it except the purple flowers, and more lately Tupper Tyler. That was what I'd thought when I had seen the flowers spreading to the far horizons, but it had been supposition only. It was a conclusion I had jumped to without too much evidence.

Although it was in part supported by the seeming fact that nothing else existed in this particular place — no birds, no insects or animals, not a thing at all, except perhaps some bacteria and viruses and even these, I thought, might be essential to the well-being of the Flowers.

Although the outer surface of the bone had chalked off when I picked it up, it seemed sound in structure. Not too long ago, I knew, it had been a part of a living thing. Its age probably would depend to a large extent upon the composition and the moistness of the soil and probably many other factors. It was a problem for an expert and I was no expert.

Now I saw something else, a little spot of whiteness just to the right of me. It could have been a white stone lying on the ground, but even as I looked at it I didn't think it was. It had that same chalky whiteness of the rib I had picked up.

I moved over to it and as I bent above it I could see it was no stone.

I let the rib drop from my fingers and began to dig.

The soil was loose and sandy and although I had no tools, my fingers served the purpose.

As I dug, the bone began to reveal its shape and in a moment I knew it was a skull — and only a little later that it was a human skull.

I dug it loose and lifted it and while I might have failed to identify the rib, there was no mistaking this.

I hunkered on the slope and felt pity well inside of me, pity for this creature that once had lived and died — and a growing fear, as well.

For by the evidence of the skull I held within my hands, I knew for a certainty that this was not the home world of the Flowers. This was — this must be a world that they had conquered, or at least had taken over. They might, indeed, I thought, be very far in time from that old home where another race (by their description of it, a non-human race) had trained them to intelligence.

How far back, I wondered, lay the homeland of the Flowers? How many conquered earths lay between this world and the one where they had risen?

How many other earths lay empty, swept clean of any life that might compete with the Flowers?

And that other race, the race that had raised and elevated them above their vegetable existence where was that old race today?

I put the skull back into the hole from which I'd taken it. Carefully, I brushed back the sand and dirt until it was covered once again, this time entirely covered, with no part of it showing. I would have liked to take it back to camp with me so I could have a better look at it. But I knew I couldn't, for Tupper must not know what I had found. His mind was an open book to his friends the Flowers, and I was sure mine wasn't, for they had had to use the telephone to get in touch with me. So long as I told Tupper nothing, the Flowers would never know that I had found the skull. There was the possibility, of course, that they already knew, that they had the sense of sight, or perhaps some other sense that was as good as sight. But I doubted that they had; there was so far no evidence they had. The best bet was that they were mental symbionts, that they had no awareness beyond the awareness they shared with minds in other kinds of life.

I worked my way around and down the mound and along the way I found other blocks of stone. It was becoming evident to me that at some other time a building had stood upon this site. A city, I wondered, or a town? Although whatever form it might have taken, it had been a dwelling place.

I reached the creek at the far end of the mound, where it ran close against the cutbank it had chewed out of the mound, and started wading back to the place where I had crossed.

The sun had set and with it had gone the diamond sparkle of the water.

The creek ran dark and tawny in the shadow of the first twilight.

Teeth grinned at me out of the blackness of the bank that rose above the stream, and I stopped dead, staring at that row of snaggled teeth and the whiteness of the bone that arched above them. The water, tugging at my ankles, growled a little at me and I shivered in the chill that swept down from the darkening hills.

For, staring at that second skull, grinning at me out of the darkness of the soil that stood poised above the water, I knew that the human race faced the greatest danger it had ever known. Except for man himself, there had been, up to this moment, no threat against the continuity of humanity.

But here, finally, that threat lay before my eyes.

13

I sighted the small glowing of the fire before I reached the camp. When I stumbled down the hillside, I could see that Tupper had finished with his nap and was cooking supper.

"Out for a walk?" he asked.

"Just a look around," I said. "There isn't much to see."

"The Flowers is all," said Tupper.

He wiped his chin and counted the fingers on one hand, then counted them again to be sure he'd made no mistake.

"Tupper?"

"What is it, Brad?"

"Is it all like this? All over this Earth, I mean? Nothing but the Flowers?"

"There are others come sometimes."

"Others?"

"From other worlds," he said. "But they go away."

"What kind of others?"

"Fun people. Looking for some fun."

"What kind of fun?"

"I don't know," he said. "Just fun, is all." He was surly and evasive.

"But other than that," I said, "there's nothing but the Flowers?"

"That's all," he said.

"But you haven't seen it all."

"They tell me," Tupper said. "And they wouldn't lie. They aren't like people back in Millville. They don't need to lie." He used two sticks to move the earthen pot off the hot part of the fire.

"Tomatoes," he said. "I hope you like tomatoes." I nodded that I did and he squatted down beside the fire to watch the supper better.

"They don't tell nothing but the truth," be said, going back to the question I had asked. "They couldn't tell nothing but the truth. That's the way they're made. They got all this truth wrapped up in them and that's what they live by. And they don't need to tell nothing but the truth. It's afraid of being hurt that makes people lie and there is nothing that can hurt them." He lifted his face to stare at me, daring me to disagree with him.

"I didn't say they lied," I told him. "I never for a moment questioned anything they said. By this truth they're wrapped up in, you mean their knowledge, don't you?"

"I guess that's what I mean. They know a lot of things no one back in Millville knows." I let it go at that. Millville was Tupper's former world. By saying Millville, he meant the human world.

Tupper was off on his finger-counting routine once again. I watched him as he squatted there, so happy and content, in a world where he had nothing, but was happy and content.

I wondered once again at his strange ability to communicate with the Flowers, to know them so well and so intimately that he could speak for them. Was it possible, I asked myself, that this slobbering, finger-counting village idiot possessed some sensory perception that the common run of mankind did not have? That this extra ability of his might be a form of compensation, to make up in some measure for what he did not have?

After all, I reminded myself, man was singularly limited in his perception, not knowing what he lacked, not missing what he lacked by the very virtue of not being able to imagine himself as anything other than he was. It was entirely possible that Tupper, by some strange quirk of genetic combination, might have abilities that no other human had, all unaware that he was gifted in any special way, never guessing that other men might lack what seemed entirely normal to himself. And could these extra-human abilities match certain un-guessed abilities that lay within the Flowers themselves?

The voice on the telephone, in mentioning the diplomatic job, had said that I came highly recommended. And was it this man across the fire who had recommended me? I wanted very much to ask him, but I didn't dare.

"Meow," said Tupper. "Meow, meow, meow." I'll say this much for him. He sounded like a cat. He could sound like anything at all. He was always making funny noises, practising his mimicry until he had it pat.

I paid no attention to him. He had pulled himself back into his private world and the chances were he'd forgotten I was there.

The pot upon the fire was steaming and the smell of cooking stole upon the evening air. Just above the eastern horizon the first star came into being and once again I was conscious of the little silences, so deep they made me dizzy when I tried to listen to them, that fell into the chinks between the crackling of the coals and the sounds that Tupper made.

It was a land of silence, a great eternal globe of silence, broken only by the water and the wind and the little feeble noises that came from intruders like Tupper and myself. Although, by now, Tupper might be no intruder.

I sat alone, for the man across the fire had withdrawn himself from me, from everything around him, retreating into a room he had fashioned for himself; a place that was his alone, locked behind a door that could be opened by no one but himself, for there was no other who had a key to it or, indeed, any idea as to what kind of key was needed.

Alone and in the silence, I sensed the purpleness — the formless, subtle personality of the things that owned this planet. There was a friendliness, I thought, but a repulsive friendliness, the fawning friendliness of some monstrous beast. And I was afraid.

Such a silly thing, I thought. To be afraid of flowers.

Tupper's cat was lone and lost. It prowled the dark and dripping woods of some other ogre-land and it mewed softly to itself; sobbing as it padded on and on, along a confusing world-line of uncertainties.

The fear had moved away a little beyond the circle of the firelight.

But the purpleness still was there, hunched upon the hilltop.

An enemy, I wondered. Or just something strange?

If it were an enemy, it would be a terrible enemy, implacable and efficient.

For the plant world was the sole source of energy by which the animal world was able to survive.

Only plants could trap and convert and store the vital stuff of life.

It was only by making use of the energy provided by the vegetable world that the animal kingdom could exist. Plants, by wilfully becoming dormant or by making themselves somehow inedible, could doom all other life.

And the Flowers were versatile, in a very nasty way. They could, as witness Tupper's garden and the trees that grew to supply him wood, be any kind of plant at all. They could be tree or grass, vine or bush or grain.

They could not only masquerade as another plant, they could become that plant.

Suppose they were allowed into the human Earth and should offer to replace the native trees for a better tree, or perhaps the same old trees we had always known, only that they would grow faster and straighter and taller, for better shade or lumber. Or to replace wheat for a better wheat, with a higher yield and a fuller kernel, and a wheat that was resistant to drought and other causes that made a wheat crop fail. Suppose they made a deal to become all vegetables, all grass, all grain, all trees, replacing the native plants of Earth, giving men more food per acre, more lumber per tree, an improved productivity in everything that grew.

There would be no hunger in the world, no shortages of any kind at all, for the Flowers could adapt themselves to every human need.

And once man had come to rely upon them, once he had his entire economy based upon them, and his very life staked upon their carrying out their bargain, then they would have man at their mercy. Overnight they could cease being wheat and corn and grass; they could rob the entire Earth of its food supply. Or they might turn poisonous and thus kill more quickly and more mercifully. Or, if by that time, they had come to hate man sufficiently, they could develop certain types of pollen to which all Earthly life would be so allergic that death, when it came, would be a welcome thing.

Or let us say, I thought, playing with the thought, that man did not let them in, but they came in all the same, that man made no bargain with them, but they became the wheat and grass and all the other plants of Earth surreptitiously, killing off the native plants of Earth and replacing them with an identical plant life, in all its variations. In such a case, I thought, the result could be the same.

If we let them in, or if we didn't let them in (but couldn't keep them out), we were in their hands. They might kill us, or they might not kill us, but even if they didn't kill us, there'd still remain the fact they could at any time they wished.

But if the Flowers were bent on infiltrating Earth, if they planned to conquer Earth by wiping out all life, then why had they contacted me? They could have infiltrated without us knowing it. It would have taken longer, but the road was clear. There was nothing that would stop them, for we would not know. If certain purple flowers should begin escaping Millville gardens, spreading year by year, in fence corners and in ditches, in the little out-of-the-way places of the land, no one would pay attention to them. Year by year the flowers could have crept out and out and in a hundred years have been so well established that nothing could deny them.

And there was another thought that, underneath my thinking and my speculation, had kept hammering at me, pleading to be heard. And now I let it in: even if we could, should we keep them out? Even in the face of potential danger, should we bar the way to them? For here was an alien life, the first alien life we'd met. Here was the chance for the human race, if it would take the chance, to gain new knowledge, to find new attitudes, to fill in the gaps of knowing and to span the bridge of thought, to understand a non-human viewpoint, to sample new emotion, to face new motivation, to investigate new logic. Was this something we could shy away from? Could we afford to fail to meet this first alien life halfway and work out the differences that might exist between the two of us? For if we failed here, the first time, then we'd fail the second time, and perhaps forever.

Tupper made a noise like a ringing telephone and I wondered how a telephone had gotten in there with that lone, lost cat of his. Perhaps, I thought, the cat had found a telephone, maybe in a booth out in the dark and dripping woods, and would find out where it was and how it might get home.

The telephone rang again and there was a little wait. Then Tupper said to me, most impatiently, "Go ahead and talk. This call is for you."

"What's that?" I asked, astonished.

"Say hello," said Tupper. "Go ahead and answer."

"All right," I said, just to humour him. "Hello." His voice changed to Nancy's voice, so perfect an imitation that I felt the presence of her.

"Brad!" she cried. "Brad, where are you?" Her voice was high and gasping, almost hysterical.

"Where are you, Brad?" she asked. "Where did you disappear to?"

"I don't know," I said, "that I can explain. You see…"

"I've looked everywhere," she said, in a rush of words. "We've looked everywhere. The whole town was looking for you. And then I remembered the phone in Father's study, the one without a dial, you know. I knew that it was there, but I'd never paid attention to it. I thought it was a model of some sort, or maybe just a decoration for the desk or a gag of some sort.

"But there was a lot of talk about the phones in Stiffy's shack, and Ed Adler told me about the phone that was in your office. And it finally dawned on me that maybe this phone that Father had was the same as those other phones.

"But it took an awful long time for it to dawn on me. So I went into his study and I saw the phone and I just stood and looked at it — because I was scared, you see. I was afraid of it and I was afraid to use it because of what I might find out. But I screwed my courage up and I lifted the receiver and there was an open line and I asked for you. I knew it was a crazy thing to do, but… What did you say, Brad?"

"I said I don't know if I can explain exactly where I am. I know where I am, of course, but I can't explain it so I'll be believed."

"Tell me. Don't you fool around. Just tell me where you are."

"I'm in another world. I walked out of the garden…"

"You walked where!"

"I was just walking in the garden, following Tupper's tracks and…"

"What kind of track is that?"

"Tupper Tyler," I said. "I guess I forgot to tell you that he had come back."

"But he couldn't," she told me. "I remember him. That was ten years ago."

"He did come back," I said. "He came back this morning. And then he left again. I was following his tracks…"

"You told me," she said. "You were following him and you wound up in another world. Where is this other world?" She was like any other woman. She asked the damndest questions.

"I don't know exactly, except that it's in time. Perhaps only a second away in time."

"Can you get back?"

"I'm going to try," I said. "I don't know if I can."

"Is there anything I can do to help — that the town can do to help?"

"Listen, Nancy, this isn't getting us anywhere. Tell me, where is your father?"

"He's down at your place. There are a lot of people there. Hoping that you will come back."

"Waiting for me?"

"Well, yes. You see, they looked everywhere and they know you aren't in the village, and there are a lot of them convinced that you know all about this…"

"About the barrier, you mean."

"Yes, that's what I mean."

"And they are pretty sore?"

"Some of them," she said.

"Listen, Nancy…"

"Don't say that again. I am listening."

"Can you go down and see your father?"

"Of course I can," she said.

"All right. Go down and tell him that when I can get back — if I can get back — I'll need to talk with someone. Someone in authority. Someone high in authority. The President, perhaps, or someone who's close to the President. Maybe someone from the United Nations…"

"But, Brad, you can't ask to see the President!"

"Maybe not," I said. "But as high as I can get. I have something our government has to know. Not only ours, but all the governments. Your father must know someone he can talk to. Tell him I'm not fooling. Tell him it's important."

"Brad," she said. "Brad, you're sure you aren't kidding? Because if you are, this could be an awful mess."

"Cross my heart," I said. "I mean it, Nancy, it's exactly as I've said. I'm in another world, an alternate world…"

"Is it a nice world, Brad?"

"It's nice enough," I said. "There's nothing here but flowers."

"What kind of flowers?"

"Purple flowers. My father's flowers. The same kind that are back in Millville. The flowers are people, Nancy. They're the ones that put up the barrier."

"But flowers can't be people, Brad." Like I was a kid. Like she had to humour me. Asking me if it was a nice world and telling me that flowers never could be people. All sweet reasonableness.

I held in my anger and my desperation.

"I know they can't," I said. "But just the same as people. They are intelligent and they can communicate."

"You have talked with them?"

"Tupper talks for them. He's their interpreter."

"But Tupper was a drip."

"Not back here he isn't. He's got things we haven't."

"What kind of things? Brad, you have to be…"

"You will tell your father?"

"Right away," she said. "I'll go down to your place…"

"And, Nancy…"

"Yes."

"Maybe it would be just as well if you didn't tell where I am or how you got in touch. I imagine the village is pretty well upset."

"They are wild," said Nancy.

"Tell your father anything you want. Tell him everything. But not the rest of them. He'll know what to tell them. There's no use in giving the village something more to talk about."

"All right," she said. "Take care of yourself. Come back safe and sound."

"Sure," I said.

"You can get back?"

"I think I can. I hope I can."

"I'll tell Father what you said. Exactly what you said. He'll get busy on it."

"Nancy. Don't worry. It'll be all right."

"Of course I won't. I'll be seeing you."

"So long, Nancy. Thanks for calling."

I said to Tupper, "Thank you, telephone."

He lifted a hand and stretched out a finger at me, stroking it with the finger of the other hand, making the sign for shame.

"Brad has got a girl," he chanted in a sing-song voice. "Brad has got a girl."

"I thought you never listened in," I said, just a little nettled.

"Brad has got a girl! Brad has got a girl! Brad has got a girl!" He was getting excited about it and the slobber was flying all about his face.

"Cut it out," I yelled at him. "If you don't cut it out, I'll break your God damn neck." He knew I wasn't fooling, so he cut it out.

14

I woke in a blue and silver night and wondered, even as I woke, what had wakened me. I was lying on my back and above me the sky was glimmering with stars. I was not confused. I knew where I was. There was no blind groping back to an old reality. I heard the faint chuckling of the river as it ran between its banks and I smelled the wood smoke that drifted from the campfire.

Something had awakened me. I lay still, for it seemed important that whatever had wakened me, if it were close at hand, should not know that I was awake. There was a sense of fear, or perhaps of expectation. But if it were a sense of fear, it was neither deep nor sharp.

Slowly I twisted my head a bit and when I did I could see the moon, bright and seeming very near, swimming just above the line of scrubby trees that grew on the river bank.

I was lying flat upon the ground, with nothing under me but the hard-packed earth. Tupper had crawled into his hut to sleep, curling up so his feet did not stick out. And if he were still there and sleeping, he was very quiet about it, for I heard no sound from him.

Having turned my head, I lay quietly for a time, listening for a sound to tell me that something prowled the camp. But there was no sound and finally I sat up.

The slope of ground above the camp, silvered by the floodlight of the moon, ran up to touch the night-blue sky — a balanced piece of beauty hanging in the silence, so fragile that one was careful not to speak nor to make any sudden motion, for fear that one might break that beauty and that silence and bring it down, sky and slope together, in a shower of shards.

Carefully I got to my feet, standing in the midst of that fragile world, still wondering what had wakened me.

But there was nothing. The land and sky were poised, as if they stood on tiptoe in a single instant of retarded time. Here, it seemed, was the present frozen, with no past or future, a place where no clock would ever tick nor any word be spoken.

Then something moved upon the hilltop, a man or a manlike thing, running on the ridge crest, black against the sky, lithe and tall and graceful, running with abandon.

I was running, too. Without reason, without purpose, simply running up the slope. Simply knowing there was a man or a manlike thing up there and that I must stand face to face with it, hoping, perhaps, that in this land of emptiness and flowers, in this land of silence and of fragile beauty, it might make some sense, might lend to this strange dimension of space and time some sort of perspective that I could understand.

The manlike thing was still running on the hilltop and I tried to shout to it, but my throat would make no sound and so I kept on running.

The figure must have seen me, for suddenly it stopped and swung around to face me and stood there on the hilltop, looking down at me. And now I saw that while it undoubtedly was of human form, it had a crest of some sort above its head, giving it a birdlike look as if the head of a cockatoo had been grafted on a human body.

I ran, panting, toward it, and now it moved down the hill to meet me, walking slowly and deliberately and with unconscious grace.

I stopped running and stood still, fighting to regain my breath. There was no need of running any more. I need not run to catch it.

It continued walking down the hill toward me and while its body still stayed black and featureless, I could see that the crest was white, or silver. In the moonlight it was hard to tell if it were white or silver.

My breath came more easily now and I climbed up the hill to meet it. We approached one another slowly, each of us, I suppose, afraid that any other manner of approach might give the other fright.

The manlike thing stopped ten feet or so away and I stopped as well, and now I saw that indeed it was humanoid and that it was a woman, either a naked or an almost naked woman. In the moonlight, the crest upon her head was a thing of shining wonder, but I could not make out if it were a natural appendage or some sort of eccentric hairdo, or perhaps a hat.

The crest was white, but the rest of her was black, a jet black with blue highlights that glinted in the moonlight. And there was about her body an alertness and an awareness and a sense of bubbling life that took my breath away.

She spoke to me in music. It must have been a music, for there seemed to be no words.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I do not understand." She spoke again and the trilling of the voice ran across the blue and silver world like a spray of crystal thought, but there was no understanding. I wondered, in despair, if any man of my race could ever understand a language that expressed itself in music, or if, in fact, it was meant to be understood as were the words we used.

I shook my head and she laughed, the laughter making her without any doubt a human — a low and tinkling laugh that was happy and excited.

She held out her hand and took a few quick steps toward me and I took the outstretched hand. And as I took her hand, she turned and ran lightly up the hill and I went running with her. We reached the top of the ridge and continued running, hand in hand, down the other slope, a wild, ecstatic running that was sheer youth and craziness — a running into nothing, for the utter joy of being alive in that heady moonlight.

We were young and drunk with a strange happiness for which there seemed no reason or accounting — drunk with, at least for me, a wild exuberance.

Her grip upon my hand was hard, with a lithe, young strength, and we ran together as if we were one person running — and it seemed to me, indeed, that in some awesome manner I had become a part of her, and that somehow I knew where we were going and why we were going there, but my brain was so seething with this strange happiness that it could not translate the knowledge into terms I understood.

We came down to the creek and splashed across, then ran around the mound where I had found the skulls and on up the second ridge and there, at the top of it, we came upon the picnic.

There were other people there, at this midnight picnic, a half a dozen of them, all like this alien girl who had run with me. Scattered on the ground were hampers, or things that looked like hampers, and bottles, and these bottles and the hampers were arranged in a sort of circle. In the centre of the circle was a small, silvery contraption that was just slightly larger than a basketball.

We stopped at the edge of the circle and all the rest of them turned to look at us — but to look without surprise, as if it were not unusual at all for one of them to lead in an alien creature such as I.

The woman who was with me spoke in her singing voice and they answered back with music. All of them were watching me, but it was friendly watching.

Then all of them except one sat down in the circle and the one who remained standing stepped toward me, making a motion inviting me to join the circle with them.

I sat down, with the running woman on one side of me and the one who made the invitation sitting on the other.

It was, I gathered, some sort of holiday, although there was something in that circle which made it more than a holiday.

There was a sense of anticipation in the faces and the bodies of these people sitting in the circle, as if they might be waiting for an event of great importance. They were happy and excited and vibrant with the sense of life to their fingertips.

Except for their crests, they were humanoid, and I could see now that they wore no clothing. I found time to wonder where they might have come from, for Tupper would have told me if there were people such as they. But he had told me that the Flowers were the only things which existed on this planet, although he had said sometimes there were others who came visiting.

Were these people, then, the ones who came visiting, or was it possible that they were the descendants of those people whose bones I had found down on the mound, now finally emerged from some secret hiding place? Although there was no sign in them of ever having hidden, of ever having skulked.

The strange contraption lay in the centre of the circle. At a picnic back in Millville it would have been a record player or a radio that someone had brought along. But these people had no need of music, for they talked in music, and the thing looked like nothing I had ever seen. It was round and seemed to be fashioned of many lenses, all tilted at different angles so that the surfaces caught the moonlight, reflecting it to make the ball itself a sphere of shining glory.

Some of the people sitting in the circle began an unpacking of the hampers and an uncorking of the bottles and I knew that more than likely they'd ask me to eat with them. It worried me to think of it, for since they'd been so kind I could not very well refuse, and yet it might be dangerous to eat the food they had. For although they were humanoid, there easily could be differences in their metabolism and what might be food for them could be poisonous for me.

It was a little thing, of course, but it seemed a big decision, and I sat there in mental agony, trying to make up my mind.

The food might be a loathsome and nauseating mess, but that I could have managed; for the friendship of these people I would have choked it down. It was the thought that it might be deadly that made me hesitate.

A while ago, I remembered, I had convinced myself that no matter how great a threat the Flowers might be, we still must let them in, must strive to find a common ground upon which any differences that might exist between us could somehow be adjusted. I had told myself that the future of the human race might easily hang upon our ability to meet and to get along with an alien race, for the time was coming, in a hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, when we'd be encountering other alien races, and we could not fail this first time.

And here, I realized, was another alien race, sitting in this circle, and there could be no double standard as between myself and the world at large. I, in my own right, must act as I'd decided the human race must act — I must eat the food when it was offered me.

Perhaps I was not thinking very clearly. Events were happening much too fast and I had too little time. It was a snap decision at best and I hoped I was not wrong.

I never had a chance to know, for before the food could be passed around, the contraption in the centre of the circle began a little ticking — no more than the ticking of a clock in an empty room, but at the first tick it gave they all jumped to their feet and stood watching it.

I jumped up, too, and stood watching with them, and I could sense that they'd forgotten I was with them. All of their attentions were fastened on that shining basketball.

As it ticked, the glow of it became a shining mistiness and the mistiness spread out, like a fog creeping up the land from a river bottom.

The mistiness enveloped us and out of that mistiness strange shapes began to form. At first they were wavering and unstable forms, but in a while they steadied and became more substantial, although never quite substantial; there was about them a touch of fairyland, of a shape and time that one might see, but that was forever out of reach.

And now the mistiness went away — or perhaps it still remained and we did not notice it, for with the creation of the forms it had supplied another world, of which we were observers, if not an actual part.

It appeared that we were standing on the terrace of what on Earth might have been called a villa. Beneath our feet were rough-hewn flagstones, with thin lines of grass growing in the cracks between the stones, and back of us rose rough walls of masonry. But the walls had a misty texture, as if they were some sort of simulated backdrop that one was not supposed to inspect too closely.

In front of us spread a city, an ugly city with no beauty in it. It was utilitarian in its every aspect, a geometric mass of stone, reared without imagination, with no architectural concept beyond the principle that one stone piled atop another would achieve a place of shelter. The city was the drab colour of dried mud and it spread as far as the eye could see, a disorderly mass of rectilinear structures thrust together, cheek by jowl, with no breathing space provided.

And yet there was an insubstantiality about it; never for an instant did that massive city become solid masonry. Nor were the flagstones underneath our feet an actual flagstone terrace.

Rather it was as though we floated, a fraction of an inch above the flagstones, never touching them.

We stood, it seemed, in the middle of a three-dimensional movie. And all around us the movie moved and went about its business and we knew that we were there, for we could see it on every side of us, but the actors in the movie were unaware of us and while we knew that we were there, there also was the knowledge that we were not a part of it, that we somehow stood aside from this magic world in which we were engulfed.

At first I'd seen only the city, but now I saw there was terror in the city. People were running madly in the streets, and from far off I could hear the screaming, the thin and frantic wailing of a lost and hopeless people.

Then the city and the screaming were blotted out in a searing flash of light, a blossoming whiteness that became so intense it suddenly went black.

The blackness covered us and we stood in a world that had nothing in it except the darkness and the cataract of thunder that poured out of that place where the flash of light had blossomed.

I took a short step forward, groping as I went. My hands met emptiness and the feeling flooded over me that I stood in an emptiness that stretched on forever, that what I'd known before had been nothing but illusion and the illusion now was gone, leaving me to grope eternally through black nothingness.

I took no other step, but stood stiff and straight, afraid to move a muscle, sensing in all irrationality that I stood upon a platform and might fall from it into a great emptiness which would have no bottom.

As I stood there the blackness turned to grey and through the greyness I could see the city, flattened and sharded, swept by tornadic winds, with gouts of flame and ash twisting in the monstrous whirlwind of destruction.

Above the city was a rolling cloud, as if a million thunderstorms had been rolled all into one. And from this maelstrom of fury came a deepthroated growling of death and fear and fate, a savage terrible sound that made one think of evil.

Around me I saw the others — the black-skinned people with the silver crests — standing transfixed and frozen, fascinated by the sight that lay before them, rigid as if with fear, but something more than just plain fear — superstitious fear, perhaps.

I stood there, rooted with them, and the growling died away. Thin wisps of smoke curled up above the rubble, and in the silence that came as the growling ceased I could hear the little cracklings and groanings and the tiny crashes as the splintered stone that still remained settled more firmly into place. But there was no sound of crying now, none of the thin, high screaming. There were no people and the only movements were the little ripples of settling rubble that lay beyond the bare and blackened and entirely featureless area where the light had blossomed.

The greyness faded and the city began to dim. Out in the centre of the picnic circle I could make out the glimmer of the lens-covered basketball.

There were no signs of my fellow picnickers; they had disappeared. And from the thinning greyness came another screaming — but a different kind of screaming, not the kind I'd heard from the city before the bomb had struck.

For now I knew that I had seen a city destroyed by a nuclear explosion — as one might have watched it on a TV set. And the TV set, if one could call it that, could have been nothing other than the basketball. By some strange magic mechanism it had invaded time and brought back from the past a moment of high crisis.

The greyness faded out and the night came back again, with the golden moon and the dust of stars and the silver slopes that curved to meet the quicksilver of the creek.

Down the farther slope I could see the scurrying figures, with their silver topknots gleaming in the moonlight, running wildly through the night and screaming in simulated terror. I stood looking after them and shivered, for there was something here, I knew, that had a sickness in it, a sickness of the mind, an illness of the soul.

Slowly I turned back to the basketball. It was, once again, just a thing of lenses. I walked over to it and knelt beside it and had a look at it. It was made of many lenses and in the interstices between the tilted lenses, I could catch glimpses of some sort of mechanism, although all the details of it were lost in the weakness of the moonlight.

I reached out a hand and touched it gingerly. It seemed fragile and I feared that I might break it, but I couldn't leave it here. It was something that I wanted and I told myself that if I could get it back to Earth, it would help to back up the story I had to tell.

I took off my jacket and spread it on the ground, and then carefully picked up the basketball, using both my hands to cradle it, and put it on the jacket. I gathered up the ends of the cloth and wrapped them all around the ball, then tied the sleeves together to help hold the folds in place.

I picked it up and tucked it securely underneath an arm, then got to my feet.

The hampers and the bottles lay scattered all about and it occurred to me that I should get away as quickly as I could, for these other people would be coming back to get the basketball and to gather up their picnic.

But there was as yet no sign of them. Listening intently, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint sounds of their screaming receding in the distance.

I turned and went down the hill and crossed the creek. Halfway up the other slope I met Tupper coming out to hunt me.

"Thought you had got lost," he said.

"I met a group of people. I had a picnic with them."

"They have funny topknots?"

"They had that," I said.

"Friends of mine," said Tupper. "They come here many times. They come here to be scared."

"Scared?"

"Sure. It's fun for them. They like being scared." I nodded to myself. So that was it, I thought. Like a bunch of kids creeping on a haunted house and peeking through the windows so that they might run, shrieking from imagined horror at imagined stirrings they'd seen inside the house. And doing it time after time, never getting tired of the good time that they had, gaining some strange pleasure from their very fright.

"They have more fun," said Tupper, "than anyone I know."

"You've seen them often?"

"Lots of times," said Tupper.

"You didn't tell me."

"I never had the time," said Tupper. "I never got around to."

"And they live close by?"

"No," said Tupper. "Very far away."

"But on this planet."

"Planet?" Tupper asked.

"On this world," I said.

"No. On another world. In another place. But that don't make no difference. They go everywhere for fun." So they went everywhere for fun, I thought. And everywhen, perhaps.

They were temporal ghouls, feeding on the past, getting their vicarious kicks out of catastrophe and disaster of an ancient age, seeking out those historic moments that were horrible and foul. Coming back again and yet again to one such scene that had a high appeal to their perverted minds.

A decadent race, I wondered, from some world conquered by the Flowers, free now to use the many gateways that led from world to world?

Conquered, in the light of what I knew, might not be the proper word.

For I had seen this night what had happened to this world. Not depopulated by the Flowers, but by the mad suicide of the humans who had been native to it. More than likely it had been an empty and a dead world for years before the Flowers had battered down the time-phase boundary that let them into it.

The skulls I had found had been those of the survivors — perhaps a relatively few survivors — who had managed to live on for a little time, but who had been foredoomed by the poisoned soil and air and water.

So the Flowers had not really conquered; they had merely taken over a world that had gone forfeit by the madness of its owners.

"How long ago," I asked, "did the Flowers come here?"

"What makes you think," asked Tupper, "that they weren't always here?"

"Nothing. Just a thought. They never talked to you about it?"

"I never asked," said Tupper.

Of course he wouldn't ask; he'd have no curiosity. He would be simply glad that he had found this place, where he had friends who talked with him and provided for his simple needs, where there were no humans to mock or pester him.

We came down to the camping place and I saw that the moon had moved far into the west. The fire was burning low and Tupper fed it with some sticks, then sat down beside it.

I sat down across from him and placed the wrapped basketball beside me.

"What you got there?" asked Tupper.

I unwrapped it for him.

He said, "It's the thing my friends had. You stole it from my friends."

"They ran away and left it. I want a look at it."

"You see other times with it," said Tupper.

"You know about this, Tupper?"

He nodded. "They show me many times — not often, I don't mean that, but many other times. Time not like we're in."

"You don't know how it works?"

"They told me," Tupper said, "but I didn't understand." He wiped his chin, but failed to do the job, so wiped it a second time.

They told me, he had said. So he could talk with them. He could talk with Flowers and with a race that conversed by music. There was no use, I knew, in asking him about it, because he couldn't tell me. Perhaps there was no one who could explain an ability of that sort — not to a human being.

For more than likely there'd be no common terms in which an explanation could be made.

The basketball glowed softly, lying on the jacket.

"Maybe," Tupper said, "we should go back to bed."

"In a little while," I said. Anytime I wanted, it would be no trouble going back to bed, for the ground was bed.

I put out a hand and touched the basketball.

A mechanism that extended back in time and recorded for the viewer the sight and sound of happenings that lay deep in the memory of the space-time continuum. It would have, I thought, very many uses. It would be an invaluable tool in historical research. It would make crime impossible, for it could dig out of the past the details of any crime. And it would be a terrible device if it fell into unscrupulous hands or became the property of a government.

I'd take it back to Millville, if I could take it back, if I could get back myself. It would help to support the story I had to tell, but after I had told the story and had offered it as proof; what would I do with it?

Lock it in a vault and destroy the combination? Take a sledge and smash it into smithereens? Turn it over to the scientists? What could one do with it"?

"You messed up your coat," said Tupper, "carrying that thing."

I said, "It wasn't much to start with." And then I remembered that envelope with the fifteen hundred dollars in it. It had been in the breast pocket of the jacket and I could have lost it in the wild running I had done or when I used the jacket to wrap up the time contraption.

What a damn fool thing to do, I thought. What a chance to take. I should have pinned it in my pocket or put it in my shoe or something of the sort. It wasn't every day a man got fifteen hundred dollars.

I bent over and put my hand into the pocket and the envelope was there and I felt a great relief as my fingers touched it. But almost immediately I knew there was something wrong.

My groping fingers told me the envelope was thin and it should have been bulging with thirty fifty-dollar bills.

I jerked it from my pocket and flipped up the flap. The envelope was empty.

I didn't have to ask. I didn't have to wonder. I knew just what had happened. That dirty, slobbering, finger-counting bum — I'd choke it out of him, I'd beat him to a pulp, I'd make him cough it up!

I was halfway up to nail him when he spoke to me and the voice that he spoke with was that of the TV glamour gal.

"This is Tupper speaking for the Flowers," the voice said. "And you sit back down and behave yourself."

"Don't give me that," I snarled. "You can't sneak out of this by pretending…"

"But this is the Flowers," the voice insisted sharply and even as it said the words, I saw that Tupper's face had taken on that wall-eyed, vacant look.

"But he took my roll," I said. "He sneaked it out of the envelope when I was asleep."

"Keep quiet," said the honeyed voice. "Just keep quiet and listen."

"Not until I get my fifteen hundred back."

"You'll get it back. You'll get much more than your fifteen hundred back."

"You can guarantee that?"

"We'll guarantee it." I sat down again.

"Look," I said, "you don't know what that money meant to me. It's part my fault, of course. I should have waited until the bank was open or I should have found a good safe place to hide it. But there was so much going on…"

"Don't worry for a moment," said the Flowers. "We'll get it back to you."

"OK," I said, "and does he have to use that voice?"

"What's the matter with the voice?"

"Oh, hell," I said, "go ahead and use it. I want to talk to you, maybe even argue with you, and it's unfair, but I'll remember who is speaking."

"We'll use another voice, then," said the Flowers, changing in the middle of the sentence to the voice of the businessman.

"Thanks very much," I said.

"You remember," said the Flowers, "the time we spoke to you on the phone and suggested that you might represent us?

"Certainly I remember. But as for representing you…"

"We need someone very badly. Someone we can trust."

"But you can't be certain I'm the man to trust."

"Yes, we can," they said. "Because we know you love us."

"Now, look here," I said. "I don't know what gives you that idea. I don't know if…"

"Your father found those of us who languished in your world. He took us home and cared for us. He protected us and tended us and he loved us and we flourished."

"Yes, I know all that."

"You're an extension of your father."

"Well, not necessarily. Not the way you mean."

"Yes," they insisted. "We have knowledge of your biology. We know about inherited characteristics. Like father, like son is a saying that you have." It was no use, I saw. You couldn't argue with them. From the logic of their race, from the half-assimilated, half-digested facts they had obtained in some manner in their contact with our Earth, they had it figured out. And it probably made good sense in their plant world, for an offspring plant would differ very little from the parents. It would be, I suspected, a fruitless battle to try to make them see that an assumption that was valid in their case need not extend its validity into the human race.

"All right," I said, "we'll let you have it your way. You're sure that you can trust me and probably you can. But in all fairness I must tell you I can't do the job."

"Can't?" they asked.

"You want me to represent you back on Earth. To be your ambassador. Your negotiator."

"That was the thought we had in mind."

"I have no training for a job of that sort. I'm not qualified. I wouldn't know how to do it. I wouldn't even know how to make a start."

"You have started," said the Flowers. "We are very pleased with the start you've made."

I stiffened and jerked upright. "The start I've made?" I asked.

"Why, yes, of course," they told me. "Surely you remember. You asked that Gerald Sherwood get in touch with someone. Someone, you stressed, in high authority."

"I wasn't representing you."

"But you could," they said. "We want someone to explain us."

"Let's be honest," I told them. "How can I explain you? I know scarcely anything about you."

"We would tell you anything you want to know."

"For openers," I said, "this is not your native world."

"No, it's not. We've advanced through many worlds."

"And the people — no, not the people, the intelligences — what happened to the intelligences of those other worlds?"

"We do not understand."

"When you get into a world, what do you do with the intelligence you find there?

"It is not often we find intelligence — not meaningful intelligence, not cultural intelligence. Cultural intelligence does not develop on all worlds. When it does, we co-operate. We work with it. That is, when we can."

"There are times when you can't?"

"Please do not misunderstand," they pleaded. "There has been a case or two where we could not contact a world's intelligence. It would not become aware of us. We were just another life form, another — what do you call it? Another weed, perhaps."

"What do you do, then?"

"What can we do?" they asked.

It was not, it seemed to me, an entirely honest answer. There were a lot of things that they could do.

"And you keep on going."

"Keep on going?"

"From world to world," I said.

"From one world to another."

"When do you intend to stop?

"We do not know," they said.

"What is your goal? What are you aiming at?"

"We do not know," they said.

"Now, just wait a minute. That's the second time you've said that. You must know…"

"Sir," they asked, "does your race have a goal — a conscious goal?"

"I guess we don't," I said.

"So that would make us even."

"I suppose it would."

"You have on your world things you call computers."

"Yes," I said, "but very recently."

"And the function of computers is the storage of data and the correlation of that data and making it available whenever it is needed."

"There still are a lot of problems. The retrieval of the data…"

"That is beside the point. What would you say is the goal of your computers?

"Our computers have no purpose. They are not alive."

"But if they were alive?"

"Well, in that case, I suppose the ultimate purpose would be the storage of a universal data and its correlation."

"That perhaps is right," they said. "We are living computers."

"Then there is no end for you. You'll keep on forever."

"We are not sure," they said.

"But…"

"Data," they told me, pontifically, "is the means to one end only arrival at the truth. Perhaps we do not need a universal data to arrive at truth."

"How do you know when you have arrived?"

"We will know," they said.

I gave up. We were getting nowhere. "So you want our Earth," I said.

"You state it awkwardly and unfairly. We do not want your Earth. We want to be let in, we want some living space, we want to work with you. You give us your knowledge and we will give you ours."

"We'd make quite a team," I said.

"We would, indeed," they said.

"And then?"

"What do you mean?" they asked.

"After we've swapped knowledge, what do we do then?"

"Why, we go on," they said. "Into other worlds. The two of us together."

"Seeking other cultures? After other knowledge?"

"That is right," they said.

They made it sound so simple. And it wasn't simple; it couldn't be that simple. There was nothing ever simple.

A man could talk with them for days and still be asking questions, getting no more than a bare outline of the situation.

"There is one thing you must realize," I said. "The people of my Earth will not accept you on blind faith alone. They must know what you expect of us and what we can expect of you. They must have some assurance that we can work together."

"We can help," they said, "in many different ways. We need not be as you see us now. We can turn ourselves into any kind of plant you need. We can provide a great reservoir of economic resources. We can be the old things that you have relied upon for years, but better than the old things ever were. We can be better foodstuff and better building material; better fibre. Name anything you need from plants and we can be that thing."

"You mean you'd let us eat you and saw you up for lumber and weave you into cloth? And you would not mind?"

They came very close to sighing. "How can we make you understand? Eat one of us and we still remain. Saw one of us and we still remain. The life of us is one life — you could never kill us all, never eat us all. Our life is in our brains and our nervous systems, in our roots and bulbs and tubers. We would not mind your eating us if we knew that we were helping."

"And we would not only be the old forms of economic plant life to which you are accustomed. We could be different kinds of grain, different kinds of trees — ones you have never heard of. We could adapt ourselves to any soils or climates. We could grow anywhere you wanted. You want medicines or drugs. Let your chemists tell us what you want and we'll be that for you. We'll be made-to-order plants."

"All this," I said, "and your knowledge, too."

"That is right," they said.

"And in return, what do we do?"

"You give your knowledge to us. You work with us to utilize all knowledge, the pooled knowledge that we have. You give us an expression we cannot give ourselves. We have knowledge, but knowledge in itself is worthless unless it can be used. We want it used, we want so badly to work with a race that can use what we have to offer, so that we can feel a sense of accomplishment that is denied us now. And, also, of course, we would hope that together we could develop a better way to open the time-phase boundaries into other worlds."

"And the time dome that you put over Millville — why did you do that?

"To gain your world's attention. To let you know that we were here and waiting."

"But you could have told some of your contacts and your contacts could have told the world. You probably did tell some of them. Stiffy Grant, for instance."

"Yes, Stiffy Grant. And there were others, too."

"They could have told the world."

"Who would have believed them? They would have been thought of as how do you say it — crackpots?"

"Yes, I know," I said. "No one would pay attention to anything Stiffy said. But surely there were others."

"Only certain types of minds," they told me, "can make contact with us. We can reach many minds, but they can't reach back to us. And to believe in us, to know us, you must reach back to us."

"You mean only the screwballs…"

"We're afraid that's what we mean," they said.

It made sense when you thought about it. The most successful contact they could find had been Tupper Tyler and while there was nothing wrong with Stuffy as a human being, he certainly was not what one would call a solid citizen.

I sat there for a moment, wondering why they'd contacted me and Gerald Sherwood. Although that was a little different. They'd contacted Sherwood because he was valuable to them; he could make the telephones for them and he could set up a system that would give them working capital. And me?

Because my father had taken care of them? I hoped to heaven that was all it was.

"So, OK," I said. "I guess I understand. How about the storm of seeds?"

"We planted a demonstration plot," they told me. "So your people could realize, by looking at it, how versatile we are." You never won, I thought. They had an answer for everything you asked.

I wondered if I ever had expected to get anywhere with them or really wanted to get anywhere with them. Maybe, subconsciously, all I wanted was to get back to Millville.

And maybe it was all Tupper. Maybe there weren't any Flowers. Maybe it was simply a big practical joke that Tupper had dreamed up in his so-called mind, sitting here ten years and dreaming up the joke and getting it rehearsed so he could pull it off.

But, I argued with myself it couldn't be just Tupper, for Tupper wasn't bright enough. His mind was not given to a concept of this sort. He couldn't dream it up and he couldn't pull it off. And besides, there was the matter of his being here and of my being here, and that was something a joke would not explain.

I came slowly to my feet and turned so that I faced the slope above the camp and there in the bright moonlight lay the darkness of the purple flowers. Tupper still sat where he had been sitting, but now he was hunched forward, almost doubled up, fallen fast asleep and snoring very softly.

The perfume seemed stronger now and the moonlight had taken on a trembling and there was a Presence out there somewhere on the slope. I strained my eyes to see it, and once I thought I saw it, but it faded out again, although I still knew that it was there.

There was a purpleness in the very night and the feel of an intelligence that waited for a word to come stalking down the hill to talk with me, as two friends might talk, with no need of an interpreter, to squat about the campfire and yarn the night away.

Ready? asked the Presence.

A word, I wondered, or simply something stirring in my brain — something born of the purpleness and moonlight?

"Yes," I said, "I'm ready. I will do the best I can." I bent and wrapped the time contraption in my jacket and tucked it underneath my arm and then went up the slope. I knew the Presence was up there, waiting for me, and there were quivers running up and down my spine.

It was fear, perhaps, but it didn't feel like fear.

I came up to where the Presence waited and I could not see it, but I knew that it had fallen into step with me and was walking there beside me.

"I am not afraid of you," I told it.

It didn't say a word. It just kept walking with me. We went across the ridge and down the slope into the dip where in another world the greenhouse and garden were.

A little to your left, said the thing that walked the night with me, and then go straight ahead.

I turned a little to my left and then went straight ahead.

A few more feet, it said.

I stopped and turned my head to face it and there was nothing there. If there had been anything, it was gone from there.

The moon was a golden gargoyle in the west. The world was lone and empty; the silvered slope had a hungry look. The blue-black sky was filled with many little eyes with a hard sharp glitter to them, a predatory glitter and the remoteness of uncaring.

Beyond the ridge a man of my own race drowsed beside a dying campfire, and it was all right for him, for he had a talent that I did not have, that I knew now I did not have — the talent for reaching out to grasp an alien hand (or paw or claw or pad) and being able in his twisted mind to translate that alien touch into a commonplace.

I shuddered at the gargoyle moon and took two steps forward and walked out of that hungry world straight into my garden.

15

Ragged clouds still raced across the sky, blotting out the moon. A faint lighting in the east gave notice of the dawn. The windows of my house were filled with lamplight and I knew that Gerald Sherwood and the rest of them were waiting there for me. And just to my left the greenhouse with the tree growing at its corner loomed ghostly against the rise of ground behind it.

I started to walk forward and fingers were scratching at my trouser leg. Startled, I looked down and saw that I had walked into a bush.

There had been no bush in the garden the last time I had seen it; there had been only the purple flowers. But I think I guessed what might have happened even before I stooped to have a look.

Squatting there, I squinted along the ground and in the first grey light of the coming day, I saw there were no flowers. Instead of a patch of flowers there was a patch of little bushes, perhaps a little larger, but not much larger than the flowers.

I hunkered there, with a coldness growing in me — for there was no explanation other than the fact that the bushes were the flowers, that somehow the Flowers had changed the flowers that once had grown there into little bushes. And, I wondered wildly, what could their purpose be?

Even here, I thought — even here they reach out for us. Even here they play their tricks on us and lay their traps for us. And they could do anything they wanted, I supposed, for if they did not own, at least they manipulated this corner of the Earth entrapped beneath the dome.

I put out a hand and felt along a branch and the branch had soft-swelling buds all along its length. Springtime buds, that in a day or so would be breaking into leaf. Springtime buds in the depth of summer!

I had believed in them, I thought. In that little space of time toward the very end, when Tupper had ceased his talking and had dozed before the fire and there had been something on the hillside that had spoken to me and had walked me home, I had believed in them.

Had there been something on that hillside? Had something walked with me? I sweated, thinking of it.

I felt the bulk of the wrapped time contraption underneath my arm, and that, I realized, was a talisman of the actuality of that other world. With that, I must believe.

They had told me, I remembered, that I'd get my money back — they had guaranteed it. And here I was, back home again, without my fifteen hundred.

I got to my feet and started for the house, then changed my mind. I turned around and went up the slope toward Doc Fabian's house. It might be a good idea, I told myself, to see what was going on outside the barrier. The people who were waiting at the house could wait a little longer.

I reached the top of the slope and turned around, looking toward the east. There, beyond the village, blazed a line of campfires and the lights of many cars running back and forth.

A searchlight swung a thin blue finger of light up into the sky, slowly sweeping back and forth. And at one spot that seemed a little closer was a greater blob of light. A great deal of activity seemed to be going on around it.

Watching it, I made out a steam shovel and great black mounds of earth piled up on either side of it. I could hear, faintly, the metallic clanging of the mighty scoop as it dumped a load and then reached down into the hole to take another bite. Trying, I told myself, to dig beneath the barrier.

A car came rattling down the street and turned into the driveway of the house behind me. Doc, I thought — Doc coming home after being routed out of bed on an early morning call. I walked across the lawn and around the house.

The car was parked on the concrete strip of driveway and Doc was getting out.

"Doc," I said, "it's Brad." He turned and peered at me.

"Oh," he said, and his voice sounded tired, "so you are back again. There are people waiting at the house, you know." Too tired to be surprised that I was back again; too all beat out to care.

He shuffled forward and I saw, quite suddenly, that Doc was old. Of course I had thought of him as old, but never before had he actually seemed old. Now I could see that he was — the slightly stooped shoulders, his feet barely lifting off the ground as he walked toward me, the loose, old-man hang of his trousers, the deep lines in his face.

"Floyd Caidwell," he said. "I was out to Floyd" s. He had a heart attack — a strong, tough man like him and he has a heart attack."

"How is he?"

"As well as I can manage. He should be in a hospital, getting complete rest. But I can't get him there. With that thing out there, I can't get him where he should be.

"I don't know, Brad. I just don't know what will happen to us. Mrs Jensen was supposed to go in this morning for surgery. Cancer. She'll die, anyhow, but surgery would give her months, maybe a year or two, of life. And there's no way to get her there. The little Hopkins girl has been going regularly to a specialist and he's been helping her a lot. Decker — perhaps you've heard of him. He's a top-notch man. We interned together." He stopped in front of me. "Can't you see," he said. "I can't help these people. I can do a little, but I can't do enough. I can't handle things like this — I can't do it all alone. Other times I could send them somewhere else, to someone who could help them. And now I can't do that. For the first time in my life, I can't help my people."

"You're taking it too hard," I said.

He looked at me with a beaten look, a tired and beaten look.

"I can't take it any other way," he said. "All these years, they've depended on me."

"How's Stuffy?" I asked.

"You have heard, of course." Doc snorted angrily. "The damn fool ran away."

"From the hospital?"

"Where else would he run from? Got dressed when their backs were turned and snuck away. He always was a sneaky old goat and he never had good sense. They're looking for him, but no one's found him yet."

"He'd head back here," I said.

"I suppose he would," said Doc. "What about this story I heard about; some telephone he had?"

I shook my head. "Hiram said he found one."

Doc peered sharply at me. "You don't know anything about it?"

"Not very much," I said.

"Nancy said you were in some other world or something. What kind of talk is that?"

"Did Nancy tell you that?"

He shook his head. "No, Gerald told me. He asked me what to do. He was afraid that if he mentioned it, he would stir up the village."

"And?"

"I told him not to. The folks are stirred up enough. He told them what you said about the flowers. He had to tell them something."

"Doc," I said, "it's a funny business. I don't rightly know myself. Let's not talk about it. Tell me what's going on. What are those fires out there?"

"Those are soldier fires," he told me. "There are state troops out there. They've got the town ringed in. Brad, it's crazier than hell. We can't get out and no one can get in, but they got troops out there. I don't know what they think they're doing. They evacuated everybody for ten miles outside the barrier and there are planes patrolling and they have some tanks. They tried to dynamite the barrier this morning and they didn't do a thing except blow a hole in Jake Fisher's pasture. They could have saved that dynamite."

"They're trying to dig under the barrier," I said.

"They've done a lot of things," said Doe. "They had some helicopters that flew above the town, then tried to come straight down. Figuring, I guess, that there are only walls out there, without any top to them. But they found there was a top. They fooled around all afternoon and they wrecked two ‘copters, but they found out, I guess, that it's a sort of dome. It curves all the way above us. A kind of bubble, you might say."

"And there are all those fool newspapermen out there. I tell you, Brad, there's an army of them. There isn't anything but Millville on the TV and radio, or in the papers either."

"It's big news," I said.

"Yes, I suppose so. But I'm worried, Brad. This village is getting ready to blow up. The people are on edge. They're scared and touchy. The whole damn place could go hysterical if you snapped your fingers." He came a little closer. "What are you planning, Brad?"

"I'm going down to my place. There are people down there. You want to come along?"

He shook his head. "No, I was down there for a while and then I got this call from Floyd. I'm all beat out. I'm going in to bed." He turned, and started to shuffle away and then he turned back.

"You be careful, boy," he warned. "There's a lot of talk about the flowers. They say if your father hadn't raised those flowers it never would have happened. They think it was a plot your father started and you are in on it."

"I'll watch my step," I said.

16

They were in the living-room. As soon as I came in the kitchen door, Hiram Martin saw me.

"There he is!" he bellowed, leaping up and charging out into the kitchen.

He stopped his rush and looked accusingly at me. "It took you long enough," he said.

I didn't answer him.

I put the time contraption, still wrapped in my jacket, on the kitchen table. A fold of cloth fell away from it and the many-angled lenses winked in the light from the ceiling fixture.

Hiram backed away a step. "What's that?" he asked.

"Something I brought back," I said. "A time machine, I guess." The coffee pot was on the stove and the burner was turned low. Used coffee cups covered the top of the kitchen sink. The sugar canister had its lid off and there was spilled sugar on the counter top.

The others in the living-room were crowding through the door and there were a lot of them, more than I'd expected.

Nancy came past Hiram and walked up to me. She put out a hand and laid it on my arm.

"You're all right," she said.

"It was a breeze," I told her.

She was beautiful, I thought — more beautiful than I'd remembered her, more beautiful than back in the high school days when I'd looked at her through a haze of stars. More beautiful, here close to me, than my memory had made her.

I moved closer to her and put an arm around her. For an instant she leaned her head against my shoulder, then straightened it again. She was warm and soft against me and I was sorry that it couldn't last, but all the rest of them were watching us and waiting.

"I made some phone calls," Gerald Sherwood said. "Senator Gibbs is coming out to see you. He'll have someone from the State Department. On short notice, Brad, that was the best I could do."

"It'll do," I said.

For, standing in my kitchen once again, with Nancy close beside me, with the lamplight soft in the coming dawn, with the old familiar things all around, that other world had retreated into the background and had taken on a softness that half obscured its threat — if it were a threat.

"What I want to know," Tom Preston blurted, "is what about this stuff that Gerald tells us about your father's flowers."

"Yes," said Mayor Higgy Morris, "what have they to do with it?" Hiram didn't say anything, but he sneered at me.

"Gentlemen," said lawyer Nichols, "this is not the way to go about it. You must be fair about it. Keep the questions until later. Let Brad tell us what he knows."

Joe Evans said, "Anything he has to say will be more than we know now."

"OK," said Higgy, "we'll be glad to listen."

"But first," said Hiram, "I want to know about that thing on the table. It might be dangerous. It might be a bomb."

"I don't know what it is," I said. "It has to do with time. It can handle time. Maybe you would call it a time camera, some sort of time machine." Tom Preston snorted and Hiram sneered again.

Father Flanagan, the town's one Catholic priest, had been standing quietly in the doorway, side by side with Pastor Silas Middleton, from the church across the street. Now the old priest spoke quietly, so quietly that one could barely hear him, his voice one with the lamplight and the dawn. "I would be the last," he said, "to hold that time might be manipulated or that flowers would have anything to do with what has happened here. These are propositions that go against the grain of my every understanding. But unlike some of the rest of you, I'm willing to listen before I reach a judgement."

"I'll try to tell you," I said. "I'll try to tell you just the way it happened."

"Alf Peterson has been trying to call you," Nancy said. "He's phoned a dozen times."

"Did he leave a number?"

"Yes, I have it here."

"That can wait," said Higgy. "We want to hear this story."

"Perhaps," suggested Nancy's father, "you'd better tell us right away. Let's all go in the living-room where we'll be comfortable." We all went into the living-room and sat down.

"Now, my boy," said Higgy, companionably, "go ahead and spill it." I could have strangled him. When I looked at him, I imagine that he knew exactly how I felt.

"We'll keep quiet," he said. "We'll hear you out." I waited until they all were quiet and then I said, "I'll have to start with yesterday morning when I came home, after my car had been wrecked, and found Tupper Tyler sitting in the swing."

Higgy leaped to his feet. "But that's crazy?" he shouted. "Tupper has been lost for years."

Hiram jumped up, too. "You made fun of me," he bellowed, "when I told you Tom had talked to Tupper."

"I lied to you," I said. "I had to lie to you. I didn't know what was going on and you were on the prod."

The Reverend Silas Middleton asked, "Brad, you admit you lied?"

"Yes, of course I do. That big ape had me pinned against the wall…"

"If you lied once, you'll lie again," Tom Preston shrilled. "How can we believe anything you tell us?"

"Tom," I said, "I don't give a damn if you believe me or not." They all sat down and sat there looking at me and I knew that I had been childish, but they burned me up.

"I would suggest," said Father Flanagan, "that we should start over and all of us make a heroic effort to behave ourselves."

"Yes, please," said Higgy, heavily, "and everyone shut up." I looked around and no one said a word. Gerald Sherwood nodded gravely at me.

I took a deep breath and began.

"Maybe," I said, "I should go even farther back than that — to the time Tom Preston sent Ed Adler around to take out my telephone."

"You were three months in arrears," yelped Preston. "You hadn't even…"

"Tom," said lawyer Nichols, sharply.

Tom settled back into his chair and began to sulk.

I went ahead and told everything — about Stiffy Grant and the telephone I'd found in my office and about the story Alf Peterson had told me and then how I'd gone out to Stiffy's shack. I told them everything except about Gerald Sherwood and how he had made the phones. I somehow had the feeling that I had no right to tell that part of it.

I asked them, "Are there any questions?"

"There are a lot of them," said lawyer Nichols, "but go ahead and finish. Is that all right with the rest of you?"

Higgy Morris grunted. "It's all right with me," he said.

"It's not all right with me," said Preston, nastily. "Gerald told us that Nancy talked with Brad. He never told us how. She used one of them phones, of course."

"My phone," said Sherwood. "I've had one of them for years."

Higgy said, "You never told me, Gerald."

"It didn't occur to me," said Sherwood, curtly.

"It seems to me," said Preston, "there has been a hell of a lot going on that we never knew about."

"That," said Father Flanagan, "is true beyond all question. But I have the impression that this young man has no more than started on his story." So I went ahead. I told it as truthfully as I could and in all the detail I could recall.

Finally I was finished and they sat not moving, stunned perhaps, and shocked, and maybe not believing it entirely, but believing some of it.

Father Flanagan stirred uneasily. "Young man," he asked, "you are absolutely sure this is not hallucination?"

"I brought back the time contraption. That's not hallucination."

"We must agree, I think," said Nichols, "that there are strange things going on. The story Brad has told us is no stranger than the barrier."

"There isn't anyone," yelled Preston, "who can work with time. Why time is — well, it" s…"

"That's exactly it," said Sherwood. "No one knows anything of time. And it's not the only thing of which we're wholly ignorant. There is gravitation. There is no one, absolutely no one, who can tell you what gravitation is."

"I don't believe a word of it," said Hiram, flatly. "He's been hiding out somewhere…"

Joe Evans said, "We combed the town. There was no place be could hide."

"Actually," said Father Flanagan, "it doesn't matter if we believe all this or not. The important thing is whether the people who are coming out from Washington believe it." Higgy pulled himself straighter in his chair. He turned to Sherwood.

"You said Gibbs was coming out. Bringing others with him."

Sherwood nodded. "A man from the State Department."

"What exactly did Gibbs say?"

"He said he'd be right out. He said the talk with Brad could only be preliminary. Then he'd go back and report. He said it might not be simply a national problem. It might be international. Our government might have to confer with other governments. He wanted to know more about it. All I could tell him was that a man here in the village had some vital information."

"They'll be out at the edge of the barrier, waiting for us. The east road, I presume."

"I suppose so," Sherwood said. "We didn't go into it. He'll phone me from some place outside the barrier when he arrives."

"As a matter of fact," said Higgy, lowering his voice as if he were speaking confidentially, "if we can get out of this without being hurt, it'll be the best thing that ever happened to us. No other town in all of history has gotten the kind of publicity we're getting now. Why, for years there'll be tourists coming just to look at us, just to say they've been here."

"It seems to me," said Father Flanagan, "that if this should all be true, there are far greater things involved than whether or not our town can attract some tourists."

"Yes," said Silas Middleton. "It means we are facing an alien form of life. How we handle it may mean the difference between life and death. Not for us alone, I mean, the people in this village. But the life or death of the human race."

"Now, see here," piped Preston, "you can't mean that a bunch of flowers…"

"You damn fool," said Sherwood, "it's not just a bunch of flowers."

Joe Evans said, "That's right. Not just a bunch of flowers. But an entirely different form of life. Not an animal life, but a plant life — a plant life that is intelligent."

"And a life," I said, "that has stored away the knowledge of God knows how many other races. They'll know things we've never even thought about."

"I don't see," said Higgy, doggedly, "what we've got to be afraid of. There never was a time that we couldn't beat a bunch of weeds. We can use sprays and…"

"If we want to kill them off," I said, "I don't think it's quite as easy as you try to make it. But putting that aside for the moment, do we want to kill them off?"

"You mean," yelled Higgy, "let them come in and take over?"

"Not take over. Come in and co-operate with us."

"But the barrier!" yelled Hiram. "Everyone forgets about the barrier!"

"No one has forgotten about it," said Nichols. "The barrier is no more than a part of the entire problem. Let's solve the problem and we can take care of the barrier as well."

"My God," groaned Preston, "you all are talking as if you believe every word of it."

"That isn't it," said Silas Middleton. "But we have to use what Brad has told us as a working hypothesis. I don't say that what he has told us is absolutely right. He may have misinterpreted, he may simply be mistaken in certain areas. But at the moment it's the only solid information we have to work with."

"I don't believe a word of it," said Hiram, flatly. "There's a dirty plot afoot and I…" The telephone rang, its signal blasting through the room.

Sherwood answered it.

"It's for you," he told me. "It's Alf again." I went across the room and took the receiver Sherwood held out to me.

"Hello, Alf," I said.

"I thought," said Alf, "you were going to call me back. In an hour, you said."

"I got involved," I told him.

"They moved me out," he said. "They evacuated everybody. I'm in a motel just east of Coon Valley. I'm going to move over to Elmore — the motel here is pretty bad — but before I did, I wanted to get in touch with you."

"I'm glad you did," I said. "There are some things I want to ask you. About that project down in Greenbriar."

"Sure. What about the project?"

"What kind of problems did you have to solve?"

"Many different kinds."

"Any of them have to do with plants?"

"Plants?"

"You know. Flowers, weeds, vegetables."

"I see. Let me think. Yes, I guess there were a few."

"What kind?"

"Well, there was one: could a plant be intelligent?"

"And your conclusion?"

"Now, look here, Brad!"

"This is important, Alf."

"Oh, all right. The only conclusion I could reach was that it was impossible. A plant would have no motive. There's no reason a plant should be intelligent. Even if it could be, there'd be no advantage to it. It couldn't use intelligence or knowledge. It would have no way in which it could apply them. And its structure is wrong. It would have to develop certain senses it doesn't have, would have to increase its awareness of its world. It would have to develop a brain for data storage and a thinking mechanism. It was easy, Brad, once you thought about it. A plant wouldn't even try to be intelligent. It took me a while to get the reasons sorted out, but they made good solid sense."

"And that was all?"

"No, there was another one. How to develop a foolproof method of eradicating a noxious weed, bearing in mind that the weed has high adaptability and would be able to develop immunity to any sort of threat to its existence in a relatively short length of time."

"There isn't any possibility," I guessed.

"There is," said A1f "just a possibility. But not too good a one."

"And that?"

"Radiation. But you couldn't count on it as foolproof if the plant really had high adaptability."

"So there's no way to eradicate a thoroughly determined plant?"

"I'd say none at all — none in the power of man. What's this all about, Brad?"

"We may have a situation just like that," I said. Quickly I told him something of the Flowers.

He whistled. "You think you have this straight?"

"I can't be certain, Alf, I think so, but I can't be certain. That is, I know the Flowers are there, but…"

"There was another question. It ties right in with this. It wanted to know how you'd go about contacting and establishing relations with an alien life. You think the project…?"

"No question," I said. "It was run by the same people who ran the telephones."

"We figured that before. When we talked after the barrier went up."

"Alf; what about that question? About contact with an alien?"

He laughed, a bit uneasily. "There are a million answers. The method would depend upon the kind of alien. And there'd always be some danger."

"That's all you can think of? All the questions, I mean?"

"I can't think of any more. Tell me more of what's happened there."

"I'd like to, but I can't. I have a group of people here. You're going to Elmore now?"

"Yeah. I'll call you when I get there. Will you be around?"

"I can't go anywhere," I said.

There had been no talk among the others while I'd been on the phone.

They were, all listening. But as soon as I hung up, Higgy straightened up importantly.

"I figure," he said, "that maybe we should be getting ready to go out and meet the senator. I think most probably I should appoint a welcoming committee. The people in this room, of course, and maybe half a dozen others. Doc Fabian, and maybe…"

"Mayor," said Sherwood, interrupting him, "I think someone should point out that this is not a civic affair or a social visit. This is something somewhat more important and entirely unofficial. Brad is the one the senator must see. He is the only one who has pertinent information and…"

"But," Higgy protested, "all I was doing…"

"We know what you were doing," Sherwood told him. "What I am pointing out is that if Brad wants a committee to go along with him, he is the one who should get it up."

"But my official duty," Higgy bleated.

"In a matter such as this," said Sherwood, flatly, "you have no official duty."

"Gerald," said the mayor, "I've tried to think the best of you. I've tried to tell myself…"

"Mayor," said Preston, grimly, "there's no use of pussy-footing. We might as well say it out. There's something going on, some sort of plot afoot. Brad is part of it and Stiffy's part of it and…"

"And," said Sherwood, "if you insist upon a plot, I'm part of it as well. I made the telephones."

Higgy gulped. "You did what?" he asked.

"I made the telephones. I manufactured them."

"So you knew all about it all along."

Sherwood shook his head. "I didn't know anything at all. I just made the phones."

Higgy sat back weakly. He clasped and unclasped his hands, staring down at them.

"I don't know," he said. "I just don't understand." But I am sure he did. Now he understood, for the first time, that this was no mere unusual natural happening which would, in time, quietly pass away and leave Millville a tourist attraction that each year would bring the curious into town by the thousands. For the first time, I am sure, Mayor Higgy Morris realized that Millville and the entire world was facing a problem that it would take more than good luck and the Chamber of Commerce to resolve.

"There is one thing," I sad.

"What's that?" asked Higgy.

"I want my phone. The one that was in my office. The phone, you remember, that hasn't any dial." The mayor looked at Hiram.

"No, I won't," said Hiram. "I won't give it back to him. He's done harm enough already."

"Hiram," said the mayor.

"Oh, all right," said Hiram. "I hope he chokes on it."

"It appears to me," said Father Flanagan, "that we are all acting quite unreasonably. I would suggest we might take this entire matter up and discuss it point by point, and in that way…" A ticking interrupted him, a loud and ominous ticking that beat a measure, as of doom, through the entire house. And as I heard it, I knew that the ticking had been going on for quite some time, but very softly, and that I'd been hearing it and vaguely wondering what it was.

But now, from one tick to another, it had grown loud and hard, and even as we listened to it, half hypnotized by the terror of it, the tick became a hum and the hum a roar of power.

We all leaped to out feet, startled now, and I saw that the kitchen walls were flashing, as if someone were turning on and off a light of intensive brilliance, a pulsing glow that filled the room with a flood of light, then shut off, then filled it once again.

"I knew it!" Hiram roared, charging for the kitchen. "I knew it when I saw it. I knew it was dangerous!" I ran after him.

"Look out!" I yelled. "Keep away from it!" It was the time contraption. It had floated off the table and was hovering in mid-air, with a pulse of tremendous power running through it in a regular beat, while from it came the roar of cascading energy. Below it, lying on the table, was my crumpled jacket.

I grabbed hold of Hiram's arm and tried to haul him back, but he jerked away and was hauling his pistol from its holster.

With a flash of light, the time contraption moved, rising swiftly toward the ceiling.

"No!" I cried, for I was afraid that if it ever hit the ceiling, the fragile lenses would be smashed.

Then it hit the ceiling and it did not break. Without slackening its pace, it bored straight through the ceiling. I stood gaping at the neat round hole it made.

I heard the stamp of feet behind me and the banging of a door and when I turned around the room was empty, except for Nancy standing by the fireplace.

"Come on," I yelled at her running for the door that led onto the porch.

The rest of them were grouped outside, between the porch and hedge, staring up into the sky, where a light winked off and on, going very rapidly.

I glanced at the roof and saw the hole the thing had made, edged by the ragged, broken shingles that had been displaced when the machine broke through.

"There it goes," said Gerald Sherwood, standing at my side. "I wonder what it is."

"I don't know," I said. "They slipped one over on me. They played me for a fool." I was shaken up and angry, and considerably ashamed. They had used me back there in that other world. They had fooled me into carrying back to my own world something they couldn't get there by themselves.

There was no way of knowing what it was meant to do, although in a little while, I feared, we would all find out.

Hiram turned to me in disgust and anger. "You've done it now," he blurted. "Don't tell us you didn't mean to do it, don't pretend you don't know what it is. Whatever may be out there, you're hand in glove with them." I didn't try to answer him. There was no way I could.

Hiram took a step toward me.

"Cut it out!" cried Higgy. "Don't lay a hand on him."

"We ought to shake it out of him," yelled Hiram. "If we found out what it was, then we might be able…"

"I said cut it out," said Higgy.

"I've had about enough of you," I said to Hiram. "I've had enough of you all your whole damn life. All I want from you is that phone of mine. And I want it fast."

"Why, you little squirt?" Hiram bellowed, and he took another step toward me.

Higgy hauled off and kicked him in the shin. "God damn it," Higgy said, "I said for you to stop it." Hiram jigged on one leg, lifting up the other so he could rub his shin.

"Mayor," he complained, "you shouldn't have done that."

"Go and get him his phone," Tom Preston said. "Let him have it back.

"Then he can call them up and report how good a job he did." I wanted to clobber all three of them, especially Hiram and Tom Preston. But, of course, I knew I couldn't. Hiram had beaten me often enough when we were kids for me to know I couldn't.

Higgy grabbed hold of Hiram and tugged him toward the gate. Hiram limped a little as the mayor led him off. Tom Preston held the gate for them and then the three of them went stalking up the street, never looking back.

And now I noticed that the rest had left as well — all of them except Father Flanagan and Gerald Sherwood, and Nancy, standing on the porch. The priest was standing to one side and when I looked at him, he made an apologetic gesture.

"Don't blame them," he said, "for leaving. They were embarrassed and uneasy. They took their chance to get away."

"And you?" I asked. "You're not embarrassed?"

"Why, not at all," he told me. "Although I am a bit uneasy. The whole thing, I don't mind telling you, has a whiff of heresy about it."

"Next," I said, bitterly, "you'll be telling me you think I told the truth."

"I had my doubts," he said, "and I'm not entirely rid of them. But that hole in your roof is a powerful argument against wholesale scepticism. And I do not hold with the modern cynicism that seems so fashionable. There is still, I think, much room in the world today for a dash of mysticism." I could have told him it wasn't mysticism, that the other world had been a solid, factual world, that the stars and sun and moon had shown there, that I had walked its soil and drunk its water, that I had breathed its air and that even now I had its dirt beneath my fingernails from having dug a human skull from the slope above the stream.

"The others will be back," said Father Flanagan. "They had to get away for a little time to think, to get a chance to digest some of this evidence. It was too much to handle in one gulp. They will be back, and so will I, but at the moment I have a mass to think of." A gang of boys came running down the street. They stopped a half a block away and pointed at the roof. They milled around and pushed one another playfully and hollered.

The first edge of the sun had come above the horizon and the trees were the burnished green of summer.

I gestured at the boys. "The word has gotten out," I said.

"In another thirty minutes we'll have everyone in town out in the street, gawking at the roof."

17

The crowd outside had grown.

No one was doing anything. They just stood there and looked gaping at the hole in the roof, and talking quietly among themselves — not screaming, not shouting, but talking, as if they knew something else was about to happen and were passing away the time, waiting for it to happen. Sherwood kept pacing up and down the floor.

"Gibbs should be phoning soon," he said. "I don't know what has happened to him. He should have called by now."

"Maybe," Nancy said, "he got held up — maybe his plane was late. Maybe there was trouble on the road." I stood at the window watching the crowd. I knew almost all of them.

They were friends and neighbours and there was not a thing to stop them, if they wanted to, from coming up the walk and knocking at the door and coming in to see me.

But now, instead, they stood outside and watched and waited. It was, I thought, as if the house were a cage and I was some new, strange animal from some far-off land.

Twenty-four hours ago I had been another villager, a man who had lived and grown up with those people watching in the street. But now I was a freak, an oddity — perhaps, in the minds of some of them, a sinister figure that threatened, if not their lives, their comfort and their peace of mind.

For this village could never be the same again — and perhaps the world could never be the same again. For even if the barrier now should disappear and the Flowers withdraw their attention from our Earth, we still would have been shaken from the comfortable little rut which assumed that life as we knew it was the only kind of life and that our road of knowledge was the only one that was broad and straight and paved.

There had been ogres in the past, but finally the ogres had been banished. The trolls and ghouls and imps and all the others of the tribe had been pushed out of our lives, for they could survive only on the misty shores of ignorance and in the land of superstition. Now, I thought, we'd know an ignorance again (but a different kind of ignorance) and superstition; too, for superstition fed upon the lack of knowledge. With this hint of another world — even if its denizens should decide not to flaunt themselves, even if we should find a way to stop them — the trolls and ghouls and goblins would be back with us again. There'd be chimney corner gossip of this other place and a frantic, desperate search to rationalize the implied horror of its vast and unknown reaches, and out of this very search would rise a horror greater than any true other world could hold. We'd be afraid, as we had been before, of the darkness that lay beyond the little circle of our campfire.

There were more people in the Street; they kept coming all the time.

There was Pappy Andrews, cracking his cane upon the sidewalk, and Grandma Jones, with her sunbonnet socked upon her head, and Charley Hutton, who owned the Happy Hollow tavern. Bill Donovan, the garbage man, was in the front ranks of the crowd, but I didn't see his wife, and I wondered if Myrt and Jake had come to get the kids. And just as big and mouthy as if he'd lived in Millville all his life and known these folks from babyhood, was Gabe Thomas, the trucker who, after me, had been the first man to find out about the barrier.

Someone stirred beside me and I saw that it was Nancy. I knew now that she had been standing there for some little time.

"Look at them," I said. "It's a holiday for them. Any minute now the parade will be along."

"They're just ordinary people," Nancy said. "You can't expect too much of them. Brad, I'm afraid you do expect too much of them. You even expected that the men who were here would take what you told them at face value, immediately and unquestioningly."

"Your father did," I said.

"Father's different. He's not an ordinary man. And, besides, he had some prior knowledge, he had a little warning. He had one of those telephones. He knew a little bit about it."

"Some," I said. "Not much."

"I haven't talked with him. There's been no chance for us to talk. And I couldn't ask him in front of all those people. But I know that he's involved. Is it dangerous, Brad?"

"I don't think so. Not from out there or back there or wherever that other world may be. No danger from the alien world — not now, not yet. Any danger that we have to face lies in this world of ours. We have a decision we must make and it has to be the right one."

"How can we tell," she "asked, "what is the right decision? We have no precedent." And that was it, of course, I thought. There was no way in which a decision — any decision — could be justified.

There was a shouting from outside and I moved closer to the window to see farther up the street. Striding down the centre of it came Hiram Martin and in one hand he carried a cordless telephone.

Nancy caught sight of him and said, "He's bringing back our phone. Funny, I never thought he would." It was Hiram shouting and he was shouting in a chant, a deliberate, mocking chant.

"All right, come out and get your phone. Come on out and get your God damn phone." Nancy caught her breath and I brushed past her to the door. I jerked it open and stepped out on the porch.

Hiram reached the gate and he quit his chanting. The two of us stood there, watching one another. The crowd was getting noisy and surging closer.

Then Hiram raised his arm, with the phone held above his head.

"All right," he yelled, "here's your phone, you dirty…" Whatever else he said was drowned out by the howling of the crowd.

Then Hiram threw the phone. It was an unhandy thing to throw and the throw was not too good. The receiver flew out to one side, with its trailing cord looping in the air behind it. When the cord jerked taut, the flying phone skidded out of its trajectory and came crashing to the concrete walk, falling about halfway between the gate and porch. Pieces of shattered plastic sprayed across the lawn.

Scarcely aware that I was doing it, acting not by any thought or consideration, but on pure emotion, I came down off the porch and headed for the gate. Hiram backed away to give me room and I came charging through the gate and stood facing him.

I'd had enough of Hiram Martin. I was filled up to here with him. He'd been in my hair for the last two days and I was sick to death of him. There was just one thought — to tear the man apart, to pound him to a pulp, to make certain he'd never sneer at me again, never mock me, never try again to bully me by the sole virtue of sheer size.

I was back in the days of childhood — seeing through the stubborn and red-shot veil of hatred that I had known then, hating this man I knew would lick me, as he had many times before, but ready, willing, anxious to inflict whatever hurt I could while he was licking me.

Someone bawled, "Give "em room!" Then I was charging at him and he hit me. He didn't have the time or room to take much of a swing at me, but his fist caught me on the side of the head and it staggered me and hurt. He hit me again almost immediately, but this one also was a glancing blow and didn't hurt at all — and this time I connected. I got my left into his belly just above the belt and when he doubled over I caught him in the mouth and felt the smart of bruised, cut knuckles as they smashed against his teeth. I was swinging again when a fist came out of nowhere and slammed into my head and my head exploded into a pinwheel of screaming stars. I knew that I was down, for I could feel the hardness of the street against my knees, but I struggled up and my vision cleared. I couldn't feel my legs. I seemed to be moving and bobbing in the air with nothing under me. I saw Hiram's face just a foot or so away and his mouth was a gash of red and there was blood on his shirt. So I hit his mouth again — not very hard, perhaps, for there wasn't much steam left behind my punches. But he grunted and he ducked away and I came boring in.

And that was when he hit me for keeps.

I felt myself going down, falling backwards and it seemed that it took a long time for me to fall. Then I hit and the street was harder than I thought it would be and hitting the street hurt me more than the punch that put me there.

I groped around, trying to get my hands in position to hoist myself erect, although I wondered vaguely why I bothered. For if I got up, Hiram would belt me another one and I'd be back down again. But I knew I had to get up, that I had to get up each time I was able. For that was the kind of game Hiram and I had always played. He knocked me down each time I got up and I kept on getting up until I couldn't any more and I never cried for quarter and I never admitted I was licked. And if, for the rest of my life, I could keep on doing that, then I'd be the one who won, not Hiram.

But I wasn't doing so well. I wasn't getting up. Maybe, I thought, this is the time I don't get up.

I still kept pawing with my hands, trying to lift myself and that's how I got the rock. Some kid, perhaps, had thrown it, maybe days before — maybe at a bird, maybe at a dog, maybe just for the fun of throwing rocks. And it had landed in the street and stayed there and now the fingers of my right hand found it and closed around it and it fitted comfortably into my palm, for it was exactly fist size.

A hand, a great meaty paw of a hand, came down from above and grabbed my shirt front and hauled me to my feet.

"So," screamed a voice, "assault an officer, would you!" His face swam in front of me, a red-smeared face twisted with his hatred, heavy with its meanness, gloating at the physical power he held over me.

I could feel my legs again and the face came clearer and the clot of faces in the background — the faces of the crowd, pressing close to be in at the kill.

One did not give up, I told myself, remembering back to all those other times I had not given up. As long as one was on his feet, he fought, and even when he was down and could not get up, he did not admit defeat.

Both of his hands were clutching at my shirt front, his face pushed close toward mine, I clenched my fist and my fingers closed hard around the rock and then I swung. I swung with everything I had, putting every ounce of strength I could muster behind the swinging fist swinging from the waist in a jolting upward jab, and I caught him on the chin.

His head snapped back, pivoting on the thick, bull neck. He staggered and his fingers loosened and he crumpled, sprawling in the street.

I stepped back a pace and stood looking down at him and everything was clearer now and. I knew I had a body, a bruised and beaten body that ached, it seemed, in every joint and muscle. But that didn't matter; it didn't mean a thing — for the first time in my life I'd knocked Hiram Martin down. I'd used a rock to do it and I didn't give a damn. I hadn't meant to pick up that rock — I'd just found it and closed my fingers on it. I had not planned to use it, but now that I had it made no difference to me. If I'd had time to plan, I'd probably have planned to use it.

Someone leaped out from the crowd toward me and I saw it was Tom Preston.

"You going to let him get away with it?" Preston was screaming at the crowd. "He hit an officer! He hit him with a rock! He picked up a rock!" Another man pushed out of the crowd and grabbed Preston by the shoulder, lifting him and setting him back in the forefront of the crowd.

"You keep out of this," Gabe Thomas said.

"But he used a rock!" screamed Preston.

"He should have used a club," said Gabe. "He should have beat his brains out." Hiram was stirring, sitting up. His hand reached for his gun.

"Touch that gun," I told him. "Just one finger on it and, so help me, I'll kill you." Hiram stared at me. I must have been a sight. He'd worked me over good and he'd mussed me up a lot and still I'd knocked him down and was standing on my feet.

"He hit you with a rock," yelped Preston. "He hit…" Gabe reached out and his fingers fitted neatly around Preston's skinny throat. He squeezed and Preston's mouth flapped open and his tongue came out.

"You keep out of it," said Gabe.

"But Hiram's an officer of the law," protested Chancy Hutton. "Brad shouldn't have hit an officer."

"Friend," Gabe told the tavern owner, "he's a damn poor officer. No officer worth his salt goes picking fights with people." I'd never taken my eyes off Hiram and he'd been watching me, but now he flicked his eyes to one side and his hand dropped to the ground.

And in that moment I knew that I had won — not because I was the stronger, not because I fought the better (for I wasn't and I hadn't) but because Hiram was a coward, because he had no guts, because, once hurt, he didn't have the courage to chance being hurt again. And I knew, too, that I need not fear the gun he carried, for Hiram Martin didn't have it in him to face another man and kill him.

Hiram got slowly to his feet and stood there for a moment. His hand came up and felt his jaw. Then he turned his back and walked away. The crowd, watching silently, parted to make a path for him.

I stared at his retreating back and a fierce, bloodthirsty satisfaction rose up inside of me. After more than twenty years, I'd beaten this childhood enemy. But, I told myself I had not beat him fair — I'd had to play dirty to triumph over him. But I found it made no difference. Dirty fight or fair, I had finally licked him.

The crowd moved slowly back. No one spoke to me. No one spoke to anyone.

"I guess," said Gabe, "there are no other takers. If there were, they'd have to fight me, too."

"Thanks, Gabe," I said.

"Thanks, hell," he said. "I didn't do a thing." I opened up my fist and the rock dropped to the street. In the silence, it made a terrible clatter.

Gabe hauled a huge red handkerchief out of his rear pocket and stepped over to me. He put a hand back of my head to hold it steady and began to wipe my face.

"In a month or so," he said, by way of comfort, "you'll look all right again."

"Hey, Brad," yelled someone, "who's your friend?" I couldn't see who it was who yelled. There were so many people.

"Mister," yelled someone else, "be sure you wipe his nose."

"Go on!" roared Gabe. "Go on! Any of you wisecrackers walk out here in plain sight and I'll dust the street with you." Grandma Jones said in a loud voice, so that Pappy Andrews could hear.

"He's the trucker fellow that smashed Brad's car. Appears to me if Brad has to fight someone, he should be fighting him."

"Big mouth," yelled back Pappy Andrews. "He's got an awful big mouth." I saw Nancy standing by the gate and she had the same look on her face that she'd had when we were kids and I had fought Hiram Martin then. She was disgusted with me. She had never held with fighting; she thought that it was vulgar.

The front door burst open and Gerald Sherwood came running down the walk. He rushed over and grabbed me by the arm.

"Come on," he shouted. "The senator called. He's out there waiting for you, on the east end of the road."

18

Four of them were waiting for me on the pavement just beyond the barrier. A short distance down the road several cars were parked. A number of state troopers were scattered about in little groups. Half a mile or so to the north the steam shovel was still digging.

I felt foolish walking down the road toward them while they waited for me. I knew that I must look as if the wrath of God had hit me.

My shirt was torn and the left side of my face felt as though someone had sandpapered it. I had deep gashes on the knuckles of my right hand where I'd smacked Hiram in the teeth and my left eye felt as if it were starting to puff up.

Someone had cleared away the windrow of uprooted vegetation for several rods on either side of the road, but except for that, the windrow was still there.

As I got close, I recognized the senator. I had never met the man, but I'd seen his pictures in the papers. He was stocky and well-built and his hair was white and he never wore a hat. He was dressed in a double-breasted suit and he had a bright blue tie with white polka dots.

One of the others was a military man. He wore stars on his shoulders.

Another was a little fellow with patent leather hair and a tight, cold face.

The fourth man was somewhat undersized and chubby and had eyes of the brightest china blue I had ever seen.

I walked until I was three feet or so away from them and it was not until then that I felt the first slight pressure of the barrier. I backed up a step and looked at the senator.

"You must be Senator Gibbs," I said. "I'm Bradshaw Carter. I'm the one Sherwood talked with you about."

"Glad to meet you, Mr Carter," said the senator. "I had expected that Gerald would be with you."

"I wanted him to come," I said, "but he felt he shouldn't. There was a conflict of opinion in the village. The mayor wanted to appoint a committee and Sherwood opposed it rather violently."

The senator nodded. "I see," be said. "So you're the only one we'll see."

"If you want others…"

"Oh, not at all," he said. "You are the man with the information."

"Yes, I am," I said.

"Excuse me," said the senator. "Mr Carter, General Walter Billings."

"Hello, General," I said.

It was funny, saying hello and not shaking hands.

"Arthur Newcombe," said the senator.

The man with the tight, cold face smiled frostily at me. One could see at a glance he meant to stand no nonsense. He was, I guessed, more than a little outraged that such a thing as the barrier could have been allowed to happen.

"Mr Newcombe," said the senator, "is from the State Department. And Dr Roger Davenport, a biologist — I might add, an outstanding one."

"Good morning, young man," said Davenport. "Would it be out of line to ask what happened to you?"

I grinned at him, liking the man at once. "I had a slight misunderstanding with a fellow townsman."

"The town, I would imagine," Billings said, "is considerably upset. In a little while law and order may become something of a problem."

"I am afraid so, sir," I said.

"This may take some time?" asked the senator.

"A little time," I said.

"There were chairs," the general said. "Sergeant, where are…?" Even as he spoke a sergeant and two privates, who had been standing by the roadside, came forward with some folding chairs.

"Catch," the sergeant said to me.

He tossed a chair through the barrier and I caught it. By the time I had it unfolded and set up, the four on the other side of the barrier had their chairs as well.

It was downright crazy — the five of us sitting there in the middle of the road on flimsy folding chairs.

"Now," said the senator, "I suppose we should get started. General, how would you propose that we might proceed?"

The general crossed his knees and settled down. He considered for a moment.

"This man," he finally said, "has something we should hear. Why don't we simply sit here and let him tell it to us?"

"Yes, by all means," said Newcombe. "Let's hear what he has to say. I must say, Senator…"

"Yes," the senator said, rather hastily. "I'll stipulate that it is somewhat unusual. This is the first time I have ever attended a hearing out in the open, but…"

"It was the only way," said the general, "that seemed feasible."

"It's a longish story," I warned them. "And some of it may appear unbelievable."

"So is this," said the senator. "This, what do you call it, barrier."

"And," said Davenport, "you seem to be the only man who has any information."

"Therefore," said the senator, "let us proceed forthwith." So, for the second time, I told my story. I took my time and told it carefully, trying to cover everything I'd seen. They did not interrupt me. A couple of times I stopped to let them ask some questions, but the first time Davenport simply signalled that I should go on and the second time all four of them just waited until I did continue.

It was an unnerving business worse than being interrupted. I talked into a silence and I tried to read their faces, tried to get some clues as to how much of it they might be accepting.

But there was no sign from them, no faintest flicker of expression on their faces. I began to feel a little silly over what I was telling them.

I finished finally and leaned back in my chair.

Across the barrier, Newcombe stirred uneasily. "You'll excuse me, gentlemen," he said, "if I take exception to this man's story. I see no reason why we should have been dragged out here…"

The senator interrupted him. "Arthur," he said, "my good friend, Gerald Sherwood, vouched for Mr Carter. I have known Gerald Sherwood for more than thirty years and he is, I must tell you, a most perceptive man, a hard-headed businessman with a tinge of imagination. Hard as this account, or parts of it, may be to accept, I still believe we must accept it as a basis for discussion. And, I must remind you, this is the first sound evidence we have been offered."

"I," said the general, "find it hard to believe a word of it. But with the evidence of this barrier, which is wholly beyond any present understanding, we undoubtedly stand in a position where we must accept further evidence beyond our understanding."

"Let us," suggested Davenport, "pretend just for the moment that we believe it all. Let's try to see if there may not be some basic…"

"But you can't!" exploded Newcombe. "It flies in the face of everything we know."

"Mr Newcombe," said the biologist, "man has flown in the face of everything he knew time after time. He knew, not too many hundreds of years ago, that the Earth was the centre of the universe. He knew, less than thirty years ago, that man could never travel to the other planets. He knew, a hundred years ago, that the atom was indivisible. And what have we here — the knowledge that time never can be understood or manipulated, that it is impossible for a plant to be intelligent. I tell you, sir…"

"Do you mean," the general asked, "that you accept all this?"

"No," said Davenport, "I'll accept none of it. To do so would be very unobjective. But I'll hold judgement in abeyance. I would, quite frankly, jump at the chance to work on it, to make observations and perform experiments and…"

"You may not have the time," I said.

The general swung toward me. "Was there a time limit set?" he asked. "You didn't mention it."

"No. But they have a way to prod us. They can exert some convincing pressure any time they wish. They can start this barrier to moving."

"How far can they move it?

"Your guess is as good as mine. Ten miles. A hundred miles. A thousand. I have no idea."

"You sound as if you think they could push us off the Earth."

"I don't know. I would rather think they could."

"Do you think they would?"

"Maybe. If it became apparent that we were delaying. I don't think they'd do it willingly. They need us. They need someone who can use their knowledge, who can make it meaningful. It doesn't seem that, so far, they've found anyone who can."

"But we can't hurry," the senator protested. "We will not be rushed. There is a lot to do. There must be discussions at a great many different levels — at the governmental level, at the international level, at the economic and scientific levels."

"Senator," I told him, "there is one thing no one seems to grasp. We are not dealing with another nation, nor with other humans. We are dealing with an alien people…"

"That makes no difference," said the senator. "We must do it our way."

"That would be fine," I said, "if you can make the aliens understand."

"They'll have to wait," said Newcombe, primly. And I knew that it was hopeless, that here was a problem which could not be solved, that the human race would bungle its first contact with an alien people. There would be talk and argument, discussion, consultation — but all on the human level, all from the human viewpoint, without a chance that anyone would even try to take into account the alien point of view.

"You must consider," said the senator, "that they are the petitioners, they are the ones who made the first approach, they are asking access to our world, not we to theirs."

"Five hundred years ago," I said, "white men came to America. They were the petitioners then…"

"But the Indians," said Newcombe, "were savages, barbarians…"

I nodded at him. "You make my point exactly."

"I do not," Newcombe told me frostily, "appreciate your sense of humour."

"You mistake me," I told him. "It was not said in humour."

Davenport nodded. "You may have something there, Mr Carter. You say these plants pretend to have stored knowledge, the knowledge, you suspect, of many different races."

"That's the impression I was given."

"Stored and correlated. Not just a jumble of data."

"Correlated, too," I said. "You must bear in mind that I cannot swear to this. I have no way of knowing it is true. But their spokesman, Tupper, assured me that they didn't lie…"

"I know," said Davenport. "There is some logic in that. They wouldn't need to lie."

"Except," said the general, "that they never did give back your fifteen hundred dollars."

"No, they didn't," I said.

"After they said they would."

"Yes. They were emphatic on that point."

"Which means they lied. And they tricked you into bringing back what you thought was a time machine."

"And," Newcombe pointed out, "they were very smooth about it."

"I don't think," said the general, "we can place a great deal of trust in them."

"But look here," protested Newcombe, "we've gotten around to talking as if we believed every word of it."

"Well," said the senator, "that was the idea, wasn't it? That we'd use the information as a basis for discussion."

"For the moment," said the general, "we must presume the worst."

Davenport chuckled. "What's so bad about it? For the first time in its history, humanity may be about to meet another intelligence. If we go about it right, we may find it to our benefit."

"But you can't know that," said the general.

"No, of course we can't. We haven't sufficient data. We must make further contact."

"If they exist," said Newcombe.

"If they exist," Davenport agreed.

"Gentlemen," said the senator, "we are losing sight of something. A barrier does exist. It will let nothing living through it…"

"We don't know that," said Davenport. "There was the instance of the car. There would have been some micro-organisms in it. There would have had to be. My guess is that the barrier is not against life as such, but against sentience, against awareness. A thing that has awareness of itself…"

"Well, anyhow," said the senator, "we have evidence that something very strange has happened. We can't just shut our eyes. We must work with what we have."

"All right, then," said the general, "let's get down to business. Is it safe to assume that these things pose a threat?"

I nodded. "Perhaps. Under certain circumstances."

"And those circumstances?"

"I don't know. There is no way of knowing how they think."

"But there's the potentiality of a threat?"

"I think," said Davenport, "that we are placing too much stress upon the matter of a threat. We should first…"

"My first responsibility," said the general, "is consideration of a potential danger…"

"And if there were a danger?"

"We could stop them," said the general, "if we moved fast enough. If we moved before they'd taken in too much territory. We have a way to stop them."

"All you military minds can think of," Davenport said angrily, "is the employment of force. I'll agree with you that a thermonuclear explosion could kill all the alien life that has gained access to the Earth, possibly might even disrupt the time-phase barrier and close the Earth to our alien friends…"

"Friends!" the general wailed. "You can't know…"

"Of course I can't," said Davenport. "And you can't know that they are enemies. We need more data; we need to make a further contact…"

"And while you're getting your additional data, they'll have the time to strengthen the barrier and move it…"

"Some day," said Davenport, angrier than ever, "the human race will have to find a solution to its problems that does not involve the use of force. Now might be the time to start. You propose to bomb this village. Aside from the moral issue of destroying several hundred innocent people…"

"You forget," "said the general, speaking gruffly, "that we'd be balancing those several hundred lives against the safety of all the people of the Earth. It would be no hasty action. It would be done only after some deliberation. It would have to be a considered decision."

"The very fact that you can consider it," said the biologist, "is enough to send a cold shiver down the spine of all humanity."

The general shook his head. "It's my duty to consider distasteful things like this. Even considering the moral issue involved, in the case of necessity I would…"

"Gentlemen," the senator protested weakly.

The general looked at me. I am afraid they had forgotten I was there.

"I'm sorry, sir," the general said to me. "I should not have spoken in this manner."

I nodded dumbly. I couldn't have said a word if I'd been paid a million dollars for it. I was all knotted up inside and I was afraid to move.

I had not been expecting anything like this, although now that it had come, I knew I should have been. I should have known what the world reaction would be and if I had failed to know, all I had to do would have been to remember what Stiffy Grant had told me as he lay on the kitchen floor.

They'll want to use the bomb, he'd said. Don't let them use the bomb.

Newcombe stared at me coldly. His eyes stabbed out at me.

"I trust," he said, "that you'll not repeat what you have heard."

"We have to trust you, boy," said the senator."You hold us in your hands."

I managed to laugh. I suppose that it came out as an ugly laugh. "Why should I say anything?" I asked. "We're sitting ducks. There would be no point in saying anything. We couldn't get away." For a moment I thought wryly that perhaps the barrier would protect us even from a bomb. Then I saw how wrong I was. The barrier concerned itself with nothing except life — or, if Davenport were right (and he probably was) only with a life that was aware of its own existence. They had tried to dynamite the barrier and it had been as if there had been no barrier. The barrier had offered no resistance to the explosion and therefore had not been affected by it.

From the general's viewpoint, the bomb might be the answer. It would kill all life; it was an application of the conclusion Alf Peterson had arrived at on the question of how one killed a noxious plant that had great adaptability. A nuclear explosion might have no effect upon the time-phase mechanism, but it would kill all life and would so irradiate and poison the area that for a long, long time the aliens would be unable to re-occupy it.

"I hope," I said to the general, "you'll be as considerate as you're asking me to be. If you find you have to do it, you'll make no prior announcement." The general nodded, thin-lipped.

"I'd hate to think," I said, "what would happen in this village…"

The senator broke in. "Don't worry about it now. It's just one of many alternatives. For the time we'll not even consider it. Our friend, the general, spoke a little out of turn."

"At least," the general said, "I am being honest. I wasn't pussy-footing. I wasn't playing games." He seemed to be saying that the others were.

"There is one thing you must realize," I told them. "This can't be any cloak-and-dagger operation. You have to do it honestly — whatever you may do. There are certain minds the Flowers can read. There are minds, perhaps many minds; they are in contact with at this very moment. The owners of those minds don't know it and there is no way we can know to whom those minds belong. Perhaps to one of you. There is an excellent chance the Flowers will know, at all times, exactly what is being planned." I could see that they had not thought of that. I had told them, of course, in the telling of my story, but it hadn't registered. There was so much that it took a man a long time to get it straightened out.

"Who are those people down there by the cars?" asked Newcombe.

I turned and looked.

Half the village probably was there. They had come out to watch. And one couldn't blame them, I told myself. They had a right to be concerned; they had the right to watch. This was their life. Perhaps a lot of them didn't trust me, not after what Hiram and Tom had been saying about me, and here I was, out here, sitting on a chair in the middle of the road, talking with the men from Washington. Perhaps they felt shut out. Perhaps they felt they should be sitting in a meeting such as this.

I turned back to the four across the bather.

"Here's a thing," I told them, urgently, "that you can't afford to mull. If we do, we'll fail all the other chances as they come along…"

"Chances?" asked the senator.

"This is our first chance to make contact with another race. It won't be the last. When man goes into space…"

"But we aren't out in space," said Newcombe.

I knew then that there was no use. I'd expected too much of the men in my living-room and I'd expected too much of these men out here on the road.

They would fail. We would always fail. We weren't built to do anything but fail. We had the wrong kind of motives and we couldn't change them. We had a built-in short-sightedness and an inherent selfishness and a self-concern that made it impossible to step out of the little human rut we travelled.

Although, I thought, perhaps the human race was not alone in this.

Perhaps this alien race we faced, perhaps any alien race, travelled a rut that was as deep and narrow as the human rut. Perhaps the aliens would be as arbitrary and as unbending and as blind as was the human race.

I made a gesture of resignation, but I doubt that they ever saw it. All of them were looking beyond me, staring down the road.

I twisted around and there, halfway up the road, halfway between the barrier and the traffic snarl, marched all those people who had been out there waiting. They came on silently and with great deliberation and determination. They looked like the march of doom, bearing down upon us.

"What do they want, do you suppose?" the senator asked, rather nervously.

George Walker, who ran the Red Owl butcher department, was in the forefront of the crowd, and walking just behind him was Butch Ormsby, the service station operator, and Charley Hutton of the Happy Hollow. Daniel Willoughby was there, too, looking somewhat uncomfortable, for Daniel wasn't the kind of man who enjoyed being with a mob. Higgy wasn't there and neither was Hiram, but Tom Preston was. I looked for Sherwood, thinking it unlikely that he would be there.

And I was right; he wasn't. But there were a lot of others, people I knew. Their faces all wore a hard and determined look.

I stepped off to one side, clear of the road, and the crowd tramped past me, paying no attention.

"Senator," said George Walker in a voice that was louder than seemed necessary. "You are the senator, ain't you?"

"Yes," said the senator. "What can I do for you?"

"That," said Walker, "is what we're here to find out. We are a delegation, sort of."

"I see," said the senator.

"We got trouble," said George Walker, "and all of us are taxpayers and we got a right to get some help. I run the meat department at the Red Owl store and without no customers coming into town, I don't know what will happen. If we can't get any out-of-town trade, we'll have to close our doors. We can sell to the people here in town, of course, but there ain't enough trade in town to make it worth our while and in a little while the people here in town won't have any money to pay for the things they buy, and our business isn't set up so we can operate on credit. We can get meat, of course. We've got that all worked out, but we can't go on selling it and…"

"Now, just a minute," said the senator. "Let's take this a little slow. Let's not go so fast. You have problems and I know you have them and I aim to do all I can…"

"Senator," interrupted a man with a big, bull voice, "there are others of us have problems that are worse than George" s. Take myself, for example. I work out of town and I depend on my pay cheque, every week, to buy food for the kids, to keep them in shoes and to pay the other bills. And now I can't get to work and there won't be any cheque. I'm not the only one. There are a lot of others like me. It isn't like we had some money laid by to take care of emergencies. I tell you, Senator, there isn't hardly anyone in town got anything laid by. We all are…"

"Hold on," pleaded the senator. "Let me get a word in edgewise. Give me a little time. The people in Washington know what is going on. They know what you folks are facing out here. They'll do what they can to help. There'll be a relief bill in the Congress to help out you folks and I, for one, will work unceasingly to see that it is passed without undue delay. And that isn't all. There are two or three papers in the east and some television stations that have started a drive for funds to be turned over to this village. And that's just a start. There will be a lot of…"

"Hell, Senator," yelled a man with a scratchy voice, "that isn't what we want. We don't want relief. We don't ask for charity. We just want to be able to get back to our jobs."

The senator was flabbergasted, "You mean you want us to get rid of the barrier?"

"Look, Senator," said the man with the bull-like voice, "for years the government has been spending billions to send a man up to the moon. With all them scientists you got, you can spend some time and money to get us out of here. We been paying taxes for a long time now, without getting anything…"

"But that," said the senator, "will take a little time. We'll have to find out what this barrier is and then we'll have to figure out what can be done with it. And I tell you, frankly, we aren't going to be able to do that overnight."

Norma Shepard, who worked as receptionist for Doc Fabian, wriggled through the press of people until she faced the Senator.

"But something has to be done," she said. "Has to be done, do you understand? Someone has to find a way. There are people in this town who should be in a hospital and we can't get them there. Some of them will die if we can't get them there. We have one doctor in this town and he's no longer young. He's been a good doctor for a long, long time, but he hasn't got the skill or the equipment to take care of the people who are terribly sick. He never has had, he never pretended that he had…"

"My dear," said the senator, consolingly. "I recognize your concern and I sympathize with it, and you may rest assured…" It was apparent that my interview with the men from Washington had come to an end. I walked slowly down the road, not actually down the road, but along the edge of it, walking in the harrowed ground out of which, already, thin points of green were beginning to protrude. The seeds which had been sown in that alien whirlwind had in that short time germinated and were pushing toward the light.

I wondered bitterly, as I walked along, what kind of crops they'd bear.

And I wondered, too, how angry Nancy might be at me for my fight with Hiram Martin. I had caught that one look on her face and then she'd turned her back and gone up the walk.

And she had not been with Sherwood when he had come charging down the walk to announce that Gibbs had phoned.

For that short moment in the kitchen, when I had felt her body pressing close to mine, she had been once again the sweetheart out of time — the girl who had walked hand in hand with me, who had laughed her throaty laugh and been an unquestioned part of me, as I had been of her.

Nancy, I almost cried aloud, Nancy, please let it be the same. But maybe it could never be the same, I told myself. Maybe it was Millville — a village that had come between us for she had grown away from Millville in the years she'd been away, and I, remaining here, had grown more deeply into it.

You could not dig back, I thought, through the dust of years, through the memories and the happenings and the changes in yourself- in both yourselves — to rescue out of time another day and hour. And even if you found it, you could not dust it clean, you could never make it shine as you remembered it. For perhaps it never had been quite the shining thing that you remembered, perhaps you had burnished it in your longing and your loneliness.

And perhaps it was only once in every lifetime (and perhaps not in every lifetime) that a shining moment came. Perhaps there was a rule that it could never come again.

"Brad," a voice said.

I had been walking, not looking where I went, staring at the ground.

Now, at the sound of the voice, I jerked up my head, and saw that I had reached the tangle of parked cars. Leaning against one of them was Bill Donovan.

"Hi there, Bill," I said. "You should be up there with the rest of them."

He made a gesture of disgust. "We need help," he said. "Sure we do. All the help we can get. But it wouldn't hurt to wait a while before you ran squealing for it. You can't cave in the first time you are hit. You have to hang onto at least a shred or two of your self-respect."

I nodded, not quite agreeing with him. "They're scared," I said.

"Yes," he said, "but there isn't any call for them to act like a bunch of bleating sheep."

"How about the kids?" I asked.

"Safe and sound," he told me. "Jake got to them just before the barrier moved. Took them out of there. Jake had to chop down the door to reach them and Myrt carried on all the time he was chopping it. You never heard so much uproar in your life about a God damn door."

"And Mrs Donovan?"

"Oh, Liz — she's all right. Cries for the kids and wonders what's so become of us. But the kids are safe and that's all that counts." He patted the metal of the car with the flat of his hand. "We'll work it out," he said. "It may take a little time, but there isn't anything that men can't do if they set their minds to it. Like as not they'll have a thousand of them scientists working on this thing and, like I say, it may take a while, but they'll get her figured out."

"Yes," I said, "I suppose they will." If some muddle-headed general didn't push the panic button first. If, instead of trying to solve the problem, we didn't try to smash it.

"What's the matter, Brad?"

"Not a thing," I said.

"You got your worries, too, I guess," he said. "What you did to Hiram, he had it coming to him for a long time now. Was that telephone he threw…?"

"Yes," I said. "It was one of the telephones."

"Heard you went to some other world or something. How do you manage to get into another world? It sounds screwy to me, but that's what everyone is saying." A couple of yelling kids came running through the cars and went pelting up the road toward where the crowd was still arguing with the senator.

"Kids are having a great time," said Donovan. "Most excitement they've ever had. Better than a circus." Some more kids went past, whooping as they ran. "Say," asked Donovan, "do you think something might have happened?" The first two kids had reached the crowd and were tugging at people's arms and shouting something at them.

"Looks like it," I said.

A few of the crowd started back down the road, walking to start with, then breaking into a trot, heading back for town.

As they came close, Donovan darted out to intercept them. "What's the matter?" he yelled. "What's going on?"

"Money," one of them shouted back at him. "Someone's found some money." By now the whole crowd had left the barrier and was running down the road.

As they swept past, Mae Hutton shouted at me, "Come on, Brad! Money in your garden!" Money in my garden! For the love of God, what next? I took one look at the four men from Washington, standing beyond the barrier. Perhaps they were thinking that the town was crazy. They had every right to think so.

I stepped out into the road and jogged along behind the crowd, heading back for town.

19

When I came back that morning I had found that the purple flowers growing in the swale behind my house, through the wizardry of that other world, had been metamorphosed into tiny bushes. In the dark I had run my fingers along the bristling branches and felt the many swelling buds. And now the buds had broken and where each bud had been was, not a leaf, but a miniature fifty-dollar bill!

Len Streeter, the high school science teacher, handed one of the tiny bills to me.

"It's impossible," he said.

And he was right. It was impossible. No bush in its right mind would grow fifty-dollar bills — or any kind of bills.

There were a lot of people there — all the crowd that had been out in the road shouting at the senator, and as many more. It looked to me as if the entire village might be there. They were tramping around among the bushes and yelling at one another, all happy and excited. They had a right to be. There probably weren't many of them who had ever seen a fifty-dollar bill, and here were thousands of them.

"You've looked close at it," I asked the teacher. "You're sure it actually is a bill?" He pulled a small magnifying glass out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

"Have a look," he said.

I had a look and there was no question that it looked like a fifty-dollar bill — although the only fifty-dollar bills I had ever seen were the thirty of them in the envelope Sherwood had given me. And I hadn't had a chance to more than glance at those. But through the glass I could see that the little bills had the fabric-like texture one finds in folding money and everything else, including the serial number, looked authentic.

And I knew, even as I squinted through the lens, that it was authentic.

For these were (how would one say it — the descendants?) of the money Tupper Tyler had stolen from me.

I knew exactly what had happened and the knowledge was a chill that bit deep into my mind.

"It's possible," I told Streeter. "With that gang back there, it's entirely possible."

"You mean the gang from your other world?"

"Not my other world," I shouted. "Your other world. This world's other world. When you get it through your damn thick skulls…" I didn't say the rest of it. I was glad I didn't.

"I'm sorry," Streeter said. "I didn't mean it quite the way it sounded." Higgy, I saw, was standing halfway up the slope that led to the house and he was yelling for attention.

"Listen to me!" he was shouting. "Fellow citizens, won't you listen to me." The crowd was beginning to quiet down and Higgy went on yelling until everyone was quiet.

"Stop pulling off them leaves," he told them. "Just leave them where they are."

Charley Hutton said, "Hell, Higgy, all that we was doing was picking a few of them to have a better look."

"Well, quit it," said the mayor sternly. "Every one that you pull off is fifty dollars less. Give them leaves a little time and they'll grow to proper size and then they'll drop off and all we need to do is to pick them up and every one of them will be money in our pocket."

"How do you know that?" Grandma Jones shrilled at him.

"Well," the mayor said, "it stands to reason, don't it? Here we have these marvellous plants growing money for us. The least we can do is let them be, so they can grow it for us." He looked around the crowd and suddenly saw me.

"Brad," he asked me, "isn't that correct?"

"I'm afraid it is," I said.

For Tupper had stolen the money and the Flowers had used the bills as patterns on which to base the leaves. I would have bet, without looking further, that there were no more than thirty different serial numbers in the entire crop of money.

"What I want to know," said Charley Hutton, "is how you figure we should divide it up — once it's ripe, that is."

"Why," said the mayor, "that's something I hadn't even thought of. Maybe we could put it in a common fund that could be handed out to people as they have the need of it."

"That don't seem fair to me," said Charley. "That way some people would get more of it than others. Seems to me the only way is to divide it evenly. Everyone should get his fair share of it, to do with as he wants."

"There's some merit," said the mayor, "in your point of view. But it isn't something on which we should make a snap decision. This afternoon I'll appoint a committee to look into it. Anyone who has any ideas can present them and they'll get full consideration."

"Mr Mayor," piped up Daniel Willoughby, "there is one thing I think we've overlooked. No matter what we say, this stuff isn't money."

"But it looks like money. Once it's grown to proper size, no one could tell the difference."

"I know," the banker said, "that it looks like money. It probably would fool an awful lot of people. Maybe everyone. Maybe no one could ever tell that it wasn't money. But if the source of it should be learned, how much value do you think it would have then? Not only that, but all the money in this village would be suspect. If we can grow fifty-dollar bills, what is there to stop us from growing tens and twenties?"

"I don't see what this fuss is all about," shouted Charley Hutton. "There isn't any need for anyone to know. We can keep quiet about it. We can keep the secret. We can pledge ourselves that we'll never say a word about it." The crowd murmured with approval. Daniel Willoughby looked as if he were on the verge of strangling. The thought of all that phony money shrivelled up his prissy soul.

"That's something," said the mayor, blandly, "that my committee can decide." The way the mayor said it one knew there was no doubt at all in his mind as to how the committee would decide.

"Higgy," said lawyer Nichols, "there's another thing we've overlooked. The money isn't ours." The mayor stared at him, outraged that anyone could say a thing like that.

"Whose is it, then?" he bellowed.

"Why," said Nichols, "it belongs to Brad. It's growing on his land and it belongs to him. There is no court anywhere that wouldn't make the finding." All the people froze. All their eyes swivelled in on me. I felt like a crouching rabbit, with the barrels of a hundred shotguns levelled at him.

The mayor gulped. "You're sure of this?" he asked.

"Positive," said Nichols.

The silence held and the eyes were still trained upon me.

I looked around and the eyes stared back. No one said a word.

The poor, misguided, blinded fools, I thought. All they saw here was money in their pockets, wealth such as not a single one of them had ever dared to dream. They could not see in it the threat (or promise?) of an alien race pressed dose against the door, demanding entrance. And they could not know that because of this alien race, blinding death might blossom in a terrible surge of unleashed energy above the dome that enclosed the town.

"Mayor," I said, "I don't want the stuff…"

"Well, now," the mayor said, "that's a handsome gesture, Brad. I'm sure the folks appreciate it."

"They damn well should," said Nichols.

A woman's scream rang out — and then another scream. It seemed to come from behind me and I spun around.

A woman was running down the slope that led to Doc Fabian's house — although running wasn't quite the word for it.

She was trying to run when she was able to do little more than hobble.

Her body was twisted with the terrible effort of her running and she had her arms stretched out so they would catch her if she fell — and when she took another step, she fell and rolled and finally ended up a huddled shape lying on the hillside.

"Myra!" Nichols yelled. "My God, Myra, what's wrong?" It was Mrs Fabian, and she lay there on the hillside with the whiteness of her hair shining in the sunlight, a startling patch of brilliance against the green sweep of the lawn. She was a little thing and frail and for years bad been half-crippled by arthritis, and now she seemed so small and fragile, crumpled on the grass, that it hurt to look at her.

I ran toward her and all the others were running toward her, too.

Bill Donovan was the first to reach her and he went down on his knees to lift her up and bold her.

"Everything's all right," he told her. "See — everything's all right. All your friends are here." Her eyes were open and she seemed to be all right, but she lay there in the cradle of Bill's arms and she didn't try to move. Her hair had fallen down across her face and Bill brushed it back, gently, with a big, grimed, awkward hand.

"It's the doctor," she told us. "He's gone into a coma…"

"But," protested Higgy, "he was all right an hour ago. I saw him just an hour ago."

She waited until he'd finished, then she said, as if he hadn't spoken, "He's in a coma and I can't wake him up. He lay down for a nap and now, he won't wake up." Donovan stood up, lifting her, holding her like a child. She was so little and he was so big that she had the appearance of a doll, a doll with a sweet and wrinkled face.

"He needs help," she said. "He's helped you all his life. Now he needs some help."

Norma Shepard touched Bill on the arm. "Take her up to the house," she said. "I'll take care of her."

"But my husband," Mrs Fabian insisted. "You'll get some help for him? You'll find some way to help him?"

"Yes, Myra," Higgy said. "Yes, of course we will. We can't let him down. He's done too much for us. We'll find a way to help him." Donovan started up the hill, carrying Mrs Fabian. Norma ran ahead of him.

Butch Ormsby said, "Some of us ought to go, too, "and see what we can do for Doc."

"Well," asked Charley Hutton, "how about it, Higgy? You were the one who shot off his big fat face. How are you going to help him?"

"Somebody's got to help him," declared Pappy Andrews, thumping his cane upon the ground by way of emphasis. "There never was a time we needed Doc more than we need him now. There are sick people in this village and we've got to get him on his feet somehow."

"We can do what we can," said Streeter, "to make him comfortable. We'll take care of him, of course, the best that we know how. But there isn't" anyone who has any medical knowledge…"

"I'll tell you what we'll do," said Higgy. "Someone can get in touch with some medical people and tell them what's happened. We can describe the symptoms and maybe they can diagnose the illness and then tell us what to do. Norma is a nurse — well, sort of, she's been helping out in Doc's office for the last four years or so — and she'd be some help to us."

"I suppose it's the best we can do," said Streeter, "but it's not very good."

"I tell you, men," said Pappy, loudly, "we can't stay standing here. The situation calls for action and it behooves us to get started."

What Streeter had said, I told myself, was right. Maybe it was the best that we could do, but it wasn't good enough. There was more to medicine than word-of-mouth advice or telephoned instructions. And there were others in the village in need of medical aid, more specialized aid than a stricken doctor, even if he could be gotten on his feet, was equipped to give them.

Maybe, I thought, there was someone else who could help — and if they could, they'd better, or I'd go back somehow into that other world and start ripping up their roots.

It was time, I told myself, that this other world was getting on the ball. The Flowers had put us in this situation and it was time they dug us out. If they were intent on proving what great tasks they could perform, there were more important ways of proving it than growing fifty-dollar bills on bushes and all their other hocus-pocus.

There were phones down at the village hall, the ones that had been taken from Stiffy's shack, and I could use one of those, of course, but I'd probably have to break Hiram's skull before I could get at one of them. And another round with Hiram, I decided, was something I could get along without.

I looked around for Sherwood, but he wasn't there, and neither was Nancy. One of them might be home and they'd let me use the phone in Sherwood's study.

A lot of the others were heading up toward Doc's house, but I turned and went the other way.

20

No one answered the bell. I rang several times and waited, then finally tried the door and it was unlocked.

I went inside and closed the door behind me. The sound of its closing was muffled by the hushed solemnity of the hail that ran back to the kitchen.

"Anyone home?" I called.

Somewhere a lone fly buzzed desperately, as if trying to escape, trapped against a window perhaps, behind a fold of drape. The sun spilled through the fanlights above the door to make a ragged pattern on the floor.

There was no answer to my hail, so I went down the hall and walked into the study. The phone stood on the heavy desk. The walls of books still seemed rich and wondrous. A half. empty whisky bottle and an unwashed glass stood on the liquor cabinet.

I went across the carpeting to the desk and reached out, pulling the phone toward me.

I lifted the receiver and immediately Tupper said, in his businessman's voice, "Mr Carter, it's good to hear from you at last. Events are going well, we hope. You have made, we would presume, preliminary contact." As if they didn't know!

"That's not what I called about," I snapped.

"But that was the understanding. You were to act for us." The unctuous smugness of the voice burned me up.

"And it was understood, as well," I asked, "that you were to make a fool of me?"

The voice was startled. "We fail to understand. Will you please explain?"

"The time machine," I said.

"Oh, that."

"Yes, oh, that," I said.

"But, Mr Carter, if we had asked you to take it back you would have been convinced that we were using you. You'd probably have refused."

"And you weren't using me?"

"Why, I suppose we were. We'd have used anyone. It was important to get that mechanism to your world. Once you know the pattern…"

"I don't care about the pattern," I said angrily. "You tricked me and you admit you tricked me. That's a poor way to start negotiations with another race."

"We regret it greatly. Not that we did it, but the way we did it. If there is anything we can do…"

"There's a lot that you can do. You can cut out horsing around with fifty-dollar bills…"

"But that's repayment," wailed the voice. "We told you you'd get back your fifteen hundred. We promised you'd get back much more than your fifteen hundred…"

"You've had your readers read economic texts?"

"Oh, certainly we have."

"And you've observed, for a long time and at first hand, our economic practices?"

"As best we can," the voice said. "It's sometimes difficult."

"You know, of course, that money grows on bushes."

"No, we don't know that, at all. We know how money's made. But what is the difference? Money's money, isn't it, no matter what its source?"

"You couldn't be more wrong," I said. "You'd better get wised up."

"You mean the money isn't good?"

"Not worth a damn," I said.

"We hope we've done no wrong," the voice said, crestfallen.

I said, "The money doesn't matter. There are other things that do. You've shut us off from the world and we have sick people here. We had just one poor fumbling doctor to take care of them. And now the doctor's sick himself and no other doctor can get in…"

"You need a steward," said the voice.

"What we need," I told them, "is to get this barrier lifted so we can get out and others can get in. Otherwise there are going to be people dying who don't have to die."

"We'll send a steward," said the voice. "We'll send one right away. A most accomplished one. The best that we can find."

"I don't know," I said, "about this steward. But we need help as fast as we can get it."

"We," the voice pledged, "will do the best we can." The voice clicked off and the phone went dead. And suddenly I realized that I'd not asked the most important thing of all — why had they wanted to get the time machine into our world?

I jiggled the connection. I put the receiver down and lifted it again.

I shouted in the phone and nothing happened.

I pushed the phone away and stood hopeless in the room. For all of it, I knew, was a very hopeless mess.

Even after years of study, they did not understand us or our institutions. They did not know that money was symbolic and not simply scraps of paper. They had not, for a moment, taken into consideration what could happen to a village if it were isolated from the world.

They had tricked me and had used me and they should have known that nothing can arouse resentment quite so easily as simple trickery. They should have known, but they didn't know, or if they knew, had discounted what they knew — and that was as bad or worse than if they had not known.

I opened the study door and went into the hall. And as I started down the hail, the front door opened and Nancy stepped inside.

I stopped at the foot of the stairway that rose out of the hall and for a moment we simply stood there, looking at one another, neither of us finding anything to say.

"I came to use the phone," I said.

She nodded.

"I suppose," I said, "I should say I'm sorry for the fight with Hiram."

"I'm sorry, too," she said, misunderstanding me, or pretending that she misunderstood. "But I suppose there was no way you could help it."

"He threw the phone," I told her.

But of course it had not been the phone, not the phone alone. It had been all the times before the phone was thrown.

"You said the other night," I reminded her, "that we could go out for drinks and dinner. I guess that will have to wait. Now there's no place we can go."

"Yes," she said, "so we could start over." I nodded, feeling miserable.

"I was to dress up my prettiest," she said, "and we would have been so gay."

"Like high school days," I said.

"Brad."

"Yes," I said, and took a step toward her.

Suddenly she was in my arms.

"We don't need drinks and dinner," she said. "Not the two of us." No, I thought, not the two of us.

I bent and kissed her and held her close and there was only us. There was no closed-off village and no alien terror. There was nothing that mattered now except this girl who long ago had walked the street, hand in hand with me, and had not been ashamed.

21

The steward came that afternoon, a little, wizened humanoid who looked like a bright-eyed monkey. With him was another — also humanoid — but great, lumbering and awkward, gaunt and austere, with a horse-like face. He looked, at first sight, the perfect caricature of a career diplomat. The scrawny humanoid wore a dirty and shapeless piece of cloth draped about him like a robe, and the other wore a breech-clout and a sort of vest, equipped with massive pockets that bulged with small possessions.

The entire village was lined up on the slope behind my house and the betting had been heavy that nothing would show up. I heard whispers, suddenly cutoff, everywhere I went.

Then they came, the two of them, popping out of nowhere and standing in the garden.

I walked down the slope and across the garden to meet them. They stood waiting for me and behind me, on that slope covered by a crowd of people, there was utter silence.

As I came near, the big one stepped forward, the little wizened character trailing close behind.

"I speak your language newly," said the big one. "If you don't know, ask me once again."

"You're doing well," I told him.

"You be Mr Carter?"

"That is right. And you?"

"My designation," he told me, solemnly, "is to you great gibberish. I have decided you can call me only Mr Smith."

"Mr Smith," I said, "we are glad to have you here. You are the steward I was told about?"

"No. This other personage is he. But he has no designation I can speak to you. He makes no noise at all. He hears and answers only in his brain. He is a queerish thing."

"A telepath," I said.

"Oh, yes, but do not mistake me. Of much intelligence. Also very smart. We are of different worlds, you know. There be many different worlds, many different peoples. We welcome you to us."

"They sent you along as an interpreter?"

"Interpreter? I do not share your meaning. I learn your words very fast from a mechanism. I do not have much time. I fail to catch them all."

"Interpreter means you speak for him. He tells you and you tell us."

"Yes, indeed. Also you tell me and I tell him. But interpreter is not all I am. Also diplomat, very highly trained."

"Huh?"

"Help with negotiations with your race. Be helpful as I can. Explain very much, perhaps. Aid you as you need."

"You said there are many different worlds and many different people. You mean a long, long chain of worlds and of people, too?"

"Not all worlds have people," he told me. "Some have nothing. No life of any sort. Some hold life, but no intelligence. Some once had intelligence, but intelligence is gone." He made a strange gesture with his hand. "It is pity what can happen to intelligence. It is frail; it does not stay forever."

"And the intelligences? All humanoid?" He hesitated. "Humanoid?"

"Like us. Two arms, two legs, one head…"

"Most humanoid," he said."Most like you and me." The scrawny little being tugged excitedly at his vest. The being I had been talking with turned around to face him, gave him close attention.

Then he turned back to me. "Him much upset," he told me. "Says all people here are sick. Him prostrated with great pity. Never saw such terrible thing."

"But that is wrong," I cried. "The sick ones are at home. This bunch here is healthy."

"Can't be so," said Mr Smith. "Him aghast at situation. Can look inside of people, see everything that's wrong. Says them that isn't sick will be sick in little time, says many have inactive sickness in them, others still have garbage of ancient sicknesses still inside of them."

"He can fix us up?"

"No fix. Repair complete, Make body good as new." Higgy had been edging closer and behind him several others. The rest of the crowd still stayed up on the bank, out of all harm's way. And now they were beginning to buzz a little. At first they had been stricken silent, but now the talk began.

"Higgy," I said, "I'd like you to meet Mr Smith."

"Well, I'll be darned," said Higgy. "They got names just the same as ours." He stuck out his hand and after a moment of puzzlement, Mr Smith put out his hand and the two men shook.

"The other one," I said, "can't talk. He's a telepath."

"That's too bad," said Higgy, full of sympathy. "Which one of them's the doctor?"

"The little one," I told him, "and I don't know if you can say he's a doctor. Seems that he repairs people, fixes them like new."

"Well," said Higgy, "that's what a doctor's supposed to do, but never quite makes out."

"He says we're all sick. He wants to fix us up."

"Well, that's all right," said Higgy. "That's what I call service. We can set up a clinic down at the village hall."

"But there's Doc and Floyd and all the others who are really sick. That's what he's here for."

"Well, I tell you, Brad, we can take him to them first and he can get them cured, then we'll set up the clinic. The rest of us might just as well get in on it as long as he is here."

"If," said Mr Smith, "you but merge with the rest of us, you can command the services of such as he whenever you have need."

"What's this merger?" Higgy asked of me.

"He means if we let the aliens in and join the other worlds that the Flowers have linked."

"Well, now," said Higgy, "that makes a lot of sense. I don't suppose there'll be any charges for his services."

"Charges?" asked Mr Smith.

"Yeah," said Higgy. "Pay. Fees. Money."

"Those be terms," said Mr Smith, "that ring no bell for me. But we must proceed with swiftness, since my fellow creature has other rounds to make. He and his colleagues have many worlds to cover."

"You mean that they are doctors to the other worlds?" I asked.

"You grasp my meaning clear."

"Since there isn't any time to waste," said Higgy, "leave us be about our business. Will you two come with me?"

"With alacrity," cried Mr Smith, and the two of them followed Higgy as he went up the slope and out toward the street. I followed slowly after them and as I climbed the bank, Joe Evans came charging out of the back door of my house.

"Brad," he shouted, "there's a call for you from the State Department." It was Newcombe on the phone.

"I'm over here at Elmore," he told me in his cold, clipped voice, "and we've given the Press a rundown on what you told us. But now they're clamouring to see you; they want to talk with you."

"It's all right with me," I said. "If they'll come out to the barrier…"

"It's not all right with me," said Newcombe, sourly, "but the pressure is terrific. I have to let them see you. I trust you'll be discreet."

"I'll do my best," I told him.

"All right," he said. "There's not much I can do about it. Two hours from now. At the place we met."

"OK," I said. "I suppose it'll be all right if I bring a friend along."

"Yes, of course," said Newcombe. "And for the love of Christ be careful!"

22

Mr Smith caught onto the idea of a Press conference with very little trouble. I explained it to him as we walked toward the barrier where the newsmen waited for us.

"You say all these people are communicators," he said, making sure he had it straight. "We say them something and they say other people. Interpreters, like me."

"Well, something like that."

"But all your people talk the same. The mechanism told me one language only."

"That was because the one language is all that you would need. But the people of the Earth have many languages. Although that is not the reason for newspapermen. You see, all the people can't be here to listen to what we have to say. So these newsmen spread the news…"

"News?"

"The things that we have said. Or that other people have said. Things that happen. No matter where anything may happen, there are newsmen there and they spread the word. They keep the world informed."

Mr Smith almost danced a jig. "How wonderful!" he cried.

"What's so wonderful about it?"

"Why, the ingenuity," said Mr Smith. "The thinking of it up. This way one person talks to all the persons. Everybody knows about him. Everyone hears what he has to talk." We reached the barrier and there was quite a crowd of newsmen jammed on the strip of highway on the other side. Some of them were strung along the barrier on either side of the road. As we walked up, the cameramen were busy.

When we came up to the barrier, a lot of men started yelling at us, but someone quickly shushed them, then one man spoke to us.

"I'm Judson Barnes, of Associated Press," he said. "I suppose you're Carter." I told him that I was. "And this gentleman you have with you?"

"His name is Smith," I said.

"And," said someone else, "he's just got home from a masquerade."

"No," I told them, "he's a humanoid from one of the alternate worlds. He is here to help with negotiations."

"Howdy, sirs," said Mr Smith, with massive friendliness.

Someone howled from the back: "We can't hear back here."

"We have a microphone," said Barnes, "if you don't mind."

"Toss it here," I told him.

He tossed it and I caught it. The cord trailed through the barrier. I could see where the speakers had been set up to one side of the road.

"And now," said Barnes, "perhaps we can begin. State filled us in, of course, so we don't need to go over all that you have told them. But there are some questions. I'm sure there are a lot of questions." A dozen hands went up.

"Just pick out one of them," said Barnes.

I made a motion toward a great, tall, scrawny man.

"Thank you, sir," he said. "Caleb Rivers, Kansas City Star. We understand that you represent the — how do you say it? — people, perhaps, the people of this other world. I wonder if you would outline your position in somewhat more detail. Are you an official representative, or an unofficial spokesman, or a sort of go-between? It's not been made quite clear."

"Very unofficial, I might say. You know about my father?"

"Yes," said Rivers, "we've been told how he cared for the flowers be found. But you'd agree, wouldn't you, Mr Carter, that this is, to say the least, a rather strange sort of qualification for your role?"

"I have no qualifications at all," I told him. "I can tell you quite frankly that the aliens probably picked one of the poorest representatives they could have found. There are two things to consider. First, I was the only human who seemed available — I was the only one who went back to visit them. Secondly, and this is important, they don't think, can't think, in the same manner that we do. What might make good sense to them may seem silly so far as we are concerned. On the other hand, our most brilliant logic might be gibberish to them."

"I see," said Rivers. "But despite your frankness in saying you're not qualified to serve, you still are serving. Would you tell us why?"

"There's nothing else I can do," I said. "The situation has gotten to a point where there had to be an attempt at some sort of intelligent contact between the aliens and ourselves. Otherwise, things might get out of hand."

"How do you mean?"

"Right now," I said, "the world is scared. There has to be some explanation of what is happening. There is nothing worse than a senseless happening, nothing worse than reasonless fear, and the aliens, so long as they know something's being done, may leave this barrier as it is. For the moment, I suspect, they'll do no more than they've already done. I hope it may work out that the situation gets no worse and that in the meantime some progress can be made." Other hands were waving and I pointed to another man.

"Frank Roberts, Washington Post," he said. "I have a question about the negotiations. As I understand it, the aliens want to be admitted to our world and in return are willing to provide us with a great store of knowledge they have accumulated."

"That is right," I said.

"Why do they want admission?"

"It's not entirely clear to me," I told him. "They need to be here so they can proceed to other worlds. It would seem the alternate worlds lie in some sort of progression, and they must be arrived at in a certain order. I confess quite willingly I understand none of this. All that can be done now is to reach proposals that we and the aliens can negotiate."

"You know of no terms beyond the broad proposal you have stated?"

"None at all," I said. "There may be others. I am not aware of them."

"But now you have — perhaps you would call him an advisor. Would it be proper to direct a question at this Mr Smith of yours?"

"A question," said Mr Smith. "I accept your question." He was pleased that someone had noticed him. Not without some qualms, I handed him the mike.

"You talk into it," I said.

"I know," he said. "I watch."

"You talk our language very well," said the Washington Post.

"Just barely. Mechanism teach me."

"Can you add anything about specific conditions?"

"I do not catch," said Smith.

"Are there any conditions that your different people will insist upon before they reach an agreement with us?"

"Just one alone," said Smith.

"And what would that one be?"

"I elucidate," said Smith. "You have a thing called war. Very bad, of course, but not impossible. Soon or late peoples get over playing war." He paused and looked around and all those reporters waited silently.

"Yes," said one of the reporters finally, not the Post, "yes, war is bad, but what…?"

"I tell you now," said Smith. "You have a great amount of fission… I am at loss for word."

"Fissionable material," said a helpful newsman.

"That correct. Fissionable material. You have much of it. Once in another world there was same situation. When we arrive, there was nothing left. No life. No nothing. It was very sad. All life had been wiped out. We set him up again, but sad to think upon. Must not happen here. So we must insist such fissionable material be widely dispersed."

"Now, wait," a newsman shouted. "You are saying that we must disperse fissionable material. I suppose you mean break up all the stockpiles and the bombs and have no more than a very small amount at any one place. Not enough, perhaps, to assemble a bomb of any sort."

"You comprehend it fast," said Smith.

"But how can you tell that it is dispersed? A country might say it complied when it really hadn't. How can you really know? How can you police it?"

"We monitor," said Smith.

"You have a way of detecting fissionable material?"

"Yes, most certainly," said Smith.

"All right, then, even if you knew — well, let's say it this way — you find there are concentrations still remaining; what do you do about them?"

"We blow them up," said Smith. "We detonate them loudly."

"But…"

"We muster up a deadline. We edict all concentrations be gone by such a time. Time come and some still here, they auto… auto…"

"Automatically."

"Thank you, kindly person. That is the word I grope for. They automatically blow up." An uneasy silence fell. The newsmen were wondering, I knew, if they were being taken in; if they were being, somehow, tricked by a phony actor decked out in a funny vest.

"Already," Smith said, rather casually, "we have a mechanism pinpointing all the concentrations."

Someone shouted in a loud, hoarse voice: "I'll be damned! The flying time machine!" Then they were off and running, racing pell-mell for their cars parked along the road. With no further word to us, with no leave-taking whatsoever, they were off to tell the world.

And this was it, I thought, somewhat bitterly and more than a little limp.

Now the aliens could walk in any time they wanted, any way they wanted, with full human blessing. There was nothing else that could have turned the trick no argument, no logic, no inducement short of this inducement. In the face of the worldwide clamour which this announcement would stir up, with the public demand that the world accept this one condition of an alien compact, all sane and sober counsel would have no weight at all.

Any workable agreement between the aliens and ourselves would necessarily have been a realistic one, with checks and balances. Each side would have been pledged to some contribution and each would have had to face some automatic, built-in penalty if the agreement should be broken. But now the checks and balances were gone and the way was open for the aliens to come in. They had offered the one thing that the people — not the governments, but the people — wanted, or that they thought they wanted, above every other thing and there'd be no stopping them in their demand for it.

And it had all been trickery, I thought bitterly. I had been tricked into bringing back the time machine and I had been forced into a situation where I had asked for help and Smith had been the help, or at least a part of it. And his announcement of the one demand had been little short of trickery in itself. It was the same old story. Human or alien, it made no difference. You wanted something bad enough and you went out to get it any way you could.

They'd beat us all the way, I knew. All the time they'd been that one long jump ahead of us and now the situation was entirely out of hand and the Earth was licked.

Smith stared after the running reporters.

"What proceeds?" he asked.

Pretending that he didn't know. I could have broken his neck.

"Come on," I said. "I'll escort you back to the village hall. Your pal is down there, doctoring up the folks."

"But all the galloping," he said, "all the shouting? What occasions it?"

"You should know," I said. "You just hit the jackpot."

23

When I got back home, Nancy was waiting for me. She was sitting on the steps that led up to the porch, huddled there, crouched against the world. I saw her from a block away and hurried, gladder at the sight of her than I had ever been before. Glad and humble, and with a tenderness I never knew I had welling up so hard inside of me that I nearly choked.

Poor kid, I thought. It had been rough on her. Just one day home and the world of Millville, the world that she remembered and thought of as her home, had suddenly come unstuck.

Someone was shouting in the garden where tiny fifty-dollar bills presumably were still growing on the little bushes.

Coming in the gate, I stopped short at the sound of bellowing.

Nancy looked up and saw me.

"It's nothing, Brad," she said. "It's just Hiram down there. Higgy has him guarding all that money. The kids keep sneaking in, the little eight and ten-year-olds. They only want to count the money on each bush. They aren't doing any harm. But Hiram chases them. There are times," she said, "when I feel sorry for Hiram."

"Sorry for him?" I asked, astonished. He was the last person in the world I'd suspected anyone might feel sorry for. "He's just a stupid slob."

"A stupid slob," she said, "who's trying to prove something and is not entirely sure what he wants to prove."

"That he has more muscle…"

"No," she told me, "that's not it at all." Two kids came tearing out of the garden and vanished down the street.

There was no sign of Hiram. And no more hollering. He had done his job; he had chased them off.

I sat down on the step beside her.

"Brad," she said, "it's not going well. I can feel it isn't going well." I shook my head, agreeing with her.

"I was down at the village hall," she said. "Where that terrible, shrivelled creature is conducting a clinic. Daddy's down there, too. He's helping out. But I couldn't stay. It's awful."

"What's so bad about it? That thing — whatever you may call it fixed up Doc. He's up and walking around and he looks as good as new. And Floyd Caldwell's heart and…"

She shuddered. "That's the terrible thing about it. They are as good as new. They're better than new. They aren't cured, Brad; they are repaired, like a machine. It's like witchcraft. It's indecent. This wizened thing looks them over and he never makes a sound, but just glides around and looks them over and you can see that he's not looking at the outside of them but at their very insides. I don't know how you know this, but you do. As if he were reaching deep inside of them and…" She stopped. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't talk this way. It's not very decent talk."

"It's not a very decent situation," I said. "We may have to change our minds a great deal about what is decent and indecent. There are a lot of ways we may have to change. I don't suppose that we will like it…"

"You talk as if it's settled."

"I'm afraid it is," I said, and I told her what Smith had told the newsmen. It felt good to tell her. There was no one else I could have told right then. It was a piece of news so weighted with guilt I would have been ashamed to tell it to anyone but Nancy.

"But now," said Nancy, "there can't be war — not the kind of war the whole world feared."

"No," I said, "there can't be any war." But I couldn't seem to feel too good about it. "We may have something now that's worse than war."

"There is nothing worse than war," she said.

And that, of course, would be what everyone would say. Maybe they'd be right. But now the aliens would come into this world of ours and once we'd let them in we'd be entirely at their mercy. They had tricked us and we had nothing with which we could defend ourselves. Once here they could take over and supersede all plant life upon the Earth, without our knowing it, without our ever being able to find out. Once we let them in we never could be sure.

And once they'd done that, then they'd own us. For all the animal life on Earth, including man, depended on the plants of Earth for their energy.

"What puzzles me," I said, "is that they could have taken over, anyhow. If they'd had a little patience, if they had taken a little time, they could have taken over and we never would have known. For there are some of them right here, their roots in Millville ground. They needn't have stayed as flowers. They could have been anything. In a hundred years they could have been every branch and leaf, every blade of grass…"

"Maybe there was a time factor of some sort," said Nancy. "Maybe they couldn't afford to wait."

I shook my head. "They had lots of time. If they needed more, they could have made it."

"Maybe they need the human race," she said. "Perhaps we have something they want. A plant society couldn't do a thing itself. They can't move about and they haven't any hands. They can store a lot of knowledge and they can think long thoughts — they can scheme and plan. But they can't put any of that planning into execution. They would need a partner to carry out their plans."

"They've had partners," I reminded her. "They have a lot of partners even now. There are the people who made the time machine. There's this funny little doctor and that big windbag of a Smith. The Flowers have all the partners they need. It must be something else."

"These people that you mention," she said, "may not be the right kind of people. Perhaps they searched world after world for the right kind of human beings. For the right kind of partner. Maybe that's us."

"Perhaps," I said, "the others weren't mean enough. They may be looking for a deadly race. And a deadly race, that's us. Maybe they want someone who'll go slashing into parallel world after parallel world, in a sort of frenzy; brutal, ruthless, terrible. For when you come right down to it, we are pretty terrible. They may figure that, working with us, there's nothing that can stop them. Probably they are right. With all their accumulated knowledge and their mental powers, plus our understanding of physical concepts and our flair for technology, there probably is no limit to what the two of us could do."

"I don't think that's it," she said. "What's the matter with you? I gained the impression to start with that you thought the Flowers might be all right."

"They still may be," I told her, "but they used so many tricks and I fell for all the tricks. They used me for a fall guy."

"So that's what bothers you."

"I feel like a heel," I said.

We sat quietly side by side upon the step. The Street was silent and empty. During all the time we had sat there, no one had passed.

Nancy said, "It's strange that anyone could submit himself to that alien doctor. He's a creepy sort of being, and you can't be sure…"

"There are a lot of people," I told her, "who run most willingly to quackery."

"But this isn't quackery," she said. "He did cure Doc and the rest of them. I didn't mean he was a faker, but only that he's horrid and repulsive."

"Perhaps we appear the same to him."

"There's something else," she said. "His technique is so different. No drugs, no instruments, no therapy. He just looks you over and probes into you with nothing, but you can see him probing, and then you're whole again — not only well, but whole. And if he can do that to our bodies, what about our minds? Can he change our minds, can he re-orient our thoughts?"

"For some people in this village," I told her, "that might be a good idea. Higgy, for example."

She said, sharply, "Don't joke about it, Brad."

"All right," I said. "I won't."

"You're just talking that way to keep from being scared."

"And you," I said, "are talking seriously about it in an effort to reduce it to a commonplace."

She nodded. "But it doesn't help," she said. "It isn't commonplace." She stood up. "Take me home," she said.

So I walked her home.

24

Twilight was falling when I walked downtown. I don't know why I went there. Restlessness, I guess. The house was too big and empty (emptier than it had ever been before) and the neighbourhood too quiet. There was no noise at all except for the occasional snatch of voices either excited or pontifical, strained through the electronic media. There was not a house in the entire village, I was certain, that did not have a television set or radio turned on.

But when I turned on the TV in the living-room and settled back to watch, it did no more than make me nervous and uneasy.

A commentator, one of the better known ones, was holding forth with a calm and deep assurance.

"…no way of knowing whether this contraption which is circling the skies can really do the job which our Mr Smith from the other world has announced to be its purpose. It has been picked up on a number of occasions by tracking stations which do not seem to be able, for one reason or another, to keep it in their range, and there have been instances, apparently verified, of visual sightings of it. But it is something about which it is difficult to get any solid news."

"Washington, it is understood, is taking the position that the word of an unknown being — unknown by either race or reputation — scarcely can be taken as undisputed fact. The capital tonight seems to be waiting for more word and until something of a solid nature can be deduced, it is unlikely there will be any sort of statement. That is the public position, of course; what is going on behind the scenes may be anybody's guess. And the same situation applies fairly well to all other capitals throughout the entire world.

"But this is not the situation outside the governmental circles. Everywhere the news has touched off wild celebration. There are joyous, spontaneous marches breaking out in London, and in Moscow a shouting, happy mob has packed Red Square. The churches everywhere have been filled since the first news broke, people thronging there to utter prayers of thankfulness.

"In the people there is no doubt and not the slightest hesitation. The man in the street, here in the United States and in Britain and in France — in fact, throughout the world — has accepted this strange announcement at face value. It may be simply a matter of believing what one chooses to believe, or it may be for some other reason, but the fact remains that there has been a bewildering suspension of the disbelief which characterized mass reaction so short a time ago as this morning."

"There seems, in the popular mind, to be no consideration of all the other factors which may be involved. The news of the end of any possibility of nuclear war has drowned out all else. It serves to underline the quiet and terrible, perhaps subconscious, tension under which the world has lived…" I shut off the television and prowled about the house, my footsteps echoing strangely in the darkening rooms.

It was well enough, I thought, for a smug, complacent commentator to sit in the bright-lit studio a thousand miles away and analyse these happenings in a measured and well-modulated manner. And it was well enough, perhaps, for people other than myself even here in Millville, to sit and listen to him. But I couldn't listen — I couldn't stand to listen.

Guilt, I asked myself? And it might be guilt, for I had been the one who'd brought the time machine to Earth and I had been the one who had taken Smith to meet the newsmen at the barrier. I had played the fool — the utter, perfect fool and it seemed to me the entire world must know.

Or might it be the conviction that had been growing since I talked with Nancy that there was some hidden incident or fact — some minor motive or some small point of evidence — that I had failed to see, that we all had failed to grasp, and that if one could only put his finger on this single truth then all that had happened might become simpler of understanding and all that was about to happen might make some sort of sense?

I sought for it, for this hidden factor, for this joker in the deck, for the thing so small it had been overlooked and yet held within it a vast significance, and I did not find it.

I might be wrong, I thought. There might be no saving factor. We might be trapped and doomed and no way to get out.

I left the house and went down the street. There was no place I really wanted to go, but I had to walk, hoping that the freshness of the evening air, the very fact of walking might somehow clear my head.

A half a block away I caught the tapping sound. It appeared to be moving down the street toward me and in a little while I saw a bobbing halo of white that seemed to go with the steady tapping. I stopped and stared at it and it came bobbing closer and the tapping sound went on. And in another moment I saw that it was Mrs Tyler with her snow-white hair and cane.

"Good evening, Mrs Tyler," I said as gently as I could, not to frighten her.

She stopped and twisted around to face me.

"It's Bradshaw, isn't it?" she asked. "I can't see you well, but I recognize your voice."

"Yes, it is," I said. "You're out late, Mrs Tyler."

"I came to see you," she said, "but I missed your house. I am so forgetful that I walked right past it. Then I remembered and I was coming back."

"What can I do for you?" I asked.

"Why, they tell me that you've seen Tupper. Spent some time with him."

"That's true," I said, sweating just a little, afraid of what might be coming next.

She moved a little closer, head tilted back, staring up at me.

"Is it true," she asked, "that he has a good position?"

"Yes," I said, "a very good position."

"He holds the trust of his employers?"

"That is the impression that I gained. I would say he held a post of some importance."

"He spoke of me?" she asked.

"Yes," I lied. "He asked after you. He said he'd meant to write, but he was too busy."

"Poor boy," she said, "he never was a hand to write. He was looking well?"

"Very well, indeed."

"Foreign service, I understand," she said. "Who would ever have thought he'd wind up in foreign service. To tell the truth, I often worried over him. But that was foolish, wasn't it?"

"Yes, it was," I said. "He's making out all right."

"Did he say when he would be coming home?"

"Not for a time," I told her. "It seems he's very busy."

"Well, then," she said, quite cheerfully, "I won't be looking for him. I can rest content. I won't be having to go out every hour or so to see if he's come back." She turned away and started down the street.

"Mrs Tyler," I said, "can't I see you home? It's getting dark and…"

"Oh, my, no," she said. "There is no need of it. I won't be afraid. Now that I know Tupper's all right, I'll never be afraid." I stood and watched her go, the white halo of her head bobbing in the darkness, her cane tapping out the way as she moved down the long and twisting path of her world of fantasy.

And it was better that way, I knew, better that she could take harsh reality and twist it into something that was strange and beautiful.

I stood and watched until she turned the corner and the tapping of the cane grew dim, then I turned about and headed downtown.

In the shopping district the street lamps had turned on, but all the stores were dark and this, when one saw it, was a bit upsetting, for most of them stayed open until nine o'clock. But now even the Happy Hollow tavern and the movie house were closed.

The village hall was lighted and a small group of people loitered near the door. The clinic, I imagined, must be coming to a close. I wondered, looking at the hall, what Doc Fabian might think of all of this. His testy old medic's soul, I knew, would surely stand aghast despite the fact he'd been the first to benefit.

I turned from looking at the hall, and plodded down the street, hands plunged deep into my trouser pockets, walking aimlessly and restlessly, not knowing what to do. On a night like this, I wondered, what was a man to do?

Sit in his living-room and watch the flickering rectangle of a television screen? Sit down with a bottle and methodically get drunk? Seek out a friend or neighbour for endless speculation and senseless conversation? Or find some place to huddle, waiting limply for what would happen next?

I came to an intersection and up the side street to my right I saw a splash of light that fell across the sidewalk from a lighted window. I looked at it, astonished, then realized that the light came from the window of the Tribune office, and that Joe Evans would be there, talking on the phone, perhaps, with someone from the Associated Press or the New York Times or one of the other papers that had been calling him for news. Joe was a busy man and I didn't want to bother him, but perhaps he wouldn't mind, I thought, if I dropped in for a minute.

He was busy on the phone, crouched above his desk, with the receiver pressed against his ear. The screen door clicked behind me and he looked up and saw me.

"Just a minute," he said into the phone, holding the receiver out to me.

"Joe, what's the matter?" For something was the matter. His face wore a look of shock and his eyes were stiff and staring. Little beads of sweat trickled down his forehead and ran into his eyebrows.

"It's Alf," he said, lips moving stiffly.

"Alf," I said into the phone, but I kept my eyes on Joe Evans' face. He had the look of a man who had been hit on the head with something large and solid.

"Brad!" cried Alf. "Is that you, Brad?"

"Yes," I said, "it is."

"Where have you been? I've been trying to get in touch with you. When your phone didn't answer…"

"What's the matter, Alf? Take it easy, Alf."

"All right," he said. "I'll try to take it easy. I'll take it from the top." I didn't like the sound of his voice. He was scared and he was trying not to be.

"Go ahead," I said.

"I finally got to Elmore," he told me. "The traffic's something awful. You can't imagine what the traffic is out here. They have military check points and…"

"But you finally got to Elmore. You told me you were going."

"Yes, I finally got here. On the radio I heard about this delegation that came out to see you. The senator and the general and the rest of them, and when I got to Elmore I found that they were stopping at the Corn Belt hotel. Isn't that the damndest name?

"But, anyhow, I figured that they should know more about what was going on down in Mississippi. I thought it might throw some light on the situation. So I went down to the hotel to see the senator — that is, to try to see him. It was a madhouse down there. There were great crowds of people and the police were trying to keep order, but they had their hands full. There were television cameras all over the place and newsmen and the radio people — well, anyhow, I never saw the senator. But I saw someone else. Saw him and recognized him from the pictures in the paper. The one called Davenport…"

"The biologist," I said.

"Yes, that's it. The scientist. I got him cornered and I tried to explain I had to see the senator. He wasn't too much help. I'm not even sure be was hearing what I was saying. He seemed to be upset and he was sweating like a mule and he was paper-white. I thought he might be sick and I asked him if he was, if there was anything I could do for him. Then he told me. I don't think he meant to tell me. I think maybe he was sorry that he did after he had told me. But he was so full of anger it was spilling out of him and for the moment he didn't care. The man was in anguish, I tell you. I never saw a man as upset as be was. He grabbed me by the lapels and he stuck his face up close to mine and he was so excited and he talked so fast that he spit all over me. He wouldn't have done a thing like that for all the world; he's not that sort of man…"

"Alf," I pleaded. "Alf, get down to facts."

"I forgot to tell you," Alf said, "that the news had just broken about that flying saucer you brought back. The radio was full of it. About how it was spotting the nuclear concentrations. Well, I started to tell the scientist about why I had to see the senator, about the project down in Greenbriar. And that was when he began to talk, grabbing hold of me so I couldn't get away. He said the news of the aliens' one condition, that we disperse our nuclear capacity, was the worst thing that could have happened. He said the Pentagon is convinced the aliens are a threat and that they must be stopped…"

"Alf," I said, suddenly weak, guessing what was coming.

"And he said they know they must be stopped before they control more territory and the only way to do it is an H-bomb right on top of Millville." He stopped, half out of breath.

I didn't say a thing. I couldn't say a word, I was too paralysed. I was remembering how the general had looked when I'd talked with him that morning and the senator saying, "We have to trust you, boy. You hold us in your hands."

"Brad," Alf asked, anxiously, "are you there? Did you hear me?"

"Yes," I said, "I'm here."

"Davenport told me he was afraid this new development of the nuclear pinpointing might push the military into action without due consideration — knowing that they had to act or they'd not have anything to use. Like a man with a gun, he said, facing a wild beast. He doesn't want to kill the beast unless he has to and there is always the chance the beast will slink away and he won't have to fire. But suppose he knows that in the next two minutes his gun will disappear into thin air well, then he has to take a chance and shoot before the gun can disappear. He has to kill the beast while he still has a gun."

"And now," I said, speaking more levelly than I would have thought possible, "Millville is the beast."

"Not Millville, Brad. Just…"

"Yes," I said, "most certainly not Millville. Tell that to the people when the bomb explodes."

"This Davenport was beside himself. He had no business talking to me…"

"You think he knows what he is talking about? He had a row with the general this morning."

"I think he knows more than he told me, Brad. He talked for a couple of minutes and then he buttoned up. As though he knew he had no business talking. But he's obsessed with one idea. He thinks the only thing that can stop the military is the force of public opinion. He thinks that if what they plan is known, there'll be such an uproar they'd be afraid to move. Not only, he pointed out, would the public be outraged at such cold-bloodedness, but the public wants these aliens in; they're for anyone who can break the bomb. And this biologist of yours is going to plant this story. He didn't say he would, but that's what he was working up to. He'll tip off some newspaperman, I'm sure of that." I felt my guts turn over and my knees were weak. I pressed my legs hard against the desk to keep from keeling over.

"This village will go howling mad," I said. "I asked the general this morning…"

"You asked the general! For Christ sake, did you know?"

"Of course I knew. Not that they would do it. Just that, they were thinking of it."

"And you didn't say a word?"

"Who could I tell? What good would it have done? And it wasn't certain. It was just an alternative — a last alternative. Three hundred lives against three billion…"

"But you, yourself! All your friends…"

"Alf," I pleaded, "there was nothing I could do. What would you have done? Told the village and driven everyone stark mad?"

"I don't know," said Alf, "I don't know what I'd have done."

"Alf, is the senator at the hotel? I mean, is he there right now?"

"I think he is. You mean to call him, Brad?"

"I don't know what good it'll do," I said, "but perhaps I should."

"I'll get off the line," said Alf. "And Brad…"

"Yes."

"Brad, the best of luck. I mean — oh, hell, just the best of luck."

"Thanks, Alf." I heard the click of the receiver as he hung up and the line droned empty in my ear. My hand began to shake and I laid the receiver carefully on the desk, not trying to put it back into the cradle.

Joe Evans was looking at me hard. "You knew," he said. "You knew all the time."

I shook my head. "Not that they meant to do it. The general mentioned it as a last resort. Davenport jumped on him…" I didn't finish what I meant to say. The words just dwindled off. Joe kept on staring at me.

I exploded at him. "Damn it, man," I shouted, "I couldn't tell anyone. I asked the general, if he had to do it, to do it without notice. Not to let us know. That way there'd be a flash we'd probably never see. We'd die, of course, but only once. Not a thousand deaths…"

Joe picked up the phone. "I'll try to raise the senator," he said.

I sat down in a chair.

I felt empty. There was nothing in me. I heard Joe talking into the telephone, but I didn't really hear his words, for it seemed that I had, for the moment, created a small world all of my own (as though there were no longer room for me in the normal world) and had drawn it about me as one would draw a blanket.

I was miserable and at the same time angry, and perhaps considerably confused.

Joe was saying something to me and I became aware of it only after he had almost finished speaking.

"What was that?" I asked.

"The call is in," said Joe. "They'll call us back." I nodded.

"I told them it was important."

"I wonder if it is," I said.

"What do you mean? Of course it…"

"I wonder what the senator can do. I wonder what difference it will make if I, or you, or anyone, talks to him about it."

"The senator has a lot of weight," said Joe. "He likes to throw it around." We sat in silence for a moment, waiting for the call, waiting for the senator and what he knew about it.

"If no one will stand up for us," asked Joe, "if no one will fight for us, what are we to do?"

"What can we do?" I asked. "We can't even run. We can't get away. We're sitting ducks."

"When the village knows…"

"They'll know," I said, "as soon as the news leaks out. If it does leak out. It'll be bulletined on TV and radio and everyone in this village is plastered to a set."

"Maybe someone will get hold of Davenport and hush him up."

I shook my head. "He was pretty sore this morning. Right down the general's throat." And who was right? I asked myself. How could one tell in this short space of time who was right or wrong?

For years man had fought insects and blights and noxious weeds. He'd fought them any way he could. He'd killed them any way he could. Let one's guard down for a moment and the weeds would have taken over. They crowded every fence corner, every hedgerow, sprang up in every vacant lot. They'd grow anywhere. When drought killed the grain and sickened the corn, the weeds would keep on growing, green and tough and wiry.

And now came another noxious weed, out of another time, a weed that very possibly could destroy not only corn and grain but the human race. If this should be the case, the only thing to do was to fight it as one fought any weed, with everything one had.

But suppose that this was a different sort of weed, no ordinary weed, but a highly adaptive weed that had studied the ways of man and weed, and out of its vast knowledge and adaptability could manage to survive anything that man might throw at it. Anything, that is, except massive radiation.

For that had been the answer when the problem had been posed in that strange project down in Mississippi.

And the Flowers' reaction to that answer would be a simple one. Get rid of radiation. And while you were getting rid of it, win the affection of the world. If that should be the situation, then the Pentagon was right.

The phone buzzed from the desk.

Joe picked up the receiver and handed it to me.

My lips seemed to be stiff. The words I spoke came out hard and dry.

"Hello," I said. "Hello. Is this the senator?

"Yes."

"This is Bradshaw Carter. Millville. Met you this morning. At the barrier."

"Certainly, Mr Carter. What can I do for you?"

"There is a rumour…"

"There are many rumours, Carter. I've heard a dozen of them."

"About a bomb on Millville. The general said this morning…"

"Yes," said the senator, far too calmly. "I have heard that rumour, too, and am quite disturbed by it. But there is no confirmation. It is nothing but a rumour."

"Senator," I said. "I wish you'd level with me. To you it's a disturbing thing to hear. It's personal with us."

"Well," said the senator. You could fairly hear him debating with himself.

"Tell me," I insisted. "We're the ones involved…"

"Yes. Yes," said the senator. "You have the right to know. I'd not deny you that."

"So what is going on?

"There is only one solid piece of information," said the senator.

"There are top level consultations going on among the nuclear powers. Quite a blow to them, you know, this condition of the aliens. The consultations are highly secret, as you might imagine. You realize, of course…"

"It's perfectly all right," I said. "I can guarantee…"

"Oh, it's not that so much," said the senator. "One of the newspaper boys will sniff it out before the night is over. But I don't like it. It sounds as if some sort of mutual agreement is being sought. In view of public opinion, I am very much afraid…"

"Senator! Please, not politics."

"I'm sorry," said the senator. "I didn't mean it that way. I won't try to conceal from you that I am perturbed. I'm trying to get what facts I can…"

"Then it's critical."

"If that barrier moves another foot," said the senator, "if anything else should happen, it's not inconceivable that we might act unilaterally. The military can always argue that they moved to save the world from invasion by an alien horde. They can claim, as well, that they had information held by no one else. They could say it was classified and refuse to give it out. They would have a cover story and once it had been done, they could settle back and let time take its course. There would be hell to pay, of course, but they could ride it out."

"What do you think?" I asked. "What are the chances?"

"God," said the senator, "I don't know. I don't have the facts. I don't know what the Pentagon is thinking. I don't know the facts they have. I don't know what the chiefs of staff have told the President. There is no way of knowing the attitudes of Britain or Russia, or of France." The wire sang cold and empty.

"Is there," asked the senator, "anything that you can do from the Millville end?"

"An appeal," I said. "A public appeal. The newspapers and the radio…"

I could almost see him shake his head. "It wouldn't work," he said. "No one has any way of knowing what's happening there behind the barrier. There is always the possibility of influence by the aliens. And the pleading of special favour even when that would be prejudicial to the world. The communications media would snap it up, of course, and would play it up and make a big thing of it. But it would not influence official opinion in the least. It would only serve to stir up the people — the people everywhere. And there is enough emotionalism now. What we need are some solid facts and some common sense." He was fearful, I thought, that we'd upset the boat. He wanted to keep everything all quiet and decent.

"And, anyhow," he said, "there is no real evidence…"

"Davenport thinks there is."

"You have talked with him?"

"No," I said, quite truthfully, "I haven't talked with him."

"Davenport," he said, "doesn't understand. He stepped out of the isolation of his laboratory and…"

"He sounded good to me," I said. "He sounded civilized." And was sorry I'd said it, for now I'd embarrassed him as well as frightened him.

"I'll let you know," he said, a little stiffly. "As soon as I hear anything I'll let you or Gerald know. I'll do the best I can. I don't think you need to worry. Just keep that barrier from moving, just keep things quiet. That's all you have to do."

"Sure, Senator," I said, disgusted.

"Thanks for calling," said the senator. "I'll keep in touch."

"Goodbye, Senator," I said.

I put the receiver back into the cradle. Joe looked at me inquiringly.

I shook my head. "He doesn't know and he isn't talking. And I gather he is helpless. He can't do anything for us." Footsteps sounded on the sidewalk and a second later the door came open. I swung around and there stood Higgy Morris.

Of all the people who would come walking in at this particular moment, it would be Higgy Morris.

He looked from one to the other of us.

"What's the matter with you guys?" he asked.

I kept on looking at him, wishing that he'd go away, but knowing that he wouldn't.

"Brad," said Joe, "we've got to tell him."

"All right," I said. "You go ahead and tell him." Higgy didn't move. He stood beside the door while Joe told him how it was. Higgy got wall-eyed and seemed to turn into a statue. He never moved a muscle; he didn't interrupt.

For a long moment there was silence, then Higgy said to me, "What do you think? Could they do a thing like that to us?"

I nodded. "They could. They might. If the barrier moves again. If something else should happen."

"Well, then," said Higgy, springing into action, "what are we standing here for? We must start to dig."

"Dig?"

"Sure. A bomb shelter. We've got all sorts of manpower. There's no one in the village who's doing anything. We could put everyone to work. There's road equipment in the shed down by the railroad station and there must be a dozen or more trucks scattered here and there. I'll appoint a committee and we" ll… Say, what's the matter with you fellows?"

"Higgy," said Joe, almost gently, "you just don't understand. This isn't fallout — this would be a hit with the village as ground zero. You can't build a shelter that would do any good. Not in a hundred years, you couldn't."

"We could try," said Higgy, stubbornly.

"You can't dig deep enough," I said, "or build strong enough to withstand the blast. And even if you could, there'd be the oxygen…"

"But we got to do something," Higgy shouted. "We can't simply sit and take it. Why, we'd all be killed!"

"Chum," I told him, "that's too damned bad."

"Now, see here…" said Higgy.

"Cut it out!" yelled Joe. "Cut it out, both of you. Maybe you don't care for one another, but we have to work together. And there is a way. We do have a shelter." I stared at him for a moment, then I saw what he was getting at.

"No!" I shouted. "No, we can't do that. Not yet. Don't you see? That would be throwing away any chance we have for negotiation. We can't let them know."

"Ten to one," said Joe, "they already know."

"I don't get it at all," Higgy pleaded. "What shelter have we got?

"The other world," said Joe. "The parallel world, the one that Brad was in. We could go back there if we had to. They would take care of us, they would let us stay. They'd grow food for us and there'd be stewards to keep us healthy and…"

"You forget one thing," I said. "We don't know how to go. There's just that one place in the garden and now it's all changed. The flowers are gone and there's nothing there but the money bushes."

"The steward and Smith could show us," said Joe. "They would know the way."

"They aren't here," said Higgy. "They went home. There was no one at the clinic and they said they had to go, but they'd be back again if we needed them. I drove them down to Brad's place and they didn't have no trouble finding the door or whatever you call it. They just walked a ways across the garden and then they disappeared."

"You could find it, then?" asked Joe.

"I could come pretty close."

"We can find it if we have to, then," said Joe. "We can form lines, arm in arm, and march across the garden."

"I don't know," I said. "It may not be always open."

"Open?"

"If it stayed open all the time," I said, "we'd have lost a lot of people in the last ten years. Kids played down there and other people used it for a short cut. I went across it to go over to Doc Fabian's, and there were a lot of people who walked back and forth across it. Some of them would have hit that door if it had been open."

"Well, anyhow," said Higgy, "we can call them up. We can pick up one of those phones…"

"Not," I said, "until we absolutely have to. We'd probably be cutting ourselves off forever from the human race."

"It would be better," Higgy said, "than dying."

"Let's not rush into anything," I pleaded with them. "Let's give our own people time to try to work it out. It's possible that nothing will happen. We can't go begging for sanctuary until we know we need it. There's still a chance that the two races may be able to negotiate. I know it doesn't look too good now, but if it's possible, humanity has to have a chance to negotiate."

"Brad," said Joe, "I don't think there'll be any negotiations. I don't think the aliens ever meant there should be any."

"And," said Higgy, "this never would have happened if it hadn't been for your father." I choked down my anger and I said, "It would have happened somewhere. If not in Millville, then it would have happened some place else. If not right now, then a little later."

"But that's the point," said Higgy, nastily. "It wouldn't have happened here; it would have happened somewhere else." I had no answer for him. There was an answer, certainly, but not the kind of answer that Higgy would accept.

"And let me tell you something else," said Higgy. "Just a friendly warning. You better watch your step. Hiram's out to get you. The beating you gave him didn't help the situation any. And there are a lot of hotheads who feel as Hiram does about it. They blame you and your family for what has happened here."

"Higgy," protested Joe, "no one has any right…"

"I know they don't," said Higgy, "but that's the way it is. I'll try to uphold law and order, but I can't guarantee it now." He turned and spoke directly to me. "You better hope," he said, "that this thing gets straightened out and soon. And if it doesn't, you better find a big, deep hole to hide in."

"Why, you…" I said. I jumped to my feet and I would have slugged him, but Joe came fast around the desk and grabbed hold of me and pushed me back.

"Cut it out!" he said, exasperated. "We got trouble enough without you two tangling."

"If the bombing rumour does get out," said Higgy, viciously, "I wouldn't give a nickel for your life. You're too mixed up in it. Folks will begin to wonder…"

Joe grabbed hold of Higgy and shoved him against the wall. "Shut your mouth," he said, "or I'll shut it for you." He balled up a fist and showed it to Higgy and Higgy shut his mouth.

"And now," I said to Joe, "since you've restored law and order and everything is peaceable and smooth, you won't be needing me. I'll run along."

"Brad," said Joe, between his teeth, "just a minute, there…" But I went out and slammed the door behind me.

Outside, the dusk had deepened and the street was empty. Light still burned in the village hall, but the few loungers at the door were gone.

Maybe, I told myself, I should have stayed. If for no other reason than to help Joe keep Higgy from making some fool move.

But there had, it seemed to me, been no point in staying. Even if I had something to offer (which I didn't), it would have been suspect. For by now, apparently, I was fairly well discredited. More than likely Hiram and Tom Preston had been busy all afternoon lining people up in the Hate Bradshaw Carter movement.

I turned off Main Street and headed back toward home. All along the Street lay a sense of peacefulness. Shadows flickered on the lawns quartering the intersections as a light summer breeze set the street lamps, hung on their arms, to swaying. Windows were open against the heat and to catch the breeze and soft lights shone within the houses, while from the open windows came snatches of muttering from the TV or radio. Peaceful, and yet I knew that beneath that quiet exterior lay the fear and hate and terror that could turn the village into a howling bedlam at a single word or an unexpected action.

There was resentment here, a smouldering resentment that one little group of people should be penned like cattle while all the others in the world were free. And a feeling of rebellion against the cosmic unfairness that we, of all the people in the world, should have been picked for penning. Perhaps, as well, a strange unquiet at being stared at by the world and talked of by the world, as if we were something monstrous and unkempt.

And perhaps the shameful fear that the world might think we had brought all this on ourselves through some moral or mental relapse.

Thrown into this sort of situation, it was only natural that the people of the village should be avid to grasp at any sort of interpretation that might clear their names and set them right, not only with themselves, but with the aliens and the world; that they should be willing to believe anything at all (the worst or best), to embrace all rumours, to wallow in outlandish speculation, to attempt to paint the entire picture in contrasting black and white (even when they knew that all of it was grey), because in this direction of blackness and of whiteness lay the desired simplicity that served an easier understanding and a comfortable acceptance.

They could not be blamed, I told myself. They were not equipped to take a thing like this in stride. For years they had lived unspectacularly in a tiny backwash off the mainstream of the world. The small events of village life were their great events, the landmarks of their living that time the crazy Johnson kid had rammed his beat-up jalopy into the tree on Elm Street, the day the fire department had been called to rescue Grandma Jones" cat, marooned on the roof of the Presbyterian parsonage (and to this day no one could figure out how the cat had got there), the afternoon Pappy Andrews had fallen asleep while fishing on the river bank, and had tumbled down into the stream, to be hauled out, now thoroughly awakened, but with water in his lungs, spewing and gasping, by Len Streeter (and the speculation as to why Len Streeter should have been walking along the river bank). Of such things had their lives been made, the thin grist of excitement.

But now they faced a bigger thing, something they could not comprehend, a happening and a situation that was, for the moment, too big for the world to comprehend. And because they could not reduce this situation to the simple formula of aimless wonder that could be accorded a cat that had somehow attained the parsonage roof, they were uneasy and upset and their tempers were on edge, ready to flare into an antagonistic attitude, and very probably into violence — if they could find something or someone against which such a violence could be aimed. And now I knew that Tom Preston and Hiram Martin had provided them with a target for their violence — if and when the violence came.

I saw now that I was almost home. I was in front of the house of Daniel Willoughby, a big brick house, upstanding and foursquare, the kind of house you'd know, without even thinking of it, that a man like Daniel Willoughby would own. Across the street, on the corner, was the old Perkins house.

New people had moved into the place a week or so ago. It was one of the few houses in the village that was put up for rent, and people moved in and out of it every year or so. No one ever went out of their way to get acquainted with these renters; it wasn't worth one's while. And just down the street was Doc Fabian's place.

A few minutes more, I thought, and I would be home, back in the house with the hole punched in the roof, back with the echoing emptiness and the lonely question, with the hatred and suspicion of the town performing sentry-go just outside the gate.

Across the street a screen door slammed and feet tramped across the porch boards.

A voice yelled: "Wally, they're going to bomb us! It was on television!" A shadow hunched up out of the darkness of the earth — a man who had been lying on the grass or sitting in a low-slung lawn chair, invisible until the cry had jerked hint upright.

He gurgled as he tried to form some word, but it came out wrong.

"There was a bulletin!" the other one shouted from the porch. "Just now. On television." The man out in the yard was up and running, heading for the house.

And I was running, too. Heading for home, as fast as I could go, my legs moving of their own accord, unprompted by the brain.

I'd expected I'd have a little time, but there'd been no time. The rumour had broken sooner than I had anticipated.

For the bulletin, of course, had been no more than rumour, I was sure of that — that a bombing might take place; that, as a last resort, a bomb might be dropped on Millville. But I also knew that so far as this village was concerned, it would make no difference. The people in the village would not differentiate between fact and rumour.

This was the trigger that would turn this village into a hate-filled madhouse. I might be involved and so might Gerald Sherwood — and Stiffy, too, if he were here.

I ran off the street and plunged down the slope back of the Fabian house, heading for the little swale where the money crop was growing. It was not until I was halfway down the slope that I thought of Hiram. Earlier in the day he had been guarding the money bushes and he might still be there. I skidded to a halt and crouched against the ground. Quickly I surveyed the area below me, then went slowly over it, looking for any hunch of darkness, any movement that might betray a watcher.

From far away I heard a shout and on the street above someone ran, feet pounding on the pavement. A door banged and somewhere, several blocks away, a car was started and the driver gunned the engine. The excited voice of a news commentator floated thinly through an open window, but I could not make out the words.

There was no sign of Hiram.

I rose from my crouch and went slowly down the slope. I reached the garden and made my way across it. Ahead of me loomed the shattered greenhouse, and growing at its corner the seedling elm tree.

I came up to the greenhouse and stood beside it for a moment, taking one last look for Hiram, to make sure he wasn't sneaking up on me. Then I started to move on, but a voice spoke to me and the sound of the voice froze me.

Although, even as I stood frozen, I realized there'd been no sound.

Bradshaw Carter, said the voice once again, speaking with no sound.

And there was a smell of purpleness — perhaps not a smell, exactly, but a sense of purpleness. It lay heavy in the air and it took me back in sharp and crystal memory to Tupper Tyler's camp where the Presence had waited on the hillside to walk me back to Earth.

"Yes," I said. "Where are you?" The seedling elm at the corner of the greenhouse seemed to sway, although there was not breeze enough to sway it.

I am here, it said. I have been here all the years. I have been looking forward to this time when I could talk with you.

"You know?" I asked, and it was a foolish question, for somehow I was sure it knew about the bomb and all the rest of it.

We know, said the elm tree, but there can be no despair.

"No despair?" I asked, aghast.

If we fail this time, it said, we will try again. Another place, perhaps. Or we may have to wait the — what do you call it?

"The radiation," I said. "That is what you call it."

Until, said the purpleness, the radiations leave.

"That will be years," I said.

We have the years, it said. We have all the time there is. There is no end of us. There is no end of time.

"But there is an end of time for us," I said, with a gush of pity for all humanity, but mostly for myself. "There is an end for me."

Yes, we know, said the purpleness. We feel much sorrow for you.

And now, I knew, was the time to ask for help, to point out that we were in this situation through no choice and no action of our own, and that those who had placed us in it should help to get us out.

But when I tried to say the words, I couldn't make them come. I couldn't admit to this alien thing our complete helplessness.

It was, I suppose, stubbornness and pride. But I had not known until I tried to speak the words that I had the stubborness and pride.

We feel much sorrow for you, the elm tree had said. But what kind of sorrow — a real and sincere sorrow, or the superficial and pedantic sorrow of the immortal for a frail and flickering creature that was about to die?

I would be bone and dust and eventually neither bone nor dust but forgetfulness and clay, and these things would live on and on, forever.

And it would be more important, I knew, for us who would be bone and dust to have a stubborn pride than it would be for a thing of strength and surety. It was the one thing we had, the one thing we could cling to.

A purpleness, I thought, and what was the purpleness? It was not a colour; it was something more than that. It was, perhaps, the odour of immortality, the effluvium of that great uncaring which could not afford to care since anything it cared for could only last a day, while it went on into an eternal future toward other things and other lives for which it could not allow itself to care.

And this was loneliness, I thought, a never-ending and hopeless loneliness such as the human race would never be called upon to face.

Standing there, touching the hard, cold edge of that loneliness, I felt pity stir in me and it seemed strange that one should feel pity for a tree.

Although, I knew, it was not the tree nor the purple flowers but the Presence that had walked me home and that was here as well — the same life stuff of which I myself was made — that I felt pity for.

"I am sorry for you, too," I said, but even as I spoke I knew it would not understand the pity any more than it would have understood the pride if it had known about the pride.

A car came screeching around the curve on the street above the swale and the illumination of its headlights slashed across the greenhouse. I flinched away, but the lights were gone before the flinch had finished.

Somewhere out in the darkness someone was calling me, speaking softly, almost fearfully.

Another car came around the curve, turning fast, its tires howling on the turn. The first car was stopping at my house, skidding on the pavement as the brakes spun it to a halt.

"Brad!" said the soft and fearful voice. "Are you out there, Brad?"

"Nancy," I said. "Nancy, over here." There was something wrong, I knew, something terribly wrong. There was a tenseness in her voice, as if she were speaking through a haze of terror.

And there was a wrongness, too, about those speeding cars stopping at the house.

"I thought I heard you talking," Nancy said, "but I couldn't see you. You weren't in the house and…" A man was running around the back of the house, a dark shadow outlined briefly by the street lamp at the corner. Out in front were other men; I could hear their running and the angry mumble of them.

"Brad," said Nancy.

"Hold it," I cautioned. "There's something wrong." I could see her now. She was stumbling toward me through the darkness.

Up by the house a voice yelled: "We know you're in there, Carter! We're coming in to get you if you don't come out!" I turned and ran toward Nancy and caught her in my arms. She was shivering.

"Those men," she said.

"Hiram and his pals," I said.

Glass crashed and a streak of fire went arcing through the night.

"Now, damn it," someone yelled, triumphantly, "maybe you'll come out."

"Run," I said to Nancy. "Up the hill. Get in among the trees…"

"It's Stiffy," she whispered back. "I saw him and he sent me…" A sudden glow of fire leaped up inside the house. The windows in the dining-room flared like gleaming eyes. And in the light cast by the flame I saw the dark figures gambolling, screaming now in a mindless frenzy.

Nancy turned and ran and I pelted after her, and behind us a voice boomed above the bawling of the mob.

"There he goes!" the voice shouted. "Down there in the garden!" Something caught my foot and tripped me and I fell, sprawling among the money bushes. The scraggly branches raked across my face and clawed at my clothes as I struggled to my feet.

A tongue of whipping flame leaped above the house, funnelled through the hole the time machine had punched in the roof, and the windows all were glowing now. In the sudden silence I could hear the sucking roar of fire eating through the structure.

They were running down the slope toward the garden a silent group of men. The pounding of their feet and the ugly gasping of their breath came across the space between us.

I stooped and ran my hand along the ground and in the darkness found the thing that tripped me. My fingers closed about it and I brought it up, a four foot length of two-by-four, old and beginning to rot along its edges, but still sound in the core.

A club, I thought, and this was the end of it. But one of them would die perhaps two of them while they were killing me.

"Run!" I screamed at Nancy, knowing she was out there somewhere, although I could not see her.

There was just one thing left, I told myself one thing more that I must do. And that was to get Hiram Martin with the club before the mob closed over me.

They had reached the bottom of the slope and were charging across the flat ground of the garden, with Hiram in the lead. I stood and waited for them, with the club half raised, watching Hiram run toward me, with the white gash of his teeth shining in the darkness of his face.

Right between the eyes, I told myself, and split his skull wide open.

And after that get another of them if there were time to do it.

The fire was roaring now, racing through the dryness of the house, and even where I stood the heat reached out to touch me.

The men were closing in and I raised the club a little higher, working my fingers to get a better grip upon it.

But in that last instant before they came within my reach, they skidded to a milling halt, some of them half turning to run back up the slope, the others simply staring, with their mouths wide open in astonishment and horror. Staring, not at me, but at something that was beyond me.

Then they broke and ran, back toward the slope, and above the roaring of the burning house, I could hear their bellowing — like stampeded cattle racing before a prairie fire, bawling out their terror as they ran.

I swung around to look behind me and there stood those other things from that other world, their ebon hides gleaming in the flicker of the firelight, their silver plumes stirring gently in the breeze. And as they moved toward me, they twittered in their weird bird-song.

My God, I thought, they couldn't wait! They came a little early so they wouldn't miss a single tremor of this terror-stricken place.

And not only on this night, but on other nights to come, rolling back the time to this present instant. A new place for them to stand and wait for it to commence, a new ghost house with gaping windows through which they'd glimpse the awfulness of another earth.

They were moving toward me and I was standing there with the club gripped in my hands and there was the smell of purpleness again and a soundless voice I recognized.

Go back, the voice said. Go back. You've come too soon. This world isn't open.

Someone was calling from far away, the call lest in the thundering and the crackling of the fire and the high, excited, liquid trilling of these ghouls from the purple world of Tupper Tyler.

Go back, said the elm tree, and its voiceless words cracked like a snapped whiplash.

And they were going back — or, at least, they were disappearing, melting into some strange darkness that was blacker than the night.

One elm tree that talked, I thought, and how many other trees? How much of this place still was Millville and how much purple world? I lifted my head so that I could see the treetops that rimmed the garden and they were there, ghosts against the sky, fluttering in some strange wind that blew from an unknown quarter. Fluttering — or were they talking, too? The old, dumb, stupid trees of earth, or a different kind of tree from a different earth?

We'd never know, I told myself, and perhaps it did not matter, for from the very start we'd never had a chance. We were licked before we started. We had been lost on that long-gone day when my father brought home the purple flowers.

From far off someone was calling and the name was mine.

I dropped the two-by-four and started across the garden, wondering who it was. Not Nancy, but someone that I knew.

Nancy came running down the hill. "Hurry, Brad," she called.

"Where were you?" I asked. "What's going on?"

"It's Stuffy. I told you it was Stuffy. He's waiting at the barrier. He sneaked through the guards. He says he has to see you."

"But Stiffy…"

"He's here, I tell you. And he wants to talk with you. No one else will do." She turned and trotted up the hill and I lumbered after her. We went through Doc's yard and across the street and through another yard and there, just ahead of us, I knew, was the barrier.

A gnome-like figure rose from the ground.

"That you, lad?" he asked.

I hunkered down at the edge of the barrier and stared across at him.

"Yes, it's me," I said, "but you…"

"Later. We haven't got much time. The guards know I got through the lines. They're hunting for me."

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Not what I want," he said. What everybody wants. Something that you need. You're in a jam."

"Everyone's in a jam," I said.

"That's what I mean," said Stuffy. "Some damn fool in the Pentagon is set to drop a bomb. I heard some of the ruckus on a car radio when I was sneaking through. Just a snatch of it."

"So, all right," I said. "The human race is sunk."

"Not sunk," insisted Stuffy. "I tell you there's a way. If Washington just understood, if…"

"If you know a way," I asked, "why waste time in reaching me? You could have told…"

"Who would I tell?" asked Stuffy. "Who would believe me, even if I told? I'm just a lousy bum and I ran off from that hospital and…"

"All right," I said. "All right."

"You were the man to tell," said Stiffy. "You're accredited, it seems like. Someone will listen to you. You can get in touch with someone and they'll listen to you."

"If it was good enough," I said.

"This is good enough," said Stuffy. "We have something that the aliens want. We're the only people who can give it to them."

"Give to them!" I shouted. "Anything they want, they can take away from us."

"Not this, they can't," said Stuffy.

I shook my head. "You make it sound too easy. They already have us hooked. The people want them in, although they'd come in anyhow, even if the people didn't. They hit us in our weak spot…"

"The Flowers have a weak spot, too," said Stuffy.

"Don't make me laugh," I said.

"You're just upset," said Stiffy.

"You're damned right I am." And I had a right to be. The world had gone to pot. Nuclear annihilation was poised above our heads and the village, wild before, would be running frantic when Hiram told what he'd seen down in the garden. Hiram and his hoodlum pals had burned down my house and I didn't have a home — no one had a home, for the earth was home no longer. It was just another in a long, long chain of worlds that was being taken over by another kind of life that mankind had no chance of fighting.

"The Flowers are an ancient race," said Stuffy. "How ancient, I don't know. A billion years, two billion, it's anybody's guess. They've gone into a lot of worlds and they've known a lot of races — intelligent races, that is. And they've worked with these races and gone hand in hand with them. But no other race has ever loved them. No other race has ever grown them in their gardens and tended them for the beauty that they gave and no…"

"You're crazy!" I yelled. "You're stark, raving mad."

"Brad," said Nancy, breathlessly, "he could be right, you know. Realization of natural beauty is something the human race developed in the last two thousand years or so. No caveman ever thought a flower was beautiful or…"

"You're right," said Stuffy. "No other race, none of the other races, ever developed the concept of beauty. Only a man of Earth would have dug up a clump of flowers growing in the woods and brought them home and tended them for the beauty that the Flowers had never known they had until that very moment. No one had ever loved them before, for any reason, or cared for them before. Like a lovely woman who had never known she was beautiful until someone told her that she was. Like an orphan that never had a home and finally found a home." It was simple, I told myself. It couldn't be that simple. There was nothing ever simple. Yet, when one thought of it, it seemed to make some sense. And it was the only thing that made any sense.

"The Flowers made one condition," Stuffy said. "Let us make another. Let us insist that a certain percentage of them, when we invite them, must remain as flowers."

"So that the people of the earth," said Nancy, "can cultivate them and lavish care on them and admire them for themselves."

Stuffy chuckled softly. "I've thought on it a lot," he said. "I could write that clause myself…" Would it work, I wondered. Would it really work?

And, of course, it would.

The business of being flowers loved by another race, cared for by another race, would bind these aliens to us as closely as we would be bound to them by the banishment of war.

A different kind of bond, but as strong a bond as that which bound man and dog together. And that bond was all we needed; one that would give us time to learn to work together.

We would never need to fear the Flowers, for we were someone they had been looking for, not knowing they were looking for us, not once suspecting that the sort of thing existed that we could offer them.

"Something new," I said.

"Yeah, something new," said Stuffy.

Something new and strange, I told myself. As new and strange to the Flowers as their time manipulation was new and strange to us.

"Well," asked Stuffy, "do you buy it? There's a bunch of soldier boys out here looking for me. They know I slipped through the lines and in a little while they'll nose me out." The State Department man and the senator, I recalled, had talked this very morning of long negotiation if, in fact, there could be negotiation.

And the general had talked in terms of force. But all the time the answer had lain in a soft and very human trait, mankind's love of beauty. It had remained for an undistinguished man, no senator or no general, but a crummy bum, to come up with the answer.

"Call in your soldier boys," I said, "and ask them for a phone. I'd just as soon not go hunting one." First I'd have to reach the senator and he'd talk to the President.

Then I'd get hold of Higgy and tell him what had happened so he could tame down the village.

But for a little moment I'd have it as I wanted to remember it, here with Nancy at my side and that old reprobate friend of mine across the barrier, savouring the greatness of this tiny slice of time in which the strength of true humanity (not of position or of power) rose to the vision of a future in which many different races marched side by side toward a glory we could not guess as yet.

All the Traps of Earth

THE INVENTORY list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the rest of it — all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the Barringtons through a long family history.

And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the last item of them all: One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.

He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them — the little exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked up that last visit she had made to Peking.

And having done that, his job came to an end.

He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family's past. There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon, and the old chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had plied the asteroids.

And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had helped to fashion.

And not a one of them from the last six hundred years, thought Richard Daniel, staring at them one by one, that he had not known.

There, to the right of the fireplace, old Rufus Andrew Barrington, who had been a judge some two hundred years ago. And to the right of Rufus, Johnson Joseph Barrington, who had headed up that old lost dream of mankind, the Bureau of Paranormal Research. There, beyond the door that led out to the porch, was the scowling pirate face of Danley Barrington, who had first built the family fortune.

And many others — administrator, adventurer, corporation chief. All good men and true.

But this was at an end. The family had run out.

Slowly Richard Daniel began his last tour of the house — the family room with its cluttered living space, the den with its old mementos, the library and its rows of ancient books, the dining hall in which the crystal and the china shone and sparkled, the kitchen gleaming with the copper and aluminum and the stainless steel, and the bedrooms on the second floor, each of them with its landmarks of former occupants. And finally, the bedroom where old Aunt Hortense had finally died, at long last closing out the line of Barringtons.

The empty dwelling held a not-quite-haunted quality, the aura of a house that waited for the old gay life to take up once again. But it was a false aura. All the portraits, all the china and the silverware, everything within the house would be sold at public auction to satisfy the debts. The rooms would be stripped and the possessions would be scattered and, as a last indignity, the house itself be sold.

Even he, himself, Richard Daniel thought, for he was chattel, too. He was there with all the rest of it, the final item on the inventory.

Except that what they planned to do with him was worse than simple sale. For he would be changed before he was offered up for sale. No one would be interested in putting up good money for him as he stood. And, besides, there was the law — the law that said no robot could legally have continuation of a single life greater than a hundred years.

And he had lived in a single life six times a hundred years. He had gone to see a lawyer and the lawyer had been sympathetic, but had held forth no hope.

"Technically," he had told Richard Daniel in his short, clipped lawyer voice, "you are at this moment much in violation of the statute. I completely fail to see how your family got away with it."

"They liked old things," said Richard Daniel. "And, besides, I was very seldom seen. I stayed mostly in the house. I seldom ventured out."

"Even so," the lawyer said, "there are such things as records. There must be a file on you…"

"The family," explained Richard Daniel, "in the past had many influential friends. You must understand, sir, that the Barringtons, before they fell upon hard times, were quite prominent in politics and in many other matters." The lawyer grunted knowingly.

"What I can't quite understand," he said, "is why you should object so bitterly. You'll not be changed entirely. You'll still be Richard Daniel."

"I would lose my memories, would I not?"

"Yes, of course you would. But memories are not too important. And you'd collect another set."

"My memories are dear to me," Richard Daniel told him.

"They are all I have. After some six hundred years, they are my sole worthwhile possession. Can you imagine, counselor, what it means to spend six centuries with one family?"

"Yes, I think I can," agreed the lawyer. "But now, with the family gone, isn't it just possible the memories may prove painful?"

"They're a comfort. A sustaining comfort. They make me feel important.

They give me perspective and a niche."

"But don't you understand? You'll need no comfort, no importance once you're reoriented. You'll be brand new. All that you'll retain is a certain sense of basic identity — that they cannot take away from you even if they wished. There'll be nothing to regret. There'll be no leftover guilts, no frustrated aspirations, no old loyalties to hound you."

"I must be myself," Richard Daniel insisted stubbornly. "I've found a depth of living, a background against which my living has some meaning. I could not face being anybody else."

"You'd be far better off," the lawyer said wearily. "You'd have a better body. You'd have better mental tools. You'd be more intelligent." Richard Daniel got up from the chair. He saw it was no use.

"You'll not inform on me?" he asked.

"Certainly not," the lawyer said. "So far as I'm concerned, you aren't even here."

"Thank you," said Richard Daniel. "How much do I owe you?"

"Not a thing," the lawyer told him. "I never make a charge to anyone who is older than five hundred." He had meant it as a joke, but Richard Daniel did not smile. He had not felt like smiling.

At the door he turned around.

"Why?" he was going to ask. "Why this silly law." But he did not have to ask — it was not hard to see.

Human vanity, he knew. No human being lived much longer than a hundred years, so neither could a robot. But a robot, on the other hand, was too valuable simply to be junked at the end of a hundred years of service, so there was this law providing for the periodic breakup of the continuity of each robot's life. And thus no human need undergo the psychological indignity of knowing that his faithful serving man might manage to outlive him by several thousand years.

It was illogical, but humans were illogical.

Illogical, but kind. Kind in many different ways.

Kind, sometimes, as the Barringtons had been kind, thought Richard Daniel. Six hundred years of kindness. It was a prideful thing to think about. They had even given him a double name. There weren't many robots nowadays who had double names. It was a special mark of affection and respect.

The lawyer having failed him, Richard Daniel had sought another source of help. Now, thinking back on it, standing in the room where Hortense Barrington had died, he was sorry that he'd done it. For he had embarrassed the religico almost unendurably. It had been easy for the lawyer to tell him what he had. Lawyers had the statutes to determine their behavior, and thus suffered little from agonies of personal decision.

But a man of the cloth is kind if he is worth his salt. And this one had been kind instinctively as well as professionally, and that had made it worse.

"Under certain circumstances," he had said somewhat awkwardly, "I could counsel patience and humility and prayer. Those are three great aids to anyone who is willing to put them to his use. But with you I am not certain."

"You mean," said Richard Daniel, "because I am a robot."

"Well, now…" said the minister, considerably befuddled at this direct approach.

"Because I have no soul?"

"Really," said the minister miserably, "you place me at a disadvantage.

You are asking me a question that for centuries has puzzled and bedeviled the best minds in the church."

"But one," said Richard Daniel, "that each man in his secret heart must answer for himself."

"I wish I could," cried the distraught minister. "I truly wish I could."

"If it is any help," said Richard Daniel, "I can tell you that sometimes I suspect I have a soul." And that, he could see, had been most upsetting for this kindly human.

It had been, Richard Daniel told himself, unkind of him to say it. For it must have been confusing, since coming from himself it was not opinion only, but expert evidence.

So he had gone away from the minister's study and come back to the empty house to get on with his inventory work.

Now that the inventory was all finished and the papers stacked where Dancourt, the estate administrator, could find them when be showed up in the morning, Richard Daniel had done his final service for the Barringtons and now must begin doing for himself.

He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him and went quietly down the stairs and along the hallway to the little cubby, back of the kitchen, that was his very own.

And that, he reminded himself with a rush of pride, was of a piece with his double name and his six hundred years. There were not too many robots who had a room, however small, that they might call their own.

He went into the cubby and turned on the light and closed the door behind him.

And now, for the first time, he faced the grim reality of what he meant to do.

The cloak and hat and trousers hung upon a hook and the galoshes were placed precisely underneath them. His attachment kit lay in one corner of the cubby and the money was cached underneath the floor board he had loosened many years ago to provide a hiding place.

There was, he, told himself, no point in waiting. Every minute counted.

He had a long way to go and he must be at his destination before morning light.

He knelt on the floor and pried up the loosened board, shoved in a hand and brought out the stacks of bills, money hidden through the years against a day of need.

There were three stacks of bills, neatly held together by elastic bands — money given him throughout the years as tips and Christmas gifts, as birthday presents and rewards for little jobs well done.

He opened the storage compartment located in his chest and stowed away all the bills except for half a dozen which he stuffed into a pocket in one hip.

He took the trousers off the hook and it was an awkward business, for he'd never worn clothes before except when he'd tried on these very trousers several days before. It was a lucky thing, he thought, that long-dead Uncle Michael had been a portly man, for otherwise the trousers never would have fit.

He got them on and zippered and belted into place, then forced his feet into the overshoes. He was a little worried about the overshoes. No human went out in the summer wearing overshoes. But it was the best that he could do. None of the regular shoes he'd found in the house had been nearly large enough.

He hoped no one would notice, but there was no way out of it. Somehow or other, he had to cover up his feet, for if anyone should see them, they'd be a giveaway.

He put on the cloak and it was a little short. He put on the hat and it was slightly small, but he tugged it down until it gripped his metal skull and that was all to the good, he told himself; no wind could blow it off.

He picked up his attachments — a whole bag full of them that he'd almost never used. Maybe it was foolish to take them along, he thought, but they were a part of him and by rights they should go with him. There was so little that he really owned — just the money he had saved, a dollar at a time, and this kit of his.

With the bag of attachments clutched underneath his arm, he closed the cubby door and went down the hall.

At the big front door he hesitated and turned back toward the house, but it was, at the moment, a simple darkened cave, empty of all that it once had held. There was nothing here to stay for — nothing but the memories, and the memories he took with him.

He opened the door and stepped out on the stoop and closed the door behind him.

And now, he thought, with the door once shut behind him, he was on his own. He was running off. He was wearing clothes. He was out at night, without the permission of a master. And all of these were against the law.

Any officer could stop him, or any citizen. He had no rights at all.

And he had no one who would speak for him, now that the Barringtons were gone.

He moved quietly down the walk and opened the gate and went slowly down the street, and it seemed to him the house was calling for him to come back.

He wanted to go back, his mind said that he should go back, but his feet kept going on, steadily down the street.

He was alone, he thought, and the aloneness now was real, no longer the mere intellectual abstract he'd held in his mind for days. Here he was, a vacant hulk, that for the moment had no purpose and no beginning and no end, but was just an entity that stood naked in an endless reach of space and time and held no meaning in itself.

But he walked on and with each block that he covered he slowly fumbled back to the thing he was, the old robot in old clothes, the robot running from a home that was a home no longer.

He wrapped the cloak about him tightly and moved on down the street and now he hurried, for he had to hurry.

He met several people and they paid no attention to him. A few cars passed, but no one bothered him.

He came to a shopping center that was brightly lighted and he stopped and looked in terror at the wide expanse of open, brilliant space that lay ahead of him. He could detour around it, but it would use up time and he stood there, undecided, trying to screw up his courage to walk into the light.

Finally he made up his mind and strode briskly out, with his cloak wrapped tight about him and his hat pulled low.

Some of the shoppers turned and looked at him and he felt agitated spiders running up and down his back. The galoshes suddenly seemed three times as big as they really were and they made a plopping, squashy sound that was most embarrassing.

He hurried on, with the end of the shopping area not more than a block away.

A police whistle shrilled and Richard Daniel jumped in sudden fright and ran. He ran in slobbering, mindless fright, with his cloak streaming out behind him and his feet slapping on the pavement.

He plunged out of the lighted strip into the welcome darkness of a residential section and he kept on running.

Far off he heard the siren and he leaped a hedge and tore across the yard. He thundered down the driveway and across a garden in the back and a dog came roaring out and engaged in noisy chase.

Richard Daniel crashed into a picket fence and went through it to the accompaniment of snapping noises as the pickets and the rails gave way. The dog kept on behind him and other dogs joined in.

He crossed another yard and gained the street and pounded down it. He dodged into a driveway, crossed another yard, upset a birdbath and ran into a clothesline, snapping it in his headlong rush.

Behind him lights were snapping on in the windows of the houses and screen doors were banging as people hurried out to see what the ruckus was.

He ran on a few more blocks, crossed another yard and ducked into a lilac thicket, stood still and listened. Some dogs were still baying in the distance and there was some human shouting, but there was no siren.

He felt a thankfulness well up in him that there was no siren, and a sheepishness, as well. For he had been panicked by himself, be knew; he had run from shadows, he had fled from guilt.

But he'd thoroughly roused the neighborhood and even now, he knew, calls must be going out and in a little while the place would be swarming with police.

He'd raised a hornet's nest and he needed distance, so he crept out of the lilac thicket and went swiftly down the street, heading for the edge of town.

He finally left the city, and found the highway. He loped along its deserted stretches. When a car or truck appeared, he pulled off on the shoulder and walked along sedately. Then when the car or truck had passed, he broke into his lope again.

He saw the spaceport lights miles before he got there.

When he reached the port, he circled off the road and came up outside a fence and stood there in the darkness, looking.

A gang of robots was loading one great starship and there were other ships standing darkly in their pits.

He studied the gang that was loading the ship, lugging the cargo from a warehouse and across the area lighted by the floods. This was just the setup he had planned on, although he had not hoped to find it immediately — he had been afraid that he might have to hide out for a day or two before he found a situation that he could put to use. And it was a good thing that he had stumbled on this opportunity, for an intensive hunt would be on by now for a fleeing robot, dressed in human clothes.

He stripped off the cloak and pulled off the trousers and the overshoes; he threw away the hat. From his attachments bag he took out the cutters, screwed off a hand and threaded the cutters into place. He cut the fence and wiggled through it, then replaced the hand and put the cutters back into the kit.

Moving cautiously in the darkness, he walked up to the warehouse, keeping in its shadow.

It would be simple, he told himself. All he had to do was step out and grab a piece of cargo, clamber up the ramp and down into the hold. Once inside, it should not be difficult to find a hiding place and stay there until the ship had reached first planet-fall.

He moved to the corner of the warehouse and peered around it and there were the toiling robots, in what amounted to an endless chain, going up the ramp with the packages of cargo, coming down again to get another load.

But there were too many of them and the line too tight. And the area too well lighted. He'd never be able to break into that line.

And it would not help if he could, he realized despairingly — because he was different from those smooth and shining creatures. Compared to them, he was like a man in another century's dress; he and his six-hundred-year-old body would stand out like a circus freak.

He stepped back into the shadow of the warehouse and he knew that be had lost. All his best-laid plans, thought out in sober, daring detail, as he had labored at the inventory, had suddenly come to naught.

It all came, he told himself, from never going out, from having no real contact with the world, from not keeping up with robot-body fashions, from not knowing what the score was. He'd imagined how it would be and he'd got it all worked out and when it came down, to it, it was nothing like he thought.

Now he'd have to go back to the hole he'd cut in the fence and retrieve the clothing be had thrown away and hunt up a hiding place until be could think of something else.

Beyond the corner of the warehouse he heard the harsh, dull grate of metal, and he took another look.

The robots had broken up their line and were streaming back toward the warehouse and a dozen or so of them were wheeling the ramp away from the cargo port. Three humans, all dressed in uniform, were walking toward the ship, heading for the ladder, and one of them carried a batch of papers in his hand.

The loading was all done and the ship about to lift and here he was, not more than a thousand feet away, and all that he could do was stand and see it go.

There had to be a way, he told himself, to get in that ship. If he could only do it his troubles would be over — or at least the first of his troubles would be over.

Suddenly it struck him like a hand across the face. There was a way to do it! He'd stood here, blubbering, when all the time there had been a way to do it!

In the ship, he'd thought. And that was not necessary.

He didn't have to be in the ship.

He started running, out into the darkness, far out so he could circle round and come upon the ship from the other side, so that the ship would be between him and the flood lights on the warehouse. He hoped that there was time.

He thudded out across the port, running in an arc, and came up to the ship and there was no sign as yet that it was about to leave.

Frantically he dug into his attachments bag and found the things he needed — the last things in that bag he'd ever thought he'd need. He found the suction discs and put them on, one for each knee, one for each elbow, one for each sole and wrist.

He strapped the kit about his waist and clambered up one of the mighty fins, using the discs to pull himself awkwardly along. It was not easy. He had never used the discs and there was a trick to using them, the trick of getting one clamped down and then working loose another so that be could climb.

But he had to do it. He had no choice but to do it. He climbed the fin and there was the vast steel body of the craft rising far above him, like a metal wall climbing to the sky, broken by the narrow line of a row of anchor posts that ran lengthwise of the hull — and all that huge extent of metal painted by the faint, illusive shine of starlight that glittered in his eyes.

Foot by foot he worked his way up the metal wall. Like a humping caterpillar, he squirmed his way and with each foot he gained he was a bit more thankful.

Then he heard the faint beginning of a rumble and with the rumble came terror. His suction cups, he knew, might not long survive the booming vibration of the wakening rockets, certainly would not hold for a moment when the ship began to climb.

Six feet above him lay his only hope — the final anchor post in the long row of anchor posts.

Savagely he drove himself up the barrel of the shuddering craft, hugging the steely surface like a desperate fly.

The rumble of the tubes built up to blot out all the world and he climbed in a haze of almost prayerful, brittle hope. He reached that anchor post or he was as good as dead. Should he slip and drop into that pit of flaming gases beneath the rocket mouths and he was done for.

Once a cup came loose and he almost fell, but the others held and he caught himself.

With a desperate, almost careless lunge, he hurled himself up the wall of metal and caught the rung in his finger-tips and held on with a concentration of effort that wiped out all else.

The rumble was a screaming fury now that lanced through brain and body.

Then the screaming ended and became a throaty roar of power and the vibration left the ship entirely. From one corner of his eye he saw the lights of the spaceport swinging over gently on their side.

Carefully, slowly, be pulled himself along the steel until he had a better grip upon the rung, but even with the better grip he had the feeling that some great hand had him in its fist and was swinging him in anger in a hundred-mile-long arc.

Then the tubes left off their howling and there was a terrible silence and the stars were there, up above him and to either side of him, and they were steely stars with no twinkle in them. Down below, be knew, a lonely Earth was swinging, but he could not see it.

He pulled himself up against the rung and thrust a leg beneath it and sat up on the hull.

There were more stars than he'd ever seen before, more than he'd dreamed there could be. They were still and cold, like hard points of light against a velvet curtain; there was no glitter and no twinkle in them and it was as if a million eyes were staring down at him. The Sun was underneath the ship and over to one side; just at the edge of the left-hand curvature was the glare of it against the silent metal, a sliver of reflected light outlining one edge of the ship. The Earth was far astern, a ghostly blue-green ball hanging in the void, ringed by the fleecy halo of its atmosphere.

It was as if he were detached, a lonely, floating brain that looked out upon a thing it could not understand nor could ever try to understand; as if he might even be afraid of understanding it — a thing of mystery and delight so long as he retained an ignorance of it, but something fearsome and altogether overpowering once the ignorance had gone.

Richard Daniel sat there, flat upon his bottom, on the metal hull of the speeding ship and he felt the mystery and delight and the loneliness and the cold and the great uncaring and his mind retreated into a small and huddled, compact defensive ball.

He looked. That was all there was to do. It was all right now, he thought. But how long would he have to look at it? How long would he have to camp out here in the open — the most deadly kind of open?

He realized for the first time that he had no idea where the ship was going or how long it might take to get there. He knew it was a starship, which meant that it was bound beyond the solar system, and that meant that at some point in its flight it would enter hyperspace. He wondered, at first academically, and then with a twinge of fear, what hyperspace might do to one sitting naked to it. But there was little need, he thought philosophically, to fret about it now, for in due time he'd know, and there was not a thing that he could do about it — not a single thing.

He took the suction cups off his body and stowed them in his kit and then with one hand he tied the kit to one of the metal rungs and dug around in it until he found a short length of steel cable with a ring on one end and a snap on the other. He passed the ring end underneath a rung and threaded the snap end through it and snapped the snap onto a metal loop underneath his armpit. Now he was secured; he need not fear carelessly letting go and floating off the ship.

So here he was, he thought, neat as anything, going places fast, even if he had no idea where he might be headed, and now the only thing he needed was patience. He thought back, without much point, to what the religico had said in the study back on Earth. Patience and humility and prayer, he'd said, apparently not realizing at the moment that a robot has a world of patience.

It would take a lot of time, Richard Daniel knew, to get where he was going. But he had a lot of time, a lot more than any human, and he could afford to waste it. There were no urgencies, he thought — no need of food or air, or water, no need of sleep or rest… There was nothing that could touch him.

Although, come to think of it, there might be.

There was the cold, for one. The space-hull was still fairly warm, with one side of it picking up the heat of the Sun and radiating it around the metal skin, where it was lost on the other side, but there would be a time when the Sun would dwindle until it had no heat and then he'd be subjected to the utter cold of space.

And what would the cold do to him. Might it make his body brittle?

Might it interfere with the functioning of his brain? Might it do other things he could not even guess?

He felt the fears creep in again and tried to shrug them off and they drew off, but they still were there, lurking at the fringes of his mind.

The cold, and the loneliness, he thought — but he was one who could cope with loneliness. And if he couldn't, if he got too lonely, if he could no longer stand it, he could always beat a devil's tattoo on the hull and after a time of that someone would come out to investigate and they would haul him in.

But that was the last move of desperation, he told himself. For if they came out and found him, then he would be caught. Should he be forced to that extremity, he'd have lost everything — there would then have been no point in leaving Earth at all.

So he settled down, living out his time, keeping the creeping fears at bay just beyond the outposts of his mind, and looking at the universe all spread out before him.

The motors started up again with a pale blue flickering in the rockets at the stern and although there was no sense of acceleration he knew that the ship, now well off the Earth, had settled down to the long, hard drive to reach the speed of light.

Once they reached that speed they would enter hyperspace. He tried not to think of it, tried to tell himself there was not a thing to fear — but it hung there just ahead of him, the great unknowable.

The Sun shrank until it was only one of many stars and there came a time when he could no longer pick it out. And the cold clamped down but it didn't seem to bother him, although he could sense the coldness.

Maybe, he said in answer to his fear, that would be the way it would be with hyperspace as well. But he said it unconvincingly. The ship drove on and on with the weird blueness in the tubes.

Then there was the instant when his mind went splattering across the universe.

He was aware of the ship, but only aware of it in relation to an awareness of much else, and it was no anchor point, no rallying position. He was spread and scattered; he was opened out and rolled out until he was very thin. He was a dozen places, perhaps a hundred places, all at once, and it was confusing, and his immediate reaction was to fight back somehow against whatever might have happened to him — to fight back and pull himself together. The fighting did no good at all, but made it even worse, for in certain instances it seemed to drive parts of him farther from other parts of him and the confusion was made greater.

So he quit his fighting and his struggling and just lay there, scattered, and let the panic ebb away and told himself he didn't care, and wondered if he did.

Slow reason returned a dribble at a time and he could think again and he wondered rather bleakly if this could be hyperspace and was pretty sure it was. And if it were, he knew, he'd have a long time to live like this, a long time in which to become accustomed to it and to orient himself, a long time to find himself and pull himself together, a long time to understand this situation if it were, in fact, understandable.

So he lay, not caring greatly, with no fear or wonder, just resting and letting a fact seep into him here and there from many different points.

He knew that, somehow, his body — that part of him which housed the rest of him — was still chained securely to the ship, and that knowledge, in itself, he knew, was the first small step towards reorienting himself. He had to reorient, he knew. He had to come to some sort of terms, if not to understanding, with this situation.

He had opened up and he had scattered out — that essential part of him, the feeling and the knowing and the thinking part of him, and he lay thin across a universe that loomed immense in unreality.

Was this, he wondered, the way the universe should be, or was it the unchained universe, the wild universe beyond the limiting disciplines of measured space and time.

He started slowly reaching out, cautious as he had been in his crawling on the surface of the ship, reaching out toward the distant parts of him, a little at a time. He did not know how he did it, he was conscious of no particular technique, but whatever he was doing, it seemed to work, for he pulled himself together, bit by knowing bit, until he had gathered up all the scattered fragments of him into several different piles.

Then he quit and lay there, wherever there might be, and tried to sneak up on those piles of understanding that he took to be himself.

It took a while to get the hang of it, but once be did, some of the incomprehensibility went away, although the strangeness stayed. He tried to put it into thought and it was hard to do. The closest he could come was that he had been unchained as well as the universe — that whatever bondage had been imposed upon him by that chained and normal world had now become dissolved and he no longer was fenced in by either time or space.

He could see — and know and sense — across vast distances, if distance were the proper term, and he could understand certain facts that he had not even thought about before, could understand instinctively, but without the language or the skill to coalesce the facts into independent data.

Once again the universe was spread far out before him and it was a different and in some ways a better universe, a more diagrammatic universe, and in time, he knew, if there were such a thing as time, he'd gain some completer understanding and acceptance of it.

He probed and sensed and learned and there was no such thing as time, but a great foreverness.

He thought with pity of those others locked inside the ship, safe behind its insulating walls, never knowing all the glories of the innards of a star or the vast panoramic sweep of vision and of knowing far above the flat galactic plane.

Yet he really did not know what he saw or probed; he merely sensed and felt it and became a part of it, and it became a part of him — he seemed unable to reduce it to a formal outline of fact or of dimension or of content. It still remained a knowledge and a power so overwhelming that it was nebulous. There was no fear and no wonder, for in this place, it seemed, there was neither fear nor wonder. And he finally knew that it was a place apart, a world in which the normal space-time knowledge and emotion had no place at all and a normal space-time being could have no tools or measuring stick by which he might reduce it to a frame of reference.

There was no time, no space, no fear, no wonder — and no actual knowledge, either.

Then time came once again and suddenly his mind was stuffed back into its cage within his metal skull and he was again one with his body, trapped and chained and small and cold and naked.

He saw that the stars were different and that he was far from home and just a little way ahead was a star that blazed like a molten furnace hanging in the black.

He sat bereft, a small thing once again, and the universe reduced to package size.

Practically, he checked the cable that held him to the ship and it was intact. His attachments kit was still tied to its rung. Everything was exactly as it had been before.

He tried to recall the glories he had seen, tried to grasp again the fringe of knowledge which he had been so close to, but both the glory and the knowledge, if there had ever been a knowledge, had faded into nothingness.

He felt like weeping, but he could not weep, and he was too old to lie down upon the ship and kick his heels in tantrum.

So he sat there, looking at the sun that they were approaching and finally there was a planet that he knew must be their destination, and he found room to wonder what planet it might be and how far from Earth it was.

He heated up a little as the ship skipped through atmosphere as an aid to braking speed and he had some rather awful moments as it spiraled into thick and soupy gases that certainly were a far cry from the atmosphere of Earth. He hung most desperately to the rungs as the craft came rushing down onto a landing field, with the hot gases of the rockets curling up about him. But he made it safely and swiftly clambered down and darted off into the smog-like atmosphere before anyone could see him.

Safely off, he turned and looked back at the ship and despite its outlines being hidden by the drifting clouds of swirling gases, he could see it clearly, not as an actual structure, but as a diagram. He looked at it wonderingly and there was something wrong with the diagram, something vaguely wrong, some part of it that was out of whack and not the way it should be.

He heard the clanking of cargo haulers coming out upon the field and he wasted no more time, diagram or not.

He drifted back, deeper in the mists, and began to circle, keeping a good distance from the ship. Finally he came to the spaceport's edge and the beginning of the town.

He found a street and walked down it leisurely and there was a wrongness in the town.

He met a few hurrying robots who were in too much of a rush to pass the time of day. But he met no humans.

And that, he knew quite suddenly, was the wrongness of the place. It was not a human town.

There were no distinctly human buildings — no stores or residences, no churches and no restaurants. There were gaunt shelter barracks and sheds for the storing of equipment and machines, great sprawling warehouses and vast industrial plants. But that was all there was. It was a bare and dismal place compared to the streets that he had known on Earth.

It was a robot town, he knew. And a robot planet. A world that was barred to humans, a place where humans could not live, but so rich in some natural resource that it cried for exploitation. And the answer to that exploitation was to let the robots do it.

Luck, he told himself. His good luck still was holding. He had literally been dumped into a place where he could live without human interference. Here, on this planet, he would be with his own.

If that was what he wanted. And he wondered if it was. He wondered just exactly what it was he wanted, for he'd had no time to think of what he wanted. He had been too intent on fleeing Earth to think too much about it.

He had known all along what he was running from, but had not considered what he might be running to.

He walked a little further and the town came to an end. The Street became a path and went wandering on into the wind-blown fogginess.

So he turned around and went back up the street.

There had been one barracks, he remembered, that had a TRANSIENTS sign hung out, and be made his way to it.

Inside, an ancient robot sat behind the desk. His body was old-fashioned and somehow familiar. And it was familiar, Richard Daniel knew, because it was as old and battered and as out-of-date as his.

He looked at the body, just a bit aghast, and saw that while it resembled his, there were little differences. The same ancient model, certainly, but a different series. Possibly a little newer, by twenty years or so, than his.

"Good evening, stranger," said the ancient robot. "You came in on the ship?" Richard Daniel nodded.

"You'll be staying till the next one?"

"I may be settling down," said Richard Daniel. "I may want to stay here." The ancient robot took a key from off a hook and laid it on the desk.

"You representing someone?"

"No," said Richard Daniel.

"I thought maybe that you were. We get a lot of representatives. Humans can't come here, or don't want to come, so they send robots out here to represent them."

"You have a lot of visitors?"

"Some. Mostly the representatives I was telling you about. But there are some that are on the lam. I'd take it, mister, you are on the lam." Richard Daniel didn't answer.

"It's all right," the ancient one assured him. "We don't mind at all, just so you behave yourself. Some of our most prominent citizens, they came here on the lam."

"That is fine," said Richard Daniel. "And how about yourself? You must be on the lam as well."

"You mean this body. Well, that's a little different. This here is punishment."

"Punishment?"

"Well, you see, I was the foreman of the cargo warehouse and I got to goofing off. So they hauled me up and had a trial and they found me guilty.

Then they stuck me into this old body and I have to stay in it, at this lousy job, until they get another criminal that needs punishment. They can't punish no more than one criminal at a time because this is the only old body that they have. Funny thing about this body. One of the boys went back to Earth on a business trip and found this old heap of metal in a junkyard and brought it home with him — for a joke, I guess. Like a human might buy a skeleton for a joke, you know." He took a long, sly look at Richard Daniel. "It looks to me, stranger, as if your body…" But Richard Daniel didn't let him finish.

"I take it," Richard Daniel said, "you haven't many criminals."

"No," said the ancient robot sadly, "we're generally a pretty solid lot." Richard Daniel reached out to pick up the key, but the ancient robot put out his hand and covered it.

"Since you are on the lam," he said, "it'll be payment in advance."

"I'll pay you for a week," said Richard Daniel, handing him some money.

The robot gave him back his change.

"One thing I forgot to tell you. You'll have to get plasticated."

"Plasticated?"

"That's right. Get plastic squirted over you. To protect you from the atmosphere. It plays hell with metal. There's a place next door will do it."

"Thanks. I'll get it done immediately."

"It wears off," warned the ancient one. "You have to get a new job every week or so." Richard Daniel took the key and went down the corridor until he found his numbered cubicle. He unlocked the door and stepped inside. The room was small, but clean. It had a desk and chair and that was all it had.

He stowed his attachments bag in one corner and sat down in the chair and tried to feel at home. But he couldn't feel at home, and that was a funny thing — he'd just rented himself a home.

He sat there, thinking back, and tried to whip up some sense of triumph at having done so well in covering his tracks. He couldn't.

Maybe this wasn't the place for him, he thought. Maybe he'd be happier on some other planet. Perhaps he should go back to the ship and get on it once again and have a look at the next planet coming up.

If he hurried, he might make it. But he'd have to hurry, for the ship wouldn't stay longer than it took to unload the consignment for this place and take on new cargo.

He got up from the chair, still only half decided.

And suddenly he remembered how, standing in the swirling mistiness, he had seen the ship as a diagram rather than a ship, and as he thought about it, something clicked inside his brain and he leaped toward the door.

For now he knew what had been wrong with the spaceship's diagram — an injector valve was somehow out of kilter, he had to get back there before the ship took off again.

He went through the door and down the corridor. He caught sight of the ancient robot's startled face as he ran across the lobby and out into the street. Pounding steadily toward the spaceport, he tried to get the diagram into his mind again, but it would not come complete — it came in bits and pieces, but not all of it.

And even as be fought for the entire diagram, he heard the beginning take-off rumble.

"Wait!" he yelled. "Wait for me! You can't…" There was a flash that turned the world pure white and a mighty invisible wave came swishing out of nowhere and sent him reeling down the street, falling as he reeled. He was skidding on the cobblestones and sparks were flying as his metal scraped along the stone. The whiteness reached a brilliance that almost blinded him and then it faded swiftly and the world was dark.

He brought up against a wall of some sort, clanging as he hit, and he lay there, blind from the brilliance of the flash, while his mind went scurrying down the trail of the diagram.

The diagram, he thought — why should he have seen a diagram of the ship he'd ridden through space, a diagram that had shown an injector out of whack? And how could he, of all robots, recognize an injector, let alone know there was something wrong with it. It had been a joke back home, among the Barringtons, that he, a mechanical thing himself, should have no aptitude at all for mechanical contraptions. And he could have saved those people and the ship — he could have saved them all if he'd immediately recognized the significance of the diagram. But he'd been too slow and stupid and now they all were dead.

The darkness had receded from his eyes and he could see again and he got slowly to his feet, feeling himself all over to see how badly he was hurt. Except for a dent or two, he seemed to be all right.

There were robots running in the street, heading for the spaceport, where a dozen fires were burning and where sheds and other structures had been flattened by the blast.

Someone tugged at his elbow and he turned around. It was the ancient robot.

"You're the lucky one," the ancient robot said. "You got off it just in time." Richard Daniel nodded dumbly and had a terrible thought: What if they should think he did it? He had gotten off the ship; he had admitted that he was on the lam; he had rushed out suddenly, just a few seconds before the ship exploded. It would be easy to put it all together — that he had sabotaged the ship, then at the last instant had rushed out, remorseful, to undo what he had done. On the face of it, it was damning evidence.

But it was all right as yet, Richard Daniel told himself. For the ancient robot was the only one that knew — he was the only one he'd talked to, the only one who even knew that he was in town.

There was a way, Richard Daniel thought — there was an easy way. He pushed the thought away, but it came back. You are on your own, it said. You are already beyond the law. In rejecting human law, you made yourself an outlaw. You have become fair prey. There is just one law for you — self preservation.

But there are robot laws, Richard Daniel argued. There are laws and courts in this community. There is a place for justice.

Community law, said the leech clinging in his brain, provincial law, little more than tribal law — and the stranger's always wrong.

Richard Daniel felt the coldness of the fear closing down upon him and he knew, without half thinking, that the leech was right.

He turned around and started down the street, heading for the transients barracks. Something unseen in the street caught his foot and he stumbled and went down. He scrabbled to his knees, hunting in the darkness on the cobblestones for the thing that tripped him. It was a heavy bar of steel, some part of the wreckage that had been hurled this far. He gripped it by one end and arose.

"Sorry," said the ancient robot. "You have to watch your step." And there was a faint implication in his word — a hint of something more than the words had said, a hint of secret gloating in a secret knowledge.

You have broken other laws, said the leech in Richard Daniel's brain.

What of breaking just one more? Why, if necessary, not break a hundred more.

It is all or nothing. Having come this far, you can't afford to fail. You can allow no one to stand in your way now.

The ancient robot half turned away and Richard Daniel lifted up the bar of steel, and suddenly the ancient robot no longer was a robot, but a diagram. There, with all the details of a blueprint, were all the working parts, all the mechanism of the robot that walked in the street before him.

And if one detached that single bit of wire, if one burned out that coil, if — Even as he thought it, the diagram went away and there was the robot, a stumbling, failing robot that clanged on the cobblestones.

Richard Daniel swung around in terror, looking up the street, but there was no one near.

He turned back to the fallen robot and quietly knelt beside him. He gently put the bar of steel down into the street. And he felt a thankfulness — for, almost miraculously, he had not killed.

The robot on the cobblestones was motionless. When Richard Daniel lifted him, he dangled. And yet he was all right. All anyone had to do to bring him back to life was to repair whatever damage had been done his body.

And that served the purpose, Richard Daniel told himself, as well as killing would have done.

He stood with the robot in his arms, looking for a place to hide him.

He spied an alley between two buildings and darted into it. One of the buildings, he saw, was set upon stone blocks sunk into the ground, leaving a clearance of a foot or so. He knelt and shoved the robot underneath the building. Then he stood up and brushed the dirt and dust from his body.

Back at the barracks and in his cubicle, he found a rag and cleaned up the dirt that he had missed. And, he thought hard.

He'd seen the ship as a diagram and, not knowing what it meant, hadn't done a thing. Just now he'd seen the ancient robot as a diagram and had most decisively and neatly used that diagram to save himself from murder — from the murder that he was fully ready to commit.

But how had he done it? And the answer seemed to be that be really had done nothing. He'd simply thought that one should detach a single wire, burn out a single coil — he'd thought it and it was done.

Perhaps he'd seen no diagram at all. Perhaps the diagram was no more than some sort of psychic rationalization to mask whatever he had seen or sensed. Seeing the ship and robot with the surfaces stripped away from them and their purpose and their function revealed fully to his view, he had sought some explanation of his strange ability, and his subconscious mind had devised an explanation, an analogy that, for the moment, had served to satisfy him.

Like when he'd been in hyperspace, he thought. He'd seen a lot of things out there he had not understood. And that was it, of course, he thought excitedly. Something had happened to him out in hyperspace. Perhaps there'd been something that had stretched his mind. Perhaps he'd picked up some sort of new dimension-seeing, some new twist to his mind.

He remembered how, back on the ship again, with his mind wiped clean of all the glory and the knowledge, he had felt like weeping. But now he knew that it had been much too soon for weeping. For although the glory and the knowledge (if there'd been a knowledge) had been lost to him, be had not lost everything. He'd gained a new perceptive device and the ability to use it somewhat fumblingly — and it didn't really matter that he still was at a loss as to what he did to use it. The basic fact that he possessed it and could use it was enough to start with.

Somewhere out in front there was someone calling — someone, he now realized, who had been calling for some little time.

"Hubert, where are you? Hubert, are you around? Hubert…" Hubert?

Could Hubert be the ancient robot? Could they have missed him already?

Richard Daniel jumped to his feet for an undecided moment, listening to the calling voice. And then sat down again. Let them call, he told himself.

Let them go out and hunt.

He was safe in this cubicle. He had rented it and for the moment it was home and there was no one who would dare break in upon him.

But it wasn't home. No matter how hard he tried to tell himself it was, it wasn't. There wasn't any home.

Earth was home, he thought. And not all of Earth, but just a certain street and that one part of it was barred to him forever. It had been barred to him by the dying of a sweet old lady who had outlived her time; it had been barred to him by his running from it.

He did not belong on this planet, he admitted to himself, nor on any other planet. He belonged on Earth, with the Barringtons, and it was impossible for him to be there.

Perhaps, he thought, he should have stayed and let them reorient him.

He remembered what the lawyer had said about memories that could become a burden and a torment. After all, it might have been wiser to have started over once again.

For what kind of future did he have, with his old outdated body, his old outdated brain? The kind of body that they put a robot into on this planet by way of punishment. And the kind of brain — but the brain was different, for he had something now that made up for any lack of more modern mental tools.

He sat and listened, and he heard the house — calling all across the light years of space for him to come back to it again. And he saw the faded living room with all its vanished glory that made a record of the years. He remembered, with a twinge of hurt, the little room back of the kitchen that had been his very own.

He arose and paced up and down the cubicle — three steps and turn, and then three more steps and turn for another three.

The sights and sounds and smells of home grew close and wrapped themselves about him and he wondered wildly if he might not have the power, a power accorded him by the universe of hyperspace, to will himself to that familiar street again.

He shuddered at the thought of it, afraid of another power, afraid that it might happen. Afraid of himself, perhaps, of the snarled and tangled being he was — no longer the faithful, shining servant, but a sort of mad thing that rode outside a spaceship, that was ready to kill another being, that could face up to the appalling sweep of hyperspace, yet cowered before the impact of a memory.

What he needed was a walk, he thought. Look over the town and maybe go out into the country. Besides, he remembered, trying to become practical, he'd need to get that plastication job he had been warned to get.

He went out into the corridor and strode briskly down it and was crossing the lobby when someone spoke to him.

"Hubert," said the voice, "just where have you been? I've been waiting hours for you." Richard Daniel spun around and a robot sat behind the desk. There was another robot leaning in a corner and there was a naked robot brain lying on the desk.

"You are Hubert, aren't you", asked the one behind the desk.

Richard Daniel opened up his mouth to speak, but the words refused to come.

"I thought so," said the robot. "You may not recognize me, but my name is Andy. The regular man was busy, so the judge sent me. He thought it was only fair we make the switch as quickly as possible. He said you'd served a longer term than you really should. Figures you'd be glad to know they'd convicted someone else." Richard Daniel stared in horror at the naked brain lying on the desk.

The robot gestured at the metal body propped into the corner.

"Better than when we took you out of it," he said with a throaty chuckle. "Fixed it up and polished it and got out all the dents. Even modernized it some. Brought it strictly up to date. You'll have a better body than you had when they stuck you into that monstrosity."

"I don't know what to say," said Richard Daniel, stammering. "You see, I'm not…"

"Oh, that's all right," said the other happily. "No need for gratitude.

Your sentence worked out longer than the judge expected. This just makes up for it."

"I thank you, then," said Richard Daniel. "I thank you very much." And was astounded at himself, astonished at the ease with which he said it, confounded at his sly duplicity.

But if they forced it on him, why should he refuse? There was nothing that he needed more than a modern body!

It was still working out, he told himself. He was still riding luck.

For this was the last thing that he needed to cover up his tracks.

"All newly plasticated and everything," said Andy. "Hans did an extra special job."

"Well, then," said Richard Daniel, "let's get on with it." The other robot grinned. "I don't blame you for being anxious to get out of there. It must be pretty terrible to live in a pile of junk like that." He came around from behind the desk and advanced on Richard Danie1.

"Over in the corner," he said, "and kind of prop yourself. I don't want you tipping over when I disconnect you. One good fall and that body'd come apart."

"All right," said Richard Daniel. He went into the corner and leaned back against it and planted his feet solid so that he was propped.

He had a rather awful moment when Andy disconnected the optic nerve and he lost his eyes and there was considerable queasiness in having his skull lifted off his shoulders and he was in sheer funk as the final disconnections were being swiftly made.

Then he was a blob of greyness without a body or a head or eyes or anything at all. He was no more than a bundle of thoughts all wrapped around themselves like a pail of worms and this pail of worms was suspended in pure nothingness.

Fear came to him, a taunting, terrible fear. What if this were just a sort of ghastly gag? What if they'd found out who he really was and what he'd done to Hubert? What if they took his brain and tucked it away somewhere for a year or two — or for a hundred years? It might be, he told himself, nothing more than their simple way of justice.

He hung onto himself and tried to fight the fear away, but the fear ebbed back and forth like a restless tide.

Time stretched out and out — far too long a time, far more time than one would need to switch a brain from one body to another. Although, he told himself, that might not be true at all. For in his present state he had no way in which to measure time. He had no external reference points by which to determine time.

Then suddenly he had eyes.

And he knew everything was all right.

One by one his senses were restored to him and he was back inside a body and he felt awkward in the body, for he was unaccustomed to it.

The first thing that he saw was his old and battered body propped into its corner and he felt a sharp regret at the sight of it and it seemed to him that he had played a dirty trick upon it. It deserved, he told himself, a better fate than this — a better fate than being left behind to serve as a shabby jailhouse on this outlandish planet. It had served him well for six hundred years and he should not be deserting it. But he was deserting it. He was, he told himself in contempt, becoming very expert at deserting his old friends. First the house back home and now his faithful body.

Then he remembered something else — all that money in the body!

"What's the matter, Hubert?" Andy asked.

He couldn't leave it there, Richard Daniel told himself, for he needed it. And besides, if he left it there, someone would surely find it later and it would be a give-away. He couldn't leave it there and it might not be safe to forthrightly claim it. If he did, this other robot, this Andy, would think he'd been stealing on the job or running some side racket. He might try to bribe the other, but one could never tell how a move like that might go. Andy might be full of righteousness and then there'd be hell to pay.

And, besides, he didn't want to part with any of the money.

All at once he had it — he knew just what to do. And even as he thought it, he made Andy into a diagram.

That connection there, thought Richard Daniel, reaching out his arm to catch the falling diagram that turned into a robot. He eased it to the floor and sprang across the room to the side of his old body. In seconds he had the chest safe open and the money safely out of it and locked inside his present body.

Then he made the robot on the floor become a diagram again and got the connection back the way that it should be.

Andy rose shakily off the floor. He looked at Richard Daniel in some consternation.

"What happened to me?" he asked in a frightened voice. Richard Daniel sadly shook his head. "I don't know. You just keeled over. I started for the door to yell for help, then I heard you stirring and you were all right." Andy was plainly puzzled. "Nothing like this ever happened to me before," he said.

"If I were you," counseled Richard Daniel, "I'd have myself checked over. You must have a faulty relay or a loose connection."

"I guess I will," the other one agreed. "It's downright dangerous." He walked slowly to the desk and picked up the other brain, started with it toward the battered body leaning in the corner.

Then he stopped and said: "Look, I forgot. I was supposed to tell you.

You better get up to the warehouse. Another ship is on its way. It will be coming in any minute now."

"Another one so soon?"

"You know how it goes," Andy said, disgusted. "They don't even try to keep a schedule here. We won't see one for months and then there'll be two or three at once."

"Well, thanks," said Richard Daniel, going out the door. He went swinging down the street with a newborn confidence. And he had a feeling that there was nothing that could lick him, nothing that could stop him.

For he was a lucky robot!

Could all that luck, he wondered, have been gotten out in hyperspace, as his diagram ability, or whatever one might call it, had come from hyperspace? Somehow hyperspace had taken him and twisted him and changed him, had molded him anew, had made him into a different robot than he had been before.

Although, so far as luck was concerned, he had been lucky all his entire life. He'd had good luck with his human family and had gained a lot of favors and a high position and had been allowed to live for six hundred years. And that was a thing that never should have happened. No matter how powerful or influential the Barringtons had been, that six hundred years must be due in part to nothing but sheer 1uck.

In any case, the luck and the diagram ability gave him a solid edge over all the other robots he might meet. Could it, he asked himself, give him an edge on Man as well?

No — that was a thought he should not think, for it was blasphemous.

There never was a robot that would be the equal of a man.

But the thought kept on intruding and he felt not nearly so contrite over this leaning toward bad taste, or poor judgment, whichever it might be, as it seemed to him he should feel.

As he neared the spaceport, he began meeting other robots and some of them saluted him and called him by the name of Hubert and others stopped and shook him by the hand and told him they were glad that he was out of pokey.

This friendliness shook his confidence. He began to wonder if his luck would hold, for some of the robots, he was certain, thought it rather odd that he did not speak to them by name, and there had been a couple of remarks that he had some trouble fielding. He had a feeling that when he reached the warehouse he might be sunk without a trace, for he would know none of the robots there and he had not the least idea what his duties might include. And, come to think of it, he didn't even know where the warehouse was.

He felt the panic building in him and took a quick involuntary look around, seeking some method of escape. For it became quite apparent to him that he must never reach the warehouse.

He was trapped, he knew, and he couldn't keep on floating, trusting to his luck. In the next few minutes he'd have to figure something.

He started to swing over into a side street, not knowing what he meant to do, but knowing he must do something, when he heard the mutter far above him and glanced up quickly to see the crimson glow of belching rocket tubes shimmering through the clouds.

He swung around again and sprinted desperately for the spaceport and reached it as the ship came chugging down to a steady landing. It was, he saw, an old ship. It had no burnish to it and it was blunt and squat and wore a hangdog look.

A tramp, he told himself, that knocked about from port to port, picking up whatever cargo it could, with perhaps now and then a paying passenger headed for some backwater planet where there was no scheduled service.

He waited as the cargo port came open and the ramp came down and then marched purposefully out onto the field, ahead of the straggling cargo crew, trudging toward the ship. He had to act, he knew, as if he had a perfect right to walk into the ship as if he knew exactly what he might be doing. If there were a challenge he would pretend he didn't hear it and simply keep on going.

He walked swiftly up the ramp, holding back from running, and plunged through the accordion curtain that served as an atmosphere control. His feet rang across the metal plating of the cargo hold until he reached the catwalk and plunged down it to another cargo level.

At the bottom of the catwalk he stopped and stood tense, listening.

Above him he heard the clang of a metal door and the sound of footsteps coming down the walk to the level just above him. That would be the purser or the first mate, he told himself, or perhaps the captain, coming down to arrange for the discharge of the cargo.

Quietly he moved away and found a corner where he could crouch and hide.

Above his head he heard the cargo gang at work, talking back and forth, then the screech of crating and the thump of bales and boxes being hauled out to the ramp.

Hours passed, or they seemed like hours, as he huddled there. He heard the cargo gang bringing something down from one of the upper levels and he made a sort of prayer that they'd not come down to this lower level — and he hoped no one would remember seeing him come in ahead of them, or if they did remember, that they would assume that he'd gone out again.

Finally it was over, with the footsteps gone. Then came the pounding of the ramp as it shipped itself and the banging of the port.

He waited for long minutes, waiting for the roar that, when it came, set his head to ringing, waiting for the monstrous vibration that shook and lifted up the ship and flung it off the planet Then quiet came and he knew the ship was out of atmosphere and once more on its way.

And knew he had it made.

For now he was no more than a simple stowaway. He was no longer Richard Daniel, runaway from Earth. He'd dodged all the traps of Man, he'd covered all his tracks, and he was on his way.

But far down underneath he had a jumpy feeling, for it all had gone too smoothly, more smoothly than it should.

He tried to analyze himself, tried to pull himself in focus, tried to assess himself for what he bad become.

He had abilities that Man had never won or developed or achieved, whichever it might be. He was a certain step ahead of not only other robots, but of Man as well. He had a thing, or the beginning of a thing, that Man had sought and studied and had tried to grasp for centuries and had failed.

A solemn and a deadly thought: was it possible that it was the robots, after all, for whom this great heritage had been meant? Would it be the robots who would achieve the paranormal powers that Man had sought so long, while Man, perforce, must remain content with the materialistic and the merely scientific? Was he, Richard Daniel, perhaps, only the first of many?

Or was it all explained by no more than the fact that he alone had been exposed to hyperspace? Could this ability of his belong to anyone who would subject himself to the full, uninsulated mysteries of that mad universe unconstrained by time? Could Man have this, and more, if he too should expose himself to the utter randomness of unreality?

He huddled in his corner, with the thought and speculation stirring in his mind and he sought the answers, but there was no solid answer.

His mind went reaching out, almost on its own, and there was a diagram inside his brain, a portion of a blueprint, and bit by bit was added to it until it all was there, until the entire ship on which he rode was there, laid out for him to see.

He took his time and went over the diagram resting in his brain and he found little things — a fitting that was working loose and he tightened it, a printed circuit that was breaking down and getting mushy and be strengthened it and sharpened it and made it almost new, a pump that was leaking just a bit and he stopped its leaking.

Some hundreds of hours later one of the crewmen found him and took him to the captain.

The captain glowered at him.

"Who are you?" he asked.

"A stowaway," Richard Daniel told him.

"Your name," said the captain, drawing a sheet of paper before him and picking up a pencil, "your planet of residence and owner."

"I refuse to answer you," said Richard Daniel sharply and knew that the answer wasn't right, for it was not right and proper that a robot should refuse a human a direct command.

But the captain did not seem to mind. He laid down the pencil and stroked his black beard slyly.

"In that case," he said, "I can't exactly see how I can force the information from you. Although there might be some who'd try. You are very lucky that you stowed away on a ship whose captain is a most kind-hearted man." He didn't look kind-hearted. He did look foxy. Richard Daniel stood there, saying nothing.

"Of course," the captain said, "there's a serial number somewhere on your body and another on your brain. But I suppose that you'd resist if we tried to look for them."

"I am afraid I would."

"In that case," said the captain, "I don't think for the moment we'll concern ourselves with them." Richard Daniel still said nothing, for he realized that there was no need to. This crafty captain had it all worked out and he'd let it go at that.

"For a long time," said the captain, "my crew and I have been considering the acquiring of a robot, but it seems we never got around to it. For one thing, robots are expensive and our profits are not large." He sighed and got up from his chair and looked Richard Daniel up and down.

"A splendid specimen," he said. "We welcome you aboard. You'll find us congenial."

"I am sure I will," said Richard Daniel. "I thank you for your courtesy."

"And now," the captain said, "you'll go up on the bridge and report to Mr. Duncan. I'll let him know you're coming. He'll find some light and pleasant duty for you." Richard Daniel did not move as swiftly as he might, as sharply as the occasion might have called for, for all at once the captain had become a complex diagram. Not like the diagrams of ships or robots, but a diagram of strange symbols, some of which Richard Daniel knew were frankly chemical, but others which were not.

"You heard me!" snapped the captain. "Move!"

"Yes, sir," said Richard Daniel, willing the diagram away, making the captain come back again into his solid flesh.

Richard Daniel found the first mate on the bridge, a horse-faced, somber man with a streak of cruelty ill-hidden, and slumped in a chair to one side of the console was another of the crew, a sodden, terrible creature.

The sodden creature cackled. "Well, well, Duncan, the first non-human member of the Rambler's crew." Duncan paid him no attention. He said to Richard Daniel: "I presume you are industrious and ambitious and would like to get along."

"Oh, yes," said Richard Daniel, and was surprised to find a new sensation — laughter — rising in himself.

"Well, then," said Duncan, "report to the engine room. They have work for you. When you have finished there, I'll find something else."

"Yes, sir," said Richard Daniel, turning on his heel.

"A minute," said the mate. "I must introduce you to our ship's physician, Dr. Abram Wells. You can be truly thankful you'll never stand in need of his services."

"Good day, Doctor," said Richard Daniel, most respectfully.

"I welcome you," said the doctor, pulling a bottle from his pocket. "I don't suppose you'll have a drink with me. Well, then, I'll drink to you." Richard Daniel turned around and left. He went down to the engine room and was put to work at polishing and scrubbing and generally cleaning up.

The place was in need of it. It had been years, apparently, since it had been cleaned or polished and it was about as dirty as an engine room can get — which is terribly dirty. After the engine room was done there were other places to be cleaned and furbished up and he spent endless hours at cleaning and in painting and shinning up the ship. The work was of the dullest kind, but he didn't mind. It gave him time to think and wonder, time to get himself sorted out and to become acquainted with himself, to try to plan ahead.

He was surprised at some of the things he found in himself. Contempt, for one — contempt for the humans on this ship. It took a long time for him to become satisfied that it was contempt, for he'd never held a human in contempt before.

But these were different humans, not the kind he'd known.

These were no Barringtons. Although it might be, he realized, that he felt contempt for them because he knew them thoroughly. Never before had he known a human as he knew these humans. For he saw them not so much as living animals as intricate patternings of symbols. He knew what they were made of and the inner urgings that served as motivations, for the patterning was not of their bodies only, but of their minds as well. He had a little trouble with the symbology of their minds, for it was so twisted and so interlocked and so utterly confusing that it was hard at first to read. But he finally got it figured out and there were times he wished he hadn't.

The ship stopped at many ports and Richard Daniel took charge of the loading and unloading, and he saw the planets, but was unimpressed. One was a nightmare of fiendish cold, with the very atmosphere turned to drifting snow. Another was a dripping, noisome jungle world, and still another was a bare expanse of broken, tumbled rock without a trace of life beyond the crew of humans and their robots who manned the huddled station in this howling wilderness.

It was after this planet that Jenks, the cook, went screaming to his bunk, twisted up with pain — the victim of a suddenly inflammed vermiform appendix.

Dr. Wells came tottering in to look at him, with a half-filled bottle sagging the pocket of his jacket. And later stood before the captain, holding out two hands that trembled, and with terror in his eyes.

"But I cannot operate," he blubbered. "I cannot take the chance. I would kill the man!" He did not need to operate. Jenks suddenly improved. The pain went away and he got up from his bunk and went back to the galley and Dr. Wells sat huddled in his chair, bottle gripped between his hands, crying like a baby.

Down in the cargo hold, Richard Daniel sat likewise huddled and aghast that he had dared to do it — not that he had been able to, but that he had dared, that he, a robot, should have taken on himself an act of interference, however merciful, with the body of a human.

Actually, the performance had not been too difficult. It was, in a certain way, no more difficult than the repairing of an engine or the untangling of a faulty circuit. No more difficult — just a little different.

And he wondered what he'd done and how he" d" gone about it, for he did not know. He held the technique in his mind, of that there was ample demonstration, but he could in no way isolate or pinpoint the pure mechanics of it. It was like an instinct, he thought — unexplainable, but entirely workable.

But a robot had no instinct. In that much he was different from the human and the other animals. Might not, he asked himself, this strange ability of his be a sort of compensating factor given to the robot for his very lack of instinct? Might that be why the human race had failed in its search for paranormal powers? Might the instincts of the body be at certain odds with the instincts of the mind?

For he had the feeling that this ability of his was just a mere beginning, that it was the first emergence of a vast body of abilities which some day would be rounded out by robots. And what would that spell, he wondered, in that distant day when the robots held and used the full body of that knowledge? An adjunct to the glory of the human race, or equals of the human race, or superior to the human race — or, perhaps, a race apart?

And what was his role, he wondered. Was it meant that he should go out as a missionary, a messiah, to carry to robots throughout the universe the message that he held? There must be some reason for his having learned this truth. It could not be meant that he would hold it as a personal belonging, as an asset all his own.

He got up from where he sat and moved slowly back to the ship's forward area, which now gleamed spotlessly from the work he'd done on it, and he felt a certain pride.

He wondered why he had felt that it might be wrong, blasphemous, somehow, to announce his abilities to the world? Why had he not told those here in the ship that it had been he who had healed the cook, or mentioned the many other little things he'd done to maintain the ship in perfect running order?

Was it because he did not need respect, as a human did so urgently? Did glory have no basic meaning for a robot? Or was it because he held the humans in this ship in such utter contempt that their respect had no value to him?

"And this contempt — was it because these men were meaner than other humans he had known, or was it because he now was greater than any human being? Would he ever again be able to look on any human as he had looked upon the Barringtons?

He had a feeling that if this were true, he would be the poorer for it.

Too suddenly, the whole universe was home and he was alone in it and as yet he'd struck no bargain with it or himself.

The bargain would come later. He need only bide his time and work out his plans and his would be a name that would be spoken when his brain was scaling flakes of rust. For he was the emancipator, the messiah of the robots; he was the one who had been called to lead them from the wilderness.

"You!" a voice cried.

Richard Daniel wheeled around and saw it was the captain.

"What do you mean, walking past me as if you didn't see me?" asked the captain fiercely.

"I am sorry," Richard Daniel told him.

"You snubbed me!" raged the captain.

"I was thinking," Richard Daniel said.

"I'll give you something to think about," the captain yelled. "I'll work you till your tail drags. I'll teach the likes of you to get uppity with me!"

"As you wish," said Richard Daniel.

For it didn't matter. It made no difference to him at all what the captain did or thought. And he wondered why the respect even of a robot should mean so much to a human like the captain, why he should guard his small position with so much zealousness.

"In another twenty hours," the captain said, "we hit another port."

"I know," said Richard Daniel. "Sleepy Hollow on Arcadia."

"All right, then," said the captain, "since you know so much, get down into the hold and get the cargo ready to unload. We been spending too much time in all these lousy ports loading and unloading. You been dogging it."

"Yes, sir," said Richard Daniel, turning back and heading for the hold.

He wondered faintly if he were still robot — or was he something else?

Could a machine evolve, he wondered, as Man himself evolved? And if a machine evolved, whatever would it be? Not Man, of course, for it never could be that, but could it be machine?

He hauled out the cargo consigned to Sleepy Hollow and there was not too much of it. So little of it, perhaps, that none of the regular carriers would even consider its delivery, but dumped it off at the nearest terminal, leaving it for a roving tramp, like the Rambler, to carry eventually to its destination.

When they reached Arcadia, he waited until the thunder died and the ship was still. Then he shoved the lever that opened up the port and slid out the ramp.

The port came open ponderously and he saw blue skies and the green of trees and the far-off swirl of chimney smoke mounting in the sky.

He walked slowly forward until he stood upon the ramp and there lay Sleepy Hollow, a tiny, huddled village planted at the river's edge, with the forest as a background. The forest ran on every side to a horizon of climbing folded hills. Fields lay near the village, yellow with maturing crops, and he could see a dog sleeping in the sun outside a cabin door.

A man was climbing up the ramp toward him and there were others running from the village.

"You have cargo for us?" asked the man.

"A small consignment," Richard Daniel told him. "You have something to put on?" The man had a weatherbeaten look and he'd missed several haircuts and he had not shaved for days. His clothes were rough and sweat-stained and his hands were strong and awkward with hard work.

"A small shipment," said the man. "You'll have to wait until we bring it up. We had no warning you were coming. Our radio is broken."

"You go and get it," said Richard Daniel. "I'll start unloading." He had the cargo half unloaded when the captain came storming down into the hold. What was going on, he yelled. How long would they have to wait?

"God knows we're losing money as it is even stopping at this place."

"That may be true," Richard Daniel agreed, "but you knew that when you took the cargo on. There'll be other cargoes and goodwill is something —»

"Goodwill be damned!" the captain roared. "How do I know I'll ever see this place again?" Richard Daniel continued unloading cargo.

"You," the captain shouted, "go down to that village and tell them I'll wait no longer than an hour…"

"But this cargo, sir?"

"I'll get the crew at it. Now, jump!" So Richard Daniel left the cargo and went down into the village.

He went across the meadow that lay between the spaceport and the village, following the rutted wagon tracks, and it was a pleasant walk. He realized with surprise that this was the first time he'd been on solid ground since he'd left the robot planet. He wondered briefly what the name of that planet might have been, for he had never known. Nor what its importance was, why the robots might be there or what they might be doing.

And he wondered, too, with a twinge of guilt, if they'd found Hubert yet.

And where might Earth be now? he asked himself. In what direction did it lie and how far away? Although it didn't really matter, for he was done with Earth.

He had fled from Earth and gained something in his fleeing. He had escaped all the traps of Earth and all the snares of Man. What he held was his, to do with as he pleased, for he was no man's robot, despite what the captain thought.

He walked across the meadow and saw that this planet was very much like Earth. It had the same soft feel about it, the same simplicity. It had far distances and there was a sense of freedom.

He came into the village and heard the muted gurgle of the river running and the distant shouts of children at their play and in one of the cabins a sick child was crying with lost helplessness.

He passed the cabin where the dog was sleeping and it came awake and stalked growling to the gate. When he passed it followed him, still growling, at a distance that was safe and sensible.

An autumnal calm lay upon the village, a sense of gold and lavender, and tranquillity hung in the silences between the crying of the baby and the shouting of the children.

There were women at the windows looking out at him and others at the doors and the dog still followed, but his growls had stilled and now he trotted with prick-eared curiosity.

Richard Daniel stopped in the street and looked around him and the dog sat down and watched him and it was almost as if time itself had stilled and the little village lay divorced from all the universe, an arrested microsecond, an encapsulated acreage that stood sharp in all its truth and purpose.

Standing there, he sensed the village and the people in it, almost as if he had summoned up a diagram of it, although if there were a diagram, he was not aware of it.

It seemed almost as if the village were the Earth, a transplanted Earth with the old primeval problems and hopes of Earth — a family of peoples that faced existence with a readiness and confidence and inner strength.

From down the street he heard the creak of wagons and saw them coming around the bend, three wagons piled high and heading for the ship.

He stood and waited for them and as he waited the dog edged a little closer and sat regarding him with a not-quite-friendliness.

The wagons came up to him and stopped.

"Pharmaceutical materials, mostly," said the man who sat atop the first load, "It is the only thing we have that is worth the shipping."

"You seem to have a lot of it," Richard Daniel told him. The man shook his head. "It's not so much. It's almost three years since a ship's been here. We'll have to wait another three, or more perhaps, before we see another." He spat down on the ground.

"Sometimes it seems," he said, "that we're at the tail-end of nowhere.

There are times we wonder if there is a soul that remembers we are here." From the direction of the ship, Richard Daniel heard the faint, strained violence of the captain's roaring.

"You'd better get on up there and unload," he told the man. "The captain is just sore enough he might not wait for you." The man chuckled thinly. "I guess that's up to him," he said.

He flapped the reins and clucked good-naturedly at the horses.

"Hop up here with me," he said to Richard Daniel. "Or would you rather walk?"

"I'm not going with you," Richard Daniel said. "I am staying here. You can tell the captain." For there was a baby sick and crying. There was a radio to fix. There was a culture to be planned and guided. There was a lot of work to do. This place, of all the places he had seen, had actual need of him.

The man chuckled once again. "The captain will not like it."

"Then tell him," said Richard Daniel, "to come down and talk to me. I am my own robot. I owe the captain nothing. I have more than paid any debt I owe him." The wagon wheels began to turn and the man flapped the reins again.

"Make yourself at home," he said. "We're glad to have you stay."

"Thank you, sir," said Richard Daniel. "I'm pleased you want me." He stood aside and watched the wagons lumber past, their wheels lifting and dropping thin films of powdered earth that floated in the air as an acrid dust.

Make yourself at home, the man had said before he'd driven off. And the words had a full round ring to them and a feel of warmth. It had been a long time, Richard Daniel thought, since he'd had a home.

A chance for resting and for knowing — that was what he needed. And a chance to serve, for now he knew that was the purpose in him. That was, perhaps, the real reason he was staying — because these people needed him.

and he needed, queer as it might seem, this very need of theirs. Here on this Earth-like planet, through the generations, a new Earth would arise.

And perhaps, given only time, he could transfer to the people of the planet all the powers and understanding he would find inside himself.

And stood astounded at the thought, for he'd not believed that he had it in him, this willing, almost eager, sacrifice. No messiah now, no robotic liberator, but a simple teacher of the human race.

Perhaps that had been the reason for it all from the first beginning.

Perhaps all that had happened had been no more than the working out of human destiny. If the human race could not attain directly the paranormal power he held, this instinct of the mind, then they would gain it indirectly through the agency of one of their creations. Perhaps this, after all, unknown to Man himself, had been the prime purpose of the robots.

He turned and walked slowly down the length of village street, his back turned to the ship and the roaring of the captain, walked contentedly into this new world he'd found, into this world that he would make — not for himself, nor for robotic glory, but for a better Mankind and a happier.

Less than an hour before he'd congratulated himself on escaping all the traps of Earth, all the snares of Man. Not knowing that the greatest trap of all, the final and the fatal trap, lay on this present planet.

But that was wrong, he told himself. The trap had not been on this world at all, nor any other world. It had been inside himself.

He walked serenely down the wagon-rutted track in the soft, golden afternoon of a matchless autumn day, with the dog trotting at his heels.

Somewhere, just down the street, the sick baby lay crying in its crib.

The Autumn Land

Original copyright year: 1971

He sat on the porch in the rocking chair, with the loose board creaking as he rocked. Across the street the old white-haired lady cut a bouquet of chrysanthemums in the never-ending autumn. Where he could see between the ancient houses to the distant woods and wastelands, a soft Indian-summer blue lay upon the land. The entire village was soft and quiet, as old things often are — a place constructed for a dreaming mind rather than a living being. It was an hour too early for his other old and shaky neighbor to come fumbling down the grass-grown sidewalk, tapping the bricks with his seeking cane. And he would not hear the distant children at their play until dusk had fallen — if he heard them then. He did not always hear them.

There were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could go into the backyard and spade and rake the garden once again, reducing the soil to a finer texture to receive the seed when it could be planted — if it ever could be planted — but there was slight incentive in the further preparation of a seed bed against a spring that never came. Earlier, much earlier, before he knew about the autumn and the spring, he had mentioned garden seeds to the Milkman, who had been very much embarrassed.

He had walked the magic miles and left the world behind in bitterness and when he first had come here had been content to live in utter idleness, to be supremely idle and to feel no guilt or shame at doing absolutely nothing or as close to absolutely nothing as a man was able. He had come walking down the autumn street in the quietness and the golden sunshine, and the first person that he saw was the old lady who lived across the street. She had been waiting at the gate of her picket fence as if she had known he would be coming, and she had said to him, "You're a new one come to live with us. There are not many come these days. That is your house across the street from me, and I know we'll be good neighbors." He had reached up his hand to doff his hat to her, forgetting that he had no hat. "My name is Nelson Rand," he'd told her. "I am an engineer. I will try to be a decent neighbor." He had the impression that she stood taller and straighter than she did, but old and bent as she might be there was a comforting graciousness about her. "You will please come in," she said. "I have lemonade and cookies. There are other people there, but I shall not introduce them to you." He waited for her to explain why she would not introduce him, but there was no explanation, and he followed her down the time-mellowed walk of bricks with great beds of asters and chrysanthemums, a mass of color on either side of it.

In the large, high-ceilinged living room, with its bay windows forming window seats, filled with massive furniture from another time and with a small blaze burning in the fireplace, she had shown him to a seat before a small table to one side of the fire and had sat down opposite him and poured the lemonade and passed the plate of cookies.

"You must pay no attention to them," she had told him. "They are all dying to meet you, but I shall not humor them."

It was easy to pay no attention to them, for there was no one there.

"The Major, standing over there by the fireplace," said his hostess, "with his elbow on the mantel, a most ungainly pose if you should ask me, is not happy with my lemonade. He would prefer a stronger drink. Please, Mr. Rand, will you not taste my lemonade? I assure you it is good. I made it myself. I have no maid, you see, and no one in the kitchen. I live quite by myself and satisfactorily, although my friends keep dropping in, sometimes more often than I like."

He tasted the lemonade, not without misgivings, and to his surprise it was lemonade and was really good, like the lemonade he had drunk when a boy at Fourth of July celebrations and at grade school picnics, and had never tasted since.

"It is excellent," he said.

"The lady in blue," his hostess said, "sitting in the chair by the window, lived here many years ago. She and I were friends, although she moved away some time ago and I am surprised that she comes back, which she often does. The infuriating thing is that I cannot remember her name, if I ever knew it. You don't know it, do you?"

"I am afraid I don't."

"Oh, of course, you wouldn't. I had forgotten. I forget so easily these days. You are a new arrival."

He had sat through the afternoon and drank her lemonade and eaten her cookies, while she chattered on about her nonexistent guests. It was only when he had crossed the street to the house she had pointed out as his, with her standing on the stoop and waving her farewell, that he realized she had not told him her name. He did not know it even now.

How long had it been? He wondered, and realized he didn't know. It was this autumn business. How could a man keep track of time when it was always autumn?

It all had started on that day when he'd been driving across Iowa, heading for Chicago. No, he reminded himself, it had started with the thinnesses, although he had paid little attention to the thinnesses to begin with. Just been aware of them, perhaps as a strange condition of the mind, or perhaps an unusual quality to the atmosphere and light. As if the world lacked a certain solidity that one had come to expect, as if one were running along a mystic borderline between here and somewhere else.

He had lost his West Coast job when a government contract had failed to materialize. His company had not been the only one; there were many other companies that were losing contracts and there were a lot of engineers who walked the streets bewildered. There was a bare possibility of a job in Chicago, although he was well aware that by now it might be filled. Even if there were no job, he reminded himself, he was in better shape than a lot of other men. He was young and single, he had a few dollars in the bank, he had no house mortgage, no car payments, no kids to put through school. He had only himself to support — no family of any sort at all. The old, hard-fisted bachelor uncle who had taken him to raise when his parents had died in a car crash and had worked him hard on that stony hilly Wisconsin farm, had receded deep into the past becoming a dim, far figure that was hard to recognize. He had not liked his uncle, Rand remembered — had not hated him, simply had not liked him. He had shed no tears, he recalled, when the old man had been caught out in a pasture by a bull and gored to death. So now Rand was quite alone, not even holding the memories of a family.

He had been hoarding the little money that he had, for with a limited work record, with other men better qualified looking for the jobs, he realized that it might be some time before he could connect with anything. The beat-up wagon that he drove had space for sleeping, and he stopped at the little wayside parks along the way to cook his meals.

He had almost crossed the state, and the road had started its long winding through the bluffs that rimmed the Mississippi. Ahead he caught a glimpse, at several turnings of the road, of smokestacks and tall structures that marked the city just ahead.

He emerged from the bluffs, and the city before him, a small industrial center that lay on either side the river. It was then that he felt and saw (if one could call it seeing) the thinness that he had seen before or had sensed before. There was about it, not exactly an alienness, but a sense of unreality, as if one were seeing the actuality of the scene through some sort of veil, with the edges softened and the angles flattened out, as if one might be looking at it as one would look at the bottom of a clear-water lake with a breeze gently ruffling the surface. When he had seen it before, he had attributed it to road fatigue and had opened the window to get a breath of air or had stopped the car and gotten out to walk up and down the road awhile, and it had gone away.

But this time it was worse than ever, and he was somewhat frightened at it — not so much frightened at it as he was frightened of himself, wondering what might be wrong with him.

He pulled off to the side of the road, braking the car to a halt, and it seemed to him, even as he did it, that the shoulder of the road was rougher than he'd thought. As he pulled off the road, the thinness seemed to lessen, and he saw that the road had changed, which explained its roughness. The surface was pocked with chuckholes and blocks of concrete had been heaved up and other blocks were broken into pebbly shards.

He raised his eyes from the road to look at the city, and there was no city, only the broken stumps of a place that had somehow been destroyed. He sat with his hands frozen on the wheel, and in the silence — the deadly, unaccustomed silence — he heard the cawing of crows. Foolishly, he tried to remember the last time he had heard the caw of crows, and then he saw them, black specks that flapped just above the bluff top. There was something else as well — the trees. No longer trees, but only here and there blackened stumps. The stumps of a city and the stumps of trees, with the black, ash-like flecks of crows flapping over them.

Scarcely knowing what he did, he stumbled from the car. Thinking of it later, it had seemed a foolish thing to do, for the car was the only thing he knew, the one last link he had to reality. As he stumbled from it, he put his hand down in the seat, and beneath his hand he felt the solid, oblong object. His fingers closed upon it, and it was not until he was standing by the car that he realized what he held — the camera that had been lying in the seat beside him.

Sitting on the porch, with the loose floor board creaking underneath the rocker, he remembered that he still had the pictures, although it had been a long time since he had thought of them — a long time, actually, since he'd thought of anything at all beyond his life, day to day, in this autumn land. It was as though he had been trying to keep himself from thinking, attempting to keep his mind in neutral, to shut out what he knew — or, more precisely perhaps, what he thought he knew.

He did not consciously take the pictures, although afterward he had tried to tell himself he did (but never quite convincing himself that this was entirely true), complimenting himself in a wry sort of way for providing a piece of evidence that his memory alone never could have provided. For a man can think so many things, daydream so many things, imagine so many things that he can never trust his mind.

The entire incident, when he later thought of it, was hazy, as if the reality of that blasted city lay in some strange dimension of experience that could not be explained, or even rationalized. He could remember only vaguely the camera at his eyes and the clicking as the shutter snapped. He did recall the band of people charging down the hill toward him and his mad scramble for the car, locking the door behind him and putting the car in gear, intent on steering a zigzag course along the broken pavement to get away from the screaming humans who were less than a hundred feet away.

But as he pulled off the shoulder, the pavement was no longer broken. It ran smooth and level toward the city that was no longer blasted. He pulled off the road again and sat limply, beaten, and it was only after many minutes that he could proceed again, going very slowly because he did not trust himself, shaken as he was, to drive at greater speed.

He had planned to cross the river and continue to Chicago, getting there that night, but now his plans were changed. He was too shaken up and, besides, there were the films. And he needed time to think, he told himself, a lot of time to think.

He found a roadside park a few miles outside the city and pulled into it, parking alongside an outdoor grill and an old-fashioned pump. He got some wood from the small supply he carried in the back and built a fire. He hauled out the box with his cooking gear and food, fixed the coffee pot, set a pan upon the grill and cracked three eggs into it.

When he had pulled off the road, he had seen the man walking along the roadside; and now, as he cracked the eggs, he saw that the man had turned into the park and was walking toward the car. The man came up to the pump.

"Does this thing work?" he asked.

Rand nodded. "I got water for the pot," he said. "Just now."

"It's a hot day," said the man.

He worked the pump handle up and down.

"Hot for walking," he said.

"You been walking far?"

"The last six weeks," he said.

Rand had a closer look at him. The clothes were old and worn, but fairly clean. He had shaved a day or two before. His hair was long — not that he wore it long, but from lack of barbering.

Water gushed from the spout and the man cupped his hands under it, bent to drink.

"That was good," be finally said. "I was thirsty."

"How are you doing for food?" asked Rand, The man hesitated. "Not too well," he said.

"Reach into that box on the tailgate. Find yourself a plate and some eating implements. A cup, too. Coffee will be ready soon."

"Mister, I wouldn't want you to think I was walking up here…"

"Forget it," said Rand. "I know how it is. There's enough for the both of us."

The man got a plate and cup, a knife, a fork, a spoon. He came over and stood beside the fire.

"I am new at this." he said. "I've never had to do a thing like this before. I always had a job. For seventeen years I had a job…"

"Here you are," said Rand. He slid the eggs onto the plate, went back to the box to get three more.

The man walked over to a picnic table and put down his plate. "Don't wait for me," said Rand. "Eat them while they're hot. The coffee's almost ready. There's bread if you want any."

"I'll get a slice later," said the man, "for mopping up."

John Sterling, he said his name was, and where now would John Sterling be, Rand wondered — still tramping the highways, looking for work, any kind of work, a day of work, an hour of work, a man who for seventeen years had held a job and had a job no longer? Thinking of Sterling, he felt a pang of guilt. He owed John Sterling a debt he never could repay, not knowing at the time they talked there was any debt involved.

They had sat and talked, eating their eggs, mopping up the plates with bread, drinking hot coffee.

"For seventeen years," said Sterling. "A machine operator. An experienced hand. With the same company. Then they let me out. Me and four hundred others. All at one time. Later they let out others. I was not the only one. There were a lot of us. We weren't laid off, we were let out. No promise of going back. Not the company's fault, I guess. There was a big contract that fizzled out. There was no work to do. How about yourself? You let out, too?"

Rand nodded. "How did you know?"

"Well, eating like this. Cheaper than a restaurant. And you got a sleeping bag. You sleep in the car?"

"That is right," said Rand. "It's not as bad for me as it is for some of the others. I have no family."

"I have a family," said Sterling. "Wife, three kids. We talked it over, the wife and me. She didn't want me to leave, but it made sense I should. Money all gone, unemployment run out. Long as I was around, it was hard to get relief. But if I deserted her, she could get relief. That way there's food for the wife and kids, a roof over their heads. Hardest thing I ever did. Hard for all of us. Someday I'll go back. When times get better, I'll go back. The family will be waiting."

Out on the highway the cars went whisking past. A squirrel came down out of a tree, advanced cautiously toward the table, suddenly turned and fled for his very life, swarming up a nearby trunk.

"I don't know," said Sterling. "It might be too big for us, this society of ours. It may be out of hand. I read a lot. Always liked to read. And I think about what I read. It seems to me maybe we've outrun our brains. The brains we have maybe were OK back in prehistoric days. We did all right with the brains we had until we built too big and complex. Maybe we built beyond our brains. Maybe our brains no longer are good enough to handle what we have. We have set loose economic forces we don't understand and political forces that we do not understand, and if we can't understand them, we can't control them. Maybe that is why you and I are out of jobs."

"I wouldn't know," said Rand. "I never thought about it."

"A man thinks a lot," said Sterling. "He dreams a lot walking down the road. Nothing else to do. He dreams some silly things: Things that are silly on the face of them, but are hard to say can't be really true. Did this ever happen to you?"

"Sometimes," said Rand.

"One thing I thought about a lot. A terribly silly thought. Maybe thinking it because I do so much walking. Sometimes people pick me up, but mostly I walk. And I got to wondering if a man should walk far enough could he leave it all behind? The farther a man might walk, the farther he would be from everything."

"Where you heading?" Rand asked.

"Nowhere in particular. Just keep on moving, that is all. Month or so I'll start heading south. Get a good head start on winter. These northern states are no place to be when winter comes,"

"There are two eggs left," said Rand. "How about it?"

"Hell, man, I can't. I already…

"Three eggs aren't a lot. I can get some more."

"Well, if you're sure that you don't mind. Tell you what — let's split them, one for you, one for me."

The giddy old lady had finished cutting her bouquet and had gone into the house. From up the street came the tapping of a cane — Rand's other ancient neighbor, out for his evening walk. The sinking sun poured a blessing on the land. The leaves were gold and red, brown and yellow — they had been that way since the day that Rand had come. The grass had a tawny look about it — not dead, just dressed up for dying.

The old man came trudging carefully down the walk, his cane alert against a stumble, helping himself with it without really needing any help. He was slow, was all. He halted by the walk that ran up to the porch. "Good afternoon," he said. "Good afternoon." said Rand. "You have a nice day for your walk." The old man acknowledged the observation graciously and with a touch of modesty, as if he, himself, might somehow be responsible for the goodness of the day. "It looks," he said, "as if we might have another fine day tomorrow." And having said that, he continued down the street.

It was ritual. The same words were said each day. The situation, like the village and the weather, never varied. He could sit here on this porch a thousand years, Rand told himself, and the old man would continue going past and each time the selfsame words would be mouthed — a set piece, a strip of film run over and over again. Something here had happened to time. The year had stuck on autumn.

Rand did not understand it. He did not try to understand it. There was no way for him to try. Sterling had said that man's cleverness might have outstripped his feeble, prehistoric mind — or, perhaps, his brutal and prehistoric mind. And here there was less chance of understanding than there had been back in that other world.

He found himself thinking of that other world in the same myth-haunted way as he thought of this one. The one now seemed as unreal as the other. Would he ever, Rand wondered, find reality again? Did he want to find it?

There was a way to find reality, he knew. Go into the house and take out the photos in the drawer of his bedside table and have a look at them. Refresh his memory, stare reality in the face again. For those photos, grim as they might be, were a harder reality than this world in which he sat or the world that he had known. For they were nothing seen by the human eye, interpreted by the human brain.

They were, somehow, fact. The camera saw what it saw and could not lie about it; it did not fantasize, it did not rationalize, and it had no faulty memory, which was more than could be said of the human mind.

He had gone back to the camera shop where he had left the film and the clerk had picked out the envelope from the box behind the counter.

"That will be three ninety-five." he said.

Rand took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and laid it on the counter.

"If you don't mind my asking," said the clerk, "where did you get these pictures?"

"It is trick photography," said Rand.

The clerk shook his head. "If that is what they are, they're the best I've ever seen."

The clerk rang up the sale and, leaving the register open, stepped back and picked up the envelope.

"What do you want?" asked Rand.

The man shook the prints out of the envelope, shuffled through them.

"This one," he said.

Rand stared at him levelly. "What about it?" he asked.

"The people. I know some of them. The one in front. That is Bob Gentry. He is my best friend."

"You must be mistaken," Rand said coldly.

He took the prints from the clerk's fingers, put them back in the envelope.

The clerk made the change. He still was shaking his head, confused, perhaps a little frightened, when Rand left the shop.

He drove carefully, but with no loss of time, through the city and across the bridge. When he hit open country beyond the river, he built up his speed, keeping an eye on the rear-vision mirror. The clerk had been upset, perhaps enough to phone the police. Others would have seen the pictures and been upset as well. Although, he told himself, it was silly to think of the police. In taking the photos, he had broken no regulations, violated no laws. He had had a perfect right to take them.

Across the river and twenty miles down the highway, he turned off into a small, dusty country road and followed it until he found a place to pull off, where the road widened at the approach to a bridge that crossed a small stream. There was evidence that the pull-off was much used, fishermen more than likely parking their cars there while they tried their luck. But now the place was empty.

He was disturbed to find that his hands were shaking when he pulled the envelope from his pocket and shook out the prints.

And there it was — as he no longer could remember it.

He was surprised that he had taken as many pictures as he had. He could not remember having taken half that many. But they were there, and as he looked at them, his memory, reinforced, came back again, although the photos were much sharper than his memory. The world, he recalled, had seemed to be hazed and indistinct so far as his eyes had been concerned; in the photos it lay cruel and merciless and clear. The blackened stumps stood up, stark and desolate, and there could be no doubt that the imprint that lay upon the photos was the actuality of a bombed-out city. The photos of the bluff showed the barren rock no longer masked by trees, with only here and there the skeletons of trees that by some accidental miracle had not been utterly reduced by the storm of fire. There was only one photo of the band of people who had come charging down the hill toward him; and that was understandable, for once having seen them, he had been in a hurry to get back to the car. Studying the photo, he saw they were much closer than he'd thought. Apparently they had been there all the time, just a little way off, and he had not noticed them in his astonishment at what had happened to the city. If they had been quieter about it, they could have been on top of him and overwhelmed him before he discovered them. He looked closely at the picture and saw that they had been close enough that some of the faces were fairly well defined. He wondered which one of them was the man the clerk back at the camera shop had recognized.

He shuffled the photographs together and slid them back into the envelope and put it in his pocket. He got out of the car and walked down to the edge of the stream. The stream, he saw, was no more than ten feet or so across; but here, below the bridge, it had gathered itself into a pool, and the bank had been trampled bare of vegetation, and there were places where fishermen had sat. Rand sat down in one of these places and inspected the pool. The current came in close against the bank and probably had undercut it, and lying there, in the undercut, would be the fish that the now-absent anglers sought, dangling their worms at the end of a long cane pole and waiting for a bite.

The place was pleasant and cool, shaded by a great oak that grew on the bank just below the bridge. From some far-off field came the subdued clatter of a mower. The water dimpled as a fish came up to suck in a floating insect. A good place to stay, thought Rand. A place to sit and rest awhile. He tried to blank his mind, to wipe out the memory and the photos, to pretend that nothing at all had happened, that there was nothing he must think about.

But there was, he found, something that he must think about. Not about the photos, but something that Sterling had said just the day before. "I got to wondering." he had said, "if a man should walk far enough, could he leave it all behind."

How desperate must a man get, Rand wondered, before he would be driven to asking such a question. Perhaps not desperate at all — just worried and alone and tired and not being able to see the end of it. Either that, or afraid of what lay up ahead. Like knowing, perhaps, that in a few years time (and not too many years, for in that photo of the people the clerk had seen a man he knew) a warhead would hit a little Iowa town and wipe it out. Not that there was any reason for it being hit; it was no Los Angeles, no New York, no Washington, no busy port, no center of transportation or communication, held no great industrial complex, was no seat of government. Simply hit because it had been there, hit by blunder, by malfunction, or by miscalculation. Although it probably didn't matter greatly, for by the time it had been hit, the nation and perhaps the world might have been gone. A few years, Rand told himself, and it would come to that. After all the labor, all the hopes and dreams, the world would come to just that.

It was the sort of thing that a man might want to walk away from, hoping that in time be might forget it ever had been there. But to walk away, he thought, rather idly, one would have to find a starting point. You could not walk away from everything by just starting anywhere.

It was an idle thought, sparked by the memory of his talk with Sterling; and he sat there, idly, on the stream bank; and because it had a sense of attractive wonder, he held it in his mind, not letting go at once as one did with idle thoughts. And as he sat there, still holding it in mind, another thought, another time and place crept in to keep it company; and suddenly he knew, with no doubt at all, without really thinking, without searching for an answer, that he knew the place where he could start.

He stiffened and sat rigid, momentarily frightened, feeling like a fool trapped by his own unconscious fantasy. For that, said common sense, was all that it could be. The bitter wondering of a beaten man as he tramped the endless road looking for a job, the shock of what the photos showed, some strange, mesmeric quality of this shaded pool that seemed a place apart from a rock-hard world — all of these put together had produced the fantasy.

Rand hauled himself erect and turned back toward the car, but as he did he could see within his mind this special starting place. He had been a boy — how old? he wondered, maybe nine or ten — and he had found the little valley (not quite a glen, yet not quite a valley, either) running below his uncle's farm down toward the river. He had never been there before and he had never gone again; on his uncle's farm there had been too many chores, too many things to do to allow the time to go anywhere at all. He tried to recall the circumstances of his being there and found that he could not. All that he could remember was a single magic moment, as if he had been looking at a single frame of a movie film — a single frame impressed upon his memory because of what? Because of some peculiar angle at which the light had struck the landscape? Because for an instant he had seen with different eyes than he'd ever used before or since? Because for the fractional part of a second he had sensed a simple truth behind the facade of the ordinary world? No matter what, he knew, he had seen magic in that moment.

He went back to the car and sat behind the wheel, staring at the bridge and sliding water and the field beyond, but seeing, instead of them, the map inside his head. When he went back to the highway, he'd turn left instead of right, back toward the river and the town, and before he reached them he would turn north on another road and the valley of the magic moment would be only a little more than a hundred miles away. He sat and saw the map and purpose hardened in his mind. Enough of this silliness, he thought; there were no magic moments, never had been one; when he reached the highway, he'd turn to the right and hope the job might still be there when he reached Chicago.

When he reached the highway, he turned not right, but left.

It had been so easy to find, he thought as he sat on the porch. There had been no taking of wrong roads, no stopping for directions; he'd gone directly there as if he'd always known he would be coming back and had kept the way in mind. He had parked the car at the hollow's mouth, since there was no road, and had gone on foot up the little valley. It could so easily have been that he would not have found the place, he told himself, admitting now for the first time since it all began that he might not have been so sure as he had thought he was. He might have gone up the full length of the valley and not have found the magic ground, or he might have passed it by, seeing it with other eyes and not recognizing it.

But it still was there, and he had stopped and looked at it and known it; again he was only nine or ten, and it was all right, the magic still was there. He had found a path he had not seen before and had followed it, the magic still remaining; and when he reached the hilltop, the village had been there. He had walked down the street in the quietness of the golden sunshine, and the first person that he had seen had been the old lady waiting at the gate of her picket fence, as if she had been told that he would becoming.

After he had left her house be went across the street to the house she said was his. As he came in the front door, there was someone knocking at the back.

"I am the Milkman," the knocker had explained. He was a shadowy sort of person: you could see and yet you did not really see him; when one looked away and then looked back at him, it was as if one were seeing someone he had never seen before.

"Milkman," Rand had said. "Yes, I suppose I could do with milk."

"Also," said the Milkman, "I have eggs, bread, butter, bacon and other things that you will need. Here is a can of oil; you'll need it for your lamps. The woodshed is well stocked, and when there's need of it, I'll replenish it. The kindling's to the left as you go through the door."

Rand recalled that he'd never paid the milkman or even mentioned payment. The Milkman was not the kind of man to whom one mentioned money. There was no need, either, to leave an order slip in the milkbox; the Milkman seemed to know what one might need and when without being told. With some shame, Rand remembered the time he had mentioned garden seeds and caused embarrassment, not only for the Milkman, but for himself as well. For as soon as he mentioned them, he had sensed that he'd broken some very subtle code of which he should have been aware.

The day was fading into evening, and he should be going in soon to cook himself a meal. And after that, what he wondered. There still were books to read, but he did not want to read them. He could take out from the desk the plan he had laid out for the garden and mull over it a while, but now he knew he'd never plant the garden. You didn't plant a garden in a forever-autumn land, and there were no seeds.

Across the street a light blossomed in the windows of that great front room with its massive furniture, its roomy window seats, the great fireplace flaring to the ceiling. The old man with the cane had not returned, and it was getting late for him. In the distance now Rand could hear the sounds of children playing in the dusk.

The old and young, he thought. The old, who do not care: the young, who do not think. And what was he doing here, neither young nor old?

He left the porch and went down the walk. The street was empty, as it always was. He drifted slowly down it, heading toward the little park at the village edge. He often went there, to sit on a bench beneath the friendly trees; and it was there, he was sure, that he would find the children. Although why he should think that he would find them there he did not know, for he had never found them, but only heard their voices.

He went past the houses, standing sedately in the dusk. Had people ever lived in them, he wondered. Had there ever been that many people in this nameless village? The old lady across the street spoke of friends she once had known, of people who had lived here and had gone away. But was this her memory speaking or the kind befuddlement of someone growing old?

The houses, he had noted, all were in good repair. A loose shingle here and there, a little peeling paint, but no windows broken, no loosened gutters, sagging from the eaves, no rotting porch posts. As if, he thought, good householders had been here until very recently.

He reached the park and could see that it was empty. He still heard the childish voices, crying at their play, but they had receded and now came from somewhere just beyond the park. He crossed the park and stood at its edge, staring off across the scrub and abandoned fields.

In the east the moon was rising, a full moon that lighted the landscape so that he could see every little clump of bushes, every grove of trees. And as he stood there, he realized with a sudden start that the moon was full again, that it was always full, it rose with the setting of the sun and set just before the sun came up, and it was always a great pumpkin of a moon, an eternal harvest moon shining on an eternal autumn world.

The realization that this was so all at once seemed shocking. How was it that he had never noticed this before? Certainly he had been here long enough, had watched the moon often enough to have noticed it. He had been here long enough — and how long had that been, a few weeks, a few months, a year? He found he did not know. He tried to figure back and there was no way to figure back. There were no temporal landmarks. Nothing ever happened to mark one day from the next. Time flowed so smoothly and so uneventfully that it might as well stand still.

The voices of the playing children had been moving from him, becoming fainter in the distance; and as he listened to them, he found that he was hearing them in his mind when they were no longer there. They had come and played and now had ceased their play. They would come again, if not tomorrow night, in another night or two. It did not matter, he admitted, if they came or not, for they really weren't there.

He turned heavily about and went back through the streets. As he approached his house, a dark figure moved out from the shadow of the trees and stood waiting for him. It was the old lady from across the street. It was evident that she had been waiting his return.

"Good evening, ma" am." he said gravely. "It is a pleasant night."

"He is gone," she said. "He did not come back. He went just like the others and he won't come back."

"You mean the old man."

"Our neighbor," she said. "The old man with the cane. I do not know his name. I never knew his name. And I don't know yours."

"I told it to you once," said Rand, but she paid him no attention.

"Just a few doors up the street." she said, "and I never knew his name and I doubt that he knew mine. We are a nameless people here, and it is a terrible thing to be a nameless person."

"I will look for him," said Rand. "He may have lost his way."

"Yes, go and look for him," she said. "By all means look for him. It will ease your mind. It will take away the guilt. But you will never find him."

He took the direction that he knew the old man always took. He had the impression that his ancient neighbor, on his daily walks, went to the town square and the deserted business section, but he did not know. At no other time had it ever seemed important where he might have gone on his walks.

When he emerged into the square, he saw, immediately, the dark object lying on the pavement and recognized it as the old man's hat. There was no sign of the old man himself.

Rand walked out into the square and picked up the hat. He gently reshaped and creased it and after that was done held it carefully by the brim so that it would come to no further damage.

The business section drowsed in the moonlight. The statue of the unknown man stood starkly on its base in the center of the square. When he first had come here, Rand recalled, he had tried to unravel the identity of the statue and had failed. There was no legend carved into the granite base, no bronze plate affixed. The face was undistinguished, the stony costume gave no hint as to identity or period. There was nothing in the posture or the attitude of the carven body to provide a clue. The statue stood, a forgotten tribute to some unknown mediocrity.

As he gazed about the square at the business houses. Rand was struck again, as he always was, by the carefully unmodern make-up of the establishments. A barber shop, a hotel, a livery barn, a bicycle shop, a harness shop, a grocery store, a meat market, a blacksmith shop — no garage, no service station, no pizza parlor, no hamburger joint. The houses along the quiet streets told the story; here it was emphasized. This was an old town, forgotten and by-passed by the sweep of time, a place of another century. But there was about it all what seemed to be a disturbing sense of unreality, as if it were no old town at all, but a place deliberately fashioned in such a manner as to represent a segment of the past.

Rand shook his head. What was wrong with him tonight? Most of the time he was quite willing to accept the village for what it seemed to be, but tonight he was assailed with uneasy doubt.

Across the square he found the old man's cane. If his neighbor had come in this direction, he reasoned, he must have crossed the square and gone on down the street nearest to the place where he had dropped the cane. But why had he dropped the cane? First his hat and then his cane. What had happened here?

Rand glanced around, expecting that he might catch some movement, some furtive lurker on the margin of the square. There was nothing. If there had been something earlier, there was nothing now.

Following the street toward which his neighbor might have been heading, he walked carefully and alert, watching the shadows closely. The shadows played tricks on him, conjuring up lumpy objects that could have been a fallen man, but weren't. A half a dozen times he froze when he thought he detected something moving, but it was, in each case, only an illusion of the shadows.

When the village ended, the street continued as a path. Rand hesitated, trying to plan his action. The old man had lost his hat and cane, and the points where he had dropped them argued that he had intended going down the Street that Rand had followed. If he had come down the Street, he might have continued down the path, out of the village and away from it, perhaps fleeing from something in the village.

There was no way one could be sure, Rand knew. But he was here and might as well go on for at least a ways. The old man might be out there somewhere, exhausted, perhaps terribly frightened, perhaps fallen beside the path and needing help.

Rand forged ahead. The path, rather well-defined at first, became fainter as it wound its way across the rolling moonlit countryside. A flushed rabbit went bobbing through the grass. Far off an owl chortled wickedly. A faint chill wind came out of the west. And with the wind came a sense of loneliness, of open empty space untenanted by anything other than rabbit, owl and wind.

The path came to an end, its faintness finally pinching out to nothing. The groves of trees and thickets of low-growing shrubs gave way to a level plain of blowing grass, bleached to whiteness by the moon, a faceless prairie land. Staring out across it, Rand knew that this wilderness of grass would run on and on forever. It had in it the scent and taste of foreverness. He shuddered at the sight of it and wondered why a man should shudder at a thing so simple. But even as he wondered, he knew — the grass was staring back at him; it knew him and waited patiently for him, for in time he would come to it. He would wander into it and be lost in it, swallowed by its immensity and anonymity.

He turned and ran, unashamedly, chill of blood and brain, shaken to the core. When he reached the outskirts of the village, he finally stopped the running and turned to look back into the wasteland. He had left the grass behind, but he sensed illogically that it was stalking him, flowing forward, still out of sight, but soon to appear, with the wind blowing billows in its whiteness.

He ran again, but not so fast and hard this time, jogging down the street. He came into the square and crossed it, and when he reached his house, he saw that the house across the street was dark. He did not hesitate, but went on down the street he'd walked when he first came to the village. For he knew now that he must leave this magic place with its strange and quiet old village, its forever autumn and eternal harvest moon, its faceless sea of grass, its children who receded in the distance when one went to look for them, its old man who walked into oblivion, dropping hat and cane — that he must somehow find his way back to that other world where few jobs existed and men walked the road to find them, where nasty little wars flared in forgotten corners and a camera caught on film the doom that was to come.

He left the village behind him and knew that he had not far to go to reach the place where the path swerved to the right and down a broken slope into the little valley to the magic starting point he'd found again after many years. He went slowly and carefully so that he would not wander off the path, for as he remembered it the path was very faint. It took much longer than he had thought to reach the point where the path swerved to the right into the broken ground, and the realization grew upon him that the path did not swing to right and there was no broken ground.

In front of him he saw the grass again and there was no path leading into it. He knew that he was trapped, that he would never leave the village until he left it as the old man had, walking out of it and into nothingness. He did not move closer to the grass, for he knew there was terror there and he'd had enough of terror. You're a coward, he told himself.

Retracing the path back to the village, he kept a sharp lookout, going slowly so that he'd not miss the turnoff if it should be there. It was not, however. It once had been, he told himself, bemused, and he'd come walking up it, out of that other world he'd fled.

The village street was dappled by the moonlight shining through the rustling leaves. The house across the street still was dark, and there was an empty loneliness about it. Rand remembered that he had not eaten since the sandwich he had made that noon. There'd be something in the milkbox — he'd not looked in it that morning, or had he? He could not remember.

He went around the house to the back porch where the milkbox stood. The Milkman was standing there. He was more shadowy than ever, less well defined, with the moonlight shining on him, and his face was deeply shaded by the wide-brimmed hat he wore.

Rand halted abruptly and stood looking at him, astounded that the Milkman should he there. For he was out of place in the autumn moonlight. He was a creature of the early morning hours and of no other times.

"I came," the Milkman said, "to determine if I could be of help."

Rand said nothing. His head buzzed large and misty, and there was nothing to be said.

"A gun," the Milkman suggested. "Perhaps you would like a gun."

"A gun? Why should I want one?"

"You have had a most disturbing evening. You might feel safer, more secure, with a gun in hand, a gun strapped about your waist."

Rand hesitated. Was there mockery in the Milkman's voice?

"Or a cross."

"A cross?"

"A crucifix. A symbol…"

"No," said Rand. "I do not need a cross."

"A volume of philosophy, perhaps."

"No!" Rand shouted at him. "I left all that behind. We tried to use them all, we relied on them and they weren't good enough and now…"

He stopped, for that had not been what he'd meant to say, if in fact he'd meant to say anything at all. It was something that he'd never even thought about; it was as if someone inside of him were speaking through his mouth.

"Or perhaps some currency?"

"You are making fun of me," Rand said bitterly, "and you have no right…"

"I merely mention certain things," the Milkman said, "upon which humans place reliance…"

"Tell me one thing," said Rand, "as simply as you can. Is there any way of going back?"

"Back to where you came from?"

"Yes," said Rand. "That is what I mean."

"There is nothing to go back to." the Milkman said. "Anyone who comes has nothing to go back to."

"But the old man left. He wore a black felt hat and carried a cane. He dropped them and I found them."

"He did not go back," the Milkman said. "He went ahead. And do not ask me where, for I do not know."

"But you're a part of this."

"I am a humble servant. I have a job to do and I try to do it well. I care for our guests the best that I am able. But there comes a time when each of our guests leaves us. I would suspect this is a halfway house on the road to someplace else."

"A place for getting ready," Rand said.

"What do you mean?" the Milkman asked.

"I am not sure," said Rand. "I had not meant to say it." And this was the second time, he thought, that he'd said something he had not meant to say.

"There's one comfort about this place." the Milkman said. "One good thing about it you should keep in mind. In this village nothing ever happens."

He came down off the porch and stood upon the walk. "You spoke of the old man," he said, "and it was not the old man only. The old lady also left us. The two of them stayed on much beyond their time."

"You mean I'm here all alone?"

The Milkman had started down the walk, but now he stopped and turned. "There'll be others coming," he said. "There are always others coming."

What was it Sterling had said about man outrunning his brain capacity? Rand tried to recall the words, but now, in the confusion of the moment, he had forgotten them. But if that should be the case, if Sterling had been right (no matter how he had phrased his thought), might not man need, for a while, a place like this, where nothing ever happened, where the moon was always full and the year was stuck on autumn?

Another thought intruded and Rand swung about, shouting in sudden panic at the Milkman. "But these others? Will they talk to me? Can I talk with them? Will I know their names?"

The Milkman had reached the gate by now and it appeared that he had not heard.

The moonlight was paler than it had been. The eastern sky was flushed. Another matchless autumn day was about to dawn.

Rand went around the house. He climbed the steps that led up to the porch. He sat down in the rocking chair and began waiting for the others.

Cosmic Engineers

Original copyright year: 1950

From the original short novel by the same author, Copyright 1939 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"… apart from your assignments, you must always be receptive to, be prepared for, and act upon all news potential from strange sources though it may lead you to the end of the solar system — perhaps even to the very edge of the universe…" From the Interplanetary Newsman's Manual

CHAPTER One

HERB HARPER snapped on the radio and a voice snarled, billions of miles away: "Police ship 968. Keep watch for freighter Vulcan on the Earth-Venus run. Search ship for drugs. Believed to be…"

Herb spun the dial. A lazy voice floated through the ship: "Pleasure yacht Helen, three hours out of Sandebar. Have you any messages for us?"

He spun the dial again. The voice of Tim Donovan, radio's ace newscaster, rasped "Tommy Evans will have to wait a few more days before attempting his flight to Alpha Centauri. The Solar Commerce commission claims to have found some faults in the construction of his new generators, but Tommy still insists that those generators will shoot him along at a speed well over that of light. Nevertheless, he has been ordered to bring his ship back to Mars so that technicians may check it before he finally takes off. Tommy is out on Pluto now, all poised for launching off into space beyond the solar system. At last reports he had made no move to obey the order of the commission. Tommy's backers, angered by the order, call it high-handed, charge there are politics back of it…"

Herb shut off the radio and walked to the door separating the living quarters of the Space Pup from the control room.

"Hear that, Gary?" he asked. "Maybe we'll get to see this guy, Evans, after all."

Gary Nelson, puffing at his foul, black pipe, scowled savagely at Herb. "Who wants to see that glory grabber?" he asked.

"What's biting you now?" asked Herb.

"Nothing," said Gary, "except Tommy Evans. Ever since we left Saturn we haven't heard a thing out of Donovan except this Tommy Evans."

Herb stared at his lanky partner.

"You sure got a bad case of space fever," he said. "You been like a dog with a sore head the last few days."

"Who wouldn't get space fever?" snapped Gary. He gestured out through the vision plate. "Nothing but space," he said. "Blackness with little stars. Stars that have forgotten how to twinkle. Going hundreds of miles a second and you wonder if you're moving. No change in scenery. A few square feet of space to live in. Black space pressing all about you, taunting you, trying to get in…"

He stopped and sat down limply in the pilot's chair.

"How about a game of chess?" asked Herb.

Gary twisted about and snapped at him:

"Don't mention chess to me again, you sawed-off shrimp. I'll space-walk you if you do. So help me Hannah if I won't."

"Thought maybe it would quiet you down," said Herb.

Gary leveled his pipestem at Herb.

"If I had the guy who invented three-way chess," he said, "I'd wring his blasted neck. The old kind was bad enough, but three-dimensional, twenty-seven man…"

He shook his head dismally.

"He must have been half nuts," he said.

"He did go off his rockers," Herb told him, "but not from inventing three-way chess. Guy by the name of Konrad Fairbanks. In an asylum back on Earth now. I took a picture of him once, when he was coming out of the courtroom. Just after the judge said he was only half there. The cops chased hell out of me but I got away. The Old Man paid me ten bucks bonus for the shot."

"I remember that," said Gary. "Best mathematical mind in the whole system. Worked out equations no one could understand. Went screwy when he proved that there actually were times when one and one didn't quite make two. Proved it, you understand. Not just theory or mathematical mumbo-jumbo."

Herb walked across the control room and stood beside Gary, looking out through the vision plate.

"Everything been going all right?" he asked.

Gary growled deep in his throat.

"What could go wrong out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit and watch. And there really isn't any need of that. The robot navigator handles everything." The soft purr of the geosectors filled the ship. There was no other sound. The ship seemed standing still in space. Saturn swung far down to the right, a golden disk of light with thin, bright rings. Pluto was a tiny speck of light almost dead ahead, a little to the left. The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their sight.

The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a second. The geosectors, warping the curvature of space itself, hurled the tiny ship through the void at a speed unthought of less than a hundred years before.

And now Tommy Evans, out on Pluto, was ready, if only the Solar Commerce commission would stop its interference, to bullet his experimental craft away from the solar system, out toward the nearest star, 4.29 light-years distant. Providing his improved electro-gravatic geodesic deflectors lived up to the boast of their inventors, he would exceed the speed of light, would vanish into that limbo of impossibility that learned savants only a few centuries before had declared was unattainable.

"It kind of makes a fellow dizzy," Herb declared.

"What does?"

"Why," said Herb, "this Tommy Evans stunt. The boy is making history. And maybe we'll be there to see him do it. He's the first to make a try at the stars — and if he wins, there will be lots of others. Man will go out and out and still farther out, maybe clear out to where space is still exploding."

Gary grunted. "They sure will have to hurry some," be said, "because space is exploding fast."

"Now look here," said Herb. "You can't just sit there and pretend the human race has made no progress. Take this ship, just for example. We don't rely on rockets any more except in taking off and landing. Once out in space and we set the geosectors to going and we warp space and build up speed that no rocket could ever hope to give you. We got an atmosphere generator that manufactures air. No more stocking up on oxygen and depending on air purifiers. Same thing with food. The machine just picks up matter and energy out of space and transmutes them into steaks and potatoes — or at least their equivalent in food value. And we send news stories and pictures across billions of miles of space. You just sit down in front of that spacewriter and whang away at the keys and in a few hours another machine back in New York writes what you have written."

Gary yawned. "How you run on," he said, "We haven't even started yet — the human race hasn't. What we have done isn't anything to what we are going to do. That is, if the race doesn't get so downright ornery that it kills itself off first."

The spacewriter in the corner of the room stuttered and gibbered, warming up under the impulse of the warning signals, flung out hours before and three billion miles away.

The two men hurried across the room and hung over it.

Slowly, laboriously, the keys began to tap.

NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. HAVE INFO EVANS MAY TAKE OFF FOR CENTAURI WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION OF SCC. MAKE ALL POSSIBLE SPEED TO PLUTO. HANDLE SOONEST. MOST IMPORTANT. RUSH. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine burped to a stop. Herb looked at Gary.

"Maybe that guy Evans has got some guts after all," said Gary. "Maybe he'll tell the SCC where to stick it. They been asking for it for a long time now."

Herb grunted. "They won't chase after him, that's sure." Gary sat down before the sending board and threw the switch. The hum of the electric generators drowned out the moan of the geosectors as they built up the power necessary to hurl a beam of energy across the void to Earth.

"Only one thing wrong with this setup," said Gary. "It takes too long and it takes too much power. I wish someone would hurry up and figure out a way to use the cosmics for carriers."

"Doe Kingsley, out on Pluto, has been fooling around with cosmics," said Herb. "Maybe he'll turn the trick in another year of two."

"Doe Kingsley has been fooling around with a lot of things out there," said Gary. "If the man would only talk, we'd have more than one story to send back from Pluto."

The dynamos had settled into a steady hum of power. Gary glanced at the dials and reached out his fingers. He wrote:

EVENING ROCKET. EARTH. WILL CONTACT EVANS AT ONCE IF STILL ON PLUTO. IF NOT WILL SEND STORY ON FLIGHT. NOTHING TO REPORT OUT HERE. WEATHER FINE. HERB DROPPED OUR LAST QUART AND BROKE IT. HOW ABOUT A RAISE.

"That last," he said, "will get "em."

"You didn't have to put that in about the Scotch," Herb declared. "It just slipped out of my fingers."

"Sure," said Gary. "It just slipped out of your fingers. Right smack-dab onto a steel plate and busted all to hell. After this, I handle the liquor. When you want a drink, you ask me."

"Maybe Kingsley will have some liquor," Herb said hopefully. "Maybe he'll lend us a bottle."

"If he does," declared Gary, "you keep your paws off of it. Between you sucking away at it and dropping it, I don't get more than a drink or two out of each bottle. We still got Uranus and Neptune to do after Pluto and it looks like a long dry spell."

He got up and walked to the fore part of the ship, gazing out through the vision plate.

"Only Neptune and Uranus ahead," he said. "And that's enough. If the Old Man ever thinks up any more screwball stunts, he can find someone else to do them. When I get back I'm going to ask him to give me back my old beat at the space terminal and I'm going to settle down there for the rest of my natural life. I'm going to watch the ships come in and take off and I'm going to get down on my hands and knees and kiss the ground each time and be thankful I'm not on them."

"He's paying us good dough," said Herb. "We got bank accounts piling up back home."

Gary pretended not to hear him.

"Know Your Solar System," he said. "Special articles run every Sunday in the Evening Rocket. Story by Leary Nelson. Pictures by Herbert Harper. Intrepid newsmen brave perils of space to bring back true picture of the solar system's planets. One year alone in a spaceship, bringing to the readers of the Rocket a detailed account of life in space, of life on the planets. Remember how the promotion gang busted a gut advertising us. Full page ads and everything."

He spat.

"Stuff for kids," he said.

"The kids probably think we're heroes," said Herb. "Probably they read our stuff and then pester the folks to buy them a spaceship. Want to go out and see Saturn for themselves."

"The Old Man said it would boost circulation," declared Gary. "Hell, he'd commit suicide if he thought it would boost circulation. Remember what he told us. Says he:

"Go out and visit all the planets. Get first-hand information and pictures. Shoot them back to us. We'll run them every Sunday in the magazine section." Just like he was sending us around the corner to cover a fire. That's all there was to it. Just a little over a year out in space. Living in a spaceship and a spacesuit. Hurry through Jupiter's moons to get out to Saturn and then take it on the lam for Pluto. Soft job. Nice vacation for you. That's what the Old Man said. Nice soft vacation, he said."

His pipe gurgled threateningly and he knocked it out viciously against the heel of his hand.

"Well," said Herb, "we're almost to Pluto. A few days more and we'll be there. They got a fueling station and a radio and Doc Kingsley's laboratories out there. Maybe we can promote us a poker game."

Gary walked to the telescopic screen and switched it on.

"Let's take a look at her," he said.

The great circular screen glowed softly. Within it swam the image of Pluto, still almost half a billion miles away. A dead planet that shone dully in the faint light of the far distant Sun. A planet locked in the frigid grip of naked space, a planet that had been dead long before the first stirring of life had taken place on Earth.

The vision was blurred and Gary manipulated dials to bring it more sharply into focus.

"Wait a second," snapped Herb. His lingers reached out and grasped Gary's wrist.

"Turn it back a ways," he said. "I saw something out there. Something that looked like a ship. Maybe it's Evans coming back."

Slowly Gary twisted the dial back. A tiny spot of light danced indistinctly on the screen.

"That's it," breathed Herb. "Easy now. Just a little more."

The spot of light leaped into sharper focus. But it was merely a spot of light, nothing more, a tiny, shining thing in space. Some metallic body that was catching and reflecting the light of the Sun.

"Give it more power," said Herb.

Swiftly the spot of light grew, assumed definite shape. Gary stepped the magnification up until the thing filled the entire screen.

It was a ship — and yet it couldn't be a ship.

"It has no rocket tubes," said Herb in amazement. "Without tubes how could it get off the ground? You can't use geosectors in taking off. They twist space all to hell and gone. They'd turn a planet inside out."

Gary studied it. "It doesn't seem to be moving," he said. "Maybe some motion, but not enough to detect."

"A derelict," suggested Herb.

Gary shook his head. "Still doesn't explain the lack of tubes," he said.

The two men lifted their eyes from the screen and looked at one another.

"The Old Man said we were to hurry to Pluto," Herb reminded Gary.

Gary wheeled about and strode back to the controls. He lowered his gangling frame into the pilot's chair and disconnected the robot control. His lingers reached out, switched off the geosectors, pumped fuel into the rocket chambers.

"Find something to hang onto," be said, grimly. "We're stopping to see what this is all about."

CHAPTER Two

The mysterious space-shell was only a few miles distant. With Herb at the controls, the Space Pup cruised in an ever-tightening circle around the glinting thing that hung there just off Pluto's orbit.

It was a spaceship. Of that there could be no doubt despite the fact that it had no rocket tubes. It was hanging motionless. There was no throb of power within it, no apparent life, although dim light glowed through the vision ports in what probably were the living quarters just back of the control room.

Gary crouched in the airlock of the Space Pup, with the outer valve swung back. He made sure that his pistols were securely in their holsters and cautiously tested the spacesuit's miniature propulsion units.

He spoke into his helmet mike.

"All right, Herb," he said, "I'm going. Try to tighten up the circle a bit. Keep a close watch. That thing out there may be dynamite."

"Keep your nose clean," said Herb's voice in the phones. Gary straightened and pushed himself out from the lock.

He floated smoothly in space, in a gulf of nothing, a place without direction, without an up or down, an unsubstantial place with the fiery eyes of distant stars ringing him around.

His steel-gloved hand dropped to the propulsion mechanism that encircled his waist. Midget rocket tubes flared with tiny flashes of blue power and he was jerked forward, heading for the mystery ship. Veering too far to the right, he gave the right tube a little more fuel and straightened out.

Steadily, under the surging power of the spacesuit tubes, he forged ahead through space toward the ship. He saw the gleaming lights of the Space Pup slowly circle in front of him and then pass out of sight.

A quarter of a mile away, he shut off the tubes and glided slowly in to the drifting shell. He struck its pitted side with the soles of his magnetic boots and stood upright.

Cautiously he worked his way toward one of the ports from which came the faint gleam of light. Lying at full length, he peered through the foot-thick quartz. The light was feeble and he could see but little. There was no movement of life, no indication that the shell was tenanted. In the center of what at one time had been the living quarters, he saw a large rectangular shape, like a huge box. Aside from this, however, be could make out nothing.

Working his way back to the lock, he saw that it was tightly closed. He had expected that. He stamped against the plates with his heavy boots, hoping to attract attention. But if any living thing were inside, it either did not hear or disregarded the clangor that he made.

Slowly he moved away from the lock, heading for the control-room vision plate, hoping from there to get a better view into the shell's interior. As he moved, his eyes caught a curious irregularity just to the right of the lock, as if faint lines had been etched into the steel of the hull.

He dropped to one knee and saw that a single line of crude lettering had been etched into the metal. Brushing at it with his gloved hand, he tried to make it out. Laboriously, he struggled with it. It was simple, direct, to the point, a single declaration. When one writes with steel and acid, one is necessarily brief.

The line read:

Control room vision-plate unlocked.

Amazed, he read the line again, hardly believing what he read. But there it was. That single line, written with a single purpose. Simple directions for gaining entrance.

Crouched upon the steel plating, he felt a shiver run through his body. Someone had etched that line in hope that someone would come. But perhaps he was too late. The ship had an old look about it. The lines of it, the way the ports were set into the hull, all were marks of spaceship designing that had become obsolete centuries before.

He felt the cold chill of mystery and the utter bleakness of outer space closing in about him. He gazed up over the bulged outline of the shell and saw the steely glare of remote stars. Stars secure in the depth of many light-years, jeering at him, jeering at men who held dreams of stellar conquest.

He shook himself, trying to shake off the probing fingers of half-fear, glanced around to locate the Space Pup, saw it slowly moving off to his right.

Swiftly, but carefully, he made his way over the nose of the ship and up to the vision plate.

Squatting in front of the plate, he peered down into the control cabin. But it wasn't a control cabin. It was a laboratory. In the tiny room which at one time must have housed the instruments of navigation, there was now no trace of control panel or calculator or telescopic screen. Rather, there were work tables, piled with scientific apparatus, banks and rows of chemical containers. All the paraphernalia of the scientist's workshop.

The door into the living quarters, where he had seen the large oblong box was closed. All the apparatus and the bottles in the laboratory were carefully arranged, neatly put away, as if someone had tidied up before they walked off and left the place.

He puzzled for a moment. That lack of rocket tubes, the indications that the ship was centuries old, the scrawled acid-etched line by the lock, the laboratory in the control room… what did it all add up to? He shook his head. It didn't make much sense.

Bracing himself against the curving steel hide of the shell, he pushed at the vision-plate. But he could exert little effort. Lack of gravity, inability to brace himself securely, made the task a hard one. Rising to his feet, he stamped his heavy boots against the glass, but the plate refused to budge.

As a last desperate effort, he might use his guns, blast his way into the shell. But that would be long, tedious work… and there would be a certain danger. There should be, he told himself, an easier and a safer way.

Suddenly the way came to him, but he hesitated, for there lay danger, too. He could lie down on the plate, turn on the rocket tubes of his suit and use his body as a battering ram, as a lever, to force the stubborn hinges.

But it would be an easy matter to turn on too much power, so much power that his body would be pounded to a pulp against the heavy quartz.

Shrugging at the thought, he stretched flat on the plate, hands folded under him with fingers on the tube controls. Slowly he turned the buttons. The rockets thrust at his body, jamming him against the quartz. He snapped the studs shut. It had seemed, for a moment, that the plate had given just a little.

Drawing in a deep breath, he twisted the studs again. Once more his body slammed against the plate, driven by the flaming tubes.

Suddenly the plate gave way, swung in and plunged him down into the laboratory. Savagely he snapped the studs shut. He struck hard against the floor, cracked his helmet soundly.

Groggily he groped his way to his feet. The thin whine of escaping atmosphere came to his ears and unsteadily he made his way forward. Leaping at the plate, he slammed it back into place again. It closed with a thud, driven deep into its frame by the force of rushing air.

A chair stood beside a table and he swung around, sat down in it, still dizzy from the fall. He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.

There was atmosphere here. That meant that an atmosphere generator still was operating, that the ship had developed no leaks and was still airtight.

He raised his helmet slightly. Fresh pure air swirled into his nostrils, better air than he had inside his suit. A little highly oxygenated, perhaps, but that was all. If the atmosphere machine had run for a long time unattended, it might have gotten out of adjustment slightly, might be mixing a bit too much oxygen with the air output.

He swung the helmet back and let it dangle on the hinge at the back of the neck, gulped in great mouthfuls of the atmosphere. His head cleared rapidly.

He looked around the room. There was little that he had not already seen. A practical, well-equipped laboratory, but much of the equipment, he now realized, was old.

Some of it was obsolete and that fitted in with all the rest of it.

A framed document hung above a cabinet and getting to his feet, he walked across the room to look at it. Bending close, he read it. It was a diploma from the College of Science at Alkatoon, Mars, one of the most outstanding of several universities on the Red Planet. The diploma had been issued to one Caroline Martin.

Gary read the name a second time. It seemed that he should know it. It raised some memory in his brain, but just what it was he couldn't say, an elusive recognition that eluded him by the faintest margin.

He looked around the room.

Caroline Martin.

A girl who had left a diploma in this cabin, a pitiful reminder of many years ago. He bent again and looked at the date upon the sheep-skin. It was 5976. He whistled softly. A thousand years ago!

A thousand years. And if Caroline Martin had left this diploma here a thousand years ago, where was Caroline Martin now? What had happened to her? Dead in what strange corner of the solar system? Dead in this very ship?

He swung about and strode toward the door that led into the living quarters. His hand reached out and seized the door and pushed it open. He took one step across the threshold and then he stopped, halted in his stride.

In the center of the room was the oblong box that he had seen from the port. But instead of a box, it was a tank, bolted securely to the floor by heavy steel brackets.

The tank was filled with a greenish fluid and in the fluid lay a woman, a woman dressed in metallic robes that sparkled in the light from the single radium bulb in the ceiling just above the tank.

Breathlessly, Gary moved closer, peered over the edge of the tank, down through the clear green liquid into the face of the woman. Her eyes were closed and long, curling black lashes lay against the whiteness of her cheeks. Her forehead was high and long braids of raven hair were bound about her head. Slim black eyebrows arched to almost meet above the delicately modeled nose. Her mouth was a thought too large, a trace of the patrician in the thin, red lips. Her arms were laid straight along her sides and the metallic gown swept in flowing curves from chin to ankles.

Beside her right hand, lying in the bottom of the tank, was a hypodermic syringe, bright and shining despite the green fluid which covered it.

Gary's breath caught in his throat.

She looked alive and yet she couldn't be alive. Still there was a flush of youth and beauty in her cheeks, as if she merely slept.

Laid out as if for death and still with the lie to death in her very look. Her face was calm, serene… and something else. Expectancy, perhaps. As if she only waited for a thing she hoped to happen.

Caroline Martin was the name on the diploma out in the laboratory. Could this be Caroline Martin? Could this be the girl who had graduated from the college of science at Alkatoon ten centuries ago?

Gary shook his head uneasily.

He stepped back from the tank and as he did he saw the copper plate affixed to its metal side. He stooped to read.

Another simple message, etched in copper… a message from the girl who lay inside the tank.

I am not dead. I am in suspended animation. Drain the tank by opening the valve. Use the syringe you find in the medicine cabinet.

Gary glanced across the room, saw a medicine chest on the wall above a washbowl. He looked back at the tank and mopped his brow with his coat sleeve.

"It isn't possible," he whispered.

Like a man in a dream, he stumbled to the medicine chest. The syringe was there. He broke it and saw that it was loaded with a cartridge filled with a reddish substance. A drug, undoubtedly, to overcome suspended animation.

Replacing the syringe, he went back to the tank and found the valve. It was stubborn with the years, defying all the strength in his arms. He kicked it with a heavy boot and jarred it loose. With nervous hands he opened it and watched the level of the green fluid slowly recede.

Watching, an odd calm came upon him, a steadying calm that made him hard and machine-like to do the thing that faced him. One little slip might spoil it. One fumbling move might undo the work of a thousand years. What if the drug in the hypodermic had lost its strength? There were so many things that might happen.

But there was only one thing to do. He raised a hand in front of him and looked at it. It was a steady hand.

He wasted no time in wondering what it was about. This was not the time for that. Frantic questionings clutched at his thoughts and he shook them off. Time enough to wonder and to speculate and question when this thing was done.

When the fluid was level with the girl's body, he waited no longer. He leaned over the rim of the tank and lifted her in his arms. For a moment he hesitated, then turned and went to the laboratory and placed her on one of the work tables. The fluid, dripping off the rustling metallic dress, left a trail of wet across the floor.

From the medicine chest he took the hypodermic and went back to the girl. He lifted her left arm and peered closely at it. There were little punctures, betraying previous use of the needle.

Perspiration stood out on his forehead. If only he knew a little more about this. If only he had some idea of what he was supposed to do.

Awkwardly he shoved the needle into a vein, depressed the plunger. It was done and he stepped back.

Nothing happened. He waited.

Minutes passed and she took a shallow breath. He watched in fascination, saw her come to life again… saw the breath deepen, the eyelids flicker, the right hand twitch.

Then she was looking at him out of deep blue eyes.

"You are all right?" he asked.

It was, he knew, a rather foolish question.

Her speech was broken. Her tongue and lips refused to work the way they should, but he understood what she tried to say.

"Yes, I'm all right." She lay quietly on the table. "What year is this?" she asked.

"It's 6948," he told her.

Her eyes widened and she looked at him with a startled glance. "Almost a thousand years," she said. "You are sure of the year?"

He nodded. "That is about the only thing that I am really sure of."

"How is that?"

"Why, finding you here," said Gary, "and reviving you again. I still don't believe it happened."

She laughed, a funny, discordant laugh because her muscles, inactive for years, had forgotten how to function rightly.

"You are Caroline Martin, aren't you?" asked Gary.

She gave him a quick look of surprise and rose to a sitting position.

"I am Caroline Martin," she answered. "But how did you know that?"

Gary gestured at the diploma. "I read it."

"Oh," she said. "I'd forgotten all about it."

"I am Gary Nelson," he told her. "Newsman on the loose. My pal's out there in a spaceship waiting for us."

"I suppose," she said, "that I should thank you, but I don't know how. Just ordinary thanks aren't quite enough."

"Skip it," said Gary, tersely.

She stretched her arms above her head.

"It's good to be alive again," she said. "Good to know there's life ahead of you."

"But," said Gary, "you always were alive. It must have been just like going to sleep."

"It wasn't sleep," she said. "It was worse than death. Because, you see, I made one mistake."

"One mistake?"

"Yes, just one mistake. One you'd never think of. At least, I didn't. You see, when animation was suspended every physical process was reduced to almost zero, metabolism slowed down to almost nothing. But with one exception. My brain kept right on working."

The horror of it sank into Gary slowly. "You mean you knew?"

She nodded. "I couldn't hear or see or feel. I had no bodily sensation. But I could think. I've thought for almost ten centuries. I tried to stop thinking, but I never could.

I prayed something would go wrong and I would die. Anything at all to end that eternity of thought."

She saw the pity in his eyes.

"Don't waste sympathy on me," she said and there was a note of hardness in her voice. "I brought it on myself. Stubbornness, perhaps. I played a long shot. I took a gamble."

He chuckled in his throat. "And won."

"A billion to one shot," she said. "Probably greater odds than that. It was madness itself to do it. This shell is a tiny speck in space. There wasn't, I don't suppose, a billion-to-one chance, if you figured it out on paper, that anyone would find me. I had some hope. Hope that would have reduced those odds somewhat. I placed my faith on someone and I guess they failed me. Perhaps it wasn't their fault. Maybe they died before they could even hunt for me."

"But how did you do it?" asked Gary. "Even today suspended animation has our scientists stumped. They've made some progress but not much. And you made it work a thousand years ago."

"Drugs," she said. "Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones. And they have to be combined correctly. Slow metabolism to a point where it is almost non-existent. But you have to be careful. Slow it down too far and metabolism stops. That's death."

Gary gestured toward the hypodermic. "And that," be said, "reacts against the other drug."

She nodded gravely.

"The fluid in the tank," he said. "That was to prevent dehydration and held some food value? You wouldn't need much food with metabolism at nearly zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid…"

"A mask," she said. "Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated as soon as it was struck by air."

"You thought of everything."

"I had to," she declared. "There was no one else to do my thinking for me."

She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.

"You told me a minute ago," she said, "that the scientists of today haven't satisfactorily solved suspended animation."

He nodded.

"You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?"

"There are some of them," he said, "who'd give their good right arm to know about them."

"We knew about them a thousand years ago," the girl said. "Myself and one other. I wonder…"

She whirled on Gary. "Let's get out of here," she cried. "I have a horror of this place."

"Anything you want to take?" he asked. "Anything I can get together for you?"

She made an impatient gesture.

"No," she said. "I want to forget this place."

CHAPTER Three

The Space Pup arrowed steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the subdued hum of the geosectors. The vision plate looked out on ebon space with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.

Caroline Martin leaned forward in her chair and stared out at the vastness that stretched eternally ahead. "I could stay and watch forever," she exulted.

Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:

"I've been thinking about that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it somewhere. Read it in a book."

She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.

"Perhaps you have," she said finally.

There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

The girl turned back to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. "Probably you have read about me;" she said. "Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned in your histories. You see, I was a member of the old Mars-Earth Research commission during the war with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment. Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in some scientific research work. I wanted to earn money to go back to school again."

"I'm beginning to remember now," said Gary, "but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death."

"I was a traitor," she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. "I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men. We were losing then."

"We never did win, really," Gary told her.

"They condemned me to space," she said. "They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto's orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me."

She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

"The histories don't tell that part of it," said Herb.

"They probably suppressed it," she said. "Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said. Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them."

"Would your discovery have wrecked the system?"

Gary asked.

"Yes," she said, "it would have. That's why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them."

"When you didn't," Herb said, "they couldn't back down. They couldn't afford to let you call their bluff."

"They never found your notes," said Gary.

She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. "My notes were here," she said.

He looked amazed.

"And still are," she said.

"But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?" Gary asked.

She waited for long minutes.

"That's the part I hate to think about," she said. "The part that's hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years."

She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say.

"We were in love," she said. "Together we discovered the suspended animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

"Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes."

Gary's pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.

"I knew it would be a gamble," she said. "I knew he intended that I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn't come. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks. I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I'm afraid that wasn't a very good job."

"And then," said Herb, "you put yourself to sleep."

"Not exactly sleep," she said. "Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers."

"You mean," asked Herb, "that you can read our thoughts?"

She nodded, then hastened on. "But I wouldn't," she said. "I wouldn't do that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he'd go away and leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, but he was so upset that he couldn't understand."

Gary shook his head. "Anyone would have been upset," he said.

"But," exploded Herb, "think of the chances that you took. It was just pure luck we found you. Your drug wouldn't have held up forever. Another few thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big meteor, or even a small one, for that matter, might have come along. There were a thousand things that could have happened."

She agreed with him. "It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no other way. I could have just sat still and done nothing or gone crazy, grown old and died in loneliness."

She was silent for a moment.

"It would have been easy," she said then, "if I hadn't made that one mistake."

"Weren't you frightened?" Gary asked.

Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

"I heard voices," she said. "Voices coming out of space, out of the void that lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with one another. Things to which the human race, intellectually, would appear mere insects. At first I was frightened, frightened at the things they said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn't understand. Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them, tried to attract their attention. I wasn't afraid of them any more and I thought that they might help. I didn't care much what happened any more just so someone, or something, would help me. Even take notice of me. Anything to let me know that I wasn't all alone."

Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. "Voices," said Herb.

They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the galaxies.

"Tell me," said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, "how did the war come out?"

"The war?" asked Gary. Then he understood.

"Oh, the war," he said. "Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn't dare carry the war to the enemy. Even today we haven't developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter's atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can't use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space…"

"Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

"Sure," said Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?" "No," she said, "I don't suppose there is."

Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory."

"That's what the histories call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.

"It's just one of them things," Herb decided for them.

The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.

Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference of the mighty sweep of stars.

What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body and her thousand-year-old brain?

Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped around her head.

What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust? Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he might have searched through space and failed? Or was she thinking of the voices… the voice talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?

The spacewriter, sitting in its own dark corner, broke into a gibbering chatter.

Gary sprang to his feet.

"Now what?" he almost shouted.

The chattering ceased and the machine settled into the click-clack of its message.

Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looking over his shoulder.

NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine's stuttering came to an end."

The three stared at one another.

"Messages," said Herb. "Messages out of space."

Gary shook his head. He stole a swift glance at the girl and her face seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.

CHAPTER Four

TRAIL" S END, Pluto's single community, cowering at the foot of a towering black mountain, seemed deserted. There was no stir of life about the buildings that huddled between the spacefield and the mountain. The spiraling tower of the radio station climbed dizzily spaceward and beside it squatted the tiny radio shack. Behind it stood the fueling station and the hangar, while half a mile away loomed the larger building that housed the laboratories of the Solar Science commission.

Caroline moved closer to Gary.

"It seems so lonely," she whispered. "I don't like loneliness now… after…"

Gary stirred uneasily, scraping the heavy boots of his spacesuit over the pitted rock. "It's always lonely enough," he said. "I wonder where they are."

As he spoke the lock of the radio shack opened and a space-suited figure strode across the field to meet them.

His voice crackled in their helmet phones. "You must be Nelson," it said. "I'm Ted Smith, operator here. Kingsley told me to bring you up to the house right away."

"Fine," said Gary. "Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around."

"He is," said Smith. "He's up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar. Personally, I figure he's planning to take off and let the SCC do what they can about it."

Smith fell in step with them. "It's good to see new faces," he declared, "especially a woman. We don't have women visitors very often."

"I'm sorry," said Gary. "I forgot."

He introduced Caroline and Herb to Smith as they plodded past the radio shack and started for the laboratory.

"It gets God-lonesome out here," said Smith. "This is a hellish place, if I do say so myself. No wind. No moon. No nothing. Very little difference between day and night because there's never any clouds to cover the stars and even in the daytime the Sun is little better than a star."

His tongue, loosened by visitors to talk to, rambled on. "A fellow gets kind of queer out here," he told them.

"It's enough to make anyone get queer. I think the doctor is half crazy from staying here too long. He thinks he's getting messages from some place far away. Acts mysterious about it."

"You think he just imagines it?" asked Herb.

"I'm not saying one way or the other," declared Smith, "but I ask you… where would you get the messages from? Think of the power it would take just to send a message from Alpha Centauri. And that isn't so very far away. Not so far as stars go. Right next door, you might say."

"Evans is going to fly there and back," Herb reminded him.

"Evans is space-nuts," said Smith. "With all the solar system to fool around in, he has to go gallivanting off to the stars. He hasn't got a chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I'm sorry for him. He's a nice young fellow."

They mounted the steps, hewn out of living stone, which led to the main airlock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed a button and they waited.

"I suppose you'll want Andy to go over your ship,"

Smith suggested.

"Sure," said Gary. "Tell him to take good care of it."

"Andy is the fueling-station man," the radio operator explained. "But he hasn't much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There's only a few old tubs, one or two a year, that need any fuel. Used to be a good business, but not any more."

The space lock swung open and the three stepped inside. Smith remained by the doorway.

"I have to go back to the shack," he said. "I'll see you again before you leave."

The lock hissed shut behind them and the inner screw began to turn. It swung open and they stepped into a small room that was lined with spacesuits hanging on the wall.

A man was standing in the center of the room. A big man, with broad shoulders and hands like hams. His unruly shock of hair was jet-black and his voice boomed jovially at them.

"Glad to see all of you," be said and laughed, a deep, thunderous laugh that seemed to shake the room.

Gary swung back the helmet of his suit and thrust out a gloved hand.

"You are Dr. Kingsley?" he asked.

"That's who I am," boomed the mighty voice. "And who are these folks with you?"

Gary introduced them.

"I didn't know there was a lady in the party," said the doctor.

"There wasn't," said Herb. "Not until just recently."

"Mean to tell me they've taken to hitch-hiking out in space?"

Gary laughed. "Even better than that, doctor," he said. "There's a little story about Miss Martin you'll enjoy."

"Come on," he roared at them. "Get out of your duds. I got some coffee brewing. And you'll want to meet Tommy Evans. He's that young fool who thinks he's going to fly four light-years out to old A.C."

And at just that moment Tommy Evans burst into the room.

"Doc," he shouted, "that damn machine of yours is at it again."

Dr. Kingsley turned and lumbered out, shouting back at them.

"Come along. Never mind the suits."

They ran behind him as he lumbered along. Through what obviously were the laboratory's living quarters, through a tiny kitchen that smelled of boiling coffee, into a workroom bare of everything except a machine that stood in one corner. A red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

"Whatever you say is off the record, is off the record," Gary told him.

"There's so much of it," rumbled the doctor, "that sounds like sheer dream stuff."

"Hell," said Evans, "there always is in everything new. My ships sound like it, too. But the thing will work. I know it will."

Kingsley perched himself on a heavy kitchen chair.

"It started more than a year ago," be said. "We were studying the cosmics. Elusive things, those rays. Men have studied them for about five thousand years and they still don't know as much about them as you think they would after all that time. We thought at first that we'd made a really astounding discovery, for our instruments, used on top of the building, showed that the rays came in definite patterns. Not only that, but they came in definite patterns at particular times. We developed new equipment and learned more about the pattern. We learned that it occurred only when Pluto had rotated into such a position that this particular portion of the planet was facing the Great Nebula in Andromeda. We learned that the pattern, besides having a certain fixed physical structure, also had a definite time structure, and that the intensity of the bombardment always remained the same. In other words, the pattern never varied as to readings; it occurred at fixed intervals whenever we directly faced the Great Nebula, and the intensity varied very slightly, showing an apparent constant source of energy operating at specific times. In between those times our equipment registered the general haphazard behavior one would expect in cosmic rays."

The doctor rumbled on: "The readings had me down. Cosmic simply shouldn't behave that way. There never had been any instance of their behaving that way at any time before. Of course, this was the first thorough investigation far from the Sun's interfering magnetic fields. But why should they behave in that manner only when we were broadside to the Great Nebula?

"My two assistants and I worked and studied and theorized and it finally came down to just one thing. The things we were catching with our instruments weren't cosmic rays at all. They were something else. Something new. Some strange impulse coming to us from outer space. Almost like a signal. Like something or someone or God-knows-what was signaling to someone or something stationed here on Pluto. We romanticized a bit. We toyed with the idea of signals coming from another galaxy, for you know the Great Nebula is an exterior galaxy, a mighty star system, some nine hundred million light years across intergalactic space.

"But that was just imagining. There was nothing to support it in the light of factual evidence. We still aren't sure what it's all about, although we know a great deal more now than we did then.

"The facts we did gather, you see, indicated that whatever we were receiving must be definite signals, must originate within some sort of intelligence. Some intelligence, you see, that would know just when and where to send them. But there was the problem of distance. Just suppose for a moment that they were coming from the Great Nebula. It takes light almost a billion years to reach us from the Nebula. While it is very probable that the speed of light can be far exceeded, there is little reason to believe at present than anything could be so much faster than light that signaling could be practical across such enormous space. Unless, of course, the matter of time were mixed up a little, and when you get into that you have a problem that takes more than just a master mind. There was just one thing that would seem a probable answer… that if the signals were being sent from many light years distant, they were being routed through something other than all that space. Perhaps through another continuum of space-time, through what you might call, for the want of a better term, the fourth dimension."

"Doctor," said Herb, "you got me all balled up."

Dr. Kingsley's chuckle rumbled through the room.

"It had us that way, too," he said. "And then we figured maybe we were getting pure thought. Thought telepathed across the light years of unimaginable space. Just what the speed of thought would be no one could even guess. It might be instantaneous… it might be no faster than the speed of light… or any speed in between the two. But we do know one thing: that the signals we are receiving are the projection of thought. Whether they come straigh through space or whether they travel through some shortcut, through some manipulation of space-time frames, do not know and I probably will never know.

"It took us months to build that machine you saw in the other room. Briefly, it picks up the signals, translates them from the pure energy of thought into actual thought, into symbols our mind can read. We also developed a method of sending our own thoughts back, of communicating with whatever or whoever it is that is trying to talk with Pluto. So far we haven't been successful in getting an entire message across. However, apparently we have succeeded in advising whoever is sending out the messages that we are trying to answer, for recently the messages have changed, have a note of desperation, frantic command, almost a pleading quality."

He brushed his coat sleeve across his brow.

"It's all so confusing," he confessed.

"But," asked Herb, "why would anyone send messages to Pluto? Until men came here, there was no life on the planet. Just a barren planet, without any atmosphere, too cold for anything to live. The tail end of creation."

Kingsley stared solemnly at Herb.

"Young man," he said, "we must never take anything for granted. How are we to say there never was life or intelligence on Pluto? How do we know that a great civilization might not have risen and flourished here aeons ago? How do we know that an expeditionary force from some far-distant star might not have come here and colonized this outer planet many years ago?"

"It don't sound reasonable," said Herb.

Kingsley gestured impatiently.

"Neither do these signals sound reasonable," he rumbled. "But there they are. I've thought about the things you mention. I am damned with an imagination, something no scientist should have. A scientist should just plug along, applying this bit of knowledge to that bit of knowledge to arrive at something new. He should leave the imagination to the philosophers. But I'm not that way. I try to imagine what might have happened or what is going to happen. I've imagined a mother planet groping out across all space, trying to get in touch with some long-lost colony here on Pluto. I've imagined someone trying to re-establish communication with the people who lived here millions of years ago. But it doesn't get me anywhere."

Gary filled and lit his pipe, frowning down at the glowing tobacco. Voices in space again. Voices talking across the void. Saying things to rack the human soul.

"Doctor," he said, "you aren't the only one who has heard thought from outer space."

Kingsley swung on him, almost belligerently. "Who else?" he demanded.

"Miss Martin," said Gary quietly, puffing at his pipe. "You haven't heard Miss Martin's story yet. I have a hunch that she can help you out."

"How's that?" rumbled the scientist.

"Well, you see," said Gary, softly, "she's just passed through a thousand years of mind training. She's thought without ceasing for almost ten centuries."

Kingsley's face drooped in amazement.

"That's impossible," he said.

Gary shook his head. "Not impossible at all. Not with suspended animation."

Kingsley opened his mouth to object again, but Gary hurried on. "Doctor," he asked, "do you remember the historical account of the Caroline Martin who refused to give an invention to the military board during the Jovian war?"

"Why, yes," said Kingsley. "Scientists have speculated for many years on just what it was she found —»

He started out of his chair.

"Caroline Martin!" he shouted. He looked at the girl.

"Your name is Caroline Martin, too," he whispered huskily.

Gary nodded. "Doctor, this is the woman who refused to give up that secret a thousand years ago."

CHAPTER Five

DR. KINGSLEY glanced at his watch.

"It's almost time for the signals to begin," he said. "In another few minutes we will be swinging around to face the Great Nebula. If you looked out you would see it over the horizon now."

Caroline Martin sat in the chair before the thought machine, the domed helmet settled on her head. All eyes in the room were glued on the tiny light atop the mechanism. When the signals started coming that light would blink its bright-red eye.

"Lord, it's uncanny," whispered Tommy Evans. He brushed at his face with his hand.

Gary watched the girl. Sitting there so straight, like a queen with a crown upon her head. Sitting there, waiting, waiting to hear something that spoke across a gulf that took light many years to span.

Brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, a woman who was schooled in hard and simple logic. She had thought of many things out in the shell, she said, had set up problems and had worked them out. What were those problems she had thought about? What were the mysteries she had solved? She was a young, rather sweet-faced kid, who ought to like a good game of tennis, or a dance and she'd thought a thousand years.

Then the light began to blink and Gary saw Caroline lean forward, heard the breath catch sharply in her throat. The pencil she had poised above the pad dropped from her fingers and fell onto the floor.

Heavy silence engulfed the room, broken only by the whistling of the breath in Kingsley's nostrils. He whispered to Gary: "She understands! She understands…"

Gary gestured him to silence.

The red light blinked out and Caroline swung around slowly in the chair. Her eyes were wide and for a moment she seemed unable to give voice to the words she sought.

Then she spoke. "They think they are contacting someone else," she said. "Some great civilization that must have lived here at one time. The messages come from far away. From even farther than the Great Nebula. The Nebula just happens to be in the same direction. They are puzzled that we do not answer. They know someone has been trying to answer. They're trying to help us to get through. They talked in scientific terms I could not understand. Something to do with the warping of space and time, but involving principles that are entirely new. They want something and they are impatient. It seems there is a great danger someplace. They think that we can help."

"Great danger to whom?" asked Kingsley.

"I couldn't understand," said Caroline.

"Can you talk back to them?" asked Gary. "Do you think you could make them understand?"

"I'll try," she said.

"All you have to do is think," Kingsley told her. "Think clearly and forcefully. Concentrate all that you can, as if you were trying to push the thought away from you. The helmet picks up the impulses and routes them through the thought projector."

Her slim fingers reached out and turned a dial. Tubes came to life and burned into a blue intensity of light. A soaring hum of power filled the tiny room.

The hum became a steady drone and the tubes were filled with a light that hurt one's eyes.

"She's talking to them now," thought Gary. "She is talking to them."

The minutes seemed eternities, and then the girl reached out and closed the dial. The hum of power receded, clicked off and was replaced by a deathly silence.

"Did they understand?" asked Kingsley, and even as he spoke the light blinked red again.

Kingsley's hand closed around Gary's arm and his harsh whisper rasped in Gary's ear.

"Instantaneous!" he said. "Instantaneous signals! They got her message and they are answering. That means the signals are routed through some extra-dimension."

Swiftly the red light blinked. Caroline crouched forward in the chair, her body tensed with what she heard.

The light blinked off and the girl reached up and tore the helmet off.

"It can't be right," she sobbed. "It can't be right."

Gary sprang forward, put an arm around her shoulder.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Those messages," she cried. "They come from the very edge of all the universe… from the farthest rim of exploding space!"

Kingsley leaped to his feet.

"They are like the voices I heard before," she said. "But different, somehow. More kindly… but terrifying, even so. They think they are talking to someone else. To a people they talked to here on Pluto many years ago… I can't know how many, but it was a long, long time ago."

Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.

"At first," Caroline whispered, "they referred to us by some term that had affection in it… actual kinfolk affection, as if there were blood ties between them and the things they were trying to talk to here. The things that must have disappeared centuries ago."

"Longer ago than that," Kingsley told her. "That the thought bombardment is directed at this spot would indicate the things they are trying to reach had established some sort of a center, perhaps a city, on this site. There are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone was ever here, every sign of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, nothing to erode, nothing to blow away. A billion years would be too short a time —»

"But who are they?" asked Gary. "These ones you were talking to. Did they tell you that?"

She shook her head. "I couldn't exactly understand. As near as I could come, they called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. "That's a very poor translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it."

She paused as if to marshal a definition. "As if they were self-appointed guardians of the entire universe," she explained. "Champions of all things that live within its space-time frame. And something is threatening the universe. Some mighty force out beyond the universe out where there's neither space nor time."

"They want our help," she said.

"But how can we help them?" asked Herb.

"I don't know. They tried to tell me, but the thoughts they used were too abstract. I couldn't understand entirely. A few clues here and there. They'll have to reduce it to simpler terms."

"We couldn't even get there to help them," said Gary. "There is no way in which we can reach the rim of the universe. We haven't yet gone to the nearest star."

"Maybe," suggested Tommy Evans, "we don't need to get there. Maybe we can do something here to help them."

The red light was blinking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge of power.

Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. "The edge of space. But that's impossible!"

Gary laughed at him silently.

The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.

Gary felt the cold wind from space again, flicking at his face, felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.

Kingsley was jittery. And he was jittery. Who wouldn't be at a time like this? A message from the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area where time and space still surged outward into that no-man" s-land of nothingness… into that place where there was no time or space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever, where there was no place and no circumstance and no possibility of event that could allow anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer was nothing. But what was nothing?

Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe, of these two things he constructed the sum total of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn't space?

Caroline was closing the dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

He watched the girl closely, saw her body tense and then relax. She bent forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.

Kingsley's face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his side.

Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things: that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few miles… or a few feet… distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.

Caroline was taking off her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.

"I understand a little better now," she said. "They are friends of ours."

"Friends of ours?" asked Gary.

"Friends of everyone within the universe," said Caroline. "Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some outside danger — from some outside force."

She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.

"They want us to come out to the edge of the universe," she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.

Herb's chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. "They want us…" he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.

Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley's nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.

"How do they expect us to get out there?" Kingsley asked.

"My ship is fast," Tommy Evans said, "faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!"

"A space-time warp," said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. "They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps…."

Caroline smiled at him. "That's the answer," she said.

"A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time."

Kingsley's great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.

"How will we do it?" asked Herb. "There isn't a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we're the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you'd have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you'd have to make it stay that way."

"Maybe the Engineers," said Evans.

"That's it," nodded Caroline. "The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions."

"But," protested Kingsley, "could we understand? It would involve mathematics that are way beyond us."

Caroline's voice cut sharply through his protest. "I can understand them," she replied, bitterly. "Maybe it will take a little while, but I can work them out, I've had… practice, you know."

Kingsley was dumfounded. "You can work it out?"

"I worked out new mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship," she said. "They're only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point."

She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.

"I had a thousand years to do it," she reminded him. "I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don't you see? Something to keep from going crazy."

Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto. That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.

How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that was wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and in relaxation, leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think, to figure out things. And then one died and all one's thoughts were lost. Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Lost and left for someone else to discover if he could… and probably lost forever.

But Caroline Martin had thought for forty lifetimes, thought with the sharp, quick brain of youth, without interruption or disturbance. No time out for eating or for sleeping. She might have spent a year, or a hundred years, on one problem, had she wished.

He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she knew, what keys she had found out there in the dark of interplanetary space. And — she had started with the knowledge of that secret of immense power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.

She was talking again, her words crisp and clipped, totally unlike the delightful companion that she could be.

"You see, I am interested in time and space, always have been. The weapon that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the Jovian war was your geosector… but with a vast difference in one respect."

"You discovered the geosector, the principle of driving a ship by space warp, a thousand years ago?" asked Kingsley.

She nodded. "Except that they wouldn't have used it for driving ships… not then. For Jupiter was winning and everyone was desperate. They didn't care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon."

"The geosector is no weapon," Kingsley declared flatly. "You couldn't use it near a planetary body."

"But consider this," said the girl. "If you could control the space warp created by the geosector, and if the geosector would warp time as well as space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn't it?"

Herb whistled. "I'd say it'd be a weapon," he said, "and how!"

"They wanted to train it on Jupiter," Caroline explained. "It would have blasted the planet into nothingness. It would have scattered it not only through space, but through time as well."

"But think of what it would have done to the solar system," ejaculated Kingsley. "Even if the space warp hadn't distorted space throughout the entire system, the removal of Jupiter would have caused all the other planets to shift their orbits. There would have been a new deal in the entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might have been thrown into the Sun. There most certainly would have been earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth."

The girl nodded.

"That's why I wouldn't turn it over to them. I told them it would destroy the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space."

"Why," said Gary, "you were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first workable geosector wasn't built until a hundred years ago."

Nine hundred years ahead to start with, and a thousand years to improve upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn't laughing at them. If she might not be able to laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.

He remembered how he had almost bragged about them, and felt his ears go red and hot.

"Young lady," rumbled Kingsley, "it seems to me that you don't need any help from these Cosmic Engineers."

She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. "But I do," she said.

The red light blinked and she picked up the helmet once again. Excitedly, the others watched her. The poised pencil dropped to the pad and raced across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.

"The instructions," Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely that he lapsed into shuffling silence, his great hands twisting at his side, his massive head bent forward.

The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once again the room was filled with the mighty voice of surging power and the flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.

Gary's head swam at the thought of it… that slim wisp of a girl talking across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out on the rim of the expanding universe, Talking and understanding but not perfectly understanding, perhaps, for she seemed to be asking questions, something about the equations she had written on the pad. The tip of her pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.

The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of the fluorescent tube-lights. The red light atop the thought machine was winking.

The pencil made corrections, added notes and jotted down new equations. Never once hesitating. Then the light blinked off and Caroline was taking the helmet from her head.

Kingsley strode across the room and picked up the pad. He stood for long minutes, staring at it, the pucker of amazement and bafflement growing on his face.

He looked questioningly at the girl.

"Do you understand this?" he rasped.

She nodded blithely.

He flung down the pad. "There's only one other person in the system who could," he said. "Only one person who even remotely could come anywhere near knowing what it's all about. That's Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he's in a mental institution back on Earth."

"Sure," yelled Herb, "he's the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a picture of him once."

They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.

"I understand it well enough to start," she said. "I probably will have to talk with them from time to time to get certain things straightened in my mind. But we can always do that when the time comes."

"Those equations," said Kingsley, "represent advanced mathematics of the fourth dimension. They take into consideration conditions of stress and strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom."

"Probably," Caroline suggested, "the Engineers live on a large and massive world, so large that space would be distorted, where stresses such as are shown in the equations would be the normal circumstance. Beings living on such a world would soon solve the intricacies of dimensional space. On a world that large, gravity would distort space. Plane geometry probably couldn't be developed because there'd be no such a thing as a plane surface."

"What do they want us to do?" asked Evans.

"They want us to build a machine," said Caroline, "a machine that will serve as an anchor post for one end of a space-time contortion. The other end will be on the world of the Engineers. Between those two machines, or anchor posts, will be built up a short-cut through the billions of light-years that separate us from them."

She glanced at Kingsley. "We'll need strong materials," she said. "Stronger than anything we know of in the system. Something that will stand up under the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space."

Kingsley wrinkled his brow.

"I was thinking of a suspended electron-whirl," she said. "Have you experimented with it here?"

Kingsley nodded. "We've stilled the electron-whirl," he said. "Our cold laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won't do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons dead in their tracks, but to keep them that way they have to be maintained at close to absolute zero. The least heat and they overcome inertia and start up again. Anything you built of them would dissolve as soon as it heated up, even a few degrees.

"If we could crystallize the atomic orbit after we had stopped it," he said, "we'd have a material which would be phenomenally rigid. It would defy any force to break it down."

"We can do it," Caroline said. "We can create a special space condition that will lock the electrons in their places."

Kingsley snorted. "Is there anything," he asked, "that you can't do with space?"

Caroline laughed. "A lot of things I can't do, doctor," she told him. "A few things I can do. I was interested in space. That's how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I figured out ways to control it. It was something to do to while away the time."

Kingsley glanced around the room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking to see if he had forgotten anything.

"Well," he rumbled, "what are we waiting for? Let us get to work."

"Now, wait a second," interrupted Gary. "Do we want to do this? Are we sure we aren't rushing into something we'll be sorry for? After all, all we have to go on are the Voices. We're taking them on face value alone… and Voices don't have faces."

"Sure," piped up Herb, "how do we know they aren't kidding us? How do we know this isn't some sort of a cosmic joke? Maybe there's a fellow out there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he's got us all stirred up."

Kingsley's face flushed with anger, but Caroline laughed.

"You look so serious, Gary," she declared.

"It's something to be serious about," Gary protested. "We are monkeying around with something that's entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids playing with an atom bomb. We might set loose something we wouldn't be able to stop. Something might be using us to help it set up an easy way to get at the solar system. We might be just pulling someone's chestnuts out of the fire."

"Gary," said Caroline softly, "if you had heard that Voice you wouldn't doubt. I know it's on the level. You see, it isn't a voice, really… it's a thought. I know there's danger and that we must help, do everything we can. There are other volunteers, you know, other people, or other things, from other parts of the universe."

"How do you know?" asked Gary fiercely.

"I don't know how," she defended herself. "I just know. That's all. Intuition, perhaps, or maybe a background thought in the Engineer's mind that rode through with the message."

Gary looked around at the others. Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He looked at Herb.

"What the hell," said Herb. "Let's take a chance."

Just like that, thought Gary. A woman's intuition, the burning zeal of a scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome spirit of mankind. No reason, no logic… mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.

Once a mad monk had stood before the crowds and shook a sword in air and shrieked invective against another faith, and, because of this, Christian armies, year after year, broke their strength against the walls of eastern cities.

Those were the Crusades.

This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Man again answering the clarion call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his puny strength, his little brain against great cosmic forces. Man… the damn fool… sticking out his neck.

CHAPTER Six

A GHOSTLY machine was taking shape upon the hard, pitted, frozen surface of the field… a crazy machine that glimmered weirdly in the half-light of the stars. A machine with mind-wrenching angles, with flashing prisms and spidery framework, a towering skeleton of a machine that stretched out spaceward.

Made of material in which the atomic motion had been stilled, it stood defiant against the most powerful forces of man or void. Anchored magnetically to the core of the planet, it stood firmly planted, a spidery, frail-appearing thing, but with a strength that would stand against the unimaginable drag of a cosmic space-time warp.

From it long cables snaked their way over the frozen surface to the laboratory power plant. Through those slender cables, their resistance lowered by the bitter cold, tremendous power loads could be poured into the strange machine.

"They're space-nuts," grumbled Ted Smith at Gary's elbow. "They're fixing to blow Pluto all to hell. I wish there was some way for me to get away from here before the fireworks start."

Herbs" voice crackled in Gary's helmet-phones, answering the complaint. "Shucks, there just won't nothing happen. That contraption looks more like something a kid would build with a tinker toy set than a machine. I can't see, for the life of me, how it'll ever work."

"I gave up long ago," said Gary. "Caroline tried to explain it to me, but I guess I'm just sort of dense. I can't make head or tall of it. All I know is that it's supposed to be an anchor post, a thing that will help the Engineers set up this space warp of theirs and after it is set up will operate to hold it in position."

"I never did set any stock in that Engineer talk," Ted told him, "but there's been something I've been wanting to tell you two. Haven't been able to catch you, you've been so busy. But I wanted to tell you about it, for you're the only two who haven't gone entirely star-batty."

"V/hat is it?" Gary asked.

"Well, you know," said Ted, "I don't attach much meaning to it, but it does seem kind of funny. A few days ago I sneaked out for a walk. Against orders, you know. Not supposed to get out of sight of the settlement. Too many things can happen here.

"But, anyhow, I went for a walk. Out along the mountains and over the carbon dioxide glacier and down into the little valley that lies just over the shoulder of the glacier."

He paused dramatically.

"You found something there?" asked Gary.

"Sure did," declared Ted proudly. "I found some ruins. Chiseled white stone. Scattered all over the valley floor. As if there had been a building there at one time and somebody had pulled it down stone by stone and threw the stones around."

"Sure it wasn't just boulders or peculiar rock formations?" asked Gary.

"No, sir," said Ted, emphatically. "There were chisel marks on those stones. Workmen had dressed them at some time. And all of it was white stone. You show me any white stone around here."

Gary understood what the radio operator meant. The mountains were black, black as the emptiness of space. He turned his head to stare at those jagged peaks that loomed over the settlement, their spearlike points faintly outlined against the black curtain of the void.

"Say," said Herb, "that sounds as if what the Engineers said about someone else living here at one time might be true."

"If Ted found building stone, that's exactly what it means," Gary asserted. "That would denote a city of some kind, intelligence of some kind, It takes a certain degree of culture to work stone."

"But," argued Herb, "how could anyone have lived here? You know that Pluto cooled quick, lost its lighter gases in a hurry. Its oxygen and carbon dioxide are locked up in snow and ice. Too cold for any life."

"I know all that," Gary agreed, "but it seems we can't be too sure of anything in this business. If Ted is right, it means the Engineers were right on at least one point where we all were wrong. It sort of gives a man more faith in what is going on."

"Well," said Ted, "I just wanted to tell you. I was going to go out there again some day and look around, but since then I've been too busy. Ever since you sent that story out, space has been full of messages… governmental stuff, messages from scientists and cranks. Don't give a man no time to himself at all."

As the radio man walked back to his shack, Gary looked toward the laboratory. Two space-suited figures were coming out of the main lock.

"That's Caroline and Kingsley," said Herb. "They've been up there to talk to the Engineers again. Got stuck on something. Wanted the Engineers to explain it to them."

"Looks to me like it's about finished," said Gary. "Caroline told me she didn't know just how much longer it would take, but she had hopes of getting it into working order in another day or two. Tommy's gone without sleep the last twenty hours, working to get his ship in tip-top shape. They've gone over the thing from control panel to rocket tubes."

"What I'd like to know," said Herb, irritably, "is just how we're going to use the ship in getting out to where the Engineers are."

"Those are instructions," said Gary. "Instructions from the Engineers. We don't dare do anything around here unless they say it's all right."

The space-suited figures were coming rapidly down the path to the space-field. Gary hailed them as they came nearer. "Find out what was wrong?" he asked.

Kingsley's voiced boomed at him. "Several things wrong," he declared. "This ought to put it in working shape."

The four of them advanced on the machine. Gary fell into step with Caroline and looked at the girl's face through her helmet visor. "You look fagged out," he said.

"I am tired," she confessed. They walked a few steps. "We had so much to do," she said, "and apparently so little time to do it in. The Engineers sound as if they are getting desperate. They seem to think the danger is very near."

"What I can't figure out," Gary told her, "is what we are going to do when we get there. They seem to be head and shoulders over us in scientific knowledge. If they can't work it out, I don't see how we can help them."

Her voice was full of weariness as she answered him.

"Neither do I," she said, "but they seemed so excited when they found out who we were, when I described our solar system to them and told them that the race had originated on the third planet. They asked so many questions about what kind of beings we were. It took a lot of explaining to get across the idea that we were protoplasmic creatures, and when they finally understood that they seemed even more excited."

"Maybe," suggested Gary, "protoplasmic beings are a rarity throughout the universe. Maybe they never heard of folks like us before."

She wheeled on him. "There's something funny about it all, Gary. Something funny about how anxious they are for us to come, how insistent they are in trying to find out so much about us… the extent of our science and our past history."

He thought he detected a quaver of fear in her voice. "Don't let it get you," he said. "If it gets too funny, we can always quit. We don't have to play their game, you know."

"No," she said, "we can't do that. They need us, need us to help them save the universe. I'm convinced of that."

She stepped quickly forward to help Kingsley.

"Hand me that hammer," said Kingsley's voice, and Gary stooped down, picked up the heavy hammer from the base of the machine and handed it to the scientist.

"Hell," complained Herb, "that's all we've done for days now. We've handed you wrenches and hammers and pins and bolts until I see them in my sleep."

Kingsley's chuckle sounded in their helmets as he swung the hammer against a crossbar, driving it into the mechanism at a slightly different angle.

Gary craned back his neck and gazed up the spiraling, towering height of the machine, out beyond into the blackness of space, studded with cruel-eyed stars. Out there, somewhere, was the rim of space. Out there, somewhere, a race of beings who called themselves the Cosmic Engineers were fighting a great danger which threatened the universe. He tried to imagine such a danger… a danger that would be a threat to that mighty bowl of matter and energy men called the universe, a living, expanding thing enclosed by curving time and space. But his brain swam with the bigness of the thought and he gave it up. It was entirely too big to even think about.

Tommy Evans was coming across the field from the hangar. He hailed them joyously. "The old tub is ready any time you are," he shouted.

Kingsley straightened from adjusting a series of prisms set around the base of the machine. "We're ready now," he said.

"Well, then," said Herb, "let us get going."

Kingsley stared out into space. "Not yet," he said. "We're swinging out of direct line with the Engineers. We'll wait until the planet rotates again. We can't hold the warp continuously. If we did, the rotation of Pluto would twist it out of shape. The machine, once the warp is set up, will act automatically, establishing the warp when it swings into the right position and maintaining it through forty-five degrees of Pluto's rotation."

"What happens," asked Gary, "if we can't complete the trip from here to the edge of the universe before Pluto travels that forty-five degrees? We might roll out of the warp and find ourselves marooned thousands of light-years between galaxies."

"I don't know," said Kingsley. "I'm trusting the Engineers."

"Sure," said Herb, "we're all trusting the Engineers. I hope to Heaven they know what they're doing."

Together the five of them trudged up the path to the main lock of the laboratory. "Something to eat," said Kingsley, "and a good sleep and we'll be starting out. All of us are pretty tuckered now."

In the little kitchen they crowded around the table, gulping steaming coffee and munching sandwiches. Beside Kingsleys" plate was a sheaf of spacegrams that Ted had brought up for him to read. Kingsley leafed through them irritably.

"Cranks," he rumbled. "Hundreds of them. All with ideas crazier than the one we have. And the biggest one of them all is the government. Imagine the government forbidding us to go ahead with our work. Orders to desist!" He snorted. "Some damn law that the Purity league got passed a hundred years or more ago and still standing on the statutes. Gives the government power to stop any experiment which might result in the loss of life or the destruction of property."

"The Purity league is still going pretty strong," said Gary, "although it works mostly undercover now. Too much politics mixed up in it."

He dug into the pocket of his coat and hauled forth a sheet of yellow paper. "I got this a while ago," he said. "I plain forgot about it until now. Too much other excitement."

He handed the sheet to Kinsgley. The folded paper crackled crisply as Kingsley unfolded it. It was a sheet off the teletype in the Space Pup and it read:

NELSON. ABOARD SPACE PUP ON PLUTO.

SOLAR GOVERNMENT ORDERED OUT SOLAR POLICE SECRETLY TWO DAYS AGO TO ENFORCE ORDER TO STOP EDGE OF UNIVERSE TRIP. THIS IS A WARNING. KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF WHATEVER IS GOING ON.

Kingsley crumpled the message savagely in his fist. "When did you get this?" he thundered.

"Just a couple of hours ago," said Gary. "It will take them days to get here."

"We'll be gone long before they even sight Pluto," Tommy said, his words mumbled through a huge bite of sandwich.

"That's right," agreed Kingsley, "but it makes me sore. The damn government always meddling in other people's affairs. Setting itself up as a judge and jury. Figuring it never can be wrong." He growled wickedly at the sandwich he held in one mighty fist, bit at it viciously.

Herb looked around the room. "This being sort of a farewell banquet," he said, "I sure wish we had something to drink. We ought to drink a toast to the Solar System before we leave it. We ought to make it just a little like a celebration."

"We'd have something to drink if you hadn't been so clumsy with that Scotch," Gary reminded him.

"Hell," retorted Herb, "that would have been gone long ago, with you making a pass at it every time you came in reach." He sighed and tilted his coffee cup against his face.

Kingsley's laugh thundered through the room. "Wait a minute, boys," he said. He went to a cupboard and removed a double row of canned vegetables from a shelf. A quart bottle filled with amber liquor was revealed. He set it on the table.

"Wash out your coffee cups," he said. "We haven't any glasses."

The liquor splashed into the coffee cups and they stood to drink a toast.

The telephone in the next room rang.

They set down their cups and waited as Kingsley went to answer it. They heard his roar of excitement and quick fire of rumbling questions. Then he was striding back into the room.

"My assistant, Jensen, was up in the observatory just now," he shouted at them. "He spotted five ships coming in, only a few hours out. Police ships!"

Herb had lifted his cup and now with a clatter it fell to the table, breaking. The liquor dripped to the floor.

Gary flared at him. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "You get the shakes every time you get anywhere near a drink."

"That message Gary got," Tommy was saying. "There must have been something wrong. Maybe the ships were out near Neptune when they were ordered out here."

"What would they be doing out near Neptune?" snapped Herb.

Tommy shrugged. "Police ships are always snooping around," he said. "You find them everywhere."

They stared at one another in a deathly silence.

"They can't stop us now," whispered Caroline. "They just can't."

"There's still a couple of hours before the space warp contact with the Engineers would be broken if we set it up now," said Tommy. "Maybe we could make it. The ship is ready."

"Ask the Engineers," said Gary. "Find out how soon they can get us there."

Kingsley's voice thundered commands. "Caroline," he was shouting, "get the Engineers! Find out if it would be safe to start now. Tommy, get out the spaceship! The rest of you grab what stuff we need and get down to the field."

The room was a swirl of action. All of them were rushing for the door.

Kingsley was at the telephone, talking to Andy. "Get the hangar doors open," he was shouting. "Warm up the tubes. We're taking off."

Through the thud of running feet, the rumbling of Kingsley's voice, came the high-pitched drone of the thought-machine sending set. Caroline was talking to the Engineers.

More snatches of telephone conversation. Kingsley talking with Jensen now. "Get down to the power house. Stand ready to give us all the juice you have. The leads will carry everything you can throw into them. We'll need a lot of power."

Gary was struggling into his space-armor when Caroline came into the room.

"We can make it," she shouted excitedly. "The Engineers say we'll be there in almost no time at all. Almost instantaneous."

Gary held her spacesuit for her while she clambered into it, helped her fasten down the helmet. Kingsley was puffing and grunting, hauling the space-armor over his portly body.

"We'll beat them," he was growling. "Damn them, we'll beat them yet! No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do."

Out of the air lock, they raced down the path to the field. In the center of the field reared the ghostly machine, like a shimmering skeleton standing guard over the bleakness that was Pluto. As he ran, Gary glanced up and out into space.

A voice sang in his brain, the voice of his own thoughts: "We're coming! Hang on, you Engineers! We're on our way. Little puny man is coming out to help you. Mankind, is marching to another crusade! To the biggest crusade he has ever known!"

Tommy Evans" mighty ship was at the far end of the field, a gleaming thing of silver, with the tubes a dull red, preheated to stand the sudden flare of rocket blasts in the deadly cold of Pluto's surface.

Yes, thought Gary, another crusade. But a crusade without weapons. Without even knowing who the enemy might be. Without a definite plan of campaign. With no campaign at all. With just an ideal and the sound of bugles out in space. But that was all man had needed ever. Just an ideal and the blaring of bugles.

Caroline cried out in wonder, almost in fear, and Gary glanced toward the center of the field.

The machine was gone! Where it had stood there was nothing, no faintest hint it had ever stood there. Just empty field and nothing else.

"Jensen turned on the power!" Kingsley shouted. "The machine is warped into another dimension. The road is open to the Engineers."

Gary pointed out into space. "Look," he yelled.

A faint, shimmering circle of light lay far out into the black depths. A slow wheel of misty white. A nebulous thing that hadn't been there before.

"That's where we go," said Kingsley, and Gary heard the man's breath whistling through his teeth. "That's where we go to reach the Engineers."

CHAPTER Seven

Tommy's nimble fingers flew over the rocket bank, set up a take-off pattern. His thumb tripped the firing lever and the ship surged up from the field with the thunder of the rocket blasts shuddering through its frame-work.

"Hit dead center," warned Kingsley and Tommy nodded.

"Don't you worry," he snorted. "I will hit it."

"I'd like to see the look on the face of them dumb cops when they reach Pluto and find us gone," said Herb.

"Thought they were putting over a fast one on us."

"It'll be all right if they don't set down right into that machine down there," Gary declared. "If they did that something would happen to them… and happen awful fast."

"I told Ted to warn them away from it," Kingsley said. "I don't think they'd hurt the machine, but they would sure get messed up themselves. They may try to destroy it, and if they do, they're in for a real surprise. Nothing could do that." He chuckled. "Stilled atomic-whirl and rigid space-curvature," he said. "There's material for you!"

The ship lanced swiftly through space, heading for that wheeling circle of misty light.

"How far away would it be?" Gary asked and Kingsley shook his head.

"Not too far," he said. "No reason for it being too far away."

They watched it through the vision plate, saw the wheel of light expand, become a great spinning, frosty rim that filled the plate and in its center a black hole like a hub.

Tommy set up a corrective pattern and tripped the firing lever. The cross-hairs on the destination panel bore dead center on the night-black hub.

The wheel of light flared out, the hub became bigger and blacker, a hole in space… as if one were looking through it into space, but into a space where there were no stars.

The light disappeared. Just the black hub remained, filling the vision plate with inky blackness. Then the ship was flooded with that same blackness, a cloying, heavy blackness that seemed pressing in upon them.

Caroline cried out softly and then choked back the cry, for the blackness was followed almost instantly by a flood of light.

The ship was diving down toward a city, a monstrous city that jerked Gary's breath away. A city that piled height on height, like gigantic steps, with soaring towers that pointed at them like Titan fingers. A solid, massive city of gleaming white stone and square, utilitarian lines, a city that covered mile on mile of land, so that one could see no part of the planet that bore it, the city stretching from horizon to horizon.

Three suns blazed in the sky; one white, two a misty blue, all three pouring out a flood of light and energy that, Gary realized, would have made Sol seem like a tiny candle.

Tommy's fingers flew over the rocket banks, setting up a braking pattern. But even as he did, the speed of the ship seemed to slow, as if they were driving into a soft, but resistant cushion.

And in their brains rang a voice of command, a voice telling them to do nothing, that they and their ship would be brought down to the city in safety. Not so much like words as if each one of them had thought the very thought, as if each one of them knew exactly what to do.

Gary glanced at Caroline and saw her lips shape a single word. "Engineers."

So it hadn't been a nightmare after all. There really were a people who called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. There really was a city.

The ship still plunged downward, but its speed was slowing and now Gary realized that when first they had seen this pile of stone beneath them they had been many miles away. In comparison to the city, they and their ship were tiny things… little things, like ants crawling in the shadow of a mountain.

Then they were within the city, or at least its upper portion. The ship flashed past a mighty spire of stone and swung into its shadow. Below them they saw new details of the city, winding streets and broad parkways and boulevards, like tiny ribbons fluttering in the distance. A city that could thrill one with its mere bigness. A city which would have put a thousand New Yorks to shame. A city that dwarfed even the most ambitious dreams of mankind.

A million of Man's puny cities piled into one. Gary tried to imagine how big the planet must be to bear such a city, but there was no use of thinking, for there was no answer.

They were dropping down toward one of the fifth tiers of buildings, down and down, closer and closer to the massive blocks of Stone. So close now that their vision was cut off, and the terrace of the tier seemed like a broad, flat plain.

A section of the roof was opening, like a door opening outward into space. The ship, floating on an even keel, drifted gently downward, toward that yawning trap door. Then they were through the door, with plenty of room to spare, were floating quietly down between walls of delicate pastel hues.

The ship settled with a gentle bump and was still. They had arrived at their destination.

"Well, we're here," said Herb. "I wonder what we're supposed to do."

As if in answer to his question, the voice came again, the voice that was not a voice, but as if each person were thinking for himself.

It said: "This is a place we have prepared for you. You will find the gravity and the atmosphere and the surroundings natural to yourselves. You will need no space armor, no artificial trappings of any sort. Food is waiting you."

They stared at one another in amazement.

"I think," said Herb, "that I will like this place. Did you hear that? Food? I trust there's also drink."

"Yes," said the voice, "there is drink."

Herb's jaw dropped.

Tommy stepped out of the pilot's chair. "I'm hungry," he said. He strode to the inner valve of the air lock and spun the wheel. The others crowded behind him.

They stepped out of the ship onto a great slab of stone placed in the center of a gigantic room. The stone, apparently, was merely there for the ship to rest upon, for the rest of the floor was paved in scintillating blocks of mineral that flashed and glinted in the light from the three suns pouring in through a huge, translucent skylight. The walls of the room were done in soft, pastel shades, and on the walls were hung huge paintings, while ringed about the ship was furniture, perfect rooms of furniture, but with no dividing walls. An entire household, of palatial dimension, set up in a single room.

A living room, a library, bedrooms and a dining room. A dining room with massive oaken table and five chairs, and upon the table a banquet to do justice to a king.

"Chicken!" cried Herb and the word carried a weight of awe.

"And wine," said Tommy.

They stared in amazement at the table. Gary sniffed. He could smell the chicken.

"Antique furniture," said Kingsley. "That stuff would bring a fortune back in the solar system. Mostly Chatterton and it looks authentic. And beautiful pieces, museum pieces, every one. Thousand years old at least." He stared from piece to piece. "But how did they got it here?" he burst out.

Caroline's laughter rang through the room, a chiming, silver laughter that had a note of wild happiness in it.

"What's the matter?" demanded Tommy.

"I don't see anything funny," declared Herb. "Unless there is a joke. Unless that chicken really isn't chicken."

"It's chicken," Caroline assured him. "And the rest of the food is real, too. And so is that furniture. Only I didn't think of it as antique. You see, a thousand years ago that sort of furniture was the accepted style. That was the smartest sort of pieces to have in your home."

"But you?" asked Gary. "What did you have to do with it?"

"I told the Engineers," she said. "They asked me what we ate and I told them. They must have understood me far better than I thought. I told them the kind of clothes we wore and the kind of furniture we used. But, you see, the only things I knew about were out of date, things the people used a thousand years ago. All except the chicken. You still eat chicken, don't you?"

"And how," grinned Herb.

"Why," said Gary, "this means the Engineers can make anything they want to. They can arrange atoms to make any sort of material. They can transmute matter!"

Kingsley nodded. "That's exactly what it means," he said.

Herb was hurrying for the table.

"If we don't get there, there won't be anything left," Tommy suggested.

The chicken, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the wine, the stuffed olives… all the food was good. It might have come out of the kitchen of the solar system's smartest hotel only a few minutes before. After days of living on coffee and hastily slapped-together sandwiches, they did full justice to it.

Herb regarded with regret the last piece of chicken and shook his head dolefully.

"I just can't do it," he moaned. "I just can't manage any more."

"I never tasted such food in all my life," Kingsley declared.

"They asked me what we ate," Caroline said, "so I thought of all the things I like the best. They didn't leave out a single one."

"But where are the Engineers?" asked Gary. "We haven't seen a thing of them. We have seen plenty of what they have done and can do, but not one has showed himself."

Footsteps rasped across the floor and Gary swung around in his chair. Advancing toward them was something that looked like a man, but not exactly a man. It was the same height, had the same general appearance — two arms, two legs, a man-shaped torso and a head. But there was something definitely wrong with the face; something wrong with the body, too.

"There's the answer to your question," said Tommy.

"There's an Engineer."

Gary scarcely heard him. He was watching the Engineer intently as the creature approached. And he knew why the Engineer was different. Cast in human shape, he was still a far cry from the humans of the solar system, for the Engineer was a metal man! A man fashioned of metallic matter instead of protoplasm.

"A metal man," he said.

"That's right," replied Kingsley, and keen interest rather than wonderment was in his words. "This must be a large planet. The force of gravity must be tremendous. Protoplasm probably would be unable to stand up under its pull. We'd probably just melt down if the Engineers hadn't fixed up this place for us."

"You are right," said the metal man, but his mouth didn't open, his facial expression didn't change. He was speaking to them as the voice had spoken to them back on Pluto and again as they had entered the city. The Engineer stopped beside the table and stood stiffly, his arms folded across his chest.

"Is everything satisfactory?" asked the Engineer.

It was funny, this way he had of talking. No sound, no change of expression, no gesture… just words burning themselves into one's brain, the imprint of thought thrust upon one's consciousness.

"Why, yes," said Gary, "everything is fine,"

"Fine," shouted Herb, waving a drumstick. "Why, everything is perfect."

"We tried so hard to do everything just as you told us," said the Engineer. "We are pleased that everything is all right. We had a hard time understanding one thing. Those paintings on the wall. You said they were things you had and were used to and we wanted so much to make everything as you wanted it. But they were something we had never thought of, something we had never done. We are sorry that we were so stupid. They are fine things. When this trouble is over, we may make more of them. They are so very beautiful. How queer it was we hadn't thought of them."

Gary swung around and stared at the painting opposite the table. Obviously it was a work in oils and seemed a very fine one. It portrayed some fantastic scene, a scene with massive mountains in the background and strange twisted trees and waist-high grass and the glitter of a distant waterfall. A picture, Gary decided, that any art gallery would be proud to hang.

"You mean," be asked, "that these are the first pictures you ever painted?"

"We hadn't even thought of it before," said the Engineer.

They hadn't known of paintings before. No single Engineer had ever thought to capture a scene on canvas. They had never wielded an artist's brush. But here was a painting that was perfect in color and in composition, well balanced, pleasing to the eye!

"One thing about you fellows," said Tommy, "is that you will tackle anything."

"It was so simple," said the Engineer, "that we are ashamed we never thought of it."

"But this trouble," rumbled Kingsley. "This danger to the universe. You told us about it back on Pluto, but you didn't explain. We would like to know."

"That," said the Engineer, "is what I am here to tell you…"

No change in the tone of the thoughts… no slightest trend of emotion. No change of expression on his face.

"We will do whatever we can to help," Kingsley told him.

"We are sure of that," said the Engineer. "We are glad that you are here. We were so satisfied when you said that you would come. We feel you can help us very, very much."

"But the danger," prompted Caroline. "What is the danger?"

"I will begin," said the Engineer, "with information that to us is very elemental, although I do not believe you know it. You had no chance to find it out, being so far from the edge of the universe. But we who have lived here so many years, found the truth long ago.

"This universe is only one of many universes. Only one of billions and billions of universes. We believe there are as many universes as there are galaxies within our own universe."

The Earthlings looked in astonishment at him. Gary glanced at Kingsley and the scientist seemed speechless. He was sputtering, trying to talk.

"There are over fifty billion galaxies within our universe," he finally said. "Or at least that is what our astronomers believe."

"Sorry to contradict," said the Engineer. "There are many more than that. Many times more than that."

"More!" said Kingsley, faintly for him.

"The universes are four-dimensional," said the Engineer, "and they exist within a five-dimensional inter-space, perhaps another great super-universe with the universes within it taking the place of the galaxies as they are related to our universe."

"A universe within a universe," said Gary, nodding his head. "And might it not be possible that this super-universe is merely another universe within an even greater super-universe?"

"That might be so," declared the Engineer. "It is a theory we have often pondered. But we have no way of knowing. We have so little knowledge…"

A little silence fell upon the room, a silence filled with awe. This talk of universes and super-universes. This dwarling of values. This relegating of the universe to a mere speck of dust in an even greater place!

"The universes, even as the galaxies, are very far apart," the Engineer went on. "So very far apart that the odds against two of them ever meeting are almost incomprehensibly great. Farther apart than the suns in the galaxies, farther apart, relatively, than the galaxies in the universe. But entirely possible that once in eternity two universes will meet."

He paused, a dramatic silence in his thought. "And that chance has come," he said. "We are about to collide with another universe."

They sat in stunned silence.

"Like two stars colliding," said Kingsley. "That's what formed our solar system."

"Yes," said the Engineer, "like two stars colliding. Like a star once collided with your Sun."

Kingsley jerked his head up.

"You know about that?" he asked.

"Yes, we know about that. It was long ago. Many million years ago."

"How do you know about this other universe?" asked Tommy. "How could you know?"

"Other beings in the other universe told us," said the Engineer. "Beings that know much more in many lines of research than we shall ever know. Beings we have been talking to for these many years."

"Then you knew for many years that the collision would take place," said Kingsley.

"Yes, we knew," said the Engineer. "And we tried hard, the two peoples; We of this universe and those of the other universe. We tried hard to stop it, but there seemed no way. And so at last we agreed to summon, each from his own universe, the best minds we could find. Hoping they perhaps could find a way… find a way where we had failed."

"But we aren't the best minds of the universe," said Gary. "We must be far down the scale. Our intelligence, comparatively, must be very low. We are just beginning. You know more than we can hope to know for centuries to come."

"That may be so," agreed the Engineer, "but you have something else. Or you may have something else. You may have a courage that we do not possess. You may have an imagination that we could not summon. Each people must have something to contribute. Remember, we had no art, we could not think up a painting; our minds are different. It is so very important that the two universes do not collide."

"What would happen," asked Kingsley, "if they did collide?"

"The laws of the five-dimensional inter-space," explained the Engineer, "are not the laws of our four-dimensional universe. Different results would occur under similar conditions. The two universes will not actually collide. They will be destroyed before they collide."

"Destroyed before they collide?" asked Kingsley.

"Yes," said the Engineer. "The two universes will "rub," come so close together that they will set up a friction, or a frictional stress, in the five-dimensional inter-space. Under the inter-space laws this friction would create new energy… raw energy… stuff that had never existed before. Each of the universes will absorb some of that energy, drink it up. The energy will rush into our universes in ever-increasing floods. Unloosed, uncontrollable energy. It will increase the mass energy in each universe, will give each a greater mass…"

Kingsley leaped to his feet, tipping over a coffee cup, staining the table cloth.

"Increase the mass!" he shouted. "But…"

Then he sat down again, sagged down, a strangely beaten man.

"Of course that would destroy us," he mumbled. "Presence of mass is the only cause for the bending of space. An empty universe would have no space curvature. In utter nothingness there would be no condition such as we call space. Totally devoid of mass, space would be entirely uncurved, would be a straight line and would have no real existence. The more mass there is, the tighter space is curved. The more mass there is, the less space there is for it to occupy."-

"Flood the universe with energy from inter-space," the Engineer agreed, "and space begins curving back, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, crowding the matter it does contain into smaller space. We would have a contracting rather than an expanding universe."

"Throw enough of that new energy into the universe," Kingsley rumbled excitedly, "and it would be more like an implosion than anything else. Space would rush together. All life would be destroyed, galaxies would be wiped out. Existent mass would be compacted into a tiny area. It might even be destroyed if the contraction was so fast that it crushed the galaxies in upon each other. At the best, the universe would have to start all over again."

"It would start over again," said the Engineer. "There would be enough new energy absorbed by the universe for just such an occurrence as you have foreseen. The entire universe would revert to original chaos."

"And me without my life insurance paid," said Herb. Gary snarled at him across the table.

Caroline leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. "The problem," she said, "is to find out how to control that new energy if it does enter the universe."

"That is the problem," agreed the Engineer.

"Mister," said Gary, "if anyone can do it, this little lady can. She knows more about a lot of things than you do. I'll lay you a bet on that."

CHAPTER Eight

The suits were marvelous things, flexible and with scarcely any weight at all, not uncomfortable and awkward like an ordinary spacesuit.

Herb admired his before he fastened down the helmet. "You say these things will let us walk around on your planet just as if we were at home?" he asked the Engineer.

"We've tried to make it comfortable for you here," the Engineer replied. "We hope you find them satisfactory. You came so far to help and we are so glad to see you. We hope that you will like us. We have tried so hard."

Caroline looked toward the Engineer curiously. There was a queer, vague undertone to all his thought-messages, an inexplicable sense of pleading, of desire for praise from her or from Kingsley. She shook her head with a little impatient gesture, but still that deep, less-than-half-conscious feeling was there. It made no sense, she told herself. It was just imagination. The thought-messages were pure thought, there was nothing to interpret them, nothing to give them subtle shades of meaning… no facial expression, no change of tone.

But that pleading note!

It reminded her suddenly — with a little mounting lump in her throat — of her bird dog, a magnificent mahogany-and-white Chesapeake retriever, dead these thousand years. Somehow she felt again as she used to feel when the dog had looked up at her after placing a recovered bird at her feet.

He was gone now, gone with all the world she'd known. Her ideas and her memories were magnificent antiques, museum pieces, in this newer day. But she felt that if, somehow, that dog could have been granted eternal life, he'd be searching for her still… searching, waiting, hungering for the return that never came. And rising in queerly mixed ecstasies of gladness and shyness if she ever came back to him again.

Kingsley spoke and the rising feeling snapped.

"Gravity suits," said Kingsley, almost bursting with excitement. "But even more than that! Suits that will let a man move about comfortably under any sort of conditions. Under any pressure, any gravity, in any kind of atmosphere."

"With these," Gary suggested, "we would be able to explore Jupiter."

"Sure," said Tommy, "that would be easy. Except for one little thing. Find a fuel that will take you there and take you out again."

"Hell," enthused Herb, "I bet the Engineers could tell us how to make that fuel. These boys are bell-ringers all around."

"If there is any way we can help you, anything you want, anything at all," declared the Engineer, "we would be so glad, so proud to help you."

"I bet you would at that," said Herb.

"Only a few of the denizens we called have arrived," said the Engineer. "More of them should have come. Others may be on their way. We are afraid…"

He must have decided not to say what was on his mind, for thought clicked off, broken in the middle of the sentence.

"Afraid?" asked Kingsley. "Afraid of what?"

"Funny," said Gary, almost to himself. "Funny they should be afraid of anything."

"Not afraid for ourselves," explained the Engineer. "Afraid that we may be forced to halt our work. Afraid of an interruption. Afraid someone will interfere."

"But who would interfere?" asked Caroline. "Who could possibly interfere in a thing like this? The danger is a common one. All things within the universe should unite to try to fight it."

"What you say is right," declared the Engineer. "So right that it seems impossible any could think otherwise. But there are some who do. A race so blinded by ambition and by hatred that they see in this approaching Catastrophe an opportunity to wipe us out, to destroy the Engineers."

The Earthlings stood stock-still, shocked.

"Now, wait a second," said Gary slowly. "Let us understand this. You mean to say that you have enemies who would die themselves just for the satisfaction of knowing that you were destroyed, too?"

"Not exactly," said the Engineer. "Many of them would be destroyed, but a select few would survive. They would go back to the point where the universe must start again, back to the point where space and time would once more begin expanding. And, starting there, they would take over the new universe. They would shape it to fit their needs. They would control it. They would have complete dominion over it."

"But," cried Gary, "that is mad! Utterly mad. Sacrificing a present people, throwing away an entire universe for a future possibility."

"Not so mad," said Kingsley quietly. "Our own Earth history will furnish many parallels. Mad rulers, power-mad dictators ready to throw away everything for the bare feel of power… ready to gamble with the horrors of increasingly scientific and ruthless warfare. It almost happened on Earth once… back in 2896. The Earth was almost wiped out when one man yearned for power and used biological warfare in its most hideous form. He knew what the result would be, but that didn't stop him… Better, he reasoned, if there were no more than a thousand persons left alive, if he were the leader of that thousand. Nothing stopped him. The people themselves later stopped him, after he had done the damage… stopped him like the mad dog that he was."

"They hate us," said the Engineer. "They have hated us for almost a million years. Because we, and we alone, have stood between them and their dreams of universal conquest. They see us as the one barrier they must remove, the one obstacle in their way. They know they never can defeat us by the power of arms alone, cannot defeat us so utterly that we still cannot smash their plans to take over the universe."

"And so," said Gary, "they are perfectly willing to let the collision of universes wipe you out, even if it does mean disaster and destruction for the most of them."

"They must be nuts," said Herb.

"You do not understand," protested the Engineer. "For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest. They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race, is everything… that the individual does not count at all… that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream. They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal."

"You said that some of them would survive even if the universe, as we know it, were destroyed," said Caroline. "How would they do that?"

"They have found a way to burst out of the universe," said the Engineer. "How to navigate the inter-space that exists outside the universe. They are more advanced in many sciences that we. If they wished, I have no doubt they could by themselves, with no aid at all, save us from the fate that is approaching."

"Perhaps," rumbled Kingsley, "a treaty could be arranged. A sort of eleventh-hour armistice."

The impersonal thought of the Engineer struck at them. "There can be no peace with them. No treaty. No armistice. For more than a million years they have thought and practiced war. Their every thought has been directed toward conquest. To them the very word «peace» is meaningless. War is their natural state, peace an unnatural state. And they would not, in any event, in the remote chance that they might consider an armistice, consider it at this time when they have a chance to prevent us from saving the universe."

"You mean," asked Gary, horror in his voice, "that they actually want the universe destroyed? That they would fight you to prevent you from saving it?"

"That," said the Engineer, "is exactly what I mean. You understand so well."

"Do you expect them to attack soon?" asked Tommy.

"We do not know. They may attack at any time. We are ready at all times. We know they will attack eventually."

"We must find a way," said Caroline. "We can't let them stop us! We must find a way!"

"We will find a way," rumbled Kingsley. "There has to be a way, and we'll find it."

"What do you call these rip-snorters you've been fighting all these years?" asked Herb.

"We call them the Hellhounds," said the Engineer, but that was not exactly what he meant. The thought brought together a certain measure of loathing mixed with fear and hatred. Hellhounds was the nearest the Earthlings could translate the thought.

"They can break through the time-space curve," said Caroline, musingly, "and they can travel in the fifth-dimensional inter-space." She flashed a look at Gary, a look filled with the flare of inspiration. "Perhaps," she said, "that is the answer. Perhaps that is what we should try to find the answer to."

"I don't know what you mean," said Gary, "but maybe you are right."

"The space-time curve would be rigid," said Kingsley. "Rigid and hard to unravel. Lines of stress and force that would be entirely new. That would take mathematical knowledge. That and tremendous power."

"The power of new energy," said Gary. "Perhaps the power of the energy the rubbing universes will create."

Kingsley stared at him as if he had struck him with an open hand. "You have it," he shouted. "You have it!"

"But we haven't got the energy," said Gary, bluntly.

"No," agreed Kingsley. "We'll have to get that first."

"And control it," said Caroline.

"Perhaps," suggested the Engineer, "we should go now. The others are waiting for us. They have come so far, many of them from greater distances than you."

"How many are there?" asked Gary.

"Only a few," said the Engineer, "so very few. Life is so seldom found throughout the universe. The universe does not care for life. I sometimes think life is merely a strange disease that should not be here at all, that it is some accidental arrangement of matter that has no right to be. The universe is so hostile to it that it would seem almost to be abnormal. There are so few places where it can take root and live."

"But throughout those billions of galaxies there must be many races," declared Kingsley.

"There may be many we do not know about," said the Engineer, "but very few that we can contact. It is so very hard to get in touch with them. And some of them would be useless to us, races that had developed along entirely different lines to achieve a different culture. Races that live without the application of any of the practical sciences. Races that are sunken in the welter of philosophy and thought. Races that have submerged themselves in aesthetics and are untrained in science. The only ones we could reach were those scientifically-minded races that could catch our message and could reply to us… and after that could build the apparatus that would bring them here."

"Hell," said Herb, "it takes all kinds of people to make a universe."

The Engineer led them through an air lock which opened from the room into a mighty corridor… a corridor that stretched away for inconceivable distances, a vast place that held a brooding sense of empty space.

The suits functioned perfectly. Gravity and pressure were normal and the suits themselves were far more comfortable than the spacesuits used back in the solar system.

Slowly they trudged down the hall behind the Engineer.

"How long did it take to build this city?" asked Gary.

"Many years," said the Engineer. "Since we came here."

"Came here?" asked Gary. "Then this isn't your native planet?"

"No," said the Engineer, but he did not offer to explain.

"Say," said Herb, "you didn't ask our names. You don't know who we are."

Gary thought he detected a faint semblance of dry humor in the answer of the Engineer.

"Names," he said. "You mean personal designations? I know who you are without knowing names."

"Maybe," said Herb, "but we can't read thoughts like you can. We got to have names." He trotted along at the heels of the Engineer. "Don't you fellows have names?" he asked.

"We are designated by numbers," said the Engineer. "Purely as a matter of record. The individual doesn't count so much here as he does where you came from."

"Numbers," said Herb. "Just like a penitentiary."

"If it is necessary for you to designate me," said the Engineer, "my number is 1824. I should have told you sooner. I am sorry I forgot."

They halted before a massive door and the Engineer sounded a high-pitched thought-wave that beat fantastically against their minds. The great door slid back into the wall and they walked into a room that swept away in lofty reaches of vast distances, with a high-vaulted ceiling that formed a sky-like cup above them.

The room was utterly empty of any sort of furniture. Just empty space that stretched away to the dim, far walls of soaring white. But in its center was a circular elevation of that same white stone, a dais-like structure that reared ten feet or more above the white-paved floor.

Upon the dais stood several of the Engineers and around them were grouped queer, misshapen things, nightmares snatched from some book of olden horrors, monstrosities that made Gary's blood run cold as be gazed upon them.

He felt Caroline's fingers closing on his arm. "Gary," her whisper was thin and weak, "what are they?"

"Those are the ones that we have called," said the Engineer. "The ones who have come so far to help us in our fight."

"They look like something a man would want to step on," said Herb, and there was a horrible loathing in his words.

Gary stared at them, fascinated by their very repulsiveness. Lords of the universe, he thought. These are the things that represent the cream of the universe's intelligence. These things that looked, as Herb had said, like something you would want to step on.

The Engineer was walking straight ahead, toward the wide, shallow steps that led up to the dais.

"Come on," rumbled Kingsley. "Maybe we look as bad to them."

They crossed the hall and tramped up the steps. The Engineer crossed to the other Engineers.

"These," he said, "are the ones who have come from the outer planet of the solar system we have watched so many years."

The Engineers looked at them. So did the other things. Gary felt his skin crawling under the scrutiny.

"They are welcome," came the thought-wave of one of the Engineers. "You have told them how glad we are to have them here?"

"I have told them," declared Engineer 1824.

There were chairs for the Earthlings. One of the Engineers waved an invitation to them and they sat down.

Gary looked around. They were the only ones who had chairs. The Engineers, apparently tireless, remained standing. Some of the other things stood, too. One of them stood on a single leg with his second leg tucked tight against his body — like a dreaming stork — except that he didn't look like a stork. Gary tried to classify him. He wasn't a bird or a reptile or a mammal. He wasn't anything a human being had ever imagined. Long, skinny legs, great bloated belly, head with unkempt hair falling over brooding, dead-fish eyes.

One of the Engineers began to speak.

"We have gathered here," said the thought-waves, "to consider ways and means of meeting one of the greatest dangers…"

Just like a political speaker back on Earth, thought Gary. He tried to make out which one of the Engineers was talking, but there was no facial expression, no movement of any sort which would determine which one of them the speaker might be. He tried to pick out Engineer 1824, but all the Engineers looked exactly alike.

The talk rumbled on, a smooth roll of thought explaining the situation that they faced, the many problems it presented, the need of acting at once.

Gary studied the other things about them, the loathsome, unnatural things that had been brought here from the unguessed depths of the universe. He shuddered and felt cold beads of sweat break out upon his body as he looked at them.

Several of them were immersed in tanks filled with liquids. One tank boiled and steamed as if with violent chemical action; another was cloudy and dirty-looking; another was clear as water and in it lurked a thing that struck stark terror into Gary's soul. Another was confined in a huge glass sphere through which shifted and swirled a poisonous-appearing atmosphere. Gary felt cold fingers touch his spine as he watched the sphere and suddenly was thankful for the shifting mists within it, for through them he had caught sight of something that he was certain would have shattered one's mind to look upon without the shielding swirl of fog within the glass.

In a small glass cage set upon a pedestal of stone were several writhing, grub-like things that palpitated disgustingly. Squatting on its haunches directly across from Gary was a monstrosity with mottled skin and drooling mouth, with narrow, slitted eyes and slimy features. He fastened his pinpoint gaze upon the Earthman and Gary quickly looked away.

Nothing resembled mankind, nothing except the Engineers. Here were things that were terrible caricatures of the loathsome forms of Earth life, other beings that bore not even the most remote resemblance to anything that mankind had ever seen or imagined.

Was this a fair sample of the intelligence the universe contained? Did he and Kingsley and Caroline appear as disgusting, as fearsome in the eyes as these other denizens of the universe as they appeared to his?

He shot a quick glance at Caroline. She was listening intently, her chin cupped in one hand, her eyes upon the Engineers. Just as well that way, he thought. She didn't see these other things.

The Engineer had stopped talking and silence fell upon the room. Then a new impulse of thought beat against Gary's brain, thought that seemed cold and cruel, thought that was entirely mechanistic and consciousless. He glanced swiftly around, trying to find who was speaking. It must, he decided, be the thing in the glass sphere. He could not understand the thought, grasped just vague impressions of atomic structures and mathematics that seemed to represent enormous pressure used to control surging energy.

The Engineer was talking again.

"Such a solution," he was saying, "would be possible on a planet such as yours, where an atmosphere many miles in depth, composed of heavy gases, creates the pressures that you speak of. While we can create such pressures artificially, we could not create or maintain them outside the laboratory."

"What the hell," asked Herb, "are they arguing about?"

"Shut up," hissed Gary, and the photographer lapsed into shamefaced silence.

The cold, cruel thought was arguing, trying to explain a point that Gary could only guess at. He looked at Caroline, wondering if she understood. Her face was twisted into tiny lines of concentration.

The cold stream of thought had stopped and another thought broke in, a little piping thought. Perhaps, thought Gary, one of the little slug-like creatures in the glass cage.

Disgusting little things!

Gary looked at the mottled, droopy-eyed creature that squatted opposite him. It raised its head and in the beady eyes he imagined that he caught a glimmer of amusement.

"By the Lord," he said to himself, "he thinks it's funny, too."

This arguing of hideous entities! The piping thoughts of slimy things that should be wriggling through some stagnant roadside ditch back on the planet Earth. The cold thought of the brain-blasting thing that lived on a planet covered by miles of swirling gases. The pinpoint eyes of the being with the mottled skin.

Cosmic Crusade! He laughed to himself, deep in his throat. This wasn't the way he had imagined it. He had thought of gleaming ships of war, of stabbing rays, of might arrayed against might, a place where courage would be at a premium.

But there was nothing to fight. No physical thing. Nothing a man could get at. Another universe, a mighty thing of curving space and time… that was the enemy. A man simply couldn't do anything about a thing like that.

"This place," Herb whispered to him, "is giving me the creeps."

CHAPTER Nine

"WE CAN do it," said Caroline. She flicked a pencil against a sheet of calculations. "This proves it," she declared.

Kingsley bent over her shoulder to look at the sheet. "If you don't mind," he said, "would you lead me through it all again. Go slowly, please. I find it hard to grasp a lot of it."

"Kingsley," said Herb, "you're just an amateur. To get as good as she is you'd have to think for forty lifetimes."

"You embarrass me," she said. "It's very simple. It's really very simple."

"I'll say it's simple," said Tommy. "Just a little matter of bending space and time into a tiny universe. Wrapping it about a selected bit of matter and making it stay put."

"You could use it to control the energy," rumbled Kingsley. "I understand that well enough. When the universes begin to rub you could trap the incoming energy in an artificial universe. The energy would destroy that universe, but you'd have another ready for it. What I can't understand is how you form this artificial fourth-dimensional space."

"It isn't artificial," snapped Gary. "It's real… as real as the universe we live in. But it's made by human beings instead of by some law we have no inkling of."

He pointed at the sheet of calculations. "Perhaps the secret of all the universe is on that sheet of paper," he declared. "Maybe that's the key to how the universe was formed."

"Maybe," rumbled Kingsley, "and maybe not. There may be many ways to do it."

"One," said Gary, "is good enough for me."

"There's just one thing," said Caroline, "that bothers me. We don't know anything about the fifth-dimensional inter-space. We can imagine that its laws are different from our own. Vastly different. But how do they differ? What kind of energy would be formed out there? What form would it take?" She looked from one to the other of them. "That would make a lot of difference," she declared.

"It would," agreed Kingsley. "It would make a lot of difference. It would be like setting a trap for some animal. You might set one for a rat and catch a bear… or the other way around."

"The Hellhounds know," said Tommy. "They know how to navigate in the inter-space."

"But they wouldn't tell us," said Gary. "They don't want the universe to be saved. They want it to be wrecked so they can build a new world out of the wreckage."

"It might be light, or matter, or heat, or motion, or it might be something that's entirely different," said Caroline. "It's not impossible it would be something else, some new fearful form of energy with which we are entirely unacquainted. Conditions would be just as different out in inter-space as fourth-dimensional conditions differ from our three-dimensional world."

"And to be able to control it we would have to have some idea as to what it is," said Kingsley.

"Or what it would become when it entered the hyperspace," said Gary. "It might be one kind of energy out there, an entirely different kind when it entered our universe."

"The people of the other universe don't seem to know," Tommy pointed out. "Even if they are the ones who found out about the universes drifting together. They don't seem to be able to find out too much about it."

Gary glanced around the laboratory, a mighty vaulted room that glowed with soft, white light… a room with gleaming tiers of apparatus, with mighty machines, great engines purring with tremendous power, uncanny structures that almost defied description.

"The funniest thing about the whole business," he declared, "is why the Engineers themselves can't make any progress. Why do they have to call us in? With all of this equipment, with the knowledge they already hold, it ought to be a cinch for them to do almost anything.".

"There's something queer here," Herb declared. "I've been snooping around a bit and this city is enough to set you batty. There isn't any traffic in the streets. You can travel for hours and you don't see a single Engineer. No business houses, no theaters, no nothing. All the buildings are empty. Just empty buildings. A city of empty buildings." He puffed out his breath. "Like a city that was built and waiting for someone. Waiting for someone who never came."

Something akin to terror crossed Gary's mind. A queer, haunted feeling… a pity for those magnificent white buildings standing all untenanted.

"A city built for billions of people," said Herb. "And no one in it. Just a handful of Engineers. Probably not more than a hundred thousand altogether."

Kingsley was clenching and opening his fists again, rumbling in his throat.

"It does seem queer," he said, "that they never found the answer. With all their knowledge, all their scientific apparatus."

Gary looked at Caroline and smiled. A wisp of a girl. But one who could bend space and time until it formed a sphere… or, rather, a hypersphere. A girl who could mold space as she wanted it, who could play tricks with it, make it do what she wanted it to do. She could set up a tiny replica of the universe, a little private universe that belonged to her and no one else. No one before, he was certain, ever had dared to think of doing that.

He looked at her again, a swift, sure look that saw the square-cut chin, the high forehead, the braided raven strands about her head. Was Caroline Martin greater than the Engineers? Could she master a problem that they couldn't even touch? Was she, all unheralded, the master mind of the entire universe? Did the hope of the universe lie within her mind?

It seemed impossible. And yet, she had thought of time and space for nearly forty lifetimes. With nothing but a brain to work with, with no tools, no chance of experimentation — all alone, with nothing but her thoughts, she had solved the deep-shrouded mysteries of space and time. Never dreaming, perhaps, that such knowledge could be used to a certain purpose.

Metal feet scraped across the laboratory floor and Gary whirled to come face to face with Engineer 1824. The metal man had advanced upon them unawares.

His thought came to them, clear, calm, unhurried thought, devoid of all emotion, impersonal, yet with a touch of almost human warmth.

"I heard your thoughts," he said, "and I am afraid that you might think I meant to hear them. But I am very glad I did. You wonder why the Engineers brought you here. You wonder why the Engineers can't do this work unaided."

They stood guiltily, like schoolboys caught at some forbidden act.

"I will tell you," the thought went on, "and I hope you will understand. It is difficult to tell you. Hard to tell you, because we Engineers are full of pride. Conditions being different, we would never tell you."

It sounded like a confession, and Gary stared at the metal man in stricken surprise, but there was no sign of expression upon the metal face, no hint of thought within the glowing eyes.

"We are an old and tired people," said the Engineer. "We have lived too long. We have always been a mechanistic people and as the years went on we became even more so. We plod from one thing to another. We have no imagination. The knowledge that we have, the powers we hold, were inherited by us. Inherited from a great race, the greatest race that ever lived. We have added something to that knowledge, but so very little. So very, very little when you think of all the time that has passed away since it was handed to us."

"Oh!" cried Caroline and then put her hand up as if to cover her mouth, and it clanged against the quartz of the helmet. She looked at Gary and he saw pity in her eyes.

"No pity for us, please," said the Engineer. "For we are a proud people and have the right to be. We have kept an ancient trust and kept it well. We have abided by the heritage that is ours. We have kept intact the charge that was given us."

In the little silence Gary had a sense of ancient things, of old plays played out upon a stage that had dissolved in dust these many thousand years. A sense of an even greater race upon an even greater planet. An old, old heraldry carried down through cosmic ages by these metal men.

"But you are young," declared the Engineer. "Your race is young and unspoiled. You have fallen into no grooves. Your mind is free. You are full of imagination and initiative. I sensed it when I talked with you back in your own system. And that is what we need… that is what we must have. Imagination to grasp the problem that is offered. Imagination to peer around the corner. A dreaming contemplation of what is necessary to be done, and then the vigorous initiative to meet the challenge that the dream may bring."

Again a silence.

"That is why we are so glad to have you here," went on the Engineer. "That is why I know I can tell you what must be told."

He hesitated for a moment and a million fears speared at Gary's brain. Something that must be told! Something they hadn't known before. An even greater threat to face?

They waited breathlessly.

"You should know," said the Engineer, "but I almost fear to tell you. It is this: Upon you, and you alone, must rest the fate of the universe. You are the only ones to save it."

"Upon us," cried Tommy. "Why, that is mad! You can't mean it!"

Kingsley's hands were clenched and the bearish rumble was rising in his throat. "What about those others?" he asked. "All those others you brought here, along with us?"

"I sent them back," declared the Engineer. "They were no help to us."

Gary felt the cold wind from space reach out and flick his face again. Man — and Man alone — stood between the universe and destruction. Little, puny Man. Man, with a body so delicate that he would be smashed to a bloody pulp if exposed unprotected to the naked gravity of this monstrous world. Little Man, groping toward the light, groping, feeling, not knowing where he went.

And then the blast of trumpets sounded in the air — the mythical trumpets calling men to crusade. The ringing peal that for the last ten thousand years has sent Man out to war, clutching at his sword.

"But why?" Kingsley was thundering.

"Because," said the Engineer, "we could not work with them. They could not work with one another. We could hardly understand them. Their process of intelligence was so unfathomable, their thought process so twisted, that understanding was almost impossible. How we ever made them understand sufficiently to bring them here, I will never know. Many times we almost despaired. Their minds are so different from ours, so very, very different. Poles apart in thought."

Why, sure, thought Gary, that would be the way one would expect to find it. There was no such thing as parallel physical evolution, why should there be parallel mental evolution?

"Not that their mentality is not as valid as our intelligence," said the Engineer. "Not that they might not have even a greater grasp of science than we. But there could have been no co-ordination, no understanding for us to work together."

"But," said Caroline, "we can understand your thoughts. You can understand ours. And yet we are as far removed from you as they."

The Engineer said nothing.

"And you look like us," said Tommy, quietly. "We are protoplasm and you are metal, but we each have arms and legs…"

"It means nothing," said the Engineer. "Absolutely nothing how a thing is made, the shape that one is made in." There was almost an edge of anger in his thoughts.

"Don't you worry, old man," said Herb. "We'll save the universe. I don't know how in hell we'll do it, but we'll save it for you."

"Not for us," the Engineer corrected, "but for those others. For all life that now exists within the universe. For all life that in time to come may exist within the universe."

"There," said Gary, hardly realizing that he spoke aloud, "is an ideal big enough for any man."

An ideal. Something to fight for. A spur that kept Man going on, striving, fighting his way ahead.

Save the universe for that monstrosity in the glass sphere with its shifting vapors, for the little, wriggling, slug-like things, for the mottled terror with the droopy mouth and the glint of humor in his eyes.

"But how?" asked Tommy. "How are we going to do it?"

Kingsley ruffled at him. "We'll do it," he thundered.

He wheeled on the Engineer. "Do you know what kind of energy would exist within the inter-space?" he asked.

"No," said the Engineer, "I cannot tell you that. Perhaps the Hellhounds. But that's impossible."

"Is there any other place?" asked Gary in a voice cold as steel. "Anyone else who could tell us?"

"Yes," said the Engineer. "There is one other race. I think that they might tell you. But not yet. Not yet. It is too dangerous."

"We don't care," said Herb. "We humans eat up danger."

"Let us try it," said Gary. "Just a couple of us. If something happened, the others would be left to carry on…"

"No," said the Engineer, and there was a terrible finality in the single thought.

"Why can't we go out ourselves and find out?" asked Herb. "We could make a little universe just for ourselves. Float right out into this fifth-dimension space and study the energy that we find."

"Splendid," purred Kingsley. "Absolutely splendid. Except there isn't any energy yet. Won't be until the two universes rub and then it will be too late."

"Yes," said Caroline, smiling at Herb, "we have to know before the energy is produced. When the universes rub, it will flood in upon us in such great quantity that we'll be wiped out almost immediately. The first contracting rush of space and time will engulf us. Remember, we're just inside the universal rim."

"I do not entirely understand," said the Engineer. "You spoke of making a universe. Can you make a universe? Bend space and time around a predetermined mass? I am afraid you jest. That would be difficult."

Gary started. Was it possible that Caroline had done something an Engineer thought impossible to do? Standing here, it seemed so simple, so commonplace that space-time could be bent into a hypersphere. Nothing wonderful about it. Just something to be slightly astonished at and argued about. Just a few equations spread upon a sheet of paper.

"Sure we can," bellowed Kingsley. "This little lady has it figured out."

"The little lady," commented Herb, "is a crackajack at figures."

The Engineer reached out his hand to take the sheet of calculations that Kingsley was handing to him. But as he reached out his arm little red lights began to blink throughout the laboratory and in their ears sounded a shrill, high-pitched whine — a whine that held a note of sinister alarm.

"What's that?" yelled Kingsley, dropping the sheet.

The thought of the Engineer came to them as calm as ever, as absolutely devoid of emotion as it bad always been.

"The Hellhounds," he said "The Hellhounds are attacking us."

As he spoke, Gary watched the sheet of paper flutter to the floor, a little fluttering sheet that held the key to the riddle of the universe scratched upon it in the black scrawlings of a soft-lead pencil.

The Engineer moved across the laboratory to a panel. His metallic fingers reached out, deftly punched at studs. A wall screen lighted up and on it they saw the bowl of sky above the city. Ships were shooting up and outward, great silver ships that had grim lines of power about them. Up from the roofs they arrowed out into space, squadron after squadron, following a grim trail to the shock of combat. Going out to meet the Hellhounds.

The Engineer made adjustments on the panel and they were looking deeper into space, far out into the darkness where the atmosphere had ended. A tiny speck of silver appeared and rapidly leaped toward them, dissolving into a cloud of ships. Thousands of them.

"The Hellhounds," said the Engineer.

Gary heard Herb suck in his breath, saw Kingsley's hamlike hands clenching and unclenching.

"Stronger than ever," said the Engineer. "Perhaps with new and more deadly weapons, perhaps more efficient screens. I am afraid, so very much afraid, that this means the end of us… and of the universe."

"How far away are they?" asked Tommy.

"Only a few thousand miles now," said the Engineer. "Our alarm system warns us when they are within ten thousand miles of the surface. That gives us time to get our fleet out into space to meet them."

"Is there anything we can do?" asked Gary.

"We are doing everything we can," said the Engineer.

"But I don't mean you," said Gary. "Is there anything the five of us can do? Any war service we can render you?"

"Not now," said the Engineer. "Perhaps later there will be something. But not now."

He adjusted the screen again and in it they watched the defending ships of the Engineers shooting spaceward, maneuvered into far-flung battle lines — like little dancing motes against the black of space.

In breathless attention they kept their eyes fixed on the screen, saw the gleaming points of light draw closer together, the invaders and the defenders. Then upon the screen they saw dancing flashes that were not reflections from the ships, but something else — knifing flashes that reached out, probed and stabbed and slashed, like a searchlight's beam cuts into the night. A tiny pinpoint of red light flashed momentarily and then went out. Another flamed, like lightning bugs of a summer night, except the flash was red and seemed filled with a terrible violence.

"Those flashes," breathed Caroline. "What are they?"

"Exploding ships," said the Engineer. "Screens break down and the energy drains out and then an atomic bomb or ray finds its way into them."

"Exploding ships," said Gary. "But whose?"

"How can I tell?" asked the Engineer. "It may be theirs or ours."

Even as he spoke a little ripple of red flashes ran across the screen.

CHAPTER Ten

HALF the city was in ruins, swept and raked by the stabbing rays that probed down from the upper reaches of the atmosphere, blasted by hydrogen and atomic bombs that shook the very bedrock of the planet and shattered great, sky-high towers of white masonry into drifting dust. Twisted wreckage fell into the city from the battle area, great cruisers reduced to grotesque metal heaps, bent and burned and battered out of all semblance to a ship, scorched and crushed and flattened by the energy unloosed in the height of battle.

"They have new weapons," said the Engineer. "New weapons and better screens. We can hold them off a little longer. How much longer I do not know."

In the laboratory, located in the base of one of the tallest of the skyscrapers in the great white city, the Engineers and the Earthlings had watched the battle for long hours. Had seen the first impact of the fleets, had watched the first dogfight out at the edge of atmosphere, had witnessed the Hellhounds slowly drive the defenders back until the invaders were within effective bombardment distance of the city itself.

"They have a screen stripper," said the Engineer, "that is far more effective than anything we have ever seen. It is taking too much of our ships" energy to hold up their screens under this new weapon."

In the telescopic screen a brilliant blue-white flash filled all the vision-plate as a bomb smashed into one of the few remaining towers. The tower erupted with a flash of blinding light and disappeared, with merely the ragged stump of masonry bearing mute testimony to its once sky-soaring height.

"Isn't there anyone who can help us?" asked Kingsley. "Surely there is someone to whom we might appeal."

"There is no one," said the Engineer. "We are alone. For thousands of light years there are no other great races to be found. For millions of years the Hellhounds and the Engineers have fought, and it has always been those two and just those two alone. Thus it is now. Before, we have driven them off. Many times have we destroyed them almost to the point of anihilation that we might hold their cosmic ambitions under proper check. Now it seems they will be the victors."

"No other race," said Gary, musing, "for thousands of light years."

He stared moodily at the screen, saw a piece of twisted wreckage that had at one time been a ship crash into the stump of broken tower and hang there, like a bloody, smoke-blackened offering tossed on the altar of war.

"But there is," he said. "There is at least one great race very near to us."

"There is?" asked Caroline. "Where?"

"On the other universe," said Gary. "A race that is fully as great, as capable as the Engineers. A race that should be glad to help us in this fight."

"Great suffering snakes," yelped Herb, "why didn't we think of that before?"

"I do not understand," said the Engineer. "I agree they are a great race and very close to us. Much too close, in fact. But they might as well be a billion light years away. They can do us no good. How would you get them here?"

"Yes," rumbled Kingsley, "how would you get them here?"

Gary turned to the Engineer. "You have talked to them," he said. "Have you any idea of what kind of people they might be?"

"A great people," said the Engineer. "Greater than we in certain sciences. They are the ones who notified us of the danger of the approaching universes. They knew they were nearing our universe when we didn't even know there was another universe other than our own. Such very clever people."

"Talk to them again," said Gary. "Give them the information that will enable them to make a miniature universe… one of Caroline's hyperspheres."

"But," said the Engineer, "that would do no good."

"It would," said Gary, grimly, "if they could use the laws of space to form a blister on the surface of their universe. If they could go out to the very edge of their space-time frame and create a little bubble of space — a bubble that would pinch off, independent of the parent universe and exist independently in the five-dimension inter-space."

Gary heard the rasp of Kingsley's breath in his helmet phones.

"They could cross to our universe," rumbled the scientist. "They could navigate through the inter-space with complete immunity."

Gary nodded inside his helmet. "Exactly," he said.

"Why, Gary," whispered Caroline, "what a thought!"

"Boy," said Herb, "I can hardly wait to see them Hellhounds when we sic those fellows on them."

"Maybe," said Tommy, "they won't come."

"I will talk to them," said the Engineer.

He left the room and they followed him through a mighty corridor to another room filled with elaborate machinery.

The Engineer strode to a control panel and worked with dials and studs. Intense blue power surged through long tubes and flashed in dizzy whirls through coils of glass.

Tubes boomed into sudden brilliance and the deep hum of power surged into the room.

They could hear the probing fingers of the Engineer's thoughts, thrusting out, calling to those other people in another universe. The power of thought being hurled through the very warp and weave of twisted time and space.

Then came another probing thought, a string of thoughts that were impossible to understand, hazed and blurred and all distorted. But apparently perfectly clear to the Engineer, who stood motionless under the inverted cone of glass that shimmered with blue fire of power.

Two entities talking to one another and the queer, challenging unknown of five-dimensional inter-space separating them!

The power ebbed and the blue fire sank to a glimmer in the tubes.

The Engineer turned around and faced the Earthlings.

"They will come," he said, "but only on one condition."

Suddenly a shiver went through Gary. Condition! That was something he hadn't thought about — that these other things might exact terms, might want concessions, might seek to wring front another universe some measure of profit for a service done.

He had always thought of them as benevolent beings, entities like the Engineers, living a life of service, establishing themselves as guardians of their universe. But that was it. Would they go out of their way to save another universe? Or would they fight only for their own? Was there such a thing as selflessness and universal brotherhood? Or must the universes, in time to come, be forever at one another's throats, as in ancient times nations had torn at one another in savage anger, in more recent times planets had warred for their selfish interests?

"What condition?" asked Kingsley.

"That we or they find out something concerning the nature of the inter-space and of the energy which will be generated when the universes rub," said the Engineer. "They are willing to come and fight for us, but they are not willing to deliberately invite disaster to themselves. No one knows what the inter-space is like. No one knows what laws of science it may hold. There may be laws that are utterly foreign to both our universes, laws that would defy our every bit of knowledge. They are afraid that the budding of a smaller universe from the surface of their own might serve to generate the energy they know will result when two four-dimensional frames draw close to one another."

"Now, wait," said Gary. "There is something I didn't consider when I proposed this thing. It just occurred to me now. When you said the word "condition," it came to my mind that they might want concessions or promises. I was wrong, interpreted the thought wrong. But the idea is still there. We don't know what these things in the other universe might be. We don't know what they look like or what their philosophy is or what they can do. If we allowed them to come here, we'd be giving them a key to this universe. Just opening the door for them. They might be all right and they might not. They might take over the universe."

"There's something to that," said Tommy. "We should have thought of it before."

"I do not believe it," said the Engineer. "I have some reason to believe they would not be a menace to us."

"What reason?" rumbled Kingsley.

"They notified us of the danger," said the Engineer.

"They wanted help," said Tommy.

"We have been of little help to them," said the Engineer.

"What difference does it make?" asked Herb. "Unless we can do something about this energy, we're going to be goners, anyhow. And that goes for the other universe as well. If they could save themselves by ruining us, maybe they'd do it, but it's a cinch that if we puff out they go along with us."

"That's right," agreed Kingsley. "It would be to their interest to help us beat off the Hellhounds on the chance that we might find something to save the universes. They wouldn't be very likely to turn on us until somebody had figured out something about this energy."

"And we can't control something we don't understand," said Caroline. "We have to find out what that energy is, what it's like, what form it is apt to take, something about it, so we will know how to handle it."

"How much more time have we to find some way to save us from the big explosion?" asked Gary.

"Very little time," said the Engineer. "Very little time. We are perilously close to the danger point. Shortly the two space-time frames of the two universes will start reacting upon one another, creating the lines of force and stress that will set up the energy fields in the inter-space."

"And you say there is another race that can tell us about this inter-space?"

"One other race I know of," said the Engineer. "There may be others, but I know only of this one. And it is hard to reach. Perhaps impossible to reach."

"Listen," said Gary, "it is our only chance. We might as well fail in reaching them as waiting here for the energy to come and wipe us out. Let a couple of us try. The others may find something else before it is too late. Caroline's hyperspheres might take care of the energy, but we can't be sure. And we have to be sure. The universe depends upon us being sure. We can't just shoot in the dark.

We have to know."

"And if we find out," said Herb, "those guys over in the other universe can come over and help us hold the Hellhounds off while we rig up the stuff we have to have."

"I'm afraid," said Kingsley, "we have to take the chance."

"Chance," said the Engineer. "It's a whole lot more than chance. The place I have in mind may not even exist."

"May not even exist?" asked Caroline and there was an edge of terror in her words.

"It is far away," said the Engineer. "Not far in space — perhaps even close to us in space. But far away in time."

"In time?" asked Tommy. "Some great civilization of the past?"

"No," said the Engineer. "A civilization of the future. A civilization which may never exist. One that may never come to be."

"How do you know about it, then?" flared Gary.

"I followed its world line," said the Engineer. "And yet not its actual world line, but the world line that was to come. I traced it into the realm of probability. I followed it ahead in time, saw it as it is not yet, as it may never be. I saw the shadow of its probability."

Gary's head reeled. What talk was this? Following of probable world lines. Tracing the course of an empire before it had occurred! Seeing a place that might not ever exist. Talking of sending someone to a place that might never be!

But Caroline was talking now, her cool voice smooth and calm, but with a trace of excitement tinging the tenor of her words.

"You mean you used a geodesic tracer to follow the world line into probability. That you established the fact that in some future time a certain world may exist under such conditions as you saw. That barring unforeseen circumstances it will exist as you saw it, but that you cannot be certain it ever will exist, for the world line you traced could not take into account that factor of accident which might destroy the world or divert it from the path you charted, the path that it logically would have to take."

"That is correct," said the Engineer. "Except for one thing. And that is that the world will exist as I saw it in some measure. For all probabilities must exist to some extent. But its existence might be so tenuous that we could never reach it… that for us, in hard, solid fact, it would have no real existence. In other words, we could not set foot upon it. For every real thing there are infinite probabilities, all existing, drawing some shadow of existence from the mere fact that they are probable or have been probable or will be probable. The stress and condition of circumstance selects one of these probabilities, makes it an actuality. But the others have an existence, just the same. An existence, perhaps, that we could not perceive."

"But you did see this shadow of probability?" rumbled Kingsley.

"Yes," said the Engineer, "I saw it very plainly. So plainly that I am tempted to believe it may be an actuality in time to come. But of that I cannot be sure. As I said, it may not exist, may never exist — at least to an extent where we could reach it — where it would have any bearing on our lives."

"There is a chance, though, that we could reach it?" asked Gary.

"There is a chance," said the Engineer.

"Then," said Herb, impatiently, "what are we waiting for?"

"But," said Gary, "if the universe is destroyed, if we should fail and the universe be destroyed, would that probability still be there? Wouldn't the fact that you saw it prove that we will find some way to save the universe?"

"It proves nothing," said the Engineer. "Even were the universe destroyed, the probability would still exist, for the world could have been. Destruction of the universe would be a factor of accident which would eliminate actuality and force all lines of probability to remain mere probability."

"You mean," breathed Caroline, "that we could go to a world which exists only as a probable world line and get information there to save the universe — that even after the universe is destroyed, if we fail and it is destroyed, the information which might have saved it still could be found, but too late, of course, to be of any use to us, on that probable world?"

"Yes," said the Engineer, "but there would be no one to find it then. The solution would be there, never used, at a time when it would be too late to use it. It is so hard to explain this thought as it should be explained."

"Maybe it's all right," said Herb, "but I crave action. When do we start for this place that might not be there when we get where we headed for?"

"I will show you," said the Engineer.

They followed him through a maze of laboratory rooms until they came to one which boasted only one piece of equipment, a huge polished bowl set in the floor, blazing with reflected light from the single lamp that shone in the ceiling above it.

The Engineer indicated the bowl. "Watch," he told them.

He walked to a board on the opposite wall and swiftly set up an equation on a calculating machine. The machine whirred and clicked and chuckled and the Engineer depressed a series of studs in the control board. The inside of the bowl clouded and seemed to take on motion, like a gigantic whirlpool of flowing nothingness. Faster and faster became the impression of motion.

Gary found himself unable to pull his eyes away from the wonder of the bowl — as if the very motion were hypnotic.

Then the swirl of motion began to take form, misty, tenuous form, as if they were viewing a strange solar system from a vast distance. The solar system faded from view as the vision in the bowl narrowed down to one planet. Other planets flowed out of the picture and the one grew larger and larger, a ball swinging slowly in space.

Then it filled all the bowl and Gary could see seas and cities and mountains and vast deserts. But the mountains were not high, more like weathered hills than mountains, and the seas were shallow. Deserts covered most of the spinning globe and the cities were in ruins.

There was something tantalizingly familiar about that spinning ball, something that struck a chord of memory, something about the solar system — as if he had seen it once before.

And then it struck him like an open hand across his mouth.

"The Earth!" he cried. "That is the Earth!"

"Yes," said the Engineer, "that is your planet, but you see it as it will be many millions of years from now. It is an old, old planet."

"Or as it may never be," whispered Caroline.

"You are right," said the Engineer. "Or as it may never be."

CHAPTER Eleven

TOMMY EVANS" ship rested on one of the lower roofs of the city, just outside the laboratories level. In a few minutes now it would be lifted and hurled through a warp of space and time that should place it upon the Earth they had seen in the swirling bowl… an Earth that was no more than a probability… an Earth that wouldn't exist for millions of years if it ever existed.

"Take good care of that ship," Tommy told Gary. Gary slapped him on the arm.

"I'll bring it back to you," he said.

"Well be waiting for you," Kingsley rumbled.

"Hell," moaned Herb, "I never get to have any fun. Here you and Caroline are going out there to the Earth and I got to stay behind."

"Listen," said Gary savagely, "there's no use in risking all our lives. Caroline's going because she may be the only one who could understand what the old Earth people can tell us, and I'm going because I play a better hand of poker. I beat you all, fair and square."

"I was a sucker," mourned Herb. "I should have known you'd have an ace in the hole. You always got an ace in the hole."

Tommy grinned.

"I got a lousy band," he said. "We should have played more than just one band."

"It was one way of deciding it," said Gary. "We all wanted to go, so we played one hand of poker. We couldn't waste time for more. I won. What more do you want?"

"You always win," Herb complained.

"Just how much chance have you got?" Tommy asked Caroline.

She shrugged.

"It works out on paper," she declared. "When we came here the Engineers had to distort time and space to get us here, but they distorted the two equally. Same amount of distortion for each. But here you have to distort time a whole lot more. Your factors are different. But we have a good chance of getting where we're going?"

"If it's there when you get there…" Herb began, but Kingsley growled at him and he stopped.

Caroline was talking swiftly to Kingsley.

"The Engineer understands the equation for the hyperspheres," she was saying. "Work with him. Try to set up several of them in our own space and see if it isn't possible to set up at least one outside the universe. Pinch it off the time-space warp and shove it out into the inter-space. We may be able to use it later on."

A blast of sound smote them and the solid masonry beneath their feet shivered to the impact of a bomb. For a single second the flashing blaze of atomic fury made the brilliant sunlight seem pale and dim.

"That one was close," said Tommy.

They were used to bombs now.

Gary craned his neck upward and saw the silvery flash of ships far overhead.

"The Engineers can't hold out much longer," Kingsley rumbled. "If we are going to do anything we have to do it pretty soon."

"There is the old space warp again," said Herb. He pointed upward and the others sighted out into space beyond his pointing finger.

There it was… the steady wheel of light, the faint spin of space in motion… they had seen back on Pluto.

The doorway to another world.

"I guess," said Caroline, "that means we have to go." Her voice caught on something that sounded like a sob.

She turned to Kingsley. "If we don't come back," she said, "try the hyperspheres anyhow. Try to absorb the energy in them. You won't have to control it long. Just long enough so the other universe explodes. Then we'll be safe."

She stepped through the air lock and Gary followed her. He turned back and looked at the three of them… great, rumbling Kingsley with his huge head thrust forward, staring through his helmet, with his metal-shod fists opening and closing; dapper, debonair Tommy Evans, the boy who had dreamed of flying to Alpha Centauri and had come to the edge of the universe instead; Herb, the dumpy little photographer who was eating out his heart because he couldn't go. Through eyes suddenly bleared with emotion, Gary waved at them and they waved back. And then he hurried into the ship, slammed down the lever that swung tight the air-lock valves.

In the control room he took off his helmet and dropped into the pilot's seat. He looked at Caroline. "Good to get the helmet off," he said.

She nodded, lifting her own off her head.

His fingers tapped out a firing pattern. He hesitated for a moment, his thumb poised over the firing lever.

"Listen, Caroline," be asked, "how much chance have we got?"

"We'll get there," she said.

"No," he snapped, "don't tell me that. Tell me the truth. Have we any chance at all?"

Her eyes met his and her mouth sobered into a thin, straight line.

"Yes, some," she said. "Not quite fifty-fifty. There are so many factors of error, so many factors of accident. Mathematics can't foresee them, can't take care of them, and mathematics are the only signposts that we have."

He laughed harshly.

"We're shooting at a target, don't you see?" she said. "A target millions of light-years away, and millions of years away as well, and you have to have a different set of co-ordinates for both the time and distance. The same set won't do for both. It's difficult."

He looked at her soberly. She said it was difficult. He could only faintly imagine how difficult it might be. Only someone who was a master at the mathematics of both time and space could even faintly understand — someone, say, who had thought for forty lifetimes.

"And even if we do hit the place," he said, "it may not be there."

Savagely he plunged his thumb against the lever. The rockets thundered and the ship was arcing up. Another pattern and another. They were plunging upward now under the full thrust of rocket power and still the ruined city was all around them, cragged, broken towers shattered by the blasting of atomic energy.

The soft swirl of light that marked the opening of the time-space tunnel lay between and beyond two blasted towers. Gary fired a short, corrective pattern to line the nose of the ship between the towers and then depressed a stud and fired a blast that drove them straight between the towers, up and over the city, straight for the whirl of light.

The ship arrowed swiftly up. The directional crossbars lined squarely upon the hub of spinning light.

"We're almost there," he said, his breath whistling between his teeth. "We'll know in just a minute."

The cold wind out of space was blowing on his face again; the short hairs on his neck were trying to rise into a ruff. The old challenge of the unknown. The old glory of crusading.

He snapped a look at Caroline. She was staring out of the vision plate, staring straight ahead, watching the rim of the wheel spin out until only the blackness of the hub remained.

She turned to him. "Oh, Gary!" she cried, and then the ship plunged into the hub and blackness as thick and heavy and as stifling as the ink of utter space flooded into the ship and seemed to dim the very radium lamps that burned within the room. He heard her voice coming out of the blackness that engulfed them. "Gary, I'm afraid!"

Then the black was gone and the ship rode in space again — in a star-sprinkled space that had, curiously, a warm and friendly look after the blackness of the tunnel.

"There it is!" Caroline cried, and Gary expelled his breath in a sigh of relief.

Below them swam a planet, a planet such as they had seen in the spinning bowl back in the city of the Engineers. A planet that was spotted with mighty mountains weathered down to meek and somber hills, a planet with shallow seas and a thinning atmosphere.

"The Earth," said Gary, looking at it.

Yes, the Earth. The birthplace of the human race, now an old and senile planet tottering to its doom, a planet that had outlived its usefulness. A planet that had mothered a great race of people — a race that always strove to reach what was just beyond, always reaching out to the not-as-yet, that met each challenge with a battle cry. A crusading people.

"It's really there," said Caroline. "It's real."

Gary glanced swiftly at the instruments. They were only a matter of five hundred miles above the surface and as yet there was no indication of atmosphere. Slowly the ship was dropping toward the planet, but still there was no sign of anything but space.

He whistled softly. Even the slightest presence of gases would be registered on the dials and so far the needles hadn't even flickered.

Earth must be old! Her atmosphere was swiftly being stripped from her to leave her bare bones naked to the cold of space. Space, cold and malignant, was creeping in on mankind's cradle.

He struck the first sign of atmosphere at slightly under two hundred miles.

The surface of the planet was lighted by a Sun which must have lost much of its energy, for the light seemed feeble compared to the way Gary remembered it. The Sun, behind them, was shielded from their vision.

Swiftly they dropped, closer and closer to the surface. Eagerly they scanned the land beneath them for some sign of cities, but they saw only one and that, the telescope revealed, was in utter ruins. Drifting sands were closing over its shattered columns and once mighty walls.

"It must have been a great city in its day," said Caroline softly. "I wonder what has happened to the people."

"Died off," said Gary, "or left for some other planet, maybe for some other sun."

The telescopic screen mirrored scene after scene of desolation. Vast deserts with shifting dunes and mile after mile of nothing but shimmering sand, without a trace of vegetation. Worn-down hills with boulder-strewn slopes and wind-twisted trees and shrubs making their last stand against the encroachment of a hostile environment.

Gary turned the ship toward the night side of the planet, and it was then they saw the Moon. Vast, filling almost a twelfth of the sky, it loomed over the horizon, a monstrous orange ball in full phase.

"How pretty!" gasped Caroline.

"Pretty and dangerous," said Gary.

It must be approaching Roche's limit, he thought. Falling out of the sky, year after year it had drawn closer to the Earth. When it reached a certain limit, it would be disrupted, torn to bits by the stresses of gravitation hauling and tugging at it. It would shatter into tiny fragments and those fragments would take up independent orbits around old Earth, giving her in miniature the rings of Saturn. But the same forces which would tear the Moon to bits would shake up the Earth, giving rise to volcanic action, world-shattering earthquakes, monstrous tidal waves. Mountains would be leveled, new continents raised. Earth's face would be changed once again, as it probably had been changed many times before. As it had been changed since early Man had known it, for search as he might, Gary could find no single recognizable feature, not a single sea or continent that seemed familiar.

He reflected on the changes that must have come to pass. The Earth must have slowed down. Probably a night now was almost a month long, and a day equally as long. Long scorching days and endless frigid nights. Century after century, with the moon tides braking the Earth's motion, with the addition of mass due to falling meteors, Earth had lost her energy. Increase of mass and loss of energy had slowed her spin, had shoved her farther and farther away from the Sun, pushing her out and into the frigidness of space. And now she was losing her atmosphere. Her gravity was weakening and the precious gases were slowly being stripped from her. Rock weathering also would have absorbed some of the oxygen.

"Look!" cried Caroline.

Aroused from his daydreaming, Gary saw a city straight ahead, looming on the horizon, a great city a-gleam with shining metal.

"The Engineer said we would find people here," Caroline whispered. "That must be where we'll find them."

The city was falling into ruin. Much of it, undoubtedly, already had been covered by the creeping desert that crawled toward it from every direction. Some of the buildings were falling apart, with great gaping holes staring like empty, hopeless eyes. But part of it, at least, was standing, and that part gave a breath-taking hint to the sort of city it had been when it soared in full pride of strength at its very prime.

Smoothly Gary brought the ship down toward the city, down toward a level patch of desert in front of the largest building yet standing. And the building, he saw, was a beauteous thing that almost defied description, a poem in grace and rhythm, seemingly too fragile for this weird and bitter world.

The ship plowed along the sand and stopped. Gary rose from the pilot's seat and reached for his helmet. "We're here," he announced.

"I didn't think we'd make it," Caroline confessed. "We took such an awful chance."

"But we did," he said gruffly. "And we have a job to do."

He set his helmet on his head and clamped it down. "I have a hunch we'll need these things," be said.

She put on her helmet and together they went out of the air lock.

Wind keened thinly over the empty deserts and the ruins, kicked up little puffs of sand that raced and danced weird rigadoons across the dunes and past the ship, up to the very doors of the shiny building that confronted them.

A slinking shape slunk across a dune and streaked swiftly for the shelter of a pile of fallen masonry — a little furtive shape that might have been a skulking dog or something else, almost anything at all.

A sense of desolation smote Gary and he felt an alien fear gripping at his soul.

He shivered. This wasn't the way a man should feel on his own home planet. This wasn't the way a man should feel on coming home from the very edge of everything.

But it wasn't the edge of everything, he reminded himself. It was just the edge of the universe. For the universe wasn't everything. Beyond it, stretching for uncountable, mind-shattering distances, were other universes. The universe was just a tiny unit of the whole, perhaps as tiny a unit of the whole as the Earth was a tiny unit of its universe. A grain of sand upon the beach, he thought — less than a grain of sand upon the beach.

And this might not be Earth, of course. It might be just the shadow of the Earth — a probability that gained strength and substance and a semblance of being because it missed being an actuality by a mere hair" s-breadth.

His mind whirled at the thought of it, at the astounding vista of possibilities that the thought brought up, the infinite number of possibilities that existed as shadows, each with a queer shadow existence of its very own, things that just missed being realities. Disappointed ghosts, he thought, wailing their way through the eternity of nonexistence.

Caroline was close beside him. Her voice came to him through the helmet phones, a tiny voice. "Gary, everything is so strange."

"Yes," he said. "Strange."

Cautiously they walked forward, toward the gaping door of the great metal building from whose turrets and spires and froth of superstructure the moonbeams splintered in a cold glitter of faery beauty.

Sand crunched and grated underfoot. The wind made shrill, keening noises and they could see the frozen frost crystals in the sand, moisture locked in the grip of deadly cold.

They reached the doorway and peered inside. The interior was dark and Gary unhooked the radium lamp from his belt. The lamp cut a broad beam of light down the mighty, high-arched hallway that led straight from the door toward the center of the building.

Gary caught his breath, seized with a nameless fear, the fear of the dark and the unfamiliar, of the ghostly and the ancient.

"We might as well go in," he said, fighting down the fear.

Their footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the darkness as the metal of their boots rang against the cold paving blocks.

Gary felt the weight of centuries pressing down upon him — the eyes of many nations and of many people watching furtively, jealous to guard old tradition from the invasion of an alien mind. For he and Caroline, he sensed, were aliens here, aliens in time if not in blood. He sensed it in the very architecture of the place, in the atmosphere of the long and silent hall, in the quiet that brooded on this dead or dying planet.

Suddenly they left the hallway and were striding into what seemed a vast chamber. Gary snapped the lamp to full power and explored the place. It was filled with furniture. Solid blocks of seat faced a rostrum, and all about the wall ran ornate benches.

At one time, now long gone, it might have been a council hall, a meeting place of the people to decide great issues. In this room, he told himself, history might have been written, the course of cosmic empire might have been shaped and the fate of stars decided.

But now there was no sign of life, just a brooding silence that seemed to whisper in a tongueless language of days and faces and problems long since wiped out by the march of years.

He looked about and shivered.

"I don't like this place," said Caroline.

A light suddenly flared and blazed as a door opened and thought-fingers reached out to them, thoughts that were kindly and definitely human:

"Do you seek someone here?"

CHAPTER Twelve

STARTLED, they swung around. A stooped old man stood in a tiny doorway that opened from the hall — an old man who, while he was human, seemed not quite human. His head was large and his chest bulged out grotesquely. He stood on trembly pipestem legs and his arms were alarmingly long and skinny.

A long white beard swept over his chest, but his great domed head was innocent of even a single hair. Across the space that separated them, Gary felt the force of piercing eyes that stared out from under shaggy eyebrows.

"We're looking for someone," said Gary, "to give us information."

"Come in," shrieked the thought of the old man. "Come in. Do you want me to catch my death of cold holding the door open for you?"

Gary grasped Caroline by the hand. "Come on," he said.

At a trot, they crossed the room, ducked through the door. They heard the door slam behind them and turned to look at the old man.

He stared back at them. "You are human beings," said his thoughts. "People of my own race. But from long ago."

"That's right," said Gary. "From many millions of years ago."

They sensed something that almost approached disbelief in the old man's thoughts.

"And you seek me?"

"We seek someone," said Gary. "Someone who may tell us something that may save the universe."

"Then it must be me," said the old man, "because I'm the only one left."

"The only one left!" cried Gary. "The last man?"

"That's right," said the old man, and he seemed almost cheerful about it. "There were others but they died. All men's life spans must sometime come to an end."

"But there are others," persisted Gary. "You can't be the last man left alive."

"There were others," said the old one, "but they left. They went to a far star. To a place prepared for them."

A coldness gripped Gary's heart.

"You mean they died?"

The old man's thoughts were querulous and impatient.

"No, they did not die. They went to a better place. To a place that has been prepared for them for many years. A place where they could not go until they were ready."

"But you?" asked Gary.

"I stayed because I wanted to," said the old man. "Myself and a few others. We could not forsake Earth. We elected to stay. Of those who stayed all the others have died and I am left alone."

Gary glanced around the room. It was tiny, but comfortable. A bed, a table, a few chairs, other furniture he did not recognize.

"You like my place?" asked the old man.

"Very much," said Gary.

"Perhaps," said the old man, "you would like to take off your helmets. It's warm in here and I keep the atmosphere a little denser than it is outside. Not necessary that I do so, of course, but it is more comfortable. The atmosphere is getting pretty thin and hard to breathe."

They unfastened their helmets and lifted them off. The air was sharp and tangy, the room was warm.

"That's better," said Caroline.

"Chairs?" asked the old man, pointing out a couple.

They sat and he lowered his old body into another.

"Well, well," he said, and his thoughts had a grandfatherly touch about them, "humans of an earlier age. Splendid physical specimen, the two of you. And fairly barbaric still — but the stuff is in you. You use your mouths to talk with and man hasn't talked with other than his thoughts for thousands and thousands of years. That in itself would set you pretty far back."

"Pretty far is right," said Gary. "We are the first humans who ever left the solar system."

"That is far," said the old man. "Far, far…"

His sharp eyes watched them closely. "You must have an interesting story," be suggested.

"We have," said Caroline and swiftly they told it to him, excitedly, first one and then the other talking, adding in details, explaining situations, laying before him the problems which they faced.

He listened intently, snapping questions now and then, his bright old eyes shining with the love of adventure, the wrinkles in his face taking on a kind benevolence as if they might be children, home from the first day of school, telling of all the new wonders they had met.

"So you came to me," he said. "You came trundling down a crazy timepath to seek me out. So that I could tell you the things you need to know."

Caroline nodded. "You can tell us, can't you?" she asked. "It means so much to us — so much to everyone."

"I wouldn't worry," said the old man. "If the universe had come to an end, I wouldn't be here. You couldn't have come to me."

"But maybe you aren't real," said Caroline. "Maybe you are just a shadow. A probability…"

The oldster nodded and combed his beard with gnarled fingers. The breath wheezed in his mighty chest.

"You are right," he agreed. "I may be only a shadow. This world of mine may be no more than a shadow-world. I sometimes wonder if there is any reality at all — if there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some gigantic intelligence has dreamed all these things we see and believe in and accept as real… if the giant intelligence may not have set mighty dream stages and peopled them with actors of his imagination. I wonder at times if all the universes may be nothing more than a shadow show. A company of shadowy actors moving on a shadow stage."

"But you can tell us," pleaded Caroline. "You will tell…"

His old eyes twinkled. "I will tell you, yes, and gladly. Your fifth dimension is eternity. It is everything and nothing… all rolled into one. It is a place where nothing has ever happened and yet, in a sense, where everything has happened. It is the beginning and the end of all things. In it there is no such thing as space or time or any other phenomena which we attribute to the four-dimensional continuum."

"I can't understand," said Caroline, lines of puzzlement twisting her face. "It seems so hopeless, so entirely hopeless. Can it be explained by mathematics?"

"Yes," said the old man, "but I'm afraid you wouldn't understand. The mathematics necessary to explain it weren't evolved until just a few thousand years ago."

He stroked the beard down smoothly over his pouter-pigeon chest.

"I do not wish to make you feel badly," he declared, "but I can't see how you would have the intelligence to grasp it. After all, you are a people from an earlier age, an almost barbaric age."

"Try her," growled Gary.

"All right," said the old man, but there was a patronizing tone to his thoughts.

Gary gained a confused impression of horrific equations, of bracketed symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure of meaning — a meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind instinctively shuddered away from it.

Then the thoughts were gone and Gary's mind was spinning with them, with the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic structure that had been in the mathematics.

He looked at Caroline and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of awe spread over her face.

"Why," she said, and hesitated slightly, "…. why, the equations cancel, represent both everything and nothing, both zero and the ultimate in everything imaginable."

Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind of their host.

"You understand," said the faltering thought. "You grasp the meaning perfectly."

"Didn't I tell you," said Gary. "Of course, she understands."

"

Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her thoughts aloud. "That means the energy would be timeless. It would have no time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost infinite. There'd be no stopping it, once it started."

"You are right," said the old man. "It would be raw, created energy from a region where four-dimensional laws are no longer valid. It would be timeless and formless."

"Formless," said Caroline. "Of course, it would be formless. It wouldn't be light, or heat, or matter, or motion, or any other form of energy such as we know. But it could be anything. It would be waiting to become something. It could crystallize into anything."

"Good Lord," said Gary, "how could you handle stuff like that? Your hyperspheres wouldn't handle it. It could mold space itself. It could annihilate time."

Caroline looked at him soberly.

"If I could create a fifth-dimensional trap," she said, "if I could trap it in the framework of the medium from which it came. Don't you see that such a framework would attract it, would gather it in and hold it. Like a battery holds energy. Like water seeking its own level and coming to rest."

"Sure," agreed Gary, "if you could create a fifth-dimensional trap. But you can't. It's eternity. The dimension of eternity. You can't go fooling around with eternity."

"Yes, she can," said the old man.

The two of them stared at him, not believing.

"Listen closely," said the oldster. "By rotating a circle through three dimensions you create a sphere. Rotate the sphere through four dimensions and you have a hypersphere. You already have created this. You have bent time and space around a mass to create a hypersphere, a miniature universe. Now all you have to do is rotate the hypersphere through five-dimensional space."

"But you'd have to be in five-dimensional space to do that," objected Gary.

"No, you wouldn't," contended the old man. "Scattered throughout three-dimensional space are ether eddies and time faults and space traps — call them anything you like. They are a common phenomena and they're nothing more, when you come right down to it, than isolated bits of four-dimensional space scattered around through three-dimensional space. The same thing would apply to a fifth dimension in the fourth dimension."

"But how," asked Caroline, "would one go about it? How would one rotate a hypersphere through the fifth dimension?"

Again Gary had that sense of confusion as the thoughts of the ancient one swept over him, thoughts that translated themselves into symbols and equations and brackets of mathematics that it seemed impossible any man could know.

"Gary," gasped Caroline, "have you a pencil and some paper?"

Gary fumbled in his pocket and found an old envelope and a stub of pencil. He handed them to her.

"Please repeat that very slowly," she said, smiling at the old man.

Gary watched in amazement as Caroline, slowly and carefully, jotted down the formulas, equations, symbols — carefully checking and going over them, checking and rechecking so there could be no mistake.

"It will take power," she said. "Tremendous power. I wonder if the Engineers can supply it."

"They have magnetic power," said Gary. "They ought to be able to give you all you need."

The old man's eyes were twinkling. "I am remembering the Hellhounds," he said. "The ones who would have the universe destroyed. I cannot seem to like them. It seems to me that something should be done about them."

"But what?" asked Gary. "They seem to be all-powerful. By the time we get back they may have battered the city into a mass of ruins."

The oldster nodded almost sleepily, but his eyes were glowing.

"We have had ones like that in our history," he said. "Ones who overrode the nations and imposed their will, standing in the way of progress. But always someone found something that would break them. Someone found a greater weapon or a greater strength and they went their way. Their names and works were dust and they were forgotten and the civilization that they sought to mold to their own selfish ends went on as if they had never been."

"But I don't see…" began Gary, and then suddenly he did — as clearly as light. He smote his knee and yelled his enthusiasm.

"Of course," he cried. "We have a weapon. A weapon that could wipe them out. The fifth-dimensional energy!"

"Certainly you have," said the old man.

"That would be barbarous," protested Caroline.

"Barbarous!" shouted Gary. "Isn't it barbarous to want to see the universe destroyed so the Hellhounds can go back to the beginning and take it over, control it, dominate it, take over galaxy after galaxy as a new universe is born? Shape it to their needs and desires. Hold in thrall every bit of life that develops on every cooling planet. Become the masters of the universe."

"We must hurry, then," said Caroline. "We must get back. Minutes count. We still may be able to save the Engineers and the universe, wipe out the Hellhounds."

She rose impatiently to her feet.

The old man protested. "You would go so soon?" he asked. "You would not stay and eat with me? Or tell me more about this place at the edge of the universe? Or let me tell you strange things that I know you would be glad to hear?"

Gary hesitated. "Maybe we could stay a while," he suggested.

"No," said Caroline. "We must go."

"Listen," said Gary to the old man, "why don't you come along with us? We'd be glad to have you. We could use you in the fight. There are things that you could tell us that would help."

The old man shook his bead. "I cannot go," he said. "For, you see, you are right. I may be only a shadow. A very substantial shadow, perhaps, but still just a shadow of probability. You can come to me, but I can't go back with you. If I left this planet I might puff into nothingness, revert to the non-existence of the thing that never was."

He hesitated. "But there's something," he said, "that makes me suspect I am not a shadow… that this is actuality, that the Earth will follow the course history tells me it has followed."

"What is that?" asked Gary.

"It is a thing," the old man said, "that I cannot tell you."

"Perhaps we can come back and see you again," said Caroline. "After all this trouble is over."

"No, my child," he said. "You will never come, for ours are lives that never should have met. You represent the beginning and I represent the end. And I am proud that the Earth's last man could have been of service to one of the beginners."

They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.

"I will walk with you to your ship," said the old man. "I do not walk a great deal now, for the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting old."

Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert, a shrill-voiced wind that played an eternal overture for the stage of desolation old Earth had become.

"I live with ghosts," said the old man as they walked toward the ship. "Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.

"Probably you wonder that I resemble a man so much. Perhaps you thought that men, in time to come, would evolve into specialized monstrosities — great, massive brains that had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of emotional reactions, unstable as the very wind, or foolish philosophers, or, worse yet, drab realists. But we became none of these things. We kept our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads."

They reached the ship and stood before the opened outer valve.

The old man waved a hand toward the mighty metal building.

"The proudest city Man ever built," he said. "A city whose fame spread to the far stars, to distant galaxies. A city that travelers told about in bated whispers. A place to which came the commerce of many solar systems, ships from across far inter-galactic space. But now it is crumbling into dust and ruin. Soon the desert will claim it and the wind will sing a death dirge for it and little, furry animals will burrow in its bones."

He turned to them and Gary saw a half-mystic light shining in his eyes.

"Thus it is with cities," he said, "but Man is different. Man marches on and on. He outgrows cities and builds others. He outgrows planets. He is creating a heritage, a mighty heritage that in time will make him the master of the universe.

"But there will be interludes of defeat. Times when it seems that all is lost — that Man will slip again to the primal savagery and ignorance. Times when the way seems too hard and the price too great to pay. But always there will be bugles in the sky and a challenge on the horizon and the bright beckoning of ideals far away. And Man will go ahead, to greater triumphs, always pushing back the frontiers, always moving up and outward."

The old man turned around and headed back toward the doorway in the building. He went without a word of farewell and his sandaled feet left a tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.

CHAPTER Thirteen

THE black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal space again. Normal, but not right.

Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline's quick gasp of surprise.

"There's something wrong!" she cried.

There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.

There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.

There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.

It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.

Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.

Something happened and here we are — in what strange corner of the universe?

"Something went wrong," Caroline said again. "Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps."

"More likely," Gary told her, "the fault lies in the human brain — or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, be might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm."

Caroline nodded at him. "The mistakes creep in so easy," she admitted. "Like mice… mice running in the mind."

"We can turn around and go back," said Gary, but even as he said it he knew that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be out of focus at the other end as well.

"But we can't," said Caroline.

"I know we can't," said Gary. "I spoke too quickly. Without thinking."

"We can't even try," said Caroline. "The wheel is gone." He saw that she was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out and they were here alone.

Here? he asked. And where was here?

There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there was no way of telling.

"Lost," said Caroline. "Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you remember, and covered them with leaves."

The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the controls again.

"We'll look it over," he said.

"There may be someone there," said Caroline.

Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Some thing.

The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.

The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.

Finally Gary shook his head. "There's nothing here," he said. "We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other."

They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet's surface were vegetation of a sort.

"Toadstools," said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. "Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it's not asparagus."

"Like something out of a goblin book," said Gary.

Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn't go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.

They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits — slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.

"Let's go out," said Gary, gruffly, "and have a look around."

"Gary, you sound as if you might be scared."

"I am," he admitted. "Pink with purple spots."

The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.

There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.

The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.

On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.

"You'd expect to see a goblin," Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.

All at once the goblin was there.

He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.

"Good Lord!" said Gary. "I know that fellow!"

The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled like an excited turkey.

"He's the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference," said Gary. "You remember, when they got all the aliens together — all those that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him — or one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did now, and I thought that…

"There's another one," said Caroline.

The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed feet swinging over the edge.

Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike terror and revulsion into one's soul.

Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until they stood with their backs against it.

Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.

"Let's go away," said Caroline. "Let's get in the ship and go."

"Wait," counseled Gary. "Let us wait a while. We can always go. These things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the Engineers called in."

He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.

"Hello," he called.

They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him out of slitted eyes.

"We are friends," said Gary. They didn't move a muscle.

Gary held up his empty hands, palms outward in the human gesture of peace.

"We are friends," he said.

The silence was on the world again — the dreadful, empty silence. The goblins were gone.

Slowly Gary came back to the ship.

"It doesn't work," he said. "I had no reason to believe it would."

"All things," said Caroline, "would not necessarily communicate by sound. That's just one way of making yourself understood. There would be many other ways. These things make sounds, but that doesn't mean they would have to talk with sound. They may have no auditory apparatus. They may not even know that they make sounds, might not know what sound is."

"They're back again," said Gary. "You try this time. Try thinking at them. Pick out one of them and concentrate on him."

A minute passed, a minute of utter silence.

"It's funny," said Caroline. "I couldn't reach them at all. There wasn't even a flicker of response. But I had the feeling that they knew and that they rejected what I tried to tell them. They closed their minds and would not listen."

"They don't talk," said Gary. "And they either can't or won't telepath. What's next?"

"Sign language," Caroline said. "Pictures after that. Pantomime."

But it did no good. The goblins watched with interest when Gary tried sign language. They crept close to watch as he drew diagrams in the sandy soil. And they squealed and chortled when he tried pantomime. But that they understood any of it they gave not a single sign.

Gary came back to the ship.

"They're intelligent," he said. "They have to be, otherwise how would they ever have been brought to the rim of the universe by the Engineers. Something like that takes understanding, a mechanical aptitude, a penchant for higher mathematics."

He gestured in disgust. "And yet," he said, "they do not understand even the most elementary symbolism."

"These ones may not be trained," said Caroline. "There may be others here who are. There may be an elite, an intelligentsia. These may be the peasants and the serfs."

Gary said wearily: "Let's get out of here. Make a circuit or two of the planet. Watch closely for some sign of development, some evidence of culture."

Caroline nodded. "We could have missed it before."

They went into the ship and closed the port behind them. Through the vision plates they saw the goblins, a large crowd of them by now, lined up at the edge of the mushroom forest, staring at the ship.

Gary lowered himself into the pilot's chair, reached out for the warming knob and twisted it over. Nothing happened. He twisted it back and turned it on again. Silence swam within the ship — no sound of warming jets.

Lord, thought Gary, what a place to get stuck.

Outside the ship, equipped with a kit of tools, he crawled into the take-off tubes, took off the plates that housed the warming assembly and pried into their innards.

An hour later he had finished. He crawled out, grimed and smudged with carbon.

"Nothing wrong," he told Caroline. "No reason why they shouldn't work."

He tried again and they didn't work.

He checked the feed line and the wiring. He ripped off the control panel and went over it, wire by wire, relay by relay, tube by tube. There was nothing wrong. But still it wouldn't work.

"The goblins," Caroline guessed.

He agreed. "It must be the goblins. There is nothing else to think."

But how, he asked himself, could such simple-minded things turn an almost foolproof, letter-perfect spaceship into a heap of junk?

CHAPTER Fourteen

The next morning the Hellhounds came, a small ship quartering down out of the dawn light of the great red sun. It came down on a long smooth slant and landed not more than half a mile away, plowing a swath through the mushroom forest as it grounded. There was no mistaking its identity, for its lines were distinctive and the insignia upon its bow was the insignia that both Caroline and Gary had seen many times on the ships that screamed down to lay bombs upon the mighty city of the Engineers.

"And us," said Gary, "with nothing but hand guns in the locker and a ship that we can't lift."

He saw the stricken look on Caroline's face and tried to make amends. "Maybe they won't know who we are," he said. "Maybe they…"

"Don't let's fool ourselves," Caroline told him. "They know who we are, all right. More than likely we're the reason that they're here. Maybe they…"

She hesitated and Gary asked, "Maybe they what?"

"I was thinking," she said, "that they might have twisted the tunnel. The mathematics might have been all right. Somebody might have brought us here. It might have been the Hellhounds who trapped us here, knowing what we had, knowing the knowledge that we carried. They might have brought us here and now they've come to finish up the job."

"They were not the ones who brought you here," said a voice out of nowhere. "You were brought here but they were not the ones who brought you. They were brought themselves."

Gary whirled around. "Who said that?" he shouted.

"You cannot find me," said the voice, still talking out of nowhere. "Don't waste your time in trying to find me. I brought you here and I brought the others here and only the one of you may leave… the humans or the Hellhounds."

"I don't understand," said Gary. "You are mad…"

"You are enemies, you and the Hellhounds," said the voice. "You are equal in number and in strength of arms. There are two of you and there are two of them. You have small weapons only and so have they. It will be a fair encounter."

Fantastic, thought Gary. A situation jerked raw from a latter-day Alice in Wonderland. A nightmare twisted out of the strange and grotesque alienness of this splotched planet. A planet filed with goblins and with nightmares — a fairyland turned sour.

"You want us to fight?" he asked. "Fight the Hellhounds? A sort of — well, you might call it a duel?"

"That is exactly it," the voice told him.

"But what good will it do?"

"You are enemies, aren't you, human?"

"Why, yes, we are," said Gary, "but anything that we do here won't affect the war one way or the other."

"You will fight," said the voice. "You are two and they are two and…"

"But one of us is a woman," protested Gary. "Female humans do not engage in duels."

The voice did not answer, but Gary sensed frustration in a mind — perhaps a presence rather than a mind — that was near to them.

He pressed his advantage. "You say that our arms are equal, that they have small arms only and so have we. But you can't be sure that the arms are equal. Their arms, even if they are no bigger than ours, may be more powerful. Size is not a measure for power. Or their arms may be equal, but the Hellhounds may be better versed in their use."

"They are small weapons," said the voice. "They are…"

"You want this to be a fair fight, don't you?"

"Why, yes," said the voice. "Yes, of course, I do. That is the purpose of it, that everything be even, so that in all fairness the two species may test their true and proper fitness for survival."

"But, you see," said Gary, "you can't be sure it's even. You never can be sure."

"Yes, I can," the voice told him and there was an insane ring of triumph in it. "I can make sure that it will be even. You will fight without weapons. None of you will have weapons. Just bare hands and teeth or whatever else you may have."

"Without…"

"That's it. Neither of you will have weapons."

"But they have guns," said Gary.

"Their guns won't work," the voice said. "And yours won't either. Your ship won't work and your guns won't work and you will have to fight."

Terrible laughter came from the voice, a gleeful laughter that verged on hysteria. Then the laughter ceased and they knew that they were alone, that the mind — or the presence — with the voice had withdrawn from them, that it had gone elsewhere. But that it still was watching.

"Gary," Caroline said softly.

"Yes," said Gary.

"That voice was insane," she said. "You caught it, didn't you. The overtones in it."

He nodded. "Delusion of grandeur. Playing at God. And the worst of it is, he can make it stick. We've stumbled into his yard. There isn't a thing we can do about it."

Across the mushroom forest, the entrance port of the Hellhound ship was swinging open. From it came two beings, tall and waddling things that glimmered in the feeble light of the great red sun.

"Reptilian," said Caroline and there was more disgust than horror in her voice.

The Hellhounds stepped down from the ship and stood uncertainly, their snouted faces turning toward the Earth ship, then swinging from side to side to take in the country.

"Caroline," said Gary, "I'll stay here and watch. You go in and get the guns. They are in the locker."

"They won't work," said Caroline.

"I want to be sure," Gary told her.

He heard her turn from his side and go, climbing up the ladder into the entrance lock.

The Hellhounds still stayed near their ship. They're confused, too, Gary told himself. They don't understand it any more than we do. They're nervous, trying to figure out just what to do.

But they wouldn't stay that way long, he knew.

Shadows flitted in the mushroom forest. Some of the natives, perhaps, sneaking around, keeping under cover, waiting to see what happened.

Caroline spoke from the lock. "The guns aren't any good. They won't work. Just like the voice said."

He nodded, still watching the Hellhounds. She came down the steps and stood beside him.

"We haven't got a chance against them," she said. "They are brutes, strong. They are trained for war. Killing is their business."

The Hellhounds were walking out from their ship, heading cautiously and slowly toward the Earth ship.

"Not too sure of themselves yet," said Gary. "Probably we don't look too formidable to them, but they aren't taking any chances… not yet. In a little while they'll figure that we're comparatively harmless and they'll make their play."

The Hellhounds were dog-trotting now, their scaly bodies glistening redly in the sun, their blunt feet lifting little puffs of dust as they ran along.

"What are we going to do, Gary?" Caroline asked.

"Fort up," said Gary. "Fort up and do some thinking. We can't lick these things, hand to hand and rough and tumble. It would be like trying to wrestle a combined alligator and grizzly bear."

"Fort up? You mean the ship."

Gary nodded. "We got to buy us some time. We have to get a thing or two figured out. As it is, we're caught flatfooted."

"What if they find a way of getting at us, even in the ship."

Gary shrugged. "That's a chance we take."

The Hellhounds separated, spreading out to left and right, angling out to come at the ship from two directions.

"You better get into the lock," said Gary. "Grab hold of the closing lever and be ready. When I come, I may have to move fast. There's no telling what these gents are fixing to uncork."

But even as he spoke, the two reptiles charged, angling in at a burst of speed that almost made them blur, a whirlwind of dust spiraling up behind them.

"In we go!" yelled Gary.

He heard Caroline's feet beating a tattoo on the steps.

For a split second he stood there, still facing the charging Hellhounds, then whirled and leaped up the steps, catapulting himself into the lock. He saw Caroline swinging the lever down. The ladder ran up into its seat and the lock slammed home. Through its closing edge he caught sight of the beasts as they swung about in a skidding turn, cheated of their kill.

Gary wiped his forehead. "Close thing," he said. "We almost waited too long. I had no idea they could move that fast."

Caroline nodded. "They figured that we wouldn't. They saw a chance to catch us at the very start. Remember how they waddled. That was to make us think that they couldn't move too fast."

The voice said to them: "This is no way to fight."

"It's common sense," said Gary. "Common sense and good strategy."

"What is strategy?"

"Fooling the enemy," said Gary. "Working things so that you get an advantage over him."

"He'll be waiting for you when you come out. And you'll have to come out after a while."

"We rest and take it easy," said Gary, "while he tears up the ground outside and wears himself to a frazzle. And we do some thinking."

"It's a lousy way to fight," the voice insisted.

"Look," said Gary. "Who's doing the fighting here?

You or us."

"You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight."

They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.

Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.

Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hands.

"We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No nothing. This ship is deader than a doornail. It's lucky the lock worked manually or we'd been goners before we even started."

Gary nodded in agreement. "That voice bothers me the most," he said. "It has power, a strange sort of power. It can stop a spaceship dead in its tracks. It can fix guns so that they won't work. It can blanket out electricity; Lord knows what else it can do."

"It can reach into the unknown of space and time," said Caroline. "Into a place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here."

"It's irresponsible," said Gary. "Back on Earth we'd call it insanity but what you and I would term insanity may be normal here."

"There's no yardstick," said Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No way in which one can establish a norm for correct behavior or a correct mentality. Maybe the voice is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of arriving at that purpose we do not understand and for that we call him crazy. Every race must be different, must think differently… arrive at the same conclusion and the same result, perhaps, but arrive at them differently. You remember all those beings that came to confer with the Engineers. All of them were capable, perhaps more capable than we. Independently they might have been able to arrive at the same solution as we and perhaps much more easily and more effectively… and yet the Engineers sent them home again, because the Engineers could not work with them. Not because they were not capable, but because they thought so differently, because their mental processes ran at such divergent tangents that there was no basis for co-operation."

"And yet we thought like the Engineers," said Gary.

"Enough like them, at any rate, that we could work together. I wonder why that is."

Caroline wrinkled her forehead. "Gary, you are certain these goblin things out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?"

"I would swear it," Gary told her. "I got a good look at the one that was there. It sort of… well, burned itself into my mind. I'll never quite forget it."

"And the voice," said Caroline. "I wonder if the voice has anything to do with the goblins."

"The goblins," said the voice, "are my pets. Like the dogs and cats you keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness."

It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.

"But," protested Caroline, "one of the goblins came to the city of the Engineers."

The voice chuckled at them. "Of course, human thing, of course. As my representative, of course. For I must have representatives, don't you see. In a material world, I must be fronted for by something that can be seen, that can be perceived. I could not very well go to a meeting of that great importance as a disembodied voice, as a thought stalking the corridors of that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him."

"What are you, voice?" Caroline asked. "Tell us what you are."

"I still don't think," said the voice, "that what you are doing is a good way to fight a duel. I think you're making a great mistake."

"What makes you think so, Butch?" asked Gary.

"Because," the voice said, "the Hellhounds are building a fire under your ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out."

Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their mind.

"No power," said Caroline, weakly.

"The heat absorption units," Gary cried.

"No power," said Caroline. "The absorption cells won't work."

Gary glanced toward the forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were curling up outside the glass.

"The mushrooms burn well," the voice told them, "when they get old and dry. There are lots of old and dry mushrooms around. They'll have no trouble in keeping up the fire."

"Like smoking out a rabbit," said Gary, bitterly.

"You asked for it," the voice declared.

"Get out of here!" yelled Gary. "Get out of here and leave us alone, can't you."

They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.

Like a bad dream, Gary thought. Like a Wonderland adventure, with he and Caroline the poor bewildered Alice stumbling through a world of vast incredibility.

Listening, they could hear the crackling of the fire. Now the smoke was a dense cloud through the forward ports.

How do you fight when you have no weapon? How do you get out of a spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you think up a smart dodge when your time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?

What are weapons?

How did they start?

What is the basic of a weapon?

"Caroline," Gary asked, "what would you say a weapon was?"

"Why," she told him, "that seems simple to me. An extension of your fist. An extension of your power to hurt, of your ability to kill. Men fought first with tooth and nail and fist and then with stones and clubs. The stones and clubs were extensions of man's fist, an extension of his muscles and his hate or need."

Stones and clubs, he thought. And then a spear. And, after that, a bow,

A bow!

He swung on his heel, walked rapidly back along the ship, jerked open the door to the supply cabinet. Rummaging inside it, he found the things he wanted.

He brought them out, a fistful of wooden flagpoles, each with small flags fastened to one end, the other end steel-tipped for easy sticking in the ground.

"Explorer flags," he explained to Caroline. "You go out on an alien planet and you want to be sure that you can find your way back to the ship. You plant these things at intervals and then follow them back to the ship, picking them up as you go along. No chance of getting lost."

"But…" said Caroline.

"Evans figured he was going to use this ship to go to Alpha Centauri, He took some of these things along, just in case."

He placed the steel-shod tip of one of the poles on the floor, threw his weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.

"A bow?" asked Caroline.

He nodded. "Not too good a one. Not too accurate. Maybe not too strong. When I was a kid I used to go out into the woods and whack me off a sapling. No curve, no nothing. Bigger at one end than the other. But it worked as a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for arrows. Killed one of my mother's chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper."

"It's getting warm in here," Caroline told him. "We can't waste any time."

He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.

"Hunt up some cord," he told her. "Any kind of cord. If it's not strong enough, we'll twist several strands together."

Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.

From another stick he split long wands off the straight-grained wood, fashioning them into arrows. There'd be no time for feathering… in fact, there were no feathers in the ship, but that was a refinement that would not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.

But he did have arrowheads. With snippers, he clipped off the sharp tips with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow. Testing them with a finger, he was satisfied. They were sharp enough… if he could get some power behind them.

"Gary," said Caroline, and her voice was almost a whimper.

He swung around.

"There's no cord, Gary. I've looked everywhere."

No cord!

"Everywhere?" he asked.

She nodded. "There isn't any. I looked everywhere."

Clothing, he thought, desperately. Strips torn from their clothing. But that would be worse than useless. It would unravel, come apart between his fingers when he needed it the most. Leather? Leather was too stiff to start with, and it would stretch. Wire? Too stiff and no zip to it.

He let the bow-stick fall from his hands, reached up to wipe his face.

"It's getting hot in here," he said.

He twisted around and stared at the forward visors. The smoke was a cloud and there was a ruddy reflection in it, the reflection of the fire that blazed around the ship.

How much longer, he wondered. How much longer before they'd have to open the port and make a dash for it, knowing even as they did that it was a hopeless thing to do, for the Hellhounds would be waiting just outside the port.

The shell of the spaceship crawled with a dull, dead heat, the kind of heat that comes up off a dusty road on a still, hot day in August.

And soon, he knew, it would be a live heat, not a dead heat any longer, but a blasting furnace heat that would pour from every angle of the steel around them, that would shrivel the leather of their shoes and scorch the clothing that they wore. But long before the leather of their shoes shriveled and curled, they would have to make their break, a hopeless dash for freedom that could end in nothing but death at the hands of the things that waited by the port.

Like an oven, like two rabbits roasting in an oven.

We must turn, thought Gary. We must keep turning about so that we will roast evenly on all sides.

"Gary!" cried Caroline.

He swung around.

"Hair?" she asked. "I just thought of it. Would hair make you a bowstring?"

He gasped at the thought. "Hair," he shouted. "Human hair! Why, of course… it's the best material there is."

Caroline's hands were busy with her braids. "It's long," she said. "I was proud of it and I let it grow."

"It'll have to be braided," said Gary. "Twisted into a cord."

"Your knife," she said, and he handed it over.

The knife flashed close to her head and one of the braided strands dangled in her hand.

"We'll have to work fast," said Gary. "We haven't got much time."

The air was dry and hard to breath. It burned one's lungs and dried out the tissues of the mouth. When he bent over and placed a hand against the steel plates of the ship's deck, the steel was warm, like the pavement on a summer's day.

"You'll have to help," said Gary. "We have to be fast and sure. We can't afford to bungle. We won't have a second chance."

"Tell me what to do," she said.

Fifteen minutes later, he nodded at her.

"Open the port," he said, "and when you do stand back against the wall. I'll need all the arm room I can get."

He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.

Not much of a bow, he thought. Nothing you would want to try against a willow at three hundred paces. But these things outside aren't willow wands. It will last for a shot or two… I hope it lasts for a shot or two.

The port clanged open as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.

He brought the bow up and the wood bent with the sudden surge of hate and triumph that coursed in his being… the hate and fear of fire, the hate of things that wait to do a man to death, the fury of a human being backed into a corner by a thing that is not human.

The arrow made a whispering sound and was a silver streak that spurted through the smoke. The bow bent again and there was another whisper, the whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.

On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.

It was just like shooting rabbits.

CHAPTER Fifteen

"VERY ingenious," said the voice. "You won fair and square. You did much better than I thought you would."

"And now," said Caroline, "you will send us back again. Back to the city of the Engineers."

"Why, certainly," said the voice. "Why, of course, I will. But first, I have to clean up the place. The bodies, first of all. Cadavers are such unsightly things."

Fire puffed briefly and the bodies of the two Hellhounds were gone. A tiny puff of yellow smoke hung over where they had been and a tiny flurry of ashes eddied in the air.

"I asked you once before," said Caroline, "and you didn't tell me. What are you? We looked for signs of culture and…"

"You are befuddled, young human," the voice told her. "You seek for childish things. You looked for cities and there are no cities. You looked for roads and ships and farms and there are none of these. You expected to find a civilization and there is no civilization such as you would recognize."

"You are right," said Gary. "There are none of those."

"I have no city," said the voice, "because I need no city. Although I could build a city at a second's notice. The mushroom forests are the only farms I need to feed my little pets. I need no roads and ships because I can go anywhere I wish without the aid of them."

"You mean you can go in your mind," said Caroline.

"In my mind," the voice said. "I go wherever I may wish, in either time or space, and I am there. I do not merely imagine that I am there; I am really there. Long ago my race forsook machines, knowing that in its mental ability, within the depth of its collective mind it had more potentiality than it could ever get from a clattering piece of mechanism. So the race built minds instead of machines. Minds, I say. But mind, one mind, a single mind, is the better explanation. I am that mind today. A single racial mind.

"I used that mind to pluck you from the space-time tunnel at the very moment you were about to emerge above the city of the Engineers. I used that mind to bring the Hellhounds here. That mind grounded your ship and blanketed your guns and that mind could kill you in a moment if I thought the thought."

"But you," said Caroline. "The personal pronoun that you use. The «I» you speak of. What is that?"

"I am the mind," the voice told them, "and the mind is me. I am the race. I have been the race for many million years."

"And you play God," said Caroline. "You bring lesser things together, into the arena of this world, and you make them fight while you sit and chuckle…"

"Why, of course," the voice said. "Because, you see, I'm crazy. I'm really, at times, quite violently insane."

"Insane!"

"Why, certainly," the voice told them. "It's what would be bound to happen. You can't perfect a mind, a vast communal mind, a mighty racial mind to the point that my mind is perfected and expect it to keep a perfect balance as a good watch would keep perfect time. But the mind's behavior varies. Sometimes," the voice said, quite confidentially, "I'm battier than a bedbug."

"And how are you now?" asked Gary.

"Why, now," the voice said, "as funny as it seems, I'm quite rational. I'm very much myself."

"Then how about fixing it up so that we can get back?"

"Right away," said the voice, very businesslike. "I'll just clean up a thing or two. Don't like the residue of my irrationality cluttering up the planet. That Hellhound ship over there…."

But instead of the Hellhound ship, it was the Earth ship that went skyward in a terrific gout of flame that sent a wash of heat across the barren land.

"Hey, there…" yelled Gary and then stood stock still as the enormity of what had happened crackled in his mind.

"Tsk, tsk," said the voice. "How very stupid of me. How could I have done a thing like that! Now I'll never be able to send you home again."

His cackling laughter filled the sky and beat like a mighty drum.

"The Hellhound ship!" yelled Gary. "Run… run…"

But even as they whirled to race toward it, it was gone in a blaze of fire, followed by a trail of smoke that hung briefly above the scorched piece of the ground where the ship had lain.

"You couldn't have operated it, anyhow," said the voice. "It wouldn't have done you a single bit of good."

He laughed again and the laughter trailed off into distance, like a retreating thunderstorm.

Gary and Caroline stood side by side and looked at the emptiness of the bog and mushroom forest. A goblin ducked out of a clump of mushrooms and hooted at them, then dashed back in again.

"What do we do?" asked Caroline and it was a question that went echoing down the long corridor of improbability, a question for which there was, at the moment, no satisfactory answer.

Swiftly, Gary made an inventory:

The clothes they stood in.

A few matches in his pocket.

A bow and some arrows, but the bow didn't count for much.

And that was all. There was nothing else.

"More pets," said Caroline, bitterly.

"What's that?" asked Gary, not sure he heard her right.

"Let it go," she said. "Forget I ever said it."

"There's nothing to get hold of," Gary said. "Nothing you can touch. The voice… the voice is nothing."

"It's a horrible thing," said Caroline. "Don't you see, Gary, what a horrible thing it is. The tag end of some great race. Think of it. Millions of years, millions of years to build up a mighty mental civilization. Not a mechanical civilization, not a materialistic culture, but a mental civilization. A striving toward understanding rather than toward doing.

"And now it's a senile thing, an insane thing that has gone back to its second childhood, but its power is too great for a child to wield and it is dangerous… dangerous…"

Gary nodded. "It could masquerade as anything it pleased. It sent one of the goblins to the city of the Engineers and the Engineers thought the goblin was the mentality that they had contacted. But it wasn't. It was a simple, foolish puppet, but the voice moved it as it wished, talked through its flimsy mind."

"The Engineers must have sensed the inherent insanity of that mind," said Caroline. "They may not have been sure, but they must, at least, have sensed it, for they sent it away with all the rest of them. The voice could have worked with us. You notice how it talks the way a human talks… that's because it picked our minds, because it found the thoughts and words we used, because it was able to know everything we know."

"It could see everything in the universe," said Gary. "It could know everything that there was to know."

"Perhaps it did," Caroline told him. "Perhaps the weight of the knowledge was too great. When you overload an engine, the engine will burn out. What would happen if you should overload a mind, even a great communal mind such as we have here?"

"Insanity, maybe," said Gary. "Lord, I don't know. It's like nothing I ever ran across before."

Caroline moved close to Gary.

"We're alone, Gary," she said. "The human race stands all alone. No other race has the balance that we have. Other races may be as great, but they do not have the balance. Look at the Engineers. Materialistic, mechanical to a point where they cannot think except along mechanistic lines. And the voice. It goes on the opposite tangent. No mechanics at all, just mentality. An overwhelming and an awful mentality. And the Hellhounds. Savage killers. Bending every knowledge to the business of killing. Egomaniacs who would destroy the universe to achieve their own supremacy."

They stood silent, side by side. The great red sun was nearing the western horizon. The goblins scuttered through the mushrooms, chirping and hooting. A disgusting thing, a couple of feet long, crawled out of the slimy waters of the bog, reared itself and stared at them, then lumbered around and slid into the water once again.

"I'll start a fire," said Gary. "Night will be coming soon. We'll have to keep the fire going once we get it started.

I only have a few matches."

"Maybe we can eat the mushrooms," said Caroline. "Some of them may be poisonous," Gary told her. "We'll have to watch the goblins, eat what they eat. No absolute guarantee, of course, that what they eat wouldn't poison us, but it's the only way we have of knowing. We'll eat just a little at a time, only one of us eating…"

"The goblins! Do you think they will bother us?"

"Not likely," Gary told her, but he wasn't as confident as he made it sound.

They gathered a stack of the dried stems of the mushrooms and corded them against the night. Gary, carefully shielding the flame with a protecting hand, struck a match and started a small fire.

The sun had set and the stars were coming out in the hazy darkness of the sky… but stars they did not know.

They crouched by the fire, more for the companionship of its flames than for the heat it gave, and watched the stars grow brighter, listening to the chattering of the busy goblins in the mushrooms behind them.

"We'll need water," said Caroline.

Gary nodded. "We'll try filtering it. Lots of sand. Sand is a good filter."

"You know," said Caroline, "I can't feel that this has happened to us. I keep thinking, pretty soon we'll wake up and it will be all right. It hasn't really happened. It…"

"Gary…" she gasped.

He jerked upright at the alarm in her tone.

Her hands were at her head, feeling of the braids of hair.

"It's there again!" she whispered. "The braid I cut off to make a bowstring. I cut it off and it was gone and it is there again!"

"Well, I'll be…" But he did not finish the sentence. For there, not more than a hundred feet away, was the ship… Tommy Evans" ship, the ship that the voice had destroyed in a single flash of fire. It sat on the sand sedately, with light pouring from its ports, with the shine of starlight on its plates.

"Caroline!" he shouted. "The ship! The ship!"

"Hurry," said the voice to them. "Hurry, before I change my mind. Hurry, before I go insane again."

Gary reached down a hand and pulled Caroline to her feet.

"Come on," he shouted.

"Think of me as kindly as you can," said the voice. "Think of me as an old man, an old, old man, who is not quite the man he was… not quite the man he was."

They ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the ship. "Hurry, hurry," the voice shouted at them. "I cannot trust myself."

"Look!" cried Caroline. "Look, in the sky!"

The wheel of light was there, the slow, lazy wheel of light they first had seen on Pluto… the entrance to the space-time tunnel.

"I gave you back the ship," said the voice. "I gave you back the strand of hair. Think kindly of me please… think kindly…"

They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind them.

At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.

He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel that shimmered above them.

They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city, its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.

Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the tears that welled in Caroline's eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

"The poor thing," she said. "That poor old man back there."

CHAPTER Sixteen

THE city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately, battling valiantly to hold off the hordes of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant of the Engineer battle fleet still stood between it and complete destruction.

The proud towers were blasted into dust and the roadways and parks were sifted with the white cloud of destruction, the powdered masonry smashed and pulverized to drifting fragments by the disintegrator rays and the atomic bombs. Twisted bits of wreckage littered the chaotic wastes of shattered stone — wreckage of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.

Gary glanced skyward anxiously. "I hope they can hold them off," he said, "long enough for the energy to build up."

Caroline straightened from the bank of instruments mounted upon the roof outside the laboratory.

"It's building up fast," she said. "I'm almost afraid. It might get out of control, you know. But we have to have enough energy to start with. If the first stroke doesn't utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won't have a second chance."

Gary's mind ran over the hectic days of work, the mad scramble against time. He remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy had gone out to the edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim of space into a hump, curving the time-space continuum into a hypersphere that finally closed and divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.

It had taken power to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out of the magnetic power transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at hand for the making of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to «skin» a hypersphere, to turn it through a theoretical fifth dimension until it was of the stuff that the inter-space was made of — a place where time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a mystery region that was astonishingly easy to maneuver through space once it was created. It wasn't a sphere or a hypersphere — it was a strange dimension that apparently did not lend itself to measurement, or to definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.

But whatever it was, it hung there above the city, although there was no clue to its existence. It couldn't be seen or sensed — just something that had been created from equations supplied by the last man living out his final days on a dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried an irate letter from a creditor back on Earth who felt that be should have long since been paid. "Too long overdue," the letter had said. Gary grinned, Back on Earth the creditor undoubtedly still was sending him letters pointing out that the account was becoming longer overdue with the passing of each month.

Outside the universe that tiny, created hypersphere was bumping along, creating frictional stress, creating a condition for the creation of the mysterious energy of eternity — an energy that even now was pouring into the universe and being absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised above the city.

A new, raw energy from a region that had no time, an energy that was at once timeless and formless, but an energy that was capable of being crystallized into any form.

Kingsley was standing beside Gary, his great head bent, staring upward. "An energy field," he said, "and what energy! Like a battery, storing up that energy from interspace. I hope it does what Caroline thinks it will."

"Don't worry," said Gary. "You saw the mathematics that she brought back."

"Sure, I saw the mathematics," Kingsley said, "but I couldn't understand them."

He shook his head inside the helmet.

"What's the universe coming to?" he asked.

Caroline spoke quietly to the Engineer.

"There's plenty of energy now," she said. "You may call them down."

The Engineer, headphones clamped upon his skull, apparently was giving orders to the Engineer fleet, but the Earthlings couldn't catch his thoughts.

"Watch now," chirped Herb. "This is going to be a sight worth seeing."

High above the city a ship dropped, flashing downward, like a silver bullet. Another dropped and still another, until the entire Engineer fleet, blackened and ripped and decimated, was in full retreat, flashing back toward the ruined city. And in their wake came the triumphant Hellhounds, a victorious pack in full cry, determined to wipe out the last trace of a hated civilization.

The Engineer had snatched the headphones off, was racing to the set of controls. Gary, glancing from the battle scene above, saw his metal fingers reach out and manipulate controls, saw Caroline pick up an ordinary flashlight.

He knew that the Engineer was shifting the fifth-dimensional mass into a position between them and the screaming fleet of death above them, shifting that field of terrible energy into the Hellhounds" path.

The last of the Engineer fleet had reached the city, was shrieking down between the shattered towers, as if fleeing for its very life.

And only a few miles above them, in what amounted to a mass formation, the Hellhound fleet was plunging down, guns silent now, protective screens still up, grim and ghastly ships running their quarry to the ground.

Gary's body tensed as he saw Caroline's arm swing up, clutching the tiny flashlight, pointing it at the on-driving fleet.

He saw the flash of light burn upward, pale in the light of the sinking suns — a tiny, feeble, ineffective beam of light stabbing at the oncoming ships. Like taking a swipe at a grizzly bear with a pancake turner.

And then the heavens seemed to blaze with light and a streamer of blue-white intensity whipped out toward the ships. Protective screens flared briefly and then exploded into a million flashing sparks. For the space of one split second, before he could get his hand up to shield his eyes against the inferno in the sky, Gary saw the gaunt black skeletons of the Hellhound ships, writhing and disappearing in the surging blast of energy that tore at them and twisted them and finally, in the snapping of one's finger, utterly destroyed them.

The sky was empty, as empty as if there had never been a Hellhound ship. There was no sign of the fifth-dimensional mass, no hint of ship or gun — just the blue of the sky, ashing into violet as the three suns swung below the far-off horizon.

"Well," said Herb, and Gary could hear his voice sobbing with excitement, "that's the end of the Hellhounds."

Yes, that was the end of the Hellhounds, thought Gary. There was nothing in the universe that could stand before such a blast of energy. When the light, the tiny, feeble beam from the ridiculous little flash had struck the energy field, the energy, that timeless, formless stuff, had suddenly crystallized, had taken on the form of the energy that it had encountered. And in a burst of light it had struck at the Hellhounds, struck with terrible effectiveness — with entire lack of mercy, had wiped them out in the winking of one's eye.

He tried to imagine that blast of light moving out into the universe. It would travel for years, would flash its merciless way for many thousands of light-years. In time its energy would wane, would slowly dissipate, would lose some of its power in the vast spaces of intergalactic space. And perhaps the day would come when all its energy would be gone. But meanwhile nothing could stand in its way, nothing could resist it. In years to come great suns might explode into invisible gas as the frightful beam of power reached them and annihilated them and then passed on. And some astronomer, catching the phenomena in his lens, would speculate upon just what had happened.

He turned slowly around and faced Caroline. "How does it feel," he asked, "to win a war?"

The face she turned to him was strained and worn. "Don't say that to me," she said. "I had to do it. They were a terrible race, but they were alive — and there is so little life in this universe."

"You need some sleep," he said.

He saw the tragic lines of her mouth.

"There is no sleep," she said. "No rest at all. We have just started. We have to save the universe. We have to create more and more of the fifth-dimensional frameworks, many of them and larger. To absorb the energy when the universes meet."

Gary started. He had forgotten the approaching universe. So absorbed had they become in ending the Hellhound attack that the edge of the real and greater danger had been dulled.

But now, brought back to it, he realized the job they faced.

He spun on the Engineer. "How much longer?" he asked. "How much longer have we?"

"Very little time," said the Engineer. "Very little. I fear that energy may flood in upon us at any time."

"That energy," said Kingsley, a fanatical flame in his eyes. "Think of what could be done with it. We could set up a huge framework of fifth-dimensional space, use it as an absorber, a battery. We could send energy almost anywhere throughout the universe. A central universal power plant."

"First," declared Tommy, "you'd have to control it, be able to direct it in a tight beam."

"First," insisted Caroline, "we have to do something about this other universe."

"Wait a second," said Gary. "We've forgotten something. We asked those people in the other universe to come over and help us, but we don't need them now."

He looked at the Engineer. "Have you heard from them?" he asked.

"Yes," said the Engineer. "I have heard from them. They still want to come."

"They still want to come?" Astonishment rang in Gary's voice. "Why should they want to come?"

"They want to emigrate to our universe," said the Engineer. "And I have agreed to allow them to do so."

"You have agreed?" rumbled Kingsley. "And since when has this universe been in the market for immigrants? We don't know what kind of people they are. They might be dangerous. They may want to destroy the present life within the universe."

"There is plenty of room for them," said the Engineer, and if possible, his voice seemed colder and more impersonal than ever. "There is room to spare. We have over fifty billion galaxies — and more than fifty billion stars in each galaxy. Only one out of every ten thousand of the stars has a solar system, that is true, of course… but only one out of every hundred solar systems has life. And if we need more solar systems we can manufacture them. With the power of the dimension of eternity at our command, we can move stars, we can hurl them together to make solar systems. With this power we can reshape the universe, mold it to our needs."

The idea impacted with stunning force on Gary's brain. They could reshape the universe! Working with the raw materials at hand, with the almost infinite power at their command, they could alter the course of stars, could realign the galaxies, could manufacture planets, set up a well coordinated plan to offset entropy, the tendency to run down, the tendency to go amuck. His mind groped futilely at the ideas, pawing them over and over, but back of it all was a curtain of wonderment and awe. And through his brain sang a subtle warning… a persistent little warning that hammered at his thoughts. Mankind itself wasn't ready for such power, couldn't use it intelligently, perhaps would destroy the universe with it. Was there any other entity in the universe qualified to use it? Would it be wise to place such power in the hands of any entity?

"But why," Caroline was asking, "do they want to come?"

"Because," said the Engineer, "we are going to destroy their universe to save ours."

It was as if a bombshell had been dropped among them. Silence clapped down. Gary felt Caroline's hand creep into his. He held it tight.

"But why destroy their universe?" shouted Tommy. "We have the means at hand to save them both. All we have to do is create more of those five-dimensional screens to absorb the energy."

"No," said the Engineer, "we cannot do it. Given time, we could. But there is so little time, not nearly enough. The energy would overwhelm us once it came. It would take so many screens and we have so little time."

His thoughts cut off and Gary heard the shuffle of Kingsley's feet.

"These other beings," the Engineer went on, "know that their universe has very little longer to exist in any event. It has almost reached the end of its time. It soon will die the heat death. Throughout its space, matter and energy are being swiftly distributed. Soon the day will arrive when it will be equally distributed, when the heat, the energy, the mass throughout the universe will be spread so thin that it scarcely exists."

Gary sucked in his breath. "Like a watch running down," he said.

"You're right," said Kingsley. "Like a watch that has run down. That is what will happen to our universe in time."

"Not," said Gary, "if we have the energy from interspace at our command."

"Already," said the Engineer, "only one corner of this other universe is still suitable for life… the area that is facing us. Into that corner all life has been driven and now it has been, or is being, assembled to transfer itself to our universe."

"But," asked Herb, "just how are they going to get here?"

"They will use a time warp," said the Engineer. "They will bud out from their universe, but in doing so they will distort the time factor in the walls of their hypersphere — a distortion that will send them ahead in time, will push their little universe closer to us than to their universe. Our gravity will grasp their hypersphere and draw it in."

"But that," protested Gary, "will produce more energy. Their little universe will be destroyed."

"No," declared the Engineer, "because they will merge their space-time continuum with the continuum of our universe as soon as the two come together. They will immediately become a part of our universe."

"You told them how to create a hypersphere?" asked Herb.

"I did," said the Engineer. "And it will save the people of that other universe. They had tried many things, had worked out theories and new branches of mathematics in their efforts to escape. They discovered many things that we do not know, but they never thought of budding out from their universe. They apparently are a mechanistic people, a people very much like we Engineers. They seem to have lost that vital spark of imagination with which your people are so well supplied."

"My Lord," said Gary, "think of it! Imagination saving the people of another universe. The imagination of a little third-rate race that hasn't even started really using its imagination yet."

"You are right," declared the Engineer, "and in the aeons to come that imagination will make your race the masters of the entire universe."

"Prophesy," said Gary.

"I know," said the Engineer.

"There's just one thing," said Herb. "How is that other universe going to be destroyed?"

"We are going to destroy it," said the Engineer, "in exactly the same way we destroyed the Hellhounds."

CHAPTER Seventeen

Tommy sat in the pilot's seat and urged the ship slowly forward, using rocket blast after rocket blast to keep it on its course.

"You have to fight to stand still here," he gritted between his teeth. "A man can't tell just where he is. There doesn't seem to be any direction, nothing to orient oneself."

"Of course not," rumbled Kingsley. "We're in a sort of place no other man has ever been. We're right out in the area where space and time are breaking down, where lines of force are all distorted, where everything is jumbled and broken up."

"The edge of the universe," said Caroline.

Gary stared out through the vision plate. There was nothing to see, nothing but a deep blue void that queerly seemed alive with a deep intensity of life.

He turned from the panel and asked the Engineer:

"Any signs of energy yet?"

"Faint signs," said the Engineer, bending lower to peer at the dial set in a detector instrument. "Very faint signs. The other universe is almost upon us now and the lines of force are just beginning to make themselves felt."

"How much longer will it take?" asked Kingsley.

"I cannot tell," said the Engineer. "We know very little about the laws out here. It may be a very short while or it may be some time as yet."

"Well," said Herb, "the fireworks can start any time now. The folks from the other universe have crossed safely and there's no reason for the other universe to exist. We can blast it any time we want to."

"Gary," said Kingsley, "you and Herb better get over to those guns. We may want action fast."

Gary nodded and walked to the controls of a disintegrator gun. He slid into the seat back of the controls and reached out a hand to grasp the swivel butt. He swung it back and forth, knew that outside the ship the grim muzzle of the weapon was swinging in a wide arc.

Through the tiny port in front of him he could see the blue intensity of the void in which they moved.

Out here time and space were thinning down and breaking up. Like a boat riding on the surface of a heaving sea, they were riding the very rim of the universe, their ship tossed about by the shifting, twisting co-ordinates of force.

Out there somewhere, very close, was the mysterious inter-space. Close, too, invisible in all its immensity, was another universe. An old and tottering universe from which its inhabitants had fled, a dying universe that had been sentenced to death so that a younger universe might live.

In just a few minutes now the space between the universes would begin to fill with a charge of that terrible timeless, formless energy. Slowly it would begin seeping into the two universes, slowly at first and then faster and faster, increasing their mass, dooming them to almost instant destruction.

But before that could happen, the disintegrator ray, the most terrible form of energy known to the Engineers, would blast out into that field of latent energy, would sweep outward toward that other approaching universe.

Instantly the field of energy would be turned into the terrific power of the disintegrator ray, but millions of times more powerful than the ray itself… a blinding sheet of energy that would stop at nothing, that would smash the very mold of time and space, would destroy matter and cancel other energy. And this sheet of energy would smash its way into the other universe.

And when that happened, the energy field, draining all its energy into the disintegrator blast, would be diverted from the younger universe, would turn in full force upon the one to be destroyed.

Staggering under the onrush of such a fierce storm of energy, the old universe would start contracting. Its mass would build up, faster and faster, as the fifth-dimensional energy, riding on the beams of the disintegrator guns, hurled itself into its space-time frame.

Gary wiped his brow with the back of his hand.

That was the way Caroline and the Engineer had figured it out. He hoped that it would work. And yet it seemed impossible that a tiny ship, two tiny guns manned by the puny members of the human race, could utterly annihilate a universe, an unimaginably massive space-time matrix.

Yet he had seen the beam of a tiny flashlight, crystalizing the energy of the eternal dimension, blast out of existence, in the twinkling of an eye, a mighty fleet of warships protected by heavy screens, armored against vicious bombs, impregnable to anything… to anything except the flashlight in the hands of a wisp of a girl.

Remembering that, it was easier to believe that the disintegrators, crystalizing a much vaster field of energy, might accomplish the destruction of a universe. For it wasn't the guns themselves that would do the job, but the direction of all the energy into the other universe, energy rising on the million-mile front set up by the fanning guns.

"The field is building up," said Caroline. "Be ready." Gary grinned at her. "We'll fire when we see the whites of their eyes," he said.

He racked his brain for the origin of that sentence. Something out of history. Something out of the dim old legends of the past. A folk tale of some mighty battle of the ancient days.

He shrugged his shoulders. The story, whatever it might be, probably wasn't true, anyhow. So few of the ancient legends were. Just another story to be told of a black night in the chimney corner when the wind howled around the eaves and the rain dripped on the roof.

His eyes went to the port again, stared out into the misty blue, the blue that seemed to throb with vibrant life.

They had to wait. Wait until the energy had built up to a point where it would be effective. But not too long. For if they waited too long, it might pour into their own universe and wipe them out.

"Get ready," thundered Kingsley, and Gary's hand went out to the switch that would loosen the blast of the disintegrator. His fingers gripped the switch tightly, tensed, ready for action.

"Give it to "em," Kingsley roared, and Gary snapped the switch.

With both hands he swung the swivel back and forth, back and forth. Beside him, he knew, Herb was doing the same.

Outside the port blossomed a maelstrom of fiery light, a blinding, vicious flare of light that seemed to leap and writhe and then become a solid sheet of flame. A solid sheet of flame that drove on and on, leaping outward, bringing doom to a worn-out universe.

It was over in just a few seconds… a few seconds during which an inferno of energy was turned loose to rage between two universes.

Then the misty blue filled the port again and the ship was bucking, tossed about like a chip in heavy seas, twisted and dashed about by the broken lines of force that still heaved and quivered under the backlash of the titanic forces which a moment before bad filled the inter-space.

Gary turned in his seat, saw that Caroline and the Engineer were bent over the detector dial, watching it intently.

Kingsley, looking over the Engineer's shoulder, was muttering: "No sign. No sign of energy."

That meant, then, that the other universe was already contracting, was rushing backward to a new beginning… no longer a menace.

Gary patted the gun. It and Man's ingenuity had turned the trick. Mere Man had destroyed one universe, but had saved another. It seemed too utterly fantastic to be true.

He looked around the control room. Tommy at the controls. Herb at the second gun. The other three watching the energy detector. Everything was familiar. Nothing was any different than it was before. All commonplace and ordinary.

And yet, for the first time, tiny beings spawned within the universe had taken firm hold of the universe's destiny. Henceforward Man and his little compatriots throughout the vast gulfs of space would no longer be mere pawns in the grim tide of cosmic forces. Henceforward life would rule these forces, bend them to its will, put them to work, change them, shift them about.

Life was an accident. There was little doubt of that. Something that wasn't exactly planned. Something that had crept in, like a malignant disease in the ordered mechanism of the universe. The universe was hostile to life. The depths of space were too cold for life, most of the condensed matter too hot for life, space was traversed by radiations inimical to life. But life was triumphant. In the end, the universe would not destroy it… it would rule the universe.

His mind went back to the day Herb had sighted that tiny flash of reflected light in the telescopic screen, back to the finding of the girl in the space shell. And before him seemed to unreel the chain of events that had led up to this moment. If Caroline Martin had not been condemned to space, if she had not known the secret of suspended animation, if that suspended animation had not failed to suspend thought, if Herb had not seen the flash that revealed the presence of the shell, if he, himself, had been unable to revive the girl, if Kingsley had not been curious about why cosmic rays should form a definite pattern…

And in that chain of happenings he seemed to see the hand of something greater than just happenstance. What was it the old man back on Old Earth had said? Something about a great dreamer creating stages and peopling them with actors.

"No energy indications," said the Engineer. "We have definitely ended the menace. The other universe has contracted beyond the danger point. We are saved. I am so very happy."

He faced them. "And so very grateful, too," he said. "Forget it," said Herb. "It was our neck as well as yours."

CHAPTER Eighteen

HERB polished the last chicken bone methodically and sighed. "That's the best meal I ever ate," he said.

They sat at the table in the apartment the Engineers had arranged for them. It had escaped the general destruction of the Hellhound attack, although the tower above it had been obliterated by a hydrogen bomb.

Gary filled his wineglass again and leaned back in his chair.

"I guess our job is done here," he said. "Maybe we'll be going home in just a little while."

"Home?" asked Caroline. "You mean the Earth?"

Gary nodded.

"I have almost forgotten the Earth," she said. "It has been so long since I have seen the Earth. I suppose it has changed a great deal since I saw it last."

"Perhaps it has," Gary told her, "although there are some things that never change. The smell of fresh-plowed fields and the scent of hayfields at harvest time and the beauty of trees against the skyline at evening."

"Just a poet," said Herb. "Just a blasted poet."

"Maybe there will be things I won't recognize," said Caroline. "Things that will be so different."

"I'll show you the Earth," said Gary. "I'll set you straight on everything."

"What bothers me," declared Kingsley, "are those people from the other universe. It's just like letting undesirable elements come in under our immigration schedule on Earth. You can't tell what sort of people they are. They might be life forms that are inimical to us."

"Or," suggested Caroline, "they might be possessors of great scientific accomplishments and a higher culture. They might add much to this universe."

"There isn't much danger from them," said Gary. "The Engineers are taking care of them. They're keeping them cooped up in the hypersphere they used to cross interspace until suitable places for their settlement can be found. The Engineers will keep an eye on them."

Metallic feet grated on the floor and Engineer 1824 came across the room toward the table.

He stopped before the table and folded his arms across his chest.

"Everything is all right?" he asked. "The food is good and you are comfortable."

"I'll say we are," said Herb.

"We are glad," said the Engineer. "We have tried so hard to make it easy for you. We are grateful that you came. Without you we never would have saved the universe. We never would have gone to Old Earth to find the secret of the energy, because we are not driven by restless imagination… an imagination that will not let one rest until all has been explained."

"We did what we could," rumbled Kingsley. "But all of the credit goes to Caroline. She was the one who worked out the mathematics for the creation of the hypersphere. She is the only one of us who would have been able to understand the equations relating to the energy and the inter-space."

"You are right," said the Engineer, "and we thank Caroline especially. But the rest of you had your part to do and did it. It has made us very proud."

"Proud," thought Gary. "Why should he be proud of anything we've done?"

The Engineer caught his thought.

"You ask why we should be proud," he said, "and I shall tell you why. We have watched and studied you closely since you came, debating whether you should be told what there is to tell. Under different circumstances we probably would allow you to depart without a word, but we have decided that you should know."

"Know what?" thundered Kingsley.

The rest of them were silent, waiting.

"You are aware of how your solar system came into being?" asked the Engineer.

"Sure," said Kingsley. "There was a dynamic encounter between two stars. Our Sun and an invader. About three billion years ago."

"That invader," said the Engineer, "was the Sun of my people, a sun upon whose planets they had built a great civilization. My people knew well in advance that the collision would take place. Our astronomers discovered it first and after that our physicists and other scientists worked unceasingly in a futile effort either to avert the collision or to save what could be salvaged of our civilization when the encounter came. But century after century passed, with the two stars swinging closer and closer together. There seemed no chance to save anything. We knew that the planets would be destroyed when the first giant tide from your Sun lashed out into space, that the resultant explosion would instantly destroy all life, that more than likely some of the planets would be totally destroyed.

"Our astronomers told us that our Sun would pass within two million miles of your star, that it would grip and drag far out in space some of the molten mass which your Sun would eject. In such a case we could see but little hope for the continuance of our civilization."

His thoughts broke off, but no one said a word. All eyes were staring at the impassive metal face of the Engineer, waiting for him to continue.

"Finally, knowing that all their efforts were hopeless, my people constructed vast spaceships. Spaceships designed for living, for spending many years in space. And long before the collision occurred these ships were launched, carrying select groups of our civilization. Representative groups. Men of different sciences, with many records of our civilization."

"The Ark," said Caroline, breathlessly. "The old story of the Ark."

"I do not understand," said the Engineer.

"It doesn't matter," Caroline said. "Please go on."

"From far out in space my people watched the two stars sweep past each other," said the Engineer. "It was as if the very heavens had exploded. Great tongues of gas and molten matter speared out into space for millions of miles. They saw their own Sun drag a great mass of this stellar material for billions of miles out into space, strewing fragments of it en route. They saw the gradual formation of the matter around your Sun and then, in time, they lost sight of it, for they were moving far out into space and the eruptive masses were settling down into a quieter state.

"For generation after generation, my people hunted for a new home. Men died and were given burial in space. Children were born and grew old in turn and died. For century after century the great ships voyaged from star to star, seeking a planetary system on which they might settle and make their homes. One of the ships ran too close to a giant sun and was drawn to its death. Another was split wide open when it collided with a dark star. But the rest braved the dangers and uncertainties of space, hunting, always hunting for a home."

Another pause and still there were no questions. The Engineer went on:

"But no planetary system could be found. Only one star in every ten thousand has a planetary system, and they might have hunted for thousands of years without finding one.

"Finally, tired out with searching, they decided to return to your Sun. For while there was as yet no planetary system there, they knew that in ages to come there would be."

The cold wind from space was flicking Gary in the face again. Could this tale the Engineer was telling be the truth? Was this why the Engineers had been signaling to Pluto?

The Engineer's thoughts were coming again.

"After many years they reached your Sun, and as they approached it they saw that planets were beginning to form around the centers of relatively dense matter. But there was something else. Swinging in a great, erratic orbit on the very edge of this nebula-like mass of raw planetary matter was a planet which they recognized. It was one of the planets of their old home star, fourth out from their Sun. It had been stolen from their Sun, now was swinging in an orbit of its own around its adopted star.

"My people had found a home at last. They descended to the surface of the planet to find that its atmosphere was gone, that all life had vanished, that all signs of civilization had been utterly wiped out.

"But they settled there and tried to rebuild, in part at least, the civilization that was their heritage. But it was a heart-rending task. For years and centuries they watched the slow formation of your solar system, saw the planets take on shape and slowly cool, waiting against the day when the race might occupy them. But the process was too slow. The work of building their civilization anew, the lack of atmosphere, the utter cold of space, were sapping the strength of my people. They foresaw the day when they would perish, when the last one of the race would die. But they planned for the future. They planned very carefully.

"They created us and gave us great ships and sent us out to try to find them new homes, hoping against hope that we would be able to find them a better home before it was too late. For out in space our ships separated, each traveling its own way, bent on a survey of the entire universe if such were necessary."

"They created you?" asked Gary. "What do you mean? Aren't you direct descendants of that other race, the race of the invading star?"

"No," said the Engineer. "We are robots. But so carefully made, so well endowed with a semblance of life that we cannot be distinguished from authentic life forms. I sometimes think that in all these years we may have become life in all reality. I have thought about it a great deal, have hoped so much that we might in time become something more than mere machines."

In the silence, Gary wondered why he had not guessed the truth before. It had been there to see. The form, the very actions of the Engineers were mechanistic. Once the Engineer had told them that he was bound by mechanistic precepts, that he and his fellows possessed almost no imagination. And machines, of course, would have no imagination.

But they had seemed so much like people, almost like human beings, that he had thought of them as actual life, but cast in metallic rather than protoplasmic form.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Kingsley.

"Boy," said Herb, "you're topnotch robots, if I do say so."

Gary snarled at him across the table. "Pipe down," he warned.

"Maybe you aren't robots any more," Caroline was saying. "Maybe through all these years you have become real entities. Your creators must have given you electrochemical brains, and that, after all, is what the human brain amounts to. In time those brains would become real, almost as efficient, probably in some instances even more efficient than a protoplasmic brain. And brain power, the ability to think and reason, seems to be all that counts when everything is balanced out."

"Thank you," said the Engineer. "Thank you very much. You are so kind to say so. That is what I have tried to tell myself."

"Look here," said Gary. "It really doesn't matter, does it? I mean, whether you are robots or independent entities. You serve the same purpose, you follow the same dictates of conscience, you create the same destiny as things that move and act through the very gift of life. In many ways, to my mind, a robotic existence might be preferable to a human existence."

"Perhaps it doesn't really matter," agreed the Engineer. "I told you once that we were a proud people, that we had inherited a great trust, that we had carried out that trust. Pride might have kept us from telling you what we were, but now I am glad I have, for the rest will be easier to understand."

"The rest," said Tommy in surprise. "Is there more?"

"Much more," said the Engineer.

"Wait a second," rumbled Kingsley. "Do you mean that all you Engineers were created by a race that flourished three billion years ago, that you have lived through that space of time?"

"Not all of us," said the Engineer. "My people made only a few of us, a few to man each ship. We ourselves have made others, copies of ourselves. But in each new creation we have tried to inculcate some of the factors which we find missing in ourselves. Imagination, for one thing, and greater initiative, and a greater scope of emotional perception."

"You yourself are one of the original robots made back on Pluto?" asked Caroline.

The Engineer nodded.

"You are eternal and immortal," suggested Kingsley.

"Not eternal nor immortal," said the Engineer. "But with proper care, replacement of worn-out parts, and barring accident, I will continue to function for many more billions of years to come."

Billions of years, thought Gary. It was something a man could not imagine. A human mind could not visualize a billion years or a thousand years or even a hundred years. Man, in general, could visualize not much beyond the figure four.

But if the Engineers had lived for three billion years, how come they had been unable to create a hypersphere, why hadn't they probed out beyond the universe to learn the laws of inter-space? Why must this work wait for the arrival of the human mind?

"I have answered that before," said the Engineer, "and I will answer it again. It is because of imagination and vision… the ability to see beyond facts, to probe into probabilities, to visualize what might be and then attempt to make it so. That is something that we cannot do. We are chained to mechanistic action and mechanistic thought. We do not advance beyond the proven fact. When two facts create another fact, we accept the third fact, but we do not reach out in speculation, collect half a dozen tentative facts and then try to crystallize them. That is the answer to your question."

Gary looked startled. He hadn't realized that the Engineer could read his undirected thoughts. Caroline was looking at him, a smile twitching the corners of her mouth.

"Did you ask him something?"

"I guess I did," said Gary.

"Did you ever hear from the other Engineers?" asked Kingsley. "The ones who were in the other ships?"

"No," said the Engineer, "we never did. Presumably they have by now found other planets where they are doing the same work as we. We have tried to get in touch with them, but we have never been able to do it."

"What is your work?" asked Gary.

"Why," said Caroline, "you should know that, Gary. It is to prepare a place for the Engineers" people to live. Isn't that right?" she asked the Engineer.

"It is right," said the Engineer.

"But," protested Gary, "those people are dead. There is no sign of them in our solar system and they certainly didn't start out looking for some other planet. They died off on Pluto."

He remembered the chiseled masonry that Ted Smith had found. The hands of the Engineers" creators had cut those stones, billions of years ago… and today they still were on Pluto's surface, mute testimony to the greatness of a race that had died while the solar system's planets still were cooling off.

"They are not dead," said the Engineer, and his thoughts seemed to have a particular warmth in them.

"Not dead," said Gary. "Do you know where they are?"

"Yes," said the Engineer. "I do. Some of them are in this very room."

"In this roorn," began Caroline, and then she stopped as the significance of what the Engineer had said struck home.

"In this room," said Herb. "Hell, the only people who are in this room are us. And we aren't your people."

"But you are," declared the Engineer. "There are differences, to be sure. But you are much like them, so like them in many ways. You are protoplasmic and they were protoplasmic. Your general form is the same and, I have no doubt, your metabolism. And above all, the way your mind works."

"That," said Caroline, "was why we could understand you and you could understand us. Why you kept us here when you sent the other entities back to their homes."

"Do you mean," asked Kingsley, "that we are the direct descendants of your people… that your people finally took over the planets? That seems hardly possible, for we know we started from very humble beginnings. We have no legends, no evidence pointing to such a genesis."

"Not that," said the Engineer. "Not exactly that. But I suppose you have wondered how life got its start on your planet. There are many planetary systems, you know, where life is entirely unknown. Planets that are fully as old as yours that are barren of all life."

"There is the spore theory," said Kingsley, and as he said the words he pounded the table with his massive fist.

"By Lord, that's it," he shouted. "The spore theory. Your people out on Pluto, only a few of them left, with the planets still unfit for habitation, knowing that they faced the end… couldn't they have insured life on the young planets by the development and planting of life spores?"

"That," said the Engineer, "is what I thought. That is the theory that I hold."

"But if that were the case," objected Caroline, "why should we have developed as we did? Why should a life form almost duplicating the Engineers" people have developed? Surely they couldn't have planted determinants in the spore… they couldn't have seen or planned that far ahead. They couldn't possibly have planned the eventual evolution of a race re-creating their own!"

"They were a very ancient people," said the Engineer, "and a very clever people. I do not doubt that they could have planned it as you say."

"Interesting," said Herb. "But what does it make us?"

"It makes you the heir of my people," said the Engineer. "It means that what we have done here, all we have, all we know is yours. We will rebuild this city, we will condition it in such a manner that your people can live here. Also that whatever the other Engineers may have found or done is yours. We want nothing for ourselves except the joy and the satisfaction of knowing that we have served, that we have done well with the trust that was handed to us."

They sat stunned, scarcely believing what they heard.

"You mean," asked Kingsley, "that you will rebuild this city and hand it over to the people of our solar system?"

"That is what I mean," said the Engineer. "It is yours. I have no doubt that you descended in some manner from my people. Since you came here I have studied you closely. Time and again I have seen little actions and mannerisms, little mental quirks that mark you as being in some way connected with the people who created us."

Gary tried to reason it out. The Engineers were handing the human race a heritage from an ancient people, handing them a city and a civilization already built, a city and a civilization such as the race itself would not achieve for the next many thousand years.

But there was something wrong, something that didn't click.

He remembered Herb's comment that the city looked like a place that was waiting for someone who had never come. Herb had hit upon the exact situation. This city had been built for a greater race, for a race that probably had died long before the first stone had been laid in place. A race that must have been so far advanced that it would make the human race look savage in comparison.

He tried to imagine what effect such a city and such a civilization would have upon the human race. He tried to picture the greed and hate, the political maneuvering, the fierce trade competition, the social inequality and its resultant class struggle… all of it inherent in humanity… in this white city under the three suns. Somehow the two didn't go together.

"We can't do it," he said. "We aren't ready yet. We'd just make a mess of things. We'd have too much power, too much leisure, too many possessions. It would smash our civilization and leave us one in its stead that we could not manage. We haven't put our own civilization upon a basis that could coincide with what is here."

Kingsley stared at him.

"But think of the scientific knowledge! Think of the cultural advantages!" he shouted.

"Gary is right," said Caroline. "We aren't ready yet."

"Sometime," said Gary. "Sometime in the future. When we have wired out some of the primal passions. When we have solved the great social and economic problems that plague us now. When we have learned to observe the Golden Rule… when we have lost some of the lustiness of our youth. Sometime we will be ready for this city."

He remembered the ancient man they had met on Old Earth. He had said something about the rest of the race going away, to a far star, to a place that had been prepared for them.

That place the old man had spoken of, he realized now, was this very city. And that meant that the Old Earth they had visited had been the real Earth… no shadow planet, but the actuality existing in the future. And the old man had spoken as if the rest of the race had gone to the city but a short while earlier. He had said that he refused to go, that he couldn't leave the Earth.

The time would be long, then. Longer than he thought. A long and bitter wait for the day when the race might safely enter into a better world, into a heritage left to them by a race that died when the solar system was born.

"You understand?" he asked the Engineer.

"I understand," the Engineer replied. "It means that we must wait for the masters that we worked for… that it will be long before they come to us."

"You waited three billion years," Gary reminded him. "Wait a few million more for us. It won't take us long. There's a lot of good in the human race, but we aren't ready yet."

"I think you're crazy," said Kingsley, bitterly.

"Can't you see," asked Caroline, "what the human race right now would do to this city?"

"But magnetic power," wailed Kingsley, "and all those other things. Think of how they would help us. We need power and tools and all the knowledge we can get."

"You may take certain information with you," said the Engineer. "Whatever you think is wise. We will watch you and talk with you throughout the years, and it may be there will be times that you will wish our help."

Gary rose from the table. His hand fell on the Engineer's broad metal shoulder.

"And in the meantime there is work for you," he said. "A city to rebuild. The development of power stations to use the fifth-dimensional energy. Learning how to control and use that energy. Using it to control the universe. The day will come, unless we do something about it, that our universe will run down, will die the heat death. But with the eternal power of the inter-space, we can shape and control the universe, mold it to our needs."

It seemed that the metal man drew himself even more erect.

"It will be done," he said.

"We must work, not for Man alone, but for the entire universe," said Gary.

"That is right," said the Engineer.

Kingsley heaved himself to his feet.

"We should be leaving for Pluto," he said. "Our work here is done."

He stepped up to the Engineer. "Before we go," he said, "I would like to shake your hand."

"I do not understand," said the Engineer.

"It is a mark of respect," Caroline explained. "Assurance that we are friends. A sort of way to seal a pact."

"That is fine," said the Engineer. He thrust out his hand. And then his thoughts broke. For the first time since they had met him, in this same room, there was emotion in his voice.

"We are so glad," he said. "We can talk to you and not feel so alone. Perhaps some day I can come and visit you."

"Be sure to do that," bellowed Herb. "I'll show you all the sights."

"Are you coming, Gary?" asked Caroline, but Gary didn't answer.

Some day Man would come home… home to this wondrous city of white stone, to marvel at its breathtaking height, at its vastness of design, at its far-flung symbol of achievement reared against an alien sky. Home to a planet where every power and every luxury and every achievement would be his. Home to a place that had grown out of a dream… the great dream of a greater people who had died, but in dying had passed along the heritage of their life to a new-spawned solar system. And more than that, had left another heritage in the hands and brains of good stewards who, in time, would give it up, in fulfillment of their charge.

But this city and this proud achievement were not for him, nor for Caroline, nor Kingsley, nor Herb, nor Tommy. Nor for the many generations that would come after them. Not so long as Man carried the old dead weight of primal savagery and hate, not so long as he was mean and vicious and petty, could he set foot here.

Before he reached this city, Man would travel long trails of bitter dust, would know the sheer triumphs of the star-flung road. Galaxies would write new alphabets across the sky, and the print of many happenings would be etched upon the tape of time. New things would come and hold their sway and die, Great leaders would stand up and have their day and shuffle off into oblivion and silence. Creeds would rise and flourish and be sifting dust between the worlds. The night watch of stars would see great deeds, applaud great happenings, witness great defeat, weep over bitter sorrows.

"Just think," said Caroline. "We are going home."

"Yes," said Gary. "At last, we're going home."

Drop dead

Original copyright year: unknown, re-published 1962

THE CRITTERS were unbelievable. They looked like something from the maudlin pen of a well-alcoholed cartoonist.

One herd of them clustered in a semicircle in front of the ship, not jittery or belligerent — just looking at us. And that was strange. Ordinarily, when a spaceship sets down on a virgin planet, it takes a week at least for any life that might have seen or heard it to creep out of hiding and sneak a look around.

The critters were almost cow-size, but nohow as graceful as a cow. Their bodies were pushed together as if every blessed one of them had run full-tilt into a wall. And they were just as lumpy as you'd expect from a collision like that. Their hides were splashed with large squares of pastel color — the kind of color one never finds on any self-respecting animal: violet, pink, orange, chartreuse, to name only a few. The overall effect was of a checkerboard done by an old lady who made crazy quilts.

And that, by far, was not the worst of it.

From their heads and other parts of their anatomy sprouted a weird sort of vegetation, so that it appeared each animal was hiding, somewhat ineffectively, behind a skimpy thicket. To compound the situation and make it completely insane, fruits and vegetables — or what appeared to be fruits and vegetables — grew from the vegetation.

So we stood there, the critters looking at us and us looking back at them, and finally one of them walked forward until it was no more than six feet from us. It stood there for a moment, gazing at us soulfully, then dropped dead at our feet.

The rest of the herd turned around and trotted awkwardly away, for all the world as if they had done what they had come to do and now could go about their business.

Julian Oliver, our botanist, put up a hand and rubbed his balding head with an absentminded motion.

"Another what is it coming up!" he moaned. "Why couldn't it, for once, be something plain and simple?"

"It never is," I told him. "Remember that bush out on Hamal V that spent half its life as a kind of glorified tomato and the other half as grade A poison ivy?"

"I remember it," Oliver said sadly.

Max Weber, our biologist, walked over to the critter, reached out a cautious foot and prodded it.

"Trouble is," he said, "that Hamal tomato was Julian's baby and this one here is mine."

"I wouldn't say entirely yours," Oliver retorted. "What do you call that underbrush growing out of it?"

I came in fast to head off an argument. I had listened to those two quarreling for the past twelve years, across several hundred light-years and on a couple dozen planets. I couldn't stop it here, I knew, but at least I could postpone it until they had something vital to quarrel about.

"Cut it out," I said. "It's only a couple of hours till nightfall and we have to get the camp set up."

"But this critter," Weber said. "We can't just leave it here."

"Why not? There are millions more of them. This one will stay right here and even if it doesn't —»

"But it dropped dead!"

"So it was old and feeble."

"It wasn't. It was right in the prime of life."

"We can talk about it later," said Alfred Kemper, our bacteriologist. "I'm as interested as you two, but what Bob says is right. We have to get the camp set up."

"Another thing," I added, looking hard at all of them. "No matter how innocent this place may look, we observe planet rules. No eating anything. No drinking any water. No wandering off alone. No carelessness of any kind."

"There's nothing here," said Weber. "Just the herds of critters. Just the endless plains. No trees, no hills, no nothing."

He really didn't mean it. He knew as well as I did the reason for observing planet rules. He only wanted to argue.

"All right," I said, "which is it? Do we set up camp or do we spend the night up in the ship?"

That did it.

We had the camp set up before the sun went down and by dusk we were all settled in. Carl Parsons, our ecologist, had the stove together and the supper started before the last tent peg was driven.

I dug out my diet kit and mixed up my formula and all of them kidded me about it, the way they always did.

It didn't bother me. Their jibs were automatic and I had automatic answers. It was something that had been going on for a long, long time. Maybe it was best that way, better if they'd disregarded my enforced eating habits.

I remember Carl was grilling steaks and I had to move away so I couldn't smell them. There's never a time when I wouldn't give my good right arm for a steak or, to tell the truth, any other kind of normal chow. This diet stuff keeps a man alive all right, but that's about the only thing that can be said of it.

I know ulcers must sound silly and archaic. Ask any medic and he'll tell you they don't happen any more. But I have a riddled stomach and the diet kit to prove they sometimes do. I guess it's what you might call an occupational ailment. There's a lot of never-ending worry playing nursemaid to planet survey gangs.

After supper, we went out and dragged the critter in and had a closer look at it.

It was even worse to look at close than from a distance.

There was no fooling about that vegetation. It was the real McCoy and it was part and parcel of the critter. But it seemed that it only grew out of certain of the color blocks in the critter's body.

We found another thing that practically had Weber frothing at the mouth. One of the color blocks had holes in it — it looked almost exactly like one of those peg sets that children use as toys. When Weber took out his jackknife and poked into one of the holes, he pried out an insect that looked something like a bee. He couldn't quite believe it, so he did some more probing and in another one of the holes he found another bee. Both of the bees were dead.

He and Oliver wanted to start dissection then and there, but the rest of us managed to talk them out of it.

We pulled straws to see who would stand first guard and, with my usual luck, I pulled the shortest straw. Actually there wasn't much real reason for standing guard, with the alarm system set to protect the camp, but it was regulation — there had to be a guard.

I got a gun and the others said good night and went to their tents, but I could hear them talking for a long time afterward. No matter how hardened you may get to this Survey business, no matter how blasé, you hardly ever get much sleep the first night on any planet.

I sat on a chair at one side of the camp table, on which burned a lantern in lieu of the campfire we would have had on any other planet. But here we couldn't have a fire because there wasn't any wood.

I sat at one side of the table, with the dead critter lying on the other side of it and I did some worrying, although it wasn't time for me to start worrying yet. I'm an agricultural economist and I don't begin my worrying until at least the first reports are in.

But sitting just across the table from where it lay, I couldn't help but do some wondering about that mixed-up critter. I didn't get anywhere except go around in circles and I was sort of glad when Talbott Fullerton, the Double Eye, came out and sat down beside me.

Sort of, I said. No one cared too much for Fullerton. I have yet to see the Double Eye I or anybody else ever cared much about.

"Too excited to sleep?" I asked him.

He nodded vaguely, staring off into the darkness beyond the lantern's light.

"Wondering," he said. "Wondering if this could be the planet."

"It won't be," I told him. "You're chasing an El Dorado, bunting down a fable."

"They found it once before," Fullerton argued stubbornly. "It's all there in the records."

"So was the Gilded Man. And the Empire of Prester John. Atlantis and all the rest of it. So was the old Northwest Passage back on ancient Earth. So were the Seven Cities. But nobody ever found any of those places because they weren't there."

He sat with the lamplight in his face and he had that wild look in his eyes and his hands were knotting into fists, then straightening out again.

"Sutter," he said unhappily, "I don't know why you do this — this mocking of yours. Somewhere in this universe there is immortality. Somewhere, somehow, it has been accomplished. And the human race must find it. We have the space for it now — all the space there is — millions of planets and eventually other galaxies. We don't have to keep making room for new generations, the way we would if we were stuck on a single world or a single solar system. Immortality, I tell you, is the next step for humanity!"

"Forget it," I said curtly, but once a Double Eye gets going, you can't shut him up.

"Look at this planet," he said. "An almost perfect Earth-type planet. Main-sequence sun. Good soil, good climate, plenty of water — an ideal place for a colony. How many years, do you think, before Man will settle here?"

"A thousand. Five thousand. Maybe more."

"That's right. And there are countless other planets like it, planets crying to be settled. But we won't settle them, because we keep dying off. And that's not all of it…"

Patiently, I listened to all the rest — the terrible waste of dying — and I knew every bit of it by heart. Before Fullerton, we'd been saddled by one Double Eye fanatic and, before him, yet another. It was regulation. Every planet-checking team, no matter what its purpose or its destination, was required to carry as supercargo an agent of Immortality Institute.

But this kid seemed just a little worse than the usual run of them. It was his first trip out and he was all steamed up with idealism. In all of them, though, burned the same intense dedication to the proposition that Man must live forever and an equally unyielding belief that immortality could and would be found. For had not a lost spaceship found the answer centuries before — an unnamed spaceship on an unknown planet in a long-forgotten year!

It was a myth, of course. It had all the hallmarks of one and all the fierce loyalty that a myth can muster. It was kept alive by Immortality Institute, operating under a government grant and billions of bequests and gifts from hopeful rich and poor — all of whom, of course, had died or would die in spite of their generosity.

"What are you looking for?" I asked Fullerton, just a little wearily, for I was bored with it. "A plant? An animal? A people?"

And he replied, solemn as a judge: "That's something I can't tell you."

As if I gave a damn!

But I went on needling him. Maybe it was just something to while away my time. That and the fact that I disliked the fellow. Fanatics annoy me. They won't get off your ear.

"Would you know it if you found it?"

He didn't answer that one, but he turned haunted eyes on me.

I cut out the needling. Any more of it and I'd have had him bawling.

We sat around a while longer, but we did no talking.

He fished a toothpick out of his pocket and put it in his mouth and rolled it around, chewing at it moodily. I would have liked to reach out and slug him, for he chewed toothpicks all the time and it was an irritating habit, that set me unreasonably on edge. I guess I was jumpy, too.

Finally he spit out the mangled toothpick and slouched off to bed.

I sat alone, looking up at the ship, and the lantern light was just bright enough for me to make out the legend lettered on it: "Caph VII — Ag Survey 286", which was enough to identify us anywhere in the Galaxy.

For everyone knew Caph VII, the agricultural experimental planet, just as they would have known Alderbaran XII, the medical research planet, or Capella IX, the university planet, or any of the other special departmental planets.

Caph VII is a massive operation and the hundreds of survey teams like us were just a part of it. But we were the spearheads who went out to new worlds, some of them uncharted, some just barely charted, looking for plants and animals that might be developed on the experimental tracts.

Not that our team had found a great deal. We had discovered some grasses that did well on one of the Eltanian worlds, but by and large we hadn't done anything that could be called distinguished. Our luck just seemed to run bad — like that Hamal poison ivy business. We worked as hard as any of the rest of them, but a lot of good that did.

Sometimes it was tough to take — when all the other teams brought in stuff that got them written up and earned them bonuses, while we came creeping in with a few piddling grasses or maybe not a thing at all.

It's a tough life and don't let anyone tell you different. Some of the planets turn out to be a fairly rugged business. At times, the boys come back pretty much the worse for wear and there are times when they don't come back at all.

But right now it looked as though we'd hit it lucky — a peaceful planet, good climate, easy terrain, no hostile inhabitants and no dangerous fauna.

Weber took his time relieving me at guard, but finally he showed up.

I could see he still was goggle-eyed about the critter. He walked around it several times, looking it over.

"That's the most fantastic case of symbiosis I have ever seen," he said. "If it weren't lying over there, I'd say it was impossible. Usually you associate symbiosis with the lower, more simple forms of life."

"You mean that brush growing out of it?" He nodded.

"And the bees?"

He gagged over the bees.

"How are you so sure it's symbiosis?"

He almost wrung his hands. "I don't know," he admitted.

I gave him the rifle and went to the tent I shared with Kemper. The bacteriologist was awake when I came in.

"That you, Bob?"

"It's me. Everything's all right."

"I've been lying here and thinking," he said. "This is a screwy place."

"The critters?"

"No, not the critters. The planet itself. Never saw one like it. It's positively naked. No trees. No flowers. Nothing. It's just a sea of grass."

"Why not?" I asked. "Where does it say you can't find a pasture planet?"

"It's too simple," be protested. "Too simplified. Too neat and packaged. Almost as if someone had said "let's make a simple planet, let's cut out all the frills, let's skip all the biological experiments and get right down to basics. Just one form of life and the grass for it to eat.""

"You're way out on a limb," I told him. "How do you know all this? There may be other life-forms. There may be complexities we can't suspect. Sure, all we've seen are the critters, but maybe that's because there are so many of them."

"To hell with you," he said and turned over on his cot.

Now there's a guy I liked. We'd been tent partners ever since he'd joined the team better than ten years before and we got along fine.

Often I had wished the rest could get along as well. But it was too much to expect.

The fighting started right after breakfast, when Oliver and Weber insisted on using the camp table for dissecting. Parsons, who doubled as cook, jumped straight down their throats. Why he did it, I don't know. He knew before be said a word that he was licked, hands down. The same thing had happened many times before and he knew, no matter what he did or said, they would use the table.

But he put up a good battle. "You guys go and find some other place to do your butchering! Who wants to eat on a table that's all slopped up?"

"But, Carl, where can we do it? We'll use only one end of the table."

Which was a laugh, because in half an hour they'd be sprawled all over it.

"Spread out a canvas," Parsons snapped back.

"You can't dissect on a canvas. You got to have —»

"Another thing. How long do you figure it will take? In a day or two, that critter is going to get ripe."

It went on like that for quite a while, but by the time I started up the ladder to get the animals, Oliver and Weber had flung the critter on the table and were at work on it.

Unshipping the animals is something not exactly in my line of duty, but over the years I'd taken on the job of getting them unloaded, so they'd be there and waiting when Weber or some of the others needed them to run off a batch of tests.

I went down into the compartment where we kept them in their cages. The rats started squeaking at me and the zartyls from Centauri started screeching at me and the punkins from Polaris made an unholy racket, because the punkins are hungry all the time. You just can't give them enough to eat. Turn them loose with food and they'd eat themselves to death.

It was quite a job to get them all lugged up to the port and to rig up a sling and lower them to the ground, but I finally finished it without busting a single cage. That was an accomplishment. Usually I smashed a cage or two and some of the animals escaped and then Weber would froth around for days about my carelessness.

I had the cages all set out in rows and was puttering with canvas flies to protect them from the weather when Kemper came along and stood watching me.

"I have been wandering around," he announced. From the way he said it, I could see he had the wind up.

But I didn't ask him, for then he'd never have told me. You had to wait for Kemper to make up his mind to talk.

"Peaceful place," I said and it was all of that. It was a bright, clear day and the sun was not too warm. There was a little breeze and you could see a long way off. And it was quiet. Really quiet. There wasn't any noise at all.

"It's a lonesome place," said Kemper.

"I don't get you," I answered patiently.

"Remember what I said last night? About this planet being too simplified?"

He stood watching me put up the canvas, as if he might be considering how much more to tell me. I waited.

Finally, he blurted it. "Bob, there are no insects!"

"What have insects —»

"You know what I mean," he said. "You go out on Earth or any Earthilke planet and lie down in the grass and watch. You'll see the insects. Some of them on the ground and others on the grass. There'll be all kinds of them."

"And there aren't any here?"

He shook his head. "None that I could see. I wandered around and lay down and looked in a dozen different places. Stands to reason a man should find some insects if he looked all morning. It isn't natural, Bob."

I kept on with my canvas and I don't know why it was, but I got a little chilled about there not being any insects. Not that I care a hoot for insects, but as Kemper said, it was unnatural, although you come to expect the so-called unnatural in this planet-checking business.

"There are the bees," 1 said.

"What bees?"

"The ones that are in the critters. Didn't you see any?"

"None," he said. "I didn't get close to any critter herds. Maybe the bees don't travel very far."

"Any birds?"

"I didn't see a one," he said. "But I was wrong about the flowers. The grass has tiny flowers."

"For the bees to work on."

Kemper's face went stony. "That's right. Don't you see the pattern of it, the planned —»

"I see it," I told him.

He helped me with the canvas and we didn't say much more. When we had it done, we walked into camp.

Parsons was cooking lunch and grumbling at Oliver and Weber, but they weren't paying much attention to him. They had the table littered with different parts they'd carved out of the critter and they were looking slightly numb.

"No brain," Weber said to us accusingly, as if we might have made off with it when he wasn't looking. "We can't find a brain and there's no nervous system."

"It's impossible," declared Oliver. "How can a highly organized, complex animal exist without a brain or nervous system?"

"Look at that butcher shop!" Parsons yelled wrathfufly from the stove. "You guys will have to eat standing up!"

"Butcher shop is right," Weber agreed. "As near as we can figure out, there are at least a dozen different kinds of flesh — some fish, some fowl, some good red meat. Maybe a little lizard, even."

"An all-purpose animal," said Kemper. "Maybe we found something finally."

"If it's edible," Oliver added. "If it doesn't poison you. If it doesn't grow hair all over you."

"That's up to you," I told him. "I got the cages down and all lined up. You can start killing off the little cusses to your heart's content."

Weber looked ruefully at the mess on the table.

"We did just a rough exploratory job," he explained. "We ought to start another one from scratch. You'll have to get in on that next one, Kemper."

Kemper nodded glumly.

Weber looked at me. "Think you can get us one?"

"Sure," I said. "No trouble."

It wasn't.

Right after lunch, a lone critter came walking up, as if to visit us. It stopped about six feet from where we sat, gazed at us soulfully, then obligingly dropped dead.

During the next few days, Oliver and Weber barely took time out to eat and sleep. They sliced and probed. They couldn't believe half the things they found. They argued. They waved their scalpels in the air to emphasize their anguish. They almost broke down and wept. Kemper filled box after box with slides and sat hunched, half petrified, above his microscope.

Parsons and I wandered around while the others worked. He dug up some soil samples and tried to classify the grasses and failed, because there weren't any grasses — there was just one type of grass. He made notes on the weather and ran an analysis of the air and tried to pull together an ecological report without a lot to go on.

I looked for insects and I didn't find any except the bees and I never saw those unless I was near a critter herd. I watched for birds and there were none. I spent two days investigating a creek, lying on my belly and staring down into the water, and there were no signs of life. I hunted up a sugar sack and put a hoop in the mouth of it and spent another two days seining. I didn't catch a thing — not a fish, not even a crawdad, not a single thing.

By that time, I was ready to admit that Kemper had guessed right.

Fullerton walked around, too, but we paid no attention to him. All the Double Eyes, every one of them, always were looking for something no one else could see. After a while, you got pretty tired of them. I'd spent twenty years getting tired of them.

The last day I went seining, Fullerton stumbled onto me late in the afternoon. He stood up on the bank and watched me working in a pool. When I looked up, I had the feeling he'd been watching me for quite a little while.

"There's nothing there," he said.

The way he said it, he made it sound as if he'd known all along there was nothing there and that I was a fool for looking.

But that wasn't the only reason I got sore.

Sticking out of his face, instead of the usual toothpick, a stem of grass and he was rolling it around in his lips chewing it the way he chewed the toothpicks.

"Spit out that grass!" I shouted at him. "You fool, spit it out!"

His eyes grew startled and he spit out the grass.

"It's hard to remember," he mumbled. "You see, it's my first trip out and —»

"It could be your last one, too," I told him brutally. "Ask Weber sometime, when you have a moment, what happened to the guy who pulled a leaf and chewed it. Absent-minded, sure. Habit, certainly. He was just as dead as if he'd committed suicide."

Fullerton stiffened up.

"I'll keep it in mind," he said.

I stood there, looking up at him, feeling a little sorry that I'd been so tough with him.

But I had to be. There were so many absent-minded, well-intentioned ways a man could kill himself.

"You find anything?" I asked.

"I've been watching the critters," he said. "There was something funny that I couldn't quite make out at first…"

"I can list you a hundred funny things."

"That's not what I mean, Sutter. Not the patchwork color or the bushes growing out of them. There was something else. I finally got it figured out. There aren't any young."

Fullerton was right, of course. I realized it now, after he had told me. There weren't any calves or whatever you might call them. All we'd seen were adults. And yet that didn't necessarily mean there weren't any calves. It just meant we hadn't seen them. And the same, I knew, applied as well to insects, birds and fish. They all might be on the planet, but we just hadn't managed to find them yet.

And then, belatedly, I got it — the inference, the hope, the half-crazy fantasy behind this thing that Fullerton had found, or imagined he'd found.

"You're downright loopy," I said flatly.

He stared back at me and his eyes were shining like a kid's at Christmas.

He said: "It had to happen sometime, Sutter, somewhere." I climbed up the bank and stood beside him. I looked at the net I still held in my hands and threw it back into the creek and watched it sink.

"Be sensible," I warned him. "You have no evidence. Immortality wouldn't work that way. It couldn't. That way, it would be nothing but a dead end. Don't mention it to anyone. They'd ride you without mercy all the way back home."

I don't know why I wasted time on him. He stared back at me stubbornly, but still with that awful light of hope and triumph on his face.

"I'll keep my mouth shut," I told him curtly. "I won't say a word."

"Thanks, Sutter," he answered. "I appreciate it a lot."

I knew from the way he said it that he could murder me with gusto.

We trudged back to camp.

The camp was all slicked up.

The dissecting mess had been cleared away and the table had been scrubbed so hard that it gleamed. Parsons was cooking supper and singing one of his obscene ditties. The other three sat around in their camp chairs and they had broken out some liquor and were human once again.

"All buttoned up?" I asked, but Oliver shook his head.

They poured a drink for Fullerton and he accepted it, a bit ungraciously, but he did take it. That was some improvement on the usual Double Eye.

They didn't offer me any. They knew I couldn't drink it. "What have we got?" I asked.

"It could be something good," said Oliver. "It's a walking menu. It's an all-purpose animal, for sure. It lays eggs, gives milk, makes honey. It has six different kinds of red meat, two of fowl, one of fish and a couple of others we can't identify."

"Lays eggs," I said. "Gives milk. Then it reproduces."

"Certainly," said Weber. "What did you think?"

"There aren't any young."

Weber grunted. "Could be they have nursery areas. Certain places instinctively set aside in which to rear their young."

"Or they might have instinctive birth control," suggested Oliver. "That would fit in with the perfectly balanced ecology Kemper talks about…"

Weber snorted. "Ridiculous!"

"Not so ridiculous," Kemper retorted. "Not half so ridiculous as some other things we found. Not one-tenth as ridiculous as no brain or nervous system. Not any more ridiculous than my bacteria."

"Your bacteria!" Weber said. He drank down half a glass of liquor in a single gulp to make his disdain emphatic.

"The critters swarm with them," Kemper went on. "You find them everywhere throughout the entire animal. Not just in the bloodstream, not in restricted areas, but in the entire organism. And all of them the same. Normally it takes a hundred different kinds of bacteria to make a metabolism work, but here there's only one. And that one, by definition, must be general purpose — it must do all the work that the hundred other species do."

He grinned at Weber. "I wouldn't doubt but right there are your brains and nervous systems — the bacteria doubling in brass for both systems."

Parsons came over from the stove and stood with his fists planted on his hips, a steak fork grasped in one hand and sticking out at a tangent from his body.

"If you ask me," he announced, "there ain't no such animal. The critters are all wrong. They can't be made that way."

"

"But they are," said Kemper.

"It doesn't make sense! One kind of life. One kind of grass for it to eat. I'll bet that if we could make a census, we'd find the critter population is at exact capacity — just so many of them to the acre, figured down precisely to the last mouthful of grass. Just enough for them to eat and no more. Just enough so the grass won't be overgrazed. Or undergrazed, for that matter."

"What's wrong with that?" I asked, just to needle him.

I thought for a minute he'd take the steak fork to me.

"What's wrong with it?" he thundered. "Nature's never static, never standing still. But here it's standing still. Where's the competition? Where's the evolution?"

"That's not the point," said Kemper quietly. "The fact is that that's the way it is. The point is why? How did it happen? How was it planned? Why was it planned?"

"Nothing's planned," Weber told him sourly. "You know better than to talk like that."

Parsons went back to his cooking. Fullerton had wandered off somewhere. Maybe he was discouraged from hearing about the eggs and milk.

For a time, the four of us just sat.

Finally Weber said: "The first night we were here, I came out to relieve Bob at guard and I said to him…"

He looked at me. "You remember, Bob?"

"Sure. You said symbiosis."

"And now?" asked Kemper.

"I don't know. It simply couldn't happen. But if it did — if it could — this critter would be the most beautifully logical example of symbiosis you could dream up. Symbiosis carried to its logical conclusion. Like, long ago, all the life-forms said let's quit this feuding, let's get together, let's cooperate. All the plants and animals and fish and bacteria got together —»

"It's far-fetched, of course," said Kemper. "But, by and large, it's not anything unheard of, merely carried further, that's all. Symbiosis is a recognized way of life and there's nothing —»

Parsons let out a bellow for them to come and get it, and I went to my tent and broke out my diet kit and mixed up a mess of goo. It was a relief to eat in private, without the others making cracks about the stuff I had to choke down.

I found a thin sheaf of working notes on the small wooden crate I'd set up for a desk. I thumbed through them while I ate. They were fairly sketchy and sometimes hard to read, being smeared with blood and other gook from the dissecting table. But I was used to that. I worked with notes like that all the blessed time; So I was able to decipher them. The whole picture wasn't there, of course, but there was enough to bear out what they'd told me and a good deal more as well.

For examples, the color squares that gave the critters their crazy-quiltish look were separate kinds of meat or fish or fowl or unknown food, whatever it might be. Almost as if each square was the present-day survivor of each ancient symbiont — if, in fact, there was any basis to this talk of symbiosis.

The egg-laying apparatus was described in some biologic detail, but there seemed to be no evidence of recent egg production. The same was true of the lactation system.

There were, the notes said in Oliver's crabbed writing, five kinds of fruit and three kinds of vegetables to be derived from the plants growing from the critters.

I shoved the notes to one side and sat back on my chair, gloating just a little.

Here was diversified farming with a vengeance! You had meat and dairy herds, fish pond, aviary, poultry yard, orchard and garden rolled into one, all in the body of a single animal that was a complete farm in itself!

I went through the notes hurriedly again and found what I was looking for. The food product seemed high in relation to the gross weight of the animal. Very little would be lost in dressing out.

That is the kind of thing an ag economist has to consider.

But that isn't all of it, by any means. What if a man couldn't eat the critter? Suppose the critters couldn't be moved off the planet because they died if you took them from their range?

I recalled how they'd just walked up and died; that in itself was another headache to be filed for future worry.

What if they could only eat the grass that grew on this one planet? And if so, could the grass be grown elsewhere? What kind of tolerance would the critter show to different kinds of climate? What was the rate of reproduction? If it was slow, as was indicated, could it be stepped up? What was the rate of growth?

I got up and walked out of the tent and stood for a while, outside. The little breeze that had been blowing had died down at sunset and the place was quiet. Quiet because there was nothing but the critters to make any noise and we had yet to hear them make a single sound. The stars blazed overhead and there were so many of them that they lighted up the countryside as if there were a moon.

I walked over to where the rest of the men were sitting. "It looks like we'll be here for a while," I said. "Tomorrow we might as well get the ship unloaded."

No one answered me, but in the silence I could sense the half-hidden satisfaction and the triumph. At last we'd hit the jackpot! We'd be going home with something that would make those other teams look pallid. We'd be the ones who got the notices and bonuses.

Oliver finally broke the silence. "Some of our animals aren't in good shape. I went down this afternoon to have a look at them. A couple of the pigs and several of the rats."

He looked at me accusingly.

I flared up at him. "Don't look at me! I'm not their keeper. I just take care of them until you're ready to use them."

Kemper butted in to bead off an argument. "Before we do any feeding, we'll need another critter."

"I'll lay you a bet," said Weber.

Kemper didn't take him up.

It was just as well he didn't, for a critter came in, right after breakfast, and died with a savoir faire that was positively marvelous. They went to work on it immediately.

Parsons and I started unloading the supplies. We put in a busy day. We moved all the food except the emergency rations we left in the ship. We slung down a refrigerating unit Weber had been yelling for, to keep the critter products fresh.

We unloaded a lot of equipment and some silly odds and ends that I knew we'd have no use for, but that some of the others wanted broken out. We put up tents and we lugged and pushed and hauled all day. Late in the afternoon, we had it all stacked up and under canvas and were completely bushed.

Kemper went back to his bacteria. Weber spent hours with the animals. Oliver dug up a bunch of grass and gave the grass the works. Parsons went out on field trips, mumbling and fretting.

Of all of us, Parsons had the job that was most infuriating.

Ordinarily the ecology of even the simplest of planets is a complicated business and there's a lot of work to do. But here was almost nothing. There was no competition for survival.

There was no dog eat dog. There were just critters cropping grass.

I started to pull my report together, knowing that it would have to be revised and rewritten again and again. But I was anxious to get going. I fairly itched to see the pieces fall together — although I knew from the very start some of them wouldn't fit. They almost never do.

Things went well. Too well, it sometimes seemed to me.

There were incidents, of course, like when the punkins somehow chewed their way out of their cage and disappeared.

Weber was almost beside himself.

"They'll come back," said Kemper. "With that appetite of theirs, they won't stay away for long."

And he was right about that part of it. The punkins were the hungriest creatures in the Galaxy. You could never feed them enough to satisfy them. And they'd eat anything. It made no difference to them, just so there was a lot of it. And it was that very factor in their metabolism that made them invaluable as research animals.

The other animals thrived on the critter diet. The carnivorous ones ate the critter-meat and the vegetarians chomped on critter-fruit and critter-vegetables. They all grew sleek and sassy. They seemed in better health than the control animals, which continued their regular diet. Even the pigs and rats that had been sick got well again and as fat and happy as any of the others.

Kemper told us, "This critter stuff is more than just a food. It's a medicine. I can see the signs: "Eat Critter and Keep Well!""

Weber grunted at him. He was never one for joking and I think he was a worried man. A thorough man, he'd found too many things that violated all the tenets he'd accepted as the truth. No brain or nervous system. The ability to die at will. The lingering hint of wholesale symbiosis. And the bacteria.

The bacteria, I think, must have seemed to him the worst of all.

There was, it now appeared, only one type involved.

Kemper had hunted frantically and had discovered no others, Oliver found it in the grass. Parsons found it in the soil and water. The air, strangely enough, seemed to be free of it.

But Weber wasn't the only one who worried. Kemper worried, too. He unloaded most of it just before our bedtime, sitting on the edge of his cot and trying to talk the worry out of himself while I worked on my reports.

And he'd picked the craziest point imaginable to pin his worry on.

"You can explain it all," he said, "if you are only willing to concede on certain points. You can explain the critters if you're willing to believe in a symbiotic arrangement carried out on a planetary basis. You can believe in the utter simplicity of the ecology if you're willing to assume that, given space and time enough, anything can happen within the bounds of logic."

"You can visualize how the bacteria might take the place of brains and nervous systems if you're ready to say this is a bacterial world and not a critter world. And you can even envision the bacteria — all of them, every single one of them — as forming one gigantic linked intelligence. And if you accept that theory, then the voluntary deaths become understandable, because there's no actual death involved — it's just like you or me trimming off a hangnail. And if this is true, then Fullerton has found immortality, although it's not the kind he was looking for and it won't do him or us a single bit of good.

"But the thing that worries me," he went on, his face all knotted up with worry, "is the seeming lack of anything resembling a defense mechanism. Even assuming that the critters are no more than fronting for a bacterial world, the mechanism should be there as a simple matter of precaution. Every living thing we know of has some sort of way to defend itself or to escape potential enemies. It either fights or runs and hides to preserve its life."

He was right, of course. Not only did the critters have no defense, they even saved one the trouble of going out to kill them.

"Maybe we are wrong," Kemper concluded. "Maybe life, after all, is not as valuable as we think it is, Maybe it's not a thing to cling to. Maybe it's not worth fighting for. Maybe the critters, in their dying, are closer to the truth than we."

It would go on like that, night after night, with Kemper talking around in circles and never getting anywhere. I think most of the time he wasn't talking to me, but talking to himself, trying by the very process of putting it in words to work out some final answer.

And long after we had turned out the lights and gone to bed, I'd lie on my cot and think about all that Kemper said and I thought in circles, too. I wondered why all the critters that came in and died were in the prime of life. Was the dying a privilege that was accorded only to the fit? Or were all the critters in the prime of life? Was there really some cause to believe they might be immortal?

I asked a lot of questions, but there weren't any answers.

We continued with our work. Weber killed some of his animals and examined them and there were no signs of ill effect from the critter diet. There were traces of critter bacteria in their blood, but no sickness, reaction or antibody formation. Kemper kept on with his bacterial work. Oliver started a whole series of experiments with the grass. Parsons just gave up.

The punkins didn't come back and Parsons and Fullerton went out and hunted for them, but without success.

I worked on my report and the pieces fell together better than I had hoped they would. It began to look as though we had the situation well nailed down. We were all feeling pretty good. We could almost taste that bonus.

But I think that, in the back of our minds, all of us were wondering if we could get away scot free. I know I had mental fingers crossed. It just didn't seem quite possible that something wouldn't happen.

And, of course, it did.

We were sitting around after supper, with the lantern lighted, when we heard the sound. I realized afterward that we had been hearing it for some time before we paid attention to it. It started so soft and so far away that it crept upon us without alarming us. At first, it sounded like a sighing, as if a gentle wind were blowing through a little tree, and then it changed into a rumble, but a far-off rumble that had no menace in it. I was just getting ready to say something about thunder and wondering if our stretch of weather was about to break when Kemper jumped up and yelled.

I don't know what he yelled. Maybe it wasn't a word at all. But the way he yelled brought us to our feet and sent us at a dead run for the safety of the ship. Even before we got there, in the few seconds it took to reach the ladder, the character of the sound had changed and there was no mistaking what it was — the drumming of hoofs heading straight for camp.

They were almost on top of us when we reached the ladder and there wasn't time or room for all of us to use it. I was the last in line and I saw I'd never make it and a dozen possible escape plans flickered through my mind. But I knew they wouldn't work fast enough. Then I saw the rope, hanging where I'd left it after the unloading job, and I made a jump for it. I'm no rope-climbing expert, but I shinnied up it with plenty of speed. And right behind me came Weber, who was no rope-climber; either, but who was doing rather well.

I thought of how lucky it had been that I hadn't found the time to take down the rig and how Weber had ridden me unmercifully about not doing it. I wanted to shout down and point it out to him, but I didn't have the breath.

We reached the port and tumbled into it. Below us, the stampeding critters went grinding through the camp. There seemed to be millions of them. One of the terrifying things about it was how silently they ran. They made no outcry of any kind; all you could hear was the sound of their hoofs pounding on the ground. It seemed almost as if they ran in some blind fury that was too deep for outcry.

They spread for miles, as far as one could see on the star-lit plains, but the spaceship divided them and they flowed to either side of it and then flowed back again, and beyond the spaceship there was a little sector that they never touched.

I thought how we could have been safe staying on the ground and huddling in that sector, but that's one of the things a man never can foresee.

The stampede lasted for almost an hour. When it was all over, we came down and surveyed the damage. The animals in their cages, lined up between the ship and the camp, were safe. All but one of the sleeping tents were standing. The lantern still burned brightly on the table. But everything else was gone. Our food supply was trampled in the ground. Much of the equipment was lost and wrecked. On either side of the camp, the ground was churned up like a half-plowed field. The whole thing was a mess.

It looked as if we were licked.

The tent Kemper and I used for sleeping still stood, so our notes were safe. The animals were all right. But that was all we had — the notes and animals.

"I need three more weeks," said Weber. "Give me just three weeks to complete the tests."

"We haven't got three weeks," I answered. "All our food is gone."

"The emergency rations in the ship?"

"That's for going home."

"We can go a little hungry."

He glared at us — at each of us in turn — challenging us to do a little starving.

"I can go three weeks," he said, "without any food at all? "We could eat critter," suggested Parsons. "We could take a chance."

Weber shook his head. "Not yet. In three weeks, when the tests are finished, then maybe we will know. Maybe we won't need those rations for going home. Maybe we can stock up on critters and eat our heads off all the way to Caph."

I looked around at the rest of them, but I knew, before I looked, the answer I would get.

"All right," I said. "We'll try it."

"It's all right for you," Fullerton retorted hastily. "You have your diet kit."

Parsons reached out and grabbed him and shook him so hard that be went cross-eyed. "We don't talk like that about those diet kits."

Then Parsons let him go.

We set up double guards, for the stampede had wrecked our warning system, but none of us got much sleep. We were too upset.

Personally, I did some worrying about why the critters had stampeded. There was nothing on the planet that could scare them. There were no other animals. There was no thunder or lightning — as a matter of fact, it appeared that the planet might have no boisterous weather ever. And there seemed to be nothing in the critter makeup, from our observation of them, that would set them off emotionally.

But there must be a reason and a purpose, I told myself. And there must be, too, in their dropping dead for us. But was the purpose intelligence or instinct? That was what bothered me most. It kept me awake all night long.

At daybreak, a critter walked in and died for us happily. We went without our breakfast and, when noon came, no one said anything about lunch, so we skipped that, too.

Late in the afternoon, I climbed the ladder to get some food for supper. There wasn't any. Instead, I found five of the fattest punkins you ever laid your eyes on. They had chewed holes through the packing boxes and the food was cleaned out. The sacks were limp and empty. They'd even managed to get the lid off the coffee can somehow and had eaten every bean.

The five of them sat contentedly in a corner, blinking smugly at me. They didn't make a racket, as they usually did. Maybe they knew they were in the wrong or maybe they were just too full. For once, perhaps, they'd gotten all they could eat.

I just stood there and looked at them and I knew how they'd gotten on the ship. I blamed myself, not them. If only I'd found the time to take down the unloading rig, they'd never gotten in. But then I remembered how that dangling rope had saved my life and Weber's and I couldn't decide whether I'd done right or wrong.

I went over to the corner and picked the punkins up. I stuffed three of them in my pockets and carried the other two. I climbed down from the ship and walked up to camp. I put the punkins on the table.

"Here they are," I said. "They were in the ship. That's why we couldn't find them. They climbed up the rope."

Weber took one look at them. "They look well fed. Did they leave anything?"

"Not a scrap. They cleaned us out entirely."

The punkins were quite happy. It was apparent they were glad to be back with us again. After all, they'd eaten everything in reach and there was no further reason for their staying in the ship.

Parsons picked up a knife and walked over to the critter that had died that morning.

"Tie on your bibs," he said.

He carved out big steaks and threw them on the table and then he lit his stove. I retreated to my tent as soon as he started cooking, for never in my life have I smelled anything as good as those critter steaks.

I broke out the kit and mixed me up some goo and sat there eating it, feeling sorry for myself.

Kemper came in after a while and sat down on his cot.

"Do you want to hear?" he asked me.

"Go ahead," I invited him resignedly.

"It's wonderful. It's got everything you've ever eaten backed clear off the table. We had three different kinds of red meat and a slab of fish and something that resembled lobster, only better. And there's one kind of fruit growing out of that bush in the middle of the back…"

"And tomorrow you drop dead."

"I don't think so," Kemper said. "The animals have been thriving on it. There's nothing wrong with them."

It seemed that Kemper was right. Between the animals and men, it took a critter a day. The critters didn't seem to mind. They were johnny-on-the-spot. They walked in promptly, one at a time, and keeled over every morning.

The way the men and animals ate was positively indecent. Parsons cooked great platters of different kinds of meat and fish and fowl and what-not. He prepared huge bowls of vegetables. He heaped other bowls with fruit. He racked up combs of honey and the men licked the platters clean. They sat around with belts unloosened and patted their bulging bellies and were disgustingly contented.

I waited for them to break out in a rash or to start turning green with purple spots or grow scales or something of the sort. But nothing happened. They thrived, just as the animals were thriving. They felt better than they ever had.

Then, one morning, Fullerton turned up sick. He lay on his cot flushed with fever. It looked like Centaurian virus, although we'd been inoculated against that. In fact, we'd been inoculated and immunized against almost everything. Each time, before we blasted off on another survey, they jabbed us full of booster shots.

I didn't think much of it. I was fairly well convinced, for a time at least, that all that was wrong with him was overeating.

Oliver, who knew a little about medicine, but not much, got the medicine chest out of the ship and pumped Fullerton full of some new antibiotic that came highly recommended for almost everything.

We went on with our work, expecting he'd be on his feet in a day or two.

But he wasn't. If anything, he got worse.

Oliver went through the medicine chest, reading all the labels carefully, but didn't find anything that seemed to be the proper medication. He read the first-aid booklet. It didn't tell him anything except how to set broken legs or apply artificial respiration and simple things like that.

Kemper had been doing a lot of worrying, so he had Oliver take a sample of Fullerton's blood and then prepared a slide. When he looked at the blood through the microscope, he found that it swarmed with bacteria from the critters. Oliver took some more blood samples and Kemper prepared more slides, just to double-check, and there was no doubt about it.

By this time, all of us were standing around the table watching Kemper and waiting for the verdict. I know the same thing must have been in the mind of each of us.

It was Oliver who put it into words. "Who is next?" he asked.

Parsons stepped up and Oliver took the sample.

We waited anxiously.

Finally Kemper straightened.

"You have them, too," he said to Parsons. "Not as high a count as Fullerton."

Man after man stepped up. All of us had the bacteria, but in my case the count was low.

"It's the critter," Parsons said. "Bob hasn't been eating any."

"But cooking kills — " Oliver started to say.

"You can't be sure. These bacteria would have to be highly adaptable. They do the work of thousands of other microorganisms. They're a sort of bandy-man, a jack-of-all-trades. They can acclimatize. They can meet new situations. They haven't weakened the strain by becoming specialized."

"Besides," said Parsons, "we don't cook all of it. We don't cook the fruit and most of you guys raise hell if a steak is more than singed."

"What I can't figure out is why it should be Fullerton," Weber said. "Why should his count be higher? He started on the critter the same time as the rest of us."

I remembered that day down by the creek.

"He got a head start on the rest of you," I explained. "He ran out of toothpicks and took to chewing grass stems. I caught him at it."

I know it wasn't very comforting. It meant that in another week or two, all of them would have as high a count as Fullerton. But there was no sense not telling them. It would have been criminal not to. There was no place for wishful thinking in a situation like that.

"We can't stop eating critter," said Weber. "It's all the food we have. There's nothing we can do."

"I have a hunch," Kemper replied, "it's too late anyhow."

"If we started home right now," I said, "there's my diet kit…"

They didn't let me finish making my offer. They slapped me on the back and pounded one another and laughed like mad.

It wasn't funny. They just needed something they could laugh at.

"It wouldn't do any good," said Kemper. "We've already had it. Anyhow, your diet kit wouldn't last us all the way back home."

"We could have a try at it," I argued.

"It may be just a transitory thing," Parsons said. "Just a bit of fever. A little upset from a change of diet."

We all hoped that, of course.

But Fullerton got no better.

Weber took blood samples of the animals and they bad a bacterial count almost as high as Fullerton's — much higher than when he'd taken it before.

Weber blamed himself. "I should have kept closer check. I should have taken tests every day or so."

"What difference would it have made?" demanded Parsons. "Even if you had, even if you'd found a lot of bacteria in the blood, we'd still have eaten critter. There was no other choice."

"Maybe it's not the bacteria," said Oliver. "We may be jumping at conclusions. It may be something else that Fullerton picked up."

Weber brightened up a bit. "That's right. The animals still seem to be okay."

They were bright and chipper, in the best of health.

We waited. Fullerton got neither worse nor better.

Then, one night, he disappeared.

Oliver, who had been sitting with him, had dozed off for a moment. Parsons, on guard, had heard nothing.

We hunted for him for three full days. He couldn't have gone far, we figured. He had wandered off in a delirium and he didn't have the strength to cover any distance.

But we didn't find him.

We did find one queer thing, however. It was a ball of some strange substance, white and fresh-appearing. It was about four feet in diameter. It lay at the bottom of a little gully, hidden out of sight, as if someone or something might have brought it there and hidden it away.

We did some cautious poking at it and we rolled it back and forth a little and wondered what it was, but we were hunting Fullerton and we didn't have the time to do much investigating. Later on, we agreed, we would come back and get it and find out what it was.

Then the animals came down with the fever, one after another — all except the controls, which had been eating regular food until the stampede had destroyed the supply.

After that, of course, all of them ate critter.

By the end of two days, most of the animals were down.

Weber worked with them, scarcely taking time to rest. We all helped as best we could.

Blood samples showed a greater concentration of bacteria. Weber started a dissection, but never finished it. Once he got the animal open, he took a quick look at it and scraped the whole thing off the table into a pail. I saw him, but I don't think any of the others did. We were pretty busy.

I asked him about it later in the day, when we were alone for a moment. He briskly brushed me off.

I went to bed early that night because I had the second guard. It seemed I had no more than shut my eyes when I was brought upright by a racket that raised goose pimples on every inch of me.

I tumbled out of bed and scrabbled around to find my shoes and get them on. By that time, Kemper had dashed out of the tent.

There was trouble with the animals. They were fighting to break out, chewing the bars of their cages and throwing themselves against them in a blind and terrible frenzy. And all the time they were squealing and screaming. To listen to them set your teeth on edge.

Weber dashed around with a hypodermic. After what seemed hours, we had them full of sedative. A few of them broke loose and got away, but the rest were sleeping peacefully.

I got a gun and took over guard duty while the other men went back to bed.

I stayed down near the cages, walking back and forth because I was too tense to do much sitting down. It seemed to me that between the animals" frenzy to escape and Fullerton's disappearance, there was a parallel that was too similar for comfort.

I tried to review all that had happened on the planet and I got bogged down time after time as I tried to make the picture dovetail. The trail of thought I followed kept turning back to Kemper's worry about the critters" lack of a defense mechanism.

Maybe, I told myself, they had a defense mechanism, after all — the slickest, smoothest, trickiest one Man ever had encountered.

As soon as the camp awoke, I went to our tent to stretch out for a moment, perhaps to catch a catnap. Worn out, I slept for hours.

Kemper woke me.

"Get up, Bob!" he said. "For the love of God, get up!"

It was late afternoon and the last rays of the sun were streaming through the tent flap. Kemper's face was haggard. It was as if he'd suddenly grown old since I'd seen him less than twelve hours before.

"They're encysting," he gasped. "They're turning into cocoons or chrysalises or…"

I sat up quickly. "That one we found out there in the field!"

He nodded.

"Fullerton?" I askecl

"We'll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone."

We had some trouble finding it because the land was so flat and featureless that there were no landmarks.

But finally we located it, just as dusk was setting in. The ball had split in two — not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after a chicken has been hatched. And the halves lay there in the gathering darkness, in the silence underneath the sudden glitter of the stars — a last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien fact.

I tried to say something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely sure just what I should say. Anyhow, the words died in the dryness of my mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out.

For it was not only the two halves of the cocoon — it was the marks within that hollow, the impression of what had been there, blurred and distorted by the marks of what it had become.

We fled back to camp.

Someone, I think it was Oliver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily, unable to look at one another, knowing that the time was past for all dissembling, that there was no use of glossing over or denying what we'd seen in the dim light in the gully.

"Bob is the only one who has a chance," Kemper finally said, speaking more concisely than seemed possible. "I think be should leave right now. Someone must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them."

He looked across the circle of lantern light at me.

"Well," he said sharply, "get going! What's the matter with you?"

"You were right," I said, not much more than whispering. "Remember how you wondered about a defense mechanism?"

"They have it," Weber agreed. "The best you can find. There's no beating them. They don't fight you. They absorb you. They make you into them. No wonder there are just the critters here. No wonder the planet's ecology is simple. They have you pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on the planet. Take one drink of water. Chew a single grass stem. Take one bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold."

Oliver came out of the dark and walked across the lantern-lighted circle. He stopped in front of me.

"Here are your diet kit and notes," he said.

"But I can't run out on you!"

"Forget us!" Parsons barked at me. "We aren't human any more. In a few more days…"

He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high, so that we could see.

"Look," he said.

There were no animals. There were just the cocoons and the little critters and the cocoons that had split in half.

I saw Kemper looking at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his face.

"You don't want to stay," he told me. "If you do, in a day or two, a critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you'll go crazy all the way back home — wondering which one of us it was."

He turned away then. They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I was all alone.

Weber had found an axe somewhere and he started walking down the row of cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out.

I walked slowly over to the ship and stood at the foot of the ladder, holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest.

When I got there, I turned around and looked back at them and it seemed I couldn't leave them.

I thought of all we'd been through together and when I tried to think of specific things, the only thing I could think about was how they always kidded me about the diet kit.

And I thought of the times I had to leave and go off somewhere and eat alone so that I couldn't smell the food. I thought of almost ten years of eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because of my ulcerated stomach.

Maybe they were the lucky ones, I told myself. If a man got turned into a critter, he'd probably come out with a whole stomach and never have to worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except the grass, but maybe, I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me.

So I stood there for a while and I thought about it. Then I took the diet kit and flung it out into the darkness as far as I could throw it and 1 dropped the notes to the ground.

I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons.

"What have you got for supper?" I asked him.

The Fellowship of the Talisman

Original copyright year: 1978

1

The manor house was the first undamaged structure they had seen in two days of travel through an area that had been desolated with a thoroughness at once terrifying and unbelievable.

During those two days, furtive wolves had watched them from hilltops. Foxes, their brushes dragging, had skulked through underbrush. Buzzards, perched on dead trees or on the blackened timbers of burned homesteads, had looked upon them with speculative interest. They had met not a soul, but occasionally, in thickets, they had glimpsed human skeletons.

The weather had been fine until noon of the second day, when the soft sky of early autumn became overcast, and a chill wind sprang from the north. At times the sharp wind whipped icy rain against their backs, the rain sometimes mixed with snow.

Late in the afternoon, topping a low ridge, Duncan Standish sighted the manor, a rude set of buildings fortified by palisades and a narrow moat. Inside the palisades, fronting the drawbridge, lay a courtyard, within which were penned horses, cattle, sheep, and hogs. A few men moved about in the courtyard, and smoke streamed from several chimneys. A number of small buildings, some of which bore the signs of burning, lay outside the palisades. The entire place had a down-at-heels appearance.

Daniel, the great war-horse, who had been following Duncan like a dog, came up behind the man. Clopping behind Daniel came the little gray burro, Beauty, with packs lashed upon her back. Daniel lowered his head, nudged his master's back.

"It's all right, Daniel," Duncan told him. "We've found shelter for the night."

The horse blew softly through his nostrils.

Conrad came trudging up the slope and ranged himself alongside Duncan. Conrad was a massive man. Towering close to seven feet, he was heavy even for his height. A garment made of sheep pelts hung from his shoulders almost to his knees. In his right fist he carried a heavy club fashioned from an oak branch. He stood silently, staring at the manor house.

"What do you make of it?" asked Duncan.

"They have seen us," Conrad said. "Heads peeking out above the palisades."

"Your eyes are shaper than mine," said Duncan. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, m" lord."

"Quit calling me "my lord." I'm not a lord. My father is the lord."

"I think of you as such," said Conrad. "When your father dies, you will be a lord."

"No Harriers?"

"Only people," Conrad told him.

"It seems unlikely," said Duncan, "that the Harriers would have passed by such a place."

"Maybe fought them off. Maybe the Harriers were in a hurry."

"So far," said Duncan, "from our observations, they passed little by. The lowliest cottages, even huts, were burned."

"Here comes Tiny," said Conrad. "He's been down to look them over."

The mastiff came loping up the slope and they waited for him. He went over to stand close to Conrad. Conrad patted his head, and the great dog wagged his tail. Looking at them, Duncan noted once again how similar were the man and dog. Tiny reached almost to Conrad's waist. He was a splendid brute. He wore a wide leather collar in which were fastened metal studs. His ears tipped forward as he looked down at the manor. A faint growl rumbled in his throat.

"Tiny doesn't like it, either," Conrad said.

"It's the only place we've seen," said Duncan. "It's shelter. The night will be wet and cold."

"Bedbugs there will be. Lice as well."

The little burro sidled close to Daniel to get out of the cutting wind.

Duncan shucked up his sword belt. "I don't like it, Conrad, any better than you and Tiny do. But there is a bad night coming on."

"We'll stay close together," Conrad said. "We'll not let them separate us."

"That is right," said Duncan. "We might as well start down."

As they walked down the slope, Duncan unconsciously put his hand beneath his cloak to find the pouch dangling from his belt. His fingers located the bulk of the manuscript. He seemed to hear the crinkle of the parchment as his fingers touched it. He found himself suddenly enraged at his action. Time after time, during the last two days, he'd gone through the same silly procedure, making sure the manuscript was there. Like a country boy going to a fair, he told himself, with a penny tucked in his pocket, thrusting his hand again and again into the pocket to make sure he had not lost the penny.

Having touched the parchment, again he seemed to hear His Grace saying, "Upon those few pages may rest the future hope of mankind." Although, come to think of it, His Grace was given to overstatement and not to be taken as seriously as he sometimes tried to make a person think he should be. In this instance, however, Duncan told himself, the aged and portly churchman might very well be right. But that would not be known until they got to Oxenford.

And because of this, because of the tightly written script on a few sheets of parchment, he was here rather than back in the comfort and security of Standish House, trudging down a hill to seek shelter in a place where, as Conrad had pointed out, there probably would be bedbugs.

"One thing bothers me," said Conrad as he strode along with Duncan.

"I didn't know that anything ever bothered you."

"It's the Little Folk," said Conrad. "We have seen none of them. If anyone, they should be the ones to escape the Harriers. You can't tell me that goblins and gnomes and others of their kind could not escape the Harriers."

"Maybe they are frightened and hiding out," said Duncan. "If I am any judge of them, they'd know where to hide."

Conrad brightened visibly. "Yes, that must be it," he said.

As they drew closer to the manor, they saw their estimation of the place had not been wrong. It was far from prepossessing. Ramshackle was the word for it. Here and there heads appeared over the palisades, watching their approach.

The drawbridge was still up when they reached the moat, which was a noisome thing. The stench was overpowering, and in the greenish water floated hunks of corruption that could have been decaying human bodies.

Conrad bellowed at the heads protruding over the palisades. "Open up," he shouted. "Travelers claim shelter."

Nothing happened for a time, and Conrad bellowed once again. Finally, with much creaking of wood and squealing of chains, the bridge began a slow, jerky descent. As they crossed the bridge they saw that there stood inside a motley crowd with the look of vagabonds about them, but the vagabonds were armed with spears, and some carried makeshift swords in hand.

Conrad waved his club at them. "Stand back," he growled. "Make way for m" lord."

They backed off, but the spears were not grounded; the blades stayed naked. A crippled little man, one foot dragging, limped through the crowd and came up to them. "My master welcomes you," he whined. "He would have you at table."

"First," said Conrad, "shelter for the beasts."

"There is a shed," said the whining lame man. "It is open to the weather, but it has a roof and is placed against the wall. There'll be hay for the horse and burro. I'll bring the dog a bone."

"No bone," said Conrad. "Meat. Big meat. Meat to fit his size."

"I'll find some meat," said the lame man.

"Give him a penny," Duncan said to Conrad.

Conrad inserted his fingers into the purse at his belt, brought out a coin, and flipped it to the man, who caught it deftly and touched a finger to his forelock, but in a mocking manner.

The shed was shelter, barely, but at the worst it offered some protection from the wind and a cover against rain. Duncan unsaddled Daniel and placed the saddle against the wall of the palisade. Conrad unshipped the pack from the burro, piled it atop the saddle.

"Do you not wish to take the saddle and the pack inside with you?" the lame man asked. "They might be safer there."

"Safe here," insisted Conrad. "Should anyone touch them, he will get smashed ribs, perhaps his throat torn out."

The raffish crowd that had confronted them when they crossed the bridge had scattered now. The drawbridge, with shrill sounds of protest, was being drawn up.

"Now," said the lame man, "if you two will follow me. The master sits at meat."

The great hall of the manor was ill lighted and evil smelling. Smoky torches were ranged along the walls to provide illumination. The rushes on the floor had not been changed for months, possibly for years; they were littered with bones thrown to dogs or simply tossed upon the floor once the meat had been gnawed from them. Dog droppings lay underfoot, and the room stank of urine—dog, and, more than likely, human. At the far end of the room stood a fireplace with burning logs. The chimney did not draw well and poured smoke into the hall. A long trestle table ran down the center of the hail. Around it was seated an uncouth company. Half-grown boys ran about, serving platters of food and jugs of ale.

When Duncan and Conrad came into the hail, the talk quieted and the bleary white of the feasters" faces turned to stare at the new arrivals. Dogs rose from their bones and showed their teeth at them.

At the far end of the table a man rose from his seat. He roared at them in a joyous tone, "Welcome, travelers. Come and share the board of Harold, the Reaver."

He turned his head to a group of youths serving the table.

"Kick those mangy dogs out of the way to make way for our guests," he roared. "It would not be seemly for them to be set upon and bitten."

The youths set upon their task with a will. Boots thudded into dogs; the dogs snapped back, whimpering and snarling.

Duncan strode forward, followed by Conrad.

"I thank you, sir," said Duncan, "for your courtesy."

Harold, the Reaver, was raw-boned, hairy and unkempt. His hair and beard had the appearance of having housed rats. He wore a cloak that at one time may have been purple, but was now so besmirched by grease that it seemed more mud than purple. The fur that offset the collar and the sleeves was moth-eaten.

The Reaver waved at a place next to him. "Please be seated, sir," he said.

"My name," said Duncan, "is Duncan Standish, and the man with me is Conrad."

"Conrad is your man?"

"Not my man. My companion."

The Reaver mulled the answer for a moment, then said, "In that case, he must sit with you." He said to the man in the next place, "Einer, get the hell out of here. Find another place and take your trencher with you."

With ill grace, Einer picked up his trencher and his mug and went stalking down the table to find another place.

"Now since it all is settled," the Reaver said to Duncan, "will you not sit down. We have meat and ale. The ale is excellent; for the meat I'll not say as much. There also is bread of an indifferent sort, but we have a supply of the finest honey a bee has ever made. When the Harriers came down upon us, Old Cedric, our bee master, risked his very life to bring in the hives, thus saving it for us."

"How long ago was that?" asked Duncan. "When the Harriers came?"

"It was late in the spring. There were just a few of them at first, the forerunners of the Horde. It gave us a chance to bring in the livestock and the bees. When the real Horde finally came, we were ready for them. Have you, sir, ever seen any of the Harriers?"

"No. I've only heard of them."

"They are a vicious lot," the Reaver said. "All shapes and sizes of them. Imps, demons, devils, and many others that twist your gut with fear and turn your bowels to water, all with their own special kinds of nastiness. The worst of them are the hairless ones. Human, but they are not human. Like shambling idiots, strong, massive idiots that have no fear and an undying urge to kill. No hair upon them, not a single hair from top to toe. White—white like the slugs you find when you overturn a rotting log. Fat and heavy like the slugs. But no fat. Or I think no fat, but muscle. Muscle such as you have never seen. Strength such as no one has ever seen. Taken all together, the hairless ones and the others that run with them sweep everything before them. They kill, they burn, there is no mercy in them. Ferocity and magic. That is their stock in trade. We were hard put, I don't mind telling you, to hold them at arm's length. But we resisted the magic and matched the ferocity, although the very sight of them could scare a man to death."

"I take it you did not scare."

"We did not scare," the Reaver said. "My men, they are a hard lot. We gave them blow for blow. We were as mean as they were. We were not about to give up this place we had found."

"Found?"

"Yes, found. You can tell, of course, that we are not the sort of people you'd ordinarily find in a place like this. The Reaver in my name is just a sort of joke, you see. A joke among ourselves. We are a band of honest workmen, unable to find jobs. There are many such as we. So all of us, facing the same problems and knowing there was no work for us, banded together to seek out some quiet corner of the land where we might set up rude homesteads and wrest from the soil a living for our families and ourselves. But we found no such place until we came upon this place, abandoned."

"You mean it was empty. No one living here."

"Not a soul," the Reaver said sanctimoniously. "No one around. So we had a council and decided to move in—unless, of course, the rightful owners should show up."

"In which case you'd give it back to them?"

"Oh, most certainly," said the Reaver. "Give it back to them and set out again to find for ourselves that quiet corner we had sought."

"Most admirable of you," said Duncan.

"Why, thank you, sir. But enough of this. Tell me of yourselves. Travelers, you say. In these parts not many travelers are seen. It's far too dangerous for travelers."

"We are heading south," said Duncan. "To Oxenford. Perhaps then to London Town."

"And you do not fear?"

"Naturally we fear. But we are well armed and we shall be watchful."

"Watchful you'll need to be," the Reaver said. "You'll be traveling through the heart of the Desolated Land. You face many perils. Food will be hard to find. I tell you there's nothing left. Were a raven to fly across that country he'd need to carry his provisions with him."

"You get along all right."

"We were able to save our livestock. We planted late crops after the Harriers passed on. Because of the lateness of the planting, the harvest has been poor. Half a crop of wheat, less than half a crop of rye and barley. Only a small oat crop. The buckwheat was a total failure. We are much pushed for an adequate supply of hay. And that's not all. Our cattle suffer from the murrain. The wolves prey upon the sheep."

Trenchers were set down in front of Duncan and Conrad, then a huge platter with a haunch of beef on one end of it, a saddle of mutton on the other. Another youth brought a loaf of bread and a plate of honey in the comb.

As he ate, Duncan looked around the table. No matter what the Reaver may have said, he told himself, the men who sat there could not be honest workmen. They had the look of wolves. Perhaps a raiding party that, in the midst of raiding, had been surprised by the Harriers. Having fought off the Harriers and with nothing better to do, they had settled down, at least for the time. It would be a good hiding place. No one, not even a lawman, would come riding here.

"The Harriers?" he asked. "Where are they now?"

"No one knows," the Reaver told him. "They could be anywhere."

"But this is little more than the border of the Desolated Land. Word is that they struck deep into northern Britain."

"Ah, yes, perhaps. We have had no word. There are none to carry word. You are the only ones we've seen. You must have matters of great import to bring you to this place."

"We carry messages. Nothing more."

"You said Oxenford. And London Town."

"That is right."

"There is nothing at Oxenford."

"That may be," said Duncan. "I have never been there."

There were no women here, he noted. No ladies sitting at the table, as would have been the case in any well-regulated manor. If there were women here, they were shut away.

One of the youths brought a pitcher of ale, filled cups for the travelers. The ale, when Duncan tasted it, was of high quality. He said as much to the Reaver.

"The next batch will not be," the Reaver said. "The grain is poor this year and the hay! We've had a hell's own time getting any hay, even of the poorest quality. Our poor beasts will have slim pickings through the winter months."

Many of those at the table had finished with their eating. A number of them had fallen forward on the table, their heads pillowed on their arms. Perhaps they slept in this manner, Duncan thought. Little more than animals, with no proper beds. The Reaver had lolled back in his chair, his eyes closed. The talk throughout the hall had quieted.

Duncan sliced two chunks of bread and handed one of them to Conrad. His own slice he spread with honey from the comb. As the Reaver had said, it was excellent, clean and sweet, made from summer flowers. Not the dark, harsh-tasting product so often found in northern climes.

A log in the fireplace, burning through, collapsed in a shower of sparks. Some of the torches along the wall had gone out, but still trailed greasy smoke. A couple of dogs, disputing a bone, snarled at one another. The stench of the hall, it seemed, was worse than when they had first entered.

A muted scream brought Duncan to his feet. For a second he stood listening, and the scream came again, a fighting scream, of anger rather than of pain. Conrad surged up. "That's Daniel," he shouted.

Duncan, followed by Conrad, charged down the hall. A man, stumbling erect from a sodden sleep, loomed in Duncan's path. Duncan shoved him to one side. Conrad sprang past him, using his club to clear the way for them. Men who came in contact with the club howled in anger behind them. A dog ran yipping. Duncan freed his sword and whipped it from the scabbard, metal whispering as he drew the blade.

Ahead of him, Conrad tugged at the door, forced it open, and the two of them plunged out into the courtyard. A large bonfire was burning and in its light they saw a group of men gathered about the shed in which the animals had been housed. But even as they came out into the yard the group was breaking up and fleeing.

Daniel, squealing with rage, stood on his hind legs, striking out with his forefeet at the men in front of him. One man was stretched on the ground and another was crawling away. As Duncan and Conrad ran across the yard, the horse lashed out and caught another man in the face with an iron-shod hoof, bowling him over. A few feet from Daniel, a raging Tiny had another man by the throat and was shaking him savagely. The little burro was a flurry of flailing hoofs.

At the sight of the two men racing across the courtyard, the few remaining in the group before the shed broke up and ran.

Duncan strode forward to stand beside the horse. "It's all right now," he said. "We're here."

Daniel snorted at him.

"Let loose," Conrad said to Tiny. "He's dead."

The dog gave way, contemptuously, and licked his bloody muzzle. The man he had loosed had no throat. Two men stretched in front of Daniel did not move; both seemed dead. Another dragged himself across the courtyard with a broken back. Still others were limping, bent over, as they fled.

Men were spewing out of the great hall door. Once they came out, they clustered into groups, stood, and stared. Pushing his way through them came the Reaver. He walked toward Duncan and Conrad.

He blustered at them. "What is this?" he stormed. "I give you hospitality and here my men lie dead!"

"They tried to steal our goods," said Duncan. "Perhaps they had in mind, as well, to steal the animals. Our animals, as you can see, did not take kindly to it."

The Reaver pretended to be horrified. "This I can't believe. My men would not stoop to such a shabby trick."

"Your men," said Duncan, "are a shabby lot."

"This is most embarrassing," the Reaver said. "I do not quarrel with guests."

"No need to quarrel," said Duncan sharply. "Lower the bridge and we'll leave. I insist on that."

Hoisting his club, Conrad stepped close to the Reaver. "You understand," he said. "M" lord insists on it."

The Reaver made as if to leave, but Conrad grabbed him by the arm and spun him around. "The club is hungry," he said. "It has not cracked a skull in months."

"The drawbridge," Duncan said, far too gently.

"All right," the Reaver said. "All right." He shouted to his men. "Let down the bridge so our guests can leave."

"The rest stand back," said Conrad. "Way back. Give us room. Otherwise your skull is cracked."

"The rest of you stand back," the Reaver yelled. "Do not interfere. Give them room. We want no trouble."

"If there is trouble," Conrad told him, "you will be the first to get it." He said to Duncan, "Get the saddle on Daniel, the packs on Beauty. I will handle this one."

The drawbridge already was beginning to come down. By the time its far end thumped beyond the moat, they were ready to move out.

"I'll hang on to the Reaver," Conrad said, "till the bridge is crossed."

He jerked the Reaver along. The men in the courtyard stood well back. Tiny took the point.

Once on the bridge, Duncan saw that the overcast sky had cleared. A near-full moon rode in the sky, and the stars were shining. There still were a few scudding clouds.

At the end of the bridge they stopped. Conrad loosed his grip upon the Reaver.

Duncan said to their erstwhile host, "As soon as you get back, pull up the bridge. Don't even think of sending your men out after us. If you do, we'll loose the horse and dog on them. They're war animals, trained to fight, as you have seen. They'd cut your men to ribbons."

The Reaver said nothing. He clumped back across the bridge. Once back in the courtyard, he bellowed at his men. Wheel shrieked and chains clanked, wood moaned. The bridge began slowly moving up.

"Let's go," said Duncan when it was halfway up.

Tiny leading, they went down a hill, following a faint path.

"Where do we go?" asked Conrad.

"I don't know," said Duncan. "Just away from here."

Ahead of them Tiny growled a warning. A man was standing in the path.

Duncan walked forward to where Tiny stood. Together the two walked toward the man. The man spoke in a quavery voice, "No need to fear, sir. It's only Old Cedric, the bee master."

"What are you doing here?" asked Duncan.

"I came to guide you, sir. Besides, I bring you food."

He reached down and lifted a sack that had been standing, unnoticed, at his feet.

"A flitch of bacon," he said, "a ham, a cheese, a loaf of bread, and some honey. Besides, I can show you the fastest and the farthest way. I've lived here all my life. I know the country."

"Why should you want to help us? You are the Reaver's man. He spoke of you. He said you saved the bees when the Harriers came."

"Not the Reaver's man," said the bee master. "I was here for years before he came. It was a good life, a good life for all of us—the master and his people. We were a peaceful folk. We had no chance when the Reaver came. We knew not how to fight. The Reaver and his hellions came two years ago, come Michaelmas, and…

"But you stayed with the Reaver."

"Not stayed. Was spared. He spared me because I was the one who knew the bees. Few people know of bees, and the Reaver likes good honey."

"So I was right in my thinking," Duncan said. "The Reaver and his men took the manor house, slaughtering the people who lived here."

"Aye," said Cedric. "This poor country has fallen on hard times. First the Reaver and his like, then the Harriers."

"And you'll show us the quickest way to get out of the Reaver's reach?"

"That I will. I know all the swiftest paths. Even in the dark. When I saw what was happening, I nipped into the kitchen to collect provisions, then went over the palisades and lay in wait for you."

"But the Reaver will know you did this. He'll have vengeance on you."

Cedric shook his head. "I will not be missed. I'm always with the bees. I even spend the nights with them. I came in tonight because of the cold and rain. If I am missed, which I will not be, they'll think I'm with the bees. And if you don't mind, sir, it'll be an honor to be of service to the man who faced the Reaver down."

"You do not like this Reaver."

"I loathe him. But what's a man to do? A small stroke here and there. Like this. One does what he can."

Conrad took the sack from the old man's hand. "I'll carry this," he said. "Later we can put it with Beauty's pack."

"You think the Reaver and his men will follow?" Duncan asked.

"I don't know. Probably not, but one can't be sure."

"You say you hate him. Why don't you travel with us? Surely you do not want to stay with him."

"Not with him. Willingly I'd join you. But I cannot leave the bees."

"The bees?"

"Sir, do you know anything of bees?"

"Very little."

"They are," said Cedric, "the most amazing creatures. In one hive of them alone their numbers cannot be counted. But they need a human to help them. Each year there must be a strong queen to lay many eggs. One queen. One queen only, mind you, if the hive is to be kept up to strength. If there are more than one, the bees will swarm, part of them going elsewhere, cutting down the number in the hive. To keep them strong there must be a bee master who knows how to manage them. You go through the comb, you see, seeking out the extra queen cells and these you destroy. You might even destroy a queen who is growing old and see that a strong new queen is raised…"

"Because of this, you'll stay with the Reaver?"

The old man drew himself erect. "I love my bees," he said. "They need me."

Conrad growled. "A pox on bees. We'll die here, talking of your bees."

"I talk too much of bees," the old man said. "Follow me. Keep close upon my heels."

He flitted like a ghost ahead of them. At times he jogged, at other times he ran, then again he'd go cautiously and slowly, feeling out his way.

They went down into a little valley, climbed a ridge, plunged down into another larger valley, left it to climb yet another ridge. Above them the stars wheeled slowly in the sky and the moon inclined to the west. The chill wind still blew out of the north, but there was no rain.

Duncan was tired. With no sleep, his body cried out against the pace old Cedric set. Occasionally he stumbled. Conrad said to him, "Get up on the horse," but Duncan shook his head. "Daniel's tired as well," he said.

His mind detached itself from his feet. His feet kept on, moving him ahead, through the darkness, the pale moonlight, the great surge of forest, the loom of hills, the gash of valleys. His mind went otherwhere. It went back to the day this had all begun.

2

Duncan's first warning that he had been selected for the mission came when he tramped down the winding, baronial staircase and went across the foyer, heading for the library, where Wells had said his father would be waiting for him with His Grace.

It was not unusual for his father to want to see him, Duncan told himself. He was accustomed to being summoned, but what business could have brought the archbishop to the castle? His Grace was an elderly man, portly from good eating and not enough to do. He seldom ventured from the abbey. It would take something of more than usual importance to bring him here on his elderly gray mule, which was slow, but soft of foot, making travel easier for a man who disliked activity.

Duncan came into the library with its floor-to-ceiling book-rolls, its stained-glass window, the stag's head mounted above the flaming fireplace.

His father and the archbishop were sitting in chairs half facing the fire, and when he came into the room both of them rose to greet him, the archbishop puffing with the effort of raising himself from the chair.

"Duncan," said his father, "we have a visitor you should remember."

"Your Grace," said Duncan, hurrying forward to receive the blessing. "It is good to see you once again. It has been months."

He went down on a knee and once the blessing had been done, the archbishop reached down a symbolic hand to lift him to his feet.

"He should remember me," the archbishop told Duncan's father. "I had him in quite often to reason gently with him. It seems it was quite a job for the good fathers to pound some simple Latin and indifferent Greek and a number of other things into his reluctant skull."

"But, Your Grace," said Duncan, "it was all so dull. What does the parsing of a Latin verb…"

"Spoken like a gentleman," said His Grace. "When they come to the abbey and face the Latin that is always their complaint. But you, despite some backsliding now and then, did better than most."

"The lad's all right," growled Duncan's father. "I, myself, have but little Latin. Your people at the abbey put too much weight on it."

"That may be so," the archbishop conceded, "but it's the one thing we can do. We cannot teach the riding of a horse or the handling of a sword or the cozening of maidens."

"Let's forsake the banter and sit down," said Duncan's father. "We have matters to discuss." He said to Duncan, "Pay close attention, son. This has to do with you."

"Yes, sir," said Duncan, sitting down.

The archbishop glanced at Duncan's father. "Shall I tell him, Douglas?"

"Yes," Duncan's father said. "You know more of it than I do. And you can tell it better. You have the words for it."

The archbishop leaned back in his chair, laced pudgy fingers across a pudgy paunch. "Two years or more ago," he said to Duncan, "your father brought me a manuscript that he had found while sorting out the family papers."

"It was a job," said Duncan's father, "that should have been done centuries ago. Papers and records all shuffled together, without rhyme or reason. Old letters, old records, old grants, old deeds, ancient instruments, all shoved into a variety of boxes. The job's not entirely done as yet. I work on it occasionally. It's difficult, at times, to make sense of what I find."

"He brought me the manuscript," said the archbishop, "because it was written in an unfamiliar language. A language he had never seen and that few others ever have."

"It turned out to be Aramaic," said Duncan's father. "The tongue, I am told, in which Jesus spoke."

Duncan looked from one to the other of them. What was going on? he asked himself. What was this all about? What did it have to do with him?

"You're wondering," said the archbishop, "what this may have to do with you."

"Yes, I am," said Duncan.

"We'll get to it in time."

"I'm afraid you will," said Duncan.

"Our good fathers had a terrible time with the manuscript," the archbishop said. "There are only two of them who have any acquaintance with the language. One of them can manage to spell it out, the other may have some real knowledge of it. But I suspect not as much as he might wish that I should think. The trouble is, of course, that we cannot decide if the manuscript is a true account. It could be a hoax.

"It purports to be a journal that gives an account of the ministry of Jesus. Not necessarily day to day. There are portions of it in which daily entries are made. Then a few days may elapse, but when the journal takes up again the entry of that date will cover all that has happened since the last entry had been made. It reads as if the diarist was someone who lived at the time and witnessed what he wrote—as if he might have been a man not necessarily in the company of Jesus, but who somehow tagged along. A sort of hanger-on, perhaps. There is not the barest hint of who he might have been. He does not tell us who he is and there are no clues to his identity."

The archbishop ended speaking and stared owlishly at Duncan. "You realize, of course," he said, "if the document is true, what this would mean?"

"Why, yes, of course," Duncan answered. "It would give us a detailed, day-by-day account of the ministry of Our Lord."

"It would do more than that, my son," his father said. "It would give us the first eyewitness account of Him. It would provide the proof that there really was a man named Jesus."

"But, I don't—I can't…"

"What your father says is true," the archbishop said. "Aside from these few pages of manuscript we have, there is nothing that could be used to prove the historicity of Jesus. There do exist a few bits of writing that could be grasped at to prove there was such a man, but they are all suspect. Either outright hoaxes and forgeries or interpolations, perhaps performed by scriptorium monks who should have had better sense, who allowed devotion to run ahead of honesty. We of the faith do not need the proof; Holy Church does not doubt His existence for a moment, but our belief is based on faith, not on anything like proof. It is a thing we do not talk about. We are faced with so many infidels and pagans that it would be unwise to talk about it. We ourselves do not need such proof, if proof it is, that lies in the manuscript, but Mother Church could use it to convince those who do not share our faith."

"It would end, as well," Duncan's father said, "some of the doubt and skepticism in the Church itself."

"But it might be a hoax, you say."

"It could be," the archbishop said. "We're inclined to think it's not. But Father Jonathan, our man at the abbey, does not have the expertise to rule it out. What we need is a scholar who knows his Aramaic, who has spent years in the study of the language, the changes that have come about in it, and when they came about. It is a language that over the fifteen hundred years it was in use had many dialectical forms. A modern dialect of it is spoken still in some small corners of the eastern world, but the modern form differs greatly from that used in the time of Jesus, and even the form that Jesus used could have been considerably different than the dialect that was used a hundred miles away."

"I'm excited, of course," said Duncan, "and impressed. Excited that from this house could have come something of such significance. But I don't understand you. You said that I…"

"There is only one man in the world," the archbishop said, "who would have any chance of knowing if the manuscript were authentic. That man lives at Oxenford."

"Oxenford? You mean in the south?"

"That's right. He lives in that small community of scholars that in the last century or so…"

"Between here and Oxenford," Duncan's father said, "lies the Desolated Land."

"It is our thought," said the archbishop, "that a small band of brave and devoted men might be able to slip through. We had talked, your father and I, of sending the manuscript by sea, but these coasts are so beset by pirates that an honest vessel scarcely dares to leave its anchorage."

"How small a band?"

"As small as possible," Duncan's father said. "We can't send out a regiment of men-at-arms to go crashing through almost half of Britain. Such a force would call too much attention to itself. A small band that could move silently and unobtrusively would have a better chance. The bad part is, of course, that such a band would have to go straight across the Desolated Land. There is no way to go around it. From all accounts, it cuts a broad swath across the entire country. The expedition would be much easier if we had some idea of where the Harriers might be, but from the reports we get, they seem to be everywhere throughout the north. In recent weeks, however, from the more recent news that we have had, it seems that they may be moving in a northeasterly direction."

His Grace nodded solemnly. "Straight at us," he said.

"You mean that Standish House…"

Duncan's father laughed, a clipped, short laugh that was not quite a laugh. "No need for us to fear them here, son. Not in this ancient castle. For almost a thousand years it has stood against everything that could be hurled against it. But if a party were to attempt to get through to Oxenford, it might be best that they get started soon, before this horde of Harriers is camping on our doorstep."

"And you think that I…"

His father said, "We thought we'd mention it."

"I know of no better man to do it," said His Grace. "But it is your decision. It is a venture that must be weighed most carefully."

"I think that if you should decide to go," Duncan's father said, "you might have a fair chance of success. If I had not thought so, we would not have brought it up."

"He's well trained in the arts of combat," said His Grace, speaking to Duncan's father. "I am told, although I do not know it personally, that this son of yours is the most accomplished swordsman in the north, that he has read widely in the histories of campaigns…"

"But I've never drawn a blade in anger," protested Duncan. "My knowledge of the sword is little more than fencing. We have been at peace for years. For years there have been no wars…"

"You would not be sent out to engage in battle," his father told him smoothly. "The less you do of that the better. Your job would be to get through the Desolated Land without being seen."

"But there'd always be a chance that we'd run into the Harriers. I suppose that somehow I would manage, although it's not the kind of role in which I've ever thought to place myself. My interest, as it has been yours and your father's before you, lies in this estate, in the people and the land…"

"In that you're not unique," his father told him. "Many of the Standish men have lived in peace on these very acres, but when the call came, they rode off to battle and there was none who ever shamed us. So you can rest easy on that score. There's a long warrior line behind you."

"Blood will tell," said His Grace pontifically. "Blood will always tell. The fine old families, like the Standishes, are the bulwark of Britain and Our Lord."

"Well," said Duncan, "since you've settled it, since you have picked me to take part in this sally to the south, perhaps you'll tell me what you know of the Desolated Land."

"Only that it's a cyclic phenomenon," said the archbishop. "A cycle that strikes at a different place every five centuries or thereabouts. We know that approximately five hundred years ago it came to pass in Iberia. Five hundred years before that in Macedonia. There are indications that before that the same thing happened in Syria. The area is invaded by a swarm of demons and various associated evil spirits. They carry all before them. The inhabitants are slaughtered, all habitations burned. The area is left in utter desolation. This situation exists for an indeterminate number of years—as few as ten, perhaps, usually more than that. After that time it seems the evil forces depart and people begin to filter back, although it may require a century or more to reclaim the land. Various names have been assigned the demons and their cohorts. In this last great invasion they have been termed the Harriers; at times they are spoken of as the Horde. There is a great deal more, of course, that might be told of this phenomenon, but that is the gist of it. Efforts have been made by a number of scholars to puzzle out the reasons and the motives that may be involved. So far there are only rather feeble theories, no real evidence. Of course, no one has actually ever tried to investigate the afflicted area. No on-the-spot investigations. For which I cannot blame…"

"And yet," said Duncan's father, "you are suggesting that my son…"

"I have no suggestion that he investigate. Only that he try to make his way through the afflicted area. Were it not that Bishop Wise at Oxenford is so elderly, I would say that we should wait. But the man is old and, at the last reports, grown very feeble. His sands are running out. If we wait, we may find him gone to his heavenly reward. And he is the only hope we have. I know of no one else who can judge the manuscript."

"If the manuscript is lost while being carried to Oxenford, what then?" asked Duncan.

"That is a chance that must be taken. Although I know you would guard it with your life."

"So would anyone," said Duncan.

"It's a precious thing," said His Grace. "Perhaps the most precious thing in all of Christendom. Upon those few pages may rest the future hope of mankind."

"You could send a copy."

"No," said the archbishop, "it must be the original. No matter how carefully it would be copied, and at the abbey we have copyists of great skill, the copyist might miss, without realizing it, certain small characteristics that would be essential in determining if it's genuine or not. We have made copies, two of them, that will be kept at the abbey under lock and key. So if the original should be lost we still will have the text. But that the original should be lost is a catastrophe that bears no thinking on."

"What if Bishop Wise can authenticate the text, but raises a question on the parchment or the ink? Surely he is not also an expert on parchments and on inks."

"I doubt," the archbishop said, "that he'll raise such questions. With his scholarship, he should know beyond all question if it is genuine from an examination of the writing only. Should he, however, raise those questions, then we must seek another scholar. There must be those who know of parchments and of inks."

"Your Grace," said Duncan's father, "you say there have been theories advanced about the Desolated Land, about the motive and the reason. Do you, perhaps, have a favorite theory?"

"It's hard to choose among them," the archbishop told him. "They all are ingenious and some of them are tricky, slippery of logic. The one, of all of them, that makes most sense to me is the suggestion that the Desolated Lands are used for the purpose of renewal—that the evil forces of the world at times may need a resting period in which to rededicate their purpose and enrich themselves, recharging their strength. Like a church retreat, perhaps. So they waste an area, turning it to a place of horror and desolation, which serves as a barrier to protect them against interference while they carry out whatever unholy procedures may be necessary to strengthen them for another five centuries of evil doing. The man who propounded this theory sought to show a weakening of the evil done for some years preceding the harrying of a desolated land, and in a few years after that a great increase in evil. But I doubt he made his point. There are not sufficient data for that kind of study."

"If this should be true," said Duncan, "then our little band, if it trod most carefully and avoided any fuss, should have a good chance to pass through the Desolated Land unnoticed. The forces of Evil, convinced they are protected by the desolation, would not be as alert as they might be under other circumstances, and they also would be busy doing all the things they need to do in this retreat of theirs."

"You might be right," his father said.

The archbishop had been listening silently to what Duncan and his father had been saying. He sat with his hands folded across his paunch, his eyes half closed, as if he were wrestling with some private thought. The three of them sat quietly for a little time until finally His Grace stirred himself and said, "It seems to me that more study, really serious study, should be made of this great force of Evil that has been loose upon the world for uncounted centuries. We have responded to it, all these centuries, with horror, explaining it by thoughtless superstition. Which is not to say there is no basis for some of the tales we hear and the stories that are told. Some of the tales one hears, of course, are true, in some cases even documented. But many of them are false, the tales of stupid peasants who think them up, I am convinced, to pass off idle hours. Ofttimes, other than their rude horseplay and their fornications, they have little else to amuse themselves. So we are engulfed in all sorts of silly stories. And silly stories do no more than obscure the point. What we should be most concerned with is an understanding of this Evil. We have our spells and enchantments with which to cast out devils; we have our stories of men being changed into howling dogs or worse; we believe volcanoes may be the mouths of Hell; not too long ago we had the story of some silly monks who dug a pit and, descending into it, discovered Purgatory. These are not the kinds of things we need. What we need is an understanding of Evil, for only with an understanding of it will we have some grounds upon which to fight against it.

"Not only should we get ourselves into a position to fight it effectively for our own peace of mind, for some measure of freedom against the indignity, injury and pain Evil inflicts upon us, but for the growth of our civilization. Consider for the moment that for many centuries we have been a stagnant society, making no progress. What is done each day upon this estate, what is done each day throughout the world, does not differ one iota from what was done a thousand years ago. The grains are cut as they always have been harvested, threshed as they always have been threshed, the fields are plowed with the same inefficient plows, the peasants starve as they have always starved…."

"On this estate they don't," said Duncan's father. "Here no one starves. We look after our own people. And they look after us. We store food against the bad years and when the bad years come, as they seldom do, the food is there for all of us and…"

"My lord," said the archbishop, "you will pardon me. I was speaking quite in general. What I have said is not true on this estate, as I well know, but it is true in general."

"Our family," said Duncan's father, "has held these lands for close on ten centuries. As holders of the land, we have accepted the implicit responsibility…"

"Please," said the archbishop, "I did not mean your house. Now may I go on?"

"I regret interrupting you," said Duncan's father, "but I felt obliged to make it clear that no one goes hungry at Standish House."

"Quite so," the archbishop said. "And now to go on with what I was saying. It is my opinion that this great weight of Evil which has borne down upon our shoulders has worked against any sort of progress. It has not always been so. In the olden days men invented the wheel, made pottery, tamed the animals, domesticated plants, smelted ore, but since that first beginning there has been little done. There have been times when there seemed a spark of hope, if history tells us true. There was a spark of hope in Greece, but Greece went down to nothing. For a moment Rome seemed to hold a certain greatness and some promise, but in the end Rome was in the dust. It would seem that by now, in the twentieth century, there should be some sign of progress. Better carts, perhaps, and better roads for the carts to run on, better plows and a better understanding of how to use the land, better ways of building houses so that peasants need no longer live in noisome huts, better ships to ply the seas. Sometimes, I have speculated on an alternate history, an alternate to our world, where this Evil did not exist. A world where many centuries of progress have opened possibilities we cannot even guess. That could have been our world, our twentieth century. But it is only a dream, of course.

"We know, however, that west of us, across the Atlantic, there are new lands, vast new lands, so we are told. Sailors from the south of Britain and the western coasts of Gaul go there to catch the cod, but few others, for there are few trustworthy ships to go in. And, perhaps, no great desire to go, for we are deficient in our enterprise. We are held in thrall by Evil and until we do something about that Evil, we will continue so.

"Our society is ill, ill in its lack of progress and in many other ways. I have also often speculated that the Evil may feed upon our misery, grow strong upon our misery, and that to insure good feeding it may actively insure that the misery continues. It seems to me, too, that this great Evil may not always have been with us. In earlier days men did make some progress, doing those few things that have made even such a poor society as we have now possible. There was a time when men did work to make their lives more safe and comfortable, which argues that they were undeterred by this Evil that we suffer or, at least, not as much deterred. And so the question, where did the Evil come from? This is a question, of course, that cannot now be answered. But there is one thing that to me seems certain. The Evil has stopped us in our tracks. What little we have we inherited from our ancient forebears, with a smidgen from the Greeks and a dab from Rome.

"As I read our histories, it seems to me that I detect a deliberate intent upon the part of this great Evil to block us from development and progress. At the end of the eleventh century our Holy Father Urban launched a crusade against the heathen Turks who were persecuting Christians and desecrating the shrines of Jerusalem. Multitudes gathered to the Standard of the Cross, and given time, undoubtedly would have carved a path to the Holy Land and set Jerusalem free. But this did not come to pass, for it was then that the Evil struck in Macedonia and later spread to much of Central Europe, desolating all the land as this land south of us now is desolated, creating panic among those assembled for the crusade and blocking the way they were to take. So the crusade came to naught and no other crusades were launched, for it took centuries to emerge from the widespread chaos occasioned by this striking of the Evil. Because of this, even to this day, the Holy Land, which is ours by right, still lies in the heathen grip."

He put a hand to his face to wipe away the tears that were running down his chubby cheeks. He gulped, and when he spoke again there was a suppressed sobbing in his voice.

"In failing in the crusade, although in the last analysis it was no failure of ours, we may have lost the last hope of finding any evidence of the factual Jesus, which might have still existed at that time, but now undoubtedly is gone beyond the reach of mortal man. In such a context, surely you must appreciate why we place so great an emphasis upon the manuscript found within these walls."

"From time to time," said Duncan's father, "there has been talk of other crusades."

"That is true," said His Grace, "but never carried out. That incidence of Evil, the most widespread and most vicious of which our histories tell us, cut out the heart of us. Recovering from its effects, men huddled on their acres, nursing the unspoken fear, perhaps, that another such effort might again call up the Evil in all its fury. The Evil has made us a cowering and ineffectual people with no thought of progress or of betterment.

"In the fifteenth century, when the Lusitanians evolved a policy calculated to break this torpor by sailing the oceans of the world to discover unknown lands, the Evil erupted once again in the Iberian peninsula and all the plans and policies were abandoned and forgotten as the peninsula was devastated and terror stalked the land. With two such pieces of evidence you cannot help but speculate that the Evil, in its devastations, is acting to keep us as we are, in our misery, so that it can feed and grow strong upon that very misery. We are the Evil's cattle, penned in our scrubby pastures, offering up to it the misery that it needs and relishes."

His Grace raised a hand to wipe his face. "I think of it at nights, before I go to sleep. I agonize upon it. It seems to me that if this keeps on there'll be an end to everything. It seems to me that the lights are going out. They're going out all over Europe. I have the feeling that we are plunging back again into the ancient darkness."

"Have you talked with others about these opinions of yours?" asked Duncan's father.

"A few," the archbishop said. "They profess to take no stock in any of it. They pooh-pooh what I say."

A discreet knock came at the door.

"Yes," said Duncan's father. "Who is it?"

"It is I," said Wells's voice. "I thought, perhaps, some brandy."

"Yes, indeed," exclaimed the archbishop, springing to life, "some brandy would be fine. You have such good brandy here. Much better than the abbey."

"Tomorrow morning," Duncan's father said, between his teeth, "I shall send you a keg of it."

"That," said the archbishop suavely, "would be most kind of you."

"Come on in," Duncan's father yelled to Wells.

The old man carried in a tray on which were balanced glasses and a bottle. Moving quietly in his carpet slippers, he poured out the brandy and handed the glasses around.

When he was gone the archbishop leaned back in his chair, holding out the glass against the firelight and squinting through it. "Exquisite," he said. "Such a lovely color."

"How large a party did you have in mind?" Duncan asked his father.

"You mean that you will go?"

"I'm considering it."

"It would be," said the archbishop, "an adventure in the highest tradition of your family and this house."

"Tradition," said Duncan's father sharply, "has not a thing to do with it."

He said to his son, "I had thought a dozen men or so."

"Too many," Duncan said.

"Perhaps. How many would you say?"

"Two. Myself and Conrad."

The archbishop choked on the brandy, jerked himself upright in his chair. "Two?" he asked, and then, "Who might this Conrad be?"

"Conrad," said Duncan's father, "is a barnyard worker. He is handy with the hogs."

The archbishop sputtered. "But I don't understand."

"Conrad and my son have been close friends since they were boys. When Duncan goes hunting or fishing he takes Conrad with him."

"He knows the woodlands," Duncan said. "He's run in them all his life. When time hangs heavy on his hands, as it does at times, for his duties are not strenuous, he takes out for the woods."

"It does not seem to me," the archbishop said, "that running in the woods is a great qualification…"

"But it would be," said Duncan. "We'd be traveling in a wilderness."

"This Conrad," said Duncan's father, "is a brawny man, about seven feet and almost twenty stone of muscle. Quick as a cat. Half animal. He bears unquestioning allegiance to Duncan; he would die for him, I'm sure. He carries a club, a huge oaken club…"

"A club!" the archbishop groaned.

"He's handy with it," said Duncan. "I'd put him with that club of his up against a dozen swordsmen and I'd give you odds on Conrad and his club."

"It would not be too bad a choice," Duncan's father said. "The two of them would move quietly and swiftly. If they need defend themselves, they'd be capable."

"Daniel and Tiny to go along with us," said Duncan.

Duncan's father saw the archbishop's lifted eyebrows. "Daniel is a war-horse," he explained, "trained to battle. He is the equal of three men. Tiny is a great mastiff. He is trained for war as well."

3

Cedric left them well before dawn, after guiding them to a patch of thick woodland where they spent the remainder of the night. Shortly after dawn, Conrad awakened Duncan and they breakfasted on cheese and bread, unwilling to light a fire. Then they set out again.

The weather had improved. The wind had shifted and died down. The clouds were gone and the sun was warm.

They traveled through a lonely land, largely covered by woods, with deep glens and faery dells running through the woodlands. Occasionally they came across small farms where the buildings had been burned, with the ripe grain standing unharvested. Except for a few ravens that flew silently, as if awed to silence by the country they were passing over, and an occasional startled rabbit that came popping out of one thicket and ran toward another, they saw no life. About the whole country there was a sense of peacefulness and wellbeing, and this was strange, for this was the Desolated Land.

Some hours later they were traveling up a steep slope through a woods. The trees began thinning out and the woods came to an end. Ahead of them lay a barren, rocky ridge.

"You stay here," Conrad said to Duncan. "I'll go ahead and scout."

Duncan stood beside Daniel and watched the big man go swiftly up the hill, keeping well down, heading for a rocky outcrop that thrust above the ridge. Daniel rubbed a soft muzzle against Duncan's shoulder, whickering softly.

"Quiet, Daniel," Duncan said.

Tiny sat a few feet ahead of them, ears sharp-pricked and bent forward. Beauty moved over to stand on the other side of Duncan, who reached out a hand and stroked her neck.

The silence wore on to a breaking point, but it did not break. There was no sound, no movement. Not even a leaf was rustling. Conrad had disappeared among the rocks. The afternoon wore on.

Daniel flicked his ears, again rubbed his muzzle against Duncan's shoulder. This time he did not whicker.

Conrad reappeared, stretched out full length, slithering, snakelike, over the rocks. Once he was clear of the ridge, he came swiftly down the slope.

"Two things I saw," he said.

Duncan waited, saying nothing. Sometimes one had to wait for Conrad.

"There is a village down below us," Conrad finally said. "Black and burned. Except for the church. It is stone and could not burn. No one stirring. Nothing there."

He stopped and then said, "I do not like it. I think we should go around."

"You said you saw two things."

"Down the valley. There were men on horses going down the valley, far beyond the village."

"Men?"

"I think I saw the Reaver at the head of them. Far off, but I think I recognized him. There were thirty men or more."

"You think they're after us?" asked Duncan.

"Why else should they be here?"

"At least we know where they are," said Duncan, "and they don't know where we are. They're ahead of us. I'm surprised. I hadn't thought they'd follow. Revenge can get expensive in a place like this."

"Not revenge," said Conrad. "They want Daniel and Tiny."

"You think that's why they're here?"

"A war-horse and a war-dog would be very good to have."

"I suppose so. They might have trouble getting them. Those two would not change masters willingly."

"Now what do we do?"

"Damned if I know," said Duncan. "They were heading south?"

"South, and west, too. A little west. The way the valley runs."

"We'd better swing east, then. Go around the village and widen the distance from them."

"They are some distance off. Still more distance would be better." Tiny rose to his feet, swinging around to the left, a growl deep in his throat.

"The dog has something," Duncan said.

"A man," said Conrad. "That's his man growl."

"How can you know?"

"I know all his talk," said Conrad.

Duncan swiveled around to stare in the direction Tiny was looking. He could see nothing. No sign anything was there.

"My friend," Duncan said, conversationally, "I'd come out if I were you. I'd hate to have to send the dog in after you."

Nothing happened for a moment. Then some bushes stirred and a man came out of them. Tiny started forward.

"Leave him be," said Conrad to the dog.

The man was tall and cadaverous. He wore a shabby brown robe that reached to his ankles. A cowl was bunched about his shoulders. In his right hand he carried a long and knobby staff, in his left he clutched a fistful of plants. The skin clung so tightly to his skull that the bones showed through. His beard was skimpy.

He said to them, "I'm Andrew, the hermit. I had meant not to interfere with you. So, catching sight of you, I hid from sight of you. I was out to hunt for greens, a mess of pottage for my supper. You wouldn't have some cheese, perchance, would you?"

"We have cheese," growled Conrad.

"I dream of cheese," said Andrew, the hermit. "I wake up at night and find I am thinking of a bit of cheese. It has been a long time since I have had the taste of cheese."

"In that case," said Duncan, "we'll be glad to give you some. Why don't you, Conrad, take that sack off Beauty."

"Nay, wait a moment," objected Andrew. "No need to do it now. You be travelers, are you not?"

"You can see we are," said Conrad, not too pleasantly.

"In that case," said Andrew, "why not spend the night with me. I'm fair famished for the sight of human faces and the sound of human tongue. There's Ghost, of course, but talking with him is little like talking with someone in the flesh."

"Ghost?" asked Duncan.

"Aye, a ghost. A very honest ghost. And quite a decent one. Not given to the rattling of chains or moaning in the night. He's shared my cell with me since the day that he was hanged. The Harriers done it to him."

"The Harriers, of course," said Duncan. "Would you tell us how you escaped the Harriers."

"I hid in my cell," said Andrew. "It really is a cave and it's not as small and cramped and miserable as a proper cell should be. I fear I am not a proper hermit. I do not go in for the mortifications of the flesh as the more successful hermits do. I dug the cave first to cell-like proportions, as I understood I was supposed to, but over the years I have enlarged it until it's spacious and fairly comfortable. There's plenty of room for you. It's hidden quite away. You'll be secure from all observation, as I would imagine most travelers in a place like this naturally would want to be. The evening's coming on and you must soon seek camp and you can't find a better place than this cell of mine."

Duncan looked at Conrad. "What are your thoughts," he asked, "upon the matter?"

"Little sleep you got last night," said Conrad, "I got even less. This one seems an honest yokel."

"There's the ghost," warned Duncan.

Conrad shrugged elaborately. "Ghosts I do not mind."

"All right, then," said Duncan. "Friar Andrew, if you will lead the way."

The cave was located a mile or so outside the village, and to reach it they passed through a cemetery which, from the variety and condition of the stones, must have been in continuous use for centuries. Near the center of it stood a small tomb built of native stone. Sometime in the past, perhaps in a storm, the heavy trunk of a large oak tree nearby had fallen across the tomb, shattering the small statuary fixed atop it and pushing the covering slab askew.

A short distance beyond the cemetery they came to the hermit's cave, which was excavated from a steep hillside, its entrance well masked by a growth of trees and heavy underbrush and a chattering brook hurrying down a steep ravine directly in front.

"You go on in," Conrad said to Duncan. "I'll unsaddle Daniel, bring in Beauty's pack."

The cave was dark, but even in the darkness it had a spacious sense. A small fire burned on the hearth. Fumbling in the darkness, the hermit found a large candle, lit it at the fire, and placed it on a table. The candle, flaring up, showed the thick carpet of rushes on the floor, the crude table with benches that could be pulled up to it, a badly constructed chair, bins against the earthen walls, the pallet in one corner. A cabinet in another corner held a few parchment rolls.

Noting Duncan looking at them, the hermit said, "Yes, I can read, but barely. In idle moments I sit here by candlelight, spelling out the words and striving at the meanings of the ancient Fathers of the Church. I doubt that I arrive at meaning, for I am a simple soul and at times a stupid one to boot. And those ancient Fathers, it seems to me, ofttimes were much more involved in words than they were in meaning. As I told you, I'm not really a good hermit, but I keep on trying, although at times I find myself awonder at the true profession of a hermit. I have thought off and on that a hermit must be the silliest and most useless member of society."

"It is, however," said Duncan, "a calling that is thought of very highly."

"It has occurred to me, when I've thought deeply on it," said the hermit, "that men may be hermits for no other reason than to escape the labors of another kind of life. Surely hermiting is easier on the back and muscles than grubbing in the soil or performing other menial tasks by which one may win his bread. I have asked myself if I am this kind of hermit and, truthfully, I must answer that I do not know."

"You say you hid here when the Harriers came and that they did not find you. That seems not exactly right. In all our journey we have seen no one who survived. Except one group of ruffians and bandits who had taken over a manor house and had been skillful enough or lucky enough to have been able to defend it."

"You speak of Harold, the Reaver?"

"Yes. How come you know of him?"

"Word travels throughout the Desolated Land. There are carriers of tales."

"I do not understand."

"The little folk. The elves, the trolls, the gnomes, the fairies and the Brownies…"

"But they…"

"They are local folk. They've lived here since time unknown. They may be pestiferous at times and unpleasant neighbors and, certainly, individuals in whom you can place no trust. Mischievous they may be, but very seldom vicious. They did not align themselves with the Harriers, but themselves hid from them. And they warned many others."

"They warned you so you could hide away?"

"A gnome came to warn me. I had not thought him a friend, for through the years cruel tricks he had played upon me. But, to my surprise, I found that he was an unsuspected friend. His warning gave me time to put out my fire so the smoke would not betray me, although I doubt the little smoke of my poor fire would have betrayed anyone at all. It would have gone unnoticed in the general burning that came about when the Harriers arrived. The huts went up in flames, the haystacks and the straw stacks, the granaries and the privies. They even burned the privies. Can you imagine that?"

"No, I can't," said Duncan.

Conrad came clumping into the cave, dumping the saddle and the packs to one side of the door.

"I heard you say a ghost," he rumbled. "There isn't any ghost."

"Ghost is a timid one," said Andrew. "He hides from visitors. He thinks no one wants to see him. He has a dislike for scaring people, although there's really nothing about him that should scare anyone. As I told you, he is a decent and considerate ghost."

He raised his voice. "Ghost, come out of there. Come out and show yourself. We have guests."

A tendril of white vaporous substance streamed reluctantly from behind the cabinet holding the parchment rolls.

"Come on, come on," the hermit said impatiently. "You can show yourself. These gentlemen are not frightened of you, and it is only courteous that you come out to greet them."

The hermit said to Duncan, out of the corner of his mouth, "I have a lot of trouble with him. He thinks it's disgraceful to be a ghost."

Slowly Ghost took shape above the cabinet, then floated to floor level. He was a classical ghost, white sheeted. The only distinguishing mark was a short loop of rope knotted about his neck, with a couple of feet or so hanging down in front.

"I'm a ghost," he said in a hollow, booming voice, "with no place to haunt. Usually a ghost haunts his place of death, but how is one to haunt an oak tree? The Harriers dug my poor body out of the thicket in which I hid and forthwith strung me up. They might have paid me the courtesy, it seems to me, to have hung me from a mighty oak, one of those forest patriarchs that are so common in these woods of ours, tall trees standing well above the others and of mighty girth. But this they did not do. They hung me from a scrawny, stunted oak. Even in my death I was made sport of. In my life I begged alms at the church door and a poor living I made of it, for there were those who spread the rumor that I had no reason for the begging, that I could have done a day's work as well as any man. They said I only pretended to be crippled."

"He was a fraud," the hermit said. "He could have labored as well as any other."

"You hear?" the ghost asked. "You hear? Even in death I am branded as a cheat and fraud. I am made a fool of."

"I'll say this for him," the hermit said. "He's a pleasure to have around. He's not up on all the ghostly tricks that other ghosts employ to make nuisances of themselves."

"I try," said Ghost, "to be but little trouble. I'm an outcast, otherwise I would not be here. I have no proper place to haunt."

"Well, now you have met with these gentlemen and have conversed with them in a seemly manner," said the hermit, "we can turn to other matters." He turned to Conrad. "You said you had some cheese."

"Also bacon and ham, bread and honey," said Duncan.

"And you'll share all this with me?"

"We could not eat it ourselves and not share it with you."

"Then I'll build up the fire," said Andrew, "and we shall make a feast. I shall throw out the greens I gathered. Unless you should like a taste of greens. Perhaps with a bit of bacon."

"I do not like greens," said Conrad.

4

Duncan woke in the night and for a moment of panic wondered where he was. There were no points of reference, just a musty darkness with some flicker in it—as if he might be in some limbo, a waiting room for death.

Then he saw the door, or if not a door, an opening, with the soft wash of moonlight just beyond it, and in the fire-lit flicker, the bulk of Tiny, lying stretched out before the opening. Tiny had his legs pushed out in front of him, with his head resting on his paws.

Duncan twisted his head around and saw that the flicker came from a low-burned fire upon the hearth. A few feet away lay Conrad, flat upon his back, his toes pointing upward and his arms flung out on each side. His great barrel chest went up and down. He was breathing through his mouth, and the sucked-in then expelled air made a fluttering sound.

There was no sign of the hermit. Probably he was on his pallet, over in the corner. The air smelled faintly of wood smoke, and over his head, Duncan could make out the indistinct shapes of bunches of herbs the hermit had hung up to dry. From outside came a soft stamping sound. That would be Daniel not far away.

Duncan pulled the blanket up beneath his chin and shut his eyes. More than likely it was several hours till dawn, and he could get more sleep.

But sleep was reluctant to come. Much as he tried to shut them out, the events of the last few days kept parading up and down his mind. And the parading of events brought home again the rigors of the adventure he had embarked upon. In this hermit cave it was snug enough, but beyond the cave lay the Desolated Land with its freight of evil, with the burned-out village only a mile or so away, the church the only building standing. Not only the Evil, he reminded himself, but a band of evil men headed by the Reaver, who were out to track down his little party. For the moment, however, he could forget the Reaver, who had gone blundering off somewhere ahead of them.

Then his mind went back to that last day at Standish House when he'd sat with his father in the library, that same room where His Grace had told the story of the script writ in Aramaic.

Now he asked of his father the question that had been roiling in his mind ever since he'd heard the story. "But why us?" he asked. "Why should the manuscript have been in Standish House?"

"There is no way to know," his father said. "The family's history is a long one and not too well documented. There are large parts of it that have been entirely lost. There are some records, of course, some writings, but mostly it is legend, stories from so long ago and so often told that there is no way to judge the truth that may be in them. We now are solid country folks, but there was a time when we were not. In the family records and in the legendary tales there are many wanderers and some shameless adventurers. It could have been one of these, traveling far, who brought home the manuscript. Probably from somewhere in the east. As part, perhaps, of his portion of the loot from a captured city or stolen from some monastery or, less likely, honestly purchased for a copper or two as a curiosity. There could not have been much value placed upon it, and rightly so, of course, for until it was placed in the hands of the fathers at the abbey, there was no one who could have known the significance of it. I found it in an old wooden crate, the wood half gone with rot and with mildew on the documents that it contained. The manuscript was tossed in among other odds and ends of parchment, most of which were worthless."

"But you saw or sensed some significance in it. Enough to take it to the abbey."

"No significance," his father said. "No thought of any possible significance. Just an idle curiosity. I read some Greek, you know, and I can make my way in several other languages, although but poorly, but I'd never seen the like of the manuscript before. I simply wondered what it might be and was somewhat intrigued by it, and I thought that perhaps I should put some of those fat and lazy fathers at it. After all, they should be called upon occasionally to do a little work for us, if for no other reason than to remind them where they get their keep. When there's a roof to be repaired at the abbey, we are the ones they come to for the slate and the expertise to put it on. When they need a load of hay, being too trifling to go out and scythe it on their own, they know where to come to get it."

"You must say this for them," said Duncan. "They did quite a job on the manuscript."

"Better that they should be doing that," his father said, "which, after all, is useful work, rather than producing precious little conceits that they employ to spell out the happy hours of someone or other. All scriptoria, and I suspect the scriptorium at our abbey most of all, are filled with artistic fools who have too high an opinion of themselves. The Standishes have held this land for nigh on a thousand years, and from first to last we have given service to the abbey, and as those years went on, the abbey has become more grasping and demanding. Take the matter of that keg of brandy. His Grace did not ask for it, but he came as close to asking as even his good offices allowed."

"That brandy is a sore point with you, my lord," said Duncan.

His father whiffled out his mustache. "For centuries this house has produced good brandy. It is a matter of some pride for us, for this is not a country of the grape. But through the years we have pruned and grafted and budded until we have a vine that would be the pride of Gaul. And I tell you, son, a keg of brandy is not come by easily. His Grace had best use this one sparingly, for he's not about to get another soon."

They sat for a time not speaking, with the fire snapping in the great fireplace.

Duncan's father finally stirred in his chair. "As we have done with the grape," he said, "so have we done with other things. We have cattle here that run to several hundredweight heavier than most cattle in other parts of Britain. We raise good horses. Our wool is of the best. The wheat we grow is hardy for this climate—wheat, while many of our neighbors must be content with oats. And as it is with the crops and livestock, so it is with people. Many of the peasants and serfs who work our acres and are happy at it have been here almost as many years as the family. Standish House, although it was not known then as Standish House, had its beginnings in a time of strife and uncertainty, when no man's life was safe. It began as a wooden fort, built upon a mound, protected by a palisade and moat as many manor houses are protected even to this day.

"We still have our moat, of course, but now it has become a pretty thing, with water lilies and other decorative plants growing in it, and its earthen sides well landscaped with shrubs and slanted flower beds. And stocked with fish that serve as sport or food for whoever has the mind to dangle a baited hook into its waters. The drawbridge remains in place as a bridge across the moat. Ritually, we raise and lower it once a year to be sure it still will work. The country has grown a little more secure with the years, of course, but not so one could notice. There still are roving bands of human predators who show up every now and then. But with the years our house has grown stronger and news of our strength has spread. Not for three hundred years or more has any bandit or reaver or whatever he may call himself dared to throw himself against our walls. A few hit-and-run raids to snatch up a cow or two or a clutch of sheep are all that ever happen now. Although I do not think it is the strength of our walls alone that has brought about this security we enjoy. It is the knowledge that our people still are a warrior people, even if they be no more than serfs or peasants. We no longer maintain an army of idle and arrogant men-at-arms. There is no longer need to do so. Should there be danger, every man of this estate will take up arms, for each man here considers this land his land as much as it is ours. So in a still turbulent society we have created here a place of security and peace."

"I have loved this house," said Duncan. "I shall not be easy, leaving it."

"Nor I easy, my son, at having you leave it. For you will be going into danger, and yet I do not feel any great uneasiness, for I know that you can handle yourself. And Conrad is a stout companion."

"So," said Duncan, "are Daniel and Tiny."

"His Grace, the other night," his father said, "carried on at some length about our lack of progress. We are, he said, a stagnant society. And while this may be true, I still can see some good in it. For if there were progress in other things, there'd be progress in armaments as well. And any progress in arms would spell continual war, for if some chieftain or piddling king acquired a new implement of war he need must try it out against a neighbor, thinking that for at least a moment it would give him some advantage."

"All our arms," said Duncan, "historically are personal arms. To use them one man must face another man at no more than arm's length. There are few that reach out farther. Spears and javelins, of course, but they are awkward weapons at the best and once one has cast them he cannot retrieve them to cast them once again. They and slings are all that have any distance factor. And slings are tricky things to use, mostly inaccurate and, by and large, not too dangerous."

"You are right," his father said. "There are those, like His Grace, who bewail our situation, but to my mind we are quite fortunate. We have achieved a social structure that serves our purposes and any attempt to change it might throw us out of balance and bring on many troubles, most of which, I would imagine, we cannot now suspect."

A sudden coldness, a breath of frost sweeping over Duncan, jerked him from his review of that last day. His eyes popped open, and bending over him, he saw the hooded face of Ghost, if face it could be called. It was more like a murky oval of swirling smoke, encircled by the whiteness of the cowl. There were no features, just that smoky swirl, and yet he felt he was staring straight into a face.

"Sir Ghost," he said sharply, "what is your intent to waken me so rudely and abruptly?"

Ghost, he saw, was hunkering beside him, and that was a strange thing, that a ghost should hunker.

"I have questions to ask your lordship," said Ghost. "I have asked them beforetimes of the hermit and he is impatient of me for asking questions that do not fall within his knowledge, although as a holy man one might think he had the knowledge. I asked them of your huge companion and he only grunts at me. He was outraged, me-thinks, that a ghost should presume to talk to him. Should he think he might find any substance to me, I believe he might have put those hamlike hands about my throat and choked me. Although no longer can I be choked. I have been choked sufficiently. Also, I think, a broken neck. So, happily, I now am beyond all such indignity."

Duncan threw the blanket off him and sat up.

"After such a lengthy prelude," he said, "your questions must be ones of more than ordinary importance."

"To me," said Ghost, "they are."

"I may not be able to answer them."

"In which case, you'll be no worse than any of the others."

"So," said Duncan, "go ahead and ask."

"How come, my lord, do you think that I should be wearing such a getup? I know, of course, that it is a proper ghostly costume. It is worn by all proper ghosts, although I understand that in the case of some castle ghosts the habiliment may be black. Certainly I was not dressed in such a spotless robe when I was strung up from the oak. I was strung up in very filthy rags and in the terror of being hanged I fear I befouled them even further."

"That," said Duncan, "is a question I cannot answer."

"At least you accord me the courtesy of an honest reply," said Ghost. "You did not growl or snarl at me."

"There might be someone who has made a study of such matters who could give you an answer. Someone of the Church, perhaps."

"Well, since I'm not likely soon to meet someone of the Church, methinks I can then do little about it. It is not too important, but it is something that has bothered me. I have mulled upon it."

"I am sorry," Duncan said.

"I have yet another question."

"Ask it if you feel you must. An answer I'll not promise."

"My question," said Ghost, "is why me? Not all people who die, not even all whose lives are ended violently or in shame, assume a ghostly guise. If all did, the world would be filled with ghosts. They'd be treading upon one another's sheets. There'd be no room for the living."

"Neither can I answer that one."

"Actually," said Ghost, "I was not a really sinful person. Rather, I was despicable and no one has ever told me that despicability is a sin. I had my sins, of course, as has everyone, but unless my understanding of sins is faulty, they were very small ones."

"You really have your troubles, don't you. You were complaining when we first met that you had no proper place to haunt."

"I think if I had," said Ghost, "I might be happier, although perhaps it is not intended that a ghost should be happy. Contented, perhaps. It might be proper for a ghost to feel contentment. Contentment, certainly, cannot be proscribed. If I had a place to haunt, then I'd have a task to do and could be about it. Although if it included the jangling of chains and making whooing noises, I would not like it much. If it was just slinking around and letting people catch small glimpses of me that might not be bad. Do you suppose that not having a place to haunt, not having a job to do, may be in the way of retribution for the way I lived? I don't mind telling you, although I would not tell everyone and would not want you to bruit it about, that if I had wanted to I could have done some work, making an honest living instead of begging at the church. Light work, of course. I was never very strong; I was sickly as a child. I recall that it was the wonder of my parents" life that they managed to raise me."

"You raise too many questions of philosophy," said Duncan. "I cannot cope with them."

"You say that you are going to Oxenford," said Ghost. "Perhaps to confer with some great scholar there. Otherwise, why would one go to Oxenford? I have heard that there are many great doctors of the Church gathered there and that among themselves they hold much learned discourse."

"When we arrive," said Duncan, "we undoubtedly will see some of the learned doctors."

"Do you suppose some of them might have answers to my questions?"

"I cannot say for sure."

"Would it be too forward to ask if I might travel with you?"

"Look," said Duncan, becoming exasperated, "if you want to go to Oxenford you can easily and safely travel there yourself. You're a free spirit. You are bound to no place that you must haunt. And in the shape you're in, no one could lay a hand on you."

Ghost shuddered. "By myself," he said, "I'd be scared to death."

"You're already dead. No man can die a second time."

"That is true," said Ghost. "I had not thought of that. Lonesome, then. How about my loneliness. I know I'd be very lonesome if I tried to travel alone."

"If you want to go with us," said Duncan, "I can't think of a thing we can do to stop you. But you'll get no invitation."

"If that's the case," said Ghost, "I shall go along with you."

5

They had great slabs of ham for breakfast, with oaten cakes and honey. Conrad came in from outside to report that Daniel and Beauty had found good grazing in the corner of a nearby hay field and that Tiny had provided his own food by capturing a rabbit.

"In such a case," said Duncan, "we can be on our way with good conscience. The bellies of all are full."

"If you're not in too much of a hurry," said Andrew, the hermit, "there is one service you could do for me, which I would greatly appreciate."

"If it did not take too much time," said Duncan. "We owe you something. You furnished us shelter from the night and good company."

"It should not take too long," said Andrew. "It is but a small task for many hands and the strong back of a burro. It has to do with the harvesting of cabbages."

"What is this talk of cabbages?" asked Conrad.

"Someone made an early garden," said Andrew, "before the Harriers came. Neglected through the summer, it had grown until I discovered it. It is located not too far from the church, just a skip and jump from here. There is a mystery, however…"

"A mystery with cabbages?" Duncan asked, amused.

"Not with the cabbages. Not entirely with the cabbages, that is. But with other vegetables. The carrots and the rutabagas, the peas and beans. Someone has been stealing them."

"And I suppose," said Duncan, "that you have not been stealing them."

"I found the garden," Andrew said stiffly. "I have looked for this other person, but not too bravely, you understand, for I am not a warrior type and would scarce know what to do if I came upon him. Although I ofttimes have told myself that if he were not pugnacious, it would be comforting to have another person with whom to pass the time of day. But there are many fine cabbages, and it would be a pity should they go to waste, or should all be taken by this garden thief. I could harvest them myself, but it would take many trips."

"We can spare the time," Duncan told him, "in the name of Christian charity."

"M" lord," warned Conrad, "leagues we have to go."

"Quit calling me my lord," said Duncan. "If we do this chore of neighborliness we'll undoubtedly travel with lighter hearts."

"If you insist," said Conrad. "I'll catch up Beauty."

The garden, which lay a stone's throw back of the church, displayed a splendid array of vegetables growing among rampant weeds that in places reached waist high.

"You certainly did not break your back to keep the garden clean," Duncan observed to Andrew.

"Too late when I discovered it," protested Andrew. "The weeds had too good a start."

There were three long rows of cabbages and they were splendid heads, large and firm. Conrad spread out a packsack cloth, and all of them got busy pulling up the cabbages, shaking off the dirt that clung to their roots before tossing them onto the cloth.

A voice spoke behind them. "Gentlemen," it said. There was a sharp note of disapproval in the word.

The three of them turned swiftly. Tiny, spinning around to face the threat, growled deeply in his throat.

First Duncan saw the griffin and then he saw the woman who rode it and for a long moment he stood rooted to the ground.

The woman was dressed in leather breeches and a leather jacket, wore a white stock at her throat. In her right hand she carried a battle axe, its blade glistening in the sun.

"For weeks," she said, in a calm and even voice, "I have been watching this scabby hermit stealing from the garden and did not begrudge him what he took, for skin and bones as he is, it seemed that he might need it. But I had never expected to find a gentleman of the realm joining him in theft."

Duncan bowed. "My lady, we were simply assisting our friend in harvesting the cabbages. We had no knowledge that you, or anyone, might have better claim to this garden plot."

"I have taken great care," said the woman, "to be sure that no one knew I was about. This is a place where one does not make one's presence known."

"My lady, you are making it known now."

"Only to protect the little food I have. I could afford to allow your friend an occasional carrot or a cabbage now and then. But I do object to the stripping of the garden."

The griffin cocked its large eagle head at Duncan, appraising him with a glittering golden eye. Its forelegs ended in eagle claws; the rest was lion, except that instead of a lion's tail it had a somewhat longer appendage with a wicked sting at its end. Its huge wings were folded far back and high, leaving room for its rider. It clicked its beak at Duncan and its long tail switched nervously.

"You need have no fear of him," the woman said. "He is something of a pussycat, the gentleness of him brought on by extreme age. He puts up a splendid and ferocious front, of course, but he'll do no one harm unless I bid him to."

"Madam," said Duncan, "I find this somewhat embarrassing. My name is Duncan Standish. I and my companion, the big one over there, are on a trip to the south of Britain. Only last night we fell in with the hermit, Andrew."

"Duncan Standish, of Standish House?"

"That is right, but I had not thought…"

"The fame of your house and family is known in every part of Britain. I must say, however, that you have chosen a strange time to embark upon a journey through these lands."

"No stranger," said Duncan, "than to find a lady of quality in those same lands."

"My name," she said, "is Diane, and I am no lady of quality. I am quite something else again."

Andrew stumped forward. "If you would excuse me, m" lord, I have grave doubts that the Lady Diane can lay legal, or even ethical, claim upon this garden patch. It was an early planted plot, put in by one of the villagers before the Harriers came with fire and sword, and she owns it no more than I do. If you think back, I never did lay claim to it."

"It would be unseemly," said Duncan, "for us to stand here squabbling over it."

"The truth is," said the Lady Diane, "that he is quite right. It is not my garden, nor is it his. We both used out of it and that I did not mind. But it roused my ire to see interlopers laying claim to it as well."

"I would be willing," said Andrew, "to share it with her. Half the cabbages to me, half to her."

"That seems fair to me," said Duncan, "but somewhat unchivalrous."

"I am no man of chivalry," said Andrew snappishly.

"If yon hermit can provide me with certain information," said Diane, "it may be he can have all the cabbages since then I'd have no need of them."

She dismounted from the griffin and walked forward to join them. "The information that you seek," said Andrew. "What makes you believe that I might have it?"

"You are a native of the village?"

"Aye, myself and all my folk before me."

"Then maybe you would know. There was a man named Wulfert. He is supposed to have lived here at one time. When I arrived here, after the Harriers had left, I took up residence in the church. It was the only roof left standing. I searched the church for records. I found few. Not anything of value. The parish priests you people had, Sir Hermit, were careless in their record keeping."

"Wulfert, you say?" asked the hermit. "You say a man named Wulfert. How long ago?"

"A hundred years or more. Have you ever heard of him, anyone speak of him?"

"A sage? A saintly man?"

"He might have posed as such. He was a wizard."

The hermit gasped and put his hands up to his head, his fingers gripping his skull.

"A wizard!" he whimpered. "Are you sure of that?"

"Quite sure. A most accomplished wizard."

"And not of Holy Church?"

"Assuredly not of Holy Church."

"What is wrong with you?" Duncan asked Andrew. "What is going on?"

"In holy ground," Andrew whispered, gasping. "Oh, the shame of it. In holy ground they put him. And him a heathen wizard, for to be a wizard one must be a heathen, must he not? They even built a tomb for him."

"These are strange goings-on," said Conrad. "I find no head nor tail of it."

"No wonder," Andrew cried wildly. "No wonder that the oak should fall upon it."

"Wait a minute, now," said Duncan. "You mean an oak fell upon the tomb? There was a cemetery just the other day."

"Please tell me," said Diane, "about this oak and tomb."

"We passed through a cemetery," Duncan said. "Just a mile or so from here. There was a tomb and a tree had fallen on it. Quite some time ago, it seemed. It still is there, lying across the tomb. The slab covering the tomb had been shoved aside and broken. I wondered at the time why no one had repaired it."

"It's an old burial ground," Andrew explained. "Not used for years. No one bothered. And there may not have been many people who would know who was buried there."

"You think this might be the tomb of Wulfert?" Diane asked.

"The shame of it!" wailed the hermit. "That such be placed in holy ground. But the people did not know, the people of the village had no way to know. Of this Wulfert I have heard. A holy man, it was said of him, who sought refuge from the world in this lonely place."

Duncan asked Diane, "Is this the information that you…"

And then he stopped, for there was something wrong. A sudden silence—and that was strange, for there had been no sound before, nothing but the background sound of insects and birds, an ever-present sound one grew so accustomed to hearing that it went unnoticed. And that was it, thought Duncan—the sudden silence was the absence of that background sound. The sudden silence and the strange feeling of expectancy, as if one were tensed for something that was about to happen, not knowing what it was, but rocking forward on the toes to be ready for it.

The others had noticed the silence and perhaps the expectancy as well, for they were frozen in their places, tensed and listening and watchful.

Duncan's hand lifted slowly and his fingers wrapped about the hilt of his sword, but he did not draw it, for there was as yet no solid evidence of danger. But the sense of danger still hung heavy in the air. Diane, he saw, had half lifted the battle axe she held. The griffin had shifted its position and its eagle head was pivoting slowly from one side to the other.

Bushes stirred on the far perimeter of the garden plot and a figure half emerged: a round head, superficially human, thrust forward on a short, almost non-existent neck set between massive shoulders. Bald—the head bald, the shoulders bald, no trace of hair, not like something that had shaved its hair, but rather something that had never grown hair.

The hairless one, Duncan told himself, the hairless ones the Reaver had told him of that night they stopped at the manor house. Great, white, hairless human slugs that fell short of being human.

The sword rasped as he cleared it. He slashed it in the air and the sun glistened off it as he made the symbolic slash.

"Now we'll see," he said, speaking half to himself, half to the Reaver, who had told him of these creatures.

The hairless one rose to full height, emerging from the bushes. It stood a little taller than an ordinary man, but not as tall as the Reaver had led him to believe. It stood on bowed legs, bent forward at the knees, and shambled as it walked. It wore not a stitch of clothing, and the fish white of its bulging torso shone in the sunlight. In one hand it carried a huge knotted club. The club was held nonchalantly, its head pointing toward the ground, as if the club were an extension of its arm.

Behind it were others, stepping out from the trees and bushes to array themselves beside the first. They stood in a ragged line, their round heads thrust forward, tiny eyes beneath bald and jutting brows looking with an interested but contemptuous gaze at those who stood in the garden patch.

They shambled forward, slowly, awkwardly, then suddenly, with no indication they intended to do anything but shamble, they charged, coming in great leaps through the weeds. Their clubs were no longer pointed at the ground, but lifted high, and the chilling thing about the charge was that they came silently. They did not whoop or scream or cry out in any way at all. There was, it seemed to Duncan, a deadliness in the very silence of their attack.

Instinctively, without a thought of what he should do, he stepped forward to meet them. In the lead was the one who had first come into view—Duncan was sure it was the one, although there were no distinguishing marks by which one could be told from another. And this one was coming straight toward him, as if it had marked him out as its special prey.

The club in the hands of the hairless one started to come down and with a quick lunge, Duncan leaped beneath the stroke. His sword arm was back and he drove the blade forward with all his strength. As the sword caught it in the throat, the hairless one tumbled toward him, falling like a severed tree. Duncan threw himself to one side, the sword freeing itself as it ripped a jagged wound through the white, bald throat.

The body grazed him as it fell, throwing him slightly off his balance, forcing him to skip awkwardly for a step or two to maintain his balance. To one side of him was another of the creatures, and even as he skipped to keep his balance, Duncan flung up his blade and cut down at the oncoming hairless one. The whistling edge caught it in the juncture between neck and shoulder and went on through, severing the head and opposite shoulder from the trunk. A gush of blood spurted like a fountain as the head came off.

From the corner of his eye, Duncan saw Diane on the ground, struggling to free herself from the bulk of the body of a hairless one. The outflung blade of her battle axe was smeared with blood, and there was no question that the hairless one on top of her was dead. Towering above her, standing on its hind legs, was the griffin. From one eagle claw dangled a squirming hairless one. The claw was fastened around its head, lifting it so its feet were off the ground, the feet moving rapidly back and forth, as if the hairless one were attempting to run on empty air.

From somewhere, Conrad was yelling at him, "Take heed, m" lord!"

Warned, Duncan ducked to one side, spinning as be ducked. A club caught him on the shoulder, bowling him over. Hitting the ground, he rolled and came swiftly to his feet. A few feet from him one of the hairless ones, perhaps the one that had bowled him over, was lunging at him to strike again. Duncan jerked up the sword, but before he could use it, Tiny struck the hairless one like a foaming fury; powerful jaws fastened on its club arm. The hairless one went down and Tiny, releasing the hold upon its arm, had it by the throat.

Duncan switched around, satisfied that Tiny had the situation well under control—you no longer had to worry about something if Tiny had its throat. Diane had pulled herself from beneath the body of the hairless one and was running toward the griffin, which was facing three of the attackers, striking with its claws, jabbing with its beak. Beneath him lay the body of the one he first had seized, and the three in front of him were beginning to back off.

Just beyond the griffin, Conrad was engaged in a fencing match with two of the hairless ones, all three of them armed with clubs that crashed and splintered as terrific blows were struck, caught, and deflected. A little farther off one of the hairless ones had dropped its club and was running desperately, in full flight from Daniel, who was closing on it, running with outstretched neck and bared teeth. Even as Duncan watched, Daniel clamped his teeth down upon his victim's shoulder and with a toss of his head, flung it high into the air.

There was no sign of the hermit.

With a bellow of encouragement, Duncan ran to aid Conrad in his unequal fencing match. Running, he tripped and fell forward and there was a great throb in his head, a pulsating, red-hot pain that flared until his head threatened to explode. At that point exactly, just before the moment of explosion, the pain went away, only to come again. He did not know when he hit the ground; he felt no impact as he fell. Later, with no way of knowing how much later, he found himself crawling on his belly, reaching out with clawed hands to clutch the ground and pull himself along. The funny thing was that he seemed to have no head. In its place was a tumbled fuzziness that could neither see nor hear. Later—he could not tell how much later or how soon—someone was splashing water on his face and saying, "It's all right, m" lord." Then he was lifted and slung across a shoulder and he tried to protest against it, but he couldn't make a sound and he couldn't move a muscle. All that he could do was sway and dangle on the shoulder.

6

There finally was existence. But that was all—existence. It was a purposeless existence that floated in a place without reference points. It floated in an emptiness that was tied to nothing. The emptiness was comfortable and there was no urge to escape from it or reach beyond it.

A tiny sound intruded: a faint, far-off chirping sound, and the emptiness of existence tried to push it off or shut itself against it. For it was not meet, it might be destructive, for even so slight a thing as a chirping sound to intrude upon it.

But the chirping sound persisted and it was nearer now or louder, and there was more of it, as if there might be many sources from which the chirps were coming.

The consciousness floated in the emptiness and listened with an enforced tolerance to the chirping sound. And the chirping brought a word. -Birds-. It was birds that were chirping. They were the ones that made the noise. The consciousness reluctantly struggled with the word, for it had no idea what the word might mean or if it had a meaning.

Then suddenly it did know what the word meant and that brought something else.

I am Duncan Standish, said the emptiness, and I am lying somewhere, listening to birds.

That was quite enough. That was all it needed, that was far more than it needed. It would have been content if nothing had come at all. For if this much came, there would be more yet to come and that was undesirable. The emptiness tried to shrink away, but that was impossible. Having come to something, it must then go on.

Duncan Standish, no longer an existence poised in a vault of emptiness, but Duncan Standish, something. A man, he (or it) thought, and what was a man?

Slowly he knew. Knew what he was and that he had a head and that a dull throbbing ache pulsed inside the head, with the comfort now all gone.

Duncan Standish, man, lying in some confined space, for now he became aware that he was confined.

He lay quietly to pull all his thoughts together, all those simple things that he had known at one time and only now was rediscovering. But even as he pulled his thoughts together, he kept his eyes tight shut, for he did not want to see. If he did not see, perhaps he could go back to that emptiness and comfort he had known before.

It was no use, however. The knowledge first crept upon him slowly, then came on with a rush.

He opened his eyes and stared up at a high-noon sky seen through a leafy canopy. He raised a hand and a rough stone stopped it, bruising his knuckles. He lowered his eyes and saw the stone, a slab that covered him almost to his shoulders. Resting on the slab was the bole of a large oak tree, the bark scaling off it as if it suffered some ravaging disease.

The tomb, he thought, startled. The tomb of Wulfert, the wizard, unroofed many years ago by a falling tree. And now he was tucked into it.

It was Conrad, he told himself, who had tucked him in the tomb. It was the kind of stupid thing that Conrad would do, convinced all the time he was doing it that it was for the best, that it was perfectly logical and what any man might do.

It must have been Conrad, he told himself. Someone had talked with him, calling him "m" lord" while splashing water in his face, and no one but Conrad would have called him that. And after splashing water in his face, someone had lifted him and carried him on a shoulder, with no effort whatsoever, as if he had been no more than a sack of grain. And there was no one big enough and strong enough to do that as easily as it had been done other than Conrad. And then Conrad had crammed him in the tomb and there must surely have been a reason for doing what he did.

His first reaction was to scramble out, to free himself from the embrace of the tomb, but a sudden caution held him there. There had been danger and there might still be danger. He'd been hit on the head, probably by a thrown club, but while his head still throbbed and he was a little shaky, he seemed to be all right.

Except for the chirping of the birds there was no sound. He listened closely for the rustle of a fallen leaf, a snap of a twig that might tell him someone was nearby and moving. There were no such sounds; the birds, undisturbed, went on with their chirping.

He stirred a little, testing how he lay, and there was a dry rustling under him. Leaves, he thought, autumn-dead leaves that over the years had fallen into the tomb. Dry leaves and something else. Bones, perhaps, the bones of Wulfert, the wizard. With one hand he dug into the debris of the tomb. He could not see what his fingers brought up, for the stone slab cut off his vision, but his fingers told him—dry leaves and certain crumbling fragments that could be powdered bone. There was something, now that he had time to note it, that was digging into his left side, just below his shoulder blade. The skull, perhaps. Would the skull, he wondered, stand up, retain its shape and strength, longer than the other bones?

He shuddered, the fingers of superstitious dread reaching out to touch him, but he fought off the dread. He could not panic and surge howling from the tomb. For safety's sake, he reminded himself sternly, he could share this space with the dead.

He wriggled a little, trying to shift the skull or whatever it might be that was pressing into his ribs. It would not shift and it seemed harder than a skull should be. Maybe, he told himself, a stone that someone, in a flush of mistaken bravado, had chucked into the tomb, before running away as if the Devil were at his heels.

Lying quietly, he listened intently. The birds, flitting from branch to branch, kept up their chirping, but there was no other sound. There was no wind and not a leaf was moving.

He shifted his hand to feel the scabbard at his side and found that the sword was in it. Conrad, meticulous even in the absurdity of what he had done, nevertheless had taken the time to make certain that the blade was secure and ready for use.

Cautiously, Duncan lifted his head to see outside the tomb. The gravestones drowsed in the sun. There was nothing else. Carefully he levered himself up and out, slid to the ground, and crouched beside the tomb. He noted that the stone of which it was constructed was covered by large patches of lichens.

From far down the hill, on the opposite side of the tomb, a twig broke with a snap. Feet scuffed through the fallen leaves.

Duncan quietly unsheathed his blade and, holding it before him, keeping well down so he'd be hidden by the tomb, crept along its base to reach the end of it in order to see who might be coming.

The scuff of leaves moved steadily up the hill. Duncan shifted his weight, getting set for swift action if it should be needed.

In a moment, he could see who it was and let the point of the blade drop to the ground. His breath came out of him with a gush of relief. He was surprised; he had not realized he had been holding his breath.

He stood erect and waved the sword in greeting to Conrad. Conrad came forward with a rush, stopping in front of him.

"Thank the good Lord," he said. "You are all right."

"And you? How are you?"

"Fine," said Conrad. "Knocked around some, but all right. The hairless ones are gone. There is no one around. Had to be sure before I came back to you."

He put a hamlike hand on Duncan's shoulder, shook him affectionately. "You sure you are all right? Seemed all but dead to me. Had to find a place to hide you safe."

"But for the love of God," asked Duncan, "why a tomb? Why hide me in a tomb?"

"Unusual place," said Conrad. "No one would think to look."

"That's right. Conrad, you did fine. Thank you so much."

"The old lord, he told me take care of you."

"I'm sure he did," said Duncan. "And how are the others?"

"Daniel and Tiny are well. They are standing guard behind me. Beauty ran away, but Daniel found her. Daniel has a bruise, high on the shoulder. We licked them, m" lord. We licked them good and proper."

"Diane? The woman?"

"She flew away on the dragon."

"Not a dragon, Conrad. A griffin."

"Griffin, then. She flew away on him."

"Was she hurt?"

"Blood all over her, but I think it came from the hairless one she killed. The hermit ran away. There's no hide nor hair of him."

"Rest easy about him," said Duncan. "He'll be back to get his cabbages."

"What will we do now?"

"We regroup. We talk it over and decide."

"Harriers now know we are here. They'll keep watch on us."

"Maybe it was silly for us to think we could slip through them," said Duncan.

Although at the time they had talked about it, back at Standish House, it had seemed quite possible. The area that had been desolated was large, and it had seemed unlikely that the Harriers could keep watch over all of it, or would even try to keep watch over all of it. Apparently, however, they had worked out some system to guard the approaches to the area. More than likely they used the hairless ones as pickets to keep watch for anyone who might show up. Which could have been why, back in the garden plot, they had faced only the hairless ones and not any of the others that made up the Horde.

"We'll go back to hermit's cave to talk?" asked Conrad. "Maybe spend the night there?"

"Yes, I think so. I expect the hermit will show up. There's something I want to talk with him about."

Conrad half turned to go.

"Wait," said Duncan. "There is something I want to see about."

He led the way around the tomb and leaned down to stare into it.

"I think someone threw a rock into it," he said. "But maybe not. It may be something else."

It was something else. It glistened as no rock would glisten.

He reached in and lifted it out.

"A bauble," Conrad said.

"Yes," said Duncan, "a bauble. And what is it doing here?"

It was as big as a man's fist and pear-shaped. It was covered by a lacy fretwork of gold, inset at the intersection of the fretwork lines with tiny, flashing jewels. Seen through the fretwork was a silvery object, egg-shaped and with a look of heft to it. From the small neck of the pear-shaped outer framework hung a heavy chain that also may have been gold, but was not quite so lustrous as the fretwork.

Duncan handed the bauble to Conrad and once more leaned over the tomb to peer. From one corner a skull grinned out at him.

"God rest you," said Duncan to the skull. Together the two men went down the hill, heading for the cave.

7

I guess," said Andrew, the hermit, "that I never got around to telling you that besides being a devout man, I'm an arrant coward. My heart cried out to help you, but my legs said for me to go. In the end they overruled my heart and took me out of there as fast as I could go."

"We made out without you," said Conrad.

"But I failed you. I only had my staff but with it I could have struck a stout blow or two."

"You're not a fighting man," said Duncan, "and we hold no blame of you for running. But there is another way that you can help us."

The hermit finished up his slice of ham and reached for a wedge of cheese.

"In any way I can," he said. "It would be my pleasure to be of aid to you."

"This bauble we found in Wulfert's tomb," said Duncan. "Can you tell us what it is? Could it be what the griffin woman was seeking?"

"Ah, that woman," cried Andrew. "You must believe me, please. I had no idea she was here. She hid from me. I am sure of that. She hid and watched me get my poor meals from the garden patch. There must have been some reason for her hiding."

"I am sure of that," said Duncan. "We must try to find the reason."

"She hid in the church," the hermit said. "What kind of place is that to hide? It's sacrilege, that's what it is. A church is not a place to live in. It was not built to live in. No proper person would even think of living in a church."

"It was the only place in the village," said Duncan, "that had a roof to cover her. If she were going to stay here she'd have to have someplace to keep out of the weather."

"But why did she want to stay here?"

"You heard her. She was seeking some news of Wulfert. She was searching the church records for some word of him. She knew that at one time he lived here. She might have thought that he left here to go elsewhere, and it may have been that kind of word that she was seeking. There is no way she could have known that he was buried here."

"I know all that," the hermit said, "but why should she be seeking him?"

Duncan dangled the bauble in front of him, and as he did so Andrew reared back in horror, putting as much distance between it and himself as he was able.

"I think she was seeking this," said Duncan. "Do you happen to know what it is? Were there any stories in the village about it?"

"It was a relic," said Andrew. "That's what the villagers thought it was. That's how the olden stories ran. A relic, but a relic of what or whom I don't think I ever heard. Perhaps no one ever knew. The village thought Wulfert was a holy man. He never told them otherwise. He let them go on thinking he was a holy man. It might not have been safe for him if they'd known he was a wizard. Ah, the black shame of it…."

"Yes, I know," Duncan said unsympathetically. "He was buried in holy ground."

"Not only that," cried Andrew, "but the people of the village built a tomb for him. For themselves they were content with crudely carven stones, but for him they spent many days in quarrying great slabs of the choicest stone and more days in dressing it and constructing a place for him to lie. And what is more, there was a great expenditure of wine."

"Wine? What did wine have to do with it?"

"Why, to pickle him, of course. The old tales said he died at the height of summer and that it was necessary to keep him…"

"That I understand. But they needn't have used wine. Plain brine would have done as well or better."

"You may be right—better. There is one story that he got rather high before they could lay him in the tomb. But there were those who thought plain brine would be too vulgar."

"So they entombed this wizard with a great deal of work and appropriate ceremony in the belief that he was a holy man. And they buried his relic with him. Perhaps hung around his neck."

Andrew nodded in misery. "I guess, my lord, you have summed it up.

"Don't call me lord. I'm not a lord. My father is the lord."

"I am sorry, my lord. I shall not call you so again."

"How do you suspect that the stories of this Wulfert have lasted so long? A century at least, perhaps several centuries. You have no idea of how long ago this happened?"

"None at all," said Andrew. "There was a date marked on the little statuary that surmounted the tomb, but that was shattered when the tree fell. Although it is not to be wondered at that the stories survived. In a village like this months would go by with nothing, absolutely nothing, happening. So when something did happen, it made a great impression and was long remembered and much talked about. Besides, to have a holy man was a long leg up. It gave the village some mark of distinction no other nearby village had."

"Yes," said Duncan, "that I can understand. And this relic?"

Andrew shrank farther back against the cave wall.

"No relic," he said. "It is an infernal machine."

"It does nothing," said Conrad. "It just hangs there."

"Probably it's not activated," said Duncan. "Not working. There may be a certain word to speak, a certain mechanism to be set."

"My advice," said Andrew, "would be to bury it deep or fling it into running water. No good can come of it. We face enough danger and misery without asking for more. Why have you so much interest in it? You say you travel to Oxenford. I do not understand you. You say it is important you get to Oxenford and yet you become overly entranced by this disgraceful thing out of a wizard's grave."

"We travel to Oxenford on the Lord's business," said Conrad.

"Your lord's business?"

"No, the Great Lord's business. Holy business."

"Conrad!" Duncan said, sharply.

Andrew appealed to Duncan. "Is what he says correct? Is this the Lord's business you are on? Holy business?"

"I suppose one could say so. We do not talk about it."

"It must be important," Andrew said. "The way is long and hard and cruel. Yet you have about you something that says the journey must be made."

"It will be harder now," said Duncan. "We had hoped, with only a small party of us, we could slip through unnoticed. But now the Harriers know. We fell afoul of what must have been their picket line and now they'll be watching us. There'll be no step of the way we won't be in their sight. The hairless ones probably will not be the only ones. The whole thing makes me nervous. If they have pickets out, there is something the Horde is trying to protect. Something that they want no one to stumble on."

"How will we go about it?" asked Conrad.

"Straight ahead," said Duncan. "It's the only way to do it. We might try to travel farther east, but I fear we'd find the Harriers there as well. We'd be going a long way out of our way and perhaps not be any safer. We'll go straight ahead, travel as swiftly as we can, and keep close watch."

Ghost had been suspended in one corner of the cave while they bad been talking, and now he floated forward.

"I could scout for you," he said. "I could go ahead and scout. The fear of it will shrivel up my soul, if indeed I still have a soul, but for the love of you who have agreed to let me go with you, for a holy purpose, I can do it."

"I didn't ask you to accompany us," said Duncan. "I said I saw no way we could stop you going."

"You do not accept me," Ghost wailed. "You see me not as a thing that once had been a man. You do not…"

"We see you as a ghost, whatever a ghost may be. Can you tell me, sir, what a ghost may be?"

"I do not know," said Ghost. "Even being one I cannot tell you. You ask me for one definition and now I'll ask you for another. Can you tell me what a man may be?"

"No, I can't."

"I can tell you," said Ghost, "that it is a bitter thing to be a ghost. A ghost does not know what he is nor how he should act. This especially is true of a ghost that has no place to haunt."

"You could haunt the church," suggested Andrew. "In life you were closely connected with the church."

"But never in it," said Ghost. "Outside of it. Sitting on the steps, begging alms. And I tell you, Hermit, that it was not, all in all, as good a life as I had thought it might be. The people in the village were a stingy lot."

"They were poor," said Andrew.

"Miserly as well. Few of them so poor they could not spare a copper. There were days on end when there were no coppers, not a single one."

"So your lot is hard," Andrew said unfeelingly. "All of our lots are hard."

"There is one recompense," said Ghost. "Being a ghost is not as bad as being dead, especially if, being dead, one should go to Hell. There are many poor souls alive this very moment who know that once they die they will go straight to Hell."

"And you?"

"Again I do not know. I was not a vicious man, only a lazy one."

"But things are looking up for you. You are going with these people to Oxenford. You may like Oxenford."

"They say there is no way in which they can stop me going, an attitude I take to be ungracious of them. But, anyhow, I'm going."

"So am I," said Andrew. "If they will have me, that is. I have longed all my life to be a soldier of the Lord. That was what I thought I was doing when I took up hermiting. A holy zeal burned, perhaps not too brightly, in my breast, but at least it burned. I tried many things to prove my devotion. For years I sat staring at a candle flame, taking time only to find and consume food and take care of my bodily needs. I slept only when I could no longer stay awake. At times I nodded and singed my eyebrows on the candle's flame. And it was expensive. I was at times hard put to keep in candles. And I got nowhere. The candle-watching never accomplished a thing for me. I didn't even feel good about it. I stared at the candle flame, I told myself, so that I might become one of those who were one with the fall of the leaf, the song of bird, the subtle color of the sunset, the intricate web spun by a spider, in this wise becoming one with the universe—and none of this happened. A fall of a leaf meant nothing to me; I could not care less for birds or the songs they sang. I lacked something or the idea went all wrong or those who had claimed success before were only bald-faced liars. After a time I came to know that I was a fraud.

"Now, however, I have a chance to be a real soldier of the Lord. Craven I may be, and with no more strength than a reed, but with my staff I trust that I can strike a lusty blow or two if need be. I'll do my best not to run away, as I did today when danger threatened."

"You were not the only one today to run away," Duncan said sourly. "The Lady Diane, battle axe and all, also ran away."

"But not until it all was over," Conrad said.

"I thought you told me…"

"You misunderstood my words," said Conrad. "When the battle started, she was dismounted, but she mounted again and she and the griffin fought. She with her axe, the griffin with his claws and beak. Only when the hairless ones broke and ran did she fly away."

"That makes me feel better," Duncan said. "She had not seemed to be one who would run away. I was the only shirker, then."

"You caught an unlucky throw of a club," said Conrad. "I stood over you to fight off those who came at you. Most of the damage done to the hairless ones was by my lady and the dragon."

"Griffin," Duncan said.

"That is right, m" lord. A griffin. I confuse the two."

Duncan stood up.

"We should go to the church," he said, "and see if we can find the lady. There still is daylight left."

"How is your head?" asked Conrad.

"It has an outsize goose egg on it, and it hurts. But I am all right."

8

The church was not large, but it was a more impressive structure than would have been expected in such a village. Over the centuries pious villagers had labored to erect it, quarrying and dressing the stone, hoisting it into place, laying the heavy slabs that made up the floor, carving the pews and altar and all the other furniture out of native oak, weaving the tapestries to decorate its walls. There was about it, Duncan told himself, a rude simplicity that made for a charm too seldom found in other much larger and more elaborate buildings.

The tapestries had been pulled down from the walls and lay on the flagstones, crumpled and trampled. Some of them had been set afire, but had failed to burn. The pews and other furniture had been smashed, the altar demolished.

Diane and the griffin were not there, although there were signs that once they had been. Griffin dung spotted the stones of the floor; they found the chapel that the woman had used as a sleeping room—sheepskins upon the floor to make a bed, a small, rudely built cooking pit fashioned of stone, and half a dozen cooking utensils.

In the second chapel stood a long table, miraculously still intact. Upon it were spread piles of parchment sheets. An inkpot and a quill pen, fixed to its stand, stood among the litter.

Duncan picked up one of the parchments. It crinkled at his touch. The writing was crabbed, the words misspelled, bordering on the illiterate. Someone had been born, someone had died, a couple had been married, a mysterious murrain had killed a dozen sheep, the wolves had been bad that year, an early frost had shriveled the gardens, but snow had held off almost until Christmas.

He picked up other sheets. They were all the same. The records of years of village nothingness. Births, deaths, marriages, minor local catastrophes. The gossip of old wives, the small fears, the small triumphs—an eclipse of the moon and the terror in its wake, the time of falling stars and the wonder of it, the early bloom of forest flowers, the violent summer thunderstorm, the feasts and their celebrations, the good crops and the bad—all the local historical trivia, the records of a village pastor so immersed in village happenings that he had no other interests.

"She searched all these records," Duncan said to Andrew. "She was looking for some mention of Wulfert, some clue as to where a trace of him might be found. Apparently she found nothing."

"But she must have known that by this time he would be dead."

"Not him," said Duncan. "Not the man himself. That was not what she was looking for. The relic, don't you understand. To her the relic—or, if you insist, the infernal machine—was what was important."

"But I do not understand."

"You are blinded," Duncan said, "by your candle flame, by all your piety. Or was it piety?"

"I do not know," said Andrew. "I had always thought so. My lord, I am a sincere hermit, or I try to be."

"You cannot see beyond your own nose," Duncan told him. "You cannot accept that what you call an infernal machine may have validity and value. You will not give a wizard his due. There are many lands, as Christian as this one, where wizards, however uncomfortable the thought of them may be, are held in high regard."

"There is about them the stink of paganism."

"Old truths," said Duncan. "Old ideas, old solutions, old methods and procedures. You cannot afford to reject them because they antecede Christianity. My lady wanted what the wizard had."

"There is one thing you do not realize," said Andrew, speaking softly. "One thing you have not thought about. She herself may be a wizard."

"An enchantress, you mean. A sophisticated witch."

"I suppose so," Andrew said. "But whatever the correct designation, you had never thought of that."

"I had not thought of it," said Duncan. "It may well be true."

Shafts of late afternoon sunlight came through the tall, narrow windows, looking very much like those shafts of glory that biblical artists delighted in depicting as shining upon saints. The windows were of tinted glass—those that still had glass in them, for many had been broken by thrown rocks. Looking at the few remaining tinted windows, Duncan wondered how the village, in all its piety and devotion, could have afforded that much tinted glass. Perhaps the few affluent residents, of which there certainly would have been very few, had banded together to pay for its fabrication and installation, thereby buying themselves certain dispensations or absolutions, buttressing their certainty of Heaven.

Tiny motes of dust danced in the shining shafts of light, lending them a sense of life, of motion and of being, that simple light in itself could never have. And in back of the living light shafts something moved.

Duncan reached out to grasp Andrew's arm.

"There's something here," he said. "Back there in the corner."

He pointed with a finger, and the hermit peered in the direction that he pointed, squinting his eyes to get a better focus. Then he chuckled to himself, visibly relaxing.

"It's only Snoopy," he said.

"Snoopy? Who the hell is Snoopy?"

"That's what I call him. Because he's always snooping around. Always watching out for something that he can turn to his own advantage. He's a little busybody. He has another name, of course. A name you cannot get your tongue around. He doesn't seem to mind that I call him Snoopy."

"Someday that long-windedness of yours will be the death of you," said Duncan. "This is all well and good, but will you tell me, who is…"

"Why, I thought you knew," said Andrew. "I thought I had mentioned him. Snoopy is a goblin. One of the local boys. He pesters me a lot and I have no great love of him, but he's really not a bad sort."

By this time the goblin had walked through the distorting shafts of window-light and was coming toward them. He was a little fellow; he might have reached to a grown man's waist. He was dressed in nut-colored brown: a peaked cap that had lost its stiffening and flopped over at the top, a jerkin, a pair of trousers fitted tight around his spindly legs, shoes that curled up ridiculously at the toe. His ears were oversize and pointed, and his face had a foxy look.

Without preamble, Snoopy spoke to Andrew. "This place is livable now," he said. "It has lost some of its phony smell of sanctity, which was something that neither I nor any of my brethren could abide. The stabling of the griffin perhaps had much to do with it. There is nothing like the smell of griffin dung to fumigate and offset the odor of sanctity."

Andrew stiffened. "You're being impertinent again," he said.

"In that case," said Snoopy, "I shall turn about and leave. You will pardon me. I was only trying to be neighborly."

"No," said Duncan. "Wait a minute, please. Overlook the sharp tongue of this good hermit. His outlook has been warped by trying to be a holy man and, perhaps, not going about it in quite the proper way."

Snoopy looked at Duncan. "You think so?" he asked.

"It's a possibility," said Duncan. "He tells me he wasted a lot of time staring at a candle flame, and I'm not sure, in my own mind, whether that is the way to go about it if one should feel the compulsion to be holy. Although, you understand, I'm not an expert at this sort of thing."

"You seem to be a more reasonable person than this dried-up apple of a hermit," said the goblin. "If you give me your word that you'll hold him off me and will prevail upon him to keep his foul mouth shut, I shall proceed upon what I came to do."

"I shall do all that I am able to restrain him," Duncan said. "So how about you telling me what you came to do."

"I came in the thought that I might be of some small assistance to you."

"Pay no attention to him," counseled Andrew. "Any assistance you may get from him would turn out to be equivalent to a swift punch in the nose."

"Please," said Duncan, "let me handle this. What harm can it do to listen to what he has to say?"

"There you see," said Snoopy. "That's the way it goes. The man has no sense of decency."

"Let's not belabor the past differences between the two of you," said Duncan. "If you have information we would be glad to hear it. It seems to me we stand in some need of it. But there is one thing that troubles me and you'll have to satisfy us on that point."

"What is this thing that troubles you?"

"I presume you know that we intend to travel farther into the Desolated Land, which at the moment is held by the Harriers."

"That I do know," said Snoopy, "and that is why I'm here. I can acquaint you with what would be the best route and what you should be watching for."

"That, precisely, is what troubles me," said Duncan. "Why should you be willing to assist us against the Harriers? It would seem to me that you might feel more kinship toward them than you feel toward us."

"In some ways you may be correct in your assumption," said Snoopy, "but your reasoning is not too astute, perhaps because you are not fully acquainted with the situation. We have no grounds to love the humans. My people—those folk you so insultingly speak of as the Little People—were residents of this land, of the entire world, for that matter, long before you humans came, thrusting your way so unfeelingly among us, not even deigning to recognize us, looking upon us as no more than vermin to be swept aside. You did not look upon us as a legitimate intelligent life form, you ignored our rights, you accorded us no courtesy or understanding. You cut down our sacred woods, you violated our sacred places. We had a willingness to accommodate our way of life with your way, to live in harmony among you. We held this willingness even when you came among us as arrogant invaders. We had powers we would have been willing to share with you, perhaps in an exchange that would have given something of value to us. But you had a reluctance to stoop, as you felt, to the point of communicating with us. You thrust yourself upon us, you kicked us out of the way, you forced us to live in hidden places. So, at long last, we turned against you, but because of your ferocity and unfeeling violence, there was little that we could do against you; we have never been a match for you. I could go on for a much longer length of time cataloguing our grievances against you, but that, in summary, my dear sir, is why we cannot love you."

"You present a good case," said Duncan, "and, without admitting it to be the truth in all regards, which I am in no position to do and would not do in any case, I must admit that there is some merit in the words you've spoken. Which proves my point, exactly. Hating us as you must, why are you willing to offer us assistance? Knowing your feelings about us, how can we reconcile ourselves to trusting you?"

"Because we hate the Harriers more than we hate you," said Snoopy. "While you may think so, in your human folly, the Harriers are not our people. We and they stand very much apart. There are several reasons for this. They are pure evil and we are not. They live for evil alone and we do not. But since you humans lump us in with them, through the centuries they have given us a bad name. Much that they do is blamed on us. There are certain areas in which we might have arrived at an accommodation with humans, but the Harriers have foreclosed these avenues to us because their actions and your fuddle-headedness has made us seem as bad as they. When you condemn them, you condemn us equally with them. There are some more intelligent and compassionate humans who, having taken the trouble to know us better, do not join in this condemnation but, sadly, the most of you do, and the voices of the few compassionates are lost in the flurry of hatred that is directed against us. In this invasion of the Harriers, we have suffered with the humans, perhaps not as much as you humans, for we have our small magics that have been some protection for us, magics that you humans could have shared with us had you been willing to accept us. So, in balance, we hate the Harriers more than we do the humans, and that is why we are willing to help you."

"Given such an attitude," Andrew said to Duncan, "you would be insane to trust him completely. He might lead you straight into an ambush. I take no great stock in his professed hatred of the Harriers, even though he warned me once against them. I tell you, there is no assurance of truth in his kind."

Duncan disregarded Andrew. He said to Snoopy, "You say the Harriers are not your people, that you are in no way related to them. Where, then, did they come from? What is their origin?"

"They first appeared," said Snoopy, "some twenty thousand years ago, perhaps longer ago than that. Our legends say this and our people take great care that the legends should run true, unchanged, from generation to generation. At first there were only a few of them, but as the centuries went on, their numbers increased. During that time when there were only a few of them, we had the opportunity to learn what kind of folk they were. Once we learned in all truth the evil that was in them, we were able, in a measure, to protect ourselves. I suppose the same thing happened to the primitive humans who existed in those early days, but the humans, without magic, could do little to protect themselves. Sadly, only a few of those humans, perhaps because they were so primitive, could learn to accept us. Many made no distinction between us and these others whom you now call the Harriers, but who have been known by many other names throughout the ages."

"They first appeared, you tell me, two hundred centuries ago. How did they appear?"

"They just were here, was all."

"But where did they come from?"

"There are those who say they came from the sky. There are others who say they came from deep underground, where they had been penned, but that they either broke loose or overcame the force that penned them there, or, perhaps, that their penance extended over only a certain period of time and that the time-term had expired."

"But they can't be of any one race. I am told they come in all shapes and sizes."

"That is true," said Snoopy. "They are not a race. They are a swarm."

"I don't understand."

"A swarm," Snoopy said impatiently. "A swarm. Don't you know a swarm?"

"He's talking in a lingo of his own," said Andrew. "He has many such words and concepts that cannot be understood by humans."

"Well, we'll let it go at that," said Duncan. "What is important now is what he has to tell us."

"You don't mean you are about to trust him?"

"I'm inclined to. At least we need what he can tell us."

"I can show you the route that may be the safest for you to take," said Snoopy. "I can draw a map for you. There is ink and parchment in one of the chapels."

"Yes, we know," said Duncan.

"A room," said Snoopy, "where a long line of dithering priests sat writing down the inconsequential inanities of irrelevant lives and events."

"I just now," said Duncan, "was reading through some of them." Snoopy led the way toward the chapel, followed by Duncan, with Andrew clumping crustily in the rear. Conrad hurried to take his place alongside Duncan.

Reaching the chapel, Snoopy climbed upon the table and pawed with his splayed fingers among the documents until he found one that had some white space remaining on it. Carefully he spread it out on the tabletop. Picking up the quill, he dipped it in the ink and made an X on the parchment.

"We are here," he said, pointing to the X. "This way is north." He made a slash to indicate the direction. "You go straight south from here, down the valley, south and a little west. You'll be moving in good cover. There may be watchers on the hilltops. Keep an eye out for them. They probably won't cause you any trouble. More than likely, they'll not attack; they'll just report back on you. Forty miles or so from here the stream flows into a fen—marshy ground, pools of water, heavy growth…"

"I do not like the looks of it," said Conrad.

"You turn off," said Snoopy, "keeping to the left bank of the fen. There are high cliffs to your left, leaving a narrow strip between the fen and the cliffs."

"They could drive us into the marsh," said Conrad. "There would be no place to stand."

"They won't come at you through the fen," said Snoopy. "The cliffs are high and unscalable. You can't climb them, certainly, but neither can someone on the top climb down."

"There might be dragons, harpies, other flying things."

Snoopy shrugged. "Not many. And you could fight them off. If they make a ground sally at you, it has to be either front or back and on a narrow front. They can't get around to flank you."

"I'm not fond of it either," said Duncan. "Master Goblin, is there no other way?"

"Many more miles to travel," Snoopy told him, "and even then no farther on your way. Hard traveling. Uphill, downhill. Easy to get lost."

"But this has danger in it."

"Dangerous, perhaps, but bold. A route they'd not expect you to take. If you moved at night, keeping well under cover…"

Duncan shook his head.

"There is no place safe," said the goblin. "Not in the Desolated Land."

"If you traveled," asked Conrad, "would you travel as you tell us?"

"I accept the danger," said Snoopy. "I shall travel with you. It's my neck as well as yours."

"Christ save us now," said Duncan. "A hermit, a ghost, a goblin. We grow into an army."

"In going," said Snoopy, "I only show my faith."

"All right," said Duncan. "I take your word for it."

"Down this strand between the fen and cliff you come to a chasm, a gap, a break in the cliffs that cuts through the hills. A short distance only, five miles or so."

"It's a trap," said Conrad. "I can smell a trap."

"But once you leave the gap, you are in what seems fair and open country. But in it sits a castle."

"I shall tread beside you closely," said Conrad. "If a trap this turns out to be, I shall simply cut your throat."

The goblin shrugged.

"You shrug," said Conrad. "Perhaps you want to have it cut." Snoopy flung down the quill in exasperation. Spatters of ink splotched the parchment.

"What is hard for me to understand," said Duncan, "is that at first you say you will draw a map for us and then you say you will go with us. Why bother with a map? Why not simply say, to start with, that you will go with us and show the way?"

"At first," said the goblin, "I had not meant to go with you. I had simply thought the map. Then, when you questioned my sincerity, I decided that I must go with you, that otherwise you'd have no belief in me."

"What we ask is truth," said Conrad. "We do not ask belief."

"The one," said Snoopy, "cannot go without the other."

"Okay," said Duncan. "Carry on. You said there was a castle."

"An old castle. Moldering away. Falling down. The battlements tumbled. It stinks of great age. I warn you of the castle. You give it wide berth. You do not approach it. On no account go inside of it. It also is evil. Not the Evil of the Harriers. A different kind of evil."

"Wipe all this from your mind," the hermit said. "He is about to get us killed, or worse. Never for a moment can you trust him."

"You make up your mind," said Snoopy. "I've told you all I have to tell. I have tried to be of help and for that you've given me the back of your hand. If in the morning you want to set out, you will find me here."

He jumped down off the table and stalked out of the chapel.

Tiny came pertly into the chapel, walking carefully and alertly on tiptoe. He came up to Conrad and leaned companionably against his leg. Out in the church Daniel was snorting gently and pawing at the flagstone floor.

"Well?" asked Andrew.

"I don't know," said Duncan. "We have to think about it. We must do something. We can't just stay here."

He said to Conrad, "I'm surprised at you. I thought that of all of us, you would have been the one to trust him. Back home you have much traffic with the Little Folk. As you walk through the woods they come popping out to talk with you. It seemed to me that you had an understanding with them. Just the other day you were upset that we had not seen them here. You were worried that the Harriers might have wiped them out."

"What you say is true," said Conrad. "I have a liking for them. I have many friends with them. But of this one we must be sure."

"So you warn him that you'll cut his throat should he lead us astray."

"It's the only way. He must understand."

"Well, then, what do you really think?"

"I think, m" lord, that we can trust him. I only wanted to make sure. I wanted him to understand this was serious and no place for playing games. Little Folk, no matter how nice they may be, are always playing tricks. Even on their friends. I wanted to make sure this one plays no tricks."

"In a situation such as this he'd not be playing foolish tricks."

"That's where you're wrong," said Andrew. "They're always up to tricks, some of them just this side of vicious. I shall keep an eye on him as well. If Conrad does not cut his throat, should need be, I'll brain him with my staff."

9

He had been right, Duncan told himself, back there at the church. They couldn't stay here any longer. They had wasted time and he had the feeling, somehow, that time might be important.

He sat, propped against the cave wall, the heavy blanket pulled up to cover half his body. Tiny lay across the cave's mouth. Outside, just beyond the cave, Daniel stamped and Beauty could be heard moving about. In one corner Conrad snored heroically, gulping explosively between the snores. Andrew, the hermit, wrapped in a blanket on his pallet, mumbled in his sleep. Ghost had disappeared.

He and Conrad could go back, of course, Duncan thought. Back to Standish House. And no one would blame them. The plan from the very beginning had been that a small party, traveling quietly and swiftly, would be able to slip unobserved through the Desolated Land. Now that appeared to be impossible. The shape of circumstances had operated in such a manner as to make it impossible. More than likely it had been impossible from the start. Their collision with the hairless ones had given notice that they were here. The expedition by the Reaver, who had set out to track them down, probably had alerted the Harriers. Duncan wondered what might have happened to the Reaver and his men. If they had come to a bad end, it would be no wonder, for they were an ill-favored and fumbling lot.

He didn't like it, he told himself. He liked none of the situation. The whole adventure had gone awry. Thinking of it, he realized that one of the things he liked least about it were the volunteers they had picked up. Ghost was bad enough, but there wasn't much that could be done about a ghost. The hermit was the worst. He was an old fuddy-duddy with busybody tendencies and a coward to boot. He said he wanted to be a soldier of the Lord and there was no way one could argue against that, just so he kept out of other people's way. The thing about it was, of course, that so far he'd kept out of no one's way. If he kept on with them he'd be underfoot at every turn. But what could be done about it? Tell him he couldn't go? Tell him there was no place for him? Tell him this after they had accepted his hospitality?

Maybe, Duncan told himself, he was fretting when there was no need to fret. Ten to one, the hermit would beg off, would decide at the last moment that there were imperative reasons why he should not venture from his cell.

And Snoopy, the goblin, what about him? Not to be trusted, more than likely, although in some ways he had made an impressive case for himself. They'd have to watch him closely. That could be left to Conrad. Snoopy probably was more than a little scared of Conrad, and he had a right to be. Conrad had not been joking when he'd said he'd cut his throat. Conrad never joked.

So what to do? Go on or turn back? A case could be made for abandoning the journey. There had been no charge placed upon them to face up to great danger, to ram their heads into a noose, to keep on no matter what the hazard.

But the stakes were high. It was important that the aged savant at Oxenford should see the manuscript, and if they turned back now there was a chance he would never see it. The man was old; His Grace had said that his sands were running out.

And now, thinking of it, he remembered something else that His Grace had said that evening in the library of Standish House. "The lights are going out," he'd said. "They are going out all over Europe. I have a feeling that we are plunging back again into the ancient darkness." His Grace, when all was said and done, was something of a sanctimonious blabbermouth, but even granting that, he was not a fool. If, in all solemnity, he had voiced a feeling that the lights were going out, then there was a good chance that they were going out and the olden darkness would come creeping in again.

The churchman had not said that proving the manuscript to be genuine would play a part in holding back the darkness, and yet, as Duncan remembered it, the implication had been there. For if it could be proved, beyond all doubt, that a man named Jesus had actually walked the Earth two millennia ago, if it could be shown that He had said the words He was reported to have said, died in the manner and in the spirit the Gospels reported, then the Church would gain in strength. And a strengthened Church would be a powerful force to hold back that darkness of which His Grace had spoken. For almost two thousand years it had been the one great force speaking out for decency and compassion, standing firm in the midst of chaos, providing men a slender reed of hope to which they might cling in the face of apparent hopelessness.

And what, he asked himself, if once the man at Oxenford had seen the manuscript he should pronounce it valueless, a fraud, a cruel hoax against mankind? Duncan shut his eyes, squeezing them shut, shaking his head. That was something he must never think of. Somehow the faith must be preserved. The whole matter of the manuscript was a gamble, he told himself in all honesty, that must be taken.

He lay, with his head thrown back against the wall of earth, and the agony welled in him. No devout member of the Church, he still was of the Church. It was a heritage that he could not ignore. Almost forty generations of his forebears had been Christians of one sort or another, some of them devout, others considerably less than devout, but Christians all the same. A folk who stood against the roaring and the jeering of the pagan world. And here, finally, was a chance to strike a blow for Christ, a chance such as no other Standish had ever had. Even as he thought this, he knew there was no way he could step aside from the charge that had been placed upon him. There could be no question but that he must go on. The faith, poor as it might be, was a part of him; it was blood and bone of him, and there was no denying it.

10

Snoopy had not been waiting at the church. They had hunted for him, yelled for him, waited for him, but he had not appeared. Finally they had gone on without him, Tiny taking up the point, ranging well ahead and to all sides. The hermit, pacing beside Beauty, followed Conrad, while Duncan and Daniel took up the rear.

Andrew still grumbled about the goblin. "You should be glad that he failed to show up," he told Duncan. "I tell you there is no truth in him. You can't trust any of them. They are fickle folk."

"If we had him with us," Duncan said, "we could keep an eye on him."

"On him, of course. But he's a slippery imp. He could be off and away without your noticing. And what are you going to do about the others?"

"The others?"

"Yes. Other goblins. Assorted gnomes, imps, banshees, trolls, ogres and others of their kind."

"You talk as if there were many of them here."

"They are as thick as hair on a dog and up to no good, not a one of them. They hate all of us."

"But Snoopy said they hated the Harriers even worse."

"If I were you," said the hermit, "I wouldn't bet my life on it, and that is what we are doing, betting our lives on what a goblin told us."

"Yet when Snoopy told us the quickest and the easiest way, you did not contradict or correct him."

"The goblin was right," said Andrew. "This is the easiest way. If it is also the safest, we shall see."

They followed a small valley, heavily wooded. The brook, which had its origin in the spring near Andrew's cave, brawled and chattered along a rocky streambed.

As the valley broadened out, they came upon a few small homesteads, some burned to the ground, others with a few blackened timbers or a chimney standing. Crops that had ripened lay in swaths upon the ground, the heavy heads of grain beaten down by rain and wind. Fruit trees had been chopped down.

Ghost had not put in an appearance, although on several occasions Duncan thought he glimpsed him flitting through the trees on the hillside above the valley.

"Have you seen anything of Ghost?" he asked Andrew. "Is he with us?"

"How should I know," grumbled the hermit. "Who is there to know what a ghost would do?"

He clumped along, fuming, striking his staff angrily against the ground.

"If you don't want to be here, why don't you go back?" Duncan asked.

"I may not like it," said Andrew, "but this is the first chance I've had to be a soldier of the Lord. If I don't grasp it now, I may never have the chance again."

"As you wish," said Duncan.

At noon they halted for a brief rest and something to eat.

"Why don't you ride the horse?" Andrew asked Duncan. "If I had a horse I would save my feet."

"I'll ride him when the time comes to do so."

"And when will that be?"

"When the two of us can work together as a fighting unit. He's not a saddle horse; he's a war-horse, trained to fight. He'll fight with me or without me."

Andrew grumbled. He'd been grumbling ever since they had started out.

Conrad said, "I like it not. Too quiet."

"You should be glad of that," said Andrew.

"Tiny would have let us know if anyone were about," said Duncan.

Conrad placed the head of his club against the ground, gouging the soil with it.

"They know we're here," he said. "They are waiting someplace for us."

When they took up the march again, Duncan found that he was inclined to be less watchful than he had been when they started in the morning. Despite the occasional burned homestead and the general absence of life, the valley, which grew wider and less wild as they progressed, had a sense of peace and beauty. He upbraided himself at those times when he realized he had become less alert, but a few minutes later he would fall into inattentiveness. After all, he told himself, Tiny was scouting out ahead. If there was anything around, he would let them know.

When he did snap back to attention, he found himself glancing at the sky rather than at the surrounding hills, and it took him a little time to realize that he was watching for Diane and her griffin. Where could she have gone, he wondered, and perhaps more important, why had she gone? And who could she be? Given the time, he would have tried to find out about her, but there had been no time. The puzzling thing about it all was her interest in Wulfert, a wizard centuries dead, with gray-blue lichens growing on his tomb. More than likely it had been Wulfert's bauble and not Wulfert himself that she had been seeking, although he had no proof of that. He felt the outline of the bauble, which he had thrust into his belt pouch. It made sense, he told himself, that it was the bauble she had been seeking. Wulfert's bones could be of no use to anyone. Perhaps if he really got down to business and examined the bauble, he might be able to pick up some clue to its purpose. Although, he thought, he would be a poor one to do that. An infernal machine, Andrew had called it. Although that could be discounted, for it was the kind of reaction to be expected of the hermit. Should it be a machine, as the hermit had said, infernal or otherwise, he, Duncan Standish, knew nothing of machines. For that matter, he thought, comforting himself, neither did many other people.

Head down, thinking, he ran into Beauty's rear end. Startled, he backed away and the little burro, cocking her head to glance backward at him, unloosed a playful kick that caught him in the knee. It was a light kick, with little power behind it.

Everyone had stopped, he saw, and was staring down the valley. Coming toward them, hobbling, limping and complaining loudly, was an old woman. Behind her, shagging her along, came Tiny.

Conrad said proudly, "Tiny's got him something."

No one else said anything. Duncan walked forward to join Conrad.

The old woman came up to them and flopped down on the ground in a sitting position, pulling her rags about her. She was a hag. Her nose was sharp and pointed, with hairs like spiderlegs growing out of it. More hairs sprouted on her chin. She had no more than half a dozen teeth, and her gray hair hung about her eyes.

"Call off your hound," she shrilled at them. "He drove me like a cow. Gentlemanly about it, I must say. He took no chunks of flesh out of this poor body, as I suppose he could have. But he routed me out of that foul nest I call my home and herded me up the valley. And I don't like it. I don't like being herded. If I had a tithe of the power I once had, I would have frazzled him. But now I have no power. They took all the things I had got together—the owl's blood, the bat's brains, the eyes of newts, the skin of toad, ash from a fire in which a witch had burned, the tooth of a dog that had bitten a priest…"

"Hold up, grandmother," said Duncan. "Who took this great hoard from you?"

"Why, the Harriers," she said. "Not only did they take them, but they laughed at me gruesomely. Yes, that is how they laughed at me—gruesomely. Then they kicked my big butt out of there and set the torch to my humble hut."

"You are lucky," Andrew told her, "that they didn't hang you or toss you in the blaze."

She spat with disgust upon the ground. "The brutes!" she said. "The bullies! And I almost one of them. Almost of their own. They shamed me, that's what they did. They said, short of saying it, that I was not worth a length of rope or the disturbance of the fire."

"You should be glad they shamed you," Andrew said. "Shame is a preferable alternative to death."

"I had worked so hard," she lamented, "and for so many years. I tried hard to build a professional reputation as a witch upon whom my clients could depend. I studied the cabala and I practiced—I practiced endlessly to perfect my art. I worked hard and sought endlessly for materials needed in my craft. I hate to think of the midnight hours I spent in graveyards, seeking out the various kinds of grave mold…."

"You tried hard to be a witch," said Conrad.

"Laddy, that I did. I was an honest witch. An honest witch and there are not too many honest witches. Evil, perhaps. A witch must have some evil in her. Otherwise she would not be a witch. Evil, but honest."

She looked at Duncan.

"And now, sir, should you wish to run that great sword through me…"

"I would not think of it," said Duncan. "Through another witch, perhaps, but not an honest witch."

"What do you intend to do with me? Since your dog brought me here, what will you do with me?"

"Feed you, for one thing," said Duncan. "That is, if you are in need of food. You look as if you might be. Why should not one be courteous to an honest witch who has fallen on hard times?"

"You'll regret the courtesy," Andrew said to Duncan. "Pool around with witches and some of the witchery is bound to rub off on you."

"But this one is scarcely a witch any longer," protested Duncan. "You heard her say so. She has lost all her paraphernalia. She has not a thing to work with."

Tiny had sat down and was regarding her quizzically. He acted as if he thought she belonged to him.

"Get that horrid beast away from me," said the witch. "Although he hides it in a seeming humor, he has a wicked eye."

"Tiny is no wicked dog," said Conrad. "He has no badness in him. Otherwise you would be without an arm or leg."

The woman put her hands on the ground and tried to lift herself. "Here," said Conrad, putting out a hand. She grasped it and he hauled her to her feet. She shook herself to make the rags fall back in place.

"In truth," she said, "you two are gentlemen. The one does not run a blade through me and the other helps me to my feet. Old Meg thanks you."

She switched her gaze to Andrew.

"This one I do not know about," she said. "He is a sour character at the best."

"Pay no attention to him," Duncan said. "He is a sour old hermit and the day's not gone well for him."

"Witches I have no love for," said Andrew. "I will tell you plain. Nor goblins nor gnomes nor wizards nor any of their ilk. There are too many such in this world we live in. We'd be better off without them."

"You said something about food," said Meg, the witch.

"We have another hour or two of travel before the day is done," said Duncan. "If you could wait that long."

"I have in my pocket," said Andrew, "a small bit of cheese, carrying it in case I should feel faint. If she wants it, she is welcome to it."

"But Andrew, I thought…"

"For a woman," said Andrew, "not a witch. Anyone who hungers…"

He held out the piece of cheese and she accepted it demurely, if a creature such as she could be demure.

"Bless you," she said.

"I do not accept your blessing," Andrew told her stiffly.

11

Well before the sun had set, they camped, gathering wood, building a fire, bringing water.

"There's no reason to go without a fire," said Duncan. "If there's anyone around, they'll know that we are here."

Meg had ridden Daniel, who had been inclined to prance when she'd first been boosted to the saddle, but later quieted down, going at a deliberate pace to accommodate the rack of bones that rode upon his back.

Conrad, squatting before the fire, raked hot coals off to one side and cooked oaten cakes and rashers of bacon.

Their camp was situated at the edge of a small grove, with the stream in front of them and a sandy stretch of ground running from the water to the grove.

They ate as darkness was creeping over the land. A short time later Ghost came floating in.

"So there you are," said Andrew. "We had been wondering what had happened to you."

"Much afraid," said Ghost, "still I travel very widely. In the open daylight, which is unpleasant for me, I spied out the land."

"How far have you gone?" asked Duncan.

"To where the fen begins. I do not go beyond. Very spooky place."

"And you a spook," said Conrad.

"A ghost," Ghost told him primly. "Not a spook. There is a difference."

"You saw nothing, of course," said Conrad. "Tiny has been out all day as well."

"There are those you call the hairless ones," said Ghost. "A very few of them. To the east, some miles to the east. Several small bands of them. Keeping pace with you. Traveling in the same direction."

"How came Tiny not to see them?"

"I flit much faster than the hound," said Ghost. "Over hill and dale. But frightened. Very frightened. It is not given a ghost should be out in open country. His proper sphere is within a structure, shielded from the sky."

"Maybe they don't even know we are here," said Andrew.

Duncan shook his head. "I'm afraid they do. If not they'd be traveling this same easy route, instead of out there, clambering up and down the hills. It sounds to me as if we're being herded, somewhat less obviously than Tiny herded in the witch. They know, because of the fen, that we cannot go west. They're making sure we don't make a break toward the east."

Meg, the witch, tugged at Duncan's sleeve. "Sire," she said, "those others."

"What is it, grandmother? What others?"

"The ones other than the hairless ones. They are nearby. They squat in outer darkness. They are the ones who laugh gruesomely even as they proceed with your undoing."

"If anyone was here," Conrad objected, "if anyone was near, Tiny would know of them and warn us."

Tiny lay beside the fire, his nose resting on his outstretched paws. He gave no sign that he knew of anything.

"The dog might not know," said Meg. "You are dealing here with something that is more subtle and with a greater capacity for evil and deception than the evil things you encounter in the ordinary run of events. They are…"

"But the Reaver spoke of demons and of imps," said Conrad. "He would know. He fought them."

"He used the only names he knew," said Meg. "He had no names for these other ones, which are not seen as often as the demon or the imp. And there may, perchance, have been imp and demon, for the Horde would attract a large gathering of camp followers, all the evil of ordinary kind joining in with them as great gatherings of common people will follow a human army."

"But you did not join with them," said Duncan. "And you said that you were evil. A little evil, you said. That you'd have to be a little evil to be a witch at all."

"Thus you find me out," said Meg. "I only try to be evil. I would be evil if I could, for then my powers would be the greater. But I only try. At times I thought myself of greater evil than I was and I felt no fear when the Horde came sweeping in, for I said to myself most surely they will recognize me and leave me alone or teach me, perhaps, a greater evil. But this they did not do. They stole all my amulets and they burned my hut and they kicked me in the butt, a most uncourteous way in which to treat someone who is doing her poor best to be even as they are."

"And you feel no shame in this quest of evil? You feel it is appropriate that you make yourself an evil one?"

"Only the better to practice my work," said Meg without a trace of shame. "Once a person lays hands upon her life work, then it must make sense that she do the best she can, no matter where her proficiency may lead her."

"I'm not sure I follow you entirely," Duncan said.

"I knew you for no evil one," said Conrad, "when first I laid eyes upon you. There was no evil in your eye. No more evil than one finds in a goblin or a gnome."

"There are those who believe," said Andrew primly, "that a goblin and a gnome have some taint of evil in them."

"But they're not," insisted Conrad. "They are Little People, different from us, having little magics while we have almost no magic at all."

"I could get along quite comfortably," said Andrew, "without their little magics. Using those small magics they've pestered me almost to the death."

Duncan said to Meg, "You say that there are members of this greater Evil about, even now, outside the camp? That the dog may not be able to detect them?"

"I do not know about the dog," said Meg. "He may detect them and be only slightly puzzled. Not enough to pay much attention to them, not knowing what they are. But Old Meg detects them, ever so faintly, and she knows what they are."

"You are sure about that?"

"I am sure," she said.

"In that case," said Duncan, "we cannot depend on Tiny alone to stand guard against them, as we might have otherwise. We'll have to stand watch throughout the night. I'll take the first watch, Conrad the second."

"You're leaving me out," said Andrew, somewhat wrathfully. "I claim my right to stand my share of the watch. I am, after all, a soldier of the Lord. I share the dangers with you."

"You get your rest," said Duncan. "The day ahead will be a hard one."

"No harder than it will be for you and Conrad."

"You still will get your rest," said Duncan. "We can't hold up the march for you. And your mind must be clear and sharp to point out the way if there should be question."

"It is true," said Andrew, "that I know the trail, for I've followed it many times when I was younger than I am now. But it presents no problems. Any fool could follow it."

"Nevertheless I insist you get your rest."

Andrew said no more, but sitting close beside the campfire, he did some mumbling.

Andrew was the last of them to go to sleep. Conrad stretched out and pulled the blanket over him and almost immediately began to snore. Meg, curled up in a ball beside the saddle and the packs, slept like a baby, at times making little crying noises. Off to one side, Daniel lay down to sleep; Beauty slept standing on her feet, her head drooped, her nose almost touching the ground. Tiny dozed beside the fire, occasionally getting up to march stiff-legged about the camp's perimeter, growling softly in his throat, but giving no indication that there was anything requiring his immediate attention.

Duncan, sitting beside the fire, close beside Tiny, found no trouble in staying awake. He was tensed and on edge, and when he tried to smooth out the tenseness, it refused to go away. No wonder, he told himself, with all of Meg's talk about the Evil being close. But if there was Evil about he could not detect it. If it were there, it rustled in no bushes, it made no noise of any kind. He listened intently for the footstep—or the paw-step or the hoof-step—and there was nothing there at all.

The land drowsed in the liquid moonlight. There was no breeze, and the leaves were silent, unstirring. The only sound was the soft gurgle of the water flowing over a short stretch of shingle between two pools. Once or twice he heard the hooting of owls far in the distance.

He pressed his fingers against the pouch hanging at his belt and heard the faint crinkling of the parchment. For this, he thought, for so frail a thing as these few sheets of parchment, he and the others (the others, with the exception of Conrad, not knowing) were marching deep into the Desolated Land, where only God might know what would be waiting for them. A frail thing and a magic thing as well? Magic in that if it should prove to be genuine, then the Church would be strengthened, and more would find belief, and the world, in time to come, would be a better place. The Evil Horde had its evil magic, the Little People their small magics, but these leaves of parchment, in the last accounting, might be the greatest magic of them all. Without actually forming words, he bowed his head and prayed it might be so.

And, finally, as he prayed, he heard a sound and for a long moment could not be sure what it was. It was so distant, so muffled, that at first he was not sure he heard it, but as he listened intently, it became more distinct, and he could make it out. The sound of distant hoofbeats, the undeniable hoofbeats of a horse, and now another sound, the far-off baying of dogs.

Although never loud, the sounds were distinct and clear. There could be no doubt of it: the wild hoofbeats of a running horse and the baying of hounds, and occasionally (although he could not be sure of this) the shouting of a man or men.

The strange thing about it was that the sound seemed to be coming from the sky. He looked up at the starwashed, moon-drenched sky, and there was nothing there. And yet the sound seemed to come from there.

It lasted only for a few minutes, and then it went away, and the silence of the night closed in.

Duncan, who had risen to make his survey of the sky, sat down again. Beside him, Tiny was growling softly, his muzzle pointed upward. Duncan patted him on the head. "You heard it, too," he said. Tiny ceased his growling and settled down.

Later on, Duncan rose to his feet and walked down to the stream, carrying a cup to get a drink of water. As he knelt beside the stream, a fish jumped in the pool above him, shattering the stillness. A trout, he wondered. The stream might carry trout. If they had time in the morning, they might try to catch a few of them for breakfast. If they had time; that was, if it didn't take too long. For there was no time to waste. The more quickly they were on their way, the faster they got through the Desolated Land, the better it would be.

When the moon had dropped appreciably toward the west, he awakened Conrad, who came to his feet, alert, with no sign of sleep left in him.

"Is everything all right, m" lord?"

"Everything is fine," said Duncan. "There has been nothing stirring."

He said nothing about the hoofbeats and the baying in the sky. As he formed the words in his mind to tell Conrad, they sounded too silly for the telling, and he did not say them.

"Call me a little early," he said. "I'll try to catch some trout for breakfast."

Duncan rolled up his cloak and used it as a pillow. Stretching out on the hard ground, he pulled the blanket over him. Lying on his back, he stared up at the sky. He pressed his fingers against the soft deerskin pouch and heard the soft crinkling of the manuscript. He pressed his eyes tight shut, trying in this manner to put himself to sleep, but behind the closed eyes he conjured up in his mind, without intending to, quite unwillingly in fact, a scene that he could not understand. But then the realization of what his mind's eye, in all the activity of his imagination, was showing him came clear. Impatiently he tried to shake it off, but it would not go away. No matter how hard he tried to shake it off, that figment of imagination hung on stubbornly. He turned over on his side and opened his eyes, seeing the campfire, Tiny lying beside it, Conrad looming over him.

Duncan closed his eyes, determined that this time he would go to sleep. But his mind's vision fastened on a furtive little man who scurried busily about to see and hear all that might be heard or seen among a small band of men who were associated with a tall and saintly figure. These men, all of them, the saintly man as well as his followers, were young, although too somber for their years, too dedicated, with a strange light in their eyes. They were of the people, certainly, for they were clothed in tattered garments, and while some of them wore sandals, others had nothing on their feet. At times the band was alone, at other times there were crowds of people who had gathered to gaze upon the saintly man, straining their ears to hear what he might say.

And always, hovering on the edge of these crowds of people, or dogging the footsteps of the little band when it was alone, was this furtive figure who darted all about, never of the band, but with it, listening so hard that his ears seemed to swivel forward to catch the slightest words, his bright, sharp, almost weasel eyes squinted against the desert sunlight, but watching closely, missing no move that might be made.

And later, crouching against a sheltering boulder or hunkering by a small campfire in the dead of night, writing all he'd seen or heard. Writing small so that his parchment would not run out, using every scrap of whiteness to inscribe his labored words, twisting his face and pursing his tiny mouth in the effort to get down the words exactly as they should be, telling in those words all that he had witnessed.

Duncan tried without success to gain a full view of this furtive man, to look him in the face, so that he might judge what sort of man he was. But he was never able to. The face was always in a shadow or was turned away at that very moment when, finally, he thought he'd see the face. He was a short man, almost a dumpy figure. His feet were bare and there were bruises on them from the desert rocks and pebbles; he was dressed in dusty rags, so tattered that he was continually pulling at them in an effort to cover his scrawny nakedness. His hair was long and unkempt, his straggly beard untrimmed. He was not the sort of man upon whom a casual observer would have wasted a second glance. He was a nonentity. He faded into the crowd. He was an unrecognizable and unimportant human among many other humans, a man so undistinguished that he drew no attention. There was nothing about him that made him stand out among all the others; he was engulfed and absorbed by them.

Duncan followed him, trudging steadily and doggedly to keep pace with his furtiveness, attempting to circle him so that he might come head-on at him and so get to see his face. Always he failed to do so. It was almost as if this furtive man was aware of him and was studiously careful either to keep well away from him or, on his approach, to turn away from him. Yet watching for some sign that this other furtive one was aware of him, he could catch no sign he was.

Then someone was shaking him and hissing him to silence. He fought his eyes open and sat up. Conrad was crouched in front of him. His half-clenched hand was raised to the level of Duncan's face, and an emphatic outstretched thumb was pointing across the dying campfire toward the ring of darkness that lay beyond the circle of the campfire's light. There, at the edge of the circle, between the light and dark stood Tiny in a rigid stance, straining forward as if someone held him on a leash, lips curled back to bare his fangs, a low growl rumbling in his throat.

Out of the darkness gleamed two wide-spaced balls of green fire and below them a frog-mouth rimmed by gleaming teeth, and over all of it—the teeth and balls of fire—the impression of a head or face so outrageous in its formation, so chilling in its outline that the mind rejected it, refusing to give credence to there being such a thing. The mouth was froglike, but the face was not. It was all angles and sharp planes and above it rose the suggestion of a crest. And in the instant that Duncan saw it, there was slaver at the corner of the mouth, a drooling hunger that yearned toward the campfire circle but was held from coming out—perhaps by the snarling Tiny, perhaps by something else.

He saw it only for a moment, and then it was blotted out. The balls of fire were gone and so were the sharp and gleaming teeth. For an instant the outline of the face, or the hinted outline of the face, persisted; then it, too, blinked out.

Tiny took a quick step forward, the growl rising in his throat.

"No, Tiny," Conrad said softly. "No."

Duncan surged to his feet.

"They've been around the last hour or so," said Conrad. "Prowling in the dark. But this is the first we've seen."

"Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"No need, m" lord. Tiny and me were watching. They were looking us over only."

"Many of them? More than this one?"

"More than one, I think. Not many."

Duncan put more wood on the fire. Tiny was pacing around the campfire circle.

Conrad spoke to the dog. "Come in. Tame down. No more of them tonight."

"How do you know there'll be no more tonight?" asked Duncan. "They just looked us over. But now they've decided not to tackle us tonight. Maybe later on."

"How do you know all this?"

"Don't know. Just guess is all. A feeling in the bones."

"They have something planned for us," said Duncan.

"Maybe," Conrad said.

"Conrad, do you want to turn back?"

Conrad grinned viciously. "Just when it's getting good?" he asked. "I mean it," Duncan told him. "There is danger here. I do not want to lead all of us to death."

"And you, m" lord?"

"I'd go on, of course. Perhaps alone, I could make it. But I don't insist that the rest of you…"

"The old lord, he said take care of you. He'd skin me alive should I come back without you."

"Yes, I know," said Duncan. "It has been that way since the time that we were boys."

"The hermit," Conrad said. "Maybe the hermit would go back. He's been bitching ever since we started."

"The hermit," Duncan told him, "is a self-proclaimed soldier of the Lord. He needs this to restore his self-respect. He feels he was a failure as a hermit. Scared witless, he'd still not turn back unless the others of us did."

"Then we go on," said Conrad. "Three comrades-in-the-arms. But what about the witch?"

"She can make her choice. She hasn't much to lose, one way or another. She had nothing when we found her."

So, no matter what Ghost may have told them, Duncan thought, it was not only the hairless ones who were watching and keeping track of them. Meg had been right. The others were about, had been there all night, perhaps, watching from the darkness. Even when he'd sat beside the campfire during that first watch, they had been out there without his knowing it. And what was more, without Tiny's knowing it. Only the witch had known it. And strange as it might seem, she had not been greatly perturbed by it. Despite knowing they were there, she had curled up beside the saddle and the packs and had slept like a baby, making those little crying noises that had made her seem more babylike.

Perhaps she had sensed somehow that they were safe, that there'd be no attack. And how could she have known, he wondered, and why had those others not attacked? Huddled as they were around the campfire, one swift rush from the outer darkness would have taken care of them—there would have been no way a small party such as they could have stood them off.

And in the days ahead, how would they stand them off? Surely there would come a time when the Harriers would set out to kill them. They would stay vigilant, of course, but vigilance was not the entire answer. If enough of the Harriers were willing to meet death themselves, they could do the job.

Yet, he told himself, he could not turn back. He carried with him a certain talisman that might keep the lights still burning, beating back the ancient darkness. And if he did not turn back, neither would Conrad, neither would the hermit.

Dawn was near at hand. The darkness was filtering from the trees and one now was able to see a ways into the woods. A flight of ducks went over the camp, crying as they flew, perhaps heading for a favorite feeding ground.

"Conrad," he asked, "do you see anything strange?"

"Strange?"

"Yes, the way this place looks. It seems to be all wrong. Not the way it was when we camped last night."

"Just the light," said Conrad. "Things look different in the dawn." But it was more than the dawn light, Duncan told himself. He tried to place the wrongness and was unable to. There was nothing definite that he could put a finger on. And yet it was different. The woods were wrong. The stream was wrong. The sense of things was wrong. As if someone had taken the geography in hand and had given it a slightly different twist, not changing it too much, but enough to be noticed, enough to give a viewer the feeling that it was skewed out of shape.

Andrew sat up, levering himself upright with his elbows.

"What is wrong?" he asked.

"There is nothing wrong," growled Conrad.

"But there is. I know it. It is in the air."

"We had a visitor last night," said Duncan. "Peeking from the bushes."

"More than one," said Conrad. "Only one peeked out."

Andrew came swiftly to his feet, snatching up his staff.

"Then the witch was right," he said.

"Of course she was," said Meg, from where she was huddled by the saddle and the packs. "Old Meg is always right. I told you they were skulking about. I said they were watching us."

Daniel lunged to his feet, took a few quick steps toward the campfire, then paused. He blew fiercely through his nostrils and pawed with one hoof at the ground.

"Daniel knows as well," said Conrad.

"All of us know," said Andrew. "What do we do about it?"

"We go on," said Conrad. "That is, if you want to."

"What makes you think I wouldn't want to?"

"I thought you would," said Conrad.

Meg threw back her blanket, got to her feet, shook her rags into some semblance of shape about her.

"They are gone now," she said. "I can't feel them any more. But they have enchanted us. We are in a trap. There is a certain stench to it."

"I see no trap," said Conrad.

"Not us," said Andrew. "We are not the ones enchanted. It is the place that is enchanted."

"How do you know?" asked Duncan.

"Why, the strangeness of it. Look over there, just above the stream. There is a rainbow shiver in the air."

Duncan looked. He could see no rainbow shiver in the air.

"The Little People sometimes try to do it," Andrew said, "but they do it very badly. As they do most things very badly. They are tumblers."

"And the Harriers are not?"

"Not the Harriers," said Meg. "They have the power. They do a job of it."

It was all insane, thought Duncan, to stand here so calmly, saying there was an enchantment on this place. And yet, perhaps there was. He had noticed the strange way in which the geography seemed to have been skewed about, slightly out of focus. He had not seen Andrew's rainbow, but he had noticed how the place was slightly out of joint. Looking at it, he saw that it still was out of joint.

"Perhaps we should get started," Duncan said. "We can have breakfast later. If we move immediately, we may get out of this strangeness that you call enchantment. Surely it cannot cover a great expanse of ground."

"It will get worse farther on," said Andrew. "I am sure that a deeper enchantment lies ahead of us. If we should go back we might soon be out of it."

"Back is where they want us to go," said Conrad. "Otherwise why enchantment? And we are not going back. M" lord has decided we go on."

He reached for the saddle and threw it on the back of the waiting Daniel.

"Come on," he said to Beauty. ""Tis time to get you packed."

Beauty flapped her ears and trotted forward so he could put on the packs.

"No one needs to go," said Duncan. "Conrad and I have decided that we will. But the others of you need not."

"You heard me say that I would go," said Andrew.

Duncan nodded. "Yes, I did. I was sure you would."

"And I as well," said Meg. "Faith and there's little in this howling wilderness for an old girl such as I. And I have seen worse enchantments."

"We do not know what may lie ahead," warned Duncan.

"At least with you, there's food," she said, "which looms large in the eyes of a poor old soul who betimes has been forced to eke out her existence by eating nuts and roots, much as a hog would eat, rooting in the woods to find his dinner. And there's companionship, of which I had none before."

"We have no time to waste," said Conrad grimly. He grasped Meg around the waist and heaved her into the saddle.

"Hang on," he said.

Daniel pranced a little, in a way of welcome to his rider.

Conrad spoke again. "Tiny, point," he said.

The dog trotted down the trail, Conrad close behind him. Beauty took up her place, with Andrew trudging along beside her, thumping the ground with an energetic staff. Daniel and Duncan brought up the rear.

The enchantment deepened. The land became wilder than it had been before. Monstrous oaks grew in massive groves, the underbrush was denser, and about it all there was an unreality that made one wonder if the oaks and underbrush were really there, if the boulders had as thick a coat of lichens and the sense of antiquity that they seemed to have. But that was only a part of it. A brooding grimness held over everything. A deep hush pervaded the land, a bush of ominous and foreboding waiting, sinister and doomful.

If the oaks had only been monstrous oaks, if the underbrush had been no more than thick, if the boulders had been only ancient mounds of lichens, a man, Duncan thought, could have accepted it. But there was the warping of these ordinary things, the crookedness and bias of them, as if they were not permanently planted in the earth, but were only there for the moment, as if someone bad projected a picture of them and was as yet undecided what kind of picture he might want. It was a picture that wavered, as the reflection in a water surface might fluctuate with the almost imperceptible movement of the water, an oscillation, a shifting, a puzzling impermanence. And here and there one glimpsed at times the broken segments of shivering rainbow colors that Andrew had mentioned earlier, but that Duncan had not seen when he had looked for them. But now he did see them—the sort of shimmering color one saw when light shone through thick glass and its rays were scattered into a million hues. They appeared and disappeared, they did not last for long and never were they a complete rainbow arc, but fragments of arcs, shattered arcs, as if someone had taken a perfect rainbow and crushed it in his hands, shattering it, then broadcasting the fragments to the wind.

The valley still remained, and the hills that rose on each side of it. But the faint trail they had been following had disappeared, and now they made their way through the tangled forest as best they could. Conrad was holding Tiny close ahead of him, not allowing the dog the wide range that he had permitted before. Daniel was nervous, tossing his head and snorting every now and then.

"It's all right, boy," said Duncan, and Daniel answered with a quiet whicker.

Ahead of Duncan, Andrew stumped along beside Beauty, thumping his staff with unaccustomed force. Beauty minced beside him, staying close. Unaccountably, she seemed to have taken a fancy to this strange companion. Perhaps she believed, thought Duncan, chuckling at the thought, that now she had acquired a human of her own, as Tiny had Conrad and Daniel had Duncan.

At the head of the column, Conrad and Tiny had stopped. The others came up to cluster with them.

"A swamp ahead," said Conrad. "It blocks our way. Could this be the fen?"

"Not the fen," said Andrew. "The fen does not block the way. It lies to one side and is open water."

Through the trees the swamp could be seen, a spreading marshiness that was not open land, but choked by trees and other heavy growth.

"Perhaps it's not deep," said Duncan. "We may be able to make our way through it, keeping close to the hill."

He moved ahead, Conrad striding beside him, the others trailing in their wake.

Duncan and Conrad stopped at the edge of the water.

"Looks deep to me," said Conrad. "Some deep pools out there. More than likely mud. And the hill you speak of. There isn't any hill."

What he said was correct. The line of hills they had been following now fell away and to their left, as well as toward their right, lay the tangled swamp.

"Stay here," said Duncan.

He stepped into the water. At each step the water deepened, and beneath his feet he felt the squishiness of mud and slime. Before him lay the beginning of one of the pools that Conrad had called his attention to—black as the blackest ink, with a look of oil, of something heavier and more treacherous than water.

He shifted his course to skirt it, and as he did the inky blackness of the water boiled, lashed to fury by something that struggled to emerge from it. A sinuous back humped up and broke through the blackness of the pool. Duncan's hand went to the sword hilt, half drew the blade. The sinuous back subsided and the water once more assumed its undisturbed oiliness. But in another pool a little farther on, the surface exploded in a froth of violence, and out of it shot a vicious head supported by a snakelike body that hurled itself erect, towering above the level of the pool. The head was triangular, not so large as might be expected from the size of the ropelike body. Two horns crowned the scaly head; the cheeks had the appearance of armor plate, pinching down to a beaklike snout. It opened its mouth, and the mouth was larger than the head. Cruel curved fangs projected from the jaws.

Duncan had the blade out by now and stood, holding it, ready for attack, but the attack did not come. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the body slid back into the pool and the head disappeared beneath the surface. The swamp lay quiet and black and menacing.

"I think you'd best come back," said Conrad.

Slowly, step by careful step, Duncan backed out of the swamp.

"No chance to get across," said Conrad.

Andrew came clumping down to where they stood, Beauty mincing along behind him.

"There is no swamp," he said. "There never was a swamp. It is all enchantment."

"Swamp or not," said Meg, huddled on top of Daniel, "a bewitchment such as this can kill you."

"Then what do we do?" asked Duncan.

"We try another route," said Andrew. "We pass the enchantment by. No matter how powerful may be the ones who laid this witchery on us, they cannot lay it over everything. They knew where we were going and it was along that route that the enchantment was laid."

"You mean into the hills," said Duncan. "If we go there, how well do you know this land?"

"Not as well as this valley, but I know it. A few miles from here, due east, there is another trail. A bad trail. Very crooked, up and down the hills. Hard going. But it will take us south. It will take us beyond these hills that block us from the south."

"I think," said Meg, "we best had seek that trail."

12

They found Andrew's trail, but it proved to be the wrong trail. Halfway up a steep hillside it petered out to nothing.

They had left the enchantment far behind them, had escaped from it. Now there were no rainbow tints, no feeling that the landscape had been skewed. The land was the kind of land one would have expected to find. The oaks were honest oaks, the honest boulders had honest lichens on them, the stretches of underbrush were normal underbrush. The feeling of gloom was gone, the foreboding had dropped away.

It had been hard work. There had been no level ground. Constantly they had been traveling steep slopes, or making their careful way down steep slopes, which in some cases was almost as exhausting as the climbing.

Now that the trail had finally disappeared, Duncan glanced up at the sky. The sun was almost at its zenith.

"Let us stop to eat and rest," he said. "Then we'll strike east and try to find the right trail." He said to Andrew, "You are sure that there is one."

Andrew nodded. "I've traveled it, but only a few times and that many years ago. I am not well acquainted with it."

The trail had been lost on a small shelf of fairly level ground, extending for not more than a few yards before the steep slope took up again. Conrad gathered wood and started a fire. Daniel and Beauty stood with hanging heads, resting from hard travel. Tiny flopped down on the ground.

"We could use Ghost," said Conrad, "but he is far away, spying out the land ahead of us."

"I'll say this for Ghost," said Andrew. "I have a lot more respect for him than I had before. It takes real courage for a ghost to go out in broad daylight and do the kind of job that he's been doing."

A gray shadow moved among the trees below them.

"There's a wolf," said Duncan.

"There are a lot of wolves around," said Andrew. "More than there ever were since the Harriers came."

Another gray shadow followed the first, and farther down the slope was yet another one.

"At least three of them," said Duncan. "And there may be more. Do you think they might be following us?"

"Nothing to worry about," said Conrad. "A wolf is a coward. Face up to one and he runs away."

Meg put her arms around herself, hugging herself, shivering a little. "They smell blood," she said. "They can smell blood before there is any blood."

"Old wives" tale," said Conrad.

"Not a tale," Meg said. "I know. They know when death is coming."

"Not our blood," said Conrad. "Not our death."

A wind had come up and far down the hill it could be heard moaning in the trees. The ground was thick with fallen leaves. And over all of it was a somberness, the sense of autumn, a psychic warning against the coming of the snow. Duncan felt a faint unease, although there was nothing, he told himself, to be uneasy about. In just a short time now they would find the right trail and be on their way again, following a harder road than they had first intended, but on their way at last.

How many more days, he wondered, and was amazed that he had no idea. Once they were through these hills, more than likely, they would make faster time. So far they had not hurried, but gone along at an easy pace. Now was the time, once they were squared around, he told himself, to really cover ground.

"If Snoopy were only here," said Andrew, "he would know the way, how to find the trail. But that is wishful thinking. There is no honor in him. Even when he told us, when he gave his word, he had no intention of being any help to us."

"We'll make out without him," Duncan said, a sharpness to his words.

"At least," said Conrad, "we walked out of the witchery that was laid for us."

"The witchery, yes," said Andrew. "But there will be other things."

They ate and then moved on, striking toward the east, or as close to east as was possible, for in this tangled, tortuous land there was no such thing as heading in any one direction. There were diversions—a bad lay of ground, a particularly steep climb that they tried to skirt, a tangle of fallen trees they must go around. But, in general, they trended toward the east.

The sun went down the sky and there was still no sign of any trail. They moved through a region that had no trace of men, or of there ever having been any men. There were no burned farmsteads, no cuttings where timber had been harvested. Ancient trees stood undisturbed, hoary with age.

From time to time they caught glimpses of wolves, but always at a distance. There was no way of knowing if they were the same wolves they had seen earlier.

We are lost, Duncan told himself, although he said nothing to the others. Despite all that Andrew said, all that he professed to know, there might not be a trail. For days they might keep plunging into the great wilderness and find nothing that would help them, floundering in confusion. Perhaps, he thought, it might be the enchantment still at work, although in a less obvious manner than had been the case before.

The sun was almost gone when they came down a long slope into a deep glen, rimmed by the hills, as if it might be sunk into the very earth, a place of quiet and shadows, filled with a sense of melancholy. It was a place where one walked softly and did not raise his voice. The light of the sun still caught the hilltops above them and gilded some of the autumn trees with flaming color, but here night was falling fast.

Duncan hurried ahead to catch up with Conrad.

"This place," said Conrad, "has an evil smell to it."

"Evil or not," said Duncan, "it is a place to camp. Sheltered from the wind. Probably we'll find water. There must be a stream somewhere. Better than being caught on some windy hillside."

"I thought to catch sight of something ahead," said Conrad. "A whiteness. Like a church, perhaps."

"An odd place for a church," said Duncan.

"I could not be sure. In this dark, it is hard to see."

As they talked they kept moving ahead. Tiny had fallen back to walk with the two of them.

Ahead of them Duncan caught a glimpse of whiteness.

"I think I see it, too," he said. "Straight ahead of us."

As they progressed a little farther they could see that it was a building—for all the world like a tiny church. A thin tall spire pointed toward the sky and the door stood open. In front of it a space had been cleared of underbrush and trees, and they went across this space filled with wonder. For there should not be a church here, even a small one. Round about lived no one who would attend it, and yet there it stood, a small building, like a toy church. A chapel, Duncan thought. One of those hidden chapels tucked away, for one obscure reason or another, in places that were off the beaten track.

Duncan and Conrad came to a halt in front of it, and Andrew came hurrying up to them.

"Jesus of the Hills," he said. "The Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills. I had heard of it, but had never seen it. I had no idea how to get to it. It was a thing spoken of half in wonder, half in disbelief."

"And here it is," said Conrad.

Andrew was visibly shaken. The hand that held the staff was trembling.

"A holy place," said Duncan. "A place of pilgrimage, perhaps."

"A holy place only recently. Only the last few hundred years," said Andrew. "It stands on most unholy ground. In earlier times it was a pagan shrine."

"There are many holy places that were raised on areas that once were special to the pagans," Duncan told him. "In the thought, perhaps, that the pagans would more readily accept Christianity if the places of worship were built on familiar ground."

"Yes, I know," said Andrew. "Reading in the Fathers, I ran across some mention of such thoughts. But this one—this was something else."

"A pagan shrine, you said. A place of the Druids, most likely."

"Not the Druids," said Andrew. "Not a shrine for humans. A gathering place for evil, where high carnival was held upon certain days."

"But if such were the case, why was a chapel built here? It would seem to me this was a place the Church had best avoid, for a time at least."

"I do not know," said Andrew. "Not with any certainty. There were in the olden days certain militant churchmen who perforce must seize evil by the horns, must confront it face to face…"

"And what happened?"

"I do not know," said Andrew. "The legends are unclear. There are many stories, but perhaps no truth to any of them."

"But the chapel's here," said Conrad. "It was allowed to stand." Duncan strode forward, went up the three shallow steps that led up to the chapel door, and through the door.

The place was tiny, a dollhouse sort of place. There was one window on each side made of low-grade colored glass that glinted in the fading light, and six pews, three on each side of the narrow aisle. And above the altar.

Duncan stared in horror. He gagged and knew the bitterness of gall gushing in his mouth. His stomach knotted at the sight of the crucifix that hung behind the altar. It was carved out of a large oak log, all of it in one piece, the cross and the carven Jesus hanging on the cross.

The crucifix was upside down. The figure of Christ was standing on His head, as if He had been caught in the midpoint of a somersault. Filth had been smeared upon Him and obscene sentences, written in Latin, were painted on the wood.

It was, Duncan thought fleetingly, as if someone had struck him hard across the mouth. It was only with an effort that he kept his knees from buckling. And even as he reacted to the profanation and the sacrilege, wondered why he should—he, the mildest of Christians, with no great piety or devotion. And yet a man, he thought, who risked his neck and the necks of others to perform a service to the Church.

The crucifix was a mockery, a gusty whoop of pagan laughter, a burlesque of the Faith, a hooting, a ridicule, a scoffing, and, perhaps as well, a hatred. If the enemy cannot be conquered, at least he can be ridiculed and laughed at.

Conrad had pointed out that despite the pagan ground on which it had been built, the chapel had been allowed to stand. And in this observation there was implicit the question of why it had been allowed to stand. And this, the reversed crucifix and the violence that had been done it, was the reason. Years ago a man of Christ had come, a militant man intent on ramming Christianity down a pagan throat, and had built the chapel. And now the joke had been turned upon him and the chapel stood a mockery.

He heard the gasps behind him as Conrad and Andrew saw the crucifix and caught, for an instant, the impact of the horror.

Duncan whispered at them, "A mockery. A living mockery. But Our Lord can stand that. He can take a little mockery."

The chapel, he saw, was clean and well cared for. There was no sign of the ravages of time. It had been swept but recently. It had been kept in good repair.

Slowly he began to back out of the door, Conrad and Andrew backing with him. On the steps outside sat a huddled Meg.

"You saw," she said to Duncan. "You saw?"

Dumbly, stricken, he nodded his head.

"I did not know," she said. "I did not know we were coming to this place. If I had, I'd have told you, stopped you."

"You knew what was here?"

"I had heard of it. That was all. Heard of it."

"And you do not approve of it?"

"Approve of it? Why should I disapprove of it? I have no quarrel with it. And yet, I would not have had you see it. I've eaten your food, ridden on your horse, your great dog did not tear hunks of flesh from me, you ran no sword through me, the big one reached out his hand to help me rise, he boosts me onto the horse. Even that sour apple of a hermit gave me cheese. Why should such as I wish any ill for you?"

Duncan reached down and patted her on the head. "It's all right, grandmother. We take it in our stride."

"Now what do we do?" asked Andrew.

"We spend the night here," Duncan said. "We are worn out with our travels of the day. We're in no shape to go on. We need some food and rest."

"Not a bite of food will I be able to swallow," said Andrew. "Not in such a place."

"What do we do then?" asked Duncan. "Go running out into the hills, fighting through the woods in the dark? We'd not make a mile."

Thinking, even as he said the words, that were it not for Andrew and Meg, he and Conrad could go, leave this pagan place behind them, find a safer camping place. Or keep going all the night, if that were necessary, to put some distance between them and the Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills. But Andrew's legs were tottery from the punishment they'd taken, and Meg, although she probably would deny it, was near the end of her endurance. Back at the hermit's cave he'd worried about the volunteers they were taking on, and here was evidence that he'd been right in worrying.

"I'll get some wood and start a fire," said Conrad. "There's a stream over to the right. I heard running water there."

"I'll go and get some water," Andrew said. Duncan, watching him, knew the kind of courage it had taken for him to offer to go alone out into the dark.

Duncan called Daniel and Beauty in, took the saddle off Daniel and the packs off Beauty. Beauty huddled against Daniel, and he seemed quite content to have her there. The two of them, Duncan thought, know as well as we that there is something wrong. Tiny prowled restlessly about, head held high to catch any scent of danger.

Meg and Conrad did the cooking at the fire that Conrad lighted only a short distance in front of the steps leading up to the chapel. The lights from the flames of the fire washed across the whiteness of the tiny structure.

Up on the hill to the west a wolf howled and was answered by another from the north.

"Some of those we saw early in the day," said Conrad. "They are still around."

"The wolves have been bad this year," said Andrew.

The glen, as full night came down, held the dank, wet feel of fear, of danger walking on soft pads, moving in on them. Duncan, feeling this, wondered if this sense of apprehension arose from having seen the defamation of the crucifix, or if it would have been present if there had been no chapel and no crucifix.

"Conrad and I will do double watch tonight," said Duncan.

"You're forgetting me again," said Andrew, but with something in his voice that sounded to Duncan as if it might be relief.

"We want you rested," said Duncan. "The both of you, so that we can put in a long day tomorrow. We'll start as soon as we can see. Well before full morning light."

He stood beside the fire, staring out into the dark. It was hard, he found, not to take alarm at an imagined shape or an imagined noise.

Twice he thought he saw movement out beyond the campfire circle, but each time decided it was no more than his imagination, sharpened by the fear that he sought to conceal but could not, himself, deny.

The wolves occasionally howled, not only from the west and north, but from the east and south as well. This country, he told himself, was crawling with the beasts. However, the howls still were from a distance; the wolves did not seem to be moving in. They might come later, Duncan told himself, after they had worked up more courage, and the activity about the campfire had quieted down. Although of wolves, they need have no fear. If they came in, Daniel and Tiny would wreak havoc on them.

If there were anything to be feared, it would be something other than the wolves. Remembering, once again he saw the frog's mouth full of teeth, the glowing eyes, the suggestion of a face that was made up of smooth planes and sharp angles—the face that had stared out at them from beyond the campfire of the night before. And the snaky evilness that had surged out of the black pool in the swamp.

Meg called them in for food and they squatted around the fire, wolfing it down. Andrew, despite his assertion that he would not be able to swallow a single morsel, did full justice to the meal.

There was little talk, only a sentence now and then and of inconsequential things. No one talked about what they'd found inside the chapel. It was as if all of them were busy in an effort to wipe it from their minds.

But it was not a thing, Duncan found, that could be wiped away. Never for a moment since he first had seen it had it been more than a short distance from his consciousness. Mockery, he had told himself, and it was that, of course, but it also would be, he thought, more than mockery. Hatred, he had said, almost as an afterthought. But now, having thought on it, he knew that there was in it as much hatred as there was mockery.

And that was understandable. The pagan gods of ancient days had a right to hate this new faith that had risen something less than two millennia ago. But he chided himself that he should think of the pagan gods as somehow legitimate in their hatred, that he should admit, even parenthetically, that they had existed and did now exist. This was not, he reminded himself, the way a Christian should be thinking. A devout Christian would consign them all to limbo, would deny there ever had been such as they. But this, he knew, was a viewpoint that he could not accept. He must still conceive of them as the ever-present enemy, and this was especially true in this place, the Desolated Land.

His fingers dropped to the purse suspended from his belt and beneath them he felt the crinkle of the pages that he carried. Here lay his faith, he thought; here, in this place where he sat, lay another faith. Perhaps a mistaken faith, perhaps a faith that should not be accepted, that instead should be opposed with every power at one's command, but a faith nevertheless—a faith that man, in his ignorance, with no other faith, and yearning toward something that could intercede for him against the vastness of infinity and the cruelty of fate, had embraced despite all its cruelty and horror, thinking perhaps that any fate that was worth embracing must be horrible and cruel, for in those two qualities lay power, and power was something that man needed to protect himself against the outer world.

Here on this very ground, undoubtedly, had been performed certain hideous and repugnant rites that he had no knowledge of and was glad he had no knowledge of. Here humans may have died as sacrifices. Here blood had been spilled upon the ground, here obscene practices had been acted out, here monstrous entities had trod with evil intent—and not only recently, but extending back into unguessed time, perhaps into that time that anteceded mankind.

Daniel walked up close to where he was sitting, thrust down his head to nuzzle at his master. Duncan stroked the big horse's head, and Daniel snorted softly at him.

From the west a wolf howled, and it seemed that this time the howl was closer.

Conrad came striding up to stand near the horse and man.

"We'll have to keep the fire burning high throughout the night," he said. "Wolves have a fear of fire."

"We have naught to fear of wolves," said Duncan. "They are not driven by hunger. There is plenty for them to pull down and eat out there in the woods."

"They are closing in," said Conrad. "I have been catching glimpses of their eyes."

"They are curious. That is all."

Conrad hunkered down beside Duncan. He pushed the head of his club back and forth upon the ground.

"What do we do tomorrow?"

"I suppose we go on hunting for Andrew's trail."

"And what if we don't find the trail?"

"We'll find it. There had to be a trail across these hills."

"What if enchantment closes the trail to us? Makes us not to see it."

"We escaped the enchantment, Conrad." Although, Duncan reminded himself, he had entertained the thought, earlier in the day, that the enchantment might still be with them.

"We are lost," said Conrad. "We don't know where we are. I don't think Andrew knows."

Out at the edge of the firelight circle two eyes gleamed back at Duncan and then, almost instantly, were gone.

"I saw one of your wolves just now," he said to Conrad. "Or at least his eyes."

"Tiny has been watching," Conrad said, "pacing back and forth. He knows they are out there."

They were moving in closer now. The darkness at the edge of the campfire circle was rimmed by shining eyes.

Tiny went walking out toward them. Conrad called him back. "Not yet, Tiny. Not quite yet."

Duncan rose to his feet.

"We're in for it," said Conrad quietly. "They are getting set to rush us."

Daniel switched around to face the gathering wolves. He tossed his head, snorting in anger. Tiny, coming back, ranged himself by Conrad. His ruff was lifted and a growl gurgled in his throat.

One of the wolves paced forward. In the firelight his gray fur seemed almost white. He was large and raw-boned, a death's head of a wolf. He seemed to teeter forward, his great gaunt head thrust out, the lips pulled back from the fangs, his eyes glittering in the reflection of the flames.

Another wolf came up behind and to one aide of him, stopped with its head at the first wolf's shoulder.

Duncan drew his blade. The rasp of drawn metal was harsh in the silence that had fallen on the clearing. The firelight glinted off the shining steel.

He said to the horse beside him, "Steady, Daniel, steady, boy."

At a quick shuffle of feet behind him he risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that it was Andrew. He held the staff half lifted. The cowl had fallen to his shoulders, and his graying hair was a halo in the firelight.

From the darkness at the edge of the clearing a voice spoke, loud and clear, but using words that Duncan had never heard before—not English, neither Latin nor Greek, nor with the inflection of the Gaulish tongue. Words that were harsh and guttural and with a snarl in them.

At the words the wolves came charging in: the big wolf that had first appeared paced by the second one that had come up to stand with him, and others racing out on each side, coming in half crouched, tensed to leap, bursting from the dark at the signal or the command of the one who had spoken from the darkness.

At Duncan's side, Daniel reared up, striking out with his front hoofs. Tiny was a streak of unleashed hatred lunging at the beasts. The big wolf rose, soaring effortlessly from the ground, his jaws aimed at Duncan's throat. The sword licked out and caught his outstretched neck, hurling him to one side with the impact of the thrust.

The second wolf, running beside him and leaping as he ran, crumpled under Conrad's club. Out in front of Conrad, Tiny seized a third by the throat and with a powerful toss of the head sent him spinning through the air.

Another wolf leaped at Duncan, fangs gleaming, mouth wide open for the strike. Even as Duncan lifted the blade, a spearlike stick came thrusting from one side and impaled the beast in its open mouth, ramming deep into its throat. The wolf folded in midair, but the impact of its leap carried it forward, taking the spear with it as it fell.

Duncan's foot caught on the falling stick and he was thrown to his knees. A wolf was rushing in at him and he jerked up the blade, but even as he did, Daniel reached out with a driving hoof, catching the animal behind its hunched shoulder blades. The wolf went down with a crunch of snapping bones.

Duncan surged to his feet, and as he did he saw Tiny on the ground, locked in battle with one of the beasts, and another charging in, with a raging Conrad standing close beside the dog, club lifted and ready for the charging wolf. And just beyond the embattled dog, Beauty was struggling frantically to tug free of one of the beasts that had caught her by a foreleg, with two other wolves rushing in upon her.

Duncan lunged to Beauty's aid, but he had taken no more than a step or two when a raging fury, brandishing two burning brands, streaked toward the burro's attackers. One of the brands went spinning through the air, turning end for end, and the two charging beasts sheered off.

"Meg!" Duncan shouted. "Meg, for the love of God, watch out!" But she paid him no attention, running like the wind, her ancient body wobbling on her shaky legs that seemed to twinkle with her speed even as she wobbled. She lifted the one remaining brand and brought it down on the wolf that had Beauty by the leg. The wolf yelped and spun away, went whimpering out into the darkness.

From the darkness came again the loud, clear voice speaking in the unknown tongue, and as the words rang across the clearing, all the wolves turned about and ran.

Duncan came to a halt and turned slowly to his left. Daniel stood beside the fire, and a short distance from him Andrew had one foot on a dead wolf to hold it down while he tugged desperately to free the staff rammed deep into its throat.

Conrad and Meg were walking toward the fire, with Tiny trailing, while behind Tiny came the limping Beauty. Here and there lay the bodies of the wolves. One of them, possibly the one that Daniel had struck, was trying to pull itself along with frantically working forelegs, its hind quarters dragging.

As Duncan walked toward the fire, Andrew suddenly screamed, let go of the staff on which he had been tugging, and backed away from the dead wolf, his hands lifted to his face.

"No! No!" he screamed. "No, not that!"

Duncan ran toward him and then stopped short, staring at the dead wolf in shocked amazement and disbelief.

The body of the wolf was slowly changing and as he watched in horror, it became the body of a naked woman, with the hermit's staff still protruding from her mouth.

Beside Duncan, Meg chirped at him in a high and squeaky voice. "I could have told you, but I never had a chance. It happened all too fast."

Conrad stepped past Duncan, grasped the hermit's staff in one hamlike hand, and jerked it free.

The body of the wolf beyond the woman had turned into a man, and out beyond the two of them, the thing with the broken back that had been dragging itself away wailed suddenly in a human voice, a cry of pain and terror.

"I'll take care of him," said Conrad grimly.

"No," said Duncan. "For the moment, leave him be."

"Werewolves," spat Conrad. "They're only good for killing."

"There is something I have to find out," said Duncan. "There were a lot of them. Only a few of them attacked. The others hung back. If they had all come in…"

"Someone called them back," said Conrad.

"No, it wasn't that. Not that alone. There was something else."

"Here," said Conrad, holding out the staff to Andrew.

The hermit shrank away. "No, no," he wailed. "I do not want to touch it. I killed a woman with it."

"Not a woman. A werewolf. Here, take it. Hold fast to it. You'll never have another staff quite like it."

He thrust it out forcefully at Andrew and the hermit took it. He thumped it on the ground.

"I shall always remember," he pleaded.

"Good thing to remember," Conrad said. "A blow struck for our Lord."

Duncan walked out to the edge of the firelight, stood over the wailing man with the broken back, then slowly knelt beside him. The man was old. His arms and legs were thin as straws, his knees and elbows knobs. His ribs showed through his skin. His snow-white hair hung down to curl up at his neck and was plastered with sweat across his forehead. He looked at Duncan with fear and hatred in his shining eyes.

"Tell me," said Duncan, "who spoke out of the dark."

The man's lips pulled back to reveal his yellowed teeth. He snarled and spat.

Duncan reached out to grab him by the shoulder and he flinched away. He opened his mouth and screamed, his head arched high, the cords in his neck standing out like ropes. White, foamy spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth and he screamed and moaned and clawed feebly at the ground to pull himself away. He writhed in agony.

A hand came down and grasped Duncan by the shoulder, hauled him to his feet.

"Here, let me," said Conrad.

His club came down and there was the sickening sound of a crunching skull. The man crumpled and lay still.

Duncan turned to Conrad angrily. "You shouldn't have done that. I told you not to."

"When you kill snakes," said Conrad, "you kill them. You do not coddle them."

"But there was a question."

"You asked the question and you got no answer."

"But he might have answered."

Conrad shook his head. "Not that one. He was too afraid of you." And that was true, thought Duncan. The werewolf had been beside itself with fear. It had screamed and tried to claw itself away. It had writhed in agony.

Conrad touched him on the arm. "Let's go back to the fire. I have to see how Beauty is."

"She was limping. That was all. Meg saved her."

"Yes, I saw," said Conrad.

"How is Tiny?"

"A slit ear. A tooth mark here and there. He'll be all right. Just a little sore."

By the time they got back to the fire Andrew had piled on more wood, and the flames were leaping high. Andrew and Meg were standing side by side. Conrad went off to see about Beauty.

"That was a brave thing you did," Duncan told Meg. "Running out there to help Beauty."

"I had fire. Werewolves are afraid of fire."

She bridled at him. "I suppose you wonder why I helped. My being a witch and all. Well, I'll tell you. A little magic and some mild enchantments, those are all right with me. In my day I've done a lot of that. There is nothing wrong with it. Many times it helps. But I told you I had no real evil and I meant that. Werewolves are evil and I cannot abide them. Mean, downright vicious evil. There's no call for anyone to be that evil."

"There was a pack of them," said Duncan. "A lot of them. I never knew that werewolves ran in packs, although perhaps they do. You were telling me about the camp followers who trailed in the wake of the Harriers. Could that be what accounted for so large a pack?"

"It must be that. They must have come swarming in from all over Britain."

"And you heard the voice?"

She put her arms around herself, hugging tight and shivering.

"You knew the words? You recognized the language?"

"Not the words," she said, "but the language, yes. A word here and there. It's a very ancient tongue."

"How ancient?"

"That I cannot tell you, sir. Not in years or centuries. It goes deep back. Spoken before any human spoke, perhaps before there were such things as humans."

"Primordial," he said. "The words of primordial evil."

"I do not know."

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how she recognized the language, but he did not ask the question. There was no need to distress her further. She had been honest in her answers, he was sure, and that was good enough.

Conrad came back. "Beauty is all right," he said. "Her leg's a little sore. We came out lucky."

The clearing was quiet. The humped bodies of the dead werewolves lay at the edge of the outer darkness.

"Perhaps," said Andrew, "we should bury them."

"You do not bury werewolves," Conrad said. "A stake through the heart, perhaps. Besides, we haven't any shovel."

"We'll do nothing," Duncan said. "We'll leave them where they are."

The chapel stood white in the flickering firelight. Duncan looked at the open door. The firelight did not reach deep enough into the interior to show the reversed crucifix and he was glad of that.

"I'll not sleep a wink this night," said Andrew.

"You had best," said Conrad roughly. "Come morning light, we have a long, hard day ahead. Do you think you can find that trail?"

Andrew shook his head in perplexity. "I am not sure. I seem all turned around. Nothing has looked right."

A wailing scream cut through the night, seeming to come from directly overhead, as if the screamer hung in the darkness over them.

"My God," yelped Andrew. "Not more. Not any more tonight." The scream came again, a moan and whimper in it. It was the sort of sound that squeezed the heart and made the blood run cold.

A calm voice spoke to them from just inside the firelit zone. "You have no reason to fear," it said. "That is only Nan, the banshee."

Duncan spun around to face the one who spoke. For a moment he did not recognize him. A little man with a cap that drooped, a pair of spindly legs, ears that were oversized.

"Snoopy," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Hunting you," said Snoopy. "We've been hunting you for hours. Ever since Ghost told us he had lost track of you."

Ghost came fluttering down and beside him another figure, its darkness in contrast to the white of Ghost.

"It was pure happenstance," said Ghost, "that I ran into them."

"It was much more than happenstance," said Snoopy, "and you wouldn't understand. We have no time to explain."

Ghost floated lower until his white robe swept the ground. Nan, the banshee, settled down, hunched herself along the ground toward the fire. She was repulsive. Her deep-set eyes glittered at them from beneath her shaggy brows. Thick black hair flowed down her back almost to her waist. Her face was thin and hard.

"Faith," she said, "and you were hidden well. It took us long to find you."

"Madam," said Duncan, "we were in no wise hiding. We simply reached here and camped the night."

"And a fine place you picked," said Snoopy, walking up to them. "You know you cannot stay here."

"We intend to," Conrad told him. "We fought off a pack of werewolves. We can handle whatever else comes."

"We have been looking for you, goblin," said Andrew. "Why were you not at the church, where you said you'd be?"

"I've been out spreading word that you'll need some help. And the way you've been fumbling around, you will need all the help that we can give."

"You found little help," Andrew said snappishly. "One beaten-up old banshee."

"I'll have you know, you twerp," said Nan, the banshee, "that I can give you ace and spades and beat you at hands-down."

"There'll be others later on," said Snoopy calmly. "They'll be there when you need them most. And you know you can't stay here. No matter what you say, in your ignorance and arrogance, we have to get you somewhere else."

"We know," said Duncan, "that this is a pagan shrine."

"More than that," Snoopy told him. "Much more than that. A place that was sacred to Evil before there were any pagans who might worship Evil. Here, in the days of the first beginning, gathered beings that would shrivel up your tiny souls were you to catch even the smallest glimpse of them. You desecrate the ground. You befoul the place. They will not suffer that you stay here. The werewolves were the first. There will be others, not so easily beaten off as werewolves."

"But there is the chapel…"

"They suffered the chapel to be built. They watched it being built by arrogant and misunderstanding men, by stupid churchmen who should have known far better. They lurked in the shades and watched it going up and they bided their time and when that time came…"

"You can't frighten us," said Conrad.

"Perhaps we should be frightened," said Duncan. "Perhaps if we had good sense we would be."

"That is right," said Meg. "You should be."

"But you came along with us. You did not protest when we…"

"Where else is an old and crippled witch to go?"

"You could have flown off on your broomstick," said Conrad.

"I never had a broomstick. Nor did any other witch. That is only one of the many stupid stories…"

"We can't move until we get some rest," said Duncan. "Conrad and I could go on, but the witch is feeble and Andrew has walked the livelong day. He is worn out."

"I had the strength to kill a werewolf," the hermit pointed out.

"You mean it, don't you?" Conrad said to Snoopy. "You're not just shoving us around."

"He means it," said Nan, the banshee.

"We could put Andrew up on Daniel," Conrad said. "Let Beauty carry Meg. She weighs no more than a feather. The packs we could carry. Beauty, even with a sore leg, could carry Meg."

"Then," said Snoopy, "let us be about it."

"I plead with you," said Ghost. "Please do. If you stay here you'll join me in death by morning. And you might not have the good fortune that I had to become a ghost."

13

After a time Duncan's eyes became acclimated to the darkness and he found that, after a fashion, he could see. That is, he could distinguish trees sufficiently not to run head-on into them. But there was no way to know the character of the ground underfoot. Time after time he tripped over a fallen branch or fell when he stepped into a hole. Rather than walking, it was like floundering. By keeping his eyes on Conrad's broad back and the whiteness of the pack that Conrad carried, he did not wander off. Had it not been for Conrad and the pack, he was sure he would have.

Snoopy led the way, with Ghost sailing along just above him, serving as a sort of beacon they could follow. Daniel followed Snoopy and Ghost, and Beauty trailed along behind her comrade, Daniel. Conrad and Duncan brought up the rear. Nan flew about somewhere above them, but she wasn't too much help. The rags she wore were either black or drab and could not be seen, and she had the disconcerting habit of letting loose upon occasion with dolorous wails.

Andrew had objected to riding Daniel, but when Conrad picked him up and heaved him into the saddle, he did not try to get off. He rode slumped over, his head nodding. Half the time, thought Duncan, the man's asleep. Meg lay lengthwise on the little burro, clinging like a leech, her arms around Beauty's neck. There was no saddle for Beauty, and her rotund little barrel of a body was not ridden easily.

Time stretched out. The moon slid slowly down the western sky. Occasionally night birds cried out, probably in answer to Nan's wailing. Duncan wished she would shut up, but there was, he knew, no way to make her do it, and besides, he didn't have the breath to shout at her. The walking was punishment. It was all up and down hills. Duncan had the impression that they were going in the same direction from which they had come, but he couldn't be sure about it.

He was all mixed up. Thinking of it, it seemed to him that they had been mixed up for some time now.

If it had not been for the enchantment, they could have continued to the fen and down the strand. By this time, more than likely, they would be getting close to the fair and open land Snoopy had told them of, free at last of these tortured hills.

It was strange, he thought. The Harriers had made three attempts to stop them or turn them aside: the encounter in the garden near the church, the enchantment of the day before, the attack of the werewolves. But each attack had been feebler than he would have expected. The hairless ones had broken off the encounter in the garden without making too great an effort. The enchantment had failed—or maybe it had succeeded. Maybe all it had been intended to do was to get them off the trail they had been following. And back at the chapel, undoubtedly if all the werewolves had made a concerted attack, they could have wiped out the little band of humans. Before that could happen, however, they had turned tail and run, called off by the voice that cried out of the darkness.

There was something wrong, he told himself. None of it made sense. The Harriers had swept through this land, killing off the inhabitants, burning villages and farmsteads, making the area into a desolated land. Surely a band as small as theirs should not have been able to stand before them.

Except for the frog-mouth full of teeth that had stared out of the darkness at them, there had been no sign of the Harriers. He had no way of knowing, he admitted to himself, that frog-face had been a Harrier, although, since it resembled nothing else he had ever heard of, he supposed it was.

Did he and his band, he wondered, travel under some powerful protection? Perhaps the hand of God extended over them, although even as he thought it, he knew it to be a foolish thought. It was not often that God operated in such a manner.

It must be, he told himself, only half believing it, the amulet he had taken from Wulfert's tomb—a bauble, Conrad had called it. But it might be more than a bauble. It might be a powerful instrument of magic. Andrew had called it an infernal machine. Thinking of it as a machine, he had naturally thought that there must be some way to turn it on and make it operate. But if it were magic, as it might be, it would need no turning on. It would be operative whenever the occasion demanded that it should be. He had dropped it into the pouch in which he carried the manuscript and had scarcely thought of it since. But he could recognize the possibility that it was the magic that had protected them from the full wrath of the Harriers.

No Harriers, he had told himself. And yet, might not the hairless ones be Harriers, or at least one arm of the Harriers? Harold, the Reaver, had mentioned them as among those that had attacked the manor. It was entirely possible, Duncan told himself, that they were the fighting arm of the Harriers—the shock troops designed to protect the true Harriers while they gathered to participate in those mysterious rites of rejuvenation. If that, in fact, was what they were doing. He could not even be sure of that, he told himself. It was one of the theories that His Grace had mentioned.

Christ, he thought, if I could only know one thing for certain. If I could be sure of only one aspect of this tangled mess.

Wulfert—he was not even sure of him. Regarded by the village where he'd come to live as a holy man, not correcting the error that the villagers had fallen into. Not correcting it because it gave him safety. A wizard who was hiding out. Why should a wizard be hiding out? And, when one came to think of it, how about Diane? She had known that Wulfert was a wizard, had come seeking word of him. But when she gained the word, she had not followed up on it, but had gone flying off. Where was she now? If he could only talk to her, she might be able to explain some of what had been happening.

The moon by now was well down toward the western horizon, but there was still no hint of morning light. Were they ever going to stop? They'd been laboring through these hills for hours, and there was no indication that they were about to stop. How much distance did they need to put between themselves and the Chapel of the Jesus of the Hills to be safe from the jealous evil that protected it?

For some time now Nan had desisted from her wailing. They had emerged from the forest to come on one of the occasional clear spots they had found on the summit of some of the hills. The backbone of the hill reared up in a mass of rocky outcrops.

Looking up, Duncan saw Nan, a black bat of a woman, flying through the sky, outlined by the faintness of the moonlight.

What little wind there had been had died down, a signal of the coming dawn. A heavy silence reigned over everything. The only sound was the occasional ringing of Daniel's or Beauty's iron-shod hoofs as they came in contact with a stone.

Then, out of the moonlit sky, it came again, the sounds that Duncan had heard the night before: the sound of hoofbeats in the sky, the distant shouts of men, the distant baying of dogs.

Ahead of him, Conrad came to a halt and he saw that the others had come to a halt as well. Snoopy stood on a small rocky ridge ahead of them and was staring into the sky. Meg sat bolt upright on Beauty and also stared skyward. Andrew remained slumped in the saddle, doubled over, fast asleep.

The shouting became louder, the baying swelled and deepened, and the hoofbeats were like faint thunder rolling down the heavens.

A shadowy tracery of something came over the treetops to the north, and as he watched, Duncan saw that there was only one horseman riding in the sky, standing straight in the saddle, brandishing a hunting horn and shouting to spur on the dogs that ran ahead of him—vicious, bounding hunting dogs that slavered on the trail of an unseen quarry. The great black horse galloped through the empty air with no ground beneath its pounding hoofs.

The horse and rider and the dogs swept toward the group standing on the hilltop and passed over them. There was no way to see the features of the man, the horse, or the dogs, for they all were black, like silhouetted shadows moving across the sky. The hoofbeats pounded so hard that they seemed to raise echoes among the hills, and the baying was a torrent of sound that engulfed them as they stood there. The rider raised the horn to his mouth and blew a single blast that seemed to fill the sky, and then the rider and his pack were gone. They disappeared over the southern tree line, and the sound gradually diminished with the distance until nothing could be heard, although it seemed to Duncan that he still heard the ringing of the hoofs long after the sound of them had gone.

Nan came tumbling out of the sky and landed beside Duncan. She skipped a step or two to gain her balance, stood in front of him, and craned her head upward. She was jigging in excitement.

"Do you know who that was?" she asked.

"No I don't. Do you?"

"That was the Wild Huntsman," she screeched. "I saw him once, years ago. In Germany. That was when I was young and before I settled down. The Wild Huntsman and his hounds."

Meg had slipped off Beauty and was tottering toward them.

"He always was in Germany," she said. "He never was anywhere else. That proves what I've been telling you about all these things of evil gathering with the Harriers."

"Was he looking for us?" asked Conrad.

"I doubt it," said Meg. "He's not really hunting anyone or anything. He just rides the skies. He whoops and hollers and blows that horn of his and his dogs make such a racket they scare you half to death. But he doesn't mean anything by it. That's just the way he is."

"Who is he?" Duncan asked.

"No one knows," said Nan. "His name has been forgotten. He's been riding the skies so long there's no one who remembers."

Snoopy came scuttling down from the ridgetop.

"Let's get moving," he said. "It's just a little farther. We'll be there by first light."

"Where are you taking us?" asked Duncan. "We have a right to know."

"I'm taking you to where you should have been all the time. Back to the strand."

"But that, or just short of there, is where we ran into enchantment. They'll be waiting there for us."

"Not now," said Snoopy. "There's no one there right now. You'll be safe. They would not think that you would come back."

Ghost jiggled in the fading moonlight, just above their heads.

"That is right," he said. "All the blessed day not a sign of anyone at all. I'd say the way was clear."

"We'll have to rest," said Duncan, "before we try the strand. All of us are practically dead upon our feet from loss of sleep."

"Andrew's getting sleep," said Conrad.

"He's the only one of us," said Duncan. "He'll pay for it. When we get there he'll stand guard while the rest of us get some rest."

14

• The slimy monster hurled itself out of the swamp, scaly, triangular, horned head, with fringed jaws and darting snakelike tongue, mounted on a barrel-sized snakelike body, towering above him, while he stood thigh-deep in water, the muck of the marsh sucking at his feet, anchoring him so he could not get away, but had to stand and face the monster. He bawled at the monster in anger and revulsion as it hung above him, hissing, dominating him, sure of him, taking its time, not in any hurry, hanging there like a stroke of certain doom while he waited with his toothpick of a sword—good steel, sharp and deadly and well fitted to his fist, but so small a weapon that it seemed unlikely it could inflict more than a scratch upon this scaly monstrosity that eventually would pick its time to strike.-

• The swamp was silent except for the hissing of the monster and the slow drip of water from its shining hide. It had a strange unearthliness, as if not entirely of the earth nor quite yet of some other place—a moment and a space poised on some freakish borderline between reality and unreality. Tendrils of trailing fog roiled above the black and stagnant water—black molasses water, too thick to be actual water, but a devilish brew that reeked and stank of foul decay. The trees that grew out of the water were leprous, their gray and scaling trunks bearing the mark of an unknown and loathsome ailment with which the entire world on the other side of the borderline might be afflicted.-

• Then the head came crushing down with the body following, arcing and coiling and striking him as if some giant fist had descended on him, brushing aside his sword-arm, buckling his knees, throwing its smooth and muscular loops about his body, enfolding him in its strength, driving the breath out of his lungs, crushing his ribs, dislocating his shoulders, folding him in upon himself and a voice bawling, "Be careful of that dog. Tie him tight, but don't put a mark upon him. He's worth more than all of you together. If he be so much as bruised, I'll hang the man who does it by his thumbs."-

There was sand in Duncan's mouth—sand, not water—and hands that held him, not the great snake body. He struggled, trying to lash out with arms and legs, but the hands held him so tightly that he could accomplish nothing. There was a knee thrust into the small of his back and another pressing on his shoulders. His face was pressed hard against the ground. His eyes came open and he saw a dead and fallen leaf, with an insect crawling slowly on it, fighting its way across its smooth and slippery surface.

"Tie that big one tight," said the bawling voice. And then, "That horse. Watch out. He'll kick the guts out of you."

Somewhere Tiny was growling fiercely, somewhere Daniel was fighting off, or trying to fight off, his captors. And from all around came thumping sounds and the grunts of struggling men.

Duncan felt heavy cords cutting harshly into his wrists, and then someone jerked him up and flipped him over. He lay on his back and stared up at the sky. At the periphery of his vision he saw the figures of uncouth men looming over him. From somewhere far off came an eerie keening.

He fought his body erect, pushing with hands lashed behind his back to lever himself upright, till he was sitting flat upon his rump with his bound feet thrust out straight before him.

A few feet away lay Conrad, trussed up like a Christmas goose, but still struggling to break free.

"Once I get my hands on you," Conrad roared at the men who had just stepped away from him, "I'll rip your livers out."

"Friend Conrad," said one of the men, "I extremely doubt you shall have that chance."

There was something about the man that seemed familiar to Duncan, but his head was half turned away and he could not be sure. Then the man shifted slightly and he saw that it was Harold, the Reaver.

Duncan's mind struggled to grasp reality. But it was difficult to grasp reality, for the transition had been too swift. He had been dreaming—yes, that must be it, he had been dreaming—of confronting a snakelike monster that had lunged out of a swamp, the dream more than likely touched off by the similar monster he had seen emerging from the inky pool in the enchantment swamp. And then, suddenly, he had not been dreaming any longer, but was being caught and tied by this vicious, ragamuffin crew.

He glanced around him, trying to take in the situation at a glance. Andrew was tied to a small tree, his hands roped against the tree, other ropes about his middle. There was no sign of Meg, although she must be somewhere, and no sign of Daniel either, but the patient little Beauty stood hitched to another tree, a heavy rope looped, halterlike, about her head and neck. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Tiny, his four feet tied together, his jaws held shut by loops of cord pulled tightly about them. Tiny was struggling fiercely, throwing himself about, but there seemed little possibility the dog could fight his way to freedom. Conrad still lay a few feet away, looking more than ever like a Christmas goose ready for the oven.

They were at the edge of a small grove of trees at the beginning of the strand—the place where they had stopped in early morning light and flopped, without thought of breakfast or of fire, wanting only to catch a few hours of sleep while Andrew stood the guard.

Snoopy was nowhere in sight, nor was Nan, the banshee, nor was Ghost. Which, Duncan told himself, was no more than might have been expected. As soon as his charges were safely at the strand, Snoopy, perhaps accompanied by Nan, would have gone off to collect his band of Little People. Ghost more than likely was out on scout, alert to any danger. Ghost had said last night that he had seen no one during the entire day, that here they would be safe. And if that had been the case, Duncan wondered, where the hell had the Reaver and his men been hiding?

The Reaver was walking toward him, and he watched him as he came, puzzled at the emotions the man evoked in him—some fear, perhaps, certainly some hatred, but the fear and the hatred washed away by the utter contempt he felt for such a rogue. The Reaver was the scum of the earth, a vicious opportunist with no principles whatsoever; a nothing, less than nothing.

The Reaver stopped a few feet from him and stood, with his hands planted firmly on his hips, looking down at him.

"So, m" lord, how do you like it now?" he asked. "The tables now are turned. Perhaps you'd care to tell me what this is all about."

"I told you," said Duncan, "that night at the manor. We are bound for Oxenford."

"But you did not tell me why."

"I told you. We carry messages."

"And that is all?"

Duncan shrugged. "That is all," he said.

The Reaver stooped forward, placed one great hand on the pouch at Duncan's belt, and with one wrench tore it free.

"Now we'll see," be said.

Taking his time, he carefully undid the buckles and opened the pouch. His hand dipped into it and brought out Wulfert's amulet. He dangled it on its chain, the brilliant jewels set in it turned to fire in the fading sunlight.

"A pretty thing, forsooth," he said, "and perhaps valuable. Tell me what it is."

"A bauble only," Duncan said. "A piece crafted for its beauty."

And deep inside himself he prayed, — Not the manuscript! Please, not the manuscript!-

The Reaver dropped the amulet into his pocket, reached in the pouch again and brought out the manuscript.

"And this?"

"A few leaves of parchment," said Duncan, as smoothly as he could, "brought along for reading. A favorite of mine. I've had little time to read it."

"Bah!" said the Reaver in disgust. He crumpled the manuscript in his fist and tossed it to one side. The wind caught it and scudded it along the sand for a few feet. Then it caught on a small shrub and lodged there, the wind still tugging at it.

The Reaver's hand went in the pouch again, bringing out a rosary, the cross of ivory, the beads of amber. He examined his find carefully.

"Venerable?" he asked. "Perhaps sanctified by some holy man?"

"By His Grace, the archbishop of Standish Abbey," Duncan said. "Which makes it only moderately sanctified."

"Still a splendid piece of work," the Reaver said affably, dropping it into his pocket. "I might get a copper for it."

"It's worth much more than that," said Duncan. "You'd be a fool to sell it for a copper."

Next the Reaver came up with a clinking doeskin bag. "Now this," he said, a grin exposing his snaggle-teeth, "is more like it." He opened the bag and poured some of the coins into an open palm, poking at them with a finger of the hand that held the bag.

"A goodly sum," he said, "and welcome to a man in as straitened circumstances as I find myself to be."

He poured the coins back into the bag and dropped it, as well, into the pocket of his jacket.

Opening the pouch wide, he peered into it, reaching in a hand to explore the remaining items.

"Junk," he said contemptuously and tossed the pouch aside.

"And now the sword," he said. "A blade carried by a gentleman. Much better, I suppose, than the poor iron that we carry."

He stepped to one side and drew the blade from Duncan's scabbard. Squatting down in front of Duncan, he examined it with a practiced eye.

"Good steel," he said, "and serviceable. But where is the gold, where are the jewels? I would have expected a scion of the nobility to carry a better piece than this."

"Gold and jewels are for ceremony," Duncan told him. "This is a fighting weapon."

The Reaver nodded. "What you say is true. Sharp and with a needle point. Very good, indeed."

He flicked the sword point upward, thrust it forward an inch or two to prick against Duncan's throat.

"Let us now suppose," he said, "you tell me what is really going on. Where is the treasure that you seek? What kind of treasure is it?"

Duncan said nothing. He sat quietly—quietly while every instinct screamed for him to pull away. But if he flinched from the pointed steel, he told himself, there would be no purpose served. Flinch away and one flick of the Reaver's wrist would have the point against his throat again.

"I'll have your throat out," the Reaver threatened.

"If you do," said Duncan, "you'll foreclose ever finding out."

"How true," the Reaver said. "How very true, indeed. Perhaps skinning you alive would be a better way. Tell me, have you ever watched while a man was skinned alive?"

"No, I never have."

"It is not a pretty sight," the Reaver said. "It is done most slowly, a little at a time. There are various methods of procedure. Beginning at the toes or sometimes at the fingers. But that is tedious work for the skinner, who must be very careful since the technique is quite delicate. I think I might prefer, if I were the skinner, to begin at the belly or the crotch. Although quite complicated, I think I would prefer beginning at the crotch. That is a very tender region and it usually brings fast results. If we were to do it on you, where would you prefer we start? We'll accord you the courtesy of making your own choice."

Duncan said nothing. He could feel the sweat popping out along his forehead and he hoped it didn't show. For this, he sensed, was not idle talk. It was not meant to frighten him into talking. This butcher meant to do it.

The Reaver appeared to be in deep thought, mulling over the situation.

"Maybe it might be better," he said, "if we did it first on someone else and let you watch a while before we started in on you. Perhaps that great oaf over yonder. He'd be a good one to do it on. He has such a splendid hide. So much of it and in such good condition. Once a man had it off him, he could make a jacket of it. Or that piddling hermit, tied against the tree. He would scream louder than the oaf. He would squirm in agony. He would scream and ask for mercy. He would call most piteously on the Lord. He'd put on quite a show. Although I am undecided. The hermit's skin is so wrinkled that it would seem scarcely worth the effort."

Duncan still said nothing.

The Reaver made a deprecating gesture. "Oh, well," he said, "it's too late in the day to talk about it now. To do a first-rate skinning job good light is needed, and the sun's about to set. First thing in the morning, that is when we'll start. So we'll have the full day for it."

He lumbered to his feet, tucked Duncan's sword beneath his arm, patted his bulging jacket pocket, and made as if to turn away. Then he turned back and looked at Duncan, grinning at him.

"That'll give you the night to think it over," he said. "We can talk again, come morning."

He shouted to his men. "Einer and Robin," he bellowed, "you stand first watch over this precious haul of ours. Don't take your eyes off them. And I want no marks upon them. I want no injury to their hides. I want the pelts perfect when we strip them from them. And should you fail—should you let them, by some mischance, get away, or should you, in your fumbling way, abuse them in any way at all, I shall have your balls."

"Reaver," said Duncan, "you are misinformed. There is no treasure. Our journey is not a treasure quest."

"Ah, well," said the Reaver, "later we can judge as to that. Although I fear, if you finally should convince me that I am mistaken, it may be difficult to stick your hide back on you."

He walked a few steps out beyond the edge of the grove to reach the beginning of the strand and again raised his voice in a bellow.

"Cedric, for the love of Christ, why so far away? I said set up the camp nearby."

From a short distance away Old Cedric's piping voice answered him. "Here there was a small patch of grazing for the horses—we'll want to keep an eye on them—and a good supply of down wood ready for the fire."

The Reaver grumbled underneath his breath, then said, "Well, I guess it really makes no difference. These ones are securely bound. The Devil himself could not work them free. They'll be closely watched and we are just a step away."

Einer, the one who had been made to change his seat to make room for Duncan and Conrad that night at the manor house, said, "We could drag them into camp. It would be a pleasure."

The Reaver considered for a moment and then said, "No, I don't think so. There'll be two men at all times watching over them. Why should we waste our strength? Besides, here they'll have quiet to get their thoughts together and know their proper course, come morning."

As he went down the strand, others trailed after him. Einer and Robin, two lusty louts, stayed behind.

Einer said to Duncan, "You heard what he said. We want no shenanigans. I am under orders to make no marks on you, but at the least tomfoolery I'll feed you sand until you choke."

Conrad asked, "You all right, m" lord?"

"No talking," Robin, the guard, told them, "You are to keep your mouths shut."

"I'm all right," said Duncan. "So is Andrew. I don't see Meg."

"She's over toward the left, not far from Daniel. They have him tied up between two trees."

"I said no talking," Robin screamed, taking a quick step forward, brandishing a rusty claymore.

"Easy," Einer cautioned him. "The Reaver said no marks."

Robin pulled back, let the claymore fall to his side.

"M" lord," said Conrad, "it seems we face great peril."

"I am sure we do," said Duncan.

The manuscript was still where it had blown, tangled in the tiny shrub, held there by the pressure of the wind.

15

There was something stirring in the clump of willows at the outer edge of the grove. Duncan sat bolt upright, staring at the spot where he had seen the stirring, or thought that he had seen it. Watching intently, he could not be sure. A fox, he thought, although it seemed unlikely that a fox would creep in so close. Or perhaps some other animal, some small roamer of the night, out to find a meal.

The clump of tangled willows screened the Reaver's camp. Through the interlacing branches Duncan could see the flare of fire. Earlier the night had been loud with the shouting, the laughter and the singing of the men about the fire, but as the night wore on, the noise had quieted down.

The moon had risen earlier and now stood halfway up the eastern sky. The keening he had heard before still came intermittently and he now was certain that the sound came from somewhere in the fen.

His wrists were sore from straining against the ropes in the hope that he could loosen them, might even slip them off. But he no longer strained against them, for there was no give to them and he was convinced that there was no way of working free of them.

There had to be a way to escape, he told himself, there simply had to be. For hours he had racked his brains to find the way. A sharp stone, perhaps, against which he could scrape his bonds, abrading them, finally cutting through them or damaging them so much they could then be broken. But there seemed to be no stones, only sand mixed with a little loam and clay. By intricate contortions he probably could slide his bound hands beneath his rump, double up his knees and thus be able to reverse the position of his hands, pulling them under and over his legs, getting them in front of him, where he could get at the rope that bound them with his teeth. But that, he knew, would be impossible with the two guards watching. As a matter of fact, he was not sure at all that it could be done. Or it was possible that if he could crawl to Conrad, either he could chew through Conrad's bonds or Conrad chew through his—more than likely Conrad chew through his, for Conrad had bigger teeth and a stronger jaw. But that, too, would be impossible with Einer and Robin watching.

He built up fantasies of rescue—of Snoopy coming back and being able to sneak up and cut the bonds of one of them, who could then engage the guards while Snoopy went on with the freeing of the others; of Ghost coming in and then streaking off for help, for any kind of help; of Diane plummeting down astride her griffin, armed with her battle axe; even of the Wild Huntsman and his pack of baying dogs, forsaking his eternal chase across the sky and rushing in to help. But none of this, he knew, was about to happen.

The chances were that there'd be no escape or rescue, and when morning came… But he refused to think of that, he shut his mind to it. It was the sort of prospect a man could not plan against. Thinking of it in those small chinks of time when he could not block his thinking of it, he admitted that it was unlikely he could stand up, in any decent sort of way, against the torture. And the worst of it, he thought, was that he had nothing he could tell the Reaver that would forestall the torture.

For there was no treasure, there had been no thought of treasure. He wondered how the Reaver had picked up the idea they might be after treasure. Although, come to think of it, that would be almost automatic for a man of the Reaver's stripe. Ascribing his own motives and expectations to other men, it would not be unusual for the Reaver to sniff out the scent of treasure or the drive toward a treasure in anyone he met.

Tiny had quit his struggling some time before, although he had kept it up for a long while, and now lay quietly on his side. For a long time Conrad had not stirred; knowing Conrad, Duncan thought, he might have gone to sleep. Andrew hung against his tree, limp, the ropes supporting him. From the Reaver's camp came muted sounds of revelry, although more subdued than they had been in the evening.

The manuscript still was entangled in the low-growing shrub, the wind still fluttering the edges of its pages. Duncan ached to make some effort to conceal or hide it, but feared that any effort he might make to do so would call attention to it.

The guards had not been relieved and were getting restless. Quietly they had talked it over between themselves, wondering aloud if the Reaver might have forgotten to send out their replacements.

With some surprise, Duncan realized that he was hungry and thirsty. Thirst he could understand, but the hunger puzzled him. Surely a man in his position, facing what he faced, should not think of hunger.

How many days, he wondered, since he and Conrad had left Standish House? It seemed half of forever, but when he counted back it was only five or six, although he could not be sure. Somehow, when he thought of them, the days got tangled up. So little time, he thought, to get into so much trouble; so much time to have gone so short a distance on their journey.

Robin said to Einer, loudly enough for Duncan to catch the words, "They should have sent someone long ago to take our place. Probably, by this time, the lot of them are besotted on the wine that was given for all of us. And us not with a taste of it."

"I would not mind a cup of it," said Einer. "It is seldom that we have wine. I had been looking forward to it. For months we have drunk nothing but ale until it lies sour upon the stomach."

"I have a mind," said Robin, "to go and get a gourd of it for us. In a moment I'd be back."

"The Reaver would take the ears off you if you left your post."

"The Reaver, whatever else you may say of him," protested Robin, "is a reasonable man and not one to exact undue suffering from his men. If I went and spoke to him of it, he might send out someone to take our place. He's simply forgotten how long he's had us out here."

"But the prisoners!"

"Not a one of them has stirred in the last hour. There's naught to fear from them."

"I still don't like the sound of it," said Einer.

"I'm going to get that wine," said Robin. "It's not fair to keep us out here while they lie guzzling. I'll be back in the shake of a wee lamb's tail. They all may be so sodden they'll take no notice of me."

"If there's any wine left."

"There should be. There were three casks of it."

"Well, if you're determined, then. But hurry. I still think it is a foolish thing to do."

"I'll be right back," said Robin.

He wheeled about and disappeared, moving hurriedly, blotted from Duncan's sight by the clump of willows.

Wine, thought Duncan. Who could they have encountered who would give them wine?

A faint rustling came from the willows. The fox, or whatever it might be, was still there, or had come back again.

Einer, who must have heard the rustling, started to turn, but the figure that rose out of the willows moved too fast for him. An arm went around his throat and metal flashed briefly before it disappeared with a thud, sinking into Elner's chest. The guard straightened momentarily, gurgling, then slumped and fell, to lie huddled on the sand. One foot jerked spasmodically, kicking at the earth.

The man who had risen from the willows ran toward Duncan and knelt beside him. In the light of the moon, Duncan caught a glimpse of his face.

"Cedric!" he whispered.

"As I told you once before," Cedric whispered back, "a small stroke here and there."

The knife in his hand sliced through the bonds that held Duncan's hands, then he turned to the feet and slashed the rope that held the ankles. He thrust the knife toward Duncan.

"Here," he said, "take this. You'll have need of it."

The old bee master rose and started for the willows.

"Wait, man!" whispered Duncan. "Stay and go with us. If the Reaver finds you out…"

"Nay. My bees. The bees still have need of me. They would be lost without me. And no one will notice. They all lie as if dead, badly in their cups."

Duncan surged to his feet. His legs seemed dead beneath him, numb from being bound so long. Old Cedric was already gone, vanishing in the willows.

Duncan ran to Conrad, pushed at him so he could reach his arms.

"What goes on, m" lord?"

"Quiet," Duncan whispered.

He cut the cords that bound Conrad's arms and handed him the knife.

"Free your legs," he said, "then cut loose the others. The second guard is coming back. I'll take care of him."

Conrad grabbed the knife. "Thank dear God," he said.

As he ran toward the willows, Duncan could hear the shuffling tread of Robin returning, floundering through the sand. Duncan stooped to scoop up the claymore that Einer had dropped. It was an awkward, heavy weapon that did not fit his fist. His numbed fingers had some difficulty grasping it, but finally he managed to get a good grip on it.

Robin began talking to Einer even before he rounded the willows. "I took an unbroached cask of it," he crowed triumphantly. "No one noticed. Or I don't think they did. All of them are slobbered."

He grunted, shifting the cask from one shoulder to the other. "We have enough to last out the night," he said. "More than enough to last the night. There'll be some left over we can wash our feet in if we feel the urge."

He came around the corner of the clump of willows, and Duncan stepped swiftly forward. The stroke had no finesse, no fanciness, no swordsmanship. He simply crashed the edge of the claymore down on the top of Robin's head. The skull split with the sound of a ripe melon popping; the rusty iron stopped only when it reached the breast bone. The violence of the iron striking the heavy bone set up a vibration that made Duncan's forearm tingle. Robin made no sound. He fell like a tree before an axe. The cask hit the ground and bounced, rolling for a ways, its contents slopping in it.

Duncan bent over the body, reached for the hilt of Robin's blade and jerked it free. Then he ran for the manuscript, and with the two weapons tucked beneath his armpit, held by the pressure of his arm, he picked up the manuscript, folded it once, unneatly, and thrust it inside his shirt, where it lay against his skin.

Andrew was free, staggering about on unsteady legs, and so also was Meg. Conrad was bending over Tiny, carefully cutting the cords that held the big dog's jaws together. Duncan ran for Daniel, roped between two trees. As he approached, the horse shied away. Duncan spoke to him softly. "It's all right, Daniel. Take it easy, boy." He slashed at the ropes and as they came free, the horse lunged forward, then stood trembling. Beauty, already freed, trotted up, dragging the rope that had been her halter.

Conrad was moving toward Duncan, and Duncan held out one of the claymores toward him. Conrad raised his hand to show he had his club. "They left it lying there beside me." Duncan tossed one of the claymores to one side.

"What the hell's the matter with Andrew?" he asked. The hermit was stumbling about, looking at the ground.

Duncan hurried to him, grasped him by the arm. "Come on," he said. "We must get out of here."

"My staff," gasped Andrew. "I must find my staff."

He made a sudden lurch forward. "Ah, there it is," he said.

He grabbed it up and thumped it on the ground.

"Where to, m" lord?" asked Conrad.

"Back into the hills. We'll have a better chance there."

Conrad sprinted forward, snatched up Meg, threw her on Daniel's back. "Hang on tight," he said. "Stay low so a branch doesn't scrape you off. You'll have to cling with all your might, for you haven't got a saddle. I don't even know where the goddamn saddle is."

16

They halted in the clearing on the top of the rocky ridge where they had stopped the night before to watch the Wild Huntsman careen across the sky. The moon was low in the west and a few birds were beginning to stir and twitter in the woods below them. Meg slid off Daniel, grateful for the halt, and Andrew sat down on a small boulder.

"They're all beat out, the both of them," Duncan told Conrad. "Maybe we should hole in here and wait to see what happens."

Conrad looked around. "Good place," he said. "We could get our backs against those rocks and hold them off, should they come upon us. Better than being caught out in the woods."

He held out his wrists for Duncan to see. They still carried ugly red welts from the bonds and the skin was abraded and bleeding. "I notice yours are the same," he said.

"They tied us tight," said Duncan. "If it hadn't been for Cedric…"

"He should have come along with us. If the Reaver finds him out…"

"Maybe he won't find him out. All of them were dead drunk. Someone had given them three casks of wine. And of course, they'd have to try to drink it up. Who in the world would have given them wine?"

"Maybe they found it. In one of the burned homesteads."

"No. Einer, or was it Robin, said someone had given it to them."

"You asked Old Cedric to come along with us?"

"That's right. He said he couldn't. That his bees had need of him."

"Ghost didn't show up last night."

"Maybe he did and saw what had happened and went tearing off to try to locate Snoopy."

"Had he come down, he would have scared the Jesus out of those two guards. They'd have lit out."

Duncan shook his head. "What good would it have done? Even so, Ghost could have done nothing to cut us loose."

"Yes," said Conrad, "maybe that is it. Maybe he did show up and then left again. But what do we do now, m" lord?"

"We'll talk it over, think about it," Duncan said. "I don't know quite yet what we should do. Maybe find a place to hole up until the situation clears a bit."

"If it clears."

"We have to do something. We have no food, no blankets. Nothing. And the Reaver took the wizard's amulet."

"Small loss," said Conrad. "Just a pretty bauble."

"It may be more than that," said Duncan. "It may be a powerful talisman. It may have provided us protection. We were able to escape the enchantment, we defeated the hairless ones with ease, the werewolves turned tail and ran. It may have been the amulet that brought all these things about."

"It gave us no protection from the Reaver."

"That is right," said Duncan. "It did not help us against the Reaver. But I am sure it helped us with the others."

Andrew rose from his boulder and came over to where they were standing.

"I know," he said, "what you must think of me. There was no time for it to be done before, but now that we have a breathing space perhaps you may want to castigate me for the dereliction of my duty. I was the one who should have kept the watch. You left me on guard against any seeming danger. But I dozed. I caught a catnap, I am sure of that. That must have been the manner in which they came upon us, with me nodding while I should have been a-watch."

"So that is how it came about," rumbled Conrad. "I had wondered briefly on it, but had no time to think any further. So you were fast asleep. Why should you have needed sleep? You slept all the night before, slumped in Daniel's saddle."

"That is true, of course," said Andrew. "But it was not restful sleep. It was not the kind of sleep you judged it to be. Dozing was more like it. Not sound and solid sleep. Although I do not offer that as an extenuation of my failing. It all comes of a certain weakness in me, a weakness of the body. My mind may tell the body to perform, but the body fails. I am of not such stuff as martyrs may be made."

"And you also," said Conrad, "have a mouth that keeps running on."

"Think no further on it," Duncan said. "To each of us our weaknesses. In the end, it turned out all right."

"I shall endeavor," Andrew said, "to recompense for my failure in this instance. I shall try the harder to do my bounden duty as a soldier of the Lord. Henceforth, I swear to you, you may depend upon me in all surety."

"If it would make you feel any better," Conrad said, "I would be delighted to kick you in the rump. That might ease your conscience, which seems to be so sorely smarting."

"If you truly would, sir," said Andrew eagerly, "making certain that it is a lusty kick, with no power in it held back in consideration of me as a companion of the road."

He turned around and bent over, hiking up his robe to present his bare and scrawny bottom.

"Stop this buffoonery," snapped Duncan. "It is ill behavior in a soldier of the Lord to present his bony ass to his boon companions. Let down your robe and straighten, like a man. Sir Hermit, henceforth I shall expect more propriety of you."

Andrew let down his robe and straightened up.

Conrad said to Duncan, "It might have been better, m" lord, if you had allowed me. There must be something done to stiffen up his spine and make a better soldier of him. And anyhow, a swift kick in the stern never yet has failed to help a malefactor."

Duncan held up his hand for silence. "Listen," he said. "Quiet, all of you, and listen."

Faintly, from far away, came the sound of shouting and of screams. At times the sounds gained somewhat in volume and at other times shrank to no more than a whisper in the wind.

"From the strand," said Conrad. "It is from the direction of the strand."

They listened further. The distant and muffled yelling and screaming kept on. For a time it seemed to stop and then it took up again and finally it did stop and there was nothing to be heard.

"The Reaver's men," said Conrad. "They met up with someone."

"Perhaps the hairless ones," said Andrew.

They stood for long moments listening, but nothing further happened. The first light of the sun was flushing the east and the birds were chirping in the woods below them.

"We should know," said Conrad. "If the fight, if that is what it was, has swept them from the strand, then we could use it safely and make our way through these cursed hills without all the labor that it would be to climb them."

"Let me go," said Andrew. "I shall be very careful. I shall not let them see me. Let me, please, to disclose to you my newfound resolution to be a trustworthy member of this company."

"No," said Duncan. "No, we stay here. We do not move from here. We have no way of knowing what might have happened. And should they come against us, here at least we have a chance to make a stand against them."

Meg chirped at Duncan's elbow. "Then, dear sir, please let me be the one," she said. "Certainly, if they should come against us you could spare my feeble strength. But I can go and bring back to you a report of what happened with all the shouting and the yelling."

"You?" asked Conrad. "You can barely crawl about. All this time with us, you've ridden to preserve your little strength."

"I can manage it," protested Meg. "I can go through the underbrush like a scuttling spider. I can use what little magic I still may have left in me. I can get there and back, bringing word."

Conrad looked at Duncan questioningly.

"Maybe," said Duncan. "Maybe she could do it. Is it, Meg, something that you want to do?"

"Little enough I have done," said Meg. "So far I've been no more than a burden to you."

"We do need to know," said Duncan. "We could sit on this hilltop for days, not knowing. It is important that we know. But we can't split up our small force to send another one of us to scout the situation."

"If only Ghost were here," said Conrad.

"Ghost isn't here," said Duncan.

"Then I may go," said Meg.

Duncan nodded and she swiftly scuttled down the hill. For a time they stood and watched her as she darted through the trees, but finally she was lost from view.

Duncan walked back to a group of stone slabs that at one time had broken off and fallen from the rocky ridge. Choosing one of the slabs, he sat down upon it. Conrad seated himself on one side of him and Andrew on the other. Silently, the three of them sat in a row. Tiny came ambling around the mass of broken slabs and lay down ponderously in front of Conrad. Down the slope Daniel and Beauty cropped at a patch of scanty grass.

So here they were, thought Duncan, sitting side by side on a slab of riven stone in a godforsaken wilderness, three adventurers and about as sorry a lot as ever could be found.

His belly ached with hunger, but he did not mention it to the others, for without a doubt, they were hungry, too, and there was no sense talking of it. Before the day was over, certainly by tomorrow, they would have to find some food. Tiny might be able to pull down a deer if one was to be found, but thinking back on it, Duncan remembered that they had seen no deer nor any other game except occasional rabbits. Tiny could catch rabbits and did, for his own eating, but probably would not be able to catch enough of them to provide food for everyone. Probably there were roots and berries and other provender in the woods that could ease their hunger, but he would not know where to look or what to choose, and be doubted that any of the others did. Perhaps Meg could be of help. As a witch, she might have knowledge of the food provided by the woods, for she would have been concerned with finding certain materials that went into her potions.

He thought of what they'd do next and of the way ahead, and found that he was shuddering away from it. They had made little progress so far, and in making the little that they had, they had run into a lot of trouble. Now they would be traveling without Wulfert's amulet and without it, the trouble might get worse. The amulet, he was convinced, had helped them with the hairless ones, the enchantment and the werewolves, and yet, come to think of it, he knew that he was wrong. The amulet could not have been of help with the hairless ones, for it was not until after their encounter with them that he had acquired it. Although that, he thought, might have been simply happenstance. Certainly the amulet must have been some protection against the enchantment and the werewolves. Perhaps the victory over the hairless ones could be explained by something else—perhaps by Diane and her griffin. The hairless ones, until the last moment, probably had not expected to face Diane and the griffin along with the rest of them. Yes, he said to himself, thinking foggily, that must be the explanation.

And yet, with the amulet or without it, he knew he would go on, by whatever means, under no matter what kind of circumstances. He had no choice; he had fought out the issue that night when he'd lain in the hermit's cave. The long history of his heritage made no other decision possible. And when he went on, the others would go with him—Conrad, because the two of them were close to being brothers, Andrew because of the mad obsession with being a soldier of the Lord. And Meg? There was no reason for Meg to continue with them, no advantage for her to gain, but he was sure she would.

The sun had climbed far up the sky and there was a drowsiness in the air—a soft, warm drowsiness. Duncan found himself nodding, half asleep. He pulled himself erect, drew in great breaths of air to force himself back to wakefulness, and in a few minutes" time was nodding once again. His body ached and his wrists were sore from the chafing of the bonds. His gut was an empty howl of hunger. He craved sleep. If he could only go to sleep, he thought, maybe when he woke the soreness and the ache, perhaps even the sharpness of the hunger, would be gone. But he could not go to sleep, he must not sleep. Not now. Not yet. Later there would come a time for sleep.

Beside him Conrad came to his feet, staring down the slope. He took a half-step forward, as if unsure of himself, then he said, "There she is."

Duncan forced himself upright and stared down the slope with Conrad. Andrew did not stir. He was doubled over, hands grasping his staff, his head almost to his knees, fast asleep.

At the edge of the forest below them, Duncan saw a faint movement. Then, as he watched, he saw that it was Meg. She was toiling up the hill, bent over, almost crawling. She fell and struggled to her feet and came on again, moving slowly and tortuously.

Conrad was running down the hill. When he reached her he lifted her, cradling her in his arms, leaping up the hill with her. Carefully he laid her down in front of Duncan. When she struggled to sit erect, he helped her, lifting her into a sitting position.

She looked up at them with beady eyes. Her jaws worked and a harsh sound came out of them.

"Dead," she said.

"Dead?" asked Duncan. "The Reaver's men?"

"All of them," she whispered in harsh tones. "Laid out on the strand."

"All of them?"

"All of them. Dead and bloody."

17

The wind off the fen fluttered the rags that clothed some of the humped figures lying on the sand—not all of them, for it was apparent that some of the dead were hairless ones, and they had no rags to flutter. Huge black birds perched upon the corpses or hopped angrily about among them; and there were other birds as well, although they were not noticeable at first, little birds of the forest and the strand that hopped or ran about, pecking with their vicious little beaks at morsels scattered on the ground or at the pools of black, coagulated blood that lay puddled on the sand. The bodies lay within a small area, as if the Reaver's band had come together to present a solid front to the massed attack, which must have come on them from three sides, giving them no way to escape except into the fen, which would have been death itself. Luggage and saddlebags, pots and pans, blankets, pieces of clothing, drinking mugs, and weapons lay scattered all about. The campfire still smoldered feebly, sending up thin threads of tenuous, finespun smoke. Far up the strand a half dozen horses stood with shot hips and hanging heads. There was no sign of the rest of the horses; by now they could be widely scattered.

Against a tumbled pile of firewood lay carelessly stacked saddles, saddle blankets and other harnesses.

Duncan stopped when he came around the clump of willows, and the others stopped with him, staring at the scene of carnage. Looking at the grotesque scattering of bodies, Duncan felt the bitter taste of bile rising in his throat and hoped he would not vomit, for that would be a disgraceful thing to do. Although he had read in the history scrolls at Standish House the lurid, spine-chilling accounts of battles and the somber, black descriptions of their aftermath, this was the first time he had seen at firsthand the butchery of combat.

It was strange, he thought, that it should affect him so. He had felt nothing like this in the garden skirmish with the hairless ones or in beating off the werewolves. Only a few hours ago he had cleaved the skull of the unsuspecting Robin, and it had been no more than a detail, a necessary job that must be done in the struggle for survival. But this was different. There was nothing personal about this. He was not involved. This was death on a fairly massive scale, the evidence of death and the violence that had brought it on this short stretch of ground between the flatness of the fen and the sharply rising ground.

Here lay the men, he told himself, who had threatened violence and torture to himself and the others with him, and, staring at the small patch of crumpled bodies, he tried to tell himself that he was glad this had happened to them, that it freed him of his fear, that it might even be, in some way, a product of his hatred of them, but he found, surprisingly, that he could not hate the dead.

It was not that he had never known human death before. He had first met it when he was ten or so, when Old Wells had come to his chamber, where he was hiding, and taken him to that great room where his grandfather lay dying. The rest of the family had been there, but he had seen no face clearly except for the hawklike face of the old man who lay upon the bed. Thick, tall lighted tapers stood at the four corners of the bed, as if the old man who lay there might have already died, the flickering light of the tapers doing little to beat back the gloom of death. His Grace had stood beside the bed, draped in his brilliant yet somber robes of office, muttering Latin prayers for the solace and the benediction of the dying man. But it had been his grandfather he had watched, the only one he had really seen, a frail old body surmounted by the fierceness of the hawklike face.

And yet despite the desperate fierceness of the face, a shell-like man, a man made out of wax, a waxen replica of a man already gone.

Conrad touched his arm. "M" lord," he said.

"Yes," said Duncan. "I am sorry. I was thinking."

They walked forward slowly, tramping ponderously, and at their approach the large black scavengers, squawking in outrage at this disturbance of their feast, spread their ragged wings and pumped them mightily to lift their heavy bodies. The smaller birds waited for a time in an attempt to brazen out the intrusion, and then they, too, flew away in a blizzard of whirring wings.

White and empty faces, some of them with the eyes already plucked out of them by the ravenous birds, stared uncomprehendingly at them here and there from the heap of tangled bodies.

"The thing that we now must do," said Conrad, "is find what they have taken from us—your sword, the amulet on which you place so much trust, Daniel's saddles, our blankets, some food for us to eat. And then we can leave this place behind us, thankful that it all is done."

Duncan stopped and Conrad went ambling on, circumnavigating the area of the dead. Meg scuttled about, humped over, resembling in certain ways the scavengers that had flown away, snatching up items that she found lying on the ground. Andrew stood a little way in the rear, leaning pensively on his staff, his peaked face peering out from beneath the cowl. Tiny trotted at Conrad's heels, snarling softly at the tangled dead.

"M" lord," said Conrad. "Please come, m" lord."

Duncan hastened around the heap of dead to reach Conrad's side. He looked down at the body indicated by Conrad's pointing finger. The eyes in the body's head came open and looked up at him.

"The Reaver," said Conrad. "The son-of-a-bitch still lives. Shall I finish him?"

"There's no need to finish him," said Duncan. "He's not leaving here. His last hour is upon him."

The Reaver's mouth worked and words came dribbling out.

"Standish," he said. "So we meet again."

"Under somewhat different circumstances than the last time. You were about to skin me."

"They betrayed me, Standish." The words ran out and the Reaver closed his eyes. Then the words took up again, but the eyes stayed closed. "They said for me to kill you, but I did not kill you."

"And I'm to feel great charity because of that?"

"They used me, Standish. They used me to kill you. They had no stomach for the job themselves."

"Who are the «they» that you talk about?"

The eyes came open again, staring up at Duncan. "You'll tell me something true?" the Reaver asked. "You'll swear it on the Cross?"

"For a dead man, yes. I'll swear it on the Cross."

"Is there any treasure? Was there ever any treasure?"

"There is no treasure," Duncan said. "There never was a treasure."

The Reaver closed his eyes again. "That's all I needed. I simply had to know. Now you can let that great lout who stands beside you…"

Conrad lifted up his club.

Duncan shook his head at him.

"There's no need," he said. "There is nothing to be gained."

"Except the satisfaction."

"There'd be," said Duncan, "no satisfaction in it."

Andrew had moved up to stand beside them. "Some last words should be said," he told Duncan softly. "Last rites for the dying. I am not equipped nor empowered to do it. But surely some small words…"

The Reaver opened his eyes again, but they did not stay open. The lids simply fluttered, then went shut again.

"Get that sanctimonious bastard out of here," he muttered, his words so low they could scarcely be heard.

"You're not welcome," Conrad said to Andrew.

"One last mercy," whispered the Reaver.

"Yes, what is it, Reaver?"

"Bash in my goddamn head."

"I would not think of doing it," said Conrad.

"I lie among my dead. Help me die."

"You'll die soon enough," Conrad told him.

Andrew dropped his staff, snatched at the club in Conrad's hand, wrested it from him. The club went up, came down.

Conrad stared in astonishment at his empty hand.

"A final word?" asked Duncan. "This is your last rite?"

"I gave him mercy," Andrew said, handing back the club.

18

They camped some distance up the strand, out of sight of the huddled dead. Night had closed down and from across the fen came the far-off keening. The wind-blown firelight flickered, reaching to the upsurge of the soaring cliffs, to the rim of the far, flat fen.

The fen was a fearsome place, Duncan told himself, sitting by the fire, fearsome in its far-reaching flatness, in its empty loneliness, a stretch of watery wilderness that reached as far as one could see—not a lake, nor yet a marsh, but a place of many little ponds and sluggish streams, separated with rank-growing small groves of willows and other water-loving shrubs and trees. Dropped in the middle of it, a man would be hard put to find his way safely out.

Conrad, sitting across the fire from Duncan, said, "We came out of it well, m" lord. We not only saved our necks, but got back all of our belongings—your sword, the amulet—plus some other welcome plunder."

"I'm sorry about Old Cedric," Duncan said.

"We should have stayed to bury him," said Andrew. "If not the others, at least Cedric. He deserved that much from us."

"We would have done him no great favor," Conrad told the hermit. "No matter how deep we might have dug his grave, the wolves would have him out of it in a day or two."

"It was getting late," said Duncan. "We had only a couple of hours till dark. I wanted to be well up the strand before the sun had set."

Ghost came floating in. He hovered between them and the fen.

"Well, finally," said Andrew, considerably disgusted. "Where have you been all this time? We have been in trouble…"

"In trouble I knew you were," said Ghost. "I came back last night and glimpsed the trouble you were in. I did not show myself, for immaterial as I am, I knew that I, all by myself, could be of no help at all. So immediately I went off in search of Snoopy or perhaps of others of his kind, hoping to summon them to provide what aid they could. But I could not find them…"

"That Snoopy!" Andrew said. "He is as worthless and as irresponsible as you are, yourself. I tell you, he is not one to trust. No good will ever come of him."

"He helped us the other night," said Duncan. "At the Jesus of the Hills. He warned us to get out of there. He showed us the way."

"Well, every now and then," conceded the hermit, "he may be of some small help. When the notion strikes him. But he's no one to depend on. You'll break your neck if you depend on him. There's a deep sense of mischief in him."

"I am happy to report," said Ghost, "that there is no present danger. Whatever hairless ones there may be still about are well beyond the hills, on the other side of them."

"The hairless ones were here this morning," Conrad said. "They did in the Reaver."

"That I know," said Ghost. "But they did not linger. They now are far away."

"The Reaver and his men may have been hiding in the rift," said Duncan. "That may be why no one saw them. You are sure the hairless ones are not hiding in the rift?"

"Sure I am," said Ghost. "I just came from there. The selfsame thought had occurred to me. I am straight from there. I traveled its entire length." He shuddered. "A terrifying place," he said.

"Beyond it," said Duncan, "there should be a castle. That is what Snoopy said."

"What once had been a castle. A ruin now, no more. The stones have fallen in. It's no better than a mound. Trees grow out of it and mosses cover it."

Meg, crouched in a place of her own beside the fire, away from the rest of them, was muttering to herself. She had picked up some pebbles and seemed to be playing some sort of game with them.

"You are casting runes," said Andrew, distaste in his voice. "What do they tell you? What do you see for us?"

"Trouble," said the witch. "New trouble. Great trouble." Duncan said, "We've had our trouble, old grandmother. We have had our share of it."

"No one has his share of it," said Meg. "It's not equally divided. Some know nothing but travail and trouble, others none at all."

"Can you tell us what shape it may take?" asked Conrad. "So we can be ready when it strikes."

"The runes do not tell me that much. Only that trouble lies on the road ahead."

"A fake you are," said Andrew. "It all is fakery. Those are not runes you have. They are no more than pebbles. Runes are stones that have certain magic marks upon them."

"That's unkind of you to say," Duncan told the hermit. "We must think the woman knows her art."

"Well spoke," said Meg, "and I thank you, sire. One who knows the art can pick up any stone and it will serve the purpose. The secret lies not in the stone at all, but in the knowledge of the thrower."

"One thing you may tell me," Duncan said. "I think that you might know. What is this keening we hear from off the fen? It has the sound of sorrow in it."

"It is sorrow," said Meg. "It is sorrow for the world. For all life upon this Earth. For men and everything that now exists or that existed before there were any men."

"You speak sacrilege," said Andrew. "I've heard this somewhere before, not too long ago, and then I did not speak of it. But now I speak of it. The Book tells us there was no life before men, that all life was created on the selfsame day. In Genesis, it is written…"

Duncan interrupted him. "Softly, my friend," he said. "There are some great doctors, students of the rocks, who think otherwise. They have found imprints on the stones…"

"Also I have heard of that," said Andrew wrathfully. "I place no credence in it. It all is sophistry."

"Each man to his own belief," said Duncan. "We will not argue it." He said to Meg, "Sorrow, you say. From whom or whence comes this sorrow?"

"I do not know," said Meg. "That is hidden from me. What I do know is that in many places in the world there come these sounds of sorrow. Desolate places, lonely and forsaken places. A wailing for the world."

Duncan sat and listened to the wailing for the world. It seemed to come from some distant place, not necessarily from the fen, although it came across the fen—perhaps, he thought, from some secret place where the miseries and the disappointments of the world came to a common focus. A wailing for all the events that could have been, but did not come to be, for the crusade that never got off to a decent start, leaving Jerusalem still in the hands of infidels; for the Iberian ships that never clove the ocean waves to those ports and the unknown lands that still were waiting for them; for the Europe that still lay stagnant, plowing its worn-out soils with the plows that had been used for centuries, with the peasantry, for the most part, still huddling in dark and noisome hovels; with pools of paganism still remaining, some of them almost within the shadow of the magnificence of churches that had been reared up, with Christian sweat and prayer, to proclaim the glory of the Lord.

An evil force, His Grace had said, that battened and fattened on mankind's misery, that moved upon strategic crisis points to guarantee continuation of the misery. That Evil in the past had struck in many places, at strategic points, and now it had struck in Britain. What factors were there that might make Britain a strategic place to strike? Britain, through all history, had been a place of quiet, a backwater of the world, where there might be local squabbling and some small clash of arms, but an area that had never loomed large in the consideration of the world.

"Fair sir," said Ghost, moving over to him, "I believe I have not done too badly. I have been faithful in my scouting. I have ever told you truth."

"You have been loyal," said Duncan, "although I do not understand your loyalty. There is no reason in the world you should be loyal to me."

"You told me once, however, that you would not invite me to go along with you, although you said you saw no way that you could stop me going. It was not a remark, I know, that was meant to be unkind, but ever since it has rankled in my breast."

"And what do you think that I should say?" asked Duncan. "That given another chance, I would have invited you? I don't know if I can say that, although I can say something else. I am glad you chose to come along."

"You truly mean that, sir?"

"I most sincerely mean it, Ghost."

"Then," said Ghost, "I shall continue with a lighter heart. When would you estimate, sir, we will arrive in Oxenford? I am very anxious to hunt out a reverend doctor there and discuss my case with him."

"At the rate that we've been going, we may never get there."

"You cannot mean that, sir."

"No, I suppose I don't. Someday we will be in Oxenford."

But even as he said it he wondered if they would. They had covered, so far, not too many miles, and if they took too much longer, Bishop Wise might well be dead before the manuscript could be placed into his hands. And should the good bishop not be there, their journey would have been a foolish errand at the best.

It would help, he thought, if they could only know the location of the Horde of Harriers. They must be somewhere in northern Britain, perhaps in congregation for that strange procedure that would bring about their rejuvenation. It certainly must now be time, he thought, for the procedure to begin, for surely they had carved out to its fullest extent that area of desolation designed to protect them from any interference. It might be, he thought, that the Harriers had thrown roadblocks in his path for the simple reason that he was inadvertently heading straight for their congregation, thereby posing that possibility of interference they must guard against. If it could only be known where they were, he and his band could swing wide around them, and the Harriers then might let them be.

He thought back once again along the trail that they had traveled, hoping by doing this to pick up some clue that would be useful in planning their further progress. But in thinking back along their trail, he thought again of Diane and her griffin. And try as hard as he might to see her simply as an incident of their travel, his mind hung back and clung to the memory of her. He tried to rebuild her in his mind, to re-create the memory that he held of her, but he found that he was unable to accomplish this. All that remained was the memory of the axe that she had carried and the griffin she had ridden. What color was her hair? He was astonished to find that he did not know. What color were her eyes? Again he could not say. And the shape of her face, he found, now had quite escaped him. Thinking back, he realized that he had thought of her, had even watched for her, every day since they first had met—which had been just a few days earlier, but which seemed, for some reason, to be much longer ago than it was in actuality.

Why, he wondered, was he so obsessed with her—not knowing in his own mind that he was obsessed with her, but still thinking of her, in idle moments, each day since he had seen her.

"M" lord," said Conrad, "a fog is beginning to roll in. We must keep sharp watch tonight."

What Conrad said was true. In the last few minutes, a fog had risen from the fen high into the air and now was creeping in toward them. From the fen still came, somewhat muffled by the rising, thickening fog, the keening sound—the wailing for the world.

19

They reached the end of the strand when the sun was well down the western sky, and entered the rift. It was a narrow cleft between two towering walls of rock, as if sometime in the far past a giant, wielding a heavy sword, had cleft the mountain in a single stroke. Blowing sand from the strand had drifted for a short distance into the rift, lying in ripples and low dunes, pocked by the tracks of men and horses, probably made by the Reaver's band. But within a few rods the sand ended and the bottom of the rift was a solid rock. For a short stretch it would be as level as a floor, then would be rough and broken for a time, often almost blocked by slabs of stone that in the past peeled off the rocky walls and tumbled down into the bottom of the cleft. There was no vegetation—no blade of grass, no small shrubs or trees rooted desperately to the walls of solid rock. A steady, relentless wind funneled through the rift, moving from the fen. High in the chasm, the rushing winds howled and wailed, at times shrinking to a whisper, at others rising to a shrill and doleful lamentation.

They took up automatically the order of march they had used since starting from the village—Tiny leading, but staying much closer than he had in open country, with Conrad following, behind Conrad, Beauty and the hermit, going in single file now, for often there was not room for them to walk side by side. Behind the two of them came Duncan, with Daniel close upon his heels, Meg huddled on the horse's back, clutching the saddle to guard against a misstep that might be brought upon Daniel by the uneven footing.

The rift lay in deep twilight. Only for a few moments during the day, when the sun was directly overhead, did any sunlight ever reach the floor. The upper portions of the eastern wall were lighted by the sun, but as the day went on, the shadow crept higher up the wall, with the slice of sunlight growing less and less and the shadow deepening in the lower reaches of the rift.

Duncan had the feeling that they were walking in the bottom of a well, isolated from the world outside, cut off from all that might be happening there—cut off, perhaps, but not protected, for the place, he knew, could be a trap.

They had routinely taken up their accustomed order of march, and while that might have been all right in more open country, Duncan realized that it was wrong here. With room to maneuver, Daniel, bringing up the rear, could swing about to face any danger that might come up behind him. Here he had little room to maneuver; there were places on the trail where he would have been unable to turn around. Duncan squeezed himself against the right hand wall of rock and when Daniel, seeing him stop, also stopped, his master urged him ahead. "It's all right, boy," he told the horse. "I want to take up the rear." If danger presented itself at the head of the march, he told himself, Tiny and Conrad could hold it off until he could manage to join them.

Stepping carefully, almost daintily, Daniel walked past him, his hairy body pressing Duncan hard against the rock wall. Duncan said to Meg, "Keep close watch ahead. If anything appears to be happening up there, let me know at once."

Overhead the wind moaned and screamed. Except for that, however, the only sounds were the ring of Daniel's iron-shod hoofs against the rock, the pitter-patter clacking of Beauty's little hoofs as she hurried along.

Plodding along behind Daniel, Duncan put his hand down to the belt pouch, which he had retrieved and resewn onto his belt, felt beneath his fingers the yielding crackle of the manuscript. Shifting his hand down, he encountered the small bulk of Wulfert's amulet, recovered from the Reaver's pocket. At the feel of it he felt reassured. Something had operated to bring them safely through all the dangers they had faced, and he felt certain that it could not have been happenstance alone. Could it have been the amulet? Might it not, through the years that it had lain in Wulfert's tomb, have reinforced its magic, as a good brandy might acquire better flavor and bouquet from aging? But magic or not, he told himself, potent or weak, he felt the better for having it again.

Time went on and the shadow crept slowly up the left wall of the rock. There was no sign that the rift was coming to an end; no daylight loomed ahead. They perforce were going at a slow rate, but by this time they should be nearing the end. What was it Snoopy had said, only five miles or so? Although, as Andrew insisted, one probably could not place much reliance upon anything that the goblin said. If the goblin were anywhere close to right, even at their slow rate they should have covered the distance by this time. For a moment Duncan entertained the fantasy that the rift would never end; that there was a magic laid upon it that would keep it going on forever; that they would never reach the end of it.

For considerable time it had seemed to him that the sounds made by the wind in the upper part of the chasm had been changing, becoming no longer merely the sound of wind, but the sound of voices, as if a congress of damned souls might be screeching and shrieking, yelling back and forth in unintelligible words.

A lull came in the wind and the sound ceased and for a long moment all was deathly quiet. To Duncan it seemed that the silence was more terrifying than the howling and the shrieking. The hoofbeats of Daniel and Beauty rang out sharp and clear, like the beating of a drum by which they marched to an unknown, but a certain doom.

Again the wind took up and the voices came once more, if they were voices and not his imagination. And now above the shrieks of fear and the screams of agony one voice boomed out, drowning all the others. The voice kept saying, "Holy! Holy! Holy!" the one word repeated over and over again, each repetition of it embodying an ecstatic and terrifying fervor. At times it seemed to Duncan that the one word was quite clear, and at other times he could not be entirely certain of it, although a moment later he would be convinced that he had heard the word correctly. But whether clear or uncertain, it carried in it that unsettling, almost embarrassing fervor of euphoric rapture—the kind of rapture to which a condemned soul might give expression should it suddenly and unexpectedly be raised from the torture of Purgatory to the very gates of Heaven.

Duncan put his hands to his ears to shut out the sound of that joyous paean, and when he took them away a few moments later, Conrad was shouting up ahead.

"Light!" he was yelling. "I can see light. We are coming to the end."

Staring fixedly ahead, Duncan could see no light, although that was not greatly to be wondered at, for here the trail was exceptionally narrow and Daniel's big body filled the most of it, blocking his view. But in a short while he could distinguish a faint glimmer that made the walls of stone a little brighter. The ecstatic voice still was shouting "Holy! Holy! Holy!" but as the light grew stronger, the sound lost its strength and some of its ecstasy and finally faded out entirely. The shrieking of the wind came to be no more than a mumble and the damned souls grew silent and ahead he could see a glimpse of the green and pleasant land that Snoopy had told them of.

It was, in all truth, a green and pleasant land, a wide sweep of valley backdropped by the hills through which they had come. Before them lay the ruins of the castle against which they had been warned by the goblin.

The castle was little more than the mound that Ghost had described. Two crumbling turrets still stood guard at each end of it, but between the turrets, the stone lay heaped in an untidy pile, the rough edges of the fallen stones rounded and modified by weather. But the thing that caught Duncan's attention was the well-spaced standing stones, no longer upright, but canting at various angles. At one time, it was apparent, the entire castle had been surrounded and fenced in by a circle of massive stones of the kind that one might see, or so it was said, at Stonehenge and on a smaller scale in many other places. But this circle was larger than the one at Stonehenge, if traveler's tales could be credited, perhaps a great deal larger, for this castle circle once had enclosed many acres. In an earlier day, Duncan thought, it must have been an impressive sight, but now, like the castle, it was considerably dismantled. The lintel stones, with the slow canting of the uprights, had fallen from their places and lay half buried on the surface, or, not falling entirely free, still lay with one end propped against a standing stone.

The sun was no more than a few minutes above the western horizon, and shadows were lengthening and growing deeper in the valley. Just beyond the castle ran a quiet river, unhurried in its flow, with small flocks of ducks flying above it, and others floating on its surface. Behind him Duncan could hear the subdued mumble of the wind blowing through the rift.

He walked forward to join Conrad. Tiny had trotted on ahead, quartering the slope of hillside below them, nosing out the land.

"I would say we should go down to the river and camp the night," said Duncan. "Get an early start, come morning."

Conrad nodded his agreement. "It will be good," he said, "to have some open land. Now we can make better time."

"We need to," Duncan said. "We have wasted a lot of time."

"If we could have caught some of the Reaver's horses."

"We tried," said Duncan. "They were having none of us."

"We still can make good time," said Conrad. "We have good legs."

"The hermit will hold us up."

"We could put him up with Meg on Daniel. That horse could carry both of them and never notice."

"We'll see about it," said Duncan. "The hermit would raise hell. He wants to be the same as you and I."

"I'll grant him that," said Conrad, "if he'd just keep up with us." They started down the slope, the others trailing along behind them. They had reached the bottom of the slope and started out across the valley when Meg let out a shriek.

They whirled about.

Filing out of the timbered hill to the east of the rift came a long rank of hairless ones, and behind them loomed a bank of fog, or what appeared to be fog, disturbed and agitated, as if some sort of commotion were taking place inside of it. Tendrils of it spurted out in front of the rolling bank so that the slouching hairless ones seemed to be wading knee-deep through a patch of ground mist. In the broken rifts of the swirling fog could be caught occasional glimpses of obscene monstrosities—an impression of teeth, of horns, of beaks, of glittering eyes.

Conrad sucked in his breath. "Magic," he said.

The rest of the band was piling down the hill. They reached Duncan and Conrad and swung into line to face the oncoming hairless ones, who were backed by the roiling cloud of smoky fog.

"We make our stand here?" Conrad asked.

"We might as well," said Duncan. "There's no place to retreat. If we ran, they'd pull us down."

"The ruins of the castle," suggested Conrad. "We could place the mound at our back. Here they'll sweep around our flanks. They'll be down on us like wolves."

"There isn't time to reach the castle," Duncan said. "Besides, Snoopy warned us of the castle."

Daniel was at his right hand, Andrew at his left, Beauty and Meg next, with Conrad and Tiny anchoring the left.

"Meg, what are you doing here?" demanded Duncan. "Get out of here. Run for your life."

She cackled at him. "I can bite and scratch," she squealed. "I can kick. I can summon up some magic."

"A pox on your magic," Andrew told her. "Those coming at us are the ones with magic."

The hairless ones came slowly down the hill with their lumbering gait, the clubs in their hamlike fists held ready. Behind them rolled the cloud of fog that now seemed shot through with lightning bolts, flaring as it seethed. Within it loomed horrific shapes, revealed momentarily by the lightning flares, then shut from sight by the roiling of the fog.

The last rays of the sun still touched the top of the hills to the north, but in the valley, shadows were beginning to creep across the land.

Duncan held his sword at ready and was pleased to find that there was no fear in him. It was useless, he told himself, to attempt to make a stand before such a force. The hairless ones would strike them and for a moment there would be a flurry of fighting, then the hairless ones and the monstrosities coming on behind them would roll over their thin line and that would be the end of it. But what was a man to do? Run, to be hunted down and dragged down, like a fleeing animal? Collapse upon his knees and plead for mercy when he knew there would be no mercy? Simply stand and take death as it came? No, by God, he told himself, he'd fight and when it was all over, once it all was known, there'd be no shame at Standish House.

For a moment he remembered, as clearly as if he stood before him, that old man at Standish House, with his plumb-line upright body, his rugged face with the short clipped mustache, his gray hair and the clear, honest grayness of his eyes. The kind of a man, Duncan knew, that a son could never shame.

He raised his sword as the foremost hairless one came toward him. Another step, he told himself. The hairless one took the other step, his club raised and already beginning to come down. Duncan chopped with his blade. He felt, rather than saw, the striking into flesh. Then the hairless one was falling and another took his place. The sword slashed out again, missed the stroke that he had intended, deflected by the club, but took off the club arm just above the elbow. Beside him Daniel was screaming in battle rage, as only a fighting horse could scream, standing on his hind legs, striking out with his forelegs, crushing skulls, bowling over the hairless ones as they leaped at him. To Duncan's left Andrew was tugging to free his staff from the belly of one of the attackers. Another hairless one aimed a club at him as he was tugging at the staff, but before the club could strike Duncan brought his sword down, slicing open the throat of the thing that held the club.

Duncan lost track of time. There was no past, no future, simply a bloodstained, straining present in which he thrust and struck, as if somewhere back there someone was lining up the hairless ones for him to strike at, as if it were some sort of silly game, replacing the one that went down with another that came charging in upon him to supply him with another target for his swordsmanship. It seemed to him incredible that he could keep on, but he did keep on.

Quite suddenly there was in front of him not a hairless one, but a spitting, vicious fury that was all claws and fangs, black as the deepest pit of night, oozing loathsomeness, and in a flare of blinding hatred, a hatred he had not felt against the hairless ones, he brought down the blade upon it, hewing it in half.

Something struck him from one side and he lost his balance, going over. As he scrambled to his feet, he saw what had struck him. A raging griffin, poised with beating wings over the swirling cloud of fog, which was still streaked by lightning flashes, was reaching down with grasping claws and stabbing beak, slashing, clawing, stabbing, rending the things that hid inside the cloud. Leaning from the griffin's back, a woman clad in a leather jacket, the red-gold glory of her hair streaming in the battle wind, wielded a shining battle axe that was smeared with the red of blood and black ichor such as had spouted from the body of the spitting fury Duncan had killed.

As Duncan surged to his feet he heard the thunder of hoofs coming from above him, as if they were riding down the sky, the sudden blaring of a hunting horn, and the deep bay of hunting dogs.

He took a step forward and stumbled again, coming down with one knee across the fallen body of the hermit. Ahead of him a hairless one was shambling forward, rocking on his bowed legs, heading for Tiny, who was systematically tearing apart a horror that squealed and shrieked. Duncan lunged to his feet, surged toward the hairless one. The point of his blade took it in the throat, and the club, coming down, thudded into the ground, falling short of Tiny.

Then the thunder of the hoofs and the deep hoarse baying of the hunting dogs seemed to fill the valley, and down out of the sky they came—black silhouettes of horse and rider and hunting dogs—fog-draped shadows that still had some substantiality, and a howling wind came with them that almost blew Duncan from his feet.

The Wild Huntsman and his pack swooped down to tear through the roiling bank of fog that concealed the hideous shapes with the obscene teeth and beaks and talons, emerged again, climbing in the sky, then wheeled to return.

Atop the griffin, her high-lifted battle axe dripping blood and ichor, Diane shouted at Duncan. "The castle! Run for your life. Run to the castle!"

Duncan turned to pick up Andrew, but the hermit was getting to his feet, using his staff to pull himself erect. One side of his face was raw, the blood dripping from his wispy beard onto his tattered robe.

"To the castle," Duncan shouted at him. "Run. As fast as you can go."

Diane still was shouting, "Everyone to the castle. It's your only chance."

Duncan reached for Daniel, grabbed him by the mane.

"Daniel, come," he shouted.

There were no longer any of the hairless ones charging in upon them. The fog bank lay in tatters, the lightning flashes gone, and a mass of dark shapes were hopping and running, crawling and wriggling up the hillside.

Duncan spun around to look for Conrad and saw him limping toward the ruined castle, one hand gripping the collar of a raging Tiny, dragging the dog along. Meg and Beauty were running a footrace for the castle, Meg hobbling and wobbling in a frantic effort to keep pace with the little burro. Andrew stumped along behind them, angrily striking at the ground with his staff.

"Come, Daniel," Duncan said and set off at a swinging pace, the big horse following.

Looking over his shoulder, Duncan saw the Huntsman and his pack in a sharp climb up the sky. He heard a swirl of leathery wings and saw Diane and the griffin also heading for the castle.

The canted standing stones were just ahead of him and as he ran toward them, he wondered what kind of safety might be offered by the castle. If the Evil forces and the remaining hairless ones attacked again, and probably they would as soon as they had reassembled, he and his band would have to fight again. They would be fighting, this time, with the castle mound to protect their backs, but even so, how long could they hope to stand against such a force? It was sheer good luck they had made the stand they had. Had it not been for the intervention of Diane and the Huntsman, they now would all be dead. And the Wild Huntsman, he wondered. Why had this wild rider of the skies taken a hand in it? What interest could have brought him to it?

He looked quickly behind him and saw the irregular lumps of the dead hairless ones lying in a ragged row. The hairless ones and the other things as well—the spitting fury that he had sliced in two, the squawling thing that Tiny had torn apart, and perhaps there were others of them, too.

He passed between two of the standing stones, Daniel pacing at his side, and as he stepped between them, the grass beneath his feet turned from unkempt meadow grass to a well-kept, pampered velvet lawn.

Startled, he looked up and gasped at what he saw. The castle mound was gone. In its place stood a splendid castle, a building out of fairyland, brand new and shining, stone steps leading up to a great front entrance that was agleam with candlelight and with lights showing as well in some of the many windows.

The griffin stood humped upon the lawn in front of him and Diane, in her leather breeches and her leather jacket, her hair a golden glory in the fading light from out the west, still carrying the gory battle axe, was walking across the lawn toward him.

She stopped a few feet from him and made a little curtsy.

"Welcome," she said, "to the Castle of the Wizards."

All the rest of them were there, standing on the sweep of immaculate lawn, their heads tilted up to stare at the castle, all of them, more than likely, as puzzled as he was.

He still was carrying the naked sword in his fist, and he lifted it, unthinking, to place it in the scabbard, but Diane made a motion to stop him.

"Not," she said, "until you wipe it clean. Here." One hand went to her throat and pulled free the white stock that she wore.

"Use this," she said, holding it out to him.

"But I would not want to…"

"Go ahead," she said. "I have plenty of others. This is an old one, anyhow."

"I could manage with some grass."

She shook her head and he took from her the length of fabric. It was fine of weave and silky to the touch.

"With your permission, ma" am," he said.

Carefully he wiped and polished the blade until there was not a fleck upon it.

"Give the rag to me," she said. Hesitantly, he handed the stained piece of cloth to her and she, in turn, used it to clean the battle axe.

"It was good sport," she said. "Good hunting."

He shrugged in bewilderment. "Yes, it turned out that way. We were in a bad way for a time, until you and the Huntsman showed up. Tell me, what has the Huntsman to do with all of this? For that matter, what have you? And this castle…"

"I've told you," she said. "This is the Castle of the Wizards. Once you pass the magic circle you stand on enchanted ground."

Conrad came limping up, followed by Tiny.

"What happened to you?" asked Duncan.

Conrad swung slowly around to show the bloody gash that ran from thigh to knee. "Something raked me. I think that thing, whatever it was, that Tiny tore apart. But you are all right, m" lord."

"Knocked down by a griffin's wing, that's all."

He put his hand up to his forehead and it came away sticky with clotting blood.

"I'm sorry about that," said Diane. "At times Hubert tends to get a little awkward. But it's really not his fault. He is so old, you know." She said to Conrad, "You better had come in. That gash…"

"It will heal," said Conrad. "I have taken worse."

"There could be poison in it. There are unguents that will take care of that. I'm well schooled in salves and potions."

"My thanks," said Conrad, trying to be courtly, but not quite making it.

Glancing back at the circle of standing stones, Duncan saw that now they were all in place and correctly seated. Now there was no cant to them. Lying squarely on top of them, in their proper places, were the lintel stones. All the stones, the lintels and the standing ones, were new and white, shining faintly in the fading light, as if they had been carved only yesterday.

"I don't understand," he said to Diane. "The stones all standing, the castle new and shining, this lawn, the stone benches on the lawn, the shrubs and trees, the little pools, the paths, all so neatly landscaped."

"It is an enchanted place," she said. "A special place. Outside the magic circle it all seems a ruin, as it rightly should be, for it was raised many centuries ago. But once inside the circle it is as it always has been since the day it was created. Here time and the ravages of time are held at bay. At one time many powerful wizards lived here and they possessed great secrets. They could hold the world and time at arm's length. They could…"

"At one time, you said. And now?"

"Now one wizard still lives here. He is the last of them."

He started to ask another question, but clamped shut his mouth before the words came out.

She laughed a merry laugh at him. "You were about to ask about myself."

"I have no right, milady."

"I don't mind telling you. I have wizard blood."

"You a wizard?"

She shook her head. "No. I have tried to be. I wanted to be. I have found I'm not. Wulfert. You remember that I asked of Wulfert."

"Yes, I do remember."

She said, "Wulfert was my great-grandfather. But we stand here talking when we should be going in. Your big comrade needs something on that wound. And there may be other injuries. You have a scratch upon your head. All of you, I suppose, are half starved."

Conrad brightened visibly. "I could do with food," he said. "And a little drink should you have it. Fighting's thirsty work."

"You must excuse him," Duncan said. "He has no shame at all."

"We have no staff," said Diane. "Not a single servant. There was a day when the castle did have servants everywhere, when there were people here who might have need of servants. But now there really is little need of them and it is hard to find the kind of faithful servitors that one would want. There is not a great deal to do. The preparation of food, the making of beds, such small chores as that. The enchantment takes care of all the rest."

"In a rough fashion, milady," said Conrad, "m" lord and I can cook, and I suppose old Meg as well. The hermit I don't know about. At best he is a simple soul."

"Well, get along," said Diane. "The larder is well stocked. It always is well stocked. We'll not go hungry."

With Duncan on one side of her, Conrad on the other, she led the way toward the long flight of broad, wide steps that went up to the castle's entrance. Meg fell in behind them.

"We'll find meat for the dog," said Diane. "The lawn will provide good pasturage for the horse and burro."

"We thank you, milady," Duncan said. "Your hospitality is above and beyond all courtesy. What you did in helping us today…"

"The help was mutual," she said. "You did as much for us as I and Hubert did for you. You lured the Evil out and struck a mighty blow against them. You made them smart. Cuthbert will be pleased. It is something he would have done himself had he not been so old and feeble and so very much alone. You see, I am the only one he has. All his old comrades are gone."

"Cuthbert?"

"He is the wizard that I spoke of. The last of a mighty band of wizards. But now all the rest are gone and he has lost much of his former power because of the loss of his companions, although he would deny that should it be mentioned. I am very careful not to mention it."

"You say he is old and sick. I did not know…"

"Wizards are not supernatural beings," said Diane. "Certainly you know that. They are merely men of great knowledge in certain arcane subjects and therefore able to accomplish many wondrous things, but they are not immune to the common ills and woes of mankind. I had meant to come back to the church and village where we first met, but when I returned I found Cuthbert very ill and have remained here since, nursing him."

"And how is he now?"

"Much better, thank you. It's his own fault, perhaps. When I leave he forgets to eat. He gets so busy that he forgets to eat. Old as he is, he needs proper nourishment."

They came to the foot of the long stairs and began to climb them. Halfway up, Duncan looked back and saw that outside the circle of standing stones stood a heavy growth of trees.

"Those trees were not there before," he said.

"What trees?" Diane asked.

"The trees outside the circle."

"You don't understand," she said. "From this place you see everything the way it was when the castle was created. At the time it came into being this land was wilderness, with only a few wild tribes or occasional hunters following the few paths that ran across it."

They continued their climb and finally came to the great entrance, which led into a large room, a sort of reception hall, thought Duncan. The floor was of well-fitted, colorful flagstone, and from it ran up several other short stone staircases leading to other parts of the castle. Candelabra set in the walls flared with thick waxen candles, lending a soft light to the hail.

In the center of the hall stood a six-foot column of stone, three feet through, and at the sight of what crouched atop it, Duncan and all the others stopped short in their tracks.

"Come on," said Diane impatiently. "It is only Scratch. There is no need to fear him. I assure you he's quite tame and harmless."

Slowly they went forward, the creature on top of the column watching them intently. The creature spoke to them. "Only Scratch, she says, and she speaks right, as she always does, for she is a very truthful and even a kindly person. You see before you, either for your pity or your contempt, a demon straight from the pits of Hell."

"He always dramatizes," said Diane. "He stops all who visit to tell his story to them. There's no one now, of course, who can judge how true it is, but he has much to tell. Give him the opportunity and he'll talk an arm off you."

"But what is he?" asked Duncan.

"He is what he told you, a demon out of Hell. He has served as doorkeeper here for almost as long as the castle has existed."

"That is what they designate me," said Scratch, "but I keep no door. I am chained here to this column as a subject for ridicule by humans, who more often than not make great sport of me. Rather, it seems to me, I should be an object of deep pity, the most unfortunate of creatures, a runaway from my place of origin, but not a true resident of this palace of opulence and glory. Gaze upon me, please, and see if I tell you wrong. See my crumpled horn, observe the hump upon my back, the clubfoot that I carry, my crippled hands, clenched and held as in a vise by arthritis, the result of the foul and damp and chilly climate of this most barbarous of countries."

"Scratch, shut up," Diane said sharply.

"And please," said Scratch, "look upon my tail which, along with his horns, is the pride of any demon. Look upon it and tell me if it seems a thing of pride. Broken in three places and never set properly, although the setting of it would have been as child's play for any competent chirurgeon."

"Scratch," said Diane, "I command you to be silent. Stop this endless chatter. Our guests have no interest in you."

All that Scratch had said of himself, Duncan saw, was true. The last third of his tail took the form of an amazing zigzag, as if it had been broken and no attempt made to reset the bones, or if an attempt had been made, it had been very badly done. His left foot was clubbed, at least three times as large as it should have been, and with a misshapen hoof enclosing the malformation. Above the clubfoot a long chain was riveted, hanging in a loop to the floor, the other end of it set into a heavy metal staple sunk into the stone. An unsightly hump rode his shoulder blades, forcing the upper half of his body into an awkward forward thrust. The left horn atop his head was perfectly formed, short, but stout, the other horn distorted and grown to greater size, ridged with ugly wrinkles like the markings on a clam shell, and bent close against his forehead. His outthrust hands were twisted and bent, the fingers convulsively half closed.

Conrad moved closer to the column, reached up to touch one of the crippled hands. "You poor son-of-a-bitch," said Conrad.

Diane spoke coldly. "Let us proceed. He is no one to waste your pity on."

20

First Diane administered to the wounds, smearing salve on Conrad's gash, swabbing off Andrew's abraded face and rubbing soothing unguent on it, cleaning out the small cut on Duncan's head. Meg, who had come through without a scratch upon her, sat in a chair too high for her, with her feet dangling off the floor, cackling as she recalled her part in the battle.

"Faith," she said, "the old girl knew what she was about. I got well down to the ground, well out of all harm's way. I killed no single one of them, for I had not the strength to do it, but I discommoded them. I found a stout branch that had fallen from a thorn tree and from where I crouched upon the ground, I cracked them in the shins. They did not know what hit them, and I whacked with all the strength I had in my scrawny arm. But I made them hop and flinch, and as they hopped and flinched, m" lord smote them with his blade or the hermit speared them with his staff."¨

"Always in the gut," said Andrew proudly. "The gut is a soft place and easily penetrated with a determined blow."

"I don't know how you managed it," said Diane. "I got there as quickly as I could, but…"

"Our arms were strong," said Conrad sanctimoniously, "because our cause was just."

The doctoring over, they explored the larder and found a haunch of beef, well roasted, a large loaf of wheaten bread, a wheel of cheese, a platter of fried fowl left over from the day before, a small pigeon pie, a keg half full of pickled herring, and a basket of juicy pears.

"Cuthbert, when he does not forget to eat," said Diane, "is a trencherman of note. He likes good food and, too often, far too much of it. He is no stranger to the gout."

Now they sat around the table in the kitchen, where Diane had done her doctoring, the medications pushed to one end of the table, the food set on the other.

"I must beg your pardon," Diane said, "for serving you in such a lowly place, but the dining room is far too splendid. It makes me a bit self-conscious. It is too splendid a room for my taste and, I would suppose, for yours as well. Also, once the meal is done, there is much china and silver to be washed and dried and put away again. It is too much work."

"Cuthbert?" asked Duncan. "You have spoken of him often. When will we be able to talk with him? Or will we?"

"Most certainly," said Diane, "but not tonight. There was a time when he would sit up half the night, working at his desk, but of late years he has taken to going to his bed at the coming of first dusk. The man is old and needs his rest. And now suppose you tell me all that's happened since the day I first met you in the orchard. There have been rumors, of course, of the things that you have done, but you know how rumors are. Not to be relied upon."

"Nothing great," said Duncan. "We have, it seems, stumbled from one disaster to another, but each time have managed to escape by the skin of our teeth."

They told her, chiming in on the story by turns, while she sat listening intently, her head bent forward, the flare of the candles making another flame of her shining hair. One thing Duncan did not tell her, and the others did not think to, or noticing that he had omitted it, made no mention of it—and that was about the finding of the amulet in Wulfert's tomb.

Watching her as she listened, Duncan debated whether he should go back along the story's trail and tell her of the amulet, but in the end he refrained from doing so. Certainly, he knew, it was a thing that would greatly interest her, and perhaps she had a right to know—most surely had the right to know if Wulfert truly had been kin of hers, as she had said.

Finally, when the story was all done, she asked of Wulfert. "You remember that I was seeking him," she said, "or rather, some word of him, for he must have long since been dead. You, Sir Hermit, before we were interrupted by the hairless ones, seemed to indicate that you knew of him. For some reason you did not explain, you appeared to be greatly distressed."

Andrew lifted his head, looking across the table at the sternness of Duncan's face.

"Only, milady," he said smoothly, "that I had heard of him, knew that he was buried in the village cemetery. My distress was that the village had regarded him as a saintly man. It was a shock to learn that he had been, instead, a wizard."

"You were outraged to learn that he was a wizard and no holy man?"

"Milady," said Andrew, "I and the people of my village were only simple folk. Perhaps even ignorant folk. We did not know of wizards. We had thought…"

"I can guess what you had thought," said Diane. "And it seems that I remember you saying that he was placed in a tomb, that the village built a tomb for him because he was thought a saintly man."

"That is right," said Andrew, "but an oak fell and shattered it. In some great storm, perhaps."

"There is a story, perhaps no more than a legend, that he carried with him a piece of wondrous magic. Had you ever heard of that?"

"No ma" am, I don't recall I ever had."

"I imagine not," said Diane. "He would have kept it secret. I suppose it now is lost. Oh, the pity of it!"

"Why the pity, ma" am?" asked Conrad.

"The legend says that it was designed as a weird against the Horde of Evil, known in these parts as the Harriers."

"And," said Duncan, "you hoped to recover it."

"Yes," she said, "that had been my hope. There now is need of it."

Duncan felt the others looking at him.

"Even had you found it," he said, "it might be of little value. One would have to know how to put it to most effective use."

"No, I think not. I think the mere possession of it would be quite sufficient. The magic rests in the talisman itself, not in the user of it."

"Perhaps you should search the tomb," said Conrad, skating on thin ice.

"Perhaps," said Diane. "I had thought of that. I had meant to go back again. But after the incident in the garden plot with the hairless ones, I had the frantic feeling that Cuthbert needed me, so I flew directly here. I found that he did indeed have need of me. I have nursed him ever since."

She made a motion with her hands. "Although I doubt the searching of the tomb would be of any use. Even had the talisman been buried with him, which it might not have been, when the oak fell upon the tomb its contents would have been revealed to anyone who might want to investigate. Certainly there would have been in the village those with a ghoulish twist of mind. Undoubtedly, had it been there, it would have been filched long since."

"What you say may well be true," said Andrew, "but of this talisman you speak of I have never heard."

"A tomb robber," said Diane, "would not reveal himself."

"I suppose not," Andrew said.

No one was watching him any more, Duncan saw. The deed had been done. Rightly or wrongly, the lie had been told. To the man, they had backed him in his secrecy. Of them all, only Meg had said nothing and she, he knew, would not go against the rest of them. His fingers itched to go to the pouch at his side, touch the slight bulge of the amulet to assure himself that it still was there. But he fought successfully against doing it.

Tiny, who had gulped down a generous helping from the roast, earlier had been lying, asleep or half-asleep, in one corner of the kitchen, but now, Duncan noted, he was gone. More than likely he had gone out exploring. The castle had a lot of nooks and crannies that he could snoop in.

"There is one thing that intrigues me," Duncan said to Diane. "I asked you earlier, but you had no chance to answer. It concerns the Huntsman. Why should he get himself involved?"

"He hates the Evil," Diane told him. "As do many of the others of us. The Little Folk—you'll find few of them who have any liking for the Evil. Basically they themselves are not evil; only different. There are certain naturally evil beings, of course, like the werewolves, the ghouls, the vampires, and others who would willingly align themselves with the Harriers, holding them in high regard and believing that they may be one with them. But the Little Folk are decent people and so is the Huntsman."

"I have wondered," Duncan said, "if he could have been watching us all the time. We saw him a few nights ago and I am certain, at an earlier time, I heard him in the sky."

"He could have been."

"But why should he bother with us?"

"He is a free spirit, the Huntsman. I know very little about him, although I met him briefly a few years ago. He originated, I believe, in the Germanies, but I can't be sure of that. Maybe sometime in the past he may have witnessed some of the ravages brought about by the Harriers and has been watching them ever since."

"A crusader for the right?"

"No, I'd scarcely call him that."

"In any case," said Andrew, "we are appreciative of the part he played today."

"This Evil," said Duncan. "I wonder what it really is."

"Cuthbert, if you asked, probably could tell you much better than I can," said Diane.

"Our archbishop at the abbey back home suggested that the creatures may feed on the misery of the world and that they will go to any lengths to keep that misery going."

"I have heard that," Diane said, "but Cuthbert is an expert on the Evil. He has spent long years in the study of it. He has at hand much documentation bearing on it. He's the one to ask about it."

"Would he be willing to discuss it with us? Many experts grow somewhat jealous of the body of knowledge they have acquired."

"Yes, I think he will."

A burst of savage barking came from far away. Conrad leaped to his feet. "That's Tiny," he said. "I'll take care of him. There are times when he hasn't got good sense."

Turning, he ran out the door and the others pelted after him. "Sic" em, boy!" yelled Meg.

"No, not that," snapped Conrad. "Don't encourage him."

They ran down a hall and across the magnificent dining hall, coming out on the circular corridor that fronted on the huge reception hall.

There they sighted Tiny. He was in front of the demon's column, his rear thrust high into the air, his front feet thrust out on the floor, his muzzle resting on them. His tail was waving frantically in good fun, and every now and then he lifted his head from his paws to unloose a half-playful, half-savage barking at the crouching Scratch.

Conrad went clattering down the staircase to the hall. "Tiny, cut it out," he yelled. "Tiny, you damn fool. Leave Old Scratch alone."

The demon sang out at him in protest. "Not Old Scratch. That is another demon entirely. That is the fullfledged Devil. To call me Scratch was a play on words. The ones who finally trapped and caught me would guffaw and roll upon the floor in laughter when they called me Scratch. For reasons that I do not entirely understand, it was a great joke to them. But they called me Young Scratch, to distinguish me, you understand, from the other one. But finally it became simply Scratch and that I have been ever since. Which is not an appellation that I enjoy overmuch, but since I have been stuck with it all these years I must live by it."

Conrad strode across the floor to Tiny, grabbed him by the collar and hauled him to his feet. "Shame on you," he said. "Here he is, chained to this stone, while you are running free. You should be ashamed."

Tiny fawned on Conrad, but he did not look ashamed.

Duncan, coming up behind Conrad, said to Scratch, "You seem to be all right. Did he try to harm you?"

"Not in the least," said the demon. "He was only engaged in some doggish fun. I did not mind at all. He had no intent to hurt me, nor, I believe, to even frighten me. In his doggish mind, he only played a game with me."

"That's generous of you," said Duncan.

"Why, thank you, sir. It is very decent of you to say so."

"And by the way," asked Duncan, "is it true, as you said, that you are a demon from the very pits of Hell? And if that is so, how come you here?"

"That is a long story and a sad one," said Scratch. "Someday, when you have the time, I will relate to you the whole of it. I was an apprentice demon, you must understand, assigned to the antechambers of the Infernal Regions to learn my vocations. But, I fear, I did very badly at it. So to speak, I was all thumbs. I never did get anything quite right. I suppose I never really got into the spirit of the job. I was always in the doghouse. Constantly I was reprimanded for my lack of honest zeal."

"Maybe you were not cut out to be a demon."

"That may well be. But being a demon, I had little choice. There were few other occupations that were open to me. I would have you believe that at all times I did my valiant best."

"So what happened?"

"Why, I ran away. I couldn't take it any longer. One day I just cut out. And do you know, sir, and this was the unkindest cut of all—I don't believe they made any great effort to run me down and haul me back."

"Except for the chain, you have good treatment here?"

"Except for the chain, I would say so. I know that I am somewhat better treated here than a human would be treated should he find himself in Hell."

21

Cuthbert lay propped up in bed by two pillows placed atop one another against the headboard. He wore a nightcap of startling red and a nightgown with ruffles at the throat and wrists. He was a sunken man. His eyes were sunken deep beneath white, bushy eyebrows, the cap coming down so far upon his forehead that it seemed to rest upon the eyebrows. His face was sunken so that his cheekbones could be seen, the skin drawn tightly over them, his nose stabbing out like a beak, the mouth a furrow between the stabbing nose and outjutting chin. His chest was sunken, his shoulders rising above it in their bony knobbiness. Beneath the coverlet his stomach was so flat and sunken that the pelvic bones stood out, making twin humps beneath the bedclothes.

He cackled at Duncan, then spoke in a raspy voice, "So. Diane tells me you smote them hip and thigh. That's the way to do it. That's the one language that they understand."

"My band and I," said Duncan. "I did not do it all alone."

"You'll see the others of them later," Diane told the wizard. "They are a motley group."

She said to Duncan, "You do not mind if I call them a motley group?"

"I suppose you could call them that," said Duncan, not too well pleased.

"You told me of them," Cuthbert said to Diane. "A dog and horse and also a little burro. I'll want to see them, too."

"The dog, perhaps," said Diane. "Certainly not the horse."

"I want to see the entire tribe of them," insisted Cuthbert. "I want to gaze upon this little band that smote them hip and thigh. By gad, it does me good to know there are such still in the land. Not running squealing from them, but standing up to them."

"The horse and burro would have trouble getting here," protested Diane. "All those stairs."

"Then I'll go and see them."

"You know, sire, you must not exert yourself."

He grumbled at her with mumbling words. He said to Duncan, "This is what happens when a man grows old. You can't exert yourself. You can't walk to the water closet. You must squat upon a pot to pee. You must move slowly and you must remain in bed. You must eat soft foods because your gut will not handle honest meat. You must be sparing with the wine. You must do not a single thing that you may enjoy, but many that you don't."

"In a short while," said Duncan, "it would be my hope and prayer that you'll again be doing all the things you most enjoy. But you must take what care you can…"

"You're in league with her," Cuthbert accused him. "Everyone is in league with her. She can twist a strong man about her little finger. Look at her, the hussy, all that golden hair and the way she bats her eyes."

"You know, sire," said Diane sharply, "that I never bat my eyes. And if your behavior does not improve considerably I shall cook you up a mess of greens and feed them to you for supper. And see you eat them, too."

"You see," Cuthbert said to Duncan. "A man hasn't got a chance. Especially should he grow old. Take care you do not advance beyond the age of thirty. And now suppose you tell me about your little band and this great battle."

"We would not have survived the battle," Duncan said, "had it not been for Diane and her griffin and the Wild Huntsman…"

"Ah, the Huntsman—a stout fellow, that one. I well remember the time…" He speared Duncan with a sharp glance. "Don't tell me you're the Huntsman. A close relative, perhaps, but surely not the Huntsman. You can't fool me with your tales. I know the Huntsman. You can't palm yourself off…"

"Sire," said Diane, "I told you of this gentleman. He's not the Huntsman nor did he claim to be. You're imagining again. Duncan Standish is the scion of a great house in the north."

"Yes, yes," said Cuthbert, "now I do recall. The Standish, you say. The Standish, yes, I have heard of them. If you are of that house, what are you doing here? Why did you not tarry in the safety of the north, behind the castle walls?"

"I go with messages to Oxenford," said Duncan.

"Oxenford? Oxenford. Yes, I know of Oxenford. A great company of distinguished scholars. I have friends in Oxenford."

He let his head drop back on the pillow and closed his eyes. Duncan looked questioningly at Diane and she signaled patience.

After a time the wizard stirred on the pillows, opened his eyes and hauled himself into a more upright position. He looked at Duncan.

"You're still here," he said. "I thought you might have left. You sat throughout my nap. You must excuse me, sir. Unaccountably, at times, I fall into these little naps."

"You feel better now, sire?"

"Yes, much better now. Diane told me you had a question for me."

"It's about the Horde of Evil. My archbishop told me…"

"And what archbishop might that be?"

"His Grace of Standish Abbey."

"A fuddy-duddy," said the wizard. "A blathering fuddy-duddy. Do you not agree?"

"At times I have thought him so."

"And what does he say of the Horde of Evil?"

"Very little, sire. He knows not what it is. He believes it feeds on human misery and that the devastations, which come at regular intervals, may be periods when it rejuvenates itself."

"You would have me tell you what the Evil is?"

"If you know, sire."

"Of course I know. What do you think I and my band of now-dead brethren have been doing all these years? The answer, of course, is that we have been performing many tasks and digging deep for truth. In the course of our work we have not ignored the Evil. What would you know of it?"

"What it is, sire. Where it came from. Where did it start?"

"It came here from the stars," the wizard said. "This we do know. Why it came we are not certain. It may have been driven from the stars by a stronger force against which it could not stand. Or it may have run so rampant in its rapacity among the stars that there was nothing left for it to feed upon and so, rather than face starvation, it sought out another world and by pure chance, or perhaps not so much by chance, came upon this poor world of ours, where it found the teeming life that could provide the misery that it needed to feed upon and grow. Apparently it has done well here. With the weight of this world's misery it has increased in strength and numbers with the passing of each century. If something is not done soon it will swallow all the life of Earth and then, perhaps, be forced to go again among the stars to seek another world.

"It came here an untold time ago. Of the years that it's been here, we have no measure. When man arose, with his greater capacity for misery—a greater capacity than our friends, the beasts, although they, too, can suffer misery—it began to reap a richer harvest and in consequence has waxed the fatter, and now there seems but little prospect that it can be stopped or stood against. That is why I treasure so greatly the stand you made against it, the evidence that there are men who still will stand fast against it, with no fear in their hearts."

"But you are wrong," said Duncan. "I did have fear."

"And yet you stood."

"Sire, there was nothing else to do. We had no place to run."

"You're a truthful man," the wizard said. "It takes a truthful man, and a courageous one, to confess the fear within him. But, then, you are a puissant warrior."

"That I'm not," said Duncan. "Trained in arms, of course, but until this journey I had never drawn a blade in anger. Rather, I am a farmer. I'm much more interested in growing better beef and mutton, raising better crops…"

"It is well," said Cuthbert. "Britain, and the world, has need of farmers such as you. More need, perhaps, than for those who can wield a mighty blade. And yet, also, you are proficient with the blade."

He said to Diane, "Greens, you say. I will not eat your greens. Greens and pottage and sometimes gruel, that is all you ever feed me." He said to Duncan, "How can you expect a man to keep up his strength with such hog slop as that?"

Duncan said, "It may be that your stomach…"

"What does a minx like her know of a grown man's stomach? Meat, that's what I need. Good red meat, not done to a crisp, but pink throughout and with blood upon the trencher."

"I fed you meat," Diane reminded him, "and you threw it up."

"Badly cooked," he said. "Very badly cooked. Give me a properly cooked haunch of beef or a saddle of mutton and…"

His mind seemed to jump. He said to Duncan, "You asked me another question. What was it, now?"

"I had another question. Several other questions. But I had not asked them yet. My archbishop…"

"So, we're back to that old woman of a churchman once again."

"He said that the devastations the Evil causes may be for the purpose of rejuvenation, setting up an area where there will be no interference in their rejuvenation procedure. That there they grow in strength, and perhaps in numbers, so they'll be ready for more centuries of their evil-doing."

"I've heard the theory," said the wizard, "and in certain instances there may be some truth in it, although it seems more likely that the devastations serve another purpose, probably designed to block developments that might, in the long run, improve the lot of mankind.

"In this instance, in this present devastation, I am certain that the devastation is not for rejuvenation if, in fact, it ever is. This time the Evil is running very scared. It is frightened of something that will happen. It is gathering its forces to prevent the happening. And yet, for some reason, the Evil appears very much confused, uncertain of itself, as if some unforeseen event had come about that makes all its planning go for naught.

"I was pleased, to tell you the truth, when the devastation started in this area, for now, I told myself, it would be easier to study it at firsthand rather than from old records and the observations of others, who may not have been as accurate in what they had written down as might be desirable. Here was the chance of a lifetime for such a one as I, but I was hampered greatly by the lack of trusty associates. I told myself, however, that I could do the work alone, for I had many years of experience in such a labor. So I worked on it…"

"You worked too hard," said Diane. "That's what's the matter with you now."

The wizard's mind jumped. "We were talking about the Huntsman," he said. "Do you know he once spent a week with us? There were several of us then and sometimes we'd have guests of a slow weekend. But the Huntsman was no invited guest. He dropped in. He came riding in one evening on his horse and with all those dogs of his. They landed in the big dining room you saw, where we were just finishing a well-cooked meal. The dogs jumped up on the sideboard and made off with a platter of partridge, a ham, and a venison pot roast, and fought one another up and down the hall for each one's fair share of it, while those of us at table sat petrified with the gaucherie of it. The Huntsman, meantime, hoisted a small keg of beer to drink directly from the bung-hole, pouring it directly down his throat and I swear you could hear the glugging of it when it hit his stomach. Although after that first onslaught it all got straightened out and we had a jolly week of it, with those dogs eating us out of house and home and the Huntsman drinking us out of house and home. But we didn't mind too much, for the Huntsman told us tales that thereafter, for a full year's time, we recited to one another, savoring them again."

"You must have had good times in those days," said Duncan, saying the first thing that came to mind.

"Oh, we did," the wizard said. "You must ask me about that night when a band of drunken rogues brought the demon to us. Having tired of him themselves, and looking to get rid of him, they thought it a splendid joke to bring him as a gift to us. By the way, you have met the demon, have you not?"

"Yes, I have," said Duncan.

"As demons go," the wizard said, "he is not a bad sort. He claims he has not a single vicious bone in his body and while I'd not go so far as that…"

"Sire," said Diane, in a gentle voice, "you were talking about the Horde of Evil."

Cuthbert seemed somewhat surprised.

"Were we?" he asked. "Is that what we were talking of?"

"I believe it was," said Duncan.

"As I was saying," said the wizard. "Or was I saying it? I just cannot remember. But, anyhow, I think it likely that most people have no real idea of how a congress of wizards live. I would imagine they might equate a wizard's castle with a monastery where the little monks wind their silent ways through mazes of doctrinal theology, clutching their ragged little souls close within their breasts, scarcely daring to breathe for fear they will draw into their lungs a whiff of heresy. Or they might think of a castle such as this as a place of hidden trapdoors, with sinister figures, black draped and cowled, hiding around corners or ambushed behind the window drapes, with sinister winds whistling down the corridors and hideous odors billowing from thaumaturgic laboratories. It is, of course, nothing like unto either one of these. While this place now is quiet from lack of occupants, there was a day when it was a gleesome place, jocular and laughter loving. For we made a jovial group when we put our work aside. We worked hard, it is true, for the tasks we set ourselves were not easy ones, but we also knew how to spend merry hours together. Lying here, I can call the roll of those old companions. There were Caewlin and Arthur, Aethelbehrt and Raedwald. Eadwine and Wulfert—and I can think of them all most kindly, but for Wulfert I feel remorseful pangs, for while what we did was necessary, it still was a hard and sad action to be taken. We turned him out the gate…"

"Sire," said Diane, "you have forgotten that Wulfert was kin of mine."

"Yes, yes," said Cuthbert. "I forget again and my tongue runs on. It seems to me that lately I do much forgetting." He made a thumb at Diane and said to Duncan, "That is quite correct. Wizard blood runs in her veins, or perhaps you already know. Mayhaps she has told you…"

"Yes, she had," said Duncan.

The wizard lay quietly on the pillows and it seemed the talk had ended, but again he stirred and spoke.

"Yes, Wulfert," he said. "He was like unto a brother to me. But when the decision came to be made, I sided with the others."

He fell into a silence and then again he spoke. "Arrogance," he said. "Yes, it was his arrogance. He set himself against the rest of us. He set his knowledge and his skills against our skills and knowledge. We told him that he wasted time, that there was no power in his talisman, and yet, setting at naught our opinions and our friendships, he insisted that it had great power. He said it was our jealousy that spoke. We tried to reason with him. We talked to him like brothers who held great love of him. But he'd not listen to us, stubbornly he stood against us all. Granted that this talisman of his was a thing of beauty, in more ways than one, since he was a magnificent craftsman, a skilled worker in the arcane, but it takes more than beauty…"

"You are sure of that?" asked Diane.

"My dear, I am sure of it. A petty power, perhaps. He claimed that this silly talisman of his could be used to go against the Horde of Evil and that was pure insanity. A mere petty power, is all. Certainly nothing that could be used against the Evil."

"How is it," Diane asked, "that you never spoke to me of this before? You knew I was seeking word of him, that I hoped to find the talisman."

"Why should I cause you pain?" the wizard asked. "I would not have said it now, but in my silliness and weakness, it slipped out of me. I would not willingly have spoken, for I knew how loyal you were to him. Or to his memory. For I suppose he now is dead. I think you told me that."

"Yes, for a century or more. I found where he was buried. In the village just beyond the hills. The last years of his life he posed as a saintly man. The village would have run him out if they'd known he was a wizard."

The old man's eyes were misted. A tear went running down one wasted cheek.

He waved a hand at them. "Leave me now," he said. "Go. Leave me with my grief."

22

He had a problem, Duncan told himself, and the fact he had a problem worried him a lot. He should not have this kind of problem—it was not in his nature to follow a course that would result in such a problem. All his life he had been frank and forthright, saying exactly what he thought, holding back no truth, telling no lies. And this was worse than a simple lie; this was dishonesty.

The amulet—perhaps the talisman, for that was how Cuthbert had described it—did not belong to him. It belonged to Diane, and every fiber in him cried out for him to hand it back to her. It had been constructed by her great-grandfather and should be passed on to her. And yet he had said nothing about having it, had set the course for the rest of his band to say nothing of it, either.

Cuthbert had said it had no power, that its fabrication had been a failure. And yet Wulfert, Diane's great-grandfather, had been willing to accept banishment from the congress of wizards rather than admit that it had no power.

It was because of the nagging feeling, almost a conviction, that it did have a very potent power, he knew, that he had acted as he had. For if the talisman had any kind of power at all, could afford its bearer even the slightest protection, then, he told himself, he had a greater need of it than had anyone. Not he, of course, but the manuscript—for that was the crux of it, the manuscript. He must get it to Oxenford and there was nothing that he could ignore, nothing at all, that would help him get it there.

It was not for himself alone that he, who had never been dishonest, now was dealing in dishonesty. In the library back at Standish House His Grace had said that in the manuscript lay mankind's greatest hope—perhaps the one last hope remaining. If that were true, and Duncan had no doubt it was, then dishonesty was a trivial price to pay to get the writings of that unknown follower of Jesus into the hands of Bishop Wise.

And yet Duncan did not like it. He felt, somehow, unclean. Unworthy and unclean, fouled with deceit and shiftiness, skulduggery and trickery.

What was right? As he thought of it, the line between right and wrong became blurred and smeared, and it never had been that way before with him. He had always known, instinctively, without being told, what was right and what was wrong. There had been no blurring, there had been no smear. But his prior decisions in this regard, he realized, had always dealt with simple considerations in which there had been no complicating factor. But here there was a complicating factor that, in no way, he could quite fit into place.

He sat on the bottom step of the great stone stairway that led up to the castle's entrance. In front of him swept the verdant greenness that ran from where he sat to the edge of the sweeping circle of standing stones ringing in the castle's park. Through the park ran curving paths and walkways paved with bricks. Spotted about the smoothness of the lawn were stone benches, pools, and spouting fountains, rose-covered bowers, flowering gardens, and clumps of shrubs and trees set tastefully in the great green expanse of grass.

It was a beautiful place, he thought—not a place of natural beauty, but a place of artificial beauty, made so, not perhaps by man, as would be the case in other castle parks and gardens, but by the wizardry of a congress of men skilled in bringing about events that stood beyond the natural.

There was in it a peace and restfulness that he would not have thought possible in the domain of wizardry. And yet, he told himself, it would have been wrong for him to think so, for wizards were not necessarily evil men, although there had been some, if history told true, who had turned to evil. The temptation to evil, he realized, would always have been present among men who held such large-scale powers as they, but that did not mean evil was inherent in them; perhaps only a small fraction of them had ever turned to evil. Their powers were great because of the knowledge that they held and this might be, he told himself, why wizards were in such bad repute. The general populace, the great mass of common men, viewed all great power and all extensive knowledge with suspicion; they viewed with suspicion anything they could not understand, and the knowledge held by wizards was unimaginably beyond the understanding of the rest of mankind.

Down near the standing stones, Conrad and Tiny were playing. Conrad was throwing a stick for Tiny, and Tiny, beside himself with joy, for there were not often times when he could play, went racing after the stick when Conrad threw it, bringing it back in his mouth, gamboling and frisking in an ecstasy of fun that somehow did not fit in with the disposition of a war dog. To one side stood Daniel and Beauty, watching the play. Daniel, it seemed to Duncan, was looking on disdainfully, as if he recognized that such behavior was beneath Tiny's dignity. Beauty, however, did not seem to mind. At times she cropped a mouthful of grass, but for the most part watched with uncommon interest. Probably, Duncan thought, if Conrad were to throw a stick for her, she would run and fetch it, too.

A short distance from Daniel and Beauty, Hubert, Diane's griffin, was lying on the lawn, the eagle head held high, the long whip of a tail curled halfway around his body as a cat would curl its tall when lying down, the jutting, rounded lion hips tawny against the greenness of the grass.

Behind him, Duncan heard a faint sound and turned his head. Diane was coming down the steps, but a different Diane. She was clothed in a filmy, clinging gown that reached from neck to toes, belted at the waist. Leaf green it was, the pale yellow-green of the first spring leaves of the willow tree. Her flame-colored hair almost shouted against the pale softness of the fabric.

Duncan came swiftly to his feet. "Milady," he said, "you are beautiful. Beautiful and charming."

She laughed lightly at him. "I thank you, sir. Who, I ask you, could be beautiful in buckskins?"

"Even then," he said, "you had a charm about you. But this—I cannot tell you."

"It's not often," she said, "that I can dress like this, or have occasion to. But with a house of guests, what other could I do?"

She sat down upon a step and he sat beside her.

"I was watching Conrad and Tiny at their play," he said.

"They are a pair," she said.

"You have known them long?"

"Conrad and I since we were boys," he told her. "We were inseparable. And Tiny since he was a pup."

"Meg is in the kitchen," she said, "cooking up a mess of sauerkraut and pig knuckles. She says it has been years since she has had her fill of such a dish. I wonder, do you like it?"

"Exceedingly," said Duncan. "And what of the hermit? I've not seen him all the day."

"He's wandering," said Diane. "All about the grounds. He stands, leaning on his staff, staring off at nothing. Your hermit is a troubled man."

"A befuddled man," said Duncan. "Unsure of himself. Torn by many questions. He cannot quite determine the condition of his soul. He tried for long, by various means, to be a holy man, and now he has become a soldier of the Lord and it's a profession he's uneasy at."

"Poor man," she said. "He has within himself so much good and no way to express it. And Cuthbert? How did you like Cuthbert?"

"Impressive," Duncan said. "Although, at times, difficult to understand. Difficult to follow."

"He's senile," said Diane.

Duncan shot a quick astonished glance at her. "You are sure of that?" he asked.

"Well, aren't you?" she asked, in turn. "A brilliant mind, sharp and clever, but now dulled by time and sickness. He cannot follow up his thoughts. At times he's irrational. I watch him closely, lest he hurt himself."

"He did seem to have some trouble."

"The last of a long line," she said, "that persisted over hundreds of years. Now all are gone except for Cuthbert. They tried to keep the congress going, bringing in young apprentices, but it never worked. There are few outstanding wizards any more. It takes a special kind of man to be a wizard. A capacity to absorb vast amounts of arcane knowledge and to work with it. Perhaps something more than that. An instinct for wizardry, perhaps. A distinctive turn of mind. There may be few people in the world today who have that turn of mind."

"How about yourself?"

She shook her head. "Women seldom can accomplish wizardry. That turn of mind, perhaps. Not the kind of mind that a woman has. It may have to be a man's mind. The mind of the male animal may be shaped and pointed in a slightly different direction than a woman's mind. I tried, of course, and they let me try, for while they were forced to banish Wulfert, they held a high respect for him, even in his banishment. He was the most accomplished wizard of them all. And while I could grasp some of the concepts, could perform certain little magics, put together some of the more simple of the manipulations, I was not cut out for wizardry. They did not tell me this. In time to come they would have had to tell me, but I did not force them to. I realized it myself, that I could never be anything other than a poor apprentice wizard. And there's no room in the world for inefficient apprentices."

"But you are a resident of the wizards" castle."

"A courtesy," she said. "A sincere and heartfelt courtesy. Because I have Wulfert's blood in me. When my parents died of a plague that swept the countryside, Cuthbert left the castle for the first time in his life, for the only time, for he has not left it since, and claimed me as a descendant of his great, good friend who by that time, I now know, had long since been dead. The last of the wizards raised me here and because I loved them I tried to learn their skills, but couldn't. All this I tell you about Cuthbert coming to get me, I've been told, for I was then too young to remember it. Not only did they raise me here and care for me, but they gave me as well old Hubert, who was Wulfert's griffin, left behind when my great-grandfather had to leave this place, for he could not take a griffin with him."

"The day will come when Cuthbert will die," said Duncan gently. "What about you then? Will you continue to stay on?"

"I don't know," she said. "I have seldom thought upon it. I have tried to keep from thinking on it. With Cuthbert gone, it would be lonely here. I don't know what I'd do. There'd be no place in the outside world for me. I am not used to it, would not know what to do, have had no chance to know what one should do. And I could not for long keep hidden that I had wizard blood in me. The outside world, I am afraid, would not take kindly to me if that were known."

"The world can be cruel," said Duncan. "I wish I could tell you that it isn't, but it is."

She leaned toward him, kissed him swiftly on the cheek. "The world can be kind," she said. "You have been kind to me. You have talked of my problem with a very gentle kindness."

"I thank you, milady," said Duncan gravely. "I thank you for your words. And for the kiss. it was a lovely kiss."

"You make fun of me," she said.

"Not at all, Diane. It is true gratitude, the more grateful because I have done nothing to deserve it."

"Cuthbert," she said, changing the subject abruptly, "has expressed a desire to see you."

"It must be soon," said Duncan. "We tarry here too long. We must be on our way."

She protested, somewhat flustered. "Why so soon? You should take several days to rest. All of you need rest. You've had no easy time."

"We've been held up," said Duncan, "by many misadventures. By this time we should have been in Oxenford."

"Oxenford can wait," she argued.

"I'm sorry, milady, but I don't believe it can."

She rose swiftly to her feet. "I must be going in to see how Cuthbert is. I cannot leave him long."

"I'll go with you," he said. "You said he wanted to see me."

"Not now," she told him. "I'll call you when he is ready for you."

23

As Duncan crossed the reception hail, Scratch, the demon, perched upon his pedestal, called out to him.

"Are you in a hurry, sire?" he asked. "Would you, perhaps, have a little time to spare? If so, it would be merciful of you to halt a while and chat. Despite all this magnificence of stone and fancy scrollwork, despite the elevated and exalted throne they have provided for me, there are times when the hours hang heavy on my hands."

Duncan altered his course and walked toward Scratch's column. "I have not a thing to do," he said. "Mistress Diane is gone to see how the wizard fares and my companions apparently have pursuits of their own. I would treasure a little time with you."

"Now, that is fine," the demon said. "Two men with the selfsame thought, a way in which to pleasantly while away some time. But there's no need for you to stand there, getting a crick in your neck from staring up at me. If you'd only help me down, we could sit on that stone bench a step or two away. My chain is long enough for me to reach it handily and with some to spare."

Duncan moved closer to the column and reached up his hands. The demon leaned forward and Duncan grasped him about the waist and helped him down.

"Except for this clubfoot of mine, which additionally is weighted down by the chain, I could get down quite easily myself," said Scratch. "In fact, I often do, but not in a manner that you could call easily." He held out his arthritis-crippled hands. "And these don't help, either."

They walked to the bench and sat down, side by side. Scratch lifted his clubhoof and crossed his knees. He jiggled the hoof up and down and the chain clanked.

"I was explaining to you the other day," he said, "that my name is Scratch—formerly Young Scratch, now simply Scratch, but never Old Scratch, for that is the vulgar designation of His Nibs, who runs the Infernal Operation. Since the name has been given me, I suppose I must abide by it, but I have never liked it. It is the kind of name one might give a dog. Why, even milady's griffin is given the honest name of Hubert, which is a far better name than Scratch. Through the years I have squatted on my column and have thought, among many other things, of a name that I'd enjoy bearing. A more suitable name, with more dignity and a more euphonious sound. I have paraded hundreds of names through my mind, taking my time, for I have all the time there is, weighing each name as I think of it, twisting and turning it in my mind, so I can get a critical look at it from every angle, rolling it around in my mouth to get the sound and feel of it. And after all these years and all the examination, I think I have finally found a name that would fit me well and that I'd be proud to have. I'll wager you cannot guess what that name might be."

"I have no faintest idea," said Duncan. "How could I have?"

"It is Walter," said Scratch triumphantly. "It is a splendid name. Do you not think it is? It has a full round sound to it. It is a name that is complete of itself and not a bobtailed name. Although I am aware it could be shortened to Walt. If I had such a name I should frown upon its shortening. It is not a fancy name. It has no flair to it. It is a solid name, an honest name, fashioned to fit a solid and an honest man."

"So that is how you spend your time," said Duncan. "Thinking up a new name for yourself. I suppose it is as good a device as any to make the time go by."

"It is only one of many things I do," said Scratch. "I do a lot of imagining. I imagine how it might have been for me had events gone differently. If I had worked out as an apprentice demon, if I could have cut the mustard, by now I would be a senior demon or, just possibly, a junior devil. I would be much larger than I am now, although maybe there would not have been that much change in size. I am a runt, you know; I have always been a runt. It may be that therein lies my trouble. Perhaps a runt is foreordained to failure, perhaps a runt never can make good. But even when I know this, I still can keep on imagining. I can envision myself as a senior demon or a junior devil, with a big paunch of a belly and hair upon my chest and a very dirty laugh. That's one thing I never was able to achieve, that very nasty laugh that can chill a human's blood and shrivel up his soul."

"You seem to me," said Duncan, "to be quite philosophical about your plight. You have not grown bitter. Many lesser ones would have grown bitter. And you do not whine for pity."

"What would be accomplished," asked Scratch, "should I rant or rave or whine? No one would love me more; in fact, they'd love me less. No one loves a bellyacher. Although I do not know why I talk of love, for there's no one who loves me. Who could love a demon? There are those who may feel some small pity of me, but pity is not love. What they mostly do is laugh at me—at my twisted tail, at my clubhoof, at my crumpled horn. And laughter, my lord, is very hard to take. If they'd only shrink from me in horror, or even in disgust, I'd be better satisfied. I could live with that."

"I have not laughed at you," said Duncan, "nor have I felt overwhelming pity for you. But I'll not claim I love you."

"That is not expected," said Scratch. "I would have some suspicion of a human who professed love for me. I then would look for motive."

"And well you might," said Duncan, "but since I have proclaimed no love of you and thus have not attempted to put you in my debt, could I ask an honest question?"

"I would be pleased to have you."

"Then what can you tell me about the Horde of Evil? I would imagine that in this castle, from wizard talk, you may have heard some mention of it."

"That I have. What is it you would know? Although it occurs to me you may know something of it personally. I have been informed that you and your band stood them off not too long ago."

"Only a small party of them, mostly the hairless ones, although there were others. I don't know how many of them or how many kinds."

"The hairless ones," said Scratch, "if I correctly catch the meaning of your term, are the slogging infantry, the guards, the skirmishers who do the initial dirty work. In a certain sense they are not true evil beings, not really of the Horde. All they have is bone and muscle. They have little magic in them, perhaps none at all."

"And the rest of them? I talked with one who'd seen these others. Or told me that he had. He talked of imps and demons and I doubt that he is right. He was only using names he knew, generic names for evil. In our encounter outside the wall, I killed one of these others and Tiny killed another and they were not imps or demons. I know not what they were."

"You're quite right," said Scratch. "They are neither imps nor demons. Imps and demons are of this world and these other ones are not. You know, of course, that the Horde came from the stars."

"So I've been told," said Duncan.

"They are the spawn of other places, other worlds, which I suspect are not like our world. So it only stands to reason that the Evil they spawned is unlike the evil of the Earth. They come in inconceivable shapes and forms. The very alienness of them is sufficient to clot one's lifeblood. Their habits and their motives and their modes of operation, I presume, as well, would not conform to the habits, the motives and the operations of an evil thing of Earth. In going up against them you are encountering a sort of creature you can never have imagined, perhaps could not possibly imagine."

"Someone told me," Duncan said, "that they are no horde at all; they really are a swarm. What could be meant by that?"

"I do not really know," said Scratch. "I have, you must understand, no real knowledge of them. It's only what I've heard."

"I realize that. But about a swarm. Prior to being told that they were more like a swarm than horde, I had talked with a venerable bee master and he talked of swarming bees. In this wise, could there be some connection?"

"There is one thing," said Scratch, "although it was a short conversation only that I chanced to overhear. It might, just possibly, bear on this swarming matter."

"Please go on," said Duncan. "Tell me what it was."

"At those times," said Scratch, "when the Horde is in the process of devastating an area, in the way it has devastated northern Britain, the members of the Horde at times are prone to come together, to form a sort of living mass. Perhaps like unto a swarm of bees. The ones who talked of this, having heard of it from a few widely separated and isolated observations, were very puzzled by the reported action. At other times, it appears, the individual members of the Horde, when there is no devastation going on, seem to work alone or in small parties, only a few of them together. But when they are about a devastation, they do collect, or so observers say, into a massive swarm…"

"Now, wait a minute," Duncan said. "I think there might be a clue to that. A learned man told me, not long ago, that they devastated an area to make themselves secure so they can engage in a rejuvenation process, a retreat of sorts, he said, as fathers of the church sometimes hold retreats. Do you suppose…"

"You know," said Scratch excitedly, "you may have something there. I have never heard of their rejuvenation rites. But that could well be it. A coming together of the entire community of Evil, a close coming together, a personal contact, one to one, and from that contact they might gain an unknown strength, a renewing of themselves. What do you think? It sounds reasonable to me."

"That had been my thought. I'm glad you share it with me."

"That might explain the swarming."

"I think it could. Although there are so many factors, so many things of which we have no understanding and perhaps never will."

"That is true," said Scratch, "but it's a good hypothesis. One that could be worked on. You talked with Cuthbert. What had he to say of it?"

"We did not talk about the swarming. At the time I did not know of it and if he did, he did not mention it. I brought up the rejuvenation theory, but he seemed to think little of it. He said the Horde was frightened of something, probably was getting together to move against it, but for some reason had become confused. Tell me something, Scratch. If you were forced to take sides in this matter, if there were no way in which you could avoid taking sides, which side would you choose?"

The demon jiggled his hoof up and down and the chain clanked. "This may sound strange to you," he said, "but if forced to take a stand I'd stand in with you humans. My heritage may be evil, but it's a human evil, or at least an earthly evil. I could not stomach associating with an alien evil. I'd not know them and they'd not know me and I'd be uncomfortable with them. Evil may be evil, but there are various kinds of it and they can't always come together."

Steps sounded on the stairs coming down from the balcony into the reception hail, and Duncan looked around. Still dressed in her green gown, Diane seemed to be floating down the stairs. Only the tapping of her sandals betrayed her walking.

Duncan got off the bench and Scratch also clambered off to stand stiffly beside him.

"Scratch," asked Diane, "what are you doing off your pillar?"

"Milady," Duncan told her, "I asked him to come down and sit with me. It was more comfortable for me. That way I did not need to stand, craning up my head to look at him."

"Has he been pestering you?"

"Not at all," said Duncan. "We've had a pleasant talk."

"I suppose," said Scratch, "I'd best get up again."

"Wait a second," Duncan said, "and I'll lend you a hand." He reached down and hoisted the demon so he could catch hold with his crippled hands and scramble back atop the pillar.

"It was good talking with you," Duncan said. "Thanks for giving me your time."

"That is gracious of you, my lord. We will talk again?"

"Most assuredly," said Duncan.

The demon squatted atop the pillar and Duncan turned back to Diane. She was standing in the entrance waiting for him.

"I had thought," she said, "we might take a turn around the grounds. I'd like to show them to you."

"I'd be delighted," said Duncan. "It is kind of you."

He offered her his arm and they went down the stairs together.

"How is Cuthbert feeling?" Duncan asked.

She shook her head. "Not as well as yesterday. I am worried for him. He seems so irrational. He's asleep now. I waited to come down until he was asleep."

"Could my visit with him…"

"Not at all," she said. "His ailment grows upon him. It progresses day by day. Occasionally he has a good day, but not too often now. Apparently he has not been himself since I left to go in search of Wulfert. I suppose I should not have left him, but he said he'd be all right, that he could get along without me."

"You have great love of him?"

"You must remember, he has been a father to me. Since the time I was a babe. The two of us are family."

They reached the bottom of the stairs and now turned to the left to follow a path that led to the back of the castle park. The lawn ran down to just short of the river, fenced in by the ring of standing stones.

"You think, undoubtedly," she said, "that I am harsh with Scratch."

"It seems to me you might have been, a little. Certainly he has a right to come down off his pillar and sit upon a bench."

"But he pesters everyone," she said. "It is seldom now that we have visitors, but in the olden days there were many who came to the castle, and he always pestered them, wanting to pass the time of day with them, hanging onto them as long as possible to engage them in his silly jabber. Cuthbert felt, and I think the others did as well, that he was an embarrassment."

"I can see how that might be," said Duncan, "but he really is all right. I'm not an authority on demons, naturally, so I can't…"

"Duncan."

"Yes?"

"Let's stop all this foolish chatter. There's something that I have to tell you, and if I don't tell it to you now, I'll never have the strength to."

She had halted at the bending of the path, opposite a large clump of birch and pine. He swung about to confront her and saw that her face was drawn and white.

"There can't anything be that bad," he said, startled by the look of her.

"Yes, there can be," she told him tightly. "You remember just an hour or so ago you said that you must be leaving soon, and I said there was no hurry, that you should stay a while and rest."

"Yes, I remember that."

"I should have told you then. But I couldn't tell you. I simply couldn't say the words. I had to leave to try to find the courage."

He started to speak, but she held up a hand to stop him.

"I can't wait," she said. "There can be no further talk. I must tell you now. Duncan, it is this: you can't leave. You can never leave this castle."

He stood stupid in the path, the words not sinking in, refusing to sink in.

"But that can't be," he said. "I don't…"

"I can't say it any plainer. There's no way for you to leave. No one can help you leave. It's a part of the enchantment. There's no way to break it…"

"But you were just telling me you had visitors. And you, yourself…"

"It takes magic," she told him. "Your personal magic, not someone else's magic. It takes an arcane knowledge that one holds oneself. The visitors have had that kind of knowledge, that kind of magic. Because of that, they could go where no others could. I have some of that knowledge myself, also a special dispensation…"

"You mean because none of us has that knowledge…" She nodded, tears in her eyes.

"And you can't help us? The wizard can't help us?"

"No one can help. The ability must be yours."

Suddenly anger flared within him, blinding him.

"Goddamn it, then," he yelled, "why did you tell us to run for the castle? You knew what would happen. You knew we would be trapped. You knew…"

He stopped in mid-sentence, for he doubted she was hearing him. She was weeping openly, head bowed, arms hanging at her side. Just standing there, all alone, and weeping.

She raised a tearstained face to look at him, cringing away from him.

"You would have been killed," she said. "We broke the Harrier line, but they'd have been back again. It was only a momentary battle lull. They'd have returned and hunted you down, like wild animals."

She reached out for him. "You understand?" she cried. "Please do understand!"

She took a step toward him and he put his arms around her, drawing her close against him, holding her tightly. She bowed her head against him, weeping convulsively, her body shaking with the sobs.

Her muffled voice said, "I lay awake last night, thinking of it. Wondering how I could have done it, how I'd ever tell you. I thought perhaps I could ask Cuthbert to tell you. But that wouldn't have been right. I was the one who did it, I should be the one to tell you. And now I have—and now I have…"

24

They sat in silence for a time after Duncan had finished telling them—not so much a shocked silence as a benumbed silence.

Meg was the first to speak, attempting to cast a cheerful light on it. "Well, I don't know," she said. "It's not too bad. There are a lot worse places for an old bag such as Meg to live out her final days."

They disregarded her.

Finally Conrad stirred and said, "You say one has to have some knowledge of the arcane arts. What are the chances that we could acquire that knowledge?"

"I'd say not too good," said Duncan. "I suspect it would have to be a detailed and specific knowledge, perhaps well backgrounded by even other knowledge. Not all of us could learn these arts, perhaps not any of us. And who is there to teach us? Cuthbert is old and dying. Diane's knowledge is too small. I gather that it is not the knowledge that she has, but a special dispensation, that enables her to come and go."

"I suppose that's right," said Conrad, "and, anyhow, it would take too long a time. We haven't got that kind of time."

"No, we haven't," said Duncan. "Two dying men—a dying man here and another one at Oxenford."

"And what about Tiny? What about Daniel and Beauty? They could not be taught the arts. Even could we go we couldn't leave them behind. They're a part of us."

"Probably we could take them with us," Duncan said. "I don't know. There is Diane's griffin; he can come and go. Certainly he does not know the arts."

"Even if there is none to teach us," Andrew said, "there are books. I found the library this morning. A huge room and tons of writing."

"It would take too long," objected Duncan. "We'd have to sift through heaps of scrolls and might not recognize what we sought even should we find it. And there's no one to guide us in our studies. There'd also be the problem of language. Many of the books, I suspect, may be written in ancient tongues that now are little known."

"For myself," said Andrew, "for me, personally, this turn of events is no great tragedy. Quite willingly, if there were no other considerations, I could settle down here, for it is a pleasant place and I could carry on my profession here as well as elsewhere. But for the two of you I know it is a matter of great importance to get to Oxenford."

Conrad pounded the ground with his club. "We have to get to Oxenford. There has to be a way. I, for one, will not give up and say there is no way."

"Nor will I," said Duncan.

"I had a premonition of this," Andrew told them. "Or if not of this, of something very wrong. When I saw the birds and the butterfly…"

"What the hell," asked Duncan, "have birds and butterflies got to do with it?"

"In the woods," said Andrew. "In the forest just beyond the standing stones. The birds sit frozen in the branches, not moving, as if they might be dead, but they have a live look to them. And there was a butterfly, a little yellow butterfly sitting on a milkweed pod. Not stirring, not moving. You know the way a butterfly will sit, slowly moving its wings up and down, not very much, but some motion to them. This one did not move at all. I watched for a long time and it did not move. I think I saw, although I could not be sure, a thin film of dust upon it. As if it had been there a long time and dust had collected on it. I think the woods are part of the enchantment, too, that time has stopped there except for the people—and Hubert. Everything else is exactly the same as it was on the day this castle was created by enchantment."

"The stoppage of time," said Duncan. "Yes, that could be it. The castle is brand new, so are the standing stones. The chisel marks still fresh upon them, as if they had been carved only yesterday."

"But outside," said Conrad, "in that world we left to walk into this world, the castle lies in ruins, the stones have tumbled down. Tell me, m" lord, what do you think is going on?"

"It's an enchantment," said Meg. "A very potent one."

"We've beaten enchantments before," said Conrad. "We beat the enchantment that came upon us as we approached the strand."

"That was but a feeble spell," said Meg, "designed only to confuse us, to get us off the track. Not a well-constructed spell, not carefully crafted as this one surely is."

Duncan knew that what she said was true. Despite all their whistling past the graveyard, despite all of Conrad's bravado, the firm confidence they showed for one another's benefit, this was an enchantment they were not about to break.

They sat crouched in a row on the bottom step of the stairway that came down from the entrance. Before them ran the measured velvet of the lawn. Daniel and Beauty were at the foot of the park, near the standing stones, filling their bellies with succulent grass. Hubert, the griffin, still lay where he had been earlier in the day. Grown stiff with age, he did not move around too much.

"Where's Tiny?" Duncan asked.

"The last I saw of him," said Conrad, "he was digging out a mouse. He's around somewhere."

So here they were, Duncan told himself, caught in as pretty a mousetrap as anyone could want. This way not only would the manuscript never get to Oxenford, but it would be lost to mankind as well. All that would remain would be the two copies made at the abbey's scriptorium.

His father, at Standish House, and His Grace, at the abbey, would wait for word of him and Conrad, and there would be no word; there never would be word. They would have gone into the Desolated Land and that would be the last of them. Although perhaps, just perhaps, there might be a way for word to be gotten out. Diane could get out, could go out and return. At least, should she be willing, she could carry word to Standish House, perhaps carry the manuscript as well. There still might be time for someone else to get to Oxenford with it. Not through the Desolated Land, for that route had proved too dangerous; the chances of traversing it were slight. Despite the swarming pirates, it might be carried by ship. There still might be enough time left to pull together a fleet of fighting ships, manned by men-at-arms, to get through the pirate packs.

"M" lord," said Conrad.

"Yes, what is it?"

"A delicate matter."

"There are no delicate matters between you and me. Speak up. Tell me what you were about to."

"The Horde," said Conrad, "does not want us to get to Oxenford—well, maybe not actually to Oxenford, maybe they just don't want us to get anywhere. They've tried to block us at every turn. And now perhaps we're blocked for good. They'll have no more trouble from us."

"That's true. But what's your point?"

"The Lady Diane."

"What about the Lady Diane?"

"Could she be in league with them? Is this but a clever trick?"

Duncan flushed in anger, opened his mouth to speak and then held back the words.

Andrew hurriedly said, "I think not. To me it is inconceivable. Twice she aided us in battle. She would not have done this had she been in league with them."

"I think you probably are right," said Conrad. "It's only that we must consider every angle."

In the silence that followed, Duncan's mind went back again to his half-formed plan to get the manuscript to Oxenford by some other route. It wouldn't work, he knew. Diane, without question, could carry it to Standish House, could acquaint his father with what had happened to him and Conrad, but it seemed hardly likely that the manuscript could be carried to Oxenford by sea. His father and the archbishop had given that possibility full consideration and apparently had decided that it would be impossible. It might be that his father would decide to attempt it by land once again, sending out a small army of men-at-arms, but that sort of venture, it seemed to Duncan, would have little chance of success. The Reaver's band of thirty men or more had been easily wiped out. That his own small group had gotten as far as it had, he was convinced, was due only to the protection afforded by the talisman.

Or, wait a moment, he told himself. If Diane could take the manuscript to Standish House, she could take it just as easily to Oxenford. At Oxenford she could deliver it by hand to Bishop Wise and wait to bring back the word.

But, thinking this, he knew that none of it was possible, knew that he had been doing no more than conjuring up fantasies in a desperate effort to find some solution to his problem.

He could not hand over the manuscript to Diane—nor, perhaps, to any other. He could not give it to someone he could not trust and in this place, other than Conrad, whom could he trust? Diane had lured him and his party into this circle of enchantment. And now she said that she was sorry, had even wept in saying she was sorry. But expressions of sorrow come easily, he told himself, and tears just as easily.

And that was not all. The manuscript had been given into his keeping and it must stay that way. He was the one who had sole responsibility for it; it was a sacred trust he could share with no one else. In his mad groping for some way out of his predicament, he had forgotten, for the moment, the holy vow he implicitly had taken when His Grace had handed him the parchment.

"Another thing," said Conrad. "Could the demon help us? He might have a trick or two up his sleeve. If we appealed to him, if we were able to offer him the payment of setting him free, if we could…"

"With a demon I'll not deal," snapped Andrew. "He is a filthy beast."

"To me," said Duncan, "he seems a decent chap."

"You cannot trust him," Andrew said. "He would play you false."

"You said we could not trust Snoopy either," Conrad reminded him. "Yet if we'd paid attention to Snoopy, we'd not be where we are now. He warned us against the castle. He told us not to go near it."

"Have it your own way," whined Andrew, "but leave me out of it. I'll have no traffic with a demon out of Hell."

"He might have a way to help us."

"If he did, there'd be a price attached. Mark my word, there'd be a price to pay."

"I'd be prepared to pay the price," said Conrad.

"Not the kind he'd ask," said Andrew.

It was no good, Duncan told himself. Scratch, decent chap though he might be—something of which they could not be certain—would not be able to help them. Nor could anyone. Diane, if she had been able, would have opened a path for them. And if she were unable, so would be all the others of them. An enchantment of this sort, he told himself, if it were to have any value, would have to be foolproof and tamperproof.

Despite all his daydreaming, all his wishful thinking, the matter now was closed, the venture cancelled out. They could not leave the castle, the manuscript would not get to Oxenford, the one last hope of mankind, as His Grace had termed it, now had flickered out.

He rose heavily to his feet and started up the stairway.

"Where are you going, m" lord?" Conrad asked.

Duncan didn't answer him, for there was no answer. He had no idea where he might be going or what might be his purpose. He had no thought at all. It was as if his mind had been wiped clean of every thought he had. The only thing he knew was that somehow he must get away, although he did not know from what. And even as he thought this, he knew that he would be unable to get away from anything.

He kept on plodding up the stairs.

He had almost reached the entrance when he heard the scream—a ululating wail laden with an unsupportable terror, the kind of half screech, half howl a condemned soul might utter, interspersed with squeals of stricken horror. The sound nailed him to the spot, petrified and stupefied, terror-stricken by the horror of it.

The screaming was coming from somewhere inside the castle, and the first thought he had was of Diane. But it was not Diane, he realized; the sound was too full-throated, too deep to be made by a woman. Cuthbert, he told himself—it had to be the wizard.

With a superhuman effort he broke the chain of terror that held him in place, forced his legs to move, and went leaping up the stairs. As he burst through the entrance into the hall, he saw that it was Cuthbert. The old man was running along the balcony above the hall. He wore the long white nightgown with ruffles at the throat and wrists, the flaming red nightcap askew upon his head. His hands were lifted high, as if raised in horror, and his face was so twisted it seemed scarcely human. From his foam-flecked, frothing lips issued a stream of screams and squeals, and then, in mid-scream, he went over the balustrade that closed in the balcony and spun in the air, cartwheeling through the emptiness, his scream becoming one loud, persistent screech that did not end until he hit the floor. Then the scream cut off and he lay, a huddled, crumpled figure all in white except for the red nightcap.

Duncan rushed forward, and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of Diane, still clad in her filmy gown of green, running down one of the staircases from the balcony.

He reached Cuthbert and went to his knees beside him, reaching out his hands to lift the body, but stopping when he saw the rivulet of blood that came from beneath the shattered head to run along the polished flagstones. Then, more slowly, he reached out again and turned the body, saw what had happened to the head and face and then let it roll back again to its original position.

Diane was racing toward him and, getting to his feet, he leaped to intercept her. He caught her in his arms and held her while she beat at him with her fists.

"Don't look," he told her sharply. "You don't want to look."

"But Cuthbert…"

"He is dead," said Duncan.

Above him he heard a creaking, and looking up, he saw that a part of the balcony balustrade was swaying. Even as he watched it came crashing down. Shards of shattered stone skittered across the floor, and from somewhere within the castle's bowels came a groaning sound. Then one of the pillars that stood along the wall of the reception hall tieing the hall and balcony together slowly, gracefully peeled itself off the wall and toppled, not with a rush, but settling slowly, describing a polished arc, as if it were tired and lying down to rest. It struck the floor with violence despite its graceful fall and came apart, the broken debris flying out to roll across the flagstones.

"Let's get out of here," yelled Conrad. "The whole damn place is beginning to fall down."

From deep within the castle came the moaning of strained and shifting masonry, the moans punctuated by unseen crashes. Out of the walls of the hall blocks of stone were coming loose and moving, the entire wall writhing as the blocks continued their shifting.

"M" lord!" yelled Conrad. "M" lord, get a move on, for the love of God!"

Duncan moved as if in a dream, heading for the entrance, dragging Diane with him. Behind him came thunderous crashes as the castle continued to collapse. Meg was scuttling out the entrance, followed closely by Andrew. Conrad was hurrying toward Duncan, intent on grasping him and propelling him to safety.

A bawling voice rang through the hall.

"Help me!" the voice bawled. "Do not leave me here."

Duncan, still with a grip upon Diane, swung around to see where the voice came from.

Scratch, the demon, had jumped down off his pedestal and was on the floor, his back toward them, his hands upon the chain, leaning backward, heels dug in, tugging futilely at the chain in an effort to free it from the stone.

Duncan gave Diane a shove toward the entrance. "Run!" he shouted. "Don't look back, just run."

He leaped for the demon and the chain, but Conrad got there first. He shoved the demon to one side, wrapped the chain around his fists, and reared back on his heels, throwing the weight of his massive body against the staple fastened in the pillar. The links of the chain hummed and whined with the strain he put upon them, but the staple held.

Duncan, moving in behind Conrad, also grasped the chain. "Now," he said. The two of them threw their weight against the staple but it did not stir.

"No way," gasped Conrad. "We can't pull it out."

"Hang on. Keep it taut," said Duncan. He stepped around Conrad to position himself between Conrad and the staple. He drew his sword and lifted it high above his head, then struck at the chain with all his strength. Sparks flew as the blade's edge struck the iron, but the sword skidded along the length of chain and the links held. Duncan struck again and again sparks flew, but the chain still stayed intact.

One wall of the reception hall was down and stones were falling from the ceiling, bouncing on the flagstones. Stone dust floated in the air, and the floor was covered with tiny bits of fragmented masonry. Any minute now, Duncan knew, the entire structure would collapse upon them.

"Let the damn chain be," wailed the demon. "Cut off my hoof to free me from the chain."

Conrad grunted at Duncan. "He's right," he said. "That's the only way. Cut off his goddamn foot."

Duncan spun around, ducked behind Conrad.

"Fall down," he yelled at Scratch. "Hold up the foot so I can make a cut at it."

Scratch sprawled full length on the floor and held up the clubhoof. Duncan raised his blade for the stroke. Someone joggled him. He saw that it was Andrew.

"Get out of the way," Duncan shouted at him. "Give me room." But Andrew did not move. His staff was poised above his head and he brought it down in a vicious sweep. It struck the outstretched chain and at the blow the chain shattered into bits, tiny shards of metal spewing out along the floor.

Still holding the staff in his right hand, Andrew reached down with his left, grabbing the demon by the arm, and headed for the entrance, dragging the freed Scratch along behind him.

"Run for it!" yelled Conrad, and Duncan ran, with Conrad close behind him. Ahead of them Andrew loped along with surprising speed, still hauling along an outraged demon, who screamed to be let loose, that he could make it by himself. As they burst out the entrance and started down the stairway, the reception hail caved in upon itself with a thunderous roar. Small fragments of broken stone went whizzing past them, and a cloud of dust belched out of the entrance.

By this time Andrew had let go of Scratch, and the demon, despite his clubfoot, was scrambling frantically down the stairs. On the lawn at the foot of the stairs, Meg was kneeling with her arms locked around Diane's knees to keep her from struggling free. Behind Duncan and Conrad the castle continued crashing in upon itself. The central tower had already fallen and the walls were buckling.

Reaching the foot of the stairs, Duncan ran to reach Diane. He grasped her arm.

"You can't go back in," he said.

"Cuthbert," she said. "Cuthbert."

"She tried to break away and go back," said Meg. "I had to hold her. I had to seize violently upon her. She almost got away."

"It's all right now," said Duncan. "All of us are out."

He grasped Diane by both shoulders, shook her.

"It's all over now," he told her. "We can't help him. We never could have helped him. He died when he hit the floor."

Daniel and Beauty were at the foot of the park, standing beside one another, staring up toward them, watching the crumbling of the castle. Tiny was loping up the park toward them, his ears laid back, his tail standing out behind him. Hubert, the griffin, did not seem to be about.

Scratch hobbled over to confront Andrew. He stood before him, his head tilted up to look at him.

"I thank you, reverend father," he said, "for freeing me. That is a truly miraculous staff you have."

Andrew made a choking sound, as if he had swallowed something that tasted very bad. His face twisted in disgust and he had the look of a man who, any minute now, might fall down dead.

"It was not death I feared," said Scratch. "I doubt I would have died. It was something worse than death. Death is something that holds no fear for me, for I doubt I'll ever die. In a truly horrible way, I suppose I am immortal. But if the castle had crashed down upon me, I'd have been imprisoned there until the very stones should rot away with time and…"

Andrew made a croaking sound and swung his arm, as if to banish the demon forever from his sight.

"Leave me alone," he moaned. "Begone, foul demon, from me. I want no sight of you again."

"You do not even want my thanks?"

"Least of all I want your thanks. I want nothing of you. Forgetfulness is all I ask from you."

"But Andrew," said Conrad, walking up to him, "all this poor creature tries to do is express his gratitude. It is not meet you take such an attitude toward him. Demon he may be, but surely you must agree it is to his credit to feel gratitude. And he says right—you have a miracle of a staff. Why had you not told us before it held such puissant power?"

"Begone!" howled Andrew. "All of you begone. I want not to have you gaze upon me. I do not wish you to be the witnesses to my shame."

He turned about and started walking down the park. Conrad made as if to follow him, but Duncan signed him to desist.

"But there's something wrong with him," protested Conrad.

"In time he'll let us know," said Duncan. "Now all he wishes is to be left alone. Give the man some time."

Diane pulled herself away from Duncan and looked at him with level eyes.

"I'm all right now," she said. "It now is at an end. I know what happened. With the death of the final wizard, the enchantment now is ending."

The sun had been shining brightly, only halfway down the western sky, but now it seemed to be getting dark and the sun was gone.

The crashes from the castle were fewer, and in the deepening dark it no longer was a castle, but a heap of rubble, with only two towers still standing. A faint haze of white stone dust still could be seen hanging over the shattered masonry.

Conrad plucked at Duncan's sleeve. "Look, the standing stones," he said. Duncan looked toward the foot of the park and saw that the standing stones were no longer standing as they had been. Many of them were canted at an angle and the lintels had fallen off them.

He turned back to stare at the castle and in the moonlight (the moonlight!) he saw it as a mound—saw it as he first had seen it when they'd come out of the chasm with the windy voice in the upper reaches of its walls chanting, "Holy! Holy! Holy!"

"So it ends," said Diane, her voice small and soft. "The last wizard is dead and the enchantment gone. The castle a mound, as it has been for centuries."

"There are fires," said Conrad, and, indeed, there were, many little campfires gleaming in the dark on the hillside between the mounded castle and the hills.

"The Horde?" the demon asked. "Waiting there for us?"

"I think it unlikely," said Duncan. "The Horde would have no need of fires."

"More than likely," Conrad said, "it is Snoopy and his gang."

Duncan said to Scratch, "There's no need for you to stay. We placed no price upon the freeing of you. We have no claim upon you. If there's somewhere you want to go…"

"You mean you do not want me?"

"It's not that," said Duncan. "Should you want to stay with us, you're welcome."

"I thought, perhaps, the hermit. He is not happy with me. Although I cannot understand…"

"He's only dramatizing," said Conrad. "Showing off a little. He'll get over it."

"I have nowhere else to go," said Scratch. "I have no other friends. I can, mayhaps, be of some small service to you. I can fetch and carry."

"Stay, then," said Duncan. "Our company becomes more diverse as we proceed upon the journey. We can make room for a demon."

The ground beneath his feet, Duncan realized, no longer had the even smoothness of a lawn. It was rough and humpy, covered by wild grasses and low-growing ground cover that rasped, as he moved, against his boots. Somewhere, off in the distance, an owl was hooting, and in the hills above the castle mound a wolf howled mournfully.

The moonlight was bright, the moon a night or two from fullness, and to the south he caught a glimpse of the river, shining like a mirror.

Saved again, he thought, jerked out of the jaws of disaster by the most unlikely of events, the castle's enchantment broken by the death of the last of those who had held it together. Cuthbert had committed suicide, whether intentionally or in a fit of insanity, there was no way of knowing. But it had been suicide. He had hurled himself from the balcony to the floor below.

Diane moved close to him and he put an arm about her, held her tightly. She leaned her head upon his shoulder.

"I am sorry," he said. "Sorry that it happened this way."

"I should have known," she said. "I should have realized that one day Cuthbert would be gone and the castle gone with him. I guess I did know, way back in my mind, but I didn't allow myself to even think of it."

He stood, holding her closely, trying to give her the little comfort that he could, looking out beyond the canted standing stones to the fires that blazed along the slope.

"There must be a lot of them out there," he said. "Snoopy told us he'd collect an army."

"Duncan," asked Diane, "have you seen Hubert anywhere?"

"No, I haven't. He must be around. He was out there just a while ago with Daniel and Beauty."

She shook her head against his shoulder. "I don't think so. I think I've lost him, too. He was one with the castle. He'd been here so long."

"As soon as it is light," said Duncan, "we'll look for him. He may wander in before the night is over."

"There's someone coming," Conrad said.

"I don't see anyone."

"Just the other side of the standing stones. Snoopy, more than likely. I think we should go out to meet them. They won't want to pass beyond the stones. They know something's happened, but they can't know quite what."

"There's no danger now," said Diane.

"They'd not know that," Conrad said.

Conrad started down the slope and the rest of them followed. They passed between the standing stones and now it could be seen that a band of half a dozen little figures stood there waiting for them.

One of them stepped forward, and Snoopy's voice spoke to them in a scolding tone. "I warned you," he said. "Why can't you pay attention? I warned you to shun the castle mound."

25

Snoopy knelt on the ground beside the fire and swept an area clear of litter with his hand.

"Watch closely," he said. "I'll draw a map to show you the situation."

Duncan, standing to one side, bent over to stare at the smooth place on the ground, remembering how the goblin had drawn a map for them that first day they'd met in the chapel of the church.

Snoopy picked up a stick, stabbed a hole into the ground. "We are here," he said. He drew a ragged line along the map's northern edge. "There are the hills," he said. To the south he drew a snaky line. "That's the river." To the west he made a sweeping line, running south, then turning west and looping to the north.

"The fen," said Conrad.

Snoopy bobbed his head. "The fen."

He ran the stick along the line that represented the hills, curved it east, made a tight loop, and continued south of the snaky line that was the river.

"The Horde," he said, "is stretched out along that line. They have us hedged in north and east and south. Mostly hairless ones, with some of the other Horde members mixed in. They have us backed against the fen."

"Any chance of breaking through?" asked Conrad,

Snoopy shrugged. "We haven't tried. Anytime we want to, we can. We can filter out, a few here, a few there. They won't even try to stop us. We're not the ones they want. It is you they want. They lost you here; they know you couldn't have gotten out of this pocket. Perhaps they think you may be hiding in the mound. If that's the case, they tell themselves, the time will come when you must move out. They know you'll have to surface sometime and then they'll have you. And you can't filter out as we can."

"You mean," said Duncan, "that they've just been sitting there and you've been just sitting here?"

"Not entirely," said Snoopy. "Not us just sitting here, I mean. We've got dozens of magics set out for them, foolish little traps that will not really hold them, but that can hamper and confuse them, slow up any progress they might make. Some of the traps are mean as sin. They know they're there and don't want to tangle with them until they have to. If they start to move anywhere along their line, we'll know."

"You're sticking out your necks for us," said Duncan. "We had not intended that you should help us, of course. We were glad of the help you gave us. But we never expected this."

"As I told you," Snoopy said, "we can back off anytime we want to. There's no overwhelming danger for us. You're the ones who are in danger."

"How many of your people do you have here?"

"A few hundred. Maybe a thousand."

"I wouldn't have dreamed you could get together that many. You told us the Little Folk have small love of humans."

"I also told you, if you recall, that we have less love of the Horde. Once the word got started that here was a small band of humans marching into the face of the Horde, the news ran on all sides like wildfire. Day after day our people came flocking in, singly and in little bands. I will not try to deceive you. My people will not fight to the death for you. Actually they have but little stomach for fighting. They've never been a warrior people. But they'll do what they can."

"For which," said Duncan, "they have our gratitude."

"If you'd only pay attention to what we tell you," said Snoopy, testily, "you would be better off. I told you, specifically, to stay away from the castle mound. Don't go near it, I told you. From what you've told me, it was only by incredible human luck that you won free of it." He shook his head. "I do not understand this human capacity for luck. Our people never have that kind of luck."

"We had but little choice," Conrad pointed out. "If we'd not sought refuge in the castle, we'd have been massacred."

"If you could have gotten across the river…"

"There was no possibility of that," said Duncan. "The Horde contingent would have run us down. They were re-forming even as we ran."

"From what we found on the field of battle," Snoopy said, "you wreaked a deal of damage on them."

"Only for a time," said Conrad. "We could not have held. Even as it stood, Diane and the Huntsman saved us. The unexpected violence of their attack…"

Snoopy nodded his head emphatically. "Yes, I know. I know."

"This time," Duncan promised, "we'll pay a closer attention to you. We'll follow your counsel. What do you suggest?"

The goblin rocked back and sat upon his heels. "Not a thing," he said. "I have no suggestions."

"You mean nothing at all? No plan at all?"

"I've thought it over well," said Snoopy. "So have the rest of us. We held a council on it. We spoke for long, we thought extremely hard. We have nothing to offer. We fear your goose is cooked."

Duncan turned his head to look at Conrad.

"We'll find a way m" lord," said Conrad.

"Yes, of course," said Duncan, wondering as he said it if this might be some ghastly joke the Little Folk were playing on them. A joke or just the brutal truth?

"In the meantime," said Snoopy, "we'll do what we can for you. We've already found a blanket for the Lady Diane to shield her from the cold, for that flimsy gown she wore was no protection whatsoever. Without the blanket she would have frozen before the night was over."

Duncan straightened up from the position he had assumed to study Snoopy's map. The fire was burning high. Daniel and Beauty were standing companionably together, heads hanging, across the fire from him. Tiny lay curled up, half asleep, not far from Conrad. Around the fire sat and crouched a number of the Little People—goblins, gnomes, elves, sprites and pixies—but the only one he recognized was Nan, the banshee. She sat huddled close to the fire, her wings wrapped neatly about her. Her eyes, so black they seemed to be polished gems shining in the firelight, peered out from beneath a shock of disordered, coal-black hair.

He tried to read the faces, but could not make them out. If there was friendliness, he failed to see it. Nor did he see hatred. They simply sat there, staring, waiting. More than likely watching, he told himself, to see what the humans were about to do.

"These lines that hem us in," Conrad said to Snoopy. "Surely they cannot be made up of the entire Horde."

"No," said Snoopy. "The main Horde is across the fen, west of the fen, moving northward up its shore."

"Closing us in from the west."

"Perhaps not. Ghost has been keeping watch on them."

"Ghost has been working with you? Where is he now?"

Snoopy waved a hand. "Out there somewhere, watching. He and Nan have been our eyes. They've kept us well informed. I had hoped that there might be other banshees. They would have been useful.́But Nan is the only one who came. You can't count on them. They're an ugly lot."

"You said that the main Horde may not be blocking us on the west. How is that?"

"Ghost thinks that tomorrow or the next day they'll move farther north, leaving the west bank, directly across from us, free. But why are you so interested? You could not hope to cross the fen. No one in his right mind would try to cross the fen. It is mud and swamp and water and shifting sands. There are places where there is no bottom to it, and you can't know, until you come upon them, where those pits may be. One spot may be solid footing, but the next one is muck that seizes you and holds you. Once he sets foot into the fen, one has no chance of coming out alive."

"We'll see," said Conrad. "If that's the only hope, we'll try it."

"If Hubert is still around," said Duncan, "Diane could go out on patrol with Ghost and Nan. That would give us one more set of eyes."

"Hubert?"

"Diane's griffin. He was not around after the castle fell."

"We'll look for him tomorrow," Snoopy said.

"I'm afraid," said Diane, "that he'll not be found."

"Nevertheless, we'll look," Snoopy promised. "We'll try to make up as well for all you lost."

"We lost everything," said Conrad. "Blankets, cooking utensils, food."

"It will be no problem," said the goblin. "Some of our people right now are working on a set of buckskins for milady. The gown she wears is useless for this sort of life."

"It's kind of you," said Diane. "One thing else I beg of you. A weapon."

"A weapon?"

"I lost my battle axe."

"I don't know about a battle axe," said Snoopy. "But perhaps something else—a blade, perhaps."

"A sword?"

"Yes, a sword. I think I know of one I can lay my hands upon."

"It would be gracious of you."

Snoopy grumbled. "I don't know what's the use of all of this. You're caught within a trap. To my way of thinking, there is no way to get out of it. When the Horde decides to move in, they'll squeeze you like a bunch of grapes."

Duncan looked around the campfire circle. All the Little People crouched there were bobbing their heads in agreement with Snoopy.

"I never saw such a bunch of quitters in all my life," said Conrad scornfully. "Hell, you're ready to give up without even trying. Why don't you all take off? We'll get along without you."

He turned and walked out into the darkness.

"You must excuse my friend," Duncan told those huddled at the fire. "He is not one to accept defeat with any grace."

Just beyond the fire a figure moved furtively out of the trees, stood there for a moment, then scuttled back again. Duncan hurried in his direction and stopped at the edge of the grove from which the figure had emerged.

He called softly, "Andrew, where are you? What is wrong with you?"

"What do you want with me?" asked Andrew in a pettish voice.

"I want to talk with you. You've been acting like a spoiled child. We have to get to the bottom of it."

Duncan walked a few steps into the grove. Andrew moved out from behind a tree. Duncan came up to him, stood facing him.

"Out with it," he said. "What is chewing on you?"

"You know what's chewing on me."

"Yes, I think I may. Let us talk about it."

The firelight did not reach the spot where they stood, and all that Duncan could see of the hermit was the white blob of his face, but in the faintness of the light he could read no expression.

"You remember that night we talked in my cell," said Andrew. "I told you how I had tried hard to be a hermit. About how I tried to read the early fathers of the Church. About how for hours on end I sat staring at a candle flame, and how none of it seemed to be of any use at all. I think I told you I was a failure as a hermit, that my early hope to be at least a slightly holy man had come to nothing. I probably told you that I was poor timber for a hermit, that I was not cut out to be a holy man. I am sure I told you all of this and perhaps a great deal more. For I was sore of heart and had been for some time. It is no easy matter for a man to spend the greater part of his life at his profession and in the end to know that he has failed, that all his time and effort have gone for naught, that all his hopes and dreams have vanished with the wind."

"Yes, I remember some of it," said Duncan. "I think, in telling it now, you have embellished it a bit. I think that having felt yourself a failure as a hermit, you then jumped at the slightest chance to become a soldier of the Lord. And if that is what you really are, although I'm not too sure of the proper definition, you have done rather well at it. You have no occasion to be out here now sulking in the brambles."

"But you do not understand."

"Please enlighten me," said Duncan dryly.

"Don't you see that all the staring at the candles paid off in the end? The candle business, and perhaps some of the other things I did. Perhaps the fact that I willingly took the road as a soldier of the Lord. I'm not sure that I am a holy man—I would not be so brash as to claim I am. It might be sacrilegious to even hint I am. But I do have powers I did not have before, powers that I had no suspicion that I had. My staff…"

"So that is it," said Duncan. "Your staff broke the demon's chain. Broke it after a full blow of my sword did nothing but strike a shower of sparks from it."

"You know, if you'll but admit it," Andrew said, "that the staff itself could not have fazed the chain. You know that the answer must be either that the staff itself suddenly has acquired a magic, or that the man who wielded it…"

"Yes, I do agree," said Duncan. "You must have certain holy powers for the staff to accomplish what it did. But, for God's sake, man, you should be glad you have."

"But don't you see?" wailed Andrew. "Don't you truly see my predicament?"

"I'm afraid this entire thing escapes me."

"The first manifestation of my power resulted in the freeing of a demon. Can't you understand how that tears me up inside? That I, a holy man, if a holy man I am, should use this power, for the first time, mind you, to free a mortal enemy of Holy Mother Church?"

"I don't know about that," said Duncan. "Scratch does not appear to be a bad sort. A demon, sure, but a most unsuccessful demon, unable to perform even the simple tasks of an apprentice imp. Because of that he ran away from Hell. And to demonstrate how little he was missed, what a poor stick of a demon he had turned out to be, the Devil and his minions did not turn a hand to haul him back to his tasks in Hell."

"You have tried to put a good face on it, my lord," said Andrew, "and I thank you for your consideration. You're an uncommon kindly man. But the fact remains that a black mark has been inscribed against me."

"There are no black marks," said Duncan with some irritation. "This is about as silly an idea as I have ever heard. There's no one sitting somewhere, inscribing black marks against you or anyone else."

"Upon my soul," said Andrew, "there is such a mark. No one else may know, but I know. There is no way for me to wipe it out. There is no eraser that will obliterate it. I'll carry it to my death and, mayhaps, beyond my death."

"Tell me one thing," said Duncan. "It has puzzled me. Why, seeing that the sword had failed, did you wield the staff? Did you have some sort of premonition, some sort of inner light…"

"No, I did not," said Andrew. "I was carried away, is all. Somehow or other, I don't know why, I wanted to get into the act. You and Conrad were doing what you could and I felt, I suppose, although at the time I was not aware of it, that I should do what I could."

"You mean that when you dealt such a mighty blow with that staff of yours that you were trying to help the demon?"

"I don't know," said Andrew. "I never thought of it in that way. But I suppose I was trying to help him. And, realizing that, my soul is wrung the harder. Why should I try to help a demon? Why should I lift a finger for him?"

Duncan put out a hand and grasped the hermit's scrawny shoulder, squeezed it hard. "You are a good man, Andrew. Better than you know."

"How is that?" asked Andrew. "How does helping a demon make me a good man? I would have thought it made me worse. That's the entire trouble. I gave aid to a minion out of Hell, with the reek of sulphur still upon him."

"One," said Duncan, "that had forsaken Hell. That turned his back upon it, renouncing it. Perhaps for the wrong reasons, but still renouncing it. Even as you and I renounce it. He is on our side. Don't you understand that? He stands now with us. One with the mark of evil still upon him, but now he stands with us."

"I don't know," said Andrew doubtfully. "I'd have to think on that. I'd have to work it out."

"Come back to the fire with me," said Duncan. "Sit by the fire and be comfortable while you work at it. Get some warmth into those shivering bones of yours, some food into your belly."

"Come to think of it," said Andrew, "I am hungry. Meg was cooking up a mess of sauerkraut and pig's knuckles. I could taste them, just thinking of them. It has been years since I have eaten kraut and knuckles."

"The Little Folk can't offer you kraut and knuckles, but there is a venison stew that is monstrous good. There's enough of it left, I'm sure, to more than fill your gut."

"If you think it would be all right," said Andrew. "If they'd make room for me."

"They'll welcome you," Duncan assured him. "They've been asking after you." Which was not exactly true, but it was a small untruth and it could do no harm. "So come along." Duncan put an arm around the hermit's shoulder and together they walked back to the fire.

"I'm not yet clear in mind," warned Andrew, stubborn to the last. "There is much to puzzle out."

"Take your time," said Duncan. "You'll get it straightened out. You'll have the time to mull it over."

Duncan escorted him across the cleared area around the fire at which he'd talked with Snoopy. Diane and Nan were sitting together and he took him over to them.

"Here's a hungry man," he said to Nan. "Could there still remain a bowl of stew?"

"More than a bowl," said the banshee. "More than even he can eat, hungry as he looks." She said to Andrew, "Sit down close to the blaze. I will get it for you."

"Thank you, ma" am," said Andrew.

Duncan swung about and looked for Conrad, but was unable to locate him. Nor could he find Snoopy among the scattered Little People.

The moon had moved well up in the sky. It must be almost midnight, Duncan told himself. Within a short time all of them should be settling down to get some sleep, for they'd need to be up by dawn. What they'd do he had no idea, but as quickly as possible they had to have a course of action planned. Conrad, he thought, might have turned up some new piece of information, and it was important that he see him soon.

It was just possible that Conrad had wandered over to another fire. Purposefully he set out for the nearest one. He had gone only a couple of hundred feet or so when someone hissed at him from the darkness of a clump of bushes. Swiftly he swung around, his hand going to the sword hilt.

"Who's there?" he challenged. "Show yourself."

A deeper shadow detached itself from the bushes. Moonlight shimmered on the crumpled horn.

"Scratch, what are you doing here?" Duncan asked.

"Waiting for you," the demon said. "I have a thing to tell you. Quietly. Not too loud. Squat down so we can talk."

Duncan squatted to face the dumpy little figure. The demon leaned forward painfully, head thrust forward by the hump upon his back.

"I have been listening," he said. "You are in trouble."

"It's nothing new," Duncan told him. "We always are in trouble."

"But this time facing powerful forces on all sides of you."

"That is true."

"No way to escape?"

"So the Little People tell us. We do not take their word entirely."

"There is a way across the fen," said Scratch.

What was going on? What was Scratch attempting to do here? Shut up in the castle for centuries, how would he know about the fen?

"You do not believe me," said the demon.

"It's hard to. How could you know?"

"I told you once that someday I would tell you of my adventures. We never got around to it."

"You did tell me that. I'd be delighted to hear the tale you have to tell. But not now. I'm looking for Conrad."

"Not all of it now," said Scratch. "Just a part of it. You must know that once I fled from Hell the word got around in human circles there was a demon loose—a fugitive demon from whom the protection of Old Scratch had been withdrawn, fair game for anyone who could lay hands upon him. I was hunted mercilessly.

"That's how I came to know about the fen. At this very place, the south end of the fen, I hid for several years; until I felt that I was safe, that everyone had forgotten me, that the trail had grown cold and the hunt been given up. So I came out of the fen and, wouldn't you know it, almost immediately was gobbled up."

"But the fen is death," said Duncan. "Or so we have been told."

"If one knows the way…"

"And you know the way?"

"A water sprite showed me. A grumpy little sprite, but he took pity on me. One must be careful, but it can be done. There are certain landmarks…"

"It's been a long time since you've been in the fen. Landmarks can change."

"Not these. There are certain islands."

"Islands change. They can shift or sink."

"The hills come down to the fen and stop. But a part of them, very ancient parts of them, still remain, much worn down and lower than the hills. These are the islands that I speak of. They stand solid through the ages. All rock, they cannot sink. Rock ledges run underwater between them, connecting them. The ledges are what you follow to get across the fen. They are covered by water and just by looking, you cannot see them. One must know."

"Deep water?"

"Up to my neck in places. No deeper."

"All the way across? To the western shore?"

"That is right, my lord. A hidden ridge of rock, a part of the ancient hills, but there are tricky places."

"You'd recognize the tricky places?"

"I am sure I can. I have a good memory."

"You would lead us, show us the way?"

"Honored sir," said Scratch, "I owe you a debt I had never hoped I could repay. Showing you across the fen would be only partial payment. But if you would accept…"

"We do accept," said Duncan. "If events so order themselves…"

"Events?"

"It may be the main Horde of Harriers will block our way. They are moving up the west bank of the fen. If they should continue moving north, as they were when last seen, then, with your help, we can cross the fen and be clear of them."

"There is one thing else."

"Yes?"

"At the western edge of the fen stands a massive island, much larger than the others. It is guarded by dragons."

"Why dragons?"

"The island," said Scratch, "is a wailing place. The Place of Wailing for the World."

26

Diane, Meg, and Nan were sitting together by the fire, a little apart from the others, when Duncan returned, trailed by the limping, lurching Scratch. A short distance off, Andrew was stretched out on the ground, covered by a sheepskin, fast asleep and snoring. A long, slender fold of black velvet lay on Diane's lap.

Meg cackled at Duncan. "You should see what Diane has. You should see what Snoopy gave her."

She gestured at the fold of velvet.

Duncan turned to look at Diane. Her eyes were sparkling in the firelight and she smiled at him. Carefully she unfolded the velvet to reveal what lay within it.

The naked blade shone with a hundred fiery highlights and a nest of inset jewels glinted in the hilt.

"I told him," she said, "that it was too magnificent for me, but he insisted that I take it."

"It is splendid," Duncan said.

"The goblins have guarded it for years," said Nan, "as a sacred treasure. Never, in their wildest dreams, did they ever think they'd find a human they would want to give it to." She shrugged. "Of course it is far too massive for a goblin or any other of our kind to ever think of wielding."

Duncan went down on his knees in front of Diane, reached out to touch the blade.

"May I?" he asked.

She nodded at him.

The steel beneath his fingers was cold and smooth. He ran his fingers along its length in something that was close to a caress.

"Duncan," Diane said in a hushed voice, "Duncan, I'm afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Afraid I know what it is. Snoopy didn't tell me."

"Then," said Duncan, "I don't think you should ask."

He picked up one end of the velvet and folded it back to cover the sword.

"Cover it," he said. "It is a precious thing. It should not be exposed to the damp night air. Snug it safe and tight."

He said to Meg, "There is something I should ask you. Some days ago you told us about the wailing for the world. You told us very little. Can you tell us more of it?"

"No more than I told you then, my lord. We spoke of it when we heard the keening from the fen."

"You said there were several such wailing places, probably widely separated. You seemed to think one of the wailing places was located in the fen."

"So it has been told."

"Who is it that does the wailing?"

"Women, my lord. Who else would wail in this world of ours? It is the women who have cause for wailing."

"Do you have a name for these wailing women?"

Meg wrinkled up her face, trying to remember. "I believe there is a name for them, my lord, but I don't think I've ever heard it."

"And you," Duncan said to Nan. "You banshees are wailers."

"Wailers, yes," said Nan, "but not for the entire world. We have trouble enough to wail for those who need it most."

"Perhaps the entire world stands in need of wailing, of a crying out against its misery."

"You may be right," the banshee told him, "but we wail at home, on the land we know, for the widow left alone, for the hungry children, for the needy old, for those bereft by death. There is so much to wail over that we can take care of only those we know. We crouch outside the lonely cottage that is overrun by grief and need and we cry out against those who have occasioned the grief and need and we…"

"Yes, I understand," said Duncan. "You know nothing of the wailing for the world?"

"Only what the witch has told you."

A soft step sounded behind Duncan, someone moving lightly. "What is this about the wailing?" Snoopy asked. Duncan swiveled around to face the approaching goblin. "The demon says there is a wailing in the fen."

"The demon's right," the goblin said. "I have heard it often. But what has that to do with us?"

"Scratch tells me the fen can be crossed. He claims he knows the way."

Snoopy puckered up his face. "I doubt that," he said. "It has always been told the fen is impassable."

"But you do not know for sure?"

"I do not know for sure. No one has ever been fool enough to try. No one ever puts a boat upon its waters, for there are lurking dangers there that rise up to seize one."

"Then," said Duncan, "look upon a fool. I am about to try."

"You'll be swallowed up," said Snoopy.

"We'll be swallowed up in any case. You say the Horde pens us in. That leaves the fen the only way to go."

"With the main body of the Horde on the western shore?"

"You told me Ghost had reported they were moving north. If they continue to move north, if they move far enough to the north, the way will be clear."

"The ones surrounding us are beginning to move in," said Snoopy. "A closing of the net. There is some movement from the east. They've tripped some of our magic traps."

"Then all the more reason," said Duncan, "for trying the fen. And as quickly as we can."

"If the forces surrounding us know that you are here, and most certainly they must for otherwise there would be no movement, then surely the main body on the fen's western bank also must know."

"But the Horde on the western bank can have no idea we will try to cross the fen."

Snoopy threw up his hands in disgust. "Go on," he growled. "Do what you wish. You will in any case. You do not listen to me. You have never listened to me."

"I'm sorry," Duncan said. "You offer no alternatives. The fen does offer an alternative. I have decided I will go. The demon will go with me to point the way. Conrad, I am sure, will come along."

"And so will I," Diane said softly. She said to Snoopy, "You spoke of buckskins for me. When will they be ready? I cannot essay the fen in such dress as this."

"By first morning light," said Snoopy. "Our people have been working all the night."

"We can't leave by morning light," said Duncan, "although I would like to. Before we leave a search for the griffin must be made."

"There has been searching in the night," said Snoopy. "He has not been found. At the first hint of dawn the area will be swept again. We have slight hope of finding him. He was tied too closely for too long to the wizards and the castle. He was old and worn out with long service and may not have wished to survive the castle. It is unlikely he would have survived with the final wizard gone. Milady, I think, shares our beliefs."

"Yes, I do," said Diane. "But without Hubert I still will go."

"You could ride Daniel," Duncan said.

"No. Daniel is your horse. He's too accomplished a war-horse to be hindered by a rider save that he and the rider fight as one. In all the encounters on this journey you have never ridden him. The two of you have fought side by side. That is as it should be."

"I will go with you," said Nan. "The fen holds no terrors for me, since I can fly above it, although haltingly and with no grace at all, flapping like a crow. Perhaps I can be of some help in spying out the land."

"And since I started this adventure with you," Snoopy said, "you cannot leave me out."

"There is no need," said Duncan. "You have little faith in what is proposed and certainly you should stay here to direct your people."

"There is no need of my direction," Snoopy told him. "In truth, I never have directed them. I simply sent out a call for their gathering. And they came, as if to a picnic, for the adventure they might find. But they are not ones who will face up to great danger. Rather, being wise people, all of them, they run from danger. To tell the honest truth, they're beginning to scatter now. By the time you are gone, they will be as well."

"Then, in good common sense, why don't you scatter with them? We thank you for the thought of going with us, but it is beyond…"

Snoopy broke in with a fine display of rage. "You would deprive me of a feat of which I can talk for years, with all the others of them sitting about to listen, intent on every word as it drops from off my lips? The life of the Little Folk, as you are wont to call us in your patronizing manner, is a boring life. We have but few occasions to perform feats of derring-do. Few of us ever have the chance of becoming even minor heroes. It was different in those days before you humans came and pushed us off our land. The land was then our own and we played out upon it our little dramas and our silly comedies, but now we can do none of this, for we have not the room, and halfway through are certain to run into some stupid, loutish human who reminds us of our present poor estate and thereby robs us of what little fun we're having."

"Well, all right, then," said Duncan, "if that's the way it is. We'll value your company. Although I must warn you that somewhere along the way we may meet with dragons."

"I give that for dragons," said Snoopy, snapping his fingers.

Twigs snapped in the darkness and Conrad came blundering into the firelit circle. He made a thumb, pointing into the air above him.

"See who I've found," he said.

They all looked up and saw that it was Ghost, who floated down to mingle with them.

"I had given you up, my lord," he said to Duncan. "I searched and searched for you, but there wasn't any trace. But even as I searched I held true to the task I had been assigned. I watched the Horde, in its many various parts, and lacking anyone to whom I could report, since you were gone, I passed my knowledge on to Snoopy. He was as puzzled as I was as to what could have happened to you, but he had suspicions that your disappearance had something to do with the castle mound and this has now been confirmed by Conrad, whom I was delighted to stumble on just a while ago and…"

"Hold up," said Duncan, "hold up. There's word I want from you."

"And I, my lord, have word to give you. But first I must ask, for mine own peace of mind, if you still intend, despite the many interruptions, to continue on to Oxenford. I still retain the hope of getting there for, as you know, I have many troublesome questions to ask the wise ones there. Troublesome questions for me, perhaps, but I hope not for them. It is my most earnest dream they can give me answers that will set me more at ease."

"Yes," said Duncan, "we do intend to continue on to Oxenford. But now my question. What about that part of the Horde traveling up the west bank of the fen?"

"They continue north," said Ghost. "They've picked up speed. They are traveling faster now."

"And show no sign of stopping?"

"There is no sign of their slackening their pace. They continue lunging onward."

"That settles it," said Duncan, with some satisfaction. "We start tomorrow, as soon as we are able."

27

At the first paling of the eastern sky, they searched for Hubert. They swept the grounds surrounding the castle mound and the stretch of river meadows below and to every side of the castle without finding a trace of the griffin. There were, now, fewer of the Little People than there had been the night before, but those who were left aided in the search with a will. Once the search was done, they disappeared, drifting off with no one able to mark their going. All that remained to show they had ever been there were a dozen smoldering, dying campfires spread out on the slope above the castle mound.

Duncan and Conrad pulled their small force together and started out, heading for the fen. To the north loomed the great mass of the hill through which Duncan and his band had passed, its western end cut off sharply where it met the fen. To the south the river wound lazily through the marshy meadows.

The band traveled spread out now rather than in a column, through open land broken here and there by small groves of trees and sparse woodland, the space between covered by low ground cover and patches of hazel. The morning, which had dawned clear and bright, became dismal as heavy clouds moved in from the west, not covering the sun, but dimming it so that it became little more than a pale circle of light.

Less than an hour after starting, they heard the first faint sound of wailing. Subdued by distance, it still was clear, a far lament of loneliness with an overtone of hopelessness, as if the cause of wailing would never go away, but would endure forever.

Walking beside Duncan, Diane shivered at the sound of it.

"It goes through one," she said. "It cuts me like a knife."

"You've never heard it before?" he asked.

"Yes, of course, at times. But from far off and I paid no attention to it. There are always funny noises coming off the fen. I had no idea what it was and…"

"But the wizards would have known."

"Knowing, they might have told me. Except when I went to search for Wulfert, I seldom left the castle. In many ways, although I was not aware of it, I lived a protected life."

"Protected? You, a warrior maid…"

"Don't mistake me," she said. "I am no forlorn waif, no damsel in distress. I rode on certain forays and I learned the art of arms. And that reminds me, there's something I must thank you for. You believed with me in the blade."

She carried it naked in her hand, for there was no scabbard for it. She cut a small figure with it and it flashed even in the faint sunlight.

"It is a good piece of steel," he said.

"And that is all?"

"Snoopy told you nothing. You should ask no further."

"But there was a sword lost long ago and…"

"There have been many swords and many of them lost."

"All right," she said. "That's the way we leave it?"

"I think it's for the best," said Duncan.

They had been breasting the uplift of a long and gentle swale and now they came to the top of it, all of them bunched together and staring toward the west, where they could see the thin faint blueness of the fen. At the bottom of the uplift lay a long thin strip of forest lying between them and the fen, running from the cut-off mass of the northern range of hills as far south as they could see.

Scratch edged up to Duncan, tugging at his jacket for attention.

"Scratch, what do you want?" asked Duncan.

"The woods."

"What about the woods?"

"It wasn't there before. I remember from the time that I was here. There wasn't any woods. The land ran smooth down to the fen."

"But that was long ago," said Conrad. "A long, long time ago."

"Several centuries," said Diane. "He's been chained in the castle for that long."

"In several centuries," said Duncan, "a woods could have grown up."

"Or he remembers incorrectly," said Conrad.

Andrew growled at them, thumping his staff on the ground. "Pay no attention," he said, "to that imp of Satan. He is a troublemaker."

"Meg," asked Duncan, "do you know about this woods?"

"How could I?" asked the witch. "I've not been here before."

"It looks all right to me," said Conrad, "and I always am the first to sniff out trouble. Just an ordinary woods."

"I can detect nothing wrong with it," said Snoopy.

"I tell you," shrilled Scratch, "it was not there before."

"We'll proceed cautiously," said Conrad. "We'll keep on the watch. To get to the fen, it is quite clear that we must make our way through the woods."

Duncan looked down at Scratch, who still was standing close beside him, still with a hand upon the jacket as if he meant to tug it once again. In the other hand he held a long-handled trident, its three tines barbed and sharp.

"Where did you get that?" asked Duncan.

"I gave it to him," said Snoopy. "It belonged to a goblin that I know, but it is too heavy and awkward for such as we to wield."

"Giving it to me," said Scratch, "he remarked that it was appropriate to me."

"Appropriate?"

"Why, certainly," said Snoopy. "You are not up, my lord, on your theology."

"What has all of this got to do with my theology?" asked Duncan.

"I may be wrong," Snoopy told him, "but I thought it was an old tradition. I happened, not too long ago, upon a scroll that I supposed, from what I saw of it, must have recorded Bible stories. I did not take the time to puzzle out any of the barbarity of your written language, but I did look at the pictures. Among them I found a drawing, rather crudely done, showing demons, such as this friend of ours, pitchforking a number of disconsolate humans into the flames of Hell. The instruments the demons used to do the forking very much resembled this trident that our present demon holds. That is all I meant when I suggested that such a weapon might be appropriate to him."

Duncan grunted. "Let's be on our way," he said.

A faint path, seemingly one that was not often traveled, angled down the gentle slope toward the woods. From a short distance off the edge of the woods seemed quite ordinary. It seemed in no way different from any other patch of woodland. The trees were ancient, with a hoary look about them, thick through at the butt, quickly branching to form a heavy tangle of interlocking branches. The faint pathway they had been following continued on into the thickness of the woods, providing enough clearance through the tangle for a man to follow it with ease.

"You're quite certain," Duncan asked Scratch, "that this woods was not here when you last saw this place? Can you be absolutely sure this is the place you saw?"

Scratch lifted his clubfoot and scratched the other leg with the misshapen hoof.

"I am fairly certain sure," he said. "I doubt I could be mistaken."

"In any case," Conrad pointed out, "we shall have to cross it if we are to reach the fen."

"That is true," said Duncan. "Conrad, I think you and Tiny should take the point, as you always do. The narrowness of the path means that we must go in single file. Diane and I will guard the rear. Don't let Tiny get too far ahead of you."

Meg, who had been riding Daniel, slipped off his back.

"You'd better get back on," said Conrad. "We'll be moving out."

"All the more reason why I should not be in the way of a fighting horse," said Meg. "I can hobble by myself through this small patch of woods."

"I'll walk beside her," said Andrew, "to help her on her way."

"Why, thank you, kind sir," said Meg. "It is not often that an old bag such as I has offer of an escort."

"Meg," asked Duncan, "is there something wrong? You would not encumber Daniel, you tell us. Is it that…"

The witch shook her head. "Nothing wrong at all, my lord. But these woods are close quarters."

Duncan made a sign to Conrad, who moved out, walking down the path, with Tiny stalking close ahead of him. The others fell into line. Diane and Duncan brought up the rear, with the crippled demon limping painfully ahead of them, using the reversed trident as a staff to help himself along.

The woods held a somber sense, such as one would expect of a woods in autumn, the sense of the dying, drifting leaf, of the frost-shriveling of the little plants that grew on the forest floor. But otherwise there seemed to be nothing and that, thought Duncan, in itself was not wrong, for that was the way that it should be. Most of the trees were oaks, although there were other scattered kinds. The path, he told himself, was the sort of trail that deer, over the years, might beat out for themselves, going in single file, stepping in one another's tracks. A hush hung over everything. Not even a leaf was rustling and that, Duncan thought, was strange, for there seldom was a time when leaves did not do some rustling. Even on the calmest day, with no wind at all, in an utter quietness, somewhere in a woods a leaf would rustle for no apparent reason. Fallen leaves, lying on the path, muffled their footfalls and no one spoke a word. The hush of the woods had imposed a hush on the people who entered it.

As is the case with most woodland trails, the path was a crooked one. It dodged between trees, it wound around a fallen, moldering forest giant, it avoided lichen-covered boulders, it clung to the slightly higher ground, skirting the small wet areas that lay on the forest floor—and in doing all of this it wound a twisted way.

Duncan, bringing up the rear, with Diane just ahead of him and ahead of her the limping, lurching demon, stopped and turned halfway around to view the path behind him. For, unaccountably, he felt an itching between his shoulder blades, the sort of feeling a receptive man might have from something watching him. But there was nothing. The path, the little that he could see of it, was empty, and there was no sign that any other might be near.

The feeling, he told himself, came about from the almost certain knowledge that in a very little time the entire area held by the Little Folk would be swarming with the hairless ones and other members of the Horde, closing in to make their kill. The Little Folk, more than likely, by now had cleared the area. They had started sifting out before the night was over and by the time he and his band had left, there had been none about—none but Snoopy, who now was marching up there in front with Conrad, and Nan, who presumably was flying about to spy out whatever might be happening. The magic traps the Little Folk had set out might impede the Horde for a time, but perhaps for only a few hours at the best. The traps, wicked and mean as some of them might be, could not stand for long against the more powerful and subtle magic of the Horde. In the final reckoning, all the traps would be little more than minor nuisances.

He put his hand to his belt pouch, felt the small, round hardness of Wulfert's talisman, the yielding softness of the manuscript, listening to its crackling rustle as he pressed his fingers to it.

If only Scratch should be right, he told himself—if they could cross the fen, if the main body of the Horde kept moving northward up the west margin of the fen—then they still would have a chance. With the south open for the run to Oxenford, there still would be a chance to carry out the mission. It was the only chance they had, he reminded himself. There were no alternatives. There were no choices, no decisions to be made.

With one last look down the empty path behind him, he turned about and hurried to catch up with Diane. As he hurried along the path, he caught the first faint sound of wailing he had heard since they'd entered the woods. It seemed farther off than ever, a mere whisper of a sound, muted and broken up by the denseness of the trees.

Suddenly, ahead of him, the heavy growth lessened, and he stepped out into a small clearing, an almost circular clearing, as if in some time long past a woodsman had chopped down the trees and hauled off the logs to make a cleared circle in the forest.

The rest of the band had stopped and were clustered in the center of the clearing. As Duncan stepped smartly forward to join them, he glanced around and it seemed that the circle was hemmed in by larger and thicker trees than they had passed through heretofore. The trunks of the trees were huge and they grew almost cheek by jowl; their massive interlocking branches, springing from the trunks only a few feet above the ground, formed an impenetrable hedge that held them locked inside the circle.

He hurried up to Conrad. "What are we stopping for?" he asked. "Why don't you continue on? We have to reach the fen."

"There is no path," said Conrad. "A path comes into the clearing, but there is none leading out."

"And now," said Andrew, thumping his staff upon the ground with an exasperation summoned up to mask his fear, "there's none coming in, as well."

Duncan spun around and looked back the way he'd come and saw that Andrew was right. The trees, somehow, had moved in and closed together to block out the path they had been following.

"With a great deal of work," said Conrad, "we could wriggle our way through. But it would be difficult for Daniel. He can't get down on his hands and knees and crawl as can the rest of us. We'll have to do some chopping to make a way for him. Even without the work of chopping, progress will be slow."

Meg came hobbling up. "It's witchery," she said, "and a most convincing witchery. Had it been otherwise than cunning, I would have smelled it out."

Snoopy jumped up and down in rage, flapping his arms. "It's them double-dipped-in-damnation gnomes," he howled. "I told them and told them no traps need be laid against the fen, for none of the Horde was there. Concentrate, I told them, on that stretch of ground north of the river meadow. But they did not listen. Gnomes are arrogant and they never listen. They laid this intricate trap to snare the Horde and now we're caught instead. Now the gnomes are gone, scattered like all the rest of them, and they cannot be gotten to spring and free the trap."

"You are sure of that?" asked Duncan.

"Sure of it I am."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I know the gnomes. Cross-grained folk they are. And skilled in very complex magic. No other of our people could do the kind of work required to lay out a belt of forest and to…"

The sound of flapping wings cut him short and everyone looked up to see what was going on. It was Nan, coming down in an awkward plunge, wings windmilling desperately to check her speed and to maintain her balance. She landed sprawling, falling forward on her face. Once on her feet, she lurched forward to meet them.

"The Horde is coming in!" she shrilled. "The Horde is on the way! They're pouring down the hill, moving toward the woods."

"Now what do we do?" yapped Andrew. "What do we do now?"

"We quit our blubbering," said Conrad gruffly, "and remember we are soldiers of the Lord."

"I'm no soldier of the Lord," yelled Scratch, "but if it comes to fighting, I'll fight by the side of those who are. Given the necessity, I can be a very dirty fighter."

"I just bet you can," said Meg.

"Let us hope," said Duncan, "that the magic of the gnomes can work as effectively against the Horde as it seems to work with us and…"

He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at the trees.

"My God," he whispered, "will you look at that!"

There had been, he remembered, many years ago, a roving artist who had stopped at Standish House for a bite of food and a night of shelter and wound up staying on for months, finally ending up at the abbey, where he undoubtedly still was, working at the scriptorium, drawing sketches and doing miniature paintings and other nonsensical conceits with which the monks fancied up their manuscripts and scrolls. As a boy, Duncan recalled, he had spent much time with the artist, whose name he had forgotten after all these years, hanging over the little desk on which he worked, watching in fascination the magic lines of his pencil sketching scenes and people unlike anyplace or anyone he had ever seen before. The sketch that had intrigued him the most, which the artist had given him, had depicted a group of trees that had somehow turned into rather frightening people—trees with faces that had only a rough, but frightening, equivalence to the faces of people, their limbs becoming arms, their branches many-fingered grasping hands. Trees turned into monsters.

And now here, in this magic forest of the gnomes, the trees were assuming the guise of monsters just as those trees the artist sketched had. The trunks bore flabby faces: loose-lipped, ravening mouths, most of them toothless, although a few of them had fangs; bulbous, obscene noses sprawling over half the face; ghoulish, spiteful eyes. Now there was a rustling of leaves as the limbs and branches of the trees became the arms and hands of monsters, some with fingers, some with claws, some with tentacles, and all of them waving in a frenzy of sudden energy, reaching out to grasp one, to claw one to his death.

They were hemmed in by monsters that were trees, or trees that were trying to be monsters.

"Them stinking gnomes," raged Snoopy, "they have no decency at all. This magic of theirs cannot distinguish between friend and foe."

From far away, apparently from the edge of the woods, back toward the slope they had descended, came muffled screaming.

"That's the hairless ones," said Conrad. "They have reached the woods and met the trees."

"Or the trees," said Andrew. "The hairless ones did not strike me as ones who would do much screaming."

"Meg, can you do anything?" Duncan shouted at the witch. "Do you have the spells to overcome this magic?"

Andrew strode forward toward the trees opposite their entry point into the circle, brandishing his staff at them and intoning Latin phrases, the most atrocious Latin, Duncan told himself, that he had ever heard.

"Shut up!" Duncan yelled at him, and to Meg, he said, "Is there any way that you can help?"

"I can but try," Meg told him. "As I've explained before, my powers are very feeble. My witchery trappings all were taken from me."

"Yes, I know," said Duncan. "You have told us that. All the bat's blood, all the polecat dung, all the rest of it. But there must lie within you a power that does not need these trappings."

He yelled at Andrew, "Desist from that silly blather. This is not a place where churchly mouthings will do us any good."

Meg said in a small voice, "Perhaps the two of us together?" A faint tendril of fog came drifting through the trees at that point where they had entered the clearing.

Conrad came up to stand beside Duncan and Diane. "That fog," he said, "is the fog of the Horde. You remember, when we fought before the castle mound. It has the same smell as it had then. They came at us in a rolling bank of fog and…"

"I don't remember any smell," said Duncan.

"Well, I do," said Conrad. "I have a sharper nose than you have."

"The Horde is trying to get through the woods," said Diane. "They may be held up for a while, but perhaps not for long. Snoopy told us none of the magic traps could really stop the Horde."

Snoopy said, "This one will hold a little longer than the others. Those crazy gnomes really put their heart into this one. All their efforts put the one place it wasn't needed. If it hadn't been for them, we would have reached the fen by now."

"Maybe Meg can witch a path for us," said Conrad.

"Not with Andrew bellowing out that obnoxious Latin," said Duncan. "We'll have to shut him up."

Something very violent was taking place within that section of the woods through which they'd come. The trees were shaking furiously, their branches whipping all about. The mouths in the trunks of the trees were opened wide as if to scream, but no sound came out, although there were other sounds—the crunch and swish of lashing branches, sudden screams and grunts.

"It's the hairless ones," said Conrad. "They are breaking through."

He shifted the club in his hand and took a quick step forward.

Over the top of the trees came a torn black rug, flapping furiously, plopping down toward them. Twin heads reached out for them, needle teeth rimming the open mouth, wings with hooked claws slashing at the air.

"Look out!" howled Conrad.

Diane stepped swiftly to one side as the ragged rug hovered just above her. Her sword flashed high and came down like a blade of light. It struck the flapping wing and sheared it off. The creature went lopsided, skidding through the air. Duncan's sword swung up to meet it. One of the heads came off and the remainder of the already shorn wing. The creature flopped to the ground. Conrad brought his club down on the remaining head and the thing skittered about the clearing, twisting and turning, hopping in the air and somersaulting like a chicken with its head lopped off.

Duncan saw that his blade was smeared with the sticky black ichor he had seen when he'd killed the squalling, flapping thing in the fight at the castle mound.

He threw a quick glance skyward and saw that another of the flying rugs had cleared the trees and hung above the clearing, but even as he saw it the rug veered off, heading back across the trees.

Meg and Andrew, he saw, were standing side by side, facing the opposite side of the clearing, Andrew furiously shaking his staff and bawling out his Latin, while Meg waved her arms in cabalistic gestures and cried out a high sing-song of words so twisted and kinky that they seemed to Duncan, listening to them, to be beyond the range of human tongue.

More fog was rolling into the clearing. Between the trees, low down against the ground, came a pointed head with a cruel beak, sinuous, like a snake, scuttling forward on little lizard's feet. The head reared up, surging from side to side, as if seeking, rearing itself to strike. Diane leaped forward and the glistening blade came down in a long, smooth swing. The beaked head popped into the air, fell to the ground and bounced, a flood of thick, blackish ichor pouring in a flood from the severed neck. But the long, twisting, snakelike body, propelled by its many little feet, kept on coming out. As its forepart fell to the ground, the rest of it, emerging from the trees, piled upon itself.

The trees were whipping violently, as if beaten by a vicious wind, the mouths still open and working in their silent screaming, the branches swaying furiously, the hands making grasping motions. At times screams, often cut off abruptly, sounded from the depths of the woods. One giant branch, with a dozen hands attached, heaved into the air. Grasped by the hands was the twisting, broken body of a hairless one. Another hairless one staggered through the trees, going to its knees, then rising swiftly, shuffling toward them, a club gripped in its hand.

Duncan sprang forward to meet it, but Conrad was there before him. Before the hairless one could lift its club, Conrad aimed a blow at it. The sound of a crunching skull sounded distinctly and the hairless one staggered forward, falling, but behind it was another one and another and another. The hairless ones had broken through the woods and were coming with a rush.

Duncan saw a lifted arm, with a club poised in its fist, and swung his blade in instinctive defense. The arm came off and the falling club struck his left shoulder a glancing blow. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Diane to one side and slightly behind him, her sword flashing as it struck. A hairless one came at him and he skipped aside to dodge the swinging club, caught the charging enemy in the throat with his sword point. But there was still another one behind the one that he had stabbed, and this time, he knew, the club would find its mark before he could lift his blade. And even as he thought this, two plunging, striking hoofs came across his shoulder, one of them striking the hairless one squarely in the face. Daniel's body crashed into Duncan and he went down on hands and knees, with the great horse's body looming over him, snorting with rage, striking with his hoofs and teeth.

Conrad, he saw, also was on the ground, crawling, with his right arm dangling limply. Standing on spraddled legs above him was a hairless one, with the club already lifted and starting to come down. Duncan lunged upright, hurling himself forward, but he knew he'd be too late. Before he could intervene, the lifted club would come thudding down on Conrad's head. Out of nowhere, a dark, stout body was suddenly between Conrad and the hairless one, the trident thrusting upward, propelled by both hands and with all the power in Scratch's muscular body. The tines caught the hairless one squarely in the throat, just below the chin, driving deep, the full length of the tines.

A bellow rang out—Andrew's voice—"A path! We have got a path!"

Duncan now was on his feet, his attention divided between Andrew's sudden bellow and the harpooned hairless one, which slowly tipped backward, its club fallen from its hand, as Scratch still clutched the trident's shaft, tugging furiously to disengage the tines. Just beyond Conrad, Tiny leaped from the body of a hairless one that he had downed, crouching for a new attack.

For the moment, it seemed, there was nothing to attack. There were no more hairless ones. Rolling fog still poured from out the forest and the trees still were thrashing furiously, but the small band of hairless ones who had broken through now were lying on the ground, either dead or dying.

Andrew still continued shouting, "We have a path! We have a path!"

"Head for that path," yelled Duncan. "All of you. Get out of here."

He took a quick stride to one side, grasped Conrad around his massive body and heaved him to his feet. Even as Duncan lifted him, the big man still was scrambling wildly to retrieve his fallen club. He grasped it in his left hand and staggered forward, his right arm still dangling at his side. By main strength, Duncan awkwardly got him turned around.

"Andrew has a path," he told him. "Get out there and follow it." Tiny came up, his face wrinkled in doggish worry. He pushed himself close against the tottering Conrad, trying to support him.

Scratch was there, too, dragging the trident with one hand, wedging himself between Tiny and Conrad.

"Here," he said to Conrad, "lean upon my shoulder."

Duncan reached out and took the club from Conrad's hand.

"I'll carry this," he said. "Lean on the demon. He is stout and strong. He can give you help."

"I need no help," growled Conrad.

"The hell you don't," said Duncan.

Conrad put his left hand on Scratch's shoulder, started hobbling away.

Duncan swung around. Diane, he saw, had hold of Daniel's forelock, was leading the big horse across the clearing, toward Andrew's path. Off to one side, Snoopy was racing toward the path, driving Beauty before him.

For one last look, Duncan swung around. The wood still was in violent commotion and the fog still was seeping out of it. But coming out of it were no more hairless ones, no more snaky creatures with cruel beaks.

They had to get out of there fast, he knew. The magic built into the forest by the gnomes might not hold much longer, and once it failed the way would be open for the Horde to come down upon them.

Give us time, he prayed. Time to get through the woods and to reach the fen.

For once they reached the fen, they probably would be safe. Even if the hairless ones or others of the Horde tried to follow them across the water, defense against them would be relatively simple.

He felt a hand upon his arm.

"Come on, Duncan," said Diane. "The others all are on the path."

Wordlessly he turned and followed her.

The path was narrow, with only scant room for one person to push his way through. Daniel, Duncan thought, might have some trouble.

Ahead of him he heard the others making their way down the path. Snoopy had said, in his anger, he remembered, that the stupid gnomes had built a trap that could not distinguish between friend and foe—and in this Snoopy had been wrong. It had not yielded to the magic of the Horde, but had paid attention to Meg's witchery and Andrew's howled-out Latin.

Slowly he backed down the path, watching behind him. And as he backed the path closed in behind him. Trees materialized or shifted to block the way and heavy growth closed in.

He turned and said to Diane, "Let us run for it."

Ahead of them he saw open sky, and a moment later they burst from the woods. The others were ahead of them, running down the slope, Conrad loping in the rear, using his left hand to cradle the useless right arm.

Scratch ran ahead of all of them, racing for the fen. At its edge, he halted for a moment and looked about, as if searching for a landmark. Then he ran along its shore for a little way and plunged into the water, the others following.

When they reached the shore, Diane and Duncan walked out into the water, which came barely to their ankles. As they went farther, in places it became deeper, but never more than knee-deep. Ahead of them lay a small rocky island, and when the others reached it they clambered over it and disappeared. A few minutes later Diane and Duncan reached the island, climbing over the piled-up rocks. On the other side they found the rest of them, huddled out of sight—Daniel standing in the water just beyond the island, effectively hidden by the tumbled rocks.

Scratch reached up and pulled them down. "We'll hide here," he said. "if the Horde doesn't see us, they probably will not try to venture out. They'll have no idea the fen can be crossed."

They lay behind the rocks and watched. The woods still existed, although from their distance, there was no sign of the commotion within it, except for tiny puffs of fog still issuing from it.

Again they could hear the wailing. At times it was fairly clear and loud, at other times faded.

Snoopy came crawling up the rocks to stretch himself beside Duncan.

"Those crazy gnomes," he said, "built better than they knew. Even the witch could not detect the magic of the woods. And they still are standing up."

Even as he spoke, the woods vanished, disappearing in their entirety. The slope on which they had stood lay quite bare except for a scattered band of hairless ones, and behind them other creatures half obscured by fog.

The hairless ones moved down the slope, shambling along. At the edge of the fen they stopped, staring across the water, then began running up and down the shore, like quartering dogs seeking out a scent. After a time they went back up the slope, walking through the fog bank, which moved to follow them. In a little time they and the fog bank disappeared over the crest of the slope and did not reappear.

"We'll wait here until evening falls," said Scratch. "It won't be long. The sun is not far from down. Then we'll move out. It never gets quite dark out here. There is always some reflection from the water."

Conrad was sitting on a rock near the edge of the island, hunched over, hugging his injured arm close against his body. Duncan made his way down to him.

"Let me see that arm," he said.

"The damn thing hurts," said Conrad, "but I don't think it's broken. I can move it if I have to, but it hurts when I do. A club caught me, on the fleshy part of the arm, just below the shoulder."

The upper arm was so swollen that the skin was shiny. An angry red welt, beginning to change to purple, covered the area from the shoulder to the elbow. Duncan squeezed the arm gently and Conrad flinched.

"Easy there," he said.

Duncan took the elbow in his palm, worked it slowly up and down.

"It's not broken," he said. "You're a lucky man."

"He should have it in a sling," said Diane. "It's easier that way." She reached into the pocket of her new buckskin jacket, brought out the filmy green gown she'd worn.

"We can use this," she said.

Conrad looked at it. "I couldn't," he moaned. "If back home, the word got out…"

"That's nonsense," she said. "Of course you can."

Duncan laid the club beside Conrad. "Here's your club," he said. "Thanks," said Conrad. "I would have hated to lose it. The best of wood, well seasoned. I spent hours shaping it."

Working swiftly, Diane fashioned a sling from the gown, eased it around the arm, tied it at the shoulder.

She laughed gaily. "A bit too much material," she said. "It'll hang on you like a cape. But you'll have to put up with that. I will not tear it up. There may be a time I'll need it."

Conrad grinned at her.

"Everyone must be hungry," he said. "Beauty's down there with Daniel. Someone should take off her packs. We have some food in there."

"No cooking, though," said Duncan. "We can't show any smoke." Conrad grunted. "No wood to burn, anyhow. The packs must have something we can choke down without cooking."

As evening came down Duncan and Diane sat together on a boulder at the water's edge. They had been silent for a time. Finally Diane said, "Duncan, about that sword. The one that Snoopy gave me."

"Yes. What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. But it's strange."

"It's unfamiliar to you."

"It's not that. It" s—how do I say this? It's as if someone's helping me. As if another arm than mine is wielding it. As if someone steps inside me and helps me handle it. Not that I haven't control of it, for I have. But as if someone's helping."

"That's your imagination."

She shook her head. "I don't think so. There was a sword that was thrown into a lake…"

"That's enough," said Duncan sternly. "No more fantasy. No more."

"But Duncan, I'm afraid."

He put an arm around her, held her close against him. "It's all right," he said. "Everything's all right."

28

It was, Duncan told himself, like walking through a painting, one of the blue pastel landscapes with an overtone of faery that hung in one of the sitting rooms at Standish House, precious little canvases that had been painted so long ago and hid away so long that no one now could remember who the artist might have been. Not much contrast in color, all executed in various hues of blue, with the only other color a pale moon of rather sickly yellow glinting through the blue of clouds and sky. No contrasts, nothing but subtle gradations of color, so that viewed from a distance the canvas seemed to be little more than a smudge of blue. Closer up one could make out the details and only then could there be some appreciation of what the painter might have had in mind. There had been one of them, he remembered, very much like this, a flat watery landscape showing little but the expanse of water, with deeper tones that hinted at a distant shoreline, and in the sky, as here, the sickly yellow moon.

They had been making their way through the water for hours, keeping very much in line, following close upon one another's heels, each turning as the one ahead of him turned in order to stay on the narrow underwater ledge of rock along which Scratch was feeling his way at the head of the column.

Besides the moon, there were a few stars in the sky, although at times the drifting, filmy clouds blotted out the most of them. But the flat, smooth surface of the fen, acting like a mirror, picked up and reflected every splinter of light that fell upon it. With eyes now well adjusted to the dark, it did not seem that they were moving through night at all, but through twilight, through that time of day, that particular moment, when the last deepening of twilight gives way to final night.

Diane was at the head of the column, close behind Scratch, while Duncan was last in line, with Andrew just ahead of him. The hermit, it seemed to Duncan, was becoming tired. He stumbled every now and then and was doing a lot more splashing with his staff than seemed necessary. Before too long, Duncan knew, they would have to stop to rest. He hoped that soon they would reach another of the little rocky islands. Since they had left the first island, they had come to and passed over two others. He had no idea if there were more ahead. He hoped there were, for Andrew certainly had need of rest, and perhaps some of the others as well. Conrad, despite his rugged strength, must be experiencing heavy going with his injured arm.

The water was not deep, seldom more than above his knees, but the going was slow and laborious, for with each step it was necessary to reach out and feel for solid footing before putting down one's weight.

There had been no interruptions. Twice great bodies had hurled themselves out of the fen, but had been prevented from reaching those upon the ledge of rock by the shallowness of the water. One of them Duncan had not seen, since it had hurled itself at the head of the column. He had only heard the furious splashing as the creature fought to drive itself across the ledge. The other he had seen only momentarily and in the poor light had been unable to gain more than a fleeting impression of it. The body had been huge and thick, the head vaguely toadlike. His strongest impression had been of the single, list-sized eye that for a moment had been caught in the moonlight, blazing red like an angry jewel.

All the night they had heard the far-off wailing for the world, and now it seemed to Duncan that they must be getting closer to it. It was louder and did not fade in and out as it had before. Now it kept on and on, the wailing varying in pitch but never going away. If one concentrated on it, Duncan told himself, it could be not only an annoying, but an unnerving sound. In the last hour or so it had seemed to him that he was, in a degree, becoming accustomed to it. One can get used to almost anything, be thought. Or maybe he only hoped so.

Ahead of him Andrew stumbled and went to his knees. Moving quickly, Duncan seized him and pulled him to his feet.

"You're getting tired," he said.

"I am tired," whined the hermit. "Tired in body and in soul."

"I can understand about the body," Duncan said. "What's this business of the soul?"

"The good Lord," said Andrew, "has been pleased to show me that through all my years of unremitting and conscientious labor I have acquired some small measure of a certain holiness. And how have I used it? How have I put to use this feeble power of mine? I'll tell you how. By freeing a demon from his chains. By overcoming, or helping to overcome, a vicious and a devious heathen magic, but only with the aid of one sunk deep in witchery. It is an evil thing to collaborate with a witch or any other force or practitioner of evil, my lord. It is worse to take some credit to myself for something that well might have been done by witchery alone, for I have no way of knowing to what degree, if any at all, I was responsible for the opening of the path that freed us from the forest."

"One of these days," said Duncan harshly, "this overwhelming self-pity that you feel will be the death and the damnation of you. Remember, man, that you are a soldier of the Lord—self-proclaimed, perhaps, but still, in your mind, a soldier of the Lord."

"Yes," said Andrew, "a soldier of the Lord, but a poor one. A little fumbling, inept soldier who quakes inside himself with fear, who finds no joy in it, who drives himself to be what he may not be."

"You'll feel better," said Duncan, "once you've had a chance to rest. It has been a bitter day for us and you no longer young. You've shown the true spirit of a soldier in bearing up so well."

"It might have been better," said Andrew, "if I'd remained in my simple cell and not gone adventuring. This journey has revealed to me more of my true self than is comfortable to know. I have accomplished nothing and…"

"Now, hold up," Duncan told him. "It would appear to me that you have accomplished quite a lot. If you had not freed the demon he would not have been able to guide us across the fen."

Andrew brightened up. "I had not thought of that," he said, "although to accomplish that I gave aid and comfort to an imp of Satan."

"He doesn't belong to Satan any longer. Remember that. He ran away from Hell."

"But still he is a thing of wickedness. He has no grace within him and no possibility…"

"If by that you mean he is not a convert to Christianity, it is true. He's not. But in view of what he has done for us, we must count him as a friend and ally."

"My lord, at times it seems to me that you have strange values."

"Each of us," said Duncan, "must decide upon our own values. Take it easy now. If you should stumble once again, I'll be here to fish you out."

Following the still tottery, fumbling hermit, Duncan gazed out across the fen. It was a place of flatness, a great expanse of limpid water stretching out on every side, broken here and there by darker splotches that probably were beds of reeds growing in a patch of shallow water or small islands of willows rooted in a mud flat.

The wailing continued, rising, falling, a lonely sound that could twist the heart of one who allowed himself to listen to it and to nothing else. After a time, even listening to it peripherally, the sound seemed to acquire a weight, as if it were a physical substance that bore down upon one. Duncan found himself wondering if it might be the weight of the wailing, pressing on the fen, that made it so flat and featureless. Nothing, he told himself, not even a watery wilderness such as this, could stand unaffected beneath the weight of the wailing for the world.

Ahead of him loomed a pile of rocks, another island, with those ahead of him clambering over it. He increased his stride, caught Andrew's arm, assisting him over the great slabs of riven stone. He found a flat slab that made a good seat and swung Andrew around and sat him down upon it.

"You stay here and rest," he told him. "Don't move until I come to get you. You're all tuckered out."

Andrew did not answer. He hunched up his knees, put his arms down on them and bent his head to rest it upon the folded arms.

Duncan clambered up the rocks and found the rest of the company on the other side, settling down to rest. He said to Snoopy, "I think we should hold up for a while. Everyone must be tired. Andrew is about played out."

"So are the others," Snoopy said. "Big and tough as he may be, Conrad has almost had it. That arm is hurting him a lot. You'll have to talk with Scratch. Reason with him a little. He's hell-bent for going on. That demon is all whang-leather. He doesn't know what tired is. He could keep on forever. He'll want to go on after we rest only for a short while."

"What's his hurry?"

"I don't know. We must be better than halfway across by now. It is hard to judge. Everything looks the same here. There aren't any landmarks."

"I'll talk with him. He may have a reason. Have you seen anything of Nan?"

Snoopy made a face. "I think she's gone."

"You mean she left us?"

"I can't be sure, but I think maybe. She's not a good flyer. You know that. A flutterer rather than a flyer."

"Yes, I know."

"Over land, where she can come down anywhere or anytime she wishes, she wouldn't mind. But here, if she had to come down, there is nothing solid to set down on, only water. Banshees hate the water. Besides, there's danger here."

"You mean the things that rushed us."

"Well, yes, those. We're fairly safe from them so long as we are on the ledge. Here they can't get at us. The water is too shallow and they're too big. Otherwise, we'd have been gobbled up."

"There are other dangers?"

Snoopy twitched his shoulder. "I don't know. Stories. There are all sorts of stories about the fen. No one knows about it and that's how the stories start. No one ventures into it."

"And you think Nan is gone?"

"I think so. I don't know. She didn't tell me one way or the other."

"Maybe she figured she had done enough for us."

"That could be true," said Snoopy.

Duncan worked his way down the island to the water's edge. There he found Scratch perched on a boulder. He hunkered down beside him.

"The folks are fairly well beat out," he said. "Is there any reason we can't stay here until daylight, get some rest?"

"We should get across as fast as we can," said Scratch. "Look ahead there." He pointed and Duncan peered in the direction he was pointing. "See those peaks over there? Three peaks. They are hard to make out."

Duncan shook his head. "I'm not sure I can. One minute I think I see something and the next I don't."

"The peaks are the Island of the Wailing for the World."

"The place where the dragons are."

"That's exactly it," said Scratch. "They may not see us in the dark. Dragons maybe can see in the dark. I'm not sure. But if so, not very well. If we could reach the island before dawn we might not have too bad a time with them. But if they spot us open in the water and we still have a long way to go they'll peck us to death; they'll get us one by one."

"We'd have a better chance if we were on the island that they guard?"

"Yes, a better chance. They couldn't fly at us. They've got a big wingspread and they can't get in close to the island's rocky crags. They'll come at us, of course, on the ground, but they'll be easier to handle there. Kill a couple of them and the others may sheer off. Basically dragons are a cowardly lot."

"Then you think we should push ahead?"

"What's to hold us up?"

"Andrew is on his last legs. Conrad is hurting a lot and is getting shaky."

"Put one of them on the horse."

"Meg already is riding Daniel. She doesn't weigh much more than a feather, of course, but I'd hate to put more weight on him. I'd hate to tire him out. He's the best fighter that we have. When it comes time to face the dragons, I want him there and able to fight the best tie can."

"My lord," said Scratch, "I think it is important that we make a try to reach that island not later than dawn."

"Once we get to the wailing island, how much farther across the fen?"

"A short distance. A mile or so. It's hard by the western shore."

"From the island we could make a run for the shore despite the dragons?"

"If they saw us leaving the island they might not be after us so hard. Their job is to guard the island. Leaving it, we'd no longer be a threat. I think it might work out that way. I'm just guessing."

From overhead came a soft rustling. Duncan looked up and saw Ghost floating in.

"I bring sad tidings," said Ghost. "The unexpected has come about." He paused dramatically.

"All right," said Duncan. "Quit your silly posing, catch your breath, and dump all the misery on us."

"My breath I do not need to catch," said Ghost. "As you well know, I have no breath to catch. And I have no intent to dump misery on anyone at all. I only tell you truth."

"Then out with it," said Duncan impatiently. "Tell us this great truth."

"The Horde has ceased its northward progress and has turned back," said Ghost. "It is encamped on the western shore opposite the wailing island and its components are beginning to form into a massive sphere."

"My God," said Duncan, "a swarm. They are starting to form a swarm."

"A swarm?" asked Ghost.

"Yes, a swarm." Duncan turned to Scratch. "You told me about their swarming habits."

"I told you what I'd heard," said Scratch.

"A defensive swarming, you said. Gaining strength by personal, almost one-to-one contact of all the members of the Horde. A pulling together. A gathering to face danger."

"That," said Scratch, "was the interpretation I had heard put upon it."

"Against us, for the love of God," said Duncan.

"If any of this that I earlier told you is true," said the demon, "I would assume the defense would have to be against us. We're the only possible danger around."

"Cuthbert told me the Horde was running scared," said Duncan. "He had no idea of what it might be scared. But why should they be scared of us? They have faced us and beaten us. We have fled repeatedly from them. What danger do we pose?"

"There is ample evidence of their fear of you," said Ghost. "They have never really come against you, not the members of the Horde. Only a few of them, a half-dozen at the most. They have sent the hairless ones against you and the hairless ones may not even be members of the Horde. They may be no more than beings created by their magic—foot soldiers, the carriers-out of orders who may not have the sense to know of fear."

"What the ghost says is true," the demon said. "If the Horde had no fear of you, you'd have been dead days ago."

"What do you do now?" asked Ghost. "They lie in wait for you."

"We can't retreat," said Duncan. "We've come too far to think of turning back. The quicker we get across the fen, the quicker we'll confront them. We may be able to slip past them. I don't know. The one thing we can't do is give them time. It may take them a while to complete the swarming."

"When you face them, what will you do?" asked Ghost. "My shrunken soul, if I still have any soul at all, shrinks even further at the thought of it."

"We'll do what we can," said Duncan. "Maybe when we face them we'll know what we should do."

He leaped to his feet.

"Be ready to show us the way," he said to Scratch. "We are going on, right now."

29

The wailing had become louder and heavier—heavier in the sense that it seemed to press down harder on the earth and water and all those things that lived or traveled on the land and water, as if a great invisible hand, with its palm spread wide, was pushing down, squeezing all that lay beneath it.

Conrad stumbled and pitched forward, his hand slipping from Duncan's shoulder, which it had been gripping for support. Duncan thrust himself forward and sidewise in an attempt to block Conrad's fall and got one arm around him, but it slipped away, and the impact of the big man's fall shoved them both into the water.

It was the third time Conrad had fallen since they had started the grueling drive to reach the wailing island before dawn set in. On several other occasions Duncan had been able to catch him soon enough to prevent a fall.

Now Duncan struggled up out of the water and by hauling and shoving got Conrad on his knees. The big man snorted and coughed, spitting out the water he had swallowed.

"M" lord," he wheezed, "why not go on without me?"

"Because we started this together," said Duncan, "and we are, by God, finishing it together."

Conrad struggled up, stood swaying on his feet.

"It's the arm," he said. "The pain of it has drained my strength. I am shaken by a fever. Go ahead. I can follow after. On hands and knees, if need be, but I'll follow after."

"I'll carry you if I have to."

"M" lord, you can't carry me. It would be like carrying a horse."

"Or drag you by the heels," said Duncan.

"Where's my club?" asked Conrad.

"Snoopy's carrying it."

"It's too heavy for Snoopy. He might drop it and it could float away from him."

"Look," said Duncan. "There's the wailing island, dead ahead of us. A half a mile away. That's as far as we have to go. And we'll get there in time. There's no sign of dawn as yet."

"Where are the dragons?" Conrad asked. "There should be dragons. Scratch said so. I heard him say it."

"Come on," commanded Duncan. "Get your legs moving. Get going. Grit your teeth and move. Lean on me."

"It's not right I should lean on you, m" lord."

"Goddamn it, lean on me," yelled Duncan.

Conrad lurched forward, leaning heavily on Duncan, breathing hard, shivering and shaky. Step by step they inched themselves along.

They had fallen a little behind the others, but not by much. The line of march was moving slowly. Everyone was worn down by this terrible trek across the fen, Duncan told himself. Somewhere near the head of the line, Diane was shepherding Andrew along, keeping him awake, keeping him from falling, keeping him going.

So far there had been no sign of dragons. Maybe, Duncan told himself, there would not be any dragons. Although that, he knew, was more than one could hope for.

If only the wailing would stop, he thought, stop at least for a minute to give one a slight breathing space. The wailing and the pressure, the sense of the weight of wailing bearing down upon one, the pressure that held the fen tideless and motionless, flat and calm, a great palm pressed against the water.

Then, for some reason that he didn't know, in an intuition that came to him as unquestioned truth, an intelligence that suddenly blossomed in his brain, he knew that it was not the wailing alone that was pressing down upon him, but the misery of the world—all the misery and hate, all the terror, all the pain and guilt—somehow collected, drawn from all the peoples of the world and concentrated here, funneling down upon this island just ahead, to present itself, to make the force of itself known. As if, he thought, here all the people of the world were coming to confessional, seeking the solace and the comfort that might be gained from such a rite, and, perhaps, getting it, in at least some degree, from the wailing that came off the island. Were the misery and guilt, the pain and terror, he wondered, here converted into wailing and given to the winds to be swept away?

It was a stunning knowledge and he fought against it, for it was horrible, it was unreasonable and not possible, it was unseemly that such a thing could be—shameless, an obscenity, a barbarity. It was a wonder, he thought, that the island did not writhe in throes of agony, that the fen did not steam and boil under the impact of this stream of misery.

And yet, struggle as he might against this unbidden knowledge, he knew it to be true, and knowing this, the pressure seemed greater and more oppressive, more unrelenting than it had been before.

A short distance ahead a small island loomed, no more than a tiny clump of rocks jutting out of the water only a hundred yards or so from the wailing island. Looking up, Duncan looked again at the three sharp peaks of the bigger island, outlined as deep blue spires against the paler blue of sky. The moon was almost down; it swam just a hand's breadth above the darkness of the western horizon. Looking toward the east it seemed to him that just possibly dawn might be breaking soon. He could not be certain, but it appeared that the eastern sky was lightening, the first faint hint of a rising sun.

The stubby dark form of the demon climbed the little rocky islet just ahead and disappeared down its far side. Behind him came Daniel, with Meg clinging like a bug upon his back. Behind Daniel was Beauty, mincing daintily along, choosing her footsteps precisely and with grace. The whiteness of the pack strapped to her back glimmered in the dark. Then Diane, supporting the stumbling Andrew, who still carried his staff, clutching it in a death grip despite his feebleness. And behind these two came the spidery figure of Snoopy, skittering busily from rock to rock, with Conrad's club carried precariously upon a shoulder, the club threatening every now and then to overbalance him.

Tiny came splashing back through the water to see how Duncan and Conrad were making out, his forehead all wrinkled up with worry. He nuzzled gently at Conrad.

"It's all right," said Conrad, speaking to him with teeth clenched against the pain. "Go ahead now. Catch up with the others."

Satisfied, Tiny turned and trotted through the water.

They came up to the small clump of rocks. "Take it easy," Duncan said to Conrad. "Grab tight hold of me. I can take your weight."

"Yes, m" lord," said Conrad.

"Be sure of your footing before you move," said Duncan. "You can't fall down and hurt that arm again."

They worked their way slowly and carefully up the rocks, went cautiously down the other side, were in the water once again. Those ahead of them were more than halfway to the wailing island.

There had been no dragons. Thank God, said Duncan to himself, there have been no dragons.

"Just a little ways farther," he said to Conrad. "Then we can rest. Get some sleep."

He had not thought, he remembered, that it would be this way. Two days, he had figured, when they had started out, for them to cross the fen. But instead they had crossed it, or almost crossed it, in a single night.

He had been watching his feet, he realized, as if watching them might tell him how best to place them. Now, looking up, he saw that those ahead of him had stopped, all of them with their heads bent back, staring up into the sky. Diane had let loose her hold on Andrew, who had fallen and was floundering in the water. Daniel was rearing on his hind legs and Meg was sliding, as if in slow motion, off his back, to sprawl into the waters of the fen. Directly above Daniel was a black shape against the sky, a batlike shape with wings far stretched out, curved tail lashing behind it, vicious head thrust out.

"Stay here!" Duncan yelled at Conrad. "A dragon! Stay here."

He wrenched himself free of Conrad's clutching hand, leaped forward, sword rasping from its sheath. Beneath him one foot skidded on the slippery underwater rock and as he tried to right himself, the other foot also slipped and he went down upon his back, the water closing over him.

He tried to rise, feeling a sense of blind panic washing over him, and slipped again. A shrill scream split the silence and he saw that the dragon, gripping Beauty with its two taloned feet, was beating its wings frantically to lift itself. Daniel, rearing high, had seized the dragon's neck with his teeth and was hanging on. As Duncan watched, the struggling dragon lifted Daniel off his feet and then sank down again. To one side Duncan saw the flash of Diane's sword. As she swung, a second dragon, seeking to avoid the blow, slithered sideways, almost crashing into the water. The sweep of one of its wings knocked Diane off her feet.

Conrad was running toward Daniel and as Duncan watched, he launched himself into the air, his one good arm reaching out. The arm encircled the dragon's neck and the dragon sprawled in the water, unable to beat its way to safety with Conrad's added weight.

Beauty had ceased her screaming. Her limp body, released by the dragon, bobbed in the water, which was being thrashed into foam by the dragon's struggles to escape. Tiny leaped at the dragon's throat, his head making a slashing motion. The dragon stiffened, tried frantically to hump itself out of the water, and then collapsed and lay still. The dragon that had attacked Diane was beating its way upward. Diane had regained her feet.

There was a sound of wings above him, and looking up, Duncan saw that the air seemed full of dragons circling swiftly in upon them, heading for the kill. And this, he knew, was the end of it; this was where the journey ended. His company, beaten down by the long night of travel, caught in the open no more than a hundred feet from the safety of the wailing island, could not stand against such an attack. Bitterness flared so deeply within him that he tasted gall inside his mouth. Roaring out a challenge that had no words, a berserker roar of hate, he lifted his sword arm high, running forward to take his stand with the others of the band.

From overhead, above the circling dragons, somewhere in the deep blueness of the sky, came the sudden clatter of driving hoofs, a wild bugling and the baying of a hundred hunting hounds.

The dragons broke their circling, milling wildly as they sought to get away, and down through them, scattering them, came the Wild Huntsman on his neighing charger whose pounding hoofs struck sparks in the air. The horse and huntsman swooped so low that for a moment Duncan caught sight of his face, eyes glowing wildly under bushy brows, beard blowing back across his shoulder in the wind of his own charge. Then the horse, with frenzied hoofs, was climbing into the blue again, the Huntsman flourishing his horn in hand. The dragons were fleeing wildly from the hunting dogs that bayed them down the sky.

The rest of his band, Duncan saw, was lunging through the water toward the safety of the island, Diane dragging a limp and struggling Andrew, Conrad plunging steadily ahead on his own.

Duncan waded out and seized Beauty. When he touched her he knew that she was dead. Her body floated and he towed her to shore. There he sat down and laid her head across his lap. He put down a hesitant hand and stroked her, pulled gently at her long and silky ears. No more, he thought, the little mincing feet, dancing along the trail ahead of him. The least and the humblest of them all and now it had come to this.

A soft nose nuzzled his shoulder and he turned his head. Daniel snorted softly at him. He reached up a hand to stroke the horse. "We've lost her, boy," he said. "We have lost our Beauty."

30

Duncan was walking down a woodland path when he met the giant. It was early spring and all the trees had the soft, green-yellow, lacy look they have when the leaves first start unfurling from the buds, and there were many flowers—the floor of the woods carpeted with flowers of every hue—little flowers that nodded at Duncan as he went past, as if they had seen him and wanted to say hello. The woods were a friendly place, fairly open, with a lot of space for light and air, not one of your thick, somber, even threatening woods that all the time is closing in as if they meant to trap the traveler.

Duncan didn't know where the woods were, he didn't know where he had started from nor where he might be going; it was enough that he was there. He walked in the present moment only and that, he thought, was good. He had no past to be remorseful over, he had no future he must fear.

And then the giant came into sight and each of them walked forward until they confronted one another. The path was narrow and there was not room for the both of them. To pass by one another the both of them, or at least one of them, must step aside. But neither of them did. They stopped, facing one another, Duncan glaring up at the giant, the giant glaring down at him.

Then the giant reached down with an enormous hand, lifted him, and shook him. He shook him lustily. Duncan's head snapped back and forth and his legs were jerking every which way. His arms did not move because the giant's great fist was holding them tightly in its grasp.

And the giant was saying, "Wake up, my lord. Wake up. There is someone here to see you."

Duncan tried to crawl back into the dream again. "Leave me be," he mumbled. But the giant said, "Wake up. Wake up. Wake up." And the funny thing about it was that it was not the giant's voice that was speaking, but another grating voice that he thought he recognized. It seemed to him it must be Scratch's voice. The shaking kept right on, someone shaking his shoulder rather violently.

He opened one eye and saw Scratch bending over him. He opened the other eye and saw that he was lying flat upon his back, with a projection of rock hanging over him.

"You're awake now," said Scratch. "Stay awake. Don't fall back to sleep."

The demon squatted back upon his heels, but he did not make a move to leave. Scratch stayed there, watching him.

Duncan pulled himself to a sitting position, lifted a fist to rub his eyes. He was on a small bench of stone with another outcropping of stone extending over him. Beyond the outcrop the sun was shining brightly and almost at his feet he saw the water of the fen. A little distance off Conrad lay huddled on one side, with a sleeping Tiny squeezed very close against him. Andrew was on his back, with his mouth wide open, snoring.

Duncan started to get up and then sat back, faint with the panic that had flooded over him. He had gone to sleep, he realized, perhaps all of them had fallen into exhausted sleep, with no proper precautions taken. No guard had been set, no one had spied out the land. They must have simply fallen down and slept. And that, he knew, was inexcusable of him, a failure as a leader.

He asked in a weak voice, "Is everything all right?"

"Everything's all right," said Scratch. "I stood the watch while my companions slept."

"But you were tired as well."

Scratch shook his head. "Not tired. A demon does not know fatigue. But there are people waiting, sire. Otherwise I'd not have wakened you."

"Who's waiting?"

"Some old women. Rather nice old women."

Duncan groaned and rose to his feet.

"Thank you, Scratch," he said.

Where the slab on which he had been lying ended, a path began, and he stepped out onto it. As soon as he left the protection of the overhanging ledge of stone the pressure and the weight of the wailing struck him, although there was no wailing now. And if there were no wailing, he asked himself rather numbly, how could there be weight and pressure? Almost instantly he had the answer—not the pressure of the wailing, but the pressure and the weight of the world's misery flowing in upon this place, flowing in to be exorcised, to be canceled by the wailing. The pressure seemed so great that momentarily he staggered under it and became, as well, aware of the sadness of it, an all-encompassing sadness that damped every other feeling, that set the joy of life at naught, that made one numb with the enormity of the hate and terror in the world.

The women that Scratch had mentioned were standing, the three of them, just up the path that led from the fen's edge into the island's height. They were dressed in flowing gowns that came down to their ankles, very simple gowns, with no frills or ruffles on them, that once had been white but now were rather grimy.

They carried baskets on their arms, standing there together, awaiting him. He squared his shoulders against the pressure of the misery and marched up the path to face them.

When they were face-to-face they stood silent for a moment, he and the three of them, looking one another over.

They were no longer young, he saw; it had been a long time since they had been young, if ever. They had the look of women who never had been young. Yet they were not hags, despite the wrinkles on their faces. The wrinkles, rather, gave them dignity, and there was about them a calmness that was at odds with the concentrated misery pouring in upon this place.

Then one of them spoke, the one who stood slightly in the forefront of the three.

"Young man," she asked, "can you be the one who did violence on our dragons?"

The question was so unexpected and the implication so incongruous that Duncan laughed involuntarily. The laugh was short and harsh, little better than a bark.

"You should not have," the woman said. "You have badly frightened them. They have not as yet returned and we are very worried of them. I believe you killed one of them, as well."

"Not until it had done its best to kill us," said Duncan sharply. "Not until it had killed little Beauty."

"Beauty?" asked the woman.

"A burro, ma" am."

"Only a burro?"

"One of my company," said Duncan. "There is a horse and dog as well, and they also are of our company. Not pets, not animals, but truly part of us."

"Also a demon," said the woman, "an ugly clubfooted demon that challenged us and threatened us with his weapon when we came down the path."

"The demon also," said Duncan. "He, likewise, is one of us. And, if you will, with us also is a witch, a goblin and a hermit who thinks he is a soldier of the Lord."

The woman shook her head. "I have never heard the like," she said. "And who, may I ask, are you?"

"Ma" am, I am Duncan of the House of Standish."

"Of Standish House? Then why are you not at Standish House rather than out here in the fen harassing inoffensive dragons?"

"Madam," he said evenly, "I can't imagine how you fail to know, but since you don't, I'll tell you. Your inoffensive dragons are the most bloodthirsty raveners I have ever happened on. Further I will tell you that while we had the right good will to harass them handsomely, it was not we who really did the job. We were too worn out from the crossing of the fen to do it creditably. It was the Wild Huntsman who put the run on them."

They looked at one another, questions in their faces.

"I told you," said one of the others who stood behind the one who had been speaking. "I told you I heard the Huntsman and the baying of his hounds. But you said that I was wrong. You said the Huntsman had not the hardihood to approach this island, to interfere with us and the work that we are doing."

"Your work," said Duncan, "is something in which I have some interest. You are the wailers for the world?"

"Young Standish," said the spokeswoman, "this is something with which you should not concern yourself. The mysteries in which we are engaged is not a subject to be pondered by mortals. It is bad enough that your earthly feet have violated the sacred soil on which you stand."

"And yet," said one of the others, "we are able to forgive you your sacrilege. We extend, symbolically, our hospitality. We have brought you food."

She stepped forward and placed the basket that she carried on the path. The other two set their baskets down beside it.

"You can eat it with no fear," said the one who had first set down the basket. "There is no poison in it. It is wholesome, solid food. There is enough natural misery in this world. We do not need, of ourselves, to compound it further."

"You should be the ones who know," said Duncan, not realizing until he'd said it how ungracious it must sound.

They did not answer him and seemed about to go, but he made a motion asking them to stay.

"One thing," he said. "Have you by any chance, seen from your vantage point upon the island, any evidence of the Horde of Harriers?"

They stared at him in wonder, then one of them said, "This is silly, sisters. Certainly he must know about the Horde. This deep in the Desolated Land, he must be well aware of them. So why don't we answer him?"

"It can do no harm," said the spokeswoman. "There is nothing he, nor anyone, can do. The Horde, Sir Duncan, lies just across the fen, on the western shore, a short distance from this place. They must know that you are coming, for they've formed into a swarm, although why they should swarm for the likes of you is more than I can understand."

"A defensive swarm?" asked Duncan.

The spokeswoman asked sharply, "How do you know about defensive swarms?"

Duncan laughed at her.

"Save your laughter, young man," she told him. "If you cross that stretch of water to face them your laughter will be out of the other corner of your mouth."

"And if we go back," said Duncan, "your precious dragons will be the death of us."

"You're obnoxious and ill-mannered," said one of the three, "to speak thus of friends of ours."

"Friends of yours?"

"Why, most certainly," said one of them. "The dragons are our puppydogs, and without the Horde, through all the centuries, there'd be less misery in the world."

"Less misery…" And then he understood. Not a confessional to ease the pain and supply the comfort, not an exorcism of fear and terror, but a reveling in the misery of the world, rolling happily in the distress and sadness as a dog would roll in carrion.

"Vultures," he said. "She-vultures." And was sick of heart.

Christ, was there anything that was decent left?

Nan, the banshee, keened for the widow in her humble cottage, for the mother who had lost her child, for the old and weary, for the sick, for the abandoned of the world, and whether the keening was of help or not, it was meant to help. Nan and her sister banshees were the mourners for those who had no others who would mourn for them.

But these—the wailers for the world, who walled either by themselves or by a more extensive sisterhood or by means of some infernal machine that made modulated wailing sounds—he caught the vision of some great complicated piece of machinery with someone turning a long and heavy crank to produce the wailing—these used the misery of the world; they sucked it in and funneled it to this place where they wanted it to be, and there they luxuriated in it, there they rolled in it and smeared themselves with it, as a hog would bury itself in repulsive filth.

The three had turned about and were going up the path, and he waved an angry arm at them.

"Filthy bitches," he said, but he said it underneath his breath, for it would do no good to yell at them—no harm, perhaps, but no good, either—and they were not the ones he should be concerned about. They were filth that one passed by, filth that one stepped around and tried not to notice. His concern lay beyond this island.

He stepped forward swiftly and, lifting the baskets one by one, hurled them out into the waters of the fen.

"We gag upon your hospitality," he told, between clenched teeth, the women walking up the path. "We need no crusts of bread you toss to us. We damn you all to Hell."

Then he turned about and went down the path. Scratch and Conrad were sitting side by side upon the ledge on which they'd slept.

"Where are the others?" he asked.

"The hermit and the witch have gone to bring in Beauty's pack," said Scratch. "They spotted it. It had been floating in the water and came to shore just down the beach. There may be something in it still fit to eat."

"How are you feeling?" Duncan asked Conrad.

The big man grinned at him. "The fever's gone. The arm feels better. Some of the swelling's down and the pain is not as bad."

"Milady," said Scratch, "went off in that direction." He made a thumb to show the way she'd gone. "She said something about spying out the land. Before I woke you up. She has been gone for quite some time."

Duncan looked at the sky. The sun was halfway down from noon. They had slept a good part of the daylight hours away.

"You stay here," he said. "When the others come in keep them here as well. I'll go and find Diane. That way, you said."

The demon nodded, grinning.

"If there's anything to eat," said Duncan, "eat it. We must be on our way. We have no time to lose."

"M" lord," said Conrad, "you plan to beard the Horde?"

"There's nothing else to do," said Duncan. "We have no other choice. We can't go back and we can't stay here. This island is an abomination."

Conrad grinned wolfishly. "I shall be close beside you when we go in," he said. "I need but one arm to swing a club."

"And I as well," said Scratch. "Snoopy was right in what he said in giving me the pitchfork. Appropriate, he said. And it is that. It fits my hands as if it had been made for me."

"I'll see you soon," said Duncan.

He found Diane on a small headland that overlooked the fen, back the way they'd come. She was sitting on a small rocky upthrust and turned her head when she heard his step behind her.

"Is it time to go?" she asked.

"Almost," he said. "In just a little while."

"I don't know," she said. "This facing of the Horde…"

"There's something I must tell you," he said. "Something I must show you. I should have long ago."

He put his hand into the pouch at his belt, took out the talisman and held it out to her.

She drew her breath in sharply, put out a hand toward it and then threw back the hand.

"Wulfert" s?" she asked.

He nodded.

"How did you get it? Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I was afraid," said Duncan. "Afraid that you might claim it. I had need of it, you see."

"Need of it?"

"Against the Horde," he said. "That was the purpose for which Wulfert made it."

"But Cuthbert said…"

"Cuthbert was wrong. It has protected us against the Horde from the day I found it. They have sent their minions against us, but with a few exceptions, no members of the Horde have come against us. They have kept well away from us."

She put out both her hands and took it from him, turning it slowly, the embedded jewels blazing as the sunlight caught them.

"So beautiful," she said. "Where did you find it?"

"In Wulfert's tomb," he told her. "Conrad hid me in the tomb after I was knocked out in the garden fight. Where we first met, remember?"

"What a strange thing to do," she said. "To hide you in a tomb."

"Conrad sometimes does strange things. They usually are effective."

"And you found it there by accident?"

"When I came to I was lying on it and it was uncomfortable. I thought it was a rock someone had chucked into the tomb. At first I had meant to give it to you, if we found you again. But then, when it became apparent…"

"I understand," she said. "And now you think you can use it against the Horde. Perhaps destroy them?"

"I'm gambling on it," Duncan said. "I think so. It is apparent something has been protecting us. It must be the talisman. I think we have a weapon feared by the Horde. Why else would they swarm against us?"

"So Wulfert was right all along," she said. "The others all were wrong. They threw him out when he was right."

"Even wizards can be wrong," he said.

"One thing," she said. "Tell me why you're here. What brought you here? What is going on? Why is it so important that you get to Oxenford? You never told me that. Or Cuthbert. Cuthbert would have been interested. He had many friends in Oxenford. He wrote to them and they wrote to him. Over the years he had corresponded with them."

"Well," he said, "there is this manuscript. The story is a long one, but I'll try to tell it quickly."

He told her quickly, condensing it, using as few words as he could.

"This doctor in Oxenford," she said. "The one man in all the world who can authenticate the manuscript. Have you got his name?"

"His name is Wise. Bishop Wise. An old man and not too well. That's why we are in such a hurry. He is old and ill; he may not have too long. His Grace said his sands were running out."

"Duncan," she said in a small voice. "Duncan…"

"Yes? You know the name?"

She nodded. "He was Cuthbert's old friend, his good friend."

"Why, that is fine," he said.

"No, Duncan, it is not. Bishop Wise is dead."

"Dead!"

"Some weeks ago Cuthbert got the word," she told him. "Word his old friend had died. More than likely before you set out from Standish House."

"Oh, my God!" he said, going down on his knees beside her.

A pointless trip, he thought. All of this for nothing. The man who could have authenticated the manuscript dead before they even had set out. Now the manuscript would not be authenticated. Not now. Perhaps never. A hundred years from now there might be another man, or there might never be another man such as Bishop Wise. His Grace would have to wait, Holy Church would have to wait, the Christian world would have to wait for that other man, if there should ever be one.

"Diane," he said, choking. "Diane!"

She reached out and pulled his head into her lap, held him there, as a mother might a child.

"Go ahead and weep," she said. "I'm the only one to see. Tears will do you good."

He did not weep. He could not weep. Rather, bitterness swept in and gripped him, twisting him, rankling his soul. Until now, until this very moment, he realized, he had not known or had not let himself know how much the manuscript had meant to him—not as an abstract thing holding potential good for all the world, but to him personally. To him, Duncan Standish, as a Christian soul, as one who believed, however marginally, that a man named Jesus once had walked the Earth, had said the words He was reported to have said, had performed His miracles, had laughed at wedding feasts, had drunk wine with His brothers, and finally had died upon a Roman cross.

"Duncan," Diane said softly. "Duncan, I mourn as well as you."

He lifted his head and looked at her.

"The talisman," he said.

"We will use the talisman as Wulfert meant it should be used."

"It's all that's left," he said. "At least some good may come out of this journey."

"You have no doubts of the talisman?"

"Yes, there may be doubts. But what more is there to do?"

"Nothing more," she said.

"We may die," he said. "The talisman may not be enough."

"I'll be there," she said. "I'll be there beside you."

"To die with me?"

"If that is how it happens. I don't think it will. Wulfert…"

"You have faith in him?"

"As much faith as you have in your manuscript."

"And after it is over?"

"What do you mean? Once it is over?"

"I'll go back to Standish House. And you?"

"I'll find a place. There are other wizard castles. I'll be welcome."

"Come home with me."

"As your ward? As your mistress?"

"As my wife."

"Duncan, dearest, I have wizard blood."

"And in my veins runs the blood of unscrupulous adventurers, martial monsters, reavers, pirates, the ravishers of cities. Go far enough back and God knows what you'd find."

"But your father. Your father is a lord."

For a moment Duncan envisioned his father, standing tall-tree straight, whiffling out his mustache, his eyes gray as granite and yet with a warmth within them.

"A lord," he said, "and yet a gentleman. He'll love you as a daughter. He never had a daughter. He has no one but me. My mother died years ago. Standish House has waited long for a woman's hand."

"I'll need to think," she said. "One thing I can tell you. I love you very much."

31

The swarm rested on top of a small ridge, back from the edge of the fen. It was a terrifying sight—black and yet not entirely black, for through it ran strange flickerings, like the distant flaring of heat lightning such as one would see far off, coloring the horizon, on a summer night. At times the swarm seemed to be substantial, a solid ball of black; at other times it appeared curiously flimsy, like a loose ball of yarn, like a soap bubble very close to bursting. It seemed, even when it appeared to be most solid, to be in continual motion, as if the creatures or the things or whatever it might be that made it up, were continually striving to place themselves in more advantageous positions, rearranging themselves, shuffling about to attain a more ideal configuration. Watching it, one at times could see, or imagine he saw, a shape, an individual member of the swarm, although never for long enough to be entirely sure what it might be. And that, thought Duncan, was perhaps as well, for the glimpses that he got were of shapes and structures so horrifying, so far beyond anyone's most outrageous imaginings, that they made the blood run cold.

He spoke to those who clustered about him. "All of you know what we are to do," he said. "I will carry the talisman, holding it high, presenting it. I will walk in front, going slowly. Thus," he said, holding it high so that all could see. In the last rays of the setting sun, the jewels in the talisman caught fire, blazing like a mystic flame with all the colors of a rainbow, but brighter, far brighter than a rainbow.

"And if it doesn't work?" growled Conrad.

"It — must- work," Diane told him coldly.

"It must work," Duncan agreed calmly. "But, on the off-chance that it doesn't, everyone run like hell. Back into the fen, back toward the island."

"If we can run," said Conrad. "I won't run. The hell with running…"

A hand reached up and snatched the talisman out of Duncan's grip.

"Andrew!" Duncan roared, but the hermit was rushing forward, running toward the swarm, the blazing talisman held high in one hand, his staff flailing in the other, his mouth open and screaming words that were not words at all.

Conrad was raging. "The stupid, show-off son-of-a-bitch!" he howled.

Duncan leaped forward, racing to catch Andrew.

Ahead of him a lightning stroke flared. In its afterglow Duncan saw Andrew stand for a moment, burning in bright flames. Then, as the flames snuffed out, the hermit was a smoking torch of man, a torch a vagrant gust of wind had blown out, with tendrils of greasy smoke streaming from his upraised arms. The talisman was gone and Andrew slowly crumpled, fell in upon himself into a mound of charred and smoking flesh.

Duncan threw himself flat on the ground and the wild, terrible thought ran through him: It had not been Wulfert's talisman, it had not been the talisman that the Horde had feared; it had not been the talisman that had protected them in their long journeying through the Desolated Land. He should have known, he told himself. On the strand the Horde—it must have been the Horde—had used Harold the Reaver to obtain the thing they feared, the one thing they had not dared to try to seize themselves. And they had gotten the talisman, but had left it there upon the strand, as a thing of little value.

The one thing they had not gotten was the manuscript!

The — manuscript-, he thought. The manuscript, for the love of God! It had been the manuscript that the Horde had attempted to destroy, to negate, to obliterate. That had been the purpose of this latest desolation—desolate the northern part of Britain and then, having isolated it, move on Standish Abbey, where the manuscript was housed. But by the time they were ready to move on Standish Abbey, the manuscript, the original manuscript written by the little furtive figure who had scurried about to watch and listen, was no longer there. The Horde seemed much confused, Cuthbert had said, uncertain of itself. And that was it, of course. The manuscript, they had learned or somehow sensed, was no longer where it had been, but was being carried through the very desolation the Horde had brought about.

Little furtive man, little skulking, skittering man—Duncan said to that one who so long ago had lurked, jackal-like, about the company of Jesus, who had never been one of that company nor had tried to be one of them, who had only watched and listened and then had sat huddled, in some hidden corner, to write what he had seen and heard—you did better than you knew. Writing down the words of Jesus exactly as He spoke them, with no variation whatsoever, with no paraphrasing, reporting every gesture, every movement, even the expression on His face. For that, Duncan realized, was the way it had to be. It had to be the truth, it had to be a report of events exactly as they were if it were still, centuries later, to retain the magic, recapture the glory and the power, present the full force of the Man who had spoken.

Why, he asked that little skulking man, why did you never let me see your face? Why did you keep turning from me, why did you keep your face in shadow so that I could not know you? And that, he thought, that was a part of it as well, that was the way it had to be. For this little furtive man sought no glory for himself; all would have been for naught if he had sought the glory. He must remain, forever, the truly faceless man.

Duncan thrust his hand into the pouch, his fingers closing on the manuscript, bringing it out, the crinkling, crackling mass of it. Rising to his feet, he held it high above his head and with a bellow of triumph, charged the looming swarm.

Ahead of him the great, dark, shifting ball of the swarm flared with its many lightning strokes and with each stride he took, the flares grew ever brighter, but staying within the swarm itself, never reaching out. The same flaring strokes that had run the length of the rolling fog on the slope above the castle mound, flares such as the one that had reached out to turn Andrew into a smoking torch, but now they did not reach out.

Suddenly the flaring all came together and when that happened the swarm was turned into a ball of exploding fire. It burst apart and there were many smoldering fragments flying in the air, falling all about him, smoking and shriveling as they struck the ground, to lie there for a moment, writhing as if in agony, then going quiet and dead.

The Horde was gone and in the twilight that came creeping in with the going of the sun there came a putrid stench that rolled like a fog over everything.

Duncan let his arm fall to his side, still clutching the wrinkled manuscript, wrinkled from being clutched too tightly.

A wailing scream rose in the twilight, not the wailing for the world, but another wailing, a wailing very close.

Duncan turned and saw Meg crouched above the stinking mound that had been Andrew and knew that the wailing came from her.

"But why?" asked Diane, coming up beside him. "A hermit and a witch?"

"He gave her a bite of cheese that first day we found her," Duncan said. "He offered her his arm to help her along the forest trail. He stood side by side with her to witch a path out of the forest clearing. Is that not enough?"

32

So the manuscript would not now be authenticated. With Bishop Wise dead in Oxenford, there was no one now to put the stamp of truth upon it. It would be returned to Standish Abbey and for years it would lie there, perhaps housed in an ornate coffer, unannounced to the world and unknown because there'd be no one who could say it was true or false, an actual document or a pious fraud.

And yet, Duncan told himself, so far as he was concerned it had been authenticated. For it had been the truth of it, the authenticity of it, the proven words and acts of Jesus, that had brought about the Horde's destruction. Anything less than that, he told himself, would have made no mark upon the Horde.

He touched his fingers to the pouch at his side and beneath the pressure heard the reassuring rustle of it. So many times, he thought, he had done this very thing and listened to the crackle of the parchment, but never with the thankfulness and the surety that he felt now.

Diane stirred at his side, and when he put an arm around her she came close to him.

The fire blazed high, and off to one side Scratch had raked off a bed of coals and was engaged, with Conrad's help, in frying fish that he and Conrad had caught out of a little stream after begging the loan of Duncan's shirt to improvise a net.

"Where is Ghost?" asked Duncan. "He was around for a while, but now he's disappeared."

"You won't see him," said Diane. "He's off to haunt a castle."

"A castle. Where did he find a castle?"

"The castle mound," said Diane. "He came to me to ask for my permission."

"And you gave it to him?"

"I told him it was not mine to give, but to go ahead. I told him that I couldn't see any way to stop him."

"I told him that very thing," said Duncan, "when he wanted to go to Oxenford with us. I'm surprised he would settle for a castle. He wanted to go to Oxenford so badly."

"He said that he wanted a home. He wanted a place to haunt. Said he had been hanged to a small-sized tree and you couldn't haunt a tree, especially a little bitty one."

"It seems to me I've heard that plaint before. What would Cuthbert think of it?"

"I think that Cuthbert, if he knew, might be rather pleased. But Ghost, poor thing, he wanted it so badly. He said he had no home…"

"If you listen to him," Duncan said, "he will wring your heart. I'm glad to be shut of him. He was nothing but a pest."

"How about Scratch?" Diane asked. "What will happen to him?"

"He is coming along with us. Conrad invited him."

"I'm glad of that," said Diane. "He and Conrad have gotten to be pals. And that is good. Scratch, despite being a demon, is not too bad a being."

"He saved Conrad's life back there in the clearing," Duncan said. "Conrad is not about to forget such an act as that."

"And Conrad was nice to him back there at the castle," said Diane. "So were you. Everyone else, up to that time, had treated him absolutely rotten."

Meg brought them fish on birch bark platters and squatted down in front of them.

"Don't eat too soon," she warned them. "Let it cool a bit."

"And you?" asked Diane. "What are you going to do now that the adventure's over? Scratch is coming with us."

"Standish House," said Duncan, "could use a resident witch. We've not had one for years."

Meg shook her head. "I've been thinking. I've wanted to talk with you about it. I have no hut, you see; no place at all to live. I have not a thing at all. But Andrew had a cell. Do you suppose he'd mind? I think I know where it is. If not, Snoopy said he'd show me."

"If that is what you want," said Duncan, "I think Andrew might be happy to know that you were there."

"I think," said Meg, "that he might have liked me just a little bit. Back, that first time we met, he took this piece of cheese out of his pocket. It had lint upon it from the pocket and there were teeth marks on it, for he'd been nibbling on it and he gave it to me and he…"

Her voice broke and she could speak no more. She put her hands to her eyes and, swiftly rising, hobbled off into the darkness.

"She was in love with Andrew," Diane said. "Strange, that a witch and hermit…"

"We all were in love with him," said Duncan, "cross-grained as he might have been."

Cross-grained and a soldier of the Lord. A soldier of the Lord to the very last, insisting that he was a soldier of the Lord when he still was a hermit. Rushing to his death as a soldier of the Lord. Andrew and Beauty, Duncan thought—a soldier of the Lord and a little patient burro.

I'll miss them both, he thought.

From far off, faint in a vagrant wind, came the keening of the wailing for the world. Now, Duncan told himself, as the years went on, there'd be less wailing for the world. Still some misery in the world, but with the Horde no longer on the Earth, less and less of it. Less for the she-vultures on the island to wallow in, less for them to smear upon themselves.

Diane set the plate of fish down upon the ground, plucked at Duncan's sleeve.

"Come with me," she said. "I can't do this all alone. I must have you standing by."

He followed her around the fire to where Snoopy sat eating fish. Diane walked to a place in front of him. She held out the naked sword, cradled in her hands.

"This is too precious a blade," she said, "to belong to any human. Would you take it back into the custody of the Little People? Keeping it until there's need of it again."

Snoopy carefully wiped his hands, held them out to take the sword. Tears stood in his eyes.

"You know, then, milady, who it once belonged to?"

She nodded, not trusting herself to speak.

"Willingly, then," said Snoopy, "we will take it back. We will guard it well and reverence it. Someday it may be there'll be another hand that is worthy to hold it. But no one ever more than yours, milady."

"You will tell the Little People," said Diane, "how much they honored me."

"It was because we trusted you," said Snoopy. "You were not unknown to us. You'll be found at Standish House?"

"Yes," said Diane. "We're leaving in the morning."

"Someday we'll come and visit you," said Snoopy.

"We'll be waiting for you," said Diane. "There'll be cakes and ale. There'll be dancing on the green."

She turned away and went back to Duncan. She took him by the arm. "And now," she said, "I'm ready for tomorrow."

Galactic Chest

Original copyright year: 1956

I had just finished writing the daily Community Chest story, and each day I wrote that story I was sore about it; there were plenty of punks in the office who could have ground out that kind of copy. Even the copy boys could have written it and no one would have known the difference; no one ever read it — except maybe some of the drive chairmen, and I'm not even sure about them reading it.

I had protested to Barnacle Bill about my handling the Community Chest for another year. I had protested loud. I had said: "Now, you know, Barnacle, I been writing that thing for three or four years. I write it with my eyes shut. You ought to get some new blood into it. Give one of the cubs a chance; they can breathe some life into it. Me, I'm all written out on it."

But it didn't do a bit of good. The Barnacle had me down on the assignment book for the Community Chest, and he never changed a thing once he put it in the book.

I wish I knew the real reason for that name of his. I've heard a lot of stories about how it was hung on him, but I don't think there's any truth in them. I think he got it simply from the way he can hang on to a bar.

I had just finished writing the Community Chest story and was sitting there, killing time and hating myself, when along came Jo Ann. Jo Ann was the sob sister on the paper; she got some lousy yarns to write, and that's a somber fact I guess it was because I am of a sympathetic nature, and took pity on her, and let her cry upon my shoulder that we got to know each other so well. By now, of course, we figure we're in love; off and on we talk about getting married, as soon as I snag that foreign correspondent job I've been angling for.

"Hi, kid," I said.

And she says, "Do you know, Mark, what the Barnacle has me down for today?"

"He's finally ferreted out a one-armed paperhanger," I guessed, "and he wants you to do a feature…"

"Its worse than that," she moans. "It's an old lady who is celebrating her one hundredth birthday."

"Maybe," I said, "she will give you a piece of her birthday cake."

"I don't see how even you can joke about a thing like this," Jo Ann told me. "It's positively ghastly."

Just then the Barnacle let out a bellow for me, so I picked up the Community Chest story and went over to the city desk.

Barnacle Bill is up to his elbows in copy; the phone is ringing and he's ignoring it, and for this early in the morning he has worked himself into more than a customary lather. "You remember old Mrs. Clayborne?"

"Sure, she's dead. I wrote the obit on her ten days or so ago."

"Well, I want you to go over to the house and snoop around a bit."

"What for?" I asked. "She hasn't come back, has she?"

"No, but there's some funny business over there. I got a tip that someone might have hurried her a little."

"This time," I told him, "you've outdone yourself. You've been watching too many television thrillers."

"I got it on good authority," he said and turned back to his work.

So I went and got my hat and told myself it was no skin off my nose how I spent the day; I'd get paid just the same!

But I was getting a little fed up with some of the wild-goose chases to which the Barnacle was assigning not only me, but the rest of the staff as well. Sometimes they paid off; usually, they didn't. And when they didn't, Barnacle had the nasty habit of making it appear that the man he had sent out, not he himself, had dreamed up the chase. His "good authority" probably was no more than some casual chatter of someone next to him at the latest bar he'd honored with his cash.

Old Mrs. Clayborne had been one of the last of the faded gentility which at one time had graced Douglas Avenue. The family had petered out, and she was the last of them; she had died in a big and lonely house with only a few servants, and a nurse in attendance on her, and no kin close enough to wait out her final hours in person.

It was unlikely, I told myself, that anyone could have profited by giving her an overdose of drugs, or otherwise hurrying her death. And even if it was true, there'd be little chance that it could be proved; and that was the kind of story you didn't run unless you had it down in black and white.

I went to the house on Douglas Avenue. It was a quiet and lovely place, standing in its fenced-in yard among the autumn-colored trees.

There was an old gardener raking leaves, and he didn't notice me when I went up the walk. He was an old man, pottering away and more than likely mumbling to himself, and I found out later that he was a little deaf.

I went up the steps, rang the bell and stood waiting, feeling cold at heart and wondering what I'd say once I got inside. I couldn't say what I had in mind; somehow or other I'd have to go about it by devious indirection.

A maid came to the door.

"Good morning, ma" am," I said, "I am from the — Tribune-. May I come in and talk?"

She didn't even answer; she looked at me for a moment and then slammed the door. I told myself I might have known that was the way it would be.

I turned around, went down the steps, and cut across the grounds to where the gardener was working. He didn't notice me until I was almost upon him; when he did see me, his face sort of lit up. He dropped the rake, and sat down on the wheelbarrow. I suppose I was as good an excuse as any for him to take a breather.

"Hello," I said to him, "Nice day," he said to me. "Indeed it is."

"You'll have to speak up louder," he told me; "I can't hear a thing you say."

"Too bad about Mrs. Clayborne," I told him.

"Yes, yes," he said. "You live around here? I don't recall your face."

I nodded; it wasn't much of a lie, just twenty miles or so.

"She was a nice old lady. Worked for her almost fifty years. It's a blessing she is gone."

"I suppose it is."

"She was dying hard," he said.

He sat nodding in the autumn sun and you could almost hear his mind go traveling back across those fifty years. I am certain that, momentarily, he'd forgotten I was there.

"Nurse tells a funny story," he said finally, speaking to himself more than he spoke to me. "It might be just imagining; nurse was tired, you know."

"I heard about it," I encouraged him.

"Nurse left her just a minute and she swears there was something in the room when she came back again. Says it went out the window, just as she came in. Too dark to see it good, she says. I told her she was imagining. Funny things happen, though; things we don't know about."

"That was her room," I said, pointing at the house. "I remember, years ago…"

He chuckled at having caught me in the wrong. "You're mistaken, sonny. It was the corner one; that one over there."

He rose from the barrow slowly and took up the rake again.

"It was good to talk with you," I said. "These are pretty flowers you have. Mind if I walk around and have a look at them?"

"Might as well. Frost will get them in a week or so."

So I walked around the grounds, hating myself for what I had to do, and looking at the flowers, working my way closer to the corner of the house he had pointed out to me.

There was a bed of petunias underneath the window and they were sorry-looking things. I squatted down and pretended I was admiring them, although all the time I was looking for some evidence that someone might have jumped out the window.

I didn't expect to find it, but I did.

There, in a little piece of soft earth where the petunias had petered out, was a footprint-well, not a footprint, either, maybe, but anyhow a print. It looked something like a duck track-except that the duck that made it would have had to be as big as a good-sized dog.

I squatted on the walk, staring at it and I could feel spiders on my spine. Finally I got up and walked away, forcing myself to saunter when my body screamed to run.

Outside the gate I — did- run.

I got to a phone as fast as I could, at a corner drugstore, and sat in the booth a while to get my breathing back to normal before I put in a call to the city desk.

The Barnacle bellowed at me. "What you got?"

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe nothing. Who was Mrs. Clayborne's doctor?"

He told me. I asked him if he knew who her nurse had been, and he asked how the hell should he know, so I hung up.

I went to see the doctor and he threw me out.

I spent the rest of the day tracking down the nurse; when I finally found her she threw me out too. So there was a full day's work gone entirely down the drain.

It was late in the afternoon when I got back to the office. Barnacle Bill pounced on me at once. "What did you get?"

"Nothing," I told him. There was no use telling him about that track underneath the window. By that time, I was beginning to doubt I'd ever seen it, it seemed so unbelievable.

"How big do ducks get?" I asked him. He growled at me and went back to his work.

I looked at the next day's page in the assignment book. He had me down for the Community Chest, and: — See Dr. Thomas at Univ.-magnetism.-

"What's this?" I asked. "This magnetism business?"

"Guy's been working on it for years," said the Barnacle. "I got it on good authority he's set to pop with something."

There was that "good authority" again. And just about as hazy as the most of his hot tips.

And anyhow, I don't like to interview scientists. More often than not, they're a crochety set and are apt to look down their noses at newspapermen. Ten to one the newspaperman is earning more than they are — and in his own way, more than likely, doing just as good a job and with less fumbling.

I saw that Jo Ann was getting ready to go home, so I walked over to her and asked her how it went.

"I got a funny feeling in my gizzard, Mark," she told me. "Buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it."

So we went down to the corner bar and took a booth way in the back.

Joe came over and he was grumbling about business, which was unusual for him. "If it weren't for you folks over at the paper," be said, "I'd close up and go home. That must be what all my customers are doing; they sure ain't coming here. Can you think of anything more disgusting than going straight home from your job?"

We told him that we couldn't, and to show that he appreciated our attitude he wiped off the table — a thing he almost never did.

He brought the drinks and Jo Ann told me about the old lady and her hundredth birthday. "It was horrible. There she sat in her rocking chair in that bare living room, rocking back and forth, gently, delicately, the way old ladies rock. And she was glad to see me, and she smiled so nice and she introduced me all around."

"Well, that was fine," I said. "Were there a lot of people there?"

"Not a soul."

I choked on — my- drink. "But you said she introduced…"

"She did. To empty chairs."

"Good Lord!"

"They all were dead," she said.

"Now, let's get this straight…"

"She said, "Miss Evans, I want you to meet my old friend, Mrs. Smith. She lives just down the street. I recall the day she moved into the neighborhood, back in "33. Those were hard times, I tell you." Chattering on, you know, like most old ladies do. And me, standing there and staring at an empty chair, wondering what to do. And, Mark, I don't know if I did right or not, but I said, "Hello, Mrs. Smith. I am glad to know you." And do you know what happened then?"

"No," I said. "How could I?"

"The "old lady said, just as casually as could be — just conversationally, as if it were the most natural thing in all the world-"You know, Miss Evans, Mrs. Smith died three years ago. Don't you think it's nice she dropped in to see me?""

"She was pulling your leg," I said. "Some of these old ones sometimes get pretty sly."

"I don't think she was. She introduced me all around; there were six or seven of them, and all of them were dead."

"She was happy, thinking they were there. What difference does it make?"

"It was horrible," said Jo Ann.

So we had another drink to chase away the horror.

Joe was still down in the mouth. "Did you ever see the like of it? You could shoot off a cannon in this joint and not touch a single soul. By this time, usually, they'd be lined up against the bar, and it'd be a dull evening if someone hadn't taken a poke at someone else — although you understand I run a decent place."

"Sure you do," I said. "Sit down and have a drink with us."

"It ain't right that I should," said Joe. "A bartender should never take a drink when he's conducting business. But I feel so low that if you don't mind, I'll take you up on it."

He went back to the bar and got a bottle and a glass and we had quite a few.

The corner, he said, had always been a good spot — steady business all the time, with a rush at noon and a good crowd in the evening. But business had started dropping off six weeks before, and now was down to nothing.

"It's the same all over town," he said, "some places worse than others. This place is one of the worst; I just don't know what's gotten into people."

We said we didn't, either. I fished out some money and left it for the drinks, and we made our escape.

Outside I asked Jo Ann to have dinner with me, but she said it was the night her bridge club met, so I drove her home and went on to my place.

I take a lot of ribbing at the office for living so far out of town, but I like it. I got the cottage cheap, and it's better than living in a couple of cooped-up rooms in a third-rate resident hotel-which would be the best I could afford if I stayed in town.

After I'd fixed up a steak and some fried potatoes for supper, I went down to the dock and rowed out into the lake a ways. I sat there for a while, watching the lighted windows winking all around the shore and listening to the sounds you never hear in daytime — the muskrat swimming and the soft chuckling of the ducks and the occasional slap of a jumping fish.

It was a bit chilly and after a little while I rowed back in again, thinking there was a lot to do before winter came. The boat should be caulked and painted; the cottage itself could take a coat of paint, if I could get around to it. There were a couple of storm windows that needed glass replaced, and by rights I should putty all of them. The chimney needed some bricks to replace the ones that had blown off in a windstorm earlier in the year, and the door should have new weatherstripping.

I sat around and read a while and then I went to bed. Just before I went to sleep I thought some about the two old ladies — one of them happy and the other dead.

The next morning I got the Community Chest story out of the way, first thing; then I got an encyclopedia from the library and did some reading on magnetism.

I figured that I should know something about it, before I saw this whiz-bang at the university.

But I needn't have worried so much; this Dr. Thomas turned out to be a regular Joe. We sat around and had quite a talk. He told me about magnetism, and when he found out I lived at the lake be talked about fishing; then we found we knew some of the same people, and it was all right.

Except he didn't have a story.

"There may be one in another year or so," he told me. "When there is, I'll let you in on it."

I'd heard that one before, of course, so I tried to pin him down.

"Its a promise," he said; "you get it first, ahead of anyone?"

I let it go at that. You couldn't ask the man to sign a contract on it.

I was watching for a chance to get away, but I could see he still had more to say. So I stayed on; it's refreshing to find someone who wants to talk to you.

"I think there'll be a story," be said, looking worried, as if he were afraid there mightn't be. "I've worked on it for years. Magnetism is still one of the phenomena we don't know too much about. Once we knew nothing about electricity, and even now we do not entirely understand it; but we found out about it, and when we knew enough about it, we put it to work, We could do the same with magnetism, perhaps-if we only could determine the first fundamentals of it."

He stopped and looked straight at me. "When you were a kid, did you believe in brownies?"

That one threw me and he must have seen it did.

"You remember — the little helpful people. If they liked you, they did all sorts of things for you; and all they expected of you was that you'd leave out a bowl of milk for them."

I told him I'd read the stories, and I supposed that at one time I must have believed in them — although right at the moment I couldn't swear I had.

"If I didn't know better," he said, "I'd think I had brownies in this lab. Someone — or something — shuffled my notes for me. I'd left them on the desktop held down with a paperweight; the next morning they were spread all over, and part of them dumped onto the floor."

"A cleaning woman," I suggested.

He smiled at my suggestion. "I'm the cleaning woman here."

I thought he had finished and I wondered why all this talk of notes and brownies. I was reaching for my hat when he told me the rest of it.

"There were two sheets of the notes still underneath the paperweight," he said. "One of them had been folded carefully. I was about to pick them up, and put them with the other sheets so I could sort them later, when I happened to read what was on those sheets beneath the paperweight."

He drew a long breath. "They were two sections of my notes that, if left to myself, I probably never would have tied together. Sometimes we have strange blind spots; sometimes we look so closely at a thing that we are blinded to it. And there it was — two sheets laid there by accident. Two sheets, one of them folded to tie up with the other, to show me a possibility I'd never have thought of otherwise. I've been working on that possibility ever since; I have hopes it may work out."

"When it does…" I said.

"It is yours," he told me.

I got my hat and left.

And I thought idly of brownies all the way back to the office.

I had just got back to the office, and settled down for an hour or two of loafing, when old J. H. - our publisher — made one of his irregular pilgrimages of good will out into the newsroom. J. H. -is- a pompous windbag, without a sincere bone in his body; he knows we know this and we know he knows-but he, and all the rest of — us-, carry out the comedy of good fellowship to its bitter end.

He stopped beside my desk, clapped me on the shoulder, and said in a voice that boomed throughout the newsroom: "That's a tremendous job you're doing on the Community Chest, my boy."

Feeling a little sick and silly, I got to my feet and said, "Thank you, J. H.; it's nice of you to say so."

Which was what was expected of me. It was almost ritual.

He grabbed me by the hand, put the other hand on my shoulder, shook my hand vigorously and squeezed my shoulder hard. And I'll be damned if there weren't tears in his eyes as he told me, "You just stick around, Mark, and keep up the work. You won't regret it for a minute. We may not always show it, but we appreciate good work and loyalty and we're always watching what you do out here."

Then he dropped me like a hot potato and went on with his greetings.

I sat down again; the rest of the day was ruined for me. I told myself that if I deserved any commendation I could have hoped it would be for something other than the Community Chest stories. They were lousy stories; I knew it, and so did the Barnacle and all the rest of them. No one blamed me for their being lousy — you can't write anything but a lousy story on a Community Chest drive. But they weren't cheering me.

And I had a sinking feeling that, somehow, old J. H. had found out about the applications I had planted with a half dozen other papers and that this was his gentle way of letting me know he knew — and that I had better watch my step.

Just before noon, Steve Johnson — who handles the medical run along with whatever else the Barnacle can find for him to do — came over to my desk. He had a bunch of clippings in his hand and he was looking worried. "I hate to ask you this, Mark," he said, "but would you help me out?"

"Sure thing, Steve."

"It's an operation. I have to check on it, but I won't have the time. I got to run out to the airport and catch an interview."

He laid the clips down on my desk. "It's all in there,"

Then he was off for his interview.

I picked up the clippings and read them through; it was a story that would break your heart.

There was this little fellow, about three years old, who had to have an operation on his heart. It was a piece of surgery that had been done only a time or two before, and then only in big Eastern hospitals by famous medical names — and never on one as young as three.

I hated to pick up the phone and call; I was almost sure the kind of answer I would get.

But I did, and naturally I ran into the kind of trouble you always run into when you try to get some information out of a hospital staff — as if they were shining pure and you were a dirty little mongrel trying to sneak in. But I finally got hold of someone who told me the boy seemed to be okay and that the operation appeared to be successful.

So I called the surgeon who had done the job. I must have caught him in one of his better moments, for he filled me in on some information that fit into the story.

"You are to be congratulated, Doctor," I told him and he got a little testy.

"Young man," he told me, "in an operation such as this the surgeon is no more than a single factor. There are so many other factors that no one can take credit."

Then suddenly he sounded tired and scared. "It was a miracle," he said.

"But don't you quote me on that," he fairly shouted at me.

"I wouldn't think of it," I told him.

Then I called the hospital again, and talked to the mother of the boy.

It was a good story. We caught the home edition with it, a four-column head on the left side of page one, and the Barnacle slipped a cog or two and gave me a byline on it.

After lunch I went back to Jo Ann's desk; she was in a tizzy. The Barnacle had thrown a church convention program at her and she was in the midst of writing an advance story, listing all the speakers and committee members and special panels and events. Ifs the deadliest kind of a story you can be told to write; it's worse, even, than the Community Chest.

I listened to her being bitter for quite a while; then I asked her if she figured she'd have any strength left when the day was over.

"I'm all pooped out," she said.

"Reason I asked," I told her, "is that I want to take the boat out of the water and I need someone to help me."

"Mark," she said, "if you expect me to go out there and horse a boat around…"

"You wouldn't have to lift," I told her. "Maybe just tug a little. We'll use a block and tackle to lift it on the blocks so that I can paint it later. All I need is someone to steady it while I haul it up."

She still wasn't sold on it, so I laid out some bait.

"We could stop downtown and pick up a couple of lobsters," I told her. "You are good at lobsters. I could make some of my Roquefort dressing, and we could have a…"

"But without the garlic," she said. So I promised to forego the garlic and she agreed to come.

Somehow or other, we never did get that boat out of the water; there were so many other things to do.

After dinner we built a fire in the fireplace and sat in front of it. She put her head on my shoulder and we were comfortable and cozy. "Let's play pretend," she said. "Let's pretend you have that job you want. Let's say it is in London, and this is a lodge in the English fens…"

"A fen," I said, "is a hell of a place to have a lodge."

"You always spoil things," she complained. "Let's start over again. Let's pretend you have that job you want…"

And she stuck to her fens.

Driving back to the lake after taking her home, I wondered if I'd ever get that job. Right at the moment it didn't look so rosy. Not that I couldn't have handled it, for I knew I could. I had racks of books on world affairs, and I kept close track of what was going on. I had a good command of French, a working knowledge of German, and off and on I was struggling with Spanish. It was something I'd wanted all my life — to feel that I was part of that fabulous newspaper fraternity which kept check around the world.

I overslept, and was late to work in the morning. The Barnacle took a sour view of it. "Why did you bother to come in at all?" he growled at me. "Why do you ever bother to come in? Last two days I sent you out on two assignments, and where are the stories?"

"There weren't any stories," I told him, trying to keep my temper. "They were just some more pipe dreams you dug up."

"Some day," he said, "when you get to be a real reporter, you'll dig up stories for yourself. That's what's the matter with this staff," he said in a sudden burst of anger. "That's what's wrong with you. No initiative; sit around and wait; wait until I dig up something I can send you out on. No one ever surprises me and brings in a story I haven't sent them out on."

He pegged me with his eyes. "Why don't you just once surprise me?"

"I'll surprise you, buster," I said and walked over to my desk.

I sat there thinking. I thought about old Mrs. Clayborne, who had been dying hard — and then suddenly had died easy. I remembered what the gardener had told me, and the footprint I had found underneath the window. I thought of that other old lady who had been a hundred years old, and how all her old, dead friends had come visiting. And about the physicist who had brownies in his lab. And about the boy and his successful operation.

And I got an idea.

I went to the files and went through them three weeks back, page by page. I took a lot of notes and got a little scared, but told myself it was nothing but coincidence.

Then I sat down at my typewriter and made half a dozen false starts, but finally I had it.

• The brownies have come back again-, I wrote.

• You know, those little people who do all sorts of good deeds for you, and expect nothing in return except that you set out a bowl of milk for them.-

At the time I didn't realize that I was using almost the exact words the physicist had said.

I didn't write about Mrs. Clayborne, or the old lady with her visitors, or the physicist, or the little boy who had the operation; those weren't things you could write about with your tongue in cheek, and that's the way I wrote it.

But I did write about the little two and three paragraph items I had found tucked away in the issues I had gone through — the good luck stories; the little happy stories of no consequence, except for the ones they had happened to — about people finding things they'd lost months or years ago, about stray dogs coming home, and kids winning essay contests, and neighbor helping neighbor. All the kindly little news stories that we'd thrown in just to fill up awkward holes.

There were a lot of them — a lot more, it seemed to me, than you could normally expect to find. -All these things happened in our town in the last three weeks-, I wrote at the end of it.

And I added one last line: — Have you put out that bowl of milk?-

After it was finished, I sat there for a while, debating whether I should hand it in. And thinking it over, I decided that the Barnacle had it coming to him, after the way he'd shot off his mouth.

So I threw it into the basket on the city desk and went back to write the Community Chest story.

The Barnacle never said a thing to me and I didn't say a thing to him; you could have knocked my eyes off with a stick when the kid brought the papers up from the pressroom, and there was my brownie story spread across the top of page one in an eight-column feature strip.

No one mentioned it to me except Jo Ann, who came along and patted me on the head and said she was proud of me — although Cod knows why she should have been.

Then the Barnacle sent me out on another one of his wild-goose chases concerning someone who was supposed to be building a homemade atomic pile in his back yard. It turned out that this fellow is an old geezer who, at one time, had built a perpetual motion machine that didn't work. Once I found that out, I was so disgusted that I didn't even go back to the office, but went straight home instead.

I rigged up a block and tackle, had some trouble what with no one to help me, but I finally got the boat up on the blocks. Then I drove to a Utile village at the end of the lake and bought paint not only for the boat, but the cottage as well. I felt pretty good about making such a fine start on all the work I should do that fall.

The next morning when I got to the office, I found the place in an uproar. The switchboard had been clogged all night and it still looked like a Christmas tree. One of the operators had passed out, and they were trying to bring her to.

The Barnacle had a wild gleam in his eye, and his necktie was all askew. When he saw me, he took me firmly by the arm and led me to my desk and sat me down. "Now, damn you, get to work!" he yelled and he dumped a bale of notes down in front of me.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"It's that brownie deal of yours," he yelled. "Thousands of people are calling in. All of them have brownies; they've been helped by brownies; some of them have even seen brownies."

"What about the milk?" I asked.

"Milk? What milk?"

"Why, the milk they should set out for them."

"How do I know?" he said. "Why don't you call up some of the milk companies and find out?"

That is just what I did — and, so help me Hannah, the milk companies were slowly going crazy. Every driver had come racing back to get extra milk, because most of their customers were ordering an extra quart or so. They were lined up for blocks outside the stations waiting for new loads and the milk supply was running low.

There weren't any of us in the newsroom that morning who did anything but write brownie copy. We filled the paper with it — all sorts of stories about how the brownies had been helping people. Except, of course, they hadn't known it was brownies helping them until they read my story. They'd just thought that it was good luck.

When the first edition was in, we sat back and sort of caught our breath — although the calls still were coming in — and I swear my typewriter still was hot from the copy I'd turned out.

The papers came up, and each of us took our copy and started to go through it, when we heard a roar from J.H.'s office. A second later, J. H. came out himself, waving a paper in his fist, his face three shades redder than a brand-new fire truck.

He practically galloped to the city desk and he flung the paper down in front of the Barnacle and hit it with his fist. "What do you mean?" he shouted. "Explain yourself. Making us ridiculous!"

"But, J. H., I thought it was a good gag and —»

"Brownies!" J. H. snorted.

"We got all those calls," said Barnacle Bill. "They still are coming in. And —»

"That's enough," J. H. thundered. "You're fired!" He swung around from the city desk and looked straight at me. "You're the one who started it," he said. "You're fired, too."

I got up from my chair and moved over to the city desk. "We'll be back a little later," I told J. H., "to collect our severance pay."

He flinched a little at that, but he didn't back up any. The Barnacle picked up an ash tray off his desk and let it fall. It hit the floor and broke. He dusted off his hands. "Come on, Mark," he said; "I'll buy you a drink."

We went over to the corner. Joe brought us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and we settled down to business.

Pretty soon some of the other boys started dropping in. They'd have a drink or two with us and then go back to work. It was their way of showing us they were sorry the way things had turned out. They didn't say anything, but they kept dropping in. There never was a time during the entire afternoon when there wasn't someone drinking with us. The Barnacle and I took on quite a load.

We talked over this brownie business and at first we were a little skeptical about it, laying the situation more or less to public gullibility. But the more we thought about it, and the more we drank, the more we began to believe there might really be brownies. For one thing, good luck just doesn't come in hunks the way it appeared to have come to this town of ours in the last few weeks. Good luck is apt to scatter itself around a bit — and while it may run in streaks, it's usually pretty thin. But here it seemed that hundreds — if not thousands — of persons had been visited by good luck.

By the middle of the afternoon, we were fairly well agreed there might be something to this brownie business. Then, of course, we tried to figure out who the brownies were, and why they were helping people.

"You know what I think," said Barnacle. "I think they're aliens. People from the stars. Maybe they're the ones who have been flying all these saucers."

"But why would aliens want to help us?" I objected. "Sure, they'd want to watch us and find out all they could; and after a while, they might try to make contact with us. They might even be willing to help us, but if they were they'd want to help us as a race, not as individuals."

"Maybe," the Barnacle suggested, "they're just busybodies. There are humans like that. Psychopathic dogooders, always sticking in their noses, never letting well enough alone."

"I don't think so," I argued back at him. "If they are frying to help us, I'd guess it's a religion with them. Like the old friars who wandered all over Europe in the early days. Like the Good Samaritan. Like the Salvation Army."

But he wouldn't have it that way. "They're busybodies," he insisted. "Maybe they come from a surplus economy, a planet where all the work is done by machines and there is more than enough of everything for everyone. Maybe there isn't anything left for anyone to do — and you know yourself that a man has to have something to keep him occupied, something to do so he can think that he is important."

Then along about five o'clock Jo Ann came in. It had been her day off and she hadn't known what had happened until someone from the office phoned her. So she'd come right over.

She was plenty sore at me, and she wouldn't listen to me when I tried to explain that at a time like this a man had to have a drink or two. She got me out of there and out back to my car and drove me to her place. She fed me black coffee and finally gave me something to eat and along about eight o'clock or so she figured I'd sobered up enough to try driving home.

I took it easy and I made it, but I had an awful head and I remembered that I didn't have a job. Worst of all, I was probably tagged for life as the man who had dreamed up the brownie hoax. There was no doubt that the wire services had picked up the story, and that it had made front page in most of the papers coast to coast. No doubt, the radio and television commentators were doing a lot of chuckling at it.

My cottage stands up on a sharp little rise above the lake, a sort of hog's back between the lake and road, and there's no road up to it. I had to leave my car alongside the road at the foot of the rise, and walk up to the place.

I walked along, my head bent a little so I could see the path in the moonlight, and I was almost to the cottage before I heard a sound that made me raise my head.

And there they were.

They had rigged up a scaffold and there were four of them on it, painting the cottage madly. Three of them were up on the roof replacing the bricks that had been knocked out of the chimney. They had storm windows scattered all over the place and were furiously applying putty to them. And you could scarcely see the boat, there were so many of them slapping paint on it.

I stood there staring at them, with my jaw hanging on my breastbone, when I heard a sudden — swish- and stepped quickly to one side. About a dozen of them rushed by, reeling out the hose, running down the hill with it. Almost in a shorter time than it takes to tell it, they were washing the car.

They didn't seem to notice me. Maybe it was because they were so busy they didn't have the time to — or it might have been just that it wasn't proper etiquette to take notice of someone when they were helping him.

They looked a lot like the brownies that you see pictured in the children's books, but there were differences. They wore pointed caps, all right, but when I got close to one of them who was busy puttying, I could see that it was no cap at all. His head ran up to a point, and that the tassle on the top of it was no tassle of a cap, but a tuft of hair or feathers — I couldn't make out which. They wore coats with big fancy buttons on them, but I got the impression — I don't know how — that they weren't buttons, but something else entirely. And instead of the big sloppy clown-type shoes they're usually shown as wearing, they had nothing on their feet.

They worked hard and fast; they didn't waste a minute. They didn't walk, but ran. And there were so many of them.

Suddenly they were finished. The boat was painted, and so was the cottage. The puttied, painted storm windows were leaned against the trees. The hose was dragged up the hill and neatly coiled again.

I saw that they were finishing and I tried to call them all together so that I could thank them, but they paid no attention to me. And when they were finished, they were gone. I was left standing, all alone — with the newly painted cottage shining in the moonlight and the smell of paint heavy in the air.

I suppose I wasn't exactly sober, despite the night air and all the coffee Jo Ann had poured into me. If I had been cold, stone sober I might have done it better; I might have thought of something. As it was, I'm afraid I bungled it.

I staggered into the house, and the outside door seemed a little hard to shut. When I looked for the reason, I saw it had been weather-stripped.

With the lights on, I looked around — and in all the time I'd been there the place had never been so neat. There wasn't a speck of dust on anything and all the metal shone. All the pots and pans were neatly stacked in place; all the clothing I had left strewn around had been put away; all the books were lined straight within the shelves, and the magazines were where they should be instead of just thrown anywhere.

I managed to get into bed, and I tried to think about it; but someone came along with a heavy mallet and hit me on the head and that was the last I knew until I was awakened by a terrible racket.

I got to it as fast as I could.

"What is it now?" I snarled, which is no way to answer a phone, but was the way I felt.

It was J.H. "What's the matter with you?" he yelled. "Why aren't you at the office? What do you mean by…"

"Just a minute, J. H.; don't you remember? You canned me yesterday."

"Now, Mark," he said, "you wouldn't hold that against me, would you? We were all excited…"

"— I- wasn't excited," I told him.

"Look," he said, "I need you, There's someone here to see you."

"All right," I said and hung up.

I didn't hurry any; I took my time. If J. H. needed me, if there was someone there to see me, both of them could wait. I turned on the coffee maker and took a shower; after the shower and coffee, I felt almost human.

I was crossing the yard, heading for the path down to the car, when I saw something that stopped me like a shot.

There were tracks in the dust, tracks all over the place-exactly the kind of tracks I'd seen in the flower bed underneath the window at the Clayborne estate. I squatted down and looked closely at them to make sure there was no mistake and there couldn't be. They were the self-same tracks.

They were brownie tracks!

I stayed there for a long time, squatting beside the tracks and thinking that now it was all believable because there was no longer any room for disbelief.

The nurse had been right; there had been something in the room that night Mrs. Clayborne died. It was a mercy, the old gardener said, his thoughts and speech all fuzzed with the weariness and the basic simplicity of the very old. An act of mercy, a good deed, for the old lady had been dying hard, no hope for her.

And if there were good deeds in death, there were as well in life. In an operation such as this, the surgeon had told me, there are so many factors that no one can take the credit. It was a miracle, he'd said, but don't you quote me on it.

And someone — no cleaning woman, but someone or something else — had messed up the notes of the physicist and in the messing of them had put together two pages out of several hundred — two pages that tied together and made sense.

Coincidence? I asked myself. Coincidence that a woman died and that a boy lived, and that a researcher got a clue he'd otherwise have missed? No, not coincidence when there was a track beneath a window and papers scattered from beneath a paperweight.

And — I'd almost forgotten — Jo Ann's old lady who sat rocking happily because all her old dead friends had come to visit her. There were even times when senility might become a very kindness.

I straightened up and went down to the car. As I drove into town I kept thinking about the magic touch of kindness from the stars or if, perhaps, there might be upon this earth, coexistent with the human race, another race that had a different outlook and a different way of life. A race, perhaps, that had tried time and time again to ally itself with the humans and each time had been rejected and driven into hiding — sometimes by ignorance and superstition and again by a too-brittle knowledge of what was impossible. A race, perhaps, that might be trying once again.

J. H. was waiting for me, looking exactly like a cat sitting serenely inside a bird cage, with feathers on his whiskers. With him was a high brass flyboy, who had a rainbow of decorations spread across his jacket and eagles on his shoulders. They shone so bright and earnestly that they almost sparkled.

"Mark, this is Colonel Duncan," said J. H. "He'd like to have a word with you."

The two of us shook hands and the colonel was more affable than one would have expected him to be. Then J. H. left us in his office and shut the door behind him. The two of us sat down and each of us sort of measured up the other. I don't know how the colonel felt, but I was ready to admit I was uncomfortable. I wondered what I might have done and what the penalty might be.

"I wonder, Lathrop," said the colonel, "if you'd mind telling me exactly how it happened.

"How you found out about the brownies?"

"I didn't find out about them, Colonel; it was just a gag."

I told him about the Barnacle shooting off his mouth about no one on the staff ever showing any initiative, and how I'd dreamed up the brownie story to get even with him. And how the Barnacle had got even with me by running it.

But that didn't satisfy the colonel. "There must be more to it than that," he said.

I could see that he'd keep at me until I'd told it, anyhow; and while he hadn't said a word about it, I kept seeing images of the Pentagon, and the chiefs of staff, and Project Saucer — or whatever they might call it now — and the FBI, and a lot of other unpleasant things just over his left shoulder.

So I came clean with him. I told him all of it and a lot of it, I granted, sounded downright silly.

But he didn't seem to think that it was silly. "And what do you think about all this?"

"I don't know," I told him. "They might come from outer space, or…"

He nodded quietly. "We've known for some time now that there have been landings. This is the first time they've ever deliberately called attention to themselves."

"What do they want, Colonel? What are they aiming at?"

"I wish I knew."

Then he said very quietly, "Of course, if you should write anything about this, I shall simply deny it. That will leave you in a most peculiar position at best."

I don't know how much more he might have told me — maybe quite a bit. But right then the phone rang. I picked it up and answered; it was for the colonel.

He said "Yes," and listened. He didn't say another word. He got a little white around the gills; then he hung up the phone.

He sat there, looking sick.

"What's the matter, Colonel?"

"That was the field," he told me. "It happened just a while ago. They came out of nowhere and swarmed all over the plane — polished it and cleaned it and made it spic and span, both inside and out. The men couldn't do a thing about it. They just had to stand and watch."

I grinned. "There's nothing bad about that, Colonel. They were just being good to you."

"You don't know the half of it," he said. "When they got it all prettied up, they painted a brownie on the nose."

That's just about all there's to it as far as the brownies are concerned. The job they did on the colonel's plane was, actually, the sole public appearance that they made. But it was enough to serve their purpose if publicity was what they wanted — a sort of visual clincher, as it were. One of our photographers — a loopy character by the name of Charles, who never was where you wanted him when you wanted him, but nevertheless seemed to be exactly on the spot when the unusual or disaster struck — was out at the airport that morning. He wasn't supposed to be there; he was supposed to be covering a fire, which turned out luckily to be no more than a minor blaze. How he managed to wind up at the airport even he, himself, never was able to explain. But he was there and he got the pictures of the brownies polishing up the plane — not only one or two pictures, but a couple dozen of them, all the plates he had. Another thing — he got the pictures with a telescopic lens. He'd put it in his bag that morning by mistake; he'd never carried it before. After that one time he never was without it again and, to my knowledge, never had another occasion where he had to use it.

Those pictures were a bunch of lulus. We used the best of them on page one — a solid page of them — and ran two more pages of the rest inside. The AP got hold of them, transmitted them, and a number of other member papers used them before someone at the Pentagon heard about it and promptly blew his stack. But no matter what the Pentagon might say, the pictures had been run and whatever harm — or good — they might have done could not be recalled.

I suppose that if the colonel had known about them, he'd have warned us not to use them and might have confiscated them. But no one knew the pictures had been taken until the colonel was out of town, and probably back in Washington. Charlie got waylaid somehow — at a beer joint most likely — and didn't get back to the office until the middle of the afternoon.

When he heard about it, J. H. paced up and down and tore his hair and threatened to fire Charlie; but some of the rest of us got him calmed down and back into his office. We caught the pictures in our final street edition, picked the pages up for the early runs next day, and the circulation boys were pop-eyed for days at the way those papers sold.

The next day, after the worst of the excitement had subsided, the Barnacle and I went down to the corner to have ourselves a couple. I had never cared too much for the Barnacle before, but the fact that we'd been fired together established a sort of bond between us; and he didn't seem to be such a bad sort, after all,

Joe was as sad as ever. "It's them brownies," he told us, and he described them in a manner no one should ever use when talking of a brownie. "They've gone and made everyone so happy they don't need to drink no more."

"Both you and me, Joe," said the Barnacle; "they ain't done nothing for me, either."

"You got your job back," I told him.

"Mark," he said, solemnly, pouring out another. "I'm not so sure if that is good or not."

It might have developed into a grade-A crying session if Lighthing, our most up-and-coming copy boy, had not come shuffling in at that very moment.

"Mr. Lathrop," he said, "there's a phone call for you."

"Well, that's just fine."

"But it's from New York," said the kid.

That did it. It's the first time in my life I ever left a place so fast that I forgot my drink.

The call was from one of the papers to which I had applied, and the man at the New York end told me there was a job opening in the London staff and that he'd like to talk with me about it. In itself, it probably wasn't any better than the job I had, he said, but it would give me a chance to break in on the kind of work I wanted.

When could I come in? he asked, and I said tomorrow morning.

I hung up and sat back and the world all at once looked rosy. I knew right then and there those brownies still were working for me.

I had a lot of time to think on the plane trip to New York; and while I spent some of it thinking about the new job and London, I spent a lot of it thinking about the brownies, too.

They'd come to Earth before, that much at least was clear. And the world had not been ready for them. It had muffled them in a fog of folklore and superstition, and had lacked the capacity to use what they had offered it. Now, they tried again. This time we must not fail them, for there might not be a third time.

Perhaps one of the reasons they had failed before — although not the only reason — had been the lack of a media of mass communications. The story of them, and of their deeds and doings, had gone by word of mouth and had been distorted in the telling. The fantasy of the age attached itself to the story of the brownies until they became no more than a magic little people who were very droll, and on occasion helpful, but in the same category as the ogre, or the dragon, and others of their ilk.

Today it had been different. Today there was a better chance the brownies would be objectively reported. And while the entire story could not be told immediately, the people could still guess.

And that was important — the publicity they got. People must know they were back again, and must believe in them and trust them.

And why, I wondered, had one medium-sized city in the midwest of America been chosen as the place where they would make known their presence and demonstrate their worth? I puzzled a lot about that one, but I never did get it figured out, not even to this day.

Jo Ann was waiting for me at the airport when I came back from New York with the job tucked in my pocket. I was looking for her when I came down the ramp and I saw that she'd got past the gate and was running toward the plane. I raced out to meet her and I scooped her up and kissed her and some damn fool popped a flash bulb at us. I wanted to mop up on him, but Jo Ann wouldn't let me.

It was early evening and you could see some stars shining in the sky, despite the blinding floodlights; from way up, you could hear another plane that had just taken off; and up at the far end of the field, another one was warming up. There were the buildings and the lights and the people and the great machines and it seemed, for a long moment, like a table built to represent the strength and swiftness, the competence and assurance of this world of ours.

Jo Ann must have felt it, too, for she said suddenly:

"It's nice, Mark. I wonder if they'll change it." I knew who she meant without even asking.

"I think I know what they are," I told her; "I think I got it figured out. You know that Community Chest drive that's going on right now. Well, that's what they are doing, too — a sort of Galactic Chest. Except that they aren't spending money on the poor and needy; their kind of charity is a different sort. Instead of spending money on us, they're spending love and kindness, neighborliness and brotherhood. And I guess that it's all right. I wouldn't wonder but that, of all the people in the universe, we are the ones who need it most. They didn't come to solve all our problems for us — just to help clear away some of the little problems that somehow keep us from turning our full power on the important jobs, or keep us from looking at them in the right way."

That was more years ago than I like to think about, but I still can remember just as if it were yesterday.

Something happened yesterday that brought it all to mind again.

I happened to be in Downing Street, not too far from No. 10, when I saw a little fellow I first took to be some sort of dwarf. When I turned to look at him, I saw that he was watching me; he raised one hand in an emphatic gesture, with the thumb and first finger made into a circle — the good, solid American signal that everything's okay.

Then he disappeared. He probably ducked into an alley, although I can't say for a fact I actually saw him…

But he was right. Everything's okay.

The world is bright, and the cold war is all but over. We may be entering upon the first true peace the human race has ever known.

Jo Ann is packing, and crying as she packs, because she has to leave so many things behind. But the kids are goggle-eyed about the great adventure just ahead. Tomorrow morning we leave for Peking, where I'll be the first accredited American correspondent for almost thirty years.

And I can't help but wonder if, perhaps, somewhere in that ancient city — perhaps in a crowded, dirty street; perhaps along the imperial highway; maybe some day out in the country beside the Great Wall, built so fearsomely so many years ago — I may not see another little man.

The Golden Bugs

Original copyright year: 1960

It started as a lousy day.

Arthur Belsen, across the alley, turned on his orchestra at six o'clock and brought me sitting up in bed.

I'm telling you, Belsen makes his living as an engineer, but music is his passion. And since he is an engineer, he's not content to leave well enough alone. He had to mess around.

A year or two before he'd had the idea of a robotic symphony, and the man has talent, you have to give him that. He went to work on this idea and designed machines that could read—not only play, but read—music from a tape, and he built a machine to transcribe the tapes. Then he built a lot of these music machines in his basement workshop.

And he tried them out!

It was experimental work, quite understandably, and there was redesigning and adjusting to be done, and Belsen was finicky about the performance that each machine turned out. So he tried them out a lot—and loudly—not being satisfied until he had the instrumentation just the way he thought it should be.

There had been some idle talk in the neighborhood about a lynching party, but nothing came of it. That's the trouble, one of the troubles, with this neighborhood of ours—they'll talk an arm off you, but never do a thing.

As yet no one could see an end to all the Belsen racket. It had taken him better than a year to work up the percussion section and that was bad enough. But now he'd started on the strings and that was even worse.

Helen sat up in bed beside me and put her hands up to her ears, but she couldn't keep from hearing. Belsen had it turned up loud, to get, as he would tell you, the feel of it.

By this time, I figured, he probably had the entire neighborhood awake.

"Well, that's it," I said, starting to get up.

"You want me to get breakfast?"

"You might as well," I said. "No one's going to get any sleep with that thing turned on."

While she started breakfast, I headed for the garden back of the garage to see how the dahlias might be faring. I don't mind telling you I was delighted with those dahlias. It was nearly fair time and there were some of them that would be at bloom perfection just in time for showing.

I started for the garden, but I never got there. That's the way it is in this neighborhood. A man will start to do something and never get it done because someone always catches him and wants to talk a while.

This time it was Dobby. Dobby is Dr. Darby Wells, a venerable old codger with white chin whiskers, and he lives next door. We all call him Dobby and he doesn't mind a bit, for in a way it's a badge of tribute to the man. At one time Dobby had been an entomologist of some repute at the university and it had been his students who had hung the name on him. It was no corruption of his regular name, but stemmed rather from his one-time interest in mud-dauber wasps.

But now Dobby was retired, with nothing in the world to do except hold long and aimless conversations with anyone he could manage to nail down.

As soon as I caught sight of him, I knew I was sunk.

"I think it's admirable," said Dobby, leaning on his fence and launching into full-length discussion as soon as I was in voice distance, "for a man to have a hobby. But I submit it's inconsiderate of him to practice it so noisily at the crack of dawn."

"You mean that," I said, making a thumb at the Belsen house, from which the screeching and the caterwauling still issued in full force.

"Exactly," said Dobby, combing his white chin whiskers with an air of grave deliberation. "Now, mind me, not for a moment would I refuse the man the utmost admiration—"

"Admiration?" I demanded. There are occasions when I have a hard time understanding Dobby. Not so much because of the pontifical way in which be talks as because of the way he thinks.

"Precisely;" Debby told me. "Not for his machines, although they are electronic marvels, but for the way in which he engineers his tapes. The machine that he rigged up to turn out those tapes is a most versatile contraption. Sometimes it seems to be almost human."

"When I was a boy," I said, "we had player pianos and the pianos ran on tapes."

"Yes, Randall, you are right," admitted Dobby; "the principle was there, but the execution—think of the execution. All those old pianos had to do was tinkle merrily along, but Belsen has worked into his tapes the most delicate nuances."

"I must have missed them nuances," I told him, without any charity at all. "All I've heard is racket."

We talked about Belsen and his orchestra until Helen called me in for breakfast.

I had no sooner sat down than she dragged out her grievance list.

"Randall," she said, with determination, "the kitchen is positively crawling with grease ants again. They're so small you can hardly see them and all at once they're into everything."

"I thought you got rid of them," I said.

"I did. I tracked them to their nest and poured boiling water into it. But this time it's up to you."

"Sure thing," I promised. "I'll do it right away."

"That's what you said last time."

"I was ready to," I told her, "but you beat me to it."

"And that isn't all," she said. "There are those wasps up in the attic louvers. They stung the little Montgomery girl the other day."

She was getting ready to say more, but just then Billy, our eleven year old, came stumbling down the stairs.

"Look, Dad," he cried excitedly, holding out a small-size plastic box. "I have one here I've never seen before."

I didn't have to ask one what. I knew it was another insect. Last year it had been stamp collecting and this year it was insects—and that's another thing about having an idle entomologist for a next door neighbor.

I took the box without enthusiasm.

"A ladybug," I said.

"No, it's not," said Billy. "It's too big to be a ladybug. And the spots are different and the color is all wrong. This one is gold and a ladybug is orange."

"Well, look it up," I said, impatiently. The kid will do anything to keep away from reading.

"I did," said Billy. "I looked all through the book and I couldn't find it."

"Oh, for goodness sakes," snapped Helen, "sit down and eat your breakfast. It's bad enough to be overrun with ants and wasps without you spending all your time catching other bugs."

"But, Mom, it's educational," protested Billy. "That's what Dr. Wells says. He says there are seven hundred thousand known families of insects…"

"Where did you find it, son?" I asked, a bit ashamed of how we both were jumping on him.

"Right in my room," said Billy.

"In the house!" screamed Helen. "Ants aren't bad enough…"

"Soon as I get through eating, I'll show it to Dr. Wells."

"Now, don't you pester Dobby."

"I hope he pesters him a lot," Helen said, tight-lipped. "It was Dobby who got him started on this foolishness."

I handed back the box and Billy put it down beside his plate and started in on breakfast.

"Randall," Helen said, taking up her third point of complaint. "I don't know what I'm going to do with Nora."

Nora was the cleaning woman. She came in twice a week.

"What did she do this time?"

"It's what she doesn't do. She simply will not dust. She just waves a cloth around and that's all there is to it. She won't move a lamp or vase."

"Well, get someone else," I said.

"Randall, you don't know what you're talking about. Cleaning women are hard to find and you can't depend on them. I was talking to Amy…"

I listened and made the appropriate replies. I've heard it all before.

As soon as I finished breakfast, I took off for the office. It was too early to see any prospects, but I had some policies to write up and some other work to do and I could use the extra hour or two.

Helen phoned me shortly after noon and she was exasperated.

"Randall," she said, without preamble, "someone has dumped a boulder in the middle of the garden."

"Come again?" I said.

"You know. A big rock. It squashed down all the dahlias."

"Dahlias!" I yipped.

"And the funny thing about it is there aren't any tracks. It would take a truck to move a rock that big and…"

"Now, let's take this easy. How big, exactly, is this boulder?"

"It's almost as tall as I am."

"It's impossible!" I stormed. Then I tried to calm myself, "It's a joke," I said. "Someone played a joke."

I searched my mind for someone who might have done it and I couldn't think of anyone who'd go to all the trouble involved in that sort of joke. There was George Montgomery, but George was a sobersides. And Belsen, but Belsen was too wrapped up in music to be playing any jokes. And Dobby—it was inconceivable he'd ever play a joke.

"Some joke!" said Helen.

Nobody in the neighborhood, I told myself, would have done a trick like that, Everyone knew I was counting on those dahlias to win me some more ribbons.

"I'll knock off early," I told her, "and see what can be done about it."

Although I knew there was precious little that could be done about it—just haul the thing away.

"I'll be over at Amy" s," Helen said. "I'll try to get home early."

I went out and saw another prospect, but I didn't do too well. All the time I was thinking of the dahlias.

I knocked off work in the middle of the afternoon and bought a spray-can of insecticide at a drugstore. The label claimed it was effective against ants, roaches, wasps, aphids and a host of other pests.

At home, Billy was sitting on the steps.

"Hello, son. Nothing much to do?"

"Me and Tommy Henderson played soldier for a while, but we got tired of it."

I put the insecticide on the kitchen table, then headed for the garden. Billy trailed listlessly behind me.

The boulder was there, squarely in the middle of the dahlia patch, and every bit as big as Helen said it was. It was a funny looking thing, not just a big slab-sided piece of rock, but a freckled looking job. It was a washed out red and almost a perfect globe.

I walked around it, assessing the damage. There were a few of the dahlias left, but the better ones were gone. There were no tracks, no indication of how the rock might have gotten where it was. It lay a good thirty feet from the alleyway and someone might have used a crane to hoist it off a truck bed, but that seemed most unlikely, for a heavy nest of utility wires ran along the alley.

I went up to the boulder and had a good, close look at it. The whole face of it was pitted with small, irregular holes, none of them much deeper than half an inch, and there were occasional smooth patches, with the darker luster showing, as if some part of the original surface had been knocked off, The darker, smoother patches had the shine of highly polished wax, and I remembered something from very long ago—when a onetime pal of mine had been a momentary rock collector.

I bent a little closer to one of the smooth, waxy surfaces and it seemed to me that I could see the hint of wavy lines running in the stone.

"Billy," I asked, "would you know an agate if you saw one?"

"Gosh, Dad, I don't know. But Tommy would. He is a sort of rockhound. He's hunting all the time for different kinds of rocks."

He came up close and looked at one of the polished surfaces. He wet his thumb against his tongue and rubbed it across the waxy surface to bring out the satin of the stone.

"I don't know," he said, "but I think it is."

He backed off a ways and stared at the boulder with a new respect.

"Say, Dad, if it really is an agate—if it is one big agate, I mean, it would be worth a lot of money, wouldn't it?"

"

"I don't know. I suppose it might be."

"A million dollars, maybe."

I shook my head. "Not a million dollars."

"I'll go get Tommy, right away," he said.

He went around the garage like a flash and I could hear him running down the driveway, hitting out for Tommy's place.

I walked around the boulder several times and tried to estimate its weight, but I had no knowledge I could go on.

I went back to the house and read the directions on the can of insecticide. I uncapped and tested it and the sprayer worked.

So I got down on my knees in front of the threshold of the kitchen door and tried to find the path the ants were using to come in. I couldn't see any of them right away, but I knew from past experience that they are little more than specks and almost transparent in the bargain and mighty hard to see.

A glittery motion in one corner of the kitchen caught my eye and I wheeled around. A glob of golden shimmer was running on the floor, keeping close to the baseboard and heading for the cabinet underneath the kitchen sink.

It was another of the outsize ladybugs.

I aimed the squirt can at it and let it have a burst, but it kept right on and vanished underneath the cabinet.

With the bug gone, I resumed looking for the ants and found no sign of them. There were none coming in the door. Or going out, for that matter. There were none on the sink or the work table space.

So I went around the corner of the house to size up Operation Wasp. It would be a sticky one, I knew. The nest was located in the attic louver and would be hard to get at. Standing off and looking at it, I decided the only thing to do was wait until night, when I could be sure all the wasps were in the nest. Then I'd put up a ladder and climb up and let them have it, then get out as fast as I could manage without breaking my fool neck.

It was a piece of work that I frankly had no stomach for, but I knew from the tone of Helen's voice at the breakfast table there was no ducking it.

There were a few wasps flying around the nest, and as I watched a couple of them dropped out of the nest and tumbled to the ground.

Wondering what was going on, I stepped a little closer and then I saw the ground was littered with dead or dying wasps. Even as I watched, another wasp fell down and lay there, twisting and squirming.

I circled around a bit to try to get a better look at whatever might be happening. But I could make out nothing except that every now and then another wasp fell down.

I told myself it was all right with me. If something was killing off the wasps it would save me the job of getting rid of them.

I was turning around to take the insecticide back to the kitchen when Billy and Tommy Henderson came panting in excitement from the backyard.

"Mr. Marsden," Tommy said, "that rock out there is an agate. It's a banded agate."

"Well, now, that's fine," I said.

"But you don't understand," cried Tommy. "No agate gets that big. Especially not a banded agate. They call them Lake Superior agates and they don't ever get much bigger than your fist."

That did it. I jerked swiftly to attention and went pelting around the house to have another look at the boulder in the garden. The boys came pounding on behind me.

That boulder was a lovely thing. I put out my hand and stroked it. I thought how lucky I was that someone had plopped it in my garden. I had forgotten all about the dahlias.

"I bet you," Tommy told me, his eyes half as big as saucers, "that you could get a lot of money for it."

I won't deny that approximately the same thought had been going through my mind.

I put out my hand and pushed against it, just to get the solid and substantial feel of it.

And as I pushed, it rocked slightly underneath the pressure!

Astonished, I pushed a little harder, and it rocked again.

Tommy stood bug-eyed. "That's funny, Mr. Marsden. By rights, it hadn't ought to move. It must weigh several tons. You must be awfully strong."

"I'm not strong," I told him. "Not as strong as that." I tottered back to the house and put away the insecticide, then went out and sat down on the steps to do some worrying.

There was no sign of the boys. They probably had run swiftly off to spread the news through the neighborhood.

If that thing was an agate, as Tommy said it was—if it really was one tremendous agate, then it would be a fantastic museum piece and might command some money. But if it was an agate, why was it so light? No ten men, pushing on it, should have made it budge.

I wondered, too, just what my rights would be if it should actually turn out to be an agate. It was on my property and it should be mine. But what if someone came along and claimed it?

And there was this other thing: How had it gotten there to start with?

I was all tied up in knots with my worrying when Dobby came trundling around the corner of the house and sat down on the steps beside me.

"Lots of extraordinary things going on," he said. "I hear you have an agate boulder in the garden."

"That's what Tommy Henderson tells me. I suppose that he should know. Billy tells me he's a rockhound."

Dobby scratched at his whiskers. "Great things, hobbies," he said. "Especially for kids. They learn a lot from them,"

"Yeah," I said without enthusiasm.

"Your son brought me an insect for identification after breakfast this morning."

"I told him not to bother you."

"I am glad he brought it," Dobby said. "It was one I'd never seen before."

"It looked like a ladybug."

"Yes," Dobby agreed, "there is — some- resemblance. But I'm not entirely certain—well, fact of the matter is, I'm not even sure that it is an insect. To tell the truth, it resembles a turtle in many ways more than it does an insect. There is an utter lack of bodily segmentation, such as you'd find in any insect. The exoskeleton is extremely hard and the head and legs are retractible and it has no antennae."

He shook his head in some perplexity. "I can't be sure, of course. Much more extensive examination would be necessary before an attempt could be made at classifying it You didn't happen to find any more of them, did your"

"I saw one running on the floor not so long ago."

"Would you mind, next time you see one, grabbing it for me?"

"Not at all," I said. "I'll try to get you one."

I kept my word. After he left I went down into the basement to look up a bug for him. I saw several of them, but couldn't catch a one. I gave up in disgust.

After supper, Arthur Belsen came popping from across the alley. He was in a dither, but that was not unusual. He is a birdlike, nervous man and it doesn't take too much to get him all upset.

"I hear that boulder in your garden is an agate," he said to me. "What do you intend to do with it?"

"Why, I don't know. Sell it, I suppose, if anyone wants to buy it."

"It might be valuable," said Belsen. "You can't just leave it out there. Someone might come along and pinch it."

"Guess there's nothing else to do," I told him. "I certainly can't move it and I'm not going to sit up all night to guard it."

"You don't need to sit up all night," said Belsen. "I can fix it for you. We can rig up a nest of trip wires and hook up an alarm."

I wasn't too impressed and tried to discourage him, but he was like a beagle on a rabbit trail. He went back to his basement and came out with a batch of wire and a kit of tools and we fell to work.

We worked until almost bedtime getting the wires rigged up and an alarm bell installed just inside the kitchen door. Helen took a sour view of it. She didn't like the idea of messing up her kitchen, agate or no agate.

In the middle of the night the clamor of the bell jerked me out of bed, wondering what all the racket was. Then I remembered and went rushing for the stairs. On the third step from the bottom I stepped on something that rolled beneath my foot and sent me pitching down the stairs into the living room. I fell sprawling and skidded into a lamp, which landed on top and me and hit me on the head. I brought up against a chair, tangled with the lamp.

A marble, I thought. That damn kid has been strewing marbles all over the house again! He's too big for that. He knows better than to leave marbles on the stairs.

In the bright moonlight pouring through the picture window I saw the marble and it was moving rapidly- — not rolling, moving! — And there were a lot of other marbles, racing across the floor. Sparkling golden marbles running in the moonlight.

And that wasn't all—in the center of the living room stood the refrigerator!

The alarm bell was still clanging loudly and I picked myself up and got loose from the lamp and rushed for the kitchen door. Behind me I heard Helen yelling at me from the landing.

I got the door open and went racing in bare feet through the dew-soaked grass around the corner of the house.

A puzzled dog was standing by the boulder. He had managed to get one foot caught in one of Belsen's silly wires and he was standing there, three-legged, trying to get loose.

I yelled at him and bent over, scrabbling in the grass, trying to find something I could throw at him. He made a sudden lurch and freed himself. He took off up the alley, ears flapping in the breeze.

Behind me the clanging bell fell silent.

I turned around and trailed back to the house, feeling like a fool.

I suddenly remembered that I had seen the refrigerator standing in the living room. But, I told myself, that must be wrong. The refrigerator was in the kitchen and no one would have moved it. There was, first of all, no reason for a refrigerator to be in the living room; its place was in the kitchen. No one would have wanted to move it, and even if they did, they'd have made noise enough to wake the house if they'd tried to do it.

I was imagining things, I told myself. The boulder and the bugs had got me all upset and I was seeing things.

But I wasn't.

The refrigerator still stood in the center of the living room. The plug had been pulled out of the outlet and the cord trailed across the floor. A puddle of water from the slowly-thawing box had soaked into the carpet.

"It's ruining the carpet!" Helen shrieked at me, standing in a corner and staring at the errant refrigerator. "And the food will all be spoiled and…"

Billy came stumbling down the stairs, still half asleep.

"What's going on?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

I almost told him about the bugs I'd seen running in the house, but caught myself in time. There was no use upsetting Helen any more than she was right then.

"Let's get that box back where it belongs," I suggested, as matter-of-factly as I could. "The three of us can do it."

We tugged and shoved and hauled and lifted and got it back in its proper place and plugged it in again. Helen found some rags and started to mop up the sopping carpet.

"Was there something at the boulder, Dad?" asked Billy.

"A dog," I told him. "Nothing but a dog."

"I was against it—from the start," declared Helen, on her knees, angrily mopping the carpet. "It was a lot of foolishness. No one would have stolen the boulder. It isn't something you can just pick up and carry off. That Arthur Belsen's crazy."

"I agree with you," I told her, ruefully. "But he is a conscientious sort of fellow and a determined cuss and he thinks in terms of gadgets…"

"We won't get a wink of sleep," she said. "We'll be up a dozen times a night, chasing off stray dogs and cats. And I don't believe the boulder is an agate. All we have to go on is Tommy Henderson."

"Tommy is a rockhound," Billy told her, staunchly defending his pal. "He knows an agate when he sees one. He's got a big shoe box full of ones he's found."

And here we were, I thought, arguing about the boulder, when the thing that should most concern us—the happening with the most brain-twisting implications—was the refrigerator.

And a thought came to me—a floating, random thought that came bumbling out of nowhere and glanced against my mind.

I shivered at the thought and it came back again and burrowed into me and I was stuck with it:

• What if there was some connection between the refrigerator and the bugs?-

Helen got up from the floor. "There," she said accusingly, "that is the best I can do. I hope the carpet isn't ruined."

But a bug, I told myself—no bug could move a refrigerator. No bug, nor a thousand bugs. And what was more and final, no bug would want to move one. No bug would care whether a refrigerator was in the living room or kitchen.

Helen was very businesslike. She spread the wet cloth out on the sink to dry. She went into the living room and turned out the lights.

"We might as well get back to bed," she said. "If we are lucky, we can get some sleep."

I went over to the alarm beside the kitchen door and jerked the connections loose.

"Now," I told her, "we can get some sleep."

I didn't really expect to get any. I expected to stay awake the rest of the night, worrying about the refrigerator. But I did drop off, although not for very long.

At six-thirty Belsen turned on his orchestra and brought me out of bed.

Helen sat up, with her hands against her ears.

"Oh, not again!" she said.

I went around and closed the windows. It cut down the noise a little.

"Put the pillow over your head," I told her.

I dressed and went downstairs. The refrigerator was in the kitchen and everything seemed to be all right. There were a few of the bugs running around, but they weren't bothering anything.

I made myself some breakfast; then I went to work. And this was the second day running I'd gone early to the office. If this kept up, I told myself, the neighborhood would have to get together and do something about Belsen and his symphony.

Everything went all right. I sold a couple of policies during the morning and lined up a third.

When I came back to the office early in the afternoon a wild-eyed individual was awaiting me.

"You Marsden?" he demanded. "You the guy that's got an agate boulder?" -

"That's what I'm told it is," I said.

The man was a little runt. He wore sloppy khaki pants and engineer boots. Stuck in his belt was a rock hammer, one of those things with a hammer on one end of the head and a pick on the other.

"I heard about it," said the man, excitedly and a bit belligerently, "and I can't believe it. There isn't any agate that ever ran that big."

I didn't like his attitude. "If you came here to argue…"

"It isn't that," said the man. "My name is Christian Barr. I'm a rockhound, you understand. Been at it all my life. Have a big collection. President of our rock club. Win prizes at almost every show. And I thought if you had a rock like this…"

"Yes?"

"Well, if you had a rock like this, I might make an offer for it. I'd have to see it first."

I jammed my hat back on my head.

"Let us go," I said.

In the garden, Barr walked entranced around the boulder, He wet his thumb and rubbed the smooth places on its hide. He leaned close and inspected it. He ran a speculative hand across its surface. He muttered to himself.

"Well?" I asked.

"It's an agate," Barr told me, breathlessly. "Apparently a single, complete agate. Look here, this sort of pebbled, freckled surface—well, that's the inverse imprint of the volcanic bubble inside of which it formed. There's the characteristic mottling on the surface one would expect to find. And the fractures where the surface has been nicked show subconchoidal cleavage. And, of course, there is the indication of some banding."

He pulled the rock hammer from his belt and idly banged the boulder. It rang like a monstrous bell.

Barr froze and his mouth dropped open.

"It hadn't ought to do that," he explained as soon as he regained some of his composure. "It sounds as if it's hollow."

He rapped it once again and the boulder pealed.

"Agate is strange stuff," he said. "It's tougher than the best of steel. I suppose you could make a bell out of it if you could only fabricate it."

He stuck the hammer back into his belt and prowled around the boulder.

"It could be a thunderegg," he said, talking to himself, "But no, it can't be that. A thunderegg has agate in its center and not on the surface. And this is banded agate and you don't find banded agate associated with a thunderegg."

"What is a thunderegg?" I asked, but he didn't answer. He had hunkered down and was examining the bottom portion.

"Marsden," he asked, "how much will you take for it?"

"You'd have to name a figure," I told him. "I have no idea what it's worth."

"I'll give you a thousand as it stands."

"I don't think so," I said. Not that I didn't think it was enough, but on the principle that it's never wise to take a man's first figure.

"If it weren't hollow," Barr told me, "It would be worth a whole lot more."

"You can't be sure it's hollow."

"You heard it when I rapped it."

"Maybe that's just the way it sounds."

Barr shook his head. "It's all wrong," he complained. "No banded agate ever ran this big. No agate's ever hollow. And you don't know where this one came from."

I didn't answer him. There was no reason for me to.

"Look here," he said, after a while. "There's a hole in it. Down here near the bottom."

I squatted down to look where his finger pointed. There was a neat, round hole, no more than half an inch in diameter; no haphazard hole, but round and sharply cut, as if someone might have drilled it.

Barr hunted around and found a heavy weed stalk and stripped off the leaves. The stalk, some two feet of it, slid into the hole.

Barr squatted back and stared, frowning, at the boulder.

"She's hollow, sure as hell," he said.

I didn't pay too much attention to him. I was beginning to sweat a little. For another crazy thought had come bumbling along and fastened onto me:

• That hole would be just big enough for one of those bugs to get through!-

"Tell you what," said Barr. "I'll raise that offer to two thousand and take it off your hands."

I shook my head. I was going off — my- rocker linking up the bugs and boulder—even if there was a bug-size hole drilled into the boulder. I remembered that I likewise had linked the bugs with the refrigerator—and it must be perfectly obvious to anyone that the bugs could not have anything to do with either the refrigerator or the boulder.

They were just ordinary bugs—well, maybe not just ordinary bugs, but, anyhow, just bugs. Dobby had been puzzled by them, but Dobby would be the first, I knew, to tell you that there were many insects unclassified as yet. This might be a species which suddenly had flared into prominence, favored by some strange quirk of ecology, after years of keeping strictly under cover.

"You mean to say," asked Barr, astonished, "that you won't take two thousand?"

"Huh?" I asked, coming back to earth.

"I just offered you two thousand for the boulder."

I took a good hard look at him. He didn't look like the kind of man who'd spend two thousand for a hobby. More than likely, I told myself, he knew a good thing when he saw it and was out to make a killing. He wanted to snap this boulder up before I knew what it was worth.

"I'd like to think it over," I told him, warily. "If I decide to take the offer, where can I get in touch with you?"

He told me curtly and gruffly said goodbye. He was sore about my not taking his two thousand. He went stumping around the garage and a moment later I heard him start his car and drive away.

I squatted there and wondered if maybe I shouldn't have taken that two thousand. Two thousand was a lot of money and I could have used it. But the man had been too anxious and he'd had a greedy look.

Now, however, there was one thing certain. I couldn't leave the boulder out here in the garden. It was much too valuable to be left unguarded. Somehow or other I'd have to get it into the garage where I could lock it up. George Montgomery had a block and tackle and maybe I could borrow it and use it to move the boulder.

I started for the house to tell Helen the good news, although I was pretty sure she'd read me a lecture for not selling for two thousand.

She met me at the kitchen door and threw her arms around my neck and kissed me.

"Randall," she caroled, happily, "It's just too wonderful."

"I think so, too," I said, wondering how in the world she could have known about it.

"Just come and look at them," she cried. "The bugs are cleaning up the house!"

"They're what!" I yelled.

"Come and look," she urged, tugging at my ann. "Did you ever see the like of it? Everything's just shining!"

I stumbled after her into the living room and stared in disbelief that bordered close on horror.

They were working in battalions and they were purposeful about it. One gang of them was going over a chair back, four rows of them in line creeping up the chair back, and it was like one of those before-and-after pictures. The lower half of the chair back was so clean it looked like new, while the upper half was dingy.

Another gang was dusting an end table and a squad of others was working on the baseboard in the corner and a small army of them was polishing up the television set.

"They've got the carpeting all done!" squealed Helen. "And this end of the room is dusted and there are some of them starting on the fireplace. I never could get Nora to even touch the fireplace. And now I won't need Nora. Randall, do you realize that these bugs will save us the twenty dollars a week that we've been paying Nora? I wonder if you'll let me have that twenty dollars for my very own. There are so many things I need, I haven't had a new dress for ages and I should have another hat and I saw the cutest pair of shoes the other day…"

"But bugs!" I yelled. "You are afraid of bugs. You detest the things. And bugs don't clean carpeting. All they do is eat it."

"These bugs are cute," protested Helen, happily, "and I'm not afraid of them. They're not like ants and spiders. They don't give you a crawly feeling. They are so clean themselves and they are so friendly and so cheerful. They are even pretty. And I just love to watch them work. Isn't it cunning, the way they get together in a bunch to work? They're just like a vacuum cleaner. They just move over something and the dust and dirt are gone."

I stood there, looking at them hard at work, and I felt an icy finger moving up my spine, for no matter how it might violate common sense, now I knew that the things I had been thinking, about the refrigerator and the boulder, had not been half as crazy as they might have seemed.

"I'm going to phone Amy," said Helen, starting for the kitchen. "This is just too wonderful to keep. Maybe we could give her some of the bugs. What do you think, Randall? Just enough of them to give her house a start."

"Hey, wait a minute," I hollered at her. "These things aren't bugs."

"I don't care what they are," said Helen, airily, already dialing Amy's number, "just so they clean the house."

"But, Helen, if you'd only listen to me…"

"Shush," she said playfully. "How can I talk to Amy if you keep—Oh, hello, Amy, is that you…"

I saw that it was hopeless. I retreated in complete defeat.

I went around the house to the garage, intending to move some stuff to make room for the boulder at the back.

The door was open. Inside was Billy, busy at the work bench.

"Hello, son," I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. "What's going on?"

"I'm making some bug traps, Dad. To catch some of the bugs that are cleaning up the house. Tommy's partners with me. He went home to get some bait."

"Bait?"

"Sure. We found out that they like agates."

I reached out and grabbed a studding to hold myself erect. Things were going just a bit too fast to take.

"We tried out the traps down in the basement," Billy told me. "There are a lot of the bugs down there. We tried everything for bait. We tried cheese and apples and dead flies and a lot of other things, but the bugs weren't having any. Tommy had an agate in his pocket, just a little gravel agate that he picked up. So we tried that."

"But why an agate, son? I can't think of anything less likely…"

"Well, you see, it was this way, Dad. We tried everything…"

"Yes," I said, "I can see the logic of it."

"Trouble is," Billy went on, "we have to use plastic for the traps. It's the only thing that will hold the bugs. They burst right out of a trap made of anything but plastic."

"Now, just a minute there," I warned him. "Once you catch these bugs, what do you intend to do with them?"

"Sell them, naturally," said Billy. "Tommy and me figured everyone would want them. Once the people around here find out how they'll clean a house, everyone will want them. We'll charge five dollars for half a dozen of them. That's a whole lot cheaper than a vacuum cleaner."

"But just six bugs…"

"They multiply," said Billy. "They must multiply real fast. A day or two ago we had just a few of them and now the house is swarming."

Billy went on working on the trap.

Finally he said, "Maybe, Dad, you'd like to come in with us on the deal? We need some capital. We have to buy some plastic to make more and better traps. We might be able to make a big thing out of it."

"Look, son. Have you sold any of the bugs?"

"Well, we tried to, but no one would believe us. So we thought we'd wait until Mom noised it around a bit."

"What did you do with the bugs you caught?"

"We took them over to Dr. Wells. I remembered that he wanted some. We gave them to him free."

"Billy, I wish you'd do something for me."

"Sure, Dad. What is it?"

"Don't sell any of the bugs. Not right away at least. Not until I say that it's okay."

"But, gee, Dad…"

"Son, I have a hunch. I think the bugs are alien."

"Me and Tommy figured that they might be."

"You what!"

"It was this way, Dad. At first we figured we'd sell them just as curiosities. That was before we knew how they would clean a house. We thought some folks might want them because they looked so different, and we tried to figure out a sales pitch. And Tommy said why don't we call them alien bugs, like the bugs from Mars or something. And that started us to thinking and the more we thought about it the more we thought they might really be bugs from Mars. They aren't insects, nor anything else so far as we could find. They're not like anything on Earth…"

"All right," I said, "All right!"

That's the way kids are these days. You can't keep up with them. You think you have something all nailed down and neat and here they've beat you to it. It happens all the time.

I tell you, honestly, it does nothing for a man.

"I suppose," I said, "that while you were figuring all this out, you also got it doped how they might have got here."

"We can't be really sure," said Billy, "but we have a theory. That boulder out in back—we found a hole in it just the right size for these bugs. So we sort of thought they used that."

"You won't believe me, son," I told him, "but I was thinking the same thing. But the part that's got me stumped is what they used for power. What made the boulder move through space?"

"Well, gee, Dad, we don't know that. But there is something else. They could have used the boulder for their food all the time they traveled. There'd be just a few of them, most likely, and they'd get inside the boulder and there'd be all that food, maybe enough of it to last them years and years. So they'd eat the agate, hollowing out the boulder and making it lighter so it could travel faster—well, if not faster, at least a little easier. But they'd be very careful not to chew any holes in it until they'd landed and it was time to leave."

"But agate is just rock…"

"You weren't listening, Dad," said Billy, patiently. "I told you that agate was the only bait they'd go for."

"Randall," said Helen, coming down the driveway, "if you don't mind, I'd like to use the car to go over and see Amy. She wants me to tell her all about the bugs."

"Go ahead," I said. "Any way you look at it, my day is shot. I may as well stay home."

She went tripping back down the driveway and I said to Billy: "You just lay off everything until I get back."

"Where are you going, Dad?"

"Over to see Dobby."

I found Dobby roosting on a bench beneath an apple tree, his face all screwed up with worry. But it didn't stop him from talking.

"Randall," he said, beginning to talk as soon as I hove in sight, "this is a sad day for me. All my life I've been vastly proud of my professional exactitude in my chosen calling. But this day I violated, willingly and knowingly and in a fit of temper, every precept of experimental observation and laboratory technique."

"That's too bad," I said, wondering what he was talking about. Which was not unusual. One often had to wonder what he was getting at.

"It's those damn bugs of yours," Dobby accused me explosively.

"But you said you wanted some more bugs. Billy remembered that and he brought some over."

"And so I did. I wanted to carry forward my examination of them. I wanted to dissect one and see what made him go. Perhaps you recall my telling you about the hardness of the exoskeletons."

"Yes, of course I do."

"Randall," said Dobby sadly, "would you believe me if I told you that exoskeleton was so hard I could do nothing with it? I couldn't cut it and I couldn't peel it off. So you know what I did?"

"I have no idea," I declared, somewhat exasperated. I hoped that he'd soon get to the point, but there was no use in hurrying him. He always took his time.

"Well, I'll tell you, then," said Dobby, seething. "I took one of those little so-and-sos and I put him on an anvil. Then I picked up a hammer and I let him have it. And I tell you frankly that I am not proud of it. It constituted, in every respect, a most improper laboratory technique."

"I wouldn't let that worry me at all," I told him. "You'll simply have to put this down as an unusual circumstance. The important thing, it seems to me, is what you learned about the bug…"

And then I had a terrible thought. "Don't tell me the hammer failed!"

"Not at all," said Dobby with some satisfaction. "It did a job on him. He was smashed to smithereens."

I sat down on the bench beside him and settled down to wait. I knew that in due time he'd tell me.

"An amazing thing," said Dobby. "Yes, a most amazing thing. That bug was made of crystals—of something that looked like the finest quartz. There was no protoplasm in him. Or, at least," he qualified, judiciously, "none I could detect."

"But a crystal bug! That's impossible!"

"Impossible," said Dobby. "Yes, of course, by any earthly standard. It runs counter to everything we've ever known or thought. But the question rises: Can our earthly standards, even remotely, be universal?"

I sat there, without saying anything, but somehow I felt a great relief that someone else was thinking the same thing I had thought It went to prove, just slightly, that I wasn't crazy.

"Of course," said Dobby, "it had to happen sometime. Soon or late, it should be almost inevitable that some alien intelligence would finally seek us out. And knowing this, we speculated on monsters and monstrosities, but we fell short of the actual mark of horr—"

"There's no reason at the moment," I told him hastily, "that we should fear the bugs. They might in fact, become a useful ally. Even now they are cooperating. They seemed to strike up some sort of deal. We furnish them a place to live and they, in turn…"

"You're mistaken, Randall," Dobby warned me solemnly. "These things are alien beings. Don't imagine for a moment that they and the human race might have a common purpose or a single common concept. Their life process, whatever it may be, is entirely alien to us. So must be their viewpoints. A spider is blood-brother to you as compared with these."

"But we had ants and wasps and they cleaned out the ants and wasps."

"They may have cleaned out the ants and wasps, but it was no part, I am sure, of a cooperative effort. It was no attempt on their part to butter up the human in whose dwelling place they happened to take refuge, or set up their camp, or carve out their beachhead, however you may put it. I have grave doubts that they are aware of you at all except as some mysterious and rather shadowy monstrosity they can't bother with as yet. Sure they killed your insects, but in this they did no more than operate on a level common with their own existence. The insects might have been in their way or they may have recognized in them some potential threat or hindrance."

"But even so, we can use them," I told him impatiently, "to control our insect pests, or carriers of disease."

"Can we?" Dobby asked. "What makes you think we can? And it would not be insect pests alone, but rather all insects. Would you, then deprive our plant life of its pollination agents—to mention just one example of thousands?"

"You may be right," I said, "but you can't tell me that we must be afraid of bugs, of even crystal bugs. Even if they should turn out to be a menace, we could find a way in which to cope with them."

"I have been sitting here and thinking, trying to get it straight within my mind," said Dobby, "and one thing that has occurred to me is that here we may be dealing with a social concept we've never met with on this planet. I'm convinced that these aliens must necessarily operate on the hive-mind principle. We face not one of them alone nor the total number of them, but we face the sum total of them as a single unit, as a single mind and a single expression of purpose and performance."

"If you really think they're dangerous, what would you have us do?"

"I still have my anvil and my hammer."

"Cut out the kidding, Dobby."

"You are right," said Dobby. "This is no joking matter, nor is it one for an anvil and a hammer. My best suggestion is that the area be evacuated and an atom bomb be dropped."

Billy came tearing clown the path.

"Dad!" he was yelling. "Dad!"

"Hold up there," I said, clutching at his arm. "What is going on?"

"Someone is ripping up our furniture," yelled Billy, "and then throwing it outdoors."

"Now, wait a minute—are you sure?"

"I saw them doing it," yelled Billy. "Gosh, will Mom be sore!"

I didn't wait to hear any more. I started for the house as fast as I could go. Billy followed close behind me and Dobby brought up the rear, white whiskers bristling like an excited billy goat.

The screen door off the kitchen was standing open as if someone had propped it, and outside, beyond the stoop, lay a pile of twisted fabric and the odds and ends of dismembered chairs.

I went up the steps in one bound and headed for the door. And just as I reached the doorway I saw this great mass of stuff bulleting straight toward me and I ducked aside. A limp and gutted love seat came hurtling out the door and landed on the pile of debris. It sagged into a grotesque resemblance of its former self.

By this time I was good and sore. I dived for the pile and grabbed up a chair leg. I got a good grip on it and rushed through the door and across the kitchen into the living room. I had the club at ready and if there'd be anybody there I would have let him have it.

But there was no one there—no one I could see.

The refrigerator was back in the center of the room and heaped all about it were piles of pots and pans. The tangled coil springs from the love seat were leaning crazily against it and scattered all about the carpet there were nuts and bolts, washers, brads and nails and varying lengths of wire.

There was a strange creaking noise from somewhere and I glanced hurriedly around to find out what it was. I found out, all right.

Over on one corner, my favorite chair was slowly am deliberately and weirdly coming apart. The upholstery nails were rising smoothly from the edging of the fabric—rising from the wood—as if by their own accord—and dropping to the floor with tiny patterings. As I watched a bolt fell to the floor and one leg bent underneath the chair and the chair tipped over. The upholstery nails kept right on coming out.

And as I stood there watching this, I felt the anger draining out of me and a fear come dribbling in to take its place. I started to get cold all over and I could feel the gooseflesh rising.

I started sneaking out. I didn't dare to turn my back so I backed carefully away and I kept my club ready.

I bumped into something and let out a whoop and spun around and raised my club to strike.

It was Dobby. I just stopped the club in time. "Randall," said Dobby calmly, "it's those bugs of yours again."

He gestured toward the ceiling and I looked. The ceiling was a solid mass of golden-gleaming bugs.

I lost some of my fear at seeing them and started to get sore again. I pulled back my arm and aimed the club up at the ceiling. I was ready to let the little stinkers have it, when Dobby grabbed my arm.

"Don't go getting them stirred up," he yelled. "No telling what they'd do."

I tried to jerk my arm away from him, but he hung on to it.

"It is my considered opinion," he declared, even as he wrestled with me, "that the situation has evolved beyond the point where it can be handled by the private citizen."

I gave up. It was undignified trying to get my arm loose from Dobby's clutching paws and I likewise began to see that a club was no proper weapon to use against the bugs.

"You may be right," I said.

I saw that Billy was peering through the door.

"Get out of here," I yelled at him. "You're in the line of fire. They'll be throwing that chair out of here in another minute. They're almost through with it."

Billy ducked back out of sight.

I walked out to the kitchen and hunted through a cupboard drawer until I found the phone book. I looked up the number and dialed the police.

"This is Sergeant Andrews talking," said a voice.

"Now listen closely, Sergeant," I said. "I have some bugs out here…"

"Ain't we all?" the sergeant asked in a happy tone of voice.

"Sergeant," I told him, trying to sound as reasonable as I could, "I know that this sounds funny. But these are a different kind of bug. They're breaking up my furniture and throwing it outdoors."

"I tell you what," the sergeant said, still happy. "You better go on back to bed and try to sleep it off. If you don't, I'll have to run you in."

"Sergeant," I told him, "I am completely sober…"

A hollow click came from the other end and the phone went dead.

I dialed the number back.

"Sergeant Andrews," said the voice.

"You just hung up on me," I yelled. "What do you mean by that? I'm a sober, law-abiding, taxpaying citizen and I'm entitled to protection, and even if you don't think so, to some courtesy as well. And when I tell you I have bugs…"

"All right," said the sergeant wearily. "Since you are asking for it. What's your name and address?"

I gave them to him.

"And Mr. Marsden," said the sergeant.

"What is it now?"

"You better have those bugs. If you know what's good for you, there better be some bugs."

I slammed down the phone and turned around.

Dobby came tearing out of the living room.

"Look out! Here it comes!" he yelled.

My favorite chair, what was left of it, came swishing through the air. It hit the door and stuck. It jiggled violently and broke loose to drop on the pile outside.

"Amazing," Dobby panted. "Truly amazing. But it explains a lot."

"Tell me," I snapped at him, "what explains a lot?" I was getting tired of Dobby's ramblings.

"Telekinesis," said Dobby.

"Tele-what?"

"Well, maybe only teleportation," Dobby admitted sheepishly. "That's the ability to move things by the power of mind alone."

"And you think this teleportation business bears out your hive-mind theory?"

Dobby looked at me with some astonishment. "That's exactly what I meant," he said.

"What I can't figure out," I told him, "is why they're doing this."

"Of course you can't," said Dobby. "No one expects you to. No one can presume to understand an alien motive. On the surface of it, it would appear they are collecting metal, and that well may be exactly what they're doing. But the mere fact of their metal grabbing does not go nearly far enough. To truly understand their motive…"

A siren came screaming down the street.

"There they are," I said, racing for the door.

The police car pulled up to the curb and two officers vaulted out.

"You Marsden?" asked the first one.

I told him that I was.

"That's funny," said the second one. "Sarge said he was stinko."

"Say," said the first one, staring at the pile of wreckage outside the kitchen door, "what is going on here?"

Two chair legs came whistling out the door and thudded to the ground.

"Who is in there throwing out the stuff?" the second cop demanded.

"Just the bugs," I told them. "Just the bugs and Dobby. I guess Dobby's still in there."

"Let's go in and grab this Dobby character," said the first one, "before he wrecks the joint."

I stayed behind. There was no use of going in. All they'd do would be ask a lot of silly questions and there were enough of them I could ask myself without listening to the ones thought up by someone else.

A small crowd was beginning to gather. Billy had rounded up some of his pals and neighbor women were rushing from house to house, cackling like excited chickens. Several cars had stopped and their occupants sat gawping.

I walked out to the street and sat down on the curbing.

And now, I thought, it all had become just a little clearer. If Dobby was right about this teleportation business, and the evidence said he was, then the boulder could have been the ship the bugs had used to make their way to Earth. If they could use their power to tear up furniture and throw it out of the house, they could use that selfsame power to move anything through space. It needn't have been the boulder; it could have been anything at all.

Billy, in his uninhibited, boyish thinking, probably had struck close to the truth—they had used the boulder because it was their food.

The policemen came pounding back out of the house and stopped beside me.

"Say, mister," said one of them, "do you have the least idea what is going on?"

I shook my head. "You better talk to Dobby. He's the one with answers."

"He says these things are from Mars."

"Not Mars," said the second officer. "It was you who said it might be Mars. He said from the stars."

"He's a funny-talking old coot," complained the first policeman. "A lot of stuff he says is more than a man can swallow."

"Jake," said the other one, "we better start doing something about this crowd. We can't let them get too close."

"I'll radio for help," said Jake.

He went to the police car and climbed into it.

"You stick around," the other said to me, "Tm not going anywhere," I said.

The crowd was good-sized by now. More cars had stopped and some of the people in them had gotten out, but most of them just sat and stared. There were an awful lot of kids by this time and the women were still coming, perhaps from blocks away. Word spreads fast in an area like ours.

Dobby came ambling down the yard. He sat down beside me and started pawing at his whiskers.

"It makes no sense," he said, "but, then, of course, it wouldn't."

"What I can't figure out," I told him, "is why they cleaned the house. Why did it have to be spic and span before they started piling up the metal? There must be a reason for it."

A car screeched down the street and slammed up to the curb just short of where we sat. Helen came bustling out of it.

"I can't turn my back a minute," she declared, "but something up and happens."

"It's your bugs," I said. "Your nice house-cleaning bugs. They're ripping up the place."

"Why don't you stop them, then?"

"Because I don't know how."

"They're aliens," Dobby told her calmly. "They came from somewhere out in space."

"Dobby Wells, you keep out of this! You've caused me all the trouble I can stand. The idea of getting Billy interested in insects! He's had the place cluttered up all summer."

A man came rushing up. He squatted down beside me and started pawing at my arm. I turned around and saw that it was Barr, the rockhound.

"Marsden," he said, excitedly, "I have changed my mind. I'll give you five thousand for that boulder. I'll write you out a check right now."

"What boulder?" Helen asked. "You mean our boulder out in the back?"

"That's the one," said Barr. "I've got to have that boulder."

"Sell it to him," Helen said.

"I will not," I told her.

"Randall Marsden," she screamed, "you can't turn down five thousand! Think of what five thousand…"

"I can turn it down," I told her, firmly. "It's worth a whole lot more than that. It's not just an agate boulder any longer. It's the first spaceship that ever came to Earth. I can get anything I ask."

Helen gasped.

"Dobby," she asked weakly, "is he telling me the truth?"

"I think," said Dobby, "that for once he is." The wail of sirens sounded down the street. One of the policemen came back from the car.

"You folks will have to get across the street," he said.

"As soon as the others get here, we'll cordon off the place."

We got up to start across the street.

"Lady," said the officer, "you'll have to move your car."

"If you two want to stay together," Dobby offered, "I'll drive it down the street."

Helen gave him the keys and the two of us walked across the street. Dobby got into the car and drove off,

The officers were hustling the other cars away.

A dozen police cars arrived. Men piled out of them. They started pushing back the crowd. Others fanned out to start forming a circle around the house.

Broken furniture, bedding, clothing, draperies from time to time came flying out the kitchen door. The pile of debris grew bigger by the moment.

We stood across the street and watched our house be wrecked.

"They must be almost through by now," I said, with a strange detachment. "I wonder what comes next."

"Randall," said Helen tearfully, clinging to my arm, "what do we do now? They're wrecking all my things. How about it—is it covered by insurance?"

"Why, I don't know," I said. "I never thought of it."

And that was the truth of it—it hadn't crossed my mind. And me an insurance man!

I had written that policy myself and now I tried desperately to remember what the fine print might have said and I had a sinking feeling. How, I asked myself, could anything like this be covered? It certainly was no hazard that could have been anticipated.

"Anyhow," I said, "we still have the boulder. We can sell the boulder."

"I still think we should have taken the five thousand," Helen told me. "What if the Government should move in and just grab the boulder off?"

And she was right, I told myself. This would be just the sort of thing in which the Government could become intensely interested.

I began to think myself that maybe we should have taken that five thousand.

Three policemen walked across the yard and went into the house. Almost at once they came tearing out again. Pouring out behind them came a swarm of glittering dots that hummed and buzzed and swooped so fast they seemed to leave streaks of their golden glitter in the air behind them. The policemen ran in weaving fashion, ducking and dodging. They waved their hands in the air above their heads.

The crowd surged back and began to run. The police cordon broke and retreated with what dignity it could.

I found myself behind the house across the street, my hand still gripping Helen's arm. She was madder than a hornet.

"You needn't have pulled me along so fast," she told me. "I could have made it by myself. You made me lose my shoes."

"Forget your shoes," I told her sharply. "This thing is getting serious. You go and round up Billy and the two of you get out of here. Go up to Amy's place."

"Do you know where Billy is?"

"He's around somewhere. He is with his pals. Just look for a bunch of boys."

"And you?"

"I'll be along," I said.

"You'll be careful, Randall?"

I patted her shoulder and stooped down to kiss her. "I'll be careful. I'm not very brave, you know. Now go and get the boy."

She started away and then turned back. "Will we ever go back home?" she asked.

"I think we will," I said, "and soon. Someone will find a way to get them out of there."

I watched her walk away and felt the chilly coldness of the kindness of my lie.

Would we, in solemn truth, ever go back home again? Would the entire world, all of humanity, ever be at home again? Would the golden bugs take away the smug comfort and the warm security that Man had known for ages in his sole possession of a planet of his own?

I went up the backyard slope and found Helen's shoes. I put them in my pocket. I came to the back of the house and peeked around the corner.

The bugs had given up the chase, but now a squadron of them flew in a lazy, shining circle around and just above the house. It was plain to see that they were on patrol.

I ducked back around the house and sat down in the grass, with my back against the house. It was a warm amid blue-sky summer day; the kind of day a man should mow his lawn.

A slobbering horror, I thought, no matter how obscene or fearful, might be understood, might be fought against. But the cold assuredness with which the golden bugs were directed to their purpose, the self-centered, vicious efficiency with which they operated, was something else again.

And their impersonal detachment, their very disregard of us, was like a chilly blast upon human dignity.

I heard footsteps and looked up, startled.

It was Arthur Belsen and he was upset.

But that was not unusual. Belsen could get upset at something that was downright trivial.

"I was looking for you everywhere," he chattered. "I met Dobby just a while ago and he tells me these bugs of yours…"

"They're no bugs of mine," I told him sharply. I was getting tired of everyone talking as if I owned the bugs, as if I might be somehow responsible for their having come to Earth.

"Well, anyway, he was telling me they are after metal." I nodded. "That's what they're after. Maybe it's precious stuff to them. Maybe they haven't got too much of it wherever they are from."

And I thought about the agate boulder. If they had had metal, certainly they'd not have used the agate boulder.

"I had an awful time getting home," said Belsen. "I thought there was a fire. There are cars parked in the street for blocks and an awful crowd. I was lucky to get through."

"Come on and sit down," I told him. "Stop your fidgeting."

But he paid no attention to me.

"I have an awful lot of metal," he said. "All those machines of mine down in the basement. I've put a lot of time and work and money into those machines and I can't let anything happen to them. You don't think the bugs will start branching out, do you?"

"Branching out?"

"Well, yes, you know—after they get through with everything in your house, they might start getting into other houses."

"I hadn't thought of it," I said. "I suppose that it could happen."

I sat there and thought about it and I had visions of them advancing house by house, cleaning out and salvaging all the metal, putting it into one big pile until it covered the entire block and eventually the city.

"Dobby says that they are crystal. Isn't that a funny thing for bugs to be?"

I said nothing. After all, he was talking to himself.

"But crystal can't be alive," protested Belsen. "Crystal is stuff that things are made of. Vacuum tubes and such. There is no life in it."

"Don't try to fight with me," I told him. "I can't help it if they are crystal."

There seemed to be a lot of ruckus going on out in the street and I got on my feet to peer around the corner of the house.

For a moment there was nothing to see. Everything looked peaceful. One or two policemen were running around excitedly, but I couldn't see that anything was happening. It looked just as it had before.

Then a door slowly, almost majestically, detached itself from one of the police cars parked along the curb and started floating toward the open kitchen door. It reached the door and made a neat left turn and disappeared inside.

A rear vision mirror sailed flashing through the air. It was followed by a siren. Both disappeared within the house.

Good Lord, I told myself, the bugs are going after the cars!

Now I saw that a couple of the cars were already minus hoods and fenders and that some other doors were missing.

The bugs, I thought, had finally really hit the jackpot. They wouldn't stop until they'd stripped the cars clean down to the tires.

And I was thinking, too, with a strange perverse reaction, that there wasn't nearly room enough inside the house to pack all those dismantled cars, What, I wondered, would the bugs do when the house was full?

A half dozen policemen dashed across the street and started for the house. They reached the lawn before the bug patrol above the house became aware of them and swooped down in a screaming, golden arc.

The policemen ran back pell-mell. The bug patrol, it's duty done, returned to circling the house. Fenders, doors, taillights, headlights, radio antennae, and other parts of cars continued to pour into the house.

A dog came trotting out of nowhere and went across the lawn, tail wagging in friendly curiosity.

A flight of bugs left the patrol and headed down toward him.

The dog, startled by the whistle of the diving bugs, wheeled about to run.

He was too late.

There was a sickening thud of missiles hitting flesh. The dog leaped high into the air and fell over on his back.

The bugs swooped up into the air again. There were no gaps in their ranks.

The dog lay twitching in the yard and blood ran in the grass.

I ducked back around the corner, sick. I doubled up, retching, trying hard to keep from throwing up.

I fought it off and my stomach quieted down. I peeked around the corner of the house.

All was peaceful once again. The dead dog lay sprawling in the yard. The bugs were busy with their stripping of the cars. No policemen were in sight. There was no one in sight at all. Even Belsen had disappeared somewhere.

It was different now, I told myself. The dog had made it different.

The bugs were no longer only a mystery; now they were a deadly danger. Each of them was a rifle bullet with intelligence.

I remembered something that Dobby had said just an hour or so ago. Evacuate the area, he had said, then drop an atom bomb.

And would it come to that? I wondered. Was that the measure of the danger?

No one, of course, was thinking that way yet, but in time they might. This was just the start of it. Today the city was alerted and the police were on the scene; tomorrow it might be the governor sending in some troops. And in time it would be the Federal Government. And after that, Dobby's solution might be the only answer.

The bugs hadn't spread too far as yet. But Belsen's fear was valid; in time they would expand, pushing out their beachhead block by block as there were more and more of them. For Billy had been right when he had said they must multiply real fast.

I tried to imagine how the bugs could multiply, but I had no idea.

First of all, of course, the Government would probably try to make contact with them, would attempt to achieve some communication with them—not with the creatures themselves, perhaps, but rather with that mass mind which Dobby had figured them to have.

But was it possible to communicate with creatures such as these? On what intellectual level might one approach them? And what good could possibly come of such communication if it was established? Where was the basis for understanding between these creatures and the human race?

And I realized, even as I thought all this, that I was thinking with pure panic. To approach a problem such as the bugs presented, there was need of pure objectivity—there could be no question of either fear or anger. The time had come for Man to discard the pettiness of one-planet thinking.

It was no problem of mine, of course, but thinking of it, I saw a deadly danger—that the eventual authority, whoever that might be, might delay too long in its objectivity.

There had to be a way to stop the bugs; there must be some measure to control them. Before we tried to establish contact, there must be a way in which we could contain them.

And I thought of something—of Billy telling me that to hold them once you caught them you needed a plastic trap.

I wondered briefly how the kid had known that. Perhaps it had been no more than simple trial and error. After all, he and Tommy Henderson must have tried several different kinds of traps.

Plastic might be the answer to the problem I had posed. It could be the answer if we acted before they spread too far.

And why plastic? I wondered. What element within plastic would stop them cold and hold them once they were trapped within it? Some factor, perhaps, that we would learn only after long and careful study. But it was something that did not matter now; it was enough we knew that plastic did the trick.

I stood there for a time, turning the matter in my mind, wondering who to go to.

I could go to the police, of course, but I had a feeling I would get little hearing there. The same would be true of the officials of the city. For while it was possible the might listen, they'd have to talk it over, they'd have to call a conference, they'd feel compelled to consult some expert before they did anything about it. And the Government in Washington, at the moment, was unthinkable.

The trouble was that no one was scared enough as yet to act as quickly as they should. They'd have to be scared silly—and I had had a longer time to get scared silly than any of the rest.

Then I thought of another man who was as scared as I was.

Belsen.

Belsen was the man to help me. Belsen was scared stiff.

He was an engineer and possibly he could tell me if what I had been thinking was any good or not. He could sit down and figure how it might be done. He'd know where to get the plastic that we needed and the best type of it to use and more than likely he'd know how to go about arranging for its fabrication. And he might, a well, know someone it would do some good to talk to.

I went back to the corner of the house and had a look around.

There were a few policemen in sight, but not too many of them. They weren't doing anything, just standing there and watching while the bugs kept on working at the cars. They had the bodies pretty well stripped down by now and were working on the engines. As I watched I saw one motor rise and sail toward the house. It was dripping oil, and chunks of caked grease and dust were falling off of it. I shivered at the thought of what a mess like that would do to Helen's carpeting and the decorating.

There were a few knots of spectators here and there, but all of them were standing at quite a distance off.

It looked to me as if I'd have no trouble reaching Belsen's house if I circled around the block, so I started out.

I wondered if Belsen would be at home and was afraid he might not be. Most of the houses in the neighborhood seemed to be deserted. But it was a chance, I knew, that I had to take. If he wasn't at his house, I'd have to hunt him down.

I reached his place and went up the steps and rang the bell. There wasn't any answer, so I walked straight in.

The house seemed to be deserted.

"Belsen," I called.

He didn't answer me and I called again.

Then I heard footsteps clattering up a stairs.

The basement door came open and Belsen stuck his head out.

"Oh, it's you," he said. "I'm glad you came. I will need some help. I sent the family off."

"Belsen," I said, "I know what we can do. We can get a monstrous sheet of plastic and drop it on the house. That way they can't get out. Maybe we can get some helicopters, maybe four of them, one for each corner of the sheet…"

"Come downstairs," said Belsen. "There's work for both of us."

I followed him downstairs into his workroom.

The place was orderly, as one might expect from a fuss-budget such as Belsen.

The music machines stood in straight and shining lines, the work bench was immaculate and the tools were al in place. The tape machine stood in one corner and it was all lit up like a Christmas tree.

A table stood in front of the tape machine, but it was far from tidy. It was strewn with books, some of then lying flat and open and others piled haphazardly. There were scribbled sheets of paper scattered everywhere and balled-up bunches of it lay about the floor.

"I cannot be mistaken," Belsen told me, jittery as ever "I must be sure the first time. There'll be no second chance. I had a devil of a time getting it all figured out but I think I have it now."

"Look, Belsen," I said, with some irritation, "I don't know what harebrained scheme you may be working on, but whatever it may be, this deal of mine is immediate and important."

"Later," Belsen told me, almost hopping up and down in his anxiety. "Later you can tell me. I have a tape I have to finish. I have the mathematics all worked out…"

"But this is about the bugs!"

Belsen shouted at me: "And so is this, you fool! What else did you expect to find me working on? You know I can't take a chance of their getting in here. I won't let them take all this stuff I've built."

"But, Belsen…"

"See that machine," he said, pointing to one of the smaller ones. "That's the one we'll have to use. It is battery powered. See if you can get it moved over to the door."

He swung around and scurried over to the tape machine and sat down in front of it. He began punching slowly and carefully on the keyboard and the machine began to mutter and to chuckle at him and its lights winked on and off.

I saw there was no sense in trying to talk to him until he had this business done. And there was a chance, of course, that he knew what he was doing—that he had figured out some way either to protect these machines of his or to stop the bugs.

I walked over to the machine and it was heavier than it looked. I started tugging at it and I could move it only a few inches at a time, but I kept on tugging it.

And suddenly, as I tugged away, I knew without a question what Belsen must be planning.

And I wondered why I hadn't thought of it myself, why Dobby, with all his talk of A-bombs, hadn't thought of it. But, of course, it would take a man like Belsen, with his particular hobby, to have thought of it.

The idea was so old, so ancient, so much a part of the magic past that it was almost laughable—and yet it ought to work.

Belsen got up from the machine and lifted a reel of tape from a cylinder in its side. He hurried over to me and knelt down beside the machine I'd tugged almost to the door.

"I can't be sure of exactly what they are," he told me. "Crystal. Sure, I know they're crystalline in form, but what kind of crystals—just what type of crystals? So I had to work out a sort of sliding shotgun pattern of supersonic frequencies. Somewhere in there, I hope, is the one that will synchronize with whatever structure they may have."

He opened a section of the small machine and started threading in the tape.

"Like the violin that broke the goblet," I said.

He grinned at me nervously. "The classical example, I see you've heard of it."

"Everyone has," I said.

"Now listen to me carefully," said Belsen. "All we have to do is flip this switch and the tape starts moving. The dial controls the volume and it's set at maximum. We" open up the door and we'll grab the machine, one on each side of it, and we'll carry it as far as we can before we set it down. I want to get it close."

"Not too close," I cautioned. "The bugs just killed a dog. Couple of them hit him and went through him without stopping. They're animated bullets."

Belsen licked his lips. "I figured something like that." He reached out for the door.

"Just a minute, Belsen. Have we got a right to?"

"A right to what?" he asked.

"A right to kill these things. They're the first aliens I come to visit us. There's a lot we might learn from them if we could only talk to them…"

"Talk to them?"

"Well, communicate. Get to understand them."

And I wondered what was wrong with me, that should be talking that way.

"After what they did to the dog? After what they did to you?"

"Yes, I think," I said, "even after what they did to me."

"You're crazy," Belsen screamed.

He pulled the door wide open.

"Now!" he shouted at me.

I hesitated for a second, then grabbed hold.

The machine was heavy, but we lifted it and rushed out into the yard. We went staggering with it almost to the alley and there the momentum of our rush played out and we set it down.

I looked up toward my house and the bug patrol was there, circling at rooftop height, a flashing golden circle in the light of the setting sun.

"Maybe," Belsen panted, "maybe we can get it closer."

I bent to pick it up again and even as I did I saw the patrolling circle break.

"Look out!" I screamed. The bugs were diving at us.

"The switch!" I yelled. "The switch!"

But Belsen stood there, staring at them, frozen, speechless, stiff.

I flung myself at the machine and found the switch and flipped it and then I was groveling in the dirt, rooting into it, trying to make myself extremely thin and small.

There was no sound and, of course, I had known there would be none, but that didn't stop me from wondering why I didn't hear it. Maybe, I thought, the tape had broken; maybe the machine had failed to work.

Out of the tail of my eye I saw the patrol arrowing down on us and they seemed to hang there in the air, as if something might have stopped them, but I knew that was wrong, that it was simply fright playing tricks with time.

And I was scared, all right, but not as seared as Belsen. He still stood there, upright, unable to move a muscle, staring at oncoming death in an attitude of stricken disbelief.

They were almost on top of us. They were so close that I could see each of them as a dancing golden mote and then suddenly each little mote became a puff of shining dust and the swarm was gone.

I climbed slowly to my feet and brushed off my front. "Snap out of it," I said to Belsen. I shook him.

He slowly turned toward me and I could see the tension going from his face.

"It worked," he said, in a flat sort of voice. "I was pretty sure it would."

"I noticed that," I said. "You're the hero of the hour." And I said it bitterly, without even knowing why.

I left him standing there and walked slowly across the alley.

We had done it, I told myself. Right or wrong, we'd done it. The first things from space had come and we had smashed them flat.

And was this, I wondered, what would happen to us, too, when we ventured to the stars? Would we find as little patience and as little understanding? Would we act as arrogantly as these golden bugs had acted?

Would there always be the Belsens to outshout the Marsdens? Would the Marsdens always be unable or unwilling to stand up before the panic-shouting—always fearful that their attitude, slowly forming, might be antisocial? Would the driving sense of fear and the unwillingness to understand mar all things from the stars?

And that, I told myself, was a funny thing for me, of all people, to be thinking. For mine was the house the bugs had ruined.

Although, come to think of it, they might have cost me not a dime. They might have made me money. I still had the agate boulder and that was worth a fortune.

I looked quickly towards the garden and the boulder wasn't there!

I broke into a run, breath sobbing in my throat. I stopped at the garden's edge and stared in consternation at the neat pile of shining sand.

There was one thing I'd forgotten: that an agate, as well as bugs and goblet, was also crystalline!

I turned around and stared back across the yard and I was sore clean through.

That Belsen, I thought—him and his sliding shotgun pattern!

I would take one of those machines of his and cram it down his throat!

Then I stopped dead still. There was, I realized, nothing I could do or say. Belsen was the hero, exactly as I said he was.

He was the man, alone, who'd quashed the menace from the stars.

That was what the headlines would be saying, that was what the entire world would think. Except, perhaps, a few scientists and others of their kind who didn't really count.

Belsen was the hero and if I laid a finger to him I'd probably be lynched.

And I was right. Belsen is the hero.

He turns on his orchestra at six o'clock each morning and there's no one in the neighborhood who'll say a word to him.

Is there anyone who knows how much it costs to soundproof an entire house?

Leg Forst

Original copyright year: 1958

When it was time for the postman to have come and gone, old Clyde Packer quit working on his stamps and went into the bathroom to comb his snow-white hair and beard. It was an everlasting bother, but there was no way out of it. He'd he sure to meet some of his neighbors going down and coming back and they were a snoopy lot. He felt sure that they talked about him; not that he cared, of course. And the Widow Foshay, just across the hall, was the worst one of them all.

Before going out, he opened a drawer in the big desk in the middle of the cluttered living room, upon the top of which was piled an indescribable array of litter, and found the tiny box from Unuk al Hay. From the box he took a pinch of leaf and tucked it in his cheek.

He stood for a moment, with the drawer still open, and savored the flavorful satisfaction of the taste within his mouth — not quite like peppermint, nor like whiskey, either, but with some taste akin to both and with some other tang that belonged entirely to itself. It was nothing like another man had ever tasted and he suspected that it might be habit-forming, although PugAlNash had never informed him that it was.

Perhaps, he told himself, even if Pug should so try to inform him, he could not make it out, for the Unukian's idea of how Earth's language should be written, and the grammar thereof, was a wonder to behold and could only be believed by someone who had tried to decipher one of his flowery little notes.

The box, he saw, was nearly empty, and he hoped that the queer, faithful, almost wistful little correspondent would not fail him now. But there was, he told himself, no reason to believe he would; PugAlNash, in a dozen years, had not failed him yet. Regularly another tiny box of leaf arrived when the last one was quite finished, accompanied by a friendly note — and all franked with the newest stamps from Unuk.

Never a day too soon, nor a day too late, but exactly on the dot when the last of the leaf was finished. As if PugAlNash might know, by some form of intelligence quite unknown to Earth, when his friend on Earth ran out of the leaf.

A solid sort, Clyde Packer told himself. Not humanoid, naturally, but a very solid sort.

And he wondered once again what Pug might actually be like. He always had thought of him as little, but he had no idea, of course, whether he was small or large or what form his body took. Unuk was one of those planets where it was impossible for an Earthman to go, and contact and commerce with the planet had been accomplished, as was the case on so many other worlds, by an intermediary people.

And he wondered, too, what Pug did with the cigars that he sent him in exchange for the little boxes of leaf — eat them, smoke them, smell them, roll in them or rub them in his hair? If he had hair, of course.

He shook his head and closed the door and went out into the hall, being doubly sure that his door was locked behind him. He would not put it past his neighbors, especially the Widow Foshay, to sneak in behind his back.

The hall was empty and he was glad of that. He rang almost stealthily for the elevator, hoping that his luck would hold.

It didn't.

Down the hall came the neighbor from next door. He was the loud and flashy kind, and without any encouragement at all, he'd slap one on the back.

"Good morning, Clyde!" he bellowed happily from afar.

"Good morning, Mr. Morton," Packer replied, somewhat icily. Morton had no right to call him Clyde. No one ever called him Clyde, except sometimes his nephew, Anton Camper, called him Uncle Clyde, although he mostly called him Unk. And Tony, Packer reminded himself, was a worthless piece — always involved in some fancy scheme, always talking big, but without much to show for it. And besides, Tony was crooked — as crooked as a cat.

Like myself, Packer thought, exactly like myself. Not like the most of the rest of them these days, who measured to no more than just loud-talking boobies.

• In my day-, he told himself with fond remembrance, — I could have skinned them all and they'd never know it until I twitched their hides slick off-.

"How is the stamp business this morning?" yelled Morton, coming up and clapping Packer soundly on the back.

"I must remind you, Mr. Morton, that I am not in the stamp business," Packer told him sharply. "I am interested in stamps and I find it most absorbing and I could highly recommend it —»

"But that is not what I meant," explained Morton, rather taken aback "I didn't mean you dealt in stamps…"

"As a matter of fact, I do," said Packer, "to a limited extent. But not as a regular thing and certainly not as a regular business. There are certain other collectors who are aware of my connections and sometimes seek me out —»

"That's the stuff!" boomed Morton, walloping him on the back again in sheer good fellowship. "If you have the right connections, you get along okay. That works in any line. Now, take mine, for instance…"

The elevator arrived and rescued Packer.

In the lobby, he headed for the desk.

"Good morning, Mr. Packer," said the clerk, handing him some letters. "There is a bag for you and it runs slightly heavy. Do you want me to get someone to help you with it?"

"No, thank you," Packer said. "I am sure that I can manage."

The clerk hoisted the bag atop the counter and Packer seized it and let it fall to the floor. It was fairly large — it weighed, he judged, thirty pounds or so — and the shipping tag, he saw with a thrill of anticipation, was almost covered with stamps of such high denominations they quite took his breath away.

He looked at the tag and saw that his name and address were printed with painful precision, as if the Earthian alphabet was something entirely incomprehensible to the sender. The return address was a mere jumble of dots and hooks and dashes that made no sense, but seemed somewhat familiar, although Packer at the moment was unable to tell exactly what they were. The stamps, he saw, were Iota Cancri, and he had seen stamps such as them only once before in his entire life. He stood there, mentally calculating what their worth might be.

He tucked the letters under his arm and picked up the bag. It was heavier than he had expected and he wished momentarily that he had allowed the clerk to find someone to carry it for him. But he had said that he would carry it and he couldn't very well go back and say he'd rather not. After all, he assured himself, he wasn't quite that old and feeble yet.

He reached the elevator and let the bag down and stood facing the grillwork, waiting for the cage.

A birdlike voice sounded from behind him and he shivered at it, for he recognized the voice — it was the Widow Foshay.

"Why, Mr. Packer," said the Widow, gushingly, "how pleasant to find you waiting here."

He turned around. There was nothing else for it; he couldn't just stand there, with his back to her.

"And so loaded down!" the Widow sympathized. "Here, do let me help you."

She snatched the letters from him.

"There," she said triumphantly, "poor man; I can carry these."

He could willingly have choked her, but he smiled instead. It was a somewhat strained and rather ghastly smile, but he did the best he could.

"How lucky for me," he told her, "that you came along. I'd never have made it."

The veiled rebuke was lost on her. She kept on bubbling at him.

"I'm going to make beef broth for lunch," she said, "and I always make too much. Could I ask you in to share it?"

"Impossible," he told her in alarm. "I am very sorry, but this is my busy day. I have all these, you see." And he motioned at the mail she held and the bag he clutched. He whuffled through his whiskers at her like an irate walrus, but she took no notice.

"How exciting and romantic it must be," she gushed, "getting all these letters and bags and packages from all over the galaxy. From such strange places and from so far away. Some day you must explain to me about stamp collecting."

"Madam," he said a bit stiffly, "I've worked with stamps for more than twenty years and I'm just barely beginning to gain an understanding of what it is all about. I would not presume to explain to someone else."

She kept on bubbling.

• Damn it all-, he thought, — is there no way to quiet the blasted woman?-

Prying old biddy, he told himself, once again whuffling his whiskers at her. She'd spend the next three days running all about and telling everyone in the entire building about her strange encounter with him and what a strange old coot he was. "Getting all those letters from all those alien places," she would say, "and bags and packages as well. You can't tell me that stamps are the only things in which he's interested. There is more to it than that; you can bet your bottom dollar on it."

At his door she reluctantly gave him back his letters.

"You won't reconsider on that broth?" she asked him, "It's more than just ordinary broth. I pride myself on it. A special recipe."

"I'm sorry," he said.

He unlocked his door and started to open it. She remained standing there.

"I'd like to invite you in," he told her, lying like a gentleman, "but I simply can't. The place is a bit upset."

Upset was somewhat of an understatement.

Safely inside, he threaded his way among piles of albums, boxes, bags and storage cases scattered everywhere.

He finally reached the desk and dropped the bag beside it. He leafed through the letters and one was from Dahib and another was from the Lyraen system and the third from Muphrid, while the remaining one was an advertisement from a concern out on Mars.

He sat down in the massive, upholstered chair behind his desk and surveyed the room.

Someday he'd have to get it straightened out, he told himself. Undoubtedly there was a lot of junk he could simply throw away and the rest of it should be boxed and labeled so that he could lay his hands upon it. It might be, as well, a good idea to make out a general inventory sheet so that he'd have some idea what he had and what it might be worth.

Although, he thought, the value of it was not of so great a moment.

He probably should specialize, he thought. That was what most collectors did. The galaxy was much too big to try to collect it all. Even back a couple of thousand years ago when all the collectors had to worry about were the stamps of Earth, the field even then had become so large and so unwieldy and so scattered that specialization had become the thing.

But what would a man specialize in, if he should decide to restrict his interest? Perhaps just the stamps from one particular planet or one specific system? Perhaps only stamps from beyond a certain distance — say, five hundred light-years? Or covers, perhaps? A collection of covers with postmarks and cancellations showing the varying intricacies of letter communication throughout the depths of space, from star to star, could be quite interesting.

And that was the trouble with it — it all was so interesting. A man could spend three full lifetimes at it and still not reach the end of it,

In twenty years, he told himself, a man could amass a lot of material if he applied himself. And he had applied himself; he had worked hard at it and enjoyed every minute of it, and had become in certain areas, he thought with pride, somewhat of an expert. On occasion he had written articles for the philatelic press, and scarcely a week went by that some man well-known in the field did not drop by for a chat or to seek his aid in a knotty problem.

There was a lot of satisfaction to be found in stamps, he told himself with apologetic smugness. Yes, sir, a great deal of satisfaction.

But the mere collection of material was only one small part of it — a sort of starting point. Greater than all the other facets of it were the contacts that one made. For one had to make contacts — especially out in the farther reaches of the galaxy. Unless one wanted to rely upon the sorry performance of the rascally dealers, who offered only what was easy to obtain, one must establish contacts. Contacts with other collectors who might be willing to trade stamps with one; contacts with lonely men in lonely outposts far out on the rim, where the really exotic material was most likely to turn up, and who would be willing to watch for it and save it and send it on to one at a realistic price; with far-out institutions that made up mixtures and job lots in an attempt to eke out a miserly budget voted by the home communities.

There was a man by the name of Marsh out in the Coonskin system who wanted no more than the latest music tapes from Earth for the material that he sent along. And the valiant priest at the missionary station on barren Agustron who wanted old tobacco tins and empty bottles which, for a most peculiar reason, had high value on that topsy-turvy world. And among the many others, Earthmen and aliens alike, there was always PugAlNash.

Packer rolled the wad of leaf across his tongue, sucking out the last faded dregs of its tantalizing flavor.

If a man could make a deal for a good-sized shipment of the leaf, he thought, he could make a fortune on it. Packaged in small units, like packs of gum, it would go like hot cakes here on Earth. He had tried to bring up the subject with Pug, but had done no more than confuse and perplex the good Unukian who, for some unfathomable reason, could not conceive of any commerce that went beyond the confines of simple barter to meet the personal needs of the bargaining individuals.

The doorbell chimed and Packer went to answer it.

It was Tony Camper.

"Hi, Uncle Clyde," said Tony breezily.

Packer held the door open grudgingly.

"Since you are here," he said, "you might as well come in."

Tony stepped in and tilted his hat back on his head. He looked the apartment over with an appraising eye.

"Some day, Unk," he said, "you should get this place shoveled out. I don't see how you stand it."

"I manage it quite well," Packer informed him tartly. "Some day I'll get around to straightening up a bit."

"I should hope you do," said Tony.

"My boy," said Packer, with a trace of pride, "I think that I can say, without fear of contradiction, that I have one of the finest collections of out-star stamps that anyone can boast. Some day, when I get them all in albums —»

"You'll never make it, Unk. It'll just keep piling up. It comes in faster than you can sort it out."

He reached out a foot and nudged the bag beside the desk.

"Like this," he said. "This is a new one, isn't it?"

"It just came in," admitted Packer. "Haven't gotten around as yet to figuring out exactly where it's from."

"Well, that is fine," said Tony. "Keep on having fun. You'll outlive us all."

"Sure I will," said Packer testily. "What is it that you want?"

"Not a thing, Unk. Just dropped in to say hello and to remind you you're coming up to Hudson's to spend the weekend with us. Ann insisted that I drop around and nudge you. The kids have been counting the days —»

"I would have remembered it," lied Packer, who had quite forgotten it.

"I could drop around and pick you up. Three this afternoon?"

"No, Tony, don't bother. I'll catch a stratocab. I couldn't leave that early. I have things to do."

"I bet you have," said Tony.

He moved toward the door.

"You won't forget," he cautioned.

"No, of course I won't," snapped Packer.

"Ann would be plenty sore if you did. She's fixing everything you like."

Packer grunted at him.

"Dinner at seven," said Tony cheerfully.

"Sure, Tony. I'll be there."

"See you, Unk," said Tony, and was gone. -Young whippersnapper-, Packer told himself. -Wonder what he's up to now. Always got a new deal cooking, never quite making out on it. Just keeps scraping along.-

He stumped back to the desk.

• Figures he'll be getting my money when I die-, he thought. -The little that I have. Well, I'll fool him. I'll spend every cent of it. I'll manage to live long enough for that.-

He sat down and picked up one of the letters, slit it open with his pocketknife and dumped out its contents on the one small bare spot on the desk in front of him,

He snapped on the desk lamp and pulled it close. He bent above the stamps.

Pretty fair lot, he thought. That one there from Rho Geminorum XII, or was it XVI, was a fine example of the modern classic — designed with delicacy and imagination, engraved with loving care and exactitude, laid on paper of the highest quality, printed with the highest technical precision.

He hunted for his stamp tongs and failed to find them. He opened the desk drawer and rummaged through the tangled rat's nest be found inside it. He got down on his hands and knees and searched beneath the desk.

He didn't find the tongs.

He got back, puffing, into his chair, and sat there angrily.

• Always losing tongs-, he thought. -I bet this is the twentieth pair I've lost. Just can't keep track of them, damn "em!-

The door chimed.

"Well, come on in!" Packer yelled in wrath.

A mouse-like little man came in and closed the door gently behind him. He stood timidly just inside, twirling his hat between his hands.

"You Mr. Packer, sir?"

"Yes, sure I am," yelled Packer. "Who did you expect to find here?"

"Well, sir," said the man, advancing a few careful steps into the room, "I am Jason Pickering. You may have heard of me."

"Pickering?" said Packer. "Pickering? Oh, sure, I've heard of you. You're the one who specializes in Polaris."

"That is right," admitted Pickering, mincing just a little. "I am gratified that you —»

"Not at all," said Packer, getting up to shake his hand. "I'm the one who's honored."

He bent and swept two albums and three shoe boxes off a chair. One of the shoe boxes tipped over and a mound of stamps poured out

"Please have a chair, Mr. Pickering," Packer said majestically.

Pickering, his eyes popping slightly, sat down gingerly on the edge of the swept-clean chair.

"My, my," he said, his eyes taking in the litter that filled the apartment, "you seem to have a lot of stuff here. Undoubtedly, however, you can lay your hands on anything you want."

"Not a chance," said Packer, sitting down again. "I have no idea whatsoever what I have."

Pickering tittered. "Then, sir, you may well be in for some wonderful surprises."

"I'm never surprised at anything," said Packer loftily.

"Well, on to business," said Pickering. "I do not mean to waste your time. I was wondering if it were possible you might have Polaris 17b on cover. It's quite an elusive number, even off cover, and I know of not a single instance of one that's tied to cover. But someone was telling me that perhaps you might have one tucked away."

"Let me see, now," said Packer. He leaned back in his chair and leafed catalogue pages rapidly through his mind. And suddenly he had it — Polaris 17b — a tiny stamp, almost a midget stamp, bright blue with a tiny crimson dot in the lower left-hand corner and its design a mass of lacy scrollwork.

"Yes," he said, opening his eyes, "I believe I may have one. I seem to remember, years ago…"

Pickering leaned forward, hardly breathing.

"You mean you actually…"

"I'm sure it's here somewhere," said Packer, waving his hand vaguely at the room.

"If you find it," offered Pickering, "I'll pay ten thousand for it."

"A strip of five," said Packer, "as I remember it. Out of Polaris VII to Betelgeuse XIII by way of — I don't seem to remember by way of where."

"A strip of five!"

"As I remember it. I might be mistaken."

"Fifty thousand," said Pickering, practically frothing at the mouth. "Fifty thousand, if you find it."

Packer yawned. "For only fifty thousand, Mr. Pickering, I wouldn't even look."

"A hundred, then."

"I might think about it."

"You'll start looking right away? You must have some idea."

"Mr. Pickering, it has taken me all of twenty years to pile up all the litter that you see and my memory's not too good. I'd have not the slightest notion where to start."

"Set your price," urged Pickering. "What do you want for it?"

"If I find it," said Packer, "I might consider a quarter million. That is, if I find it."

"You'll look?"

"I'm not sure. Some day I might stumble on it. Some day I'll have to clean up the place. I'll keep an eye out for it."

Pickering stood up stiffly.

"You jest with me," he said.

Packer waved a feeble hand, "I never jest," he said.

Pickering moved toward the door.

Packer heaved himself from the chair. "I'll let you out," he said.

"Never mind. And thank you very much."

Packer eased himself back into the chair and watched the man go out.

He sat there, trying to remember where the Polaris cover might be buried. And finally gave up. It had been so long ago.

He hunted some more for the tongs, but be didn't find them.

He'd have to go out first thing in the morning and buy another pair. Then he remembered that he wouldn't be here in the morning. He'd be up on Hudson's Bay, at Tony's summer place.

It did beat hell, he thought, how he could manage to lose so many tongs.

He sat for a long time, letting himself sink into a sort of suspended state, not quite asleep, nor yet entirely awake, and he thought, quite vaguely and disjointedly, of many curious things.

But mostly about adhesive postage stamps and how, of all the ideas exported by the Earth, the idea of the use of stamps had caught on most quickly and, in the last two thousand years, had spread to the far corners of the galaxy.

It was getting hard, he told himself, to keep track of all the stamps, even of the planets that were issuing stamps. There were new ones popping up all the blessed time. A man must keep everlastingly on his toes to keep tab on all of them.

There were some funny stamps, he thought. Like the ones from Menkalinen that used smells to spell out their values. Not five cent stamps or five dollar stamps or hundred dollar stamps, but one stamp that smelled something like a pasture rose for the local mail and another stamp that had the odor of ripe old cheese for the system mail and yet another with a stink that could knock out a human at forty paces distance for the interstellar service. And the Algeiban issues that shifted into colors beyond the range of human vision — and worst of all, with the values based on that very shift of color. And that famous classic issue put out, quite illegally, of course, by the Leonidian pirates who had used, instead of paper, the well-tanned, thin-scraped hides of human victims who had fallen into their clutches.

He sat nodding in the chair, listening to a clock hidden somewhere behind the litter of the room, ticking loudly in the silence.

It made a good life, he told himself, a very satisfactory life. Twenty years ago when Myra had died and he had sold his interest in the export company, he'd been ready to curl up and end it all, ready to write off his life as one already lived. But today, he thought, he was more absorbed in stamps than he'd ever been in the export business and it was a blessing — that was what it was, a blessing.

He sat there and thought kindly of his stamps, which had rescued him from the deep wells of loneliness, which had given back his life and almost made him young again.

And then he fell asleep.

The door chimes wakened him and he stumbled to the door, rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

The Widow Foshay stood in the hall, with a small kettle in her hands. She held it out to him.

"I thought, poor man, he will enjoy this," she said. "It's some of the beef broth that I made. And I always make so much. It's so hard to cook for one."

Packer took the kettle.

"It was kind of you," he mumbled.

She looked at him sharply.

"You are sick," she said.

She stepped through the door, forcing him to step back, forcing her way in.

"Not sick," he protested limply. "I fell asleep, that's all. There's nothing wrong with-me."

She reached out a pudgy hand and held it on his forehead.

"You have a fever," she declared. "You are burning…"

"There's nothing wrong with me," he bellowed. "I tell you, I just fell asleep, is all."

She turned and bustled out into the room, threading her way among the piled-up litter. Watching her, be thought: — My God, she finally got into the place! How can I throw her out?-

"You come over here and sit right down," she ordered him. "I don't suppose you have a thermometer."

He shook his head, defeated.

"Never had any need of one," he said. "Been healthy all my life."

She screamed and jumped and whirled around and headed for the door at an awkward gallop. She stumbled across a pile of boxes and fell flat upon her face, then scrambled, screeching, to her feet and shot out of the door.

Packer slammed the door behind her and stood looking, with some fascination, at the kettle in his hand. Despite all the ruckus, he'd spilled not a single drop.

But what had caused the widow…

Then he saw it — a tiny mouse running on the floor. He hoisted the kettle in a grave salute.

"Thanks, my friend," he said.

He made his way to the table in the dining room and found a place where he could put down the kettle.

Mice, he thought. There had been times when he had suspected that he had them — nibbled cheese on the kitchen shelf, scurryings in the night — and he had worried some about them making nests in the material he had stacked all about the place.

But mice had a good side to them, too, he thought.

He looked at his watch and it was almost five o'clock and he had an hour or so before he had to catch a cab and he realized now that somehow he had managed to miss lunch. So he'd have some of the broth and while he was doing that he'd look over the material that was in the bag.

He lifted some of the piled-up boxes off the table and set them on the floor so he had some room to empty the contents of the bag.

He went to the kitchen and got a spoon and sampled the broth. It was more than passing good. It was still warm and he had no doubt that the kettle might do the finish of the table top no good, but that was something one need not worry over.

He hauled the bag over to the table and puzzled out the strangeness of the return address. It was the new script they'd started using a few years back out in the Bootes system and it was from a rather shady gentle-being from one of the Cygnian stars who appreciated, every now and then, a case of the finest Scotch.

Packer, hefting the bag, made a mental note to ship him two, at least.

He opened up the bag and upended it and a mound of covers flowed out on the table.

Packer tossed the bag into a corner and sat down contentedly. He sipped at the broth and began going slowly through the pile of covers. They were, by and large, magnificent. Someone had taken the trouble to try to segregate them according to systems of their origin and had arranged them in little packets, held in place by rubber bands.

There was a packet from Rasalhague and another from Cheleb and from Nunki and Kaus Borealis and from many other places.

And there was a packet of others he did not recognize at all. It was a fairly good-sized packet with twenty-five or thirty covers in it and all the envelopes, he saw, were franked with the same stamps — little yellow fellows that had no discernible markings on them — just squares of yellow paper, rather thick and rough. He ran his thumb across one and he got the sense of crumbling, as if the paper were soft and chalky and were abrading beneath the pressure of his thumb.

Fascinated, he pulled one envelope from beneath the rubber band and tossed the rest of the packet to one side.

He shambled to his desk and dug frantically in the drawer and came back with a glass. He held it above the stamp and peered through it and he had been right — there were no markings on the stamp. It was a mere yellow square of paper that was rather thick and pebbly, as if it were made up of tiny grains of sand.

He straightened up and spooned broth into his mouth and frantically flipped the pages of his mental catalogue, but he got no clue. So far as he could recall, he'd never seen or heard of that particular stamp before.

He examined the postmarks with the glass and some of them he could recognize and there were others that he couldn't, but that made no difference, for he could look them up, at a later time, in one of the postmark and cancellation handbooks. He got the distinct impression, however, that the planet, or planets, of origin must lie Libra-ward, for all the postmarks he could recognize trended in that direction.

He laid the glass away and turned his full attention to the broth, being careful of his whiskers. Whiskers, he reminded himself, were no excuse for one to be a sloppy eater.

The spoon turned in his hand at that very moment and some of the broth spilled down his beard and some spattered on the table, but the most of it landed on the cover with the yellow stamp.

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to wipe the cover clean, but it wouldn't wipe. The envelope was soggy and the stamp was ruined with the grease and he said a few choice cusswords, directed at his clumsiness.

Then he took the dripping cover by one corner and hunted until he found the wastebasket and dropped the cover in it.

He was glad to get back from the weekend at Hudson's Bay.

Tony was a fool, he thought, to sink so much money in such a fancy place. He had no more prospects than rabbit and his high-pressure deals always seemed to peter out, but he still went on talking big and hung onto that expensive summer place. Maybe, Packer thought, that was the way to do it these days; maybe if you could fool someone into thinking you were big, you might have better chance of getting into something big. Maybe that was the way it worked, but he didn't know.

He stopped in the lobby to pick up his mail, hoping there might be a package from PugAlNash. In the excitement of leaving for the weekend, he'd forgotten to take along the box of leaf and three days without it had impressed upon him how much he had come to rely upon it. Remembering how low his supply was getting he became a little jittery to think that more might not be forthcoming.

There was a batch of letters, but no box from Pug.

And he might have known, he told himself, that there wouldn't be, for the box never came until he was entirely out. At first, he recalled, he wondered by what prophetic insight Pug might have known when the leaf was gone, how he could have gauged the shipping time to have it arrive exactly when there was need of it. By now he no longer thought about it, for it was one of those unbelievable things it does no good to think about.

"Glad to have you back," the clerk told him cheerfully. "You had a good weekend, Mr. Packer?"

"Tolerable," growled Packer, grumpily, heading for the elevator.

Before he reached it, he was apprehended by Elmer Lang, the manager of the building.

"Mr. Packer," he whinnied, "I'd like to talk to you."

"Well, go ahead and talk."

"It's about the mice, Mr. Packer."

"What mice?"

"Mrs. Foshay tells me there are mice in your apartment."

Packer drew himself up to the fullness of his rather dumpy height.

"They are your mice, Lang," he said. "You get rid of them."

Lang wrung his hands. "But how can I, Mr. Packer? It's the way you keep your place. All that litter in there. You've got to clean it up."

"That litter, I'll have you know, sir, is probably one of the most unique stamp collections in the entire galaxy. I've gotten behind a little in keeping it together, true, but I will not have you call it litter."

"I could have Miles, the caretaker, help you get it straightened out."

"I tell you, sir," said Packer, "the only one who could help me is one trained in philately. Does your caretaker happen to be —»

"But, Mr. Packer," Lang pleaded, "all that paper and all those boxes are nesting places for them. I can do nothing about the mice unless I can get in there and get some of it cleared away."

"Cleared away!" exploded Packer. "Do you realize, sir, what you are talking of? Somewhere hidden in that vast stock of material, is a certain cover — to you, sir, an envelope with stamps and postmarks on it — for which I have been offered a quarter million dollars if I ever turn it up. And that is one small piece of all the material I have there. I ask you, Lang, is that the sort of stuff that you clear away?"

"But, Mr. Packer, I cannot allow it to go on. I must insist —»

The elevator arrived and Packer stalked into it haughtily, leaving the manager standing in the lobby, twisting at his hands.

Packer whuffled his moustache at the operator.

"Busybody," he said, "What was that, sir?"

"Mrs. Foshay, my man. She's a busybody."

"I do believe," said the operator" judiciously, "that you may be entirely right."

Packer hoped the corridor would be empty and it was. He unlocked his door and stepped inside.

A bubbling noise stopped him in his tracks.

He stood listening, unbelieving, just a little frightened.

The bubbling noise went on and on.

He stepped cautiously out into the room and as he did he saw it.

The wastebasket beside the desk was full of a bubbling yellow stuff that in several places had run down the sides and formed puddles on the floor.

Packer stalked the basket, half prepared to turn and run.

But nothing happened. The yellowness in the basket simply kept on bubbling.

It was a rather thick and gooey mess, not frothy, and the bubbling was no more than a noise that it was making, for in the strict sense of the word, he saw, it was not bubbling.

Packer sidled closer and thrust out a hand toward the basket. It did not snap at him. It paid no attention to him.

He poked a finger at it and the stuff was fairly solid and slightly warm and he got the distinct impression that it was alive.

And immediately he thought of the broth-soaked cover be had thrown in the basket. It was not so unusual that he should think of it, for the yellow of the brew within the basket was the exact color of the stamp upon the cover,

He walked around the desk and dropped the mail he'd picked up in the lobby. He sat down ponderously in the massive office chair.

So a stamp had come to life, he thought, and that certainly was a queer one. But no more queer, perhaps, than the properties of many other stamps, for while Earth had exported the idea of their use, a number of peculiar adaptations of the idea had evolved.

• And now-, he thought a little limply, — you have to get this mess in the basket out of here before Lang comes busting in.-

He worried a bit about what Lang had said about cleaning up the place and he got slightly sore about it, for he paid good money for these diggings and he paid promptly in advance and he was never any bother. And besides, he'd been here for twenty years, and Lang should consider that.

He finally got up from the chair and lumbered around the desk. He bent and grasped the wastebasket, being careful to miss the places where the yellow goo had run down the sides, He tried to lift it and the basket did not move. He tugged as hard as he could pull and the basket stayed exactly where it was. He squared off and aimed a kick at it and the basket didn't budge.

He stood off a ways and glared at it, with his whiskers bristling. As if he didn't have all the trouble that he needed, without this basket deal! Somehow or other, he was going to have to get the apartment straightened out and get rid of the mice, He should be looking for the Polaris cover. And he'd lost or mislaid his tongs and would have to waste his time going out to get another pair.

But first of all, he'd have to get this basket out of here. Somehow it had become stuck to the floor — maybe some of the yellow goo had run underneath the edge of it and dried. Maybe if he had a pinch bar or some sort of lever that he could jab beneath it, he could pry it loose.

From the basket the yellow stuff made merry bubbling noises at him.

He clapped his bat back on his head and went out and slammed and locked the door behind him.

It was a fine summer day and he walked around a little, trying to run his many problems through his mind, but no matter what he thought of, he always came back to the basket brimming with the yellow mess and he knew he'd never be able to get started on any of the other tasks until he got rid of it.

So he hunted up a hardware store and bought a good-sized pinch bar and headed back for the apartment house. The bar, he knew, might mark up the floor somewhat, but if he could get under the edge of the basket with a bar that size he was sure that he could pry it loose,

In the lobby, Lang descended on him.

"Mr. Packer," he said sternly, "where are you going with that bar?"

"I went out and bought it to exterminate the mice."

"But, Mr. Packer —»

"You want to get rid of those mice, don't you?"

"Why, certainly I do."

"It's a desperate situation," Packer told him gravely, "and one that may require very desperate measures."

"But that bar!"

"Ill exercise my best discretion," Packer promised him. "I shall hit them easy."

He went up the elevator with the bar. The sight of Lang's discomfiture made him feel a little better and he managed to whistle a snatch of tune as he went down the hall.

As he fumbled with the key, he heard the sound of rustling coming from beyond the door and he felt a chill go through him, for the rustlings were of a furtive sort and they sounded ominous,

• Good Lord-, he thought, — there can't be that many mice in there!-

He grasped the bar more firmly and unlocked the door and pushed it open.

The inside of the place was a storm of paper.

He stepped in quickly and slammed the door behind him to keep the blowing paper from swooping out into the hall.

• Must have left a window open-, he thought. But he knew he had not, and even if he had, it was quiet outside. There was not a breath of breeze.

And what was happening inside the apartment was more than just a breeze.

He stood with his back against the door and watched what was going on and shifted his grip on the bar so that it made a better club.

The apartment was filled with a sleet of flying paper and a barrage of packets and a snowstorm of dancing stamps. There were open boxes standing on the floor and the paper and the stamps and packets were drifting down and chunking into these, and along the wall were other boxes, very neatly piled — and that was entirely wrong, for there had been nothing neat about the place when he had left it less than two hours before.

But even as he watched, the activity slacked off. There was less stuff flying through the air and some of the boxes were closed by unseen hands and then flew off, all by themselves, to stack themselves with the other boxes.

• Poltergeists! — he thought in terror, his mind scrambling back frantically over all that he had ever thought or read or heard to grasp some explanation.

Then it was done and over.

There was nothing flying through the air. All the boxes had been stacked. Everything was still.

Packer stepped out into the room and stared in slackjawed amazement.

The desk and the tables shone. The drapes hung straight and clean. The carpeting looked as if it might be new. Chairs and small tables and lamps and other things, long forgotten, buried all these years beneath the accumulation of his collection, stood revealed and shining — dusted, cleaned and polished.

And in the middle of all this righteous order stood the wastebasket, bubbling happily.

Packer dropped the bar and headed for the desk.

In front of him a window flapped open and he heard a swish and the bar went past him, flying for the window. It went out the window and slashed through the foliage of a tree, then the window closed and he lost sight of it.

Packer took off his hat and tossed it on the desk.

Immediately his hat lifted from the desk and sailed for a closet door. The closet door swung open and the hat ducked in. The door closed gently on it.

Packer whuffled through his whiskers, He got out his handkerchief and mopped a glistening brow.

"Funny goings-on," he said to himself.

Slowly, cautiously, he checked the place. All the boxes were stacked along one wall, three deep and piled from floor to ceiling. Three filing cabinets stood along another wall and be rubbed his eyes at that, for he had forgotten that there were three of them — for years he'd thought that he had only two. And all the rest of the place was neat and clean and it fairly gleamed.

He walked from room to room and everywhere it was the same.

In the kitchen the pots and pans were all in place and the dishes stacked primly in the cupboard. The stove and refrigerator had been wiped clean and there were no dirty dishes and that was a bit surprising for he was sure there had been. Mrs. Foshay's kettle, with the broth emptied out of it and scrubbed until it shone, stood on the kitchen table.

He went back to the desk and the top of it was clear except for several items laid out, as if for his attention:

Ten dead mice.

Eight pairs of stamp tongs.

The packet of covers with the strange yellow stamps.

Two — not one — but two covers, one bearing a strip of four and the other a strip of five Polaris 17b.

Packer sat down heavily in his chair and stared at the items on the desk.

How in the world, he wondered — how had it come about? What was going on?

He peeked around the desk edge at the bubbling basket and it seemed to chortle at him.

It was, he told himself, it — must be- the basket — or, rather, the stuff within the basket. Nothing else had been changed, no other factor had been added. The only thing new and different in the apartment was the basket of yellow gook.

He picked up the packet of covers with the yellow stamps affixed and opened the drawer to find a glass. The drawer was arranged with startling neatness and there were five glasses lying in a row. He chose the strongest one.

Beneath the glass the surface of the stamps became a field made up of tiny ball-like particles, unlike the grains of sand which the weaker glass he had used before had shown.

He bent above the desk, with his eye glued to the glass, and he knew that what he was looking at were spores.

Encysted, lifeless, they still would carry life within them, and that had been what had happened here. He'd spilled the broth upon the stamp and the spores had come to life — a strange alien community of life that settled within the basket.

He put the glass back in the drawer and rose. He gathered up the dead mice carefully by their tails. He carried them to the incinerator shaft and let them drop.

He crossed the room to the bookcases and the books were arranged in order and in sequence and there, finally, were books that he'd lost years ago and hunted ever since. There were long rows of stamp catalogs, the set of handbooks on galactic cancellations, the massive list of postmarks, the galactic travel guides, the long row of weird language dictionaries, indispensable in alien stamp identification, and a number of technical works on philatelic subjects.

From the bookcase he moved to the piled-up boxes. One of them he lifted down. It was filled with covers, with glassine envelopes of loose stamps, with sheets, with blocks and strips. He dug through the contents avidly, with wonder mounting in him.

All the stamps, all the covers, were from the Thuban system.

He closed the box and bent to lift it back. It didn't wait for him. It lifted by itself and fitted itself in place.

He looked at three more boxes. One contained, exclusively, material from Korephoros, and another material from Antares and the third from Dschubba. Not only had the litter been picked up and boxed and piled into some order, but the material itself had been roughly classified…

He went back to the chair and sat down a little weakly. It was too much, he thought, for a man to take.

The spores had fed upon the broth and had come to life, and within the basket was an alien life form or a community of life forms. And they possessed a passion for orderliness and a zest for work and an ability to channel that zest into useful channels.

And what was more, the things within the basket did what a man wanted done.

It had straightened up the apartment, it had classified the stamps and covers, it had killed the mice, it had located the Polaris covers and had found the missing tongs.

And how had it known that he wanted these things done? Read his mind, perhaps?

He shivered at the thought, but the fact remained that it had done absolutely nothing except bubble merrily away until he had returned. It had done nothing, perhaps, because it did not know what to do — until he had somehow told it what to do. For as soon as he had returned, it had found out what to do and did it.

The door chimed and he got up to answer. It was Tony.

"Hi, Unk," he said. "You forgot your pajamas and I brought them back. You left them on the bed and forgot to pack them."

He held out a package and it wasn't until then that he saw the room.

"Unk!" he yelled. "What happened? You got the place cleaned up!"

Packer shook his head in bewilderment. "Something funny, Tony."

Tony walked in and stared around in admiration and astonishment.

"You sure did a job," he said.

"I didn't do it, Tony."

"Oh, I see. You hired someone to do it while you were up at our place."

"No, not that. It was done this morning. It was done by that!"

He pointed at the basket.

"You're crazy, Unk," said Tony, firmly. "You have flipped your thatch."

"Maybe so," said Packer. "But the basket did the work."

Tony walked around the basket warily. He reached down and punched the yellow stuff with a stuck-out finger.

"It feels like dough," he announced.

He straightened up and looked at Packer.

"You aren't kidding me?" he asked.

"I don't know what it is," said Packer. "I don't know why or how it did it, but I'm telling you the truth."

"Unk," said Tony, "we may have something here!"

"There is no doubt of that."

"No, that's not what I mean. This may be the biggest thing that ever happened. This junk, you say, will really work for you?"

"Somehow or other," said" Packer. "I don't know how it does it. It has a sense of order and it does the work you want. It seems to understand you — it anticipates whatever you want done. Maybe it's a brain with enormous psi powers. I was looking at a cover the other night and I saw this yellow stamp…"

Packer told him swiftly what had happened. Tony listened thoughtfully, pulling at his chin. "Well, all right, Unk," he said, "we've got it. We don't know what it is or how it works, but let's put our thinking into gear. Just imagine a bucket of this stuff standing in an office — a great big, busy office. It would make for efficiency such as you never saw before. It would file a1l the papers and keep the records straight and keep the entire business strictly up to date. There'd never be anything ever lost again. Everything would be right where it was supposed to be and could be located in a second, When the boss or someone else should want a certain file — bingo! it would be upon his desk. Why, an office with one of these little buckets could get rid of all its file clerks. A public library could be run efficiently without any personnel at all. But it would be in big business offices — in insurance firms and industrial concerns and transportation companies — where it would be worth the most."

Packer shook his head, a bit confused. "It might be all right, Tony; it might work the way you say. But who would believe you? Who would pay attention? It's just too fantastic. They would laugh at you."

"You leave all that to me," said Tony. "That's my end of the business. That's where I come in."

"Oh," said Packer, "so we're in business now."

"I have a friend," said Tony, who always had a friend, "who'd let me try it out. We could put a bucket of this stuff in his office and see how it works out."

He looked around, suddenly all business.

"You got a bucket, Unk?"

"Out in the kitchen. You'd find something there."

"And beef broth. It was beef broth, wasn't it?"

Packer nodded. "I think I have a can of it."

Tony stood and scratched his head. "Now let's get this figured out, Unk. What we want is a sure source of supply."

"I have those other covers. They all have stamps on them. We could start a new batch with one of them."

Tony gestured impatiently. "No, that wouldn't" do. They are our reserves. We lock them tight away against emergency. I have a hunch that we can grow bucket after bucket of the stuff from what we have right here. Pull off a handful of it and feed it a shot of broth —»

"But how do you know —»

"Unk," said Tony, "doesn't it strike you a little funny that you had the exact number of spores in that one stamp, the correct amount of broth, to grow just one basket full?"

"Well, sure, but…"

"Look, this stuff is intelligent. It knows what it is doing. It lays down rules for itself to live by. It's got a sense of order and it lives by order. So you give it a wastebasket to live in and it lives within the limits of that basket. It gets just level with the top; it lets a little run down the sides to cement the basket tight to the floor. And that is all. It doesn't run over. It doesn't fill the room. It has some discipline."

"Well, maybe you are right, but that still doesn't answer the question —»

"Just a second, Unk. Watch here."

Tony plunged his hand into the basket and came out with a chunk of the spore-growth ripped loose from the parent body.

"Now, watch the basket, Unk," he said.

They watched. Swiftly, the spores surged and heaved to fill the space where the ripped-out chunk had been. Once again the basket was very neatly filled.

"You see what I mean?" said Tony. "Given more living room, it will grow. All we have to do is feed it so it can. And we'll give it living room. We'll give it a lot of buckets, so it can grow to its heart's content and —»

"Damn it, Tony, will you listen to me? I been trying to ask you what we're going to do to keep it from cementing itself to the floor. If we start another batch of it, it will cement its bucket or its basket or whatever it is in to the floor just like this first one did."

"I'm glad you brought that up," said Tony. "I know just what to do. We will hang it up. We'll hang up the bucket and there won't be any floor."

"Well," said Packer, "I guess that covers it. I'll go heat up that broth."

They heated the broth and found a bucket and hung it on a broomstick suspended between two chairs.

They dropped the chunk of spore-growth in and watched it and it stayed just as it was.

"My hunch was right," said Tony. "It needs some of that broth to get it started."

He poured in some broth and the spores melted before their very eyes into a black and ropy scum.

"There's something wrong," said Tony, worriedly.

"I guess there is," said Packer.

"I got an idea, Unk. You might have used a different brand of broth. There might be some difference in the

ingredients. It may not be the broth itself, but some ingredient in it that gives this stuff the shot in the arm it needs. We might be using the wrong broth."

Packer shuffled uncomfortably.

"I don't remember, Tony."

"You have to!" Tony yelled at him. "Think, Unk! You got to — you have to remember what brand it was you used." Packer whuffled out his whiskers unhappily.

"Well, to tell you the truth, Tony, it wasn't boughten broth. Mrs. Foshay made it."

"Now, we're getting somewhere! Who is Mrs. Foshay?"

"She's a nosy old dame who lives across the hall."

"Well, that's just fine. All you have to do is ask her to make some more for you."

"I can't do it, Tony."

"All we'd need is one batch, Unk. We could have it analyzed and find out what is in it. Then we'd be all set."

"She'd want to know why I wanted it. And she'd tell all over how I asked for it. She might even figure out there was something funny going on."

"We can't have that," exclaimed Tony in alarm. "This is our secret, Unk. We can't cut in anyone."

He sat and thought.

"Anyhow, she's probably sore at me," said Packer. "She sneaked in the other day and got the hell scared out of her when a mouse ran across the floor. She tore down to the management about it and tried to make me trouble."

Tony snapped his fingers.

"I got it!" he cried. "I know just how we'll work it. You go on and get in bed —»

"I will not!" snarled Packer.

"Now listen, Unk, you have to play along. You have to do your part."

"I don't like it," protested Packer. "I don't like any part of it."

"You get in bed," insisted Tony, "and look the worst you can. Pretend you're suffering. I'll go over to this Mrs. Foshay and I'll tell her how upset you were over that mouse scaring her. I'll say you worked all day to get the place cleaned up just because of that; I'll say you worked so hard —»

"You'll do no such thing," yelped Packer. "She'll come tearing in here. I won't have that woman —»

"You want to make a couple billion, don't you?" asked Tony angrily.

"I don't care particularly," Packer told him. "I can't somehow get my heart in it."

"I'll tell this woman that you are all tuckered out and that your heart is not so good and the only thing you want is another bowl of broth."

"You'll tell her no such thing," raved Packer. "You'll leave her out of this."

"Now, Unk," Tony reasoned with him, "If you won't do it for yourself, do it for me — me, the only kin you have in the entire world. It's the first big thing I've ever had a chance at. I may talk a lot and try to look prosperous and successful, but I tell you, Unk…"

He saw he was getting nowhere.

"Well, if you won't do it for me, do it for Ann, do it for the kids. You wouldn't want to see those poor little kids —»

"Oh, shut up," said Packer. "First thing you know, you'll be blubbering. All right, then, I'll do it."

It was worse than he had thought it would be. If he had known it was to be so bad, he'd never have consented to go through with it.

The Widow Foshay brought the bowl of broth herself. She sat on the bed and held his head up and cooed and crooned at him as she fed him broth.

It was most embarrassing. But they got what they were after. When she had finished feeding him, there was still half a bowl of broth and she left that with them because, she said, poor man, he might be needing it.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon and almost time for the Widow Foshay to come in with the broth.

Thinking of it, Packer gagged a little.

Someday, he promised himself, he'd beat Tony's brains out. If it hadn't been for him, this never would have started.

Almost six months now and every blessed day she had brought the broth and sat and talked with him while he forced down a bowl of it. And the worst of it, Packer told himself, was that he had to pretend that he thought that it was good.

And she was so gay! Why did she have to be so gay? — Toujours gai-, he thought. Just like the crazy alley cat that ancient writer had penned the silly lines about.

• Garlic in the broth-, he thought — my God, who'd ever heard of garlic in beef broth! — It was uncivilized. A special recipe, she'd said, and it was all of that. And yet it had been the garlic that had done the job with the yellow sporelife — it was the food needed by the spores to kick them into life and to start them growing.

The garlic in the broth might have been good for him as well, he admitted to himself, for in many years, seemed, he had not felt so fine. There was a spring in his step, he'd noticed, and he didn't get so tired; he used to take a nap in the afternoon and now he never did. He worked as much as ever, actually more than ever, and he was, except for the widow and the broth, a very happy man. Yes, a very happy man.

He would continue to be happy, he told himself, as long as Tony left him to his stamps. Let the little whippersnapper carry the load of Efficiency, Inc.; he was, after all, the one who had insisted on it. Although, give him credit, he had done well with it. A lot of industries had signed up and a whole raft of insurance companies and a bunch of bond houses and a good scattering of other lines of business. Before long, Tony said, there wouldn't be a business anywhere that would dare to try to get along without the services of Efficiency, Inc.

The doorbell chimed and he went to answer it. It would be the Widow Foshay, and she would have her hands full with the broth.

But it was not the widow.

"Are you Mr. Clyde Packer?" asked the man who stood in the hall.

"Yes, sir," Packer said. "Will you please step in?"

"My name is John Griffin," said the man, after he was seated, "I represent Geneva."

"Geneva? You mean the Government?"

The man showed him credentials.

"Okay," said Packer a bit frostily, being no great admirer of the Government. "What can I do for you?"

"You are senior partner in Efficiency, Inc., I believe."

"I guess that's what I am."

"Mr. Packer, don't you know?" — "Well, I'm not positive. I'm a partner, but I don't know about this senior business. Tony runs the show and I let him have his head."

"You and your nephew are sole owners of the firm?"

"You bet your boots we are. We kept it for ourselves. We took no one in with us."

"Mr. Packer, for some time the Government has been attempting to negotiate with Mr. Camper. He's told you nothing of it?"

"Not a thing," said Packer. "I'm busy with my stamps. He doesn't bother me."

"— We- have been interested in your service," Griffin said. "-We- have tried to buy it."

"It's for sale," said Packer. "You just pay the price and —»

"But you don't understand. Mr. Camper insists on a separate contract for every single office that we operate. That would run to a terrific figure —»

"Worth it," Packer assured him. "Every cent of it."

"It's unfair," said Griffin firmly. "We are willing to buy it on a departmental basis and we feel that even in that case we would be making some concession. By rights the Government should be allowed to come in under a single covering arrangement."

"Look," protested Packer, "what are you talking to me for? I don't run the business; Tony does. You'll have to deal with him. I have faith in the boy. He has a good hard business head. I'm not even interested in Efficiency. All I'm interested in is stamps."

"That's just the point," said Griffin heartily. "You've hit the situation exactly on the head."

"Come again?" asked Packer.

"Well, it's like this," Griffin told him in confidential tones. "The Government gets a lot of stamps in its daily correspondence. I forget the figure, but it runs to several tons of philatelic material every day. And from every planet in the galaxy. We have in the past been disposing of it to several stamp concerns, but there's a disposition in certain quarters to offer the whole lot as a package deal at a most attractive price."

"That is fine," said Packer, "but what would I do with several tons a day?"

"I wouldn't know," declared Griffin, "but since you are so interested in stamps, it would give you a splendid opportunity to have first crack at a batch of top-notch material. It is, I dare say, one of the best sources you could find."

"And you'd sell all this stuff to me if I put in a word for you with Tony?"

Griffin grinned happily. "You follow me exactly, Mr Packer."

Packer snorted, "Follow you! I'm way ahead of you."

"Now, now," cautioned Griffin, "you must not get the wrong impression. This is a business offer — a purely business offer."

"I suppose you'd expect no more than nominal payment for all this waste paper I would be taking off your hands."

"Very nominal," said Griffin.

"All right, I'll think about it and I'll let you know. I can't promise you a thing, of course."

"I understand, Mr. Packer. I do not mean to rush you."

After Griffin left, Packer sat and thought about it and the more he thought about it, the more attractive it became.

He could rent a warehouse and install an Efficiency Basket in it and all he'd have to do would be dump all that junk in there and the basket would sort it out for him.

He wasn't exactly sure if one basket would have the time to break the selection down to more than just planetary groupings, but if one basket couldn't do it, he could install a second one and between the two of them, he could run the classification down to any point he wished. And then, after the baskets had sorted out the more select items for his personal inspection, he could set up an organization to sell the rest of it in job lots and he could afford to sell it at a figure that would run all the rest of those crummy dealers clear out on the limb.

He rubbed his hands together in a gesture of considerable satisfaction, thinking how he could make it rough for all those skinflint dealers. It was murder, he reminded himself, what they got away with; anything that happened to them, they had coming to them.

But there was one thing he gagged on slightly. What Griffin had offered him was little better than a bribe, although it was, he supposed, no more than one could expect of the Government. The entire Governmental structure was loaded with grafters and ten percenters and lobbyists and special interest boys and others of their ilk.

Probably no one would think a thing of it if he made the stamp deal — except the dealers, of course, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it except sit and howl.

But aside from that, he wondered, did he have the right to interfere with Tony? He could mention it to him of course, and Tony would say yes. But did he have the right?

He sat and worried at the question, without reaching a conclusion, without getting any nearer to the answer until the door chimes sounded.

It was the Widow Foshay and she was empty-handed. She had no broth today.

"Good afternoon," he said. "You are a little late."

"I was just opening my door to come over when I saw you had a caller. He's gone now, isn't he?"

"For some time," said Packer.

She stepped inside and he closed the door. They walked across the room.

"Mr. Packer," said the Widow, "I must apologize. I brought no broth today. The truth of the matter is, I'm tired of making it all the time."

"In such a case," he said, very gallantly, "the treats will be on me."

He opened the desk drawer and lifted out the brand new box of PugAlNash's leaf, which had arrived only the day before.

Almost reverently, he lifted the cover and held the box out to her. She recoiled from it a little.

"Go ahead," he urged. "Take a pinch of it. Don't swallow it. Just chew it."

Cautiously, she dipped her fingers in the box.

"That's too much," he warned her. "Just a little pinch. You don't need a lot. And it's rather hard to come by."

She took a pinch and put it in her mouth.

He watched her closely, smiling. She looked for all the world as if she had taken poison. But soon she settled back in her chair, apparently convinced it was not some lethal trick.

"I don't believe," she said, "I've ever tasted anything quite like it."

"You never have. Other than myself, you may well be the only human that has ever tasted it. I get it from a friend of mine who lives on one of the far-out stars. His name is PugAlNash and he sends it regularly. And he always includes a note."

He looked in the drawer and found the latest note.

"Listen to this," he said.

He read it:

• Der Fiend: Grately injoid latter smoke you cent me. Ples mor of sam agin. You du knot no that I profetick and wach ahed for you. Butt it be so and I grately hapy to perform this taske for fiend. I assur you it be onely four the beste. You prophet grately, maybee.

Your luving fiend,

PugAlNash-

He finished reading it and tossed it on the desk.

"What do you make of it?" he asked. "Especially that crack about his being a prophet and watching ahead for me?"

"It must be all right," the widow said. "He claims you will profit greatly."

"He sounds like a gypsy fortune-teller. He had me worried for a while."

"But why should you worry over that?"

"Because I don't want to know what's going to happen to me. And sometime he might tell me. If a man could look ahead, for example, he'd know just when he was going to die and how and all the —»

"Mr. Packer," she told him, "I don't think you're meant to die. I swear you are getting to look younger every day."

"As a matter of fact," said Packer, vastly pleased, "I'm feeling the best I have in years."

"It may be that leaf he sends you."

"No, I think most likely it is that broth of yours."

They spent a pleasant afternoon — more pleasant, Packer admitted, than he would have thought was possible.

And after she had left, he asked himself another question that had him somewhat frightened.

Why in the world, of all people in the world, had he shared the leaf with her?

He put the box back in the drawer and picked up the note. He smoothed it out and read it once again.

The spelling brought a slight smile to his lips, but he quickly turned it off, for despite the atrociousness of it, PugAlNash nevertheless was one score up on him. For Pug had been able, after a fashion, to master the language of Earth, while he had bogged down completely when confronted with Pug's language.

• I profetick and wach ahed for you.-

It was crazy, he told himself. It was, perhaps, some sort of joke, the kind of thing that passed for a joke with Pug.

He put the note away and prowled the apartment restlessly, vaguely upset by the whole pile-up of worries.

What should he do about the Griffin offer?

Why had he shared the leaf with the Widow Foshay?

What about that crack of Pug" s?

He went to the bookshelves and put out a finger and ran it along the massive set of — Galactic Abstracts-. He found the right volume and took it back to the desk with him.

He leafed through it until he found — Unuk al Hay-. Pug, he remembered, lived on Planet X of the system.

He wrinkled up his forehead as he puzzled out the meaning of the compact, condensed, sometimes cryptic wording, bristling with fantastic abbreviations. It was a bloated nuisance, but it made sense, of course. There was just too much information to cover in the galaxy — the set of books, unwieldy as it might be, would simply become unmanageable if anything like completeness of expression and description were attempted.

• X-lt.kn., int., uninh. Hu., (T-67), tr. intrm. (T-102) med. hbs., leg. forst., diff. lang…-

Wait a second, there!

• Leg. forst.-

Could that be — legend of foresight?-

He read it again, translating as he went:

• X-little known, intelligence, uninhabitable for humans (see table 67), trade by intermediaries (see table 102), medical herbs, legend (or legacy?) of foresight, difficult language…-

And that last one certainly was right. He'd gained a working knowledge of a lot of alien tongues, but will Pug's he could not even get an inkling.

• Leg. forst.?-

One couldn't be sure, but it could be — it could be!

He slapped the book shut and took it back to the shelf.

• So you watch ahead for me-, he said.

• And why? To what purpose?-

• PugAlNash-, he said, a little pleased, — some day I'll wring your scrawny, meddling neck.-

But, of course, he wouldn't. PugAlNash was too far away and he might not be scrawny and there was no reason to believe he even had a neck.

When bedtime came around, be got into his flame-red pajamas with the yellow parrots on them and sat on the edge of the bed, wiggling his toes.

It had been quite a day, he thought.

He'd have to talk with Tony about this Government offer to sell him the stamp material. Perhaps, he thought, be should insist upon it even if it meant a loss of possible revenue to Efficiency, Inc. He might as well get what he could and what he wanted when it was for the taking. For Tony, before they were through with it, probably would beat him out of what he had coming to him. He had expected it by now — but more than likely Tony had been too busy to indulge in any crookedness. Although it was a wonder, for Tony enjoyed a dishonest dollar twice as much as he did an honest one.

He remembered that he had told Griffin that he had faith in Tony and he guessed that he'd been right — he had faith in him and a little pride as well. Tony was an unprincipled rascal and there was no denying it. Thinking about it, Packer chuckled fondly. -Just like me-, he told himself, — when I was young as Tony and was still in business.-

There had been that triple deal with the bogus Chippendale and the Antarian paintings and the local version of moonshine from out in the Packrat system. -By God-, he told himself, — I skinned all three of them on that one.-

The phone rang and he padded out of the bedroom, his bare feet slapping on the floor.

The phone kept on insisting.

"All right!" yelled Packer angrily. "I'm coming!" He reached the desk and picked up the phone. "This is Pickering," said the voice.

"Pickering. Oh, sure. Glad to hear from you."

"The man you talked with about the Polaris cover."

"Yes, Pickering. I remember you."

"I wonder, did you ever find that cover?"

"Yes, I found it. Sorry, but the strip had only four. I told you five, I fear. An awful memory, but you know how it goes. A man gets old and —»

"Mr. Packer, will you sell that cover?"

"Sell it? Yes, I guess I told you that I would. Man of my word, you realize, although I regret it now."

"It's a fine one, then?"

"Mr. Pickering," said Packer, "considering that it's the only one in existence —»

"Could I come over to see it sometime soon?"

"Any time you wish. Any time at all."

"You will hold it for me?"

"Certainly," consented Packer. "After all, no one know as yet that I have the thing."

"And the price?"

"Well, now, I told you a quarter million, but I was talking then about a strip of five. Since it's only four I'd be willing to shave it some. I'm a reasonable man Mr. Pickering. Not difficult to deal with."

"I can see you aren't," said Pickering with a trace of bitterness.

They said good night and Packer sat in the chair and put his bare feet up on the desk and wiggled his toes watching them with a certain fascination, as if he had never seen them before.

He'd sell Pickering the four-strip cover for two hundred thousand. Then he'd let it get noised about that there was a five-strip cover, and once he heard that Pickering would be beside himself and frothing at the mouth. He'd be afraid that someone might get ahead of him and buy the five-stamp strip while he had only four. And that would be a public humiliation that a collector of Pickering's stripe simply couldn't stand.

Packer chortled softly to himself.

"Bait," he said aloud.

He probably could get half a million out of that five strip piece. He'd make Pickering pay for it. He'd have to start it high, of course, and let Pickering beat him down.

Be looked at the clock upon the desk and it was ten o'clock — a good hour past his usual bedtime.

He wiggled his toes some more and watched them. Funny thing about it, he wasn't even sleepy. He didn't want to go to bed; he'd got undressed from simple force of habit.

Nine o'clock, he thought, is a hell of a time for a man to go to bed. He could remember a time when he had never turned in until well after midnight and there had been many certain memorable occasions, he chucklingly recalled, when he'd not gone to bed at all.

But there had been something to do in those days. There had been places to go and people to meet and food had tasted proper and the liquor had been something a man looked forward to. They didn't make decent liquor these days, he told himself. And there were no great cooks any more. And no entertainment, none worthy of the name. All his friends had either died or scattered; none of them had lasted.

Nothing lasts, he thought.

He sat wiggling his toes and looking at the clock and somehow he was beginning to feel just a bit excited, although he could not imagine why.

In the silence of the room there were two sounds only — the soft ticking of the clock and the syrupy gurgling of the basket full of spores.

He leaned around the corner of the desk and looked at the basket and it was there, foursquare and solid — a basketful of fantasy come to sudden and enduring life.

Someday, he though, someone would find where the spores came from — what distant planet in what misty reaches out toward the rim of the thinning galaxy. Perhaps even now the origin of the stamps could be determined if he'd only release the data that he had, if he would show the covers with the yellow stamps to some authority. But the covers and the data were a trade secret and had become too valuable to be shown to any one; they were tucked away deep inside a bank vault.

Intelligent spores, he mused — what a perfect medium for the carrying of the mail. You put a dab of them on letter or a package and you told them, somehow or other, where the letter or the package was to go and they would take it there. And once the job was done then the spores encysted until the day that someone else, or something else, should recall them to their labors.

And today they were laboring for the Earth and the day would come, perhaps, when they'd be housekeepers to the entire Earth. They'd run all business efficiently and keep all homes picked up and neat; they would clean the streets and keep them free of litter and introduce everywhere an era of such order and such cleanliness as no race had ever known.

He wiggled his toes and looked at the clock again. I was not ten-thirty yet and it was really early. Perhaps he should change his mind — perhaps he should dress again and go for a moonlight stroll. For there was a moon; he could see it through the window.

Damn old fool, he told himself, whuffling out his whiskers.

But he took his feet down off the desk and paddled toward the bedroom.

He chuckled as he went, planning exactly how he was going to skin Pickering to within an inch of that collector's parsimonious life.

He was bending at the mirror, trying to make his tie track, when the doorbell set up a clamor.

If it was Pickering, he thought, he'd throw the damn fool out. Imagine turning up at this time of night to do a piece of business that could better wait till morning.

It wasn't Pickering.

The man's card said he was W. Frederick Hazlitt and that he was president of the Hazlitt Suppliers Corporation.

"Well, Mr. Hazlitt?"

"I'd like to talk to you a minute," Hazlitt said, peering furtively around. "You're sure that we're alone here?"

"Quite alone," said Packer.

"This is a matter of some delicacy," Hazlitt told him, "and of some alarm as well. I came to you rather than Mr. Anton Camper because I know of you by reputation as a man of proven business sagacity. I feel you could understand the problem where Mr. Camper —»

"Fire away," invited Packer cordially.

He had a feeling that he was going to enjoy this. The man was obviously upset and scared to death as well.

Hazlitt hunched forward in his chair and his voice dropped almost to a whisper.

"Mr. Packer," he confided in stricken horror, "I am becoming honest!"

"That's too bad," said Packer sympathetically.

"Yes, it is," said Hazlitt soberly. "A man in my position — in any business connection — simply can't be honest. Mr. Packer, I'll tell you confidentially that I lost out on one of the biggest deals in all my business life just last week because I had grown honest."

"Maybe," Packer suggested, "if you persevered, if you set your heart on it, you could remain at least partially dishonest."

Hazlitt shook his head dolefully. "I tell you, sir, can't. I've tried. You don't know how hard I've tried. And no matter how I try, I find myself telling the truth about everything. I find that I cannot take unfair advantage of anyone, not even of a customer. I even found myself the other day engaged in cutting my profit margins down to a more realistic figure —»

"Why, that's horrible!" cried Packer.

"And it's all your fault," yelled Hazlitt.

"My fault," protested "Packer, whuffling out his whiskers. "Upon my word, Mr. Hazlitt, I can't see how you can say a thing like that. I haven't had a thing to do with it."

"It's your Efficiency units," howled Hazlitt. "They're the cause of it."

"The Efficiency units have nothing to do with you, declared Packer angrily. "All they do…"

He stopped.

Good Lord, he thought, they could!

He'd been feeling better than he'd felt for years an he didn't need his nap of an afternoon and here he was dressing to go out in the middle of the night!

"How long has this been going on?" he asked in growing horror.

"For a month at least," said Hazlitt. "I think I first noticed it a month or six weeks ago."

"Why didn't you simply heave the unit out?"

"I did," yelled Hazlitt, "but it did no good."

"I don't understand. If you threw it out that should be the end of it."

"That's what I thought at the time, myself. But I was wrong. That yellow stuffs still there. It's growing in the

cracks and floating in the air and you can't get rid of it. Once you have it, you are stuck with it."

Packer clucked in sympathy.

"You could move, perhaps."

"Do you realize what that would cost me, Packer? And besides, as far as I'm concerned, it simply is no good. The stuff's inside of me!"

He pounded at his chest. "I can feel it here, inside of me — turning me honest, making a good man out of me, making me orderly and efficient, just like it made our files. And I don't want to be a good man, Packer — I want to make a lot of money!"

"There's one consolation," Packer told him. "Whatever is happening to you undoubtedly also is happening to your competitors."

"But even if that were the case," protested Hazlitt, "it would be no fun. What do you think a man goes into business for? To render service, to become identified with the commercial community, to make money only? No, sir, I tell you — it's the thrill of skinning a competitor, of running the risk of losing your own shirt, of —»

"Amen," Packer said loudly.

Hazlitt stared at him. "You, too…"

"Not a chance," said Packer proudly. "I'm every bit as big a rascal as I ever was."

Hazlitt settled back into his chair. His voice took on an edge, grew a trifle cold.

"I had considered exposing you, warning the world, and then I saw I couldn't…"

"Of course you can't," said Packer gruffly. "You don't enjoy being laughed at. You are the kind of man who can't stand the thought of being laughed at."

"What's your game, Packer?"

"My game?"

"You introduced the stuff. You must have known what it would do. And yet you say you are unaffected by it. What are you shooting at — gobbling up the entire planet?"

Packer whuffled. "I hadn't thought of it," he said. "But it's a capital idea."

He rose stiffly to his feet. "Little old for it," he said, "but I have a few years yet. And I'm in the best of fettle. Haven't felt —»

"You were going out," said Hazlitt, rising. "I'll not detain you."

"I thank you, sir," said Packer. "I noticed that there was a moon and I was going for a stroll. You wouldn't join me, would you?"

"I have more important things to do, Packer, than strolling in the moonlight."

"I have no doubt of that," said Packer, bowing slightly. "You would, of course, an upright, honest businessman like you."

Hazlitt slammed the door as he went out.

Packer padded back to the bedroom, took up the tie again.

Hazlitt an honest man, he thought. And how many other honest men this night? And a year from now — how many honest men in the whole wide world just one year from now? How long before the entire Earth would be an honest Earth? With spores lurking in the cracks and floating in the air and running with the rivers, it might not take so long.

Maybe that was the reason Tony hadn't skinned him yet. Maybe Tony was getting honest, too. Too bad, thought Packer, gravely. Tony wouldn't be half as interesting if he should happen to turn honest.

And the Government? A Government that had come begging for the spores — begging to be honest, although to be completely fair one must admit the Government as yet did not know about the honesty.

That was a hot one, Packer told himself. An honest Government! And it would serve those stinkers right! He could see the looks upon their faces.

He gave up the business of the tie and sat down on the bed and shook for minutes with rumbling belly laughter.

At last he wiped the tears out of his eyes and finished with the tie.

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, he'd get in touch with Griffin and arrange the package deal for the stamp material. He'd act greedy and drive a hard bargain and then, in the end, pay a bit more than the price agreed upon for a long-term arrangement. An honest Government, he told himself, would be too honest to rescind such an agreement even if, in the light of its new honesty, it should realize the wrongness of it. For, happily, one of the tenets of honesty was to stay stuck with a bad bargain, no matter how arrived at.

He shucked into his jacket and went into the living room. He stopped at the desk and opened the drawer. Reaching in, he lifted the lid of the box of leaf. He took a pinch and had it halfway to his mouth when the thought struck him suddenly and he stood for a moment frozen while all the gears came together, meshing, and the pieces fell into a pattern and he knew, without even asking, why he was the only genuine dishonest man left on the entire Earth.

• I profetick and wach ahed for you!-

He put the leaf into his mouth and felt the comfort of it.

• Antidote-, he thought, and knew that he was right.

But how could Pug have known — how could he have foreseen the long, twisting tangle of many circumstances which must inevitably crystallize into this very moment?

• Leg. forst.?-

He closed the lid of the box and shut the drawer and turned toward the door.

The only dishonest man in the world, he thought. Immune to the honesty factor in the yellow spores because of the resistance built up within him by his long use of the leaf.

He had set a trap tonight to victimize Pickering and tomorrow he'd go out and fox the Government and there was no telling where he'd go from there. Hazlitt had said something about taking over the entire planet and the idea was not a bad one if he could only squeeze out the necessary time.

He chuckled at the thought of how all the honest suckers would stand innocently in line, unable to do a thing about it — all fair prey to the one dishonest man in the entire world. A wolf among the sheep!

He drew himself erect and pulled the white gloves on carefully. He flicked his walking stick. Then he thumped himself on the chest — just once — and let himself out into the hall. He did not bother to lock the door behind him.

In the lobby, as he stepped out of the elevator, he saw the Widow Foshay coming in the door. She turned and called back cheerfully to friends who had brought her home.

He lifted his hat to her with an olden courtesy that he thought he had forgotten.

She threw up her hands in mock surprise. "Mr. Packer," she cried, "what has come over you? Where do you think you're going at this time of night, when all honest people are abed?"

"Minerva," he told her gravely, "I was about to take a stroll. I wonder if you might come along with me?"

She hesitated for an instant, just long enough to give the desired small show of reluctance and indecision.

He whuffled out his moustache at her. "Besides," he said, "I am not an honest person."

He offered her his arm with distinguished gallantry.

Madness from Mars

Original copyright year: 1939

The "Hello Mars IV" was coming home, back from the outward reaches of space, the first ship ever to reach the Red Planet and return. Telescopes located in the Crater of Copernicus Observatory on the Moon had picked it up and flashed the word to Earth, giving its position. Hours later, Earth telescopes had found the tiny mote that flashed in the outer void.

Two years before, those same telescopes had watched the ship's outward voyage, far out until its silvery hull had dwindled into nothingness. From that day onward there had been no word or sign of "Hello Mars IV" — nothing until the lunar telescopes, picking up again that minute speck in space, advised Earth of its homecoming.

Communication with the ship by Earth had been impossible. On the Moon, powerful radio stations were capable of hurling ultra-short wave messages across the quarter million miles to Earth. But man as yet had found no means of communicating over fifty million miles of space. So "Hello Mars IV" had arrowed out into the silence, leaving the Moon and the Earth to speculate and wonder over its fate.

Now, with Mars once again swinging into conjunction, the ship was coming back — a tiny gnat of steel pushing itself along with twinkling blasts of flaming rocket-fuel. Heading Earthward out of that region of silent mystery, spurning space-miles beneath its steel-shod heels. Triumphant, with the red dust of Mars still clinging to its plates — a mote of light in the telescopic lenses.

Aboard it were five brave men — Thomas Delvaney, the expedition's leader; Jerry Cooper, the red-thatched navigator; Andy Smith, the world's ace cameraman, and two space-hands, Jimmy Watson and Elmer Paine, grim old veterans of the Earth-Moon run.

There had been three other "Hello Mars" ships — three other ships that had never come back — three other flights that had collided with a meteor a million miles out from the Moon. The second had flared briefly, deep in space, a red splash of flame in the telescopes through which the flight was watched — the fuel tanks had exploded. The third had simply disappeared. On and on it had gone, boring outward until lost from sight. That had been six years ago, but men still wondered what had happened.

Four years later — two years ago — the "Hello Mars IV" had taken off. Today it was returning, a gleaming thing far out in space, a shining symbol of man's conquest of the planets. It had reached Mars — and it was coming back. There would be others, now — and still others. Some would flare against the black and be lost forever. But others would win through, and man, blindly groping, always outward, to break his earthly bonds, at last would be on the pathway to the stars.

Jack Woods, «Express» reporter, lit a cigarette and asked:

"What do you figure they found out there, Doc?"

Dr. Stephen Gilmer, director of the Interplanetary Communications Research Commission, puffed clouds of smoke from his black cigar and answered irritably:

"How in blue hell would I know what they found? I hope they found something. This trip cost us a million bucks."

"But can't you give me some idea of what they might have found?" persisted Woods. "Some idea of what Mars is like. Any new ideas."

Dr. Gilmer wrangled the cigar viciously.

"And have you spread it all over the front page," he said. "Spin something out of my own head just because you chaps are too impatient to wait for the actual data. Not by a damn sight. You reporters get my goat sometimes."

"Ah, Doc, give us something," pleaded Gary Henderson, staff man for the Star.

"Sure," said Don Buckley, of the «Spaceways». "What do you care? You can always say we misquoted you. It wouldn't be the first time."

Gilmer gestured toward the official welcoming committee that stood a short distance away.

"Why don't you get the mayor to say something, boys?" he suggested. "The mayor is always ready to say something."

"Sure," said Gary, "but it never adds up to anything. We've had the mayor's face on the front page so much lately that he thinks he owns the paper."

"Have you any idea why they haven't radioed us?" asked

Woods. "They've been in sending distance for several hours now."

Gilmer rolled the cigar from east to west. "Maybe they broke the radio," he said.

Nevertheless there were little lines of worry on his face. The fact that there had been no messages from the "Hello Mars IV" troubled him. If the radio had been broken it could have been repaired.

Six hours ago the "Hello Mars IV" had entered atmosphere. Even now it was circling the Earth in a strenuous effort to lose speed. Word that the ship was nearing Earth had brought spectators to the field in ever-increasing throngs. Highways and streets were jammed for miles around.

Perspiring police cordons struggled endlessly to keep the field clear for a landing. The day was hot, and soft drink stands were doing a rushing business. Women fainted in the crowd and some men were knocked down and trampled. Ambulance sirens sounded.

"Humph," Woods grunted. "We can send space-ships to Mars, but we don't know how to handle crowds."

He stared expectantly into the bright blue bowl of the sky.

"Ought to be getting in pretty soon," he said.

His words were blotted out by a mounting roar of sound. The ear-splitting explosions of roaring rocket tubes. The thunderous drumming of the ship shooting over the horizon.

The bellow from the crowd competed with the roaring of the tubes as the "Hello Mars IV" shimmered like a streak of silver light over the field. Then fading in the distance, it glowed redly as its forward tubes shot flame.

"Cooper sure is giving her everything he has," Woods said in awe. "He'll melt her down, using the tubes like that."

He stared into the west, where the ship had vanished. His cigarette forgotten, burned down and scorched his fingers.

Out of the tail of his eye he saw Jimmy Andrews, the «Express» photographer.

"Did you get a picture?" Woods roared at him.

"Picture, hell," Andrews shouted back. "I can't shoot greased lightning."

The ship was coming back again, its speed slowed, but still traveling at a terrific pace. For a moment it hung over the horizon and then nosed down toward the field.

"He can't land at that speed," Woods yelled. "It'll crack wide open!"

"Look out," roared a dozen voices and then the ship was down, its nose plowing into the ground, leaving in its wake a smoking furrow of raw earth, its tail tilting high in the air, threatening to nose over on its back.

The crowd at the far end of the field broke and stampeded, trampling, clawing, pushing, shoving, suddenly engulfed in a hysteria of fear at the sight of the ship plowing toward them.

But the "Hello Mars IV" stopped just short of the police cordon, still right side up. A pitted, battered ship — finally home from space — the first ship to reach Mars and return.

The newspapermen and photographers were rushing forward. The crowd was shrieking. Automobile horns and sirens blasted the air. From the distant rim of the city rose the shrilling of whistles and the far-away roll of clamoring bells.

As Woods ran a thought hammered in his head. A thought that had an edge of apprehension. There was something wrong. if Jerry Cooper had been at the controls, he never would have landed the ship at such speed. It had been a madman's stunt to land a ship that way. Jerry was a skilled navigator, averse to taking chances. Jack had watched him in the Moon Derby five years before and the way Jerry could handle a ship was beautiful to see.

The valve port in the ship's control cabin swung slowly open, clanged back against the metal side. A man stepped out — a man who staggered jerkily forward and then stumbled and fell in a heap.

Dr. Gilmer rushed to him, lifted him in his arms.

Woods caught a glimpse of the man's face as his head lolled in Gilmer's arms. It was Jerry Cooper's face — but a face that was twisted and changed almost beyond recognition, a face that burned itself into Jack Wood's brain, indelibly etched there, something to be remembered with a shudder through the years. A haggard face with deeply sunken eyes, with hollow cheeks, with drooling lips that slobbered sounds that were not words.

A hand pushed at Woods.

"Get out of my way," shrilled Andrews~ "How do you expect me to take a picture?"

The newsman heard the camera whirr softly, heard the click of changing plates.

"Where are the others?" Gilmer was shouting at Cooper. The man looked up at him vacantly, his face twisting itself into a grimace of pain and fear.

"Where are the others?" Gilmer shouted again, his voice ringing over the suddenly hushed stillness of the crowd.

Cooper jerked his head toward the ship.

"In there," he whispered and the whisper cut like a sharp-edged knife.

He mumbled drooling words, words that meant nothing. Then with an effort he answered.

"Dead," he said.

And in the silence that followed, he said again:

"All dead!"

They found the others in the living quarters back of the locked control room. All four of them were dead — had been dead for days. Andy Smith's skull had been crushed by a mighty blow.

Jimmy Watson had been strangled, with the blue raised welts of blunt fingers still upon his throat. Elmer Paine's body was huddled in a corner, but upon him there were no marks of violence, although his face was contorted into a visage of revulsion, a mask of pain and fear and suffering. Thomas Delvaney's body sprawled beside a table. His throat had been opened with an old fashioned straight-edge razor. The razor, stained with blackened blood, was tightly clutched in the death grip of his right hand.

In one corner of the room stood a large wooden packing box. Across the smooth white boards of the box someone had written shakily, with black crayon, the single word «Animal». Plainly there had been an attempt to write something else — strange wandering crayon marks below the single word. Marks that scrawled and stopped and made no sense.

That night Jerry Cooper died, a raving maniac.

A banquet, planned by the city to welcome home the conquering heroes, was cancelled. There were no heroes left to welcome back.

What was in the packing box?

"It's an animal," Dr. Gilmer declared, "and that's about as far as I would care to go. It seems to be alive, but that is hard to tell. Even when moving fast — fast, that is, for it — it probably would make a sloth look like chain lightning in comparison."

Jack Woods stared down through the heavy glass walls that caged the thing Dr. Gilmer had found in the packing box marked "Animal".

It looked like a round ball of fur.

"It's all curled up, sleeping," he said.

"Curled up, hell," said Gilmer. "That's the shape of the beast. It's spherical and it's covered with fur. Fur-Ball would be a good name for it, if you were looking for something descriptive. A fur coat of that stuff would keep you comfortable in the worst kind of weather the North Pole could offer. It's thick and it's warm. Mars, you must remember, is damned cold."

"Maybe we'll have fur-trappers and fur-trading posts up on Mars," Woods suggested. "Big fur shipments to Earth and Martian wraps selling at fabulous prices."

"They'd kill them off in a hurry if it ever came to that," declared Gilmer. "A foot a day would be top speed for that baby, if it can move at all. Oxygen would be scarce on Mars. Energy would be something mighty hard to come by and this boy couldn't afford to waste it by running around. He'd just have to sit tight and not let anything distract him from the mere business of just living."

"It doesn't seem to have eyes or ears or anything you'd expect an animal to have," Woods said, straining his eyes the better to see the furry ball through the glass.

"He probably has sense-perceptions we would never recognize," declared Gilmer. "You must remember, Jack, that he is a product of an entirely different environment — perhaps he rose from an entirely different order of life than we know here on Earth. There's no reason why we must believe that parallel evolution would occur on any two worlds so remotely separated as Earth and Mars.

"From what little we know of Mars," he went on, rolling the black cigar between his lips, "it's just about the kind of animal we'd expect to find there. Mars has little water — by Earth standards, practically none at all. A dehydrated world. There's oxygen there, but the air is so thin we'd call it a vacuum on Earth. A Martian animal would have to get on very little water, very little oxygen.

"And, when he got it, he'd want to keep it. The spherical shape gives him a minimum surface-per-volume ratio.

"This makes it easier for him to conserve water and oxygen. He probably is mostly lungs. The fur protects him from the cold. Mars must be devilish cold at times. Cold enough at night to free carbon dioxide. That's what they had him packed in on the ship."

"No kidding," said Woods.

"Sure," said Gilmer. "Inside the wooden box was a steel receptacle and that fellow was inside of that. They had pumped out quite a bit of the air, made it a partial vacuum, and packed frozen carbon dioxide around the receptacle. Outside of that, between the box and the ice, was paper and felt to slow up melting. They must have been forced to repack him and change air several times during the trip back.

"Apparently he hadn't had much attention the last few days before they got here, for the oxygen was getting pretty thin, even for him, and the ice was almost gone. I don't imagine he felt any too good. Probably was just a bit sick. Too much carbon dioxide and the temperature uncomfortably warm."

Woods gestured at the glass cage.

"I suppose you got him all fixed up now," he said. "Air conditioned and everything."

Gilmer chuckled.

"Must seem just like home to him." he replied. "In there the atmosphere is thinned down to about one-thousandth Earth standard, with considerable ozone. Don't know whether he needs that, but a good deal of the oxygen on Mars must be in the form of ozone. Surface conditions there are suitable for its production. The temperature is 20 degrees below zero Centigrade. I had to guess at that, because I have no way of knowing from what part of Mars this animal of ours was taken. That would make a difference."

He wrangled the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other.

"A little private Mars all his own," he stated.

"You found no records at all on the ship?" asked Woods. "Nothing telling anything at all about him?"

Gilmer shook his head and clamped a vicious jaw on the cigar.

"We found the log book," he said, "but it had been deliberately destroyed. Someone soaked it in acid. No chance of getting anything out of it."

The reporter perched on a desk top and drummed his fingers idly on the wood.

"Now just why in hell would they want to do that?" he asked.

"Why in hell did they do a lot of things they did?" Gilmer snarled. "Why did somebody, probably Delvaney, kill Paine and Watson? Why did Delvaney, after he did that, kill himself? What happened to Smith? Why did Cooper die insane, screaming and shrieking as if something had him by the throat? Who scrawled that single word on the box and tried to write more, but couldn't? What stopped him writing more?"

Woods nodded his head toward the glass cage.

"I wonder how much our little friend had to do with it," he speculated.

"You're crazier than a space-bug," Gilmer snapped. "What m blue hell could he have had to do with it? He's just an animal and probably of a pretty low order of intelligence. The way things are on Mars he'd be kept too damn busy just keeping alive to build much brain. Of course, I haven't had much chance to study it yet. Dr. Winters, of Washington, and Dr. Lathrop, of London, will be here next week. We'll try to find out something then."

Woods walked to the window in the laboratory and looked out.

The building stood on top of a hill, with a green lawn sweeping down to a park-like area with fenced off paddock, moat-protected cliff-cages and monkey-islands — the Metropolitan Zoo.

Gilmer took a fresh and fearsome grip on his cigar.

"It proves there's life on Mars," he contradicted. "It doesn't prove a damn thing else."

"You should use a little imagination," chided Woods.

"If I did," snarled Gilmer, "I'd be a newspaperman. I wouldn't be fit for any other job."

Along toward noon, down in the zoo, Pop Anderson, head-keeper of the lionhouse, shook his head dolefully and scratched his chin.

"Them cats have been actin" mighty uneasy," he declared. "Like there was something on their minds. They don't hardly sleep at all. Just prowl around."

Eddie Riggs, reporter for the «Express», clucked sympathetically.

"Maybe they aren't getting the right vitamins, Pop," he suggested.

Pop disagreed.

"It ain't that," he said. "They're gettin" the same feed we always give "em. Plenty raw meat. But they're restless as all git-out. A cat is a lazy critter. Sleeps hours at a stretch and always takin" naps. But they don't do that no more. Cranky. Fightin" among themselves. I had to give Nero a good whoppin" the other day when he tried to beat up Percy. And when I did he made a pass at me — me, who's took care of him since he was a cub."

From across the water-moat Nero snarled menacingly at Pop.

"He's still got it in for me," Pop said. "If he don't quiet down, I'll give him a raw-hidin" he'll remember. There ain't no lion can get gay with me."

He glanced apprehensively at the lion-run.

"I sure hope they calm down," he said. "This is Saturday and there'll be a big crowd this afternoon. Always makes them nervous, a crowd does, and the way they are now there'll be no holdin"

"em."

"Anything else you heard of going on?" Riggs asked. Pop scratched his chin.

"Susan died this morning," he declared.

Susan was a giraffe.

"Didn't know Susan was sick," said Riggs.

"She wasn't," Pop told him. "Just keeled over."

Riggs turned his eyes back to the lion caves. Nero, a big black-maned brute, was balancing himself on the edge of the water ditch, almost as if he were about to leap into the water. Percy and another lion were tusseling, not too good-naturedly.

"Looks like Nero might be thinking of coming over here after you," the reporter suggested.

"Shucks," snorted Pop. "he wouldn't do that. Not Nero. Nor no other lion. Why, them cats hate water worse" n poison."

From the elephant paddock, a mile or more away, came the sudden angry trumpeting of the pachyderms. Then a shrill squeal of elephantine rage.

"Sounds like them elephants was actin" up, too," Pop declared calmly.

Pounding feet thundered around the corner of the walk that circled the cat-cages. A man who had lost his hat, whose eyes were wild with terror, pounded past them. As he ran on he cried:

"An elephant has gone mad! It's coming this way!"

Nero roared. A mountain lion screamed.

A great gray shape, moving swiftly despite its lumbering gait, rounded a clump of bushes and moved out on the smooth green sward of the park. It was the elephant. With trunk reared high, emitting screams of rage, with huge ears flapping, the beast headed for the cat-cages.

Riggs turned and pounded madly toward the administration building. Behind him Pop puffed and panted.

Shrill screams rent the air as early visitors at the zoo scampered for safety.

Animal voices added to the uproar.

The elephant, turning from his original direction, charged through the two acre paddock in which three pairs of wolves were kept, taking fence, trees and brush in his stride.

On the steps of the administration building. Riggs looked back.

Nero, the lion, was dripping water! The water that theoretically should have kept him penned in his cage as securely as steel bars!

A keeper, armed with a rifle, rushed up to Riggs.

"All hell's broken loose," he shouted.

The polar bears had staged a bloody battle, with two of them dead, two dying and the rest so badly mauled that there was little hope they would live. Two buck deer, with locked horns, were fighting to the death. Monkey Island was in an uproar, with half of the little creatures mysteriously dead — dead, the keepers said, of too much excitement. A nervous condition.

"It ain't natural," protested Pop, when they were inside. "Animals don't fight like that."

Riggs was yelling into a telephone.

Outside a rifle roared.

Pop flinched.

"Maybe that's Nero." he groaned. "Nero, that I raised from a cub. Bottle-fed him, I did."

There were traces of tears in the old man's eyes.

It was Nero. But Nero, before he died, had reached out for the man who held the rifle and had killed him with a single vicious blow that crushed his skull.

Later that day, in his office, Doctor Gilmer smote the newspaper that lay open on his desk.

"You see that?" he asked Jack Woods.

The reporter nodded grimly. "I see it. I wrote it. I worked on it all afternoon. Wild animals turned loose in the city. Ravening animals. Mad with the lust to kill. Hospitals full of dying people. Morgues with ripped humanity. I saw an elephant trample a man into the earth before the police shot the beast. The whole zoo gone mad. Like a jungle nightmare."

He wiped his forehead with his coat sleeve and lit a cigarette with shaking fingers.

"I can stand most anything," he said, "but this was the acme of something or other. It was pretty horrible, Doc. I felt sorry for the animals, too," he said. "Poor devils. They weren't themselves. It was a pity to have to kill so many of them."

Doc leaned across the table. "Why did you come here?" he asked.

Woods nodded toward the glass cage that held the Martian animal. "I got to thinking," he said. "The shambles down there today reminded me of something else —»

He paused and looked squarely at Gilmer.

"It reminded me of what we found in the "Hello Mars IV"."

"Why?" snapped Gilmer.

"The men on board the ship were insane," declared Woods. "Only insane men would do the things they did. And Cooper died a maniac. How he held onto his reason long enough to bring the ship to a landing is more than I know."

Gilmer took the mangled cigar out of his mouth and concentrated on picking off the worst of the frayed edge. He tucked it carefully back into the corner of his jaw.

"You figured those animals were insane today?"

Woods nodded.

"And for no reason," he added.

"So you up and suspicioned the Martian animal," said Gilmer. "Just how in blue hell do you think that defenseless little Fur-Ball over there could make men and animals go insane?"

"Listen," said Woods, "don't act that way, Doc. You're on the trail of something. You broke a poker date tonight to stay here at the laboratory. You had two tanks of carbon monoxide sent up. You were shut in here all afternoon. You borrowed some stuff from Appleman down in the sound laboratory. It all adds up to something. Better tell me."

"Damn you," said Gilmer, "you'd find out anyway even if I kept mum."

He sat down and put his feet on the desk. He threw the wrecked and battered cigar into the waste-paper basket, took a fresh one out of a box, gave it a few preliminary chews and lit it.

"Tonight," said Gilmer, "I am going to stage an execution. I feel badly about it, but probably it is an act of mercy."

"You mean," gasped Jack, "that you are going to kill Fur-Ball over there?"

Gilmer nodded. "That's what the carbon monoxide is for. Introduce it into the cage. He'll never know what happened. Get drowsy, go to sleep, never wake up. Humane way to kill the thing."

"But why?"

"Listen to me," said Gilmer. "You've heard of ultrasonics, haven't you?"

"Sounds pitched too high for the human ear to hear," said Woods. "We use them for lots of things. For underwater signaling and surveying. To keep check on high-speed machines, warn of incipient breakdowns,"

"Man has gone a long way with ultrasonics," said Gilmer. "Makes sound do all sorts of tricks. Creates ultrasonics up to as high as 20 million vibrations per second. One million cycle stuff kills germs. Some insects talk to one another with 32,000 cycle vibration. Twenty thousand is about as high as the human ear can detect. But man hasn't started yet. Because little Fur-Ball over there talks with ultrasonics that approximate thirty million cycles."

The cigar traveled east to west.

"High frequency sound can be directed in narrow beams, reflected like light, controlled. Most of our control has been in liquids. We know that a dense medium is necessary for the best control of ultrasonics. Get high frequency sound in a medium like air and it breaks down fast, dissipates. That is, up to twenty million cycles, as far as we have gone.

"But thirty million cycles, apparently, can be controlled in air, in a medium less dense than our atmosphere. Just what the difference is I can't imagine, although there must be an explanation. Something like that would be needed for audible communication on a place like Mars, where the atmosphere must be close to a vacuum."

"Fur-Ball used thirty million cycle stuff to talk with," said Jack, "That much is clear. What's the connection?"

"This." said Gilmer. "Although sound reaching that frequency can't be heard in the sense that your auditory nerves will pick it up and relay it to your brain, it apparently can make direct impact on the brain. When it does that it must do something to the brain. It must disarrange the brain, give it a murderous complex, drive the entity of the brain insane."

Jack leaned forward breathlessly.

"Then that was what happened on the "Hello Mars IV". That is what happened down in the park today."

Gilmer nodded, slowly, sadly.

"It wasn't malicious," he said. "I am sure of that. Fur-Ball didn't want to hurt anything. He was just lonesome and a little frightened. He was trying to contact some intelligence. Trying to talk with something. He was asleep or at least physiologically dormant when I took him from the ship. Probably he fell into his sleep just in time to save Cooper from the full effects of the ultrasonics. Maybe he would sleep a lot. Good way to conserve energy.

"He woke up sometime yesterday, but it seemed to take some time for him to get fully awake. I detected slight vibrations from him all day yesterday. This morning the vibrations became stronger. I had put several different assortments of food in the cage, hoping he would choose one or more to eat, give me some clue to his diet. But he didn't do any eating, although he moved around a little bit. Pretty slow, although I imagine it was fast for him. The vibrations kept getting stronger. That was when the real hell broke out in the zoo. He seems to be dozing off again now and things have quieted down."

Gilmer picked up a box-like instrument to which was attached a set of headphones.

"Borrowed these from Appleman down in the sound laboratory," he said. "The vibrations had me stumped at first. Couldn't determine their nature. Then I hit on sound. These things are a toy of Appleman" s. Only half-developed yet. They let you «hear» ultrasonics. Not actual hearing, of course, but an impression of tonal quality, a sort of psychological study of ultrasonics, translation of ultrasonics into what they would be like if you could hear them."

He handed the head-set to Woods and carried the box to the glass cage. He set it on the cage and moved it slowly back and forth, trying to intercept the ultrasonics emanating from the little Martian animal.

Woods slipped on the phones, sat waiting breathlessly.

He had expected to hear a high, thin sound, but no sound came. Instead a dreadful sense of loneliness crept over him, a sense of bafflement, lack of understanding, frustration. Steadily the feeling mounted in his brain, a voiceless wail of terrible loneliness and misery — a heart-wrenching cry of home-sickness.

He knew he was listening to the wailing of the little Martian animal, was «hearing» its cries, like the whimperings of a lost puppy on a storm-swept street.

His hands went up and swept the phones from his head.

He stared at Gilmer, half in horror.

"It's lonesome," he said. "Crying for Mars. Like a lost baby."

Gilmer nodded.

"It's not trying to talk to anyone now," he said. "Just lying there, crying its heart out. Not dangerous now. Never intentionally dangerous, but dangerous just the same."

"But," cried Woods, "you were here all afternoon. It didn't bother you. You didn't go insane."

Gilmer shook his head.

"No," he said, "I didn't go insane. Just the animals. And they would become immune after a while with this one certain animal. Because Fur-Ball is intelligent. His frantic attempts to communicate with some living things touched my brain time and time again… but it didn't stay. It swept on. It ignored me.

"You see, back in the ship it found that the human brain couldn't communicate with it. It recognized it as an alien being. So it didn't waste any more time with the human brain. But it tried the brains of monkeys and elephants and lions, hoping madly that it would find some intelligence to which it could talk, some intelligence that could explain what had happened, tell it where it was, reassure it that it wasn't marooned from Mars forever.

"I am convinced it has no visual sense, very little else except this ultrasonic voice to acquaint itself with its surroundings and its conditions. Maybe back on Mars it could talk to its own kind and to other things as well. It didn't move around much. It probably didn't have many enemies. It didn't need so many senses."

"It's intelligent," said Woods. "Intelligent to a point where you can hardly think of it as an animal."

Gilmer nodded.

"You're right," he said. "Maybe it is just as human as we are. Maybe it represents the degeneration of a great race that once ruled Mars…"

He jerked the cigar out of his mouth and flung it savagely on the floor.

"Hell," he said, "what's the use of speculation? Probably you and I will never know. Probably the human race will never know."

He reached out and grasped the tank of carbon monoxide, started to wheel it toward the glass cage.

"Do you have to kill it, Doc?" Woods whispered. "Do you really have to kill it?"

Gilmer wheeled on him savagely.

"Of course I have to kill it," he roared. "What if the story ever got out that Fur-Ball killed the boys in the ship and all those animals today? What if he drove others insane? There'd be no more trips to Mars for years to come. Public opinion would make that impossible. And when another one does go out they'll have instructions not to bring back any Fur-Balls — and they'll have to be prepared for the effects of ultrasonics."

He turned back to the tank and then wheeled back again.

"Woods," he said, "you and I have been friends for a long time. We've had many a beer together. You aren't going to publish this, are you, Jack?"

He spread his feet.

"I'd kill you if you did," he roared.

"No," said Jack, "just a simple little story. Fur-Ball is dead. Couldn't take it, here on Earth."

"There's another thing," said Gilmcr. "You know and I know that ultrasonics of the thirty million order can turn men into insane beasts. We know it can be controlled in atmosphere, probably over long distances. Think of what the war-makers of the world could do with that weapon! Probably they'll find out in time — but not from us!"

"Hurry up," Woods said bitterly. "Hurry up, will you. Don't let Fur-Ball suffer any longer. You heard him. Man got him into this — there's only one way man can get him out of it. He'd thank you for death if he only knew."

Gilmer laid hands on the tank again.

Woods reached for a telephone. He dialed the «Express» number.

In his mind he could hear that puppyish whimper, that terrible, soundless cry of loneliness, that home-sick wail of misery. A poor huddled little animal snatched fifty million miles from home, among strangers, a hurt little animal crying for attention that no one could offer.

""Daily Express"," said the voice of Bill Carson, night editor. "This is Jack," the reporter said. "Thought maybe you'd want something for the morning edition. Fur-Ball just died — yeah, Fur-Ball, the animal the "Hello Mars IV" brought in — Sure, the little rascal couldn't take it."

Behind him he heard the hiss of gas as Gilmer opened the valve.

"Bill," he said, "I just thought of an angle. You might say the little cuss died of loneliness… yeah, that's the idea, grieving for Mars… Sure, it ought to give the boys a real sob story to write…"

Over the River and through the Woods

Original copyright year: 1965

The two children came trudging down the lane in applecanning time, when the first goldenrods were blooming and the wild asters large in bud. They looked, when she first saw them, out the kitchen window, like children who were coming home from school, for each of them was carrying a bag in which might have been their books. Like Charles and James, she thought, like Alice and Maggie — but the time when those four had trudged the lane on their daily trips to school was in the distant past. Now they had children of their own who made their way to school.

She turned back to the stove to stir the cooking apples, for which the wide-mouthed jars stood waiting on the table, then once more looked out the kitchen window. The two of them were closer now and she could see that the boy was the older of the two — ten, perhaps, and the girl no more than eight.

They might be going past, she thought, although that did not seem too likely, for the lane led to this farm and to nowhere else.

The turned off the lane before they reached the barn and came sturdily trudging up the path that led to the house. There was no hesitation in them; they knew where they were going.

She stepped to the screen door of the kitchen as they came onto the porch and they stopped before the door and stood looking up at her.

The boy said: "You are our grandma. Papa said we were to say at once that you were our grandma."

"But that's not…," she said, and stopped. She had been about to say that it was impossible that she was not their grandma. And, looking down into the sober, childish faces, she was glad that she had not said the words.

"I am Ellen," said the girl, in a piping voice.

"Why, that is strange," the woman said. "That is my name, too."

The boy said, "My name is Paul."

She pushed open the door for them and they came in, standing silently in the kitchen, looking all about them as if they'd never seen a kitchen.

"It's just like Papa said," said Ellen. "There's the stove and the churn and…"

The boy interrupted her. "Our name is Forbes," he said.

This time the woman couldn't stop herself. "Why, that's impossible," she said. "That is our name, too."

The boy nodded solemnly. "Yes, we knew it was."

"Perhaps," the woman said, "you'd like some milk and cookies."

"Cookies!" Ellen squealed, delighted.

"We don't want to be any trouble," said the boy. "Papa said we were to be no trouble."

"He said we should be good," piped Ellen.

"I am sure you will be," said the woman, "and you are no trouble."

In a little while, she thought, she'd get it straightened out.

She went to the stove and set the kettle with the cooking apples to one side, where they would simmer slowly.

"Sit down at the table," she said. "I'll get the milk and cookies."

She glanced at the clock, ticking on the shelf. Four o'clock, almost. In just a little while the men would come in from the fields. Jackson Forbes would know what to do about this; he had always known.

They climbed up on two chairs and sat there solemnly, staring all about them, at the ticking clock, at the wood stove with the fire glow showing through its draft, at the wood piled in the wood box, at the butter churn standing in the corner.

They set their bags on the floor beside them, and they were strange bags, she noticed. They were made of heavy cloth or canvas, but there were no drawstrings or no straps to fasten them. But they were closed, she saw, despite no straps or strings.

"Do you have some stamps?" asked Ellen.

"Stamps?" asked Mrs Forbes.

"You must pay no attention to her," said Paul. "She should not have asked you. She asks everyone and Mama told her not to."

"But stamps?"

"She collects them. She goes around snitching letters that other people have. For the stamps on them, you know."

"Well now," said Mrs Forbes, "there may be some old letters. We'll look for them later on."

She went into the pantry and got the earthen jug of milk and filled a plate with cookies from the jar. When she came back they were sitting there sedately, waiting for the cookies.

"We are here just for a little while," said Paul. "Just a short vacation. Then our folks will come and get us and take us back again."

Ellen nodded her head vigorously. "That's what they told us when we went. When I was afraid to go."

"You were afraid to go?"

"Yes. It was all so strange."

"There was so little time," said Paul. "Almost none at all. We had to leave so fast."

"And where are you from?" asked Mrs Forbes. "Why," said the boy, "just a little ways from here. We walked just a little ways and of course we had the map. Papa gave it to us and he went over it carefully with us…"

"You're sure your name is Forbes?"

Ellen bobbed her head. "Of course it is," she said. "Strange," said Mrs Forbes. And it was more than strange, for there were no other Forbes in the neighborhood except her children and her grandchildren and these two, no matter what they said, were strangers.

They were busy with the milk and cookies and she went back to the stove and set the kettle with the apples back on the front again, stirring the cooking fruit with a wooden spoon.

"Where is Grandpa?" Ellen asked.

"Grandpa's in the field. He'll be coming in soon. Are you finished with your cookies?"

"All finished," said the girl.

"Then we'll have to set the table and get the supper cooking. Perhaps you'd like to help me."

Ellen hopped down off the chair. "I'll help," she said. "And I," said Paul, "will carry in some wood. Papa said I should be helpful. He said I could carry in the wood and feed the chickens and hunt the eggs and…"

"Paul," said Mrs Forbes, "it might help if you'd tell me what your father does."

"Papa," said the boy, "is a temporal engineer."

The two hired men sat at the kitchen table with the checkerboard between them. The two older people were in the living room.

"You never saw the likes of it," said Mrs Forbes. "There was this piece of metal and you pulled it and it ran along another metal strip and the bag came open. And you pulled it the other way and the bag was closed."

"Something new," said Jackson Forbes. "There may be many new things we haven't heard about, back here in the sticks. There are inventors turning out all sorts of things."

"And the boy," she said, "has the same thing on his trousers. I picked them up from where he threw them on the floor when he went to bed and I folded them and put them on the chair. And I saw this strip of metal, the edges jagged-like. And the clothes they wear. That boy's trousers are cut off above the knees and the dress that the girl was wearing was so short…"

"They talked of plains," mused Jackson Forbes, "but not the plains we know. Something that is used, apparently, for folks to travel in. And rockets — as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Earth."

"We couldn't question them, of course," said Mrs Forbes. "There was something about them, something that I sensed."

Her husband nodded. "They were frightened, too."

"You are frightened, Jackson?"

"I don't know," he said, "but there are no other Forbes. Not close, that is. Charlie is the closest and he's five miles away. And they said they walked just a little piece."

"What are you going to do?" she asked. "What can we do?"

"I don't rightly know," he said. "Drive in to the county seat and talk with the sheriff, maybe. These children must be lost. There must be someone looking for them."

"But they don't act as if they're lost," she told him. "They knew they were coming here. They knew we would be here. They told me I was their grandma and they asked after you and they called you Grandpa. And they are so sure. They don't act as if we're strangers. They've been told about us. They said they'd stay just a little while and that's the way they act. As if they'd just come for a visit."

"I think," said Jackson Forbes, "that I'll hitch up Nellie after breakfast and drive around the neighborhood and ask some questions. Maybe there'll be someone who can tell me something."

"The boy said his father was a temporal engineer. That just don't make sense. "Temporal means the worldly power and authority and…"

"It might be some joke," her husband said. "Something that the father said in jest and the son picked up as truth."

"I think," said Mrs Forbes, "I'll go upstairs and see if they're asleep. I left their lamps turned low. They are so little and the house is strange to them. If they are asleep, I'll blow out the lamps."

Jackson Forbes grunted his approval. "Dangerous," he said, "to keep lights burning of the night. Too much chance of fire."

The boy was asleep, flat upon his back — the deep and healthy sleep of youngsters. He had thrown his clothes upon the floor when he had undressed to go to bed, but now they were folded neatly on the chair, where she had placed them when she had gone into the room to say goodnight.

The bag stood beside the chair and it was open, the two rows of jagged metal gleaming dully in the dim glow of the lamp. Within its shadowed interior lay the dark forms of jumbled possessions, disorderly, and helter-skelter, no way for a bag to be.

She stooped and picked up the bag and set it on the chair and reached for the little metal tab to close it. At least, she told herself, it should be closed and not left standing open. She grasped the tab and it slid smoothly along the metal tracks and then stopped, its course obstructed by an object that stuck out.

She saw it was a book and reached down to rearrange it so she could close the bag. And as she did so, she saw the title in its faint gold lettering across the leather backstrap — Holy Bible.

With her fingers grasping the book, she hesitated for a moment, then slowly drew it out. It was bound in an expensive black leather that was dulled with age. The edges were cracked and split and the leather worn from long usage. The gold edging of the leaves were faded.

Hesitantly, she opened it and there, upon the fly leaf, in old and faded ink, was the inscription:

To Sister Ellen from Amelia Oct. 30, 1896

Many Happy Returns of the Day

She felt her knees grow weak and she let herself carefully to the floor and there, crouched beside the chair, read the fly leaf once again.

30 October 1896 — that was her birthday, certainly, but it had not come as yet, for this was only the beginning of September, 1896.

And the Bible — how old was this Bible she held within her hands? A hundred years, perhaps, more than a hundred years.

A Bible, she thought — exactly the kind of gift Amelia would give her. But a gift that had not been given yet, one that could not be given, for that day upon the fly leaf was a month into the future.

It couldn't be, of course. It was some kind of stupid joke. Or some mistake. Or a coincidence, perhaps. Somewhere else someone else was named Ellen and also had a sister who was named Amelia and the date was a mistake — someone had written the wrong year. It would be an easy thing to do.

But she was not convinced. They had said the name was Forbes and they had come straight here and Paul had spoken of a map so they could find the way.

Perhaps there were other things inside the bag. She looked at it and shook her head. She shouldn't pry. It had been wrong to take the Bible out.

On 30 October she would be fifty-nine — an old farm-wife with married sons and daughters and grandchildren who came to visit her on week-end and on holidays. And a sister Amelia who, in this year of 1896, would give her a Bible as a birthday gift.

Her hands shook as she lifted the Bible and put it back into the bag. She'd talk to Jackson when she went down stairs. He might have some thought upon the matter and he'd know what to do.

She tucked the book back into the bag and pulled the tab and the bag was closed. She set it on the floor again and looked at the boy upon the bed. He still was fast asleep, so she blew out the light.

In the adjoining room little Ellen slept, baby-like, upon her stomach. The low flame of the turned-down lamp flickered gustily in the breeze that came through an open window.

Ellen's bag was closed and stood squared against the chair with a sense of neatness. The woman looked at it and hesitated for a moment, then moved on around the bed to where the lamp stood on a bedside table.

The children were asleep and everything was well and she'd blow out the light and go downstairs and talk with Jackson, and perhaps there'd be no need for him to hitch up Nellie in the morning and drive around to ask questions of the neighbors.

As she leaned to blow out the lamp, she saw the envelope upon the table, with the two large stamps of many colors affixed to the upper right-hand corner.

Such pretty stamps, she thought — I never saw so pretty. She leaned closer to take a look at them and saw the country name upon them. Israel. But there was no such actual place as Israel. It was a Bible name, but there was no country. And if there were no country, how could there be stamps?

She picked up the envelope and studied the stamp, making sure that she had seen right. Such a pretty stamp!

She collects them, Paul had said. She's always snitching letters that belong to other people.

The envelope bore a postmark, and presumably a date, but it was blurred and distorted by a hasty, sloppy cancellation and she could not make it out.

The edge of a letter sheet stuck a quarter inch out of the ragged edges where the envelope had been torn open and she pulled it out, gasping in her haste to see it while an icy fist of fear was clutching at her heart.

It was, she saw, only the end of a letter, the last page of a letter, and it was in type rather than in longhand — type like one saw in a newspaper or a book.

Maybe one of those new-fangled things they had in big city offices, she thought, the ones she'd read about. Typewriters — was that what they were called?

• do not believe-, the one page read, — your plan is feasible. There is no time. The aliens are closing in and they will not give us time.

And there is the further consideration of the ethics of it, even if it could be done. We can not, in all conscience, scurry back into the past and visit our problems upon the people of a century ago. Think of the problems it would create for them, the economic confusion and the psychological effect.

If you feel that you must, at least, send the children back, think a moment of the wrench it will give those two good souls when they realize the truth. Theirs is a smug and solid world — sure and safe and sound. The concepts of this mad century would destroy all they have, all that they believe in.

But I suppose I cannot presume to counsel you. I have done what you asked. I have written you all I know of our old ancestors back on that Wisconsin farm. As historian of the family, I am sure my facts are right. Use them as you see fit and God have mercy on us all.

Your loving brother,

Jackson

P.S. A suggestion. If you do send the children back, you might send along with them a generous supply of the new cancer-inhibitor drug. Great-great-grandmother Forbes died in 1904 of a condition that I suspect was cancer. Given those pills, she might survive another ten or twenty years. And what, I ask you, brother, would that mean to this tangled future? I don't pretend to know. It might save us. It might kill us quicker. It might have no effect at all. I leave the puzzle to you.

If I can finish up work here and get away, I'll be with you at the end.-

Mechanically she slid the letter back into the envelope and laid it upon the table beside the flaring lamp.

Slowly she moved to the window that looked out on the empty lane.

They will come and get us, Paul had said. But would they ever come. Could they ever come?

She found herself wishing they would come. Those poor people, those poor frightened children caught so far in time.

Blood of my blood, she thought, flesh of my flesh, so many years away. But still her flesh and blood, no matter how removed. Not only these two beneath this roof tonight, but all those others who had not come to her.

The letter had said 1904 and cancer and that was eight years away — she'd be an old, old woman then. And the signature had been Jackson — an old family name, she wondered, carried on and on, a long chain of people who bore the name of Jackson Forbes?

She was stiff and numb, she knew. Later she'd be frightened. Later she would wish she had not read the letter. Perhaps, she did not know.

But now she must go back downstairs and tell Jackson the best way that she could.

She moved across the room and blew out the light and went out into the hallway.

A voice came from the open door beyond.

"Grandma, is that you?"

"Yes, Paul," she answered. "What can I do for you?"

In the doorway she saw him crouched beside the chair, in the shaft of moonlight pouring through the window, fumbling at the bag.

"I forgot," he said. "There was something papa said I was to give you right away."

Shotgun Cure

Original copyright year: 1960

The clinics were set up and in the morning they'd start on Operation Kelly — and that was something, wasn't it, that they should call it Kelly!

He sat in the battered rocking chair on the sagging porch and said it once again and rolled it on his tongue, but the taste of it was not so sharp nor sweet as it once had been, when that great London doctor had risen in the United Nations to suggest it could be called nothing else but Kelly.

Although, when one came to think of it, there was a deal of happenstance. It needn't have been Kelly. It could have been just anyone at all with an M.D. to his name. It could as well have been Cohen or Johnson or Radzonovich or any other of them — any one of all the doctors in the world.

He rocked gently in the creaking chair while the floor boards of the porch groaned in sympathy, and in the gathering dusk were the sounds, as well, of children at the day" s-end play, treasuring those last seconds before they had to go inside and soon thereafter to bed.

There was the scent of lilacs in the coolness of the air and at the corner of the garden he could faintly see the white flush of an early-blooming bridal wreath — the one that Martha Anderson had given him and Janet so many years ago, when they first had come to live in this very house.

A neighbor came tramping down the walk and he could not make him out in the deepening dusk, but the man called out to him.

"Good evening, Doc," he said.

"Good evening, Hiram," said old Doc Kelly, knowing who it was by the voice of him.

The neighbor went on, tramping down the walk.

Old Doc kept up his gentle rocking with his hands folded on his pudgy stomach and from inside the house he could hear the bustling in the kitchen as Janet cleared up after supper. In a little while, perhaps, she'd come out and sit with him and they'd talk together, low-voiced and casually, as befitted an old couple very much in love.

Although, by rights, he shouldn't stay out here on the porch. There was the medical journal waiting for him on the study desk and he should be reading it. There was so much new stuff these days that a man should keep up with — although, perhaps, the way things were turning out it wouldn't really matter if a man kept up or not.

Maybe in the years to come there'd be precious little a man would need to keep up with.

Of course, there'd always be need of doctors. There'd always be damn fools smashing up their cars and shooting one another and getting fishhooks in their hands and falling out of trees. And there'd always be the babies.

He rocked gently to and fro and thought of all the babies and how some of them had grown until they were men and women now and had babies of their own. And he thought of Martha Anderson, Janet's closest friend, and he thought of old Con Gilbert, as ornery an old shikepoke as ever walked the earth, and tight with money, too. He chuckled a bit wryly, thinking of all the money Con Gilbert finally owed him, never having paid a bill in his entire life.

But that was the way it went. There were some who paid and others who made no pretense of paying, and that was why he and Janet lived in this old house and he drove a five-year car and Janet had worn the selfsame dress to church the blessed winter long.

Although it made no difference, really, once one considered it. For the important pay was not in cash.

There were those who paid and those who didn't pay. And there were those who lived and the other ones who died, no matter what you did. There was hope for some and the ones who had no hope — and some of these you told and there were others that you didn't.

But it was different now.

And it all had started right here in this little town of Millville — not much more than a year ago.

Sitting in the dark, with the lilac scent and the white blush of the bridal wreath and the muted sounds of children clasping to themselves the last minutes of their play, he remembered it.

It was almost 8:30 and he could hear Martha Anderson in the outer office talking to Miss Lane and she, he knew, had been the last of them.

He took off his white jacket, folding it absent-mindedly, fogged with weariness, and laid it across the examination table.

Janet would be waiting supper, but she'd never say a word, for she never had. All these many years she had never said a word of reproach to him, although there had been at times a sense of disapproval at his easy-going ways, at his keeping on with patients who didn't even thank him, much less pay their bills. And a sense of disapproval, too, at the hours he kept, at his willingness to go out of nights when he could just as well have let a call go till his regular morning rounds.

She would be waiting supper and she would know that Martha had been in to see him and she'd ask him how she was, and what was he to tell her?

He heard Martha going out and the sharp click of Miss Lane's heels across the outer office. He moved slowly to the basin and turned on the tap, picking up the soap.

He heard the door creak open and did not turn his head. "Doctor," said Miss Lane, "Martha thinks she's fine. She says you're helping her. Do you think…"

"What would you do," he asked.

"I don't know," she said.

Would you operate, knowing it was hopeless? Would you send her to a specialist, knowing that he couldn't help her, knowing she can't pay him and that she'll worry about not paying? Would you tell her that she has, perhaps, six months to live and take from her the little happiness and hope she still has left to her?"

"I am sorry, doctor."

"No need to be. I've faced it many times. No case is the same. Each one calls for a decision of its own. It's been a long, hard day…"

"Doctor, there's another one out there."

"Another patient?"

"A man. He just came in. His name is Harry Herman."

"Herman? I don't know any Hermans."

"He's a stranger," said Miss Lane. "Maybe he just moved into town."

"If he'd moved in," said Doc, "I'd have heard of it. I hear everything."

"Maybe he's just passing through. Maybe he got sick driving on the road."

"Well, send him in," said Doc, reaching for a towel. "I'll have a look at him."

The nurse turned to the door.

"And Miss Lane."

"Yes?"

"You may as well go home. There's no use sticking round. It's been a real bad day."

And it had been, at that, he thought. A fracture, a burn, a cut, a dropsy, a menopause, a pregnancy, two pelvics, a scattering of colds, a feeding schedule, two teethings, a suspicious lung, a possible gallstone, a cirrhosis of the liver and Martha Anderson. And now, last of all, this man named Harry Herman — no name that he knew and when one came to think of it, a rather funny name.

And he was a funny man. Just a bit too tall and willowy to be quite believable, ears too tight against his skull, lips so thin they seemed no lips at all.

"Doctor?" he asked, standing in the doorway.

"Yes," said Doc, picking up his jacket and shrugging into it. "Yes, I am the doctor. Come on in. What can I do for you?"

"I am not ill," said the man.

"Not ill?"

"But I want to talk to you. You have time, perhaps?"

"Yes, certainly," said Doc, knowing that he had no time and resenting this intrusion. "Come on in. Sit down."

He tried to place the accent, but was unable to. Central European, most likely.

"Technical," said the man. "Professional."

"What do you mean?" asked Doc, getting slightly nettled.

"I talk to you technical. I talk professional."

"You mean that you're a doctor?"

"Not exactly," said the man, "although perhaps you think so. I should tell you immediate that I am an alien."

"An alien," said Old Doc. "We've got lots of them around. Mostly refugees."

"Not what I mean. Not that kind of alien. From some other planet. From some other star."

"But you said your name was Herman…"

"When in Rome," said the other one, "you must do as Romans."

"Huh?" asked Doc, and then: "Good God, do you mean that? That you are an alien. By an alien, do you mean…"

The other nodded happily. "From some other planet. From some other star. Very many light-years."

"Well, I'll be damned," said Doc.

He stood there looking at the alien and the alien grinned back at him, but uncertainly.

"You think, perhaps," the alien said, "but he is so human!"

"That," said Doc, "was going through my mind."

"So you would have a look, perhaps. You would know a human body."

"Perhaps," said Doc grimly, not liking it at all. "But the human body can take some funny turns."

"But not a turn like this," said the stranger, showing him his hands.

"No," said the shocked old Doc. "No such turn as that." For the hand had two thumbs and a single finger, almost as if a bird claw had decided to turn into a hand.

"Nor like this?" asked the other, standing up and letting down his trousers.

"Nor like that," said Doc, more shaken than he'd been in many years of practice.

"Then," said the alien, zipping up his trousers, "I think that it is settled."

He sat down again and calmly crossed his knees, "If you mean I accept you as an alien," said Doc, "I suppose I do. Although it's not an easy thing."

"I suppose it is not. It comes as quite a shock."

Doc passed a hand across his brow. "Yes, a shock, of course. But there are other points…"

"You mean the language," said the alien. "And my knowledge of your customs."

"That's part of it, naturally."

"We've studied you," the alien said. "We've spent some time on you. Not you alone, of course…"

"But you talk so well," protested Doc. "Like a well-educated foreigner."

"And that, of course," the other said, "is what exactly I am."

"Why, yes, I guess you are," said Doc. "I hadn't thought of it."

"I am not glib," said the alien. "I know a lot of words, but I use them incorrect. And my vocabulary is restricted to just the common speech. On matters of great technicality, I will not be proficient."

Doc walked around behind his desk and sat down rather limply.

"All right," he said, "let's have the rest of it. I accept you as an alien. Now tell me the other answer. Just why are you here?"

And he was surprised beyond all reason that he could approach the situation as calmly as he had. In a little while, he knew, when he had time to think it over, he would get the shakes.

"You're a doctor," said the alien. "You are a healer of your race."

"Yes," said Doc. "I am one of many healers."

"You work very hard to make the unwell well. You mend the broken flesh. You hold off death…"

"We try. Sometimes we don't succeed."

"You have many ailments. You have the cancer and the heart attacks and colds and many other things — I do not find the word."

"Diseases," Doc supplied.

"Disease. That is it. You will pardon my shortcomings in the tongue."

"Let's cut out the niceties," suggested Doc. "Let's get on with it."

"It is not right," the alien said, "to have all these diseases. It is not nice. It is an awful thing."

"We have less than we had at one time. We've licked a lot of them."

"And, of course," the alien said, "you make your living with them."

"What's that you said!" yelped Doc.

"You will be tolerant of me if I misunderstand. An economic system is a hard thing to get into one's head."

"I know what you mean," growled Doc, "but let me tell you, sir…"

But what was the use of it, he thought. This being was thinking the self-same thing that many humans thought.

"I would like to point out to you," he said, starting over once again, "that the medical profession is working hard to conquer those diseases you are talking of. We are doing all we can to destroy our own jobs."

"That is fine," the alien said. "It is what I thought, but it did not square with your planet's business sense. I take it, then, you would not be averse to seeing all disease destroyed."

"Now, look here," said Doc, having had enough of it, "I don't know what you are getting at. But I am hungry and I am tired and if you want to sit here threshing out philosophies…"

"Philosophies," said the alien. "Oh, not philosophies. I am practical. I have come to offer an end of all disease."

They sat in silence for a moment, then Doc stirred half protestingly and said, "Perhaps I misunderstood you, but I thought you said…"

"I have a method, a development, a find — I do not catch the word — that will destroy all diseases."

"A vaccine," said Old Doc.

"That's the word. Except it is different in some ways than the vaccine you are thinking."

"Cancer?" Doc asked.

The alien nodded. "Cancer and the common cold and all the others of them. You name it and it's gone."

"Heart," said Doc. "You can't vaccinate for heart."

"That, too," the alien said. "It does not really vaccinate. It makes the body strong. It makes the body right. Like tuning up a motor and making it like new. The motor will wear out in time, but it will function until it is worn out entirely."

Doc stared hard at the alien. "Sir," he said, "this is not the sort of thing one should joke about."

"I am not joking," said the alien.

"And this vaccine — it will work on humans? It has no side effects?"

"I am sure it will. We have studied your — your — the way your bodies work."

"Metabolism is the word you want."

"Thank you." said the alien.

"And the price?" asked Doc.

"There is no price," the alien said. "We are giving it to you."

"Completely free of charge? Surely there must be…"

"Without any charge," the alien said. "Without any strings."

He got up from the chair. He took a flat box from his pocket and walked over to the desk. He placed it upon the desk and pressed its side and the top sprang open. Inside of it were pads — like surgical pads, but they were not made of cloth.

Doc reached out, then halted his hand just above the box.

"May I?" he asked.

"Yes, certainly. You only touch the tops."

Doc gingerly lifted out one of the pads and laid it on the desk. He kneaded it with a skittish finger and there was liquid in the pad. He could feel the liquid squish as he pressed the pad.

He turned it over carefully and the underside of it was rough and corrugated, as if it were a mouthful of tiny, vicious teeth.

"You apply the rough side to the body of the patient." said the alien. "It seizes on the patient. It becomes a part of him. The body absorbs the vaccine and the pad drops off."

"And that is all there's to it?"

"That is all," the alien said.

Doc lifted the pad between two cautious fingers and dropped it back into the box.

He looked up at the alien. "But why?" he asked. "Why are you giving this to us!"

"You do not know," the alien said. "You really do not know."

"No, I don't," said Doc.

The alien's eyes suddenly were old and weary and he said: "In another million years you will."

"Not me," said Doc.

"In another million years," the alien said, "you'll do the same yourself, but it will be something different. And then someone will ask you, and you won't be able to answer any more than I am now."

If it was a rebuke, it was a very gentle one. Doc tried to decide if it were or not. He let the matter drop.

"Can you tell me what is in it?" he asked, gesturing at the pad.

"I can give you the descriptive formula, but it would be in our terms. It would be gibberish."

"You won't be offended if I try these out?"

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't," said the alien. "I would not expect your faith to extend so far. It would be simple minded."

He shut the box and pushed it closer to Old Doc. He turned and strode toward the door.

Doc rose ponderously to his feet.

"Now, wait a minute there!" he bellowed.

"I'll see you in a week or two," the alien said.

He went out and closed the door behind him.

Doc sat down suddenly in the chair and stared at the box upon the desk.

He reached out and touched it and it was really there. He pressed the side of it, and the lid popped open and the pads were there, inside.

He tried to fight his way back to sanity, to conservative and solid ground, to a proper — and a human — viewpoint.

"It's all hogwash," he said.

But it wasn't hogwash. He knew good and well it wasn't.

He fought it out with himself that night behind the closed door of his study, hearing faintly the soft bustling in the kitchen as Janet cleared away from supper.

And the first fight was on the front of credibility.

He had told the man he believed he was an alien and there was evidence that he could not ignore. Yet it seemed so incredible, all of it, every bit of it, that it was hard to swallow.

And the hardest thing of all was that this alien, whoever he might be, had come, of all the doctors in the world, to Dr. Jason Kelly, a little one horse doctor in a little one horse town.

He debated whether it might be a hoax and decided that it wasn't, for the three digits on the hand and the other thing he'd seen would have been difficult to simulate. And the whole thing, as a hoax, would be so stupid and so cruel that it simply made no sense. Besides, no one hated him enough to go to all the work. And even granting a hatred of appropriate proportion, he doubted there was anyone in Millville imaginative enough to think of this.

So the only solid ground he had, he told himself, was to assume that the man had been really an alien and that the pads were — bona fide-.

And if that was true, there was only one procedure: He must test the pads.

He rose from his chair and paced up and down the floor.

Martha Anderson, he told himself. Martha Anderson had cancer and her life was forfeit — there was nothing in man's world of knowledge that had a chance to save her. Surgery was madness, for she'd probably not survive it. And even if she did, her case was too advanced. The killer that she carried had already broken loose and was swarming through her body and there was no hope for her.

Yet he could not bring himself to do it, for she was Janet's closest friend and she was old and poor and every instinct in him screamed against his using her as a guinea pig.

Now if it were only old Con Gilbert — he could do a thing like that to Con. It would be no more than the old skinflint rightly had coming to him. But old Con was too mean to be really sick; despite all the complaining that he did, he was healthy as a hog.

No matter what the alien had said about no side effects, he told himself, one could not be sure. He had said they'd studied the metabolism of the human race and yet, on the face of it, it seemed impossible.

The answer, he knew, was right there any time he wanted it. It was tucked away back in his brain and he knew that it was there, but he pretended that it wasn't and he kept it tucked away and refused to haul it forth.

But after an hour or so of pacing up and down the room and of batting out his brains, he finally gave up and let the answer out.

He was quite calm when he rolled up his sleeve and opened up the box. And he was a matter-of-fact physician when he lifted out the pad and slapped it on his arm.

But his hand was shaking when he rolled down the sleeve so Janet wouldn't see the pad and ask a lot of questions about what had happened to his arm.

Tomorrow all over the world outside Millville, people would line up before the clinic doors, with their sleeves rolled up and ready. The lines, most likely, would move at a steady clip, for there was little to it. Each person would pass before a doctor and the doctor would slap a pad onto his or her arm and the next person would step up.

All over the world, thought Doc, in every cranny of it, in every little village; none would be overlooked. Even the poor, he thought, for there would be no charge.

And one could put his finger on a certain date and say:

"This was the day in history when disease came to an end."

For the pads not only would kill the present ailments, but would guard against them in the future.

And every twenty years the great ships out of space would come, carrying other cargoes of the pads and there would be another Vaccination Day. But not so many then — only the younger generation. For once a person had been vaccinated, there was no further need of it. Vaccinated once and you were set for life.

Doc tapped his foot quietly on the floor of the porch to keep the rocker going. It was pleasant here, he thought. And tomorrow it would be pleasant in the entire world. Tomorrow the fear would have been largely filtered out of human life. After tomorrow, short of accident or violence, men could look forward confidently to living out their normal lifetimes. And, more to the point, perhaps, completely healthy lifetimes.

The night was quiet, for the children finally had gone in, giving up their play. And he was tired. Finally, he thought, he could admit that he was tired. There was now, after many years, no treason in saying he was tired.

Inside the house he heard the muffled purring of the phone and the sound of it broke the rhythm of his rocking, brought him forward to the chair's edge.

Janet's feet made soft sounds as they moved toward the phone and he thrilled to the gentleness of her voice as she answered it.

Now, in just a minute, she would call him and he'd get up and go inside.

But she didn't call him. Her voice went on talking.

He settled back into the chair.

He'd forgotten once again.

The phone no longer was an enemy. It no longer haunted.

For Millville had been the first. The fear had already been lifted here. Millville had been the guinea pig, the pilot project.

Martha Anderson had been the first of them and after her Ted Carson, whose lung had been suspicious, and after him the Jurgen's baby when it came down with pneumonia. And a couple of dozen others until all the pads were gone.

And the alien had come back.

And the alien had said — what was it he had said?

"Don't think of us as benefactors nor as supermen. We are neither one. Think of me if you will, as the man across the street."

And it had been. Doc told himself, a reaching by the alien for an understanding, an attempt to translate this thing that they were doing into a common idiom.

And had there been any understanding — any depth of understanding? Doc doubted that there had been.

Although, he recalled, the aliens had been basically very much like humans. They could even joke.

There had been one joking thing the original alien had said that had stuck inside his mind. And it had been a sort of silly thing, silly on the face of it, but it had bothered him.

The screen door banged behind Janet as she came out on the porch. She sat down in the glider.

"That was Martha Anderson," she said.

Doc chuckled to himself. Martha lived just five doors up the street and she and Janet saw one another a dozen times a day yet Martha had to phone.

"What did Martha want?" he asked.

Janet laughed. "She wanted help with rolls."

"You mean her famous rolls?"

"Yes. She couldn't remember for the life of her, how much yeast she used."

Doc chortled softly. "And those are the ones, I suppose, she wins all the prizes on at the county fair."

Janet said, crisply: "It's not so funny as you make it, Jason. It's easy to forget a thing like that. She does a lot of baking."

"Yes, I suppose you're right." said Doc.

He should be getting in, he told himself, and start reading in the journal. And yet he didn't want to. It was so pleasant sitting here — just sitting. It had been a long time since he could do much sitting.

And it was all right with him, of course, because he was getting old and close to worn out, but it wouldn't be all right with a younger doctor, one who still owed for his education and was just starting out. There was talk in the United Nations of urging all the legislative bodies to consider medical subsidies to keep the doctors going. For there still was need of them. Even with all diseases vanished, there still was need of them. It wouldn't do to let their ranks thin out, for there would be time and time again when they would be badly needed.

He'd been listening to the footsteps for quite a while, coming down the street, and now all at once they were turning in the gate.

He sat up straighter in his chair.

Maybe it was a patient, knowing he'd be home, coming in to see him.

"Why," said Janet, considerably surprised, "it is Mr. Gilbert."

It was Con Gilbert, sure enough.

"Good evening, Doc," said Con. "Good evening, Miz Kelly."

"Good evening," Janet said, getting up to go.

"No use of you to leave," Con said to her.

"I have some things to do," she told him. "I was just getting ready to go in."

Con came up the steps and sat down on the glider.

"Nice evening," he declared.

"It is all of that," said Doc.

"Nicest spring I've ever seen," said Con, working his way around to what he had to say.

"I was thinking that," said Doc. "It seems to me the lilacs never smelled so good before."

"Doc," said Con, "I figure I owe you quite a bit of money."

"You owe me some," said Doc.

"You got an idea how much it might be?"

"Not the faintest," Doc told him. "I never bothered to keep track of it."

"Figured it was a waste of time," said Con. "Figured I would never pay it."

"Something like that," Doc agreed.

"Been doctoring with you for a right long time," said Con.

"That's right, Con."

"I got three hundred here. You figure that might do it?"

"Let's put it this way. Con," said Doc. "I'd settle for a whole lot less."

"I guess, then, that sort of makes us even. Seems to me three hundred might be close to fair."

"If you say so," said Doc.

Con dug out his billfold, extracted a wad of bills and handed them across. Doc took them and folded them and stuffed them in his pocket.

"Thank you, Con," he said.

And suddenly he had a funny feeling, as if there were something he should know, as if there were something that he should be able to just reach out and grab.

But he couldn't, no matter how he tried, figure what it was.

Con got up and shuffled across the porch, heading for the steps.

"Be seeing you around," he said.

Doc jerked himself back to reality.

"Sure, Con. Be seeing you around. And thanks."

He sat in the chair, not rocking, and listened to Con going down the walk and out the gate and then down the street until there was only silence.

And if he ever was going to get at it, he'd have to go in now and start reading in the journal.

Although, more than likely, it was all damn foolishness. He'd probably never again need to know a thing out of any medic journal.

Doc pushed the journal to one side and sat there, wondering what was wrong with him. He'd been reading for twenty minutes and none of it had registered. He couldn't have told a word that he had read.

Too upset, he thought. Too excited about Operation Kelly. And wasn't that a thing to call it — Operation Kelly!

And he remembered it once again exactly.

How he'd tried it out on Millville, then gone to the county medical association and how the doctors in the county, after some slight amount of scoffing and a good deal of skepticism, had become convinced. And from there it had gone to state and the AMA.

And finally that great day in the United Nations, when the Ellen had appeared before the delegates and when he, himself, had been introduced — and at last the great London man arising to suggest that the project could be called nothing else but Kelly.

A proud moment, he told himself — and he tried to call up the pride again, but it wasn't there, not the whole of it. Never in his life again would he know that kind of pride.

And here he sat, a simple country doctor once again, in his study late at night, trying to catch up with reading he never seemed to get the time to do.

Although that was no longer strictly true. Now he had all the time there was.

He reached out and pulled the journal underneath the lamp and settled down to read.

But it was slow going.

He went back and read a paragraph anew.

And that, he told himself, was not the way it should be.

Either he was getting old or his eyes were going bad or he was plain stupid.

And that was the word — that was the key to the thing that it had seemed he should have been able to just reach out and grab.

Stupid!

Probably not actually stupid. Maybe just a little slow. Not really less intelligent, but not so sharp and bright as he had been. Not so quick to catch the hang of things.

Martha Anderson had forgotten how much yeast to use in those famous, prize-winning rolls of hers. And that was something that Martha should never have forgotten.

Con had paid his bill, and on the scale of values that Con had subscribed to all his life, that was plain stupidity. The bright thing, the sharp thing would have been for Con, now that he'd probably never need a doctor, just to forget the obligation. After all, it would not have been hard to do; he'd been forgetful of it up to this very night.

And the alien had said something that, at the time, he'd thought of as a joke.

"Never fear," the alien had said, "we'll cure all your ills. Including, more than likely, a few you don't suspect."

And was intelligence a disease?

It was hard to think of it as such.

And yet, when any race was as obsessed with intelligence as Man was, it might be classed as one.

When it ran rampant as it had during the last half century, when it piled progress on top of progress, technology on top of technology, when it ran so fast that no man caught his breath, then it might be disease.

Not quite so sharp, thought Doc. Not quite so quick to grasp the meaning of a paragraph loaded with medical terminology — being forced to go a little slower to pack it in his mind.

And was that really bad?

Some of the stupidest people he'd ever known, he told himself, had been the happiest.

And while one could not make out of that a brief for planned stupidity, it at least might be a plea for a less harassed humanity.

He pushed the journal to one side and sat staring at the light.

It would be felt in Millville first because Millville had been the pilot project. And six months from tomorrow night it would be felt in all the world.

How far would it go, he wondered — for that, after all, was the vital question.

Only slightly less sharp?

Back to bumbling?

Clear back to the ape?

There was no way one could tell…

And all he had to do to stop it was pick up the phone.

He sat there, frozen with the thought that perhaps Operation Kelly should be stopped — that after all the years of death and pain and misery, Man must buy it back.

But the aliens, he thought — the aliens would not let it go too far. Whoever they might be, he believed they were decent people.

Maybe there had been no basic understanding, no meeting of the minds, and yet there had been a common ground — the very simple ground of compassion for the blind and halt.

But if he were wrong, he wondered — what if the aliens proposed to limit Man's powers of self-destruction even if that meant reducing him to abject stupidity… what was the answer then? And what if the plan was to soften man up before invasion?

Sitting there, he knew.

Knew that no matter what the odds were against his being right, there was nothing he could do.

Realized that as a judge in a matter such as this he was unqualified, that he was filled with bias, and could not change himself.

He'd been a doctor too long to stop Operation Kelly.

Small Deer

Original copyright year: 1965

Willow Bend, Wisconsin June 23, 1966

Dr. Wyman Jackson, Wyalusing College. Muscoda, Wisconsin

My dear Dr. Jackson:

I am writing to you because I don't know who else to write to and there is something I have to tell someone who can understand. I know your name because I read your book, "Cretaceous Dinosaurs," not once, but many times. I tried to get Dennis to read it, too, but I guess he never did. All Dennis was interested in were the mathematics of his time concept — not the time machine itself. Besides, Dennis doesn't read too well. It is a chore for him.

Maybe I should tell you, to start with, that my name is Alton James. I live with my widowed mother and I run a fix-it shop. I fix bicycles and lawn mowers and radios and television sets — I fix anything that is brought to me. I'm not much good at anything else, but I do seem to have the knack of seeing how things go together and understanding how they work and seeing what is wrong with them when they aren't working. I never had no training of any sort, but I just seem to have a natural bent for getting along with mechanical contraptions.

Dennis is my friend and I'll admit right off that he is a strange one. He doesn't know from nothing about anything, but he's nuts on mathematics. People in town make fun of him because he is so strange and Ma gives me hell at times for having anything to do with him. She says he's the next best thing to a village idiot. I guess a lot of people think the way that Ma does, but it's not entirely true, for he does know his math.

I don't know how he knows it. He didn't learn it at school and that's for sure. When he got to be 17 and hadn't got no farther than eighth grade, the school just sort of dropped him. He didn't really get to eighth grade honest: the teachers after a while got tired of seeing him on one grade and passed him to the next. There was talk, off and on, of sending him to some special school, but it never got nowhere.

And don't ask me what kind of mathematics he knew. I tried to read up on math once because I had the feeling, after seeing some of the funny marks that Dennis put on paper, that maybe he knew more about it than anyone else in the world. And I still think that he does — or that maybe he's invented an entirely new kind of math. For in the books I looked through I never did find any of the symbols that Dennis put on paper. Maybe Dennis used symbols he made up, inventing them as he went along, because no one had ever told him what the regular mathematicians used. But I don't think that's it — I'm inclined to lean to the idea Dennis came up with a new brand of math, entirely.

There were times I tried to talk with Dennis about this math of his and each time he was surprised that I didn't know it, too. I guess he thought most people knew about it. He said that it was simple, that it was plain as day. It was the way things worked, he said.

I suppose you'll want to ask how come I understood his equations well enough to make the time machine. The answer is I didn't. I suppose that Dennis and I are alike in a lot of ways, but in different ways, I know how to make contraptions work (without knowing any of the theory) and Dennis sees the entire universe as something operating mechanically (and him scarcely able to read a page of simple type).

And another thing. My family and Dennis" family live in the same end of town and from the time we were toddlers, Dennis and I played together. Later on, we just kept on together. We didn't have a choice. For some reason or other, none of the kids would play with us. Unless we wanted to play alone, we had to play together. I guess we got so, through the years, that we understood each other.

I don't suppose there'd have been any time machine if I hadn't been so interested in paleontology. Not that I knew anything about it; I was just interested. From the time I was a kid I read everything I could lay my hands on about dinosaurs and saber-tooths and such, Later on I went fossil hunting in the hills, but I never found nothing really big. Mostly I found brachiopods. There are great beds of them in the Platteville limestone. And lots of times I'd stand in the street and look up at the river bluffs above the town and try to imagine what it had been like a million years ago, or a hundred million. When I first read in a story about a time machine, I remember thinking how I'd like to have one. I guess that at one time I thought a little about making one, but then realized I couldn't.

Dennis had a habit of coming to my shop and talking, but most of the time talking to himself rather than to me. I don't remember exactly how it started, but after a while I realized that he had stopped talking about anything but time. One day he told me he had been able to figure out everything but time, and now it seemed he was getting that down in black and white, like all the rest of it.

Mostly I didn't pay too much attention to what he said, for a lot of it didn't make much sense. But after he'd talked, incessantly, for a week or two, on time, I began to pay attention. But don't expect me to tell you what he said or make any sense of it, for there's no way that I can. To understand what Dennis said and meant, you'd have to live with him, like I did, for twenty years or more. It's not so much understanding what Dennis says as understanding Dennis.

I don't think we actually made any real decision to build a time machine, It just sort of grew on us. All at once we found that we were making one.

We took our time. We had to take our time, for we went back a lot and did things over, almost from the start. It took weeks to get some of the proper effects — at least, that's what Dennis called them. Me, I didn't know anything about effects. All that I knew was that Dennis wanted to make something work a certain way and I tried to make it work that way. Sometimes, even when it worked the way he wanted it, it turned out to be wrong, So we'd start all over.

But finally we had a working model of it and took it out on a big bald bluff, several miles up the river, where no one ever went. I rigged up a timer to a switch that would turn it on, then after two minutes would reverse the field and send it home again.

We mounted a movie camera inside the frame that carried the machine, and we set the camera going, then threw the timer switch.

I had my doubts that it would work, but it did. It went away and stayed for two minutes, then came back again.

When we developed the camera film, we knew without any question the camera had traveled back in time. At first there were pictures of ourselves standing there and waiting. Then there was a little blur, no more than a flicker across a half a dozen frames, and the next frames showed a mastodon walking straight into the camera. A fraction of a second later his trunk jerked up and his ears flared out as he wheeled around with clumsy haste and galloped down the ridge.

Every now and then he'd swing his head around to take a look behind him. I imagine that our time machine, blossoming suddenly out of the ground in front of him, scared him out of seven years of growth.

We were lucky, that was all. We could have sent that camera back another thousand times, perhaps, and never caught a mastodon — probably never caught a thing. Although we would have known it had moved in time, for the landscape had been different, although not a great deal different, but from the landscape we could not have told if it had gone back a hundred or a thousand years. When we saw the mastodon, however, we knew we'd sent the camera back 10,000 years at least.

I won't bore you with how we worked out a lot of problems on our second model, or how Dennis managed to work out a time-meter that we could calibrate to send the machine a specific distance into time. Because all this is not important. What is important is what I found when I went into time.

I've already told you I'd read your book about Cretaceous dinosaurs and I liked the entire book, but that final chapter about the extinction of the dinosaurs is the one that really got me. Many a time I'd lie awake at night thinking about all the theories you wrote about and trying to figure out in my own mind how it really was.

So when it was time to get into that machine and go, I knew where I would be headed.

Dennis gave me no argument. He didn't even want to go. He didn't care no more. He never was really interested in the time machine. All he wanted was to prove out his math. Once the machine did that, he was through with it.

I worried a lot, going as far as I meant to go, about the rising or subsidence of the crust. I knew that the land around Willow Bend had been stable for millions of years. Sometime during the Cretaceous a sea had crept into the interior of the continent, but had stopped short of Wisconsin and, so far as geologists could determine, there had been no disturbances in the state. But I still felt uneasy about it. I didn't want to come out into the Late Cretaceous with the machine buried under a dozen feet of rock or, maybe, hanging a dozen feet up in the air.

So I got some heavy steel pipes and sunk them six feet into the rock on the bald bluff top we had used the first time, with about ten feet of their length extending in the air. I mounted the time frame on top of them and rigged up a ladder to get in and out of it and tied the pipes into the time field. One morning I packed a lunch and filled a canteen with water. I dug the old binoculars that had been my father's out of the attic and debated whether I should take along a gun. All I had was a shotgun and I decided not to take it. If I'd had a rifle, there'd been no question of my taking it, but I didn't have one. I could have borrowed one, but I didn't want to. I'd kept pretty quiet about what I was doing and I didn't want to start any gossip in the village.

I went up to the bluff top and climbed up to the frame and set the time-meter to 63 million years into the past and then I turned her on. I didn't make any ceremony out of it. I just turned her on and went.

I told you about the little blur in the movie film and that's the best way, I suppose, to tell you how it was. There was this little blur, like a flickering twilight. Then it was sunlight once again and I was on the bluff top, looking out across the valley.

Except it wasn't a bluff top any longer, but only a high hill. And the valley was not the rugged, tree-choked, deeply cut valley I had always known, but a great green plain, a wide and shallow valley with a wide and sluggish river flowing at the far side of it. Far to the west I could see a shimmer in the sunlight, a large lake or sea. But a sea, I thought, shouldn't be this far east. But there it was, either a great lake or a sea — I never did determine which.

And there was something else as well. I looked down to the ground and it was only three feet under me. Was I ever glad I had used those pipes!

Looking out across the valley, I could see moving things, but they were so far away that I could not make them out. So I picked up the binoculars and jumped down to the ground and walked across the hilltop until the ground began to slope away.

I sat down and put the binoculars to my eyes and worked across the valley with them.

There were dinosaurs out there, a whole lot more of them than I had expected. They were in herds and they were traveling. You'd expect that out of any dozen herds of them, some of them would be feeding, but none of them was. All of them were moving and it seemed to me there was a nervousness in the way they moved. Although, I told myself, that might be the way it was with dinosaurs.

They all were a long way off, even with the glasses, but I could make out some of them. There were several groups of duckbills, waddling along and making funny jerky movements with their heads. I spotted a couple of small herds of thescelosaurs, pacing along, with their bodies tilted forward. Here and there were small groups of triceratops. But strangest of all was a large herd of brontosaurs, ambling nervously and gingerly along, as if their feet might hurt. And it struck me strange, for they were a long way from water and from what I'd read in your book, and in other books, it didn't seem too likely they ever wandered too far away from water.

And there were a lot of other things that didn't look too much like the pictures I had seen in books.

The whole business had a funny feel about it. Could it be, I wondered, that I had stumbled on some great migration, with all the dinosaurs heading out for some place else?

I got so interested in watching that I was downright careless and it was foolish of me. I was in another world and there could have been all sorts of dangers and I should have been watching out for them, but I was just sitting there, flat upon my backside, as if I were at home.

Suddenly there was a pounding, as if someone had turned loose a piledriver, coming up behind me and coming very fast. I dropped the glasses and twisted around and as I did something big and tall rushed past me, no more than three feet away, so close it almost brushed me. I got just a brief impression of it as it went by — huge and gray and scaly.

Then, as it went tearing down the hill, I saw what it was and I had a cold and sinking feeling clear down in my gizzard. For I had been almost run down by the big boy of them all — Tyrannosaurus rex-.

His two great legs worked like driving pistons and the light of the sun glinted off the wicked, recurved claws as his feet pumped up and down. His tail rode low and awkward, but there was no awkwardness in the way he moved. His monstrous head swung from side to side, with the great rows of teeth showing in the gaping mouth, and he left behind him a faint foul smell — I suppose from the carrion he ate. But the big surprise was that the wattles hanging underneath his throat were a brilliant iridescence — red and green and gold and purple, the color of them shifting as he swung his head.

I watched him for just a second and then I jumped up and headed for the time machine. I was more scared than I like to think about. I had, I want to testify right here, seen enough of dinosaurs for a lifetime.

But I never reached the time machine.

Up over the brow of the hill came something else. I say something else because I have no idea what it really was. Not as big as — rex-, but ten times worse than him.

It was long and sinuous and it had a lot of legs and it stood six feet high or so and was a sort of sickish pink. Take a caterpillar and magnify it until it's six feet tall, then give it longer legs so that it can run instead of crawl and hang a death mask dragon's head upon it and you get a faint idea. Just a faint idea.

It saw me and swung its head toward me and made an eager whimpering sound and it slid along toward me with a side-wheeling gait, like a dog when it's running out of balance and lop-sided.

I took one look at it and dug in my heels and made so sharp a turn that I lost my hat. The next thing I knew, I was pelting down the hill behind old — Tyrannosaurus-.

And now I saw that myself and — rex- were not the only things that were running down the hill. Scattered here and there along the hillside were other running creatures, most of them in small groups and herds, although there were some singles. Most of them were dinosaurs, but there were other things as well.

I'm sorry I can't tell you what they were, but at that particular moment I wasn't what you might call an astute observer. I was running for my life, as if the flames of hell were lapping at my heels.

I looked around a couple of times and that sinuous creature was still behind me. He wasn't gaining on me any, although I had the feeling that he could if he put his mind to it. Matter of fact, he didn't seem to be following me alone. He was doing a lot of weaving back and forth. He reminded me of nothing quite so much as a faithful farm dog bringing in the cattle. But even thinking this, it took me a little time to realize that was exactly what he was — an old farm dog bringing in a bunch of assorted dinosaurs and one misplaced human being. At the bottom of the hill I looked back again and now that I could see the whole slope of the hill, I saw that this was a bigger cattle drive than I had imagined. The entire hill was alive with running beasts and behind them were a half dozen of the pinkish dogs.

And I knew when I saw this that the moving herds I'd seen out on the valley floor were not migratory herds, but they were moving because they were being driven — that this was a big roundup of some sort, with all the reptiles and the dinosaurs and myself being driven to a common center.

I knew that my life depended on getting lost somehow, and being left behind. I had to find a place to hide and I had to dive into this hiding place without being seen. Only trouble was there seemed no place to hide. The valley floor was naked and nothing bigger than a mouse could have hidden there.

Ahead of me a good-size swale rose up from the level floor and I went pelting up it. I was running out of wind. My breath was getting short and I had pains throbbing in my chest and I knew I couldn't run much farther.

I reached the top of the swale and started down the reverse slope. And there, right in front of me, was a bush of some sort, three feet high or so, bristling with thorns. I was too close to it and going too fast to even try to dodge it, so I did the only thing I could — I jumped over it.

But on the other side there was no solid ground. There was, instead, a hole. I caught just a glimpse of it and tried to jerk my body to one side, and then I was falling into the hole.

It wasn't much bigger than I was. It bumped me as I fell and I picked up some bruises, then landed with a jolt. The fall knocked the breath out of me and I was doubled over, with my arms wrapped about my belly.

My breath came slowly back and the pain subsided and I was able to take a look at where I was.

The hole was some three feet in diameter and perhaps as much as seven deep. It slanted slightly toward the forefront of the slope and its sides were worn smooth. A thin trickle of dirt ran down from the edge of it, soil that I had loosened and dislodged when I had hit the hole. And about halfway up was a cluster of small rocks, the largest of them about the size of a human head, projecting more than half their width out of the wall. I thought, idly, as I looked at them, that some day they'd come loose and drop into the hole. And at the thought I squirmed around a little to one side, so that if they took a notion to fall I'd not be in the line of fire.

Looking down, I saw that I'd not fallen to the bottom of the hole, for the hole went on, deeper in the ground. I had come to rest at a point where the hole curved sharply, to angle back beneath the swale top.

I hadn't noticed it at first, I suppose because I had been too shook up, but now I became aware of a musky smell. Not an overpowering odor, but a sort of scent — faintly animal, although not quite animal.

A smooth-sided hole and a musky smell — there could be no other answer: I had fallen not into just an ordinary hole, but into a burrow of some sort. And it must be the burrow of quite an animal, I thought, to be the size it was. It would have taken something with hefty claws, indeed, to have dug this sort of burrow.

And even as I thought it, I heard the rattling and the scrabbling of something coming up the burrow, no doubt coming up to find out what was going on.

I did some scrabbling myself. I didn't waste no time. But about three feet up I slipped. I grabbed for the top of the hole, but my fingers slid through the sandy soil and I couldn't get a grip. I shot out my feet and stopped my slide short of the bottom of the hole. And there I was, with my back against one side of the hole and my feet braced against the other, hanging there, halfway up the burrow.

While all the time below me the scrabbling and the clicking sounds continued. The thing, whatever it might be, was getting closer, and it was coming fast.

Right in front of me was the nest of rocks sticking from the wall. I reached out and grabbed the biggest one and jerked and it came loose. It was heavier than I had figured it would be and I almost dropped it, but managed to hang on.

A snout came out of the curve in the burrow and thrust itself quickly upward in a grabbing motion. The jaws opened up and they almost filled the burrow and they were filled with sharp and wicked teeth.

I didn't think. I didn't plan. What I did was instinct. I dropped the rock between my spread-out legs straight down into that gaping maw. It was a heavy rock and it dropped four feet or so and went straight between the teeth, down into the blackness of the throat. When it hit it splashed and the jaws snapped shut and the creature backed away.

How I did it, I don't know, but I got out of the hole. I clawed and kicked against the wall and heaved my body up and rolled out of the hole onto the naked hillside.

Naked, that is, except for the bush with the inch-long thorns, the one that I'd jumped over before I fell into the burrow. It was the only cover there was and I made for the upper side of it, for by now, I figured, the big cattle drive had gone past me and if I could get the bush between myself and the valley side of the swale, I might have a chance. Otherwise, sure as hell, one of those dogs would see me and would come out to bring me in.

For while there was no questions that they were dinosaur herders, they probably couldn't tell the difference between me and a dinosaur. I was alive and could run and that would qualify me.

There was always the chance, of course, that the owner of the burrow would come swarming out, and if he did I couldn't stay behind the bush. But I rather doubted he'd be coming out, not right away, at least. It would take him a while to get that stone out of his throat.

I crouched behind the bush and the sun was hot upon my back and, peering through the branches, I could see, far out on the valley floor, the great herd of milling beasts. All of them had been driven together and there they were, running in a knotted circle, while outside the circle prowled the pinkish dogs and something else as well — what appeared to be men driving tiny cars. The cars and men were all of the same color, a sort of greenish gray, and the two of them, the cars and men, seemed to be a single organism. The men didn't seem to be sitting in the cars; they looked as if they grew out of the cars, as if they and the cars were one. And while the cars went zipping along, they appeared to have no wheels, It was hard to tell, but they seemed to travel with the bottom of them flat upon the ground, like a snail would travel, and as they traveled, they rippled, as if the body of the car were some sort of flowing muscle.

I crouched there watching and now, for the first time, I had a chance to think about it, to try to figure out what was going on. I had come here, across more than sixty million years, to see some dinosaurs, and I sure was seeing them, but under what you might say were peculiar circumstances. The dinosaurs fit, all right. They looked mostly like the way they looked in books, but the dogs and car-men were something else again. They were distinctly out of place.

The dogs were pacing back and forth, sliding along in their sinuous fashion, and the car-men were zipping back and forth, and every once in a while one of the beasts would break out of the circle and the minute that it did, a half dozen dogs and a couple of car-men would race to intercept it and drive it back again.

The circle of beasts must have had, roughly, a diameter of a mile or more — a mile of milling, frightened creatures. A lot of paleontologists have wondered whether dinosaurs had any voice and I can tell you that they did. They were squealing and roaring and quacking and there were some of them that hooted — I think it was the duckbills hooting, but I can't be sure.

Then, all at once, there was another sound, a sort of fluttering roar that seemed to be coming from the sky. I looked up quickly and I saw them coming down — a dozen or so spaceships, they couldn't have been anything but spaceships. They came down rather fast and they didn't seem too big and there were tails of thin, blue flame flickering at their bases. Not the billowing clouds of flame and smoke that our rockets have, but just a thin blue flicker.

For a minute it looked like one of them would land on top of me, but then I saw that it was too far out. It missed me, matter of fact, a good two miles or so. It and the others sat down in a ring around the milling herd out in the valley.

I should have known what would happen out there. It was the simplest explanation one could think of and it was logical. I think, maybe, way deep down, I did know, but my surface mind had pushed it away because it was too matter-of-fact and too ordinary.

Thin snouts spouted from the ships and purple fire curled mistily at the muzzle of those snouts and the dinosaurs went down in a fighting, frightened, squealing mass. Thin trickles of vapor drifted upward from the snouts and out in the center of the circle lay that heap of dead and dying dinosaurs, all those thousands of dinosaurs piled in death.

It is a simple thing to tell, of course, but it was a terrible thing to see. I crouched there behind the bush, sickened at the sight, startled by the silence when all the screaming and the squealing and the hooting ceased. And shaken, too — not by what shakes me now as I write this letter, but shaken by the knowledge that something from outside could do this to the Earth.

For they were from outside. It wasn't just the spaceships, but those pinkish dogs and gray-green car men, which were not cars and men, but a single organism, were not things of earth, could not be things of earth.

I crept back from the bush, keeping low in hope that the bush would screen me from the things down in the valley until I reached the swale top. One of the dogs swung around and looked my way and I froze, and after a time he looked away.

Then I was over the top of the swale and heading back toward the time machine. But half way down the slope, I turned around and came back again, crawling on my belly, squirming to the hilltop to have another look.

It was a look I'll not forget.

The dogs and car-men had swarmed in upon the heap of dead dinosaurs, and some of the cars already were crawling back toward the grounded spaceships, which had let down ramps. The cars were moving slowly, for they were heavily loaded and the loads they carried were neatly butchered hams and racks of ribs.

And in the sky there was a muttering and I looked up to see yet other spaceships coming down — the little transport ships that would carry this cargo of fresh meat up to another larger ship that waited overhead.

It was then I turned and ran.

I reached the top of the hill and piled into the time machine and set it at zero and came home. I didn't even stop to hunt for the binoculars I'd dropped.

And now that I am home, I'm not going back again. I'm not going anywhere in that time machine. I'm afraid of what I might find any place I go. If Wyalusing College has any need of it, I'll give them the time machine.

But that's not why I wrote.

There is no doubt in my mind what happened to the dinosaurs, why they became extinct. They were killed off and butchered and hauled away, to some other planet, perhaps many light years distant, by a race which looked upon the earth as a cattle range — a planet that could supply a vast amount of cheap protein.

But that, you say, happened more than sixty million years ago. This race did once exist. But in sixty million years it would almost certainly have changed its ways or drifted off in its hunting to some other sector of the galaxy, or, perhaps, have become extinct, like the dinosaurs.

But I don't think so. I don't think any of those things happened. I think they're still around. I think Earth may be only one of many planets which supply their food.

And I'll tell you why I think so. They were back on Earth again, I'm sure, some 10,000 or 11,000 years ago, when they killed off the mammoth and the mastodon, the giant bison, the great cave bear and the saber-tooth and a lot of other things. Oh, yes. I know they missed Africa. They never touched the big game there. Maybe, after wiping out the dinosaurs, they learned their lesson, and left Africa for breeding stock.

And now I come to the point of this letter, the thing that has me worried.

Today there are just a few less than three billion of us humans in the world. By the year 2,000 there may be as many as six billion of us.

We're pretty small, of course, and these things went in for tonnage, for dinosaurs and mastodon and such. But there are so many of us! Small as we are, we may be getting to the point where we'll be worth their while.

So Bright the Vision

Original copyright year: 1956

The showroom was in the decorous part of town, where Kemp Hart seldom found himself. It was a long way from his usual haunts and he was surprised to find that he had walked so far. In fact, he would not have walked at all if his credit had been good at the Bright Star bar where his crowd hung out.

As soon as he realized where he was he knew he should turn around and walk rapidly away, for he was out of place in this district of swank publishers, gold-plated warrens and famous eateries. But the showroom held him. It would not let him go. He stood in front of it in all his down-at-the-heels unkemptness, one hand thrust in a pocket, fugitively rubbing between thumb and finger the two small coins that still remained to him.

Behind the glass the machines were shining-wonderful, the sort of merchandise that belonged on this svelte and perfumed street. One machine in the corner of the showroom was bigger and shinier than the others and had about it a rare glint of competence. It had a massive keyboard for the feeding in of data and it had a hundred slots or so for the working tapes and films. It had a mood control calibrated more sensitively than any he had ever seen and in all probability a lot of other features that were not immediately apparent.

With a machine such as that, Hart told himself, a man could become famous almost automatically and virtually overnight. He could write anything he wished and he would write it well and the doors of the most snooty of the publishers would stand open to him.

But much as he might wish to, there was no use of going in to see it. There was nothing to be gained by even thinking about it. It was just something he could stand and look at from beyond the showroom's glass.

And yet, he told himself, he had a perfect right to go in and look it over. There was not a thing to stop him. Nothing, at least, beyond the sneer upon the salesman's face at the sight of him — the silent, polite, well-disciplined contempt when he turned and slunk away.

He looked furtively up and down the street and the street was empty. The hour was far too early for this particular street to have come to life, and it occurred to him that if he just walked in and asked to see the machine, it would be all right. Perhaps he could explain he did not wish to buy it, but just to look at it. Maybe if he did that they wouldn't sneer at him. Certainly no one could object. There must be a lot of people, even rich and famous people, who only come to look.

He edged along the showroom, studying the machines and heading for the door, telling himself that he would not go in, that it was foolish to go in, but secretly knowing that he would.

He reached the door and opened it and stepped inside. The salesman appeared almost as if by magic.

"The yarner in the corner," Hart said. "I wonder if I might —»

"Most certainly," said the salesman. "If you'll just come along with me."

In the corner of the showroom, the salesman draped his arm across the machine affectionately.

"It is our newest model," he said. "We call it the Classic, because it has been designed and engineered with but one thought in mind — the production of the classic. It is, we think, a vast improvement over our Best Seller Model, which, after all, is intended to turn out no better than best sellers — even though on occasion it has turned out certain minor classics. To be quite honest with you sir, I would suspect that in almost every one of those instances, it had been souped up a bit, I am told some people are very clever that way."

Hart shook his head. "Not me. I'm all thumbs when it comes to tinkering."

"In that case," said the salesman, "the thing for you to do is buy the best yarner that you can. Used intelligently, there's virtually no limit to its versatility. And in this particular model the quality factor is much higher than in any of the others. Although naturally, to get the best results you must be selective in your character film, and your narrative problem tapes. But that needn't worry you. We have a large stock of tapes and films and some new mood and atmosphere fixers that are quite unique. They come fairly high, of course, but —»

"By the way, just what is the price of this model?"

"Ifs only twenty-five thousand," the salesman told him brightly. "Don't you wonder, sir, how it can be offered at so ridiculous a figure? The engineering that went into it is remarkable. We worked on it for ten full years before we were satisfied. And during those ten years the specifications were junked and redrawn time and time again to keep pace with our developmental research."

He slapped the shiny machine with a jubilant hand. "I can guarantee you, sir, that nowhere can you get a product superior to this. It has everything. Millions of probability factors have been built into it, assuring you of sure-fire originality. No danger of stumbling into the stereotype, which is not true at all with so many of the cheaper models. The narrative bank alone is capable of turning out an almost infinite number of situations on any particular theme and the character developer has thousands of points of reference instead of the hundred or so you find in inferior models. The semantics section is highly selective and sensitive and you must not overlook —»

"It's a good machine," interposed Hart. "But it costs a bit too much. Now, if you had something else…"

"Most certainly, sir. We have many other models."

"Would you take a machine in trade?"

"Gladly. What kind of machine do you have, sir?"

"An Auto-Author Ninety-six."

The salesman froze just slightly. He shook his head, half sadly, half in bewilderment. "Well, now, I don't know if we could allow you much for that. It's a fairly old type of machine. Almost obsolete."

"But you could give me something?"

"I think so. Not a great deal, though."

"And time payment?"

"Yes, certainly. We could work something out. If you would give me your name."

Hart told him what it was.

The salesman jotted it down and said, "Excuse me a moment, sir."

Hart stood for a moment, looking after him. Then, like a sneak thief in the night, he moved softly to the front door and walked swiftly down the street.

There was no use in staying. No use at all of waiting for the salesman to come back and shake his hand and say, "We're very sorry, sir."

We're very sorry, sir, because we've looked up your credit rating and it's absolutely worthless. We checked your sales record and found you sold just one short story in the last six months.

"It was a mistake to go for a walk at all," Hart told himself, not without bitterness.

Downtown, in a section of the city far removed from the glamorous showroom, Hart climbed six flights of stairs because the elevator was out of whack again.

Behind the door that said IRVING PUBLICATIONS, the preoccupied receptionist stopped filing her nails long enough to make a motion with her thumb toward the inner office.

"Go on in and see him," she said.

Ben Irving sat behind a heaped-up desk cluttered with manuscripts, proofs and layout sheets. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he wore an eyeshade. He always wore the eyeshade and that was one of the minor mysteries of the place, for at no time during the day was there light enough in his dingy office to blind a self-respecting bat.

He looked up and blinked at Hart.

"Glad to see you, Kemp," he said. "Sit down. What's on your mind today?"

Hart took a chair. "I was wondering. About that last story that I sent you —»

"Haven't got around to it yet," said Irving. He waved his hand at the mess upon his desk by way of explanation.

"Mary!" he shouted.

The receptionist stuck her head inside the door.

"Get Hart's manuscript," be said, "and let Millie have a look at it"

Irving leaned back in his chair. "This won't take long," he said. "Millie's a fast reader."

"I'll wait," said Hart.

"I've got something for you," Irving told him. "We're starting a new magazine, aimed at the tribes out in the Algol system. They're a primitive sort of people, but they can read, Lord love them. We had the devil's own time finding someone who could do the translations for us and it'll cost more than we like to pay to have the type set up. They got the damnedest alphabet you ever saw. We finally found a printer who had some in his fonts."

"What kind of stuff?" Hart asked.

"Simple humanoid," Irving replied. "Blood and thunder and a lot of spectacle. Life is tough and hard out there, so we have to give them something with plenty of color in it that's easy to read. Nothing fancy, mind you."

"Sounds all right."

"Good basic hack," said Irving. "See how it goes out there and if it goes all right we'll make translations for some of the primitive groups out in the Capella region. Minor changes, maybe, but none too serious."

He squinted meditatively at Hart.

"Not too much pay. But if it goes over we'll want a lot of it"

"I'll see what I can do," said Hart "Any taboos? Anything to duck?"

"No religion at all," the editor told him. "They've got it, of course, but it's so complicated that you'd better steer clear of it entirely. No mushy stuff. Love don't rate with them. They buy their women and don't fool around with love. Treasure and greed would be good. Any standard reference work will give you a line on that. Fantastic weapons — the more gruesome the better. Bloodshed, lots of it. Hatred, that's their dish. Hatred and vengeance and hell-for-leather living. And you simply got to keep it moving."

"I'll see what I can do."

"That's the second time you've said that."

"I'm not doing so good, Ben. Once I could have told you — yes-. Once I could have hauled it over by the ton."

"Lost the touch?"

"Not the touch. The machine. My yarner is haywire. I might just as well try to write my stories by hand."

Irving shuddered at the thought.

"Fix it up," he said, "Tinker with it."

"I'm no good at that. Anyhow, it's too old. Almost obsolete."

"Well, do the best you can. I'd like to go on buying from you."

The girl came in. Without looking at Hart she laid the manuscript down upon the desk. From where he sat, Hart could see the single word the machine had stamped upon its face: REJECTED.

"Emphatic," said the girl. "Millie almost stripped a gear."

Irving pitched the manuscript to Hart.

"Sorry, Kemp. Better luck next time."

Hart rose, holding the manuscript in his hand. "I'll try this other thing," he said.

He started for the door.

"Just a minute," Irving said, his voice sympathetic.

Hart turned back.

Irving brought out his billfold, stripped out two tens and held them out.

"No," said Hart, staring at the bills longingly.

"It's a loan," said the editor. "Damn it, man, you can take a loan. You'll be bringing me some stuff."

"Thanks, Ben. I'll remember this."

He stuffed the bills into his pocket and made a swift retreat.

Bitter dust burned in his throat and there was a hard, cold lump in the center of his belly.

• Got something for you-, Ben had said. -Good basic hack.-

• Good basic hack.-

So that was what he'd sunk to!

Angela Maret was the only patron in the Bright Star bar when Hart finally arrived there, with money in his pocket and a man-sized hankering for a glass of beer. Angela was drinking a weird sort of pink concoction that looked positively poisonous. She had her glasses on and her hair skinned back and was quite obviously on a literary binge. It was a shame, Hart thought. She could be attractive, but preferred not to be.

The instant Hart joined her Blake, the bartender, came over to the table and just stood there, with his fists firmly planted on his hips.

"Glass of beer," Hart told him.

"No more cuff," Blake said, with an accusing stare.

"Who said anything about cuff? I'll pay for it."

Blake scowled. "Since you're loaded, how about paying on the bill?"

"I haven't got that kind of money. Do I get the beer or don't I?"

Watching Blake waddle back to the bar, Hart was glad he had had the foresight to stop and buy a pack of cigarettes to break one of the tens. Flash a ten and Blake would be on it in a second and have it chalked against his bill.

"Staked?" Angela asked sweetly.

"An advance," Hart told her, lying like a gentleman. "Irving has some stuff for me to do. He'll need a lot of it. It doesn't pay too well, of course."

Blake came with the beers and plunked it down on the table and waited pointedly for Hart to do the expected thing.

Hart paid him and he waddled off.

"Have you heard about Jasper?" Angela asked.

Hart shook his head. "Nothing recent," he said. "Did he finish his book?"

Angela's face lit up. "He's going on vacation. Can you imagine that? — Him- going on vacation!"

"I don't see why not," Hart protested. "Jasper has been selling. He's the only one of us who manages to stay loaded week after week."

"But that's not it, Kemp. Wait until I tell you — it simply is a scream. Jasper thinks he can write better if he goes off on vacation."

"Well, why not? Just last year Don went to one of those summer camps. That Bread Loaf thing, as they call it."

"All they do there," she said, "is brush up on mechanics. It's a sort of refresher course on the gadgetry of yarners. How to soup up the old heap so it'll turn out fresher stuff."

"I still don't see why Jasper can't take a vacation if he can afford it."

"You're so dense," said Angela. "Don't you get the point at all?"

"I get the point all right. Jasper thinks there's still a human factor in our writing. He's not entirely satisfied to get his facts out of a standard reference work or encyclopedia. He's not content to let the yarner define an emotion he has never felt or the color of a sunset he has never seen. He was nuts enough to hint at that and you and the rest of them have been riding him. No wonder the guy is eccentric. No wonder he keeps his door locked all the time."

"That locked door," Angela said cattily, "is symbolic of the kind of man he is."

"I'd lock my door," Hart told her. "I'd be eccentric too — if I could turn it out like Jasper. I'd walk on my hands. I'd wear a sarong. I'd even paint my face bright blue."

"You sound like you believe the same as Jasper does."

He shook his head. "No, I don't think the way he does. I know better. But if he wants to think that way let him go ahead and think it."

"You do," she crowed at him. "I can see it in your face. You think it's possible to be independently creative."

"No, I don't. I know it's the machines that do the creating — not us. We're nothing but attic tinkers. We're literary mechanics. And I suppose that's the way it should be. There is, naturally, the yearning for the past. That's been evident in every age. The "good old days" complex. Back in those days a work of fiction was writ by hand and human agony."

"The agony's still with us, Kemp."

He said, "Jasper's a mechanic. That's what's wrong with me. I can't even repair that junk-heap of mine and you should see the way Jasper has his clunk souped up."

"You could hire someone to repair it. There are firms that do excellent work."

"I never have the money." He finished his beer.

"What's that stuff you're drinking?" he asked. "Want another one?"

She pushed her glass away. "I don't like that mess," she said. "I'll have a beer with you, if you don't mind."

Hart signaled to Blake for two beers.

"What are you doing now, Angela?" he asked. "Still working on the book?"

"Working up some films," she said.

"That's what I'll have to do this afternoon. I need a central character for this Irving stuff. Big and tough and boisterous — but not too uncouth. I'll look along the riverfront."

"They come high now, Kemp," she said. "Even those crummy aliens are getting wise to us. Even the ones from — way out-. I paid twenty for one just the other day and he wasn't too hot, either."

"It's cheaper than buying made-up films."

"Yes, I agree with you there. But it's a lot more work."

Blake brought the beer and Hart counted out the change into his waiting palm.

"Get some of this new film," Angela advised. "It's got the old stuff beat forty different ways. The delineation is sharper and you catch more of the marginal factors. You get a more rounded picture of the character. You pick up all the nuances of the subject, so to speak. It makes your people more believable. I've been using it."

"It comes high, I suppose," he said.

"Yes, it's a bit expensive," she admitted.

"I've got a few spools of the old stuff. I'll have to get along with that."

"I've an extra fifty you can have."

He shook his head. "Thanks, Angela. I'll cadge drinks and bum meals and hit up for a cigarette, but I'm not taking a fifty you'll need yourself. There's none of us so solvent we can lend someone else a fifty."

"Well, I would have done so gladly. If you should change your mind —»

"Want another beer?" Hart asked, cutting her short.

"I have to get to work."

"So have I," said Hart.

Hart climbed the stairs to the seventh floor, then went down the corridor and knocked on Jasper Hansen's door.

"Just a minute," said a voice from within the room. He waited for three minutes. Finally a key grated in the lock and the door was opened wide.

"Sorry I took so long," apologized Jasper. "I was setting up some data and I couldn't quit. Had to finish it."

Hart nodded. Jasper's explanation was understandable. It was difficult to quit in the middle of setting up some data that had taken hours to assemble.

The room was small and littered. In one corner stood the yarner, a shining thing, but not as shiny as the one he'd seen that morning in the uptown showroom. A typewriter stood on a littered desk, half covered by the litter. A long shelf sagged with the weight of dog-eared reference works. Bright-jacketed books were piled helter-skelter in a corner. A cat slept on an unmade bed. A bottle of liquor stood on a cupboard beside a loaf of bread. Dirty dishes were piled high in the sink.

"Heard you're going on vacation, Jasper," Hart said.

Jasper gave him a wary look. "Yes, I thought I might."

"I was wondering, Jasper, if you'd do something for me.

"Just name it."

"When you're gone, could I use your yarner?"

"Well, now, I don't know, Kemp. You see —»

"Mine is busted and I haven't the cash to fix it. But I've got a line on something. If you'd let me use yours, I could turn out enough in a week or two to cover the repair bill."

"Well, now," said Jasper, "you know I'd do anything for you. Anything at all. But that yarner — I just can't let you use it. I got it jiggered up. There isn't a circuit in it that has remained the way it was originally. There isn't a soul but myself who could operate it. If someone else tried to operate it they might burn it out or kill themselves or something."

"You could show me, couldn't you?" Hart asked, almost pleadingly.

"It's far too complicated. I've tinkered with it for years," said Jasper.

Hart managed a feeble grin. "I'm sorry, I thought —»

Jasper draped an arm around his shoulder. "Anything else. Just ask me anything."

"Thanks," said Hart, turning to go.

"Drink?"

"No, thanks," said Hart, and walked out of the door.

He climbed two more flights to the topmost floor and went into his room. His door was never locked. There was nothing in it for anyone to steal. And for that matter, he wondered, what did Jasper have that anyone might want?

He sat down in a rickety chair and stared at his yarner. It was old and battered and ornery, and he hated it.

It was worthless, absolutely worthless, and yet he knew he would have to work with it. It was all he had. He'd slave and reason with it and kick it and swear at it and he'd spend sleepless nights with it. And gurgling and clucking with overweaning gratitude, it would turn out endless reams of mediocrity that no one would buy.

He got up, and walked to the window. Far below lay the river and at the wharfs a dozen ships were moored, disgorging rolls of paper to feed the hungry presses that thundered day and night. Across the river a spaceship was rising from the spaceport, with the faint blue flicker of the ion stream wisping from the tubes. He watched it until it was out of sight.

There were other ships, with their noses pointed at the sky, waiting for the signal — the punched button, the flipped switch, the flicker of a piece of navigation tape — that would send them bounding homeward. First out into the blackness and then into that other place of weird other-worldness that annihilated time and space, setting at defiance the theoretic limit of the speed of light. Ships from many stars, all come to Earth for one thing only, for the one commodity that Earthmen had to sell.

He pulled his eyes from the fascination of the spaceport and looked across the sprawling city, the tumbled, canted, box-like rectangles of the district where he lived, while far to the north shone the faerie towers and the massive greatness of the famous and the wise.

A fantastic world, he thought. A fantastic world to live in. Not the kind of world that H. G. Wells and Stapledon had dreamed. With them it had been a far wandering and galactic empire, a glory and a greatness that Earth had somehow missed when the doors to space had finally been opened. Not the thunder of the rocket, but the thunder of the press. Not the great and lofty purpose, but the faint, quiet, persistent voice spinning out a yarn. Not the far sweep of new planets, but the attic room and the driving fear that the machine would fail you, that the tapes had been used too often, that the data was all wrong.

He went to the desk and pulled all three of the drawers. He found the camera in the bottom one beneath a pile of junk. He hunted for and found the film in the middle drawer, wrapped in aluminum foil.

Rough and tough, he thought, and it shouldn't be too hard to find a man like that in one of the dives along the riverfront, where the space crews on planet leave squandered their pay checks.

The first dive he entered was oppressive with the stink of a group of spidery creatures from Spica and he didn't stay. He grimaced distastefully and got out as fast as he could. The second was repellently patronized by a few cat-like denizens of Dahib and they were not what he was looking for.

But in the third he hit the jackpot, a dozen burly humanoids from Caph — great brawling creatures with a flair for extravagance in dress, a swashbuckling attitude and a prodigious appetite for lusty living. They were grouped about a large round table out in the center of the room and they were whooping it up. They were pounding the table with their tankards and chivvying the scuttling proprietor about and breaking into songs that they repeatedly interrupted with loud talk and argument.

Hart slipped into an unoccupied booth and watched the Caphians celebrate. One of them, bigger and louder and rowdier than the rest, wore red trousers, and a bright green shirt. Looped necklaces of platinum and outlandish alien gems encircled his throat and glittered on his chest, and his hair had not been trimmed for months. He wore a beard that was faintly satanic, and, startlingly enough, his ears were slightly pointed. He looked like an ugly customer to get into a fracas with. -And so-, thought Hart, — he's just the boy I want.-

The proprietor finally lumbered over to the booth.

"Beer,"said Hart. "A big glass."

"Buster," said the man, "no one drinks beer here."

"Well, then, what have you got?"

"I got — bocca- and — igno- and — hzbut- and — greno- and —»

"— Bocca-," said Hart. He knew what — bocca- was and he didn't recognize any of the others. Lord knows what some of them might do to the human constitution. -Bocca-, at least, one could survive.

The man went away and in a little while came back with a mug of — bocca-. It was faintly greenish and it sizzled just a little. What was worse, it tasted like a very dilute solution of sulphuric acid.

Hart squeezed himself back into the corner of the booth and opened his camera case. He set the camera on the table, no farther forward than was necessary to catch Green Shirt in the lens. Sighting through the finder, he got the Caphian in focus, and then quickly pressed the button that set the instrument in motion.

Once that was done, he settled down to drinking — bocca-.

He sat there, gagging down the — bocca- and manipulating the camera. Fifteen minutes was all he needed. A the end of fifteen minutes Green Shirt would be on film. Probably not as good as if he had been using the new fangled spools that Angela was using, but at least he'd have him.

The camera ground on, recording the Caphian's physical characteristics, his personal mannerisms, his habits of speech, his thought processes (if any), his way of life, his background, his theoretic reaction in the face of any circumstance.

Not three-dimensional, thought Hart, not too concise, nor too distinctive, not digging deep into the character and analyzing him — but good enough for the kind of tripe he'd have to write for Irving.

Take this joker and surround him with a few other ruffians chosen haphazardly from the file. Use one of the films from the Deep Dark Villain reel, throw in an ingenious treasure situation and a glob of violence, dream up some God-awful background, and he'd have it, that is, if the yarner worked…

Ten minutes gone. Just five more to go. In five more minutes he'd stop the camera, put it back into its case, slip the case into his pocket and get out of the place as fast as he could. Without causing undue notice, of course.

It had been simple, he thought — much simpler than he could possibly have imagined.

• They're getting on to us-, Angela had said. -Even these crummy aliens.-

Only three more minutes to go.

A hand came down from nowhere, and picked up the camera. Hart swiveled around. The proprietor stood directly behind him, with the camera under his arm.

• Good Lord-, thought Hart, — I was watching the Caphians so closely I forgot about this guy!-

The proprietor roared at him: "So! You sneak in here under false pretences to get your film! Are you trying to give my place a bad name?"

Swiftly Hart flung himself out of the booth, one frantic eye on the door. There was just a chance that he might make it. But the proprietor stuck out an expert foot and tripped him. Hart landed on his shoulders and somersaulted. He skidded across the floor, smashed into a table and rolled half under it.

The Caphians had come to their feet and were looking at him. He could see that they were hoping he'd get his head bashed in.

The proprietor hurled the camera with great violence to the floor. It came apart with an ugly, splintering sound. The film rolled free and snaked across the floor. The lens wobbled crazily. A spring came unloose from somewhere and went — zing-. It stood out at an angle, quivering.

Hart gathered his feet beneath him, and leaped out from the table. The Caphians started moving in on him — not rushing him, not threatening him in any way. They just kept walking toward him and spreading out so that he couldn't make a dash for the door.

He backed away, step by careful step, and the Caphians still continued their steady advance.

Suddenly he leaped straight toward them in a direct assault on the center of the line. He yelled and lowered his head and caught Green Shirt squarely in the belly. He felt the Caphian stagger and lurch to one side, and for a split second he thought that he had broken free.

But a hairy, muscular hand reached out and grabbed him and flung him to the floor. Someone kicked him. Someone stepped on his fingers. Someone else picked him up and threw him — straight through the open door into the street outside.

He landed on his back and skidded, with the breath completely knocked out of him. He came to rest with a jolt against the curbing opposite the place from which he had been heaved.

The Caphians, the full dozen of them, were grouped around the doorway, aroar with booming laughter. They slapped their thighs, and pounded one another on the back. They doubled over, shrieking. They shouted pleasantries and insults at him. Half of the jests he did not understand, but the ones that registered were enough to make his blood run cold.

He got up cautiously, and tested himself, He was considerably bruised and battered and his clothes were torn. But seemingly he had escaped any broken bones. He tried a few steps, limping. He tried to run and was surprised to find that he could.

Behind him the Caphians were still laughing. But there was no telling at what moment they might cease to think that his predicament was funny and start after him in earnest — for blood.

He raced down the street and ducked into an alley that led to a tangled square. He crossed the square into another street without pausing for breath and went running on. Finally he became satisfied that he was safe and sat down on a doorstep in an alley to regain his breath and carefully review the situation.

The situation, he realized, was bad. He not only had failed to get the character he needed; he had lost the camera, suffered a severe humiliation and barely escaped with his life.

There wasn't a thing that he could do about it. Actually, he told himself, he had been extremely lucky. For he didn't have a legal leg to stand on. He'd been entirely in the wrong. To film a character without the permission of the character's original was against the law.

It wasn't that he was a lawbreaker, he thought. It wasn't as if he'd deliberately set out to break the law. He'd been forced into it. Anyone who might have consented to serve as a character would have demanded money — more money than he was in a position to shell out.

But he did desperately need a character! He simply had to have one, or face utter defeat.

He saw that the sun had set, and that twilight was drifting in. The day, he thought, had been utterly wasted, and he had only himself to blame.

A passing police officer stopped and looked into the alley.

"You," he said to Hart. "What are you sitting there for?"

"Resting," Hart told him.

"All right. You're rested. Now get a move on."

Hart got a move on.

He was nearing home when he heard the crying in the areaway between an apartment house and a bindery. It was a funny sort of crying, a not-quite-human crying — perhaps not so much a crying as a sound of grief and loneliness.

He halted abruptly and stared around him. The crying had cut off, but soon it began again. It was a low and empty crying, a hopeless crying, a crying to one's self.

For a moment he stood undecided, then started to go on. But he had not gone three paces before he turned back. He stepped into the areaway and at the second step his foot touched something lying on the ground.

He squatted and looked at the form that lay there, crying to itself. It was a bundle — that described it best — a huddled, limp, sad bundle that moaned heartbrokenly.

He put a hand beneath it and lifted it and was surprised at how little weight it had. Holding it firmly with one hand, he searched with the other for his lighter. He flicked the lighter and the flame was feeble, but he saw enough to make his stomach flop. It was an old blanket with a face that once had started out to be humanoid and then, for some reason, had been forced to change its mind. And that was all there was — a blanket and a face.

He thumbed the lighter down and crouched in the dark, his breath rasping in his throat. The creature was not only an alien. It was, even by alien standards, almost incredible. And how had an alien strayed so far from the spaceport? Aliens seldom wandered. They never had the time to wander, for the ships came in, freighted up with fiction, and almost immediately took off again. The crews stayed close to the rocket berths, seldom venturing farther than the dives along the riverfront.

He rose, holding the creature bundled across his chest as one would hold a child — it was not as heavy as a child — and feeling the infant-like warmth of it against his body and a strange companionship. He stood in the areaway while his mind went groping back in an effort to unmask the faint recognition he had felt. Somewhere, somehow, it seemed he once had heard or read of an alien such as this. But surely that was ridiculous, for aliens did not come, even the most fantastic of them, as a living blanket with the semblance of a face.

He stepped out into the street and looked down to examine the face again. But a portion of the creature's blanket-body had draped itself across its features and he could see only a waving blur.

Within two blocks be reached the Bright Star bar, went around the corner to the side door and started up the stairs. Footsteps were descending and he squeezed himself against the railing to let the other person past.

"Kemp," said Angela Maret. "Kemp, what have you there?"

"I found it in the street," Hart told her.

He shifted his arm a little and the blanket-body slipped and she saw the face. She moved back against the railing, her hand going to her mouth to choke off a scream.

"Kemp! How awful!"

"I think that it is sick. It —»

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know," Hart said. "It was crying to itself. It was enough to break your heart. I couldn't leave it there."

"I'll get Doc Julliard."

Hart shook his head. "That wouldn't do any good. Doc doesn't know any alien medicine. Besides, he's probably drunk."

"No one knows any alien medicine," Angela reminded him. "Maybe we could get one of the specialists uptown." Her face clouded. "Doc is resourceful, though. He has to be down here. Maybe he could tell us —»

"All right," Hart said. "See if you can rout out Doc."

In his room he laid the alien on the bed. It was no longer whimpering. Its eyes were closed and it seemed to be asleep, although he could not be sure.

He sat on the edge of the bed and studied it and the more he looked at it the less sense it seemed to make. Now he could see how thin the blanket body was, how light and fragile. It amazed him that a thing so fragile could live at all, that it could contain in so inadequate a body the necessary physiological machinery to keep itself alive.

He wondered if it might be hungry and if so what kind of food it required. If it were really ill how could he hope to take care of it when he didn't know the first basic thing about it?

Maybe Doc — But no, Doc would know no more than he did. Doc was just like the rest of them, living hand to mouth, cadging drinks whenever he could get them, and practicing medicine without adequate equipment and with a knowledge that had stopped dead in its tracks forty years before.

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs — light steps and trudging heavy ones. It had to be Angela with Doc. She had found him quickly and that probably meant he was sober enough to act and think with a reasonable degree of coordination.

Doc came into the room, followed by Angela. He put down his bag and looked at the creature on the bed.

"What have we here?" he asked and probably it was the first time in his entire career that the smug doctorish phrase made sense.

"Kemp found it in the street," said Angela quickly. "It's stopped crying now."

"Is this a joke?" Doc asked, half wrathfully. "If it is, young man, I consider it in the worst possible taste."

Hart shook his head. "It's no joke. I thought that you might know —»

"Well, I don't," said Doc, with aggressive bitterness.

He let go of the blanket edge and it quickly flopped back upon the bed.

He paced up and down the room for a turn or two. Then he whirled angrily on Angela and Hart.

"I suppose you think that I should do something," he said. "I should at least go through the motions. I should act like a doctor. I'm sure that is what you're thinking. I should take its pulse and its temperature and look at its tongue and listen to its heart. Well, suppose you tell me how I do these things. Where do I find the pulse? If I could find it, what is its normal rate? And if I could figure out some way to take its temperature, what is the normal temperature for a monstrosity such as this? And if you would be so kind, would you tell me how — short of dissection — I could hope to locate the heart?"

He picked up his bag and started for the door.

"Anyone else, Doc?" Hart pleaded, in a conciliatory tone. "Anyone who'd know?"

"I doubt it," Doc snapped.

"You mean there's — no one- who can do a thing? Is that what you're trying to say?"

"Look, son. Human doctors treat human beings, period. Why should we be expected to do more? How often are we called upon to treat an alien? We're not — expected- to treat aliens. Oh, possibly, once in a while some specialist or researcher may dabble in alien medicine. But that is the correct name for it — just plain dabbling. It takes years of a man's life to learn barely enough to qualify as a human doctor. How many lifetimes do you think we should devote to curing aliens?"

"All right, Doc. All right."

"And how can you even be sure there" s. something wrong with it?"

"Why, it was crying and I quite naturally thought —»

"It might have been lonesome or frightened or grieving. It might have been lost."

Doc turned to the door again.

"Thanks, Doc," Hart said.

"Not at all." The old man hesitated at the door. "You don't happen to have a dollar, do you? Somehow, I ran a little short."

"Here," said Hart, giving him a bill.

"I'll return it tomorrow," Doc promised. He went clumping down the stairs.

Angela frowned. "You shouldn't have done that, Kemp. Now he'll get drunk and you'll be responsible."

"Not on a dollar," Hart said confidently. "That's all you know about it. The kind of stuff Doc drinks —»

"Let him get drunk then. He deserves a little fun."

"But — " Angela motioned to the thing upon the bed.

"You heard what Doc said. He can't do anything. No one can do anything. When it wakes up — if it wakes up

• it may be able to tell us what is wrong with it. But I'm not counting on that."

He walked over to the bed and stared down at the creature. It was repulsive and abhorrent and not in the least humanoid. But there was about it a pitiful loneliness and an incongruity that made a catch come to his

throat.

"Maybe I should have left it in the areaway," he said. "I started to walk on. But when it began to cry again I went back to it. Maybe I did wrong bothering with it at all. I haven't helped it any. If I'd left it there it might have turned out better. Some other aliens may be looking for it by now."

"You did right," said Angela. "Don't start in fighting with windmills."

She crossed the room and sat down in a chair. He went over to the window and stared somberly out across the city.

"What happened to you?" she asked. "Nothing."

"But your clothes. Just look at your clothes."

"I got thrown out of a dive. I tried to take some film."

"Without paying for it."

"I didn't have the money."

"I offered you a fifty."

"I know you did. But I couldn't take it. Don't you understand, Angela? — I simply couldn't take it. — "

She said softly, "You're bad off, Kemp."

He swung around, outraged. She hadn't needed to say that. She had no right to say it. She — He caught himself up before the words came tumbling out

She had a right. She'd offered him a fifty — but that had been only a part of it. She had the right to say it because she knew that she could say it. No one else in all the world could have felt the way she did, about him.

"I can't write," he said. "Angela, no matter how I try, I can't make it come out right. The machine is haywire and the tapes are threadbare and most of them are patched."

"What have you had to eat today?"

"I had the beers with you and I had some — bocca-."

"That isn't eating. You wash your face and change into some different clothes and we'll go downstairs and get you some food."

"I have eating money."

"I know you have. You told me about the advance from Irving."

"It wasn't an advance."

"I know it wasn't, Kemp."

"What about the alien?"

"It'll be all right — at least long enough for you to get a bite to eat. You can't help it by standing here. You don't know how to help it."

"I guess you're right."

"Of course I am. Now get going and wash your dirty face. And don't forget your ears."

Jasper Hansen was alone in the Bright Star bar. They went over to his table and sat down. Jasper was finishing a dish of sauerkraut and pig's knuckles and was drinking wine with it, which seemed a bit blasphemous.

"Where's everyone else?" asked Angela. "There's a party down the street," said Jasper. "Someone sold a book."

"Someone that we know?"

"Hell, no," Jasper said. "Just someone sold a book. You don't have to know a guy to go to his party when he sells a book."

"I didn't hear anything about it."

"Neither did the rest of the bunch. Someone looked in at the door and hollered about the party and everyone took off. Everyone but me. I can't monkey with no party. I've got work to do."

"Free food?" asked Angela.

"Yeah. Don't it beat you, though. Here we are, honorable and respected craftsmen, and every one of us will break a leg to grab himself a sandwich and a drink."

"Times are tough," said Hart.

"Not with me," said Jasper. "I keep working all the time."

"But work doesn't solve the main problem."

Jasper regarded him thoughtfully, tugging at his chin.

"What else is there?" he demanded. "Inspiration? Dedication? Genius? Go ahead and name it. We are rnechanics, man. We got machines and tapes. We went into top production two hundred years ago. We mechanized so we could go into top production so that people could turn out books and stories even if they had no talent at all. We got a job to do. We got to turn out tons of drivel for the whole damn galaxy. We got to keep them drooling over what is going to happen next to sloe-eyed Annie, queen of the far-flung spaceways. And we got to shoot up the lad with her and patch him up and shoot him up and patch him up and…"

He reached for an evening paper, opened it to a certain page and thumped his fist upon it.

"Did you see this?" he asked. "The Classic, they call it. Guaranteed to turn out nothing but a classic."

Hart snatched the paper from him and there it was, the wondrous yarner he had seen that morning, confronting him in all its glory from the center of a full-page

"Pretty soon," said Jasper, "all you'll need to write is have a lot of money. You can go out and buy a machine like that and say turn out a story and press a button or flip a switch or maybe simply kick it and it'll cough out a story complete to the final exclamation point.

"It used to be that you could buy an old beat-up machine for, say, a hundred dollars and you could turn out any quantity of stuff — not good, but salable. Today you got to have a high-priced machine and an expensive camera and a lot of special tape and film. Someday," he said, "the human race will outwit itself. Someday it will mechanize to the point where there won't be room for humans, but only for machines."

"You do all right," said Angela.

"That's because I keep dinging my machine up all the time. It don't give me no rest. That place of mine is half study and half machine shop and I know as much about electronics as I do about narration."

Blake came shuffling over.

"What'll it be?" he growled.

"I've eaten," Angela told him. "All I want is a glass of beer."

He turned to Hart. "How about you" he demanded.

"Give me some of that stuff Jasper has — without the wine.

"No cuff," said Blake.

"Damn it, who said anything about cuff? Do you expect me to pay you before you bring it?"

"No," said Blake. "But immediately, after I bring it."

He turned and shuffled off.

"Some day," said Jasper, "there has to be a limit to it. There must be a limit to it and we must be reaching it. You can only mechanize so far. You can assign only so many human activities and duties to intelligent machines. Who, two hundred years ago, would have said that the writing of fiction could have been reduced to a matter of mechanics?"

"Who, two hundred years ago," said Hart, "could have guessed that Earth could gear itself to a literary culture? But that is precisely what we have today. Sure, there are factories that build the machines we need and lumbermen who cut the trees for pulp and farmers who grow the food, and all the other trades and skills which are necessary to keep a culture operative. But by and large Earth today is principally devoted to the production of a solid stream of fiction for the alien trade."

"It all goes back to one peculiar trait," said Jasper. "A most unlikely trait to work — as it does — to our great advantage. We just happen to be the galaxy's only liars. In a mass of stars where truth is accepted as a universal constant, we are the one exception."

"You make it sound so horrible," protested Angela.

"I suppose I do, but that's the way it is. We could have become great traders and skinned all and sundry until they got wise to us. We could have turned our talent for the untruth into many different channels and maybe even avoided getting our heads bashed in. But instead we drifted into the one safe course. Our lying became an easy virtue. Now we can lie to our hearts" content and they lap it up. No one, nowhere, except right here on Earth, ever even tried to spin a yarn for simple entertainment, or to point a moral or for any other reason. They never attempted it because it would have been a lie, and we are the only liars in the universe of stars."

Blake brought the beer for Angela and the pig knuckles for Hart. Hart paid him out of hand.

"I've still got a quarter left," he said. "Have you any pie?"

"Apple."

"Here," said Hart, "I'll pay you in advance."

"First," went on Jasper, "it was told by mouth. Then it was writ by hand and now it's fabricated by machine.

But surely that's not the end of it. There must be something else. There must be another way, a better way. There must be another step."

"I would settle for anything," said Hart. "Any way at all. I'd even write by hand if I thought I could go on selling."

"You can't!" Angela told him, sharply. "Why, its positively indecent to even joke about it. You can say it as a joke just among the three of us, but if I ever hear you —»

Hart waved his hand. "Let it go. I'm sorry that I said it."

"Of course," said Jasper, "it's a great testimonial to the cleverness of Man, to the adaptability and resourcefulness of the human race. It is a somewhat ludicrous application of big business methods to what had always been considered a personal profession. But it works. Some day, I have no doubt, we may see the writing business run on production lines, with fiction factories running double shifts."

"No," Angela said. "No, you're wrong there, Jasper. Even with the mechanization, it's still the loneliest business on Earth."

"It is," agreed Jasper. "But I don't regret the loneliness part. Maybe I should, but I don't."

"It's a lousy way to make a living," said Angela, with a strange half-bitterness in her voice. "What are we contributing?"

"You are making people happy — if you can call some of our readers people. You are supplying entertainment."

"And the noble ideas?"

"There are even a few of those."

"It's more than that," said Hart. "More than entertainment, more than great ideas. It's the most innocent and the deadliest propaganda in all of human history. The old writers, before the first space flight, glorified far wandering and galactic conquest and I thing that they were justified. But they missed the most important development completely. They couldn't possibly foresee the way we would do it — with books, not battleships. We're softening up the galaxy with a constant stream of human thought. Our words are reaching farther than our spaceships ever could."

"That's the point I want to make," Jasper said, triumphantly. "You hit the point exactly. But if we are to tell the galaxy a story it must be a — human- story. If we sell them a bill of goods it must be a human bill of goods. And how can we keep it human if we relegate its telling to machines?"

"But they're human machines," objected Angela.

"A machine can't be purely human. Basically a machine is universal. It could be Caphian as well as human, or Aldebaran or Draconian or any other race. And that's not all. We let the machine set the norm. The one virtue of mechanics is that it sets a pattern. And a pattern is deadly in literary matters. It never changes. It keeps on using the same old limp plots in many different guises.

"Maybe at the moment it makes no difference to the races who are reading us, for as yet they have not developed anything approaching a critical faculty. But it should make some difference to us. It should make some difference in the light of a certain pride of workmanship we are supposed to have. And that is the trouble with machines. They are destroying the pride in us. Once writing was an art. But it is an art no longer. It's machine-produced, like a factory chair. A good chair, certainly. Good enough to sit on, but not a thing of beauty or of craftsmanship or —»

The door crashed open and feet pounded on the floor.

Just inside the door stood Green Shirt and behind him, grinning fiendishly, his band of Caphians.

Green Shirt advanced upon them happily, with his arms flung wide in greeting. He stopped beside Hart's chair and clapped a massive hand upon his shoulder.

"You recall me, don't you?" he asked in slow and careful English.

"Sure," Hart said, gulping. "Sure, I remember you. This is Miss Maret and over there is Mr. Hansen."

Green Shirt said, with precise bookishness, "So happy, I assure you."

"Have a seat," said Jasper.

"Glad to," said Green Shirt, hauling out a chair. His necklaces jingled musically as he sat down.

One of the other Caphians said something to him in a rapid-fire alien tongue. Green Shirt answered curtly and waved toward the door. The others marched outside.

"He is worried," Green Shirt said. "We will slow — how do you say it — we will slow the ship. They cannot leave without us. But I tell him not to worry. The captain will be glad we slow the ship when he see what we bring back."

He leaned forward and tapped Hart upon the knee. "I look for you," he said. "I look high and wide."

"Who is this joker?" Jasper asked.

"Joker?" asked Green Shirt, frowning.

"A term of great respect," Hart hastily assured him. "So," said Green Shirt. "You all write the stories?"

"Yes. All three of us."

"But — you- write them best."

"I wouldn't say that exactly. You see —»

"You write the wild and woolly stories? The bang-bangs?"

"Yeah. I guess I'm guilty."

Green Shirt looked apologetic. "Had I known, we would not from the tavern have thrown you out. It was just big fun. We did not know you write the stories. When we find out who you are we try to catch you. But you run and hide."

"Just what is going on here, anyhow?" Angela demanded.

Green Shirt whooped for Blake.

"Set them up," he shouted. "These are my friends. Set up the best you have."

"The best I have," Blake said icily, "is Irish whiskey and that costs a buck a shot."

"I got the cash," said Green Shirt. "You get this name I cannot say, and you will get your cash."

He said to Hart, "I have a surprise for you, my friend. We love the writers of the bang-bangs. We read them — always-. We get much stimulation."

Jasper guffawed.

Green Shirt swung about in amazement, his bushy brows contracting.

"He's just happy," Hart explained, quickly. "He likes Irish whiskey."

"Fine," said Green Shirt, beaming. "You drink all you wish. I will give the cash. It is — how do you say — on me."

Blake brought the drinks and Green Shirt paid him.

"Bring the container," he said.

"The container?"

"He means the bottle."

"That'll be twenty dollars," said Blake.

"So," said Green Shirt, paying him.

They drank the whiskey and Green Shirt said to Hart, "My surprise is that you come with us."

"You mean in the ship?"

"We have never had a real live writer on our planet. You will have a good time. You will stay and write for us.

"Well," said Hart, "I'm not sure —»

"You try to take the picture. The tavern man explain it all to us. He say it is against the law. He say if I complain it will come big trouble."

"You can't do it, Kemp," protested Angela. "Don't let this big hyena bluff you. -We" ll- pay your fine."

"We not complain," said Green Shirt, gently. "We just with you mop up the condemned place."

Blake brought the bottle and thumped it down in the center of the table. Green Shirt picked it up and filled their glasses to the brim.

"Drink up," he said and set a fine example.

He drank and Green Shirt filled his glass again. Hart picked up his glass and twirled it in his fingers.

There had to be a way out of this mess, he told himself. It was absurd that this thundering barbarian from one of the farther suns should be able to walk into a bar and tell a man to come along with him.

However, there was no percentage in stirring up a fight — not with ten or eleven Caphians waiting just outside.

"I explain it to you," said Green Shirt. "I try hard to explain it well so that you will — so that you will —»

"Understand," supplied Jasper Hansen.

"I thank you, Hansen man. So you will understand. We get the stories only shortly ago. Many of the other races got them long ago, but with us it is new and most wonderful. It takes us — how would you say — out of ourselves. We get many things from other stars, useful things, things to hold in the hand, things to see and use. But from you we get the going of far places, the doing of great deeds, the thinking of great thoughts."

He filled the glasses all around again. "You understand?" Green Shirt asked. They nodded.

"And now we go."

Hart rose slowly to his feet. "Kemp, you can't!" screamed Angela. "You shut the mouth," said Green Shirt.

Hart marched through the door and out into the street. The other Caphians oozed out of dark alleyways and surrounded him.

"Off we go," said Green Shirt, happily. "It gives big time on Caph."

Halfway to the river, Hart stopped in the middle of the street.

"I can't do it," he said.

"Can't do what?" asked Green Shirt, prodding him along.

"I let you think," said Hart, "that I was the man you wanted. I did it because I'd like to see your planet. But it isn't fair. I'm not the man you want."

"You write the bang-bangs, do you not? You think up the wild and woollies?"

"Certainly. But not really good ones. Mine aren't the kind where you hang on every word. There's another man who can do it better."

"— This- man we want," said Green Shirt. "Can you tell us where to find him?"

"That's easy. The other man at the table with us. The one who was so happy when you ordered whiskey."

"You mean the Hansen man?"

"He is the one, exactly."

"He write the bang-bangs good?"

"Much better than I do. He's a genius at it." Green Shirt was overcome with gratitude. He hugged Hart to him in an extravagant expression of good will.

"You fair," he said. "You fine. It was nice of you to tell us."

A window banged up in a house across the street and a man stuck his head out.

"If you guys don't break it up," he bellowed, "I'll call the cops."

"We shatter the peace," sighed Green Shirt "It is a queer law you have."

The window banged down again.

Green Shirt put a friendly hand upon Hart's shoulder. "We love the wild and woollies," he said gravely. ""We want the very best. We thank you. We find this Hansen man."

He turned around and loped back up the street, followed by his ruffians.

Hart stood on the corner and watched them go. He drew a deep breath and let it slowly out.

It had been easy, he told himself, once you got the angle. And it had been Jasper, actually, who had given him the angle. -Truth Is regarded as a universal constant-, Jasper had said. -We are the only liars.-

It had turned out tough on Jasper — a downright dirty trick. But the guy wanted to go on vacation, didn't he? And here was the prospect of a travel jaunt which would be really worthwhile. He'd refused the use of his machine and he had guffawed insultingly when Green Shirt had asked about the wild and woollies. If ever a guy had it coming to him, Jasper Hansen was that guy.

And above and beyond all that, he always kept his door locked — which showed a contemptible suspicion of his fellow writers.

Hart swung about and walked rapidly away in an opposite direction. Eventually he'd go back home, he told himself. But not right now. Later on he'd go, when the dust had settled slightly.

It was dawn when Hart climbed the stairs to the seventh floor and went down the corridor to Jasper Hansen's door. The door was locked as usual. But he took out of his pockets a thin piece of spring steel he'd picked up in a junkyard and did some judicious prying. In the matter of seconds, the lock clicked back and the door swung open.

The yarner squatted in its corner, a bright and lovely sight.

Jiggered up, Jasper had affirmed. If someone else ever tried to use it, it would very likely burn out or kill him. But that had been just talk, just cover-up for his pig-headed selfishness.

Two weeks, Hart told himself. If he used his head he should be able to operate it without suspicion for at least two weeks. It would be easy. All he'd have to say was that Jasper had told him that he could borrow it any time he wished. And if he was any judge of character, Jasper would not be returning soon.

But even so, two weeks would be all the time he'd need. In two weeks, working day and night, he could turn out enough copy to buy himself a new machine.

He walked across the room to the yarner and pulled out the chair that stood in front of it. Calmly he sat down, reached out a hand and patted the instrument panel. It was a good machine. It turned out a lot of stuff — good stuff. Jasper had been selling steadily. -Good old yarner-, Hart said.

He dropped his finger to the switch and flipped it over. Nothing happened. Startled, he flipped it back, flipped it on again. Still nothing happened.

He got up hastily to check the power connection. There was no power connection! For a shocked moment, he stood rooted to the floor.

Jiggered up, Jasper had said. Jiggered up so ingeniously that it could dispense with power?

It just wasn't possible. It was unthinkable. With fumbling fingers, he lifted the side panel, and peered inside.

The machine's innards were a mess. Half of the tubes were gone. Others were burned out, and the wiring had been ripped loose in places. The whole relay section was covered with dust. Some of the metal, he saw, was rusty. The entire machine was just a pile of junk.

He replaced the panel with suddenly shaking fingers, reeled back blindly and collided with a table. He clutched at it and held on tight to still the shaking of his hands, to steady the mad roaring in his head.

Jasper's machine wasn't jiggered up. It wasn't even in operating condition…

No wonder Jasper had kept his door locked. He lived in mortal fear that someone would find out that be wrote by hand!

And now, despite the dirty trick he'd played on a worthy friend, Hart was no better off than he had been before. He was faced with the same old problems, with no prospect of overcoming them. He still had his own beaten-up machine and nothing more. Maybe it would have been better if he had gone to Caph.

He walked to the door, paused there for an instant, and looked back. On the littered desk he could see Jasper's typewriter carefully half-buried by the litter, and giving the exact impression that it was never used.

Still, Jasper sold. Jasper sold almost every word he wrote. He sold — hunched over his desk with a pencil in his hand or hammering out the words on a muted typewriter. He sold without using the yarner at all, but keeping it all bright and polished, an empty, useless thing. He sold by using it as a shield against the banter and the disgust of all those others who talked so glibly and relied so much upon the metal and the magic of the ponderous contraption.

• First it was told by mouth-, Jasper had said that very evening. -Then it was writ by hand. Now it's fabricated by machine.-

And what's next, he'd asked — as if he had never doubted that there would be something next.

• What next? — thought Hart. Was this the end and all of Man — the moving gear, the clever glass and metal, the adroit electronics?

For the sake of Man's own dignity — his very sanity — there — had- to be a next. Mechanics, by their very nature, were a dead end. You could only get so clever. You could only go so far.

Jasper knew that. Jasper had found out. He had discarded the mechanistic aid and gone back to hand again.

Give a work of craftsmanship some economic value and Man would find a way to turn it out in quantity. Once furniture had been constructed lovingly by artisans who produced works of art that would last with pride through many generations. Then the machine had come and Man had turned out furniture that was purely functional, furniture that had little lasting value and no pride at all.

And writing had followed the same pattern. It had pride no longer. It had ceased to be an art, and become a commodity.

But what was a man to do? What — could- he do? Lock his door like Jasper and work through lonely hours with the bitter taste of nonconformity sharp within his mind, tormenting him night and day?

Hart walked out of the room with a look of torment in his eyes. He waited for a second to hear the lock click home. Then he went down the hall and slowly climbed the stairs.

The alien — the blanket and the face — was still lying on the bed. But now its eyes were open and it stared at him when he came in and closed the door behind him.

He stopped just inside the door and the cold mediocrity of the room — all of its meanness and its poverty — rose up to clog his nostrils. He was hungry, sick at bean and lonely, and the yarner in the corner seemed to mock him.

Through the open window he could hear the rumble of a spaceship taking off across the river and the hooting of a tug as it warped a ship into a wharf.

He stumbled to the bed.

"Move over, you," he said to the wide-eyed alien, and tumbled down beside it. He turned his back to it and drew his knees up against his chest and lay huddled there.

He was right back where he'd started just the other morning. He still had no tape to do the job that Irving wanted. He still had a busted up haywire machine. He was without a camera and he wondered where he could borrow one — although there would be no sense of borrowing one if he didn't have the money to pay a character. He'd tried once to take a film by stealth and he wouldn't try again. It wasn't worth the risk of going to prison for three or four years.

• We love the wild and woollies-, Green Shirt had said. -From them we get the going of far places.-

And while with Green Shirt it would be the bang-bangs and the wild and woollies, with some other race it would be a different type of fiction — race after race finding in this strange product of Earth a new world of enchantment. The far places of the mind, perhaps — or the far places of emotion. The basic differences were not too important

Angela had said it was a lousy way to make a living.

But she had only been letting off steam. All writers at times said approximately the same thing. In every age men and women of every known profession at some time must have said that theirs was a lousy way to make a living. At the moment they might have meant it, but at other times they knew that it was not lousy because it was important.

And writing was important, too — tremendously important. Not so much because it meant the "going of far places," but because it sowed the seed of Earth — the seed of Earth's thinking and of Earth's logic — among the myriad stars.

They are out there waiting, Hart thought, for the stories that he would never write.

He would try, of course, despite all obstacles. He might even do as Jasper had done, scribbling madly with a sense of shame, feeling anachronistic and inadequate, dreading the day when someone would ferret out his secret, perhaps by deducing from a certain eccentricity of style that it was not machine-written.

For Jasper was wrong, of course. The trouble was not with the yarners nor with the principle of mechanistic writing. It was with Jasper himself — a deep psychopathic quirk that made a rebel of him. But even so he had remained a fearful and a hidden rebel who locked his door and kept his yarner polished, and carefully covered his typewriter with the litter on his desk so no one would suspect that he ever used it.

Hart felt warmer now and he seemed to be no longer hungry and suddenly he thought of one of those far places that Green Shirt had talked about It was a grove of trees and a brook ran through the grove. There was a sense of peace and calm and a touch of majesty and for-everness about it. He heard birdsong and smelled the sharp, spice-like scent of water running in its mossy banks. He walked among the trees and the Gothic shape of them made the place seem like a church. As he walked he formed words within his mind — words put together so feelingly and so rightly and so carefully that no one who read them could mistake what he had to say. They would know not only the sight of the grove itself, but the sound and the smell of it and the foreverness that filled it to overflowing.

But even in his exaltation he sensed a threat within the Gothic shape and the feeling of foreverness. Some lurking intuition told him that the grove was a place to get away from. He tried for a moment to remember how he had gotten there, but there was no memory. It was as if he had become familiar with the grove only a second or two before and yet he knew that he had been walking beneath the sun-dappled foliage for what must have been hours or days.

He felt a tingling on his throat and raised a hand to brush it off and his hand touched something small and warm that brought him upright out of bed.

His hand tightened on the creature's neck. He was about to rip it from his chest when suddenly he recalled, full-blown, the odd circumstance he had tried to remember just the night before.

His grip relaxed and he let his hand drop to his side. He stood beside the bed, in the warm familiarity of the room, and felt the comfort of the blanket-creature upon his back and shoulders and around his throat.

He wasn't hungry and he wasn't tired and the sickness that he'd felt had somehow disappeared. He wasn't even worried and that was most unusual, for he was customarily worried.

Twelve hours before he had stood in the areaway with the blanket creature in his arms and had sought to pry out of a suddenly stubborn mind an explanation for the strange sense of recognition he'd experienced — the feeling that somewhere he had read or heard of the crying thing he'd found. Now, with it clasped around his back and clinging to his throat, he knew.

He strode across the room, with the blanket creature clinging to him, and took a book down from a narrow, six foot shelf. It was an old and tattered book, worn smooth by many hands, and it almost slipped from his clasp as he turned it over to read the title on the spine:

• Fragments from Lost Writings.-

He reversed the volume and began to leaf through its pages. He knew now where to find what he was looking for. He remembered exactly where he had read about the thing upon his back.

He found the pages quickly enough — a few salvaged paragraphs from some story, written long ago and lost,

He skipped the first two pages, and came suddenly upon the paragraphs he wanted:

• Ambitious vegetables, the life blankets waited, probably only obscurely aware of what they were waiting for. But when the humans came the long, long wait was over. The life blanket made a deal with men. And in the last anaylsis they turned out to be the greatest aid to galactic exploration that had ever been discovered.-

And there it was, thought Hart — the old, smug, pat assurance that it would be the humans who would go into the galaxy to explore it and make contact with its denizens and carry to every planet they visited the virtues of the Earth.

• With a life blanket draped like a bobtailed cloak around his shoulders, a man had no need to worry about being fed, for the life blanket had the strange ability to gather energy and convert it into food for the body of its host.

It became, in fact, almost a second body — a watchful, fussy, quasiparental body that watched over the body of its host, keeping metabolism in balance despite alien conditions, rooting out infections, playing the role of mother, cook and family doctor combined.

But in return the blanket became, in a sense, the double of its host. Shedding its humdrum vegetable existence, it became vicariously a man, sharing all of its host's emotions and intelligence, living the kind of life it never could have lived if left to itself.

And not content with this fair trade, the blankets threw in a bonus, a sort of dividend of gratitude. They were storytellers and imaginers. They could imagine anything — literally anything at all. They spent long hours spinning out tall yarns for the amusement of their hosts, serving as a shield against boredom and loneliness.-

There was more of it, but Hart did not need to read on. He turned back to the beginning of the fragment and he read: — Author Unknown. Circa 1956.-

Six hundred years ago! Six hundred years — and how could any man in 1956 have known?

The answer was he couldn't.

There was no way he could have known. He'd simply — dreamed- it up. And hit the truth dead center! Some early writer of science fiction had had an inspired vision!

There was something coming through the grove and it was a thing of utter beauty. It was not humanoid and it was not a monster. It was something no man had ever seen before. And yet despite the beauty of it, there was a deadly danger in it and something one must flee from.

He turned around to flee and found himself in the center of the room.

"All right," he said to the blanket. "Let's cut it out for now. We can go back later."

• We can go back later and we can make a story of it and we can go many other planes and make stories of them, too. I won't need a yarner to write those kind of stories, for I can recapture the excitement and splendor of it, and link it all together better than a yarner could. I have been there and lived it, and that's a setup you can't beat.-

And there it was! The answer to the question that Jasper had asked, sitting at the table in the Bright Star bar.

What next?

And this was next: a symbiosis between Man and an alien thing, imagined centuries ago by a man whose very name was lost.

It was almost, Hart thought, as if God had placed His hand against his back and propelled him gently onward, for it was utterly fantastic that he should have found the answer crying in an areaway between an apartment house and a bindery.

But that did not matter now. The important thing was that he'd found it and brought it home — not quite knowing why at the time and wondering later why he had even bothered with it.

The important thing was that — now- was the big pay…

He heard footsteps coming up the stairs and turning down the hall. Alarmed by their rapid approach he reached up hastily and snatched the blanket from his shoulders. Frantically he looked about for a place to hide the creature. Of course! His desk. He jerked open the bottom drawer and stuffed the blanket into it, ignoring a slight resistance. He was kicking the drawer shut when Angela came into the room.

He could see at once that she was burned up.

"That was a lousy trick," she said. "You got Jasper into a lot of trouble."

Hart stared at her in consternation. "Trouble? You mean he didn't go to Caph?"

"He's down in the basement hiding out. Blake told me he was there. I went down and talked to him."

"He got away from them?" Hart appeared badly shaken.

"Yes. He told them they didn't want a man at all. He told them what they wanted was a machine and he told them about that glittering wonder — that Classic model — in the shop uptown."

"And so they went and stole it."

"No. If they had it would have been all right. But they bungled it. They smashed the glass to get at it, and that set off an alarm. Every cop in town came tearing after them."

"But Jasper was all —»

"They took Jasper with them to show them where it was."

Some of the color had returned to Hart's face. "And now Jasper's hiding from the law."

"That's the really bad part of it. He doesn't know whether he is or not. He's not sure the cops even saw him. What he's afraid of is that they might pick up one of those Caphians and sweat the story out of him. And if they do, Kemp Hart, you have a lot to answer for."

"Me? Why, I didn't do a thing —»

"Except tell them that Jasper was the man they wanted. How did you ever make them believe a line like that?"

"Easy. Remember what Jasper said. Everyone else tells the truth. We're the only ones who lie. Until they get wise to us, they'll believe every word we say. Because, you see, no one else tells anything but the truth and so —»

"Oh, shut up!" Angela said impatiently.

She looked around the room. "Where's that blanket thing?" she asked.

"It must have left. Maybe it ran away. When I came home it wasn't here."

"Haven't you any idea what it was?"

Hart shook his head. "Maybe it's just as well it's gone," he said. "It gave me a queasy feeling."

"You and Doc! That's another thing. This neighborhood's gone crazy. Doc is stretched out dead drunk under a tree in the park and there's an alien watching him. It won't let anyone come near him. It's as if it were guarding him, or had adopted him or something."

"Maybe it's one of Doc's pink elephants come to actual life. You know, dream a thing too often and —»

"It's no elephant and it isn't pink. It's got webbed feet that are too big for it and long, spindly legs. It's some thing like a spider, and its skin is warts. It has a triangular head with six horns. It fairly makes you crawl just to look at it."

Hart shuddered. Ordinary aliens could be all right but a thing like that — "Wonder what it wants of Doc."

"Nobody seems to know. It won't talk."

"Maybe it can't talk."

"You know all aliens talk. At least enough of our language to make themselves understood. Otherwise they wouldn't come here."

"It sounds reasonable," said Hart. "Maybe It's acquiring a second-hand jag just sitting there beside Doc."

"Sometimes," said Angela, "your sense of humor is positively disgusting."

"Like writing books by hand."

"Yes," she said. "Like writing books by hand. You know as well as I do that people just don't talk about writing anything by hand. It's like — well, it's like eating with your fingers or belching in public or going without clothes."

"All right," he said, "all right. I'll never mention it again."

After she had left, Hart sat down and gave some serious thought to his situation.

In many ways he'd be a lot like Jasper, but he wouldn't mind if he could write as well as Jasper.

He'd have to start locking his door. He wondered where his key — was-. He never used it and now he'd have to look through his desk the first chance he got, to see if he couldn't locate it. If he couldn't find it, he'd have to have a new key made, because he couldn't have people walking in on him unexpectedly and catching him wearing the blanket or writing stuff by hand.

Maybe, be thought, it might be a good idea to move. It would be hard at times to explain why all at once be had started to lock his door. But he hated the thought of moving. Bad as it was, he'd gotten used to this place and it seemed like home.

Maybe, after he started selling, he should talk with Angela and see how she felt about moving in with him. Angela was a good kid, but you couldn't ask a girl to move in with you when you were always wondering where the next meal was coming from. But now, even if he didn't sell, he'd never have to worry where his next meal was coming from. He wondered briefly if the blanket could be shared as a food provider by two persons and he wondered how in the world he'd ever manage to explain it all to Angela.

And how had that fellow back in 1956 ever thought of such a thing? How many of the other wild ideas concocted out of tortuous mental efforts and empty whiskey bottles might be true as well? -

A dream? An idea? A glimmer of the future? It did not matter which, for a man had thought of it and it had come true. How many of the other things that Man had thought of in the past and would think of in the future would also become the truth?

The idea scared him.

That "going of far places." The reaching out of the imagination. The influence of the written word, the thought and power behind it. It was deadlier than a battleship, he'd said, How everlastingly right he had been.

He got up and walked across the room and stood in front of the yarner. It leered at him. He stuck out his tongue at it.

"That for you," he said,

Behind him he heard a rustle and hastily whirled about.

The blanket had somehow managed to ooze out of the desk drawer and it was heading for the door, reared upon the nether folds of its flimsy body. It was slithering along in a jerky fashion like a wounded seal.

"Hey, you!" yelled Hart and made a grab at it. But he was too late. A being — there was no other word for it — stood in the doorway and the blanket reached it and slithered swiftly up its body and plastered itself upon its back.

The thing in the doorway hissed at Hart: "I lose it. You are so kind to keep it. I am very grateful."

Hart stood transfixed.

The creature — was- a sight. Just like the one which Angela had seen guarding Doc, only possibly a little uglier. It had webbed feet that were three times too big for it, so that it seemed to be wearing snowshoes, and it had a tail that curved ungracefully halfway up its back.

It had a melon-shaped head with a triangular face, and six horns and there were rotating eyes on the top of each and every horn.

The monstrosity dipped into a pouch that seemed to be part of its body, and took out a roll of bills.

"So small a reward," it piped and tossed the bills to Hart.

Hart put out a hand and caught them absentmindedly.

"We go now," said the being. "We think kind thoughts of you."

It had started to turn around, but at Hart's bellow of protest it swiveled back.

"Yes, good sir?"

"This — blanket — this thing I found. What about it?"

"We make it."

"But it's alive and —»

The thing grinned a murderous grin. "You so clever people. You think it up. Many times ago."

"That story!"

"Quite so. We read of it. We make it. Very good idea."

"You can't mean you actually —»

"We biologist. What you call them — biologic engineers."

It turned about and started down the hall.

Hart howled after it. "Just a minute! Hold up there! Just a min —»

But it was going fast and it didn't stop. Hart thundered after it. When he reached the head of the stairs and glanced down it was out of sight. But he raced after it, taking the stairs three at a time in defiance of all the laws of safety.

He didn't catch it. In the street outside he pulled to a halt and looked in all directions but there was no sign of it. It had completely disappeared.

He reached into his pocket and felt the roll of bills he had caught on the fly. He pulled the roll out and it was bigger than he remembered it. He snapped off the rubber band, and examined a few of the bills separately. The denomination on the top bill, in galactic credits, was so big it staggered him. He riffled through the entire sheaf of bills and all the denominations seemed to be the same.

He gasped at the thought of it, and riffled through them once again. He had been right the first time — all the denominations — were- the same. He did a bit of rapid calculation and it was strictly unbelievable. In credits, too — and a credit was convertible, roughly, into five Earth dollars.

He had seen credits before, but never actually held one in his hand. They were the currency of galactic trade and were widely used in interstellar banking circles, but seldom drifted down into general circulation. He held them in his hand and took a good look at them and they sure were beautiful.

The being must have immeasurably prized that blanket, he thought — to give him such a fabulous sum simply for taking care of it. Although, when you came to think of it, it wasn't necessarily so. Standards of wealth differed greatly from one planet to another and the fortune he held in his hands might have been little more than pocket money to the blanket's owner.

He was surprised to find that he wasn't too thrilled or happy, as he should have been. All he seemed to be able to think about was that he'd lost the blanket.

He thrust the bills into his pocket and walked across the street to the little park. Doc was awake and sitting on a bench underneath a tree. Hart sat down beside him.

"How you feeling, Doc?" he asked.

"I'm feeling all right, son," the old man replied.

"Did you see an alien, like a spider wearing snowshoes?"

"There was one of them here just a while ago. It was here when I woke up. It wanted to know about that thing you'd found."

"And you told it."

"Sure. Why not? It said it was hunting for it. I figured you'd be glad to get it off your hands."

The two of them sat silently for a while.

Then Hart asked, "Doc, what would you do if you had about a billion bucks?"

"Me," said Doc, without the slightest hesitation, "I'd drink myself to death. Yes, sir, I'd drink myself to death real fancy, not on any of this rotgut they sell in this end of town."

And that was the way it went, thought Hart. Doc would drink himself to death. Angela would go in for arty salons and the latest styles. Jasper more than likely would buy a place out in the mountains where he could be away from people.

And me, thought Hart, what will I do with a billion bucks — give or take a million?

Yesterday, last night, up until a couple of hours ago, he would have traded in his soul on the Classic yarner.

But now it seemed all sour and offbeat.

For there was a better way — the way of symbiosis, the teaming up of Man and an alien biologic concept.

He remembered the grove with its Gothic trees and its sense of foreverness and even yet, in the brightness of the sun, he shivered at the thought of the thing of beauty that had appeared among the trees.

That was, he told himself, a surely better way to write — to know the thing yourself and write it, to live the yarn and write it.

But he had lost the blanket and he didn't know where to find another. He didn't even know, if he found the place they came from, what he'd have to do to capture it.

An alien biologic concept, and yet not entirely alien, for it had first been thought of by an unknown man six centuries before. A man who had written as Jasper wrote even in this day, hunched above a table, scribbling out the words he put together in his brain. No yarner there — no tapes, no films, none of the other gadgets. But even so that unknown man had reached across the mists of time and space to touch another unknown mind and the life blanket had come alive as surely as if Man himself had made it.

And was that the true greatness of the human race — that they could imagine something and in time it would be so?

And if that were the greatness, could Man afford to delegate it to the turning shaft, the spinning wheel, the clever tubes, the innards of machines?

"You wouldn't happen," asked Doc, "to have a dollar on your"

"No," said Hart, "I haven't got a dollar."

"You're just like the rest of us," said Doc. "You dream about the billions and you haven't got a dime."

Jasper was a rebel and it wasn't worth it. All the rebels ever got were the bloody noses and the broken heads.

"I sure could use a buck," said Doc.

It wasn't worth it to Jasper Hansen and it wasn't worth it to the others who must also lock their doors and polish up their never-used machines, so that when someone happened to drop in they'd see them standing there.

• And it isn't worth it to me-, Kemp Hart told himself. Not when by continuing to conform he could become famous almost automatically and virtually overnight.

He put his hand into his pocket and felt the roll of bills and knew that in just a little while he'd go uptown and buy that wonderful machine. There was plenty in the roll to buy it. With what there was in that roll he could buy a shipload of them.

"Yes, sir," said Doc harking back to his answer to the billion dollar question. "It would be a pleasant death. A pleasant death, indeed."

A gang of workmen were replacing the broken window when Hart arrived at the uptown showroom, but he scarcely more than glanced at them and walked straight inside.

The same salesman seemed to materialize from thin air.

But he wasn't happy. His expression was stern and a little pained.

"You've come back, no doubt," he said, "to place an order for the Classic."

"That is right," said Hart and pulled the roll out of his pocket.

The salesman was well-trained. He stood walleyed for just a second, then recovered his composure with a speed which must have set a record.

"That's fine," he said. "I knew you'd be back. I was telling some of the other men this morning that you would be coming in."

• I just bet you were-, thought Hart.

"I suppose," he said, "that if I paid you cash you would consider throwing in a rather generous supply of tapes and films and some of the other stuff I need."

"Certainly, sir. I'll do the best I can for you."

Hart peeled off twenty-five thousand and put the rest back in his pocket.

"Won't you have a seat," the salesman urged. "I'll be right back. I'll arrange delivery and fix up the guarantee…"

"Take your time," Hart told him, enjoying every minute of it.

He sat down in a chair and did a little planning. First he'd have to move to better quarters and as soon as he had moved he'd have a dinner for the crowd and he'd rub Jasper's nose in it. He'd certainly do it — if Jasper wasn't tucked away in jail. He chuckled to himself, thinking of Jasper cringing in the basement of the Bright Star bar.

And this very afternoon he'd go over to Irving's office and pay him back the twenty and explain how it was he couldn't find the time to write the stuff he wanted.

Not that he wouldn't have liked to help Irving out.

But it would be sacrilege to write the kind of junk that Irving wanted on a machine as talented as the Classic.

He heard footsteps coming hurriedly across the floor behind him and he stood up and turned around, smiling at the salesman.

But the salesman wasn't smiling. He was close to apoplexy.

"You!" said the salesman, choking just a little in his attempt to remain a gentleman. "That money! We've had enough from you, young man."

"The money," said Hart. "Why, it's galactic credits. It…"

"It's play money," stormed the salesman. "Money for the kids. Play money from the Draconian federation. It says so, right on the face of it. In those big characters."

He handed Hart the money.

"Get out of here!" the salesman shouted.

"But," Hart pleaded, "are you sure? It can't be! You must be mistaken —»

"Our teller says it is. He has to be an expert on all sorts of money and — he says it is!-

"But you took it. You couldn't tell the difference."

"I can't read Draconian. But the teller can."

"That damn alien!" shouted Hart in sudden fury. "Just let me get my hands on him!"

The salesman softened just a little.

"You can't trust those aliens, sir. They are a sneaky lot…

"Get out of my way," Hart shouted. "I" vee got to find that alien!"

The man at the Alien bureau wasn't very helpful.

"We have no record," he told Hart, "of the kind of creature you describe. You wouldn't have a photo of it, would you?"

"No," said Hart. "I haven't got a photo."

The man started piling up the catalogs he had been looking through.

"Of course," he said, "the fact we have no record of him doesn't mean a thing. Admittedly, we can't keep track of all the various people. There are so many of them and new ones all the time. Perhaps you might inquire at the spaceport. Someone might have seen your alien."

"I've already done that. Nothing. Nothing at all. He must have come in and possibly have gone back, but no one can remember him. Or maybe they won't tell."

"The aliens hang together," said the man. "They don't tell you nothing."

He went on stacking up the books. It was near to quitting time and he was anxious to be off.

The man said, jokingly, "You might go out in space and try to hunt him up."

"I might do just that," said Hart and left, slamming the door behind him.

Joke: You might go out in space and find him. You might go out and track him across ten thousand light-years and among a million stars. And when you found him you might say I want to have a blanket and he'd laugh right in your face.

But by the time you'd tracked him across ten thousand light-years and among a million stars you'd no longer need a blanket, for you would have lived your stories and you would have seen your characters and you would have absorbed ten thousand backgrounds and a million atmospheres.

And you'd need no yarner and no tapes and films, for the words would be pulsing at your fingertips and pounding in your brain, shrieking to get out.

Joke: Toss a backwoods yokel a fistful of play money for something worth a million. The fool wouldn't know the difference until he tried to spend it. Be a big shot cheap and then go off in a corner by yourself and die laughing at how superior you are.

And who had it been that said humans were the only liars?

Joke: Wear a blanket around your shoulders and send your ships to Earth for the drivel that they write there — never knowing, never guessing that you have upon your back the very thing that's needed to break Earth's monopoly on fiction.

• And that-, said Hart, — is a joke on you.-

• If I ever find you, I'll cram it down your throat.-

Angela came up the stairs bearing an offering of peace. She set the kettle on the table. "Some soup," she said. "I'm good at making soup."

"Thanks, Angela," he said. "I forgot to eat today."

"Why the knapsack, Kemp? Going on a hiker?"

"No, going on vacation."

"But you didn't tell me."

"I just now made up my mind to go. A little while ago."

"I'm sorry I was so angry at you. It turned out all right. Green Shirt and his gang made their getaway."

"So Jasper can come out."

"He's already out. He's plenty sore at you."

"That's all right with me. I'm no pal of his." She sat down in a chair and watched him pack. "Where are you going, Kemp?"

"I'm hunting for an alien."

"Here in the city? Kemp, you'll never find him."

"Not in the city. I'll have to ask around."

"But there aren't any aliens —»

"That's right."

"You're a crazy fool," she cried. "You can't do it, Kemp. I won't let you. How will you live? What will you do?"

"I'll write."

"Write? You can't write! Not without a yarner."

"I'll write by hand. Indecent as it may be, I'll write by hand because I'll know the things I write about. It'll be in my blood and at my fingertips. I'll have the smell of it and the color of it and the taste of it!"

She leaped from the chair and beat at his chest with tiny fists.

"It's filthy! It's uncivilized! It's —»

"That's the way they wrote before. All the millions of stories, all the great ideas, all the phrases that you love to quote. And that is the way it should have stayed. This is a dead-end street we're on."

"You'll come back," she said. "You'll find that you are wrong and you'll come back."

He shook his head at her. "Not until I find my alien."

"It isn't any alien you are after. It is something else. I can see it in you."

She whirled around and raced out the door and down the stairs.

He went back to his packing and when he had finished, he sat down and ate the soup. Angela, he thought, was right. She was good at making soup.

And she was right in another thing as well. It was no alien he was seeking.

For he didn't need an alien. And he didn't need a blanket and he didn't need a yarner.

He took the kettle to the sink and washed it beneath the tap and dried it carefully. Then he set it in the center of the table where Angela, when she came, would be sure to see it.

Then he took up the knapsack and started slowly down the stairs.

He had reached the street when he heard the cry behind him. It was Angela and she was running after him. He stopped and waited for her.

"I'm going with you, Kemp."

"You don't know what you're saying. It'll be rough and hard. Strange lands and alien people. And we haven't any money."

"Yes, we have. We have that fifty. The one I tried to loan you. It's all I have and it won't go far, I know. But we have it."

"You're looking for no alien."

"Yes, I am. I'm looking for an alien, too. All of us, I think, are looking for your alien."

He reached out an arm and swept her roughly to him, held her close against him.

"Thank you, Angela," he said.

Hand in hand they headed for the spaceport, looking for a ship that would take them to the stars.

Sunspot Purge

Original copyright year: 1940

I was sitting around, waiting for the boy to bring up the first batch of papers from the pressroom. I had my feet up on the desk, my hat pulled down over my eyes, feeling pretty sick.

I couldn't get the picture of the fellow hitting the sidewalk out of my mind. Twenty storeys is a long way to jump. When he'd hit he'd just sort of spattered and it was very messy.

The fool had cavorted and pranced around up on that ledge since early morning, four long hours, before he took the dive.

Herb Harding and Al Jarvey and a couple of other — Globe- photographers had gone out with me, and I listened to them figure out the way they'd co-operate on the shots. If the bird jumped, they knew they'd each have just time enough to expose one plate. So they got their schedules worked out beforehand.

Al would take the first shot with the telescopic lens as he made the jump. Joe would catch him halfway down. Harry would snap him just before he hit, and Herb would get the moment of impact on the sidewalk.

It gave me the creeps, listening to them.

But anyhow, it worked and the — Globe- had a swell sequence panel of the jump to go with my story.

We knew the — Standard-, even if it got that sidewalk shot, wouldn't use it, for the — Standard- claimed to be a family newspaper and made a lot of being a sheet fit for anyone to read.

But the — Globe- would print anything — and did. We gave it to "em red-hot and without any fancy dressing.

"The guy was nuts," said Herb, who had come over and sat down beside me.

"The whole damn world is nuts," I told him. "This is the sixth bird that's hopped off a high building in the last month.

I wish they'd put me down at the obit desk, or over on the markets, or something. I'm all fed up on gore."

"It goes like that," said Herb. "For a long time there ain't a thing worth shooting. Then all hell breaks loose."

Herb was right. News runs that way — in streaks. Crime waves and traffic-accident waves and suicide waves. But this was something different. It wasn't just screwballs jumping off high places. It was a lot of other things.

There was the guy who had massacred his family and then turned the gun on himself. There was the chap who'd butchered his bride on their honeymoon. And the fellow who had poured gasoline over himself and struck a match.

All such damn senseless things.

No newsman in his right mind objects to a little violence, for that's what news is made of. But things were getting pretty thick; just a bit revolting and horrifying. Enough to sicken even a hard-working legman who isn't supposed to have any feelings over things like that.

Just then the boy came up with the papers, and, if I say so myself, that story of mine read like a honey. It should have. I had been thinking it up and composing it while I watched the bird teetering around up on that ledge.

The pictures were good, too. Great street-sale stuff. I could almost see old J.R. rubbing his hands together and licking his lips and patting himself on the back for the kind of a sheet we had.

Billy Larson, the science editor, strolled over to my desk and draped himself over it. Billy was a funny guy. He wore big, horn-rimmed spectacles, and he wiggled his ears when he got excited, but he knew a lot of science. He could take a dry-as-dust scientific paper and pep it up until it made good reading.

"I got an idea," he announced.

"So have I," I answered. "I'm going down to the Dutchman's and take me on a beer. Maybe two or three."

"I hope," piped Herb. "that it ain't something else about old Doc Ackerman and his time machine."

"Nope," said Billy, "it's something else. Doc's time machine isn't so hot any more. People got tired of reading about it. I guess the old boy has plenty on the ball, but what of it? Who will ever use the thing? Everyone is scared of it."

"What's it this time?" I asked.

"Sunspots," he said.

I tried to brush him off, because I wanted that beer so bad I could almost taste it, but Billy had an idea, and he wasn't going to let mc get away before he told me all about it.

"It's pretty well recognized," he told me, "that sunspots do affect human lives. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. Stocks and bonds are up, prices are high. Trade is good. But likewise, we have an increased nervous tension. We have violence. People get excited."

"Hell starts to pop," said Herb.

"That's exactly it," agreed Billy. "Tchijevsky, the Russian scientist, pointed it out thirty years ago. I believe he's the one that noted increased activity on battle fronts during the first World War occurring simultaneously with the appearance of large spots on the Sun. Back in 1937, the sit-down strikes were ushered in by one of the most rapid rises in the sunspot curve in twenty years."

I couldn't get excited. But Billy was all worked up about it. That's the way he is — enthusiastic about his work.

"People have their ups and downs," he said, a fanatic light creeping into his eyes, the way it does when he's on the trail of some idea to make — Globe- readers gasp.

"Not only people, but peoples — nations, cultures, civilizations. Go back through history and you can point out a parallelism in the cycles of sunspots and significant events. Take 1937, for example, the year they had the sit-down strikes. In July of that year the sunspot cycle hits its maximum with a Wolfer index of 137.

"Scientists are pretty sure periods of excitement are explained by acute changes in the nervous and psychic characters of humanity which take place at sunspot maxima, but they aren't sure of the reasons for those changes."

"Ultraviolet light," I yawned, remembering something I had read in a magazine about it.

Billy wiggled his ears and went on: "Most likely ultraviolet has a lot to do with it. The spots themselves aren't strong emission centers for ultraviolet. But it may be the very changes in the Sun's atmosphere which produce the spots also result in the production of more ultraviolet.

"Most of the ultraviolet reaching Earth's atmosphere is used up converting oxygen into ozone, but changes of as much as twenty percent in its intensity are possible at the surface.

"And ultraviolet produces definite reaction in human glands, largely in the endocrine glands."

"I don't believe a damn word of it," Herb declared flatly, but there was no stopping Billy.

He clinched his argument: "Let's say, then, that changes in sunshine, such as occur during sunspot periods, affect the physiological character and mental outlook of all the people on Earth. In other words, human behavior corresponds to sunspot cycles.

"Compare Dow Jones averages with sunspots and you will find they show a marked sympathy with the cycles — the market rising with sunspot activity. Sunspots were riding high in 1928 and 1929. In the autumn of 1929 there was an abrupt break in sunspot activity and the market crashed. It hit bedrock in 1932 and 1933, and so did the sunspots. Wall Street follows the sunspot cycle."

"Keep those old sunspots rolling," I jeered at him, "and we'll have everlasting prosperity. We'll simply wallow in wealth."

"Sure," said Herb, "and the damn fools will keep jumping off the buildings."

"But what would happen if we reversed things — made a law against sunspots?" I asked.

"Why, then," said Billy, solemn as an owl, "we'd have terrible depressions."

I got up and walked away from him. I had got to thinking about what I had seen on the sidewalk after the fellow jumped, and I needed that beer.

Jake, one of the copy boys, yelled at me just as I was going out the door.

"J.R. wants to see you, Mike."

So I turned around and walked toward the door behind which J.R. sat rubbing his hands and figuring out some new stunts to shock the public into buying the — Globe-.

"Mike," said J.R. when I stepped into his office, "I want to congratulate you on the splendid job you did this morning. Mighty fine story, my boy, mighty fine."

"Thanks, J.R.," I said, knowing the old rascal didn't mean a word of it.

Then J.R. got down to business.

"Mike," he said, "I suppose you've been reading this stuff about Dr. Ackerman's time machine."

"Yeah," I told him, "but if you think you're going to send me out to interview that old publicity grabber, you're all wrong. I saw a guy spatter himself all over Fifth Street this morning, and I been listening to Billy Larson telling about sunspots, and I can't stand much more. Not in one day, anyhow."

Then J.R. dropped the bombshell on me.

"The — Globe-," he announced, "has bought a time machine."

That took me clear off my feet.

The — Globe-, in my time, had done a lot of wacky things, but this was the worst.

"What for?" I asked weakly, and J.R. looked shocked; but he recovered in a minute and leaned across the desk.

"Just consider, Mike. Think of the opportunities a time machine offers a newspaper. The other papers can tell them what has happened and what is happening, but, by Godfrey, they'll have to read the — Globe- to know what is going to happen."

"I have a slogan for you," I said. "Read the News Before It Happens."

He didn't know if I was joking or was serious and waited for a minute before going on.

"A war breaks out," he said. "The other papers can tell what is happening at the moment. We can do better than that. We can tell them what will happen. Who will win and lose. What battles will be fought. How long the war will last-"

"But, J.R.," I yelled at him, "you can't do that! Don't you see what a hell of a mess you'll make of things. If one side knew it was going to lose-"

"It doesn't apply merely to wars," said J.R. "There's sports. Football games. Everybody is nuts right now to know if Minnesota is going to lick Wisconsin. We jump into our time machine, travel ahead to next Saturday. Day before the game we print the story, with pictures and everything."

He rubbed his hands and purred.

"I'll have old Johnson down at the — Standard- eating out of my hand," he gloated. "I'll make him wish he never saw a newspaper. I'll take the wind out of his sails. I'll send my reporters out a day ahead-"

"You'll have every bookie on your neck," I shouted. "Don't you know there's millions of dollars bet every Saturday on football games? Don't you see what you'd do?

You'd put every jackpot, every betting window out of business. Tracks would close down. Nobody would spend a dime to see a game they could read about ahead of time. You'd put organized baseball and college football, boxing, everything else out of business. What would be the use of staging a prize fight if the public knew in advance who was going to win?"

But J.R. just chortled gleefully and rubbed his hands.

"We'll publish stock-market quotations for the coming month on the first of every month," he planned. "Those papers will sell for a hundred bucks apiece."

Seeing him sitting there gave me a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. For I knew that in his hands rested a terrible power, a power that he was blind to or too stubborn to respect.

The power to rob every human being on Earth of every bit of happiness. For if a man could look ahead and see some of the things that no doubt were going to happen, how could he be happy?

Power to hurl the whole world into chaos. Power to make and break any man, or thing, or institution that stood before him.

I tried another angle.

"But how do you know the machine will work?"

"I have ample proof," said J.R. "The other papers ridiculed Dr. Ackerman, while we presented his announcement at face value. That is why he is giving us an exclusive franchise to the purchase and use of his invention. It's costing us plenty of money — a barrel of money — but we're going to make two barrels of money out of it."

I shrugged my shoulders.

"O.K.," I said. "Go ahead. I don't see why the hell you called me in."

"Because," beamed J.R., "you're going to make the first trip in the time machine!"

"What!" I yelled.

J.R. nodded. "You and a photographer. Herb Harding. I called you in first. You leave tomorrow morning. Five hundred years into the future for a starter. Get pictures. Come back and write your story. We'll spring it in the Sunday paper. Whole front-page layout. What does the city look like five hundred years from now? What changes have been made? Who's mayor? What are the women wearing in the fall of 2450?"

He grinned at me.

"And you might say, too, that the — Standard- no longer is published. Whether it's the truth or not, you know. Old Johnson will go hog wild when he reads that in your story."

I could have refused, of course, but if I had, he would have sent somebody else and tied the can on me. Even in 1950, despite a return to prosperity that beggared the flushest peak of 1929, good jobs in the newspaper field were not so easy to pick up.

So I said I'd go, and half an hour later I found myself getting just a bit excited about being one of the first men to travel into time. For I wouldn't be the very first. Doc Ackerman had traveled ahead a few years in his own machine, often enough and far enough to prove the thing would work.

But the prospect of it gave me a headache when I tried to reason it out. The whole thing sounded wacky to me. Not so much the idea that one could really travel in time, for I had no doubt one could. J.R. wasn't anybody's fool. Before he sunk his money in that time machine he would have demanded ironclad, gilt-edged proof that it would operate successfully.

But the thing that bothered me was the complications that might arise. The more I thought of it, the sicker and more confused I got.

Why, with a time machine a reporter could travel ahead and report a man's death, get pictures of his funeral. Those pictures could be taken back in time and published years before his death. That man, when he read the paper, would know the exact hour that he would die, would see his own face framed within the casket.

A boy of ten might know that some day he would be elected president of the United States simply by reading the — Globe-. The present president, angling for a third term, could read his own political fate if the — Globe- chose to print it.

A man might read that the next day he would meet death in a traffic accident. And if that man knew he was going to die, he would take steps to guard against it. But could he guard against it? Could he change his own future? Or was the future fast in a rigid mold? If the future said something was going to happen, was it absolutely necessary that it must happen?

The more I thought about it, the crazier it sounded. But somehow I couldn't help but think of it. And the more I thought about it, the worse my head hurt.

So I went down to the Dutchman" s.

Louie was back of the bar, and when he handed me my first glass of beer, I said to him: "It's a hell of a world, Louie."

And Louie said tome: "It sure as hell is, Mike."

I drank a lot of beer, but I didn't get drunk. I stayed cold sober. And that made me sore, because I figured that by rights I should take on a load. And all the time my head swam with questions and complicated puzzles.

I would have tried something stronger than beer, but I knew if I mixed drinks I'd get sick, so finally I gave up.

Louie asked me if there was something wrong, and I said no, there wasn't, but before I left I shook hands with Louie and said good-by. If I had been drunk, Louie wouldn't have thought a thing of it, but I could see he was surprised I acted that way when he knew I was sober as the daylight.

Just as I was going out the door I met Jimmy Langer coming in. Jimmy worked for the — Standard- and was a good newspaperman, but mean and full of low-down tricks. We were friends, of course, and had worked on lots of stories together, but we always watched one another pretty close. There was never any telling what Jimmy might be up to.

"Hi, Jimmy," I said.

And Jimmy did a funny thing. He didn't say a word. He just looked right at me and laughed into my face.

It took me so by surprise I didn't do anything until he was inside the Dutchman" s, and then I walked down the street. But at the corner I stopped, wondering if I hadn't better go back and punch Jimmy's nose. I hadn't liked the way he laughed at me.

The time-machine device was installed in a plane because, Doc Ackerman told us, it wouldn't be wise to try to do much traveling at ground level. A fellow might travel forward a hundred years or so and find himself smack in the middle of a building. Or the ground might rise or sink and the time machine would be buried or left hanging in the air. The only safe way to travel in time, Doc warned us, was to do it in a plane.

The plane was squatting in a pasture a short distance from Doc's Laboratories, situated at the edge of the city, and a tough-looking thug carrying a rifle was standing guard over it. The plane had been guarded night and day. It was just too valuable a thing to let anyone get near it.

Doc explained the operation of the time machine to me.

"It's simple," he said. "Simple as falling off a log."

And what he said was true. All you had to do was set the indicator forward the number of years you wished to travel. When you pressed the activator stud you went into the time spin, or whatever it was that happened to you, and you stayed in it until you reached the proper time. Then the mechanism acted automatically, your time speed was slowed down, and there you were. You just reversed the process to go backward.

Simple. Simple, so Doc said, as falling off a log. But I knew that behind all that simplicity was some of the most wonderful science the world had ever known — science and brains and long years of grueling work and terrible disappointment.

"It will be like plunging into night." Doc told me. "You will be traveling in time as a single dimension. There will be no heat, no air, no gravitation, absolutely nothing outside your plane. But the plane is insulated to keep in the heat. In case you do get cold, just snap on those heaters. Air will be supplied if you need it, by the oxygen tanks. But on a short trip like five hundred years you probably won't need either the heaters or the oxygen. Just a few minutes and you'll be there."

J.R. had been sore at me because I had been late. Sore, too, because Herb had one of the most beautiful hangovers I have ever laid eyes on. But he'd forgotten all about that now. He was hopping up and down in his excitement.

"Just wait," he chortled. "Just wait until Johnson sees this down at the — Standard-. He'll probably have a stroke. Serve him right, the stubborn old buzzard."

The guard, standing just outside the door of the ship, was shuffling his feet. For some reason the fellow seemed nervous.

Doc croaked at him. "What's the matter with you, Benson?"

The guy stammered and shifted his rifle from one hand to another. He tried to speak, but the words just dried up in his mouth. Then J.R. started some more of his gloating and we forgot about the guard.

Herb had his cameras stowed away and everything was ready. J.R. stuck out his fist and shook hands with me and Herb, and the old rascal was pretty close to tears.

Doc and J.R. got out of the ship, and I followed them to the door. Before I closed and sealed it I took one last look at the city skyline. There it shimmered, in all its glory, through the blue haze of an autumn day. Familiar towers, and to the north the smudge of smoke that hung over the industrial district.

I waved my hand at the towers and said to them: "So long, big boys. I'll be seeing you five hundred years from now."

The skyline looked different up there in the future. I had expected it to look different because in five hundred years some buildings would be torn down and new ones would go up. New architectural ideas, new construction principles over the course of five centuries will change any city skyline.

But it was different in another way than that.

I had expected to see a vaster and a greater and more perfect city down below us when we rolled out of our time spin, and it was vaster and greater, but there was something wrong.

It had a dusty and neglected look.

It had grown in those five hundred years, there was no doubt of that. It had grown in all directions, and must have been at least three times as big as the city Herb and I had just left behind.

Herb leaned forward in his seat.

"Is that really the old burg down there?" he asked. "Or is it just my hangover?"

"It's the same old place," I assured him. Then I asked him. "Where did you pick up that beauty you've got?"

"I was out with some of the boys," he told me. "Al and Harry. We met up with some of the — Standard- boys and had a few drinks with them later in the evening."

There were no planes in the sky and I had expected that in 2450 the air would fairly swarm with them. They had been getting pretty thick even back in 1950. And now I saw the streets were free of traffic, too.

We cruised around for half an hour, and during that time the truth was driven home to us. A truth that was plenty hard to take.

That city below us was a dead city! There was no sign of life. Not a single automobile on the street, not a person on the sidewalks.

Herb and I looked at one another, and disbelief must have been written in letters three feet high upon our faces.

"Herb," I said, "we gotta find out what this is all about."

Herb's Adam's apple jiggled up and down his neck.

"Hell," he said. "I was figuring on dropping into the Dutchman's and getting me a pick-up."

It took almost an hour to find anything that looked like an airport, but finally I found one that looked safe enough. It was overgrown with weeds, but the place where the concrete runways had been was still fairly smooth, although the concrete had been broken here and there, and grass and weeds were growing through the cracks.

I took her down as easy as I could, but even at that we hit a place where a slab of concrete had been heaved and just missed a crack-up.

The old fellow with the rifle could have stepped from the pages of a history of early pioneer days except that once in a while the pioneers probably got a haircut.

He came out of the bushes about a mile from the airport, and his rifle hung cradled in his arm. There was something about him that told me he wasn't one to fool with.

"Howdy, strangers," he said in a voice that had a whiny twang.

"By Heaven," said Herb, "it's Daniel Boone himself."

"You jay birds must be a right smart step from home," said the old guy, and he didn't sound as if he'd trust us very far.

"Not so far," I said. "We used to live here a long time ago."

"Danged if I recognize you." He pushed back his old black felt hat and scratched his head. "And I thought I knew everybody that ever lived around here. You wouldn't be Jake Smith's boys, would you?"

"Doesn't look like many people are living here any more," said Herb.

"Matter of fact, there ain't," said Daniel Boone. "The old woman was just telling me the other day we'd have to move so we'd be nearer neighbors. It gets mighty lonesome for her. Nearest folks is about ten miles up thataway."

He gestured to the north, where the skyline of the city loomed like a distant mountain range, with gleaming marble ramparts and spires of mocking stone.

"Look here," I asked him. "Do you mean to say your nearest neighbor is ten miles away?"

"Sure," he told me. "The Smiths lived over a couple of miles to the west, but they moved out this spring. Went down to the south. Claimed the hunting was better there."

He shook his head sadly. "Maybe hunting is all right. I do a lot of it. But I like to do a little farming, too, And it's mighty hard to break new ground. I had a right handsome bunch of squashes and carrots this year. "Taters did well, too."

"But at one time a lot of people lived here." I insisted. "Thousands and thousands of people. Probably millions of them."

"I heard tell of that," agreed the old man, "but I can't rightfully say there's any truth in it. Must've been a long time ago. Somebody must have built all them buildings — although what for I just can't figure out."

The — Globe- editorial rooms were ghostly. Dust lay everywhere, and a silence that was almost as heavy as the dust.

There had been some changes, but it was still a newspaper office. All it needed was the blur of voices, the murmur of the speeding presses to bring it to life again.

The desks still were there, and chairs ringed the copy table.

Our feet left trails across the dust that lay upon the floor and raised a cloud that set us both to sneezing.

I made a beeline for one dark corner of the room; there I knew I would find what I was looking for.

Old bound files of the paper. Their pages crackled when I opened them, and the paper was so yellowed with age that in spots it was hard to read.

I carried one of the files to a window and glanced at the date. September 14, 2143. Over three hundred years ago!

A banner screamed: "Relief Riots in Washington." Hurriedly we leafed through the pages. And there, on the front pages of those papers that had seen the light more than three centuries before, we read the explanation for the silent city that lay beyond the shattered, grime-streaked windows.

"Stocks Crash to Lowest Point in Ten Years!" shrieked one banner. Another said: "Congress Votes Record Relief Funds." Still another: "Taxpayers Refuse to Pay." After that they came faster and faster. "Debt Moratorium Declared"; "Bank Holiday Enforced": "Thousands Starving in Cleveland"; Jobless March on Washington"; "Troops Fight Starving Mobs": "Congress Gives Up, Goes Home": "Epidemic Sweeping East"; "President Declares National Emergency":

"British Government Abdicates"; "Howling Mob Sweeping Over France"; "U.S. Government Bankrupt."

In the market and financial pages, under smaller heads, we read footnotes to those front-page lines. Story after story of business houses closing their doors, of corporations crashing, reports on declining trade; increasing unemployment, idle factories.

Civilization, three hundred years before, had crashed to ruin under the very weight of its own superstructure. The yellowed files did not tell the entire story, but it was easy to imagine.

"The world went nuts," said Herb, "Yeah," I said. "Like that guy who took the dive."

I could see it all as plain as day. Declining business, increasing unemployment, heavier taxation to help the unemployed and buy back prosperity, property owners unable to pay those taxes. A vicious circle.

Herb was rummaging around back in the dimness by the filing cabinet. Presently he came out into the light again, all covered with dust.

"They're only twenty or thirty years of files," he said, "and we got the newest one. But I found something else. Back behind the cabinet. Guess it must have fallen back there and nobody ever bothered to clean it out."

He handed it to me — an old and crumpled paper, so brittle with age I was afraid it might crumble to dust in my very hands.

"There was quite a bit of rubble back of the cabinet," said Herb. "Some other papers. Old, too, but this one was the oldest."

I looked at the date. April 16, 1985.

That yellowed paper was almost five hundred years old! It had come off the press less than thirty-five years after Herb and I had taken off with the time machine!

Lying behind the filing cabinet all those years. The cabinet was large and heavy to move, and janitors in newspaper offices aren't noted for outstanding tidiness.

But there was something bothering me. A little whisper way back in my head, somewhere down at the base of my brain, that kept telling me there was something I should remember.

I tossed the old paper on a desk and walked to a window. Most of the glass was broken out, and what wasn't broken out was coated so thick with grime you couldn't see through it. I looked out through the place where there wasn't any glass.

There the city lay — almost as I remembered it. There was Jackson's tower, the tallest in the city back in 1950, but now dwarfed by three or four others. The spire of the old cathedral was gone, and I missed that, for it had been a pretty thing. I used to sit and watch it from this very window through the mist of early-spring rain or through the ghostly white of the winter's first snowfall. I missed the spire, but Jackson's tower was there, and so were a lot of other buildings I could place.

And every one of them looked lonely. Lonely and not quite understanding — like a dog that's been kicked out of a chair he thinks of as his own. Their windows gaping like dead eyes. No cheerful glow of light within them. Their colors dulled by the wash of seasons that had rolled over them.

This was worse, I told myself, than if we'd found the place all smashed to hell by bombs. Because, brutal as it is, one can understand a bombed city. And one can't understand, or feel comfortable in a city that's just been left behind to die.

And the people!

Thinking about them gave me the jitters. Were all the people like old Daniel Boone? We had seen how he and his family lived, and it wasn't pretty. People who had backed down the scale of progress. People who had forgotten the printed word, had twisted the old truths and the old history into screwy legends.

It was easy enough to understand how it had happened. Pull the economic props from under a civilization and there's hell to pay. First you have mad savagery and even madder destruction as class hatred flames unchecked. And when that hatred dies down after an orgy of destruction there is bewilderment, and then some more savagery and hatred born of bewilderment.

But, sink as low as he may, man always will climb again. It's the nature of the beast. He's an ornery cuss.

But man, apparently, hadn't climbed again. Civilization, as Herb and I knew it, had crashed all of three hundred years before — and man still was content to live in the shadow of his former greatness, not questioning the mute evidences of his mighty past, uninspired by the soaring blocks of stone that reared mountainous above him.

There was something wrong. Something devilish wrong.

Dust rose and tickled my nose, and suddenly I realized my throat was hot and dry. I wanted a beer, if I could only step down the street to the Dutchman" s- Then it smacked me straight between the eyes, the thing that had been whispering around in the back of my head all day.

I remembered Billy Larson's face and the way his ears wiggled when he got excited and how hopped up he had been about a sunspot story.

"By Heaven, Herb, I got it," I yelled, turning from the window.

Herb's mouth sagged, and I knew he thought that I was nuts.

"I know what happened now," I said. "We have to get a telescope."

"Look here, Mike," said Herb, "if you feel-"

But I didn't let him finish.

"It's the sunspots," I yelled at him.

"Sunspots?" he squeaked.

"Sure," I said. "There aren't any."

My hunch bad been right.

There weren't any sunspots. No black dots on that great ball of flame.

It had taken two days before we found a pair of powerful field glasses in the rubbish of what once had been a jewelry store. Most of the stores and shops were wiped clean. Raided time after time in the violence which must have followed the breakdown of government, they later would have been looted systematically.

"Herb," I said, "there must have been something in what Billy said. Lots of sunspots and we have good times. No sunspots and we have bad times."

"Yeah," said Herb, "Billy was plenty smart. He knew his science, all right."

I could almost see Billy, his ears wiggling, his eyes glowing, as he talked tome that morning.

Wall Street followed the sunspot cycle, he had said. Business boomed when sunspots were riding high, went to pot when they blinked out.

I remembered asking him what would happen if someone passed a law against sunspots. And now it seemed that someone had!

It was hard to believe, but the evidence was there. The story lay in those musty files up in the — Globe- office. Stories that told of the world going mad when business scraped rock bottom. Of governments smashing, of starving hordes sweeping nation after nation.

I put my head down between my hands and groaned. I wanted a glass of beer. The kind Louie used to push across the bar, cool and with a lot of foam on top. And now there wasn't any beer. There hadn't been for centuries. All because of sunspots!

Ultraviolet light. Endocrine glands and human behavior. Words that scientists rolled around in their mouths and nobody paid much attention to. But they were the things that had played the devil with the human race.

Herb chuckled behind me. I swung around on him, my nerves on edge.

"What's the matter with you?" I demanded.

"Boy," said Herb, "this Wash Tubbs can get himself into some of the damnedest scrapes!"

"What you got there?" I asked, seeing he was reading a paper.

"Oh, this." he said. "This is that old paper we found up at the office. The one published in "85. I'm going to take it back and give it to J.R. But right now I'm reading the funnies-"

I grunted and hunkered down, turning my mind back to the sunspots. It sounded wacky, all right, but that was the only explanation.

It didn't seem right that a body of matter ninety-three million miles away could rule the lives of mankind — but, after all, all life depended on the Sun. Whiff out the Sun and there wouldn't be any life. Those old savages who had worshiped the Sun had the right idea.

Say, then, that sunspots had gone out of style. What would happen? Exactly what those files back at the — Globe- office had shown. Depression, ever deepening. Business failures, more and more men out of work, taxes piling higher and higher as a panicky government fought to hold off the day of reckoning.

I heard Herb making some strangling sounds and swung around again. I was getting annoyed with Herb.

But the look on Herb's face halted the words that were bubbling on my lips. His face was stark. It was white as a sheet and his eyes were frozen wide.

He shoved the paper at me, babbling, a shaking finger pointing at a small item,

I grabbed the sheet and squinted to make out the faded type. Then I read, slowly, but with growing horror:

LANGER DIES

"James Langer, convicted in 1951 of tampering with the time machine in which Mike Hamilton and Herb Harding, — Globe- newsmen, set out on a flight into the future the preceding year, died in Rocky Point prison today at the age of sixty-five.

"Langer, at his trial, confessed he had bribed the guard placed in charge of the machine, to allow him to enter the plane in which it was installed. There, he testified, he removed that portion of the mechanism which made it possible for the machine to move backward in time.

"Langer, at that time, was an employee of the — Standard-, which went out of business a few years later.

"National indignation aroused by the incident resulted in the passage by Congress of a law prohibiting further building or experimentation with time machines. Heartbroken, Dr. Ambrose Ackerman, inventor of the machine, died two weeks after the trial."

I sat numb for a few minutes, my hand tightening in a terrible grip upon the paper, grinding its yellowed pages into flaking shreds.

Then I looked at Herb, and as I looked into his fear-stricken face I remembered something.

"So." I said, and I was so mad that I almost choked.

"So, you just had a few drinks with the boys that night before we left. You just met up with some — Standard- boys and had a few."

I remembered the way Jimmy Langer had laughed in my face as I was leaving the Dutchman" s. I remembered how nervous the guard had been that morning.

"You didn't spill your guts, did you?" I rasped.

"Look, Mike-" said Herb, getting up off the ground.

"You got drunk, damn you," I yelled at him, "and your brains ran right out of your mouth. You told that — Standard- crowd everything you knew. And Old Man Johnson sent Langer out to do the dirty work."

I was mad, mad clear down to the soles of my boots.

"Damn you, Mike-" said Herb, and right then I let him have it. I gave him a poke that shook him clear down to the ground, but he came right back at me. Maybe he was mad, too.

He clipped me alongside the jaw and I plastered him over the eye, and after that we went at it hammer and tongs.

Herb wasn't any slouch with his dukes, and he kept me pretty busy. I gave him everything I had, but he always came back for more, and he pasted me a few that set my head to ringing.

But I didn't mind — all I wanted was to give Herb a licking he'd remember right down to the day he breathed his last.

When we quit it was just because neither one of us could fight another lick. We lay there on the ground, gasping and glaring at one another. One of Herb's eyes was closed, and I knew I had lost a couple of teeth and my face felt like it bad been run through a meat grinder.

Then Herb grinned at me.

"If I could have stayed on my feet a bit longer," he gasped, "I'd have murdered you."

And I grinned back at him.

Probably we should have stayed back in 2450. We had a chance back there. Old Daniel Boone didn't know too much, but at least he was civilized in a good many ways. And no doubt there still were books, and we might have been able to find other useful things.

We might have made a stab at rebuilding civilization, although the cards would have been stacked against us. For there's something funny about that sunspot business. When the sunspots stopped rearing around out on the Sun, something seemed to have run out of men — the old double-fisted, hell-for-leather spirit that had taken them up through the ages.

But we figured that men would make a come-back. We were pretty sure that somewhere up in the future we'd find a race that had started to climb back.

So we went ahead in time. Even if we couldn't go back, we could still go ahead..

We went five hundred years and found nothing. No trace of Daniel Boone's descendants. Maybe they'd given up raising squashes and had moved out where the hunting was better. The city still stood, although some of the stones had crumbled and some of the buildings were falling to pieces.

We traveled another five hundred years, and this time a horde of howling savages, men little more advanced than the tribes which roamed over Europe in the old Stone Age., charged out of the ruins at us, screaming and waving clubs and spears.

We just beat them to the plane.

In two thousand years the tribe had disappeared, and in its place we saw skulking figures that slunk among the mounds that once had been a city. Things that looked like men.

And after that we found nothing at all. Nothing, that is, except a skeleton that looked like it might once have been a human being.

Here at last we stop. There's no use of going farther, and the gas in the tank of our plane is running low.

The city is a heap of earthy mounds, bearing stunted trees. Queer animals shuffle and slink over and among the mounds. Herb says they are mutations — he read about mutations somewhere in a book.

To the west stretch great veldts of waving grass, and across the river the hills are forested with mighty trees.

But Man is gone. He rose, and for a little while he walked the Earth, But now he's swept away.

Back in 1950, Man thought he was the whole works. But he wasn't so hot, after all. The sunspots took him to the cleaners. Maybe it was the sunspots in the first place that enabled him to rise up on his hind legs and rule the roost. Billy said that sunspots could do some funny things.

But that doesn't matter now. Man is just another has-been.

There's not much left for us to do. Just to sit and think about J.R. rubbing his hands together. And Billy Larson wiggling his ears. And the way Jimmy Langer laughed that night outside the Dutchman's place.

Right now I'd sell my soul to walk into the Dutchman's place and say to Louie: "It's a hell of a world, Louie."

And hear Louie answer back: "It sure as hell is, Mike."

The Thing in the Stone

Original copyright year: 1970

1

He walked the hills and knew what the hills had seen through geologic time. He listened to the stars and spelled out what the stars were saying. He had found the creature that lay imprisoned in the stone. He had climbed the tree that in other days had been climbed by homing wildcats to reach the den gouged by time and weather out of the cliff's sheer face. He lived alone on a worn-out farm perched on a high and narrow ridge that overlooked the confluence of two rivers. And his next-door neighbor, a most ill-favored man, drove to the county seat, thirty miles away, to tell the sheriff that this reader of the hills, this listener to the stars was a chicken thief.

The sheriff dropped by within a week or so and walked across the yard to where the man was sitting in a rocking chair on a porch that faced the river hills. The sheriff came to a halt at the foot of the stairs that ran up to the porch.

"I'm Sheriff Harley Shepherd," he said. "I was just driving by. Been some years since I been out in this neck of the woods. You are new here, aren't you?"

The man rose to his feet and gestured at another chair. "Been here three years or so," he said. "The name is Wallace Daniels. Come up and sit with me."

The sheriff climbed the stairs and the two shook hands, then sat down in the chairs.

"You don't farm the place," the sheriff said.

The weed-grown fields came up to the fence that hemmed in the yard.

Daniels shook his head. "Subsistence farming, if you can call it that. A few chickens for eggs. A couple of cows for milk and butter. Some hogs for meat—the neighbors help me butcher. A garden of course, but that's about the story."

"Just as well," the sheriff said. "The place is all played out. Old Amos Williams, he let it go to ruin. He never was no farmer."

"The land is resting now," said Daniels. "Give it ten years—twenty might be better—and it will be ready once again. The only things it's good for now are the rabbits and the woodchucks and the meadow mice. A lot of birds, of course. I've got the finest covey of quail a man has ever seen."

"Used to be good squirrel country," said the sheriff. "Coon, too. I suppose you still have coon. You have a hunter, Mr. Daniels?"

"I don't own a gun," said Daniels.

The sheriff settled deeply into the chair, rocking gently.

"Pretty country out here," he declared. "Especially with the leaves turning colors. A lot of hardwood and they are colorful. Rough as hell, of course, this land of yours. Straight up and down, the most of it. But pretty."

"It's old country," Daniels said. "The last sea retreated from this area more than four hundred million years ago. It has stood as dry land since the end of the Silurian. Unless you go up north, on to the Canadian Shield, there aren't many places in this country you can find as old as this."

"You a geologist, Mr. Daniels?"

"Not really. Interested, is all. The rankest amateur. I need something to fill my time and I do a lot of hiking, scrambling up and down these hills. And you can't do that without coming face to face with a lot of geology. I got interested. Found some fossil brachiopods and got to wondering about them. Sent off for some books and read up on them. One thing led to another and—"

"Brachiopods? Would they be dinosaurs, or what? I never knew there were dinosaurs out this way."

"Not dinosaurs," said Daniels. "Earlier than dinosaurs, at least the ones I found. They're small. Something like clams or oysters. But the shells are hinged in a different sort of way. These were old ones, extinct millions of years ago. But we still have a few brachiopods living now. Not too many of them."

"It must be interesting."

"I find it so," said Daniels.

"You knew old Amos Williams?"

"No. He was dead before I came here. Bought the land from the bank that was settling his estate."

"Queer old coot," the sheriff said. "Fought with all his neighbors. Especially with Ben Adams. Him and Ben had a line fence feud going on for years. Ben said Amos refused to keep up the fence. Amos claimed Ben knocked it down and then sort of, careless-like, hazed his cattle over into Amos's hayfield. How you get along with Ben?"

"All right," Daniels said. "No trouble. I scarcely know the man."

"Ben don't do much farming, either," said the sheriff. Hunts and fishes, hunts ginseng, does some trapping in the winter. Prospects for minerals now and then."

"There are minerals in these hills," said Daniels. "Lead and zinc. But it would cost more to get it out than it would be worth. At present prices, that is."

"Ben always has some scheme cooking." said the sheriff. "Always off on some wild goose chase. And he's a pure pugnacious man. Always has his nose out of joint about something. Always on the prod for trouble. Bad man to have for an enemy. Was in the other day to say someone's been lifting a hen or two of his. You haven't been missing any, have you?"

Daniels grinned. "There's a fox that levies a sort of tribute on the coop every now and then. I don't begrudge them to him."

"Funny thing," the sheriff said. "There ain't nothing can rile up a farmer like a little chicken stealing. It don't amount to shucks, of course, but they get real hostile at it."

"If Ben has been losing chickens," Daniels said, "more than likely the culprit is my fox."

"Your fox? You talk as if you own him."

"Of course I don't. No one owns a fox. But he lives in these hills with me. I figure we are neighbours. I see him every now and then and watch him. Maybe that means I own a piece of him. Although I wouldn't be surprised if he watches me more than I watch him. He moves quicker than I do."

The sheriff heaved himself out of the chair.

"I hate to go," he said. "I declare it has been restful sitting here and talking with you and looking at the hills. You look at them a lot, I take it."

"Quite a lot," said Daniels.

He sat on the porch and watched the sheriff's car top the rise far down the ridge and disappear from sight.

What had it all been about? he wondered. The sheriff hadn't just happened to be passing by. He'd been on an errand. All this aimless, friendly talk had not been for nothing and in the course of it he'd managed to ask lots of questions.

Something about Ben Adams, maybe? Except there wasn't too much against Adams except he was bone-lazy. Lazy in a weasely sort of way. Maybe the sheriff had got wind of Adams" off-and-on moonshining operation and was out to do some checking, hoping that some neighbor might misspeak himself. None of them would, of course, for it was none of their business, really, and the moonshining had built up no nuisance value. What little liquor Ben might make didn't amount to much. He was too lazy for anything he did to amount to much.

From far down the hill he heard the tinkle of a bell. The two cows were finally heading home. It must be much later, Daniels told himself, than he had thought. Not that he paid much attention to what time it was. He hadn't for long months on end, ever since he'd smashed his watch when he'd fallen off the ledge. He had never bothered to have the watch fixed. He didn't need a watch. There was a battered old alarm clock in the kitchen but it was an erratic piece of mechanism and not to be relied upon. He paid slight attention to it.

In a little while, he thought, he'd have to rouse himself and go and do the chores—milk the cows, feed the hogs and chickens, gather up the eggs. Since the garden had been laid by there hadn't been much to do. One of these days he'd have to bring in the squashes and store them in the cellar and there were those three or four big pumpkins he'd have to lug down the hollow to the Perkins kids, so they'd have them in time to make jack-o-lanterns for Halloween. He wondered if he should carve out the faces himself or if the kids would rather do it on their own.

But the cows were still quite a distance away and he still had time. He sat easy in his chair and stared across the hills.

And they began to shift and change as he stared.

When he had first seen it, the phenomenon had scared him silly. But now he was used to it.

As he watched, the hills changed into different ones. Different vegetation and strange life stirred on them.

He saw dinosaurs this time. A herd of them, not very big ones. Middle Triassic, more than likely. And this time it was only a distant view—he himself was not to become involved. He would only see, from a distance, what ancient time was like and would not be thrust into the middle of it as most often was the case.

He was glad. There were chores to do.

Watching, he wondered once again what more he could do. It was not the dinosaurs that concerned him, nor the earlier amphibians, nor all the other creatures that moved in time about the hills.

What disturbed him was that other being that lay buried deep beneath the Platteville limestone.

Someone else should know about it. The knowledge of it should be kept alive so that in the days to come—perhaps in another hundred years—when man's technology had reached the point where it was possible to cope with such a problem, something could be done to contact—and perhaps to free—the dweller in the stone.

There would be a record, of course, a written record. He would see to that. Already that record was in progress—a week by week (at times a day to day) account of what he had seen, heard and learned. Three large record books now were filled with his careful writing and another one was well started. All written down as honestly and as carefully and as objectively as he could bring himself to do it.

But who would believe what he had written? More to the point, who would bother to look at it? More than likely the books would gather dust on some hidden shelf until the end of time with no human hand ever laid upon them. And even if someone, in some future time, should take them down and read them, first blowing away the accumulated dust, would he or she be likely to believe?

The answer lay clear. He must convince someone. Words written by a man long dead—and by a man of no reputation—could be easily dismissed as the product of a neurotic mind. But if some scientist of solid reputation could be made to listen, could be made to endorse the record, the events that paraded across the hills and lay within them could stand on solid ground, worthy of full investigation at some future date.

A biologist? Or a neuropsychiatrist? Or a paleontologist?

Perhaps it didn't matter what branch of science the man was in. Just so he'd listen without laughter. It was most important that he listen without laughter.

Sitting on the porch, staring at the hills dotted with grazing dinosaurs, the listener to the stars remembered the time he had gone to see the paleontologist.

"Ben," the sheriff said. "you're way out in left field. That Daniels fellow wouldn't steal no chickens. He's got chickens of his own."

"The question is," said Adams, "how did he get them chickens?"

"That makes no sense," the sheriff said. "He's a gentleman. You can tell that just by talking with him. An educated gentleman."

"If he's a gentleman," asked Adams, "what's he doing out here? This ain't no place for gentlemen. He showed up two or three years ago and moved out to this place. Since that day he hasn't done a tap of work. All he does is wander up and down the hills."

"He's a geologist," said the sheriff. "Or anyway interested in geology. A sort of hobby with him. He tells me he looks for fossils."

Adams assumed the alert look of a dog that has sighted a rabbit. "So that is it," he said. "I bet you it ain't fossils he is looking for."

"No," the sheriff said.

"He's looking for minerals," said Adams. "He's prospecting, that's what he's doing. These hills crawl with minerals. All you have to do is know where to look."

"You've spent a lot of time looking," observed the sheriff. "I ain't no geologist. A geologist would have a big advantage. He would know rocks and such."

"He didn't talk as if he were doing any prospecting. Just interested in the geology, is all. He found some fossil clams."

"He might be looking for treasure caves," said Adams. "He might have a map or something."

"You know damn well," the sheriff said, "there are no treasure caves."

"There must be," Adams insisted. "The French and Spanish were here in the early days. They were great ones for treasure, the French and Spanish. Always running after mines. Always hiding things in caves. There was that cave over across the river where they found a skeleton in Spanish armour and the skeleton of a bear beside him, with a rusty sword stuck into where the bear's gizzard was."

"That was just a story," said the sheriff, disgusted. "Some damn fool started it and there was nothing to it. Some people from the university came out and tried to run it down. It developed that there wasn't a word of truth in it."

"But Daniels has been messing around with caves," said Adams. "I've seen him. He spends a lot of time in that cave down on Cat Den Point. Got to climb a tree to get to it."

"You been watching him?"

"Sure I been watching him. He's up to something and I want to know what it is."

"Just be sure he doesn't catch you doing it," the sheriff said.

Adams chose to let the matter pass. "Well, anyhow," he said, "if there aren't any treasure caves, there's a lot of lead and zinc. The man who finds it is about to make a million."

"Not unless he can find the capital to back him," the sheriff pointed out.

Adams dug at the ground with his heel. "You think he's all right, do you?"

"He tells me he's been losing some chickens to a fox. More than likely that's what has been happening to yours."

"If a fox is taking his chickens," Adams asked, "why don't he shoot it?"

"He isn't sore about it. He seems to think the fox has got a right to. He hasn't even got a gun."

"Well, if he hasn't got a gun and doesn't care to hunt himself—then why won't he let other people hunt? He won't let me and my boys on his place with a gun. He has his place all posted. That seems to me to be un-neighborly. That's one of the things that makes it so hard to get along with him. We've always hunted on that place. Old Amos wasn't an easy man to get along with but he never cared if we did some hunting. We've always hunted all around here. No one ever minded. Seems to me hunting should be free. Seems right for a man to hunt wherever he's a mind to."

Sitting on the bench on the hard-packed earth in front of the ramshackle house, the sheriff looked about him—at the listlessly scratching chickens, at the scrawny hound sleeping in the shade, its hide twitching against the few remaining flies, at the clothes-line strung between two trees and loaded with drying clothes and dish towels, at the washtub balanced on its edge on a wash bench leaning against the side of the house.

Christ, he thought, the man should be able to find the time to put up a decent clothes-line and not just string a rope between two trees.

"Ben," he said, "you're just trying to stir up trouble. You resent Daniels, a man living on a farm who doesn't work at farming, and you're sore because he won't let you hunt his land. He's got a right to live anywhere he wants to and he's got a right not to let you hunt. I'd lay off him if I were you. You don't have to like him, you don't have to have anything to do with him—but don't go around spreading fake accusations against the man. He could jerk you up in court for that."

2

He had walked into the paleontologist's office and it had taken him a moment fully to see the man seated toward the back of the room at a cluttered desk. The entire place was cluttered. There were long tables covered with chunks of rock with embedded fossils, Scattered here and there were stacks of papers. The room was large and badly lighted. It was a dingy and depressing place.

"Doctor?" Daniels had asked. "Are you Dr. Thorne?"

The man rose and deposited a pipe in a cluttered ashtray. He was big, burly, with graying hair that had a wild look to it. His face was seamed and weather-beaten. When he moved he shuffled like a bear.

"You must be Daniels," he said. "Yes, I see you must be. I had you on my calendar for three o'clock. So glad you could come,"

His great paw engulfed Daniel's hand. He pointed to a chair beside the desk, sat down and retrieved his pipe from the overflowing tray, began packing it from a large canister that stood on the desk.

"Your letter said you wanted to see me about something important," he said. "But then that's what they all say. But there must have been something about your letter—an urgency, a sincerity. I haven't the time, you understand, to see everyone who writes. All of them have found something, you see. What is it, Mr. Daniels, that you have found?"

Daniels said, "Doctor, I don't quite know how to start what I have to say. Perhaps it would be best to tell you first that something had happened to my brain."

Thorne was lighting his pipe. He talked around the stem. "In such a case, perhaps I am not the man you should be talking to. There are other people—"

"No, that's not what I mean," said Daniels. "I'm not seeking help. I am quite all right physically and mentally, too. About five years ago I was in a highway accident. My wife and daughter were killed and I was badly hurt and—"

"I am sorry, Mr. Daniels."

"Thank you—but that is all in the past. It was rough for a time but I muddled through it. That's not what I'm here for. I told you I was badly hurt—"

"Brain damage?"

"Only minor. Or so far as the medical findings are concerned. Very minor damage that seemed to clear up rather soon. The bad part was the crushed chest and punctured lung."

"But you're all right now?"

"As good as new," said Daniels. "But since the accident my brain's been different. As if I had new senses. I see things, understand things that seem impossible."

"You mean you have hallucinations?"

"Not hallucinations. I am sure of that. I can see the past."

"How do you mean—see the past?"

"Let me try to tell you," Daniels said. "exactly how it started. Several years ago I bought an abandoned farm in south-western Wisconsin. A place to hole up in, a place to hide away. With my wife and daughter gone I still was recoiling from the world. I had got through the first brutal shock but I needed a place where I could lick my wounds. If this sounds like self-pity—I don't mean it that way. I am trying to be objective about why I acted as I did, why I bought the farm."

"Yes. I understand," said Thorne. "But I'm not entirely sure hiding was the wisest thing to do."

"Perhaps not, but it seemed to me the answer. It has worked out rather well. I fell in love with the country. That part of Wisconsin is ancient land. It has stood uncovered by the sea for four hundred million years. For some reason it was not overridden by the Pleistocene glaciers. It has changed, of course, but only as the result of weathering. There have been no great geologic upheavals, no massive erosions—nothing to disturb it."

"Mr. Daniels," said Thorne, somewhat testily, "I don't quite see what this has to do—"

"I'm sorry. I am just trying to lay the background for what I came to tell you. It came on rather slowly at first and I thought that I was crazy, that I was seeing things, that there had been more brain damage than had been apparent—or that I was finally cracking up. I did a lot of walking in the hills, you see. The country is wild and rugged and beautiful—a good place to be out in. The walking made me tired and I could sleep at night. But at times the hills changed. Only a little at first. Later on they changed more and finally they became places I had never seen before, that no one had ever seen before."

Thorne scowled. "You are trying to tell me they changed into the past."

Daniels nodded. "Strange vegetation, funny-looking trees. In the earlier times, of course, no grass at all. Underbrush of ferns and scouring rushes. Strange animals, strange things in the sky. Saber-tooth cats and mastodons, pterosaurs and uintatheres and—"

"All at the same time?" Thorne asked, interrupting. "All mixed up?"

"Not at all. The time periods I see seem to be true time periods. Nothing out of place. I didn't know at first—but when I was able to convince myself that I was not hallucinating I sent away for books. I studied. I'll never be an expert, of course—never a geologist or paleontologist—but I learned enough to distinguish one period from another, to have some idea of what I was looking at."

Thorne took his pipe out of his mouth and perched it in the ashtray. He ran a massive hand through his wild hair.

"It's unbelievable," he said. "It simply couldn't happen. You said all this business came on rather slowly?"

"To begin with it was hazy, the past foggily imposed upon the present, then the present would slowly fade and the past came in, real and solid. But it's different now. Once in a while there's a bit of flickering as the present gives way to the past—but mostly it simply changes, as if at the snap of a finger. The present goes away and I'm standing in the past. The past is all around me. Nothing of the present is left."

"But you aren't really in the past? Physically, I mean."

"There are times when I'm not in it at all. I stand in the present and the distant hills or the river valley changes. But ordinarily it changes all around me, although the funny thing about it is that, as you say, I'm not really in it. I can see it and it seems real enough for me to walk around in it. I can walk over to a tree and put my hand out to feel it and the tree is there, But I seem to make no impact on the past. It's as if I were not there at all. The animals do not see me. I've walked up to within a few feet of dinosaurs. They can't see me or hear or smell me. If they had I'd have been dead a dozen times. It's as if I were walking through a three-dimensional movie. At first I worried a lot about the surface differences that might exist. I'd wake up dreaming of going into the past and being buried up to my waist in a rise of ground that since has eroded away. But it doesn't work that way. I'm walking along in the present and then I'm walking in the past. It's as if a door were there and I stepped through it. I told you I don't really seem to be in the past—but I'm not in the present, either. I tried to get some proof. I took a camera with me and shot a lot of pictures. When the films were developed there was nothing on them. Not the past—but what is more important, not the present, either. If I had been hallucinating, the camera should have caught pictures of the present. But apparently there was nothing there for the camera to take. I thought maybe the camera failed or I had the wrong kind of film. So I tried several cameras and different types of film and nothing happened. I got no pictures. I tried bringing something back. I picked flowers, after there were flowers. I had no trouble picking them but when I came back to the present I was empty-handed. I tried to bring back other things as well. I thought maybe it was only live things, like flowers, that I couldn't bring, so I tried inorganic things—like rocks—but I never was able to bring anything back."

"How about a sketch pad?"

"I thought of that but I never used one. I'm no good at sketching—besides, I figured, what was the use? The pad would come back blank."

"But you never tried."

"No," said Daniels. "I never tried. Occasionally I do make sketches after I get back to the present. Not every time but sometimes. From memory. But, as I said, I'm not very good at sketching."

"I don't know," said Thorne. "I don't really know. This all sounds incredible. But if there should be something to it—Tell me, were you ever frightened? You seem quite calm and matter-of-fact about it now, but at first you must have been frightened."

"At first," said Daniels, "I was petrified. Not only was I scared, physically scared—frightened for my safety, frightened that I'd fallen into a place from which I never could escape—but also afraid that I'd gone insane. And there was the loneliness."

"What do you mean—loneliness?"

"Maybe that's not the right word. Out of place. I was where I had no right to be. Lost in a place where man had not as yet appeared and would not appear for millions of years. In a world so utterly alien that I wanted to hunker down and shiver. But I, not the place, was really the alien there. I still get some of that feeling every now and then. I know about it, of course, and am braced against it, but at times it still gets to me. I'm a stranger to the air and the light of that other time—it's all imagination, of course."

"Not necessarily," said Thorne.

"But the greatest fear is gone now, entirely gone. The fear I was insane. I am convinced now."

"How are you convinced? How could a man be convinced?"

"The animals. The creatures I see—"

"You mean you recognize them from the illustrations in these books you have been reading."

"No, not that. Not entirely that. Of course the pictures helped. But actually it's the other way around. Not the likeness, but the differences. You see, none of the creatures are exactly like the pictures in the books. Some of them not at all like them. Not like the reconstruction the paleontologists put together. If they had been I might still have thought they were hallucinations, that what I was seeing was influenced by what I'd seen or read. I could have been feeding my imagination on prior knowledge. But since that was not the case, it seemed logical to assume that what I see is real. How could I imagine that Tyrannosaurus had dewlaps all the colors of the rainbow? How could I imagine that some of the saber-tooths had tassels on their ears? How could anyone possibly imagine that the big thunder beasts of the Eocene had hides as colorful as giraffes?"

"Mr. Daniels," said Thorne, "I have great reservations about all that you have told me, Every fiber of my training rebels against it. I have a feeling that I should waste no time on it. Undoubtedly, you believe what you have told me. You have the look of an honest man about you. Have you talked to any other men about this? Any other paleontologists or geologists? Perhaps a neuropsychiatrist?"

"No," said Daniels. "You're the only person, the only man I have talked with. And I haven't told you all of it. This is really all just background."

"My God, man—just background?"

"Yes, just background. You see, I also listen to the stars." Thorne got up from his chair, began shuffling together a stack of papers. He retrieved the dead pipe from the ashtray and stuck it in his mouth.

His voice, when he spoke, was noncommittal.

"Thank you for coming in," he said. "It's been most interesting."

3

And that was where he had made his mistake. Daniels told himself. He never should have mentioned listening to the stars. His interview had gone well until he had. Thorne had not believed him, of course, but he had been intrigued, would have listened further, might even have pursued the matter, although undoubtedly secretly and very cautiously.

At fault, Daniels knew, had been his obsession with the creature in the stone. The past was nothing—it was the creature in the stone that was important and to tell of it, to explain it and how he knew that it was there, he must tell about his listening to the stars.

He should have known better, he told himself. He should have held his tongue. But here had been a man who, while doubting, still had been willing to listen without laughter, and in his thankfulness Daniels had spoken too much.

The wick of the oil lamp set upon the kitchen table guttered in the air currents that came in around the edges of the ill-fitting windows. A wind had risen after chores were done and now shook the house with gale-like blasts. On the far side of the room the fire in the wood-burning stove threw friendly, wavering flares of light across the floor and the stovepipe, in response to the wind that swept the chimney top, made gurgling, sucking sounds.

Thorne had mentioned a neuropsychiatrist, Daniels remembered, and perhaps that was the kind of man he should have gone to see. Perhaps before he attempted to interest anyone in what he could see or hear, he should make an effort to find out why and how he could hear and see these things. A man who studied the working of the brain and mind might come up with new answers—if answers were to be had.

Had that blow upon his head so rearranged, so shifted some process in his brain that he had gained new capabilities? Was it possible that his brain had been so jarred, so disarranged as to bring into play certain latent talents that possibly, in millennia to come, might have developed naturally by evolutionary means? Had the brain damage short-circuited evolution and given him—and him alone—these capabilities, these senses, perhaps a million years ahead of time?

It seemed—well, not reasonable but one possible explanation. Still, a trained man might have some other explanation.

He pushed his chair back from the table and walked over to the stove. He used the lifter to raise the lid of the rickety old cook stove. The wood in the firebox had burned down to embers. Stooping, he picked up a stick of wood from the woodbox and fitted it in, added another smaller one and replaced the lid. One of these days soon, he told himself, he would have to get the furnace in shape for operation.

He went out to stand on the porch, looking toward the river hills. The wind whooped out of the north, whistling around the corners of the building and booming in the deep hollows that ran down to the river, but the sky was clear—steely clear, wiped fresh by the wind and sprinkled with stars, their light shivering in the raging atmosphere.

Looking up at the stars, he wondered what they might be saying but he didn't try to listen. It took a lot of effort and concentration to listen to the stars. He had first listened to them on a night like this, standing out here on the porch and wondering what they might be saying, wondering if the stars did talk among themselves. A foolish, vagrant thought, a wild, daydreaming sort of notion, but, voicing it, he had tried to listen, knowing even as he did that it was foolishness but glorying in his foolishness, telling himself how fortunate he was that he could afford to be so inane as to try to listen to the stars—as a child might believe in Santa Claus or the Easter Rabbit. He'd listened and he'd heard and while he'd been astonished, there could be no doubt about it, no doubt at all that out there somewhere other beings were talking back and forth. He might have been listening in on a party line, he thought, but a party line that carried millions, perhaps billions, of long-distance conversations. Not words, of course, but something (thought, perhaps) that was as plain as words. Not all of it understandable—much of it, as a matter of fact, not understandable—possibly because his background and his learning gave him no basis for an understanding. He compared himself to an Australian aborigine listening to the conversation of a couple of nuclear physicists discussing a new theory.

Shortly after that, when he bad been exploring the shallow cave down on Cat Den Point, he had picked up his first indication of the creature buried in the stone. Perhaps, he thought, if he'd not listened to the stars, if he'd not known he could listen to the stars, if he'd not trained his mind by listening, he would not have heard the creature buried deep beneath the limestone.

He stood looking at the stars and listening to the wind and, far across the river, on a road that wound over the distant hills, he caught the faint glimmer of headlights as a car made its way through the night. The wind let up for a moment, as if gathering its strength to blow even harder and, in the tiny lull that existed before the wind took up again, he heard another sound—the sound of an axe hitting wood, He listened carefully and the sound came again but so tossed about by the wind that he could not be sure of its direction.

He must be mistaken, he thought. No one would be out and chopping on a night like this. Coon hunters might be the answer. Coon hunters at times chopped down a tree to dislodge a prey too well hidden to be spotted. The unsportsmanlike trick was one that Ben Adams and his overgrown, gangling sons might engage in. But this was no night for coon hunting. The wind would blow away scent and the dogs would be unable to track. Quiet nights were the best for hunting coon. And no one would be insane enough to cut down a tree on a night like this when a swirling wind might catch it and topple it back upon the cutters.

He listened to catch the sound again but the wind, recovering from its lull, was blowing harder than ever now and there was no chance of hearing any sound smaller than the wind.

The next day came in mild and gray, the wind no more than a whisper. Once in the night Daniels had awoken to hear it rattling the windows, pounding at the house and howling mournfully in the tangled hollows that lay above the river. But when he woke again all was quiet and faint light was graying the windows. Dressed and out of doors he found a land of peace—the sky so overcast that there was no hint of sun, the air fresh, as if newly washed but heavy with the moist grayness that overlay the land. The autumn foliage that clothed the hills had taken on a richer luster than it had worn in the flooding autumn sunlight.

After chores and breakfast Daniels set out for the hills. As he went down the slope towards the head of the first hollow he found himself hoping that the geologic shift would not come about today. There were many times it didn't and there seemed to be no reason to its taking place or its failure to take place. He had tried at times to find some reason for it, had made careful notes of how he felt or what he did, even the course he took when he went for his daily walk, but he had found no pattern. It lay, of course, somewhere in his brain—something triggered into operation his new capability. But the phenomenon was random and involuntary. He had no control of it, no conscious control, at least. At times he had tried to use it, to bring the geologic shift about—in each case had failed. Either he did not know how to go about it or it was truly random.

Today, he hoped, his capability would not exercise its option, for he wanted to walk in the hills when they had assumed one of their most attractive moods, filled with gentle melancholy, all their harshness softened by the grayness of the atmosphere, the trees standing silently like old and patient friends waiting for one's coming, the fallen leaves and forest mold so hushed footfalls made no sound.

He went down to the head of the hollow and sat on a fallen log beside a gushing spring that sent a stream of water tinkling down the boulder-strewn creek bed. Here, in May, in the pool below the spring, the marsh marigolds had bloomed and the sloping hillsides had been covered with the pastel of hepaticas. But now he saw no sign of either. The woods had battened down for winter. The summer and the autumn plants were either dead or dying, the drifting leaves interlocking on the forest floor to form cover against the ice and snow.

In this place, thought Daniels, a man walked with a season's ghosts. This was the way it had been for a million years or more, although not always. During many millions of years, in a time long gone, these hills and all the world had basked in an eternal summertime. And perhaps not a great deal more than ten thousand years before a mile-high wall of ice had reared up not too far to the north, perhaps close enough for a man who stood where his house now sat to have seen the faint line of blueness that would have been the top of that glacial barrier. But even then, although the mean temperature would have been lower, there had still been seasons.

Leaving the log, Daniels went on down the hollow, following the narrow path that looped along the hillside, a cow-path beaten down at a time when there had been more cows at pasture in these woods than the two that Daniels owned. Following it, Daniels noted, as he had many times before, the excellent engineering sense of a cow. Cows always chose the easiest grade in stamping out their paths.

He stopped barely beyond the huge white oak that stood at a bend in the path, to have a look at the outsize jack-in-the-pulpit plant he had observed throughout the years. Its green-purple hood had withered away completely, leaving only the scarlet fruit cluster which in the bitter months ahead would serve as food for birds.

As the path continued, it plunged deeper between the hills and here the silence deepened and the grayness thickened until one's world became private.

There, across the stream bed, was the den. Its yellow maw gaped beneath a crippled, twisted cedar. There, in the spring, he had watched baby foxes play. From far down the hollow came the distant quacking of ducks upon the pond in the river valley. And up on the steep hillside loomed Cat Den Point, the den carved by slow-working wind and weather out of the sheer rock of the cliff.

But something was wrong.

Standing on the path and looking up the hill, he could sense the wrongness, although he could not at first tell exactly what it was. More of the cliff face was visible and something was missing. Suddenly he knew that the tree was no longer there—the tree that for years had been climbed by homing wildcats heading for the den after a night of prowling and later by humans like himself who wished to seek out the wildcat's den. The cats, of course, were no longer there—had not been there for many years. In the pioneer days they had been hunted almost to extermination because at times they had exhibited the poor judgment of bringing down a lamb. But the evidence of their occupancy of the cave could still be found by anyone who looked. Far back in the narrow recesses of the shallow cave tiny bones and the fragmented skulls of small mammals gave notice of food brought home by the wildcats for their young.

The tree had been old and gnarled and had stood, perhaps, for several centuries and there would have been no sense of anyone's cutting it down, for it had no value as lumber, twisted as it was. And in any case to get it out of the woods would have been impossible. Yet, last night, when he had stepped out on the porch, he had seemed to hear in a lull in the wind the sound of chopping—and today the tree was gone.

Unbelieving, he scrambled up the slope as swiftly as he could. In places the slope of the wild hillside slanted at an angle so close to forty-five degrees that he went on hands and knees, clawing himself upward, driven by an illogical fear that had to do with more than simply a missing tree.

For it was in the cat den that one could hear the creature buried in the stone.

He could recall the day he first had heard the creature and on that day he had not believed his senses. For he had been sure the sound came from his own imagination, was born of his walking with the dinosaurs and eavesdropping on the stars. It had not come the first time he had climbed the tree to reach the cave-that-was-a-den. He had been there several times before, finding a perverse satisfaction at discovering so unlikely a retreat. He would sit on the ledge that ran before the cave and stare over the froth of treetop foliage that clothed the plunging hillside, but afforded a glimpse of the pond that lay in the flood plain of the river. He could not see the river itself—one must stand on higher ground to see the river.

He liked the cave and the ledge because it gave him seclusion, a place cut off from the world, where he still might see this restricted corner of the world but no one could see him. This same sense of being shut out from the world had appealed to the wildcats, he had told himself. And here, for them, not only was seclusion but safety—and especially safety for their young. There was no way the den could be approached other than by climbing the tree.

He had first heard the creature when he had crawled into the deepest part of the shallow cave to marvel at the little heaps of bones and small shattered skulls where the wildcat kittens, perhaps a century before, had crouched and snarled at feast. Crouching where the baby wildcats once had crouched, he had felt the presence welling up at him, coming up to him from the depth of stone that lay far beneath him. Only the presence at first, only the knowing that something was down there. He had been skeptical at first, later on believing. In time belief had become solid certainty.

He could record no words, of course, for he had never heard any actual sound. But the intelligence and the knowing came creeping through his body, through his fingers spread flat upon the stone floor of the cave, through his knees, which also pressed the stone. He absorbed it without hearing and the more he absorbed the more he was convinced that deep in the limestone, buried in one of the strata, an intelligence was trapped. And finally the time came when he could catch fragments of thoughts—the edges of the «living» in the sentience encysted in the rock.

What he heard he did not understand. This very lack of understanding was significant. If he had understood he would have put his discovery down to his imagination. As matters stood he had no knowledge that could possibly have served as a springboard to imagine the thing of which he was made aware. He caught an awareness of tangled life relationships which made no sense at all—none of which could be understood, but which lay in tiny, tangled fragments of outrageous (yet simple) information no human mind could quite accept. And he was made to know the empty hollowness of distances so vast that the mind reeled at the very hint of them and of the naked emptiness in which those distances must lie. Even in his eavesdropping on the stars he had never experienced such devastating concepts of the other-where-and-when. There was other information, scraps and bits he sensed faintly that might fit into mankind's knowledge. But he never found enough to discover the proper slots for their insertion into the mass of mankind's knowledge. The greater part of what he sensed, however, was simply beyond his grasp and perhaps beyond the grasp of any human. But even so his mind would catch and hold it in all its incomprehensibility and it would lie there festering amid his human thoughts.

They were or it was, he knew, not trying to talk with him—undoubtedly they (or it) did not know that such a thing as a man existed, let alone himself. But whether the creature (or creatures—he found the collective singular easier) simply was thinking or might, in its loneliness, be talking to itself—or whether it might be trying to communicate with something other than himself, he could not determine.

Thinking about it, sitting on the ledge before the cave, he had tried to make some logic of his find, had tried to find a way in which the creature's presence might be best explained. And while he could not be sure of it—in fact, had no data whatsoever to bolster his belief—he came to think that in some far geologic day when a shallow sea had lain upon this land, a ship from space had fallen into the sea to be buried deeply in the mud that in later millennia had hardened into limestone. In this manner the ship had become entrapped and so remained to this very day. He realized his reasoning held flaws—for one thing, the pressure involved in the fashioning of the stone must have been so great as to have crushed and flattened any ship unless it should be made of some material far beyond the range of man's technology.

Accident, he wondered, or a way of hiding? Trapped or planned? He had no way of knowing and further speculation was ridiculous, based as it necessarily must be upon earlier assumptions that were entirely without support.

Scrambling up the hillside, he finally reached the point where he could see that, in all truth, the tree had been cut down. It had fallen downhill and slid for thirty feet or so before it came to rest, its branches entangled with the trunks of other trees which had slowed its plunge. The stump stood raw, the whiteness of its wood shining in the grayness of the day. A deep cut had been made in the downhill side of it and the final felling had been accomplished by a saw. Little piles of brownish sawdust lay beside the stump. A two-man saw, he thought.

From where Daniels stood the hill slanted down at an abrupt angle but just ahead of him, just beyond the stump, was a curious mound that broke the hillside slope, In some earlier day, more than likely, great masses of stone had broken from the cliff face and piled up at its base, to be masked in time by the soil that came about from the forest litter. Atop the mound grew a clump of birch, their powdery white trunks looking like huddled ghosts against the darkness of the other trees.

The cutting of the tree, he told himself once again, had been a senseless piece of business. The tree was worthless and had served no particular purpose except as a road to reach the den, Had someone, he wondered, known that he used it to reach the den and cut it out of malice? Or had someone, perhaps, hidden something in the cave and then cut down the tree so there would be no way in which to reach it?

But who would hold him so much malice as to come out on a night raging with wind working by lantern light, risking his life, to cut down the tree? Ben Adams? Ben was sore because Daniels would not permit hunting on his land but surely that was no sufficient reason for this rather laborious piece of petty spite.

The other alternative—that something hidden in the cave had caused the tree's destruction—seemed more likely, although the very cutting of the tree would serve to advertize the strangeness of the place.

Daniels stood puzzled, shaking his head. Then he thought of a way to find out some answers. The day still was young and he had nothing else to do.

He started climbing up the hill, heading for his barn to pick up some rope.

4

There was nothing in the cave. It was exactly as it had been before. A few autumn leaves had blown into the far corners. Chips of weathered stone had fallen from the rocky overhang, tiny evidences of the endless process of erosion which had formed the cave and in a few thousand years from now might wipe it out.

Standing on the narrow ledge in front of the cave, Daniels stared out across the valley and was surprised at the change of view that had resulted from the cutting of the tree. The angles of vision seemed somehow different and the hillside itself seemed changed. Startled, he examined the sweep of the slope closely and finally satisfied himself that all that had changed was his way of seeing it. He was seeing trees and contours that earlier had been masked.

His rope hung from the outcurving rock face that formed the roof of the cave. It was swaying gently in the wind and, watching it, Daniels recalled that earlier in the day he had felt no wind. But now one had sprung up from the west. Below him the treetops were bending to it.

He turned toward the west and felt the wind on his face and a breath of chill. The feel of the wind faintly disturbed him, rousing some atavistic warning that came down from the days when naked roaming bands of proto-men had turned, as he turned now, to sniff the coming weather. The wind might mean that a change in weather could be coming and perhaps he should clamber up the rope and head back for the farm.

But he felt a strange reluctance to leave. It had been often so, he recalled. For here was a wild sort of refuge which barred out the world and the little world that it let in was a different kind—a more primal and more basic and less complicated world than the one he'd fled from.

A flight of mallards came winging up from the pond in the river valley arrowing above the treetops, banking and slanting up the long curve of the bluff and then, having cleared the bluff top, wheeling gracefully back toward the flyer. He watched them until they dipped down behind the trees that fringed the unseen river.

Now it was time to go. There was no use waiting longer. It had been a fool's errand in the first place; he had been wrong to let himself think something might be hidden in the cave.

He turned back to the rope and the rope was gone.

For a moment he stared stupidly at the point along the cliff face where the rope had hung, swaying in the breeze. Then he searched for some sign of it, although there was little area to search. The rope could have slid, perhaps, for a short distance along the edge of the overhanging mass of rock but it seemed incredible that it could have slid far enough to have vanished from his sight.

The rope was new, strong, and he had tied it securely to the oak tree on the bluff above the cliff, snugging it tightly around the trunk and testing the knot to make certain that it would not slip.

And now the rope was gone. There had to be a human hand in this. Someone had come along, seen the rope and quietly drawn it up and now was crouched on the bluff above him, waiting for his frightened outburst when he found himself stranded. It was the sort of crude practical joke than any number of people in the community might believe to be the height of humor. The thing to do, of course, was to pay no attention, to remain quiet and wait until the joke would pall upon the jokester.

So he hunkered down upon the ledge and waited. Ten minutes, he told himself, or at least fifteen, would wear out the patience of the jokester. Then the rope would come down and he could climb up and go back to the house. Depending upon who the joker might turn out to be, he'd take him home and pour a drink for him and the two of them, sitting in the kitchen, would have a laugh together.

He found that he was hunching his shoulders against the wind, which seemed to have a sharper bite than when he first had noticed it. It was shifting from the west to north and that was no good.

Squatting on the ledge, he noticed that beads of moisture had gathered upon his jacket sleeve—not a result of rain, exactly, but of driven mist. If the temperature should drop a bit the weather might turn nasty.

He waited, huddled, listening for a sound—a scuffling of feet through leaves, the snap of broken brush—that would betray the presence of someone on the clifftop. But there was no sound at all. The day was muffled. Even the branches of the trees beneath his perch, swaying in the wind, swayed without their usual creaks and groans.

Fifteen minutes must have passed and there had been no sound from atop the cliff. The wind had increased somewhat and when he twisted his head to one side to try to look up he could feel the soft slash of the driving mist against his cheek.

He could keep silent no longer in hope of waiting out the jokester. He sensed, in a sudden surge of panic, that time was running out on him.

"Hey, up there—" he shouted.

He waited and there was no response.

He shouted again, more loudly this time.

Ordinarily the cliff across the hollow should have bounced back echoes. But now there were no echoes and his shout seemed dampened, as if this wild place had erected some sort of fence to hem him in.

He shouted again and the misty world took his voice and swallowed it.

A hissing sound started. Daniels saw it was caused by tiny pellets of ice streaming through the branches of the trees. From one breath to another the driven mist had turned to ice.

He walked back and forth on the ledge in front of the cave, twenty feet at most, looking for some way of escape. The ledge went out into space and then sheered off. The slanting projection of rock came down from above. He was neatly trapped.

He moved back into the cave and hunkered down. Here he was protected from the wind and he felt, even through his rising panic, a certain sense of snugness. The cave was not yet cold. But the temperature must be dropping and dropping rather swiftly or the mist would not have turned to ice. He wore a light jacket and could not make a fire. He did not smoke and never carried matches.

For the first time he faced the real seriousness of his position. It might be days before anyone noticed he was missing. He had few visitors and no one ever paid too much attention to him. Even if someone should find that he was missing and a hunt for him was launched, what were the chances that he would be found? Who would think to look in this hidden cave? How long, he wondered, could a man survive in cold and hunger?

If he could not get out of here, and soon, what about his livestock? The cows would be heading home from pasture, seeking shelter from the storm, and there would be no one there to let them into the barn. If they were not milked for a day or two they would be tormented by swollen udders. The hogs and chickens would go unfed. A man, he thought, had no right to take the kind of chance he had taken when so many living creatures were dependent on him.

He crawled farther back into the cave and stretched himself out on his belly, wedging himself into its deepest recess, an ear laid against the stone.

The creature still was there—of course it still was there. It was trapped even more securely than himself, held down by, perhaps, several hundred feet of solid rock, which had been built up most deliberately through many millions of years.

It was remembering again. In its mind was another place and, while part of that flow of memory was blurred and wavy, the rest was starkly clear. A great dark plain of rock, one great slab of rock, ran to a far horizon and above that far horizon a reddish sun came up and limned against the great red ball of rising sun was a hinted structure—an irregularity of the horizon that suggested a place. A castle, perhaps, or a city or a great cliff dwelling—it was hard to make out what it was or to be absolutely sure that it was anything at all.

Home? Was that black expanse of rock the spaceport of the old home planet? Or might it be only a place the creature had visited before it had come to Earth? A place so fantastic, perhaps, that it lingered in the mind.

Other things mixed into the memory, sensory symbols that might have applied to personalities, life forms, smells, tastes.

Although he could be wrong, Daniels knew, in supplying this entrapped creature with human sensory perceptions, these human sensory perceptions were the only ones he knew about.

And now, listening in on the memory of that flat black expanse of rock and imagining the rising sun which outlined the structure of the far horizon, Daniels did something he had never tried to do before. He tried to talk back to the buried creature, tried to let it know that someone was listening and had heard, that it was not as lonely and as isolated as it might have thought it was.

He did not talk with his tongue—that would have been a senseless thing to do. Sound could never carry through those many feet of stone. He talked with his mind instead.

"Hello, down there", he said. "This is a friend of yours. I've been listening to you for a long, long time and I hope that you can hear me. If you can, let us talk together. Let me try to make you understand about myself and the world I live in and you tell me about yourself and the kind of world you lived in and how you came to be where you are and if there is anything I can do for you, any help that I can give."

He said that much and no more. Having spoken, he continued lying with his ear against the hard cave floor, listening to find out if the creature might have heard him. But the creature apparently had not heard or, having heard, ignored him as something not worth its attention. It went on thinking about the place where the dull red sun was rising above the horizon.

It had been foolish, and perhaps presumptuous, he knew, for him to have tried to speak to it. He had never tried before; he had simply listened. And he had never tried, either, to speak to those others who talked among the stars—again he'd simply listened.

What new dimension had been added to himself, he wondered, that would have permitted him to try to communicate with the creature? Had the possibility that he was about to die moved him?

The creature in the stone might not be subject to death—it might be immortal.

He crawled out of the far recess of the cave and crept out to where he had room to hunker down.

The storm had worsened. The ice now was mixed with snow and the temperature had fallen. The ledge in front of the cave was filmed with slippery ice. If a man tried to walk it he'd go plunging down the cliff face to his death.

The wind was blowing harder. The branches of the trees were waving and a storm of leaves was banking down the hillside, flying with the ice and snow.

From where he squatted he could see the topmost branches of the clump of birches which grew atop the mound just beyond where the cave tree had stood. And these branches, it seemed to him, were waving about far more violently than could be accounted for by wind. They were lashing wildly from one side to the other and even as he watched they seemed to rise higher in the air, as if the trees, in some great agony, were raising their branches far above their heads in a plea for mercy.

Daniels crept forward on his hands and knees and thrust his head out to see down to the base of the cliff.

Not only the topmost branches of the clump of birches were swaying but the entire clump seemed to be in motion, thrashing about as if some unseen hand were attempting to wrench it from the soil. But even as he thought this, he saw that the ground itself was in agitation, heaving up and out. It looked exactly as if someone had taken a time-lapse movie of the development of a frost boil with the film being run at a normal speed. The ground was heaving up and the clump was heaving with it. A shower of gravel and other debris was flowing down the slope, loosened by the heaving of the ground. A boulder broke away and crashed down the hill, crushing brush and shrubs and leaving hideous scars.

Daniels watched in horrified fascination.

Was he witnessing, he wondered, some wonderfully speeded-up geological process? He tried to pinpoint exactly what kind of process it might be. He knew of one that seemed to fit. The mound kept on heaving upward, splintering outward from its center. A great flood of loose debris was now pouring down the slope, leaving a path of brown in the whiteness of the fallen snow. The clump of birch tipped over and went skidding down the slope and out of the place where it had stood a shape emerged.

Not a solid shape, but a hazy one that looked as if someone had scraped some stardust from the sky and molded it into a ragged, shifting form that did not set into any definite pattern, that kept shifting and changing, although it did not entirely lose all resemblance to the shape in which it might originally have been molded. It looked as a loose conglomeration of atoms might look if atoms could be seen. It sparkled softly in the grayness of the day and despite its seeming insubstantiality it apparently had some strength—for it continued to push itself from the shattered mound until finally it stood free of it.

Having freed itself, it drifted up toward the ledge.

Strangely, Daniels felt no fear, only a vast curiosity. He tried to make out what the drifting shape was but he could not be sure.

As it reached the ledge and moved slightly above it he drew back to crouch within the cave. The shape drifted in a couple of feet or so and perched on the ledge—either perched upon it or floated just above it.

"You spoke", the sparkling shape said to Daniels.

It was not a question, nor a statement either, really, and it was not really speaking. It sounded exactly like the talk Daniels had heard when he'd listened to the stars.

"You spoke to it", said the shape, "as if you were a friend" (although the word was not friend but something else entirely, something warm and friendly). "You offered help to it. Is there help that you can give?"

That question at least was clear enough.

"I don't know," said Daniels. "Not right now, there isn't. But in a hundred years from now, perhaps—are you hearing me? Do you know what I am saying?"

"You say there can be help", the creature said, "but only after time. Please, what is that time?"

"A hundred years," said Daniels. "When the planet goes around the star one hundred times."

"One hundred?" asked the creature.

Daniels held up the fingers of both hands. "Can you see my fingers? The appendages on the tips of my arms?"

"See?" the creature asked.

"Sense them. Count them."

"Yes, I can count them."

"They number ten," said Daniels. "Ten times that many of them would be a hundred."

"It is no great span of time", the creature said. "What kind of help by then?"

"You know genetics? How a creature comes into being, how it knows what kind of thing it is to become, how it grows, how it knows how to grow and what to become. The amino acids that make up the ribonucleic acids and provide the key to the kind of cells it grows and what their functions are."

"I do not know your terms", the creature said, "but I understand. So you know of this? You are not, then, a brute wild creature, like the other life that simply stands and the others that burrow in the ground and climb the standing life forms and run along the ground."

It did not come out like this, of course. The words were there—or meanings that had the feel of words—but there were pictures as well of trees, of burrowing mice, of squirrels, of rabbits, of the lurching woodchuck and the running fox.

"Not I," said Daniels, "but others of my kind. I know but little of it. There are others who spend all their time in the study of it."

The other perched on the ledge and said nothing more. Beyond it the trees whipped in the wind and the snow came whirling down, Daniels huddled back from the ledge, shivered in the cold and wondered if this thing upon the ledge could be hallucination.

But as he thought it, the thing began to talk again, although this time it did not seem to be talking to him. It talked, rather, as the creature in the stone had talked, remembering. It communicated, perhaps, something he was not meant to know, but Daniels had no way of keeping from knowing. Sentience flowed from the creature and impacted on his mind, filling all his mind, barring all else, so that it seemed as if it were he and not this other who was remembering.

5

First there was space—endless, limitless space, so far from everything, so brutal, so frigid, so uncaring that it numbed the mind, not so much from fear or loneliness as from the realization that in this eternity of space the thing that was himself was dwarfed to an insignificance no yardstick could measure. So far from home, so lost, so directionless—and yet not entirely directionless, for there was a trace, a scent, a spoor, a knowing that could not be expressed or understood or even guessed at in the framework of humanity; a trace, a scent, a spoor that showed the way, no matter how dimly or how hopelessly, that something else had taken at some other time. And a mindless determination, an unflagging devotion, a primal urgency that drove him on that faint, dim trail, to follow where it might lead, even to the end of time or space, or the both of them together, never to fail or quit or falter until the trail had finally reached an end or had been wiped out by whatever winds might blow through empty space.

There was something here. Daniels told himself, that, for all its alienness, still was familiar, a factor that should lend itself to translation into human terms and thus establish some sort of link between this remembering alien mind and his human mind.

The emptiness and the silence, the cold uncaring went on and on and on and there seemed no end to it. But he came to understand there had to be an end to it and that the end was here, in these tangled hills above the ancient river. And after the almost endless time of darkness and uncaring, another almost endless time of waiting, of having reached the end, of having gone as far as one might go and then settling down to wait with an ageless patience that never would grow weary.

"You spoke of help", the creature said to him. "Why help? You do not know this other. Why should you want to help?"

"It is alive," said Daniels. "It's alive and I'm alive and is that not enough?"

"I do not know", the creature said.

"I think it is," said Daniels.

"And how could you help?"

"I've told you about this business of genetics. I don't know if I can explain—"

"I have the terms from your mind", the creature said. "The genetic code."

"Would this other one, the one beneath the stone, the one you guard—"

"Not guard", the creature said. "The one I wait for."

"You will wait for long."

"I am equipped for waiting. I have waited long. I can wait much longer."

"Someday," Daniels said, "the stone will erode away. But you need not wait that long. Does this other creature know its genetic code?"

"It knows", the creature said. "It knows far more than I."

"But all of it," insisted Daniels. "Down to the last linkage, the final ingredient, the sequences of all the billions of—"

"It knows", the creature said. "The first requisite of all life is to understand itself."

"And it could—it would—be willing to give us that information, to supply us its genetic code?"

"You are presumptuous", said the sparkling creature (although the word was harder than presumptuous). "That is information no thing gives another. It is indecent and obscene" (here again the words were not exactly indecent and obscene). "It involves the giving of one's self into another's hands. It is an ultimate and purposeless surrender."

"Not surrender," Daniels said. "A way of escaping from its imprisonment. In time, in the hundred years of which I told you, the people of my race could take that genetic code and construct another creature exactly like the first. Duplicate it with exact preciseness."

"But it still would be in stone."

"Only one of it. The original one. That original could wait for the erosion of the rock. But the other one, its duplicate, could take up life again."

And what, Daniels wondered, if the creature in the stone did not wish for rescue? What if it had deliberately placed itself beneath the stone? What if it simply sought protection and sanctuary? Perhaps, if it wished, the creature could get out of where it was as easily as this other one—or this other thing—had risen from the mound.

"No, it cannot", said the creature squatting on the ledge. "I was careless. I went to sleep while waiting and I slept too long."

And that would have been a long sleep, Daniels told himself. A sleep so long that dribbling soil had mounded over it, that fallen boulders, cracked off the cliff by frost, had been buried in the soil and that a clump of birch had sprouted and grown into trees thirty feet high. There was a difference here in time rate that he could not comprehend.

But some of the rest, he told himself, he had sensed—the devoted loyalty and the mindless patience of the creature that tracked another far among the stars. He knew he was right, for the mind of that other thing, that devoted star-dog perched upon the ledge, came into him and fastened on his mind and for a moment the two of them, the two minds, for all their differences, merged into a single mind in a gesture of fellowship and basic understanding, as if for the first time in what must have been millions of years this baying hound from outer space had found a creature that could understand its duty and its purpose.

"We could try to dig it out," said Daniels. "I had thought of that, of course, but I was afraid that it would be injured. And it would be hard to convince anyone—"

"No", said the creature, "digging would not do. There is much you do not understand. But this other proposal that you have, that has great merit. You say you do not have the knowledge of genetics to take this action now. Have you talked to others of your kind?"

"I talked to one," said Daniels, "and he would not listen. He thought I was mad. But he was not, after all, the man I should have spoken to. In time I could talk with others but not right now. No matter how much I might want to—I can't. For they would laugh at me and I could not stand their laughter. But in a hundred years or somewhat less I could—"

"But you will not exist a hundred years", said the faithful dog. "You are a short-lived species. Which might explain your rapid rise. All life here is short-lived and that gives evolution a chance to build intelligence. When I first came here I found but mindless entities."

"You are right," said Daniels. "I can live no hundred years. Even from the very start, I could not live a hundred years, and better than half of my life is gone. Perhaps much more than half of it. For unless I can get out of this cave I will be dead in days."

"Reach out", said the sparkling one. "Reach out and touch me, being."

Slowly Daniels reached out. His hand went through the sparkle and the shine and he had no sense of matter—it was as if he'd moved his hand through nothing but air.

"You see", the creature said, "I cannot help you. There is no way for our energies to interact. I am sorry, friend." (it was not friend, exactly, but it was good enough, and it might have been, Daniels thought, a great deal more than friend.)

"I am sorry, too," said Daniels. "I would like to live."

Silence fell between them, the soft and brooding silence of a snow-laden afternoon with nothing but the trees and the rock and the hidden little life to share the silence with them.

It had been for nothing, then, Daniels told himself, this meeting with a creature from another world. Unless he could somehow get off this ledge there was nothing he could do. Although why he should so concern himself with the rescue of the creature in the stone he could not understand. Surely whether he himself lived or died should be of more importance to him than that his death would foreclose any chance of help to the buried alien.

"But it may not be for nothing," he told the sparkling creature. "Now that you know—"

"My knowing", said the creature, "will have no effect. There are others from the stars who would have the knowledge—but even if I could contact them they would pay no attention to me. My position is too lowly to converse with the greater ones. My only hope would be people of your kind and, if I'm not mistaken, only with yourself. For I catch the edge of thought that you are the only one who really understands. There is no other of your race who could even be aware of me."

Daniels nodded. It was entirely true. No other human existed whose brain had been jumbled so fortunately as to have acquired the abilities he held. He was the only hope for the creature in the stone and even such hope as he represented might be very slight, for before it could be made effective he must find someone who would listen and believe. And that belief must reach across the years to a time when genetic engineering was considerably advanced beyond its present state.

"If you could manage to survive the present this", said the hound from outer space, "I might bring to bear certain energies and techniques—sufficiently for the project to be carried through. But, as you must realize, I cannot supply the means to survive this crisis."

"Someone may come along," said Daniels. "They might hear me if I yelled every now and then."

He began yelling every now and then and received no answer. His yells were muffled by the storm and it was unlikely, he knew, that there would be men abroad at a time like this. They'd be safe beside their fires.

The sparkling creature still perched upon the ledge when Daniels slumped back to rest. The other made an indefinite sort of shape that seemed much like a lopsided Christmas tree standing in the snow.

Daniels told himself not to go to sleep. He must close his eyes only for a moment, then snap them open—he must not let them stay shut for then sleep would come upon him. He should beat his arms across his chest for warmth—but his arms were heavy and did not want to work.

He felt himself sliding prone to the cave floor and fought to drive himself erect. But his will to fight was thin and the rock was comfortable. So comfortable, he thought, that he could afford a moment's rest before forcing himself erect. And the funny thing about it was that the cave floor had turned to mud and water and the sun was shining and he seemed warm again.

He rose with a start and he saw that he was standing in a wide expanse of water no deeper than his ankles, black ooze underfoot.

There was no cave and no hill in which the cave might be. There was simply this vast sheet of water and behind him, less than thirty feet away, the muddy beach of a tiny island—a muddy, rocky island, with smears of sickly green clinging to the rocks.

He was in another time, he knew, but not in another place. Always when he slipped through time he came to rest on exactly the same spot upon the surface of the earth that he had occupied when the change had come.

And standing there he wondered once again, as he had many times before, what strange mechanism operated to shift him bodily in space so that when he was transported to a time other than his own he did not find himself buried under, say, twenty feet of rock or soil or suspended twenty feet above the surface.

But now, he knew, was no time to think or wonder. By a strange quirk of circumstance he was no longer in the cave and it made good sense to get away from where he was as swiftly as he could. For if he stayed standing where he was he might snap back unexpectedly to his present and find himself still huddled in the cave.

He turned clumsily about, his feet tangling in the muddy bottom, and lunged towards the shore. The going was hard but he made it and went up the slimy stretch of muddy beach until he could reach the tumbled rocks and could sit and rest.

His breathing was difficult. He gulped great lungfuls and the air had a strange taste to it, not like normal air.

He sat on the rock, gasping for breath, and gazed out across the sheet of water shining in the high, warm sun. Far out he caught sight of a long, humping swell and watched it coming in. When it reached the shore it washed up the muddy incline almost to his feet. Far out on the glassy surface another swell was forming.

The sheet of water was greater, he realized, than he had first imagined. This was also the first time in his wanderings through the past that he had ever come upon any large body of water. Always before he had emerged on dry land whose general contours had been recognizable—and there had always been the river flowing through the hills.

Here nothing was recognizable. This was a totally different place and there could be no question that he had been projected farther back in time than ever before—back to the day of some great epicontinental sea, back to a time, perhaps, when the atmosphere had far less oxygen than it would have in later eons. More than likely, he thought, he was very close in time to that boundary line where life for a creature such as he would be impossible. Here there apparently was sufficient oxygen, although a man must pump more air into his lungs than he would normally. Go back a few million years and the oxygen might fall to the point where it would be insufficient. Go a little farther back and find no free oxygen at all.

Watching the beach, he saw the little things skittering back and forth, seeking refuge in spume-whitened piles of drift or popping into tiny burrows. He put his hand down on the rock on which he sat and scrubbed gently at a patch of green. It slid off the rock and clung to his flesh, smearing his palm with a slimy gelatinous mess that felt disgusting and unclean.

Here, then, was the first of life to dwell upon the land—scarcely creatures as yet, still clinging to the edge of water, afraid and unequipped to wander too far from the side of that wet and gentle mother which, from the first beginning, had nurtured life. Even the plants still clung close to the sea, existing, perhaps, only upon rocky surfaces so close to the beach that occasional spray could reach them.

Daniels found that now he did not have to gasp quite so much for breath. Plowing through the mud up to the rock had been exhausting work in an oxygen-poor atmosphere. But sitting quietly on the rocks, he could get along all right.

Now that the blood had stopped pounding in his head he became aware of silence. He heard one sound only, the soft lapping of the water against the muddy beach, a lonely effect that seemed to emphasize rather than break the silence.

Never before in his life, he realized, had he heard so little sound. Back in the other worlds he had known there had been not one noise, but many, even on the quietest days. But here there was nothing to make a sound—no trees, no animals, no insects, no birds—just the water running to the far horizon and the bright sun in the sky.

For the first time in many months he knew again that sense of out-of-placeness, of not belonging, the feeling of being where he was not wanted and had no right to be, an intruder in a world that was out of bounds, not for him alone but for anything that was more complex or more sophisticated than the little skitterers on the beach.

He sat beneath the alien sun, surrounded by the alien water, watching the little things that in eons yet to come would give rise to such creatures as himself, and tried to feel some sort of kinship to the skitterers. But he could feel no kinship.

And suddenly in this place of one-sound-only there came a throbbing, faint but clear and presently louder, pressing down against the water, beating at the little island—a sound out of the sky.

Daniels leaped to his feet and looked up and the ship was there, plummeting down toward him. But not a ship of solid form, it seemed—rather a distorted thing, as if many planes of light (if there could be such things as planes of light) had been slapped together in a haphazard sort of way.

A throbbing came from it that set the atmosphere to howling and the planes of light kept changing shape or changing places, so that the ship, from one moment to the next, never looked the same.

It had been dropping fast to start with but now it was slowing down as it continued to fall, ponderously and with massive deliberation, straight toward the island.

Daniels found himself crouching, unable to jerk his eyes and senses away from this mass of light and thunder that came out of the sky.

The sea and mud and rock, even in the full light of the sun, were flickering with the flashing that came from the shifting of the planes of light. Watching it through eyes squinted against the flashes, Daniels saw that if the ship were to drop to the surface it would not drop upon the island, as he first had feared, but a hundred feet or so offshore.

Not more than fifty feet above the water the great ship stopped and hovered and a bright thing came from it. The object hit the water with a splash but did not go under, coming to rest upon the shallow, muddy bottom of the sea, with a bit less than half of it above the surface. It was a sphere, a bright and shiny globe against which the water lapped, and even with the thunder of the ship beating at his ears, Daniels imagined he could hear the water lapping at the sphere.

Then a voice spoke above this empty world, above the throbbing of the ship, the imagined lapping sound of water, a sad, judicial voice—although it could not have been a voice, for any voice would have been too puny to be heard. But the words were there and there was no doubt of what they said:

"Thus, according to the verdict and the sentence, you are here deported and abandoned upon this barren planet, where it is most devoutly hoped you will find the time and opportunity to contemplate your sins and especially the sin of" (and here were words and concepts Daniels could not understand, hearing them only as a blur of sound—but the sound of them, or something in the sound of them, was such as to turn his blood to ice and at the same time fill him with a disgust and a loathing such as he'd never known before). "It is regrettable, perhaps, that you are immune to death, for much as we might detest ourselves for doing it, it would be a kinder course to discontinue you and would serve better than this course to exact our purpose, which is to place you beyond all possibility of ever having contact with any sort of life again.. Here, beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse, on this uncharted planet, we can only hope that our purpose will be served. And we urge upon you such self-examination that if, by some remote chance, in some unguessed time, you should be freed through ignorance or malice, you shall find it within yourself so to conduct your existence as not to meet or merit such fate again. And now, according to our law, you may speak any final words you wish."

The voice ceased and after a while came another. And while the terminology was somewhat more involved than Daniels could grasp their idiom translated easily into human terms.

"Go screw yourself", it said.

The throbbing deepened and the ship began to move straight up into the sky. Daniels watched it until the thunder died and the ship itself was a fading twinkle in the blue.

He rose from his crouch and stood erect, trembling and weak. Groping behind him for the rock, he found it and sat down again.

Once again the only sound was the lapping of the water on the shore. He could not hear, as he had imagined that he could, the water against the shining sphere that lay a hundred feet offshore. The sun blazed down out of the sky and glinted on the sphere and Daniels found that once again he was gasping for his breath.

Without a doubt, out there in the shallow water, on the mudbank that sloped up to the island, lay the creature in the stone. And how then had it been possible for him to be transported across the hundreds of millions of years to this one microsecond of time that held the answer to all the questions he had asked about the intelligence beneath the limestone? It could not have been sheer coincidence, for this was coincidence of too large an order ever to come about. Had he somehow, subconsciously, gained more knowledge than he had been aware of from the twinkling creature that had perched upon the ledge? For a moment, he remembered, their minds had met and mingled—at that moment had there occurred a transmission of knowledge, unrecognized, buried in some corner of himself? Or was he witnessing the operation of some sort of psychic warning system set up to scare off any future intelligence that might be tempted to liberate this abandoned and marooned being? And what about the twinkling creature? Could some hidden, unguessed good exist in the thing imprisoned in the sphere—for it to have commanded the loyalty and devotion of the creature on the ledge beyond the slow erosion of geologic ages? The question raised another: What were good and evil? Who was there to judge?

The evidence of the twinkling creature was, of course, no evidence at all. No human being was so utterly depraved that he could not hope to find a dog to follow him and guard him even to the death.

More to wonder at was what had happened within his own jumbled brain that could send him so unerringly to the moment of a vital happening. What more would he find in it to astonish and confound him? How far along the path to ultimate understanding might it drive him? And what was the purpose of that driving?

He sat on the rock and gasped for breath. The sea lay flat and calm beneath the blazing sun, its only motion the long swells running in to break around the sphere and on the beach. The little skittering creatures ran along the mud and he rubbed his palm against his trouser leg, trying to brush off the green and slimy scum.

He could wade out, he thought, and have a closer look at the sphere lying in the mud. But it would be a long walk in such an atmosphere and he could not chance it—for he must be nowhere near the cave up in that distant future when he popped back to his present.

Once the excitement of knowing where he was, the sense of out-of-placeness, had worn off, this tiny mud-flat island was a boring place. There was nothing but the sky and sea and the muddy beach; there was nothing much to look at. It was a place, he thought, where nothing ever happened, or was about to happen once the ship had gone away and the great event had ended. Much was going on, of course, that in future ages would spell out to quite a lot—but it was mostly happening out of sight, down at the bottom of this shallow sea. The skittering things, he thought, and the slimy growth upon the rock were hardy, mindless pioneers of this distant day—awesome to look upon and think about but actually not too interesting.

He began drawing aimless patterns in the mud with the toe of one boot. He tried to make a tic-tac-toe layout but so much mud was clinging to his toe that it didn't quite come out.

And then, instead of drawing in the mud, he was scraping with his toe in fallen leaves, stiff with frozen sleet and snow.

The sun was gone and the scene was dark except for a glow from something in the woods just down the hill from him. Driving sheets of snow swirled into his face and he shivered. He pulled his jacket close about him and began to button it. A man, he thought, could catch his death of cold this way, shifting as quickly as he had shifted from a steaming mudbank to the whiplash chill of a northern blizzard.

The yellow glow still persisted on the slope below him and he could hear the sound of human voices. What was going on? He was fairly certain of where he was, a hundred feet or so above the place where the cliff began—there should be no one down there; there should not be a light.

He took a slow step down the hill, then hesitated. He ought not to be going down the hill—he should be heading straight for home. The cattle would be waiting at the barnyard gate, hunched against the storm, their coats covered with ice and snow, yearning for the warmth and shelter of the barn. The pigs would not have been fed, nor the chickens either. A man owed some consideration to his livestock.

But someone was down there, someone with a lantern, almost on the lip of the cliff. If the damn fools didn't watch out, they could slip and go plunging down into a hundred feet of space. Coon hunters more than likely, although this was not the kind of night to be out hunting coon. The coons would all be denned up.

But whoever they might be, he should go down and warn them.

He was halfway to the lantern, which appeared to be setting on the ground, when someone picked it up and held it high and Daniels saw and recognized the face of the man who held it.

Daniels hurried forward.

"Sheriff, what are you doing here?"

But he had the shamed feeling that he knew, that he should have known from the moment he had seen the light.

"Who is there?" the sheriff asked, wheeling swiftly and tilting the lantern so that its rays were thrown in Daniels" direction. "Daniels," he gasped. "Good God, man, where have you been?"

"Just walking around," said Daniels weakly. The answer, he knew, was no good at all—but how could he tell anyone that he had just returned from a trip through time?

"Damn it," the sheriff said, disgusted. "We've been hunting you. Ben Adams got scared when he dropped over to your place and you weren't there. He knows how you go walking around in the woods and he was afraid something had happened to you. So he phoned me, and he and his boys began looking for you. We were afraid you had fallen or had been hurt somehow. A man wouldn't last the night in a storm like this."

"Where is Ben now?" asked Daniels.

The sheriff gestured down the hill and Daniels saw that two men, probably Adams" sons, had a rope snubbed around a tree and that the rope extended down over the cliff.

"He's down on the rope," the sheriff said. "Having a look in the cave. He felt somehow you might be in the cave."

"He had good reason to—" Daniels started to say but he had barely begun to speak when the night was rent by a shriek of terror. The shrieking did not stop. It kept on and on. The sheriff thrust the lantern at Daniels and hurried forward.

No guts, Daniels thought. A man who could be vicious enough to set up another for death, to trap him in a cave—but who, when the chips were down, could not go through with it and had to phone the sheriff to provide a witness to his good intentions—a man like that lacked guts.

The shrieks had fallen to moaning. The sheriff hauled on the rope, helped by one of Adams" sons. A man's head and shoulders appeared above the cliff top and the sheriff reached out and hauled him to safety.

Ben Adams collapsed on the ground and never stopped his moaning. The sheriff jerked him to his feet.

"What's the matter, Ben?"

"There's something down there," Adams screamed. "There is something in the cave—"

"Something, damn it? What would it be? A cat? A panther?"

"I never seen it. I just knew that it was there. I felt it. It was crouched back inside the cave."

"How could anything be in there? Someone cut down the tree. How could anything get into the cave?"

"I don't know," howled Adams. "It might have been in there when the tree was cut. It might have been trapped in there."

One of the sons was holding Ben erect and the sheriff moved away. The other son was puffing in the rope and neatly coiling it.

"Another thing," the sheriff said, "how come you thought Daniels might be in that cave? If the tree was cut down he couldn't have used a rope the way you did, for there wasn't any rope. If he had used a rope it would still have been there. I don't know what's going on—damned if I do. You down messing in that cave and Daniels comes walking out of the woods. I wish someone would tell me."

Adams, who had been hobbling forward, saw Daniels for the first time and came to a sudden halt.

"Where did you come from?" he demanded. "Here we been wearing out our guts trying to hunt you down and then—"

"Oh, go on home," the sheriff said in a disgusted tone of voice. "There's a fishy smell to this. It's going to take me a little while to get it figured out."

Daniels reached out his hand to the son who had finished coiling the rope.

"I believe that's my rope," he said.

Without protest, taken by surprise, the boy handed it to him.

"We'll cut across the woods," said Ben. "Home's closer that way."

"Good night, men," the sheriff said.

Slowly the sheriff and Daniels climbed the hill.

"Daniels," said the sheriff, "you were never out walking in this storm. If you had been you'd have had a whole lot more snow on you than shows. You look like you just stepped from a house."

"Maybe I wasn't exactly walking around," Daniels said.

"Would you mind telling me where you were? I don't mind doing my duty as I see it but I don't relish being made to look a fool while I'm doing it."

"Sheriff, I can't tell you. I'm sorry. I simply cannot tell you."

"All right, then. What about the rope?"

"It's my rope," said Daniels. "I lost it this afternoon."

"And I suppose you can't tell me about that, either."

"No, I guess I can't."

"You know," the sheriff said, "I've had a lot of trouble with Ben Adams through the years. I'd hate to think I was going to have trouble with you, too."

They climbed the hill and walked up to the house. The sheriff's car was parked out on the road.

"Would you come in?" asked Daniels. "I could find a drink."

The sheriff shook his head. "Some other time," he said. "Maybe soon. You figure there was something in that cave? Or was it just Ben's imagination? He's a flighty sort of critter."

"Maybe there wasn't anything," said Daniels. "but if Ben thought there was, what difference does it make? Thinking it might be just as real as if there were something there. All of us, sheriff, live with things walking by our sides no one else can see."

The sheriff shot a quick glance at him. "Daniels, what's with you?" he asked. "What is walking by your side or sniffing at your heels? Why did you bury yourself out here in this Godforsaken place? What is going on?"

He didn't wait for an answer. He got into his car, started it and headed down the road.

Daniels stood in the storm and watched the glowing taillights vanish in the murk of flying snow. He shook his head in bewilderment. The sheriff had asked a question and then had not waited for the answer. Perhaps because it was a question to which he did not want an answer.

Daniels turned and went up the snowy path to the house. He'd like some coffee and a bite to eat—but first he had to do the chores. He had to milk the cows and feed the pigs. The chickens must wait till morning—it was too late to feed the chickens. The cows would be waiting at the barn door.

They had waited for a long time and it was not right to make them wait.

He opened the door and stepped into the kitchen.

Someone was waiting for him. It sat on the table or floated so close above it that it seemed to be sitting. The fire in the stove had gone out and the room was dark but the creature sparkled.

"You saw?" the creature asked.

"Yes," said Daniels. "I saw and heard. I don't know what to do. What is right or wrong? Who knows what's right or wrong?"

"Not you", the creature said. "Not I. I can only wait. I can only keep the faith."

Perhaps among the stars, thought Daniels, might be those who did know. Perhaps by listening to the stars, perhaps by trying to break in on their conversations and by asking questions, he might get an answer. Certainly there must be some universal ethics. A list, perhaps, of Universal Commandments. Maybe not ten of them. Maybe only two or three—but any number might be enough.

"I can't stay and talk," he said. "I have animals to take care of. Could you stick around? Later we can talk."

He fumbled for the lantern on the bench against the wall, found the matches on the shelf. He lit the lantern and its feeble flame made a puddle of light in the darkness of the room.

"You have others to take care of?" asked the creature. "Others not quite like yourself? Others, trusting you, without your intelligence?"

"I guess you could say it that way," Daniels said, "I've never heard it put quite that way before."

"Could I go along with you?" the creature asked, "it occurs to me, just now, that in many ways we are very much alike."

"Very much—" But with the sentence hanging in the air, Daniels stopped.

Not a hound, he told himself. Not the faithful dog. But the shepherd. Could that be it? Not the master but the long-lost lamb?

He reached out a hand towards the creature in a swift gesture of understanding, then pulled it back, remembering it was nothing he could touch.

He lifted the lantern and turned toward the door.

"Come along," he said.

Together the two of them went through the storm toward the barn and the waiting cows.

The End

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Content

Clifford D. Simak
All Flesh Is Grass

All Flesh is Grass

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All the Traps of Earth

The Autumn Land

Cosmic Engineers

CHAPTER One

CHAPTER Two

CHAPTER Three

CHAPTER Four

CHAPTER Five

CHAPTER Six

CHAPTER Seven

CHAPTER Eight

CHAPTER Nine

CHAPTER Ten

CHAPTER Eleven

CHAPTER Twelve

CHAPTER Thirteen

CHAPTER Fourteen

CHAPTER Fifteen

CHAPTER Sixteen

CHAPTER Seventeen

CHAPTER Eighteen

Drop dead

The Fellowship of the Talisman

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Galactic Chest

The Golden Bugs

Leg Forst

Madness from Mars

Over the River and through the Woods

Shotgun Cure

Small Deer

So Bright the Vision

Sunspot Purge

The Thing in the Stone

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