Donald E. Westlake

Collected Stories

About Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake was born on July 12, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York.

A former U.S. Air Force pilot and one time actor, Donald Westlake has become the writer most associated with tales of organized crime. Indeed, in story after story, he has demonstrated his particular belief that crime is actually not very different from any other type of business enterprise-and the intelligent criminal is just, one more example of ‘Organization Man’.

Westlake wrote constantly in his teens, and after 200 rejections, his first short story sale was in 1954. Sporadic short story sales followed over the next few years, while Westlake attended Champlain College of Plattsburgh, New York (now defunct) and Harpur College in Binghamton, New York.

In 1959, Donald Westlake moved to New York City, initially to work for a literary agency while writing on the side. Buy by 1960, he was writing full-time. His first novel under his own name, The Mercenaries, was published in 1960; over the next 48 years, Westlake published a variety of novels and short stories under his own name and over a dozen pseudonyms.

He was married three times, the final time to Abigail Westlake (also known as Abby Adams Westlake and Abby Adams), a writer of nonfiction (her two published books are An Uncommon Scold and The Gardener’s Gripe Book). The couple moved out of New York City to Ancram in upstate New York in 1990. Abby Westlake is a well-regarded gardener, and the Westlake garden has frequently been opened for public viewing in the summer.

In Westlake’s early novels like Killing Time (1961), about the running of a corrupt upstate New York town, he dealt with organized crime from the inside with great objectivity; but over the years elements of humor and the absurd have crept into his work in the shape of bungled robberies and inept confidence tricks.

In 1962, by way of contrast, he adopted the pen name Richard Stark and started a series of novels about Parker, a cold-blooded professional thief, who was later transferred to the screen in Point Blank (1967).

Not content with this, Westlake invented a second major character, Mitch Tobin, a guilt-ridden former New York cop turned private eye, whose adventures appear under the name Tucker Coe.

More recently still, he has begun writing a number of capers about a group of inept thieves led by criminal manqué John Archibald Dortmunder.

Donald Westlake was known for the great ingenuity of his plots and the audacity of his gimmicks. His writing and dialogue are lively. His main characters are fully rounded, believable, and clever. Westlake’s most famous characters include the hard-boiled criminal Parker (appearing in fiction under the Richard Stark pseudonym) and Parker’s comic flip-side John Dortmunder. Mr. Westlake was quoted as saying that he originally intended what became The Hot Rock to be a straightforward Parker novel, but “It kept turning funny,” and thus became the first John Dortmunder novel.

Most of Donald Westlake’s novels are set in New York City. In each of the Dortmunder novels, there is typically a detailed foray somewhere through the city. He wrote just two non-fiction books: Under an English Heaven, regarding the unlikely 1967 Anguillan “revolution”, and a biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

Westlake was an occasional contributor to science fiction fanzines such as Xero; and used Xero as a venue for a harsh announcement that he was leaving the science fiction field.

For this remarkable display of virtuosity, Donald Westlake has won numerous awards, including three Edgars and a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, as well as an Oscar nomination for his screenplay of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.

Donald E. Westlake died of a heart attack on Wednesday, December 31, 2008. He was 75.

Pseudonyms

In addition to writing consistently under his own name, Donald Westlake published under more than a dozen pseudonyms:

[listed in order they debuted]

Richard Stark

Grace Selacious

Alan Marshall/Alan Marsh

James Blue

Ben Christopher

John Dexter

Andrew Shaw

Edwin West

John B. Allan

Don Holliday

Curt Clark

Barbara Wilson

Tucker Coe

P.N. Castor

Timothy J. Culver

J. Morgan Cunningham

Samuel Holt

Judson Jack Carmichael

Richard Stark: Westlake’s best-known continuing pseudonym was that of Richard Stark. Stark debuted in 1959, with a story in Mystery Digest. Four other Stark short stories followed through 1961, including “The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution”, later the title story in Westlake’s first short-story collection. Then, from 1962 to 1974, sixteen novels about the relentless and remorseless professional thief Parker and his accomplices (including larcenous actor Alan Grofield) appeared and were credited to Richard Stark. “Stark” was then inactive until 1997, when Westlake once again began writing and publishing Parker novels under Stark’s name. The University of Chicago began republishing the Richard Stark novels in 2008. When Stephen King wrote the novel The Dark Half in 1989, he named the central villain George Stark as an homage to Westlake.

Grace Selacious: One-shot pseudonym, used as a third name for the short story “Martin’s Place” (Escapade, 1958). The first part of the name (“Grace”) believed to be the nickname friends called his maternal grandmother.

Alan Marshall (or Alan Marsh): Westlake acknowledged writing as many as 28 paperback soft-porn titles from 1959–64 under these names; titles include All My Lovers, Man Hungry, All About Annette, Sally, Virgin’s Summer, Call Me Sinner, Off Limits, and three featuring the character of Phil Crawford: Apprentice Virgin, All the Girls Were Willing, and Sin Prowl. Westlake was not the only author to work under Marshall’s name, claiming that: “The publishers would either pay more for the names they already knew or would only buy from (those) names… so it became common practice for several of us to loan our names to friends… Before… the end of 1961… six other people, friends of mine, published books as Alan Marshall, with my permission but without the publishers’ knowledge.” Two novels published in 1960 were co-authored by Westlake and Lawrence Block (who used the pen-name “Sheldon Lord”) and were credited to “Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall”: A Girl Called Honey, dedicated to Westlake and Block, and So Willing, dedicated to “Nedra and Loretta,” who were (at that time) Westlake and Block’s wives.

James Blue: One-shot pseudonym, used as a third name circa 1959 when both Westlake and Stark already had stories in a magazine issue. In actuality, the name of Westlake’s cat.

Ben Christopher: One-shot pseudonym for a 1960 story in 77 Sunset Strip magazine, based on the characters from the TV show.

John Dexter: A house pseudonym used by Nightstand Books for the work of numerous authors. The very first novel credited to John Dexter is a soft-core work by Westlake called No Longer A Virgin (1960)

Andrew Shaw: Pseudonym used by Westlake and Lawrence Block for their 1961 collaborative soft-core novel Sin Hellcat. Like John Dexter (above), “Andrew Shaw” was a house pseudonym used by a wide variety of authors.

Edwin West: Brother and Sister, Campus Doll, Young and Innocent, all 1961; Strange Affair, 1962; Campus Lovers, 1963, one 1966 short story.

John B. Allan: Elizabeth Taylor: A Fascinating Story of America’s Most Talented Actress and the World’s Most Beautiful Woman, 1961, biography.

Don Holliday: Pseudonym used by Westlake for two collaborative soft-core novels (with various authors, including Hal Dresner and Lawrence Block) in 1963/64.

Curt Clark: Debuted in 1964 with the short story “Nackles”. Novel: Anarchaos, 1967, science fiction.

Barbara Wilson: One co-authored novel with Laurence Janifer (The Pleasures We Know, 1964); Janifer also used this name for at least one solo novel with no involvement from Westlake.

Tucker Coe: 5 mystery novels featuring the character of Mitch Tobin: Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death, 1966; Murder Among Children, 1967; Wax Apple and A Jade in Aries, both 1970; Don’t Lie to Me, 1972.

P.N. Castor: Pseudonym used for one 1966 short story co-authored with Dave Foley.

Timothy J. Culver: Ex Officio, 1970, thriller.

J. Morgan Cunningham: Comfort Station, 1971, humor. Cover features the blurb, “I wish I had written this book! — Donald E. Westlake.”

Samuel Holt: 4 mystery novels featuring the character of Sam Holt, 1986–1989: One of Us is Wrong and I Know a Trick Worth Two of That, both 1986; What I Tell You Three Times is False, 1987; The Fourth Dimension is Death, 1989. Westlake used the Holt pseudonym as an experiment to see if he could succeed as an author under a new name; he was dismayed when his publisher revealed the true identity of “Holt” simultaneously with the release of the first book. Westlake subsequently delivered all four books he had contracted for as Holt, but abandoned plans to write at least two further books in the series.

Judson Jack Carmichael: The Scared Stiff, 2002, mystery; U.K. editions dropped the pseudonym.

Short Fiction Bibliography

Chronological

1951

Veronica, The Vincentian, May 1951

My Father’s Chair, The Vincentian, May 1951

And You (poem), The Vincentian, May 1951

1954

Or Give Me Death, Universe Science Fiction, November 1954

The Appointment, Fantastic, December 1954

1957

The Blonde Lieutenant, Rogue, July 1957

1958

Arrest, Manhunt, January 1958

Fluorocarbons Are Here to Stay! Science Fiction Stories, March 1958

Everybody Killed Sylvia, Mystery Digest, May 1958

Matin’s Place, Escapade, August 1958

The Devil’s Printer, Mystery Digest, September 1958

Sinner or Saint, Mystery Digest, December 1958

1959

Rumble Bait, Off Beat Detective Stories, February 1959

Decoy for Murder, Mystery Digest March, 1959

Death for Sale, Mystery Digest, April 1959

And Then He Went Away, Future Science Fiction, June 1959

Journey to Death, Mystery Digest, June 1959

One on a Desert Island, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1959

The Terror Queen! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, July 1959

Terror’s Sultry Sister! Web Detective Stories, July 1959

Birth of a Monster, Super Science Fiction, August 1959

Death Wears a Bikini! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, September 1959

The Ledge Bit, Mystery Digest, September/October 1959

Knife Fighter, Guilty Detective Story Magazine, November 1959

Scramble My Brains! Off Beat Detective Stories, November 1959

The Last Ghost, Mystery Digest, November-December 1959

The Best-Friend Murder, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1959

1960

Requiem for a Tramp! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, January 1960

An Empty Threat, Manhunt, February 1960

Travelers Far and Wee, Science Fiction Stories, May 1960

Fresh Out of Prison (You Put on Some Weight), Guilty Detective Story Magazine, June 1960

Friday Night, Tightrope!, June 1960

Elephant Blues, 77 Sunset Strip, July 1960

Anatomy of an Anatomy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960

Cat Killers, Shock: The Magazine of Terrifying Tales, September 1960

The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960

Come Back, Come Back, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1960

Good Night! Good Night! Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1960

Man of Action, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1960

1961

Break-Out, Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #3, 1961

A Time to Die, The Saint Mystery Magazine, [UK] March 1961

Just a Little Impractical Joke, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1961

Never Shake a Family Tree, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1961

The Risk Profession, Amazing Stories, March 1961

Call Him Nemesis, If, September 1961

They Also Serve, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, September 1961

The Feel of the Trigger, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1961

The Spy in the Elevator, Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1961

Meteor Strike! Amazing Stories, November 1961

1962

A Toast to the Damned! Off Beat Detective Stories, May 1962

Look Before You Leap, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May 1962

Lock Your Door, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1962

The Earthman’s Burden, Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1962

The Sound of Murder, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1962

1963

The Question, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1963

1964

Nackles, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1964

Just the Lady We’re Looking For, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1964

1965

The Death of a Bum, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1965

The Letter, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1965

Stage Fright, The Saint Mystery Magazine, September 1965

The Method, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1965

Paid in Full, Swank, November 1965

The Spoils System, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965

1966

Just One of Those Days, This Week, January 9, 1966

The Mother of Invention Is Worth a Pound of Cure, Dapper, February 1966

Teamwork, Shell Scott Mystery Magazine, February 1966

The Perils of the Sky Rangers, Cavalier, May 1966

Domestic Intrigue, The Saint Magazine, July 1966

Devilishly, Signature, August 1966

Cool O’Toole, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1966

The Sincerest of Flattery, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1966

1967

The Sweetest Man in the World, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1967

God Save the Mark, Cosmopolitan, May 1967

Sniff, The Saint Magazine, May 1967

1968

It, Playboy, September 1968

All Men Are Bea…, Argosy, (UK) December 1968

1970

The Winner, Nova 1, 1970

1975

The Ultimate Caper, New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1975

1977

A Travesty, Enough, 1977

Ordo, Enough, 1977

In at the Death, The Thirteenth Ghost Book, 1977

1978

The Girl of My Dreams, The Midnight Ghost Book, 1978

1979

The Mulligan Stew, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1979

1981

Ask a Silly Question, Playboy, February 1981

1982

Interstellar Pigeon, Playboy, May 1982

Re Porter, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1982

Dream a Dream, Cosmopolitan, August 1982

1983

Heaven Help Us, Playboy, July 1983

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Playboy, December 1983

1984

Hydra, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1984

After I’m Gone, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1984

The World’s a Stage, Playboy, July 1984

A Good Story, Playboy, October 1984

1985

Breathe Deep, Playboy, July 1985

Hitch Your Spaceship to a Star, Playboy, December 1985

1986

Horse Laugh, Playboy, June 1986

1989

Here’s Looking at You, Playboy, May 1989

Too Many Crooks, Playboy, August 1989

1990

The Dortmunder Workout, or Criminal Exercise, The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1990

A Midsummer Daydream, Playboy, May 1990

1992

Love in the Lean Years, Playboy, February 1992

Party Animal, Playboy, December 1992

1993

Give Till it Hurts, The Mysterious Bookshop, 1993

Last-Minute Shopping, New York Times Book Review, 1993

1994

Jumble Sale, The Armchair Detective, Summer 1994

1995

Skeeks, Playboy, June 1995

1996

The Burglar and the Whatsit, Playboy, December 1996

1997

Take It Away, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer/Fall 1997

1999

Now What? Playboy, December 1999

2000

Art & Craft, Playboy, August 2000

2001

Come Again? The Mysterious Press, 2001

Spectacles, Playboy, May 2001

2004

Fugue For Felons, Thieves Dozen, 2004

2005

Walking Around Money, Transgressions, 2005

Short Fiction Bibliography

Alphabetical

A

A Good Story, Playboy, October 1984

A Midsummer Daydream, Playboy, May 1990

A Time to Die, The Saint Mystery Magazine, [UK] March 1961

A Toast to the Damned! Off Beat Detective Stories, May 1962

A Travesty, Enough, 1977

After I’m Gone, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, June 1984

All Men Are Bea…, Argosy, (UK) December 1968

An Empty Threat, Manhunt, February 1960

Anatomy of an Anatomy, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960

And Then He Went Away, Future Science Fiction, June 1959

And You (poem), The Vincentian, May 1951

The Appointment, Fantastic, December 1954

Arrest, Manhunt, January 1958

Art & Craft, Playboy, August 2000

Ask a Silly Question, Playboy, February 1981

B

The Best-Friend Murder, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1959

Birth of a Monster, Super Science Fiction, August 1959

The Blonde Lieutenant, Rogue, July 1957

Break-Out, Ed McBain’s Mystery Book #3, 1961

Breathe Deep, Playboy, July 1985

The Burglar and the Whatsit, Playboy, December 1996

C

Call Him Nemesis, If, September 1961

Cat Killers, Shock: The Magazine of Terrifying Tales, September 1960

Come Again? The Mysterious Press, 2001

Come Back, Come Back, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1960

Cool O’Toole, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1966

The Curious Facts Preceding My Execution, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, September 1960

D

Death for Sale, Mystery Digest, April 1959

The Death of a Bum, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, June 1965

Death Wears a Bikini! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, September 1959

Decoy for Murder, Mystery Digest March, 1959

Devilishly, Signature, August 1966

The Devil’s Printer, Mystery Digest, September 1958

Domestic Intrigue, The Saint Magazine, July 1966

Don’t You Know There’s a War On? Playboy, December 1983

The Dortmunder Workout, or Criminal Exercise, The New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1990

Dream a Dream, Cosmopolitan, August 1982

E

The Earthman’s Burden, Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1962

Elephant Blues, 77 Sunset Strip, July 1960

Everybody Killed Sylvia, Mystery Digest, May 1958

F

The Feel of the Trigger, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1961

Fluorocarbons Are Here to Stay! Science Fiction Stories, March 1958

Fresh Out of Prison (You Put on Some Weight), Guilty Detective Story Magazine, June 1960

Friday Night, Tightrope!, June 1960

Fugue For Felons, Thieves Dozen, 2004

G

The Girl of My Dreams, The Midnight Ghost Book, 1978

Give Till it Hurts, The Mysterious Bookshop, 1993

God Save the Mark, Cosmopolitan, May 1967

Good Night! Good Night! Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1960

H

Heaven Help Us, Playboy, July 1983

Here’s Looking at You, Playboy, May 1989

Hitch Your Spaceship to a Star, Playboy, December 1985

Horse Laugh, Playboy, June 1986

Hydra, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1984

I

In at the Death, The Thirteenth Ghost Book, 1977

Interstellar Pigeon, Playboy, May 1982

It, Playboy, September 1968

J

Journey to Death, Mystery Digest, June 1959

Jumble Sale, The Armchair Detective, Summer 1994

Just a Little Impractical Joke, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1961

Just One of Those Days, This Week, January 9, 1966

Just the Lady We’re Looking For, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, September 1964

K

Knife Fighter, Guilty Detective Story Magazine, November 1959

L

The Last Ghost, Mystery Digest, November-December 1959

Last-Minute Shopping, New York Times Book Review, 1993

The Ledge Bit, Mystery Digest, September/October 1959

The Letter, Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1965

Lock Your Door, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, August 1962

Look Before You Leap, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May 1962

Love in the Lean Years, Playboy, February 1992

M

Man of Action, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, December 1960

Matin’s Place, Escapade, August 1958

Meteor Strike! Amazing Stories, November 1961

The Method, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1965

The Mother of Invention Is Worth a Pound of Cure, Dapper, February 1966

The Mulligan Stew, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, January 1979

My Father’s Chair, The Vincentian, May 1951

N

Nackles, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1964

Never Shake a Family Tree, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, March 1961

Now What? Playboy, December 1999

O

One on a Desert Island, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, June 1959

Or Give Me Death, Universe Science Fiction, November 1954

Ordo, Enough, 1977

P

Paid in Full, Swank, November 1965

Party Animal, Playboy, December 1992

The Perils of the Sky Rangers, Cavalier, May 1966

Q

The Question, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March 1963

R

Re Porter, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 1982

Requiem for a Tramp! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, January 1960

The Risk Profession, Amazing Stories, March 1961

Rumble Bait, Off Beat Detective Stories, February 1959

S

Scramble My Brains! Off Beat Detective Stories, November 1959

Sinner or Saint, Mystery Digest, December 1958

The Sincerest of Flattery, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1966

Skeeks, Playboy, June 1995

Sniff, The Saint Magazine, May 1967

The Sound of Murder, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1962

Spectacles, Playboy, May 2001

The Spoils System, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, December 1965

The Spy in the Elevator, Galaxy Science Fiction, October 1961

Stage Fright, The Saint Mystery Magazine, September 1965

The Sweetest Man in the World, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March 1967

T

Take It Away, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer/Fall 1997

Teamwork, Shell Scott Mystery Magazine, February 1966

The Terror Queen! Two-Fisted Detective Stories, July 1959

Terror’s Sultry Sister! Web Detective Stories, July 1959

They Also Serve, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, September 1961

Too Many Crooks, Playboy, August 1989

Travelers Far and Wee, Science Fiction Stories, May 1960

U

The Ultimate Caper, New York Times Magazine, May 11, 1975

V

Veronica, The Vincentian, May 1951

W

Walking Around Money, Transgressions, 2005

The Winner, Nova 1, 1970

The World’s a Stage, Playboy, July 1984

Sorry; I have no space left for advice.

Just do it.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

1951

Veronica

He could run but he couldn’t hide—

His name was William. He would have liked to be called Bill, or even Will. But he was one of those poor unfortunate boys with too many brains and too little muscle. In school work, he was superb; but in sports or fights he was somewhat less than terrible. This affliction cost him many bruises, both physical and mental. But the worst thing of all was his name. The others had tired of calling him “sissy” and “baby,” so they decided to give him a name that would fully express their scorn of his intelligence and lack of physical ability. Accordingly, he was dubbed, for all time, Veronica.

Veronica lived in constant fear. He always went to the school bus at a dead run, with shouting fiends chasing him with insensate glee. He always sat directly behind the bus driver and, when the bus stopped at his corner, was always out and away like a flushed quail. In school, he was always dodging guided missiles ranging from wads of paper to geography books. The noon recess was his worst enemy. During this time, lie avoided the playground as though it were Hades itself. He might even have preferred Hades.

Veronica’s worst tormenter was a charming boy variously called Peter by his mother; Mr. Austin by the teacher; and, for no known reason, Tinker by the other boys. Tinker’s favorite sport was to get on the school bus behind Veronica and, with a few well-placed shoves, punches, and kicks, force the unfortunate one to the back of the bus, where he was subjected to varied and ingenious tortures known to all and sundry as innocent fun or boys will be boys. By a strange, warped fate, Veronica and Tinker got off the bus at the same stop, along with four other young sadists.

On one particular day, when Veronica had received, among other things, a bloody nose, from his recreations in the back of the bus, he was given an extra indignity. He was forced to carry the other five boys’ books from the bus. His own were already out the window, so that the load was not too heavy. While the other boys stood behind him, to make sure lie didn’t balk. Tinker stepped out in front of him, gave him an elbow in the stomach, and said, “Wait’ll a man gets off, Veronica.” After which, he stepped grandly from the bus.

At that very moment, something snapped inside Veronica. With a healthy heave he sent the assorted books crashing down on Tinker’s grandiose head, and followed them personally, in a flapping nosedive. The two boys landed in a heap, and an enormous cloud of dust rose to cover the proceedings for a moment. No one on the entire bus moved. They were all so surprised at the suddenness and the identity of the attacker. Even the bus driver sat stock still, his mouth hanging open. Never in his entire career had he seen anyone leave the bus in this high-dive manner. He sat there, trying without success to figure out just how it had been done, and then finally got dazedly to his feet, and looked out the window at the fray. That was when he got his big surprise.

But if you think the onlooker’s surprise was great, imagine the surprise of friend Tinker for, as the dust rose gracefully from the combatants, there was Veronica, sitting astride the prostrate Tinker, pounding away with his left fist at Tinker’s face, which he kept exposed by the simple expedient of holding in his right hand most of Tinker’s hair.

After a moment, Tinker’s four horsemen arrived on the scene. With difficulty, they dragged Veronica off the now unconscious Tinker, and held him securely. Veronica gave no resistance. His fight was finished; his honor saved. His opponent lay, vanquished, on the gory field of battle. Veronica was satisfied. Then someone hit him in the face.

That was when Veronica started fighting. He wrenched his right arm free, and slammed the boy holding his left arm twice in the nose. By that time, the other boy had the idea, and immediately let go of the arm to sit on the ground and hold his nose.

Veronica threw his fists about with wild abandon. He felt a piercing pain in his stomach and head, coupled with a whole series of pains that seemed to cover every inch of his body. Once, he found himself on his back, with several dark shapes above him. Using all his energy, he slashed out mightily with his feet and saw sunlight once more. Another time, he realized that he was on his feet again, with a hank of someone’s hair in his left hand. Without clearly realizing it, he pushed down with his left hand, at the same time sending his knee whistling upward. The result was a solid crunch, a muffled ouch, and a loose handful of hair.

Then, as suddenly as it began, the fight was over. Veronica looked about himself wonderingly. About a half a block down the street, three boys ran with the speed of a hunted fox, and, trying to appear as inconspicuous as possible, a fourth boy crouched under die bus, still holding his nose. On the ground, arms outstretched, face to the sun, was Tinker. Veronica looked at the bus driver, who was still hanging halfway out the window, and said, softly, calmly, and with utmost dignity, “You may drive on, now.”

The driver didn’t say, “Yes, sir.” Instead, he leaped from the window to the driver’s seat in one bound, hitting his head in the procedure, and drove off without even closing the bus doors. He drove three blocks in first, and didn’t let one child off in eight blocks, for which act he heard long and loud when he returned to the garage that night.

When Veronica reached home at a walk for the first time in his school career, he was just beginning to understand what had happened. He had beaten up all the tough guys, not one at a time, but all together. He couldn’t understand it, but lie didn’t let that worry him. He’d beaten them, his future was secure, and he felt very happy about the whole thing.

When his mother caught sight of him, she didn’t quite share his joy. She was used to the normal amounts of cuts and bruises, but nothing like the mess that walked up the porch steps, and said, with her son’s voice, “I won, Mom.”

Mom had difficulty staying vertical. She grasped the porch-rail firmly, and said to the tattered, smeared wreck before her, “William!”

William looked up at her with shining eyes, and said, “My name’s not William, Mom.” For the first time he was proud of that nickname. “It’s Veronica.”

That was when Mom fainted.

My Father’s Chair

Uncertainty reigned his heart.

I got home late from work Tuesday. My sister was in the kitchen, preparing supper, just like every other Tuesday; my mother was at a meeting, just like every other Tuesday; but one thing was different. My father was in bed. He wasn’t pale; if anything he was too red. He looked exhausted, wornout. The first thing f thought of was his heart. He had had a heart attack the day after Christmas in ’47. I stood there, at the foot of the bed, listening to my sister rushing around the kitchen heating soup and looking at my father stretched out on the bed.

“What’s the matter. Dad?”

He sighed a little, as though he were straining against something, then smiled and tried to sit up. “I don’t know. I’ve got the shivers, and my whole head hurts.”

“Should I call the doctor?”

“No.” He had to stop after every few words to take a breath. “I’ll just rest for a while. I feel drained. I need some sleep, that’s all.”

My sister came in then, with a tray for my father. There was soup and tea and applesauce. “Your dinner,” she said, without looking at me. She had no thought for me then. Her father was sick.

I went out to my room off the kitchen and threw my coat on the bed. I went back to the kitchen and ate. I don’t know what I ate.

After I finished eating, I went back to my father’s room. My sister stopped me in the doorway. “Are you going out tonight?”

I was surprised. “Sure. It’s Hallowe’en.”

“Who are you going out with?” She had that way about her, commanding and yet not imperial.

“I don’t know. Whoever’s around, I guess.”

She backed me up against the wall. “Someone’s got to stay with Dad.”

“What’s wrong with you?” I had no place to go really, but I didn’t want to be commanded to stay home.

“I’ve got a date.” She knew she’d won; I never had talked her down.

“All right. But don’t stay out late.”

She walked past me to the kitchen without a word. She’d won, and that was that.

She left about seven-fifteen, and about quarter to eight my father got up. I was in the parlor watching television with all the lights turned off, because I didn’t want anyone ringing the bell for handouts. I heard my father in the kitchen and ran out. He had the little light over the sink on and was getting a drink of water. He looked a couple of hundred years old. He was shaking; not just his hands, but his whole body. I got him back to bed as quickly as I could. I could feel him shaking as I helped him into the bedroom. As he got into bed he said, “Call Doctor Heinz.” His voice was so low, so pitifully weak, and he had to stop between each word to breathe. His face was flushed, and his copper-colored hair lay limp and bedraggled on his forehead.

I rushed to the telephone in the dining room without even bothering to answer. I found the doctor’s number in the little hook beside the telephone and dialed. When the busy signal blared into my ear I almost fell. I held onto the telephone stand for a moment, then dialed again. I must have dialed twenty times in two minutes before I finally got the line. The doctor himself answered the phone. I told him what was the matter and he said he’d be right over.

A little after eight my mother came home. I heard her open the front door and come up the stairs. I opened the door as she reached the top step. “Dad’s sick.”

She looked first surprised, then alarmed, and then scared. “Did you call the doctor?”

I nodded. “He should be here in a little while.”

We went out to the bedroom and peered together into the darkness. I said, “Dad?” There was no answer. I felt odd then. I felt like screaming or running or doing something, doing anything. I couldn’t just stand still. But I did. My mother whispered, “He must be asleep. He’s breathing regularly.”

I didn’t breathe a sigh of relief. I didn’t breathe at all. I just listened. After a moment, I could hear my father’s breathing, deep, regular, but too loud. He didn’t breathe as though he were asleep: he breathed as though he were unconscious. Then the doorbell rang.

In three leaps I was in the kitchen. I pressed the buzzer and ran to the front door. I prayed it wasn’t kids, having a happy Hallowe’en. I prayed it was the doctor. It was.

The doctor came in, took oil his coat, and I led him to my father’s room. When I turned on the light, my father opened his eyes a little bit and squinted against the light. The doctor went over to the bed, opened his bag, and began talking to my father, the way doctors always talk to patients. As I left the bedroom, my father said, “It’s all over. My chest and my legs and under my arms and my head.”

My mother stopped me in the hall. “Get the priest.” I just about heard her. I guess that’s when I really got scared. I raced down the stairs and out into the street. When I had gone the block to the rectory I was winded. One of the priests answered the door, and I gaspingly told him the story. He said, “Wait a minute,” and went through a doorway on the right. He was back in a minute or two with his coat and hat on.

As we walked back to the house, I told him about my father’s heart attack in ’47. He asked me if my father was a regular churchgoer, and I said yes. At any other time that would have seemed like a silly thing to ask, but then it was right. All the way home I kept trying to think of what I should have for Extreme Unction. I knew all the things by heart; yet all I could think of was a lighted candle; and then I remembered something I’d read somewhere about candles burning out. I said a quick Hail Mary.

When we reached the house, I couldn’t get the key into the lock. I almost swore, but caught myself in time. I led the way upstairs to my father’s bedroom. Then I went into the living room and sat down. I’d never felt so helpless in my life. And I’d never wanted to be able to help so much.

All of a sudden I realized I was sitting in my father’s chair, the chair he watched television from, my father’s chair. I jumped up and began walking around the room aimlessly. I felt somehow ashamed. I didn’t know why. I wouldn’t even look at my father’s chair. I felt as though I’d done something degrading.

After a while the doctor left. I heard him tell my mother, “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but you can’t tell in these things. If he gets worse during the night, call me. Otherwise, I’ll be here in the morning.”

A little while later the priest left. He hadn’t anointed my father, and somehow I felt better about it.

When I went out to his room, my father said to my mother. “Don stayed in tonight to take care of me.”

My mother smiled at me, and I felt pretty good, until I thought of that chair. I told myself I was being foolish, but somehow I didn’t feel right about sitting in my father’s chair, when he was sick in bed and might never sit in it again.

When I went to bed that night, I didn’t sleep for a long time. I did a lot of praying. I kept remembering what the doctor had said: “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about, but you can’t tell in these things.”

And You

(poem)

A silver moon, a velvet sky,

Twinkling, winking stars on high,

Tiny clouds that float and fly,

And you.

Green-black leaves on coal-black trees,

A rippling stream, a whispering breeze,

Moonlit pastures like so many seas,

And you.

Rough-log fences like sentinels all,

Old stone fences like a manor wall,

A park among the trees like a medieval hall,

And you.

1954

Or Give Me Death

“Give me liberty, or give me death!” was merely a quotation from a history book to Dr. Lambert until Patrick Henry walked into his office and complained of suffering from a chronic headache.

“I’m a very busy man,” said the editor.

“I know,” said his visitor. “I won’t take long.”

“You can’t,” said the editor. “I have too much to do. Sit down.”

“Thank you,” said the visitor, sitting down.

“Now,” said the editor. “What is it?”

“First,” said the visitor. “I’d better tell you who I am. Doctor Philip Lambert. Medical doctor. And I’ve been to three psychiatrists. They all said I was sane, that I haven’t been having hallucinations.”

“Okay,” said the editor. “What haven’t you been imagining?” He looked at his watch.

Lambert leaned forward, “Patrick Henry is dead.”

The editor stared at him. Finally: “This your idea of a joke?”

Lambert shook his head. “No. He died in my house at eight-seven last night.”

The editor waved his hand between Lambert and himself, palm out. “Wait a minute,” he said. “The only Patrick Henry I know lived during the Revolution.”

Lambert nodded. “That’s the one.”

The editor stood up. “Three psychiatrists said you weren’t nuts?”

“That’s right.”

“They were nuts.”

“They talked to Patrick.”

The editor stood behind his desk, staring at Lambert, and then walked over to the door, hung a home-made sign saying, ‘Go Away’ on it, closed it, and returned to his desk. He sat down. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me. I believe anything.” Lambert smiled thinly. “He came to me about four months ago.

Of course, I didn’t know then who he was. To me, he was just a bent old man, very thickly lined of face, who came to me for relief from a chronic headache. I couldn’t find any superficial reason for the headache, so I gave him a thorough examination.

What I found was astonishing, impossible. A bit of metal, probably a bullet, embedded in his brain. A faint scar, caused by a deep wound years before, on his heart. Other things. He should have been dead a dozen times. Besides, he was a lot older than anyone I’ve ever examined before. He should have long since been dead of old age, if nothing else.

After I’d examined him, I sat and looked at him for a while, trying to make some sense out of it. Things that would kill any human being hadn’t killed him. Why? After a while, I asked him, “When were you shot?”

He looked at me oddly. “Why?”

“It should have killed you.”

“Eighteen twenty three.”

He said it just like that, and it was a minute before I caught it. Eighteen twenty three!

“How old are you?” I asked him.

“Two hundred and seventeen,” he said.

I got to my feet, backed away from him. “What are you? What do you want from me?”

“The word to use is who, not what,” he said calmly. “I’m Patrick Henry, and I want you to do something about this headache.”

“Patrick Henry’s dead,” I said. He shrugged. “They buried him anyway. In 1799.”

“Do you mean you’re a spirit?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’m as alive as you are. Probably more.” I sat down again, feeling weak. “I don’t get it. How can you be Patrick Henry? How can you be alive at all, whoever you are?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Patrick. “Remember that speech I made, when I said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death’?”

I nodded.

“Somebody in the hereafter must have been feeling prankish. That’s the only way I can figure it out. They decided I wanted one or the other, that I was giving them the choice. They gave me liberty.”

“You mean they refused to give you death?”

“Right.”

“By golly,” I said. “That’s wonderful. Immortality!”

“Bah!” he snorted. “When a man’s outlived his time, he should stop living and quit cluttering up the world. Living gets to be a bore after a while. Why, when I first realized I couldn’t die, I was overjoyed. I soon got sick of it, though. So I tried to give the humorist a hint. I got myself buried. For a year and a half I lay six feet under, with no air and no food, but I didn’t die. I got so hungry I ate my clothes and the lining of the coffin, but I didn’t die.”

“How did you ever manage to get out?” I asked him.

“Some damfool young medical student dug me up to experiment on. Huh. He almost needed a coffin himself when I sat up and said hello.”

“I can imagine,” I said. And it was somehow funny. I could imagine the scene. Then I thought of something else. “How is it nobody knows about you?” I asked, him.

“A few people do,” he said. “But if I went before a whole crowd, they’d think I was a vaudeville act, or a television mimic, and if I wrote to a magazine or a newspaper, they’d put it in their letter column as the gag of the month. A couple of the people who knew me tried, but they either wound up in a padded cell, or were laughed out of town. Besides who cares about Patrick Henry any more?”

“You could get a government pension,” I said. “Live in a vine- covered cottage outside Richmond and write delicate little stories about the Revolution.”

“Young man,” said Patrick, rising to his feet and glowering, with the old oratorical fire in his eye, “do you realize that if you spell the Revolution with a small r you have something that one of your politicians just recently said always leads to tyranny? Do you realize that I, and all the others with me were a bunch of subversives? Men who refused to do their duty as citizens and pay taxes for the mutual security and national defense of the British empire, who stored up loads of munitions in hiding places, who plotted to overthrow the government? More than that, they did overthrow the government. Dammit man, those aren’t your forebears, I think all those men were sterile, and only the Tories, the loyal, conforming Tories, had any children. Bunch of mealy-mouthed welfare statists! Bah!”

I was a little taken aback by Patrick’s sudden blast, but I said, “You’re confused. It’s the welfare statists who are trying to overthrow the government.”

“What?” He actually got purple in the face. “Social security, public power, unemployment, insurance, free college education, all the rest of it, the stupid junk they’ve been cramming down the Tories’ gullible gullets, and you try to tell me it’s the welfare statists who are trying to overthrow the government? Hell, man, they are the government.”

“What’s wrong with Social Security and free college educations?” I asked. “They’re progressive.”

“Progressive! If I told you suicide was progressive, you’d run out and kill yourself. There’s nothing wrong with government insurance. But there’s everything wrong with compulsory government insurance. And giving everybody college educations. What are most of them going to do with all that pretty knowledge? All they’re going to do is be unhappy all their lives because they were prepared for a better job than the one they got. There aren’t enough jobs needing a college education for all these young boobs. Somebody’s going to have to dig the coal and make the undershirts.”

He clutched his stomach in unfond reminiscence. “Oh, the stomach ache I got when Social Security went through! I couldn’t eat anything but liquids for three weeks.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What did Social Security have to do with your stomach?”

“Every time the United States loses some of its liberty, I get closer to death. They even off in me all the time. My health and the nation’s freedom. The Civil War conscription gave me a heart murmur. The First World War conscription gave me high blood pressure. This one gave me coronary thrombosis. Excise taxes laid me low for two months.

“Of course, there’ve been times when I was in worse shape than I’m in right now. When the Alien and Sedition Act was passed, I went stone deaf, blind in the right eye, and paralyzed from the waist down. During prohibition, it was my right arm that was paralyzed. Couldn’t bend my elbow to save myself.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you doing anything special, got any important engagements, anything like that?”

He shook his head. “No. Why?”

“How would you like to live at my house? I have plenty of room, and all the privacy you want. I’d like to examine you some more.”

He thought for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “As long as it’s examine, not investigate. I’ve had a beautiful set of ulcers since that word took on its new meaning.”

“By the way,” I said. “Your headache. How long have you had it?”

“About three weeks,” he said.

“You said your ills come from lost liberties. What liberty did we lose three weeks ago? I thought for a minute. “Around the first of the year. End of ’54, beginning of ’55. What liberty did we lose then?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes I get the ache before the thing becomes public. Whatever it is, we’ll know about it soon enough. And, whatever it is, the Tories all over the country will welcome it with open arms, as long as somebody tells them it’s progressive. Bah!”

“Don’t be bitter,” I told him. “You’d be murder in a political discussion.”

“I can back up my statements with diseases,” he said.

“I’ll close the office now,” I said, “and take you round to my house.”

I closed the office and brought him home.

There was a long pause. Then, the editor said, “Is that all?”

“Just about,” said Lambert. “I examined him some more, did what I could for the headache. He claimed it was getting worse. He first came to me three months ago. After a week, I went to see a psychiatrist. He suggested I go away somewhere for a nice long rest, so I brought him home to talk to Patrick. He went home dazed, but convinced that I was sane and Patrick was alive and, well, Patrick. I got a written statement from him and from two other psychiatrists.

Just in case I ever wanted to tell anyone about this without Patrick around, for proof.” Lambert reached into his breast pocket, withdrew a flat envelope. “Here they are,” he said.

The editor looked at the notes. He knew the names signed to the bottom of them. All three said that Doctor Philip Lambert was sane, that Patrick Henry lived, and that Lambert’s account of him was correct.

“Okay,” said the editor, dropping the notes on his desk. “Say I believe you. So what? Do you want some free publicity for Patrick, or what?”

Lambert shook his head. “I told you. Patrick died last night, at eight-seven.”

“Then what do you want?” asked the editor. “Just an obituary notice?”

“No, no, no,” said Lambert impatiently. “Didn’t I tell you that Patrick had received liberty instead of death, that until all liberty was gone from the United States, he could not die?”

“What are you trying to say?” asked the editor.

“That at eight-seven last night, we lost the last of our liberties. I don’t know what it was, what happened, anything about it. All I know is that this is no longer a free nation.”

“Now that’s enough,” said the editor. “There I can check you up. I run a paper here, and I put in it anything I want to put in it. I say whatever I feel like saying. If I couldn’t, then this wouldn’t be a free country. But I can, so your Patrick Henry story is a lot of—”

The door opened and two men walked in.

The Appointment

He was just another madman in a world full of madmen. Luckily he had enough sense to see a good psychiatrist. (P.S. The psychiatrist is now looking for a good psychiatrist.)

He was a thin man with a gray look about him. He had been shuffling aimlessly along the crowded street; now he paused to look at a window display of pots and pans.

He was the only person looking at the display. He concentrated for a moment, and imagined the contents of the window completely out of existence.

The pots and pans vanished. The thin man squared his shoulders.

I am God, he thought; and looked around to see if anyone realized the fact besides himself.

Apparently no one did, for the stream of passers-by did not shift course, nor did they disperse to render him homage. He felt a little let-down.

Godship without homage was a tasteless thing.

He looked without favor at a pot-bellied man in a gray suit. He did not like pot-bellied men with gray suits.

He imagined him out of existence, then surveyed the spot he had occupied with satisfaction.

A hand tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned, half-startled by the interruption.

“You’ll have to move on, buddy,” a blue-coated figure told him. “Can’t have you hanging around my beat. I’m sorry for you bums, but—” He let the words hang in the air while he waited for the thin man to move.

Because the words had been touched with a certain impartial kindness, the thin man did not imagine him out of existence. He moved on. He was glad the day was warm enough; otherwise, he would have had to imagine a new sun into existence. He laughed at the thought.

He shuffled along, content for the moment to study the objects about him, and the people. The bump on his head still ached. He surmised that it was responsible for his lack of memory faculties. He did not know how he had gotten it, or when.

The thin man remembered nothing about himself except his identity. He was God.

Beyond this there was a heavy haze of forgetfulness. He tried to think about it, but the effort was too much. He gave up and concentrated on being God. It was fun!

A stray dog snapped at him. He imagined it into nothingness. He stumbled against a fire hydrant; suddenly there was no hydrant. He saw an orange and yellow bus leaving the corner. He suddenly decided he would ride.

The bus was yards away, in low gear. He imagined it back at the corner and boarded it.

The driver wanted money, so he imagined a handful of coins in his pocket, and handed them over. He sat down beside a fattish woman who hitched herself away disapprovingly.

I know who I am, but I know nothing else. Could I be insane? The thought was intriguing and he kept it with him while the bus made several stops.

Finally the driver looked back and said, “End of the line, Mac. You want off?” He got off, looked around. This section of town was drab in look and outlook. It could be only a portion of the slums.

He kept thinking about being crazy. If he were crazy, then maybe he wasn’t God at all — He dismissed the idea as an absurdity. He was God. Why quibble?

He grew hungry and entered a small restaurant where the flies cavorted merrily over uncovered slabs of pie.

He ordered, ate, and left, after paying the man with what was left of the money he had imagined into his pocket previously. He felt better, but he could not rid himself of the idea of insanity.

To reassure himself, he carefully imagined a large alley cat into limbo. The cat disappeared.

But maybe, the thought came, maybe the cat just ran away fast. Cats do run fast, you know.

A doctor.

Yes. Why not a doctor?

He imagined that the torn, discarded object lying beside him on the tenement steps where he rested was a telephone book.

He pored over the pages, found a psychiatrist’s office listed a few blocks away, and began walking again. The sun was going behind the clouds and he imagined the disappearance of the clouds. They obliged. He walked on cheerfully.

People were staring at him oddly, he noticed, but he paid them little attention. He knew his apparel was dirty and frayed. But he was God and such things did not matter. He could have vengefully imagined them all out of existence, but decided to show mercy until he talked to the psychiatrist. Then…

The psychiatrist had his office in a dingy building whose lower floor housed a flower shop, grocery, and liquor store respectively. The office was on the second floor.

There was no receptionist in the waiting room. There were some chairs, and soon there was the psychiatrist himself, who smiled pleasurably when he saw his visitor.

“Come in,” he invited. His smile showed large white teeth that almost overshadowed all other features of his face. He was a dark man. He looked the way a psychiatrist ought to look.

The thin man entered uneasily. Now that he was here he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of it. Suppose he was insane? It would be the asylum. There was a trembling within him, which the psychiatrist noticed professionally.

He led the way to a comfortable couch. “Just lie down and relax,” he said. “Then we’ll get down to what ails you.” He smiled reassuringly, but the thin man could see a sharp look of inquiry right behind the big-toothed smile.

He lay down wearily. He was tired — tired and puzzled. The only thing he knew for certain was that he was God. The rest was a blank.

The psychiatrist was all business. He pulled over a chair and sat down to talk, shrewd eyes collecting facts about the thin man before he said a word.

“My fee is $25,” he stated, with a longer look at the man’s attire. “I thought it best to mention it.”

“Yes,” agreed the man on the couch; and immediately imagined this sum of money into existence. He reached into a pocket, pulled out a billfold and extracted the money, which he handed to the psychiatrist.

“Ah…” said the psychiatrist, beaming. He leaned forward and spoke in a confidential tone.

“Now — what is wrong with you, or what do you imagine to be wrong with you?”

“I am God,” said the thin man.

The psychiatrist pursed his lips and tapped a pencil reflectively against his large teeth.

“Interesting. Very interesting,” he murmured. “And what makes you believe you are God?”

The man on the couch stirred uncomfortably. “God can do anything. He is all-powerful. I can do anything. I am all-powerful. Therefore, as you can surely see, I am God.” There was some impatience in the words, which the psychiatrist hastened to assuage.

“Of course, of course. That is plausible.” He hesitated, then asked, “But what do you mean you can do anything?”

“I can move buildings,” came the quiet voice of the thin man. “I can cause mountains to crumble. I can kill people merely by wishing them dead. I could even destroy the world, if I wished.”

“Have you ever done any of these things?” The psychiatrist’s voice still maintained its interest, but a trace of boredom was setting in.

“Yes.” The man who called himself God explained what things he had done.

“Then you remember nothing of your background. Nothing at all? Only these incidents?”

The thin man shook his head, and waited.

A few other questions; then the psychiatrist leaned back. “Your ailment is a simple one,” he said impressively. “You are — as far as I can determine from your first visit — suffering from schizophrenia, or what we call split personality. In your case, I should diagnose from your head injury that you have had a fall or received a blow that brought into existence your lesser “personality” that believes itself to be God.” The psychiatrist paused and studied his patient.

“Of course, you are not God. That is purely in the realms of your imagination. All it will take to start you back on the right path is to realize that you cannot… uh… be God. The instances of apparent miracles you related to me all sound like the imaginings of a mind that is ins—, that is tired. You will need more treatments.”

He stood and motioned the thin man to do the same. He laid a hand on the man’s bony shoulder confidently.

“But you are wrong,” the patient insisted. “I do perform miracles.”

“Nonsense,” the doctor told him quietly. “You must find a way to disbelieve that.” He considered. “Why not put your ‘miracles’ to the acid test? What would be hardest of all things for you to do?”

“Destroy the world, I think.”

“Then — destroy the world,” the psychiatrist advised, with a faint smile behind the words. “The failure to do so will convince you that you are not God.”

“But I wouldn’t want to do that. I made the world.”

The psychiatrist was losing his patience a little. “You can’t do that,” he insisted. “It’s all in your head. Try it, fail; and you’ll improve a thousand per cent. Here—” he scribbled some dates on a slip of paper — “I’ve made you these appointments. They end July 16th. We’ll get you straightened out. I promise you that.”

The thin man said hesitantly, “You mean that I can’t really destroy the world. That my brain is merely twisted, and you will cure me?” He glanced down at the slip of paper on which there were dates.

“Precisely that.”

The thin man needed more reassurance. “It would be right for me to destroy the world? Right now?” He was confused and showed it.

The psychiatrist’s voice was as thin as paper. “Yes. Go right ahead, my friend. Destroy it.”

The thin man drew himself up and revealed a certain dignity of manner as he folded his arms across his chest. “It will take a while,” he said.

For a minute he remained in that position, eyes half closed, body intent.

The psychiatrist waited, patiently and disdainfully. Finally the thin man turned to him and said, “There, it’s all done.”

A loud snort burst from between the big teeth of the psychiatrist. It was unprofessional; it was without dignity; he couldn’t help it.

“You say the world’s destroyed? Then—” he pointed a finger at the man before him — “what are we doing here — alive?”

He ran to the window. “Here, I’ll show you. Look out.” He himself did so, and his face took on a dough-like hue. His hands began trembling, not in a quick spasm of motion, but slowly and methodically. He turned back to the thin man. It was a while before he could speak. When he could, he said in a peculiar voice:

“But it’s all gray out there. All clouds. Nothing but clouds and haze. No buildings, no people…” He stared at his patient while the rush of words stuck in his throat.

“Yes. It would be that way.”

“But — it can’t be. I’m seeing things. You’re—” An animal cunning suddenly lit his eyes and his breathing reverted almost to normal.

“The world is not destroyed. I don’t know what’s happened, but I know that much. I could be hypnotized…”

He paused, and there was savage triumph in his next words.

“If the world has been destroyed, then what are we doing here? Tell me that! Why are we left?” He waited, almost defiantly, while the thin man looked at him oddly.

“Why,” said the thin man, “you should really know that.”

“I should? I know nothing about it.”

“It is so simple.” The thin man smiled. “The world has been destroyed. We remain to keep the appointments we made.” He pointed to the list of dates in his hand.

The psychiatrist walked slowly to the window. He stared out, then came back.

He started to say something, but only a scream managed to find its way past his lips.

“They end July 16th,” said the thin man.

1958

Arrest

He stood there, staring at himself in the mirror. Then he put his gun to his head…

William Winthrop turned the key in its lock, pushed open the apartment door and stepped inside. Kicking the door shut behind him, he stopped in the foyer and looked at the key in the palm of his hand. He grinned to himself and slowly turned the hand palm downward. The key made no sound at all as it hit the carpet.

Winthrop moved from the foyer to the living room, leaving hat and tie on a sofa as he went by. He walked into the bedroom, tossing his coat and shirt in the corner of the room as he removed them. Then he sat down on the edge of the bed and put his head in his hands.

He could feel his hands trembling against his cheeks, and was surprised. He felt his chest for his cigarettes, realized he didn’t have his shirt on, and walked over to where the shirt lay, on the floor beside the chair. He picked it up, took the cigarettes from the pocket, and dropped it on the floor again. Removing one cigarette, he dropped the pack on the floor beside the shirt, then lit the cigarette with his pocket lighter. He looked at the lighter for a long moment, then dropped that, too.

He stuck the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, walked over to the dresser on the other side of the room, and opened the top drawer. He felt under a pile of shirts, came up with a .45 automatic. The gun dangling from his hand, he went back and sat down on the bed again. He dropped the cigarette on the floor and stepped on it.

He took the clip from the handle of the gun, looked at the eight bullets, then put the clip back. He pressed the barrel of the gun against the side of his head, just above the ear, and sat there, his finger trembling on the trigger. Perspiration broke out on his forehead. He stared at the floor.

Finally, he looked up from the floor and saw his own reflection in the mirror on the closet door. He saw a young man of twenty four, long brown hair awry, face contorted, dressed in brown pants, brown shoes and a sweaty undershirt, a gun held to his head.

He hurled the gun at the mirror. The crash startled him and he jumped. Then he lay face down on the bed, his head in the crook of his left arm, his right fist pounding the bed. “Damn it,” he cried, over and over, in time to the pounding of his fist. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

At last, he stopped swearing and beating the bed, and a sob shook his body. He cried, bracingly, for almost five minutes, then rolled over and stared at the ceiling, breathing hard.

When he had calmed down, he rolled out of the bed to his feet and walked across the room to where his cigarettes lay. This time, after he’d lit the cigarette, he stuffed cigarettes and lighter in his pants pocket, then recrossed the room, past the bed and the dresser and the shattered mirror and the gun on the floor, and on into the bathroom.

With water filling the sink, he took a comb and ran it through his hair, to get it out of the way while he washed. Then he turned the tap off, dipped a washcloth in the water, and scrubbed his face until it hurt. Grabbing a towel, he dried face and hands, and looked at himself in the mirror. Again he took the comb, this time combing more carefully, patting his hair here and there until it looked right to him.

The cigarette had gone out in the ashtray, so he lit another. Then he went back to the bedroom.

Kicking the gun and the larger pieces of glass out of the way, he opened the closet door and looked over the clothing inside. He selected a dark blue suit, shut the closet door, and tossed the suit on the bed.

Back at the dresser, he took out a clean shirt, underwear and socks. From the tie rack on the back of the bedroom door he took a conservative gray number and brought all back to bed.

He changed rapidly, transferring everything from the pockets of the pants he’d been wearing to the suit. Then he went back to the living room and made himself a drink at the bar in the corner. He gulped the drink, lit another cigarette and went to the front door, to make sure it was unlocked. On the way back, he picked up the key and put it in his pocket.

He sat down, crossed and recrossed his legs, buttoned and unbuttoned his suit coat, played with the empty glass. After a minute, he crushed the cigarette in an ashtray, got up, and made another drink. He swallowed half, lit another cigarette, threw away the empty pack and went to his room for another. When he came back, he reached for the half-full glass on the bar, but his hand shook and the glass went over, shattering on the floor behind the bar. He jumped again.

Leaning back against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, he whispered to himself, “Take it easy. Take it easy. Take it easy.”

After a while, he moved away from the wall. He’d dropped the cigarette when the glass broke, and it was still smoldering on the rug. He stepped on it and took out another. He got another glass and made a drink, then went back to the sofa and sat down again.

He was just finishing the drink when the knock came. He was facing the door. “Come in,” he called.

The door opened, and the two of them came in through the foyer to the living room. “William Winthrop?” asked one.

Winthrop nodded.

The man took out his wallet, flipped it open to show a badge. “Police,” he said.

“I know,” said Winthrop. He got to his feet. “Anything I say can be used against me. I demand my right to make one phone call.”

“To your lawyer,” said the detective. It wasn’t a question.

“Of course,” said Winthrop. He crossed to the phone. “Care for a drink? The makings are over there, in the corner.”

“No thanks,” said the detective. He motioned and the other one walked into the bedroom.

“Don’t mind the mess in there,” called Winthrop. “I tried to commit suicide.”

The detective raised his eyebrows and walked over to the bedroom door to take a look. He whistled. “What happened to the mirror?”

“I threw the gun at it.”

“Oh.” The detective came back. “At least you’re sane. A lot of guys try to cash in. Only the nuts do.”

“That’s a relief,” said Winthrop. He dialed.

The detective grunted and sat down. The other one came back from his inspection, shook his head, and sat down near the door.

Winthrop heard the click as a receiver was lifted, and a man’s voice said, “Arthur Moresby, attorney.”

“Hello, Art? This is Bill.”

There was a pause, then “Who?”

“Bill. Bill Winthrop.”

“I’m afraid I don’t recognize the name. Are you sure you have the right number?”

“Oh,” said Winthrop. “Like that. It’s in the papers already, eh?”

“On the radio.”

“You don’t know me, is that right?”

“That’s right,” said Arthur Moresby, attorney. “Goodbye.”

Winthrop heard the click but continued to hold the phone against his ear.

“What’s the matter?” asked the detective.

Winthrop shook his head and returned the phone to its cradle. He grinned crookedly at the detective. “Wrong number,” he said.

“How a wrong number?”

“I’m a sinking ship.”

“And your lawyer?”

“He’s a rat. He doesn’t know me. He never heard the name.”

“Oh,” said the detective. He stood up. “I guess we can go then, huh?”

Winthrop shrugged. “I guess so.”

He followed them out of the apartment. They walked to the elevator, Winthrop pushed the button, and they waited without speaking. When the elevator came, they stepped in and the detective pushed the button marked ‘1’.

On the way down, the detective said, “Mind if I ask you a question?”

“For the insurance,” said Winthrop. “I was in debt. Either I paid or chhhhk.” He ran a finger across his neck.

“That isn’t the question. I want to know why you waited for us to come before you called the lawyer. You had a lot of time before we got there. Why did you wait?”

Winthrop stared at the door. Why had he waited? He thought a minute, then said, “I don’t know. Bravado or something.”

“Okay,” said the detective. The door slid open and they walked across the vestibule to the street. A few passersby watched curiously as Winthrop got into the back seat of the police car.

“I’m twenty four,” said Winthrop, as they drove through the streets to Police Headquarters.

“So?” said the detective.

“Seems like a hell of an age to stop at.”

“How old was your mother?” asked the cop.

Winthrop closed his eyes. “Do you hate me?”

“No,” said the cop.

Winthrop turned and looked at the cop. “I do,” he said.

“I hate my guts.”

Fluorocarbons Are Here to Stay!

What happened to the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company when it tried to tear down the all fluoryl plastic City Hall is enough to make a man with a heart of stone laugh.

“Lewiston, Massachusetts. Population, 6,023, census of 1960. Main industry, the production of fluoryl plastics. Founded 1798 by Emmanuel Lewis, American farmer of English stock. Opportunities for new businesses, especially in the service trades. Main tourist attraction, City Hall constructed in 1958 completely of fluoryl plastics, as advertisement of town’s main industry.” (“Guide to American Cities”, 1963, Wolkin, Ehrmbach and Company, New York, 1963.)

The City Council of Lewiston decided, after long deliberation, to build a new City Hall. The present one, while drawing tourists, was also drawing trouble. There were constant traffic jams in front of the building; broken penknives littered the lawn, left behind by souvenir hunters who had made unsuccessful attempts at chipping off a piece of wall. Besides, the conservative element in the town was loudly in opposition to, “the City Fathers meeting in a three-story publicity stunt.”

Replacing a City Hall isn’t, normally, too impossibly difficult a task. All it involves is the contracting of an architect (who listens to everything you want and then goes ahead and does what he wants), the opening of bids for the construction of the new City Hall (with Cousin Jamie assured of the job, of course, but that isn’t admitted publicly), and the tearing down of the old City Hall to make way for the new one.

Tear down the old City Hall. In the words of the Bard, there’s the rub, and quite a rub it is.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of the new fluoryl plastics. They are compounded of fluorocarbons, a combination of fluorine and carbon. The process involved is a simple, if puzzling, one. A hydrogen-fluorine compound is placed in a vat with a hydrocarbon; a few volts of electricity are sent through the vat, and what’s left is fluorocarbon and free hydrogen. To date, no one’s been able to explain the whys and wherefores. The only thing sure is that it happens.

In the early fifties, non-burnable paints were made of these fluorocarbons, among other things, and experimentation was begun on a plastic made of the substance. The result: fluoryl plastic.

Fluoryl plastic is indestructible, in the only sense of the word. It won’t burn, won’t crumble, won’t decay, can’t be broken into fragments, and will not leave the original shape it was molded in, no matter what is done to it. It is, in the language of the wondering scientists, completely stable.

The City Hall in question was constructed entirely of this plastic. The outside walls were gleaming white outdoor fluoryl plastic, impervious to the elements; the inside walls were plastics of quieter colors, but no less resistant. The floors and ceilings were formed by sturdy lengths of fluoryl plastic painted with fluoryl paint to look like wood. The roof of the building, the foundation, all were fluoryl. Even the seams of the building were sealed by a fluoryl cement.

This, then, is the building the City Council planned so nonchalantly to tear down.

A wrecking crew — the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company — was called in and put to work. The first weapon they brought to bear was a heavy iron ball, attached by a cable to a derrick, with which the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company demolished walls. The first time they swung this outsize eight-ball at one of the walls of the City Hall, there was a terrible noise; the ball came ricocheting back from the unmarred wall and crunched into the arm of the derrick, doing to it what had been heretofore been done only to walls.

When the foreman of the crew found out, as he did shortly, he fired the operator for negligence, reported the damage to the office, and led his men indoors for some hand-to-hand demolition.

The office sent somebody out to remove the dilapidated derrick and replace it with a fresh contender; but the foreman and his men just didn’t have any success at all with the City Hall.

Not that they didn’t try hard enough. They stomped into the place, up the three flights of wide ebony fluoryl plastic stairs to the top floor, and attacked a wall.

It was the first wall in their experience that had ever defended itself. One of the men raised a heavy axe above his head and crashed the edge of it into the wall. Before he knew what was going on, the axe was going back the way it had come, was bringing him with it, and driving him all the way across the hall — until the axe hit the opposite wall and bounded off to one side. Then the man hit the wall and bounded off to the other side.

Somebody else slammed the wall at the same time with a sledge hammer. Before he could take it up with the union, the hammer had rebounded, sped through his spread legs, and had jackknifed him down and through after it.

It was the same thing everywhere. Axes and hammers of all kinds were bouncing off the walls, as though someone were trying to break a steel girder with a tennis ball. After about an hour of unrewarding effort, the walls didn’t have a mark on them. They were still there — and that was something which had never happened in the entire two-hundred-and-six year history of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company.

The company was irked, and rightfully so. Their men, their most experienced hands, were threatening angrily to quit; and their reputation was flying away on the wings of Mercury — or fluorine, rather. So they went before the City Council, which was holding its sessions in the one local theater, the Paramount, and asked just what the City Fathers meant to do about this.

The City Fathers hadn’t the slightest idea, and said so. They pointed out to the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company that it was their job to tear buildings down and not in the sphere of business of the City Council. They also suggested that the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company get to work pretty damn fast, and get that building down, because they had already engaged the contractor to begin building the new City Hall on the same site come June, which was only two months away.

The representatives of the company left the Paramount Theatre figuratively tearing their hair, but more determined than ever that the City Hall, indestructible or not, was going to be torn down if it took every man and every penny the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company could scrape together to do it. There’s such a thing as honor, you know.

Experts were called in, and they muddled around for a while, looking at the walls of the City Hall through magnifying glasses; inspecting samples of fluoryl plastics under microscopes; and muttering through their Van Dykes. They finally decided that there wasn’t a way in the world to tear that building down. They said as much, pocketed their pay, and left.

The Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company obstinately refused to take their experts’ word for it. In their long experience with knocking things apart, not once had they come across anything that couldn’t be knocked; and this blasted City Hall wasn’t going to be the exception. Not while the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company was out of the hands of the receivers was this going to be an exception.

They bought some Army surplus flame throwers, hired more men, and went to work spurting flame all over everything. The walls stood there and ignored the whole thing. For three solid days and nights, working their men in eight-hour shifts the clock around, they sprayed the walls with consuming flame. But the flame, unfortunately, didn’t consume a thing. It hadn’t, by the end of these three days, scorched the walls; it hadn’t done a thing to the walls. As far as the walls were concerned, the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company might have been throwing feathers at them instead of flame.

The company gave up and sold the flame throwers to somebody for about a third of what they’d paid for them. Then they sat back, took a deep breath, and looked at those walls with hate in their eyes.

By this time, the affair had hit the wire services and the whole world was watching the process, hands cupped politely over mouths. This one was a scream. An independent motion picture producer tried to get permission to make a documentary movie based on the struggle, using it symbolically — man against the machines he has created. A national beer company tried to get the next onslaught put on coast-to-coast television, with said beer company sponsoring, naturally. Both the City Council and the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company turned all such offers down vituperously and often. They were beginning to feel like peacocks with their tail feathers clipped.

Next, they tried acid. They took the most destructive acids they knew — and a few acids that nobody was sure about yet — and sprayed the walls, drenched the walls, covered the walls with reeking layers of these things; they tried the acids one after the other, and later in combination.

The walls just stood there and shrugged the whole thing off. They didn’t even shrug, really; they just stayed stolidly silent and indestructible. It was enough to give a man an inferiority complex, a persecution mania, and high blood pressure.

That’s the effect violence had on the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts: No effect at all.

The wrecking company was in such a reasonless rage that it went to the extent of suggesting an atomic bomb, but the city fathers clamped down on that idea for the double reason that the resultant radioactivity from an atomic blast would make the whole town uninhabitable for some time — and it probably wouldn’t do any good, anyway.

When the representative of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company was told this, in no uncertain terms, he became thoroughly incensed. “All right,” he agreed, “no atomic bomb; but how about an ordinary bomb? How about a few sticks of dynamite placed here and there in the building? We’d clear everyone in a three block radius of the building out of the way for a while and just let her rip. If that doesn’t do it, nothing will, and I suggest that you gentlemen might just as well go back to your old City Hall and forget about a new one.” So said the representative of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company.

The City Council thought about it for a while and finally decided it couldn’t do any harm; it would have the advantage of getting the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company out of everyone’s hair, so they said, all right, go ahead and do it.

It took eight days to gather the paraphernalia and get ready for the last decisive siege. Workmen carrying boxes of dynamite trudged endlessly into the City Hall and returned empty-handed for more. The Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company had affixed its good name to a document, guaranteeing reparation for any and all damage done to any property other than the City Hall proper. Everyone in a three block radius was moved to a safe distance. The wreckers were ready to try the last desperate attempt to destroy the Lewiston City Hall.

Reporters, photographers, newsreel cameramen and tourists crammed the town, pouring huge sums of money into the local coffers and cash registers. The town was very happy about the whole thing and the tourists and the newsmen were happy, too. The only ones who weren’t happy were the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company and the City Council of Lewiston, Massachusetts.

Probably the happiest people of all were the owners of Peabody’s Plastic Products, maker of the fluoryl plastic which formed the City Hall. While other manufacturers had to talk about laboratory tests in their advertising, Peabody’s Plastic Products had simply to point with pride to the resplendently white Lewiston City Hall, standing serene and unscarred after weeks of the most harrowing treatment — treatment that would have reduced any other building to rubble in hours. Peabody’s Plastic Products looked upon the proposed demolition with nonchalance and confidence. They even had a man with a small movie camera recording the occurrence, for future television commercials.

At precisely noon on the fatal day, the president of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company, a man named Smith, personally pushed the plunger that set off all the dynamite inside the building.

To get an idea of what happened then, consider the jet plane. A force is created in the bowels of the plane, a force that is constricted on all sides but one by sturdy walls of metal. Only to the rear is there a clear course. Oddly enough, force prefers the easiest road; and so it streams roaringly out the tail of the jet plane, pushing it forward.

Something along the same lines happened within the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts. A tremendous amount of force was suddenly born within those indestructible walls and found itself restricted almost everywhere by fluoryl plastic. Only through the windows, whose glass had been long since smashed by frustrated wreckers, could the force find an exit from the place of its birth and a portal to the great world outdoors.

All the force of the explosion, then, went swooshing out the windows; and all the frame houses around the City Hall fell over on their sides with a despairing crump! Brick or stone houses flew apart and took off in thirty different directions all at once. Within a radius of about a block and a half, the skyline was suddenly lowered to basement level.

Not that the rest of the town was spared. Walls suddenly folded inward; doors were torn off their hinges all over the city; people were picked up and carried a few blocks by the blast and cameras flew everywhere.

A survey taken later that day showed that only two windows remained intact in Lewiston; and one of these was subsequently shattered by a small boy who was beginning to develop complexes from seeing that one intact pane of glass surrounded by only the jagged reminders of panes of glass.

The other one was broken a week later by a workman, who was putting a pane of glass in an adjoining window, when he fell off his ladder.

Of course, the explosion cost the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company every cent it could convert its equipment into, and more besides. But the City Hall still stood unscathed, untouched, undamaged and untroubled by the blast that had emanated from itself to flatten the surrounding territory pretty thoroughly, and put the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company into receivership — an unusual example of man bites dog. The last threat to the life of the City Hall of Lewiston, Massachusetts had been foiled.

The City Council, in order to pay for the wasted architect’s fees — and the other miscellaneous expenses of the proposed but never-to-be-completed new City Hall, blocked off the street in which the City Hall stood alone and untarnished; turned the waste land into a parking lot; and charged tourists twenty five cents each to drive in, park and look at the Indestructible Building. For another quarter, the tourist could go inside the City Hall, wander around looking at the walls and so forth and get, absolutely free, a tiny block of fluoryl plastic for a souvenir.

Because of the publicity, the tourist trade doubled within the next few months and practically every tourist wanted the whole works. In time, this became the city’s principal source of income, and taxes were lowered point three zero one per cent, which effectively quieted the conservative element.

Later on, another gimmick was thought of. For an additional fifty cents, the tourist could bring his little hunk of fluoryl plastic into the Mayor’s office; he would autograph it for the tourist personally, with the tourist’s own name on it and a little greeting from the Mayor. This went over so big that within three years the city built, debt free, a mammoth football stadium, just for the fun of having a mammoth football stadium. And every Saturday during football season the local high school played somebody called the Visitors in the mammoth football stadium that held five times as many people as there were in the whole town of Lewiston; everyone sat in the abominably hard fluoryl plastic stands and got a tremendous kick out of it. Oh, yes, the mammoth football stadium, was made of fluoryl plastic. It was indestructible, too.

1959

And Then He Went Away

There was one trouble with artist Emory Ward’s depiction of futuristic machines and gimmicks…

Emory Ward sat hunched over his drawing board, manipulating compass and ruler and pencil. If he could get the illo roughed out by lunchtime, he could begin working with color in the afternoon. He sat hunched, weighed down by a deadline, and bit his lower lip as he drew.

The doorbell rang.

“Damn,” said Ward. He reached for the gum eraser, corrected, drew another line. The doorbell rang.

“Fry in hell.” Ward shifted on the chair, irritable, annoyed at the outside sound. He drew lines, measured angles.

The doorbell rang.

“Disconnect it,” muttered Ward. As he drew, he grumbled about the sound and its maker. Salesman, paper boy, somebody meaningless and unimportant, a cipher, non-entity, nobody, mass man…

The doorbell rang.

“Nobody home, nobody home,” Ward whispered desperately. “Go away.” He’d have to put down his tools, straighten, stand, walk to the door, open it, walk down the hall, down the stairs, across the front hall, open the door, listen to words, say, “No, thank you,” close the door, climb the stairs, walk down the hall, open the door, come into the room, close the door, cross to the drawing board, sit down, pick up his pencil and protractor and compass, put them down, light a cigaret, be angry, go back to work — total loss, ten minutes.

The doorbell rang.

“No,” grated Ward. “I will not.” He shut his ears, turned off all the circuits of his mind except those connected with his work, drew lines, measured, drew.

Someone knocked on the door.

Emory Ward stiffened. He stared at the wall. He thought indignantly, someone is outside the door. The upstairs door, this door, in my house, knocking on the door while I am trying to meet a deadline.

The door opened.

Ward’s back was to the door. He turned slowly, ready to tongue-lash an insurance salesman, browbeat a paper boy, utterly demolish a collector from the United Fund.

The visitor was tall and slender, with white hair, impeccably dressed in gray flannel surmounted by a thin face with thin smiling lips, and he said, “Mister Emory Ward?”

“Listen,” said Ward.

“I am Gamble Two,” said the visitor. “I am from, the twenty fifth century.”

Ward got to his feet. “I am going to kick you downstairs.”

“I will erect a force field around myself,” the visitor told him. “Then I will put you in a temporary state of paralysis. Very flamboyant. I would rather we sat and chatted like gentlemen.”

Ward advanced.

“I will kill you.”

The visitor smiled and disappeared. A voice said, “Please be sensible, Emory Ward.”

Ward stared at the doorway. “Listen,” he said. “Listen, cut it out. I got a deadline.”

The visitor reappeared. “Five minutes. Five minutes. No more, I promise.”

Emory Ward took a deep breath. “You are not from the future.”

“Of course I am,” said Gamble Two. “Tell me, do I speak without an accent?”

“You are a wise guy,” Ward told him. “You are a practical joker.”

Gamble Two looked faintly pained. “May we sit and chat? I would like to explain.”

Ward looked with regret at his drawing board. “I got a deadline.”

“I promise not to take long.” Gamble Two gestured at the two chairs over by the writing desk. “May we sit?”

“You from some fan club?” demanded Ward.

“May we sit?”

Ward shrugged. “Have I got a choice?” Disgruntled, he sat.

“Fine,” said Gamble Two, beaming. He also sat; he even leaned back and made himself comfortable. “‘First, as to myself. I am Gamble Two. I am an android. I am from the twenty fifth century. I am a policeman, until recently assigned to customs duty. I have just been promoted, and my job assignment changed to the Time Police. You are, frankly, my first important case.”

Ward looked sour. “I am?”

“Yes.” Gamble Two nodded. “You are Emory Ward. You are a commercial artist. An illustrator. You work primarily for science fiction magazines and paperback book companies.”

“So what?”

Gamble Two waved a hand at the illustrations covering the walls. “This,” he said, “is what you are best known for. Machines. Machines of the future. Space ships, cybernetics machines, robots, weapons, all the manufactured and constructed paraphernalia of future civilizations.”

Ward repeated, “So what?”

“Some illustrators, work mainly with the depiction of strange and fantastic life forms, creatures from other planets. Some work mainly with the human form, usually the female human form. Some are best known for their illustrations of uniforms. The Space Corps, the Intergalactic Patrol, strange uniforms with strange insignia. Some have made their names drawing other worlds, strange, seething jungles, rocky landscapes, tundras. But you draw machines.”

Emory Ward said, “I’d like to be drawing a machine right now. I got a deadline.”

Gamble Two raised a restraining hand. “Please. I hastened to the point. All of these illustrators, teeming and pouring through the newsstands, spreading their imaginations across the covers and interiors of magazines, all are wild and far-fetched and illusory. All except you.”

“Me?”

“You.” Gamble Two stood and viewed at close hand some of the illustrations on the wall. He tapped one. “Here,” he said. “This instrument panel. The J-27 model intra-system four-seater. I have operated the J-27. This instrument panel is correct. To the smallest detail, correct. Even to the alphabet used, the words on the various dials and levers. All correct.” He proceeded to another illustration. “Here,” he said. “This robot. I own one exactly like this. He is my janitor. Everything is perfectly in order. It is almost a photograph.” He proceeded around the room, tapping various illustrations, nodding and saying, “Yes,” and, “Here,” and, “Exactly.”

Ward snorted. “Ridiculous.”

Gamble Two returned to his seat. “You say ridiculous. Next, you will say coincidence. I deny both.” He mused, as Emory Ward squirmed. “Time travel,” said Gamble Two, still musing. “So fascinating, yet so impractical. So unproductive. Man is born, grows to maturity, lives and dies. All within one environment. It is as necessary to him as atmosphere. We know this. A man from the Greece of Pericles, how long could he last in this century? He would not speak the language; he would be terrified by the machines. He could not last.”

“Naturally,” said Ward.

Gamble Two reflected. “A man from this century, in the Greece of Pericles. He might stand a somewhat better chance. He could at least get an academic knowledge of the language. But could he survive?”

“Probably not,” said Ward.

“Definitely not,” agreed Gamble Two. “The change in environment. He would have no resistance to germs. Disease bacteria evolve. He would miss all the conveniences of civilization he had come to accept as a part of the environment. His ideas would be completely out of tune with the time. He would be shunned. He might even be stoned. He would last perhaps a week.”

“One out of every five science fiction stories I illustrate,” said Ward, “is based on just this conclusion. Finish, please, and let me get back to work.”

But Gamble Two could not be hurried. “Could any man survive in an era other than his own?” he wondered. “Could any man usefully employ his knowledge of his original environment?”

“Probably not.”

Gamble Two held up a finger. “One kind of man can survive in environments other than his own,” he suggested. “Think of ship-wrecked sailors on South Sea islands.”

“They usually went mad.”

“Precisely the point,” said Gamble Two. “Before one can integrate himself into a new environment, he must divorce himself from the old. There is only one way to divorce oneself from one’s environment. Insanity. Psychosis.”

“A psychotic divorces himself from all environments,” Ward suggested.

“Exactly. He doesn’t even hear doorbells.”

Emory Ward flushed. “Now, wait a minute; I heard that doorbell. I got a deadline. I never answer the doorbell when I got a deadline.”

“I am almost finished,” Gamble Two assured him. “We have already answered one point. Only a psychotic could make the necessary adjustment to a totally new environment. Now. Is there any man who could survive at the economic level in an environment other than his own? A physicist from this century, for instance, would be an unskilled laborer in Julius Caesar’s Rome. As environment changes, vocations change.”

“What about a doctor?” asked Ward. “A twentieth century doctor in second century Rome.”

Gamble Two shook his head. “Useless. Doctors do not cure, they only prescribe cures. And what good would it do a doctor to prescribe penicillin, aureomycin, or even aspirin, in an environment where such products do not exist?”

“Then,” said Ward, “The answer is no one.”

“There is a possibility, however,” Gamble Two corrected him gently. “What about an artist, an illustrator? All he requires are the drawing tools of the period. Pencil on paper, berry juices on stone, what does it matter to him? He can draw with anything.”

Emory Ward was stunned. “You’re not suggesting.”

“It is a severe crime,” Gamble Two told him, “to attempt to escape one’s obligations by running away through time. You are well aware of that.”

Ward shook his head. “You’re out of your mind.”

Gamble Two ignored him. “Return with me to the South Seas,” he said. “The shipwrecked sailor again. He always retains his European clothing, although the native dress, or undress, is much more suitable for the environment. Why is that?”

“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Ward said urgently.

“It is not possible,” Gamble Two said sadly, “for man to divorce himself entirely from his native environment. The sailor keeps his European clothes. You wistfully draw pictures of the machines you once knew and loved, the machines that once seemed so necessary to civilized life, and which you now must try to get along without. Gamble Two pointed an accusing finger. “You are from the twenty fifth century.”

Defiantly Emory Ward stated, “I am not.”

Gamble Two sighed. “I wish you would just admit it and be done with this foolishness. They should have sent an esper. I wish I could read your mind. The only thing for me to do now is return you for identification: You are from the twenty fifth century, aren’t you?”

“I am not.” Emory Ward erected a force field around himself, then he put Gamble Two in a temporary state of paralysis. Very flamboyant. Finally, he withdrew from a desk drawer a hand weapon precisely like one in an illustration on the wall. Very functional. “I am from the thirtieth century,” he said.

Journey to Death

Although ocean voyages are not new to me, I have never grown accustomed to the sway and roll of ships, especially at night. For that reason, I normally get very little sleep while crossing the Atlantic, not being able to close my eyes until I have reached such a point of exhaustion that it is no longer possible for me to keep them open. Since business often makes it necessary for me to journey to America, my wife has urged me, from time to time, to go by air, but I’m afraid I’m much too cowardly for that. The rolling of a ship at sea causes uneasiness in both my stomach and mind, but the mere of traveling through the air terrifies me. A sea voyage, then, is the lesser of two evils, and I face my insomnia, after all these years, with the calm of old resignation.

And yet, it is impossible to merely lie in bed awake, eyes staring at the ceiling, through all the long rolling nights between Dover and New York, and even reading begins, at last, to pall. On so many voyages, I have been reduced to aimless pacing of the deck, watching the million moons reflected in the waves surrounding me.

I was delighted, therefore, on the last and latest crossing, to discover, the third night out, a fellow-sufferer, an insomniac like myself, named Cowley. Cowley was an American, a businessman, younger than me, perhaps forty five or fifty. A direct and sensible man I found him, and enjoyed his company, late at night, when all the other passengers slept and we were alone in an empty and silent sea. I found no fault in him at all, save for an occasional example of rather grim and tasteless humor, a reference to the decaying bodies in Davy Jones’s locker, or some such thing.

The nights were spent in conversation, in strolls about the decks, or in billiards, a game which we both loved but neither had ever mastered. Being of equal incompetence in the sport, we contentedly wiled away many hours in the large billiard room located on the same deck as my cabin.

The eighth night of the voyage was spent in this room, where we puffed happily at cigars, played with our normal lack of skill, and waited patiently for dawn. It was a brisk and chilly night, with a cold wet wind scampering across the waves like a chilled and lonely ghost searching for land, and we had closed every door and window in the room, preferring an atmosphere polluted by cigar smoke to being chilled to the bone.

It was only fifteen minutes after thus sealing ourselves into the room that the catastrophe struck. I don’t know what it could have been, an explosion in the huge and mysterious engines somewhere in the bowels of the ship, perhaps unexpected contact with a mine still unreclaimed from the Second World War. Whatever it was, the silence of the night was suddenly torn apart by a tremendous and powerful sound, a roar, a crash that dulled the senses and paralyzed the body, and the whole ship, the Aragon, shuddered and trembled with a violent jerking spasm. Cowley and I were both thrown to the floor, and on all the tables, the billiard balls clacked and rolled, as though their hysteria and fear were equal to our own.

And then the ship seemed to poise, to stop and hold itself immobile while time flashed by, and I struggled to my feet, hearing the hum of absolute silence, of a broken world suddenly without time or movement.

I turned toward the main door, leading out to the deck, and saw there, staring in, a wild and terrified face, a woman, still in her nightgown, whose mouth was open and who was screaming. I started toward her, staring at her through the glass in the door, and time began again. The ship lurched, bent, and as I struggled to keep my balance, I saw her torn away, out to the emptiness, and eager waves dashed against the window panes.

It was like an elevator gone mad, hurtling down from the uppermost story. The water boiled and fumed outside the window, and I clung to the wall, sick and terrified, knowing that we were sinking, and in a matter of seconds I would surely be dead.

A final jolt, and all movement stopped. The ship lay at a slight angle, the floor was at a slant, and we were at the bottom of the sea.

A part of my mind screamed in horror and fear, but another part of me was calm, as though outside myself, separate, a brain not dependent upon this frail and doomed body. It — this part of my mind that I had never known before — it thought, it conjectured, it reasoned. The ship was lying on the sea floor, that much was obvious. But how far down, how far from the surface? Not too far, surely, or the pressure of the water would have burst the glass of the windows. Was the surface close enough for me to dare to leave the ship, this room, this pocket of trapped air? Could I hope to fight my way to the surface before my lungs burst, before my need for air drove open my mouth and let the water in to kill me?

I couldn’t take the chance. We had fallen for so long, and I was not a young man. I couldn’t take the chance.

A groan reminded me of Crowley. I turned and saw him lying on the floor against one wall, apparently rolled there when the ship sank. He moved now, feebly, and touched his hand to his head.

I hurried to him and helped him to his feet. At first, he had no idea what had happened. He had heard the explosion, had stumbled, his head had hit the edge of a billiard table, that was all he knew. I told him of our situation, and he stared at me, unbelieving.

“Underwater?” His face was pale with shock, pale and stiff as dry clay. He turned and hurried to the nearest window. Outside, the feeble light from our prison faintly illuminated the swirling waters around us. Cowley faced me again. “The lights—” he said.

I shrugged. “Perhaps there are other rooms still sealed off,” I said, and as I finished speaking, the lights flickered and grew dim.

I had expected Cowley to panic, as I had done, but he smiled instead, sardonically, and said, “What a way to die.”

“We may not die,” I told him. “If there were survivors—”

“Survivors? What if there were? We aren’t among them.”

“They’ll be rescued,” I said, suddenly full of hope. They’ll know where the ship went down. And divers will come.”

“Divers? Why?”

“They always do. At once. To salvage what they can, to determine the cause of sinking. They’ll send divers. We may yet be saved.”

“If there were survivors,” said Cowley. “And, if not?”

I sat down, heavily. “Then we are dead men.”

“You suggest we wait, is that it?”

I looked at him, surprised. “What else can we do?”

“We can get it over with. We can open the door.”

I stared at him. He seemed calm, the faint smile was still on his lips. “Can you give up so easily?”

The smile broadened. “I suppose not,” he said, and once more the lights flickered. We looked up, staring at the dimming bulbs. Yet a third time they flickered, and all at once they went out. We were in the dark, in pitch blackness, alone beneath the sea.

In the blackness, Cowley said, “I suppose you’re right. There’s nothing to lose but our sanity. We’ll wait.”

I didn’t answer him. I was lost in my own thoughts, of my wife, of my children and their families, of my friends on both continents, of land and air and life. We were both silent. Unable to see one another, unable to see anything at all, it seemed impossible to converse.

How long we sat there I don’t know, but suddenly I realized that it was not quite so dark any more. Vaguely, I could make out shapes within the room, I could see the form of Cowley sitting in another chair.

He stirred. “It must be daylight,” he said. “A sunny day. On the surface.”

“How long,” I asked him, “how long do you suppose the air will last?”

“I don’t know. It’s a large room, there’s only two of us. Long enough for us to starve to death, I suppose.”

“Starve?” I realized, all at once, just how hungry I was. This was a danger I hadn’t thought about. Keeping the water out, yes. The amount of air we had, yes. But it hadn’t occurred to me, until just now, that we were completely without food.

Cowley got to his feet and paced about the dim room, stretching and roaming restlessly. “Assuming survivors,” he said, as though our earlier conversation were still going on, as though there had been no intervening silence, “assuming survivors, and assuming divers, how long do you suppose it will take? Perhaps the survivors will be rescued to day. When will the divers come? Tomorrow? Next week? Two months from now?”

“I don’t know.”

Cowley laughed suddenly, a shrill and harsh sound in the closed room, and I realized that he wasn’t as calm as he had seemed. “If this were fiction,” he said, “they would come at the last minute. In the nick of time. Fiction is wonderful that way. It is full of last minutes. But in life there is online last minute. The minute before death.”

“Let’s talk about other things,” I said.

“Let’s not talk at all,” said Cowley. He stopped by one of the tables and picked up a billiard ball. IN the gloom, I saw him toss the ball into the air, catch it, toss it and catch it,and then he said, “I could solve all our problems easily. Merely throw this ball through the window there.”

I jumped to my feet. “Put it down!” If you care nothing for your own life, at least remember that I want to live!”

Again he laughed, and dropped the ball onto the table. He paced again for a while, then sank at last into a chair. “I’m tired,” he said. “The ship is very still now. I think I could sleep.”

I was afraid to go to sleep, afraid that Cowley would wait until I was dozing and would then open the door after all, or throw the billiard ball through the window. I sat and watched him for as long as I could, but my eyelids grew heavy and at last, in spite of my fears, my eyes closed and I slept.

When I awoke, it was dark again, the dark of a clouded midnight, the dark of blindness. I stirred, stretched my cramped limbs, then subsided. I could hear Cowley’s measured breathing. He slumbered on.

He awoke as it was again growing light, as the absolute blackness was once again dispelled by a gray and murky gloom, the look of late evening, a frustrating halflight that made my eyes strain to see details where there were only shapes and vague forms and half-seen mounds.

Cowley grumbled and stirred and came slowly to consciousness. He got to his feet and moved his arms in undefined and meaningless arcs. I’m hungry,” he muttered. “The walls are closing in on me.”

“Maybe they’ll come today,” I said.

“And maybe they’ll never come.” Once more, he paced around the room. At length, he stopped. “I once read,” he said, as though to himself, “that hunger is always the greatest after the first meal missed. That after a day or two without food, the hunger pains grow less.”

“I think that’s right.” I don’t think I’m as hungry now as I was yesterday.”

“I am,” he said, petulantly, as though it was my fault. “I’m twice as hungry. My stomach is full of cramps. And I’m thirsty.” He stood by a window, looking out. “I’m thirsty,” he said again. “Why don’t I open the window and let some water in?”

“Stay away from there!” I hurried across the room and pulled him away from the window. “Cowley, for God’s sake get hold of yourself! If we’re calm, if we’re patient, if we have the self-reliance and strength to wait, we may yet be saved. Don’t you want to live?”

“Live?” He laughed at me. “I died the day before yesterday.” He flung away from me, hurled himself into his chair. “I’m dead,” he said bitterly, “dead and my stomach doesn’t know it. Oh, damn this pain! Martin, believe me, I could stand anything, I could be as calm and solid as a rock, except for these terrible pains in my stomach. I have to eat, Martin. If I don’t get food soon, I’ll go out of my mind. I know I will.”

I stood watching him, helpless to say or do a thing.

His moods changed abruptly, instantaneously, without rhyme or reason. Now, he suddenly laughed again, that harsh and strident laugh that grated on my spine, that was more terrible to me than the weight of the water outside the windows. He laughed and said, “I have read of men, isolated, without food, who finally turned to the last solution to the problem of hunger.”

I didn’t understand him. I said, “What is that?”

“Each other.”

I stared at him, and a chill breath of terror touched my throat and dried it. I tried to speak, but my voice was hoarse, and I could only whisper, “Cannibalism? Good God, Cowley, you can’t mean—”

Again he laughed. “Don’t worry, Martin. I don’t think I could. If I could cook you, I might consider it. But raw? No I don’t believe I’ll ever get that hungry.” His mood changed again, and he cursed. “I’ll be eating the rug soon, my own clothing, anything!”

He grew silent, and I sat as far from him as I could get. I meant to stay awake now, no matter how long it took, no matter what happened. This man was insane, he was capable of anything. I didn’t dare sleep, and I looked forward with dread to the coming blackness of night.

The silence was broken only by an occasional muttering from Cowley across the room, unintelligible, as he muttered to himself of horrors I tried not to imagine. Blackness came, and I waited, straining to hear a sound, waiting to hear Cowley move, for the attack I knew must come. His breathing was regular and slow, he seemed to be asleep, but I couldn’t trust him. I was imprisoned with a madman, my only hope of survival was in staying awake, watching him every second until the rescuers came. And the rescuers must come. I couldn’t have gone through all this for nothing. They would come, they must come.

My terror and need kept me awake all night long and all through the next day. Cowley slept much of the time, and when he was awake he contented himself with low mumbling or with glowering silence.

But I couldn’t stay awake forever. As darkness returned again, as the third day ended without salvation, a heavy fog seemed to lower around me, and although I fought it, although I could feel the terror in my vitals, the fog closed in and I slept.

I woke suddenly. It was day again, and I couldn’t breathe. Cowley stood over me, his hands around my neck, squeezing, shutting off the air from my lungs, and I felt as though my he’d were about to burst. My eyes bulged, my mouth opened and closed helplessly. Cowley’s face, indistinct above me, gleamed with madness, his eyes bored into me and his mouth hung open in a hideous laugh.

I pulled at his hands, but they held me tight, I couldn’t move them, I couldn’t get air, air, I flailed away at his face, and my heart pounded in fear as I struggled. My fingers touched his face, perspiring face, slid away, I lunged at his eyes. My finger drove into his eye, and he screamed and released me. He fell back, his hands against his face, and I felt the warm jelly of his eye only finger.

I stumbled out of the chair, looking madly for escape, but the room was sealed, we were prisoners together. He came at me again, his clutching hands reaching out for me, his face terrible now with the bloody wound where his left eye had been. I ran, and the breath rattled in my throat as I gulped in air. Choking, sobbing, I ran from him, my arms outstretched in the gloom, and I fell against one of the billiard tables. My hands touched a cuestick, I picked it up, turned, swung at Cowley with it. Cowley fell back, howling like an animal, but then came on again. Screaming, I jabbed the cuestick full into his open mouth.

The stick snapped in two, part of it still in my hands, part jutting out of his mouth, and he started a shriek that ended in a terrible gurgling wail. He toppled face forward to the floor, driving the piece of stick through the back of his head.

I turned away and collapsed over a table. I was violently ill, my stomach jerking spasmodically, my throat heaving and retching. But it had been so long since I had eaten that I could bring nothing up, but could only lie helplessly, coughing and shaking and terribly, terribly sick.

That was three days ago, and still they haven’t come. They must come soon now. The air is growing foul in here, I can hardly breathe any more. And I find that I am talking to myself, and every once in a while I will pick up a billiard ball and look longingly at the window. I am coming to long for death, and I know that that is madness. So they must come soon.

And the worst thing is the hunger. Cowley is gone now, all gone, and I am hungry again.

One on a Desert Island

There is a perennial cartoon idea which begins, “Two men on a desert island. One of them says…” Then there is a funny gag line delivered by one of the men. It can be funny because there are two of them. But what about one man on a desert island?

Jim Kilbride was one man on a desert island. It was one of a group of four islands, alone in the middle of the Pacific, south of the major sea lanes. The island that Jim Kilbride was on was the largest of the four, a mile by a mile and a half. It was mainly unshaded sand, washed by the ocean during high tide, but there were two small hillocks near the center of the island, on which were stunted trees and dark green shrubbery. On the eastern side of the island there was a small, curving indentation in the beach, forming a natural cove in miniature, a pool surrounded by a half-circle of sand and a half-circle of ocean. A few birds soared among the islands, calling to each other in raucous voices. The caws of the birds and the whisper of the surf against the beach were the only sounds in the world.

Jim Kilbride had happened to be on a desert island, alone, through a series of half-understood desires and strange events. He had once been a bookkeeper, snug and safe and land-locked, working for a small textile firm in San Francisco. He had been a bookkeeper, and he had looked like a bookkeeper. Short, under five foot seven. The blossomings of a paunch, although he was only twenty-eight. Hair straight and black and limp, with a round and receding forehead that shone beneath the office lights. Round eyes behind rounder spectacles, steel-framed and sliding down his nose. A tie that hung from his neck like the frayed end of a halter. Suits that had looked fine in the department-store window, on the tall and lean and confident mannequins.

He was James Kilbride then, and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy because he was a cliché and he knew it. He lived with his mother, and he never went out with women, and he rarely drank intoxicants. When he read the sad tales of contemporary realism, about mild and unobtrusive bookkeepers who lived with their mothers and who never went out with women, he felt ashamed and unhappy, because he knew they were talking about him.

His mother died, and this is where all the sad tales begin or end, but for James Kilbride, nothing had changed. The office remained the same; the bus took no new routes. The house was larger, now, and darker and more silent, but that was all.

His mother had been well insured, and there was quite a bit left over. Something from his reading, or from a conversation over lunch, gave him the idea and the impetus, and he bought a boat. He bought a sailing cap. On Sundays, alone, he went sailing in the near waters of the Pacific.

But still nothing changed. The office was still bright with incandescent lights, and the bus took no new routes. He was still James Kilbride, and he still lay wide awake in bed and dreamed of women and another, livelier, happier sort of life.

The boat was a twelve-footer, with a tiny cabin. It was painted white, and named Doreen, the woman he had never met. And on one bright Sunday, when the ocean was bright and clean and the sky was scrubbed blue, he stood in his boat and stared out to sea, and he thought about going to China.

The idea grew. It took months, months of thought, of reading, of preparation, before he knew one day that he would go to China. He really and positively would. He would keep a diary and would publish it and become famous and meet Doreen.

He loaded the boat with canned food and water. He arranged for a leave of absence from his employer. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to quit completely, though he intended to never come back. And then he took off, once again on a Sunday, and steered the little boat out to sea.

The Coast Guard intercepted him, and brought him back. They explained a variety of rules and regulations to him, none of which he understood. On the second try, they were more aggressive, and told him that a third attempt would result in a jail sentence.

The third time, he left at night, and he managed to slip through the net they had set for him. He thought of himself as a spy, a dark and terrible figure, fleeing ruthlessly through the muffled night from an enemy land.

By the third day, he was lost. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. He paced back and forth, his sailing cap protecting him from the sun, and stared out at the trembling surface of the sea.

Ships, black silhouettes, passed on the horizon. Islands were mounds of mist far, far away. The near world was blue and gold, and silence was broken only by the muted play of the wavelets around his boat.

On the eighth day, there was a storm, and this first storm he managed to survive intact. He bailed until the boat was dry, then slept for almost twenty-four hours.

Three days later, there was another storm, a fierce and outraged boiling of water and air, that came at dusk and poured foaming masses of black water across the struggling boat. The boat was torn from him, and he lashed his arms about in the water, fighting and clawing and swallowing huge gulps of the furious water.

He reached the island at night, borne by the waves into the slight protection of the crescent cove. He crawled up the sanded beach, above the reach of the waves, and slept.

When he awoke, the sun was high and the back of his neck was painfully burned. He had lost his sailing cap and both of his shoes. He crawled to his feet and moved inland, toward the scrubby trees, away from the burning sunlight.

He lived. He found berries, roots, plants that he could eat, and he learned how to come near the birds, as they sat preening themselves on the tree branches, and stun them with hurled stones. He was lucky, in one way. In his pocket were matches, water-proofed, that he had put there before the storm hit. He built a small shelter from bits of branch and bark. He scooped out earth to make a shallow bowl in the ground, and started a fire in it, keeping the fire going day and night. He only had eight matches.

He lived. For the first few days, the first few weeks, he kept himself occupied. He stared for hours out at the sea, waiting expectantly for the rescuers. He prowled the small island, until he knew its every foot of beach, its every weed and branch.

But rescuers didn’t come, and soon he knew the island as well as he had once known the route of the bus. He started drawing pictures in the sand, profiles of men and women, drawings of the birds that flew and screeched above his head. He played tic-tac-toe with himself, but could never win a game. He had neither pencil nor paper, but he started his book, the book of his adventures, the book that would make him more than the minor clerk he had always been. He composed the book carefully, memorizing each sentence as he completed it, building it slowly and exactly, polishing each word, fashioning each paragraph. He had freedom and individuality and personality at last. He roamed the island, reciting the completed passages aloud.

It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. Months had passed, and he had never seen a ship, a plane, or any human face. He prowled the island, reciting the finished chapters of his book, but it wasn’t enough. There was only one thing he could do, to make the new life bearable, and at last he did it.

He went mad.

He did it slowly; he did it gradually. For the first step, he postulated a Listener. No description, not even age or sex, merely a Listener. As he walked, speaking his sentences aloud, he made believe that someone walked beside him on his right, listening to him, smiling and nodding and applauding the excellence of his composition, pleased by Jim Kilbride, no longer the petty clerk.

He came almost to believe that the Listener really existed. At times, he would stop suddenly and turn to the right, meaning to explain a point he thought might be obscure, and he would be shocked, for just a second, to find that no one was there. But then he would remember, and laugh at his foolishness, and walk on, continuing to speak.

Slowly, the Listener took on dimension. Slowly, it became a woman, and then a young woman, who listened attentively and appreciatively to what he had to say. She still had no appearance, no particular hair color, shape of face, no voice, but he did give her a name, Doreen. Doreen Palmer, the woman he had never met, had always wanted to meet.

She grew more rapidly. He realized one day that she had honey-colored hair, rather long, and that it waved back gracefully from her head when the breeze blew across the island from the sea. It came to him that she had blue eyes, round and intelligent and possessing great depths, deeper even than the ocean. He understood that she was four inches shorter than he, five foot three, and that she had a sensuous but not overly voluptuous body and dressed in a white gown and green sandals. He knew that she was in love with him, because he was brave and strong and interesting.

But he still wasn’t completely mad, not yet. Not until the day he first heard her voice.

It was a beautiful voice, clear and full and caressing. He had said, “A man alone is only half a man,” and she replied, “you aren’t alone.”

In the first honeymoon of his insanity, life was buoyant and sweet. Over and over, he recited the completed chapters of his book to her, and she would interrupt, from time to time, to tell him how fine it was, to raise her head and kiss him, her honey-blonde hair falling about her shoulders, to squeeze his hand and tell him that she loved him. They never talked about his life before he had come to the island, the incandescent office and the ruled and rigid ledgers.

They walked together, and he showed her the island, every grain of sand, every branch of every tree, every bush and bird. He showed her how he killed the birds, and how he kept the fire going, because he only had eight matches. And when the infrequent storms came, whipping the island in their insensate rages, she huddled close to him in the lean-to he had built, her blonde hair soft against his cheek, her breath warm against his neck, and they would wait out the storm, their arms clasped tightly about each other, their eyes staring at the guttering fire, hoping and hoping that it wouldn’t be blown out.

Twice it was, and he had to use precious matches to start it going again. But they reassured each other both times, saying that next time the fire would be more fully protected and would not go out.

One day, as he was talking to her, reciting the last chapter he had so far finished of the book, she said, “You haven’t written any more in a long while. Not since I first came here.”

He stopped, his train of thought broken, and realized that what she had said was true. He told her, “I will start the next chapter today.”

“I love you,” she answered.

But he couldn’t seem to get the next chapter started. He didn’t want to start another chapter, really. He wanted to recite for her the chapters he had already completed.

She insisted that he start a new chapter, and for the first time since she had come to join him, he left her. He walked away, to the other end of the island, and sat there, staring out at the ocean.

She came to him after a while and begged his forgiveness. She pleaded with him to recite the earlier chapters of the book once more, and finally he took her in his arms and forgave her.

But she brought the subject up again, and again, more sternly each time, until finally one day he snapped at her, “Don’t nag me!” and she burst into tears.

They were getting on each other’s nerves, he realized that, and he slowly came to realize, too, that Doreen was coming to behave more and more like his mother, the only woman he had ever really known. She was possessive, as his mother had been, never letting him alone for a minute, never letting him go off by himself so he could think in peace. And she was demanding, as his mother had been, insisting that he show ambition, that he return to work on the book. He almost felt she wanted him to be just a clerk again.

They argued violently, and one day he slapped her, as he had never dared to do to his mother. She looked shocked, and then she wept, and he apologized, kissing her hands, kissing her cheek where the red mark of his hand stood out like fire against her skin, running his fingers through the softness of her hair, and she told him, in a subdued voice, that she forgave him.

But things were never again the same. She became more and more shrewish, more and more demanding, more and more like his mother. She had even started to look something like his mother, a much younger version of his mother, particularly in her eyes, which had grown harder and less blue, and in her voice, which was higher now and more harsh.

He began to brood, to be secretive, to keep his thoughts to himself and to not speak to her for hours at a time. And when she would interrupt his thoughts, either to gently touch his hand as she had used to do or, more often now, to complain that he wasn’t doing any work on his book, he would think of her bitterly as an invader, as an interloper, as a stranger. Bitterly, he would snap at her to leave him alone, to stay away from him, to leave him in peace. But she would never leave.

He wasn’t sure when the thought of murder first came to his mind, but once there, it stayed. He tried to ignore it, tried to tell himself that he wasn’t the type of person who committed murder. He was a bookkeeper, a small and mild and silent man, a calm and passive man.

But he wasn’t that at all, not any more. He was an adventurer, a roamer of the sea, a dweller in the middle of the Pacific, envied by all the poor and pathetic bookkeepers in all the incandescent offices in the world. And he was, he knew now, quite capable of murder.

Day and night he thought about it, sitting before the tiny fire, staring into its flames and thinking about the death of Doreen. And she, not knowing his thoughts, not knowing how dangerous her actions were, continued to nag him, continued to demand that he work on the book. She took to watching the fire, snapping at him to bring more bark, more wood, not to let the fire go out as he had done the last two times, and he raged at the viciousness and unfairness of the charge. The storms had put the fire out, not he. But, she answered, the storm wouldn’t have put the fire out had he paid it the proper attention.

Finally, he could stand it no longer. In their earlier, happier days, they had often gone swimming together, staying near the shore for fear of sharks and other dangerous animals that might be out in the deeper water. They hadn’t swum together for a long time, and one day, casually and cunningly, he suggested that they take up the practice again.

She agreed at once, and they stripped together and ran into the water, laughing and splashing one another as though they were still lovers and still delighted with one another. He ducked her, as he had done in the old days, and she came up laughing and spluttering. He ducked her again, and this time he held her under. She fought him, when she realized his intentions, but he felt the new muscles in his arms grow taut, and he held her in a terrible grip, keeping her underwater until her struggles grew feebler and feebler and finally subsided. He then released her, and watched the ebb and flow of the waves carry her body out to sea, the honey-blonde hair swaying in the water, the blue eyes closed, the soft body lying limp in the water. He stumbled back to the beach, shaken and exhausted, and collapsed on the sand.

By the next day, he was feeling the first touches of remorse. Her voice came back to him, and her face, and he remembered the happiness of their early days together. He picked over the broken bones of all of their argument, and now he could see so clearly the times when he, too, had been in the wrong. He thought back and he could see where he had treated her unfairly, where he had always thought only of himself. She, however, had wanted him to finish the book, not for her sake, but for his own. He had been short-tempered and brutal, and it had been his fault that the arguments had grown, that they had come to detest each other so much.

He thought about how readily and how happily she had agreed to go swimming with him, and he knew that she had taken it as a sign of their reconciliation.

As these thoughts came to him, he felt horrible anguish and remorse. She had been the only woman who had ever returned his love, who had ever seen more in him than a little man stooped over ledgers in a hushed office, and he had destroyed her.

He whispered her name, but she was gone, she was dead, and he had killed her. He sprawled on the sand and wept.

In the following weeks, although he missed her terribly, he grew resigned to the loss. He felt that something dramatic and of massive import had moved through his life, changing him forever. His conscience pained him for the murder, but it was a sweet pain.

Five months later, he was rescued. A small boat came to the island from a bulging gray steam t, and the sailors helped him as he climbed clumsily into the boat. They brought him to the steamer, and helped him up the Jacob’s-ladder to the deck of the boat. They fed him, and gave him a place to sleep, and when he was refreshed, he was brought before the captain.

The captain, a small gray man in faded clothing, motioned to him to sit down in the chair near his desk. He said, “How long were you on the island?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were alone?” asked the captain gently. “All the time?”

“No,” he said. “There was a woman with me. Doreen Palmer.”

The captain was surprised. “Where is she?”

“She’s dead.” All at once, he started to weep, and the whole story came out. “We fought, we got on each other’s nerves, and I murdered her. I drowned her and her body was washed out to sea.”

The captain stared at him, not knowing what to do or say, and finally decided to do nothing, but simply to turn the man over to the authorities when they reached Seattle.

The Seattle police listened first to the captain’s statement, and then they talked to Jim Kilbride. He admitted the murder at once, saying that his conscience had troubled him ever since. He spoke logically and sensibly, answering all their questions, filling in the details of his life on the island and the crime he had committed, and it never occurred to them that he might be mad. A stenographer typed his confession and he signed it.

Old office friends visited him in jail and looked at him with new interest. They had never known him, not really. He smiled and accepted their awe.

He was given a fair trial, with court-appointed counsel, and was found guilty of first-degree murder. He was calm and dignified throughout the trial, and no one could believe that he had once been an insignificant clerk. He was sentenced to die in the gas chamber, and was duly executed.

Birth of a Monster

Those ghastly ghouls that have escaped the grave by feeding on a diet of blood from the living are the deadly enemies of all mankind, the unholy vampires.

He was sound asleep when the phone rang. He woke up, suddenly and completely, between the first and second rings, and lay with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling above him in the darkness, wondering why he had awakened.

The phone jangled again. Reaching out, he fumbled for the chain on the lamp beside his bed, found it, blinked at the sudden yellow light. The alarm clock said just past two thirty. By the third ring, he was sitting beside the bed, pawing with his toes for his slippers.

He left the bedroom, walked down the dark hall toward the dining room, promising himself yet again that he would definitely see about having an extension phone put in the bedroom. After all, a doctor, general practitioner — although it had been over three months since he had last been called so late. An emergency, that time. A drunken husband, a long, narrow flight of stairs — four bones broken and an hysterical wife.

He wondered what it would be this time. As the fourth ring began, he picked up the phone, said, “Doctor Lamming.”

It was a man’s voice. He didn’t sound at all excited. “Doctor, my wife is about to have a baby. There’s no time to get to the hospital. I have no car. If you could come—”

He didn’t recognize the voice, couldn’t remember any pregnancies due for two or three weeks yet. He said, “Is your wife one of my patients?”

There was a pause, then, “No,” said the voice. “We just moved in, we’re new in town. Can you come?”

“Certainly. What’s the address?”

“Four fifty two Larchmont. At the top of the hill.”

“The old estate?”

“Yes. We’ve just moved in.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour. Maybe less.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

He hung up, hurried back to the bedroom and dressed. He knew the estate, at the end of Larchmont Road. Empty for years. He hadn’t known anyone had moved in. Who would want to move in there? Artists, perhaps. Thinking the place was “quaint”. Probably planning to renovate, modernize, surprise their friends from the city. More and more commuters were moving into town, and a lot of them had strange tastes.

The office was in the front of the house. He stopped and loaded the bag, hurried out, leaving the cabinet doors open in the dark house behind him.

His car was in the garage. He climbed in, backed out to the street, left the garage open and hurried across town.

Larchmont Drive was a long, winding road, flanked by old gabled structures and new ranch-style one-story homes, the meeting of old and new, the locals and the commuters. The road wound and wiggled its way up the hill, ending at the great closed gates to the estate. If the estate had once had a name, once been associated with one particular owner, the name was now lost and forgotten. The brooding building at the top of the hill was now known only as “the estate”. Not even a capital letter. It didn’t even attract children, it didn’t even have a reputation for being haunted. It was only a lonely and empty shell, stuck away on the top of the hill. Its walls were gray-black from lack of paint, its front windows, facing west, shone orange in the late afternoon, but were dull black the rest of the time.

Doctor Lamming drove up the road, noticing that the huge wrought-iron gates were open now, for the first time in his memory. He drove through and on up the curving, pitted road to the estate.

There was no light. He got out of the car, holding his leather bag, and looked at the place, wondering if this call were only some practical joker’s impractical idea of a joke. Then he saw a light moving within the house, and the heavy front door whined open.

There was a man there, holding in his hand a kerosene lamp. He said, “Doctor Lamming?”

“Yes. Coming.” He trotted up the warped steps and across the rail-less pillared verandah to the door.

The man was short and thin and sallow. He might have been thirty, or forty, or fifty. His hair was black and straight and rather long, and his face was long and thin, with prominent cheek-bones, deep-set eyes and thin, bloodless lips. The thin lips smiled slightly and he said, “We just moved in. No electricity as yet.”

“Water?”

“Yes. We have our own well. My wife is upstairs.”

It was the first time Doctor Lamming had ever been inside the building. The weak kerosene lamp showed very little, but he caught glimpses, as they moved down the wide central hall to the staircase, of high- ceilinged, barren rooms, of occasional pieces of ancient, dust- covered, sheet-draped furniture, of curtainless windows and silence and emptiness.

The other man said, “Our furniture hasn’t come yet. Most of it. Just enough for the one bedroom.”

Doctor Lamming noticed, now, a faint, undecipherable accent in the other man’s speech. He couldn’t quite place it. He said, “By the way. I don’t know your name.”

The other stopped at the foot of the staircase and turned, his right hand extended. “I’m terribly sorry, Doctor. I’m not thinking straight. Cargill is my name. Anton Cargill.”

They shook hands, and Doctor Lamming was surprised at the coldness and thinness of Cargill’s hand. And, too, though Cargill claimed he wasn’t thinking straight, though he claimed his wife was upstairs, about to give birth, the man’s voice and manner and tone were completely blank, completely unemotional.

Cargill turned away and climbed the stairs to the second floor, the doctor behind him. At thirty two, with six years of general practice behind him, Doctor Lamming considered himself reasonably used to the vagaries and variety of human beings, but this complete lack of emotion from an expectant father was something new. He said, “Your first child, Mr. Cargill?”

They had reached the top of the stairs, and Cargill led the way to the left. “Yes,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it came as something of a surprise. We had been under the impression that it was — impossible for us.”

“It sometimes takes a while,” said the doctor.

Cargill walked into the bedroom, and the doctor followed. There were already three kerosene lamps in the room. The furniture was old-fashioned, massive-looking, chests and dressers and chairs and, in the center of the room, a huge canopy bed. The woman lay on the bed, her eyes closed, her black hair spread out against the pillow, her face as pale and white as her husband’s in the light of the lamps. The doctor put his bag down on the table beside the bed, and the woman groaned, moving her head.

Cargill stood beside the bed, looking without expression at his wife. “Soon now, I think,” he said.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “If you would — towels, hot water. Lots of both.”

“Of course,” said Cargill. Taking one of the lamps, he left the room.

The woman on the bed was undoubtedly in labor. She groaned again, and murmured, but Doctor Lamming couldn’t make out what she had said. He stripped the blanket away, and saw that Cargill had been right. Soon now. He took his tools from the bag, wrapped in a towel, spread them out on a table, his own stainless steel equipment, the two silver scalpels that had been his father’s, that he now carried more as good luck charms than anything else, memories of his father, who had been the Doctor Lamming in the town before him, and in whose footsteps he had striven to walk.

The woman was in pain. He worked rapidly, not noticing the odd, the strange, the unbelievable, not noticing anything but the work he was doing. The baby didn’t seem to want to be born. It was difficult, it was long and exhausting, but finally he held the infant in his hands. The child breathed, it weakly moved its chubby fists, but it did not cry out.

He set the child down and stared. He had been working with such absorption, had been so blind to everything aside from his own movements and the movements of the child, that now he could do nothing but stare, with shock and disbelief.

It had been a bloodless birth. A birth completely without blood. And now, as he stared with horror at the woman’s face, her eyes closed and her mouth open as she lay in exhausted sleep, he knew what this woman was. He looked at the sharp, pointed teeth, the long, fang-like canines, the pale lips, the chalk-white face, and he knew just what she was.

And what he had to do. The furniture in the room was old, some of it was beaten and rickety. He grabbed a chair, wrenched at it, managed to pull one of the slats out of the back. He reached for a knife, one of the delicate instruments of his profession, he hacked at the slat of wood until one end of it was sharp and pointed. Turning, he closed his eyes and plunged the wooden stake into the sleeping woman’s heart.

She moved, with a sudden lurching spasm, her cold arms beating against his face, and from her throat came the scream of the banshee, the scream of the doomed in Hell. He fell away from her, lost his balance, toppled to the floor. Rising, he saw that she was still, and that she was incredibly old.

He had to get away. He turned to the door, and Cargill was standing there, in one hand the kerosene lamp, in the other a handful of folded towels.

They stared at each other, and Cargill’s eyes seemed to be alight with passion, with rage, with obscene lust.

Doctor Lamming backed away, bumping into the table on which lay his bag and his tools. He stared at the other with loathing and fear. “Vampire!” he screamed, and his voice echoed through the empty rooms of the house.

Cargill set down the lamp, dropped the towels on the floor. “Yes,” he said. “A new world. Our new world, too. You’ll never know how difficult it was to make the crossing. To a new world, where we are not hunted, where we are not known, where we are safe.”

“You are known,” the doctor told him. “You are not safe.”

“Known only as legend.” Cargill looked without emotion at the bed. “You have killed my wife,” he said. “But I will have a new wife. And first I will have a new brother.”

The doctor backed away again, around the table, clutching at the bag on the table, wondering if he could hurl the bag, duck, run around the man — the vampire — the thing before him, down the stairs, to safety.

“The gates are closed,” Cargill told him. “You are mine,” And his arms moved up, above his head. But, no, his arms were stretched out, toward the doctor, and he rose, to the beat of dusty black wings, to swoop down upon the doctor.

The doctor screamed and pawed at the table. His father’s scalpels! His hand touched one of them, and he brought it up, a glinting silver blade, and as the hungry mouth lunged down at him he pushed the blade deep into the other’s neck.

Cargill slumped before him, clutching the doctor’s coat, gasping oaths in a language the doctor had never before heard, and the doctor swung once more with the silver scalpel, driving it deep into Cargill’s chest. Cargill screamed, and the monstrous wings fluttered, and the vampire lay dead.

Doctor Lamming staggered from the room. He had to get away, he had to get help, he had to call the police, there might be more of them here, more of them. In the darkness, without the lamp to guide him, he stumbled and ran along the upper hall, clattered and lurched and half-fell down the broad staircase, ran panting to the front door and to his car.

The car started at the first try. He turned it around, backing, turning, then pressed the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped ahead, to race around the curving driveway to the road.

The gates were closed, as Cargill had said. He hit the brakes, shoving downward with his foot, and the car squealed and swerved to a stop inches from the gates. He got out of the car, ran to the gates, pushed on them, and they started to open.

Something brushed his face. He turned and looked up, and it hovered just above him, its tiny dusky wings beating silently, and then it plunged and Doctor Lamming screamed his life away.

The baby.

1960

An Empty Threat

Ah, the South Seas. Maugham heroes and the young native girls, buxom and burgeoning at eighteen, so warm, so soft, so simple and oh, so willing. Ah, the South Seas and simple youth and the soothing, sun-tanned sirens of Samoa. Ah, for romance with the charming native girls, who never never never, it seems, give birth.

And ah, the daydreams in the cold, cold winter air. With all the car windows closed, Frederick Leary shriveled in the dry warm air spewed from the heater beside his knees, and the windshield misted over. With a window open, the cold air outside reached thin freezing fingers in to icily tweak his thin nose, and the vulnerable virgins of the South Pacific receded, waving, undulating, growing small and indistinct and far, far out of reach.

And Frederick Leary was only Frederick Leary after all. Manager of the local branch of the Bonham Bookstore chain. Well-read, through accretion. A husband, but not a father. Thirty-two, but not wealthy. College-trained, and distantly liked by his employees.

Irritated, annoyed, obscurely cheated, Frederick Leary turned into his driveway, and the car that had been following him pulled to the curb three houses away. Frederick pushed open the car door, which squeaked and cracked, and plodded through the snow to push up the garage door, an overhead, put in at great expense and a damned nuisance for all the cost. And the car that had been following him disgorged its occupant, a pale and indecisive youth, who shrunk inside his overcoat, who stood hatless in the gentle fall of snow, who chewed viciously upon a filter-tip cigarette and fondled the gun in his pocket, wondering if he had the nerve.

Returning to his car, Frederick drove it into the garage. Armed with a brown paper sack containing bread and milk, he left car and garage, pulled down the damned overhead behind him, and slogged through the new-fallen snow toward the back porch. And the youth threw away the soggy butt and shuffled away, to walk around the block, kicking at the drifts of snow, building up his courage for the act.

The back porch was screened, and the slamming of the screen door made an odd contrast to the snow collapsing from the sky. Frederick maneuvered the brown paper bag from hand to hand as he removed his overshoes, then pushed open the back door and walked into a blast of heat and bright yellow. The kitchen.

Louise had her back to him. She was doing something to a vegetable with a knife, and she didn’t bother to turn around. She already knew who it was. She said, “You’re home late.”

“Late shoppers,” Frederick told her, as he put the milk in the refrigerator and the bread in the bread-box. “You know Saturday. Particularly before Christmas. People buy books and give them to each other and nobody ever reads them. Didn’t get to close the store till twenty after six.”

“Supper in ten minutes,” Louise told him, still with her back to him, and brushed the chopped vegetable into a bowl.

Frederick walked through the house to the stairs and the foyer and the front door. He put his coat and hat in the closet and trotted upstairs to wash his hands, noticing for the thousandth time the places where the stair treads were coming loose. From his angle of vision, it seemed at times as though everything in the world were coming loose. Overhead doors, screen doors, stair treads. And the cold water faucet. He left the bathroom, refusing to listen to the measured drip of cold water behind him.

And outside, the youth completed his circuit of the block. He paused before the Leary house, looking this way and that, and a phrase came to him, from somewhere, from a conversation or television. “Calculated risk.” That’s what it was, and if he played it smart he could bring it off. He hurried along the driveway to the back of the house. He could feel his heart beating, and he touched the gun in his pocket for assurance. A calculated risk. He could do it.

On Saturday and Sunday, Frederick and Louise dined in the dining room, using the good silver, the good dishes and the good tablecloth. It was a habit that had once been an adventure. In silence they sat facing one another, in silence they fed, both aware that the good dishes were mostly chipped, the good silverware was just slightly tarnished. In pouring gravy on his boiled potatoes, Frederick spotted the tablecloth again. He looked guiltily at his wife, but she ate stolidly and silently, looking at the spot of gravy but not speaking. In the silence, the cold water dripped in the sink far away upstairs, and the tarnished silver clinked against the chipped dishes.

Stealthily, slowly, silently, the youth pushed open the screen door, sidled through, and gently closed it once again. He crept to the back door, his long thin fingers curled around the knob, soundlessly he opened the door and gained entrance to the house.

Louise looked up. “I feel a chill.”

Frederick said, “I feel fine.”

Louise said, “It’s gone now,” and looked back at her plate.

In the yellow warmth of the kitchen, the youth stood and dripped quietly upon the floor. He opened his overcoat, allowing warmth to spread closer against his body. The uncertainty crowded in on him, but he fought it away. He took the pistol from his overcoat pocket, feeling the metal cold against the skin of his hand. He stood there, tightly holding the gun until the metal grew warmer, until he was sure again, then slid forward through the hall to the dining room.

He stood in the doorway, looking at them, watching them eat, and neither looked up. He held the pistol aimed at the table, midway between the two of them, and when he was sure he could do it, he said, “Don’t move.”

Louise dropped her fork and pressed her palm against her mouth. Instinctively, she knew that it would be dangerous, perhaps fatal, for her to scream, and she held the scream back in her mouth with a taut and quivering hand.

Frederick pushed his chair back and half-rose, saying, “What—?” But then he saw the gun, and he subsided, flopping back into the chair with his mouth open and soundless.

Now that he had committed himself, the youth felt suddenly at case. It was a risk, a calculated risk. They were afraid of him, he could see it in their eyes, and now he was strong. “Just sit there,” he ordered. “Don’t make any noise. Do like I tell you, and you’ll be all right.”

Frederick closed his mouth and swallowed. He said, “What do you want?”

The youth pointed the pistol at Frederick. “I’m gonna send you on a little trip,” he said. “You’re gonna go back to that bookstore of yours, and you’re gonna open the safe and take out the money that’s in it. You got Friday night’s receipts in there and you got today’s receipts, all in there, maybe five or six grand. You’re gonna take the money out of the safe and put it in a paper bag. And then you’re gonna bring it right back here to me. I’ll be waiting right here for you. With your wife.” He looked at his watch. “It’s just about seven o’clock. I’ll give you till eight o’clock to get back here with the money from the store. If you don’t come back, I’ll kill your wife. If you call the cops and they come around, I’ll kill her for that, too.”

They stared at him, and he stared back at them. He looked at Frederick, and he said, “Do you believe me?”

“What?” Frederick started, as though he’d been asleep.

“Do you believe me? If you don’t do what I tell you, I’ll kill your wife.”

Frederick looked at the hard bright eyes of the youth, and he nodded. “I believe you.”

Now the youth was sure. It had worked, it was going to pay off. “You better get started,” he said. “You only got till eight o’clock.”

Frederick got slowly to his feet. Then he stopped. “What if I do what you tell me?” he asked. “Maybe you’ll kill the both of us anyway.”

The youth stiffened. This was the tough part. He knew that might occur to them, that he couldn’t let them live, that they could identify him, and he had to get over it, he had to make them believe a lie. “That’s the chance you got to take,” he said. He remembered his own thoughts, out in front of the house, and he smiled. “It’s what they call a calculated risk. Only I wouldn’t worry. I don’t think I’d kill anybody who did what I told them and who gave me five or six grand.”

“I’m not sure there’s that much there.”

“For your sake,” said the youth softly, “I hope there is.”

Frederick glanced at Louise. She was still staring at the youth, and her hand was still pressed against her mouth. He looked back at the youth again. “I’ll get my coat.”

The youth relaxed. It was done, the guy had gone for it. “You only got till eight o’clock,” he said. “You better hurry.”

“Hurry,” said Frederick. He turned and walked to the hallway closet and put on his coat and hat. He came back, paused to say to his wife, “I’ll be right back,” but the sentence sounded inane, said before the boy with the gun. “I’ll hurry back,” he said, but Louise still stared at the youth, and her arm was still bent and tense as she tightly gripped her mouth.

Frederick moved quickly through the house and out the back door. Automatically, he put on his overshoes, wet and cold against his ankles. He pushed open the screen door and hurried over to the garage. He had trouble opening the overhead door. He scraped between the side of the car and the concrete block wall of the garage, squeezed behind the wheel, backed the car out of the garage. Still automatically, he got out of the car and closed the overhead door again. And then the enormity of it hit him. Inside there was Louise, with a killer. A youth who would murder her, if Frederick didn’t get back in time.

He scurried back to the car, backed out to the street, turned and fled down the dark and silent, snow-covered street.

Hurry. He had to hurry. The windshield misted and he wiped impatiently at it, opened the window a bit and a touch of frost brushed his ear. The car was cold, but soon the heater was working full-strength, pumping warm dry air into the car.

His mind raced on, in a thousand directions at once, far ahead of the car. Way in the back of his mind, the Samoan virgins swayed and danced, motioning to him, beckoning to him. At the front of his mind loomed the face of the youth and the functional terror of the pistol. He would kill Louise, he really would.

He might kill her anyway. He might kill them both. Should he call the police? Should he stop and call the police? What was it the youth had said? Calculated risk. Calculated risk.

He turned right, turned left, skidded as he pressed too hard on the accelerator, barely missed a parked car and hurried on. His heart pounded, now because of the narrow escape from an accident. He could kill himself in the car, without any youths with pistols and sharp bitter faces.

Nonsense. Even at thirty miles an hour, bundled up in an overcoat the way he was, hitting a parked car wouldn’t kill him. It might knock him out, shake him up, but it wouldn’t kill him.

But it would kill Louise, because he wouldn’t get back in time.

Calculated risk. He slowed, thought of a life without Louise. The snow collapsed from the sky, and he thought of Samoa. What if he didn’t go back?

What if he didn’t go back?

But the boy might not kill her after all. And he would return, tomorrow or the next day, and she would be waiting for him, and she would know why he hadn’t come back. She would know that he had hoped the boy would kill her.

But what if he couldn’t go back?

Calculated risk. With sudden decision he accelerated, tearing down the empty residential street. He jammed his foot on the brakes, the tires slid on ice, he twisted the wheel, and the car hurtled into a telephone pole. The car crumpled against the pole with a squealing, jarring crash, but Frederick was lulled to unconsciousness by the sweet, sweet songs of the islands.

Travelers Far and Wee

A Fable of Futurity

Roger turned right on Eighth Avenue from Fourteenth Street and drove uptown. Phil was asleep in the seat on his right. Roger readjusted himself behind the wheel, cut between two cabs, barely missed a truck, gradually worked the car — this year’s Oldsmobile, with the latest sanitary equipment — over to the left-hand side of the road. Eighth Avenue is one way, uptown, and Roger drove along the farthest lane over to the left. The lights were staggered, and Roger pushed the car at just under thirty miles an hour, clicking across each intersection just as the light snapped green.

He turned left on Forty Fifth Street, crossed Ninth Avenue, followed Forty Fifth Street down to the end, turned right and drove up the ramp to the Parkway. He speeded up to thirty five miles an hour, and glanced over at Phil. The poor guy was still asleep.

At One Hundred Seventy Fifth Street, Roger turned off and took the approach to the George Washington bridge. He drove across the bridge, rolled the window down, dropped a fifty cent piece into the toll taker’s hand. Rolling the window back up, he pulled out among the Jersey traffic.

Roger appeared to be about forty. Since it was a chill October day, he wore a tailored herringbone tweed topcoat, a gray hat and tan gloves. His face was full-fleshed, but not puffy. He didn’t wear glasses, and he looked like a successful businessman.

Phil, asleep on the seat beside him, wore approximately the same clothing. Although his face had its own individuality, it gave the same impression as did Roger’s. A man of means, an executive, a man who gives commands, a man of business and foresight and a good income.

Roger swooped the gray Olds halfway round a cloverleaf, swung gently and smoothly into a turn-off, barely touched the power brakes, and the car purringly decelerated as he drove into the tiny Jersey town.

The bank was on the main road of town. Roger turned into the driveway and parked behind the car waiting by the drive-in teller’s window. He took out checkbook and pen, wrote out a check to cash, and when his turn came, drove up to the window, rolled down the window at his side, and handed the check in to the teller. After a minute, the teller pushed a wad of greenbacks out to him. Roger took the money, tossed it carelessly on the seat between himself and Philip, rolled up the window, and drove around the modest brick bank building, out to the street, and turned back the way he had come.

Another fifty cents to the man at the tollgate, and Roger drove the car swiftly back across the bridge. This time, he took the “Local Streets” exit, turned north, drove until he came to the drive-in restaurant. He parked before the neon-coated, modernistic, glassed-in building, and waited until the chilly girl carhop came over to take his order. He asked for a hamburger, a cup of coffee, apple pie with ice cream. The carhop went away, and Roger picked up the cash that had been lying on the seat, counted it, shoved it into the glove compartment with the rest of the money there, except for one ten dollar bill, and put that bill on top of the dashboard.

He ate his meal, handed the ten dollars to the carhop, and said, “Keep the change.” He knew when he said it that it was a stupid thing to do, but he didn’t really care. He backed out to the highway, leaving the carhop stunned behind him, and headed back toward the city.

He glanced at his watch. Almost four thirty. He had to get downtown soon. He drove down Ninth Avenue, keeping to the left, turned onto Fourteenth Street, over to Lexington, turned uptown again, cutting off a cab that was coming the other way on Fourteenth Street, and held traffic up for quite a while during which he executed some complicated maneuvering, making a left turn into Seventeenth Street.

At Seventeenth and Fifth, he had to stop for a red light. The light turned green, but he sat there daydreaming. A car behind him honked, raucously, impatiently. Roger came to with a start, stalled the engine, got it going again, and turned right on Fifth.

The honking had awakened Phil. He sat up, blinking, rubbing his eyes, and said, “What time is it?”

“Not quite five.”

“I might as well stay awake then.” Phil looked out at the traffic and the crowds of pedestrians. “Pretty crowded,” he said.

“Getting close to the Christmas shopping rush,” said Roger.

“That’s true. That’s going to be a real mess.”

“I’m not looking forward to it.”

They drove in silence for a while. They went into Central Park, circled it, came out on West Seventy Second, turned right, drove up to One Hundred Twenty Fifth, turned right again, over to Seventh Avenue, headed back downtown.

They had a terrible time getting through Times Square. A cab driver rolled his window down and cursed Roger in two languages. Roger maintained his dignity, stared straight ahead, drove on downtown.

As they turned into Fourteenth Street, Phil broke the silence. He waved out at all the traffic surrounding them, and said, “I wonder how many of them are like us.”

Roger shrugged. “More every day, I suppose.”

“Makes you stop and think.”

“It does that.”

They headed up Fifth Avenue again, amid the cabs and the groaning buses. As they crossed Forty Seventh, Phil said, “It’s six o’clock.”

“All right,” said Roger. “I’m rather tired.”

They were stopped by a red light at Forty Eighth. Roger put the emergency brake on and slid over to the right. Phil clambered over him and got behind the wheel. He didn’t get there before the light changed. A cab behind blatted its horn at them.

Phil released the emergency brake and started forward, slowly. The cab blatted again. Phil swerved erratically, barely missing a cab on his right. Roger relaxed in his seat, leaning against the right-hand door. “I cashed another check this afternoon,” he said.

“How much do we have left?”

“I don’t know. Millions.”

At Fifty Ninth, they were stuck behind a car trying to make a left turn. Phil laughed, bet he’s one of us.”

“More every day,” murmured Roger. His eyes were closed.

They continued uptown, turned left at Seventy Second, over to Ninth Avenue, turned downtown.

Phil watched the other traffic. His face was tired, lonely, wistful. He watched the pedestrians hurrying along the sidewalk, bumping into one another, cursing one another, straining to be first to the corner.

They crossed Fifty Ninth Street just after the light changed. A cab slammed on its brakes. Phil looked in the rear view mirror, watched the cab cross the intersection. He smiled, faintly. He said, “Do you suppose we’ll ever be able to get out of the car?”

But Roger didn’t answer. He was asleep.

Anatomy of an Anatomy

It was on a Thursday, just at four in the afternoon, when Mrs. Aileen Kelly saw the arm in the incinerator. As she told the detective who came in answer to her frantic phone call, “I opened the ramp, to put my dag of rubbish in, and plop it fell on the ramp.”

“An arm,” said the detective, who had introduced himself as Sean Ryan.

Mrs. Kelly nodded emphatically. “I saw the fingers,” she said. “Curved, like they was beckoning to me.”

“I see.” Detective Ryan made a mark or two in his notebook. “And then what?” he asked.

“Well, I jumped with fright. Anybody would, seeing a thing like that. And the ramp door shut, and when I opened it to look in again, the arm had fallen on down to the incinerator.”

“I see,” said Ryan again. He heaved himself to his feet, a short and stocky man with a lined face and thinning gray hair. “Maybe we ought to take a look at this incinerator,” he said.

“It’s just out in the hall.”

Mrs. Kelly led the way. She was a short and slightly stout lady of fifty-six, five years a widow. Her late Bertram’s tavern, half a block away at the corner of 46th Street and 9th Avenue, now belonged to her. After Bertram’s passing, she had hired a bartender-manager, and for the last five years had continued to live on in this four-room apartment on 46th Street, where she had spent most of her married life with Bertram.

The incinerator door was across the hall from Mrs. Kelly’s apartment. She opened this door and pointed to the foot-square inner ramp door. “That’s it,” she told the detective.

Ryan opened the ramp door and peered inside. “Pretty dark in there,” he commented.

“Yes, it is.”

“How tail’s this building, Mrs. Kelly?”

“Ten stories.”

“And we’re on the sixth,” he said. “Four stories up to the roof, and the chimney up there is your only source of light.”

“Well,” she said, a trifle defensively, “there’s the hall light, too.”

“Not when you’re in front of it like this.” He stooped to peer inside the ramp door again. “Don’t see any stains on the bricks,” he said.

“Well, it was only stuck for just a second.”

Ryan frowned and closed the ramp door. “You only saw this arm for a second,” he said, and it was plain he was doubting Mrs. Kelly’s story.

“That was enough, believe you me,” she told him.

“Mmmm. May I ask, do you wear glasses?”

“Just for reading.”

“So you didn’t have them on when you saw this arm.”

“I did see it. Mister Detective Ryan,” she snapped, “and it was an arm.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He opened the ramp door again, stuck his arm in. “Incinerator’s on,” he said. “I can feel the heat.”

“It’s always on in the afternoon, three till six.”

Ryan dragged an old turnip watch from his change pocket. “Quarter after five,” he said.

“Took you an hour or more to come here,” she reminded him. She didn’t like this Detective Ryan, who so obviously didn’t believe a word she was saying. For one thing, his hat needed blocking. For another, the sleeves of his gray topcoat were frayed. And for a third thing, he was wearing the most horrible orange necktie Mrs. Kelly had ever seen.

“Arm’d be all burned up by now,” he said, musingly, “if it was an arm.”

“It was an arm,” she said dangerously.

“Mmmm.” He had the most infuriating habit of neither agreeing nor disagreeing, just saying, “Mmmmm.” To which he added, “Shall we go on back to your living room?”

Furious, Mrs. Kelly marched back into her apartment and sat on the flower-pattern sofa, while Detective Ryan settled himself in Bertram’s old chair, across the room.

“Now, Mrs. Kelly,” he said, once he was seated, “I’m not doubting your sincerity for a minute, believe me. I’m sure you saw what you thought was an arm.”

“It was an arm.”

“Ail right,” he said. “It was an arm. Now, that would mean somebody upstairs had murdered somebody else, chopped the body up, and was getting rid of the pieces into the incinerator. Right?”

“Well, of course. That’s obviously what’s happening. And instead of doing something about it, you’re sitting here—”

“Now,” he said interrupting her smoothly, “you told me you were so startled by the arm you dropped your bag of rubbish, and had to pick it all up again. So you stayed at the incinerator door a couple minutes after you saw the arm. And you opened the door twice more. Once to see if the arm was still there, and once to throw your own bag of rubbish away.”

“And so?” she demanded.

“Did you see or hear any more pieces going by?”

She frowned. “No. Just the arm.” At the expression on his face, she added, “Well, isn’t that enough?”

“I’m afraid not, ma’am. What’s our murderer planning to do with the rest of the body?”

“Well, I’m sure I don’t know. Could — could be that that arm was the last part to go down. He’d thrown down all the rest of it earlier.”

“Could be, Mrs. Kelly,” Ryan said. “But frankly, I think you made an honest mistake. What you thought was an arm was really something else. Maybe a rolled-up newspaper.”

“I tell you, I saw the fingers!”

Ryan sighed, and got to his feet. “I tell you what, Mrs. Kelly,” he said. “What you got here isn’t enough for us to go on. But if a report comes in on somebody being missing in this building, that would kind of corroborate your story. If somebody’s been murdered, he or she will be reported missing before long, and—”

“It was a woman,” said Mrs. Kelly. “I saw the long fingernails.”

Ryan frowned again. “You saw long fingernails,” he asked, “in just a couple of seconds, in that dim incinerator shaft and without your glasses on?”

“I saw what I saw,” she insisted, “and I only need my glasses for reading.”

“Well,” said Ryan. He stood there, fidgeting with that awful crushed hat, obviously wanting to be done and away. “If we get word on anybody missing,” he said again.

Mrs. Kelly glared at him as he left. He didn’t believe her; he thought she was nothing but a foolish old woman with bad eyes. She could hear him now, once he got back to his precinct house: “Nothing to it, just an old crank not wearing her glasses.”

And then he was gone, and she was alone. And her irritated anger gradually gave way to something very close to fear. She looked up at the ceiling. Somewhere on the four floors above, someone had murdered a woman, and chopped her up, and thrown her forearm down the incinerator shaft. Mrs. Kelly looked up, realizing how close that terrible murderer was, and that there was to be no help from the police, and she shivered.

The next afternoon, that was a Friday, at just around four o’clock, Mrs. Kelly once more brought her rubbish bag to the incinerator. This wasn’t a coincidence. Having lived alone for five years, Mrs. Kelly had developed routines and habits of living that carried her smoothly through her solitary days. And at four o’clock each afternoon, she threw the rubbish away.

On this Friday afternoon, very much aware of the murderer lurking somewhere in the building, she peeked out into the hall before hurrying across to the incinerator door. Then she quickly dumped the rubbish, but someone had thrown something greasy away recently, and a piece of paper stuck to the ramp. Wrinkling her nose in distaste, she reached in and freed it.

That’s when it happened again. This time, it was an upper arm, elbow to shoulder, and it didn’t pause at the sixth floor. It sailed right on by, elbow foremost, and left Mrs. Kelly staring at the blank brick walls of the shaft.

She was back in her own living room, the door locked and the chain attached, before she had time to think. And when she recovered sufficiently, she decided at once to call that smarty Detective Sean Ryan, because now she knew why there had only been the forearm disposed of yesterday.

Of course. The murderer was afraid to drop all of the body at once. It would take him half an hour or more, and someone on a lower floor would be bound to see something in that time. Besides, he might be afraid the whole body wouldn’t burn in just one day.

That’s why he dropped just one piece, each afternoon at four. The incinerator had been burning for an hour by that time, and so would be nice and hot. And it would have two more hours to burn before it was turned off.

Ah-hah, Detective Ryan, she thought, and reached for the phone. But then she stopped, her hand an inch from the phone, suddenly knowing exactly what Detective Ryan would have to say. “More arms, Mrs. Kelly? And this one didn’t even stop, just whizzed right by? Do you know how fast a falling arm would go, Mrs. Kelly?”

No. Mrs. Kelly wasn’t going to go through another humiliating interview like the one yesterday.

But what could she do? A murder had been committed, and what could she do if she couldn’t even call the police?

She fretted and fumed, half-afraid and half-annoyed, and then she remembered something Detective Ryan had said yesterday. Corroboration, that’s what he had said. Proof of murder, proof someone was missing from this building.

Very well, corroboration he would get. And then he’d have to swallow those smart-alecky remarks of his. How fast does a falling arm go indeed!

All she had to do was find proof.

Almost a full week went by, and no proof. Every afternoon at four, Mrs. Kelly stood by the incinerator door and in growing frustration watched another part sail by. Saturday, the left forearm. Sunday, the left upper arm. Monday, right foot, knee to toes. Tuesday, right leg, hip to knee. Lower half of the torso on Wednesday. Left foot, knee to toes on Thursday.

And Mrs. Kelly knew she had only three days left. The upper half of the torso, the left leg, and the head.

For the first time in her life, Mrs. Kelly disliked the automatic privacy that was a part of living in a New York City apartment. Twenty-seven years she had lived in this building, and she didn’t know a soul here, except for the superintendent on the first floor. But the people in the sixteen apartments on the four floors above her were total strangers. She could watch the front door forever, and never know who was missing.

On Tuesday (right leg), it occurred to her to watch the mailboxes. It seemed to her that this murderer, whoever he was, would be staying in his apartment as much as possible until the body had been completely eliminated. There was a possibility he wouldn’t even leave to pick up his mail. If there were a stuffed mailbox, it might be the clue she needed.

There wasn’t a stuffed mailbox.

On Wednesday (lower half of the torso), she thought to go back to the mailboxes again, this time to get the names of the occupants of the sixteen apartments up above. That afternoon, clutching her list, she watched the piece go by, and repaired furiously to her apartment.

It was all that Detective Sean Ryan’s fault, that rumpled man. He must be a widower, or a bachelor. No woman would let her man out of the house as rumpled as all that. Nor wearing a necktie as horrible as that wide orange thing Detective Ryan had had around his neck.

Not that it made any difference. Mrs. Kelly had had trouble enough for one lifetime with Bertram, rest his soul. Housebreaking a man was a life’s work, and a woman would be a fool to try to do the job on two men, one right after the other. And Mrs. Aileen Kelly was certainly no fool.

Though she was beginning to feel very much like a fool, as day after day the pieces of that poor murdered woman fell down the incinerator shaft, and Mrs. Kelly still without a shred of proof.

Thursday, she considered the possibility of hiding in a hallway, where she could watch the incinerator door. According to the way the pieces were falling, there were four parts left. If Mrs. Kelly were to spend each of the four days hidden in the hallway on each of the four floors above, sooner or later she would catch the murderer red-handed.

But, how to hide in the hallways? They were all bare and empty, without a single hiding place.

Except, perhaps, the elevator.

Of course, of course, the elevator. She rushed out of her apartment, got into the elevator, and peered through the round porthole in the elevator door. By pressing her nose against the metal of the door and peeking far to the left, she could just barely catch a glimpse of the incinerator door. It would work.

Accordingly, she was in the elevator at five of four, and pushing the button marked 7. The elevator rose one flight and stopped. Mrs. Kelly took up her position, peering out at the incinerator door, and so she stood for three minutes.

Then the elevator started with a jerk, cracking Mrs. Kelly smartly across the nose, and purred down its shaft, stopping at the fourth floor. Someone else had called it.

Furious, Mrs. Kelly glared at the overcoat-bundled man who stepped aboard at the fourth floor and pushed the button marked 1.

On the first floor, the overcoated man left the building, while Mrs. Kelly dashed to the incinerator door, opened it, opened the ramp, and watched the left foot go falling by, to land in the midst of the flames below.

That did it for fair. There were only three days left now, and four floors to check. And if she didn’t find out who the murderer was before Sunday, he would have disposed of the body completely, and there wouldn’t be a shred of proof. Mrs. Kelly stormed back to the elevator, thinking, “Three days and four floors. Three days and four floors.”

And the roof.

She stopped in her tracks. The roof. The top of the incinerator shaft was up there, covered only by a wire grating. It wouldn’t be hard to bend that grating back, and drop something down the shaft.

Which meant it didn’t have to be somebody in this building at all. It could be someone from almost anywhere on the block, coming across the roofs to drop the evidence as far from home as possible.

Well, there was a way to find out about that. It had snowed all day yesterday and last night, but it hadn’t snowed today. The flat roof would have a nice thick layer of snow on it. If anyone had come across it to the incinerator shaft, he would have had to leave tracks.

Getting into the elevator, she pushed the button for the tenth floor, and waited impatiently as the elevator rose to the top of the building. Then she mounted the flight of stairs to the roof door, unbent the wire twisted around the catch, and stepped out.

She had been in too much of a hurry to stop and dress properly for the outdoors. It was cold and windy up on the roof, and the snow was ankle-deep. Mrs. Kelly turned the collar of her housecoat up and held the lapels closed against her throat. Her old scuffy slippers were no protection against the snow.

She hurried off to the right, to the incinerator chimney, circled it, and found no footprints beyond her own.

So, she’d wasted her time, frozen half to death and ruined her slippers, and all for nothing.

No, not for nothing after all. Now she knew for sure the murderer was somewhere in this building.

Friday morning, Mrs. Kelly awoke with a snuffly head cold and a steadily increasing irritation. She was furious at Detective Ryan for making her do his work for him. She was enraged at the terrible creature upstairs, who’d started this whole thing in the first place. And she was exasperated with herself, for being such a complete failure.

She spent the day sipping tea liberally laced with lemon juice, and at four hobbled out to the incinerator to watch the upper half of the torso bump by. Then, snuffly and miserable, she went back to bed.

On Saturday, the cold was just as bad, and her irritation was worse. She sat and looked at her list of sixteen names, and searched desperately for a way to find out which one of them was a murderer.

Of course, she could simply call Detective Ryan and have him come over at four o’clock, to watch the piece of body fall down the incinerator shaft. She could do that, but she wouldn’t. When she called Detective Ryan, it would be because she had found the murderer.

Besides, he probably wouldn’t even come.

So she glared at the list of names. A silly thought occurred to her. She could look up the phone numbers of all these people, and say, “Excuse me, have you been dropping a body down the incinerator?”

Well, come to think of it, why not? It was a woman’s body, which probably meant it was somebody’s wife. With her husband the murderer. Most of the people in this building were middle-aged or better, couples whose children had grown up and gone their separate ways years ago. So far as she knew, there were no large families in the building at all.

It would have to be an apartment in which there were only two people. The murderer wouldn’t be able to hide the dead body from someone living in the same apartment.

So maybe the telephone would be useful after all. She could call each apartment. If a woman answered she would say she had a wrong number. If a man answered, she would ask for his wife. The apartment without a woman would be the logical suspect.

With a definite plan at last, she ignored her stuffed nose and sat down beside the telephone to look up the phone numbers of her sixteen suspects, and start her calls.

Two of the sixteen had no phone numbers listed. Well, if the other fourteen produced nothing certain, she would have to think of something else for those two. And she was suddenly convinced that she would be able to think of something when the time came, with no trouble at all. She was suddenly oozing with confidence.

She started phoning shortly after five. Eight of the fourteen answered, five times a woman’s voice and three times a man’s voice. Mrs. Kelly apologized to the women for calling a wrong number, and asked each man who answered, “Is the Missus at home, please?” Twice, the men answered, “Just a second,” and Mrs. Kelly had to apologize to the women who came on the line. The third time, the man said, “She’s out shopping right now. Could I take a message for her?”

“I’ll call back later,” said Mrs. Kelly quickly. “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

“Fifteen, twenty minutes, probably,” said the man.

She waited an hour before calling that number again, and she was so nervous she actually did dial a wrong number to begin with. Because this might be the end of the search. If the wife still wasn’t home—

She was. Mrs. Kelly, disappointed, made the eighth wrong-number apology, and crossed the eighth name off her list.

She tried the remaining six numbers later in the evening, and only once found someone at home. A woman. Mrs. Kelly crossed the ninth name off the list.

She tried the five remaining numbers shortly after ten that night, but none of them answered. Deciding to try again in the morning, she set the alarm for eight o’clock and went to bed, where she slept uneasily, dreaming of bodies falling from endless blackness.

The upper half of the torso had fallen on Friday.

Mrs. Kelly’s cold was worse again on Saturday. She forced herself to the telephone around noon, managed to lower the number of suspects from five to three, then gave up and went back to bed, rousing only to watch the left leg plummet by at four o’clock.

Only the head remained.

Sunday morning, the cold was gone. Not even a sniffle remained. Mrs. Kelly got up early, went to eight o’clock Mass, and hurried back home through the January cold and the slippery streets to have breakfast and make more phone calls.

There were three numbers left. One of them was answered, by a disgruntled man who said his wife was asleep, but the other two still didn’t respond. She tried again at eleven, and this time the disgruntled man turned her over to his wife. Two numbers left.

Her second call was answered by a man, and Mrs. Kelly said, “Hello. Is the Missus at home?”

“Who’s this?” snapped the man. His voice was suspicious and hoarse, and Mrs. Kelly felt the leaping of hope within her breast.

“This is Annie Tyrrell,” she said, giving the first name to come to her mind, which happened to have been her mother’s maiden name.

“The wife ain’t here,” said the man. There was a pause, and he added, “She’s gone out of town. Visiting her mother. Gone to Nebraska.”

“Oh, dear me,” said Mrs. Kelly, hoping she was doing a creditable job of acting. “How long ago did she leave?”

“Wednesday before last,” said the man. “Won’t be back for a month or two.”

“Could you give me her address in Nebraska?” Mrs. Kelly asked. “I could drop her a note,” she explained.

The man hesitated. “Don’t have it right handy,” he said, finally. Then, all at once, he said, “Who’d you say this was?”

For a frantic second, Mrs. Kelly couldn’t remember what name she had given, and then it came back to her. “Annie Tyrrell,” she said.

“I don’t think I know you,” said the man suspiciously. “Where you know my wife from?”

“Oh, we — uh — we met in the supermarket.”

“Is that right?” he sounded more suspicious than ever. “I tell you what,” he said. “You give me your number. I don’t have the wife’s address right handy, but I can look it up and call you back.”

“Well, uh—” Mrs. Kelly thought frantically. She didn’t know what to do. If she gave him her own number, he might be able to check it and find out who she really was. But if she gave him some other number, he might call back and find out there wasn’t any Annie Tyrrell, and then he’d know for sure that someone suspected him.

He broke into her thoughts, saying “Say, who is this, anyway? What’s my wife’s first name?”

“What?”

“I asked you what’s my wife’s first name,” he repeated.

“Well,” she said, forcing a little laugh that sounded patently false even to her, “whatever on earth for? Don’t you even know your own wife’s first name?”

“I do,” he said. “But do you?”

Suddenly terrified, Mrs. Kelly hung up without another word, and sat staring at the telephone. It had been him! The sound of his voice, the suspicious way he had acted. It had been him! She looked at his name on her list. Andrew Shaw, apartment 8B, two floors up, directly over her apartment.

Andrew Shaw. He was the killer, and now he knew that someone suspected him. It wouldn’t take him long to realize the call had come from someone in this building, someone who must have seen the evidence in the incinerator shaft.

He would be searching for her now, and she didn’t know how long it would take him to find her. He might be much more resourceful than she; it might not take him as long as a week to find and silence the person who was threatening him.

Pride was pride, but foolishness was something else again. It was time to call Detective Ryan. She had the murderer’s name for him now, and the head of the murdered woman hadn’t yet been disposed of. It was time for Detective Sean Ryan to take over.

Thoroughly frightened, Mrs. Kelly fumbled through the phone book until she found the police station number, and had it half-dialed when she remembered it was Sunday. Of course, some policemen were at work on Sundays, but not necessarily Sean Ryan. Well, if he wasn’t working today, some other policeman would have to do. Though she did hope it would be Sean Ryan. Simply to see the expression on his face when he saw she’d been right all along, of course.

When the bored voice said, “Sixteenth Precinct,” Mrs. Kelly said, “I’d like to speak to Detective Ryan, please. Detective Sean Ryan.”

“Just one moment, please,” said the voice. Mrs. Kelly waited for a moment that seemed to go on forever, and then the same voice came back and said, “He’s off to eleven o’clock Mass now, ma’am. Be back in about an hour. Want to leave a message?”

She knew she should settle for another policeman, that this was no time for delays, but she found herself saying, “Would you ask him to call Mrs. Aileen Kelly, please? The number is CIrcle 5-9970.”

She had to spell her first name for him, and added, “Would you tell him it’s important, and to call right away, the minute he gets there?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you very much.”

And then she had nothing to do but wait. And wait. And look at the ceiling.

He didn’t call till two-thirty, and by then Mrs. Kelly was frantic. In the first place, she was afraid her phone call to Mister Andrew Shaw might have him worried about maintaining his four o’clock schedule. He might decide to get rid of the head at three o’clock, when the incinerator first went on, and then there wouldn’t be any more evidence. And in the second place she was terrified that he would find her right away, that any moment he would be knocking on the front door.

Half a dozen times, she almost called the police again, but every time she told herself that he must call in a minute or two. And when he finally did call, at two-thirty, he stepped directly into a tongue-lashing.

“You were supposed to call me directly after you got back to the precinct house,” she told him. “Directly after Mass.”

“Mrs. Kelly, I’m a busy man,” he said defensively. “I’ve just this minute got back to the station. I had some other calls to make.”

“Well, you hotfoot it over here this instant. Mister Detective Ryan,” she snapped. “I’ve got your murderer for you, but with all your shilly-shallying around, he’s liable to get off scot-free yet. They turn the incinerator on at three o’clock, you know.”

“It’s this business about the arm again, is it?”

“It’s about the whole body this time,” she informed him. “And there’s nothing left of it but the head. Now, you get over here before even that is gone.”

She heard him sigh, and then he said, “Right, Mrs. Kelly. I’ll be right over.”

It was then twenty to three. In twenty minutes, the incinerator would go on. She was positive by now that he would change his pattern, that he would get rid of the head just as soon as ever he could. And that would be in twenty minutes.

And then it was fifteen minutes, and ten minutes and five minutes, and still Ryan didn’t come, though the precinct house was only a block and a half away, up on 47th Street.

At two minutes to three, she couldn’t stand it any longer. She peered out the peekhole at the hall, and saw that it was empty. Carefully and silently, she unlocked the door and crept down the hall to the incinerator. She opened it and stood staring in at the gray brick walls of the shaft, expecting any second to see the head go sailing by.

And still Ryan didn’t come.

At three o’clock on the dot, she heard a thump from above, and knew it was the head. Without stopping to think, she thrust her arm into the shaft in a frantic attempt to grab it and save it for evidence. With her arm stretched out like that, she couldn’t see into the shaft, but she felt the head when it landed on her wrist a second later. It was freezing cold, so he’d been keeping it in a home freezer all this time, and it was held by her wrist and a wall of the incinerator.

It was also sticky, and Mrs. Kelly’s imagination suddenly gave her a vivid image of exactly what she was touching. She gave a shriek, pulled her arm back, and the head went bumping down the shaft to the fire far below.

At that moment, the elevator door slid open and Detective Ryan appeared.

She glared at him for a speechless second, then shook her fist in fury. “Now you come, do you? Now, when it’s too late and the poor woman’s head is burned to a crisp and that Andrew Shaw is free as a bird, now you come!”

He stared at her in amazement, and she shook her fist at him. “The last of the evidence,” she cried, “Gone, burned to a crisp, because of—”

For the first time, she noticed the fist she was shaking. It was red, ribboned red, and as she looked, the cold ribbon spread down her arm, and she knew it was the poor woman’s blood.

“There’s your evidence!” she cried, raising her hand to him, and fell over in a faint.

When she awoke, on the sofa in her living room. Detective Ryan was sitting awkwardly on a kitchen chair beside her. “Are you all right now?” he asked her.

“Did you get him?” she asked right back.

He nodded. A woman whom Mrs. Kelly recognized as her across-the-hall neighbor, though she didn’t know her name, came from the direction of the kitchen and handed Mrs. Kelly a steaming cup of tea.

She sat up, still shaky, and realized thankfully that someone had washed her hand while she’d been in her faint.

“We got him,” said Detective Ryan. “The incinerator had just gone on, and we got it turned off in time, so the evidence wasn’t destroyed after all. And we got him stepping out of the elevator, his suitcase all packed. And he talked enough.”

“Well, good,” said Mrs. Kelly, and she sipped triumphantly at the tea.

“Now,” said Ryan, his tone changing, “I believe I have a bone to pick with you, Mrs. Kelly.”

She frowned, “Do you, now?”

“All week long,” he said, “you’ve been watching pieces of body being disposed of, and not once did you call the police.”

“I did call the police,” she reminded him. “A smarty-pants detective named Ryan came and refused to believe me. Called me a foolish old woman.”

“I never did!” he said, shocked and outraged.

“You as much as did, and that’s the same thing.”

“You should have called again,” he insisted, “once you’d figured out his schedule.”

“Why should I?” she demanded. “I called you once, and you laughed at me. And when I finally did call you again, you lollygaggled around and showed up late anyway.”

He shook his head. “You’re a very foolhardy woman, Mrs. Kelly,” he said. “You have too much pride.”

“I solved the case for you,” she told him.

“You took totally unnecessary chances,” he said sternly.

“If you’re going to give me a sermon,” she told him, “you’d better get a more comfortable chair.”

“You don’t seem to realize,” he began, then shook his head. “You need someone to look out for you.” And he launched into his sermon.

Mrs. Kelly sat, not really listening, nodding from time to time. She noticed he was wearing that horrible orange tie again. In a bit, when the sermon was over and she felt less shaky, she’d go on out to the bedroom. She still had most of Bertram’s clothes, his neckties included. There had to be one there to go with that brown suit of Ryan’s.

That orange thing was going down the incinerator, it was.

Man of Action

One of the very finest ways to louse up someone who is determined but unwise is to give him just exactly what he thinks he wants…

When Roger awoke, the calendar-clock beside his bed told him it was August 14, 2138.

“That’s odd.” mused Roger. “It was December 3, 1960 when I went to sleep.” He frowned and tilted his head to one side. “Or was it December 4th?”

“December 3rd,” said a voice.

Roger looked around and saw that he was alone in the room. “I don’t think I said that,” he told himself. “My voice isn’t that deep.”

He waited, but the voice didn’t say anything.

Roger sat up and studied the room. He’d never seen it before, he was quite sure of that. The walls were of a peculiarly bright golden hue that Roger would never have chosen for a bedroom, and the floor seemed to be of black linoleum. Or something like linoleum. He stooped and touched the polished black smoothness of the floor, and it felt… well, non-linoleum-like. “It certainly isn’t linoleum,” said Roger. “What in the world is it?”

“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.

Roger spun around. The voice, this time, had come from behind him. But still he was alone in the room. “Who said that?” he demanded.

“I did,” said the voice, from somewhere straight ahead.

“Where are you?” asked Roger, squinting a trifle.

“Here,” said the voice.

“Who are you, then?”

“Your mechanical.”

Roger blinked. “My mechanical what?”

“Uh,” said the voice. “Squawk. Brrrp-brrrp, crah! I am your mechanical.” Except for the ‘crah!’, all of the sounds and words had been delivered with the same unemotional monotone that had characterized the voice from the beginning. The ‘crah’ was different only in that it was somewhat louder and a bit higher in pitch.

“My mechanical,” echoed Roger. He frowned and folded his arms and blinked at the blank golden wall. And it was a blank wall, a very blank wall. All the walls were blank, save for a door in the wall to Roger’s right and a window in the wall to his left. The door was silver and knobless, and in conjunction with the golden walls it made Roger think of money. And money made him think of income and outgo, which made him think of work, which made him remember that he had gone to sleep on December 3, 1960 and had awakened — if the calendar-clock were to be believed — on August 14, 2138, in a room utterly different from his own bedroom, and in a bed as strange as any he had ever seen.

Stranger, come to think of it. It was the first bed he’d ever seen hover eighteen inches above the floor.

Which made him think of the voice, for some reason, and he said, petulantly, “My mechanical what?”

“Machine?” said the voice, with a definite air of hesitant doubt.

“My mechanical machine?” Roger looked again at the blank wall. “A robot, you mean?”

“Not precisely,” said the voice.

“Where’s your grid?” asked Roger.

“Meaning doubtful,” said the voice. “Grid nonexistent.”

“Is it really August 14, 2138?” asked Roger, struck suddenly by the idea that the calendar-clock might be wrong. Must be wrong. 1960 to 2138 was — he couldn’t figure it exactly, but it was over a hundred years. Well over a hundred years.

“The date is correct,” said the voice.

“Where am I, exactly?” asked Roger.

“In this room,” said the voice.

“I mean, geographically,” said Roger, annoyed at the infuriating habit of the voice of taking every question at its most literal level of meaning.

“New York,” said the voice, “North-Eastern Union, North America, Earth, Solar Sys—”

“Enough! Thank you very much, New York was enough. That was where I went to sleep last night. Or whenever it was. At least that hasn’t changed.” Roger walked over to the window and looked out, to discover that it had changed after all. The New York outside his window was far different from the New York outside his Greenwich Village window at home, back in 1960. This New York consisted almost entirely of straight vertical lines and elliptical diagonal lines, and almost everything was the same gold as the room walls or the same silver as the room door or the same black as the room floor, “Is that real gold?” asked Roger, then hurriedly added, “Wait! I mean the metal, not the color.”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger sighed with irritation. “What is it, then?” he asked. “Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice. “And the silver?”

“Yes.”

“And the black.”

There was no answer, and Roger wondered what had gone wrong until he realized he’d phrased that last remark as a statement rather than a question. The voice, he now understood, responded only to direct questions.

It was time for the most direct question of all. “What’s going on here?” asked Roger.

“You are asking questions,” said the voice, “and I am answering them.”

“That isn’t what I mean,” wailed Roger. “I mean… I mean— What am I doing here?”

“You are asking questions,” said the voice.

Yelping, Roger snatched up the calendar-clock to hurl it, and stood posed, off-balance, rocking a bit. There wasn’t anything to hurl at, nothing but the four golden walls, the black floor, the silver door, the hovering bed, the kidney-shaped bedside table and the view out of the window. That last was good enough for Roger. He hurled the calendar-clock out the window.

The window hurled it right back. The calendar-clock bounced off the window, passed Roger at waist-level, and clashed to the floor, where it slid along until it brought up against the far wall, near the door.

Roger gaped in all directions at once, and finally moved forward to gingerly touch the window. It looked like glass, and it felt like glass, but it certainly hadn’t reacted like glass.

“What in the world is it?” he wondered.

“Fluoryl plastic,” said the voice.

Roger jumped. He hadn’t realized he’d asked that question aloud. It was a habit of his, he knew, talking to himself. It was because his three vocations — interior decorating, set designing and department store window display designing — were all essentially solitary occupations. Himself over a drawing board or prowling a presently-shabby living room or pinning a dress to a mannequin, always more or less alone, thinking and deciding and planning, and quite naturally he had developed the habit of voicing his thoughts aloud. Things like, “Red over that fireplace, I should think,” or, “Never do to put an entrance on that side,” or, “Black crepe hangings around the wedding gown would be chic.”

Which brought to mind, once again, the fact that it was morning and Roger should definitely be on his way to work. He was probably late already, and the manager at Wellman’s Department Store was a terror for punctuality.

“Of course I’m late,” he said aloud, struck by the incongruity of it all. “I’m well over a hundred years late.”

He whirled on the wall from which the voice seemed to emanate. “I want to know what’s going on,” he said angrily. “I want to know how I got here and why and when I can expect to go back and just exactly what’s going on here. And I want to know now, this minute.”

Ultimatum delivered, Roger folded his arms and waited, glaring at the wall. But the voice made no sound, and Roger remembered again that he had to ask his questions so that they sounded like questions, or the voice would simply ignore him. “All right,” he said, disgusted. “All right, then. We’ll play it your way. Question number one: How did I get here?”

“You were brought here,” said the voice.

“How?”

“Answer unavailable, involving theoretical physics beyond your mechanical’s understanding.”

“I do not have mechanical understanding,” said Roger. “Oh, wait. You mean you. Well. Was it a time machine?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“You could have simply said that in the first place,” said Roger reproachfully. “I didn’t want to know the mechanics of the thing. All right, question number two. Who brought me here?”

The voice began to reel off syllables, most of them containing an M or an L or an N, with either A or O for the vowel. A dozen or more of these syllables had poured out before Roger cried, “Stop! Halt! What is that, French?”

“Names,” said the voice.

It took Roger a minute to turn that answer into sense, and then he realized that the voice, literal as ever, had been giving him the names of the men who had built or operated or directed the operation of the time machine that had whisked him here from December 3, 1960.

December 3, 1960. “My Christmas windows!” wailed Roger all at once, remembering what he’d been due to work on today, at Wellman’s Department Store.

“It isn’t fair!” cried Roger. “I never did anything to anybody in 2138. I don’t even know anybody in 2138. And I certainly don’t have any descendants in 2138. I’m not married, and I have no intention of ever becoming married.” A doubt crossed his mind, and he frowned at the wail. “I don’t get married, do I?” he asked.

“Restricted,” said the voice.

Roger blinked. “Restricted? What do you mean, restricted?”

“Word in use in mid-Twentieth Century,” said the voice. “Meaning: applies to facts known to elite but hidden from masses. Usage here adaptation for present needs.”

The voice had an annoying habit, every once in a while, of talking like a telegram, which meant that Roger had to let the words circle around in his head two or three times, while inserting verbs and pronouns and modifiers, until he figured out what the message had been.

The message this time was humiliating. “Do you mean to say,” Roger demanded, “that you are the elite and I am the masses? Or should I say the mass?”

“Usage here,” said the voice, “adaption for present needs.”

“What that means,” snapped Roger, “is that you won’t tell me whether I ever get married or not. Do I have some smart-Aleck great-grandson playing a trick on his old great-granddad, is that it?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well! A straight answer at last. Then maybe you’ll tell me what I am here for.” Roger paused, grimaced, rephrased the last sentence and said, “What am I here for?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Well, there must be some reason, after all,” said Roger, exasperated. “Is there a reason?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“But you won’t tell me. I mean, you won’t tell me, will you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“That’s what I thought,” said Roger. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared gloomily at his pajama-clad knees. The silence lengthened. “I wonder what happens now,” he said to his knees. He looked up at the wall. “What happens now?”

“Whatever you want,” said the voice.

“Then I go right back to December 3, 1960,” said Roger promptly. He stretched out on the bed, folded his hands over his chest, and closed his eyes. “Five in the morning, I think,” he said. “I should like a little more sleep.”

He waited with his eyes closed until he had counted to twenty-five, and then he opened his eyes and looked at a silver ceiling and a golden wall. He hadn’t noticed before that the ceiling was silver. Actually, it blended—

All at once, he sat up and shouted, “Hey!” He glared at the wall. “I thought you said whatever I wanted to happen would happen. Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Well, then,” said Roger. “I want to go home. Can’t I go home?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Now?”

“No,” said the voice.

“This is infuriating,” cried Roger. He leaped from the bed and advanced on the wall where the voice came from. “I’m going to find you,” he muttered, “and rip out your wiring. Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger growled. The voice was so blatantly, blandly monotonous, so smug and self-assured. It was more than infuriating, it was — enraging. Roger tapped on the wall, trying to hear a difference in tone between one section and another, trying to find a panel or doorway or something that would let him at the voice, and found nothing. And that was even more than enraging. Roger shook his fist at the wall. “I’m going to get you!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice, as calm and monotonous as ever.

“This is ridiculous,” wailed Roger. “Can’t you see it’s ridiculous?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh, shut up with your yeses and noes,” Roger snapped. “If you can’t say anything useful, don’t say anything at all.” He paced around the room, smoldering with helpless rage and growing resentment. Stopping by the window, he looked out again at the city. It looked, he thought, like a set for a play about Buck Rogers. And not a very well-designed set at that. No symmetry at all, and a color scheme that very rapidly grew boring. Gold and silver and black, that was all, endlessly repeated. Far away, he could see tiny movement, but couldn’t make sense out of it at all, couldn’t say for sure whether he was seeing the movement of people or automobiles or what. And even with-his forehead pressed to the glass or whatever it was, he couldn’t see down to street-level at the base of tills building.

He had to think. He had to figure out some way to get back to 1960 and his own life in his own world. What he’d seen of this particular segment of the future so far hadn’t endeared him to 2138. He would much prefer his own bug-farm of an apartment in the Village, where the walls at least kept a discreet silence and the bed rested firmly upon the floor.

The voice had said that he could go home, and that he could have whatever he wanted, but that he couldn’t go home now. Well, when could he go home? That seemed like a sensible enough question, so he asked it. “When can I go home?”

“When you want to,” said the voice.

“I want to now,” said Roger immediately. “Can I go home now?”

“No.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake!” shouted Roger. “Round and round and round, you’re driving me out of my mini What’s the purpose of all this?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“But there is a purpose?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“When I know the purpose,” said Roger carefully, “can I go home?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Well. Good. At last we’re getting somewhere, I hope. Now, how do I find out what the purpose is?”

“By asking me,” said the voice. “Poppycock,” snorted Roger. “I’ve asked you half a dozen times already, and you never say anything more than, ‘Restricted’. If you think I’m going to go—”

Struck by a sudden thought, Roger stopped talking but left his mouth open. He tilted his head to one side, put the index finger of his right hand on his cheekbone, and studied the thought. Carefully, he phrased his next question. “Do you mean I am to ask you questions that will help me figure out for myself what the purpose of my being here is?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Like Twenty Questions,” said Roger. “You can’t mean it. You brought me all the way from December 3, 1960, just to play a question-and-answer game?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Now that,” said Roger firmly, “is the most absurd idea I’ve ever run across. What possible good can it do the people of 2138 to bring me all the way here from December 3, 1960, to play Twenty Questions with a mechanical machine?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

Roger, whose question had been rhetorical, was thrown into momentary confusion by the answer. Once he’d straightened it all out, he said, “All right, then. I’ll play the silly game. Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

“Question incomplete,” said the voice.

“I don’t see what your people hope to gain from this,” said Roger. “They do hope to gain something, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“What?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh blast!” swore Roger. “If you say ‘Restricted’ once more, you disembodied monstrosity, I promise you I will break through that wall some way and tear you into so many pieces you’ll look like an Erector set. Do you hear me?”

The voice said, “Yes.”

Roger took a deep breath and held it. It would be such a pleasant relief to go berserk, to rant and rave and kick things and hit faces and break prized possessions. But he couldn’t do it. There were no faces to hit and no prized possessions to break, and he had the feeling he would get the worst of any kick delivered to a fluoryl plastic wall.

The thing was, he told himself, it was patently possible to think one’s way out of this mess. The voice had as much as said so. As soon as Roger figured out for himself what he was doing here, he could go home again. It all sounded rather senseless, but he could only assume that the people who had arranged this had had some sensible motive in mind, and go on from there.

The first thing to do was get calm, and stay calm. Calm and analytical and unemotional, asking, searching, probing, intensive questions, backing this monotoning mechanical slowly but inevitably into the final corner, where at last he would have to Tell All.

Fine. That was definitely the way to do it. Roger folded his arms, took a stance, and glared firmly at the wall. It was time to start asking questions.

What questions? He said it aloud. “What questions?”

“Question incomplete,” said the voice.

Roger gritted his teeth. Calm, he told himself. You’ll never get anywhere losing your temper.

He wished, all at once, that he had done more reading in science fiction. Not that that would have done much good anyway. In this situation, it would be like being murdered and wishing you’d read more detective stories.

He had to think this through, coldly and logically. What did he know so far? He knew that he had been transported, through a time machine, from December 3, 1960, to August 14, 2138. He knew he had been transported for a definite purpose. He knew that it was up to him to find out what that purpose was, and that he could only find out by asking questions of his mechanical.

He had a sudden thought “Is the purpose of my being here,” he asked, “to discover what the purpose of my being here is?”

The voice hesitated. “Repeat, please,” it said doubtfully.

Roger tried, then tried again, and made it the second time. “Am I here to find out why I’m here?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger beamed with relief. “Eureka!” he cried. He leaped onto the bed, composed himself with arms folded across his chest, and announced, “Send me home.”

Nothing happened.

Roger opened one eye, from the corner of which he balefully surveyed the golden wall. “There’s more?”

“Yes.”

“More,” repeated Roger. He closed the eye again, and thought. These people wanted something from him. At least, it seemed that way. He thought he’d better ask, to make sure. “Do the people who brought me here want something from me?” he asked.

“Yes,” said the voice.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” complained Roger. “This is over a hundred years in the future. The people here must know everything I could possibly know, and lots more.” He opened both eyes, “Mustn’t they?”

“No,” said the voice.

“No?”

“No”

“Oh. You mean they’ve lost something, or forgotten something?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Like the secrets of the Pyramids,” reflected Roger. “How they closed the door and piled the rocks up, or whatever the secrets of the Pyramids were.” He ruminated, then sat up to ask, “Well, why don’t you just ask me, then? I’d tell you, if I knew.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said the voice.

“You’ve tried?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m not the first one. Uh, I’m not the first one. Oh, blast it, all right, am I the first one?

“No,” said the voice.

“Why did you pick me in particular?” Roger asked, struck by the sudden thought that there couldn’t possibly be any answer that made sense.

“No,” said the voice.

That one set Roger back a bit, until he remembered what question he’d asked. But this seemed to be the answer to some other question. Unless — “You mean you didn’t pick me in particular?”

“Yes.”

Another sorting out, and Roger finally had it straight. “I was picked at random,” he told himself. “By chance.” Somehow, that made it all seem much much worse.

He sank into thought, meditatively tapping his fingernails against his front teeth, a practice which had cost him any number of roommates in the past but which seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the mechanical voice. “They want me to guess what it is they’ve lost,” he said aloud. “There must be a reason for their doing things this way. On the other hand, maybe there isn’t. They’ve tried before, other ways. Maybe they’re just trying anything they can think of.” He looked at the wall. “Is that it?” he asked. “Are they trying different methods with different people, hoping sooner or later some method will work?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“How many times have they tried so far?”

“Seventeen,” said the voice.

“And they all failed?”

“Yes.”

“What happened to the seventeen people you took before? After they failed, I mean.”

“They died,” said the voice.

Roger yipped. “Died! Good heavens, why?”

“Because they failed,” said the voice.

“Why, that’s terrible!” cried Roger. “None of those people did anything to you. That’s unfair and immoral and… and… and murderous, that’s what it is.” Roger folded his arms in determination. “And I’ll have nothing more to do with it,” he said.

The voice made no comment.

“I suppose you’ll murder me now,” said Roger hesitantly. He glanced at the wall. “Will you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well, if you think I’m going to sit here,” said Roger, bounding to his feet, “and wait for you to decide to murder me, you’re sadly mistaken.” He looked wildly around the room, and noticed the silver door again. “I’m leaving.” he said. “Do you hear me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Bah,” said Roger. He advanced to the door and stood looking at it. There was no knob, but there was a depression in the surface, at waist-height, near the right edge. Roger touched the depression and pushed, and nothing happened. He tried to pull, and nothing happened. Then he pushed to the left, and the door slid back into the wall.

Roger stood looking into the next room. It was exactly like the one he was now standing in, except that there was another door in the opposite wall, rather than a window. Otherwise, everything was the same, the color scheme, the bed, the bedside table and the calendar-clock.

Roger sourly surveyed the room, and a dirty suspicion came to him. “Is there another room like this beyond that next door?” he asked.

Two voices answered, one from each room, and both of them said, “Yes.”

“And another one beyond that?”

“Yes,” said the voices.

“The window, then,” said Roger. He pushed the door closed again, and strode to the window. Experimental prodding and pushing and pulling demonstrated to him that the window wouldn’t open. And he already knew it wouldn’t break.

He was a prisoner. The door and window had made it seem less like a prison, but they had turned out to be frauds. He could go nowhere.

“I want to go home!” he shouted all at once. “I’m sick of this!”

No answer.

“Seventeen people,” muttered Roger. “They all failed. Why should you expect me to succeed? It just isn’t fair. Besides, what could I possibly know that the people of this time don’t know?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh, shut up! Here. Look at this window, look at this floor. We couldn’t build anything like this in my time. Look at that city out there. The New York in my time is greasy and grimy and dirty, not like this at all. And we could never make a bed that hovers eighteen inches off the floor.”

He picked up the calendar-clock, to put it back on the table where it belonged, and noticed that it bore no marks as a result of being tossed around by Roger and the window. “Fluoryl plastic, I suppose,” he mumbled. “Looks brand new, but it might be twenty or thirty years old, the way it takes punishment.” He looked up. “How old is this?”

“One hundred and twelve years,” said the voice.

“A hundred and twelve years old?”

“Yes.”

“That’s fantastic.” Roger looked at the calendar-clock, which seemed so brand new, and set it down on the bedside table. “How about the bed?” he asked. “How old is that?”

“Ninety-seven years,” said the voice.

“That old? What, have you given me nothing but antiques?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Why?”

“Restricted,” said the voice. “Restricted? Now, why on earth should that be restricted?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Oh, do be quiet a minute. Sometimes, I’m asking myself questions, and you don’t have to answer. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t answer.” Roger frowned. “Now,” he said, “the answer must lie somewhere in this stuff that you call restricted. So the thing to do is ask you lots of questions, and whenever you say, ‘restricted’, write down that question, and pretty soon all the questions will add up to an answer. I hope.”

He looked over at the wall. “May I have paper and pencil?” he asked “Yes,” said the voice.

Roger waited, but nothing happened. “Oh,” he said. “I see. Were on an Easter-egg hunt. Is there pencil and paper in this room?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Under the bed?”

“No.”

Roger looked around, spied the bedside table, and said, “Ah hah!” He fingered the table until he found the drawer he knew must be in there, and took out the pen and notebook. He sat down on the edge of the bed, opened the notebook, and wrote “Antiques.” Then he looked up at the wall. “What about the room?” he asked. “Is that an antique, too?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“How old is this building?”

“One hundred and twenty-one years,” said the voice.

“Is it the oldest building in New York?”

“No.”

“The youngest?”

“No.”

“How old is the youngest building In New York?”

The voice hesitated, as though checking the facts, and said, “Ninety-eight years.”

Roger blinked. “Ninety-eight years!” He was suddenly excited, sure that he was on the trail. “You’ve forgotten how to build things,” he shouted. “That’s it, that’s it! Everything here was built or manufactured generations ago, and now you’ve all forgotten how, and you want me to tell you how. Isn’t that it?”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger, about to go into an impromptu dance, faltered and sagged. “No?” he echoed hollowly.

“No,” said the voice.

Roger said four unprintable words, at the top of his voice, and kicked the bed. That hurt, so he sat down, calmed himself, picked up the pen and notebook and decided to try some other line of questioning.

What about the seventeen people? He could ask questions about them, maybe. “Were the other seventeen all from 1960?” he asked.

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh. Well, were they all from New York?”

“No.”

“Were they all from the United States?”

“No.”

“Oh, balderdash! No, no, no, all the time no, its enough to drive a body to distraction! Were they all from the Twentieth Century, at least, for pity’s sake?”

“Yes,” said the imperturbable voice.

“Well! At last. Why were they all from the Twentieth Century?”

“Restricted,” said the voice.

“Hah,” said Roger, and made a quick notation. “What you’ve lost or forgotten,” he said. “Can I assume it was something that was discovered in the Twentieth Century?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Well, perfected in the Twentieth Century?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Hm-m-m,” said Roger, making another notation. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century. You mean a machine, or something like that?”

“No”

“Not a machine. Hm-m-m.” Roger stroked his chin, where he had never successfully grown a beard. “Something perfected in the Twentieth Century,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Not a machine.” He had always liked charades and guessing games and word games of all sorts, and was now in the swing of it, the unusual circumstances and the hinted-at dire consequences of failure alike forgotten.

“A lot of politics in the Twentieth Century,” he told himself. “Maybe one of the political theories.” He looked over at the wall. “One of the political theories, is that what you’re looking for?”

“No,” said the voice.

“Nothing political,” reflected Roger. “I wish I knew the categories. Let’s see, it must have something to do with the fact that all the buildings are old. And are all the machines and manufactured things old, too? Like the bed and clock?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“That has something to do with it,” said Roger assuredly. “And, come to think of it, so has this question-answer business, one way or another. By the way, how old is the time machine that brought me here?”

“Just one hundred years old exactly,” said the voice.

“And how long ago did you start kidnaping people from the Twentieth Century?”

“Eight years ago.”

“And I’m the absolute first one who’s been put through this Twenty Questions routine?”

“Yes.”

“I take it that with the other seventeen, you asked the questions and they gave the answers, and the answere weren’t the right ones, so you’ve decided to turn it around and see if it works better this way. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“I don’t see why you have to murder people for failing,” said Roger. “Why do you?”

“It gives them incentive,” said the voice.

“Incentive,” repeated. Roger, and his eyes suddenly widened. “Incentive!” he cried. “But it didn’t give them incentive enough, did it?”

“No.”

“It wasn’t the right kind of problem for a Twentieth Century man, isn’t that it?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you’re trying this different method with me. You’re looking for a problem that suits Twentieth Century man. Right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

Roger nodded emphatically. “Of course. That’s the whole point. You want to see a Twentieth Century man solving a problem. Why? Because that’s what you’ve forgotten.” He beamed, smacked his right fist into his left palm, and strode up and down the room like a successful pirate on the top deck of a freshly-captured brig. “Now listen,” he said briskly. “This is a question, and a complicated one, and I don’t want you to answer till I’m finished. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“For thousands of years,” said Roger, “people lived lives almost totally devoid of change. Major changes, in politics or economics or society or whatever, took tens or hundreds of years. Changes in knowledge took as long or longer. Beginning in the Eighteenth Century, though, things were suddenly speeded up. Changes came more rapidly, knowledge increased by leaps and bounds, age-old problems in almost every field were solved. By the Twentieth Century, Man was even going out looking for problems to solve. From a creature which resisted change, which believed that its own order of things was the only possible order — like Aristotle convinced that the city state was the last word in government — Man became a creature searching for change, driving after change, to the point where sometimes he was shouting, ‘Change for change’s sake!’ Right so far?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“All right,” said Roger. He couldn’t keep still, he was pacing back and forth, waving his arms and nodding his head vigorously as he spoke, feeling more powerful and confident than he had ever felt before in his life. He was, after all, a representative of the Twentieth Century. And, if his guess was right, the Twentieth Century had turned out to be Man’s Golden Age after all. It was enough to make anyone feel strong and proud.

“Mankind,” declaimed Roger, “is like a pool of water. For thousands of years, it lies placid, changed only by the slow unnoticeable effects of rain and evaporation. Then something — the scientific method or the Industrial Revolution or the opening of the Western Hemisphere or whatever — something dropped a pebble into the pool, and it rippled and changed all over its surface. Political ideologies came up from everywhere. Scientific theories sprang into life. Diseases were conquered, machines invented, philosophies coined.”

Roger stopped, struck a pose, and raised one emphatic finger. “But,” he said firmly, “it could not last. The ripples would have to die down. The energy for change would have to burn itself out. By the Twentieth Century, that energy was at its peak. A hundred years later, the energy was gone.”

He whirled to face the wall. “Am I right?” he demanded.

“You are right,” said the voice.

“There is a difference between a field lying fallow,” said Roger, suddenly full of allegory,” and a field burned-out and overrun with weeds. Man could not go back to what he had been before the stone was cast into the pool, because now he had the example of the Twentieth Century to show him what he could and should be. We in my time had expected Man to have seeded the stars by now, to have finished the conquering of disease and old age, to have perfected his science and his politics and his human relations.” He pointed an accusing finger at the wall. “But you haven’t You’ve run down, you’ve stagnated. Mankind got only so far, and then stopped like an unwound watch. That’s it, isn’t it? You’ve stagnated.”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“A different kind of stagnation from that of the centuries preceding the Eighteenth. You’ve learned nothing new in the last hundred years, have you?”

“No,” said the voice.

“You haven’t gone out to the stars, have you? You haven’t solved the problems of sound government, you haven’t progressed in science or human relations. No. You’ve stopped, and now you’re sliding downhill. The peoples of the Southern Hemisphere are moving across the equator to conquer you, aren’t they? And ancient diseases, once wiped out, are reappearing. Population is growing smaller every year, with fewer and fewer births and more and more suicides, because life has become so essentially meaningless. You can no longer move forward, but it is no longer sufficient to stand still. Am l right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Of course I am,” said Roger. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so completely sure of himself, so totally in control. “And that’s why you steal people from the Twentieth Century. Because they still have the energy for change, and you want to find out how to get it for yourself. You’ve asked them straight out, and they couldn’t give you any answer that would satisfy you. You’ve probably tortured one or two of them, and still got nowhere. You’ve undoubtedly vivisected a couple, looking for the progress-spark the way the ancient doctors searched for the soul, and you haven’t found a thing. So this time you gave your Twentieth Century man a problem to solve, and told yourselves that you’d learn how to do it by watching me. Is that right?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“And have you learned anything?”

“No,” said the voice. “The process of your thinking is not understandable.”

“Still,” said Roger, “I’d’ve solved the problem. So now you can send me back to my own time. Right?”

“No,” said the voice.

Roger frowned. “Why not? Oh, wait, never mind. I see. You won’t let me go home until I’ve also solved your problem. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Simplicity itself,” said Roger. He bestowed upon the wall a superior smirk. “Stop running to the Twentieth Century for help,” he said, “and stand on your own two feet. It’s the only way. Now send me home.” And he lay down on the bed.

“Same answer,” said the voice, “given by the other seventeen. Answer unsatisfactory.”

Roger sat bolt upright. “Unsatisfactory? But it’s the only answer!” The silence following that statement was suddenly ominous, and Roger remembered the voice’s laconic answer concerning the fate of the previous seventeen: “They died.”

“Wait… wait… wait a minute now,” said Roger hastily. He jumped from the bed and backed away toward the window. “Don’t do anything, now,” he told the wall.

He waited, looking apprehensively from wall to door and back. As the seconds collected into minutes and the voice didn’t do anything, and nothing came through the door, he gradually calmed. “That isn’t the answer,” he whispered to himself. “There must be another one. There must be another one.” With sudden doubt, he squinted at the wall. “Is there another one?”

“It is assumed,” said the voice, “that there is an answer, and that the progress of the Twentieth Century is based upon it.”

“Assumed,” echoed Roger. He tried to think, and absolutely nothing happened. “How would I know?” he asked himself, and the voice, unbidden, answered, “You are a product of that time.”

“Yes, but I’m a designer. I don’t know anything about science or progress or anything like that. All I know is designing. What you need is a scientist, or a sociologist, or a—”

He stopped, suddenly hopeful. “Maybe,” he whispered. “Maybe, just maybe.” He looked at the wall again, and asked, “This search you’re making. Who’s actually behind it, the people or the machines?”

“The machines,” said the voice. “The people are too self-satisfied to worry, is that it?”

“Yes,” said the voice.

“Then I know what you should do.” He said it with great confidence and assurance, though he had no idea whether he was right or wrong. “I have one more use for your time machine,” he said. “After you send me home, I mean. There’s somebody else you should bring here. Then you should destroy the time machine, and make it impossible to build another one. So he’ll know he won’t be able to get back, he’ll just have to build a new life for himself here.” And also, he thought, so you can’t come get me if this doesn’t work. Aloud, he added, “Then you should put yourselves completely in this man’s hands. All the machines should do exactly as he tells them. Let him know he’s boss, the minute he gets here. Got that?”

“Yes,” said the voice, and somehow the monotone monosyllable managed to sound doubtful.

“What you people need,” said Roger positively, “is a leader. Look at the Twentieth Century. It was the time of leaders, of mass movements and conflicting ideologies. Every leader had a bunch of theories for how to make human society work. All the Stir and commotion that was brought on by this was what forced change and progress. The people of the Twenty-second Century don’t have anything to get all stirred up over. They don’t have a leader, somebody to give them a reason to look for change, somebody who’ll push them toward change whether—” He faltered, since he’d been going to say, “whether they like it or not,” and had realized just in time that that wasn’t what the machines had in mind. Instead, he finished, “they fully understand his methods or not.”

For the first time, the voice spoke without being asked a question. “We had decided,” it said, “that the change would have to be made within the people of our own time. We are looking for a way to make them similar—”

“I know, I know,” interrupted Roger. “That’s where you’re making your mistake. They are similar already. You’ve had seventeen failures. Don’t you see what that means? The people of my century are exactly the same as the people of yours. The only difference is that they have leaders. Without a leader, they act just the way the people of this time do.”

“Of course,” said the voice. It had apparently given up the practice of speaking only when asked questions. “The failure of the other seventeen puzzled us. We hadn’t expected it from Twentieth Century men. Do you have a particular leader in mind?”

“Certainly,” said Roger, though he didn’t. He thought rapidly. A sociologist? A physicist? A—

All at once, he smiled. “I have solved your problem,” he said with finality. “And mine.” And everybody else’s, he added to himself. “I don’t think he speaks English, though,” Roger said. “He speaks Russian. But I can positively assure you that there will be a great change here if you bring him.”

“That’s all right,” said the voice.

1961

Break-Out

Alcatraz is probably the toughest and best-known prison in the United States, long considered an impregnable, escape-proof penitentiary. The entire imprisoned population there consists of hard cases transferred from less rugged federal penitentiaries. In the middle of San Francisco Bay, it is surrounded by treacherous currents and is almost always enveloped by thick fog and high winds. A high percentage of the prisoners sent there are men who have already escaped from one or more other prisons and penitentiaries. “Now you are at Alcatraz,” they are told. “Alcatraz is escape-proof. You can’t get away from here.”

It was a challenge, and sooner or later someone had to accept it. That someone was a felon named Ted Cole. Cole had already escaped once, from an Oklahoma prison, where he had been assigned duty in the prison laundry. That escape had been made by hiding in a laundry bag. But now Cole was on Alcatraz, and Alcatraz, he was told repeatedly, was escape-proof.

Cole’s work assignment was in the prison machine shop, which suited him perfectly. Through an involved code in his infrequent mail, he managed to line up outside assistance from friends in the San Francisco area. While waiting for things to be set up outside, he spent a cautious part of each workday on the machine-shop wall, on the other side of which was the rocky, surf-torn beach of the island.

The day finally came. Leaving right after a head count, so he would have an hour or two anyway before his absence was noticed, Cole went through the machine-shop wall and dove into the water, swimming straight out from the island, the fog so thick around him he could barely see the movement of his own arms as he swam.

This, as far as he was concerned, was the only really dangerous part of the escape. If his friends couldn’t find him in the fog, he would simply swim until he drowned from exhaustion or was recaptured by a police patrol from the island.

Finally, a launch came out of the fog ahead, throttling down beside him, and Cole treaded water, staring anxiously, wondering whether this was escape or capture.

It was escape. His friends fished him out of the water, gave him blankets and brandy, and the launch veered away toward shore. Yet again, society’s challenge had been accepted, and another “escape-proof” prison had been conquered.

Accepting society’s challenge in his own antisocial way is second nature to the habitual criminal. The desire for freedom is strong in most men, and perhaps it is strongest in those who have, by the commission of crime, tried to free themselves from the restraint of society’s laws. The much harsher and much more complete restraint of a narrow prison cell and an ordered, repetitive existence within the prison walls, plus the challenge of being told that escape from this prison is impossible, increase this yearning for freedom to the point where no risk seems too great, if only there is the possibility of freedom. No matter what the builders of the prison have claimed, the imaginative and determined prisoner can always find somewhere, in a piece of wood or a rusty nail or the manner of the guards’ shift changes, the slim possibility that just might end in freedom.

This yearning for freedom, of course, doesn’t always result in imaginative and ingenious escapes. At times, it prompts instead wholesale riots, with hostages taken and fierce demands expressed and the senseless destruction of both lives and property. Such outbreaks are dreaded by prison officials, but they never result in successful escapes. They are too noisy and too emotional. The successful escapee is silent, and he uses his wits rather than his emotions.

The prisoner who is carefully working out the details of an escape, in fact, dreads the idea of a riot fully as much as do the prison officials themselves.

The result of a riot is inevitably a complete search and shakedown of the entire prison. And this means the discovery of the potential escapee’s tunnel or hacksaw or dummy pistol or specially constructed packing case or rope ladder or forged credentials. And the escapee has to think of some other plan.

He always does. No matter how tight the control, how rigid the security, how frequent the inspections or “impregnable” the prison, the man who desires freedom above all other things always does think of something else.

Take John Carroll, perhaps the only man ever to break both out of and into prison. In the twenties, Carroll and his wife, Mabel, were known throughout the Midwest as the Millionaire Bandits. Eventually captured and convicted, John Carroll was sentenced to Leavenworth while Mabel was imprisoned at the women’s reformatory at Leeds.

At that time, in 1927, Leavenworth was still thought of as being nearly escape-proof, and the constant shakedowns and absolutely rigid daily schedule had Carroll stymied for a while. But not forever.

Carroll had been put to work in the machine shop, and he spent months studying the guards, realizing that he would be much more likely to escape if he could get one of them to collaborate with him.

He finally picked the shop foreman himself, a truculent, middle-aged, dissatisfied guard obviously unhappy in his work. Carroll waited in the machine shop one afternoon until everyone else had left and he was alone with the foreman. The foreman wanted to know what he was still doing here. Carroll, making the big leap all at once, said, “How would you like to make thirty-four thousand dollars?”

The foreman showed neither interest nor shock. Instead, he demanded, as though it were a challenge, “How do I do that?”

“I have sixty-eight thousand hidden on the outside,” Carroll told him. “Help me get out of here, and half of it is yours.”

The foreman shook his head and told Carroll to go on with the others. But the next day, when work was finished, he signaled to Carroll to stay behind again. This time, he wanted to know what Carroll’s plans were.

Carroll told him. A part of the work in this shop was devoted to building the packing cases in which the convict-made goods were shipped outside. Carroll and the foreman would construct a special case and when Carroll felt the time was right, the foreman would help him ship himself out of prison and to the foreman’s apartment.

The foreman agreed, and they went to work. Carroll was a cautious man, and they worked slowly, nor did Carroll make his escape immediately after the special packing case was completed. Instead, he waited for just the right moment.

A note from his wife, delivered through the prison grapevine, forced Carroll to rush his plans. The note, which he received on February 28th, 1927, read: “Your moll has t.b. bad. I’ll die if you don’t get me out. I’m in Dormitory D at Leeds.”

Carroll knew that his wife’s greatest terror was of dying in prison, of not dying a free woman. He left Leavenworth that same night, in the packing case. But the case was inadvertently put in the truck upside down, and Carroll spent over an hour in that position, and had fallen unconscious by the time the case was delivered to the foreman’s apartment.

Coming to, Carroll broke out of the case and discovered the apartment empty and the new clothes he had asked for waiting for him on a chair. He changed and left before the foreman got home, and the foreman never saw a penny of the thirty-four thousand dollars.

Carroll went straight to Leeds. Posing as an engineer, he became friendly with one of the matrons from the prison, and eventually learned not only the location of Dormitory D within the wall, but even the exact whereabouts of his wife’s cell.

It took him five months to get his plan completely worked out. Finally, shortly after dark the night of July 27th, he drove up to the high outer wall of the prison in a second-hand car he’d recently bought. In the car were a ladder, a hacksaw, a length of rope, a bar of naphtha soap and a can of cayenne pepper.

Setting the ladder in place, Carroll climbed atop the wall and lay flat, so as not to offer any watchers a clear silhouette. He then shifted the ladder to the other side of the wall, climbed down into the prison yard, and moved quickly across to Dormitory D. He stood against the dormitory wall and whistled, a shrill, high note, a signal he knew his wife would recognize. When she answered, from her barred third-story window, he tossed the rope to her. She caught it on the third try, tied one end inside the cell, and Carroll climbed up to the window.

Mabel then spoke the only words either of them said before the escape was complete. “I knew you’d come.”

Carroll handed the tools through to his wife, then, one-handed, tied the rope around his waist, so he’d have both hands free to work. Meanwhile, Mabel had rubbed the hacksaw with soap, to cut down the noise of sawing. They each held an end of the saw and cut through the bars one by one, with frequent rest stops for Carroll to ease the pressure of the rope around his waist.

It was nearly dawn before they had removed the last bar. Carroll helped his wife clamber through the window, and they slid down to the ground, where Carroll covered their trail to the outer wall with cayenne powder, to keep bloodhounds from catching their scent They went up the ladder and over the wall, and drove away.

Carroll was recaptured over a year later, and returned willingly enough to jail. His wife was dead, had been for five months. But she hadn’t died in prison.

Most escapees don’t remain on the outside for anywhere near as long as a year. The majority seem to use up all their ingenuity in the process of getting out, and none at all in the job of staying out. Such men have fantastic courage and daring in the planning and execution of one swiftly completed job, be it a murder or a bank robbery or a prison break, but seem totally incapable of giving the same thought and interest to the day-to-day job of living successfully within society.

Another escape from Leavenworth is a case in point. This escape involved five men, led by a felon named Murdock. Murdock, employed in the prison woodworking shop, was a skilled wood-carver and an observant and imaginative man. On smoke breaks in the prison yard, Murdock had noticed the routine of the main gate. There were two gates, and theoretically they were never both open at the same time. When someone was leaving the prison, the inner gate was opened, and the outer gate wasn’t supposed to be opened until that inner gate was closed again. But the guards operating the gates had been employed in that job too long, with never a hint of an attempted escape. As a result, Murdock noticed that the button opening the outer gate was often pushed before the inner gate was completely closed, and that once the button was pushed, the gate had to open completely before it could be closed again.

This one fact, plus his wood-carving abilities, was the nucleus of Murdock’s escape plan. He discussed his plans with four other convicts, convinced them that it was workable, and they decided to go ahead with it. Murdock, working slowly and cautiously, managed to hide five small pieces of wood in the shop where he worked. Taking months over the job, he carved these pieces of wood into exact replicas of .38-caliber pistols, down to the safety catch and the trigger guard, then distributed them among his confederates.

The day and the time finally came. A delivery truck was leaving the prison while Murdock and the other four were with a group of prisoners on a smoke break in the yard. Murdock saw the outer gate opening before the inner gate was completely closed. He shouted out the prearranged word signal and ran for the gate, the other four with him. They squeezed through just before the inner gate closed all the way and Murdock, brandishing his dummy pistol, warned the guards not to reopen it The five dashed through the open outer gate and scattered.

This much planning and imagination they had given to the job of getting out. How much planning and imagination did they give to the job of staying out? Murdock himself, the ringleader, was the first one captured, less than twenty-four hours later. He was found, shivering and miserable, standing waist-deep in water in a culvert. A second was found the following morning, cowering in a barn, and numbers three and four were rounded up before the week was out.

The fifth? He was the exception. It took the authorities nearly twenty years to find him, and when they did, they discovered he had become the mayor of a small town in Canada. His record since his escape from Leavenworth was spotless, and so he was left to live out his new life in peace.

The courage and daring, the ingenuity and imagination, the skill and talent demonstrated in these and similar escapes, if used in the interests of society rather than directed against society, would undoubtedly make such men as these among society’s most valuable citizens. But the challenge is given these men, and they accept that challenge. They are not challenged to use their talents to benefit society, but to outwit society.

In fact, there seems to be a correlation between rigidity of control and attempts to escape. The tighter the control, the stronger and more secure and solid the prison, the more escape plans there will be, the more attempted escapes, and the more successful escapes.

The career of Jack Sheppard, probably the most famous despoiler of “escape-proof” prisons of all time, is a clear-cut demonstration of this. In one five-month period in 1724, Sheppard escaped from Newgate, England’s “impregnable” prison, no less than three times! The first time, he had help from inside the prison, which is probably the easiest and most common type of jailbreak. The second time, he had tools and assistance from outside, a little more difficult but obviously not impossible. The third time, without tools and absolutely unaided, he successfully completed one of the most daring and complex escapes in history.

Sheppard, born in 1701 and wanted as a highwayman and murderer before he was out of his teens, was first jailed in Newgate in May of 1724. When arrested, he had been with a girl friend, Bess Lion, who was also wanted by the police. They swore they were married and so, in the manner of that perhaps freer day, they were locked together in the same cell. Bess had managed to smuggle a hacksaw in with her — history doesn’t record how — and as soon as the two were alone, they attacked the bars of the window. But it was a twenty-five-foot drop to the prison yard, and the rope ladder they made of their blankets didn’t reach far enough. So Bess removed her clothes, which were added to the ladder, and they made their way down to the yard, the nude girl first. Bess rolled her clothes into a bundle, and she and Sheppard climbed over a side gate which was no longer in use. Bess put her clothes back on, and the two of them walked away.

He was recaptured almost immediately, returned to Newgate, and this time held long enough to be tried for his crimes and sentenced to be hanged. The day before the scheduled hanging, he was brought, chained and manacled, to the visitors’ cell. His visitors were Bess Lion and another girl friend, Poll Maggott. While Bess “distracted” the guard — history is somewhat vague on this point, too — Poll and Sheppard sawed through the bars separating them, and Poll, described as a “large” woman, picked Sheppard up and carried him bodily out of the prison, since the ankle chains made it difficult for him to walk.

That was July of 1724. Two months later, Sheppard was captured for the third time and once more found himself in Newgate. This time, the authorities were determined not to let him escape. He was allowed no visitors. After a whole kit of escape tools was found hidden in his cell, he was moved to a special room known as The Castle. This room was windowless, in the middle of the prison, and with a securely locked double door. There was no furniture, nothing but a single blanket. Sheppard’s wrists were manacled, and his ankles chained, with the ankle chain slipped through an iron bolt imbedded in the floor.

Sheppard, at this time, was twenty-three years of age. He was short, weak, sickly, suffering from both a venereal disease and too steady a diet of alcohol. His physical condition, plus the manacles and the placement of his cell, seemed to make escape absolutely impossible.

Sheppard waited until October 14th, when the opening of Sessions Court was guaranteed to keep the prison staff too busy to be thinking about a prisoner as securely confined as himself. On that morning, he made his move.

First, he grasped in his teeth the chain linking the wrist manacles, squeezed and folded his hands to make them as small as possible, and finally succeeded in slipping them through the cuffs, removing some skin in the process. He then grabbed the ankle chain and with a single twisting jerk, managed to break the link holding him to the bolt in the floor.

He now had a tool, the one broken link. Wrapping the ankle chains around his legs, to get them out of the way, he used the broken link to attack one wall, where a former fireplace had obviously been sealed up. He broke through to the fireplace, only to discover an iron bar, a yard long and an inch square, bisecting the flue a few feet up, making a space too small for him to slip by.

Undaunted, he made a second hole in the wall, at the point where he estimated the bar to be, found it and freed it, and now had two tools as well as an escape hatch. He crawled up the flue to the floor above, broke through another wall, and emerged in an empty cell. Finding a rusty nail on the floor — for tool number three — he picked the door lock with it, and found himself in a corridor. At the end of the corridor he came to a door bolted and hinged on the other side. He made a small hole in the wall beside the door, reached through and released the lock.

The third door, leading to the prisoners’ pen in the chapel, he popped open with the iron bar. The fourth door got the same treatment, and now he came to a flight of stairs leading upward. He knew his only chance for escape lay in reaching the roof.

At the head of the stairs was door number five. Thinking it was the last, Sheppard and his iron bar tore through it almost without stopping. And ahead of him was door number six.

This sixth door was fastened with a foot-wide iron-plated bar, attached to door and frame by thick iron hoops, plus a large iron bolt lock, plus a padlock, and the whole affair was crisscrossed with iron bars bolted to the oak on either side of the door.

Sheppard had now been four hours in the escape. He was exhausted, his hands were bleeding, the weight of the leg shackles was draining his energy, and the door in front of him was obviously impassable. Nevertheless, Sheppard went to work on it, succeeding at first only in bending the iron bar he was using for a tool.

It took him two hours, but he finally managed to rip the crossed bars down and snap the bolt lock, making it possible to remove the main bar, and he stepped onto the prison roof.

So far, the escape had taken six hours. It was now almost sundown. Sheppard crossed the roof and saw the roof of a private house next door, twenty feet below him. He was afraid to risk the jump, not wanting to get this far only to lie down there with a broken ankle and wait for the prison officials to come drag him back. So, regretfully, he turned around, recrossed the roof, went down the stairs and through the chapel, back down the corridor and into the cell above The Castle, down the fireplace flue and back into his cell, which was ankle deep in stone and plaster from the crumbled wall. He picked up his blanket, retraced his steps again, and went back to the roof. He had forgotten tool number four, and so he had simply gone back for it!

Atop the prison again, Sheppard ripped the blanket into strips, made a rope ladder, and lowered himself to the roof of the house next door. He waited there until he was sure the occupants had gone to sleep for the night, then he crept down through the house and out to freedom.

In the normal manner of escapees, however, Sheppard could never learn to devote as much energy to staying out as to getting out. He spent the first four days hidden in a cowshed, until finally someone came along who would bring him a hacksaw and help him shed the ankle chains. He then went straight home, where he and his mother celebrated his escape by getting drunk together on brandy. They were still drunk when the authorities showed up, and this time Sheppard stayed in Newgate long enough to meet the hangman.

Here is the core of the problem. The tougher the prison officials made their prison — the more they challenged Sheppard and told him that this time he couldn’t escape — the more determined and daring and ingenious Sheppard became.

This misdirected genius was never more evident than in the ten-man escape from Walla Walla State Penitentiary in Washington State in 1955. Their escape route was a tunnel under the main wall, but one tunnel wasn’t enough for them. They also had tunnel routes between their cells, so they could communicate and pass materials and information back and forth. When they were recaptured — which, in the traditional manner, didn’t take very long at all — the full extent of their ingenuity and daring was discovered. Each of the ten carried a brief case containing a forged draft card, business cards, a driver’s license, birth certificate and even credit cards and charge-account cards for stores in Seattle. Beyond all this, they all carried identification cards claiming them as officials of the Washington State prison system, and letters of recommendation from state officials, including the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary. And four of the escapees carried forged state pay checks, in amounts totaling over a thousand dollars. Every bit of the work involved had been done in the prison shops.

Compare this with the record of a jail such as the so-called “model prison” at Chino, California. Escaping from Chino is almost incredibly easy. There is a fence, but no wall, and the fence would be no barrier to a man intent on getting away. The guards are few, the locks fewer, much of the prisoners’ work is done outdoors, and the surrounding area is mostly wooded hills. For a man determined to escape, Chino would offer no challenge at all.

And yet, Chino has had practically no escapes at all!

Perhaps the lack of challenge is itself the reason why there are so few escapes from Chino. The cage in which the prisoner must live is not an obvious cage at Chino. He is restricted, but the restrictions are subtle, and he is not surrounded by stone and iron reminders of his shackled condition. At tougher, more security-conscious prisons, the challenge is flung in the convict’s face. “You cannot escape from here!” Inevitably there are those who accept the challenge.

The challenge at Chino — and at other prisons constructed from much the same philosophy — is far different “You should not escape from here! And when you know why society demands that you stay here, you won’t need to escape. You will be released.”

Both challenges demand of the prisoner that he think, that he use his mind, his wit and his imagination. But whereas the one challenge encourages him to think along lines that will drive him yet farther from society, the other challenge encourages him to think along lines that will adjust him to society.

No matter which challenge it is, there will always be men to accept it, as the warden of Walla Walla State Penitentiary — from which the ten convicts escaped with their forged-card-bulging brief cases — inadvertently proved, back in 1952. He gave the prisoners a special dinner one day in that year, in honor of the fact that a full year had gone by without the digging of a single tunnel. Three days later, during a normal shakedown, guards found a tunnel one hundred feet long.

Call Him Nemesis

Criminals, beware: the Scorpion is on your trail! Hoodlums fear his fury — and for that matter, so do the cops!

I

The man with the handkerchief mask said, “All right, everybody, keep tight. This is a holdup.”

There were twelve people in the bank. There was Mr. Featherhall at his desk, refusing to okay a personal check from a perfect stranger. There was the perfect stranger, an itinerant garage mechanic named Rodney (Rod) Strom, like the check said. There were Miss English and Miss Philicoff, the girls in the gilded teller cages. There was Mister Anderson, the guard, dozing by the door in his brown uniform. There was Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn, depositing her husband’s pay check in their joint checking account, and with her was her ten-year-old son Edward (Eddie) Clayhorn, Junior. There was Charlie Casale, getting ten dollars dimes, six dollars nickels and four dollars pennies for his father in the grocery store down the street. There was Mrs. Dolly Daniels, withdrawing money from her savings account again. And there were three bank robbers.

The three bank robbers looked like triplets. From the ground up, they all wore scuffy black shoes, baggy-kneed and unpressed khaki trousers, brown cracked-leather jackets over flannel shirts, white handkerchiefs over the lower half of their faces and gray-and-white check caps pulled low over their eyes. The eyes themselves looked dangerous.

The man who had spoken withdrew a small but mean-looking thirty-two calibre pistol from his jacket pocket. He waved it menacingly. One of the others took the pistol away from Mister Anderson, the guard, and said to him in a low voice, “Think about retirement, my friend.” The third one, who carried a black satchel like a doctor’s bag, walked quickly around behind the teller’s counter and started filling it with money.

It was just like the movies.

The man who had first spoken herded the tellers, Mr. Featherhall and the customers all over against the back wall, while the second man stayed next to Mr. Anderson and the door. The third man stuffed money into the black satchel.

The man by the door said, “Hurry up.”

The man with the satchel said, “One more drawer.”

The man with the gun turned to say to the man at the door, “Keep your shirt on.”

That was all Miss English needed. She kicked off her shoes and ran pelting in her stocking feet for the door.

The man by the door spread his arms out and shouted, “Hey!” The man with the gun swung violently back, cursing, and fired the gun. But he’d been moving too fast, and so had Miss English, and all he hit was the brass plate on Mr. Featherhair’s desk.

The man by the door caught Miss English in a bear hug. She promptly did her best to scratch his eyes out. Meanwhile, Mr. Anderson went scooting out the front door and running down the street toward the police station in the next block, shouting, “Help! Help! Robbery!”

The man with the gun cursed some more. The man with the satchel came running around from behind the counter, and the man by the door tried to keep Miss English from scratching his eyes out. Then the man with the gun hit Miss English on the head. She fell unconscious to the floor, and all three of them ran out of the bank to the car out front, in which sat a very nervous-looking fourth man, gunning the engine.

Everyone except Miss English ran out after the bandits, to watch.

Things got very fast and very confused then. Two police cars came driving down the block and a half from the precinct house to the bank, and the car with the four robbers in it lurched away from the curb and drove straight down the street toward the police station. The police cars and the getaway car passed one another, with everybody shooting like the ships in pirate movies.

There was so much confusion that it looked as though the bank robbers were going to get away after all. The police cars were aiming the wrong way and, as they’d come down with sirens wailing, there was a clear path behind them.

Then, after the getaway car had gone more than two blocks, it suddenly started jouncing around. It smacked into a parked car and stopped. And all the police went running down there to clap handcuffs on the robbers when they crawled dazedly out of their car.

“Hey,” said Eddie Clayhorn, ten years old. “Hey, that was something, huh, Mom?”

“Come along home,” said his mother, grabbing his hand. “We don’t want to be involved.”

“It was the nuttiest thing,” said Detective-Sergeant Stevenson. “An operation planned that well, you’d think they’d pay attention to their getaway car, you know what I mean?”

Detective-Sergeant Pauling shrugged. “They always slip up,” he said. “Sooner or later, on some minor detail, they always slip up.”

“Yes, but their tires.”

“Well,” said Pauling, “it was a stolen car. I suppose they just grabbed whatever was handiest.”

“What I can’t figure out,” said Stevenson, “is exactly what made those tires do that. I mean, it was a hot day and all, but it wasn’t that hot. And they weren’t going that fast. I don’t think you could go fast enough to melt your tires down.”

Pauling shrugged again. “We got them. That’s the important thing.”

“Still and all, it’s nutty. They’re free and clear, barrelling out Rockaway toward the Belt, and all at once their tires melt, the tubes blow out and there they are.” Stevenson shook his head. “I can’t figure it.”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” suggested Pauling. “They picked the wrong car to steal.”

“And that doesn’t make sense, either,” said Stevenson. “Why steal a car that could be identified as easily as that one?”

“Why? What was it, a foreign make?”

“No, it was a Chewy, two-tone, three years old, looked just like half the cars on the streets. Except that in the trunk lid the owner had burned in ‘The Scorpion’ in big black letters you could see half a block away.”

“Maybe they didn’t notice it when they stole the car,” said Pauling.

“For a well-planned operation like this one,” said Stevenson, “they made a couple of really idiotic boners. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do they have to say about it?” Pauling demanded.

“Nothing, what do you expect? They’ll make no statement at all.”

The squad-room door opened, and a uniformed patrolman stuck his head in. “The owner of that Chevvy’s here,” he said.

“Right,” said Stevenson. He followed the patrolman down the hall to the front desk.

The owner of the Chewy was an angry-looking man of middle age, tall and paunchy. “John Hastings,” he said. “They say you have my car here.”

“I believe so, yes,” said Stevenson. “I’m afraid it’s in pretty bad shape.”

“So I was told over the phone,” said Hastings grimly. “I’ve contacted my insurance company.”

“Good. The car’s in the police garage, around the corner. If you’d come with me?”

On the way around, Stevenson said, “I believe you reported the car stolen almost immediately after it happened.”

“That’s right,” said Hastings. “I stepped into a bar on my route. I’m a wine and liquor salesman. When I came out five minutes later, my car was gone.”

“You left the keys in it?”

“Well, why not?” demanded Hastings belligerently. “If I’m making just a quick stop — I never spend more than five minutes with any one customer — I always leave the keys in the car. Why not?”

“The car was stolen,” Stevenson reminded him.

Hastings grumbled and glared. “It’s always been perfectly safe up till now.”

“Yes, sir. In here.”

Hastings took one look at his car and hit the ceiling. “It’s ruined!” he cried. “What did you do to the tires?”

“Not a thing, sir. That happened to them in the holdup.”

Hastings leaned down over one of the front tires. “Look at that! There’s melted rubber all over the rims. Those rims are ruined! What did you use, incendiary bullets?”

Stevenson shook his head. “No, sir. When that happened they were two blocks away from the nearest policeman.”

“Hmph.” Hastings moved on around the car, stopping short to exclaim, “What in the name of God is that? You didn’t tell me a bunch of kids had stolen the car.”

“It wasn’t a bunch of kids,” Stevenson told him. “It was four professional criminals, I thought you knew that. They were using it in a bank holdup.”

“Then why did they do that?”

Stevenson followed Hastings’ pointing finger, and saw again the crudely-lettered words, “The Scorpion” burned black into the paint of the trunk lid. “I really don’t know,” he said. “It wasn’t there before the car was stolen?”

“Of course not!”

Stevenson frowned, “Now, why in the world did they do that?”

“I suggest,” said Hastings with heavy sarcasm, “you ask them that.”

Stevenson shook his head. “It wouldn’t do any good. They aren’t talking about anything. I don’t suppose they’ll ever tell us.” He looked at the trunk lid again. “It’s the nuttiest thing,” he said thoughtfully…

That was on Wednesday.

The Friday afternoon mail delivery to the Daily News brought a crank letter. It was in the crank letter’s most obvious form; that is, the address had been clipped, a letter or a word at a time, from a newspaper and glued to the envelope. There was no return address.

The letter itself was in the same format. It was brief and to the point:

Dear Mr. Editor,

The Scorpion has struck. The bank robbers were captured. The Scorpion fights crime. Crooks and robbers are not safe from the avenging Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS!

Sincerely yours,

THE SCORPION

The warning was duly noted, and the letter filed in the wastebasket. It didn’t rate a line in the paper.

II

The bank robbery occurred in late June. Early in August, a Brooklyn man went berserk.

It happened in Canarsie, a section in southeast Brooklyn near Jamaica Bay. This particular area of Canarsie was a residential neighborhood, composed of one and two family houses. The man who went berserk was a Motor Vehicle Bureau clerk named Jerome Higgins.

Two days before, he had flunked a Civil Service examination for the third time. He reported himself sick and spent the two days at home, brooding, a bottle of blended whiskey at all times in his hand.

As the police reconstructed it later, Mrs. Higgins had attempted to awaken him on the third morning at seven-thirty, suggesting that he really ought to stop being so foolish, and go back to work. He then allegedly poked her in the eye, and locked her out of the bedroom.

Mrs. Higgins then apparently called her sister-in-law, a Mrs. Thelma Stodbetter, who was Mr. Higgins’ sister. Mrs. Stodbetter arrived at the house at nine o’clock, and spent some time tapping at the still-locked bedroom door, apparently requesting Mr. Higgins to unlock the door and “stop acting like a child.”

Neighbors reported to the police that they heard Mr. Higgins shout a number of times, “Go away! Can’t you let a man sleep?”

At about ten-fifteen, neighbors heard shots from the Higgins residence, a two-story one-family pink stucco affair in the middle of a block of similar hones. Mr. Higgins, it was learned later, had suddenly erupted from his bedroom, brandishing a .30-.30 hunting rifle and, being annoyed at the shrieks of his wife and sister, had fired seven shells at them, killing his wife on the spot and wounding his sister in the hand and shoulder.

Mrs. Stodbetter, wounded and scared out of her wits, raced screaming out the front door of the house, crying for the police and shouting, “Murder! Murder!” At this point, neighbors called the police. One neighbor additionally phoned three newspapers and two television stations, thereby earning forty dollars in “news-tips” rewards.

By chance, a mobile television unit was at that moment on the Belt Parkway, returning from having seen off a prime minister at Idlewild Airport. This unit was at once diverted to Canarsie, where it took up a position across the street from the scene of carnage and went to work with a Zoomar lens.

In the meantime, Mister Higgins had barricaded himself in his house, firing at anything that moved.

The two cameramen in the mobile unit worked their hearts out. One concentrated on the movements of the police and firemen and neighbors and ambulance attendants, while the other used the Zoomar lens to search for Mr. Higgins. He found him occasionally, offering the at-home audience brief glimpses of a stocky balding man in brown trousers and undershirt, stalking from window to window on the second floor of the house.

The show lasted for nearly an hour. There were policemen everywhere, and firemen everywhere, and neighbors milling around down at the corner, where the police had roped the block off, and occasionally Mr. Higgins would stick his rifle out a window and shoot at somebody. The police used loudspeakers to tell Higgins he might as well give up, they had the place surrounded and could eventually starve him out anyway. Higgins used his own good lungs to shout obscenities back and challenge anyone present to hand-to-hand combat.

The police fired tear gas shells at the house, but it was a windy day and all the windows in the Higgins house were either open or broken. Higgins was able to throw all the shells back out of the house again.

The show lasted for nearly an hour. Then it ended, suddenly and dramatically.

Higgins had showed himself to the Zoomar lens again, for the purpose of shooting either the camera or its operator. All at once he yelped and threw the rifle away. The rifle bounced onto the porch roof, slithered down to the edge, hung for a second against the drain, and finally fell barrel first onto the lawn.

Meanwhile, Higgins was running through the house, shouting like a wounded bull. He thundered down the stairs and out, hollering, to fall into the arms of the waiting police.

They had trouble holding him. At first they thought he was actually trying to get away, but then one of them heard what it was he was shouting: “My hands! My hands!”

They looked at his hands. The palms and the palm-side of the fingers were red and blistering, from what looked like severe burns. There was another burn on his right cheek and another one on his right shoulder.

Higgins, thoroughly chastened and bewildered, was led away for burn ointment and jail. The television crew went on back to Manhattan. The neighbors went home and telephoned their friends.

On-duty policemen had been called in from practically all of the precincts in Brooklyn. Among them was Detective-Sergeant William Stevenson. Stevenson frowned thoughtfully at Higgins as that unhappy individual was led away, and then strolled over to look at the rifle. He touched the stock, and it was somewhat warm but that was all.

He picked it up and turned it around. There, on the other side of the stock, burned into the wood, were the crudely-shaped letters, “The Scorpion.”

You don’t get to be Precinct Captain on nothing but political connections. Those help, of course, but you need more than that. As Captain Hanks was fond of pointing out, you needed as well to be both more imaginative than most — “You gotta be able to second-guess the smart boys” — and to be a complete realist — “You gotta have both feet on the ground.” If these were somewhat contradictory qualities, it was best not to mention the fact to Captain Hanks.

The realist side of the captain’s nature was currently at the fore. “Just what are you trying to say, Stevenson?” he demanded.

“I’m not sure,” admitted Stevenson. “But we’ve got these two things. First, there’s the getaway car from that bank job. The wheels melt for no reason at all, and somebody burns ‘The Scorpion’ onto the trunk. Then, yesterday, this guy Higgins out in Canarsie. He says the rifle all of a sudden got too hot to hold, and he’s got the burn marks to prove it. And there on the rifle stock it is again. ‘The Scorpion’.”

“He says he put that on there himself,” said the captain.

Stevenson shook his head. “His lawyer says he put it on there. Higgins says he doesn’t remember doing it. That’s half the lawyer’s case. He’s trying to build up an insanity defense.”

“He put it on there himself, Stevenson,” said the captain with weary patience. “What are you trying to prove?”

“I don’t know. All I know is it’s the nuttiest thing I ever saw. And what about the getaway car? What about those tires melting?”

“They were defective,” said Hanks promptly.

“All four of them at once? And what about the thing written on the trunk?”

“How do I know?” demanded the captain. “Kids put it on before the car was stolen, maybe. Or maybe the hoods did it themselves, who knows? What do they say?”

“They say they didn’t do it,” said Stevenson. “And they say they never saw it before the robbery and they would have noticed it if it’d been there.”

The captain shook his head. “I don’t get it,” he admitted. “What are you trying to prove?”

“I guess,” said Stevenson slowly, thinking it out as he went along, “I guess I’m trying to prove that somebody melted those tires, and made that rifle too hot, and left his signature behind.”

“What? You mean like in the comic books? Come on, Stevenson! What are you trying to hand me?”

“All I know,” insisted Stevenson, “is what I see.”

“And all I know,” the captain told him, “is Higgins put that name on his rifle himself. He says so.”

“And what made it so hot?”

“Hell, man, he’d been firing that thing at people for an hour! What do you think made it hot?”

“All of a sudden?”

“He noticed it all of a sudden, when it started to burn him.”

“How come the same name showed up each time, then?” Stevenson asked desperately.

“How should I know? And why not, anyway? You know as well as I do these things happen. A bunch of teen-agers burgle a liquor store and they write ‘The Golden Avengers’ on the plate glass in lipstick. It happens all the time. Why not ‘The Scorpion’? It couldn’t occur to two people?”

“But there’s no explanation—” started Stevenson.

“What do you mean, there’s no explanation? I just gave you the explanation. Look, Stevenson, I’m a busy man. You got a nutty idea — like Wilcox a few years ago, remember him? Got the idea there was a fiend around loose, stuffing all those kids into abandoned refrigerators to starve. He went around trying to prove it, and getting all upset, and pretty soon they had to put him away in the nut hatch. Remember?”

“I remember,” said Stevenson.

“Forget this silly stuff, Stevenson,” the captain advised him.

“Yes, sir,” said Stevenson.

The day after Jerome Higgins went berserk, the afternoon mail brought a crank letter to the Daily News:

Dear Mr. Editor,

You did not warn your readers. The man who shot all those people could not escape the Scorpion. The Scorpion fights crime. No criminal is safe from the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.

Sincerely yours,

THE SCORPION

Unfortunately, this letter was not read by the same individual who had seen the first one, two months before. At any rate, it was filed in the same place, and forgotten.

III

Hallowe’en is a good time for a rumble. There’s too many kids around for the cops to keep track of all of them, and if you’re picked up carrying a knife or a length of tire chain or something, why, you’re on your way to a Hallowe’en party and you’re in costume. You’re going as a JD.

The problem was this schoolyard. It was a block wide, with entrances on two streets. The street on the north was Challenger territory, and the street on the south was Scarlet Raider territory, and both sides claimed the schoolyard. There had been a few skirmishes, a few guys from both gangs had been jumped and knocked around a little, but that had been all. Finally, the War Lords from the two gangs had met, and determined that the matter could only be settled in a war.

The time was chosen: Hallowe’en. The place was chosen: the schoolyard. The weapons were chosen: pocket knives and tire chains okay, but no pistols or zip-guns. The time was fixed: eleven P.M. And the winner would have undisputed territorial rights to the schoolyard, both entrances.

The night of the rumble, the gangs assembled in their separate clubrooms for last-minute instructions. Debs were sent out to play chicken at the intersections nearest the schoolyard, both to warn of the approach of cops and to keep out any non-combatant kids who might come wandering through.

Judy Canzanetti was a Deb with the Scarlet Raiders. She was fifteen years old, short and black-haired and pretty in a movie-magazine, gum-chewing sort of way. She was proud of being in the Auxiliary of the Scarlet Raiders, and proud also of the job that had been assigned to her. She was to stand chicken on the southwest corner of the street.

Judy took up her position at five minutes to eleven. The streets were dark and quiet. Few people cared to walk this neighborhood after dark, particularly on Hallowe’en. Judy leaned her back against the telephone pole on the corner, stuck her hands in the pockets of her Scarlet Raider jacket and waited.

At eleven o’clock, she heard indistinct noises begin behind her. The rumble had started.

At five after eleven, a bunch of little kids came wandering down the street. They were all about ten or eleven years old, and most of them carried trick-or-treat shopping bags. Some of them had Hallowe’en masks on.

They started to make the turn toward the schoolyard. Judy said, “Hey, you kids. Take off.”

One of them, wearing a red mask, turned to look at her. “Who, us?”

“Yes, you! Stay out of that street. Go on down that way.”

“The subway’s this way,” objected the kid in the red mask.

“Who cares? You go around the other way.”

“Listen, lady,” said the “kid in the red mask, aggrieved, “we got a long way to go to get home.”

“Yeah,” said another kid, in a black mask, “and we’re late as it is.”

“I couldn’t care less,” Judy told them callously. “You can’t go down that street.”

“Why not?” demanded yet another kid. This one was in the most complete and elaborate costume of them all, black leotards and a yellow shirt and a flowing black cape. He wore a black and gold mask and had a black knit cap jammed down tight onto his head. “Why can’t we go down there?” this apparition demanded.

“Because I said so,” Judy told him. “Now, you kids get away from here. Take off.”

“Hey!” cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume. “Hey, they’re fighting down there!”

“It’s a rumble,” said Judy proudly. “You twerps don’t want to be involved.”

“Hey!” cried the kid in the black-and-yellow costume again. And he went running around Judy and dashing off down the street.

“Hey, Eddie!” shouted one of the other kids. “Eddie, come back!”

Judy wasn’t sure what to do next. If she abandoned her post to chase the one kid who’d gotten through, then maybe all the rest of them would come running along after her. She didn’t know what to do.

A sudden siren and a distant flashing red light solved her problems. “Cheez,” said one of the kids. “The cops!”

“Fuzz!” screamed Judy. She turned and raced down the block toward the schoolyard, shouting, “Fuzz! Fuzz! Clear out, it’s the fuzz!”

But then she stopped, wide-eyed, when she saw what was going on in the schoolyard.

The guys from both gangs were dancing. They were jumping around, waving their arms, throwing their weapons away. Then they all started pulling off their gang jackets and throwing them away, whooping and hollering. They were making such a racket themselves that they never heard Judy’s warning. They didn’t even hear the police sirens. And all at once both schoolyard entrances were full of cops, a cop had tight hold of Judy and the rumble was over.

Judy was so baffled and terrified that everything was just one great big blur. But in the middle of it all, she did see the little kid in the yellow-and-black costume go scooting away down the street.

And she had the craziest idea that it was all his fault.

Captain Hanks was still in his realistic cycle this morning, and he was impatient as well. “All right, Stevenson,” he said. “Make it fast, I’ve got a lot to do this morning. And I hope it isn’t this comic-book thing of yours again.”

“I’m afraid it is, Captain,” said Stevenson. “Did you see the morning paper?”

“So what?”

“Did you see that thing about the gang fight up in Manhattan?”

Captain Hanks sighed. “Stevenson,” he said wearily, “are you going to try to connect every single time the word ‘scorpion’ comes up? What’s the problem with this one? These kid gangs have names, so what?”

“Neither one of them was called ‘The Scorpions,’ ” Stevenson told him. “One of them was the Scarlet Raiders and the other gang was the Challengers.”

“So they changed their name,” said Hanks.

“Both gangs? Simultaneously? To the same name?”

“Why not? Maybe that’s what they were fighting over.”

“It was a territorial war,” Stevenson reminded him. “They’ve admitted that much. It says so in the paper. And it also says they all deny ever seeing that word on their jackets until after the fight.”

“A bunch of juvenile delinquents,” said Hanks in disgust. “You take their word?”

“Captain, did you read the article in the paper?”

“I glanced through it.”

“All right. Here’s what they say happened: They say they started fighting at eleven o’clock. And they just got going when all at once all the metal they were carrying — knives and tire chains and coins and belt buckles and everything else — got freezing cold, too cold to touch. And then their leather jackets got freezing cold, so cold they had to pull them off and throw them away. And when the jackets were later collected, across the name of the gang on the back of each one had been branded ‘The Scorpion.’ ”

“Now, let me tell you something,” said Hanks severely. “They heard the police sirens, and they threw all their weapons away. Then they threw their jackets away, to try to make believe they hadn’t been part of the gang that had been fighting. But they were caught before they could get out of the schoolyard. If the squad cars had showed up a minute later, the schoolyard wouldn’t have had anything in it but weapons and jackets, and the kids would have been all over the neighborhood, nice as you please, minding their own business and not bothering anybody. That’s what happened. And all this talk about freezing cold and branding names into jackets is just some smart-alec punk’s idea of a way to razz the police. Now, you just go back to worrying about what’s happening in this precinct and forget about kid gangs up in Manhattan and comic book things like the Scorpion, or you’re going to wind up like Wilcox, with that refrigerator business. Now, I don’t want to hear any more about this nonsense, Stevenson.”

“Yes, sir,” said Stevenson.

The reporter showed up two days later. He was ushered into the squad room, where he showed his press card to Stevenson, smiled amiably and said, “My editor sent me out on a wild-goose chase. Would you mind chatting with me a couple minutes?”

“Not at all,” said Stevenson.

The reporter, whose press card gave his name as Tom Roberts, settled himself comfortably in the chair beside Stevenson’s desk. “You were the one handled that bank job down the street back in June, weren’t you?”

Stevenson nodded.

Roberts gave an embarrassed chuckle and said, “Okay, I’ve got just one question. You answer no, and then we can talk about football or something. I mean, this is just a silly wild-goose chase, frankly. I’m a little embarrassed about it.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Stevenson told him.

“Okay, I will. Was there the word ‘scorpion’ connected with that bank job at all? In any way at all.”

Stevenson looked at the reporter and smiled. He said, “As a matter of fact, Mr. Roberts, there was.”

Roberts blinked. “There was?”

“Yes, indeedy. There certainly was.” And Stevenson told him the full story of the bank job.

“I see,” said Roberts dazedly when Stevenson was finished. “I see. Or, I don’t see. I don’t see it at all.”

“Your turn,” Stevenson told him. “Now you tell me what made you ask that.”

“This,” said Roberts. He reached into the inside pocket of his sport jacket and withdrew a business-size envelope, which he handed over to Stevenson.

It was another crank letter, in the same newspaper clipping form as the first two. It read:

Dear Mr. Editor,

The bad boys were captured. They could not escape the Scorpion. I left the mark of the Scorpion On their jackets. Criminals fear the mark of the Scorpion. They cannot escape. This is my third letter to you. You should warn all criminals to leave the city. They cannot escape the Scorpion. WARN YOUR READERS.

Sincerely yours,

THE SCORPION

Stevenson read the letter. “Well, well,” he said.

“He says that’s the third letter,” Roberts pointed out. “We asked around in the office, and we found out who got the first two. They were both back a ways. The first one was early in the summer, and the guy who read it remembered it said something about a bank robbery. So I was sent out this morning to check up on bank robberies in June and July. You’re the third one I’ve talked to this morning. The first two figured me for some kind of nut.”

“My Captain figures me the same way,” Stevenson told him. “What about the second letter? Or, wait, don’t tell me, I’ll tell you. It’s that guy in August, the one who ran amok over in Canarsie.”

“Right you are,” said Roberts. “How did you know?”

“I was there. He left his mark on the rifle stock.”

“Okay,” said Roberts. “So there’s something in it, after all.”

“There’s something in it,” said Stevenson. “The question is, what?”

“Well,” said Roberts, “what have we got so far? Somebody — call it person or persons unknown, for the fun of it — is stepping in every once in a while when there’s a crime being committed. He stops it. He calls himself the Scorpion, and he uses some pretty dizzy methods. He melts automobile tires, makes a rifle too hot to hold, makes knives and leather jackets ice cold — how in heck does he do things like that?”

“Yeah,” said Stevenson. “And just incidentally, who is he?”

“Well,” said Roberts, “he’s a kid, that much is obvious. That whole letter sounds like a kid. Talking about ‘the bad boys’ and stuff like that.”

“What do you figure, some scientist’s kid maybe?”

“Maybe,” said Roberts. “His old man is working on something in his little old laboratory in the cellar, and every once in a while the kid sneaks in and makes off with the ray gun or whatever it is.” Roberts laughed. “I feel silly even talking about it,” he said.

“I’d feel silly, too,” Stevenson told him, “if I hadn’t seen what this kid can do.”

“Can we work anything out from the timing?” Roberts asked him. “He seems to show up once every couple of months.”

“Let me check.”

Stevenson went over to the filing cabinet and looked up the dates. “The bank job,” he said, “was on Wednesday, June 29th. At eleven o’clock in the morning. That Higgins guy was on — here it is — Friday, August 5th, around noon. And this last one was on Hallowe’en, Monday, October 31st at eleven o’clock at night.”

“If you can see a pattern in there,” Roberts told him, “you’re a better man than I am.”

“Well, the first two,” Stevenson said, “were in the daytime, during the summer, when school was out. That’s all I can figure.”

“Why just those three?” Roberts asked. “If he’s out to fight crime, he’s pretty inefficient about it. He’s only gone to work three times in four months.”

“Well, he’s a kid,” said Stevenson. “I suppose he has to wait until he stumbles across something.”

“And then rush home for Daddy’s ray gun?”

Stevenson shook his head. “It beats me. The only one that makes sense is the second one. That one was televised. He probably saw it that way. The other two times, he just happened to be around.”

“I don’t know,” said Roberts. “Does a kid happen to be around twice in four months when there’s crimes being committed? Now, the Hallowe’en thing, I can see that. A kid is liable to be out wandering around, maybe go off to a strange neighborhood after he’s done with his trick-or-treat stuff. Hallowe’en is a good time for a kid to see some other kids breaking a law. And the thing in Canarsie, like you say, he probably saw that on television. But what about the bank job?”

“That was the first,” said Stevenson thoughtfully. “That was what set him off. He was there at the time. Just by accident. And he saw they were getting away, so he zapped them. And right away he put the drama into it, right on the spur of the moment he decided to be the Scorpion. Then he sent the letter to your paper. But nothing else happened, and the paper didn’t print anything about his letter or what he’d done, and he kind of forgot about it. Until he was watching television and saw the Higgins thing. Pow, the Scorpion rides again. And then it died down again until a couple of nights ago he saw the rumble, and pow all over again.”

“What you’re saying,” Roberts told him, “is that this kid wanders around with Daddy’s zap gun all the time. That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Face it,” said Stevenson. “Daddy’s zap gun isn’t the likeliest thing I ever heard of, either. I don’t know how the kid does this. For that matter, it’s only an educated guess that it’s a kid we’re after.”

“Okay,” said Roberts. “So what do we do now?”

“Now,” said Stevenson, “I think we talk to the captain. And then I have a feeling we’ll be talking to the FBI.”

IV

Judy Canzanetti was a frightened girl. First, there had been that crazy thing in the schoolyard, and then being dragged in by the police, and then being chewed out by Mom, and now here she was being dragged in by the police again, for absolutely nothing at all.

They were all there, in the big empty room like a gymnasium in the police station, the guys and debs from both gangs, all milling around and confused. And the cops were taking all the kids out one at a time and questioning them.

When the cop pointed at her and said, “Okay. You next,” Judy almost broke into tears.

This wasn’t like anything she knew or anything she could have expected. This wasn’t like after the rumble, with the guys wisecracking the cops, and nothing to worry about but a chewing-out from Mom. This was scary. They were taking people out one at a time to question them. And nobody was coming back into the room, and who knew what happened to you when it was your turn?

“Come on,” said the cop. “Step along.”

She stepped along, numb and miserable.

There were four men in the room to which she was led. They were sitting behind a long table, with notebooks and pencils and ashtrays on the table. In front of them was a straight-backed armless chair. The cop sat her down in the chair, and left the room.

One of the men said, “Your name is Judy Canzanetti, is that right?”

“Yes, sir.” It came out a whisper. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Yes, sir.”

“You don’t have to be frightened, Judy,” said the man. “You aren’t going to be accused of anything. My name is Marshall, Stephen Marshall. This gentleman on my right is Stewart Lang. We’re with the FBI. That gentleman there is Mr. Stevenson, and he’s a detective from Brooklyn. And that there is Mr. Roberts, and he’s a reporter. And we all simply want to ask you one or two questions. All right?”

The man was obviously trying to calm her down, make her relax. And he succeeded to some extent. Judy said, “Yes, sir,” in a small voice and nodded, no longer quite so frightened.

None of the four men were particularly frightening in appearance. The two FBI men were long and lean, with bleak bony faces like cowboys. The detective was a short worried-looking man with a paunch and thinning black hair. And the reporter was a cheerful round-faced man in a loud sport coat and a bow tie.

“Now,” said Marshall, “you were present at the time of the gang fight on Hallowe’en, is that right?”

“Yes, sir. Well, no, sir. Not exactly. I was down at the corner.”

Mister Marshall smiled briefly. “On.lookout?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I see. And do you remember seeing anyone present at all aside from the boys in the two gangs and the police?”

“No, sir. That is, not except a bunch of little kids. They came along just before the co — the police.”

“A bunch of little kids?”

The detective named Stevenson said urgently, “Did you recognize any of them?”

“No, sir. They weren’t from around the neighborhood.”

Marshall said, “You’d never seen them before?”

“No, sir. They were just a bunch of little kids. Grade school kids. They were out with costumes on and everything, playing trick-or-treat.”

“Did they go near the schoolyard at all?”

“No, sir. Except for one of them. You see, I was supposed to keep people away, tell them to go around the other way. And these kids came along. I told them to go around the other way, but they said they had to get to the subway.”

“The subway?” echoed Stevenson.

“Yes, sir. They said they were out too late anyway and it was a long way to go to get home.”

The man named Marshall said, “You said one of them did go down by the schoolyard?”

“Yes, sir. I told them all to go around the other way and the one kid said, ‘Hey, they’re fighting’ or something like that, and he ran down the street. I tried to stop him. But he got away from me.”

“And then what happened?” asked Stevenson.

“Then I saw the fuzz — the police coming. I ran down to warn everybody. And all the guys were jumping around throwing their coats away.”

“And the little boy?”

“I didn’t see him at all any more. Except after the police came. I saw him go running around the corner.”

“What did this boy look like?” Stevenson asked.

“Gee, I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, sir. He was in his Hallowe’en costume.”

The four men looked at one another. “A costume,” said the one named Roberts, the reporter. “My God, a costume.”

“Yes, sir,” said Judy. “It was all black and gold. Tight black pants and a yellow shirt and a black cape and a funny kind of mask that covered his face, black and gold. And a kind of cap like maybe a skull cap on his head, black, only it was knit. Like the sailors wear in the Merchant Marine.”

“Black and gold,” said Roberts. He seemed awed by something.

“So you can’t identify this boy at all,” said Stevenson forlornly.

“One of the other kids called him Eddie,” she said, suddenly remembering.

They spent fifteen minutes more with her, going over the same ground again and again, but she just didn’t have any more to tell them. And finally they let her go.

Mr. Featherhall and Miss English were distant but courteous. It was, after all, banking hours. On the other hand, these four men were police and FBI, on official business.

“It has been a rather long time,” Featherhall objected gently. “Well over four months.”

“It seemed to me,” said Miss English, “that the police took the names of all the people who’d been here at the time of the robbery.”

“There may have been other people present,” suggested Marshall, “who left before the confusion was over. There are any number of people in this world who like to avoid being involved in things like this.”

“I can certainly appreciate their position,” said Miss English, reminiscently touching her fingertips to her head.

“Miss English was very brave,” Featherhall told the policemen. “She created the diversion that spoiled their plans.”

“Yes, we know,” said Marshall. “We’ve heard about what you did, Miss English.”

“To tell you the truth,” she said primly, “I was most concerned about the boy. To be exposed to something like that at his tender—”

“Boy?” interrupted Stevenson rudely. “Did you say boy?”

“Why, yes,” said Miss English. “There was a little boy in here at the time, with his mother. Didn’t you know?”

“No, we didn’t,” said Marshall. “Could you describe this boy?”

“Well, he was — well, not more than ten years old, if that. And he — well, it has been a long time, as Mr. Featherhall said. He was just a child, a normal average child.”

“Not exactly average,” said Stevenson cryptically.

“You said he was in here with his mother,” said Marshall.

“That’s right. I’ve seen her in here a number of times.”

“Yes, of course,” said Marshall.

“Has she been here since the robbery?” asked Stevenson.

“Yes, I believe she has.”

“So that you would recognize her if you saw her again.”

“Yes, I would. I’m sure I would. She almost always comes in with the boy. Or, no, she doesn’t, not any more. Not since school started. But she did all summer.”

“She comes in often, then.”

“I believe so,” said Miss English. “Fairly often.”

Marshall produced a small card, which he handed to Miss English. “The next time she comes in,” he said, “we’d appreciate it if you’d call us at that number. Ask for me, Mr. Marshall.”

“I will,” said Miss English. “I surely will.”

The four of them sat talking in Marshall’s office.

Tom Roberts had his shoes off, his feet on the windowsill, his spine curved into the chair and a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He had one eye closed and was sighting between his socked feet at the building across the way.

“The thing that bothers me,” he said, the cigarette waggling in his mouth, “is just that I’m sure as I can be that I’ll never get to write a word of this story. You gimlet-eyed types will clamp down on this kid, and that’ll be the end of it. Security, by George. National defense. I wonder whatever happened to freedom of the press.”

“The press overworked it,” Marshall told him.

“The thing is,” said Lang, “whatever weapon or machine this boy is using, it’s something that the government knows absolutely nothing about. We’ve sent up a report on the effects of this thing, whatever it is, and there’s been the damnedest complete survey of current government research projects you can imagine. There is nothing at all like it even on the drawing boards.”

“Whatever the boy is using,” said Marshall, “and wherever he got it from, it isn’t a part of the government’s arsenal of weapons.”

“Which it has to be,” Lang added. “Can you imagine a weapon that selectively increases or decreases the temperature of any specific object or any specific part of an object? From a distance? I wouldn’t like to be sitting on a stockpile of hydrogen warheads with somebody aiming that weapon at me. He simply presses the ‘hot’ button, and blooey!”

“You see a jet bomber coming,” said Marshall. “You point the weapon, press the ‘cold’ button, and flame-out. That pilot bought the farm.”

“What I’d like to know,” said Lang, “is where he got his hands on this thing in the first place. Not only is there no machine or weapon we know of which can do this sort of thing, but our tame experts assure us that no such machine or weapon is possible.”

“Great,” said Stevenson. “We’re looking for a ten-year-old kid armed with a weapon that no adult in the country could even imagine as possible.”

The phone rang at that point, and for a second no one moved. They all sat and looked at the jangling phone. Then Marshall and Lang moved simultaneously, but it was Marshall who answered. “Marshall here.”

The others watched him, heard him say, “Yes, Miss English. Right.” And reach forward on the desk for pad and pencil. “Right, got it. You’re sure that’s the one? Right. Thank you very much.”

Marshall cradled the phone, and looked at the others. “The woman came in. Her name is Mrs. Albert J. Clayhorn, and she lives on Newkirk Avenue. Miss English said the number would be near East 17th.”

“Five blocks from the bank,” said Stevenson.

“And about eighty blocks from Higgins’ house,” said Roberts. “That’s why it took him so long to go to work that time. He saw what was happening on television, grabbed his weapon and his trusty bike and went riding out to Canarsie. The Scorpion rides again!”

Marshall looked at his watch. “It’s only a little after one,” he said. “We can talk to the mother before the boy comes home.”

“Right,” said Stevenson, getting to his feet.

V

Mrs. Elizabeth Clayhorn was a short, roundish, pleasant-faced woman in a flower-pattern apron. She looked at the identification Marshall showed her, and smiled uncertainly. “FBI? I don’t under— Well, come in.”

“Thank you.”

The living room was neat and airy. The four men settled themselves.

Marshall, uncomfortably, was the spokesman. “I’m going to have to explain this, Mrs. Clayborn,” he said, “and frankly, it isn’t going to be easy. You see—” He cleared his throat and tried again. “Well, here’s the situation. Someone in New York has a rather strange machine of some sort — well, it’s sort of a heat machine, I suppose you could say — and we’ve traced it, through its use, to, uh — well, to your son.”

“To Eddie?” Mrs. Clayhorn was looking very blank. “Eddie?”

“I take it,” said Marshall, instead of answering, “that your son hasn’t told you about this machine.”

“Well, no. Well, of course not. I mean, he’s just a little boy. I mean, how could he have any sort of machine? What is it, a blowtorch, something like that?”

“Not exactly,” said Marshall. “Could you tell me, Mrs. Clayhorn, what your husband does for a living?”

“Well, he runs a grocery store. The Bohack’s up on Flatbush Avenue.”

“I see.”

Lang took over the questioning. “Are there any other persons living here, Mrs. Clayhorn? Any boarders?”

“No, there’s only the three of us.”

“Well, is Eddie interested in anything of a, well, a scientific nature? In school, perhaps?”

“Oh, Lord, no. He hasn’t had any real science subjects yet. He’s only in the fifth grade. His best subject is history, but that’s because he likes to read, and history is all reading. He got that from me, I read all the time.”

“He doesn’t have one of these junior chemistry sets, then, or anything like that?”

“No, not at all. He just isn’t interested. We even got him an Erector set last Christmas, and he played with it for a day or two and then gave it up completely and went back to reading.”

“The thing is,” said Stevenson, with ill-concealed desperation, “he does have this machine.”

“Are you sure it’s Eddie?”

“Yes, m’am, we’re sure.”

“Mrs. Clayhorn,” said Marshall, “the boy does have this machine. The government is very interested in it, and—”

“Well, I don’t see how a ten-year-old boy — but if you say so, then I suppose it’s so. Of course, he’ll be home from school at three-thirty. You could ask him, if you want.”

“We’d rather not, just yet,” said Marshall. “We think it might not be the best idea. As you say, Eddie is very interested in reading. He’s been using this machine, and, uh, well, he’s been making a big secret out of it, like the characters in comic books. We wouldn’t want to spoil that secret for him, at least not until we actually have the machine in our own possession.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Clayhorn doubtfully.

“Mam,” said Stevenson, “we don’t have any sort of search warrant. But we would like to take a look in Eddie’s room, with your permission.”

“Well, if you really think it’s important—”

“It is,” said Marshall.

“Then, I suppose it’s all right. It’s the door on the right, at the end of the hall.”

The three men, feeling large and cumbersome, searched the boy’s room. It was a boy’s room, nothing less and nothing more. The closet floor and shelves were stacked with comic books, there were baseball trading cards in the top bureau drawer, there were pennants on the walls. There was no heat machine, nor any hint of a heat machine.

“I just don’t know,” said Marshall at last.

“Unless he carries it all the time,” said Lang.

“Sure,” said Stevenson. “That’s why he had it with him in the bank that day.”

“Maybe,” said Marshall. “I just don’t know. You know, I don’t really believe there is a machine.”

“Of course there is,” said Stevenson. “We’ve seen what it can do.”

“Oh, I’m not denying the boy caused those things. But I just have the completely insane conviction that there isn’t any machine.” Marshall shrugged. “Ah, well, never mind. Let’s go back and soothe the mother.”

They soothed her, which took some doing, not because she was at all worried, but because she was so curious she could hardly sit still. But Marshall, by looking very stern and official, and by speaking in round long-syllabled sentences, finally convinced her that the welfare of the nation was absolutely dependent upon her not mentioning anything at all about this visit to Eddie, under any circumstances.

“We’ll be back to talk to the boy in a day or two,” Marshall told her. “In the meantime, we’d prefer him not to be forewarned.”

“If you say so,” she said, frowning.

The school principal, a gray battleship named Miss Evita Dexter, was irate. The idea that pornographic materials were being sold in her schoolyard was absurd. It was ridiculous. It was unheard-of.

Stevenson assured her that, adjectives notwithstanding, it was happening. And they were going to have a shakedown of the student body whether Miss Dexter liked it or not. Detective-Sergeant Stevenson and his associates, Marshall and Lang, were going to go through the student body with a fine tooth comb.

Neither Marshall nor Lang had mentioned the fact that they were from the FBI.

The search began at nine forty-five in the morning, and ended at ten past twelve.

On the persons of three eighth-grade boys, they found pornographic photos.

On the person of Eddie Clayhorn, they found absolutely nothing…

Abner Streitman Long was a government expert. He was more or less a government expert in the ready reserve, since he had never once been called upon to use his expertise for the government.

Not until now.

Abner Streitman Long was Resident Professor of Psychology at Mandar University. He was also one of the world’s foremost and best-known experimenters in the area of parapsychology, also called Extra-Sensory Perception, also called psionics.

The government, as a matter of principle, didn’t believe in psionics. But the government, also as a matter of principle, kept a psionics expert handy, just in case.

The “just in case” had maybe happened.

Professor Long sat in Marshall’s office and listened stolidly to the problem. The expert was a tall, barrel-chested man with a fantastic shock of white hair exploding out in all directions from his head. His nose was bulbous, hits jaw out-thrust, his eyes deepset, his ears hairy, his hands huge and his feet huger. He looked like a dressed-up lumberjack, of the old school.

He listened, and they talked, and every once in a while he nodded. and said, “Huh.” His voice was, predictably, basso profundo.

Then they were finished, and Professor Long summed it all up. “He changes the temperature of objects. Yes?”

“Yes,” said Marshall.

“You looked for a machine. Yes?”

“Yes, and we didn’t find it.”

“And your thermodynamics people said no such machine could exist anyway, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“Then why did you look for it?”

“Because,” said Marshall desperately, “we’d seen it in action. That is, we’d seen the result of its use.”

“Yes,” said the professor. He sucked on his lower lip and abstractedly watched his thumbs twiddle. “Pyrotic,” he announced at last.

“I beg your pardon?” asked Marshall.

“Pyrotic,” repeated the professor. “Yes? Yes. Pyrotic. Do you know what that is?”

“No,” said Marshall.

“Good,” said the professor. “Neither do I. But I have a theory. There are more theories than there are phenomena. That always happens. But listen to this theory. The mind reaches into the object on the molecular level, and adjusts the molecules, so. The temperature changes. Do you see?”

“Not exactly,” said Marshall doubtfully.

“Neither do I. Never mind. I know lots of theories, none of them make any sense. But they all try to explain.”

“If you say so,” said Marshall.

“Yes. I say so. Now. As a psychologist, I will tell you something else. This boy has made this a secret, yes? The Scorpion, he calls himself, and, like his heroes of the comic books, he uses his power for good. Shazam, yes? Captain Marvel.”

“Yes,” said Stevenson, nodding emphatically.

“Now, what happens if you go to this boy and tell him, ‘We know you are the Scorpion? Your secret is out.’ What happens then?”

“I don’t know,” said Marshall.

“Think,” suggested Professor Long. “Batman, let us say, or Superman. Quite apart from fighting crime, what is the major task confronting these heroes? That of maintaining the secrecy of their identity, yes?”

The four men nodded.

“Now,” said Professor Long, “to the mind of a ten-year-old boy, what is the implication? The implication is this: If the secret of the identity is lost the power of the hero is also lost. This is the clear implication. Yes?”

“You mean this boy wouldn’t be able to do it any more if we went and talked to him?” asked Lang.

“I don’t say that,” cautioned the professor. “I do say this: He will believe that he has lost the power. And this belief may be sufficient to destroy the power. Yes?”

“In other words,” said Marshall, “you’re saying that we can’t ask this boy how he manages his stunt, because if we do then he probably won’t be able to manage it any more.”

“A distinct possibility,” said the professor. “But only a temporary possibility. The drama of the Scorpion will not, I imagine, survive puberty.”

“But will the ability survive puberty?”

“No one can know. No one can even guess.”

“Now, here’s the thing,” said Marshall. “Not downgrading your theories at all, Professor, they are nevertheless still only theories. Frankly, given my choice between an impossible machine and a boy with the power to think things hot and cold, I’ll give the impossible machine the edge. At this point, accepting the idea of the machine, our next move is simple. We go ask the boy to give it to us. From what you say, we can’t even do that.”

“My best advice,” said the professor, “would be to keep the boy under careful surveillance for the next three or four years. Gradually get to know him, carefully work out a long-range program involving his reading habits, the attitudes of his teachers and parents, the sort of external stimuli to which he is—”

“Fellas,” said Roberts suddenly. “Oh, fellas.”

They turned to look at him. He was in his favorite pose, shoes off, feet up on the windowsill. He was now pointing at the window. “Do you fellas see what I fella see?” he asked them.

They saw. The window was frosting. It was a rainy, humid mid-November day, and moisture was condensing on the window pane. It was condensing, and then it was freezing.

It didn’t take long. No more than a minute passed from the time Roberts noticed the thing beginning until the time it was complete. And then they watched various specific sections of the window defrost again.

It was a very strange looking window. It was covered with frost, but there were lines of bare window, as though the frost had been scraped away. The lines formed letters, and the letters formed words, and the words were:

POO. MOM TOLD ME.

“My God,” said Marshall.

“Well, well, well, well, well,” said Stevenson.

“Yes,” said Professor Long. He nodded, and turned away from the window to look at the door. “You may come in now, Eddie,” he called.

The door opened, and Eddie Clayhorn stood there, in civilian clothes. He beamed at the window. “That was tricky,” he said.

“So,” said Professor Long. “I was mistaken, eh? Exposure does not spoil things, is that it?”

“Sometimes,” said Eddie Clayhorn, “the hero has one or two trusted friends on the police force who know who he is and give him tips about criminals. But they never tell anybody.”

“Of course!” said Professor Long. “And we are your trusted friends. Yes?”

“Sure. But you can’t tell my parents or anybody.”

Roberts leaned forward and gingerly touched the frosted window. It was cold, very cold. He turned and looked with awed eyes at Eddie Clayhorn.

Slowly, he smiled. “Scorp old boy,” he said, “you can just call me Tonto. Kimosabe!”

They Also Serve

Why should people hate vultures? After all, a vulture never kills anyone…

The launch carrying the mail, supplies and replacements eased slowly in toward the base, keeping the bulk of the Moon between itself and Earth. Captain Ebor, seated at the controls, guided the ship to the rocky uneven ground with the easy carelessness of long practice, then cut the drive, got to his walking tentacles, and stretched. Donning his spacesuit, he left the ship to go over to the dome and meet Darquelnoy, the base commander.

An open ground-car was waiting for him beside the ship. The driver, encased in his spacesuit, crossed tentacles in a sloppy salute, and Ebor returned the gesture quite as sloppily. Here on the periphery, cast formalities were all but dispensed with.

Ebor stood for a moment and watched the unloading. The cargo crew, used to working in spacesuits, had one truck already half full. The replacements, unused to spacesuits and, in addition, awed and a bit startled by the bleakness of this satellite, were moving awkwardly down the ramp.

Satisfied that the unloading was proceeding smoothly, Ebor climbed aboard the ground-car, awkward in his suit, and settled back heavily in the seat to try to get used to gravity again. The gravity of this Moon was slight, of course — barely one-sixth the gravity of the Home World or most of the colonies — but it still took getting used to, after a long trip in free-fall.

The driver sat at the controls, and the car jerked into motion. Ebor, looking up, noticed for the first time that the dome wasn’t there anymore. The main dome, housing the staff and equipment of the base, just wasn’t there.

And the driver, he now saw, was aiming the car toward the nearby crater wall. Extending two of his eyes till they almost touched the face-plate of his helmet, he could see activity at the base of the crater wall, and what looked like an air-lock entrance. He wondered what had caused the change, which had obviously been done at top speed. The last time he’d been here, not very long ago, the dome had still been intact, and there had been no hint of any impending move underground.

The driver steered the car into the open air lock, and they waited until the first cargo truck had lumbered in after them. Then the outer door closed, the pumps were turned on, and in a minute the red light flashed over the inner door. Ebor removed the spacesuit gratefully, left it in the car, and walked clumsily through the inner door into the new base.

A good job had been done on it, for all the speed. Rooms and corridors has been melted out of the rock, the floors had been carpeted, the walls painted, and the ceiling lined with light panels. All of the furnishings had been transferred here from the original dome, and the result looked, on the whole, quite livable. As livable as the dome had been, at least.

But the base commander, Darquelnoy, waiting for his old friend Ebor near the inner door of the lock, looked anything but happy with the arrangement. At Ebor’s entrance he raised a limp tentacle in weary greeting and said, “Come in, my friend, come in. Tell me the new jokes from home. I could use some cheering up.”

“None worth telling,” said Ebor. He looked around. “What’s happened here?” he asked. “Why’ve you gone underground? Why do you need cheering up?”

Darquelnoy clicked his eyes in despair. “Those things!” he cried. “Those annoying little creatures on that blasted planet up there!”

Ebor repressed an amused ripple. He knew Darquelnoy well enough to know that the commander invariably overstated things. “What’ve they been up to, Dar?” he asked. “Come on, you can tell me over a hot cup of restno.”

“I’ve been practically living on the stuff for the last two dren,” said Darquelnoy hopelessly. “Well, I suppose another cup won’t kill me. Come on to my quarters.”

“I’ve worked up a fine thirst on the trip,” Ebor told him.

The two walked down the long corridor together and Ebor said, “Well? What happened?”

“They came here,” Darquelnoy told him simply. At Ebor’s shocked look, he rippled in wan amusement and said, “Oh, it wasn’t as bad as it might have been, I suppose. It was just that we had to rush around so frantically, unloading and dismantling the dome, getting this place ready—”

“What do you mean, they came here?” demanded Ebor.

“They are absolutely the worst creatures for secrecy in the entire galaxy!” exclaimed Darquelnoy in irritation.

“Absolutely the worst.”

“Then you’ve picked up at least one of their habits,” Ebor told him. “Now stop talking in circles and tell me what happened.”

“They built a spaceship, is the long and the short of it,” Darquelnoy answered.

Ebor stopped in astonishment. “No!”

“Don’t tell me no!” cried Darquelnoy. “I saw it!” He was obviously at his wit’s end.

“It’s unbelievable,” said Ebor.

“I know,” said Darquelnoy. He led the way into his quarters, motioned Ebor to a perch, and rang for his orderly. “It was just a little remote-controlled apparatus, of course,” he said. “The fledgling attempt, you know. But it circled this Moon here, busily taking pictures, and went right back to the planet again, giving us all a terrible fright. There hadn’t been the slightest indication they were planning anything that spectacular.”

“None?” asked Ebor. “Not a hint?”

“Oh, they’ve been boasting about doing some such thing for ages,” Darquelnoy told him. “But there was never any indication that they were finally serious about it. They have all sorts of military secrecy, of course, and so you never know a thing is going to happen until it does.”

“Did they get a picture of the dome?”

“Thankfully, no. And before they had a chance to try again, I whipped everything underground.”

“It must have been hectic,” Ebor said sympathetically.

“It was,” said Darquelnoy simply.

The orderly entered. Darquelnoy told him, “Two restno,” and he left again.

“I can’t imagine them making a spaceship,” said Ebor thoughtfully. “I would have thought they’d have blown themselves up long before reaching that stage.”

“I would have thought so, too,” said Darquelnoy. “But there it is. At the moment, they’ve divided themselves into two camps — generally speaking, that is — and the two sides are trying like mad to outdo each other in everything. As a part of it, they’re shooting all sorts of rubbish into space and crowing every time a piece of the other side’s rubbish malfunctions.”

“They could go on that way indefinitely,” said Ebor.

“I know,” said Darquelnoy gloomily. “And here we sit.”

Ebor nodded, studying his friend. “You don’t suppose this is all a waste of time, do you?” he asked, after a minute.

Darquelnoy shook a tentacle in negation. “Not at all, not at all. They’ll get around to it, sooner or later. They’re still boasting themselves into the proper frame of mind, that’s all.”

Ebor rippled in sympathetic amusement. “I imagine you sometimes wish you could give them a little prodding in the right direction,” he said.

Darquelnoy fluttered his tentacles in horror, crying, “Don’t even think of such a thing!”

“I know, I know,” said Ebor hastily. “The laws—”

“Never mind the laws,” snapped Darquelnoy. “I’m not even thinking about the laws. Frankly, if it would do any good, I might even consider breaking one or two of the laws, and the devil with my conditioning.”

“You are upset,” said Ebor at that.

“But if we were to interfere with those creatures up there,” continued Darquelnoy, “interfere with them in any way at all, it would be absolutely disastrous.”

The orderly returned at that point, with two steaming cups of restno. Darquelnoy and Ebor accepted the cups and the orderly left, making a sloppy tentacle-cross salute, which the two ignored.

“I wasn’t talking necessarily about attacking them, you know,” said Ebor, returning to the subject.

“Neither was I,” Darquelnoy told him. “We wouldn’t have to attack them. All we would have to do is let them know we’re here. Not even why we’re here, just the simple fact of our presence. That would be enough. They would attack us.”

Ebor extended his eyes in surprise. “As vicious as all that?”

“Chilling,” Darquelnoy told him. “Absolutely chilling.”

“Then I’m surprised they haven’t blown themselves to pieces long before this.”

“Oh, well,” said Darquelnoy, “you see, they’re cowards, too. They have to boast and brag and shout a while before they finally get to clawing and biting at one another.”

Ebor waved a tentacle. “Don’t make it so vivid.”

“Sorry,” apologized Darquelnoy. He drained his cup of restno. “Out here,” he said, “living next door to the little beasts day after day, one begins to lose one’s sensibilities.”

“It has been a long time,” agreed Ebor.

“Longer than we had originally anticipated,” Darquelnoy said frankly. “We’ve been ready to move in for I don’t know how long. And instead we just sit here and wait. Which isn’t good for morale, either.”

“No, I don’t imagine it is.”

“There’s already a theory among some of the workmen that the blow-up just isn’t going to happen, ever. And since that ship went circling by, of course, morale has hit a new low.”

“It would have been nasty if they’d spotted you,” said Ebor.

“Nasty?” echoed Darquelnoy. “Catastrophic, you mean. All that crowd up there needs is an enemy, and it doesn’t much matter to them who that enemy is. If they were to suspect that we were here, they’d forget their own little squabbles at once and start killing us instead. And that, of course, would mean that they’d be united, for the first time in their history, and who knows how long it would take them before they’d get back to killing one another again.”

“Well,” said Ebor, “you’re underground now. And it can’t possibly take them too much longer.”

“One wouldn’t think so,” agreed Darquelnoy. “In a way,” he added, “that spaceship was a hopeful sign. It means that they’ll be sending a manned ship along pretty soon, and that should do the trick. As soon as one side has a base on the Moon, the other side is bound to get things started.”

“A relief for you, eh?” said Ebor.

“You know,” said Darquelnoy thoughtfully, “I can’t help thinking I was born in the wrong age. All this scrabbling around, searching everywhere for suitable planets. Back when the Universe was younger, there were lots and lots of planets to colonize. Now the old problem of half-life is taking its toll, and we can’t even hope to keep up with the birth rate any more. If it weren’t for the occasional planets like that one up there, I don’t know what we’d do.”

“Don’t worry,” Ebor told him. “They’ll have their atomic war pretty soon, and leave us a nice high-radiation planet to colonize.”

“I certainly hope it’s soon,” said Darquelnoy. “This waiting gets on one’s nerves.” He rang for the orderly.

The Spy in the Elevator

He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent — including my date with my girl!

I

When the elevator didn’t come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency — well, I won’t go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn’t come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.

It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you’re lucky if you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.

But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I’d been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it — to propose to Linda. I’d called her second thing this morning — right after the egg yolk — and invited myself down to her place. “Ten o’clock,” she’d said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o’clock, she meant ten o’clock.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that Linda’s a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn’t return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.

Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years. Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we’d started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I’d been killed. She couldn’t visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened — I’d broken a shoe lace — she refused to speak to me for four days.

And then the elevator didn’t come.

Until then, I’d managed somehow to keep the day’s minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg — I couldn’t very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry — and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window — one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag — I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.

I had a Whimsical Approach: “Honey, I see there’s a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.” And I had a Romantic Approach: “Darling, I can’t live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I’m madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?” I even had a Straightforward Approach: “Linda. I’m going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can’t think of anyone I would rather spend the time with than you.”

Actually, though I wouldn’t even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P — Non-Permanent, No Progeny.

So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I’d be capable of no more than a blurted, “Will you marry me?” and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning aircons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.

Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.

But then the elevator didn’t come.

I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn’t understand it.

The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the burton being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn’t be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.

I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn’t arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.

It didn’t arrive.

I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?

Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment I dialed Linda’s number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.

Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.

Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.

No matter. It didn’t arrive.

I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three rimes before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment. fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they’d be able to hear me in sub-basement three.

I got some more letters that spelled. BUSY.

It took three tries before I got through to a harried-looking female receptionist. “My name is Rice!” I bellowed. “Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and—”

“The-elevator-is-disconnected.” She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.

It only stopped me for a second. “Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don’t gel disconnected!” I told her.

“We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,” she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.

I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, “Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?”

“l-am-sorry-sir-but-that—”

“Stop,” I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn’t done that before, she’d merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.

But now she was actually looking at me.

I took advantage of the tact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, “I would like to tell you something. Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life.”

She blinked, open-mouthed. “Ruined your life?”

“Precisely.” I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. “I was on my way,” I explained, “to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?”

She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time.

“In every way but one,” I continued. “She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o’clock. I’m late!” I shook my fist at the screen. “Do you realize what you’ve done, disconnecting the elevator? Not only won’t she marry me, she won’t even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!”

“Sir,” she said tremulously, “please don’t shout.”

“I’m not shouting!”

“Sir, I’m terribly sorry. I understand your—”

“You understand?” I trembled with speechless fury.

She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. “We’re not supposed to give this information out, sir,” she said, her voice low, “but I’m going to tell you, so you’ll understand why we had to do it. I think it’s perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is—” she leaned even closer to the screen — “there’s a spy in the elevator.”

II

It was my turn to be stunned. I just gaped at her. “A… a what?”

“A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out.”

“Well... but why should there be any problem about getting him out?”

“He plugged in the manual controls. We can’t control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them.”

That sounded impossible. “He aims the elevator?”

“He runs it up and down the shaft,” she explained, “trying to crush anybody who goes after him.”

“Oh,” I said. “So it might take a while.”

She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, “They’re afraid they’ll have to starve him out.”

“Oh, no!”

She nodded solemnly. “I’m terribly sorry, sir,” she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said. “We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.” Click. Blank screen.

For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what!‘d been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!

What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?

Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me — or for most other people either, I suspected — than occasional ore-sleds that didn’t return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn’t return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman’s War.

Dr. Kilbillie — Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old — had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman’s War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman’s War, known to the textbooks, of course, as World Wars One, Two, and Three.

The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more I and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects (also called apartments anti co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grow n hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion.

And the Treaty of Oslo.

It seems there was a power struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapon is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war. Both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed.

Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles.

However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman’s War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure anymore who was on w hose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren’t sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask.

And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that.

But now there was a spy in the elevator.

When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating. I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them.

I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.

I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, proving that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late.

He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.

I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through the door was the stairway.

I hadn’t paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except for adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn’t set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old.

Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn’t we? Usually, I mean, when they didn’t contain spies. So what was the use of stairs?

Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with dries, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.

And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda’s floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.

Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open.

It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and waited and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.

On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty.

I read them. They said:

EMERGENCY ENTRANCE

ELEVATOR SHAFT

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

KEEP LOCKED

I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn’t being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.

As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun.

III

He couldn’t have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.

Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.

Unfortunately, he recovered first.

He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. “Don’t move!” he whispered harshly. “Don’t make a sound!”

I did exactly as I was told. I didn’t move and I didn’t make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.

He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy… which is to say that he didn’t look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents’ apartment.

His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, “Where do they go?”

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “All the way down,” I said.

“Good.” he said — just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boors. The Army!

But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, “Where do you live?”

“One fifty-three,” I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.

“All right,” he whispered. “Go on.” He prodded me with the gun.

And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, “I’ll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I’ll kill you. Now, we’re going to your apartment. We’re friends, just strolling along together. You got that?”

I nodded.

“All right. Let’s go.”

We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quire so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.

Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.

I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He said, “Don’t try it. I don’t want to kill you. I don’t want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We’ll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I’ll tie you up. so you won’t be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I’ll leave. If you don’t try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.”

“You’ll never get away,” I told him. “The whole Project is alerted.”

“You let me worry about that,” he said. He licked his lips. “You got any chico coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Make me a cup. And don’t get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water.”

“I only have my day’s allotment,” I protested. “Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner.”

“Two cups is fine,” he said. ‘One for each of us.”

And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn’t ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.

As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name First, and then, “What do you do for a living?”

I thought fast. “I’m an ore-sled dispatcher,” I said. That was a lie, of course, bur I’d heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.

Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karate — talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.

He was quiet for a moment. “What about radiation levels on the ore-sleds?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.

“When they come back,” he said. “How much radiation do they pick up? Don’t you people ever test them?”

“Of course not,” I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda’s information to guide me. “All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they’re brought into the building.”

“I know that.” he said impatiently. “But don’t you ever check them before de-radiating them?”

“No. Why should we?”

“To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.”

“For what? Who cares about that?”

He frowned bitterly. “The same answer,” he muttered, more to himself than to me. “The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you’re ready to stay in them forever.”

I looked around at my apartment. “Rather a well-appointed cave,” I told him.

“But a cave nevertheless.” He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. “Don’t you ever wish to get Outside?”

Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. “Outside? Of course not!”

“The same thing,” he grumbled, “over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?”

“I have no idea,” I told him.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said belligerently. “A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.” He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. “Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not.” He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. “Listen, you,” he snapped. “Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it.” He glared as though daring me to doubt it.

I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.

“So what happened?” he demanded, and immediately answered himself. “I’ll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make the first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That’s all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I’ll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his rail between his legs. That’s what he did!”

To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, “Here’s your coffee.”

“Put it on the table,” he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.

I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, “What did they tell you I was? A spy?”

“Of course,” I said.

He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. “Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I’m going to spy on?”

He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return.

“I… I wouldn’t know, exactly,” I stammered. “Military equipment, I suppose.”

“Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that’s about it.”

“The defenses—” I started.

“The defenses,” he interrupted me, “are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they’re rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.”

“If you say so,” I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.

“Your people send out spies, too, don’t they?” he demanded.

“Well, of course.”

“And what are they supposed to spy on?”

“Well—” it was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. “They’re supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.”

“And do they find any indications, ever?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” I told him frostily. “That would be classified information.”

“You bet it would,” he said, with malicious glee. “All right, if that’s what your spies arc doing, and if I’m a spy, then it follows that I’m doing the same thing, right?”

“I don’t follow you,” I admitted.

“If I’m a spy,” he said impatiently, “then I’m supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.”

I shrugged. “If that’s your job,” I said, “then that’s your job.”

He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. “That’s not my job, you blatant idiot!” he shouted. “I’m not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!”

The maniac had returned, in full force. “All right,” I said hastily. “.All right, whatever you say.”

He glowered at me a moment longer, than shouted, “Bah!” and dropped back into the chair.

He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. “All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I bad found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?”

I stared at him. “That’s impossible!” I cried. “We aren’t planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!”

“How do I know that?” he demanded.

“It’s the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?”

“Ah hah!” He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. “Now, then,” he said. “If you know it doesn’t make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you?”

I shook my head, dumbfounded. “I can’t answer a question like that,” I said. “How do I know what they’re thinking?”

“They’re human beings, aren’t they?” he cried. “Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?”

“Now, wait a minute—”

“No!” he shouted. “You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I’m a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I’m a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I’m a spy. But I’m not a spy, and I’m going to tell you what I am.”

I waited, looking as attentive as possible.

“I come.” he said, “from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any son of radiation shield at all to protect me.”

The maniac was back. I didn’t say a word. I didn’t want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.

“The radiation level.” he went on, “is way down. It’s practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don’t know how long it’s been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.” He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. “The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this rime he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There’s no need any longer for the Projects.”

And that was like saying there’s no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t say anything at all.

“I’m a trained atomic engineer,” he went on. “In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now-, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn’t let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside w ere safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.

“Well, I went ahead with the test anyway, and I was caught at it. For my punishment, I was banned from the Project. They kicked me out, telling me if I thought it was safe Outside I could live Outside. And if it really was safe, I could come back and tell them. Except that they also made it clear that I would be shot if I tried to get back in, because I would be carrying deadly radiation.”

He smiled bitterly. “They had it all their own way,” he said. “But it is safe out there. I’m living proof of it. I lived outside for five months. And gradually I realized I had to tell others. I had to spread the word that Man could have his world back. I didn’t dare try to get back into my own Project; I would have been recognized and shot before I could say a word. So I came here.”

He paused to finish the cup of chico that I should have had with lunch. “I knew better,” he continued, “than to simply walk into the building and announce that I came from Outside. Man has an instinctive distrust for strangers anyway; the Projects only intensify it. Once again. I would have been shot. So I’ve been working in a more devious way. I snuck into the Project — not a difficult thing for a man with no metal on his person, no radiation shield cocooning him — and for the last two months I’ve been wandering around the building, talking with people. I strike up a conversation. I try to plant a few seeds of doubt about the deadliness of Outside, and I hope that at least a few of the people I talk to will begin to wonder, as I once did.”

Two months! This spy, by his own admission, had been in the Project two months before being detected. I’d never heard of such a thing, and I hoped I’d never hear of such a thing again.

“Things worked out pretty well,” he said, “until today. I said something wrong — I’m still not sure what — and the man I was talking to hollered for Army, shouted I was a spy.” He pounded the chair arm. “But I’m not a spy! And it’s the truth. Outside is safe!” He glared suddenly at the window. “Why’ve you got that drape up there?”

“The window broke down.” I explained. “It’s stuck at transparent.”

“Transparent? Fine!” He got up from the chair, strode across the room, and ripped the drape down from the window.

I cowered away from the sunglare, turning my back to the window.

“Come over here!” he shouted. When I didn’t move, he snarled, “Get up and come over here, or I swear I’ll shoot!”

And he would have, it was plain in his voice. I got to my feet, hesitant, and walked trembling to the window, squinting against the glare.

“Look out there,” he ordered. “Look!”

I looked.

IV

Terror. Horror. Dizziness and nausea.

Far and away and far. nothing and nothing. Only the glare, and the high blue, and the far far horizon, and the broken gray slag stretching out, way down below.

“Do you see?” he demanded. “Look down there! We’re so high up it’s hard to see, but look for it. Do you see it? Do you see the green? Do you know what that means? There are green things growing again Outside! Not much vet. It’s only just started back, but it’s begun. The radiation is down. Plants are growing again.”

The power of suggestion. And, of course, the heightened sensitivity caused by the double threat of a man beside me carrying a gun and that yawning aching expanse of nothing beyond the window. I nearly fancied that I did see faint specks of green.

“Do you see it?” he asked me.

“Wait,” I said. I leaned closer to the window, though every nerve in me wanted to leap the other way. “Yes!” I said. “Yes, I see it! Green!”

He sighed, a long painful sigh of thanksgiving. “Then now you know,” he said. “I’ve been telling the truth. It is safe Outside.”

And my lie worked. Tor the first time, his guard was completely down.

I moved like a whirlwind. I leaped, and twisted his arm in a hard hammerlock, which caused him to cry out and drop the gun. That was wrestling. Then I turned and twisted and dipped, causing him to fly over my head and crash to the floor. That was judo. Then I jabbed one rigid forefinger against a certain spot on the side of his neck, causing the blood in his veins to forever stop its motion. That was karate.

Well, by the time the Army men had finished questioning me, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was five hours late. The Army men corroborated my belief that the man had been a spy, who had apparently lost his mind when cornered in the elevator. Outside was still dangerous, of course, they assured me of that. And he’d been lying about having been here two months. He’d been in the Project less than two days. Not only that, the Army men told me they’d found the radiation-proof car he’d driven, and in which he had hoped to drive back to his own Project once he’d discovered all our defenses.

Despite the fact that I had the most legitimate excuse for tardiness under the roof, Linda refused to forgive me for not making our ten o’clock meeting. When I asked her to marry me she refused, at length and descriptively.

But I was surprised and relieved to discover how rapidly I got over my heartbreak. This was aided by the fact that once the news of my exploit spread, there were any number of girls more than anxious to get to know me better, including the well-cleavaged young lady from the Transit Staff. After all, I was a hero.

They even gave me a medal.

Meteor Strike!

Harvey Ricks had always bit off more than he cared to chew. Somehow, he had always managed to chew, and swallow. Now, standing for the first time in the vacuum of Space, he wondered if this was the bite that would choke him.

The cargo cargo was crated for delivery at Los Angeles, where the workers didn’t consider it anything special. In the company where they worked, this particular cargo was of the type called a Standing Repeater. That is, a new order was shipped out every six months, regular as clockwork. First the order department mailed off a suggested list of specifications to the General Transits, Ltd. main office in Tangiers. Next, the list came back, usually with a few substitutions inked in, and was sent down to LA, to the warehouse, for the specific items to be crated for shipment.

There were seven aluminum crates in the cargo, each a three-foot cube. Aluminum was still the lightest feasible crating material, and this cargo was destined for the Quartermaster Base orbiting the Moon.

The seven crates left the warehouse by helicopter and were flown north to the airport midway between LA and San Francisco. There they spent thirty-two hours in another warehouse before being flown to the Tangiers Poe. (Even in nomenclature, Man made it apparent that his thoughts these days were ever outward, away from Earth. The spaceport on Earth was called Tangiers Poe, which stood for Port Of Embarkation. The spaceport on the Moon was called Moon Pod, for Port Of Debarkation. It was as though Man didn’t want to admit that he still had to make the round trip.)

The cargo arrived at the Tangiers Poe a day ahead of schedule, and spent one more night in a warehouse. Across the field, the four lighters from Station One were being unloaded. Their cargo was almost exclusively manufactured items from the factories on the Moon. Manufacturers had discovered, to their astonishment, that the lighter gravity and the accessible vacuum and the ready availability of free raw materials on the Moon more than offset the additional cost of labor and buildings and transportation. In the last fifteen years, the Moon had become studded with heavily-automated factories, producing everything from delicate electronic equipment to razor blades. Though human exploitation of the Moon had begun as a military venture, back in the late nineteen-sixties, by 1994 it had been taken over almost completely by commercial interests.

A few of the cartons being unloaded across the field were samples or data from the scientific teams on the Moon. These teams, all affiliated with one university or another, were for the most part supported by the manufacturers themselves. As at all times in the past, commercial business success had been shortly followed by commercial philanthropy. A part of the profits of what one newspaper columnist had dubbed the Moonufacturers was siphoned off to give scientists an opportunity and a freedom for research and investigation unavailable through any “short-range Government grant.

There were as yet no tourist facilities either for travel to the Moon nor for a stay on the Moon.

A rumor was current that a number of hotel and restaurant corporations were banding together to found a Moon resort, but so far nothing had come of it.

The seven aluminum crates spent the night in the Poe warehouse, and in the morning were turned over to Glenn Blair, whose charge they would be for the next thirty-three days, until they reached the Quartermaster Base.

Glenn Blair was a big man, big-boned and fully-fleshed, with a short-cropped head of light hair. Thirty-four years of age, he had been for the last seven years one of the two Chief Cargomasters for General Transits, Ltd., the franchised operator of the Earth-Moon transportation system.

He came into the warehouse now with Cy Braddock, the Poe Cargo Chief, and the two of them compared the stacked crates half-filling the warehouse with the manifest flimsies attached to Braddock’s, checking off each item as they found it. When they came to the seven crates from Los Angeles, Blair said, “Cargo for QB. Let’s see, what’s the specification?” He read the line on the manifest, and grinned. “I forgot it was time for another shipment. Six months already.” He patted the nearest of the seven crates. “The boys at QB will be happy to see you fellas,” he said.

Braddock looked over his shoulder and read the specification. “What’s so important about that stuff? I thought that was low priority.”

“Check your reegs, Cy. These fellas are priority number one. If they don’t get to QB, there’ll be hell to pay. Within a month, QB would be more dangerous than a cannibal village.”

Braddock shook his head. “You people have a funny set of values,” he said. “The more I know about you, the happier I am to stay right here. Come on, let’s finish the checkout and get loading. Takeoff is scheduled for eleven-seventeen.”

They finished the first checking of the cargo, and went on out of the shed and across the sunbaked tarmac toward the lighter. The Tangiers Poe was a great concrete oval, ringed by warehouse sheds and repair huts and administration buildings. All of Earth’s space shipping was conducted here, close to the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, where perfect flight conditions were rarely marred by clouds or rain or cold. Where flight plans include three variables — a lighter moving from a moving Earth to a moving Space Station — no one can afford delays caused by bad weather.

In the shed, the cargo handlers loaded small open-sided carts, which were then driven across the field to the lighter. The cargo for QB came out on the second cart, and Glenn Blair supervised its careful stowing and tying down in the hold, then made the second check after its specification line on the manifest. The first checkmark meant that he had found the seven crates in undamaged condition in the shed. The second one meant that he had accepted delivery onto the lighter. Eight more checkmarks would be made before the cargo was finally delivered to QB.

All cargo and personnel traveling between the Earth and the Moon made the trip in five stages. Stage One was transit from the surface of the Earth to the Space Station, aboard a torpedo-shaped ship familiarly known as a lighter. Stage Two was aboard the Station, during its fifteen-day trip from perigee, four hundred miles up, to apogee, eighty-four thousand miles from Earth. (Space Stations One and Two circled the Earth, one at perigee whenever the other was at apogee, so that a shipment left for the Moon every fifteen days.) Stage three was via a ship technically known as V-T-V (vacuum-to-vacuum) but informally called the Barbell, because of its shape. This stage also took fifteen days, and covered sixty-two thousand miles, terminating at its meeting with Space Station Three, eighty-four thousand miles from the Moon. Station Three orbited the Moon every fifteen days, so that this lap of the trip, Stage Four, took seven and a half days. And finally Stage Five, via another lighter, was from Station Three at perigee two hundred fifty miles above the Moon to the surface of the Moon itself or, as in the case of the seven aluminum crates from Los Angeles, from Station Three to Quartermaster Base, the maintenance satellite for the whole system, in permanent orbit two hundred miles above the surface of the Moon.

Although it had taken four lighters, this trip, to bring down to the Poe the shipment of manufactured goods and scientific samples from the Moon, only one lighter was required for the return shipment. The Moon colony was not yet self-supporting, but the first steps in that direction had already been made. A part of the colony’s food was homegrown, hydroponically. New plant buildings and new machinery were built right on the Moon, by firms whose only customers were other Moon companies. Clothing and furnishings were made of synthetics.

Most of the Moon-bound cargo was paperwork, of one sort or another. There was the fifteen days accumulation of mail for the Moon personnel, sheaves of new product specifications for the managers of the Moon plants, financial reports, and so on. The rest, except for the cargo for QB, was primarily food, meat and dairy products and other foods unavailable through hydroponics. There were also three engineers, new employees of Interplanetal Business Machines, replacing three men whose two year contracts were ending and who would be coming back to Earth on the next transit.

Blair greeted the three men at the lighter ramp, checking their names and identity cards against the manifest and then saying, “My name’s Blair, Glenn Blair. I’m Cargomaster on this trip, and you boys are part of the cargo. You’ve got any questions or problems, bring them to me. I’m liaison between you and the rest of the Transit personnel. Okay?”

One of the engineers said, “If we decide we can’t take it we shouldn’t bug the working types, is that it?”

“You’re Ricks? Yes, Ricks, that’s exactly it. None of you people have been off-planet before, so you can’t make any sure statements about how you’ll act. A good quarter of our first-time passengers are plenty scared. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If any of you feel it getting to you come to me. Don’t try to burrow your way through the wall, don’t try to kill yourself, don’t go running around screaming. We’ve had all of that, at one time or another, and it plays merry hell with the working day.”

Ricks grinned. “If I need a shoulder to cry on, Mister Blair,” he said, “I’ll run straight to you.”

“You do that. Come on, I’ll show you your quarters.”

Blair led the way up the ramp and into the lighter. The bottom half of the ship was engine and fuel-space, and most of the upper half was cargo hold, leaving only two levels at the top for human occupancy. The uppermost level was the control room, with passenger space on the level beneath.

The three engineers, Ricks in the lead, followed Blair up the inside ladder to the second level, a smallish circular room with twelve bunks, in tiers of three, around the walls. The center space was empty.

“There’s only four of us,” said Blair, “so we can all take middle bunks. The middle’s best; there’s less noise and vibration.”

“Beds for the babies, is that it?” said Ricks.

Blair grinned at him. “You wouldn’t want to be standing up when we blast,” he said. “Now, you lie face down in these bunks. This indentation is for your knees, and this pillow up here is for your chin. You hold onto these handles here, in front of the pillow, and you brace your feet against this bar back here. Just before we blast, you dig your chin down into that pillow hard. If you have your mouth open, you’re liable to get up to the Station minus a few teeth. In front of each bunk here, you see these three lights. The green one means you can relax, talk if you want to, readjust your position, whatever you want. The orange one means a blast within one minute, and the red one means a blast within ten seconds. The red one stays on throughout a blast. Okay?”

Ricks said, “The company had us play with these cribs. They filled us in pretty good.”

“I’m glad to hear that. I’m always pleased to get my human cargo to the Pod alive. Let’s get into the bunks now and get ourselves ready. Blast is due in a couple minutes.”

Blair saw to it that the three engineers were properly situated in their bunks, and then he crawled into the one nearest Ricks. He had the feeling that young man would be needing his hand held in just a few minutes.

Harvey Ricks was not a crybaby. Way back in grammar school, he was known as the kid who couldn’t be made to cry. A lot of the other kids tried it, and some of them were pretty ingenious, but no one ever succeeded. Harvey Ricks was not a crybaby.

He didn’t cry when he flunked out of MIT, either, in the first semester of his sophomore year. He wanted to, God knows, but he didn’t. He simply packed his gear and went on home, and spent six months thinking it over. Until the MIT fiasco, schoolwork had always come readily to him. He’d never had to do much studying, and so he’d never learned the methods or picked up the habit. He’d managed to breeze through his secondary schooling with natural intelligence and smooth glibness, and he’d tried the same technique at college. It hadn’t worked.

During those six months at home, he’d learned why it hadn’t worked. He still had his textbooks, and he spent a lot of time with them, not so much out of a desire to learn as out of a nostalgia for the school that had rejected him. Gradually he began to see where he’d gone wrong. He was at a level of learning now where natural intuition and glibness weren’t enough. There were facts and concepts and relationships in those textbooks that he just couldn’t pick up in a rapid glossing of the subject matter, and there were other things in the textbooks that he couldn’t even understand until he had a sure grip on the earlier work.

Six months of brain-beating in his own home finally did for him what thirteen years of formal schooling had not done; it taught him how to study, and it taught him why to study. At the end of that time, he was accepted by a lesser engineering school in the northeastern United States, and this time he did it right.

In this second school, however, he was known as the boy who’d flunked out of MIT. It was much the same as his reputation for non-crying in childhood. He hadn’t really wanted, then, to be known as the boy who wouldn’t cry — all he’d really wanted was for people not to try to make him cry. But he hadn’t known how to manage that, and so he’d built up a brittle sort of bravado, a challenging attitude that was actually only the other side of the crying coin.

The bravado was still his only defense when he was known as the boy who’d flunked out of MIT. His whole attitude seemed to say, “So what? I’m still a smarter better engineer than all the rest of you clods combined, and that goes for you fourth-rate teachers, too.” As a result, he had plenty of time for studying. No one at school was particularly anxious for his company.

The funny part of it was that he was right. As a child, the other kids couldn’t make him cry.

As an engineering student, he was better than anyone else in his class. After two semesters, with a string of ‘A’ marks to his credit, he re-applied at MIT and was accepted on a probationary basis. He graduated seventh in his class — held back only by his poor freshman marks — and was immediately snapped up by Interplanetal Business Machines.

Interplanetal ran him through the normal engineer trainee courses, familiarizing him with the company’s line of equipment. He sailed through, fascinated by this actual concrete usage of what had been only theoretical knowledge at school, and since he finished first in his class he was given his choice of geographical area of assignment.

By now, bravado was an ingrained characteristic of Harvey Ricks. Interplanetal maintained a Moon Division, which built computers and office equipment for lease to the other Moon industries, and all personnel there were volunteers on a two-year contract. It was inevitable that Harvey Ricks would volunteer.

Throughout his life, bravado had made him do what he could but didn’t want to do. He could hold the tears back, though he didn’t want to have to, and his attitude had forced him to prove it, time and time again. He could buckle down and study, though he’d have preferred to loaf, and his own challenge to his classmates had forced him to do it. He could spend two years on the Moon, though he would much rather have lived that time in New York or San Jose, and so here he was on his way to the Moon.

He tried to stop himself from being such a wise guy, but he always failed. Before he knew what was happening, he’d have his mouth wide open and his foot in it up to the knee. Like with this Cargomaster, Blair. He hadn’t wanted to bait the man, he hadn’t wanted to show off and act the smart-aleck, but he’d done it just the same. If, at any time in the next month of the journey, he felt himself slipping, he’d have no one to stiffen his backbone for him but himself. If he’d only kept his mouth shut and minded his own business, he could have relaxed, knowing that an older and wiser hand was always there, ready and willing to help him keep his balance. This way, as usual, he had put himself in the position where he had to rely totally on himself.

Lying face down in the bunk, chin on the squarish foam-rubber pillow, he eyed the three lights in front of him grimly and silently cursed himself for forty-seven kinds of fool. He was the reverse of the boy who cried wolf too much. He cried wolf too seldom. One of these days he would send all the hunters away and a wolf would come along too big for him to handle by himself. That day, Harvey Ricks would have his reckoning.

He wondered if the day was coming sometime in the next month.

The orange light flashed on.

Behind him, the voice of the Cargomaster came softly, talking to them all. “You fellows take it easy now,” he was saying. “Breathe deep and slow. Don’t get all tensed up. Don’t hold on to those handles so tight you bunch your shoulder muscles all up. Don’t try to kick those foot bars right off the bunks. Just relax. If you tense your bodies all up, you’ll take a lot worse licking than if you just lie easy. You can get yourselves a broken bone just by being too tense when we blast. Inhale slow and easy, now. Exhale slow and easy. Just keep a light grip on the handles, lie easy and relaxed, like you were going to doze off in a minute.”

The voice droned softly in the small room, and Ricks knew the man was trying to relax them just by the sound of his voice. But for Ricks, with his perverse bravado, it had just the opposite effect. His body kept tensing up and tensing up, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. His hands, gripping the chrome-plated handles as though they would snap them in two, were sweating already, and his shoulders were aching with strain. His feet pushed so hard against the bar that his knees were completely off the bunk.

I’m going to panic, he thought, I’m going to scream. I’m going to jump up off this bunk and get myself killed when we blast.

Only shame kept him in the bunk, only shame kept the scream unsounded in his throat. He had acted the bigshot with the Cargomaster, acted the know-it-all. He couldn’t give in, he couldn’t turn around and show himself a phony and a weakling.

The red light flicked on.

Sweat ribboned down his face. The back of his shirt clung to him, soaked through with perspiration. His collar w7as too tight, cutting off air, and his belt buckle was grinding into his middle.

He pushed his chin down into the pillow, and stared at the red light. He had to swallow, his mouth was full of saliva. But he was afraid to. If he was swallowing when the blast came, he could strangle. That had happened in the past, more than once. Perspiration stung his eyes, but he was afraid to blink. He had to keep staring at the red light, staring at the red light.

A heavy iron press slammed into his back, grinding him down into the bunk, stomping his feet down off the bar, shoving his face into the pillow. His mouth was full of saliva, dribbling out now between his lips, staining the pillow, mixing with his perspiration. The bunched muscles of his shoulders whined in agony, and his hands, numb now, slipped from the handles and lay limp, fingers curled, before his eyes.

The red light was still on, waving and changing as he tried to keep watching it. His eyes burned and, despite himself, the lids came down, as though weighted with heavy magnets.

With closed eyes came nausea. He had no equilibrium any more, no balance. There was no longer any up or down, there was only himself, crushed between the bunk and the heavy iron press.

He held his breath, closed his throat, kept it down. Breakfast swirled and lumped in his stomach, wanting to come up, but he kept it down. He couldn’t have it, he couldn’t stand it, to have the Cargomaster see him lying in his own sickness. He kept it down.

The iron press went away, with a suddenness that terrified him. He could breathe again, he could swallow, he could move his arms and legs, he could wipe the sweat out of his eyes and look at the blessed green light.

The Cargomaster was on his feet in the middle of the room, by the ladder, saying, “Okay, fellows, that’s it for a while. We’ll be at a steady one-G for a while now. There’ll be another little jolt in maybe twenty minutes, when we come into phase with the Station. In the meantime, you all can rest easy.”

One of the other two, Standish, said timidly, “Excuse me, are there any — do you have any, uh, bags?”

“Sure thing. Right in that little slot under the light panel.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t feel bad. You haven’t really been initiated into space till you’ve lost at least one meal. How are you other two doing?”

“Okay, I guess,” said Miller, the third one.

“Fine. And you, Ricks?”

“I’m doing just lovely. This is a great little old roller-coaster you’ve got here.”

Blair grinned. “I thought you’d like it,” he said.

Harvey Ricks had proved himself again.

Station One was leaving perigee, hurtling around the Earth on the long elliptical curve that would take it, fifteen days from now, eighty-four thousand miles towards the Moon. The lighter came curving up from Earth into the path of the Station’s orbit and fifty miles ahead. As the Station overtook it, it slowly increased its speed, until the two were neck-and-neck. Slowly, the lighter pilot maneuvered his ship closer to the station, until the magnetic grapples caught, holding the ship to the curving grid jutting out from the hatchway in the high center of the doughnut. A closed companionway slid out along the grid, attached itself to the airlock in the side of the lighter, and formed a hermetic seal. The lock was open, and the Station cargo handlers came aboard for the unloading.

The seven aluminum crates of the cargo for QB were stacked on a powered cart, driven across the companionway to the Station proper, and taken by elevator down two levels, thence down one of the three interior corridors to the outer ring, and were finally stowed in Section Five, with the rest of the shipment.

Glenn Blair and the Station Manager, Irv Mendel, oversaw the unloading, making the appropriate row of checkmarks as each item was transferred from lighter to station. Blair then went back up and got the three engineers, all of whom seemed a little shaken by this first stage of the journey, though Ricks was doing his best to hide it. “Don’t worry,” Blair assured them, “the worst part of the trip is done with. From now on, it’s quarter-G all the way.”

Standish, who had so far been sick twice and who was now holding tight to the nearest support as though afraid he might float up and out of sight any minute, grinned weakly and said, “I don’t know which is worse, too much gravity or too little. Do people really get used to this?”

“In a couple of days,” Blair told him, “you’ll be running around as happy as a feather in an updraft. Once you get used to it, there’s nothing in the universe as much fun as weighing only one-quarter what you’re used to.”

“I hope I get used to it soon,” said Standish, “before I starve to death.”

Blair led the way down the ladder and through the companionway to the Station. The three passengers were introduced to Irv Mendel, who told them how much they’d enjoy quarter-G in a couple days, and then they were shown their cubicles, in Section One, which would be their home for the next fifteen days. Their luggage — thirty-eight pounds permissable — had preceded them into the rooms, which were small but functional. There was, in each room, a bed and a chair and a small writing table, a lamp and a narrow closet and a tiny bathroom complete with shower stall and WC. The floor was uncarpeted black plastic and the walls and ceiling were cream-painted metal. It took the engineers a while to get used to the idea that the floor was not what they would have thought of as the ‘bottom’ of the Station from the outside. The floor of their cubicles was, on the outside, the outer edge of the Station. The center of the Station was not to the left or right, it was directly overhead.

The outer ring of the Station was divided into twelve sections. Sections Nine, Ten and Eleven housed the permanent Station personnel, including the weathermen and television relay men and so on. Sections Five, Six and Seven were cargo holds, and Sections One, Two and Three were transient quarters. (The three engineers were in Section Two.) Sections Four, Eight and Twelve contained the utilities, the sources of light and heat and air, as well as the chow hall and food storage. At the bulkhead separating each Section, floor and ceiling met at an angle of thirty degrees. A man could do a loop-the-loop simply by walking dead ahead down the main corridor until he came back to his starting point.

Once the three engineers were safely settled in their cubicles, Blair took the elevator back up to the center of the Station, where Irv Mendel was waiting for him in his office. Blair went through the same sort of paperwork as he’d done with Cy Braddock, and when they were finished Mendel said, “How are these three kids? Going to give us any trouble?”

“I’m not sure. Standish has a pretty weak stomach, it may take him a while to get adjusted, but I think he’ll just grin and bear it. Miller’s all right. I’m not too sure about Ricks. He’s pushing himself a little hard, one of these guys who wants to be an old salt before he ever gets into the water. If he cracks, he may do it in style.”

Mendel leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head. “You know,” he said, “when I was a kid, all I ever wanted was to get out here in space. I grew up reading about Moon-shots and orbiting satellites and I thought, ‘By Golly, there’s the frontier of tomorrow. There’s where the adventurers are going to be, the explorers and the prospectors and the soldiers of fortune. That’s the place for me, boy.’ Romance and adventure, that’s the way I saw it.” He grinned and shook his head. “I forgot all about the twentieth century’s most significant invention: Red tape. It never even occurred to me that space would be a job like this. Paperwork all over the place, schedules to meet and financial reports to make out, young fuzzy-faced kids to be nurse-maided. It never even occurred to me.”

“If you hate it so much,” Blair told him, “why not go on back to Earth?”

“Are you kidding? Do you know what I weigh down there? Two hundred and fourteen pounds. Maybe more by now, I’m not sure. Besides, it’s even worse down there. Paperwork up to your nose. It’s only half that high up here. If you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. Lighter gone?”

“Long gone. Halfway back to Earth by now. Left while you were with your Boy Scouts.”

“So we’re on our way again.” Blair got lazily to his feet, and stretched. “After a couple days on Earth,” he said, “quarter-G feels like a good quiet drunk. Think I’ll go lie down in the rack and think about philosophy. See you later.”

“Right. Hey, by the way.” Blair turned at the door. “By what way?”

“This is your last round trip, isn’t it? Your two years are up.”

“It was up last trip. I re-contracted.”

Mendel grinned. “Member of the club now, huh? I thought you’d do that. Welcome aboard.” Blair shrugged self-consciously. “You know how it is,” he said. “Every time I go back, Earth gets a little heavier. Besides, I like the soft life.”

“You want it really soft,” Mendel told him, “you put in for station duty. All we do is float around and around, draw our pay, and look at the pretty scenery.”

“If that boy Ricks blows up,” Blair said, “we’ll both have plenty to do. I’m going to rack out, I’ll see you later.”

“See you, nursemaid.”

Blair took the elevator down to the outer ring, and went to his cubicle in Section Two, next to the one occupied by Ricks, across the corridor from Standish and Miller. He stretched out on his bed and half-dozed, as his body gradually got reoriented to quarter-gravity.

Twenty minutes later, the meteor hit.

It should never have happened. The Station had full radar vision, and so the meteor should have been seen long before it struck. The Station was powered, and should have been able to goose itself out of the meteor’s path. So it should never have happened. But it did.

It was one of those million-to-one shots. The meteor, a chunk of space-rock about six feet in diameter, had come boiling across the Solar System, past the sun and the two innermost planets, headed on a near-collision course with Earth. It had actually dipped into the Earth’s atmosphere, which slowed it somewhat, but not enough for it to be captured by Earth’s gravity. It had shot out of the atmosphere again, moving more slowly than before, now red-hot from atmospheric friction, and shortly thereafter it plowed into the Space Station from behind.

From the moment it had first become a potential danger to the Station, it had been unseeable. It was directly between the Station and the massive ball of Earth. It was the one thin segment of space where the radar’s vision was unclear, and it was out of that segment that the juggernaut had come.

The impact could have been worse. In the first place, the meteor was not now traveling at its normal top speed. In the second place, the meteor and the Station were traveling in approximately the same direction, so that the Station, in effect, rolled with the punch. The space-rock broke through the outer hull. Whether or not it penetrated the inner hull no one was immediately sure.

The strike was in Section Five, containing the cargo, with it the seven aluminum crates for QB. At the instant of impact, even before the meteor had ground to a halt, an alarm bell rang in Section Five. The bell meant that the bulkhead doors to that section would be closed in ten seconds.

There was only one person in Section Five at the time, a crewman named Gilmore, who’d been checking the security of the lashings on the cargo. Constant strike drills had made his reaction immediate and instinctive: he ran for the nearest door. He made it, too, all but his left shoe. The bulkhead door neatly snicked off the heel of the shoe as it slammed across the doorway and sealed shut. Gilmore’s shoe was ruined and his sock slightly grazed, but his foot was untouched.

Throughout the rest of the Station, another bell was ringing, this one with a deeper tone and a two-beat rhythm. Harvey Ricks heard it and leaped up from his bunk, forgetting the discomfort that hadn’t yet abated, despite the cheery words of the Cargomaster and the Station Manager. The bell rang on, and Ricks stood quivering in his cubicle, body tensed for fight or flight, mind bewildered and frightened.

The cubicle door jolted open and Blair’s face stuck in long enough for him to shout, “Suit up! It’s under your bunk!” Then he was gone again, and Ricks heard him delivering the same call to Standish and Miller, across the corridor.

Ricks, incredibly grateful for any excuse to be in motion, lunged across the cubicle toward his bunk. He misjudged the force of his leap, with the lesser gravity, and tumbled head over heels across the bunk and into the metal wall. He lay crouched on the bunk, gripping his knees, and whispered desperately to himself, “Take it easy, take it easy, take it easy.”

When he could move without trembling, he got to his feet and dragged the spacesuit out from under the bunk. In the company course, preparatory to leaving on this trip, he’d learned how to don a spacesuit, and he clambered rapidly into this one, closing the inner and outer zippers, and then searched under the bunk again and dragged out the helmet. As he got to his feet, the bell stopped.

Ricks bit down hard on his lower lip, willing himself to be calm. Carefully, he donned the helmet and went through the series of safety checks he’d been taught. Faceplate open, he put his fingers to the row of buttons at the suit’s waist. First finger, left hand; helmet lamp: It worked, he could see it shining against the opposite wall. Click off. First finger, right hand; air intake: It worked, he could hear the faint hissing below his right ear. Cautiously, he closed the faceplate and inhaled. The oxygen mixture was rich, but good. Click off, faceplate open. Second finger, left hand; heat unit: It worked, he could immediately feel the suit warming against his legs and arms. Click off. Second finger, right hand; water intake: It worked, a thin dribble of lukewarm water emerged from the tube in the corner of his mouth. Click off.

So far, so good. He hunched his left shoulder forward, and read the small dials there: Oxygen tanks, full. Water tank, half full. Battery, fully charged. Temperature inside the suit, sixty-eight degrees.

Was the air in the cubicle getting foul? Ricks snapped the faceplate shut, pushed the air intake button. This air was cleaner, he was sure of it.

Where were the others? Where was Blair? He couldn’t hear a sound. The suit cut out all external atmosphere, but not all external sound. He reached up under the helmet chin and switched on the suit radio. A faint crackling of static told him it was on, but other than that there was no sound.

He looked around the cubicle. Was there any air in it now? He could be standing in total vacuum, there was no way to be sure. He could be the only one still alive in the Station.

“Blair?” His own voice, confined within the helmet, sounded harsh and croaking in his ears. The radio gave no answer.

Unwillingly, he moved toward the door. In here, the sound of his pounding heart was magnified, frightening him more than the radio’s silence or the thought that the Station might now be airless. He pushed open the door, and saw Blair standing in the corridor, wearing his spacesuit but holding the helmet casually in his left hand.

Blair looked at him and grimaced, then motioned for Ricks to open his faceplate. Ricks reached up, switched off the radio, and removed his helmet. He managed a grin. “Kind of nice in here,” he said. “Set up a bar, put a couple of chairs around, it could be real livable.” But he heard the tremor in his voice, and he knew that Blair heard it, too.

Blair said, “Get on down by the elevator with Standish and Miller. If you hear another bell, a few notes lower than the first one, with a triple-beep in it, clap the helmet on. Otherwise, keep it off. You don’t have canned air to waste.”

“Watch for the triple beep,” said Ricks jauntily. “Aye aye, sir.”

Blair grunted, and turned away, heading down the corridor in the opposite direction. Ricks watched him go, glaring at his back. ‘I’m a better man than you, Harvey Ricks,’ said that back. ‘You’ll break down, you’ll flunk my course, you’ll never match me or even come close.”

Blair disappeared, through the bulkhead doorway to Section Three, and Ricks turned the other way, walking down the corridor and right to the elevator. Standish and Miller were standing their, helmets on but faceplates open, and Ricks felt somewhat better. His helmet was in his hand.

As he came up to them, Standish said, “What do you suppose it is?” His pale face was even paler now, his large eyes larger.

Ricks shrugged. “It’s probably just a drill. Get us new boys all lathered up, just in case we weren’t taking it all seriously.”

“I thought I felt a tremor just before the bell started,” said Miller. “We may have been hit by a meteor or some such thing.” Ricks shrugged again. “Whatever it was, it doesn’t seem very urgent. Did Papa Blair tell you two about the triple-beep?”

“Sure,” said Miller. “He was sore at you, because you were late getting out in the hall.”

“I was running my suit-check,” said Ricks easily.

“Omigosh!” cried Standish. “I forgot!” He started the check, right then and there.

Watching Standish run through his suit-check, Ricks felt a lot better. He hadn’t forgotten.

Blair found Mendel at the sealed bulkhead between Sections Four and Five. Mendel waved to him and grinned sourly. “I thought you’d be along,” he said.

“What is it? The cargo section?”

“Right through there, boy. Sorry. We’ve had a meteor strike. Son of a gun came at us on the blind side.”

Blair glanced quickly at the gauges beside the bulkhead door. “Pressure’s up,” he said. “Looks like it didn’t break all the way through.”

“No way to tell yet,” said Mendel. “It might be a slow leakage.”

“Then we have time to move the cargo.”

Mendel shook his head. “Sorry, Glenn, no can do. Open this door here, it might joggle the air pressure just enough to make a slow leak a fast one. If that happens, it won’t be this door that slams shut, it’ll be the one way over there, between Three and Four.”

“So you wait in Three. I’m willing to take the chance.”

“I’m not. And it isn’t your pearly white skin I’m worried about, it’s my pearly white Station. If we have one Section in vacuum, we’ll have trouble enough keeping equilibrium. With two Sections out of whack, we’ll wobble all over the damn Solar System.”

“Irv, my whole cargo’s in there! The cargo for QB is in there!”

“I can’t help it. Besides, vacuum won’t hurt that stuff for QB”.

“Irv, if there’s a break through the inner hull, and that meteor shakes loose, the QB cargo won’t be in the Station any more, it’ll be scattered halfway from here to Mars. Did you ever see stuff come flying out of a room that goes suddenly to vacuum?”

“Yes, I did. Did you ever see a man that’s gone suddenly to vacuum?”

“Irv, look at your blasted pressure gauge!”

“It’s down.”

“It’s down less than half a point, Irv, and that’s because you’ve stopped pumping air in there. Listen, that QB cargo isn’t hermetically sealed. If it doesn’t get good air, it can rot.”

“It can rot right now, for all of me. I’m not touching Section Five or anything in it. We’ll get in touch with QB, and let them send a couple of reps up here. It’s their job, not ours.”

“Irv, don’t you realize what that cargo means to the boys at QB?”

“Sure, I do. But do you realize what this Station here means to me? The boys at QB can re-order another batch. I can’t go out and re-order another Station.”

“Irv, listen. The ground-pounders don’t realize how important that stuff is. Without it, the crew at QB will be at each other’s throats in a month. This is no exaggeration, Irv, the whole QB operation will fall apart within a month. And if QB falls apart, the whole system falls apart, because it’s QB’s job to run maintenance for the rest of us.”

“I know that,” said Mendel, “I know it well. Every word you say is absolutely true. But I still say they can re-order.”

“And I say it’ll take three months at the very least to fill the new order! We can’t even put the order in until we can prove to the ground-pounders’ satisfaction that this batch is destroyed, and we won’t be able to do that till the reeps get here and patch the hole. So that’s ten or fifteen days right there. Then they’ll fool around another half a month or more, figuring out costs and tax breaks and whatnot, wanting to know why QB can’t make do till the next regular shipment, and bogging down in a lot of red tape. Then they have to put the order in, out of sequence, so it’ll take longer to fill it. And every single item has to be doublechecked and approved by the psycho department and half a dozen other departments. It’ll be more than three months!”

Mendel doggedly shook his head. “I’m not going to argue with you, Glenn,” he said, “I’m going to tell you. That cargo is your responsibility, but this whole Station is mine, and I’m not going to risk this Station for you or QB or anybody. Period, finish, end of discussion. Now, I’m going to go on up and call QB and have them send us a couple of reeps. Want to come along?”

“I want to boot you in the rump, Irv, I swear.”

Mendel grinned. “I feel like doing some rump-booting myself. Take it easy, Glenn. It’ll all work out.”

“Hot diggity,” said Blair sourly.

“Want to come up to the office with me?”

“No.”

“Suit yourself.”

Mendel left, and Blair stomped angrily back down the corridor to Section Two, where he found the three engineers still waiting by the elevator. He glared at them and snarled, “What the devil are you clowns doing? Get out of those idiot clown suits, the party’s over.”

The three of them stared at him in astonishment. Ricks looked as though he might smart-talk, and Blair waited hopefully, fists clenched, but something about his stance gave Ricks second thoughts and he turned away without a word, red-faced and frowning.

QB was the Quartermaster Base, a large satellite in permanent orbit two hundred miles above the surface of the Moon. It was shaped somewhat like the three Space Stations, though with a thicker outer ring and a less intricate inner section. This base held all of the equipment for maintenance and repair of the entire General Transit system, the three Space Stations, the two barbells, and the Moon-based lighters.

Attached to QB by a simple hook-and-ring mechanism were six repair ships, familiarly known as reeps. Reeps were small blunt rounded one-man ships, with payloads made up exclusively of fuel. Protruding from the front of each reep were four jointed arms, operated by the arms and legs of the pilot. The reep had one large rocket exhaust at the rear, which swiveled to allow turning maneuverability, and four small swiveled exhausts around the body, permitting the reep complete close-range maneuverability. An experienced reep pilot could operate his ship as though it were an extension of his body, backing and sidestepping, working the four arms as readily as he used his own arms and legs.

There were two kinds of reeps, and three of each kind. There was the gripper reep, with arms designed for holding and manipulating, and the fixer reep, with arms for welding and cutting.

When the call came in from Station One, QB was three-quarters around the Earth-side of its orbit. The radioman on duty got the approximate dimensions of the meteor now jammed into the outer edge of the Station, and its approximate placement, and passed this information on to the Dispatcher Office. A call then went down to the Supply Department for Part X-102-W, outer hull replacement panel. This piece, eight feet by eight, was delivered to the Dispatch Delivery Point, at the inner rim of the doughnut.

Meanwhile, fixer reep 2 and gripper reep 5 were fueled and piloted. Spacesuited QB crewmen put the replacement panel in position for the gripper reep to get hold of, and the two ships broke away from the satellite, headed toward Earth.

The radioman at QB got in touch with the radioman at Station One and told him to expect the two reeps in fourteen days, approximately twelve hours before the Station was scheduled to make contact with the barbell from Station Three.

For everyone concerned, it was a long fourteen days. Irv Mendel watched the air pressure creep downward in Section Five, and gnawed his lower lip. Glenn Blair thought of the cargo for QB, and snarled at everyone he saw. Harvey Ricks thought of his two moments of panic, and waited for the chance to shove Blair’s superior attitude down his stinking throat.

Time in space is arbitrary. There are no seasons in the gulf between the planets, and there is no day and night. The sun, incredibly bright and fierce when seen without the protection of miles of atmosphere, glares out eternally at its domain, heating whatever it touches, leaving to frigid cold whatever lies in shadow. The twenty-four hour day is a fact of Earth, not a fact of the universe. In the void between the planets, the day is singular, and will end only with the death of the sun.

No matter how much he wills it otherwise, Man is a parochial creature, a native of a planet and not of all space. Whatever else he leaves behind him when he roves beyond his own globe, he takes with him his ingrained ideas of night and day. In every room and office of Space Station One there was a clock, and every clock pointed simultaneously to exactly the same time. The time was that of the Greenwich Meridian, the time of England and Ireland and Scotland and Wales. When Big Ben tolled twelve o’clock noon, the spacefarers of Station One ate lunch. When Big Ben, thousands of miles away in London, struck twelve o’clock midnight, the spacemen obediently went to bed.

The reeps arrived at four twenty-two p.m., the fourteenth day out from Earth. The gripper reep, still clutching replacement part X-102-W, slid into a soft elliptical orbit around the Station. The fixer reep closed gently against the personnel hatch grid. Spacesuited crewmen fastened it to the grid by metal lines through the two rings, one at the reep’s top toward the rear and the other at the bottom near the front. The reep pilot pumped the cabin air into the storage tank, adjusted his helmet, and opened the magnetically-sealed clear plastic cockpit dome. A Station crewman helped him out onto the grid, and escorted him inside for a conference with Irv Mendel and Blair.

Mendel greeted him at his office doorway, hand out-thrust. “Welcome aboard. Irv Mendel.” The pilot grinned and took the proffered hand. “Ed Wiley,” he said. He nodded to Blair. “How’s it going, Glenn?”

“Lousy,” Blair told him. “Did you see the strike?”

“Yeah, it’s a nice one, a real boulder. Which section is that?”

“Five,” said Mendel. “Glenn’s cargo is in there, that’s why he’s so peeved.”

“It’s QB’s cargo,” snapped Blair, “not mine.”

Wiley frowned. “Ours? How so?”

Mendel explained, “Your six-months’ goodies are in there.”

“Oh, fine. In what condition?” Blair said, “This fat character here won’t let me in to find out. The whole section’s at half-pressure by now.”

“Then he’s right,” said Wiley. “I hate to admit it, but he’s right. Double the pressure all at once, you’re liable to knock the meteor right out of the hole. If pressure’s going down that slow right now, it means the meteor’s partially plugging the leak.”

“And what happens when you guys yank the meteor out? Same difference.”

“Not the same,” said Mendel. “This way, nobody gets killed.” Blair shrugged angrily.

Wiley said, “Maybe we can work something. Vacuum won’t hurt the goodies, will it?”

“It may explode the cases,” said Blair. “That shouldn’t do too much damage. I’m worried about it being flipped outside. The cases’ll burst, and the whole shipment’ll be scattered to hell-an’-gone.”

Wiley nodded. “We’ll try to lower the pressure slow and easy. Have you cut off the air supply in that section?”

“First thing,” said Mendel. “Good. We’ll need two guys on the outside to give us a hand. Do you want to, Glenn?”

“Damn right,” said Blair. He got to his feet. “I’ll suit up.”

Wiley stopped him at the door. “Don’t worry, boy,” he said. “Nobody’s going to blame you if it goes wrong.”

Blair studied him, then said, “Tell me, Ed. If that shipment doesn’t get out to QB, will it be a very pleasant place to live the next few months.”

Wiley returned his gaze a moment, then shook his head. “No, it won’t. We’ll have to hide the razor blades.”

“How do you feel now, Ed?” pursued Blair. “Happy in your work, content with the job and the pay and the living conditions? How are you going to feel two months from now?”

“I know that, Glenn. Believe me, I know exactly what you mean. Don’t forget, I come from QB. If there’s any way at all to fix that strike and save the cargo, I’ll do it.”

“What do you figure your chances, Ed?”

“It’s hard to say, before we get a closer look. Maybe fifty-fifty.”

“If I open the Section Five door and go in there and get that cargo out, what are the chances of the meteor being knocked out? Fifty-fifty?”

“Less than that, Glenn. You’ve only got half-pressure in there, you tell me.” Wiley patted his shoulder. “We’ll work it out,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Blair left the office and took the elevator down to Section Two and his cubicle. As he was getting into his suit, there was a knock at the door. He grunted, and Ricks came in.

The two had been avoiding each other for the last two weeks, Ricks more obviously than Blair. Whenever one entered a room — mess hall or library or whatever — the other immediately left. When they passed one another in a corridor, they looked straight ahead with no acknowledgment.

Ricks now looked truculent and determined. Blair grimaced at the sight of him and snapped, “All right, Ricks, what is it? I don’t have time for hand-holding right now.”

“You’re going outside,” said Ricks, “to help fix the strike. I want to go out with you.”

“What? Go to hell!”

“You’re going to need more than one man out there.”

“We’ll get an experienced crewman. You’ve never been outside in vacuum in your life. This isn’t any training course.”

“How did you do the first time, Blair? Did you make it?”

“You aren’t me, sonny.”

“I’ve been taking vitamins.”

“If you want that chip knocked off your shoulder, you better try somewhere else. I’m liable to knock your head off with it.”

“Try it afterwards, Superman. I’m a better man than you are every day in the week and twice on Sundays. Give me a chance to prove it.”

“No.”

Ricks grinned crookedly. “Okay, big man,” he said. “It’s your football, so you can choose up the sides.”

He started toward the doorway and Blair growled, “Hold on a second.” When Ricks turned, he said, “You’re a grandstander, Ricks. You knew there wasn’t a chance in a million I’d let you go outside with me, so it was a nice safe challenge, wasn’t it?”

“Then call my bluff!”

Blair nodded. “I’m going to. Get into your suit. But just let me tell you something first. This isn’t a game. If you flub, it counts. You’re going to be living on the Moon for the next two years. That’s a small community; everybody knows everybody else. If you flub, those are going to be two miserable years for you, sonny. You’re going to be the boy who lost the cargo for QB, and nobody’ll let you forget it.” Ricks’ face was pale, but his grin sardonic. “All right, Cargo-master,” he said. “I can handle that job, too. I can be your whipping boy.” He spun around, and out of the cubicle.

Fists clenched tight, Blair glowered at the empty doorway.

Ricks nervously followed Blair and Wiley out through the personnel hatch and onto the grid outside the Station. His meeting with Wiley had been a simple exchange of names, with no questions asked and no explanations given. Apparently, Wiley had no idea he was merely a passenger on the Station, and not a crew member. Irv Mendel, on the other hand, had pointedly ignored him. Ricks got the impression that Mendel and Blair had argued about him, and that Mendel had lost. Blair himself simply looked grim.

It was the first time Ricks had seen the exterior of the Station. He was standing now on a grid extending from a semi-conical section which itself protruded upward from the ball in the middle of the Station. The ball contained the administrative and recreational rooms of the Station, and the cone above it contained the radio room, the control room, and cubicles containing the meteorological equipment of the weather team.

Standing on the grid, Ricks looked up and out, toward the stars, toward the vast emptinesses, and all at once he felt microscopic. He was as small as an ant beneath a redwood tree. Smaller than that, smaller than an amoeba in the ocean, smaller than a single grain of sand on the Sahara. He was a weak and tiny speck of fury and indecision, a flea riding a lily pad down the Mississippi. He could cry out, with all the strength of his lungs, and it would be no more than a faint peeping in the bottom of the deepest well of all.

Wiley’s calm voice broke into his awe and wonder, crackling tinnily from the helmet radio: “We’ll go on down and take a look at the damage first. It’s the section just to the right of that spoke.”

Blair’s voice, oddly depersonalized by the radio, said, “Right. You lead off.”

Wiley, calm and sure-footed in his magnet-soled boots, stepped off the grid onto the curving side of the cone. He marched down it, looking to Ricks like a man walking calmly down a wall, and thence across the bulge of the central ball to the spoke. Blair followed him, moving just as easily and effortlessly, and Ricks came last.

There was no gravity out here. The Station spun beneath them with what seemed lazy slowness against the distant backdrop of the stars, and the only gravitic force was the centrifugal action of the Station, trying lazily to spin them off and out into space. Above them, the gripper reep arced by in its orbit; the pilot waved.

Ricks gritted his teeth and followed the other two, imitating their actions. The magnetic boots were tricky things; you had to step high, or all at once the boot would click back against the Station with a step only half-completed. And it took a sliding knee-bending movement to release the boot for another step.

The three men moved in slow Indian file across the rounded bulk of the spoke, up across the first inner bulge of the rim, and then out on the rim’s top. They stepped carefully over the metal ridge that marked where, inside the Station, Section Six was separated from Section Five. Then there was a four-foot drop to the curve of the outer surface of the rim. If the rim of the Station had been an automobile tire, they would now have been standing on its side, out on the edge where the tread begins. The meteor was imbedded in the tread-area itself, below the curve.

Wiley and Blair stood close to the meteor; Ricks hung back a step, watching them, moving only when and as they moved. No one had spoken since they left the grid. Then, over the earphones came an unfamiliar voice: “How’s it look, Ed?”

“Not sure yet, Dan. We’re just beginning to look it over.”

Ricks looked around, baffled, then realized that Dan was the pilot in the gripper reep, now hovering a little ways off, circling as the Station circled, keeping approximately even with the meteor break, the replacement part awkward in its long arms.

“Here it is, here,” said Blair suddenly. He squatted carefully, keeping both boots firmly in contact with the Station metal, and pointed to a spot at the jagged intersection of rough meteor rock and frayed bent metal.

Ricks moved in closer, to see what Blair was pointing at. Sunlight glinted momentarily from whatever it was.

Wiley crouched down beside Blair, cutting off Ricks’ view, as Dan asked, “What is it?”

It was Wiley who answered. “Little bit of ice here. We’ve got a slow leakage. Looks like there’s probably a small puncture of the inner hull, with the meteor itself plugging it most of the way. Little bit of air gets out, dissipates between the hulls, and a smidgen of it gets out through here and freezes solid.”

Blair’s voice sounded, saying, “Does Dan know what’s in this section?”

“I don’t know a thing.”

Wiley explained it, and Dan said, “We’ll have to take it nice and easy, then. If that stuff gets loused up, I’m not going home.” Blair straightened, turning, and said, “Okay, Ricks, you can make yourself useful. Go on up with Wiley and help him unrig his ship.”

“Sure.”

Blair waited by the meteor while the other two went back across the spoke and up to the grid. Wiley said, “There’s these two wires to disengage. Wait till I’m in and set, and I’ll give you the high-sign.”

“Okay.”

Wiley clambered into the reep, sealing the dome shut and adjusting the air pressure to fill the cabin. Then he turned off the suit’s air supply and opened his faceplate. Hands and feet ready on the controls, he nodded to Ricks. Ricks released the moorings, and the reep drifted out and to the left, falling slowly away from the spinning Station. Its rear rocket flashed, and it moved away more rapidly, beyond the Station’s outer rim.

Ricks walked back to the rim. When he got there, Wiley’s ship was in place, two of the side rockets firing sporadically, keeping it still in relation to the motion of the Station. The two side arms clung to jagged tears in the rim metal, next to the meteor, while the top and bottom arms, working to the pre-measurements of a small computer tape, inched across the metal, cutting implements extended, scoring not deep enough to cut completely through the hull. Just behind each cutting edge, a small nozzle marked the line of the score with a thin line of red.

Finished, Wiley retracted all four arms, and allowed the reep to drift back away from the Station. The other reep came in closer.

Blair said, “Got something else for you to do, Ricks.” He removed from a clip on the waist of his suit what looked like a coiled length of narrow cable. “You can hold the replacement panel,” he said, “while Dan clears the meteor out. Help me unsnarl this thing.”

“Right.”

Unwound, the coil proved to be four lengths of cable, about fifteen feet long, joined together at one end and terminating at the other end in broad curved clips. While Dan hovered as close as he dared, Blair attached these clips to the edges of the panel, near the corners. Ricks held the other end, where the cables met.

“It’s going to want to drift to the left,” said Blair. “Make sure it doesn’t. Keep all four cables taut. It’s the same as flying a kite. If you let it dip, it’ll crash into the rim here. If it’s crumpled, we can’t use it. And we don’t have any spares handy.”

“I’ll keep it up,” promised Ricks.

Dan backed the gripper reep until the cables stretched taut from Ricks to the panel, and then released his hold on the panel, which immediately drifted to the left, not maintaining the speed of the Station’s spin.

Holding the joined part of the cable tight in his gloved left hand, Ricks tugged with his right at individual lines, trying to keep the panel above him. Behind him, Blair and Dan were ignoring him, working at their own part of the problem. Ricks could hear Blair instructing Dan, guiding him as he came slowly in and fastened his four gripper arms to the meteor. Two of the reep’s auxiliary rocket exhausts fired briefly, and then again, as Dan tugged tentatively at the meteor.

Ricks wanted to turn and watch the operation, but he couldn’t. The eight-by-eight replacement panel swayed above him with maddening slowness, inching away from him, curving down toward the Station. Trying to move too quickly, he pulled on the wrong cable, and the panel dipped sharply, the uppermost cable falling slack, threatening to snarl the others.

Stepping back quickly, almost losing his boot-grip on the hull, Ricks yanked desperately at the slack cable. The panel shuddered, stopped perpendicular to the hull and scarcely two feet above its surface. Then the force of Ricks’ yank took over, and it sailed slowly toward him, curving up and over him, moving now in the direction of the Station’s spin but somewhat faster. When it was directly above him, Ricks tried to stop it, but it curved on, angling down now directly toward the meteor and the arms of the gripper reep.

This time, Ricks managed to tug the cables properly, reversing the drift without too much trouble. He was beginning to catch on to the method, now. It was impossible to keep the panel stationery above him. All he could do was keep sawing it back and forth, forcing its own sluggish motion to follow his commands. Once he had the right idea, it wasn’t too difficult to keep the thing under control, but it didn’t take long at all for his arms to feel the strain. He didn’t dare relax, not for a second. His arms and shoulders twinged at every movement, and his neck and back ached from the necessity of his looking constantly directly above him.

From time to time, he chanced a quick look at the progress of the other two. Blair was standing now at the very edge of the scored section, guiding Dan both with words and with arm and body movements. Dan was tugging slowly, first to the left and then to the right, and gradually the meteor was being inched outward. At one point, Blair glanced over at Ricks and said, “How’s it going, Ricks?”

“Just dandy,” said Ricks, grunting with effort. “Just fine. Almost as good as you.”

Blair frowned, then turned his attention back to the meteor. Half a dozen times since they’d come out here, he’d been at the point of telling Ricks to go back inside, to have Mendel send out a crewman instead. He wasn’t sure what had stopped him. It wasn’t the way Ricks saw it; he wasn’t looking for a whipping boy, to take the blame for him if he lost the cargo. Glenn Blair didn’t pass the buck, he never had and he never would. He’d been given this job in the first place because he was a man who could handle responsibility, whose pride lay in his ability to complete his own jobs, not in any ability to oversee the work of others.

He had, he knew, lost the dispassionate approach necessary in his work. Ricks and the cargo for QB had both become too important to him, though in far different ways. With Ricks, he seemed somehow to have become ensnarled in some idiotic sort of contest, in which only Ricks knew the rules and the scoring, in which only Ricks could know or care who had won and who had lost. Ricks had kept him off-balance, thinking with his emotions rather than his brains. In so doing, he’d underestimated Ricks’ own concern with the contest. He’d agreed to let Ricks come out here partly out of a desire to throw the guy into a situation where he would lose his own contest under his own rules, arm partly out of a desire to call Ricks’ bluff. It had turned out to be no bluff, and Blair, thinking with his emotions, had been unable to withdraw the agreement.

And the fight with Mendel had only served to harden the cement. Mendel had been instantly and loudly opposed to Ricks’ going outside, and Blair had responded just as quickly and just as loudly. Mendel’s opposition had finally only intensified Blair’s determination to go through with it.

Outside, he had had no choice but to put Ricks to work. There were only the two of them out there, and both were needed. He’d kept for himself the intricate job of guiding the removal of the meteor — the reep pilot was too far back and too involved with the operation of his ship’s controls to be able to do the job by himself — but that had left for Ricks the scarcely-less intricate job of holding onto the replacement panel. Blair had kept an eye on him throughout, ready to step in if it looked as though Ricks would lose control, but Ricks had done surprisingly well, after bobbling the ball a bit to begin with.

Now, as Blair kept up a steady drone of low-voiced directions, Dan gradually eased the meteor out of the jagged hole it had made in the hull. The whole scored segment was now bulged outward slightly, and the sawtooth edges of the hole were scraping out and back, with the motion of the meteor.

Then, all at once, the reep jerked backward, as the meteor rasped loose. The hull vibrated beneath Blair’s feet, and then quieted.

Blair waited, cautiously watching the jagged tear, but after the second’s vibration, there was nothing more. They’d managed it, working and tugging and twisting the meteor in such a way that the remaining air in Section Five was released slowly enough to be of no danger.

Dan’s voice came over the helmet radio: “I’ll take Junior on home.”

“Right.”

The gripper reep shot, turning, up and away from the Station, carrying the meteor far enough away so that it could safely be released without being drawn right back to the Station. Blair watched it go, then stepped cautiously across the scored line and looked down through the hole at the inner hull, five feet away. It was too dark in there to be sure, but he thought he could see the marks of a tiny jagged tear.

Wiley’s voice came through the earphones, saying, “Okay, Glenn, I’m ready to slice ’er up.”

“Come ahead.” He backed out of the scored section again, and watched as the fixer reep came in close, once again clutching the edges of the hole with the side arms while the other two arms carefully sliced through the scored lines, this time cutting all the way through, leaving only thin uncut segments at the corners to keep the whole piece in place.

As the fixer reep backed off, the gripper reep returned, empty-armed now, and slid into place, grabbing the serrated edges of the hole. Blair took the small powered hand-cutter from its loop at the waist of his suit, and carefully sliced through the remaining segments. The gripper reep backed away, holding the cut-off square.

Blair crouched at the edge of the cut, and held tightly to it as he lifted both boots clear of the hull. His body swung slowly around, over the hole, and he pulled himself down into it, until his boots clamped to the inner hull.

The space between the hulls was a maze of braces and supports, five feet wide. One diagonal brace had been crushed by the meteor, and would have to be replaced once both hulls were repaired. For now, Blair was concerned to affix a temporary patch to the outside of the inner hull. The final repair job on that would be done from inside the Station. All he had to do was put on a patch that would allow Section Five to be filled with air again, so the inner repair work could be safely done.

Once his boots were firmly braced against the inner hull, Blair released his hold on the outer hull and moved through the constricted space to the cross-braced wall between Section Five and Six. A tool-and-patch kit was bolted to the wall, beside the round small entranceway to the between-hulls of Section Six. From this kit Blair took a small hammer and a foot-square rubberized metallic patch. He then returned to the spot where the meteor had broken through.

The hole in the inner hull was a ragged oval, less than half an inch in diameter at its widest point. The edges of the tear had been pulled outward by the removal of the meteor, and Blair first hammered these flat, then removed the protective backing of the patch square and pressed the square firmly over the hole. Its inner side was covered with a sealant designed to work in vacuum, binding patch and hull together at the molecular level. It was not a permanent repair job by any means, but it would hold for at least twenty-four hours of normal pressure inside Section Five.

The patch job finished, Blair came back out in much the same manner as he had gone in. Ricks, a little ways to the left, was still maneuvering the replacement panel back and forth, though his arms seemed to be sagging somewhat by now. Blair said, “Okay, Ricks, bring it in.”

“Anything you say, Admiral.” Blair helped him ease the panel down close enough for each of them to grab an edge. They released the cable clips, and Blair one-handed bunched the cable together until he could slip it back onto the catch on his suit. Together, they turned the panel around and held it flat. On Earth, this reinforced thickness of hull would have weighed nearly two hundred pounds. Here, it seemed to weigh less than nothing, since the only force on it was trying to push it up, away from the Station.

They carried the panel over to the hole made for it, and Blair said, “Lower it easy. It should be a snug fit, flush with the rest of the hull. If we set it in flat, we won’t have any trouble.”

“No trouble at all, Commander.”

“Don’t play the smart-aleck!” Surprisingly, Ricks answer was subdued: “All right. What do we do now?”

“Lower it. Don’t hold it on the edge, hold your hands flat on the top, like this. There’s no danger of it falling.”

Ricks laughed nervously. “It’s like a table-raising at a séance.” They stood on opposite sides of the hole, the panel flat between them, their arms out over it, gloved hands pressing it slowly down. The fixer reep rolled gently in toward them, and Wiley said, “Let me know when you’re ready, Glenn.”

“Just a minute now.”

The panel was a little too far over on Ricks’ side. Together, they adjusted it, and lowered it to match the hole. They stood crouched opposite one another, holding the panel in place, while the fixer reep edged into position, and the welding arm reached out to the bottom left corner. “Turn your face away, Ricks,” warned Blair.

“Right.”

It took ten minutes to weld the new piece into place. In the meantime, the gripper reep returned from dumping the scrap section, and Blair sent Ricks up to the grid to help Dan moor his ship. Ricks and Dan came back carrying two tool kits and, when the welding job was finished, Blair and Ricks stood aside as Dan power-sanded the new weld and did a quick spray-painting that removed the signs of the patch. Straightening, he said, “There you go. Good as new.”

“Fine,” said Blair. “Let’s see how the cargo made out.”

The three men returned to the grid, where they moored Wiley’s ship across from Dan’s, and then the four of them went on back inside the Station.

Mendel was waiting for them inside the lock, brow furrowed with worry. He glanced back and forth from Blair to Ricks, then said to Blair, “How did it go?”

“Fine.”

“Just peachy,” said Ricks. “I get my merit badge, don’t I, Cargomaster?”

Blair shook his head at Mendel, and went on toward the elevator without answering Ricks.

He headed immediately for Section Five. Three crewmen were already at the bulkhead, which was still sealed shut. Blair looked at the pressure gauge, and saw that the dial was above the halfway mark and noticeably climbing. He talked with the crewmen a few minutes, discussing the strike and its repairing, and then at last the bulkhead door slid back into its recess, and they went on in. The crewmen went to work on the permanent repair of the inner hull, and Blair checked his cargo. A few of the food cartons had exploded when the section had gone to vacuum, but he gave them hardly a glance. He found the seven aluminum crates for QB. All had split open, releasing interior air, but their contents looked to be still in good condition. Blair grinned to himself with relief.

QB was the maintenance base. As such, it had a permanent crew of eighty-four men. These men were on thirty-minute call at all times, and were fulfilling a two-year contract with General Transists. They spent every moment of those two years inside the QB satellite. Most of the time, they had little work to do, but the size of the crew was the statistical minimum required for any foreseeable accident to any part of the General Transits lifeline between the Earth and the Moon. When there was any sort of breakdown, such as this meteor strike on Station One, they went to work. The rest of the time, they were completely on their own. Their world, for two years, was a small metal ring nearly a quarter million miles from home. They couldn’t leave it, and they had little to do inside it.

That was why the contents of the seven aluminum crates was so important. Four cartons of motion picture film and three cartons of microfilmed books. Six months of entertainment, of distraction. The only way the men of QB could keep from going stir-crazy in their two years of self-imposed imprisonment, the only way to last through the inactive days and weeks between the infrequent calls for their skills and labor.

With no books, no motion pictures, no cheerful distractions for their minds, the men of QB would falter. Irritations would mount, squabbles would turn to hatreds, aggravations to bloody vendettas. Efficiency would collapse, morale disappear. Statistically, there would be within the first sixty days five suicides and eight murders.

Entertainment. Tinsel. But, to the men of QB, as vital as food.

Glenn Blair patted the aluminum crates, and grinned with relief.

Now that it was over, Harvey Ricks was terrified. Before he’d gone out, he’d been too full of the challenge he’d hurled at Blair; while he’d been outside, he’d been too busy. Now it was over, and he had time to realize the extent of the risks he’d taken, and he was terrified.

He spent the next four hours in his cubicle, staring at the wall, vowing great resolutions of reform. From now on, he would mind his own business, accept his limitations.

Then, after four hours, the barbell arrived from Station Three, and the transfer of cargo and passengers was made. There were five men coming back to Earth, there was stack after stack of cargo. The huge hold of the barbell was emptied, and then the shipment for the Moon — and the cargo for QB — was loaded aboard, and the three passengers for the Moon left Station One, carrying their one-suitcase-each to the new cubicle, where they would live another fifteen days of their lives. Ricks looked around at the new room, and already the retroactive terror was receding, already he was thinking of his exploit in self-congratulatory terms. He’d done well. He’d showed the Cargomaster that Harvey Ricks was a good man to have at your side, a man who can do the job right the first time.

After a while, Blair knocked at the cubicle door and entered, smiling hesitantly, saying, “I didn’t get a chance to thank you, Ricks. You did a good job out there.”

Ricks smiled, the old self-confident challenging smile. “Why, any time, Cargomaster.”

Blair’s face tightened. “Well,” he said. “So I’ve thanked you.”

“So you have, Cargomaster.”

Blair left without another word.

Ricks settled back on his bunk, arms behind his head, and smiled at the ceiling. He’d made it again. He’d sent the hunters away, and when the wolf had come he’d tromped it all on his own. He still hadn’t run across the wolf he couldn’t handle.

But there was time. There was still plenty of time for Harvey Ricks to have his reckoning.

Two years’ worth.

1962

Look Before You Leap

Want a man with his heart on the right-hand side? A left-handed red-head with one blue and one brown eye? If you just check carefully enough millions of men, you can expect to find almost any anomaly you want…

The third day of bivouac Jeremy got so scared he went home.

Just like that. And that scared him so much, he went right back. And then he spent a few days thinking about it.

Jeremy knew that it had been an hallucination. They were on bivouac, on night problem, with the tear gas bombs bursting in air, and everybody whispering, “Gas!”, and the concealed Tactical Instructors having fun with rifle shots and flares and things that went bump in the night. Jeremy was one of a long line of basic trainees crawling through a pitch-black dry drainage pipe, the curved roughness of the pipe magnifying the sounds from outside. A couple of TI’s had dropped tear gas bombs at either end of the pipe, and the whispered warnings — “Gas!” — had echoed forward and back toward Jeremy, in the middle of the pipe.

By this time, Jeremy was just about as frightened as he could possibly be anyway. And then he heard the whispers, and he pulled off his fatigue cap with one hand, and his glasses with the other hand, and that didn’t leave any hands for the gas mask.

He skittered frantically, all crouched and cramped in the pipe, trying to hold cap and glasses in one hand and put the gas mask on with two hands, and it was pitch-black so he couldn’t see a thing, and then he dropped the gas mask, and couldn’t find it.

And the first whiff of tear gas reached him.

And he could feel the young terror of all the other basic trainees in the pipe, reduced to harried sewer-crawling by a world they never made.

One second, there he was in the pipe, his heart pounding like a jack hammer. The next second, he was huddled over on hands and knees atop his own bed at home. The bedroom door was open, and soft light filtered up from the living room downstairs, and he could recognize his room, his bed, his desk, the full-length mirror on the closet door, the painting of a collie hanging on the wall over the bureau. I’m crazy! he thought wildly.

And the next second, he was back in the pipe in the miserable dark, hands fumbling for the gas mask. He found it, and got it on at last, and the people behind him were pushing and swearing. He crawled through the pipe and ran with the rest.

Colonel Brice stood on the road across the ravine, watching the scurrying basic trainees down below, and wondering whether there’d be one in this group or not. He watched the TI’s drop their tear gas bombs down toward the entrances of the drainage pipe, listened to the crash and boom of the combat simulation from up and down the length of the ravine, and he hoped there would be one. There wasn’t any reason for this, otherwise.

He wondered how much longer he could fight modernization on this front. He had the older staff officers on his side, of course; none of them would ever really believe in their heart of hearts that the every-man-a-rifleman-first concept was obsolescent now. But there were younger men coming up, men who realized that this week of bivouac was a farce, that its only result was to terrify, anger, and occasionally maim the basic trainees. The vast majority of Air Force enlisted men were going to be clerks or technicians, in support of the airplanes and missiles which were the actual combat arm. Besides, reducing the sixteen weeks of Army basic training to a five-day bivouac was, at the least, overly optimistic

Thank heaven, the colonel thought, for the military mind. Or is that a contradiction in terms? But, at any rate, as long as the military mind retains its basic qualities of blind unadaptability, every single enlisted man in the Air Force would go through this bivouac: Colonel Brice’s field experiment.

And if they phase out the bivouac, he thought, I’ll just have to find some other way to screen these people.

The colonel looked up at the control shack just in time to see the door open and Ed Clark stick his head out to speak to the runner.

They’ve found someone! he thought, and started for the control shack, not waiting for the runner to come down to him. Behind him, the TI’s with the tear gas bombs looked after him, and then glanced at one another and shrugged. Neither of them knew where Colonel Brice fit into the general scheme of things.

No one seemed to know. But he was always there, every week, every Wednesday night, to watch the night problem.

The runner met the colonel halfway up the slope. “Mr. Clark wants to see you, sir,” he said.

“I know,” said the colonel. “Thank you.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel held in the smile he felt tugging at his lips. The runner was so frankly curious. Only three people on this base were allowed into the control shack, or knew what went on in there. The colonel himself, and Ed Clark, and Paul Swanson. Not even Lieutenant general Poole, the base commander, knew anything about the colonel and his two assistants, and not even he was allowed inside the control shack, a fact which pleased the good general not at all.

There was no way to open the door from the outside. The colonel knocked, and Ed Clark pushed the door open for him. “Come on in, sir,” he said. “We’ve got a real dilly this time.”

The colonel stepped into the shack and closed the door, glancing at Clark and Paul Swanson, seated over by the TV screen.

The three men were of decided types. Colonel James Brice, tall and lean in his blue uniform, was square-jawed and thin-lipped, his brown eyes deep set beneath shaggy brows, his gray hair cropped close to his skull. Before the Second World War, he had been an anthropologist, associated with a New England university. He had learned to fly a plane, since there were some areas of the world which could be reached by no other kind of vehicle, and when the war had come along he had wound up in the Army Air Corps. He had stayed in the service, switching over to the new-born Air Force in 1947, and settled into Intelligence in 1949-

Ed Clark was twenty-six and looked ten years younger. His boyish, cheerful face was topped by pale blond hair in the inevitable crewcut. He was tall and slender, looking exactly like a first-string center on a high school basketball team. He was wearing tan slacks and a shortsleeved white shirt, open at the collar. He and Paul Swanson were both enlisted men, and took the prerogative given Intelligence personnel to wear civilian clothing. The base finance officer was the only individual on the base outside this room who knew their ranks. They sirred only Colonel Brice, and were called Mister by both enlisted men and officers on the base.

Paul Swanson was short and wiry, black-haired and full-lipped. He was twenty-three, and looked five years older. He came originally from New York City, and no one could have mistaken his place of origin. Dressed now in black trousers and a pale-green shirt, he glumly watched the dim figures moving across the television screen, piped up from the infra-red camera concealed in the drainage pipe down at the ravine.

The colonel looked at the TV screen for a second, then looked back at Ed Clark. “What is it this time?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Clark admitted. “We did get a picture of him, though, so we’ll be able to identify him.”

“Well, what did he do?” asked the colonel.

It was Paul Swanson who answered. “He disappeared.”

“He did what?”

“It was just for a second,” Swanson went on. “I almost missed it, it was so fast. But he just up and disappeared. And then, a second later, he came right back again.”

“Disappeared,” mused the colonel. “Invisibility? That one I don’t go for. You don’t just suddenly change your entire body chemistry to glass.”

“He did it,” said Swanson simply. “He learned it in the Orient,” suggested Clark. “The mysterious power to cloud men’s minds.”

“Cloud men’s minds, maybe,” said the colonel. “Cloud an infra-red television camera, never. Particularly when you don’t know it’s there.”

“Maybe he did,” said Swanson.

“A telepath?” The colonel brightened. If that’s what it is, at last — but why the disappearing act?” He turned to Swanson. “What was his reaction to it? How did he act after he’d done it? Guilty, pleased with himself, or what?”

“Scared to death,” said Swanson. “I don’t think he’d planned on doing it. He just got rattled, and did it.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Clark.

“Sit and wait,” said the colonel.

“Identify him, and keep an eye on him. But there’s no sense approaching him until we find out exactly what it is he’s doing and what his attitude toward it all is.” The colonel glanced at the TV screen again. The basic trainees were still crawling hurriedly through the drainage pipe, the line pausing intermittently to hurriedly don gas masks and then crawl on.

“He disappeared,” said the colonel softly, and shook his head.

It wasn’t until the next day that things slowed down enough for Jeremy to think about what had happened in the drainage pipe. That afternoon, he sat on the sunlit grass with the rest of the basic trainees in his flight, and listened to a man in pressed fatigues explain the principles of the carbine.

Then he had time to think. And to get scared all over again.

It had been an hallucination. It must have been an hallucination, there was no other way to explain it.

He worried and fretted and chewed his thumb-knuckle all afternoon, and by nightfall he had himself convinced. Never mind the clarity and reality of that scene, the feel of the texture of the bedspread beneath his hands, or how accurately he had seen himself reflected in the closet minor. Home was seven hundred miles away.

He had not gone home. It had been an hallucination.

He convinced himself at last, and for three days he stayed convinced. And then he got the letter from his mother.

The letter itself was simply one of the newsy, chatty notes he had come to expect from his mother in his seven weeks in the Air Force. But one sentence in it stood out as though it were written in fire.

The sentence concerned Jeremy’s dog, Andrew. “I thought at last we’d, broken Andrew of the habit of sleeping on your bed,” his mother wrote, “but last night he did it again, leaving muddy marks all over the bedspread. He was gone, of course, by the time I got there!”

Two days later, bivouac being over and the flight back at the barracks, Jeremy went on sick call. To the man-with-clipboard who marched the sick call group to the infirmary, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.” To the white-garbed medic who questioned him at the infirmary, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.” To the sour-looking doctor who got around to him at ten o’clock, he said, “I’m having hallucinations.”

The doctor looked a little more sour. “What sort of hallucinations?” he wanted to know. “Girls, or pink elephants?”

“Neither.” And Jeremy told him what had happened, and showed him the letter from his mother.

The doctor was looking increasingly sour. “What else?” he demanded.

“That’s all.”

“You said hallucinations.”

“Just the one,” said Jeremy. “Just that one.”

The doctor glowered at the letter from Jeremy’s mother, and then glowered at Jeremy. “You wouldn’t be malingering, would you?” he demanded.

“No, sir,” said Jeremy. He was getting scared again — basic training was a good place to learn how to be scared — and he was devoting a lot of time to trying to cover it. If the doctor thought he were scared, he would think it was because Jeremy was guilty of something. Like malingering, which meant goofing off by faking sickness, and which could result in a court-martial.

“You wouldn’t be,” continued the doctor, glowering more than ever, “angling for a section eight, would you? You figure you’d rather be a nut than an airman, is that it?”

“No, sir,” said Jeremy.

The doctor dropped the letter on his desk where Jeremy could reach it, and leaned back. “I don’t know what you want from me,” he said. “You aren’t physically sick. You say you had this one hallucination five days ago, and now here you are on sick call. What do you want me to do about it?”

“I keep worrying,” Jeremy told him. “I keep thinking as though it really happened. I can’t think about anything else.”

The doctor sighed, looked sour, shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do,” he said. “Forget it. If it was an hallucination, so what? It’s all over, and it didn’t come back. So forget about it.”

“That’s why I’m here, sir,” said Jeremy. “I can’t forget about it.”

“You want to see a psychiatrist, is that it?” The doctor’s tone showed clearly that this proved his earlier suspicions, that Jeremy was a faker trying to get a section eight, hoping to get an insanity discharge.

Jeremy almost said no. He didn’t want anybody to think he was a malingerer or a fake. He didn’t want anybody to think that he would try to lie his way out of the Air Force.

But the memory of the last five days was too strong in him. He’d been sleeping poorly, he hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything, his marching had deteriorated to worse than what it had been his very first day in basic training, he was goofing up on inspection, he was generally confused and miserable over this thing. So he nodded and said, “Yes, sir, I guess so.”

The doctor sighed. “All right, airman,” he said heavily. He made a brief note in Jeremy’s medical record, and wrote something else on a small sheet of paper which he clipped to the record folder. “You come on sick call Thursday morning,” he said. “Go on back to your flight now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy. He got to his feet. “Thank you, sir.”

The doctor mumbled, and looked sour.

The chief surgeon was being difficult. He, too, was a bird colonel — just recently having received his eagles, from the obvious pleasure he took in making life difficult for another officer of equal rank — and he saw no reason why he should do what Colonel Brice wanted. “Medical records,” he said pompously, “are classified material. Authorized personnel only. I’m afraid I’ll have to know your reason for wanting to see this man’s records, and also your request will most definitely have to come through the proper channels. You must know, Colonel Brice, the proper procedure for—”

“Ketchup,” said the colonel, disgusted. Since his two boys had grown old enough to understand and imitate the vocabulary of their elders, this had become the colonel’s one swear word, and it was usually disconcerting to other people the first time they heard him use it.

It was disconcerting to the chief surgeon. “I beg your pardon?”

“Where’s your hot line?” demanded the colonel.

“Well, really, Colonel, it requires an emergency of—”

“Ketchup,” said the colonel again. He came around the chief surgeon’s desk and, over that astonished gentleman’s protests, proceeded to open desk drawers.

The bright red phone was in the bottom drawer on the right-hand side. The colonel picked it up, waited a second, and then said, “Brice. For Corey.” He waited a few seconds more, and then said, “Jack? I’m fine. I want some records and — Right you are.” Deadpan, he handed the receiver to the chief surgeon.

The chief surgeon, bug-eyed, put the phone to his ear and announced his name and rank. Then he listened, nodded vacantly, said, “Of course, sir. Certainly, sir,” and put the receiver gently back onto its cradle. He closed the door, and in a chastened voice said, “I had no idea—”

“That’s all right, Colonel. Now, if I could have the medical records—”

“Of course. Certainly. Immediately.”

It took, as a matter of fact, just about ten minutes for the records to get into Colonel Brice’s hands. Then the colonel, at his request, was given an empty office where he and Clark and Swanson could look them over at leisure.

They already knew quite a bit about their man: Jeremy Masters, Airman Basic, AF12451995; twenty years, five months and twelve days old; born in Crane City, Pennsylvania; lived there all his life until he went away to attend a small liberal arts college at Marshall, in the same state; two years of college, average grades; enlistment in the Air Force; score of 73 on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Stanine scores ranging between six and eight, with a nine on clerical; negative police check; a class one physical profile on everything except eyes, where he had a two, being somewhat nearsighted; no known subversive activities, and made no sports teams in high school or college; studied trumpet four years, not very good at it.

And now they learned one thing more. What the disappearance act meant.

“He went home,” said Clark softly, wonderingly. “He up and went home.”

The colonel nodded. “I’ve been waiting for a telepath,” he said. “And I guess I’m still waiting for one. But it looks as though I’ve finally got hold of a real live teleport.”

“He refuses to believe it,” said Swanson. He tapped the doctor’s scrawled notation on Jeremy Masters’ medical record. “He’s talked himself into thinking it was an hallucination, you notice?”

“Just wait till we tell him different,” said Clark.

“No,” said the colonel.

The other two looked at him, questioning. “You aren’t going to tell him?” asked Clark.

The colonel shook his head.

“Why not?”

“However he managed to do it,” explained the colonel, “he’s managed now to get rid of the knowledge. It won’t do any good to just go to him and tell him he really did teleport after all. He won’t believe it, to begin with. He’ll think it’s some sort of crazy psychological test. And even if he does believe it, so what? He obviously doesn’t have any control over the ability. He’s no good to us as a man who teleported once and can’t remember how.”

“So what do we do?” Clark asked.

The colonel closed the medical records folder. “We let nature take its course for a while,” he said. “With a nudge or two in the right direction from us.”

Jeremy had seen the doctor on Monday. He had three more days of distracted incompetence to live through, with the TI calling him a yardbird and a goof-up and a few less printable things, and then it was finally Thursday, and he went back on sick call again.

This time, the white-garbed medic took his name and went away and came back and said, “You sit over there.”

“Over there” was a small alcove containing three leather sofas. Four miserable looking basic trainees were already there. Jeremy joined them, and waited. There was no conversation at all among the five; they were all too full of their own frightened thoughts.

At eleven-thirty, another white-garbed medic came along. “Follow me,” he said, and walked off.

Jeremy and the other four followed him out a side door. There was a truck parked there and, at the medic’s brief order, they climbed up into the back. Planks were stretched benchlike across the interior. They sat down, braced themselves, and fifteen minutes later the truck jerked forward and drove out of the base.

They rode for two hours, and then they arrived at Robinson Air Force Base, on which there was a hospital. The truck bounced to a stop in front of the hospital, and the medic came around and said, “O.K., come on out.”

Jeremy and the other four clambered down from the truck.

The medic said, “Any of you guys hungry, go on to the chow hall with the driver here. If you ain’t hungry, come on with me. And if you go to the chow hall, you get right back here after you eat. I’ll be waiting inside by the desk.”

Jeremy wasn’t hungry. It was past lunchtime, but he wasn’t hungry. He was too nervous to be hungry.

Apparently, all the others felt the same way. The five of them trooped into the hospital behind the medic. Another medic took over at that point and led them down an endless series of halls to an alcove almost exactly like the one they’d left two hours ago back at the infirmary, and left them sitting there.

Half an hour later, an Airman First Class with a clipboard came over and called out a name. One of the five stood up and said, “That’s me, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir,’ ” said the Airman First Class absently. “Follow me.”

Jeremy was the second one called, twenty minutes later. He remembered not to call the Airman First Class “sir,” and he felt very small as he followed the man-with-clipboard down the green corridors past all the white rooms.

The psychiatrist looked like the doctor, except he had less hair. He sat on one side of the desk, and

Jeremy sat on the other, and he listened impassively as Jeremy described his hallucination. When Jeremy was finished, the psychiatrist said, “This wasn’t real?”

“No, sir,” said Jeremy. “I mean, how could it be? It must have been an hallucination.”

“Then what’s the problem?” the psychiatrist asked him. “If you believed it, if you really thought you’d gone home for a minute, then we’d have a problem on our hands. But if you already realize it was an hallucination, then I don’t see the difficulty.”

“I know it was an hallucination,” said Jeremy. “But I can’t forget it. It’s as though I really believed it. I just can’t get it out of my mind. It scares me.”

The psychiatrist studied his fingernails. “I’ll tell you frankly,” he said, not looking up, “I have the feeling you’re blowing this thing all out of proportion. I’m not saying you’re doing it consciously, I don’t know whether you are or not. But here’s what I think. I think you’re sorry you enlisted, and you wish you were home. I think you wish there were some way you could get out of the Air Force. So, to give you the benefit of the doubt, I think you’ve talked yourself into believing you had this hallucination, with some vague idea of getting a section eight.”

“No, sir,” started Jeremy, but the psychiatrist raised a hand for silence.

“I’ll tell you the rest of what I think,” he said. “I think there’s the possibility you’re making this whole thing up, that you’re consciously trying to wangle a section eight. That’s a possibility. But I also think it’s more likely that you yourself don’t exactly realize what you’re doing. But consider the hallucination itself. Home. You wanted to go home. You still want to go home.”

“No, sir,” said Jeremy. He was still frightened, but he was beginning to get a little angry, too. Seven weeks of basic training had dulled his self-respect, but hadn’t totally deactivated it. This bland witch doctor was calling him a liar and a sneak. “It isn’t like that at all, sir,” he said.

“It isn’t? Well, then, you tell me what it is like.”

“This thing — happened,” said Jeremy. “I don’t know what it was. It felt real, it felt as though I were really home. It only lasted a second, and then I was right back again. But it felt real, and then I got that letter from my mother, and I just can’t get rid of the idea that maybe it really did happen. I know it’s impossible — but it happened.”

The psychiatrist said, “Um-m-m.” He studied his fingernails again. At length, he said, “You don’t really want a section eight, boy. Or do you have the idea an asylum is better than the Air Force? It isn’t. You’re in your seventh week of basic training. You have four weeks to go. I realize basic training is rough, but it has to be, and things will calm down once you complete it. If you aren’t careful, right now you can put a black mark on your record that will stay there for the rest of your life.”

“Sir,” said Jeremy desperately, “I can’t sleep, I can’t eat, I can’t concentrate on anything. I don’t know what to do. I want somebody to help me.”

“If I saw the problem—” started the psychiatrist. He shrugged and pursed his lips and studied his fingernails. At length, he said, “Do you know what sodium amytal is?”

“Yes, sir. A truth serum.”

“Not exactly, but that’s close enough. I’m thinking of giving you an injection of sodium amytal. There’s either more or less to this than you’re telling me. Now, if you want, you can stand up and walk out of here now and go on back to your outfit, and no questions asked. If you stay here, and under sodium amytal you tell me you’re faking, you’ll face court-martial action. Do you understand that?”

Jeremy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Well? What’s your decision?” Jeremy’s hands clenched in his lap. He wasn’t faking, he knew he wasn’t faking. He had seen the hallucination.

But what good would it do to convince this man he was telling the truth? The psychiatrist was right, an insane asylum was a lot worse than the Air Force.

No. It was the truth. This thing had happened, and if Jeremy didn’t get some help soon, it would drive him crazy.

Then he wondered, What kind of help do I want?

I want someone to explain it away. That was it, that was the core of it. No matter how much he knew that it had been an hallucination, no matter how often he convinced himself of that, he still didn’t believe it. Way down inside, he believed it had really happened, he had really gone home.

And that was what he wanted, somebody to shake that belief, somebody to prove to him that he was wrong, somebody to explain that hallucination away. Until that was done, he would just go on worrying about it and being frightened of it.

“I’ll stay, sir,” he said.

The psychiatrist said, “Um-m-m,” again. He nodded, and got to his feet. “Come with me.”

There was a high leather-covered cot in the next room, beside some complicated-looking apparatus. At the psychiatrist’s orders, Jeremy rolled up his left sleeve and stretched out on the cot. The intravenous injection began, and the psychiatrist alternated between studying his watch and peering at Jeremy’s face.

It was a strange sensation. First the prick of the needle, and then a spreading warmth and a drowsiness, and the end to worry. It was so pleasant, so pleasant to know that there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to worry about, that nothing in all the world was really very important. He could even stop hiding the truth.

Time passed sluggishly, and when the psychiatrist spoke at last his voice was far away and muffled. “What is your name?”

It took no effort to talk. He was easy and relaxed, and he didn’t care. “Jeremy Masters,” he said.

“And how old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“How tall?”

“Six foot.”

“Did you have an hallucination a week ago yesterday?”

Why not tell him the truth? It didn’t matter. “No.”

There was a pause, and then the psychiatrist said, “What’s your mother’s first name?”

Jeremy smiled. “Alma.”

“What’s your father’s first name?”

“Richard.”

“Why did you lie about the hallucination?”

“I was afraid to tell the truth.”

“I see. And what is the truth?”

Why not? “I went home.”

The pause this time was longer, and when the psychiatrist spoke again his voice was somewhat sharper. “You really went home?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I was afraid.”

“How did you do it?”

Jeremy frowned, trying to concentrate. But it was too much trouble, the answer was too far down. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t remember.”

“Could you do it again?”

No hesitation this time. “Yes.”

“Let’s see you.”

Jeremy thought it over, and slowly shook his head. “I can’t. Not now.”

“Why not?”

“You’re looking at me.”

“I’ll turn my back.”

“No. It isn’t dark.”

“It has to be dark?”

“Yes. And nobody seeing me. And… and right now I have to be scared.”

“What do you mean, right now?”

“Maybe… maybe I’ll get better. I don’t know.”

“I see. And have you ever done this before?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know you could do it?”

“I didn’t. It scared me.”

“But you really did go home?”

“Yes. I really did go home.”

The psychiatrist sighed, and moved around the room a bit, and then he came back and asked Jeremy some questions about girls, and whether or not he liked the Air Force (he didn’t), and whether or not there was any epilepsy in his family (there wasn’t). Then the psychiatrist said, “All right. You take a nap now, and I’ll talk to you later.” He did something with the needle that was still in Jeremy’s arm, and Jeremy went to sleep.

The psychiatrist’s name was Holland, and his rank was Captain. And he was very very curious. “Quite frankly,” he said, “I wonder what your interest in this man is.”

“Quite frankly,” said the colonel, “it’s none of your business. I don’t mean to be overly tough with you, but I’m afraid that’s the way it has to be. I’ll be the one asking all the questions, and you’ll be the one giving all the answers.”

Captain Holland’s face froze. He had plainly decided that he didn’t like this overbearing colonel very much at all. Well, that was too bad. It would be nice to be liked, but it wouldn’t get much accomplished. And the colonel meant to get things accomplished.

“You gave him sodium amytal, is that right?”

Captain Holland nodded, stiffly. “What did he say beforehand?”

“That he had had an hallucination.”

“And under the narcoanalysis?”

“He admitted that he believed the delusion. That he believed he had gone home. Wish-fulfillment, nothing more.”

“It’s a little early for an analysis,” said the colonel. He got to his feet and paced the floor, ignoring the cold gaze of the captain. At length, he said, “What do you plan to do with him?”

“Send him back to his outfit,” said the captain. “This is only a temporary thing. Given other things to think about, it’ll wear off.”

“No,” said the colonel.

“What’s that?”

“You’ll send him to the hospital at Dover,” said the colonel. “For observation and treatment.”

“But… but that’s absurd. He doesn’t need observation and treatment, all he needs is a few days to forget all this.”

“It could be,” said the colonel, “that I don’t want him to forget it.”

“Sir,” said the captain stiffly, “my first duty is to my patient. I must strongly protest any attempt to make this delusion seem overly important to him. We could blow it up now to

the point where there would be—”

“Your first duty,” cut in the colonel, “is to the Air Force, and through the Air Force to your country.”

“I don’t see how badgering a poor airman basic is going to be of any advantage at all to either the Air Force or the nation.”

“You don’t have to see that, Captain. All you have to do is take my word for it.”

“I assure you, sir, that I fully intend to protest this action of yours—”

“Ketchup!” snorted the colonel. “Protest all you want.”

“In all my years in the service—”

“You still haven’t learned to obey orders. Now, listen to me. This is important. You are to tell that boy that he is being sent to another hospital for observation. You are not to mention me at all, and you are not to tell him your own personal feelings on the subject.”

“Until I have a direct order from the surgeon general,” said the captain hotly, “I have no intention of so mishandling a simple case like—”

“You have a direct order, Captain, from me.”

The office door opened, and Ed Clark stuck his head in. “The plane’s ready, Colonel,” he said.

“Fine.” The colonel started for the door, and paused to look back at the captain. “This is important, Captain,” he said, “vitally important. You can be sure I’m not making myself difficult for the fun of it.”

“Yes, sir,” said the captain grimly. “Thank you,” said the colonel, “for your co-operation.”

Jeremy woke up starving. The light seeping through the closed Venetian blinds over the room’s one window was tinged with red, so it must be late afternoon.

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot. He felt refreshed, but dizzy.

And then he remembered the questions, and his own answers, and his hands clutched the leather covering of the cot as he stared across the room.

He believed it. He couldn’t kid himself any more, he couldn’t try to convince himself any more that it was just an hallucination. He believed it, he knew it, and so did the psychiatrist.

He shouldn’t have come here. He should have hidden it, held it down, learned to live with it. Because now the psychiatrist knew, and the psychiatrist could come to only one conclusion.

That Jeremy Masters was crazy.

Maybe I am, he thought. Maybe I really am.

The door opened, and the psychiatrist looked in. “Ah,” he said, with false joviality, “you’re awake. And I imagine you’re hungry. You woke up just in time for dinner. Come along.”

The psychiatrist was angry about something, Jeremy could feel it, but he was too worried about himself to pay any attention to the feeling. “I told you, didn’t I?” he said.

“Yes, you did.”

“Am I crazy?”

The psychiatrist looked away.

“No,” he said. He started to say something, then obviously changed his mind and said instead, “There’s an ambivalence there. You believe that this hallucination was real, and yet you understand that such a belief is a symptom of mental imbalance. You haven’t been completely captured by the illusion. I don’t think it will take too long to straighten you out.”

“Will I be staying in the hospital here?”

The psychiatrist made an angry gesture. “Only till tomorrow,” he said. “Then you’ll be going to another hospital.”

“An asylum?”

“No. Another Air Force hospital. For… for observation, that’s all.”

“I see,” said Jeremy hopelessly.

The false joviality was back. “Don’t worry about it,” the psychiatrist said. “You want to be cured, and that’s half the battle.”

The next half hour was a confusing one for Jeremy. The psychiatrist turned him over to a man-with-clipboard, who turned him over to a starched smiling nurse, who traded him a set of blue-gray hospital pajamas for his uniform fatigues, and who then turned him over to another patient, a lanky buck-toothed grinner named Bob, who took him away to the hospital chow hall for dinner.

And all through that half hour, and all through dinner, and all through the long bright evening in the eight-man ward where he was to sleep that night, he kept remembering what the psychiatrist had said.

“You WANT to be cured, and that’s half the battle.” If he had traveled seven hundred miles in one split second — if he had traveled seven hundred miles in one split second — did he want to be cured?

The next day, a different starched nurse gave him back his uniform, and at ten hundred hours he followed yet another man-with-clipboard to a bus, which he boarded with nine other people. The bus was ancient, still painted the Army olive drab, and it bounced and jounced across the base to the flight line where, two hours later, the ten of them were put on a goony bird and told to fasten their safety belts. Then, after another ten minutes, the plane took off.

After seven weeks of basic training, Jeremy was used to this kind of treatment. No one told him where he was going, or how long it would take to get there, or what would happen next, or much of anything else, but that was the Air Force way. One was moved from place to place, and one simply followed and hoped for the best.

The plane ride took an hour and a half. Jeremy had time to get used to the novelty of flying in an airplane and looking out the window at the patchwork quilt below, and spent a while looking at the other passengers. Seven of them were clearly patients like himself, dressed in rumpled fatigues and looking worried but fatalistic. The last two were also in fatigues, but the fatigues were neat and pressed, and encircled at the waist by cartridge belts from which dangled holstered automatics.

Guards. Without anyone mentioning the fact, without anyone talking to him at all, he had passed progressively through the stages from basic trainee to patient to prisoner.

His depression wasn’t dispelled after the plane landed. The guards herded the seven onto another bus, and they were driven to a gray stucco building with bars on the windows of all five floors.

And the next two days were routine. The routine, that is, that Jeremy had come to expect from the Air Force. There was the checking out of pajamas and bedding, there was the assignment to a ward, there was the filling out of innumerable forms, there was the lecture by a Staff Sergeant on the degree of cleanliness to be maintained in Jeremy’s “area” — that section of space-time which included his bed and bedside table in the eight-man ward — there was the bad chow hall food, and there was the hillbilly three beds away who owned, a small radio which was at all times tuned in to Wheeling, West Virginia.

On the third day, there was another psychiatrist, a major named Grildquist. Major Grildquist was a fat bald man in a rumpled uniform. He smiled at all times, and his eyes were ice-blue and watchful.

The first interview with Major Grildquist was exactly like the interview with the psychiatrist at the other hospital. There were the questions and the answers, and then the sodium amytal and more questions and answers. And then he was sent back to the ward.

He lay miserable in the bed, listening unwillingly to Wheeling, West Virginia, and wondering what was going to become of him.

He should have kept it to himself. It was too late now, and now he knew it. He should have kept it to himself.

The four of them were sitting around the living room of Colonel Brice’s suite in the BOQ, drinking beer and talking things over. Colonel Brice paced the floor, caged and impatient. Ed Clark sat on the arm of the sofa, happily eager. Paul Swanson sat slumped on the sofa, apparently bored and half-asleep. And Major Grildquist sat on the edge of his chair, his round face open and excited.

“Teleportation!” exclaimed the major. “That was the one I was willing to bet we’d never find, and, by golly, here’s one right here!”

“I wanted a telepath,” said the colonel grumpily. Inaction always made him grouchy, even when he understood the need for inaction, for waiting-and-seeing. “I need, a telepath,” he went on. “Somebody to dig down into the bottom of that fool boy’s mind and find out what makes him tick. He doesn’t understand the thing himself; he’s devoting all his energies to denying it ever happened.”

“A natural reaction,” said the major complacently. “He’ll get over it. Once he understands that it really did happen to him, and that it’s an ability we can use—”

“That’s just it,” snapped the colonel. He stopped his pacing to glower at Major Grildquist. “Once he understands. But how are we going to get him to understand?”

“We could tell him,” suggested Paul Swanson.

“No. He wouldn’t believe it, and he wouldn’t be any closer to finding out just how he managed to do it in the first place. We’ve got to force it out of him. We’ve got to find some way to force him into such a position that he’ll have to use that talent of his again. We’ve got to force him to believe in himself, and then we’ve got to force him to understand himself.”

“It isn’t going to be all that easy,” suggested the major.

“I don’t care whether it’s easy or not,” the colonel told him. “I just want it done. And it’s your job to do it.”

The major nodded, unruffled. He’d known Jim Brice for twelve years. He understood that the colonel’s abruptness wasn’t so much the result of a nasty personality as it was the result of his single-minded desire to get the job done. The major realized that no offense was intended, and so no offense was taken.

“I’ll do the job,” he told the colonel. “Or at least I’ll take a healthy stab at it.”

“A healthy stab isn’t enough. I want that boy’s ability out on the surface, where I can get some use out of it.”

“You talk as though you owned him,” the major chided gently.

“I do,” said the colonel. “I own his ability, at any rate. Or I will, once you dig it out for me.”

“Own it?”

“I’ll get the use of it,” said the colonel. “I can’t teleport myself, but I don’t have to, not if I have someone else who can do it for me. I’ll get the use of his ability, and what’s that if it isn’t ownership?”

“If I didn’t know you better,” the major said, “I’d think you were power-mad.”

“Not power-mad. Power-hungry. That I am. I have a job to do, and a tricky job, and I need all the power I can get, in order to do that job. And I need the power locked up in that boy’s mind.”

“Us slaves do O.K.,” said Ed Clark, grinning.

“I own his ability,” said the colonel, pointing at Ed. “I get to use it through him, and he doesn’t feel as though I’m some sort of evil mastermind. Do you, Ed?”

“Sure I do,” said Clark, the grin even broader “than before. “But it’s worth it, to get to wear civvies and eat in the BOQ.”

“It’s a pity,” said the colonel, “that brains and psi-talent don’t always go together.”

“Simple Simon met a psi-man,” said Clark.

Paul Swanson spoke up for the first time. “Simple Simon was a psi-man,” he said. He looked at Clark. “Hi, Simon.”

“Knock it off,” said the colonel. He looked back at the major. “What do you intend to do with this boy?”

“Run him through the mill,” said Grildquist. “Give him the hurry-up-and-wait routine, and wait for him to realize he’s on the treadmill. He isn’t going to cough up that ability you want until he realizes it’s the only way he’s going to get off the treadmill.”

“How long?” demanded the colonel.

The major shrugged. “A finite time,” he said. “If I try to rush him too fast, he’s liable to react in the opposite direction, shove the whole thing so far down into the subconscious we’ll never get it out.”

“I want that boy,” said the colonel grimly.

“Patience, Jim,” said the major. “Patience. I’ll give him to you on a silver platter.”

After that first interview with the new psychiatrist, Major Grildquist, Jeremy was completely ignored for three days. He spent most of his time in the floor dayroom, playing Ping-pong or pinochle with other patients, reading old magazines, and writing reassuring letters to his parents. He didn’t want them to know yet what had happened to him, so he told them he’d caught a flu bug of some kind, it was nothing serious, but he’d probably be in the hospital for a few days.

And he waited for the psychiatrists to cure him. He wanted to be cured, and the other psychiatrist had said that that was half the battle.

But nothing happened. He waited, and waited, and waited, and nothing happened.

Until the afternoon of the fourth day. Then he was transferred from the eight-man ward to a single room.

By this time, he knew the hospital scuttlebutt. A man in a ward was relatively healthy, and could expect either to be discharged from the service on a medical, or be returned to duty in a short time.

But a man in a single room wasn’t healthy at all. A man in a single room could expect either to stay there for a long while or get a section eight discharge and be transferred to a Veterans Administration hospital.

The room he was transferred to was small, squarish, pale gray and Spartan. An army cot, with blue Air Force blankets, a metal bureau, and a metal armless chair with upholstered seat, was all the furniture in the room. There was an ashtray atop the bureau, and he was allowed to smoke.

He did so. He paced the floor, and smoked, and worried, and tried to get this whole thing straightened out in his mind.

He was in a hospital, and he was clearly one step from an insane asylum. And yet he was the same person he’d been all his life, with the same attitudes and memories and beliefs. He hadn’t suddenly started seeing little green men or believing that he was being persecuted, he hadn’t gone raging around with a knife, or gone around setting buildings on fire. He hadn’t retreated into an unreachable corner of his brain, and he hadn’t developed a second personality, and he hadn’t started believing he was the lost heir to the Tasmanian throne, having been stolen as an infant by gypsies.

He was one short step from an insane asylum, and he had given none of the indications of insanity that he had ever heard of or could possibly recognize. So, why was he one step from an insane asylum?

Because he had traveled seven hundred miles in much less than a second. He had done it twice, once going and once coming. He hadn’t intended to do it, he didn’t know how he had managed to do it, and he fervently wished he’d never done it. But it had happened, and he remembered it and believed his memory, and that’s why he was moving slowly but steadily toward an insane asylum.

Teleportation. That was the word. There was, at least, a word for it, even though nobody believed in it, just as there was a word for luck even though nobody really believed in the powers of luck good or bad, and just as there had been a word for spaceship long before people believed that things like sputniks and moon shots were really possible.

Now, here was the crux of the matter. Was teleportation a thing like luck, something that nobody believed in with just cause. In other words, had he teleported himself home and back, or was he nuts?

He paced the floor and smoked, paced the floor and smoked, and tried to work it all out to a sensible conclusion. He already knew all the arguments in favor of his having teleported — the absolute reality of the second spent at home, the letter from his mother, his own conviction — and now he listed against them the arguments in favor of delusion and madness.

First, and most obvious, where had this mysterious talent suddenly come from? If he’d teleported, why didn’t he know how he’d done it, and why couldn’t he do it again? For that matter, why hadn’t he done it before? If it required fear, he’d been afraid before in his life. The time out hiking as a Boy Scout, for instance, when he’d almost fallen over a cliff. The night he was in the car with Steve Chalmers and a couple of other guys, and Steve was high as a kite, and drove so madly down that mountain road toward town. Lots of times. If he could do it at all, why hadn’t he done it long ago, and why couldn’t he do it again now?”

Second, if he had really gone home, why hadn’t he stayed there? Admitted, at that particular moment, in that drainage pipe, he had wished more than anything in the world to be safe at home, but if he had really succeeded in fulfilling that desire, why had he come right back?

Third, if he was going to go around thinking he was unique, some sort of superman with strange powers possessed by no one but himself, then he was a candidate for the twitch factory, and no questions asked. If he had the power to teleport, that must almost inevitably mean that other people had the power to teleport. Why hadn’t they? After thousands of years of recorded history, why hadn’t somebody somewhere along the line proved that teleportation was not a thing like luck?

Those were the three arguments, and when he lined them up against his own shaky conviction, the reality of a memory lasting just about one second, and an ambiguous sentence in a letter from his mother, the arguments against seemed pretty strong and the arguments for seemed pretty weak.

He lit a new cigarette from the butt of the old, and paced the floor some more. Never mind trying to bolster the arguments for, that wouldn’t get anywhere. He had to forget for a few minutes that he was worried and afraid and that he hadn’t the vaguest idea what the future held in store for him, and he had to concentrate on this problem just as calmly and logically as he could. The time had come to look for holes in the arguments against.

Number one, why hadn’t he done it before? The only possibility was that it had required a certain narrow set of conditions before the ability could express itself. What, then, were the conditions?

Well, it had been dark, pitch-black, it hadn’t been possible for him to see the rims of his glasses while he was wearing them. And he had been in a confined space. And he had been in a stress situation, feeling frantic, feeling that all was hopeless, and desiring more strongly than ever before in his life to be somewhere else. Some specific where else.

The first psychiatrist had asked him if he could teleport again. In his narcosynthesized condition he had answered no, and had given two reasons: He wasn’t alone, and there was no pressing need to go anywhere else.

All right, then. It required at least some but probably all of the conditions he’d just outlined. And could he honestly say that he had ever before in his life been in a situation with all of those conditions simultaneously present?

No, he couldn’t.

Then that was why he’d never done it before.

And had there been, since then, any other time when all of those conditions had been simultaneously present?

No, there had not been.

Then that was why he hadn’t done it again.

On to number two. If he had really gone home, why had he come right back? He tried to remember back to that second at home, tried to remember what his feelings and thoughts had been in the flash before returning to the point of departure.

He had been frightened. He had been really frightened that time, and he’d had every right to be. Sure, if he’d planned to teleport himself home, and he had then done it, he might simply have strolled on downstairs and said, “Hi, folks, I’m home.”

But he hadn’t planned it. And having the world suddenly shift seven hundred miles beneath you, without expecting it, is pretty shocking. The mind rejects the whole idea. The mind says, “This isn’t happening!” The mind says, “Go back! This isn’t possible! This is madness and chaos and death!” And you jump right back again.

And that was why he hadn’t stayed home. He’d been too shocked and terrified at being there. He had probably snapped back just in time to avoid either a heart attack or the loss of his mind.

And that left argument number three. If he could do it, why couldn’t other people do it?

Well, let’s narrow it down. Maybe some people can do it, just as some people can carry a tune and some people have 20–20 vision and some people can multiply four digit figures by three digit figures in their heads.

He could narrow it down, but that didn’t help much. He could say that it was also, aside from being an occasional characteristic rather than an inevitable characteristic, one which developed with maturity. That was another possible reason for his never having done it before, but no matter how much he narrowed and hedged, it wasn’t going to do much good unless he narrowed it all the way down to one, unless he drew a line with himself on one side and the whole human race on the other.

And then he remembered his Aunt Sara and his Uncle Fred, on his mother’s side. Eight years ago, Uncle Fred was killed in an airplane accident out in California, on the western slope of one of the Rockies. The day after that, when the news came, Aunt Sara, a kindly church-going old lady in her early sixties, insisted that she had had a premonition. Last night, she told anyone who would listen, at almost precisely the same time that poor Uncle Fred was dying against that mountainside, she swore she saw him standing in the kitchen, right next to the refrigerator. She had been in the living room, watching the television, in that mohair chair by the radiator, where she could look straight down the hall to the kitchen, and she swore she saw him standing there. And — the way she later told it — she’d said, “Why, Fred, what are you doing home so early?” And he was gone.

Of course, nobody had believed Aunt Sara. She kept on telling the story right up to the day of her death, a little over a year ago, and everybody just classed it as Aunt Sara’s one lapse into mysticism, brought on by the death of Uncle Fred, and let it go at that.

Jeremy had told the story himself once, just once, and not with any belief in it. It was two years ago, when he’d been a freshman in college. He and a bunch of the other guys in the dorm were together having a bull session, and the conversation had gotten around to ghosts and voodoo and séances and mysticism in general. All of them, being college freshmen, had the world completely figured out, and to a man they put down all that mystical nonsense as a lot of mystical nonsense. They took turns telling stories they’d heard, about phony mediums and voodoo dolls and whatnot, and Jeremy added as his contribution the story of his Aunt Sara and his Uncle Fred. Aunt Sara was still alive then, and his telling of the story was rather sarcastic and not at all kind to the old lady.

Once he’d told the story, another freshman assured him pompously that what he had just described was “a very common phenomenon, especially in wartime.” It seemed that the appearance of a loved one at just around the same moment when, it was later learned, that loved one was being killed in an enemy attack or a mine cave-in or an automobile accident, was one of the old standby situations of the believers in mysticism. It was even more common in mystical lore than the appearance of a long-dead relative. And it was, of course, all nonsense, easily explained by psychology.

Everything was easily explained by psychology, Jeremy realized now. Once you accepted the basic postulate that the mind could play tricks on a person, suddenly and without apparent reason, you could explain away just about anything that ever happened to anybody. You could prove to a man that the Earth was made of green cheese, if you first got him to accept the basic postulates of psychology.

Jeremy had believed the easy explanation of freshman psychology at the time. But now he’d been on the other end of that sort of visitation, and the easy explanations of psychology had a lot less appeal for him.

Because there was another explanation, one that didn’t require labeling nice down-to-earth old ladies as sudden crackpots.

Say that the ability to teleport was present to a greater or lesser degree in all men, just as memory is present to a greater or lesser degree in all men. There are some men with photographic memories, who can remember every word of a seven hundred page chemistry text six months after reading it once. And there are some men who can never remember a telephone number or an appointment or a birthday or what they did with the other cuff link.

Say the ability to teleport was present in men in just as wide a range as the ability to remember. And say that that ability is so buried in the mind that it is almost unreachable. And the people who have the ability to the greatest degree — comparable to the people with total recall — even those people can’t tap the ability until they get into a one hundred per cent frantic stress situation.

All right. Call these people with the greatest degree of teleporting ability latents. Say Uncle Fred was a latent teleport. He’s sitting in the airplane, probably in a seat toward the rear of the plane, and suddenly the plane bucks and dips and dives straight for the mountain — he can look out the window and see that the right-hand wing has sheared off — and for the first time in his life he’s in a situation desperate enough to reach all the way down to the teleporting ability, and he wishes frantically he were home in his own kitchen, raiding the refrigerator, and all of a sudden he’s home. Which for shock value is about equivalent to kissing a girl who suddenly and instantaneously turns into a crocodile. So he teleports right back, while he still has his sanity. And the plane plunges into the mountain.

What killed Uncle Fred? The plane crash? No. The basic ingrained inability of the human mind to immediately reflect a postulate which has been proved false is what killed Uncle Fred.

And maybe that’s why nobody had ever come along before to tell the world he’d teleported. Because it required the imminent danger of death to bring the latent ability to the surface, and because the human being, at the instinctive level, would rather die than have his world turned topsyturvy.

Which was all well and good, except for one thing. He had teleported, and he hadn’t been facing imminent death. He had probably felt almost as much blind panic as Uncle Fred, but almosts don’t win ball games.

Unless age had something to do with it. Uncle Fred, at sixty-four, might have lived long enough, lived through enough variety of experience, and come to the age where the inevitability of death was real to him long enough ago, so that his panic at seeing the airplane wing fall off was just about as deep as Jeremy’s at twenty, having lived the normal fairly sheltered life of a middle-class American boy, finding himself suddenly blind and helpless in sharply cramped quarters with tear gas drifting toward him from two directions. And the man on the battlefield, who also appeared to a loved one at the moment of his death, would undoubtedly have already been toughened more than Jeremy by wartime Army basic training, which is a lot rougher than peacetime Air Force basic training any day in the week.

Or maybe… maybe he wasn’t the first one to survive after all.

He studied that idea, turning it over and over in his mind. There might have been others like himself. Say the potentiality is strong enough in only a relatively few human beings. Say the potentiality is forced into actuality only in some of the latents. Say that the catalyst is a sudden-death situation in most cases, and only rarely does there come along someone as lucky as Jeremy, who found out he had the ability before it was too late.

That would still leave a number of teleports in the world. And, so far as Jeremy knew, there weren’t any other teleports anywhere in the world at all.

So far as he knew.

But there might be some that he didn’t know about. If there were, obviously, they wouldn’t know about him. It might work both ways. Other individuals had discovered the ability. Some, totally disbelieving the truth, would push it out of their minds as hallucination, as Jeremy had tried to do. Some, reluctantly accepting the truth, would keep it a close secret, afraid that they would be considered crazy if they described their experience to anyone, would try to do it again — as Jeremy had tried — and would fail, and would simply go through life occasionally remembering the odd thing that had happened that summer at the lake.

And some would announce themselves, as Jeremy had done, and would be moved slowly and inevitably into lunatic asylums, and there they would stay, because they would be spending their entire lives in a situation of controlled slight stress, with never sufficient panic created to trigger the teleporting ability again.

Was that all of them?

Jeremy hoped not. If those were the three choices — to lie to yourself, to lie to others, or to be classed insane — then the people like Uncle Fred were the lucky ones after all.

There had to be another choice. Why couldn’t a man hide the ability from others, but keep working on it himself, training himself to use it consciously? And then find others, there had to be a way that people with this ability could find one another. None of them would be able to tell the normal people, of course. If they tried, they’d be considered members of just another nut cult. And physical demonstrations, assuming it were even possible to train this ability and bring it under control, could be easily explained away. People who hadn’t been present would say the magic words, “Mass hysteria,” which make any piece of difficult evidence disappear like smoke, and people who had been present would say, “It’s done with mirrors.”

“You can’t fool me. He’s twins!”

At that point, the ceiling light flickered. He had been told about that earlier in the day. It meant lights out in three minutes, and he was to be in bed when the lights went out. And no smoking.

He crawled into bed, and soon the lights went out, and bars and moonlight formed a diagonal pattern on the wall to his right, shining through his one window. He stared at the pattern, and tried to think.

“I don’t like it,” said the colonel. “It’s taking too long. Nothing’s happening.”

“Give it time, Jim,” said the major gently. “It hasn’t even been a week yet.”

The four of them were once again in the colonel’s suite at the BOQ. While Major Grildquist and the colonel talked, Ed Clark followed the conversation with his usual smiling eager attention, and Paul Swanson slouched moodily on the sofa, watching a pair of small steel balls orbit about one another in mid-air across the room.

“I don’t care how long it’s been,” snapped the colonel. “You haven’t done a thing yet. Paul, stop that.”

Swanson looked suddenly guilty, and the steel balls flashed across the room and burrowed into his shirt pocket.

“Well, now, Jim,” said the major, “I have done something. In less than a week, I have put that boy on tenterhooks. Give him a week or two more, and we’ll—”

“I don’t have a week or two more,” said the colonel.

“Push, push, push,” said the major gently. “You don’t really mean all that, Jim.”

“The devil I don’t.” The colonel glanced over at Clark. “What’s he doing now?”

“Still pacing the floor, I suppose,” said the major. “Pity we have to treat him this way.”

Clark cocked his head to one side and listened attentively. “Nope,” he said. “He isn’t doing anything. Just breathing.”

“Blast,” said the major. “Is he alseep?”

Clark listened a minute more, then shook his head. “Not from the sound of his breathing. He’s awake, all right. I think he’s sub-vocalizing. I wish I could pick that up.”

“There,” said the major. “You see? Sleepless nights. He was moved to a single room today, and he knows what that means.”

“All right,” said the colonel grudgingly. “You know your business, Ben.”

“Of course I do.”

“I just wish there were a way to speed it up.”

“What do you suggest? I suppose I could go rushing into his room with a pistol and shoot at him. That might scare him enough to send him popping off home again. On the other hand, it might not. And then he wouldn’t be around at all.”

“Prima donnas,” grumbled the colonel. He glowered at Clark and Swanson. “A bunch of prima donnas.”

Clark grinned. A cigarette drifted up out of Swanson’s shirt pocket, came to rest between his lips, and a lighter came over from the table. His cigarette going and the lighter returned to the table, Swanson said, “I could jounce his bed a little if you want.”

“No,” said the colonel. “Ben’s right. He knows what he’s doing. But at least let me complain about it.”

For two days, Jeremy was left to himself in the single room, allowed out of the room only at mealtimes, and to go to the head. On the third day, his thinking having progressed no farther than on the first day, he was introduced to group therapy.

Group therapy was ridiculous. A motley collection of fifteen or sixteen sad-looking individuals sat around a good-sized room in leather armchairs, and smoked, and told each other their problems. Then they told each other how to solve their problems. A psychiatrist in civilian clothing sat in a corner and nodded approvingly.

When Jeremy was asked what his personal twitch was, he answered shortly, “I teleported.”

They then all took turns telling him why he had this particular delusion. A couple of his fellow-inmates, there because of sexual aberrations, found a sexual cause of this fantasy, equating it with the dream in which one imagines one is flying. A little guy with a pronounced persecution complex discovered that Jeremy had an unconscious persecution complex and wanted to run away. And so on.

Jeremy went to group therapy for three days, but he could never seem to get into the swing of things. He wasn’t having fun, like the other fellows. So he was taken off group therapy, and left to stew alone in his room for two more days. Then he went back to narcoanalysis and Major Grildquist.

The sessions with Major Grildquist were, if nothing else, relaxing. The only time Jeremy could relax and ignore the doubts and the fear about his future was when he was under the influence of sodium amytal. Then it didn’t matter any more. Nothing mattered, and he spoke easily and lazily, answering the major’s questions and not bothering to worry.

The major had the same technique as the first psychiatrist. He would ask a bunch of questions about high school, and all of a sudden he would say something like, “How did you teleport?” Or, “Can you do it again?”

And his prompt baffled response would always be, “I don’t know.”

And then they would go back to questions about high school again.

After six days of this, Major Grildquist began to hint about a discharge. The facilities at this hospital were perhaps not adequate for the job ahead, he suggested. The facilities here were adequate only for those with temporary disorders, who could be cured and returned to duty in a relatively short time. It might be the best thing for Jeremy, all in all, to go to a hospital where they had more adequate facilities.

And then the major asked him, “Would you like a section eight, Jeremy?”

He was under sodium amytal, and the truth came promptly. “No, sir. No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to be locked up.”

“But couldn’t you just teleport yourself out of any cell you were put in?”

“I… I don’t know. I don’t know how.”

“How would you like to spend the rest of your life in a VA hospital, Jeremy?”

“Please. Please.” Even through the mists of sodium amytal, he could feel the terror created by that suggestion. “No. Please, I want to be cured, I want to be all right. I wish it never happened, I wish, I wish, I wish it never happened.”

“All right, Jeremy. Calm down. Take a nap, now, and we’ll talk about it again later on. Just take it easy, boy.”

But he couldn’t take it easy. That night, he lay awake in his bed, staring at the ceiling. His whole life was ending here, was ending now. He was going to be just a number, a number and a body stored away in a lunatic asylum somewhere, for the rest of his life.

The next day, he announced himself cured. He told Major Grildquist that he had suddenly seen the truth. And then he proceeded to tell this truth, which turned out to be a long complicated explanation that included just about everything that anyone had said to him over the last two weeks, including one or two points brought up by his team mates on the group therapy game.

Major Grildquist listened to all this in silence, and then he fed Jeremy some more sodium amytal, and the first question he asked was, “Did you ever teleport?”

Jeremy said, “Yes.”

And that was that.

The following afternoon, Major Grildquist told him that the papers on his discharge had started their long arduous voyage through half the clerks in the Air Force. Jeremy listened to this, and thought about it all that night, and the next day he had a desperate suggestion to offer.

“Sir,” he said to the major hesitantly, “I’d like to try an experiment, if I could.”

“An experiment? What sort of experiment?”

“Well, the thing is, no matter how much I try to convince myself that I really didn’t teleport, I just can’t succeed. Now, I’ve thought it out, and I think maybe there are certain conditions that have to be met, a certain kind of situation I have to find myself in, before I can make this teleport thing work.”

The major nodded. “You want to simulate the conditions, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And what do you hope to gain from that?”

“Well, if it doesn’t work… if I can’t teleport… I don’t see why that shouldn’t convince me that the whole thing was a delusion in the first place. I won’t try to fool you or anything, I know that wouldn’t work.”

“I see,” said the major.

“And if it does work,” finished Jeremy, “then I’m sane after all.”

“I see,” said the major again. “You’ll try to go home, same as last time?”

“Yes, sir. But this time I’ll try to get some place where my mother can see me. Then I’ll have proof.”

“I’ll think about it,” said the major, deadpan. “Now, about this seventh-grade teacher of yours—”

“If he wants to try it,” said the colonel, “I say fine. That’s what we’ve been working for, after all.”

“I’m not sure,” said the major. “We might not get the conditions right — a hundred things could go wrong — and he won’t be able to do it. Then he’ll be half-convinced he didn’t do it the first time, and we’ll have lost instead of gained.”

The colonel paced the floor, glowering at the rug. “This is the turning point,” he said. “We get him, or we lose him, right here. What happens if you turn him down?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted the major. “Either he’ll revolt, and strain himself to do the trick without my co-operation, or he’ll just throw in the towel and give up completely. I wouldn’t even try to guess which way he’d go.”

“So it’s a fifty-fifty chance either way,” said the colonel. “Is that it?”

“Just about.”

“And what do you advise?”

“I frankly don’t know what to advise, Jim. This is the point, as you say. We brought him this far — now I’m lost. From now on, plans and predictions don’t mean a thing.”

The colonel nodded. He stopped his pacing to glower at Ed Clark. “What do you think?” he demanded.

“Let him try it,” said Clark promptly. “You’ve been trying to push him into action. He wants to take action now, let him do it.”

“Paul?”

Swanson shrugged. “He’s liable to know what he’s doing,” he said, “whether he knows it or not. Let him try.”

“Ben?”

The major looked helpless. “I just don’t know,” he said. “I’ve grown to like the boy. I hate the thought of pushing him that close to the brink.”

“You’d like to just send him home and forget about it?”

“Of course I would. Wouldn’t you?

“No,” said the colonel savagely. “I need him too badly. I need him, and you need him, and the whole country needs him. We can’t forget him, because we’ve got to have him.”

“Then I suppose,” said the major reluctantly, “we’d better let him try this experiment of his.”

Four glasses of beer sailed in from the kitchenette. “I thought we could use some,” said Swanson.

Major Grildquist waited two days before telling Jeremy they would try the experiment. And when he did tell him, Jeremy was so grateful he could have cried. “Thank you, sir,” he said, his voice breaking. “Thank you. And I won’t try to fool you, I swear I won’t. And whatever happens, I’ll abide by it. If it doesn’t work, then I’ll know for sure.”

“That’s, uh, fine,” said the major. He bustled at his desk, not looking Jeremy in the eye. “We’d better make the arrangements,” he said.

Two medics were brought in, and they all discussed the physical equipment needed for the experiment. Cramped quarters, for one thing. One of the medics suggested they attach a strait jacket to him and stuff him into a broom closet. Pitch blackness, too, and that could be arranged by using the broom closet in the unused basement of the west wing, where the hall lights could be switched off and absolutely no light whatsoever could work its way into the broom closet, not even at high noon.

That left the third, and probably most important, ingredient, a stress situation. “I will think,” Jeremy told them, “about insane asylums.”

The arrangements completed, Jeremy was returned to his room. The experiment would be tried the next day.

He didn’t get much sleep that night. He tossed and turned, and he went over and over the details of his plan, and he became fully convinced that it would never work in a million years.

A stress situation? Frantic panic? People don’t consciously think themselves into panic, the environment forces panic on them.

It would never work. It was his only chance, his one and only chance, and it would never never never work.

By morning, he was a nervous wreck, already feeling the first faint touches of unreasoning fear. He wanted to call the whole thing off, because it couldn’t possibly work and it wouldn’t prove a thing, and he would still believe that he had teleported, and they would ship him off to an insane asylum faster than ever. He wanted to tell them to forget it, he’d have to think of something else, but he couldn’t. He didn’t dare open his mouth. And it was hopeless. He was doomed.

He ate three mouthfuls of breakfast, felt as though he had swallowed three round lead balls, and gave up all thought of food. He paced his room most of the morning, chainsmoking, his fingers shaking when he tried to light his cigarettes, his feet stumbling on nothing at all as he prowled back and forth in the room.

They came for him at eleven, and the sound of the key in the lock was so sudden and at this moment so loud, that he almost screamed and he almost fainted. When they put the strait jacket on him, they had to move his arms for him, he couldn’t seem to make them work right. Major Grildquist looked at him oddly, and touched the back of his fingers to Jeremy’s cheek, as though he couldn’t believe there was any warmth in a cheek that gray. “Are you all right?” the major asked him.

It isn’t going to work. He wanted to say that, he wanted to yell it at the top of his lungs, but he couldn’t. It was as though he were paralyzed, as though he were a clockwork doll set into motion, and he was walking toward the table edge, and there was no way to stop his motion and keep from falling off that table edge. He trembled all over when he felt the jacket tighten on him from behind, and then he held himself rigid, to keep from trembling again.

“Are you all right?”

He managed to get it out that time. “Yes.” The one word was all he could muster.

Then they left the room, and he concentrated on walking. Raise the right leg, bend it slightly at the knee, swing it forward like pushing it through waist-deep water, straighten the knee joint, set the heel down, rock forward, raise the left leg, and repeat. Conscious motion, like learning to walk all over again, and the knowledge that he was going to fail, and he would live the rest of his life in a room like the one he’d just left.

They went down to the basement and stood by the broom closet. “There you are,” said the major. “Cramped quarters. And we’ll cut the lights once you’re in there. We’ll give you five minutes.”

Jeremy shook his head violently. “No,” he said, his voice hoarse and sandy. Five minutes alone in that darkness would kill him. Fail and get it over with.

He pronounced the words carefully, with someone else’s bone-dry tongue and palate. “One minute.”

“Are you sure?” asked the major.

He nodded, spastically.

“All right, then.”

The two medics helped him into the broom closet. “Good luck,” said the major, his voice oddly inflected, and the door closed.

The broom closet was a tiny upright box so small that his shoulders practically touched both sides, and when the arms crossed in front of him inside the strait jacket touched the back wall, his shoulder blades were just barely brushing the door.

Light crept under the door, and then there was a click, and he was alone and in darkness. Black darkness, and silence, and the wild terror of failure.

He had had a plan. He would go home, as he had before, but this time he would go to the kitchen. His mother would be in the kitchen, getting lunch ready at this time of day, and she would see him. And then he would flash back here and he would tell them, “Call my mother, she just saw me, and that proves it, that proves I can do it and I’m not crazy.”

And it couldn’t possibly work.

He tried to concentrate on the kitchen — the familiar table and chairs and the curtains on the window over the sink — and he couldn’t even visualize it. He couldn’t even get a picture of the kitchen in his mind. He tried to think of his mother, he tried to wish himself home and with his mother, and he couldn’t do it, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t concentrate on a thing. The thoughts boiled through his mind, disjointed and screaming, and he couldn’t think, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t think!

He tried to scream out his panic, but his throat was frozen shut and he could only mouth the words. “Somebody help me!”

He was standing in a living room. There was a green broadloom rug on the floor, a rust-colored sofa and two armchairs, drum tables and a coffee table. A man sat on the sofa, leaning forward over an open file folder on the coffee table. He was dressed in an Air Force uniform, with colonel’s eagles on the shoulders. He was grayhaired and lean, with a craggy narrow-lipped face.

The man looked up and blinked in astonishment. “What the hell—?”

This wasn’t home!

And he was back in pitch blackness, and this time his throat was open, and he screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

Light, and the door open, and hands grabbing him as he leaped jerking out, wide-eyed and still screaming. The hands held him and he was rushed along, his useless feet bump-bump-bumping against the steps as they hurried him up from the basement.

They put him in a bathtub, leaving the strait jacket on, and they attached a canvas cover over the whole top of the bathtub except where his head stuck out, and they ran very hot water into the tub.

After a while, they gave him a shot, and he stopped screaming and fell asleep.

“He came here!” snapped the colonel. He pointed at the middle of the room. “Right there, he stood right there, and stared at me with the most panic-stricken eyes I have ever seen in my life.”

“We shouldn’t have done it,” said the major. His voice was shaky, and he had switched to something stronger than beer. “We pushed him too hard. We shouldn’t have done it.”

“Ed!” The colonel whirled around. “What’s he doing?”

“Nothing. They gave him a sedative, I guess. He’s sound asleep.”

“What about tomorrow?” demanded the colonel. He spun back to Major Grildquist. “How’s he going to be tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Catatonic, maybe. Or maybe he’ll snap out of it.”

“If he does, if he snaps out of it—”

“I want to tell him, Jim,” said the major. “I mean it, this is too much, we’re driving that boy too far. I mean to tell him the truth.”

“And waste the whole thing?” The colonel stood straddle-legged in front of the major, his hands on his hips. “Listen to me, Ben,” he said. “Hear me good. You didn’t have to look at that boy’s face. I did. You don’t have the final responsibility for what we’re doing to him. I do.”

“We don’t have the right—”

“We don’t have the right to lose him, Ben. We don’t have the right to throw him away. We don’t have any choice. I wish we did, but we don’t.”

“It’s gone too far, Jim. I’m going to tell him, tomorrow — if he’s capable of understanding anything.”

“And lose the whole thing? He’s gone through a lot, Ben, I’ll agree with you. And so have we. If you jump the gun on this thing, you’re wasting all that trouble and all that torment. If you jump the gun, he’s going to have gone through all this for nothing.”

The major rubbed his forehead with the back of one pudgy hand. “You’re right,” he said at last. “I know you’re right. But I look at that boy, and… never mind, you’re right.”

“It must be near the end now,” said the colonel, more softly. “It shouldn’t take too much longer.”

The major shook his head. “What should I do?” he asked. “When I talk to him tomorrow. If I talk to him tomorrow, if he’s in any condition to talk to anybody tomorrow.”

“Tell him it didn’t happen,” said the colonel immediately. “Tell him it was another delusion. You know the lingo, do your best to convince him he’s nutty as a fruit cake. And then let him stew on it a while.”

Ed Clark cleared his throat hesitantly. “Does it have to go on any more, colonel?” he asked. “Couldn’t we just go to him now and tell him the truth, and tell him we’ll help him get the ability under control?”

“How are we going to help him?” the colonel demanded. “We don’t know any more about it than he does. No, he’s got to prove himself. And in order to prove himself, he’s got to get that power of his under control.”

“I guess so,” said Clark.

“There’s one thing more,” said the colonel. “And it makes me even more sure we’ve got to push this boy to the limit.”

“What’s that?” asked Major Grildquist.

“He came here. He told you he was going to try going home again, but he came here. I would love to know how he happened to come here, why he decided to come to me.”

“You’re just a daddy to us all,” said Clark.

“Might be,” said Paul Swanson from his corner, “you’ve found that telepath you’ve been yelling for.

It took Jeremy two days to get calmed down to the point where he could walk and talk with reasonable accuracy. Then he had another interview with Major Grildquist. He tried to tell him what had happened, but it got too jumbled and confused, so they went back to the old standby, sodium amytal, and then he told the story clearly and completely, giving a full description of the room and the colonel, down to the sound of the colonel’s voice.

After the effects of the narcoanalysis had worn off, Major Grildquist discussed the situation with him. “I’ll speak frankly with you, Jeremy. You so obviously want to be cured that I really thought there was a chance we’d eventually get you squared away. I’ve been delaying the discharge papers, hoping the idea of a section eight would help you snap out of this fixation. I went along with the experiment for the same reason.”

“I saw him,” said Jeremy dully. He was afraid to let himself get even a little bit excited, because he had trouble keeping himself under control.

Major Grildquist shook his head. “I was wrong,” he said. “I want to apologize to you for that, Jeremy. The experiment had just the reverse effect from the one we were both hoping for, and I’ll admit to you that I should have expected it. You were placed in a severe stress situation, one where you were being forced to prove yourself insane, and it was just too much for you. Consciously, you want to rid yourself of this delusion. Somewhere down in the subconscious, you want to hold onto it. Crammed into that lightless closet, you cracked wide open. The subconscious took over, gave you another teleportation hallucination — the second one that can’t be proved one way or the other, significantly — and the end result is that you are now much more deeply rooted in your fixation than you were before we tried the experiment.”

The major lit a cigarette with slightly-trembling fingers. “That was my fault,” he said, “and I regret it. I wish I could go back and do it all over again, because this time I would stop and think about the implications of such an experiment, and I would never let you go through with it.”

“I saw him,” insisted Jeremy. “I can tell you just what he looked like, what the room looked like. You could find him, if you tried to.”

“All the living rooms used by Air Force colonels all over the world? You’d be an old man before we finished checking, Jeremy, and then we’d just have to come tell you we hadn’t found your man.”

“I saw him,” said Jeremy doggedly. “Jeremy, look at it this way. The first time you teleported, you went home, isn’t that right? Stress hit you, and you went home. But the second time, given at least as much stress, you didn’t go home. Think about that. Why didn’t you go home?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d already done that. It was dangerous to try it again. Someone might be in the room where you claimed to have gone. You could give yourself just as convincing an hallucination this time, and have it all blown up by a statement from your mother, saying that she was dusting your room at the precise moment when you claimed to be there. You couldn’t take the chance. You had to find some place else to go, some place where we could never check your story, where there would never be an opportunity for you to be proved wrong.”

“No, sir,” said Jeremy. “I saw him.”

“You saw a living room very similar in appearance to the ward day-room where you’ve spent a lot of time, and you saw a man in Air Force uniform. Jeremy, think, boy! Doesn’t that sound more like dream material gathered from your real-world surroundings than like an actual teleportation?”

“You make sense, sir,” said Jeremy. “But I still saw him. And I still heard his voice.”

“All right, then,” said the major. “Why that particular officer? You said you didn’t know him. Two days ago, under narco, you admitted you’d never seen him before in your life, didn’t know his name or where he was, and simply claimed you’d gone to him because he could help you. But you didn’t know how he could help you? Don’t you see what that means? There’s only one way this hallucination could help you, and that is by fortifying your original belief.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy woodenly. The major sighed. “All right, Jeremy,” he said. “We’ll get the discharge papers moving now. You should be out of the Air Force in a week. And then you’ll go to a VA hospital, where they’ll be able to help you a lot more than I have.”

“An asylum?”

“A special hospital, Jeremy. Don’t worry, it won’t be a ‘Snake Pit’ kind of place.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy dully.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” said Major Grildquist to the colonel, “by the time I was finished talking, I’d halfconvinced myself. I hope I didn’t lay it on too thick.”

“We’ll soon find out,” said the colonel. “I hope.”

“What do we do now?” the major asked him.

“Now? Now, we start waiting. We’ve pushed him as far as we can. From here on, it’s up to him. If he’s ever going to get control of that ability of his, it’ll be between now and the time he expects his discharge to come through. Ed, what’s he doing?”

“He’s pacing the floor.”

“Good. That means he’s thinking.”

Jeremy was thinking. He was thinking harder than he ever had before, and all his thoughts circled and spiraled and whirlpooled around and finally bumped up against the same dead end.

The only proof he had was in his head. And if he were crazy, that wasn’t very good proof at all.

That was the dead end. Either he was sane or he was crazy, and he no longer knew which he was.

If only he knew how he’d done it. If only he could just decide to go home and poof go home. If only he didn’t have to be scared out of his wits before he could do it every time.

He paced back and forth in the small room until lights out, and then he lay atop the blankets on the bed, fully dressed, and started at the light-and-shadow pattern on the wall, and tried to figure out how he’d done it.

It was like reaching into a vat full of cosmolene and rocks. Somewhere down in there was a diamond, and all the rest were just pebbles. And he had to reach down in and find the diamond by touch alone.

And he couldn’t even be sure the diamond was there.

He dug down in, reached down in, searched for the key. What had his mind done those two times? What had it done?

It wasn’t just desire, that wasn’t enough. There was a switch of some kind, a lever inside his brain, and he had to push that lever before he could do it.

Home. Think about home, about his own bed at home. That’s where he wanted to go. Think about it, and push down deeper and deeper into his brain, and try to figure out what his brain had done those two times.

That?

The bed felt different.

His eyes were closed, and he kept them closed. His hands moved out from his sides, exploring the surface of the bed. And his hands didn’t touch the roughness of Air Force blankets, they touched the smooth coolness of bedspread.

He held his breath, listening. Laughter, from downstairs, Laughter and applause and a voice. The television set.

A car drove by, he heard it.

His mother said something, down in the living room, her voice muffled by distance.

He was home.

Still not really sure, he opened his eyes, and the familiar shapes of his bedroom were around him, and it was real, it was real, and he was home.

And this time he knew how.

It was so easy. All you had to do was find it, and then it was so easy.

It was like multiplying numbers in your head. It was the spot where you stored each digit of the answer until the multiplication was complete. A little cubbyhole down in the left-hand corner of the mind, and he’d never used it for anything but the temporary storage of numbers. But if he thought of a place — the hospital room — and did that—

And the pattern of light-and-shadow stripes was on the wall. He was back in the hospital.

He grinned.

“Sir,” said Ed Clark, getting to his feet. “He just went away.”

The other three turned to look at him. The major said, “What do you—” but the colonel shushed him with an impatient wave of his hand.

They waited, the colonel and Major Grildquist and Paul Swanson all watching Clark, and Clark listening, and after an interminable wait of almost three minutes, Clark grinned and relaxed and said, “He’s back.”

The colonel sighed, smiling. “He cracked it. See how long he was gone? This time, he cracked it. Paul, more beer.”

“On its way,” said Paul.

“The son of a gun,” said the colonel, beaming from ear to ear and rubbing his hands together. “He cracked it.”

Jeremy lay on the bed in the hospital room, getting used to the idea. He knew where it was now, he knew just how to make it work. So he wasn’t crazy after all.

Tomorrow, by golly, he was going to show that major. “Watch this,” he’d say, and flick. And maybe the major could spend some time convincing himself that they were both crazy.

Tomorrow? Why wait for tomorrow?

There was that colonel, too.

He could go right now. The colonel would help him, somehow, whoever he was. Maybe he was one of the other teleports who’d managed to avoid winding up in a looney bin.

Then why hadn’t he come here?

Never mind. He could go ask him.

Except that he didn’t know where the colonel was.

Then how had he found him the last time?

He poked around some more, with greater confidence now, but there was nothing else, only that little switch down in the number-cubbyhole, that was all.

Maybe that was all it needed.

“Colonel Whoever-you-are,” he whispered. “Here I come.”

And flick.

And he was lying on the floor in the middle of the living room. And there was the colonel looking down at him, grinning as though his face would break. And two other people in civvies, off to the left.

And Major Grildquist!

Jeremy scrambled to his feet. “Major—!”

“O.K., Jeremy,” said the colonel. “O.K., take it easy.”

Jeremy looked from face to face, and they were all smiling, all four of them, smiling as though they were proud of him.

And all at once he saw why. “You knew all along,” he said wonderingly. “You knew all along.”

“We did, Jeremy,” said the colonel. “But none of us knew how to drag that ability of yours up where you could use it. You had to do that for yourself.”

“You’re teleports, too,” said Jeremy. “I knew there had to be others, I knew it.”

The colonel shook his head. “You’re the first teleport I’ve run across,” he said. “You’re a very valuable property, boy.”

Jeremy was bewildered. “But—”

“Colonel Brice,” said the major gently, “is what you might call a talent scout. He looks for odd talents — like yours, for instance. And then he puts them to work.”

“Work?”

“We’ll have orders cut tomorrow,” said the colonel, “transferring you to my outfit. You can say goodbye to the hospital and crazy psychiatrists like Ben there.”

“Your outfit, sir? Jeremy was struggling with his bewilderment. “What outfit is that, sir?”

“What do you think? Intelligence.” Jeremy grinned. “Sure,” he said. “Sure.”

“You’ll like the outfit,” the colonel told him. “They’re all madmen like you and those two.”

Jeremy looked at the two young men in civilian dress. The colonel said, “Give him a slight demonstration, boys.”

Paul Swanson said, “Think you could use a beer, Jeremy?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Coming up.”

Jeremy watched wide-eyed as the full glass of beer sailed in from the kitchenette at waist height, made a sweeping left turn, and halted directly in front of him. He reached out hesitantly, half-afraid the whole thing was an illusion, and there he was holding a glass of beer in his hand.

“Ed,” said the colonel, “what’s going on next door?”

Clark characteristically cocked his head to one side. “Male voice saying, ‘Why not?’ sir,” he reported.

“What’s going on?”

“Just a second.” Clark listened, and then grinned, getting a bit red-faced. “Well, sir,” he said. “There’s a major in that suite.”

“Yes?”

“And a WAF Lieutenant, sir.”

“Oh. Demonstration ended.”

“Yes, sir.”

The colonel turned back to Jeremy. “You see? And I have thirty-seven more of them. You bring the strength up to an even forty.”

“I never even heard of such a thing,” said Jeremy.

“I’m not surprised. This is just about the first secret weapon any nation has ever had that has a chance of staying secret. The whole thing is locked up inside your head. No plans to steal, nothing. And nobody would believe the truth, anyway.”

Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t get it. How did you know about me? I mean, in the first place, before I was even sure of it myself. How did you know?”

The colonel smiled. “I screened you,” he said. “I ran you and a few hundred thousand other boys through a sieve, and you’re one of the forty who didn’t just slide on through.”

“A sieve? What kind of sieve? When?”

“The tunnel in your case,” the colonel told him. “The drainage pipe, where you made your first jump. That’s one of my sieves. Look, I’m in about the best position you can imagine for screening a big chunk of the human race for psi. I could screen for anything I wanted. Did you ever know anybody with his heart on the right side instead of the left?”

Jeremy shook his head.

“Of course not,” said the colonel. “There’re few of them. But the enlistment or induction physical comes up with one every once in a while. Practically every male American citizen goes through that physical. If you were looking for people with their hearts on the right side, there’s your screening center, all set up for _»» you.

“I see,” said Jeremy doubtfully.

“It’s the same with me,” the colonel told him. “I’ve got my screening center, and it’s called basic training. It puts the stressed on, it louses up your equilibrium, it rattles you like nothing you’ve ever been through before. Then it runs you through my sieve, that drainage pipe, which is as completely bugged as a movie set. I’m like a prospector panning a stream. Most of what washes through my pan is silt, but every once in a while a little piece of gold shows up. Like Paul there, who couldn’t find his gas mask with his hands, so the mask just came up to his face of his own accord.”

“And me,” said Jeremy.

The colonel nodded. “And you. And thirty-eight others, so far.” Clark laughed suddenly and the colonel turned to him. “Ed, stop listening! Leave the major alone.”

“Yes, sir,” said Clark. He sat down and looked attentive to the things going on in this room.

The colonel turned back. “You’re going to be useful, Jeremy,” he said. “We’ll have to find out your range limitations, if any, and poke around after that other talent of yours—”

“Other talent, sir?”

“You came to me,” the colonel reminded him. “You’d never heard of me, didn’t know who or where I was, and yet you came straight to me. What did it? Telepathy? Whatever it is, we’ll find it.”

“I doubt it’s telepathy, as such,” said the major. “Some kind of increased sensitivity on the emotional level, I imagine.”

“I imagine so,” said the colonel sardonically. “What other kind of sensitivity do you know?”

“My psychological training coming out,” said the major, grinning. “Reduce everything to jargon.”

“Sir,” said Jeremy hesitantly.

The colonel turned back to him. “What is it?”

“Sir, I’ve… well, it’s been a long time since… well, if I’d gone on through basic training, I’d have had a leave home by now, and… well, I was just wondering if I could get home for a few days and—”

“No,” said the colonel, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, but no. We have too much to do, and too little time to do it in. We’ve lost weeks already.” Major Grildquist cleared his throat. “Jim, it might be a good idea—”

“I know, Ben, but we just don’t have the time. Besides, Jeremy, I’m afraid you’re classed as a military secret, at least for the time being. Not even your parents are to know about this ability of yours.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy.

Paul Swanson chuckled. “Colonel,” he said, “what are you going to do if Jeremy goes home anyway? Put him in the guardhouse?”

The colonel opened his mouth, and left it open. Then he shrugged and grinned and said, “All right, Jeremy. Go on home.”

Jeremy’s face lit up. “Thank you, sir! ”

“But, Jeremy. Take the train, boy. You’re a military secret now, remember that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jeremy happily. Major Grildquist heaved himself out of his chair. “I’ll go arrange for the papers,” he said, “and have your clothing sent to your room.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jeremy.

“Be back here in five days,” said the colonel. “Noon on Wednesday.”

“Yes, sir.” Jeremy grinned and disappeared.

The colonel sat down heavily in an armchair. “Paul,” he snapped, “stop playing with that lamp. And Ed, leave that major alone.”

The lamp clunked onto the table, and Ed Clark stopped looking attentive.

“Forty of them,” muttered the colonel to himself. He shook his head, sighed, and carefully unwrapped a cigar. “Forty of them.”

The Earthman’s Burden

Mighty Earth was master of all the stars. Trouble was — nobody had told some of the inhabited worlds!

I

Helmut Glorring, Commander-in-Chief of the TSS(E&D) Lawrence, Vice-Marshal in the Imperial Fleet, Primate Representative of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, D.A.S. (Hon.), D.I.L. (Hon.), D.Lib.A. (Hon.), smiled and took the hand of Marine Captain Rink. He then turned, twisted, lifted and hurled Captain Rink over his head and into the wall.

The captain screamed, and when he rolled away from the wall his left arm was twisted.

The assembled officers dutifully cheered, beating their palms together. Glorring grinned and nodded, flexing his muscles as his two dressers hurried forward with towels and patted him dry. Rink, weaving a bit, got to his feet and staggered away to the infirmary.

“Still the best,” muttered Glorring in satisfaction.

The dressers chorused, “Yes, sir!”

Still the best, he thought. The shape he was in, he could even take the Triumvirate, one at a time. But he knew better than to voice that thought aloud. He still wasn’t sure which of his officers was the Loyalty Sneak.

As the last of them trailed out of the gym, headed for their duties in other parts of the ship, Chief Astrogator Koll came in, trailed by SSS Citizen Ehlenburgh. “Sir,” said Koll, jabbing a thumb at Ehlenburgh, “the Scientist here says we’re passing near a Sol-star. He says the charts don’t list it, and it might have planets.”

Glorring frowned. The Lawrence had been out from Earth over three years now. Seven Lost Colonies had been found and brought — forcibly, unfortunately but unavoidably — back into the fold. And Glorring had more or less decided to skip this time the token search for a habitable yet uninhabited planet which was, in the popular mind at home, the primary purpose for the Fleet.

He was anxious to return to Earth — it wasn’t politically safe to be too long away.

He turned to the Scientist. “How good are the chances?” he demanded.

Ehlenburgh, a narrow elderly man in SSS gray, shrugged bony shoulders. “You can never tell. The star is of the right type, but in FTL it’s impossible to measure anything as small as planetary mass. Statistically, our chances are good. On the other hand, there are such stars Without planets, or without planets on which humans can live. This may be one.”

“In other words,” said Glorring, “you won’t make a definite statement one way or the other.”

“I can’t,” Ehlenburgh told him. “Not in FTL.”

“If we’re going to stop,” said Astrogator Koll, “we’ll have to do it within ten minutes, Excellency.”

A commander must make his decisions rapidly and confidently. “We’ll stop,” said Glorring. Without turning around, he barked, “Strull!”

Captain Strull, adjutant, hurried forward and bowed. “Excellency.”

“Staff in the Ready Room in ten minutes,” Glorring told him.

“Very good, Excellency.” Strull bowed again and turned toward the door.

“Strull!”

The adjutant stopped, looking apprehensively at Glorring. “Excellency?”

Glorring studied the adjutant a long silent moment, raking him with his eyes. Strull was short, broad-framed, naturally prone to overweight. He had grown lax recently — was probably avoiding the exercise sessions in the gym and certainly hadn’t engaged in any wrestling matches for months now. His potential for fat had become kinetic. Strull bulged within his scarlet uniform, and his chin had multiplied.

His voice deceptively soft, Glorring purred, “Just how much do you weigh, Strull, if you please?”

“Excellency,” quavered Strull, “one hundred ninety pounds. If your Excellency pleases.”

“You’re fat!” barked Glorring. “The men of the Fleet must be lean! Must be hard! Could you wrestle me, Strull, one bone-break?”

“Oh, no, Excellency,” said Strull fearfully. “You are much stronger than I, Excellency.”

“You have seven days to weigh one-sixty,” Glorring told him, “or I’ll have the excess carved from you and served to the enlisted men for breakfast. Do I make myself clear?”

“Quite clear, Excellency,” said Strull miserably. “Seven days, Excellency.”

“I’ll be out for the briefing in ten minutes,” said Glorring. “I’ll want the staff ready.”

“Yes, Excellency. Ten minutes, Excellency.”

Strull bowed again, more deeply than before, and, maintaining the bow, backed out of the room.

Glorring nodded in satisfaction and turned away, in search of a mirror.

At decreasing multiples of the speed of light, the Lawrence approached the Sol-star. On block one, in the most forward section of the ship, Glorring preened before his mirror while the muttering and helplessly indignant Strull padded about, rounding up the staff. On block four, the six gray-garbed members of the SSS — Scientific Survey Staff — checked their equipment and prepared for observation and measurement, or at least five of them did so. One, the psysociohistorian, named Cahann, had nothing to do in this situation. His field was human groupings, not the physical universe of stars and planets. So Cahann, a thin and bitter man, sat morosely in his cubicle and thought his seditious thoughts. Below, on block six, the Marines made fast, preparing for the transition to normal speed. Among them was a twenty-year-old Spaceman Third named Elan, indistinguishable from the rest.

Cahann hated the transitions to and from FTL. The momentary feeling of bodilessness always upset him, irrationally frightening him, as though he were afraid each time that he wouldn’t come back together again.

It happened as usual this time. Cahann, swallowing repeatedly and trying to ignore his nausea, reached for a book — any book — and tried to read. The other five Scientists, he knew, would be on their way up to the Ready Room now with their preliminary reports. He could go up with them and hear the news. But he was completely disinterested. This was not a Lost Colony for which they were stopping, and he was just as pleased.

He enjoyed his work. But he hated its consequences.

He longed for his pipe. Most of the time, he could get along somehow without it, but when faced with speed transition he sorely missed its warm comfort.

Well, he reflected, at least this was an unpopulated system, and he could have no false hopes dashed by a weakling Colony. One would think, he told himself for the thousandth time, that at least one of the Lost Colonies would have advanced to the point where it could stand up to the Empire and defend itself. But it just didn’t work out that way.

True, Earth had fallen back from the Old Empire into the barbarism of the Dark Ages; but the records had still been there, waiting for men to be ready to use them again. And the colonies, at the time of the collapse of the Old Empire, had been small units, dependent on Earth for most of their technological knowledge and matériel. Only tiny areas of their worlds were tamed. In the time that Earth had rebuilt her Empire, the colonies had had to devote themselves to maintaining the shaky status quo on alien and often dangerous worlds, progressing only slowly.

A brisk rap at the cubicle door was immediately followed by the head of Strull, saying, “His Excellency wants you in the Ready Room. At once.”

Cahann looked up. “What for?”

“Don’t question his Excellency,” snapped Strull.

“I’m not. I’m questioning you.”

“And I’m not answering,” Strull told him triumphantly, and marched away down the corridor.

Cahann surged out of his chair, knowing exactly what Strull intended to do next. He raced down the corridor, Strull trundling ahead of him, and managed to get to the elevator before Strull could dose its door in his face.

Cahann grinned. “You’ll have to take some of that tonnage off before you can outrace me, Strull,” he said.

The barb seemed to strike far deeper than was warranted. Strull got red-faced and beetle-browed and sank into a burning silence. Cahann shrugged.

The Ready Room was filled with an excited buzzing. Glorring in the savage splendor of his golden uniform, prowled across the room to Cahann, smirking happily. “Good news, Cahann!” he announced. “Not only a habitable planet, but populated! There’ll be work for you. Sit down, and we’ll start the briefing.” He turned away, crying, “Ehlenburgh!”

Stunned, Cahann found a seat in the crowded Ready Room. He wondered if he’d heard aright. A populated world, not on the charts? Impossible!

Unconsciously, his hand came up to his mouth, cupped as though holding a pipe-bowl, as he listened to the other Scientists describe the world this ambulatory boil had so unexpectedly discovered.

It sounded a strange world indeed. Not physically, but in reference to the human population. Physically, it was nearly ideal. It was a rather close approximation of Earth. Somewhat less of it was under water, the climate was generally a few degrees warmer at all latitudes, and the oxygen content of the air was a trifle higher. Gravity was six per cent lighter, and in shape it was a bit more flattened at the poles. Its day was three minutes shorter than that of Earth, and its equator was an impassable jungle belt, devoid of settlements.

All of the settlements, in fact, were in the northern hemisphere, in the middle latitudes. And it was here that the strangeness set in.

These settlements showed no signs of civilization whatever.

No use of artificial illumination at night had been sighted, nor were there evidently airships of any kind. The instruments had failed to detect any use of atomic energy. There were no metropolitan centers. And large segments of land were obviously in cultivation, apparently for food… more primitive than which it was impossible to imagine.

A bucolic world, on the face of it. A primitive paradise which had reverted to a pre-civilized agricultural level. Pity they couldn’t have been left to stagnate in peace.

Why the world had been left off the charts no one present could guess. The charts, carefully assembled, translated and transcribed after the New Empire had been built up from the rubble of the Dark Ages following the collapse of the Old Empire, had always been assumed to be correct. The Old Empire had burned itself out in its attempt to seed the stars with humanity, finally bringing about its own collapse and the Dark Ages that had followed by so doing. And during those Dark Ages, contact with the far-flung colonies had been lost. It was only now, five hundred years after the dissolution of the Old Empire, that once again Earth was master of space. Now once again the Protectorate was being expanded, and the Lost Colonies were being rediscovered and reintegrated into the Empire.

The other five Scientists monotoned slowly through their reports, and then Glorring turned inquisitively to Cahann. “You’ve heard,” he said. “What do you think? Are these people peaceful, or are they warlike?”

Cahann shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “I can’t tell much about their social structure from what I’ve just heard. They’re pre-industrial, obviously, and it doesn’t seem as though their number can be very large. But we don’t have any records. We don’t know who founded the colony, how long ago, under what kind of charter, or with what sort of original population. In this situation, there’s only one way for me to learn anything, and that’s to go down and take a look.”

Glorring considered, his bullet head bowed in thought. At last, he said, “You have to see these natives in person, is that it?” Cahann nodded.

“Very well. We will land near one of the larger settlements, and you will leave the ship. You will spend one hour studying the natives, and then you will return. If you have not returned in that time, we will make every effort to rescue you.”

“Thank you,” murmured Cahann.

Strull was suddenly active, whispering into His Excellency’s ear. Glorring nodded.

“You will have an enlisted man with you,” he told Cahann. “To protect you,” he lied blandly.

“Thank you,” said Cahann, deadpan, not looking at Strull.

II

Elan and Brent sat together in their cubicle on block six. They had felt the speed-transition, and knew now that the ship was moving in normal speed. But that was all they knew. It didn’t seem as though they had come out of FTL for a Colony, since they hadn’t been put on battle standby, and of course conflicting rumors were spreading throughout the block, and of course none of the Marines actually had any idea at all what was going on. All they could do now was wait.

Elan was using this time to good advantage, shining his combat boots. At twenty, he was tall and slender. Marine life had made him lean and physically hard. It had also taught him the knack of the impassive face, and it had trained him in patience.

He had, like everyone else on Earth, been taken into the service on his sixteenth birthday. After one year of training and an additional year of garrison duty on Earth, he had been assigned to the Lawrence for the rest of his twelve-year tour.

He had had trouble adapting to the military life at first. Having been born and raised in the Adirondacks of North America, still the most backward area of Earth, the tight quarters which had seemed so natural to the men from more metropolitan regions had depressed him for a long while, though he had gradually grown used to them.

Brent broke a rather lengthy silence between them by saying, “You never know. It might be a Lost Colony after all. I sure hope so.”

“It might be,” said Elan non-commitally. He didn’t sound as pleased as Brent, but then he wasn’t a reconvert, and reconverts were always pleased, always happy.

Reconvert: Former enemy impressed into the service to bring the force back up to strength after a military engagement. Surgical and psychological reconversion, taking five days, was necessary to make such a former enemy a willing and malleable Marine. There was, of course, a good deal lost insofar as initiative, intelligence and personality were concerned, but the remainder was a good Marine.

“I sure hope it’s a Lost Colony,” said Brent. “I’d be glad to get back into action.”

Elan looked at his friend. Brent’s squarish face had the bland smile and smooth complexion of the reconvert, and he sat stolidly on his bunk, body completely at rest. In the year and a half that Brent had been on the ship, Elan had never seen any other expression or any other emotion on Brent’s face. The reconverts could only be happy.

A trace of wistfulness came into Elan’s voice: “You know, Brent, in a way you’re lucky.”

“Sure I’m lucky,” said Brent, happily but without surprise. “Good ship, good outfit, good chow. And every once in a while a chance to see some good action.”

“That isn’t what I meant,” said Elan. “I meant—” he groped for words — “you don’t ever worry, ever feel sad or lonely or afraid.”

“Sure,” smiled Brent. “It’s a great life, Elan.”

“I could volunteer,” said Elan softly, as though talking to himself. “They’d reconvert me if I asked. But I’d lose an awful lot, wouldn’t I?”

“Still be the same great outfit,” said Brent. “We’d still be here, buddy.”

“But I wouldn’t be the same.” Elan looked down at himself, wearing off-duty uniform, and then gazed out the open side of the cubicle at the other Marines he could see. All alike, every one of them. Only the faces were different. And even there the differences were small, minimized by the deadpan encouraged by the officers.

The thing that he had, that was him, that made him unique and different from anyone else — was there any real reason to keep it, if it only gave him pain?

There was only one answer to that. While he gloomily studied it S/2nd Carr, the flight leader, stuck his head into the cubicle and barked, “Elan! Dress uniform on the double and report to Personnel Hatch.”

Elan looked up, astonished. “Sir?”

“Don’t ask me, all I know is you’re going outside. On the double. No weapons.”

“Outside,” said Elan.

“Maybe there won’t be any fight,” said Brent, and it was clear that upset him, but he was still smiling happily.

Cahann leaned against the wall by the open personnel hatch, and pointedly ignored Strull. At the last moment, it had been decided to send the adjutant along. Neither one of them was happy about it.

In a way, Cahann reflected, it didn’t matter whether Strull and the enlisted man came along or not. He could still make every effort to explain the situation to the natives, to try to avoid unnecessary bloodshed, convince them that capitulation was their only defense.

The enlisted men’s elevator slid open and the Marine who was to accompany them stepped out. Cahann glanced at him, j recognized him as only one of the blank-faced enlisted men, and looked over at Strull.

“Spaceman!” called Strull abruptly.

The Marine marched rigidly over to stand in front of Strull and raise both hands high over his head in salute, parroting, “Spaceman Third Class Elan re-porting as ordered, sir.”

Strull returned the salute half-heartedly, barely raising his hands above his shoulders. The Marine’s arms snapped down to his sides. Strull said, “You will accompany us, keeping your eyes open for any danger. You will speak only when spoken to or if necessary to give warning of danger. You will not speak to any native under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” snapped the boy. “Very well. You will proceed. Cahann, second.”

Of course, thought Cahann grimly. Inverse order of rank, when the probability of attack is unknown.

The three of them went out and down the ramp, the Marine first in the dull gray of his dress uniform, Cahann second in the paler gray of his civilian garb, and Strull third, wearing his scarlet uniform.

And the man at the foot of the ramp wore a white shirt and tan knee-length trousers and was barefooted. And smiling.

Cahann stopped abruptly when he saw the native, then started moving again, since the Marine was still descending ahead of him, and Strull was coming along in the rear.

The Marine reached the foot of the ramp.

The native stepped aside to allow him to pass. Then he stepped back into Cahann’s path and said, in perfect Terran, “Wondered when you people would make up your minds to land and come out of that silly tin can of yours. The name’s Harvey. Welcome to Cockaigne.”

Cahann could only gape. Perfect Terran? No variations at all in five hundred years?

“Well, well, come along,” said Harvey with brisk cheeriness. “Got to meet the others, you know.”

Strull pushed past Cahann and announced, “I am Adjutant Captain Strull. I greet you on behalf of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and on behalf of Vice-Marshal Helmut Glorring.”

Harvey glanced at Strull, nodded, said, “Greetings yourself,” and turned away in obvious dismissal. Linking his arm through Cahann’s, he said, “It’s just over this way. Come along.”

III

Strull marched along in growing indignation, stung by the native’s snub and impatient for a chance to do something about it.

The ship had landed in the middle of a large squarish meadow, with forest backed up against low broad hills on three sides. The settlement — the largest one on the planet and still tiny by Earth standards — was on the fourth side. It was toward this settlement that they were walking.

The settlement, when they finally came to it, was certainly nothing to crow about, not in Strull’s considered opinion. It was about as primitive as one could get and still survive. There wasn’t even a transparent dome over the settlement. And these people were surely not advanced enough to have complete weather control; which could only mean that they were, from time to time, actually rained upon!

Strull glanced upward apprehensively, wondering if anything of the kind were about to happen now. But the sky was clear blue, with only a few small fluffy clouds. Strull was pessimistically surprised. The way things were going today, he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if he’d walked directly into a thunderstorm.

Strull looked again at the settlement. Buildings of various sizes and shapes and colors — though none of them more than one story high — were spotted haphazardly here and there, with no order or precision to them at all. Nor was there any sort of pavement or streets, only narrow brown paths worn into the grass, leading hither and yon.

“The meeting hall,” Strull heard the native say to Cahann, “is just over this way. We’re all anxious to get to know you people better.”

When they arrived at the entrance of the meeting hall Strull said coldly, “All right, Cahann, I’ll take over.” He stepped ahead, following the native inside.

There was just the one room within, and the walls were only the one thickness of planed lumber. At this latitude, it would never get cold enough to make more than that really necessary, though there was a rough stone fireplace in one wall.

An amateurish platform, a foot high, was at the far end, with three small stools on it. Other stools were scattered here and there, not in rows or any sort of order at all. And people were sitting on them, dressed somewhat like the first native, though there was no uniform pattern to their clothing except its rustic simplicity.

The native led the way to the platform and turned to Strull to say, “I imagine you want to make some sort of speech now. Want me to introduce you? Or would you rather just begin on your own?”

“I can handle it myself, thank you,” Strull told him, with frosty dignity.

The native shrugged and went back to sit on one of the stools. Cahann was already seated on the second, and the enlisted man was glancing at the third as though he wasn’t quite sure whether he should take it or not. Strull gave him a one-second glower, to let him know he shouldn’t, and then turned to the audience.

“My name,” he boomed, “is Strull, Captain Adjutant to Vice-Marshal Glorring of the TSS (E&D) Lawrence. I greet you of the planet, uh—” What the dickens had that native called this place?

The native in question leaned forward to stage-whisper, “Cockaigne.”

“Cockaigne, yes. Thank you. I greet you, citizens of the planet Cockaigne, on behalf of the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and additionally on behalf of Vice-Marshal Glorring, Primate Representative. I congratulate you on your rediscovery by the Empire of Earth and the Protectorate, and I welcome you as a Confederated State in good standing within the Protectorate and beneath the benign and omnipotent protection of the Empire of Earth.”

Strull inhaled, having just barely begun his speech, but he noticed that a bearded native toward the back of the room had risen to his feet and was waving a hand for attention. Strull frowned, paused, and in a lower voice than previously said, “You had a question?”

“That I did,” said the man. While somewhat older and more hairy than the first native, he shared with him an identical expression of lazy insolence. “I was just wondering,” he said, “how you can manage to rediscover us for your Empire when we were never a part of your Empire to begin with.”

Strull allowed a smile of superior knowledge to curve his lips. “Ah,” he said, “but you were in the Empire at one time, over five hundred years ago. I assume all records of a time that far back have been lost, but I can assure you that it is so. Surprising as it may seem to you, humanity is not native to this world. You are descendants of the original colonists sent here by the Old Empire, which collapsed five hundred years ago and which only now has been fully restored.”

“Sorry,” said the native, not looking at all sorry, “but you’ve got your history a little confused. This world wasn’t settled five hundred years ago by the Old Empire, it was settled seven hundred years ago by the United States of America.”

Strull had never heard the term. He blinked rapidly, saying, “What? What, what?”

And that blasted Cahann spoke up, not bothering at all to hide his dislike for Strull. Didn’t he realize that they should show these yokels a united front?

Cahann leaned forward to say, “Regional government on Earth. One of the last. There’ve been some indications in the old manuscripts that it did do some small-scale colonizing of its own, shortly before the Empire took over. We’ve always assumed that their efforts were unsuccessful.”

“Nonsense,” said Strull. “Nonsense.”

The bearded native shook his head. “Not at all,” he insisted. “We beat your Empire by a good two hundred years.”

“This planet,” said Strull desperately, “is part of the Protectorate of the Empire of Earth, as of this moment, and that’s all there is to it! No questions!”

“I’ve got a question anyway,” said a rather attractive young woman toward the front of the hall. “What if we don’t want to be part of your silly Empire?”

“That,” Strull told her happily, on familiar ground again, “would be tantamount to revolution. And we would be regrettably forced to put down any revolution.”

“We certainly wouldn’t want that,” said the young woman. A number of the other natives nodded in agreement, but they all seemed to have faint smiles drifting about their lips, as though they thought the whole discussion rather funny.

The native who had first met them got to his feet and said, “We’ll have to talk this over some, and decide what to do about you people. You can go on back to your tin can now. Tell your boss we’ll let him know our decision in a day or two.”

Strull was just as pleased. He’d come, seen that the natives were anything but dangerous, had said his piece, and now he was more than ready to return to the ship. “Come along,” he said to Cahann and the enlisted man.

“These two can stay here,” said the native. “We may have some questions to ask them.”

“Definitely not!” cried Strull. There was no telling what a seditionist like Cahann might say if left alone with these people.

“They’ll be perfectly safe here,” said the native unnecessarily. “Go on back to the ship.”

Well, in that case — “I will come back with his Excellency in an hour,” said Strull.

He was halfway back to the ship before he began to wonder just what the dickens had happened there. He hadn’t intended to leave Cahann and the enlisted man, not under any circumstances. But the native had said something — he couldn’t precisely remember what any more — and for some reason that had seemed to change things.

Why? He was somehow confused, he couldn’t for the life of him figure out exactly what had happened toward the end there.

It was all that had happened to him today, that’s what it was. Glorring being such a nasty martinet about his weight, and Cahann baiting him, and the native being so insolent, and all the rest of it. No wonder he was a little confused.

But his face was still puckered in a bewildered frown as he continued back to the ship.

Cahann, baffled, watched the natives, who had burst into laughter the minute Strull left the hall. It was his job, as psysociohistorian, to understand and categorize human societies, from the most complex industrial world to the smallest family group. Human social groupings, that was his subject matter, seen in historical context, the sociologist’s what? complemented by the psychologist’s why?

In essence, his job was even simpler than that. Every human grouping, from the smallest family to the largest industrial complex, had some sort of loophole in it, some spot for the Empire to insert itself and thus make the grouping at last only another part of the Empire. It was his job to find the loophole. He did the job well, because he enjoyed it in the abstract. He understood that he was making quite a large contribution to the Empire’s subjugation of more and more human beings, but he didn’t suppose he had any choice in the matter. His work fascinated him, and he could only perform that work in the service of the Empire. His refusal to work would not have changed the course of events one iota. Another psysociohistorian would simply have taken his place, leaping at the opportunity to get away for even a little while from the rigid anti-intellectualism of the college campus.

Since he enjoyed his work, and since he had the curious facility to separate it from its end product, and since he was additionally a highly intelligent man, he was one of the best psysociohistorians in the business. He had progressed to the point where his understanding of new societies and new cultures was so rapid as to be almost intuitive.

This was the first time he had ever been baffled.

All right, these people were not the descendants of Old Empire colonists, they were the descendants of even earlier colonists than that. But they were people, nevertheless. They were an aggregate group. They should certainly have reacted in one of a limited number of predictable ways.

They hadn’t.

Throughout his contact with them so far, they had behaved in no known manner whatsoever. Making fun of Strull — he liked to do that himself, but that was because he knew the little blimp, and he hadn’t done it on first meeting him anyway — and acting as though the threat of the ship and its complement of Marines were no threat at all. And then all at once bursting into laughter for no reason that Cahann could see.

The laughter having finally subsided, Harvey came over to Cahann and said, “You have a lot of questions to ask. That’s only natural. Where do you want to begin?”

“I’m not sure,” admitted Cahann. He looked at them, and they were all attentive now, more serious than they had been up to now. “I think I’d better begin with basics,” he said. “Government, for instance.”

“Democratic anarchy,” said Harvey promptly. “The will of the minority.” He laughed at the expression on Cahann’s face. “Not what you’re thinking,” he said. “Not a ruling minority in your Empire sense.” He motioned at the others in the hall. “We’re a minority,” he said, “of the people on Cockaigne. Every settlement is a minority. If you disagree with us, you can go find a settlement where people agree with you. If there is no such place, you can either change your thinking or be a hermit, it’s up to you.”

“What about criminals?” Cahann asked him. “What do you do with them?”

“Hermits,” said Harvey succinctly.

“All right, what about money?”

Harvey shook his head. “I know what you mean,” he said, “but we don’t use it. A society has to be more complex and sophisticated than ours to need money. Value symbols — and that’s what money is, after all — are usually the result of expanding travel, trade over larger and larger areas. We rarely travel, and we neither import nor export, so simple barter is good enough for us.”

“What about war between the settlements?” Cahann asked him.

“None,” said Harvey. “Controlled population growth is a better answer. We don’t need more land than we have.”

“You’ve never had a war?”

“Never.”

“So you don’t have much by way of military armaments.”

“Nothing at all.”

“Then why,” Cahann demanded, “are you so sure you won’t be conquered by that shipload of Marines out there?”

That set them all laughing again, though Cahann couldn’t see that he’d said anything particularly funny. He glanced at the marine, and saw only the normal blank expression. The Marine was staring straight ahead, at nothing.

The laughter stopped abruptly, and Harvey said, “I’m sorry, Cahann. You don’t understand the situation here yet.”

“I’m well aware of that,” said Cahann stiffly.

“You aren’t going to understand by asking questions,” Harvey told him. He got to his feet and said, “I can show you more easily than I can explain to you. Do you want to come along with me?”

Cahann hesitated, then stood. The Marine did likewise, but Harvey said, “You stay here, Elan, if you please. Harriet there wants to talk to you while we’re gone.” He gestured at the young woman who had spoken to Strull, and who was now coming forward, smiling pleasantly.

Cahann said hesitating, “I’m not sure—”

“—you should separate?” finished Harvey, smiling again. “Face it, Cahann, the two of you together with a roomful of us are no safer than you would be separated. Come along.”

Cahann paused again, then shrugged and said, “You’re right.” With a backward glance at the Marine, whose expressionless face was beginning to crack under an onslaught of frightened bewilderment, he followed Harvey out of the meeting hall.

Outside, Harvey gestured away to the right, deeper into the settlement. “This way,” he said.

Something in the man’s tone, or in his expression, or perhaps just in the posture of his body, made Cahann suddenly apprehensive. Just what was this he was walking into?

“You want to know, don’t you?” Harvey asked him, challenging him.

“Yes,” said Cahann. “Yes, I want to know.” He stepped out firmly in the direction the other man had indicated.

IV

Elan was alone now, and scared out of his wits. The girl who’d been called Harriet came up on the platform, smiling at him in a useless attempt at reassurance. “Please don’t be frightened, Elan,” she said. “We just want to get to know you, that’s all.”

He looked at them, too frightened at being alone to be able to read their expressions.

Harriet sat down beside him. “Don’t be upset, Elan. Just talk to us. Tell us about yourself.”

He mumbled, “I don’t know what to say.”

“Tell us about your life on the ship,” she suggested.

His mind filled with memories of the rigid military discipline of the ship, but he knew better than to give information to potential enemies and so said only, “Life on the ship is just ordinary. Like garrison duty anywhere. That’s all.”

Unexpectedly, that seemed to satisfy them, and the girl Harriet said, “Tell us about Earth, then. Tell us about your home on Earth.”

Earth. Home! Oh, but that was something else again. His home section, peaceful and beautiful.

Harriet said, surprise plain in her face and voice, “Is all of Earth like that?”

He stared at her, and felt a moment of complete panic. He hadn’t said anything!

She seemed to understand. She laughed, a bit shakily, and patted his hand. “Don’t go so goggle-eyed,” she told him. “The expression on your face told volumes. It’s clear you love your own home section, but what of the rest of Earth? Tell us about the big cities.”

He made as though to rise. “I… I have to go back—”

“No, no, they’ll come for you. They said it was all right for you to stay here.” She held his hand, gazing at him with an expression he couldn’t define. “Little rabbit,” she said soothingly. “Poor little rabbit No one will frighten you any more.”

Glorring had stripped down to loinpiece and was wrestling with Chief Astrogator Koll when Strull returned. Seeing the adjutant enter the ready room, Glorring quit fooling around. He kneed the astrogator, kidney, punched him and gave him an elbow in the eye. Koll staggered back across the ready room, while the other officers shouted appreciation. Glorring signaled the end of the match.

Immediately, his dressers came forward to towel him dry and put his golden uniform back on him.

Glorring gazed bleakly at Strull. “Took you long enough,” he snapped. “Report.”

“Yes, sir. We encountered the natives and—”

“Where’s Cahann?” Glorring interrupted.

“I left him there,” said Strull promptly. “He—”

“You what?”

“I left the enlisted man with him,” explained Strull. “There’s nothing to worry about, Excellency.”

“Oh, there isn’t, eh?” Glorring couldn’t stand a weakling, and Strull was by far the weakest boob on the ship. It was about time, Glorring decided, to make a man out of that wart. “You go right on, Captain Strull,” he said. “You go right on and tell me all about it.”

“Yes, sir,” said Strull briskly, and then seemed to falter. He looked completely confused for a second, and then said, “Well, uh, as I said, we encountered the natives. I spoke to a group of them in their meeting hall, telling them who we were and the purpose of our coming here. They claimed, by the way, that they weren’t Old Empire colonists after all, but colonists from an even earlier time than that. I forget the name of the government that sent them, but they claimed it was seven hundred years ago.”

Koll, somewhat recovered, chimed in, “So that’s why they weren’t on the charts.”

“It would seem so,” said Glorring. “Go on, Captain Strull. We haven’t come to the interesting part yet. The part where you left Cahann and the Marine and returned to the ship alone.”

“Yes, sir.” Strull gnawed a lower lip for a second, as though gathering his thoughts, and then went on in a rush. “Well, sir, after I spoke to these natives, I got suspicious. They’re as backward a bunch as you’ll ever see. Not a bit of mechanization around them at all. But they talk as though they don’t even consider us a threat. Apparently, they feel as though they have some sort of secret weapon or something. So I ordered Cahann to stay behind, because he’s particularly qualified for that sort of thing, and see what he could find out from the natives. And I ordered the Marine to stay and keep an eye on Cahann.”

“Brilliant,” said Glorring, with heavy sarcasm. “Absolutely brilliant, Captain Strull.”

“Of course,” said Strull hastily, “there was another reason, too. It was impossible in the short time I was there to get any idea of their system of government. And of course mine was just first contact, and I had no wish, your Excellency, to usurp your prerogative of direct negotiation with the local governmental leaders. So Cahann is to find out just who heads the local government and where he can be found, so you’ll be able to go directly to him when the time comes and not have to waste time asking directions of underlings.”

Glorring raised an eyebrow. That made sense, surprisingly. Of course, Strull was only currying favor by doing this, but nevertheless it was sensible for Glorring to be able to go directly to the local authority. “Very well,” he said. “You did better than I expected, Strull. Very good.”

Strull bowed, relief plain on his face. “Thank you, Excellency.”

“Very well,” said Glorring, to the room in general. “We will give Cahann an hour to find out all he can. In one hour, I shall leave the ship. We shall be escorted by one flight of Marines on foot, the other three flights to be at combat-ready stations. One hour.”

Cahann was in love. It had just happened.

It was calling to him, because it loved him, and he went to it, because he returned that love, because he loved it as much as it loved him, because to love it and to be loved by it was greater and more wonderful and more right than anything else in all of life.

They had left the meeting hall, he and Harvey. They had walked, almost aimlessly, among the scattered unordered buildings of the settlement and slowly it had grown upon him, this acquisition of love, this new understanding of the meaning and depth of love, this new completion which was possible only with the loved one, close to the loved one, blending with the loved one…

It was in this direction. Not far away now, closer and closer. They had walked aimlessly, almost as though Harvey were allowing Cahann to choose his own direction. Then Cahann had chosen his direction, and it was this way, this way toward love and toward fulfillment and toward completion, this way toward It which desired him above all things.

Before, just after they’d left the meeting hall, Cahann had been full of questions, had tried to ask them at once, but Harvey had raised a hand to stop him, saying, “Not yet. I’ll answer all your questions, I promise that, but not just yet. Let me show you this first.”

“What is it?” Cahann had asked him.

“I don’t think I could explain it to you,” Harvey had said. “When you see it, you’ll understand why. When you see it, you’ll understand a lot of things that are puzzling you now.”

“This thing, whatever it is you want to show me,” Cahann had said, “this is what you think will protect you from the Empire, is that it?”

“Not precisely,” Harvey had said. “Please, don’t try to guess. That won’t do any good. Just come along. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll understand; and that will be that.”

So they had fallen silent. And they had walked aimlessly, back and forth, and Cahann had just about come to the conclusion that he was being given a-runaround, that they were simply retracing their steps among the buildings of the settlement and not really getting anywhere at all, when the first faint touches of it had reached him.

Desire.

Love.

Warmth and compassion and understanding.

A need for him, for him and him alone of all the creatures of the universe, all the creatures that had ever lived or would ever live, for no one and nothing but him.

It had come upon him almost unnoticeably, like an aroma creeping into a room, and it is strong in the room before you even notice it. And so it was with this, it was only a faint unnoticed sensation until suddenly it had been there for a long time and had grown strong and was now all-pervasive in his mind.

This way, it called. This way.

A message of love, a message of desire and understanding and fulfillment; and he had followed it, he had turned in the path it had pointed out, and now Harvey trailed him, unnoticed and unneeded, and he hurried toward his beloved, who hungered for him.

He felt like running, but there was really no reason to run. They would have all eternity together, now that they had found one another at last. And so he walked through the settlement, striding certainly forward, eyes bright with love and hope. He reached the last of the houses of the settlement and the edge of the woods beyond, and stepped unhesitatingly into the woods, for the loved one was in there, beckoning to him, calling for him, needing him.

And Harvey trailed along behind him, two or three paces behind him.

He was getting closer and closer, so close he could feel his skin tingling with anticipation, so close that the sweat broke out all over his body and his mouth hung open and his eyes stared for a sight of the beloved.

And then, at last, he came to it, where it stood in its own small clearing.

It was the head of Medusa, a thick green plant with many sinuous waving arms reaching up and out from the single stubby base, the whole nearly eight feet high and five feet in diameter. The rubbery green branches, or arms, swayed slowly, as though from a breeze, and at their tips were great scarlet flowers with thick petals, the flowers as big as a man’s head. The arms swayed voluptuously, and the petals of the flowers, which looked like great rough tongues, scraped together with a sound like the smacking of dry lips.

This was It, the beloved, the purpose of all life.

This was his destination and his ending and his fulfillment.

For what greater purpose could any creature have than the satisfaction of the hungers of It?

What was there in life more wonderful than the feeding of It?

How grand and blessed and wonderful it was that he had been chosen, he of all the beings that lived and moved, he had been chosen to give himself to the beloved, to feed it and so to become a part of it forever.

To throw himself at its base and give himself to its hunger.

But as he stepped forward into the clearing, and the great scarlet flowers beckoned and bowed to him, he was suddenly stopped. Some petty creature was clutching at him, trying to hold him back, trying to keep him from his proper completion.

He pushed the creature aside. But it came back, and again, grabbing at him, clutching at him, pulling him away, keeping him always just out of reach of the beckoning scarlet flowers which hungered for him.

And then more of the foul filthy creatures arrived and overpowered him. And though he fought against them, though It gave him the strength of fury and of love, he was borne down and back, carried bodily away from the clearing and away from the sight of his beloved.

And still he fought, and the creatures dragged him back and back, out of the woods and among constructions which were of no moment to him, for the beloved was there, back there, still calling to him.

And when at last he knew that it was hopeless, that the creatures were not going to release him ever, that he would never be able to complete himself at the base of his beloved, he shrieked with the torment of the greatest loss and the greatest sorrow that any being had ever known. He shrieked and shrieked, till one of the creatures struck him. And then blackness rushed in, and he knew no more.

V

They could read his mind!

Every thought!

Elan sat on the platform in terror of his life. That was their secret, and he knew it now, and the nature of their secret was such that they must know he knew it.

The girl Harriet’s slip when she had asked him to describe his home had been the first indication, but it had seemed too fantastic to be believed, and he had chosen to accept her flimsy excuse.

But gradually, as the questioning had gone on, he had seen that the people in the room were listening attentively not to the evasions and generalizations he was saying but to the truths he was thinking. The play of expression on an unguarded face, a look passing between two people, things which could have been produced only by his thoughts, and not by his words.

Until finally there just wasn’t any choice any more, there weren’t any other possible answers. But still they played out the game with him, Harriet asking the questions and he stumbling through the useless answers.

At one point, a kind of wave seemed to go through them all, they looking at one another with suddenly widened eyes, and five men at the back of the room got to their feet and hurried outside. He tried to recall what his thoughts had been at that second, but it didn’t seem as though their strange apprehension had anything to do with him.

The scientist, Cahann?

Harriet patted his hand again, saying, “Be easy, Elan. You have nothing to fear.”

He stared at her. “You know what I’m thinking,” he whispered. “You’re reading my mind.”

“Be easy, Elan,” she said softly. “Don’t always expect the worst of humanity. Not all of mankind has chosen the path of Earth.”

Then they were silent. He looked from face to face, and knew that they were talking to one another without words, deciding what to do with him and with Cahann and with all the people on the ship.

The silence was suddenly shattered by a shriek from outside the building, and a second shriek on the heels of the first. “Cahann!” he cried, leaping to his feet. Jumping from the platform, he raced through the natives to the door and outside.

He ran around the corner of the building, and stopped dead.

A little distance away was the man named Harvey, and with him were the five men who had left the meeting hall so hurriedly a few minutes before.

And at their feet lay the body of Cahann.

The small band marching out from the ship in the sunlight looked hard and lean and impressive. In the lead, herculean in his golden uniform, marched Glorring. Directly behind him Strull, and next back two officers marching abreast, Majors Londin and Corse, respectively in green and black. Behind them, Captains Rink (his left arm in a sling) and Stimmel and Pleque, in blue and maroon and pale rose. Next, Lieutenants Braldor, Chip, Sassen, Kommel and Koll, in the multicolored uniforms preferred by most junior officers. And, bringing up the rear, the flight of Marines in dress gray, S/1st Loretta two paces ahead of them and S/2nd Kallett at the head of the middle squad.

There was no music, there were no flags. These were considered frills, and an Exploration & Discovery ship was notoriously devoid of frills.

But they were impressive any way The Marines looked deadly and the officers in their grim, bright colors hearkened back to the bright-plumed or feather-decorated or body-painted warriors of the dim past. These were the warriors of the Empire, respecting no one but themselves, desiring nothing but conquest, owing allegiance only to the Empire which equipped them and sent them on their missions.

Glorring, in the lead, breathed the sweet air and cast an eye of ownership over his world.

And it was his world, much more so than any other Lost Colony he had bagged for the Empire. Here was a verdant globe, already stocked with colonists, its existence unsuspected at home.

Glory came to the men who shepherded the stray Colonies back to the flock. How much more glory for the man who discovered a brand new stray!

Perhaps he might bring a few specimens of the local colony back with him. Say ten of them. Unusual, of course, but this was an unusual world, an unknown world. Yes, he would bring ten of the natives back to Earth with him.

As they came closer to the settlement, Glorring spied Cahann and the enlisted man, waiting near the closest of the buildings. They were too far away for the vice-marshal to be able to read their expressions, but he knew what they must be. Admiring envy on the part of Cahann. Military pride on the part of the Marine.

And, on the faces of the group of natives waiting with them, could there be any expression possible other than a wonderful awe?

Beneath the silver skirts, he all at once executed a little hop, the time-honored method for changing step.

Simultaneously, all the marchers behind him did exactly the same thing.

He didn’t pay any attention to that at all.

Cahann’s expression was somewhat greenish, but not with envy. It was more the greenish tinge of seasickness. He had a lot to recover from.

His memory of — the thing, it, the beloved, whatever it had been — was dim and blurred, and he had the feeling he didn’t want to remember it any more clearly than he did.

There had been an urge, a compulsion, that had seemed at the time to be right and proper and natural, and that had also seemed to come from within, to be his own invention and own decision.

He remembered the urge, remembered with a shudder what the urge had been, even remembered to some extent the all-inclusive compulsion of the thing. But his memory was pedantic and unreal, as though he were remembering a particularly vicious torture which he had never seen practiced on anyone but about which he had read graphic and detailed accounts. They were second-hand memories; he was buffered to some extent from their impact.

On regaining consciousness, the first thing he had seen had been Harvey’s face, almost comically worried. And through a surrealistic damping, he had vaguely heard Harvey’s voice:

“Cahann! Come out of it, Cahann, it’s all over! Come on, man, it’s over now, the thing doesn’t want you any more.”

The last phrase had done it. He had sat bolt upright, prepared to scream, and Harvey’s hand had clapped tight to his mouth, holding him rigid until the need to scream had passed. Then the hand had fallen away. Harvey, hunkered down beside him, said, “I’m sorry, Cahann, more sorry than you know. I hope you can forgive me.”

“Forgive you?” Cahann raised a shaking hand to wipe his forehead. “I don’t know yet what you did to me,” he confessed.

“I had no idea,” Harvey told him, “just how strong the enticer could be for somebody who didn’t have any preparation. No wonder it killed so many in the first few generations.”

“What was it?” Cahann asked I him. He felt stronger now, but his limbs ached as though he’d been tensing them too hard for too long. “What in time was it?”

“Our ancestors called it ‘enticer’,” Harvey told him. “When they came here, the plant infested the whole planet. There’s only a few left now, except around the jungle belt of the equator. We haven’t bothered to clean them out down there. We can’t use the land anyway, and their range isn’t very far.”

“But what is it?”

“It’s an enticer,” said Harvey. “It entices animal food, broadcasting a kind of telepathic beam that attracts anything that moves. We think the beam is connected with the flowers’ smell, but we’ve never proved it one way or the other.”

“All right,” said Cahann shakily. “It got to me, so it does work. But why doesn’t it go after you people? Why only me?”

“It does go after us,” Harvey told him. “It goes after every living thing that gets close enough.”

“You mean you’ve built up resistance to it? I don’t see how you get the chance.”

“It doesn’t work quite that way.” Harvey seemed to consider for a moment, and then he said, “Have you ever heard of mental telepathy?”

“Of course.”

“What do you think of it, as a possibility?”

“I think it’s nonsense,” said Cahann promptly. So did Harvey, saying it right with him word for word.

Cahann frowned. “What was that all about?” he asked, and Harvey asked the question in harmony with him.

Cahann pondered, then nodded his head, saying, “Oh, I get it. But that doesn’t—” He stopped, rather precipitately. Because every one of the twenty or twenty-five natives around him had been saying exactly the same words, in chorus with him.

Harvey smiled slightly. “You think that doesn’t prove anything,” he said, “because those are the words you might have been expected to say. All right, say something unexpected.”

Cahann looked at him, thinking furiously. He glanced at the enlisted man, who was gaping at everything with such a complete look of blank astonishment that Cahann at once felt better. At least there was one person present who was more baffled than he.

Cahann gnawed on the inside of his cheek, trying to think. Telepathy? The word was known, the field existed, but the researchers in the field were, so far as Cahann had ever known, exclusively crackpots and panacea-peddlers.

Could the thing really exist? All he had to do was open his mouth and say one word, any word at all, and he would know.

He wasn’t quite sure he wanted to know.

Mind-readers.

Peeping toms.

No privacy at all.

“It isn’t as bad as all that,” Harvey told him. “Shields do develop. Go ahead, say something.” Cahann took a deep breath and said: “Canteloupe!”

Twenty-five voices bellowed it with him: “Canteloupe!”

Harvey smiled. “Okay?”

VI

Cahann felt suddenly tired.

Too much too soon. He wiped his forehead with his palm. He was still sitting on the ground, Harvey squatting beside him and the others, with the goggle-eyed Marine, standing around in front of him. He leaned forward, arms lax, and gazed bleakly at the ground between his knees.

“All right,” he said dully. “Tell me about it.”

“I don’t know what the colonization methods of the Old Empire were,” Harvey told him, “but our ancestors were on a one-way street. They got on their ship, left Earth, traveled until they found a place where they could land and live, and that was it. There was no contact with Earth, and no way to get back to Earth. Nor was there any way to leave their new home once they’d chosen it. The ship needed a complex launching pad they weren’t equipped to build.

“So they came here,” he went on, motioning at the world around them. “They landed, stripped down the ship for parts, planted, started to build shelters… and then the enticer went to work on them.”

“The way it did on me,” said Cahann.

“Exactly. Now, here’s the point. Telepathic ability is dormant, to a greater or lesser extent, in every human being who ever lived. Back on Earth, there were countless cases of individuals whose ability was advanced almost to the threshold of self-awareness. You see, the capability is greater in some people than in others. Just as some people have better memories than others, some are better at mathematics than others, and so on.”

Cahann nodded.

“To get back to the original settlers of Cockaigne,” said Harvey. “They were stranded here, five thousand of them. And they were being picked off by the enticer, which struck them telepathically, and below the level of conscious resistance. Do you see what that! meant?”

“I think so,” said Cahann. “It meant that the people with the greatest telepathic capacity would be the ones most likely to survive. The ones who could catch what the enticer was doing in time to get back out of range.”

“Of course,” said Harvey. “On this planet, for the first time in man’s history, telepathic ability was the primary survival characteristic. This world forced man to breed for telepathy. The survivors of each generation were just a little bit more advanced toward full use of the ability than the generation before them.”

“Until now,” Cahann finished for him, “you are all fully telepathic.”

“Exactly. And with, in addition, the complementary abilities that go along with it. Such as the shield. And such as, for instance — well, for instance, what’s your name?”

He looked at Harvey blankly. Why ask that?

“Come on,” said Harvey. “Tell me your name.”

“My name’s…”

He didn’t know. He thought desperately, trying to remember, and it just wasn’t there. He didn’t know his own name! It was as though he had never had a name, as though a name had never been given him.

“Your name’s Cahann,” Harvey told him gently.

Of course! How stupid to forget it!

Cahann looked sharply at Harvey, in sudden understanding. «You made me forget it.”

Harvey nodded.

It was as though a dull weight were pressing on Cahann’s soul. “Is there no limit to what you people can do?” he asked.

“There are limits,” Harvey told him, “but they’re nothing to worry about.”

“What are you going to do with us?”

“We’ve been trying to decide. At first, when you’d just landed here, we thought the best thing to do was make you take off again at once, and give you the idea the planet was uninhabitable. It’s unlikely any other Earth ship will ever stumble across us.”

“I wish you had done that,” Cahann told him.

Harvey smiled. “You won’t when we’re finished with you,” he said. He motioned at the Marine, still goggle-eyed in the background. “See Elan there? He’s an intelligent boy. He’s also a latent telepath of a very high order. Harriet tells me she thinks she could bring the ability out completely in less than a year. But do you know what Earth has done to that boy?”

Cahann looked.at the Marine, not understanding. He hadn’t ever really paid any attention to him, he was simply an impassive face and a uniform, one of the depersonalized enlisted men from block six.

“Of course,” said Harvey. “That’s what you think of him. That’s what everybody thinks of him. They’ve told him so long and so often that he doesn’t count as a person, as an individual, that he believes it himself by now. Do you know that he has seriously considered requesting reconversion, to kill off the individuality which was only worthless and which brought him only self-doubt and worry? Do you know that four per cent of Earth’s Marines every year volunteer for reconversion? That’s how little life and individual worth have come to mean with you people.”

“I didn’t know the figures,” said Cahann distractedly. He was gazing at the Marine, trying to see him as a person, trying to see him the way Harvey saw him. It wasn’t easy to do.

“Your Empire,” Harvey told him, steel now coming into his voice, “is an open sore. It’s a gaping wound on the face of the universe. We wouldn’t feel right if we let it go on.”

“No,” said Cahann. “With all of your powers, you can’t do that. You can’t fight the Empire. One ship, yes, you could beat one ship. But not the Empire.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

A native came strolling up at that point, casually saying, “Group of them forming outside the ship. They’re going to come this way.”

“All right.” Harvey got to his feet, saying, “Come along, Cahann, We can talk while waiting for them.”

Cahann stood up, awkwardly. He was stiff and aching in every joint. He limped along beside Harvey, the Marine and the other natives following.

Harvey said, “We’re going to have to make you forget most of this, but only temporarily. We’d rather not give the Empire any warning. Ten of us are going to go back to Earth with you people, on your ship.”

“Ten of you? You can’t possibly—”

“Don’t worry about it, Cahann,” said Harvey. “Your commander is deciding right now to bring us along.”

They stopped at the edge of the meadow. In the distance, the procession was moving toward them.

How pompous they looked! Cahann had never noticed that before, how silly and pompous they all looked. Nor how completely defenseless.

“You can do it,” he said in a low voice. He felt sick and frightened, but at the same time he was beginning to feel a kind of exultation. They would do it, they really would.

And was there any doubt the Earth would be a better world when they were finished with what they would do to it?

“Earth is out of step,” said Harvey, “out of step with life. Like this group coming toward us. They’re all out of step. We have to change that.”

In the distance, the marching group all hopped at once, changing step.

1963

The Question

Introduction to THE QUESTION by LARRY M. HARRIS and DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Not infrequently it used to happen that we would get an idea for a story, only to find that another writer had not only gotten the same idea, but had written it down (and sold it) before we did; other writers report the same phenomena. Now we are an editor and we find it often happens that a MS will arrive on our desk only a day or so after we have bought one on the same theme. Coincidence? Telepathy? The Collective Unconscious? Who knows? At any rate, only a week after we got the Harris-Westlake story, along came the Demmon story. Intrigued by the way the different writers, who are unknown to each other, handed the subject which occurred to them independently, we decided to print both stories together. We think that two differently-angled views may, like those of the stereoscope, produce a three-dimensional image.

Larry M. Harris has a brown beard and plays the piano. Donald E. Westlake has a red beard and lives in Canarsie. After reading their conjoint story of what happened once to Rossi, who was convinced that the universe was aimed, like a pistol, straight at his head, we have been wondering: is either beard real? And, for that matter, is either Harris or Westlake?

The room was very quiet, anything would have disturbed which disturbed Rossi. But, then, Rossi: he was trying to correct term papers for an English I course, and he had reached the state where the entire room had begun to grate on his nerves. Soon, he knew, he would have to get up and go out for a walk. It was the middle of the afternoon, and if he went for a walk he would meet every housewife in the development. That, too, would be irritating: but all life, he had begun to realize, was a choice between irritations. He sighed, picked up the next sheet and focussed his eyes.

The coma is used to mark off pieces of a sentence which…

The telephone rang.

… pieces of a sentence which aren’t independent so that…

It rang again.

“God damn,” Rossi said, to nobody in particular, and went across the room to answer it, breathing heavily. As he reached the receiver he had won the battle for control, and his “Hello,” was almost polite.

“Hello, there,” a voice on the other end said, a bright and cheery voice. “What kind of weather is it outside?”

There was a brief silence.

Rossi said: “What?”

“I asked you,” the voice said, just as cheerfully, “what kind of weather it was outside.”

Control snapped. “Who the hell are you?” Rossi said. “The Weather Bureau? Of all the damn fool—”

“Mr. Rossi,” the voice cut in, quite without rancor, “I’m quite serious. Please believe me.”

“Now, look—”

“Please, Mr. Rossi,” the voice said. “Relax.”

Even as you and I, Rossi was sometimes prey to the impression that the universe was aimed, like a pistol, straight at his head. The afternoon had done nothing to remove this impression, and this telephone call, with its idiotic question, was the final straw. The world narrowed, contracted, and centered around Rossi s head. Everything, everything, was part of a conspiracy directed at Rossi, and everybody was out to do him harm.

“Relax?” he asked the receiver. “Now, look, whoever you are. I’m working here. I’m trying to get some work done. I don’t need anybody calling up to ask stupid—”

“It is not a stupid question,” the voice told him patiently. “Please believe that I — that we really must know your answer to it.”

Somehow, even through the red fog of anger, Rossi believed the voice. “What is this, then?” he asked thinly. “Some kind of TV program?”

“Why — no,” the voice said. “And it isn’t a research poll, a psychiatric game or a practical joke. We are quite serious, Mr. Rossi.”

“Well,” Rossi said, having come to a decision, “the hell with you.” He began to hang up. But the voice continued to talk, and curiosity won out, briefly, in its battle with anger. The whole world was, admittedly, after Rossi: but he had his choice of irritants. It was the phone call versus his English I class.

He put the receiver back to his ear.

“—must insist,” the voice was saying. “It will really be much simpler, Mr. Rossi, if you just answer the question. We can call again, you know, and continue to call. We don’t in the least want to bother or disturb you, but—”

“It would be a lot simpler,” Rossi told the voice, “if you’d let me know why you want an answer to a question like that. What kind of weather is it outside — my God, can’t you look for yourself? Or call Information, or something?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you any more,” the voice said, with a trace of what might have been real regret, and might have been only the actors version of it so common among television quiz show announcers. “But if you’ll just—”

“Some kind of a nut,” Rossi muttered.

“What was that?” the voice asked.

Rossi shook his head at the phone. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” And then, possibly under the spur of embarrassment, he bent down from his position at the telephone and took a look toward the front window of the room. “It’s a nice day,” he said. “Or anyhow it looks like a nice day. Is that what you want?”

“Exactly,” the voice said, and Rossi thought he could hear relief in its tones. “Can you go into a little more detail?”

“Well,” Rossi went on, feeling even more embarrassed — the way things had gone all day, now was the moment when someone would walk in on him and find him describing the weather to a strange voice on the telephone — “well, it’s a little cloudy. But nice. I can’t see the sun because of the clouds, but there’s plenty of light and it looks warm. Kind of misty, I suppose you’d say.”

“Ah,” the voice responded. “You can’t see the sun, you say?”

“That’s right,” Rossi told him. “But it’s a good day, if you know what I mean. A little cloudy, but — say, look, what the hell is this, anyhow?” The thought of someone surprising him during so odd a conversation gave rise to one last sudden spurt of irritation. “Calling up strangers to ask stupid questions like—”

“Thank you, Mr. Rossi,” the voice said smoothly. “Thank you very much.”

And then — and then — it said something else. Obviously not meant for Rossi’s ears, it reached them nevertheless through pure accident, just before the stranger on the other end of the line rang off. Just a few words, but in those few words Rossi realized that he had been right, right all along. Everything centered around Rossi. Maybe he would never know why, or how. But the world, the entire world, was — truly and completely — aimed right at the Rossi head.

Just a few words, heard distantly, the few words a man might say as he was hanging up a telephone receiver, to someone else in the room…

“It’s okay, Joe,” the voice said casually. “He can’t see it. You can take it away.”

1964

Nackles

This is perhaps not quite the Yuletide tale to read to your little nephew or your sweet old aunt. Still, while its theology is questionable, its sociology is rather sound. As for the author, we have been absolutely unable to learn anything about him or his whereabouts, and this, too, makes us wonder…

Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My late brother-in-law? Nackles knows.

It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn’t He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.

Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good and Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the stood, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in each of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahriman. And we ourselves know God and Satan.

But of course it’s entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly seems like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do not have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under tin; age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus docs not possess?

And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa’s power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)

Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ (?) society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.

And wherever there is a god, mustn’t there sooner or later be a devil?

Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who’s to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is — or was — a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I’ll never know. Why Susie wanted to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn’t explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.

Frank is — Frank was — I just don’t know what tense to use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive line-backer for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other way to make a living.

Ex-football players tend to become insurance salesmen, I don’t know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same company, they soon became acquainted.

Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and handsome? She’s never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully know what goes on inside the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she decided she was in love with him.

So they were married, and five weeks later he gave her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn’t have been, since Susie tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me she had a headache and we’d have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.

I got the story out of her slowly, in fits and starts. Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the gridiron again, but I want to be President and Cm an automobile salesman and I don’t go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me to let Frank know he wasn’t to vent his pique on my sister any more.

Unfortunately. I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday Times under my arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he’d surely give me a black eye to go with my sister’s. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation baseball bat, and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.

He opened the door himself and snarled, “What do you want?”

In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, and then stood over him to say, “The next time you hit my sister I won’t let you off so easy.” After which I took Susie home to my place for dinner

And after which I was Frank’s best friend.

People like that are so impossible to understand. Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised contempt. But once I’d knocked the stuffings out of him, he was my comrade for life. And I’m sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his back, had I wanted it, which I didn’t.

(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so the baseball bat remained in retirement.)

Then came the children, three of them in as many years. Frank Junior came first, and then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep, and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they were — like everything else in his life — the last straw.

He became, in a word, worse. Susie restrained him I don’t know how often from doing some severe damage to a squalling infant, and as the children grew toward the age of reason Frank’s expressed attitude toward them was that their best move would be to find a way to become invisible. The children, of course, didn’t like him very much, but then who did?

Last Christmas was when u started. Junior was six then, and Linda Joyce five, and Stewart four, so all were old enough to have heard of Santa Claus and still young enough to believe in him. Along around October, when the Christmas season was beginning, Frank began to use Santa Claus’s displeasure as a weapon to keep the children “in line,” his phrase for keeping them mute and immobile and terrified. Many parents, of course, try to enforce obedience the same way: “If you’re bad, Santa Claus won’t bring you any presents.” Which, all things considered, is a negative and passive son of punishment, wishy-washy in comparison with fire and brimstone and such. In the old days, Santa Claus would treat bad children a bit more scornfully, leaving a lump of coal in their stockings in lieu of presents, but I suppose the Depression helped to change that. There are times and situations when a lump of coal is nothing to sneer at.

In any case, an absence of presents was too weak a punishment for Frank’s purposes, so last Christmastime he invented Nackles.

Who is Nackles? Nackles is to Santa Claus what Satan is to God, what Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda, what the North Wind is to the South Wind. Nackles is the new Evil.

I think Frank really enjoyed creating Nackles; he gave so much thought to the details of him. According to Frank, and as I remember it, this is Nackles: Very very tall and very very thin. Dressed ail in black, with a gaunt gray face and deep black eyes. He travels through an intricate series of tunnels under the earth, in a black chariot on rails, pulled by an octet of dead-white goats.

And what does Nackles do? Nackles lives on the flesh of little boys and girls. (This is what Frank was telling his children; can you believe it?) Nackles roams back and forth under the earth, in his dark tunnels darker than subway tunnels, pulled by the eight dead-white goats, and he searches for little boys and girls to stuff into his big black sack and carry away and eat. But Santa Claus won’t let him have good boys and girls. Santa Claus is stronger than Nackles, and keeps a protective shield around little children, so Nackles can’t get at them.

But when little children are bad, it hurts Santa Claus, and weakens the shield Santa Claus has placed around them, and if they keep on being bad pretty soon there’s no shield left at all, and on Christmas Eve instead of Santa Claus coming down out of the sky with his bag of presents Nackles comes up out of the ground with his bag of emptiness, and stuffs the bad children in, and whisks them away to his dark tunnels and the eight dead-white goats.

Frank was proud of his invention, actually proud of it. He not only used Nackles to threaten his children every time they had the temerity to come within range of his vision, he also spread the story around to others. He told me, and his neighbors, and people in bars, and people he went to see in his job as insurance salesman. I don’t know how many people he told about Nackles, though I would guess it was well over a hundred. And there’s more than one Frank in this world; he told me from time to time of a client or neighbor or bar-crony who had heard the story of Nackles and then said, “By God, that’s great. That’s what I’ve been needing, to keep my brats in line.”

Thus Nackles was created, and thus Nackles was promulgated. And would any of the unfortunate children thus introduced to Nackles believe in this Evil Being any less than they believed in Santa Claus? Of course not.

This all happened, as I say, last Christmastime. Frank invented Nackles, used him to further intimidate his already-intimidated children, and spread the story of him to everyone he met. On Christmas Day last year I’m sure there was more than one child in this town who was relieved and somewhat surprised to awaken the same as usual, in his own trundle bed, and to find the presents downstairs beneath the tree, proving that Nackles had been kept away yet another year.

Nackles lay dormant, so far as Frank was concerned, from December 25th of last year until this October. Then, with the sights and sounds of Christmas again in the land, back came Nackles, as fresh and vicious as ever. “Don’t expect me to stop him!” Frank would shout. “When he comes up out of the ground the night before Christmas to carry you away in his bag, don’t expect any help from me!’

It was worse this year than last. Frank wasn’t doing as well financially as he’d expected, and then early in November Susie discovered she was pregnant again, and what with one thing and another Frank was headed for a real peak of ill-temper. He screamed at the children constantly, and the name of Nackles was never far from his tongue.

Susie did what she could to counteract Frank’s bad influence, but he wouldn’t let her do much. All through November and December he was home more and more of the time, because the Christmas season is the wrong time to sell insurance anyway and also because he was hating the job more every day and thus giving it less of his time. The more he hated the job, the worse his temper became, and the more he drank, and the worse his limp got, and the louder were his shouts, and the more violent his references to Nackles. It just built and built and built, and reached its crescendo on Christmas Eve, when some small or imagined infraction of one of the children — Stewart, I think — resulted in Frank’s pulling all the Christmas presents from all the closets and stowing them all in the cur to be taken back to the stores, because this Christmas for sure it wouldn’t be Santa Claus who would be visiting this house, it would be Nackles.

By the time Susie got the children to bed, everyone in the house was a nervous wreck. The children were too frightened to sleep, and Susie was too unnerved herself to be of much help in soothing them. Frank, who had taken to drinking at home lately, had locked himself in the bedroom with a bottle.

It was nearly eleven o’clock before Susie got the children all quieted down, and then she went out to the car and brought all the presents back in and arranged them under the tree. Then, not wanting to see or hear her husband any more that night — he was like a big spoiled child throwing a tantrum — she herself went to sleep on the living room sofa.

Frank junior awoke her in the morning, crying. “Look, Mama! Nackles didn’t come, he didn’t come!” And pointed to the presents she’d placed under the tree.

The other two children came down shortly after, and Susie and the youngsters sat on the floor and opened the presents, enjoying themselves as much as possible, but still with restraint. There were none of the usual squeals of childish pleasure; no one wanted Daddy to comic storming downstairs in one of his rages. So the children contented themselves with ear-to-ear smiles and whispered exclamations, and after a while Susie made breakfast, and the day carried along as pleasantly as amid he expected under the circumstances.

It was a little after twelve that Susie began to worry about Frank’s non-appearance. She braved herself to go up and knock on the locked door and call his name, but she girt no answer, not even the expected snarl, so just around one o’clock she called me and I hurried on over. I rapped smartly on the bedroom door, got no answer, and finally I threatened to break the door in if Frank didn’t open up. When I still got no answer, break the door in I did.

And Frank, of course, was gone.

The police say he ran away, deserted his family, primarily because of Susie’s fourth pregnancy. They say he went out the window and dropped to the backyard, so Susie wouldn’t see him and try to stop him. And they say he didn’t take the car because he was afraid Susie would hear him start the engine.

That all sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Yet, I just can’t believe Frank would walk out on Susie without a lot of shouting about it first. Nor that he would leave his car, which he was fonder of than his wife and children.

But what’s the alternative? There’s only one I can think of: Nackles.

I would rather not believe that I would rather not believe that Frank, in inventing Nackles and spreading word of him, made him real. I would rather not believe that Nackles actually did visit my sister’s house on Christmas Eve.

But did he? If so, he couldn’t have carried off any of the children, for a more subdued and better-behaved trio of youngsters you won’t find anywhere. But Nackles, being brand-new and never having had a meal before, would need somebody. Somebody to whom he was real, somebody not protected by the shield of Santa Claus. And, as I say, Frank was drinking that night. Alcohol makes the brain believe in the existence of all sorts of things. Also, Frank was a spoiled child if there ever was one.

There’s no question but that Frank Junior and Linda Joyce and Stewart believe in Nackles. And Frank spread the gospel of Nackles to others, some of whom spread it to their own children. And some of whom will spread the new Evil to other parents. And ours is a mobile society, with families constantly being transferred by Daddy’s company from one end of the country to another, so how long can it be before Nackles is a power not only in this one city, but all across the nation?

I don’t know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I know for sure is that there’s suddenly a new level of meaning in the lyric of that popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:

You’d better watch out.

Just the Lady We’re Looking For

Being a housewife in a suburban development is not just shopping, cleaning, and cooking — not when men like Mr. Merriweather ring the front doorbell…

That morning Mary cleaned the kitchen, and after lunch she went shopping. It was a beautiful sunny day, but getting hot; the lawns and curbs and ranch-style houses of Pleasant Park Estates gleamed and sparkled in the sunlight, and in the distance the blacktop street shone like glittering water.

Mary had lived here barely five weeks now, but one development was very like another, and in her seven years of marriage to Geoff she’d seen plenty of them. Geoff transferred frequently, spending six months here, eight months there, never as much as a year in any one location. It was a gypsyish life, but Mary didn’t mind: we’re just part of the new mobile generation, she told herself, and let it go at that.

All the stores in the shopping center were air-conditioned, but that only made it worse when Mary finally walked back across the griddle of a parking lot to the car. She thought of poor Geoff, working outdoors ’way over at Rolling Rancheros, and she vowed to make him an extra-special dinner tonight: London broil, a huge green salad, and iced coffee. In fact, she’d make up a big pot of iced coffee as soon as she got home.

But she didn’t get the chance. She’d barely finished putting the groceries away when the front doorbell sounded. She went to the living room, opened the door, and the man smiled, made a small bow, and said, “Mrs. Peters?”

He was about forty, very distinguished-looking, with a tiny Errol Flynn mustache and faint traces of gray at his temples. His dark suit fitted perfectly, and his black attaché case gleamed of expensive leather. He said, “I wonder if you could spare five minutes, or should I call back later?”

Mary frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t under—”

“Oh! You think I’m a salesman!” He laughed, but as though the joke were on himself, not on Mary. “I should have shown you my identification,” he said, and from his inside coat pocket took a long flat wallet of black leather. From it he plucked a card, and extended it to Mary, saying, “Merriweather. Universal Electric.”

The card was in laminated plastic, the printing in two colors. There was a photo of Mr. Merriweather, full face, and his signature underneath. The reverse side gave the office locations of Universal Electric in major cities.

Mr. Merriweather said, smiling, “You have heard of Universal Electric, I hope.”

“Oh, of course. I’ve seen your ads on television.”

Mr. Merriweather accepted his card back. “If you don’t have time now—”

“Oh, I have time. Come on in.”

“Thank you.” He wiped his feet on the mat, and entered. “What a lovely home!”

“Oh, not really. We just moved in last month and it’s still an awful mess.”

“Not at all, not at all! You have charming taste.”

They sat down, Mary in the armchair and Mr. Merriweather on the sofa, his attaché case beside him. He said, “May I ask what make of refrigerator you now have in your home?”

“It’s a Universal.”

“Wonderful.” He smiled again. “And how old is it?”

“I really don’t know — it came with the house.”

“I see. And a home freezer unit, do you have one of those?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, fine. You may be just the lady we’re looking for.” Taking his attaché case onto his lap, he opened it and began removing brightly colored sheets of glossy paper. “A part of our advertising campaign for—”

Now she was sure. “Excuse me,” she said, and got to her feet. Trying to smile normally and naturally, she said, “My groceries. I just got home from the store and nothing’s put away yet. Your talking about the refrigerator reminded me.”

“If you’d prefer that I come back la—”

“Oh, no.” No, she didn’t want to frighten him away. “This won’t take a minute,” she assured him. “I’ll just put the perishables away, and I’ll be right back.”

He got to his feet and smiled and bowed as she left the room.

Her heart was pounding furiously and her legs didn’t seem to want to work right. In the kitchen she went straight to the wall phone and dialed Operator, her hand trembling as she held the receiver to her ear. When the operator came on, Mary said, keeping her voice low, “I want the police, please. Hurry!”

It seemed to take forever, but finally a gruff male voice spoke, and Mary said. “My name is Mrs. Mary Peters, two-twelve Magnolia Court, Pleasant Park Estates. There’s a confidence man in my house.”

“A what?”

Didn’t this policeman watch television? “A confidence man,” she said. “He’s trying to get money from me under false pretenses. I’ll try to keep him here until you send somebody, but you’ll have to hurry.”

“In five minutes,” the policeman promised.

Mary hung up, wishing there was some way to call Geoff. Well, she’d just have to handle it herself. Generally speaking, confidence men avoided violence whenever they could, so she probably wasn’t in any direct physical danger; but you could never be sure. This one might be wanted for other more serious crimes as well, and in that case he might be very dangerous indeed.

Well, she’d started it, so she might as well see it through to the end. She took a deep breath, and went back to the living room.

Mr. Merriweather rose again, polite as ever. He now had the coffee table completely covered with glossy sheets of paper. She said, “I’m sorry I took so long, but I didn’t want any of the food to spoil.”

“Perfectly all right.” He settled himself on the sofa again and said, “As I was saying, Universal Electric is about to introduce a revolutionary new type of refrigerator-freezer, with an advertising campaign built around the concept of the satisfied user. We are placing this refrigerator-freezer in specially selected homes for a six months’ trial period, absolutely free, asking only that the housewife, if she loves this new product as much as we are convinced she will, give us an endorsement at the end of that time and permit us to use her statement and name and photograph in our advertising, both in magazines and on television.”

What would a housewife say who hadn’t seen through this fraud? Mary strove for a suitably astonished expression and said, “And you picked me?”

“Yes, we did. Now, here—” he pointed to one of the papers on the coffee table “—is the product. On the outside it looks like an ordinary refrigerator, but—”

“But how did you happen to pick me?” She knew it was a dangerous question to ask, but she couldn’t resist seeing how he would handle it. Besides, if she acted sufficiently naïve, there wouldn’t be any reason for him to get suspicious.

He smiled again, not at all suspicious, and said, “Actually, I didn’t pick you, Mrs. Peters. The names were chosen by an electronic computer at our home office. We are trying for a statistical cross-section of America.”

It was time to leave that, and become gullibly enthusiastic. She said, “And you really want to give me a refrigerator for six months?”

“Six months is the trial period. After that, you can either keep the unit in payment for your endorsement, or return it and take cash instead.”

“Well, it sounds absolutely fantastic! A brand-new refrigerator for nothing at all.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Peters,” he said, smiling, “we don’t expect to lose on this proposition. Advertising based on satisfied customers is far more effective than any other sort of campaign.” He flipped open a notebook. “May I put you down as willing?”

“Yes, of course. Who wouldn’t be willing?” And where in the world were the police?

He started to write, then suddenly cried, “Oh!” and looked stricken. “I’m so sorry, there’s something I forgot, something I should have told you before. As I explained, you have the option either to keep the unit or return it. Now, we want to be sure our trial users won’t harm the units in any way, so we do request a small damage deposit before delivery. The deposit is automatically refunded after the six months, unless you wish to return the unit and we find that it has been mistreated.”

Would the unsuspicious housewife become suspicious at this point? Mary wasn’t sure. But if she seemed too gullible, that might be just as bad as seeming too wary. So she said, guardedly, “I see.”

“I’ll give you a receipt for the deposit now,” he went on glibly, “and you show it when the unit is delivered. It’s just as simple as that.”

“How much is this damage deposit?”

“Ten dollars.” He smiled, saying, “You can see it’s merely an expression of good faith on your part. If the unit is mistreated, ten dollars will hardly cover its repair.”

“I’m not sure,” she said doubtfully. She had to act more wary now, if only to stall until the police got here. “Maybe I ought to talk it over with my husband first.”

“Certainly. Could you phone him at work? I do have to have your answer today. If you elect not to take the unit, I’ll have to contact our second choice in this area.”

“No, my husband works outdoors. I wish I could phone him.” There was nothing to do now but pay him the money and pray that the police would arrive in time. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

“Fine!”

“I’ll just get my purse.”

Mary went back to the kitchen and looked longingly at the telephone. Call the police again? No, they were surely on the way by now. She got her purse and returned to the living room.

It seemed to take no time at all to give him the money and get the receipt. Then he was rising, saying, “The unit should be delivered within three weeks.”

Desperately, she said, “Wouldn’t you like a glass of iced coffee before you go? It’s so hot out today.”

He was moving toward the door. “Thank you, but I’d better be getting back to the office. There’s still—”

The doorbell chimed.

Mary opened the door, and Mr. Merriweather walked into the arms of two uniformed policemen.

The next five minutes were hectic. Merriweather blustered and bluffed, but the policemen would have none of it. When Mary told them his line, they recognized it at once: complaints had been coming in from swindled housewives in the area for over a month. “There’s always a couple of these short-con artists working the suburbs,” one of the policemen said.

But Mr. Merriweather didn’t give up until one of the policemen suggested that they phone the local office of Universal Electric and verify his identification. At that, he collapsed like a deflated balloon. Turning to Mary, he said, “How? How did you know?”

“Women’s intuition,” she told him. “You just didn’t seem right to me.”

“That’s impossible,” he said. “What did I do wrong? How did you tumble to it?”

“Just women’s intuition,” she said.

The policemen took him away, shaking his head, and Mary went back to the kitchen and got started on dinner. She could hardly wait for Geoff to get home — to tell him about her day.

Geoff came in a little after five, his suit and white shirt limp and wrinkled. “What a scorcher,” he said. “If it keeps up like this, we’d better move north again.”

He pulled a handful of bills from his pockets, fives and tens, and dumped them on the dining-room table. As he counted them, he said, “How was your day?”

“Got rid of some of the competition,” she told him. “Guy working the Free Home Demonstration dodge. Get that grift off the table, I have to set it for dinner.”

1965

Stage Fright

Now, here was the room…

Armchairs at the sides, flanked by drum tables, and a green sofa in the middle of the carpet. A telephone on the end table beside the sofa, ashtrays on the drum tables, and magazines on the coffee table in front of the sofa. On the first wall, to the sofa’s right, a portrait of an angry-looking young blond woman in a breakaway frame. On the second wall, to the sofa’s left, a mirror smeared lightly with soap. On the third wall, behind the sofa, a glass-doored secretary containing books, this flanked by two tall windows through which could be seen a bit of formal garden and a lot of blue sky. There wasn’t any fourth wall; that was the curtain separating this room from the audience, who were now mumbling impatiently because it was twenty minutes to nine and the curtain hadn’t yet opened. And the curtain hadn’t yet opened because Heather Sanderson was lying on the sofa with her throat cut.

Sterling McCall and I wasted a good three and a half minutes arguing about who should go out and soothe the patrons, because somebody had to and neither of us wanted to. I thought he should because he was, after all, the producer, and he thought I should because I was, after all, the publicity and public relations man and this was, after all, public relations with a capital PR.

“Ling,” I said, “I can’t go out there, for God’s sake. I saw her, I’m still all shaken up.”

“Andy,” he said, “I can’t go out there, for God’s sake. You know how I stutter when I’m upset.” But he didn’t stutter when he was passing the buck.

And it didn’t help to have Bobbi Barten, her feral eyes all aglitter, interrupting all the time, telling us, “I could go on, Ling, you know that. You know that, Andy. We don’t have to cancel the show, I know it’s a terrible thing but I know the part, and you know what they say about The Show Must Go On. I mean, I am her understudy, and we could still go on.”

I give us both credit, Ling and I, we didn’t succumb. Ling didn’t want to have to give a lot of customers back a lot of money, and neither of us wanted to go out on stage and talk to the patrons, but we didn’t succumb. I said, “Forget it, Bobbi, this isn’t your big chance. There isn’t a Broadway producer in the house.”

She glowered, and sulked, and said, “I’m only trying to help,” and went back to her song and dance, while Ling and I continued to argue about who was going to go out there.

It was a foregone conclusion. I didn’t pay his salary. He did pay mine. So I went out from the wings, from where we’d been arguing by the light board, and walked along the strip of flooring between the edge of the drop cloth and the bottom of the curtain, not looking at the sofa, where Heather Sanderson, the girl in the painting in the breakaway frame, had now departed her own breakaway frame, leaving it behind with its throat cut.

You’ve always got to poke at the curtains to find where they meet, so you can get through. It looks funny out front maybe, but it doesn’t feel funny when you’re the one doing it. Particularly when you’ve got to stand there, poking at the curtain, with the body on the sofa seven feet behind you.

I got out there at last, just as some dimwit backstage dimmed the house lights. I turned my head and croaked, “Lights!” and a few patrons laughed. The lights came on again, and I said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my unfortunate duty to announce that the performance of A Sound, Of Distant Drums scheduled for tonight—” And so on.

I spent only a couple of minutes out there, not telling them about the body they weren’t seeing, only that the show was cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances beyond the control of the management and they would get their money back if they would make a line at the box office, and during the second minute there was a lot of rustling, as some of them yakked together and others of them got up and started out, to be first on line. As I was finishing, I heard the sirens coming out from town. They sounded to me exactly like fire engine sirens, even though I knew it was the police. I expected the audience any second to figure fire engines too, and get trampled in a rush or something, but they didn’t. Nobody really believes in real life drama, and thank God for small favors.

When I got off, I went through the wings and into the green room and collapsed in a wooden folding chair. I wiped my face with my show handkerchief, and Edna Stanton brought me a paper cup full of Mountain Valley water, from the cooler in the corner. She asked me if I had any idea who did it, and I told her I couldn’t begin to guess, which is the same thing I told a man named Detective Einstein ten minutes later, in the office upstairs over the lobby where the people were getting their money back and trying to figure what was going on. So I had to stay, and two by two the patrons left the Red Barn Theater and drove their cars back to Clinton, three miles down the pike.

That isn’t a very original name for a repertory summer stock theater, the Red Barn, but what are you going to do? We happened to be operating in a red barn, just like a lot of other summer stock outfits, and of course we had the same gag as them — the Red Ink Theater — because, same as them, we never made any money.

Face it, it’s impossible to run a repertory theater with less than twenty-five people, including actors and stagehands and business manager and set designer and director and stage manager and a lot of other people. So we did it with nineteen, and we lost money. That is, Sterling McCall lost money. That is, the local business types who backed Sterling McCall lost money. Except they ran free ads in the program, and the theater being there did attract vacationers to stick around overnight or a couple of days, so the local business types maybe didn’t lose money, either. On paper, everybody lost money.

But even so, this year we had a star. Heather Sanderson. By summer stock standards, she was a star. There are two kinds of people who are stars by summer stock standards. The first is the kind of person who never made it really big, but almost did, who once was second lead in an Alan Ladd movie or once was ingenue in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical on Broadway, the kind you may have heard of but you can’t remember their name. The second is the kind who made it very big, but lately they’ve been on the wane, and haven’t been doing very much on Broadway or television or in the movies in the last few years, the kind about whom you say, “What ever happened to Heather Sanderson?”

Nothing, that’s the trouble. Until now. Now, she had her throat cut.

Anyway, Heather Sanderson was this second kind of summer stock star. Back in New York, Ling knew a guy who knew a guy, or something like that, and dickering was arranged, and over her agent’s dying body Miss Heather Sanderson signed for the smaller chunk of a forty-sixty profit split. The agent was right; there weren’t going to be any profits.

Actually, the set-up we’ve got is pretty good, and we figure sooner or later it’s going to get itself a reputation like Eaglesmere or the Music Tent or the Dark Horse Players, and then we should make some loot out of it. In the meantime, it’s a good way to get a tan and three square during the summer, and a credit for the resume besides.

So we’ve got this farm. The land itself is turning back into woods and weeds, and we’ve got just the two buildings, which these local businessmen formed a committee and bought and lease to us for a dollar a year. There’s the farmhouse, where we all live, and the barn, which we converted into our theater. The seats are folding chairs and most of the stage lights are made out of tin cans and aluminum foil and the flies are jerrybuilt and never work right, but it’s a theater just the same, and we put on shows in it. Nineteen of us.

There’s Sterling McCall, who’s the producer and the business manager both, which is even more dangerous than it sounds, though I don’t suppose he steals as much as he could, which is something. And there’s me, Andy Pelliteri, publicity man and prop hustler and stagehand and occasional bit-parter. And Edna Stanton, who already mentioned, who’s secretary and ticket-taker and costume maker, the only local citizen in the crow, saddled simultaneously with the acting bug and a perpetually ailing widowed mother, and they’re the only reasons I don’t ask her to marry me, but either one of them would do. And hairy-chested Russ Barlow, light man and sound man and general technician. And non-chested Charlie Wilbe, set designer and set painter and carpenter. And Archer Marshall, phony director. And thirteen actors which, now that I think of it, is an unlucky number. Anyway, these thirteen actors spend their evenings performing this week’s play and their afternoons rehearsing next week’s play and their mornings swimming and sun-tanning at Berger’s Kill. Kill is a word in Dutch that mean creek. It is also, as we were dramatically reminded, a word in English.

I was the one found her. No, that’s wrong, I was the one noticed she was dead. She was a lush, you see. Maybe because she’d been on Mount Olympus and was now back in the valley with us mortals. Anyway, she was still conscientious, and she never missed a performance. She managed that by racking out on the set every afternoon, stewed to the nostrils, usually around three o’clock. At eight, half an hour before curtain, I would wake her. She’d totter away to the star’s dressing room — an eight by eight plywood partition, just like the other three — and put on her face and costume.

So she was there. The curtain was closed, and she was there on the sofa, and out front the rest of them had pushed the chairs out of the way and were rehearsing Love Among The Falling Stars, which was the play for next week. Edna Stanton, who was assistant director and carried the book, read Heather’s lines. At six, the rehearsal broke, and they put the chairs back in place and went oft for supper.

At eight, they were all in their dressing rooms, getting ready. The early arriving patrons were parking their cars on the pounded turf between the barn and the house. I left the green room and went through the wings and out on-stage — my steps muffled by the rug over the drop cloth — and went over to the sofa and shook Heather’s shoulder and said, “Eight o’clock, honey chile. Time for the trouper to shise and rine.”

Sometimes she was hard to wake up. This was one of the times. She was lying on her side, face pressed into the sofa back, knees bent, shoes off. I shook her again, yakking some more, and pulled her shoulder a bit, and saw the new red mouth in her neck.

When I hollered, Russ Barlow looked over from his light-board, where he was doing something or other, and he told me later that I was on my knees in front of the sofa, with a face like Hamlet’s father’s ghost. White, in other words. I don’t remember being on my knees, but I believe it. I believe I didn’t have the strength in my legs to stand up for a minute or two.

How long do you suppose fifteen minutes is? Sit in front of a clock and watch the second hand go around fifteen times, and it takes forever. Sit in front of a man with a gun, who promises to blow your head off in exactly fifteen minutes, and you barely have time to take a deep breath. All I know is it was fifteen minutes before we called the cops. In the meantime, everybody ran around and jabbered.

If I hadn’t hollered, we might have buttoned it up, just Russ and Ling and I maybe. But I hollered, and a couple of people came out from the green room, and went back and told the others. So everybody knew, and everybody talked, and nobody thought about calling the cops.

That’s not right. Not everybody knew. Seventeen people knew. But nobody at all thought to tell Edna Stanton. She was still out front, taking tickets, letting the people in. It wasn’t her fault; nobody told her.

At any rate, Ling finally thought of phoning the cops, which he did. He phoned the Clinton cops, and they said they’d be out in maybe half an hour, both cars were out right now. Clinton is a small town, seasonally swollen by vacationers.

And it was another fifteen minutes before any of us thought about the audience. By then, of course, it was after eight-thirty, and the patrons were all in their seats. Ling sent Nancy Stewart quick like a bunny to tell Edna to close shop, and then we fooled around a while, wondering what to do till the lawman came, and then we wasted three and a half minutes deciding who was going to break the news to the customers, and I lost.

I told all this to Detective Einstein, who wasn’t city police after all. The theater was outside the city limits, which the city cops had remembered in the nick of time, and they’d passed the buck on to the state police. So Detective Einstein was a plainclothes State Trooper, or something like that.

Anyway, he was a rat. I don’t have anything against police in general, but I have nothing good to say about Einstein. I told him the whole story, and I also told him that I personally had spent most of the afternoon in town with the station wagon, picking up some of the props for next week’s show, and then he said, “I hope, for your good as well as ours, that we find our murderer soon.”

I said, “Me, too.”

He said, “Because this theater is closed until our investigation is completed.”

He didn’t have to do that. Say nobody was supposed to leave the area, okay. Say nobody was supposed to touch anything on stage until the crime lab people — who showed up from Springfield a little before eleven — were finished with it, okay. Say everybody had to submit to a search, of his person and his room and his belongings, okay. Say everybody had to be available at all times for questioning, okay. But he didn’t have to close us.

What did he gain?

He gained nineteen people who wouldn’t have cooperated with him to drag him out of quicksand, that’s what he gained.

The only way I could figure, it was gratuitous nastiness, because he thought we were laughing at him. You run into that all the time. He thought we were all from New York, because we were actors and like that, and it’s a national phobia that people always think people from New York are laughing at them. Except in Chicago or Miami or Los Angeles, places like that, where they don’t care.

He was some detective. Right off the bat, he was wrong on two counts. We weren’t laughing at him. We weren’t laughing at him because one of us had been killed and we didn’t feel like laughing at all. And not a one of us had been born and raised in New York, though we all — except Edna Stanton — had gravitated there in our late teens or early twenties, to get involved with Theater. Most of the rest of them as actors. Me as a playwright. I probably have a snowball’s chance in you-know-where, but I own a portable typewriter and I type on it, so I’m a playwright. Which, naturally, is why I was off in the world’s south forty, playing publicity man.

Anyway, the theater was closed. Nobody was happy about it, with the possible exception of Einstein. We all got surly, and he called us all together the next morning and sat us in the audience’s chairs, and stood on the stage apron and talked to us about cooperation. Ling, who is not a coward, got to his feet and said cooperation was a two-way business, and how about opening the theater? And Einstein said, “As soon as our investigation is completed. If you people cooperate, it will be completed that much sooner.”

Ling’s theory was that Einstein was using the Army’s mass-punishment system. As though we knew who had killed Heather Sanderson, and he was punishing us all until somebody told him. Maybe so, maybe not. The point is, none of us had much faith in him as a detective.

So, when we had our own meeting in the living room of the farmhouse that afternoon, Ling suggested that it was more or less up to us to hand the good Captain (I speak sarcastically) the killer’s head on a silver salver. “It was one of us,” he said. “One of the eighteen in this room. I hate to say that — I hate to think it, even — but there it is.”

Jack Andrews, boy character actor, said, “Why does it have to be one of us? Why not somebody we don’t even know? Came up from New York, maybe.”

Ling said, “How did he get into the theater?”

That right there was the stickler. There are four entrances into the theater — through the lobby and through the scene dock and through the green room and through the back way onto the stage — and they’re kept locked. Five years ago, our first year up here, we had a lot of trouble with local vandals. Don’t let anybody ever tell you New York City breeds the worst kids. These little masters of high comedy out in the boondocks here would push a door open in the middle of the afternoon, throw a stink bomb — a smoldering strip of film, say — and run away giggling like mad, while we tried hopelessly to air the place before that evening’s performance. Things like that. So the doors are kept locked, all four of them, all the time. The lobby door is unlocked before a performance and locked again afterward. All nineteen of us, of course, have keys to at least one door.

So it was one of the group, one of the people we knew to have been in the theater, rehearsing, all afternoon. The actors were acting, the director was directing, Russ Barlow was working on his light board, Charlie Wilbe was working on next week’s set over in the scene dock, Ling was up in the office working on the books, and so on.

As it turned out, I was the only member of the group who wasn’t in the theater all afternoon. I picked up the station wagon at two-thirty, and went to town. I spent two hours returning last week’s props — since it was Monday — and two hours more picking up some of next week’s props, and didn’t get back to the theater till half past six. “Captain” Einstein had checked my alibi, and it was complete. I had spent a busy afternoon.

So Ling made me Chairman of the Committee on Grisly Evidence. I said, “No.”

Ling said, “Andy, you’re the only one. You’re the only one of us who couldn’t possibly have killed Heather. If I appoint anybody else, I just might be appointing the killer. That wouldn’t work out so well.”

“Why don’t you appoint yourself? You’re the boss around here, for God’s sake.”

“I might be the killer,” he said.

“Phooey.”

“All right, Andy, who’s your candidate for killer?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Then don’t say phooey, Chairman.”

So I was Chairman. I became resigned to the fact, and then I sent everybody else away and talked with Edna Stanton and Russ Barlow.

Barlow first:

Q: Where were you all afternoon?

A: Working on that unprintable lightboard.

Q: There are ladies present.

A: If she ain’t heard it before, she don’t know what it means.

Q: All right, never mind. Did you see Heather on the sofa?

A: Sure. I saw her go over there. She made an unprintable pass at me again, the dried-up old unprintable.

Q: What time was this?

A: Three o’clock. On the button.

Q: How do you know it was on the button?

A: Because I finally got the unprintable clock on the unprintable lightboard working at two minutes to three. I set the clock, see? Then she come staggering in, like always, and tried to rape me.

Q: And then she went over to the soft?

A: Like a tug in a heavy gale.

Q: And you spent the entire afternoon at the lightboard?

A: I had a couple head breaks. You know. And I went out and watched the rehearsal a while.

Q: Can you give me the times you were away from the lightboard?

A: I went away at three o’clock, right after she racked out on the sofa, and came back at three forty-two. The unprintable clock was still working.

Q: Did you leave there any other times?

A: A little after four, I went over to the scene dock and got a screwdriver from Charlie. The little one. Mine was too big.

Q: You said something about head breaks.

A: Yeah, two of them. The first one was at three o’clock, when I hung around out front and watched the rehearsal a while. The second one was at five-thirty. On the button again. And I got back at twenty-four minutes to six. I was watching that unprintable clock. You know it’s busted again?

Q: I didn’t know that.

A: I looked at it this morning. It conked out at midnight.

Q: But it was working right yesterday?

A: On the button. With my watch.

Q: And when you went to get the screwdriver from Charlie, in the scene dock?

A: A couple minutes after four. Say five after. And I wasn’t gone more’n two minutes.

Q: We’ll give it lots of leeway-Sometime between four o’clock and ten after, you were gone for two minutes. Right?

A: Right.

Q: Did that cop ask you these questions?

A: Not in so much detail.

Q: How do you mean?

A: He asked me where I was between three and six, and I told him by the lightboard. So he asked me if I was there every minute of the time, and I said no, I took a couple head breaks.

Q: That’s all? He didn’t get the times?

A: Nope.

Q: Then how the devil does he expect to get anywhere?

A: Don’t ask me. You know these unprintable cops.

So I thanked him, and sent him away, and said to Edna, “Now, we’ve got ourselves a timetable. That GP they brought in, calls himself a medical examiner, said she was killed no later than six o’clock. She got there at three. Russ was in plain view most of that time, so she had to be killed either between three and three-forty-two or between four and four-ten or between five-thirty and five-thirty-six.”

She said, “Unless Russ is lying, Andy.”

“Okay. If he’s lying, that means he did it himself. If we use his timetable and eliminate every other possibility, then it was him.”

She said, “I think you’re wonderful, Andy.”

So the great detective necked with a suspect a while. Although she wasn’t really a suspect. Not to me.

We were interrupted by Einstein, back to ask some more questions of his own. But still not the sensible ones. He was asking us about what we did for a living back in New York, and did we know Heather before this summer, and where we lived before New York, and things like that. Then he went away again, presumably to send teletypes all over the place and find out whether or not we were, as he suspected, a gang of desperate criminals posing as actors.

I went back to my own questioning, of Edna this time:

Q: When did this rehearsal start?

A: Two o’clock. Well, it was supposed to start at two o’clock.

Q: Everybody was late, I take it. As usual.

A: Some of the kids had gone off to Berger’s Kill in Archer’s car. They didn’t get back till almost two-thirty.

Q: You were holding the book, right?

A: That’s right. And the watch.

Q: Oh, god glory! A line rehearsal?

A: Sure. Monday, you know. We went through the whole play, for lines and timing.

Q: Starting when?

A: At twenty to three. And it ended at quarter to six.

Q: Get the master script, will you, honey? And lots of paper and pencil.

A: I was going to tell you all this before, but you started kissing me.

Q: I may do it again.

I did. But I waited till she brought back the master script.

A master script is something like a three-dimensional maze, with the Start at page one and the Finish three acts later. It’s made up by the assistant director, held by her during rehearsals, and shared by the stage manager and light man and sound man during performances.

Here’s the way it’s made up: The assistant director takes two copies of the script (acting version, from Samuel French) and cuts them up into their separate pages, then glues one page each to a sheet of loose-leaf filler paper. This bundle is then put, hopefully in proper order, into a filler. The assistant director marks, in pencil around each glued-in page, all of the director’s instructions for movement and stage business, with arrows to the appropriate actor and place. Light cues are added later, in blue pencil, and sound cues in red pencil. Line changes are made in pen. Pretty soon, the whole thing is impossible for anybody in the world to read, except a stage manager, who uses it as his Bible during each performance.

The master script of Love Among The Falling Stars, which Edna now brought me, was practically clean. There were a few line changes inked in, that was all, and tiny pencil notations at the beginning and ending of each scene. These pencil notes had been made yesterday afternoon by Edna, timing the rehearsal for pace. It had, as they always do, run overlong.

They’d started act one at twenty minutes to three, and had gone through the three scenes of that act without a break, finishing at twenty to four. That was when Russ had grown bored with watching, and had gone on back to his recalcitrant lightboard and his unprintable clock. Archer Marshall, phony director, had yakked at them about interpretation of various lines for fifteen minutes, and at five to four they had started act two, going through both scenes without a break and finishing at twenty-five to five. After ten minutes of directorial advice, and five minutes of head break, they had gone on to act three, from ten to five till quarter to six.

Number one: Russ had been at the lightboard during the entirety of both act breaks.

Number two: If it was one of the twelve actors who had killed Heather Sanderson, he or she had to do it during a period when he or she had no lines, the character not then being onstage.

Number three: In later questioning, the entire cast corroborated Edna’s alibi. She had taken no breaks at all during the entire afternoon, but had sat at all times on the stage apron, in front of the curtain, holding the ‘book’, the master script, timing the rehearsal and prompting people who forgot their lines.

Number four: Aside from the twelve actors, this left four other suspects; Archer Marshall, phony director; Sterling McCall, producer; Charlie Wilbe, set builder; and Russ Barlow, technician.

So. Edna and I decided to leave the actors for later and see if we could eliminate all four of the others at the outset. That evening, after supper and after Edna had driven her vintage Plymouth back into town and home and mother, I started questioning more suspects:

Charlie Wilbe:

Q: You were working on next week’s set all afternoon, Charlie?

A: Since nine o’clock in the morning. Jack Andrews and Ray Hennessy helped out in the morning, before lunch.

Q: But you worked alone all afternoon.

A: Sure. They was all rehears-in.

Q: What time did you start, in the afternoon?

A: Just about two, maybe a few minutes after.

Q: What work were you doing?

A: Fixin up a design for the set, mostly. Checkin to see what flats and doors and stairs I had around the dock, and puttin a design on paper.

Q: Was the scene dock door open or closed?

A: Open. You know how hot it gets in there, middle of the afternoon. No ventilation at all. One of these days, I’m goin to knock a window in the wall there, Ling or no Ling. I put it up high enough, nobody’s goin to get in from outside.

Q: Could you see the stage at all, from where you were working?

A: Part of the time. Up till maybe three-thirty, I was around and about in the dock there, cataloging what I had to work with, lumber and paint and muslin and the rest of it.

Q: And after three-thirty?

A: I was workin on paper, on the design. I pulled my little table over by the door, for the breeze, and sat there the whole time after that, right up to six o’clock.

Q: All right, now. Your scene dock is off the wings to stage-left, the opposite side from the green room and “the dressing rooms. And you were sitting in the doorway, looking out toward the stage. Could you see Russ Barlow?

A: Over there at the lightboard? Sure. He had a light playin right on him, where he was workin there. I don’t know if he could see me so good, inside the doorway like I was.

Q: Well, how much were you looking out at the stage? I mean, most of the time you were looking at the paper you were working on, weren’t you?

A: Maybe half and half. I’d keep lookin out there, visualizing the way the sets would go — we got a three-set show for next week, with set changes at the scene breaks, so I got to figure stuff with double-sided flats, swiveled on king pins, and stuff like that. I did a lot of lookin out at the stage, trying to see how it would all fit. I could look right through the double arch in the set on that side, and see the sofa and Russ both.

Q: And you didn’t see anyone else on-stage at all?

A: Not a one. I couldn’t see Heather on the sofa because of the angle.

Q: Well, would it have been possible for anyone to have walked out on stage, maybe out to the middle—

A: You mean kill Heather while I was sittin there? Not a chance. I was facin that way all the time, and lookin out every few seconds.

Number five: Russ’s story was corroborated by Charlie. This still left Charlie a suspect during the first act, but it also limited the time of the murder to before three-thirty.

Number six: When I went back and asked Charlie how much “Captain” Einstein had asked him, I got the same answer as from Russ. Einstein had wanted to know where he was, and if he’d been looking at the stage steadily for three hours, and a simple no was all the answer he stayed around for.

After Charlie, I questioned Archer Marshall, phony director, who smelled, as usual, of Kentucky’s finest:

Q: You were running a line rehearsal all afternoon, is that right?

A: Absolutely.

Q: You started the rehearsal at twenty to three?

A: I suppose it was something like that. I called the rehearsal for two o’clock, but you know the kind of cooperation I get around here.

Q: But everybody was present when you did get started?

A: In body, if not in mind.

Q: During the afternoon, I suppose people left the group from time to time, to go to the bathroom or whatever. Did you ever have to wait for somebody, who’d stayed away too long?

A: Oddly enough, no. But of course it was just the first rehearsal, so I suppose they weren’t bored with the show yet.

Q: Did you have to have someone read for somebody else who was absent at any time during the rehearsal?

A: That is one practice I refuse to have anything to do with, particularly in a line rehearsal.

Q: Well, Edna read for Heather, didn’t she?

A: Andy, you don’t want me to speak unkindly of the dead, do you?

Q: All right, never mind—

A: We could consider ourselves fortunate if Heather attended any rehearsals, but certainly not a line rehearsal.

Q: All right. Now, what about you? Did you leave the group at any time?

A: Oh, am I a suspect? Hew delightful.

Q: Did you?

A: Yes, I suppose I did. I imagine someone else w ill tell you if I don’t.

Q: Where did you go?

A: Over to the house a minute. I suppose I was gone five minutes in all.

Q: You left the theater completely? Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?

A: No. It locks automatically when you close it. I unlocked it when I came back, and then it locked again.

Q: What did you go over to the house for?

A: These questions are getting just a trifle personal, Andy. I don’t want you to think I murdered poor Heather, of course, but on the other hand you aren’t an official investigator, are you?

Q: All right, never mind that. Just tell me when you went over to the house.

A: When? To the minute? I really couldn’t say.

Q: During which act, then?

A: Oh, first act. Definitely. I couldn’t have lasted into the sec— Well. Is that all?

That was all. Marshall had gone over to the house for his bottle, of course. If he was telling the truth. On the other hand, he’d very conveniently gone after that bottle during the first act, which had been going on during the time span I was interested in.

Number seven: Archer Marshall was still a suspect.

After Archer, I questioned Ling:

Q: All I want to know is where you were between three and three-thirty yesterday afternoon.

A: You’ve got it narrowed down that much?

Q: I sure do.

A: Well, I’ll be derned. Good boy, Andy. I was in the office, upstairs over the lobby.

Q: Anybody with you?

A: Not a soul. Just me and the phone. That rang from time to time, but I wouldn’t know exactly when.

Q: You’ve got a window in the wall overlooking the auditorium. Did you spend any time looking through that window, watching the rehearsal going on?

A: You mean, did I see anybody slink away and go around the side toward the stage? Sony, Andy. I was at my desk all afternoon. Doing my own typing a lot of the time, in fact, since Archer stole Edna from me.

Q: Okay, Ling. Thanks.

A: If you’ve got it narrowed way down like this, Andy, down to a specific half-hour, you ought to go talk to Einstein.

Q: I want to hand him the killer on a platter.

A: Silver salver.

Q: I never pronounce that right.

A: Anyway, you ought to go to Einstein with what you’ve got. Really, Andy. Maybe it’ll get him on the stick. Besides, if you get too close, the killer may go after you.

Q: That’s a happy thought.

A: You talk to Einstein, Andy.

So I talked to Einstein. I had the suspects narrowed down to nine, half the original number. Of the nine now exonerated, I was one and so was Edna, Russ was fully accounted for, and six of the actors had parts sufficiently large in act one to preclude their leaving the group for any length of time. That left, still on my list of suspects, the other six actors, plus Charlie Wilbe and Ling and Archer Marshall.

I gave it all to Einstein, carefully and in detail, and he sat there behind his desk and just looked at me. No expression at all. He was a short and heavy man, well-jowled, and when he had no expression at all on his face he had no expression at all. Just a head, with smallish eyes and roundish nose and palish lips.

When I was finished, he nodded once and said, “Very cute. Very neat.”

“I just asked questions,” I told him. “I just asked around, that’s all.” I was feeling kind of smug, and proud of myself.

Then he said, “Now, you tell me just one thing more, my city-slicker friend.”

“What’s that?”

“Just why am I supposed to take your word for any of this?”

That one set me back. I stammered, “Well — well, you just — well, all you have to do is ask. Just ask everybody, the same as I did, and see if the stories check out or not.”

“Is that right? And why am I supposed to take their word for it?”

“Well, you’ve got to take somebody’s word!”

“Why?”

“For Pete’s sake, do you think we all did it together? Do you think it’s a great big scheme with eighteen people in it?”

“It’s possible,” he said. “It’s been known to happen.”

“You’re nuts,” I said, before I thought.

He flushed. “You watch your language,” he said. “You’re not in New York now.”

“I could tell that by the police procedure,” I told him. I said that after I thought. I didn’t care whether I got him mad or not, he’d got me mad.

“You just go on back to your the-ay-ter,” he said, “and let me handle the police procedure.”

“So you don’t care what I found out.”

“Not a particle.”

I got to my feet and left. But hanging around theater five years had made it impossible for me to leave anyplace without an exit line. I delivered it from the doorway: “I just want you to know something, Mister. We aren’t laughing at you because we’re from New York. We’re laughing at you because you’re such a lousy cop.

Which didn’t help matters at all, but I felt better.

Back at the farmhouse, I had a kitchen conference with Ling, over two cups of coffee. I told him what had happened between me and Einstein, and he shook his head and said, “We sure got a winner, Andy.”

“I noticed.”

“That’s what they do with the cops who don’t work out,” he said. “They can’t bump them off the force, because they’re on State Civil Service, and they never goof up enough to satisfy the regulations. So they’re ship-peel off to some backwoods corner of the state like Clinton, where nothing much ever happens so they can’t do too much harm.”

“This one’s doing a lot of harm,” I said. “This one’s lousing up our whole season. We’ve got six weeks to go this summer, and he may never let us open.”

“I wrote a friend of mine in New York,” Ling said. “A lawyer. Maybe he’ll know some way we can force Einstein to let us open up again.”

“That’s all we need,” I said. “A New York lawyer wandering around. Einstein would clap us in irons just to save face.”

“Let’s wait and see what my friend has to say. In the meantime, you tell everybody what happened, and tell them you’ve quit your amateur detecting.”

“Why quit? The only way we’ll open is to give Einstein the killer.”

“You don’t really have to quit if you don’t want, But you’re doing too good a job. If you keep poking around, the killer may figure you’re too dangerous to live.”

“So I tell everybody I’m quitting, and then I poke around on the sly.”

“If you want to. I know I wouldn’t. Why not hold off at least until my friend writes back?”

“If you say so.”

“It’s up to you, Andy. I just wouldn’t want to see you get your throat cut.”

“Neither would I.”

Edna came in, then, from town, and we exchanged information. I told her about my interview with “Captain” Einstein, and she told me about local opinion in town. Local opinion in town pretty much agreed with Einstein that we were a crazy bunch of beatniks from New York who’d ganged up to kill one of our number, and local opinion in town wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we came riding in with burning brands and set fire to the whole town one night. That’s the way beatniks were.

“That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all,” I said. “I’d like to see Clinton in flames.”

Edna said, “My mother doesn’t want me to come out here any more. She’s “afraid all you beatniks will murder me, too.”

“My plans are a little bit different from that,” I told her.

Ling got to his feet and said, “Okay, I can take a hint.”

After he left, Edna and I took her Plymouth out to a secluded section of Berger’s Kill and necked the afternoon away. It was a lot more fun than playing detective.

When we got back to the theater, it was suppertime. Edna stayed over, and afterwards I said, “Get the stopwatch from Ling and come on over to the theater. I want to check something out.”

She got it, and we went over, and turned on all the lights. Then Edna timed me with the stopwatch while I played murderer.

I sat in a chair in the first row of the audience. Edna sat on the stage apron, as beautiful as a new love, dressed in an old flannel shirt and faded blue jeans. Every once in a while, I’d look at her in a certain light or at a certain angle, and I’d think about the acting bug and the perpetually ailing mother, and they wouldn’t seem so all-fired important any more.

Well. Anyway. When she nodded to me, I got to my feet and sauntered away to the left. Then I ducked through the door beside the stage and up the steps past the prop room door to the green room. I turned right and crossed the green room, flanked by two dressing rooms on each side of me, and through the well-oiled soundproof door to the wings. The lightboard was just to my right. No one could come through this door without being seen by Russ, if he was working at the lightboard.

I tip-toed across the flooring to the edge of the drop cloth, and then I could walk naturally, the double thickness of drop cloth and carpet muffling my steps. I went over to where the sofa had been — the police had taken it away, apparently for further scrutiny — and stood there a few seconds, as long as I imagined it would take to stroke a sharp knife across a sleeping woman’s throat. The curtain was open today, and Edna watched me, glancing from time to time at her watch and smiling encouragingly.

Turning, I retraced my steps, came around through the wings and the green room and down the steps and through the door and back over to the same seat in the front row, where I’d started from. Edna thumbed the watch, studied it, and said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds.”

“I doubt he did it any faster than that,” I said, “and I bet he did it maybe a minute or two slower.”

Then she said, “What did you do with the knife?”

“What knife?”

“The knife you killed Heather with.”

“I wasn’t using any props, honey, I—” And that’s where it hit me.

She looked at me and grinned. “I can be a detective, too, Andy,” she said.

“And I can be a defective. You’re right, you’re right, forget the two minutes and seventeen seconds. The killer had to get rid of the knife. He had to pick up the knife, too, come to think of it.”

She bounced down from the apron and said, “It might still be here. If it was a good enough hiding place for right after the murder, it might be good enough forever.”

“I hope it isn’t that good. I looked up at the stage and around at the auditorium and said, “Well, where shall we begin?”

“The dressing rooms, I suppose.”

We searched the four dressing rooms, and we didn’t find anything. So we tried the prop room. The prop room is down underneath the stage, a long narrow low-ceilinged room formed when the stage platform was put in. It’s barely five feet high, and we keep all our permanent props down there. Permanent props are bric-a-brac and whatnot and thingamajigs and assorted white elephants that might come in handy some day.

I owned one of the four keys to the bolt-and-bar prop room door lock. The other three belonged to Ling and Archer and Russ. So I said to Edna, “if there’s something down here, like the knife for instance, it cuts our suspects down to two.”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “unlock the door, then, and let’s find out.”

So I unlocked the door, and dragged the heavy thing open, and led the way down the stairs. The only light was a bare bulb oh the wall beside the door, which I switched on on my way by.

It was dusty down there, and jam-packed full of junk. Edna took one side, and I took the other, and we searched for sharp implements not covered by dust.

We’d been looking maybe three minutes, when all of a sudden there was a shattering of glass and the light went out. I spun around, just in time to see and hear the door chunk closed. And then, in pitch blackness, the sound of the bar being dropped into place, and the lock-bolt slamming home.

And there we were.

You couldn’t see a thing in there, not a thing. The lone door was heavy and solid, and it fit into the jamb without a crack showing. There was even a step up at the threshold, against which the bottom edge of the door nestled as snug as lovers in a clinch. The walls on all four sides were simply wooden slats in front of concrete block foundation or packed earth. The ceiling was the reinforced floor of the stage.

Not only was there no light, there was no sound. Beneath the thick stage floor, with the addition of the drop cloth and carpet atop that, we were effectively muffled off from the world. We could hammer on the door if we wanted, but no one would hear us. The bar kept the door absolutely snug against the jamb, so there was no vibration. It was thick heavy wood, and when hit it gave off only a dull thud, which you could barely hear ten feet away.

In the first few seconds after the door slammed shut and the light went out, there was only silence and blackness and astonishment and terror. Then I heard a faint bumping sound to my left, and a trembling hand touched my arm, slid down it, grasped my hand.

I could hear her breathing, rapid shivering breaths. I reached out toward her, involuntarily straightening up, and cracked my head against the ceiling. I swore, and she started to giggle, and I grabbed her and held her tight, because the giggling wasn’t because anything was funny, it was just the prelude to screaming.

Gradually, the trembling left her body, and in the darkness I stroked her hair and murmured her name and silently cussed myself for a thousand different kinds of fool for letting her get into a spot like this.

He meant us to die here. The theater was closed, no one would be coming over for days, not until Einstein relented, and that wasn’t the most foreseeable of futures.

There was no food here. There was no light. And there was very little air.

We would suffocate in this dungeon before we’d starve. And we might go crazy and hurt ourselves in the darkness before that.

“Edna,” I whispered. “Sweet Edna. Darling. Edna.”

Gradually, she calmed, and finally she answered, whispering, “Andy! What are we going to do? Oh, Andy, what are we going to do?”

“Light,” I said. “Light first, and then we’ll be able to think better. I’m going to let you go now. Is it all right? Just for a second, I’ve got to find my matches.”

“All right,” she whispered. There was no need to whisper, but I understood why she did. I had to fight the same urge myself.

I released her, and took out my matches, and lit one. First, I smiled with what I hoped was reassurance at her pale face, and then I counted the matches still in the folder. Twelve.

“There ought to be candles down here,” I said. “Something that will burn, anyway. I’ll hold the match, you look.”

That was part of it, of course, part of the way to kill us. If we just stood there in the darkness, sooner or later we would die. So we had to act, we had to more. And every motion, every step, every movement of an end table or opening of a carton, swirled the dust into the air, choking us. Every match we lit — and every candle, if we found any — used up the air that much faster. Every act we made used up our energy and our strength that much sooner.

We found the packet of birthday cake candles on the tenth match, just as it was beginning to burn my fingers. I lit the eleventh, and we found a cracked china plate, and lit the candles, one by one, setting them in their own wax drippings on the plate. We lit four candles, and then we could see. With four candles left.

Birthday candles burn fast. In that stale dusty air, they also burned low. We were on the second four before I found two larger candles, stuffed away in the bottom of a carton beneath a lot of maroon drapery. They were large red Christmas candles. We lit one of them, and blew the little candles out, and then we looked around to see if there was any way to save ourselves.

To begin with. I hied to get more air into the room. There were a couple of rusty cavalry sabers down there. I took one of them and jabbed it down against the line where the door met the step. I finally managed to jam it down in, but when I applied leverage, trying to separate door and step just a fraction of an inch, the saber broke and I went reeling back down the stairs. So that wouldn’t work.

It was hot in there, and my mouth was already parched and dry. I couldn’t seem to get enough air in my lungs. Edna’s breathing was loud and ragged, and we were both stiff and cramped from having to stoop constantly under the low ceiling.

With the candle, I studied the door and the walls. The only place that seemed even remotely possible was the wall to either side of the stairwell. These two triangular sections were, with the door itself, the only part of the room above ground level. On the right side, the wall separated us from one of the dressing rooms. On the left side, it separated us from the auditorium.

The auditorium side was impossible. The proscenium wall, of which this was a part, was concrete block faced with plaster. That left the other side, leading to the dressing room.

The local businessmen who’d bought this place and paid for the conversion of it to a theater had done too damn good a job. They’d been afraid of a fire, or of the building collapsing, or any sort of disaster like that that would have reflected on them in the community. So the conversion had built solidly.

This wall separating us from the dressing room — separating us from life — was a three-quarter inch thickness of plywood nailed to two-by-four uprights and supports, with another three-quarter inch thickness of plywood on the other side forming the wall of the dressing room. And it was the only possibility.

I made Edna sit down, to conserve her strength, and I took the other saber and started to poke with it at the wall. I knew I couldn’t cut through the wood with a lousy tool like that, so what I tried to do was dig out the nails holding it to the two-by-fours. They were finishing nails, countersunk.

I kept at it and kept at it, and the saber was just too big and awkward. I threw it away in disgust finally, and Edna got to her feet, saying, “Should I look for something else? Something better?”

“Anything, for God’s sake. With a sharp point on it, and short enough to handle.”

We both searched, and I’d just run across a little wooden box containing lots of spools of thread and two pairs of scissors when Edna said, in a funny rising sort of a voice, “Andy?”

I looked over at her. She was staring at something in front of her. “What is it?”

“Andy, please?”

I went stumbling over doodads and whatsits to her side, and looked where she was looking.

Do you remember the Raggedy Ann doll, with the triangle eyes? There was Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy, and down among all the other junk in the prop room was a Raggedy Ann. Looking at it, for a minute I became Raggedy Andy.

There was a knife stuck in it, right through the body. And a couple of brown stains on the material just under the knife blade, as though the doll had bled. Raggedy Ann looked up at us with her black triangle eyes, and she had a knife stuck all the way through her.

“That’s it,” I said. Then I realized I’d whispered it. I cleared my throat and spoke aloud. “That’s what he used.”

“He was watching us,” she said. She looked at me, and her eyes were wide, and not triangle-shaped at all. “He watched and watched, and if we hadn’t come down in here he wouldn’t have bothered us.”

“He knew we’d find it.”

“Andy, my mother will start to worry, she’ll call the police. They’ll search for us, won’t they?”

“Not on your life. I’ll tell you just what he did when he left here, after he locked us in. He took the station wagon away and hid it, and if anybody says, ‘Where’s Edna?’ he’ll say, ‘I don’t know, and I haven’t seen Andy either.’ And everybody’ll say, ‘Those two crazy kids eloped, at a time like this, what do you think of that?’ ”

“They won’t even look for its.”

“Not here they won’t. They’ll look in New York, or in some state where there’s no waiting period to get married, but they won’t look in here.”

“Andy, I’m scared.”

“That’s two of us.” I remembered the scissors then, and went over and got them. “But we’ve still got a chance,” I said, showing them to her.

I went back to work. She insisted on helping me, using the other pair of scissors.

The scissors helped. Finishing nails have practically no head at all, but the scissors could grip them and give me at least a little leverage, once I’d dug some of the wood away. But whoever had done this job had loved hammering» nails. There were thousands of them, millions. Or at least it seemed that way.

The first candle gave out, and we lit the second. The room smelled like a decayed tooth. I felt dizzy, and there were green and yellow flashes at the corner of my eyes.

Edna fainted. I half-carried, half-dragged her down the steps and stretched her out on the floor. Her breathing was quick and jagged. I went back up and fought nails out of plywood with sewing scissors.

The second candle burned out, and we were in darkness again. I had less than half of the nails out. But the bottom corner, farthest from the door, was free. I went cautiously down the steps and pawed around in the blackness till I found the saber, and brought it back up the steps again. I closed my eyes against the dust, and by touch alone managed to slip the saber in between the corner of the plywood and the two-by-four. I pushed it in almost to the hilt, where the metal was thick and should be less prone to break. Then, with some leverage to help me, I tugged on the saber, trying to pry the plywood free.

The sound of squealing nails was then the most beautiful song in the world. I heaved on the saber, again and again, and each time the nails would squawk, and each time I edged the saber higher up the wall. I kept slamming my fingers between the saber handle and the wall corner, but I didn’t care. Not then. All I cared about was the beautiful sound those nails made.

I got it off. One huge chunk of plywood, millions of nails still sticking out of its other side. I wrestled it slowly down the stairs, afraid any second it would slip away from me and go crashing down onto Edna, but I finally got it tucked away to one side, and then I went back up and attacked the other side of the wall.

That was easier. I only had to push, with nothing beyond the plywood to hold it back. I sat on the top step, my back braced against the other wall, and kicked out with both feet until I saw light around the edges of the plywood, and then I kicked it even harder.

Air came in, that was the thing. Air and a touch of gray dim light, and for the first time I really thought there was a chance I might live through this.

And for the first time, I got mad at the beast that had locked us in here to die. Up till now, I’d been too worried about Edna, and too worried about myself, to have room for any other emotion. Now I had plenty of room. Plenty of room. And I needed every bit of it.

I kicked the wall down, and went crawling out to partial gloom. The theater lights were out, but there was a window in the green room, over the exit door, and daylight streamed through that, some of it finding its way into this dressing room, the door not completely closed.

I staggered to my feet and went stumbling out of the dressing room and out to the wings and the lightboard. I threw the master lever up, and every light in the place went on. Then I went back around to the prop room door and unlocked it, and carried Edna up out of there.

I left her on the sofa in the green room, still unconscious but breathing more regularly, and went back into the prop room and found the doll with the knife in it. He might even have been dumb enough to leave his fingerprints on the knife handle, so I carried it out by the doll’s left arm. I went out of the theater and around the building to the farmhouse. The sun was high. It was almost noon. We’d been in there fifteen hours.

Jack Andrews was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He looked at me in surprise and said, “Where the hell have you been? Where’s Edna?”

“Just listen to me,” I said. It was one of two, Ling or Archer.

But he said, “You married?”

“Do I look married? Listen to me, God damn it.”

He saw the Raggedy Ann I was carrying, then, and said, “What the hell is that?”

“Shut up, Jack. Just shut up, that’s all. You let me ask the questions, God damn it.”

“I just don’t—”

“Shut up! Now! Now, tell me, where did you go after supper last night?”

“Where did I—”

“Now stop that. Answer, don’t ask. Where did you go after supper last night?”

“Well— A bunch of us went into Clinton, to the movies.”

“Did Archer go?”

“No, it was just—”

“Did Ling go?”

“If you’ll let me talk, I’ll tell you who—”

“Did Ling go?”

“No, it was—”

“All right, never mind.”

He started asking questions again, and I went around him to the front of the house and upstairs. Ling and Archer, unlike the rest of us, had private rooms, facing each other down at the end of the hall.

I tried Archer first. I went storming into his room and found him sitting at his writing table, the bottle tilted up over his mouth. He ducked it down fast, spilling some, and glared at me, starting to spout things about knocking first, and I overrode him, saying, “I got about ten seconds, Archer. I want you to listen, and answer fast. Where did you go after supper last night?”

“Go? I didn’t go anywhere, I stayed right here.”

“In this room?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Well, of course. What in the world—”

I held the doll up by its arms, and showed it to him. “I think you’re it, Archer,” I said. “I’m going to Einstein with this, and this time I’m going to force him to listen. Your fingerprints may still be on this knife, but either way you don’t have any alibi for either time; and—”

“Either time? Now, wait, wait.”

“You wait, Archer.” I backed for the door. “Just wait for Einstein.”

“Wait, please. I wasn’t alone!”

I stopped, my hand on the knob. “What?”

“Bobbi Barten was with me. Ask her, she’ll tell you. I wasn’t going to bruit it around, Andy, you can understand that, but—”

He kept talking. I suppose he did, he would. But I wasn’t listening, because I was listening to something else. Somebody was running down the hallway.

I yanked open the door, and went after him. He’d been in his room, he’d heard me shouting at Archer, he’d come out in the hall to listen, and as soon as he’d heard Archer come up with an alibi he’d known it was all over.

“Ling!” I shouted, but he kept going. I could hear his footsteps going down the stairs.

I ran after him, and got to the head of the stairs just as the front door slammed. I went down, three at a time, and as I got to the front door I heard the sudden growl of Ling’s own car starting, the red MG he kept parked around at the side of the house.

I went down off the stoop and around to the side, and he came roaring straight at me, hunched over the wheel. I threw the Raggedy Ann at him, and jumped out of the way of the car just in time, and rolled over and over and sat up just in time to see the collision.

Einstein was arriving, just turning his official car off the road when Ling came barreling out from beside the house in the little MG, and they met head-on.

So Einstein got his man after all.

They both lived through it, and I’m sorry to say I can’t feel happy about either of them. But at least the accident hospitalized Einstein, and the state had to send up another man, who turned out to have a brain in his head.

It was Ling. In the hospital, he told how and why.

How: He looked down from his office window, and saw Russ watching the rehearsal, so the coast was clear. He’d started to kill her twice before, but somebody had been in sight both times. He got the knife out of his desk drawer, where he’d been keeping it for a couple of weeks, and went downstairs and out the front way and around to the green room entrance. He went in, and on-stage, and heard Charlie Wilbe wrestling flats around deep in the scene dock. He went over and cut her throat, and blood spurted unexpectedly, so he went down into the prop room and wiped his hands off with an old piece of drapery. He was mad at the blood being on his hands, and I guess that’s why he jabbed the knife into the Raggedy Ann. He left it there, hidden deep in with all the junk, figuring there was too much sharp weaponry down there anyway for one more or less to be suspect, and he’d gone back to work. While he was gone, the phone was off the hook, just in case any calls came in.

And why: That was in the contract in his desk drawer. He’d told us all it was a sixty-forty profit split he had with Heather Sanderson, and that was partially true. It was a sixty-forty split of the profits over and above Heather’s salary. And her salary was a thousand dollars a week, eleven thousand for the full season.

He’d been convinced her name would pack them in. He’d been wrong. At the end of the season, there wouldn’t be any profit. And there wouldn’t be any eleven thousand for Heather. Also in the contract was what she would get in lieu of salary. The theater.

So he was getting revenge, because she hadn’t fulfilled her promise to load the theater with customers. And he was saving the theater. He killed her the way he did because he had a refinement for his revenge: Her murder would publicize the theater. In death, she would draw the patrons as she hadn’t drawn them in life.

If he hadn’t tried to kill Edna and me, I would almost sympathize with him. Heather was a has-been and a lush, and she’d taken Ling for a ride.

As to why he’d suggested I play detective in the first place, the reason wasn’t exactly ego-building. He figured I couldn’t possibly learn anything dangerous, and I might inadvertently help by goofing things up and confusing the cops. At the very least, he hoped my eager-beaver amateur detecting would convince Einstein we were on the up-and-up, so he’d let us open the theater again. But when I started doing so much better than Einstein, and when I started searching the theater, he got rattled.

But there was, from it all, one happy conclusion. Edna could never convince her mother she’d been out all night only because someone had tried to murder her. When she got home, she found her bags packed, and her mother gave her the bit about never darken my door again.

So what could she do? She had to marry me.

Paid in Full

“Old bills,” I said. “I insist on that, they must be old bills.”

“Of course,” he murmured, smiling at me in that secretive way he affected. His face always looked hooded to me, remaining me of those blackout shields on automobile headlights in the war. With that face, with that smile, with that insinuating honeyed voice, no word he said could possibly sound sincere or truthful. But surely no one can lie all the time.

Most of what I knew of him I doubted. His name for instance, which he’d murmured was Sylvan Kelso, and which sounded too unlikely to be either the truth or a falsehood. His claimed feelings of friendliness for me, which I understood at once was artificial; I’ve had such buddies before, among insurance salesmen and candidates for minor political office. And the nation for which he claimed to be operating: Bulgaria! That couldn’t possibly be true.

The only truth of which I was sure was that he wished to buy from me what I was perfectly willing to sell. Willing, that is, if all my conditions were satisfactorily met, which is why we were meeting for the third time here in this dim bar in Arlington, not far from Chain Bridge.

“And small denomination,” I said to him now, as we sat crouched toward one another in the rear booth. “Nothing bigger than a twenty.”

“Ahh,” he said, “that will make a bulky package.”

“Not very,” I said. “Two packages, anyway. Half before, half after.”

“Your distrust, Mr. Stilmont,” he assured me in oiled tones, “is quite unnecessary.

“I’ve got to protect myself,” I told him.

“Of course you must. Certainly.”

“I don’t know you. I don’t know what you’re liable to pull.”

He spread doughy hands. “Not a thing, Mr. Stilmont,” he said, “I do assure you. After all, why should I do anything to offend you? This is merely our first transaction.”

“Our only transaction,” I said, somewhat bitterly. “You know as well as I do there’s only the one valuable file I have access to. Once the deal is done, I’m sold out.”

“Temporarily, Mr. Stilmont. But surely in the future, as you climb the ladder of success in government employment, additional occasions will arise when we can be of… profitable service to one another.”

I was about to tell him the answer to that one was also no, but at the last second refrained. If Kelso really did think I might be useful again in the future, so much the better; it would make him less likely to double-cross me or make trouble for me.

But whether he knew the truth about me or not, I surely knew the truth about myself. I had climbed the ladder of success in government employment as far as the Civil Service system could carry me. I hovered at the edge of the executive level now, and here I would hover until retirement. In order to attain the upper ranks in government service, it is necessary to have either one of two things: superlative ability or political influence. I had neither.

Why do you suppose I’d undertaken this transaction in the first place? Do you think I’m a traitor, a spy? Do you think I’m here by choice? Let me tell you something that the progression o your own life has perhaps not yet demonstrated to you. Expenditures increase. Year by year, decade by decade, house by house, job by job, expenditures gradually but unceasingly increase. So long as income also increases — so long, in fact, as one continues to advance in one’s occupation — all is well. But when income levels off, when one has ceased to advance in one’s occupation, then, my friends, all is Hell.

I won’t blame my wife, I won’t blame my children, and I won’t even blame myself. I am the victim, perhaps, of nothing more willful or malicious than a natural law, as though I’d been struck down by a slow lightning bolt.

Be that as it may, the end result of these inexorable economics was my presence here for the third time in a grimy neighborhood tavern with the stout man who called himself Sylvan Kelso, whose assurances rang with such a tinny click, that I was constantly on the verge of throwing over the whole thing, rushing home, and struggling along without the forty thousand dollars.

Well. I went over the points once more in my mind: Old bills. Small denominations. “Oh, yes,” I said. “One thing more. The most important of all.”

Kelso smiled like drawings of the moon. “Merely state it, Mr. Stilmont,” he murmured.

“No counterfeits,” I said. “I’ve heard of that stunt, don’t think I haven’t, people being paid off in counterfeit money smuggled into the country. I worked in the Treasury Department three years and believe me you can’t pass any phony money on me.” My having worked in the Treasury Department was true, but it hardly made me an expert on counterfeit bills; I’d been a file clerk, nothing more. So far as I know, I’ve never so much as seen a counterfeit bill in all my life.

But I was relying on Kelso’s not knowing these details, and apparently he did not, for he smiled more moonlike than ever and said, “Not a chance of it, my dear Stilmont, not the slightest chance. That was a German trick anyway, we wouldn’t do anything of that sort.”

“I just want you to know,” I said, “that I’m keeping my eyes open.”

“As you certainly should,” he declared, thumping his fat palm on the table. “A cautious man is a delight to do business with.”

“All right, then,” I said. “Now, what about payment?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said, lowering his voice, leaning toward me, “when you leave work, walk to the south-east corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street. Near the corner, on the 12th Street side, there will be parked a black taxicab with red lettering. The numeral seven will appear directly beneath the handle of the right front door. The taxi will be driven by a woman wearing an unusual hat.”

“All taxis in Washington,” I said, overstating it slightly, “are driven by women wearing unusual hats.”

“Then concentrate on the numeral seven,” he said. “You will enter this taxi, you will say ‘Dumbarton House, please,’ and the taxi will start off, with you in it.”

I said, “Dumbarton House? Where’s Dumbarton House?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “You won’t be going there. On the floor in back you will find an attaché case containing the first half-payment and the camera, plus a typewritten sheet of directions for the camera’s use. You will, taking care not to be seen by passersby, assure yourself of the genuineness of the money, and that it appears in the proper amount, and then you will read the camera instructions until you are certain you can operate the camera correctly. You will then hand the instruction sheet to the driver, and tell her where you wish to be driven.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all for tomorrow,” he said. “The next day, Friday, you will photograph the proper documents as agreed. Once again, after you leave work for the day, you will find the same taxicab waiting in the same place as before. You will enter it, bringing both the camera and the attaché case in which you received your first payment. Now empty, of course. You will be driven to a place where the film may be verified, and then you will take your second payment and go on with your life as though nothing at all had occurred.”

“I want more detail about that last part,” I said. “Where I turn over the camera and get my second payment.”

“Certainly,” he said. “As soon as we order another round of drinks. Barkeep! Two more vodka martinis.”

Well. We got our fresh drinks, and we went over the details of the transaction until I was satisfied, or at least prepared to settle for what I had. Then, understandably nervous and tense, I made my way to my home in Bethesda, downed some straight bourbon in the kitchen, and got into bed beside my sleeping wife. Since I had, in the last few years, developed the habit of spending an occasional evening at a local tavern, there was no excuse necessary; had my wife awakened, my breath would have been sufficient indication of my recent whereabouts.

I slept badly, awaking time after time from terrible dreams in which monsters chased me while I ran through walls of molasses, and at the breakfast table had to listen to a recital of unpaid bills. I drove to work as usual, left my car in its usual slot at the parking garage on E Street, and arrived at work with trembling hands and a splitting headache. All the gins of a hangover, one might say, except that I hadn’t drunk enough the night before to justify such strong symptoms. No, it wasn’t alcohol, it was worry and fear and doubt and shame and shaky determination.

A man does what he can with what he has. All I had of any value was one fairly unimportant national secret. That it was important enough to someone to earn me forty thousand dollars was my very good fortune, and I told myself again and again I’d be a fool to pass this by. Just once, in my lifetime, just once.

An apparently chance encounter had led me into all this in the first place, and of course it was not by chance, but a recital of its appearance and subsequent reality seems unnecessary here. Kelso contacted me, that is sufficient, and found in me someone willing to listen.

That day stretched like a taut rubber band, along which I crawled toward four-thirty an eternity away. Three times my duties took me near the cabinet in which the documents were filed. Harry, the archive guard, told me an unfunny joke about a bellydancer and an eel. We had known one another’s faces for years.

Four-thirty, at long last. I walked to Pennsylvania Avenue and 12th Street, found the cab, boarded it, was driven aimlessly around Washington while I checked and counted the money — all here, all old bills, all so beautiful to the eye and the hand — and while I familiarized myself with the camera. This camera gave the appearance of a cigarette lighter. It had to be held directly above the flat document, on which a strong light was to shine. The camera should be ten to twelve inches above the document. And so on.

“I’m done,” I said at last to the woman cabdriver in her unusual hat; berries and leaves, on black straw. “Take me to Universal Parking Garage at E Street.”

“The instruction sheet,” she said.

“Oh. Sorry.” I handed it to her, and she drove me to my car.

By the time I got home, the attaché case was safely stashed in the trunk. Late that night, after my wife had gone to sleep, I went out to the garage and transferred the cash to my coffee cans. For several years I have saved Maxwell House coffee cans, piling them up on a shelf above my workbench, using a few of them to store nails and washers and whatnot, vaguely convinced I’ll be using the others for something eventually. Well, now was that eventually. Into the coffee cans went the twenty thousand dollars, and back into the trunk went the empty attaché case.

The actual photographing of the documents was simplicity itself. I took the documents away to my office — Harry told me a racial joke — switched my desk lamp on, and took the pictures in quick succession, five of them. The documents were merely pages of figures, tabulations, specifications, dry as dirt and no doubt meaningless to most people. Essentially meaningless to me as well, although necessary to me from time to time in connection with my administrative duties.

The tiny camera, full of treasonous film, seemed hot in my trouser pocket, branding my thigh. All afternoon I kept holding my watch to my ear, unable to believe it hadn’t stopped. Was it only, was it only, was it only…?

Was it at last four-thirty? Thank God.

The same cab was there again, but this time as I entered it, carrying the empty attaché case, I discovered another passenger already occupying the far side of the rear seat. As I hesitated, he said, “Not to worry, Mr. Stilmont. I am merely to accompany you.”

He didn’t look dangerous. Quite the reverse, he was a pale and slender lad, the kind brought to mind by the word ‘effete.’ I slid in beside him and said, “Where’s the money?”

“On the seat beside our driver,” he said. “You can put that case on the floor there.”

I put the case on the floor, leaned forward, and saw an identical case on the front seat. I said, “I assume I can look at it now.”

“If I might have the camera,” he said.

“I’m glad to get rid of it.” I took it from my pocket and handed it to him. Then — we were in motion by now, darting through Washington traffic — I took the new case onto my lap, and determined that it contained twenty thousand dollars in genuine, old, small bills.

Wonderful, wonderful.

We stopped in front of an elderly boarding house on 8th Street NE. “Wait here,” said the young man, and left the cab, and went into the building.

In a way, I wanted to make conversation with the woman driver, merely to have the reassurance of the sound of voices, but in another way I felt as though I didn’t want to talk to anyone again.

I’d been over it and over it, rationalized it to the last detail. This information I was selling, this would help the opponents, the enemy, the other side — whoever and whatever they were — but only to a small extent, and surely to a degree easily counterbalanced by similar spy networks in their camp. What I had sold was not decisive. I would feel guilty about it the rest of my life, no doubt, but it would be a guilt of manageable size.

The woman, for her part, sat stolid and unmoving, gazing straight ahead through the windshield, her hands resting easily on the steering wheel.

After ten minutes or so, the young man appeared in the doorway, came trotting down the stairs, smiled at me, said to the woman, “Fine,” and went walking away.

The woman said, “Where to?”

“Universal Parking Garage,” I said.

That night I filled the rest of my coffee cans. On Saturday I purchased a new set of tires for my car, paying cash, and also bought a power saw. On Sunday, I took the family to a drive-in. Monday morning I phoned into the office that I was sick, and went shopping. I bought two suits, some other clothing, a decent fishing rod, a pair of sunglasses, and a case of good scotch. I deposited three hundred dollars in our checking account, went home, and explained to my wife I’d won a boxing pool in the office. This was to be my only splurge. From now on, my extra money would be inserted into my income ten, twenty, thirty dollars at a time. It would make the difference, all the difference, give us just that little extra to get us over the hump of our economic bind.

I was beginning to feel better than I had in years.

Tuesday evening they came and arrested me. State police, not Federal. They wouldn’t say a word to me, wouldn’t explain a thing, until they had me in an office surrounded by serious looking men in plain clothes. Then one of the — gray-haired, trim, a pipe smoker — said, “You seem to have come into bit of money all of a sudden, Mr. Stilmont.”

“Money?” I said.

He picked up some bills from the desk; old, small denominations. “You passed these bills Saturday,” he said, “at Ben Franklin Shopping Center. And these you deposited in your personal checking account just yesterday.”

“Counterfeit,” I said.

He said, “I beg your pardon?”

“They did it to me anyway,” I said. “That’s what I was afraid of all the time, counterfeit bills. But I thought, old bills, used bills, how could they be counterfeit? Did you get them, too? Just so you got them, too.”

He said, “I’m not entirely sure I understand, Mr. Stilmont.”

I said, “Those bills. They’re counterfeit, right? Just as I thought they would. That’s how you got onto me.”

“These bills,” he said, holding them up so I could see them, “are perfectly valid. Excellent bills.”

I said, “But—”

“These bills,” he said, “were part of the two hundred thousand dollar haul in the armored car robbery in Baltimore last Wednesday. The numbers of those bills were known, Mr. Stilmont.” He leaned toward me. “Now,” he said, “let’s talk about the rest of the money, Mr. Stilmont.”

The Spoils System

The “supine credulity” of man is said to be his most charming chracteristic; certainly the proponent of the “fast sell” must find it so.

It was in the catacombish club car of the Phoebe Snow, that crack passenger express that roars across the Southern Tier of the Empire State with the speed of an income tax refund, that I most recently met Judd Dooley, a man with a strong sense of family. He is named for his infamous grandfather, the Judd Dooley celebrated in song and wanted poster, the man who, with the aid of patent medicine, gold watch, and lost silver mine stock, opened the great Midwest to the rapid patter, the fast shuffle, and the quick getaway back around the tum of the century, a man sadly neglected by the television industry, which owes him a great deal.

The contemporary Judd Dooley is continuing the family tradition in a ceaseless barrage of non-violent outrages from Kennebunkport to Mexicali, and is usually good for a reminiscence or two on his latest depredations against a public which has grown no less puerile since Grandpa’s time.

Of course, there have been subtle differences in both the customer and the approach since Grandpa Dooley last foisted a genuine gold brick on a fatuous farmer in the bunco belt of the great Midwest. Judd tells me that today’s farmer is a much different cookie from the bucolic boob who supported his grandfather, and a much tougher cookie to crumble. But, says Judd, with a light of reverence in his eye, Grandpa would have felt right at home in today’s suburbia, where the modern housewife controls the income and the modern con man controls the outgo.

“I have just come from Cleveland,” Judd told me, as we sat over Scotch on the rocks while the Phoebe Snow struggled out of Binghamton, “a town with suburbs that would have made Grandpa cry with delight. I was plying the Free Home Demonstration gizmo through a split-level development when—”

“Free Home Demonstration gizmo? I don’t think I know it.”

“You don’t? It’s a little gem — the quickest fast-fin dodge since the invention of Something For Nothing. All it requires is a pocketful of forms, an identification card, an ingratiating smile and ten minutes of rapid chatter. The brand name involved is Electro-Tex Limited, and if the name sounds familiar, you’re half hooked already. The merchandise is a combination washer-dryer-television-radio-popup toaster-oven that retails for a stratospheric sum I won’t even mention. But the company is about to commence an intensive advertising campaign, built around the inane concept of the satisfied customer. Therefore, I have been sent around by the company to selected housewives to offer them a Free Home Demonstration, for a trial six week period, during which time they may have the Electro-Tex Push-Button Dew-It-Awl Wonder Whiz in their home, absolutely free, on the condition that we may use their name and a statement of satisfaction from them in our advertising.”

“I imagine Mrs. America is normally interested by this time,” I said.

“Interested? She couldn’t be more excited if I were giving her a season pass to the Garry Moore show and a two-week vacation for two in Saskatchewan. She is frothing at the mouth.”

“You’ve got her hooked, all right. But where does the swindle come in?”

“With all the wonders I am offering,” said Judd, “could anyone in the world quibble over a measly five-dollar damage deposit?”

“In advance, of course.”

“If I had to wait until after the merchandise showed up, I’d be riding on top of the train, not inside here in the warm. But, as I was saying, I was working this gizmo with great success and dodging the pedigreed hounds who infest suburbia like one of the plagues of Egypt, when I happened to spy a personable young man working the same side of the street and coming my way. His briefcase was black, bulging and polished to perfection. His eyes twinkled with bland sincerity behind a pair of black-rimmed spectacles, and his suit was so stark in its lines it’s a wonder he didn’t cut himself putting it on. Here, obviously, was another man in the same line of work.

“Not wanting either of us to create problems for the other, and since there were so many suburbs to choose from in the locality, I called to him, hoping we could work out an equitable distribution of the terrain.

“His name was Dan Miller, and he was perfectly agreeable to a division of spoils. Our occupations being what they are, we were both equipped with maps of the city, so we hunkered down on the sidewalk, surrounded by dogs, children and young men delivering ten cents-off coupons, and divided the city between us in the age-old manner of the conquering invader. We learned that we were staying at the same hotel, a second-class but clean ‘hustlery’ called the Warwick, and made a date to meet in the cocktail lounge to compare notes on our sectors for future use.”

I got to my feet. “Another Scotch?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “yes.”

When I returned with the Scotch, swaying a bit (only an inveterate seafarer could feel really at borne on the Phoebe Snow) I asked, “Was this Dan Miller working the Free Home Demonstration gizmo, too?”

“Thank you,” he said, reaching for the glass, a man with whom first things are always first. “No, he was collecting donations for the Citizen’s Committee to Keep Our Neighborhood Beautiful, with some magazine contest for the most beautiful neighborhood in the country as a tie-in. The donation games are all right, in a way, but I only work one when I’m really desperate. He’d have to do more talking per housewife for maybe a dollar donation than I had to do for a five-dollar damage deposit. Dan Miller looked to me like a boy who was building a stake. I’ve already got a couple of permanent dodges that give me a steady trickle of income, mail order things and other gimmicks along the same line, so I haven’t had to fall back on any of the smaller routines for a couple of years now.

“At any rate, I didn’t see Dan Miller for about a week, not until I was finished with my half of the territory. I don’t drink while I’m working, not even an after-dinner cocktail. It’s one of the rules Grandpa instilled in me, and I’ve never known Grandpa to be wrong yet. So I didn’t go to the cocktail lounge until a week later, when I had run out of territory and receipts.”

“Receipts?”

Judd nodded. “Another of Grandpa’s dictums,” he said. “Never leave a sucker empty-handed. Always give him something for his money, some little memento he can press between the leaves of the family bible, even if it’s just a little scrap of paper with Theodore Roosevelt’s signature scrawled on it.

“Well, as I was saying, when I’d completed my tour of Cleveland, I counted my gains and discovered I had damaged the Cleveland deposits to the tune of four thousand dollars. It was time for a celebration. I donned my money belt, a legacy from Grandpa, and went down to the cocktail lounge for a quiet toot.

“Dan Miller was there, happy as an early-morning disc jockey, and it turned out that he had just finished beautifying his half of the city to the tune of twenty-five hundred iron men. We had a congratulatory toast, and then Dan turned serious. He said, ‘Judd, what do you do with your admirable profits?’

“ ‘Spend it or bank it,’ I told him. ‘But mainly spend it.’

“He shook his head. ‘Bad business,’ he told me. ‘Think about your old age. You should invest it. A solid investment today will bring joy to your declining years.’

“For just a minute, I didn’t know what to say. Did Dan Miller think my declining years had set in already? Was he really going to try to sell me gold mine stock? It didn’t seem possible, so I said, ‘Dan, just what do you have in mind?’

“ ‘Uranium mine stock,’ he whispered. He leaned close to me, looking earnestly at me through his plain-glass spectacles. ‘I’ve been putting all of my cash into uranium stock for over a year now,’ he confided. ‘I’ve got over nine thousand dollars worth of stock. And it’s a reputable New York firm, one that’s been in business since the eighteen-fifties. Uranium stock just can’t go anywhere but up. The way I’m salting it away, I’ll be able to buy Long Island for my country estate when I retire.’

“ ‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I’ve never put much faith in stock, since I’ve sold a share or two myself from time to time.’

“ ‘This is legit,’ he insisted. ‘On the up and up. Come on up to my room, and I’ll show you their brochure.’

“More out of a professional interest in the competition than for any other reason, I joined Dan Miller successively in the lobby, an elevator and his room, where he bolted the door, drew the blinds, and slammed the transom before taking a whole sheaf of papers out of a battered suitcase.

“I looked it all over. The stock certificates were fancy things, all curlicues and whirligigs and gewgaws and whereases, and the brochure had been written by a man who could name his own price on Madison Avenue. The Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company really did things right.

“Dan hovered around me while I leafed through the evidence. ‘What do you think of it, Judd?’ he asked me.

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to admit it does look pretty good.’

“ ‘Can you think of a better or safer place for your money?’ he wanted to know.

“I had to admit I couldn’t.

“ ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘I was about to send them a telegram, telegraph my profits and tell them to send me a batch more shares. Why don’t we double up on the same telegram, send your money too, and tell them to add you to the list of stockholders?’

“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose that is the thing to do. It certainly does look like a better deal than three and a quarter percent interest at a bank.’

“So we went down to the Western Union office in the lobby, and I reached into my shirt and pulled three thousand dollars worth of damage deposits out of my money belt. We spent about half an hour getting the message down to fifteen words, then went back to the cocktail lounge to celebrate our good fortune, good sense and good security.”

Judd sipped musingly at his Scotch, and the silence was broken only by the clatter of the Phoebe Snow bucketing down a Sullivan County mountainside. Finally, I said, “Did you get the stock certificates?”

“Came just before I left Cleveland,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a bundle of stock certificates. He handed them over, and I studied them. To my unpracticed eye, they looked perfectly legitimate. But so did the Confederate money handed out in Wheaties boxes a few years back. I’m anything but a judge.

I gave the certificates back, saying, “Do you suppose they’re all right?”

“No,” he said. “They’re as phony as Dotto.”

“But — you pumped three thousand dollars into them!”

“There wasn’t much else I could do,” said Judd. He smiled rather sadly. “I couldn’t very well tell Dan Miller that the Navajo Squaw Uranium Development And Mining Company was one of my little projects, now could I?”

1966

Just One of Those Days

The bank robbery was planned to account for every last detail — except one.

Harry came into the motel room as I was putting my shoulder holster on. “Forget it, Ralph,” he said.

I looked at him. “Forget it? What do you mean, forget it?”

He took off his coat and tossed it on the hod. “The bank’s closed,” he said.

“It can’t be closed,” I said. “This is Tuesday.”

“Wrong,” he said. He flipped his automatic out of his holster and tossed it on the bed. “It ran be closed,” he said. “Everything can be closed. This is Griffin’s Day.”

“This is what’s Day?”

“Griffin’s,” he said. He shrugged out of his shoulder holster and tossed it on the bed. “Kenny Griffin’s Day,” he said.

“I give up,” I said. “What’s a Kenny Griffin?”

“Astronaut,” he said. He opened his shirt collar and tossed himself onto the bed. “Comes from this burg,” he said. “It’s his Homecoming Day. They’re having a big parade for him.”

“By the bank?” I asked.

“What difference?” He moved his automatic out from under his hip, adjusted his pillow, and shut his eyes. “The bank’s closed anyway,” he said.

I cocked my head, and from far away I heard band music. “Well, if that isn’t nice,” I said.

“They’re gonna give him the key to the city,” Harry said.

“That is real nice,” I said.

“Speeches, and little kids giving him Bowers.”

“That’s so nice I can’t stand it,” I said.

“He was in orbit,” Harry said.

“He should of stayed in orbit,” I said.

“So we’ll do it tomorrow,” said Harry.

“I know,” I said. “But it’s just irritating.”

It was more irritating to me than to Harry, because, after all, I was the planner. I hated it when a plan went wrong or had to be changed around, no matter how minor the change. Like planning a caper on Tuesday and having to do it on Wednesday instead. A small alteration, an unimportant shift, but we’d have to stay in this town one day longer than expected, which increased the chances of identification at some later date. We’d have to change our airline reservations, which maybe some smart clerk would think about afterwards. We’d show up at the Miami hotel a day late, which would tend to make us conspicuous there, too. Nothing vital, sure, nothing desperate, but it only takes a tiny leak to sink a mighty battleship. I remember reading that on a poster once when I was a kid, and it made a big impression on me.

I am the natural planner type. I had eased this bank and this town for three weeks before making my plan, and then for another five days after it was set. I worked out just the right method, the right time, the right getaway, the right everything.

The one thing I didn’t work out was one of those astronauts hailing from this town and deciding on my day he’ll come on hack again. As I later said to Harry, why couldn’t he of just phoned?

So we did it on Wednesday. We went to the bank at precisely two fifty-four, flipped the masks up over our faces, and announced, “This is a stick-up. Everybody freeze.”

Everybody froze. While I watched the people and the door, Harry went behind the counter and started filling the bag.

Actually, Wednesday worked just as well as Tuesday so far as the mechanics of the plan were concerned. On all three midweek days, Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, all but three of the bank employees were at lunch at two fifty-four p.m., having to take a later-than-normal lunch because the bank was at its busiest during usual lunch hours. On the days I had chocked it, there had never been any more than three customers here at this time, and the average had been only slightly over one. Today, for instance, there was just one, a small and elderly lady, who carried an umbrella despite the bright sun outside.

The rest of the plan would work as well on Wednesday as on Tuesday, too. The traffic lights I’d timed worked the same every day of the week, the plane schedule out at the airport was the same as yesterday and the traffic we could expect on the Belt Highway was no different, either. Still, I did hate to have things changed on me.

Harry was done filling the bag at one minute to three, which was a full minute ahead of time. We both stood by the door and waited and, when the second hand was done with its sweep once more, Harry put his gun away, flipped his mask off, picked up the hag and went out to where we’d parked the stolen Ford in front of the fire hydrant.

I now had 40 seconds. I was looking everywhere at once, at my watch, at the three employees and the little old lady customer ami at Harry out front in the Ford. If he didn’t manage to get it started in time, we’d have to wait another minute and ten seconds.

But he did. After 31 seconds, he gave me the sign. I nodded, let nine more seconds go by and dashed out of the bank. Eighteen running paces while I stuffed the gun away and stripped off the mask, and then I was in the car and it was rolling.

There was a traffic light at the corner. “Twenty-two miles an hour,” I said, looking at that light, seeing it red down there in front of us.

“I know,” said Harry. “Don’t worry, I know.”

The light turned green just as we reached the intersection. We sailed on through. I looked back, and saw people just erupting from the bank.

Midway down this block there was an alley on the right that led through to the next block. Harry made the turn, smooth and sweet, into a space hardly any wider than our car, and ahead of us was the MG. Harry hit the brakes, I grabbed the bag, and we jumped out of the Ford. Harry opened the Ford’s hood and grabbed a handful of wires and yanked. Then he shut the hood and ran to the MG.

I was already in it, putting on the beard and the sunglasses and the cap and the yellow turtleneek sweater. Harry put on his beard and sunglasses and beret and green sports jacket. He started the engine, I stared at the second hand of my watch.

“Five,” I said. “Four. Three. Two. One. Go!”

We shot out of the alley, turned left, made the light just before it went to red, turned right, made the lights perfectly for three blocks, then hit the Schuyler Avenue ramp to the Belt Highway.

“You watch the signs,” Harry said. “I’ll watch the traffic.”

“Naturally.” I said.

Almost every city has one of these bypass highways now, a belt that makes a complete circuit of the city. Not only can travelers passing through use it to avoid getting involved in city traffic, but local citizens can use it for high-speed routing from one part of the city to the other. This one, called the Belt Highway, was an elevated road all the way around, giving a fine view of the town and the countryside.

But it was neither the town nor the surrounding countryside I was interested in at the moment. Right now, my primary concern was the Airport Road exit. As Harry steered us through the light midweek afternoon traffic, I watched the signs.

One thing I have to admit, they did put up plenty of signs. Like for the first exit we came to, which was called Callisto Street Exit. First there was a sign that said, “Callisto Street Exit, ¼ Mile.” A little after that, there was a sign that said, “Callisto Street Exit, Keep Right.” And then finally, at the exit itself, a sign with an arrow pointing to the down-ramp at the words. “Callisto Street Exit.”

Of course, all of this was mostly geared for local citizens, so there wasn’t any sign telling you where Callisto Street itself might take you, but if you knew it was Callisto Street you wanted there wasn’t a chance in the world that you’d miss it.

Harry buzzed us along in the white MG, just exactly at the 50-mile-an-hour speed limit, and I watched the exits go by, with the standard three signs for each one: Woodford Road, Eagle Avenue, Griffin Road, Crowell Street, Five Mile Road, Esquire Avenue…

I looked at my watch. I said, “Harry, are you going too slow? You’re supposed to go fifty.”

Harry was insulted; he prides himself on being one of the best drivers in the business. “I am going fifty,” he said, and gestured for me to take a look at the speedometer myself.

But I was too intent on watching for signs. Airport Road I wanted, Airport Road. I said, “It shouldn’t be taking anywhere near this long, I know.”

“I’m doing fifty — and I been doing fifty.”

I looked at my watch, then back out at the highway. “Maybe the speedometer’s busted. Maybe you’re only doing forty.”

“I’m doing fifty,” Harry said. “I can tell. I know what fifty feels like, and I’m doing fifty.”

“If we miss that plane,” I said, “we’re in trouble.”

“We won’t miss it,” said Harry grimly, and hunched over the wheel.

“The cops will be asking questions all around the neighborhood back there now,” I said. “Sooner or later they’ll find somebody that saw this car come out of the alley. Sooner or later they’ll be looking for us in this car and with these descriptions.”

“You just watch the signs,” said Harry.

So I watched the signs. Remsen Avenue, DeWitt Boulevard, Green Meadow Park, Seventeenth Street, Glenwood Road, Powers Street…

Harry said, “You must of missed it.”

I said, “Impossible. I’ve read every sign. Every sign. Your speedometer’s off.”

“It isn’t.”

Earhart Street, Willoughby Lane, Firewall Avenue, Broad Street, Marigold Hill Road…

I looked at my watch. “Our plane just took off,” I said.

“You keep looking at your watch,” Harry said. “That’s how come you missed it.”

“I did not miss it,” I said.

“Here comes Schuyler Avenue again,” he said. “Isn’t that where we got on?”

“How did I miss it?” I cried. “Hurry, Harry! We’ll get it this time! They’ll have a plane going somewhere!”

Harry crouched over the steering wheel.

They stopped us halfway around the circuit again. Some smart cop had seen us — the description was out by now. of course — and radioed in, and they set up a nice little road block across their elevated highway, and we drove right around to it and stopped, and they put the arm on us.

As I was riding in the back of a police car, going in the opposite direction on the Belt now, I asked the detective I was handcuffed to, “Do you mind telling me what you did with Airport Road?”

He grinned at me and pointed out the window, saying, “There it is.”

The sign he pointed at said, “Griffin Road, ¼ Mile.”

I said, “Griffin Road? I want Airport Road.”

“That’s it,” he said. “We changed the name yesterday, in honor of Kenny Griffin. You know, the astronaut. We’re all real proud of Kenny around here.”

“I better not say anything against him then,” I said.

The Perils of the Sky Rangers

(as Curt Clark)

Once upon a time, when the world teas young and simple, and so were we, a kid could enter a theater on a Saturday afternoon and, after waiting impatiently through the two features and the three cartoons, be rewarded by that glorious fifteen minutes of death and destruction known to all as the Chapter. Today, a kid can get his cartoons on the television set, and the feature movies at his neighborhood theater are much the same as ever, but where in the world is he going to find himself a good ripsnorting Chapter? Nowhere. Nowhere.

Breathes there a man alive today who didn’t as a child stand up on his seat and cheer when, with a familiar brrrannggg, the latest episode of his favorite serial came flashing on the screen? If there is one at all, he’s probably the kid with glasses who always got A in geography. All red-blooded, red-eyed, bloodthirsty regular guys would no more miss their weekly Chapter that always closed with a cliff-hanging scene than tune out Tom Mix in favor of Just Plain Bill.

To all such fire-breathing boys now disguised as men, the following is dedicated. Everything is here: the fast cars and the slow thought processes, the secret panels in the walls of the apartment, the ka-pwing of revolver ricochets in a California canyon, the mysterious rays that burned gaping holes through strongest steel, the inspiring fist fights that knocked people out of action but never out of their hats, the sputtering rocket ships held up by thick black wires, the hero in his padded costume and the heroine in her padded shoulders, and the mad, mad villain who has escaped once more from his padded cell. All frantically hurled together in a world of evil evil and good good. No economy has been spared in bringing you this flashback into the glorious time when serials were better than movies, and Saturday afternoon was by far the most glorious lime of all…

Chapter 1

The Return of Doctor Gore

At Sky Ranger Headquarters high atop a peak in the North American Rockies. Commander Harlowe North calls into his office Captain Rip Storm and his faithful sidekick Happy Gibson, for briefing on a special assignment. North, through a confidential agent, has received a secret document suggesting that Doctor Gore, the villainous scientific genius whom they had thought to be dead at the conclusion of Kip Storm of the Sky Rangers (1954), is still alive and in league with a mysterious organization known only as The Society for the Destruction of the World. North instructs Rip and Happy to search from the air in the vicinity of the Grand Tetons, where it is believed Gore’s secret laboratory is located.

Upon leaving North’s office, the Sky Rangers encounter Sally Blair, girl reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, and her friend Daisy Bates. Sally, having received a tip that a big story is brewing, is determined to get air exclusive. The Sky Rangers, however, refuse to reveal the nature of their mission.

Stopping off at the headquarters laboratories, Rip and Happy learn that Leon Zolkin, scientist, has perfected a device which detects unusual ray activity. Since this would aid their search for Dr. Gore. Zolkin arranges to have the device installed in Rip’s rocket ship by Sky Ranger Mechanic Ray Webb, who is secretly in league with Gore.

Meanwhile, Sally and Daisy have returned to the newspaper, where Sally, after consulting her editor, determines to stow away on a Sky Ranger rocket ship.

At this moment, in his underground lair, Dr. Gore is greeting Vontz and Vera von Hendrich, agents of a foreign power which has been financing the doctor’s research into a new Destroying Ray in the expectation that Gore will turn it over to it on completion. The agents are angered by Gore’s apparent stalling on the unit, but the doctor informs them that he has perfected a small working model.

Interrupted by a call from Webb, Gore learns that the Sky Ranger rocket ship is even now proceeding toward his headquarters. Gore, seeing an opportunity to convince Vontz and Vera of his good intentions, offers to demonstrate his ray by blasting the rocket ship out of the sky.

In the meantime, Rip and Happy, unaware of Sally’s presence aboard, pilot their craft to the sector indicated by Commander North. Zolkin’s Ray Detector Device soon reveals that they have flown within range of a powerful but unknown electromagnetic force.

At this moment, a bolt from Gore’s device scores a direct hit on the Sky Ranger craft. Helpless, their ship out of control, Rip. Happy and Sally fall to their dooms below.

Chapter 2

Descending Doom

Searching for the hideout of the notorious Doctor Gore, Rip Storm and Happy Gibson find evidence of an electromagnetic ray in operation, when…

A bolt from Gore’s device scores a direct hit on the Sky Ranger craft. Helpless, their ship out of control, Rip, Happy and (unknown to them) Sally plunge earthward, the fuel tanks aflame. But at the last moment Rip, struggling with the controls, lands the ship safely in the lee of a ridge and out of sight of Gore’s remote television viewing device. Shaken, Rip and Happy succeed in extinguishing the blare before it gets out of control.

Meanwhile, at the laboratory, Vontz and Vera congratulate Gore on his genius and pledge their country’s continued aid. After their departure, The Destroyer, mysterious hooded leader of The Society for the Destruction of the World, enters with Lobo, Gore’s mindless henchman. It is revealed that the Destroying Ray is merely a front for Gore’s true work. He is developing a device which he calls the Mind-Freezing Ray which blots out the good in human beings, making them completely evil. Victims of this ray are subject to the will of Dr. Gore, and it is his intention to amass an army against the forces of justice and sanity.

Meantime, at the fallen rocket ship, Rip and Happy contact Sky Ranger Headquarters and inform North of the near disaster. Instructed to return to headquarters, they head toward the highway, unaware that Sally is lying unconscious in the cargo hold of their ship.

Gore, meanwhile, after The Destroyer’s departure, has sent a party of henchmen to recover the bodies of the Sky Rangers. Finding Sally alone, the henchmen blindfold her and return with her to Gore’s laboratory.

Upon reaching the highway, Rip and Happy are given a lift by a passing truck loaded with electronic equipment intended for Gore. Recognizing the nature of the apparatus, Rip and Happy overpower the driver and force him to reveal that his destination is the Museum of Tibetan Art and Culture in a nearby city. Unable to extract any further information, the Rangers turn the driver over to the Highway Police and proceed into town.

In the meantime, Dr. Gore has confronted Sally Blair in his secret hideaway. Telling her that she is valuable to him as bait, he outlines a plan to set a trap for the Sky Rangers that very night. At Gore’s instruction, Lobo and the henchmen take Sally to a warehouse in the city. Gore then sends a radio message on a Sky Ranger frequency telling of Sally’s whereabouts.

At the museum, meanwhile, Rip and Happy question J. Lyman Raucher, curator, who denies any knowledge of Dr. Gore or the machinery intended for the museum. Rip and Happy, dissatisfied, leave for Sky Ranger Headquarters.

Upon arrival, the rangers learn from Daisy Bates of Gore’s radio message and hurry away to rescue Sally at once.

At the warehouse, the Rangers find Sally on the top floor, bound to a chair. As they release her. Gore’s voice booms out from concealed speakers, informing them that their fate is sealed. Even now, the Destroying Ray is trained on the warehouse. There is no escape.

With the very walls around them beginning to glow and melt, the Rangers and Sally race to the elevator. As the car descends, the beam of the ray penetrates the shaft, severing the cable. The car plummets down the shaft with its doomed occupants as the warehouse collapses into white-hot ruins.

Chapter 3

Robot Deathtrap

Attempting to rescue Sally from the clutches of Dr. Gore, Kip and Happy walk into a trap at the old warehouse, and…

As the Destroying Ray melts the warehouse walls, Rip, Happy and Sally plummet down the elevator shaft when the ray’s beam severs the elevator cable.

Fortunately, safety springs at the bottom of the shaft cushion the fall of the elevator car. Moreover, the trio is now below street level and they are spared the full force of the ray as it destroys the building above them. Shaken but unhurt, the three crawl free of the ruins and proceed to Sky Ranger Headquarters.

Meanwhile, gloating over his apparent victory, Dr. Gore has informed Vontz and Vera that the Destroying Ray is now almost ready to be turned over to them. Upon completion of the doctor’s call, the agents discuss the true nature of their mission — to steal the completed ray from Gore and execute him with it. They are not aware that the doctor plans to double-cross them.

At his laboratory, Gore and The Destroyer decide that only Leon Zolkin stands in the way of their plans. Gore instructs Lobo to bring Ray Webb to a conference that evening, to which Vera von Hendrich, mysteriously, has also been invited.

In the meantime, at Sky Ranger Headquarters Commander North has devised a plan to infiltrate Gore’s mob. Sally agrees to have her paper release a story reporting the death of the trio in the warehouse disaster, thereby lulling Gore into a sense of false security. Rip and Happy, in disguise, will then join Gore’s mob and attempt to locate his hidden lair. This plan is not revealed to the Sky Ranger staff, since North is now convinced, because of Gore’s apparent knowledge of Ranger movements, that there is a spy at his headquarters.

Sally informs them that while Gore’s prisoner she overheard a henchman mention a rendezvous at the Wun Lo Asiatic Import Corporation, and Rip and Happy determine to seek the gang there.

That evening, at his secret lair, Gore meets with Vera, and it is revealed that she is, in reality, a counteragent working with the doctor against the foreign power represented by Vontz. She informs him of the nature of Vontz’s planned double cross, and Gore resolves to deal with him at the proper time. For the moment, the doctor, convinced that the scientist’s genius can be useful to him, is determined to capture Zolkin alive. Upon Webb’s arrival, Gore outlines his plan…

Sally, meanwhile, has contacted Daisy, and they have proceeded to the Museum of Tibetan Art and Culture. The girls are suspicious of the curator and suspect that somehow he is in league with Gore.

At this moment, Rip and Happy arrive at the Wun Lo offices with a set of dummy Sky Ranger blueprints provided by Zolkin. They wish to sell these plans directly to Dr. Gore and refuse to deal with subordinates. Wun leaves them in an outer room, contacts The Destroyer by radio, and is instructed to bring the two to his secret headquarters.

Sally and Daisy, in the meantime, have arrived at the museum and are attempting to force the lock on Curator Raucher’s private office, unaware that an electronic death trap awaits anyone entering the room.

By now Rip and Happy, still in disguise have met The Destroyer who, after agreeing to transport them to Gore, informs a henchman that these men are spies. He orders that they be killed at once. The disguised rangers are taken by car to the outskirts of town.

At the museum at that very moment, Sally and Daisy succeed in forcing the lock on Raucher’s office and enter, unaware of their danger. Instantly, a rain of electrical fire begins falling from the ceiling, cutting off their escape. They watch helpless as the death-fall sweeps toward them.

In the speeding car, meanwhile, a henchman holding Rip and Happy at gunpoint informs them their ruse has failed. Making a sudden lunge, Rip grapples for the gun, and in the struggle Happy and his adversary are thrown clear of the careening vehicle as, uncontrolled, the auto hurtles madly toward a power generating station. Still bearing the battling Rip and the remaining henchman, the vehicle smashes through a fence and directly into the certain doom of a million-volt high-tension terminal, which explodes in a shower of sparks around the plummeting death car.

Chapter 4

The Mask of Evil

Sally and Daisy have forced the lock on Raucher’s office, unaware of the deathtrap awaiting them, while Rip and Happy, their identities discovered, battle with The Destroyer’s men in the speeding car, and…

In the struggle, Happy and his adversary are thrown clear of the careening vehicle as, uncontrolled, the auto hurtles madly toward a power generating station. Still bearing the battling Rip and the remaining henchman, the vehicle smashes through a fence and directly into the certain doom of a million-volt high-tension terminal, which explodes in a shower of sparks around the plummeting death car.

As a result of the crash, an entire section of the city is blacked-Out, and the electronic death mechanism in Raucher’s office is cut off. Shaken, Sally and Daisy flee from the museum and return to the office of the newspaper.

At the power station, the car has jarred to a stop beyond the demolished terminal, and Rip and the henchman have survived the crash, owing to the protective steel of the auto body. A live-wire, however, is draped across the hood, and Rip, aware that to touch the frame of the car means sudden death, attempts to dissuade the henchman from doing so, but to no avail. The henchman opens the auto door and is instantaneously killed. His body, however, falls clear, leaving the door open, upon which Rip launches himself through the opening to safety, as the gas tank of the auto bursts into flame behind him.

Rack on the highway. Happy has been knocked unconscious by Gore’s henchman and is being taken by auto to the secret hideout of the master-fiend himself. A search of his pockets reveals his Locataspace Device, a standard Sky Ranger unit, which electronically pinpoints the location of the bearer, and the henchmen resolve to turn this mechanism over to Dr. Gore at the earliest opportunity.

Shortly after, Zolkin, the scientist, who has determined Rip’s whereabouts by tracking his Locataspace Device, arrives by rocket ship at the burning power station. The Locataspace Screen within the ship shows that Happy is in motion and drawing farther and farther away. Zolkin and Rip, convinced of Happy’s capture by Gore’s men, follow the progress of the signal to learn Gore’s secret hiding place.

However, when the henchmen and their captive reach the underground laboratory, Gore immediately recognizes the nature of the Locataspace Device and instructs the henchmen to take it by car to the Asiatic Import Corporation in the city. After their departure, Gore instructs Lobo to follow and destroy the car when it is a safe distance away, thereby deceiving the rangers as to the location of his laboratory. At the rocket ship, Rip and Zolkin, unaware of Gore’s ruse, continue to track what they believe to be Happy’s signal.

Vera, in the meantime, observed Sally and Daisy leaving the museum and conveys this information to The Destroyer, who is under the impression that she is a double-agent working for Gore and The Society for the Destruction of the World against the foreign power. In reality, however, Vera is a triple-agent, owing allegiance only to Dr. Gore, who intends to double-cross the Society when it can no longer be of use to him.

At the newspaper, later, Sally and Daisy receive a phone tip on the location of the Society’s headquarters and determine to track it down over their editor’s protests.

Back at the rocket ship, Rip and Zolkin note that the Locataspace Device is no longer transmitting and rocket oil in the direction of its last signal. Lobo is ahead of them, however, and has destroyed the speeding car containing it with an electronic grenade of Gore’s design. When the rocket ship arrives on the scene, Rip and Zolkin discover only smoking wreckage. Convinced that Ranger Happy has been killed, they return sadly in the ship to headquarters.

Meanwhile, in Gore’s laboratory, the Mind-Freezing Ray is being tested on its first victim — Happy Gibson. The test successful, Gore instructs Happy to return to Ranger Headquarters, seek out Rip Storm, and kill him. His mind warped by the doctor’s device. Ranger Happy agrees and departs on his treacherous mission. At this point, Vera, who has been following the movements of Sally and Daisy, radios Gore that the girls are seeking the Society’s secret meeting place. Since they are sure to be captured and killed by the group. Gore hastens away, determined that his plans for Sally Blair will not be foiled.

Sally and Daisy, meantime, have located the brownstone headquarters of the Society. They are discovered, however, and, in the confusion. Daisy escapes, but Sally is taken prisoner by The Destroyer. Confronted by the hooded villain, Sally makes a sudden boll for freedom and in the darkness fails to see a black and yawning pit. As she plunges headlong into the trap, Sally’s fate seems sealed.

Simultaneously, at Sky Ranger Headquarters the mind-frozen Happy seeks Rip out in the Ranger trophy room, where he threatens his former partner at gunpoint. Rip, also armed, pleads with Happy not to shoot, lest he be forced to defend himself. Defiant, his brain twisted by Gore’s evil device. Happy opens fire, whereupon Rip’s own gun barks out its message of death.

Chapter 5

Quadruple Jeopardy

Sally, discovered spying on The Destroyer, attempts to escape and plummets into a yawning pit, while, at Sky Hanger Headquarters, the mind-frozen Happy confronts his former partner Hip at gunpoint, and…

Rip, also armed, pleads with Happy not to shoot, lest he be forced to defend himself. Defiant, his brain twisted by Gore’s evil device, Happy opens fire, whereupon Rip’s own gun barks out its message of death.

Having seen a way to subdue his friend without harming him, Rip aims at the cables supporting a trophy rocket model, which falls, knocking Happy unconscious. Rip takes his fallen comrade to Zolkin, who immediately recognizes the nature of Happy’s condition and begins work on a counteracting ray. Ray Webb, overhearing the conversation, dashes off to radio Gore.

Meanwhile, at the Society’s headquarters, Sally is lying unconscious at the bottom of the pit. Gore, hurrying to the scene through a secret tunnel, enters at the bottom of the shaft and. finding the prone figure of Sally, bears her off to his hideout. Daisy, meantime, attempting to flee for help, is kidnapped by Vera, who takes the struggling girl to the Museum.

Back at Ranger Headquarters, Zolkin is slowly developing the device which he hopes will cure Happy. His progress is slow, and Rip waits worriedly as Zolkin attempts every means known to his science to bring Happy to his senses.

Meanwhile, Commander North, monitoring at Sky Ranger Communications Center, overhears Webb’s message to Gore. Knowing now the identity of the spy, the Commander hastens to Rip and Zolkin and informs them of Gore’s plan to capture the Sky Ranger scientist. Zolkin suggests that Gore be allowed to succeed, since the doctor seems to want him alive, as he would then be in a position to learn the nature of the doctor’s defenses. After discussion, Rip and North agree to the plan. Zolkin, however, is still determined to cure Happy before putting the scheme into effect.

At Gore’s hideout, Sally has been brought before the doctor and, angered by her capture, insults Gore to his face. Enraged, Gore instructs Lobo to put Sally to death in the lava pits below the laboratory.

At the museum, at this very moment, Daisy has managed to elude Vera long enough to get a call through to Ranger Headquarters. She informs Rip of Sally’s latest whereabouts and tells him the location of the Society’s meeting place. Before she can reveal her own location, however, Vera discovers her on the phone, and the connection is broken. The hapless girl is sealed in an airless sarcophagus by Vera, who informs her that the oxygen will not last more than an hour.

At Ranger Headquarters, meanwhile. Zolkin has discovered the antidote for the Mind-Freezing Ray. Rapidly instructing Rip in its use, Zolkin allows himself to be captured by Webb and taken to Gore’s hideout, leaving Rip to work on Happy. Shortly thereafter, Happy returns to his senses, and the Rangers immediately head for the headquarters of The Society for the Destruction of the World.

Sally, in the meantime, has been taken to the lava pits and is hanging by her heels over a pool of molten rock as an automatic mechanism slowly lowers her to certain doom.

Rip and Happy, arriving at the Society meeting-place, decide to split up for safety. Rip, going ahead, is discovered and captured and is brought before The Destroyer, who orders him executed. Happy, following dose behind, bursts into the room in time to see Rip chained to the wall in the path of a Death Ray Machine.

At the underground lair, meanwhile, Webb and Zolkin are confronted by Gore, who opens fire, thereby removing the last bit of hope for the doomed Sally’s rescue.

Chapter 6

The Final Reckoning

Daisy has been sealed in a suffocating sarcophagus by Vera, and Hip is tied helpless in the path of a Death Hay at the Destroyers hideout, while Zolkin, facing certain death from Dr. Core’s revolver, is unable to aid Sally, being slowly lowered helpless into a pit of molten lava, when…

Happy, seizing upon the momentary confusion caused by his sudden appearance in the room where Rip is chained to the wall, smashes the Death Ray Machine before its beam can reach Rip. The senior Ranger manages to release himself, and he and Happy battle furiously with the members of the Society for the Destruction of the World.

Meanwhile, at Core’s hidden lair, the doctor’s bullet has found the heart of Ray Webb, who, Gore explains to Zolkin, is no longer useful, now that his duplicity has been discovered. Gore then proposes that Zolkin make his scientific genius available to the doctor’s organization, which Zolkin agrees to do on the condition that no harm come to Sally, who, he is sure, is in the doctor’s clutches. Agreeing to this, Gore instructs Lobo to halt the mechanism that is lowering the helpless girl to her doom, which the mindless henchman succeeds in doing in the nick of time.

In the meantime, at the museum, a struggling Daisy has succeeded in unbalancing the sarcophagus by shifting her weight, and the heavy coffin falls to the floor, bursting open and releasing her. Quickly recovering from her ordeal, Daisy discovers a map in Raucher’s office which shows the precise location of Gore’s hideaway. She heads toward Sky Ranger Headquarters immediately with this invaluable information.

At the Society meeting place, meanwhile. Rip and Happy have almost completely succeeded in subduing all the members of the evil group. During the battle, Vera arrives, and, realizing that the Society has been exposed, sets a time-bomb before fleeing back to Gore. Rip and Happy fight their way clear of the building before the infernal mechanism detonates, demolishing the Society and all its members, save The Destroyer.

At Gore’s laboratory, at that very moment, Zolkin and the now released Sally are studying the Doctor’s fiendish Mind-Freezer. The Ranger scientist soon discovers the principle of its operation and conceives of a plan to render Gore powerless.

Rip and Happy, returning to headquarters, find Daisy in conference with Commander North and soon learn the whereabouts of Gore’s lair from the map she has stolen. Daisy also informs them that, by listening from within the sarcophagus to a phone call by Vera, she learned of Sally’s capture by Gore. North orders an immediate armada of rocket ships assembled for the final assault on Dr. Gore.

Vera, meanwhile, arrives at Gore’s hideout and informs him of the fate of the Society. It is her belief, however, that The Destroyer has escaped and could still seriously hinder their plans. Gore sweeps her objections away. The Mind-Freezer is now ready, and Dr. Gore needs help from no man. Nothing now can possibly stop his plan for the conquest of the world. Vera convinces him that Vontz, at least, should be liquidated, and he instructs her to bring the agent to the hidden lair.

At this moment, The Destroyer, his headquarters destroyed and all his henchmen dead, realizes that only Vera von Hendrich could have been responsible for this betrayal and that therefore she must be in league with Gore. He starts at once for the doctor’s mountain stronghold.

Vera, meanwhile, has succeeded in luring Vontz to Gore’s hideout with the information that the Destroying Ray is now complete and ready to be turned over to the foreign power. Upon their arrival, the treacherous Vontz holds Gore at gunpoint, but, unsuspecting, hands the gun to Vera, who immediately shoots Vontz, her one-time associate, dead. At this moment, however, The Destroyer, who has been listening to the conversation, leaps from concealment and grapples with Gore. In the resulting confusion, Vera effects her escape.

At that very moment, at Sky Ranger Headquarters, the armada is nearing readiness. Rip and Happy, concerned for the safety of Sally and Zolkin, are permitted by North to precede the sky force and attempt to penetrate Gore’s lair on foot.

Meanwhile, in Gore’s laboratory, Zolkin searches for a way to convert the Mind-Freezing Ray to his own purposes. While he studies the evil machine, Rip and Happy succeed in penetrating the stronghold. Before they can locate Gore, however, Zolkin succeeds in adapting the Mind-Freezer and switches it on. As modified by the Ranger scientist, the Mind-Freezing Ray now has the reverse effect on the minds of its subjects, repressing all the evil and bringing only the good to the surface.

At that moment, The Destroyer, now under the influence of the my, ceases fighting with Dr. Gore and unmasks himself as J. Lyman Raucher, curator of the Museum of Tibetan Art and Culture, Gore, unaffected by the modified ray, shoots the reformed Raucher down.

Rip and Happy, meanwhile, have reached Zolkin and Sally, and lead them to safety as the Ranger armada arrives. The underground fortress of Dr. Gore is emptying of his henchmen, now reformed and repentant due to the action of the reversed Mind-Freezing Ray.

With only the mindless Lobo still at his side, Gore, enraged beyond reason at the thwarting of his scheme, turns his Destroying Rayon at full power in a mad effort to annihilate the Sky Ranger force. Pushed beyond its power capacity, its tubes bursting and its wiring running into white-hot liquid, the ray machine explodes, destroying the secret lair, Lobo, and the insane Dr. Gore in a blinding flash of energy.

Shortly after, at Sky Ranger Headquarters, Rip and Happy receive a special citation from Commander North for their brave and fearless work, while Sally and Daisy look on proudly. Zolkin, meanwhile, is hard at work on a further version of the Mind Ray, one which will eventually extend its influence around the world, thereby assuring that the forces of evil will never again be able to threaten the Sky Rangers.

Domestic Intrigue

“Mrs. Carroll,” said the nasty man, “I happen to know that your husband is insanely jealous.”

I happened to know the same thing myself, and so there was nothing for me to do but agree. Robert was insanely jealous. “However,” I added, “I fail to see where that is any of your business.”

The nasty man smiled at me, nastily. “I’ll come to that,” he said.

“You entered this house,” I reminded him, “under the guise of taking some sort of survey. Yet you ask me no questions at all about my television viewing habits. On the contrary, you promptly begin to make comments about my personal life. I think it more than likely that you are a fraud.”

“Ah, madam,” he said, with that nasty smile of his, under that nasty little mustache, “of course I’m a fraud. Aren’t we all frauds, each in his — or her — own way?”

“I think,” I said, as icily as possible, “it would be best if you were to leave. At once.”

He made no move to get up from the sofa. In fact, he even spread out a bit more than before, acting as though at any instant he might kick off his shoes and take a nap. “If your husband,” he said lazily, “were to discover another man making love to you, there’s no doubt in my mind that Mr. Carroll would shoot the other man on the spot.”

Once again I had no choice but to agree, since Robert had more than once said the same thing to me, waving that great big pistol of his around and shouting, “If I ever see another man so much as kiss you, I’ll blow his brains out, I swear I will!”

Still, that was my cross to bear, and hardly a subject for idle chatter with perfect strangers who had sailed into my living room under false colors, and I said as much. “I don’t know where you got your information,” I went on, “and I don’t care. Nor do I care to discuss my private life with you. If you do not leave, I shall telephone the police at once.”

The nasty man smiled his nasty smile and said, “I don’t think you’ll call the police, Mrs. Carroll. You aren’t a stupid woman. I think you realize by now I’m here for a reason, and I think you’d like to know what that reason is. Am I right?”

He was right to an extent, to the extent that I had the uneasy feeling he knew even more about my private life than he’d already mentioned, possibly even more than Robert knew, but I was hardly anxious to hear him say the words that would confirm my suspicions, so I told him, “I find it unlikely that you could have anything to say to me that would interest me in the slightest.”

“I haven’t bored you so far,” he said, with a sudden crispness in his tone, and I saw that the indolent way he had of lounging on my sofa was pure pretense, that underneath he was sharp and hard and very self-aware. But this glimpse of his interior was as brief as it was startling; he slouched at once back into that infuriating pose of idleness and said, “Your husband carries that revolver of his everywhere, doesn’t he? A Colt Cobra, isn’t it? Thirty-eight caliber. Quite a fierce little gun.”

“My husband is in the jewelry business,” I said. “He very frequently carries on his person valuable gems or large amounts of money. He has a permit for the gun, because of the business he’s in.”

“Yes, indeed, I know all that.” He looked around admiringly and said, “And he does very well at it, too, doesn’t he?”

“You are beginning to bore me,” I said, and half-turned away. “I believe I’ll call the police now.”

Quietly, the nasty man said, “Poor William.”

I stopped. I turned around. I said, “What was that?”

“No longer bored?” Under the miserable mustache, he smiled once again his nasty smile.

I said, “Explain yourself!”

“You mean, why did I say, ‘Poor William’? I was merely thinking about what would happen to William if a Colt Cobra were pointed at him, and the trigger pulled, and a thirty-eight caliber bullet were to crash through his body.”

I suddenly felt faint. I took three steps to the left and rested my hands on the back of a chair. “What’s his last name?” I demanded, though the demand was somewhat nullified by the tremor in my voice. “William who?”

He looked at me, and again he gave me a glimpse of the steel within. He said, “Shall I really say the name, Mrs. Carroll? Is there more than one William in your life?”

“There are no Williams in my life,” I said, but despairingly, knowing now that this nasty man knew everything. But how? How?

“Then I must say the name,” he said. “William Car—”

“Stop!”

He smiled. His teeth were very even and very white and very sparkly. I hated them. He said softly, “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Carroll? You seem a bit pale.”

I moved around the chair I’d been holding for support, and settled into it, rather heavily and gracelessly. I said, “I don’t know when my husband will be home, he could be—”

“I do,” he said briskly. “Not before one-fifteen. He has appointments till one, and it’s at least a fifteen minute drive here from his last appointment.” He flickered back to indolence, saying lazily, “I come well prepared, you see, Mrs. Carroll.”

“So I see.”

“You are beginning,” he said, “to wonder what on Earth it is that I want. I seem to know so very much about you, and so far I have shown no interest in doing anything but talk. Isn’t that odd?”

From the alert and mocking expression on his face, I knew he required an answer, and so I said, “I suppose you can do what you want. It’s your party.”

“So it is. Mrs. Carroll, would you like to see your good friend William dead? Murdered? Shot down in cold blood?”

My own blood ran cold at the thought of it. William! My love! In all this bleak and brutal world, only one touch of tenderness, of beauty, of hope do I see, and that is William. If it weren’t for those stolen moments with William, how could I go on another minute with Robert?

If only it were William who was rich, rather than Robert. But William was poor, pitifully poor, and as he was a poet, it was unlikely he would ever be anything but poor. And as for me, I admit that I was spoiled, that the thought of giving up the comforts and luxuries which Robert’s money could bring me made me blanch just as much as the thought of giving up William. I needed them both in equal urgency; William’s love and Robert’s money.

The nasty man, having waited in vain for me to answer his rhetorical question, at last said, “I can see you would not like it. William is important to you.”

“Yes,” I said, or whispered, unable to keep from confessing it. “Oh, yes, he is.”

Until William, I had thought that all men were beasts. My mother — bless her soul — had said constantly that all men were beasts, all through my adolescence, after my father disappeared, and I had come to maturity firmly believing that she was right. I had married Robert even though I’d known he was a beast, but simply because I had believed there was no choice in the matter, that one married a beast or one didn’t marry at all. And Robert did have the advantage of being rich.

But now I had found William, and I had found true love, and I had learned what my mother never knew; that not all men are beasts. Almost all, yes, but not entirely all. Here and there one can find the beautiful exception. Like William. But not, obviously, like this nasty man in front of me. I would have needed none of my mother’s training to know that this man was a beast. Perhaps, in his own cunning way, an even worse beast than brutal and blustering Robert. Perhaps, in his own way, even more dangerous.

I said, “What is it you want from me?”

“Oh, my dear lady,” he protested, “I want from you? Not a thing, I assure you. It is what you want from me.”

I stared at him. I said, “I don’t understand. What could I possibly want from you?”

As quickly as a striking snake, his hand slid within his jacket, slid out again with a long blank white envelope, and flipped it through the air to land in my lap. “These,” he said. “Take a look at them.”

I opened the envelope. I took out the pictures. I looked at them, and I began to feel my face go flaming red.

I recognized the room in the pictures, remembered that motel. The faces were clear in every one of the photographs.

“What you’ll want,” said the nasty man, smiling triumphantly, “is the negatives.”

I whispered, “You mean, you’ll show these to my husband?”

“Oh, I would much rather not. Wouldn’t you like to have them for yourself? The prints and the negatives?”

“How much?”

“Well, I really hadn’t thought,” he said, smiling and smiling. “I’d rather leave that up to you. How much would you say they are worth to you, Mrs. Carroll?”

I looked at the photos again, and something seemed to go click in my mind. I said, “I believe I’m going to faint,” Then my eyes closed, and I fell off the chair onto the floor.

He had a great deal of difficulty awaking me, patting my cheeks and chafing my hands, and when at last I opened my eyes, I saw that he was no longer smiling, but was looking very worried.

“Mrs. Carroll,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“My heart,” I whispered. “I have a weak heart.” It was untrue, but it seemed a lie that might prove useful.

It did already. He looked more worried than ever, and backed away from me, looking down at me lying on the floor and saying, “Don’t excite yourself, Mrs. Carroll. Don’t get yourself all upset. We can work this out.”

“Not now,” I whispered. “Please.” I passed a hand across my eyes. “I must rest. Call me. Telephone me, I’ll meet you somewhere.”

“Yes, of course. Of course.”

“Call me this evening. At six.”

“Yes.”

“Say your name is Boris.”

“Boris,” he repeated. “Yes, I will.” Hastily he retrieved the fallen photos. “Call at six,” he said, and dashed out of the house.

I got to my feet, brushed off my toreadors, and went to phone William. “Darling,” I said.

“Darling!” he cried.

“My love.”

“Oh, my heart, my sweet, my rapture!”

“Darling, I must—”

“Darling! Darling! Darling!”

“Yes, sweetheart, thank you, that’s all very—”

“My life, my love, my all!”

“William!”

There was a stunned silence, and then his voice said, faintly, “Yes, Mona?”

There were advantages to having a poet for a lover, but there were also disadvantages, such as a certain difficulty in attracting his attention sometimes.

But I had his attention now. I said, “William, I won’t be able to see you tonight.”

“Ob, sweetheart!”

“I’m sorry, William, believe me I am, but something just came up.”

“Is it—” his voice lowered to a whisper, “—is it him?”

He meant Robert. I said, “No, dear, not exactly. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

“Shall I see you tomorrow?”

“Of course. At the Museum. At noon.”

“Ah, my love, the hours shall have broken wings.”

“Yes, dear.”

With some difficulty I managed to end the conversation. I then took the other car, the Thunderbird, and drove to the shopping center. In the drugstore there I purchased a large and foul-looking cigar, and in the Mister-Master Men’s Wear Shoppe I bought a rather loud and crude necktie.

I returned to the house, lit the cigar, and found that it tasted even worse than I had anticipated. Still, it was all in a good cause. I went upstairs, puffing away at the cigar, and draped the necktie over the doorknob of the closet door in my bedroom. I then went back to the first floor, left a conspicuous gray cone of cigar ash in the ashtray beside Robert’s favorite chair, puffed away until the room was full of cigar smoke and I felt my flesh beginning to turn green, and then tottered out to the kitchen. I doused the cigar under the cold water at the kitchen sink, stuffed it down out of sight in the rubbish bag, and went away to take two Alka-Seltzer and lie down.

By one-fifteen, when Robert came bounding home, I was recovered and was in the kitchen thawing lunch. “My love!” roared Robert, and crushed me in his arms.

That was the difference right there. William would have put the accent on the other word.

I suffered his attentions, as I always did, and then he went away to read the morning paper in the living room while I finished preparing lunch.

When he came to the table he seemed somewhat more subdued than usual. He ate lunch in silence, with the exception of one question, asked with an apparent attempt at casualness: “Umm, darling, did you have any visitors today?”

I dropped my spoon into my soup. “Oh! Wasn’t that clumsy! What did you say, dear?”

His eyes narrowed. “I asked you, did you have any visitors today?”

“Visitors? Why… why, no, dear.” I gave a guilty sort of little laugh. “What makes you ask, sweetheart?”

“Nothing,” he said, and ate his soup.

After lunch he said, “I have time for a nap today. Wake me at three, will you?”

“Of course, dear.”

I woke him at three. He said he’d be home by five-thirty, and left. I checked, and the crude necktie was no longer hanging on the doorknob in my bedroom.

When Robert came home at five-thirty he was even quieter than before. I caught him watching me several times, and each time I gave a nervous start and a guilty little laugh and went into some other room.

I was in the kitchen at six o’clock, when the phone rang.

“I’ll get it, dear!” I shouted. “It’s all right, dear! I’ll get it! I’ll get it!”

I picked up the phone and said hello and the nasty man’s voice said, “This is Boris.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, keeping my voice low.

“Can we talk?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t your husband home?”

“It’s all right, he’s in the living room, he can’t hear me. I want to meet you tonight, to discuss things.” I gave a heavy emphasis to that word, and put just a touch of throatiness into my voice.

He gave his nasty laugh and said, “Whenever you say, dear lady. I take it you’re recovered from this afternoon?”

“Oh, yes. It was just tremors. But listen, here’s how we’ll meet. You take a room at the Flyaway Motel, under the name of Clark. I’ll—”

“Take a room?”

“We’ll have a lot to — talk about. Don’t worry, I’ll pay for the room.”

“Well,” he said, “in that case…”

“I’ll try to be there,” I said, “as soon after nine as possible. Wait for me.”

“All right, M—”

“I must hang up,” I said hastily, before he could call me Mrs. Carroll. I broke the connection, went into the living room, and found Robert standing near the extension phone in there. I said, “Dinner will be ready soon, dear.”

“Any time, darling,” he said. His voice seemed somewhat strangled. He seemed to be under something of a strain.

Dinner was a silent affair, though I tried to make small talk without much success. Afterward, Robert sat in the living room and read the evening paper.

I walked into the living room at five minutes to nine, wearing my suede jacket. “I have to go out for a while, dear.”

He seemed to control himself with difficulty. “Where to, dear?”

“The drugstore. I need nail polish remover.”

“Oh, yes,” he said.

I went out and got into the Thunderbird. As I drove away I saw the lights go on in my bedroom.

If it was nail polish remover Robert was looking for, he’d have little trouble finding it. There was a nearly full bottle with my other cosmetics on the vanity table.

I drove at moderate speeds, arriving at the Flyaway Motel at ten minutes past nine. “I’m Mrs. Clark,” I told the man at the desk “Could you tell me which unit my husband is in?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He checked his register and said, “Six.”

“Thank you.”

Walking across the gravel toward unit 6, I thought it all out again, as it had come to me in a flash of inspiration this afternoon just before I had had my ‘faint’. The idea that I could have Robert’s money without necessarily having to have Robert along with it had never occurred to me before. But now it had, and I liked it. To have Robert’s money without having Robert meant I could have William!

What a combination! William and Robert’s money! My step was light as I approached unit 6.

The nasty man opened the door to my knock. He seemed somewhat nervous. “Come on in, Mrs. Carroll.”

As I went in, I glanced back and saw an automobile just turning into the motel driveway. Was that a Lincoln? A blue Lincoln?

The nasty man shut and locked the door, but I said, “None of that. Unlock that door.”

“Don’t worry about me, lady,” he said, grinning nastily. “All I want from you is your money.” Nevertheless, he unlocked the door again.

“Fine,” I said. I took off my suede jacket.

“Now,” he said, coming across the room, rubbing his hands together, “to get to business.”

“Of course,” I said. I took off my blouse.

He blinked at me. He said, “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” I told him, and unzipped my toreadors.

His eyes widened and he waved his hands at me, shouting, “Don’t do that! You got it all wrong, don’t do that!”

“I don’t believe I have it wrong,” I said, and stepped out of the toreadors.

With utter panic and bewilderment, the nasty man said, “But William said you’d—” And stopped.

We both stopped. I stared at the nasty man in sudden comprehension. All at once I understood how it was he had known so much about me, how it had been possible for him to take those pictures.

So William couldn’t live on the amount I gave him willingly. Mother was right, all men are beasts.

As I stood there, trying to get used to this new realization, the door burst open and Robert came bellowing in, waving that huge and ugly pistol of his.

I still wasn’t recovered from my shock. To think, to think I’d been trying to save William from being killed, to think I’d been willing to sacrifice both Robert and the nasty man for William’s sake. And all the time, all the time, William had betrayed me.

But then I did recover from the shock, and fast, because I saw that Robert had stopped his enraged bellowing and was glaring at me. At me. And pointing that filthy pistol at me.

At me.

“Not me!” I cried, and pointed at the nasty man. “Him! Him!”

The first shot buzzed past my ear and smashed the glass over the woodland painting above the bed.

I ran left, I ran right. The nasty man cowered behind the dresser. Robert’s second shot chunked into the wall behind me.

“You lied!” I screamed. “You lied!”

All men are bea—

1968

It

The little joke she played on him created a misunderstanding, brought on a coolness, grew into a quarrel and culminated in an explosion.

WHEN THE ALARM CLOCK woke Ralph Stewart that morning, there was a diaphragm in the bed. Karen’s, of course. Looking at it, Ralph wondered if she knew it was no longer with her. No, probably not. Had the week at her mother’s made her forgetful?

From the kitchen, Karen called, “Ralph! You getting up?”

“Sure, sure,” Ralph said. He sat there, looking at it. She must think it was still with her. When she discovered it was gone, what a moment that would be.

“Ralph! Breakfast is ready and you’re going to be late for work!”

“Sure, sure.” Chuckling to himself, Ralph wrapped it in a Kleenex and tucked it away in the drawer of the night table on Karen’s side. Then he padded off to brush his teeth.

After a week away, Karen was pleased to be back in her own kitchen again, though that wasn’t what made her smile as she waited for Ralph to come in for breakfast. She was imagining the look on Ralph’s face when he’d seen it lying there in the bed. At first she’d thought of peeking around the bedroom doorway to see what he’d do next, but lie might have seen her and that would have spoiled the effect. Besides, it was even better this way, wondering what would be the first thing he’d say when he came through the kitchen door.

He came through the kitchen door. He said, “I’m starved.”

Not a word from him during breakfast. He kissed her goodbye, said, “See you at six,” grabbed his briefcase and ran.

Hadn’t he seen it? She went into the bedroom and looked in the lied and it was gone. That was strange. He had found it, but he hadn’t said a word about it. And he’ll taken it away with him. Karen paled. Could it be? But there was no other explanation. She’ll been away for a week and Ralph must have thought it belonged to somebody else.

Who?

Ralph came into the apartment a little after six with a small smile already tugging at his lips. What would she say?

She said, “Oh, there you are.” Coldly.

Chipper as a cricket, Ralph said, “Anything happen today, lion?”

“Nothing much,” she said. Coldly.

All evening. Ralph waited for her to say something, and she never did. Also, there was a definite chill in the air, a definite chill. Ralph began to feel irritated, both because his joke seemed to have fallen Hat and because Karen was acting very distant, for some reason. At ten o’clock, they had a sudden flare-up over whether to watch the spy show on channel two or the special about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on channel four. Voices weren’t raised, but anger quivered in their tones and one or two cutting remarks were exchanged. Ultimately. Ralph went down to the Kozy Korner and watched the spy show there.

When he got home. Karen was already in bed and asleep, or at least appearing to be asleep. Ralph slid between the sheets and lay there a long while, staring at the ceiling. She had never mentioned it. Also, she was acting very cold and distant, for no good reason at all. He’ll been trying to avoid the thought, but as far as he could see, there was only one explanation. She must think she’d lost it somewhere else.

Where?

After Ralph left for work the next morning, slamming the apartment door behind him. Karen sat at the kitchen table and cried for a quarter of an hour. The argument over breakfast had been the most violent of their four years of marriage. Ralph hail said some things—

But one thing in particular, one unforgivable thing in particular. To bring up Howie Youngblood again after all these years, to bring up an incident that had happened when she was very young and innocent, and it had been a college weekend, and she hadn’t even known Ralph then, and she’d told him everything about it even before they were married, and to bring that up now, to throw it in her lace like that, was unforgivable.

Of course, she knew why he was doing it. Trying to justify his own actions, that’s all. She wondered if it could be that girl at Ralph’s office, that Linda Sue Powers. Ralph very rarely mentioned her anymore, and when Karen had thrown the name out at breakfast that morning. Ralph had seemed to hesitate, as though maybe he felt guilty about something.

When Grace from down the hall came in for their usual midmorning coffee, Karen said to her, “Grace, sometimes a person needs a trusted friend, someone she can talk to.”

“Oh, Karen, you know me,” Grace said, looking bright and alert. “Silent as the tomb.”

So Karen told her everything. Except about putting it in the bed, of course; that was too personal and silly and hardly important anymore, anyway.

It was the first time Ralph hail taken Linda Sue Powers to lunch. “I don’t know why I should bother you with my troubles,” he said. “We’re hardly more than office acquaintances.”

“Oh, I hope you think of me as more than that,” she said. She has very nice blue eyes. “I hope you think of me as your friend,” she said.

“I’d like to,” Ralph said. And before he was done, he’d told her everything. Except about finding it in the bed, of course: that was unimportant by now and not the sort of thing to mention to a young lady.

The fight at the Cullbertsons’ party was just the climax to five weeks of border skirmishes and commando raids. The fight, which took place in front of IS exceedingly interested spectators, lasted 21 minutes and culminated this way:

Karen: “And I suppose you haven’t spent every night the past two weeks with that Powers woman?”

Ralph: “Kerning, you filthy-minded bitch, earning, not night; we’ve been working at the office. And it’s left you plenty of time to howl, hasn’t it?”

Karen: “Ralph. I want a divorce I want a divorce I want a divorce!”

Ralph: “Divorce? The way you catty on, I could practically gel an annulment!”

The lawyer said. “We always require at least this one meeting between the principals, to see if any sort of reconciliation is possible. You two are both intelligent people; maybe this marriage can still be saved. What caused the estrangement, can you tell me that? What started it?”

Karen said, “I suppose it all started with Linda Sue Powers.”

Ralph said, “I believe the name my wile is looking for is Howie Youngblood.”

The lawyer had to shout and pound on his desk before they’d quiet down.

After the divorce, they met one last time at the apartment to divide up their possessions, neither trusting the other to go in first and alone. Ralph arrived with Linda Site Powers. Karen brought along a pipe smoking chap she didn’t introduce.

They moved through the apartment together, their escorts waiting in ultimate table silence in the living room, the principals talking in monosyllables as they said, “That’s yours.” Or, “I’ll lake that,” or, “You can throw that out if you want.” There were no arguments now, no squabbles, no rousing of passion. When they got to the night table. Karen opened the drawer. “So that’s where you put it,” she said, taking it out and unwrapping the Kleenex.

“A joke,” he said. He sounded faintly bitter.

She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I put it in the bed for a joke.”

“You did?”

She frowned at the drawer. “And you—”

Then they looked at each other and they both understood; and for just a second, something very much like hope sprang up in their eyes. But then Karen shook her head and said, “No. There are things you said to me—”

Ralph said, “You accused me of some things—”

Karen said, “And there’s that woman out there.”

“Talking with that smokestack of yours.”

They looked away from each other, their faces set. “Well,” said Karen. She turned and threw it into the wastebasket.

Ralph said, “Aren’t you going to take it with you?”

“I’ve got a new one,” she said.

1970

The Winner

When the author of this story was presented with the Edgar, the award that is given by the Mystery Writers of America for the best mystery novel of the year, he responded hut briefly with the shortest acceptance speech on record. “I don’t talk, I write,” Mr. Westlake said. He does indeed. Concerning people and science, and the misuse of science. Which, after all, is what the whole world is about.

Wordman stood at the window, looking out, and saw Revel I walk away from the compound. “Come here,” he said to the interviewer. “You’ll see the Guardian in action.”

The interviewer came around the desk and stood beside Wordman at the window. He said, “That’s one of them?”

“Right.” Wordman smiled, feeling pleasure. “You’re lucky,” he said. “It’s rare when one of them even makes the attempt. Maybe he’s doing it for your benefit.”

The interviewer looked troubled. He said, “Doesn’t he know what it will do?”

“Of course. Some of them don’t believe it, not till they’ve tried it once. Watch.”

They both watched. Revell walked without apparent haste, directly across the field toward the woods on the other side. After he’d gone about two hundred yards from the edge of the compound he began to bend forward slightly at the middle, and a few yards farther on he folded his arms across his stomach as though it ached him. He tottered, but kept moving forward, staggering more and more, appearing to be in great pain. He managed to stay on his feet nearly all the way to the trees, but finally crumpled to the ground, where he lay unmoving.

Wordman no longer felt pleasure. He liked the theory of the Guardian better than its application. Turning to his desk, he called the infirmary and said, “Send a stretcher out to the east, near the woods. Revell’s out there.”

The interviewer turned at the sound of the name, saying, “Revell? Is that who that is? The poet?”

“If you can call it poetry.” Wordman’s lips curled in disgust. He’d read some of Revell’s so-called poems; garbage, garbage.

The interviewer looked back out the window. “I’d heard he was arrested,” he said thoughtfully.

Looking over the interviewer’s shoulder, Wordman saw that Revell had managed to get back up onto hands and knees, was now crawling slowly and painfully toward the woods. But a stretcher team was already trotting toward him and Wordman watched as they reached him, picked up the pain-weakened body, strapped it to the stretcher, and carried it back to the compound.

As they moved out of sight, the interviewer said, “Will he be all right?”

“After a few days in the infirmary. He’ll have strained some muscles.”

The interviewer turned away from the window. “That was very graphic.” he said carefully.

“You’re the first outsider to see it,” Wordman told him, and smiled, feeling good again. “What do they call that? A scoop?”

“Yes,” agreed the interviewer, sitting back down in his chair. “A scoop.”

They returned to the interview, just the most recent of dozens Wordman had given in the year since this pilot project of the Guardian had been set up. For perhaps the fiftieth time he explained what the Guardian did and how it was of value to society.

The essence of the Guardian was the miniature black box, actually a tiny radio receiver, which was surgically inserted into the body of every prisoner. In the center of this prison compound was the Guardian transmitter, perpetually sending its message to these receivers. As long as a prisoner stayed within the hundred-and-fifty-yard range of that transmitter, ail was well. Should he move beyond that range, the black box inside his skin would begin to send messages of pain throughout his nervous system. This pain increased as the prisoner moved farther from the transmitter, until at its peak it was totally immobilizing.

“The prisoner can’t hide, you see.” Wordman explained. “Even if Revell had reached the woods, we’d have found him. His screams would have led us to him.”

The Guardian had been initially suggested by Wordman himself, at that time serving as assistant warden at a more ordinary penitentiary in the Federal system. Objections, mostly from sentimentalists, had delayed its acceptance for several years, but now at last this pilot project had been established, with a guaranteed five-year trial period, and Wordman had been placed in charge.

“If the results are as good as I’m sure they will be,” Wordman said, “all prisons in the Federal system will be converted to the Guardian method.”

The Guardian method had made jailbreaks impossible, riots easy to quell — by merely turning off the transmitter for a minute or two — and prisons simplicity to guard. “We have no guards here as such,” Wordman pointed out. “Service employees only are needed here, people for the mess hall, infirmary and so on.”

For the pilot project, prisoners were only those who had committed crimes against the State rather than against individuals. “You might say,” Wordman said, smiling, “that here are gathered the Disloyal Opposition.”

“You mean, political prisoners,” suggested the interviewer.

“We don’t like that phrase here,” Wordman said, his manner suddenly icy. “It sounds Commie.”

The interviewer apologized for his sloppy use of terminology, ended the interview shortly afterward, and Wordman, once again in a good mood, escorted him out of the building. “You see,” he said, gesturing. “No walls. No machine guns in towers. Here at last is the model prison.”

The interviewer thanked him again for his time, and went away to his car. Wordman watched him leave, then went over to the infirmary to see Revell. But he’d been given a shot, and was already asleep.

Revell lay flat on his back and stared at the ceiling. He kept thinking, over and over again, “I didn’t know it would be as bad as that. I didn’t know it would be as bad as that.” Mentally, he took a big brush of black paint and wrote the words on the spotless white ceiling: “I didn’t know it would be as bad as that.”

“Revell.”

He turned his head slightly and saw Wordman standing beside the bed. He watched Wordman, but made no sign.

Wordman said, “They told me you were awake.”

Revell waited.

“I tried to tell you when you first came,” Wordman reminded him. “I told you there was no point trying to get away.”

Revell opened his mouth and said, “It’s all right, don’t feel bad. You do what you have to do, I do what I have to do.”

“Don’t feel bad!” Wordman stared at him. “What have I got to feel bad about?”

Revell looked up at the ceiling, and the words he had painted there just a minute ago were gone already. He wished he had paper and pencil. Words were leaking out of him like water through a sieve. He needed paper and pencil to catch them in. He said, “May I have paper and pencil?”

“To write more obscenity? Of course not.”

“Of course not,” echoed Revell. He closed his eyes and watched the words leaking away. A man doesn’t have time both to invent and memorize, he has to choose, and long ago Revell had chosen invention. But now there was no way to put the inventions down on paper and they trickled through his mind like water and eroded away into the great outside world. “Twinkle, twinkle, little pain,” Revell said softly, “in my groin and in my brain, down so low and up so high, will you live or will I die?”

“The pain goes away,” said Wordman. “It’s been three days, it should be gone already.”

“It will come back,” Revell said. He opened his eyes and wrote the words on the ceiling. “It will come back.”

Wordman said, “Don‘t be silly. It’s gone for good, unless you run away again.”

Revell was silent.

Wordman waited, half-smiling, and then frowned. “You aren’t,” he said.

Revell looked at him in some surprise. “Of course I am,” he said. “Didn’t you know I would?”

“No one tries it twice.”

“I’ll never stop leaving. Don’t you know that? I’ll never stop leaving, I’ll never stop being. I’ll not stop believing I’m who I must be. You had to know that.”

Wordman stared at him. “You’ll go through it again?”

“Ever and ever,” Revell said.

“It’s a bluff.” Wordman pointed an angry finger at Revell, saying, “If you want to die, I’ll let you die. Do you know if we don’t bring you back you’ll die out there?”

“That’s escape, too,” Revell said.

“Is that what you want? All right. Go out there again, and I won’t send anyone after you, that’s a promise.”

“Then you lose,” Revell said. He looked at Wordman finally, seeing the blunt angry face. “They’re your rules,” Revell told him, “and by your own rules you’re going to lose. You say your black box will make me stay, and that means the black box will make me stop being me. I say you’re wrong. I say as long as I’m leaving you’re losing, and if the black box kills me you’ve lost forever.”

Spreading his arms, Wordman shouted, “Do you think this is a game?”

“Of course,” said Revell. “That’s why you invented it.”

“You’re insane,” Wordman said. He started for the door. “You shouldn’t be here, you should be in an asylum.”

“That’s losing, too,” Revell shouted after him, but Wordman had slammed the door and gone.

Revell lay back on the pillow. Alone again, he could dwell once more on his terrors. He was afraid of the black box, much more now that he knew what it could do to him, afraid to the point where his fear made him sick to his stomach. But he was afraid of losing himself, too, this a more abstract and intellectual fear but just as strong. No, it was even stronger, because it was driving him to go out again.

“But I didn’t know it would be as bad as that,” he whispered. He painted it once more on the ceiling, this time in red.

Wordman had been told when Revell would be released from the infirmary, and he made a point of being at the door when Revell came out. Revell seemed somewhat leaner, perhaps a little older. He shielded his eyes from the sun with his hand, looked at Wordman, and said, “Good-bye, Wordman.” He started walking east.

Wordman didn’t believe it. He said, “You’re bluffing, Revell.”

Revell kept walking.

Wordman couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt such anger. He wanted to run after Revell and kill him with his bare hands. He clenched his hands into fists and told himself he was a reasonable man. a rational man, a merciful man. As the Guardian was reasonable, was rational, was merciful. It required only obedience, and so did he. It punished only such purposeless defiance as Revell’s, and so did he. Revell was antisocial, self-destructive, he had to learn. For his own sake, as well as for the sake of society, Revell had to be taught.

Wordman shouted, “What are you trying to get out of this?” He glared at Revell’s moving back, listened to Revell’s silence. He shouted, “I won’t send anyone after you! You’ll crawl back yourself!”

He kept watching until Revell was far out from the compound, staggering across the field toward the trees, his arms folded across his stomach, his legs stumbling, his head bent forward. Wordman watched, and then gritted his teeth, and turned his back, and returned to his office to work on the monthly report. Only two attempted escapes last month.

Two or three times in the course of the afternoon he looked out the window. The first time, he saw Revell far across the field, on hands and knees, crawling toward the trees. The last time, Revell was out of sight, but he could be heard screaming. Wordman had a great deal of trouble concentrating his attention on the report.

Toward evening he went outside again. Revell’s screams sounded from the woods, faint but continuous. Wordman stood listening, his fists clenching and relaxing at his sides. Grimly he forced himself not to feel pity. For Revell’s own good he had to be taught.

A staff doctor came to him a while later and said, “Mr. Wordman, we’ve got to bring him in.”

Wordman nodded. “I know. Bur I want to be sure he’s learned.”

“For God’s sake,” said the doctor, “Listen to him.”

Wordman looked bleak. “All right, bring him in.”

As the doctor started away, the screaming stopped. Wordman and the doctor both turned their heads, listened — silence. The doctor ran for the infirmary.

Revell lay screaming. All he could think of was the pain, and the need to scream. But sometimes, when he managed a scream of the very loudest, it was possible for him to have a fraction of a second for himself, and in those fractions of seconds he still kept moving away from the prison, inching along the ground, so that in the last hour he had moved approximately seven feet. His head and right arm were now visible from the country road that passed through these woods.

On one level, he was conscious of nothing but the pain and his own screaming. On another level, he was totally, even insistently, aware of everything around him, the blades of grass near his eyes, the stillness of the woods, the tree branches high overhead. And the small pickup truck, when it stopped on the road beyond him.

The man who came over from the truck and squatted beside Revell had a lined and weathered face and the rough clothing of a farmer. He touched Revell’s shoulder and said, “You hurt, fella?”

“Eeeeast!” screamed Revell. “Eeeeast!”

“Is it okay to move you?” asked the man.

“Yesssss!” shrieked Revell. “Eeeeast!”

“I’d best take you to a doctor.”

There was no change in the pain when the man lifted him and carried him to the truck and lay him down on the floor in back. He was already at optimum distance from the transmitter; the pain now was as bad as it could get.

The farmer tucked a rolled-up wad of cloth into Revell’s open mouth. “Bile on this,” he said. “It’ll make it easier.”

It made nothing easier, but it muffled his screams. He was grateful for that; the screams embarrassed him.

He was aware of it all, the drive through increasing darkness, the farmer carrying him into a building that was of colonial design on the outside but looked like the infirmary on the inside, and a doctor who looked down at him and touched his forehead and then went to one side to thank the farmer for bringing him. They spoke briefly over there, and then the farmer went away and the doctor came back to look at Revell again. He was young, dressed in laboratory white, with a pudgy face and red hair. He seemed sick and angry. He said. “You’re from that prison, aren’t you?”

Revell was still screaming through the cloth. He managed a head-spasm which he meant to be a nod. His armpits felt as though they were being cut open with knives of ice. The sides of his neck were being scraped by sandpaper. All of his joints were being ground back and forth, back and forth, the way a man at dinner separates the bones of a chicken wing. The interior of his stomach was full of acid. His body was stuck with needles, sprayed with fire. His skin was being peeled off, his nerves cut with razor blades, his muscles pounded with hammers. Thumbs were pushing his eyes out from inside his head. And yet, the genius of this pain, the brilliance that had gone into its construction, it permitted his mind to work, to remain constantly aware. There was no unconsciousness for him, no oblivion.

The doctor said, “What beasts some men are. I’ll try to get it out of you. I don’t know what will happen, we aren’t supposed to know how it works, but III try to take the box out of you.”

He went away, and came back with a needle. “Here. This will put you to sleep.”

Ahhhhh.

“He isn’t there. He just isn’t anywhere in the woods.”

Wordman glared at the doctor, but knew he had to accept what the man reported. “All right,” he said. “Someone took him away. He had a confederate out there, someone who helped him get away.”

“No one would dare,” said the doctor. “Anyone who helped him would wind up here themselves.”

“Nevertheless,” said Wordman. “I’ll call the State Police,” he said, and went on into his office.

Two hours later the Sate Police called back. They’d checked the normal users of that road, local people who might have seen or heard something, and had found a farmer who’d picked up an injured man near the prison and taken him to a Dr. Allyn in Boonetown. The State Police were convinced the farmer had acted innocently.

“But not the doctor,” Wordman said grimly. “He’d have to know the truth almost immediately.”

“Yes, sir, I should think so.”

“And he hasn’t reported Revell.”

“No, sir.”

“Have you gone to pick him up yet?”

“Not yet. We just got the report.”

“I’ll want to come with you. Wait for me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Wordman traveled in the ambulance in which they’d bring Revell back. They arrived without siren at Dr. Allyn’s with two cars of state troopers, marched into the tiny operating room, and found Allyn washing instruments at the sink.

Allyn looked at them all calmly and said, “I thought you might be along.”

Wordman pointed at the man who lay, unconscious, on the table in the middle of the room. “There’s Revell,” he said.

Allyn glanced at the operating table in surprise. “Revell? The poet?”

“You didn’t know? Then why help him?”

Instead of answering, Allyn studied his face and said, “Would you be Wordman himself?”

Wordman said, “Yes, I am.”

“Then I believe this is yours,” Allyn said, and put into Wordman’s hands a small and bloody black box.

The ceiling was persistently bare. Revell’s eyes wrote on it words that should have singed the paint away, but nothing ever happened He shut his eyes against the white at last and wrote in spidery letters on the inside of his lids the single word oblivion.

He heard someone come into the room, but the effort of making a change was so great that for a moment longer he permitted his eyes to remain closed. When he did open them he saw Wordman there, standing grim and mundane at the foot of the bed.

Wordman said, “How are you, Revell?”

“I was thinking about oblivion,” Revell told him. “Writing a poem on the subject.” He looked up at the ceiling, but it was empty.

Wordman said, “You asked, one time, you asked for pencil and paper. We’ve decided you can have them.”

Revell looked at him in sudden hope, but then understood. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, that.”

Wordman frowned and said, “What’s wrong? I said you can have pencil and paper.”

“If I promise not to leave anymore.”

Wordman’s hands gripped the foot of the bed. He said, “What’s the matter with you? You can’t get away, you have to know that by now.”

“You mean I can’t win. But I won’t lose. It’s your game, your rules, your home ground, your equipment; if I can manage a stalemate, that’s pretty good.”

Wordman said, “You still think it’s a game. You think none of it matters. Do you want to see what you’ve done?” He stepped back to the door, opened it, made a motion, and Dr. Allyn was led in. Wordman said to Revell, “You remember this man?”

“I remember,” said Revell.

Wordman said, “He just arrived. They’ll be putting the Guardian in him in about an hour. Does it make you proud, Revell?”

Looking at Allyn, Revell said, “I’m sorry.”

Allyn smiled and shook his head. “Don’t be. I had the idea the publicity of a trial might help rid the world of things like the Guardian.” His smile turned sour. “There wasn’t very much publicity.”

Wordman said, “You two arc cut out of the same cloth. The emotions of the mob. that’s all you can think of. Revell in those so-called poems of his, and you in that speech you made in court.”

Revell, smiling, said, “Oh? You made a speech? I’m sorry I didn’t get to hear it.”

“It wasn’t very good,” Allyn said. “I hadn’t known the trial would only be one day long, so I didn’t have much time to prepare it.”

Wordman said, “All right, that’s enough. You two can talk later, you’ll have years.”

At the door Allyn turned back and said, “Don’t go anywhere till I’m up and around, will you? After my operation.”

Revell said, “You want to come along next time?”

“Naturally,” said Allyn.

1975

The Ultimate Caper

I. The Purloined Letter

“Yes,” the fat man said, “I’ve spent the last 17 years in this pursuit. More armagnac, Mr. Staid?”

“Nice booze,” Staid admitted. Adding a splash of Fresca, he said, “What is this dingus anyway, this purloined letter?”

“Ah,” the fat man said. “It’s quite a story, Mr. Staid. I have you ever heard of the Barony of Ueltenplotz?”

Staid sucked on his stogie. “Thuringian, isn’t it? One of the prizes in the Carpathian succession, not settled till MCCLXIV.”

“Very good, Mr. Staid! I like a man who knows his dates.”

“These onions aren’t bad either,” Staid allowed.

“Well, sir,” the fat man said, “if you know the history of the Barons Ueltenplotz, you know they’ve been the renegades of Mitteleuropa for a thousand years.”

“Maupers and gapes.” Staid grated.

“Exactly. And arrogant to a fault. What would you say, sir, if I told you the seventh Baron Ueltenplotz stole a letter from the European alphabet?”

“I’d say your brain was all funny.”

“And yet, sir, that is precisely what happened. Yes, sir. The family name was originally one letter longer, beginning with that missing letter.”

“Which letter was it?”

“No one knows,” the fat man said. “In MXXIX, the seventh Baron, Helmut the Homicidal, having seen one of his personal monogrammed polo shirts being used as a horsewipe, determined to commandeer his initial letter for his own personal use. The Barony was wealthy in those days — carrots had been discovered in the territory — and so monks, scribes, delineators, transvestites and other civil servants were dispatched across Europe to excise that letter wherever it might appear. Illuminated manuscripts developed sudden unexplained fly specks and pen smears. Literate men — and they were few in the CMth century, Mr. Staid. I assure you — were bribed or threatened to forget that letter. The alphabet, which had been 27 letters in length — ‘Thrice nine’ was a saying of the time, Mr. Staid, long since forgotten — was reduced to 26. The letter between K and L had been stolen! And what do you say to that, sir?”

“I say you’ve been staring at the light too long,” Staid said. He puffed on his pipe.

“And yet these are facts, sir, facts. I first came across this remarkable story 17 years ago, in MCMLVIII, in conversation with a retired harpsichord tuner in Potsdam. The letter had been removed everywhere, Mr. Staid, except from the face of one shield, sir, one shield maintained for centuries in the deepest recesses of Schloss Ueltenplotz. During the Second World War, a Technical Sergeant from Bismarck, North Dakota, stumbling across the shield and mistaking it for a beer tray, sent it home to his father, an official in the Veterans of Foreign Wars. But the shield never arrived, sir, and what do you think of that?”

“Not much,” Staid admitted, and dragged on his cigarette.

“It had been stolen, sir, yet again, by a Jugoslav General in Istanbul, one Brigadier Ueltehmitt. But he didn’t know what he had, sir. He thought the mark on the shield was a typographical error, and believed it to be a Yield sign from the Hungarian Highway Department.”

“What’s this dingus look like, anyway?”

“No one knows for certain,” the fat man said. “Some think it’s a Φ, some say a Λ.”

“Φ seems more likely,” Staid said. “What’s it supposed to sound like?” Staid said.

“No one has pronounced that letter,” the fat man said, “in over a thousand years. Some think it’s the sound in a man’s throat on the third day of Asian flu when watching a rock record commercial during the 6 o’clock news.”

“Guttural,” said Staid.

The fat man, whose real name was Guttural, frowned at Staid through narrowed eyes. “It seems I’ve underestimated you,” he said.

“Looks like,” admitted Staid.

“Well, sir,” the fat man said, “we’ll put our cards on the table. I want that letter. Will you join me?”

“Where is this dingus, anyway?”

“Come along, sir!”

II. The Shield of Ueltenplotz

The Ueltehmitt Caper ran without a hitch. First, the three helicopters descended over the Bahnhof Boogie in Dusseldorf. released their grappling hooks and removed the building to Schwartzvogel Island in Lake Liebfraumilch, w here the demolition team with the laser sliced through the sides of the vault. Eliminating the alarm system by squirting Redi-Whip into the air-conditioning ducts, they sprayed the guards with a sleep-inducing gas disguised as pocket packs of Propa PH, and lowered ropes to one another until exactly 6:27. Removing the lead-lined box containing the priceless Shield of Ueltenplotz, they placed it in the speedboat and sped away to the innocent-appearing minesweeper dawdling in the current. Waterline gates in the minesweeper yawned open, the speedboat entered, and before the minesweeper sank the lead-lined box had been transferred to the catapult plane and launched skyward. Two hours later, the pilot parachuted over Loch Ness and was driven swiftly to Scotswa Hay, the ancestral retreat of Guttural’s co-conspirator Hart in the highlands.

Staid, Guttural, Hart, Wilmer, Obloquy and the beauteous Laurinda synchronized their watches and crowded around the table where lay the package, now wrapped in yesterday’s Dortmunder Zeitung Geblatt. Ripping off the wrappings, the fat man opened the box and took out the precious shield.

“Ahhhh.” said the beauteous Wilmer.

“At last,” commented Obloquy, and choked to death on his Russian cigarette.

The fat man turned over the shield. “No!” he cried. “No!”

Staid frowned at the shield. Rounder than most, it bore the figure π.

“It’s a Frisbee!” cried the fat man.

“You fool!” shrieked Laurinda, stamping her foot with a dater. “Ueltehmitt tricked you!”

“Wrong dingus, huh?” Staid asked, and lit up a corncob.

“Seventeen years,” the fat man said. “Well, I’ll give it 17 more if need be.” He flung the false shield out the window. “On to Istanbul! Will you join us. Staid?”

“No, thanks, fat man.” Staid watched the Frisbee sail over the heath cliff, “π in the sky,” he said.

1977

In at the Death

It’s not hard to believe in ghosts when you are one. I hanged myself in a fit of truculence — stronger than pique, but not so dignified as despair — and regretted it before the thing was well begun. The instant I kicked the chair away, I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.

There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in my throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and turn, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

I was frantic and terrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold corner of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death, I thought, and I no longer wanted it, now that the choice was gone forever.

My name is — was — Edward Thornburn, and my dates are 1938–1977. I killed myself just a month before my fortieth birthday, though I don’t believe the well-known pangs of that milestone had much if anything to do with my action. I blame it all (as I blamed most of the errors and failures of my life) on my sterility. Had I been able to father children my marriage would have remained strong, Emily would not have been unfaithful to me, and I would not have taken my own life in a final fit of truculence.

The setting was the guest room in our house in Barnstaple, Connecticut, and the time was just after seven p.m.; deep twilight, at this time of year. I had come home from the office — I was a realtor, a fairly lucrative occupation in Connecticut, though my income had been falling off recently — shortly before six, to find the note on the kitchen table: “Antiquing with Greg. Afraid you’ll have to make your own dinner. Sorry. Love, Emily.”

Greg was the one; Emily’s lover. He owned an antique shop out on the main road toward New York, and Emily filled a part of her days as his ill-paid assistant. I knew what they did together in the back of the shop on those long midweek afternoons when there were no tourists, no antique collectors to disturb them. I knew, and I’d known for more than three years, but I had never decided how to deal with my knowledge. The fact was, I blamed myself, and therefore I had no way to behave if the ugly subject were ever to come into the open.

So I remained silent, but not content. I was discontent, unhappy, angry, resentful — truculent.

I’d tried to kill myself before. At first with the car, by steering it into an oncoming truck (I swerved at the last second, amid howling horns) and by driving it off a cliff into the Connecticut River (I slammed on the brakes at the very brink, and sat covered in perspiration for half an hour before backing away), and finally by stopping athwart one of the few level crossings left in this neighborhood. But no train came for twenty minutes, and my truculence wore off, and I drove home.

Later I tried to slit my wrists, but found it impossible to push sharp metal into my own skin. Impossible. The vision of my naked wrist and that shining steel so close together washed my truculence completely out of my mind. Until the next time.

With the rope; and then I succeeded. Oh, totally, oh, fully I succeeded. My legs kicked at air, my fingernails clawed at my throat, my bulging eyes stared out over my swollen purple cheeks, my tongue thickened and grew bulbous in my mouth, my body jigged and jangled like a toy at the end of a string, and the pain was excruciating, horrible, not to be endured. I can’t endure it, I thought, it can’t be endured. Much worse than knife slashings was the knotted strangled pain in my throat, and my head ballooned with pain, pressure outward, my face turning black, my eyes no longer human, the pressure in my head building and building as though I would explode. Endless horrible pain, not to be endured, but going on and on.

My legs kicked more feebly. My arms sagged, my hands dropped to my sides, my fingers twisted uselessly against my sopping trouser legs, my head hung at an angle from the rope, I turned more slowly in the air, like a broken wind chime on a breezeless day. The pains lessened, in my throat and head, but never entirely stopped.

And now I saw that my distended eyes had become lusterless, gray. The moisture had dried on the eyeballs, they were as dead as stones. And yet I could see them, my own eyes, and when I widened my vision I could see my entire body, turning, hanging, no longer twitching, and with horror I realized I was dead.

But present. Dead, but still present, with the scraping ache still in my throat and the bulging pressure still in my head. Present, but no longer in that used-up clay, that hanging meat; I was suffused through the room, like indirect lighting, everywhere present but without a source. What happens now? I wondered, dulled by fear and strangeness and the continuing pains, and I waited, like a hovering mist, for whatever would happen next.

But nothing happened. I waited; the body became utterly still; the double shadow on the wall showed no vibration; the bedside lamps continued to burn; the door remained shut and the window shade drawn; and nothing happened.

What now? I craved to scream the question aloud, but I could not. My throat ached, but I had no throat. My mouth burned, but I had no mouth. Every final strain and struggle of my body remained imprinted in my mind, but I had no body and no brain and no self, no substance. No power to speak, no power to move myself, no power to remove myself from this room and this suspended corpse. I could only wait here, and wonder, and go on waiting.

There was a digital clock on the dresser opposite the bed, and when it first occurred to me to look at it the numbers were 7:21 — perhaps twenty minutes after I’d kicked the chair away, perhaps fifteen minutes since I’d died. Shouldn’t something happen, shouldn’t some change take place?

The clock read 9:11 when I heard Emily’s Volkswagen drive around to the back of the house. I had left no note, having nothing I wanted to say to anyone and in any event believing my own dead body would be eloquent enough, but I hadn’t thought I would be present when Emily found me. I was justified in my action, however much I now regretted having taken it, I was justified, I knew I was justified, but I didn’t want to see her face when she came through that door. She had wronged me, she was the cause of it, she would have to know that as well as I, but I didn’t want to see her face.

The pains increased, in what had been my throat, in what had been my head. I heard the back door slam, far away downstairs, and I stirred like air currents in the room, but I didn’t leave, I couldn’t leave.

“Ed? Ed? It’s me, hon!”

I know it’s you. I must go away now, I can’t stay here, I must go away. Is there a God? Is this my soul, this hovering presence? Hell would be better than this, take me away to Hell or wherever I’m to go, don’t leave me here!

She came up the stairs, calling again, walking past the closed guest room door. I heard her go into our bedroom, heard her call my name, heard the beginnings of apprehension in her voice. She went by again, out there in the hall, went downstairs, became quiet.

What was she doing? Searching for a note perhaps, some message from me. Looking out the window, seeing again my Chevrolet, knowing I must be home. Moving through the rooms of this old house, the original structure a barn nearly two hundred years old, converted by some previous owner just after the Second World War, bought by me twelve years ago, furnished by Emily — and Greg — from their interminable, damnable, awful antiques. Shaker furniture, Colonial furniture, hooked rugs and quilts, the old yellow pine tables, the faint sense always of being in some slightly shabby minor museum, this house that I had bought but never loved. I’d bought it for Emily, I did everything for Emily, because I knew I could never do the one thing for Emily that mattered. I could never give her a child.

She was good about it, of course. Emily is good, I never blamed her, never completely blamed her instead of myself. In the early days of our marriage she made a few wistful references, but I suppose she saw the effect they had on me, and for a long time she has said nothing. But I have known.

The beam from which I had hanged myself was a part of the original building, a thick hand-hewed length of aged timber eleven inches square, chevroned with the marks of the hatchet that had shaped it. A strong beam, it would support my weight forever. It would support my weight until I was found and cut down. Until I was found.

The clock read 9:23 and Emily had been in the house twelve minutes when she came upstairs again, her steps quick and light on the old wood, approaching, pausing, stopping. “Ed?”

The doorknob turned.

The door was locked, of course, with the key on the inside. She’d have to break it down, have to call someone else to break it down, perhaps she wouldn’t be the one to find me after all. Hope rose in me, and the pains receded.

“Ed? Are you in there?” She knocked at the door, rattled the knob, called my name several times more, then abruptly turned and ran away downstairs again, and after a moment I heard her voice, murmuring and unclear. She had called someone, on the phone.

Greg, I thought, and the throat-rasp filled me, and I wanted this to be the end. I wanted to be taken away, dead body and living soul, taken away. I wanted everything to be finished.

She stayed downstairs, waiting for him, and I stayed upstairs, waiting for them both. Perhaps she already knew what she’d find up here, and that’s why she waited below.

I didn’t mind about Greg, about being present when he came in. I didn’t mind about him. It was Emily I minded.

The clock read 9:44 when I heard tires on the gravel at the side of the house. He entered, I heard them talking down there, the deeper male voice slow and reassuring, the lighter female voice quick and frightened, and then they came up together, neither speaking. The doorknob turned, jiggled, rattled, and Greg’s voice called, “Ed?”

After a little silence Emily said, “He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t do anything, would he?”

“Do anything?” Greg sounded almost annoyed at the question. “What do you mean, do anything?”

“He’s been so depressed, he’s — Ed!” And forcibly the door was rattled, the door was shaken in its frame.

“Emily, don’t. Take it easy.”

“I shouldn’t have called you,” she said. “Ed, please!”

“Why not? For heaven’s sake, Emily—”

“Ed, please come out, don’t scare me like this!”

“Why shouldn’t you call me, Emily?”

“Ed isn’t stupid, Greg. He’s—”

There was then a brief silence, pregnant with the hint of murmuring. They thought me still alive in here, they didn’t want me to hear Emily say, “He knows, Greg, he knows about us.”

The murmurings sifted and shifted, and then Greg spoke loudly, “That’s ridiculous. Ed? Come out, Ed, let’s talk this over.” And the doorknob rattled and clattered, and he sounded annoyed when he said, “We must get in, that’s all. Is there another key?”

“I think all the locks up here are the same. Just a minute.”

They were. A simple skeleton key would open any interior door in the house. I waited, listening, knowing Emily had gone off to find another key, knowing they would soon come in together, and I felt such terror and revulsion for Emily’s entrance that I could feel myself shimmer in the room, like a reflection in a warped mirror. Oh, can I at least stop seeing? In life I had eyes, but also eyelids, I could shut out the intolerable, but now I was only a presence, a total presence, I could not stop my awareness.

The rasp of key in lock was like rough metal edges in my throat; my memory of a throat. The pain flared in me, and through it I heard Emily asking what was wrong, and Greg answering. “The key’s in it, on the other side.”

“Oh, dear God! Oh, Greg, what has he done?”

“We’ll have to take the door off its hinges,” he told her. “Call Tony. Tell him to bring the toolbox.”

“Can’t you push the key through?”

Of course he could, but he said, quite determinedly, “Go on, Emily,” and I realized then he had no intention of taking the door down. He simply wanted her away when the door was first opened. Oh, very good, very good!

“All right,” she said doubtfully, and I heard her go away to phone Tony. A beetle-browed young man with great masses of black hair and olive complexion, Tony lived in Greg’s house and was a kind of handyman. He did work around the house and was also (according to Emily) very good at restoration of antique furniture; stripping paint, reassembling broken parts, that sort of thing.

There was now a renewed scraping and rasping at the lock, as Greg struggled to get the door open before Emily’s return. I found myself feeling unexpected warmth and liking toward Greg. He wasn’t a bad person. Would he marry her now? They could live in this house, he’d had more to do with its furnishing than I. Or would this room hold too grim a memory, would Emily have to sell the house, live elsewhere? She might have to sell at a low price; as a realtor, I knew the difficulty in selling a house where a suicide has taken place. No matter how much they may joke about it, people are still afraid of the supernatural. Many of them would believe this room was haunted.

It was then I finally realized the room was haunted. With me! I’m a ghost, I thought, thinking the word for the first time, in utter blank astonishment. I’m a ghost.

Oh, how dismal! To hover here, to be a boneless fleshless aching presence here, to be a kind of ectoplasmic mildew seeping through the days and nights, alone, unending, a stupid pain-racked misery-filled observer of the comings and goings of strangers — she would sell the house, she’d have to, I was sure of that. Was this my punishment? The punishment of the suicide, the solitary hell of him who takes his own life. To remain forever a sentient nothing, bound by a force greater than gravity itself to the place of one’s finish.

I was distracted from this misery by a sudden agitation in the key on this side of the lock. I saw it quiver and jiggle like something alive, and then it popped out — it seemed to leap out, itself a suicide leaping from a cliff — and clattered to the floor, and an instant later the door was pushed open and Greg’s ashen face stared at my own purple face, and after the astonishment and horror, his expression shifted to revulsion — and contempt? — and he backed out, slamming the door. Once more the key turned in the lock, and I heard him hurry away downstairs.

The clock read 9:58. Now he was telling her. Now he was giving her a drink to calm her. Now he was phoning the police. Now he was talking to her about whether or not to admit their affair to the police; what would they decide?

“Nooooooooo!”

The clock read 10:07. What had taken so long? Hadn’t he even called the police yet?

She was coming up the stairs, stumbling and rushing, she was pounding on the door, screaming my name. I shrank into the corners of the room, I felt the thuds of her fists against the door, I cowered from her. She can’t come in, dear God don’t let her in! I don’t care what she’s done, I don’t care about anything, just don’t let her see me! Don’t let me see her!

Greg joined her. She screamed at him, he persuaded her, she raved, he argued, she demanded, he denied. “Give me the key. Give me the key.”

Surely he’ll hold out, surely he’ll take her away, surely he’s stronger, more forceful.

He gave her the key.

No. This cannot be endured. This is the horror beyond all else. She came in, she walked into the room, and the sound she made will always live inside me. That cry wasn’t human; it was the howl of every creature that has ever despaired. Now I know what despair is, and why I called my own state mere truculence.

Now that it was too late, Greg tried to restrain her, tried to hold her shoulders and draw her from the room, but she pulled away and crossed the room toward… not toward me. I was everywhere in the room, driven by pain and remorse, and Emily walked toward the carcass. She looked at it almost tenderly, she even reached up and touched its swollen cheek. “Oh, Ed,” she murmured.

The pains were as violent now as in the moments before my death. The slashing torment in my throat, the awful distension in my head, they made me squirm in agony all over again; but I could not feel her hand on my cheek.

Greg followed her, touched her shoulder again, spoke her name, and immediately her face dissolved, she cried out once more and wrapped her arms around the corpse’s legs and clung to it, weeping and gasping and uttering words too quick and broken to understand. Thank God they were too quick and broken to understand!

Greg, that fool, did finally force her away, though he had great trouble breaking her clasp on the body. But he succeeded, and pulled her out of the room and slammed the door, and for a little while the body swayed and turned, until it became still once more.

That was the worst. Nothing could be worse than that. The long days and nights here — how long must a stupid creature like myself haunt his death-place before release? — would be horrible, I knew that, but not so bad as this. Emily would survive, would sell the house, would slowly forget. (Even I would slowly forget.) She and Greg could marry. She was only thirty-six, she could still be a mother.

For the rest of the night I heard her wailing, elsewhere in the house. The police did come at last, and a pair of grim silent white-coated men from the morgue entered the room to cut me — it — down. They bundled it like a broken toy into a large oval wicker basket with long wooden handles, and they carried it away.

I had thought I might be forced to stay with the body, I had feared the possibility of being buried with it, of spending eternity as a thinking nothingness in the black dark of a casket, but the body left the room and I remained behind.

A doctor was called. When the body was carried away the room door was left open, and now I could plainly hear the voices from downstairs. Tony was among them now, his characteristic surly monosyllable occasionally rumbling, but the main thing for a while was the doctor. He was trying to give Emily a sedative, but she kept wailing, she kept speaking high hurried frantic sentences as though she had too little time to say it all. “I did it!” she cried, over and over. “I did it! I’m to blame!”

Yes. That was the reaction I’d wanted, and expected, and here it was, and it was horrible. Everything I had desired in the last moments of my life had been granted to me, and they were all ghastly beyond belief. I didn’t want to die! I didn’t want to give Emily such misery! And more than all the rest I didn’t want to be here, seeing and hearing it all.

They did quiet her at last, and then a policeman in a rumpled blue suit came into the room with Greg, and listened while Greg described everything that had happened. While Greg talked, the policeman rather grumpily stared at the remaining length of rope still knotted around the beam, and when Greg had finished the policeman said, “You’re a close friend of his?”

“More of his wife’s. She works for me. I own The Bibelot, an antique shop out on the New York road.”

“Mmm. Why on earth did you let her in here?”

Greg smiled; a sheepish embarrassed expression. “She’s stronger than I am,” he said. “A more forceful personality. That’s always been true.”

It was with some surprise I realized it was true. Greg was something of a weakling, and Emily was very strong. (I had been something of a weakling, hadn’t I? Emily was the strongest of us all.)

The policeman was saying, “Any idea why he’d do it?”

“I think he suspected his wife was having an affair with me.” Clearly Greg had rehearsed this sentence, he’d much earlier come to the decision to say it and had braced himself for the moment. He blinked all the way through the statement, as though standing in a harsh glare.

The policeman gave him a quick shrewd look. “Were you?”

“Yes.”

“She was getting a divorce?”

“No. She doesn’t love me, she loved her husband.”

“Then why sleep around?”

“Emily wasn’t sleeping around,” Greg said, showing offense only with that emphasized word. “From time to time, and not very often, she was sleeping with me.”

“Why?”

“For comfort.” Greg too looked at the rope around the beam, as though it had become me and he was awkward speaking in its presence. “Ed wasn’t an easy man to get along with,” he said carefully. “He was moody. It was getting worse.”

“Cheerful people don’t kill themselves,” the policeman said.

“Exactly. Ed was depressed most of the time, obscurely angry now and then. It was affecting his business, costing him clients. He made Emily miserable but she wouldn’t leave him, she loved him. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”

“You two won’t marry?”

“Oh, no.” Greg smiled, a bit sadly. “Do you think we murdered him, made it look like suicide so we could marry?”

“Not at all,” the policeman said. “But what’s the problem? You already married?”

“I am homosexual.”

The policeman was no more astonished than I. He said, “I don’t get it.”

“I live with my friend; that young man downstairs. I am — capable — of a wider range, but my preferences are set. I am very fond of Emily, I felt sorry for her, the life she had with Ed. I told you our physical relationship was infrequent. And often not very successful.”

Oh, Emily. Oh, poor Emily.

The policeman said, “Did Thornburn know you were, uh, that way?”

“I have no idea. I don’t make a public point of it.”

“All right.” The policeman gave one more half-angry look around the room, then said, “Let’s go.”

They left. The door remained open, and I heard them continue to talk as they went downstairs, first the policeman asking, “Is there somebody to stay the night? Mrs. Thornburn shouldn’t be alone.”

“She has relatives in Great Barrington. I phoned them earlier. Somebody should be arriving within the hour.”

“You’ll stay until then? The doctor says she’ll probably sleep, but just in case—”

“Of course.”

That was all I heard. Male voices murmured awhile longer from below, and then stopped. I heard cars drive away.

How complicated men and women are. How stupid are simple actions. I had never understood anyone, least of all myself.

The room was visited once more that night, by Greg, shortly after the police left. He entered, looking as offended and repelled as though the body were still here, stood the chair up on its legs, climbed on it, and with some difficulty untied the remnant of rope. This he stuffed partway into his pocket as he stepped down again to the floor, then returned the chair to its usual spot in the corner of the room, picked the key off the floor and put it in the lock, switched off both bedside lamps, and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Now I was in darkness, except for the faint line of light under the door, and the illuminated numerals of the clock. How long one minute is! That clock was my enemy, it dragged out every minute, it paused and waited and paused and waited till I could stand it no more, and then it waited longer, and then the next number dropped into place. Sixty times an hour, hour after hour, all night long. I couldn’t stand one night of this, how could I stand eternity?

And how could I stand the torment and torture inside my brain? That was much worse now than the physical pain, which never entirely left me. I had been right about Emily and Greg, but at the same time I had been hopelessly brainlessly wrong. I had been right about my life, but wrong; right about my death, but wrong. How much I wanted to make amends, and how impossible it was to do anything anymore, anything at all. My actions had all tended to this, and ended with this: black remorse, the most dreadful pain of all.

I had all night to think, and to feel the pains, and to wait without knowing what I was waiting for or when — or if — my waiting would ever end. Faintly I heard the arrival of Emily’s sister and brother-in-law, the murmured conversation, then the departure of Tony and Greg. Not long afterward the guest room door opened, but almost immediately closed again, no one having entered, and a bit after that the hall light went out, and now only the illuminated clock broke the darkness.

When next would I see Emily? Would she ever enter this room again? It wouldn’t be as horrible as the first time, but it would surely be horror enough.

Dawn grayed the window shade, and gradually the room appeared out of the darkness, dim and silent and morose. Apparently it was a sunless day, which never got very bright. The day went on and on, featureless, each protracted minute marked by the clock. At times I dreaded someone’s entering this room, at other times I prayed for something, anything — even the presence of Emily herself — to break this unending boring absence. But the day went on with no event, no sound, no activity anywhere — they must be keeping Emily sedated through this first day — and it wasn’t until twilight, with the digital clock reading 6:52, that the door again opened and a person entered.

At first I didn’t recognize him. An angry-looking man, blunt and determined, he came in with quick ragged steps, switched on both bedside lamps, then shut the door with rather more force than necessary, and turned the key in the lock. Truculent, his manner was, and when he turned from the door I saw with incredulity that he was me. Me! I wasn’t dead, I was alive! But how could that be?

And what was that he was carrying? He picked up the chair from the corner, carried it to the middle of the room, stood on it—

No! No!

He tied the rope around the beam. The noose was already in the other end, which he slipped over his head and tightened around his neck.

Good God, don’t!

He kicked the chair away.

The instant I kicked the chair away I wanted it back, but gravity was turning my former wish to its present command; the chair would not right itself from where it lay on the floor, and my 193 pounds would not cease to urge downward from the rope thick around my neck.

There was pain, of course, quite horrible pain centered in my throat, but the most astounding thing was the way my cheeks seemed to swell. I could barely see over their round red hills, my eyes staring in agony at the door, willing someone to come in and rescue me, though I knew there was no one in the house, and in any event the door was carefully locked. My kicking legs caused me to twist and turn, so that sometimes I faced the door and sometimes the window, and my shivering hands struggled with the rope so deep in my flesh I could barely find it and most certainly could not pull it loose.

I was frantic and horrified, yet at the same time my brain possessed a cold corner of aloof observation. I seemed now to be everywhere in the room at once, within my writhing body but also without, seeing my frenzied spasms, the thick rope, the heavy beam, the mismatched pair of lit bedside lamps throwing my convulsive double shadow on the walls, the closed locked door, the white-curtained window with its shade drawn all the way down. This is death, I thought.

1978

The Girl of My Dreams

Yesterday I bought a gun.

I’m very confused; I don’t know what to do.

I have always been a mild and shy young man, quiet and conservative and polite. I have been employed the last five years — since at nineteen I left college due to a lack of funds — at the shirt counter of Willis & Dekalb, Men’s Clothiers, Stores in Principal Cities, and I would say that I have been generally content with my lot. Although recently I have been finding the new manager, Mr. Miller, somewhat abrasive — not to overstate the matter — the work itself has always been agreeable, and I have continued to look forward to a quiet lifetime in the same employment.

I have never been much of a dreamer, neither by day nor by night. Reveries, daydreams, these are the products of vaulting ambition or vaulted desire, of both of which I have remained for the most pan gratefully free. And, though science assures us that some part of every night’s sleep is spent in the manufacture of dreams, mine must normally be gentle and innocuous, even dull, as I rarely remember them in the morning.

I would date the beginning of the change in my life from the moment of the retirement of old Mr. Randmunson from his post as manager of our local Willis & DeKalb store, and his prompt replacement by Mr. Miller, a stranger from the Akron branch.

Mr. Miller is a hearty man, cheeks and nose all red with ruddy health, handshake painfully firm, voice roaring, laugh aggressive. Not yet thirty-five, he moves and speaks with the authority and self-confidence of a man much older, and he makes it no secret that some day he intends to be president of the entire chain. Our little store is merely a stopover for him, another rung on the ladder of his success.

His first day in the store, he came to me, ebullient and overpowering and supremely positive. He asked my opinion, he discussed business and geography and entertainment, he offered me cigarettes, he thumped my shoulder. “We’ll get along, Ronald!” he told me. “Just keep moving those shirts!”

“Yes, Mr. Miller.”

“And let me have an inventory list, by style and size, tomorrow morning.”

“Sir?”

“Any time before noon,” he said carelessly, and laughed, and thumped my shoulder. “We’ll have a great team here, Ronald, a first-rate team!”

Two nights later I dreamed for the first time of Delia.

I went to bed as usual at eleven-forty, after the news on Channel 6. I switched out the light, went to sleep, and in utter simplicity and clarity the dream began. In it, I was driving my automobile on Western Avenue, out from the center of town. It was all thoroughly realistic, the day, the traffic, the used car lots along Western Avenue all gleaming in the spring sun. My six-year-old car was pulling just a little to the right, exactly as it does in real life. I knew I was dreaming, but at the same time it was very pleasant to be in my car on Western Avenue on such a lovely spring day.

A scream startled me, and my foot trod reflexively on the brake pedal. Nearby, on the sidewalk, a man and girl were struggling together. He was trying to wrest a package from her but she was resisting, clutching the package tight with both arms around it, and again screaming. The package was wrapped in brown paper and was about the size and shape of a suit carton from Willis & DeKalb.

I want to emphasize that everything was very realistic, down to the finest detail. There were none of the abrupt shifts in time or space or viewpoint normally associated with dreams, no impossibilities or absurdities.

There was no one else on the pavement nearby, and I acted almost without thinking. Braking the car at the curb, I leaped out, ran around the car, and began to grapple with the girl’s attacker He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a black leather jacket and he needed a shave. His breath was bad.

“Leave her alone!” I shouted, while the girl continued to scream.

The mugger had to give up his grip on the package in order to deal with me. He pushed me away, and I staggered ineffectively backward just as I would do in real life, while the girl kicked him repeatedly in the shins. As soon as I regained my balance I rushed forward again, and now he decided he’d had enough. He turned tail and ran, down Western Avenue and through a used car lot and so out of sight.

The girl, breathing hard, still clutching the package to her breast, turned to smile gratefully upon me and say, “How can I ever thank you?”

What a beautiful girl! The most beautiful girl I have ever seen, before or since. Auburn hair and lovely features, deep dear hazel eyes, slender wrists with every delicate birdlike bone outlined beneath the tender skin. She wore a blue and white spring dress, and casual white shoes. Silver teardrops graced her graceful ears.

She gazed at me with her melting, warm, companionable eyes, and she smiled at me with lips that murmured to be kissed, and she said to me, “How can I ever thank you?” in a voice as dulcet as honey.

And there the dream ended, in extreme close-up on my Delia’s face.

I awoke the next morning in a state of euphoria. The dream was still vivid in my mind in every detail, and most particularly did I remember the look of her sweet face at the end. That face stayed with me throughout the day, a day which otherwise might have been only bitter, as it was on that day Mr. Miller gave the two-week notice to my friend and co-worker Gregory Shostrill of the stockroom. I shared, of course, the employees’ general indignation that such an old and loyal worker had been so summarily dismissed, but for me the outrage was tempered by the continuing memory of last night’s wonderful dream.

I never anticipated for a second that I would ever see my dream-girl again, but that night she returned to me, and my astonishment was only matched by my delight. I went to bed at my usual hour, went to sleep, and the dream began. It started precisely where, the night before, it had ended, with the beautiful girl saying to me, “How can I ever thank you?”

I now functioned at two levels of awareness. The first, in which I knew myself to be dreaming, was flabbergasted to find the dream picking up as though no day had elapsed, no break at all had taken place in the unfolding of this story. The second level, in which I was an active participant in the dream rather than its observer, treated this resumption of events as natural and inevitable and obvious, and reacted without delay.

It was this second level which replied, “Anyone would have done what I did,” and then added, “May I drive you wherever you’re going?”

Now here, I grant, the dream had begun to be somewhat less than realistic. That I should talk with this lovely creature so effortlessly, without stammering, without blushing, with no worms of terror acrawl within my skull, was not entirely as the same scene would have been played in real life. In this situation in reality, I might have attacked the mugger as I’d done in the dream, but upon being left alone with the girl afterward I would surely have been reduced to strained smiles and strangled silences.

But not in the dream. In the dream I was gallant and effortless, as I offered to drive her wherever she was going.

“If it wouldn’t be putting you out of your way—”

“Not in the least,” I assured her. “Where are you going?”

“Home,” she said. “Summit Street. Do you know it?”

“Of course. It’s right on my way.”

Which wasn’t at all true. Summit Street, tucked away in the Oak Hills section, a rather well-to-do residential neighborhood, was a side street off a side street. There’s never any reason to drive on Summit Street unless Summit Street is your destination; it leads nowhere and comes from nowhere.

Nevertheless I said it was on my way — and she accepted, pleasantly. Holding the car door for her, I noticed my car was unusually clean and I was glad I’d finally gotten round to having it washed. New seat covers, too. Very nice-looking; I couldn’t remember having bought them but I was pleased I had.

Once we were driving together along Western Avenue I introduced myself: “My name’s Ronald. Ronald Grady.”

“Delia,” she told me, smiling again. “Delia Wright.”

“Hello, Delia Wright.”

Her smile broadened. “Hello, Ronald Grady.” She reached out and, for just a second, touched her fingers to my right wrist.

After that, the dream continued in the most naturalistic manner, the two of us chatting about one thing and another, the high schools we’d attended and how odd it was we’d never met before. When we reached Summit Street, she pointed out her house and I stopped at the curb. She said, “Won’t you come in for a cup of coffee? I’d like you to meet my mother.”

“I really can’t now,” I told her, smiling regretfully. “But if you’re doing nothing tonight, could I take you to dinner and a movie?”

“I’d like that,” she said.

“So would I.”

Our eyes met, and the moment seemed to deepen — and there the dream stopped.

I awoke next morning with a pleasant warm sensation on my right wrist, and I knew it was because Delia had touched me there. I ate a heartier breakfast than usual, startled my mother — I have continued to live at home with my mother and older sister, seeing no point in the additional expense of a place of my own — startled my mother, I say, by singing rather loudly as I dressed, and went off to work in as sunny a mood as could be imagined.

Which Mr. Miller, a few hours later, succeeded in shattering.

I admit I returned late from lunch. The people at the auto store had assured me they could install the new seat covers in fifteen minutes, but it actually took them over half an hour. Still, it was the first time in five years I had ever been late, and Mr. Miller’s sarcasm and abuse seemed to me under the circumstances excessive. He carried on for nearly an hour, and in fact continued to make reference to the incident for the next two weeks.

Still, my hurt and outrage at Mr. Miller’s attitude were not so great as they might have been, had I not had that spot of warmth on my wrist to remind me of Delia. I thought of Delia, of her beauty and grace, of my own ease and confidence with her, and I weathered the Miller storm much better than might have been expected.

That night I hardly watched the eleven o’clock news at all. I stayed until it ended only because any change in my habits would have produced a string of irrelevant questions from my mother, but as soon as the newscaster had bid me good night I headed directly for my own bed and sleep.

And Delia. I had been afraid to hope the dream would continue into a third night, but it did, it did, and most delightfully so.

This time, the dream skipped. It jumped over those dull meaningless hours when I was not with Delia, those hours as stale and empty as the real world, and it began tonight with me back at Summit Street promptly at seven, and Delia opening her front door to greet me.

Again the dream was utterly realistic. The white dinner jacket I wore was unlike anything in my waking wardrobe, but otherwise all was lifelike.

In tonight’s dream we went to dinner together at Astoldi’s, an expensive Italian restaurant which I had attended — in daylife — only once, at the testimonial dinner for Mr. Randmunson when he retired from Willis & DeKalb. But tonight I behaved — and felt, which is equally important — as though I dined at Astoldi’s twice a week.

The dream ended as we were leaving the restaurant after dinner, on our way to the theatre.

The next day. and the days that followed, passed in a slow and velvet haze I no longer cared about Mr. Miller’s endless abrasion. I bought a white dinner jacket, though in daylife I had no use for it. Later on, after a dream-segment in which I wore a dark blue ascot, I bought three such ascots and hung them in my closet.

The dream, meanwhile, went on and on without a break, never skipping a night. It omitted all periods of time when I was not with my Delia, but those times spent with her were presented entirely, and chronologically, and with great realism.

There were, of course, small exceptions to the realism. My ease with Delia, for instance. And the fact my car grew steadily younger night by night, and soon stopped pulling to the right.

That first date with Delia was followed by a second, and a third. We went dancing together, we went swimming together, we went for rides on a lake in her cousin’s cabin cruiser and for drives in the mountains in her own Porsche convertible. I kissed her, and her lips were indescribably sweet.

I saw her in all lights and under all conditions. Diving from a tacketa-tacketa long board into a jade green swimming pool, and framed for one heartbeat in silhouette against the pale blue sky. Dancing in a white ball gown, low across her tanned breasts and trailing the floor behind her. Kneeling in the garden behind her house, dressed in shorts and a sleeveless pale green blouse, wearing gardening gloves and holding a trowel, laughing, with dirt smudged on her nose and cheek. Driving her white Porsche, her auburn hair blowing in the wind, her eyes bright with joy and laughter.

The dream, the Dream, became to me much finer than reality, oh, much much finer. And in the Dream there was no haste, no hurry, no fear. Delia and I were in love, we were lovers, though we had not yet actually gone to bed together. I was calm and confident, slow and sure, feeling no frantic need to seduce my Delia now, now. I knew the rime would come, and in our tender moments I could see in her eyes that she also knew, and that she was not afraid.

Slowly we learned one another. We kissed, I held her tight, my arm encircled her slender waist. I touched her breasts and one moonlight night on a deserted beach, I stroked her lovely legs.

How I loved my Delia! And how I needed her, how necessary an antidote she was to the increasing bitterness of my days.

It was Mr. Miller, of course, who disrupted my days thoroughly as Delia soothed and sweetened my nights. Our store was soon unrecognizable, most of the older employees gone, new people and new methods everywhere. I believe I was kept on only because I was such a silent enduring victim for Mr. Miller’s sarcasm, his nasal voice and his twisted smile and his bitter eyes. He was in such a starved hurry for the presidency of the firm, he was so frantic to capture Willis & DeKalb, that it forced him to excesses beyond belief.

But I was, if not totally immune, at least relatively safe from the psychological blows of Mr. Miller’s manner. The joyful calm of the Dream carried me through all but the very worst of the days in the store.

Another development was that I found myself more self-assured with other people in daylife. Woman customers, and even the fashionably attractively newly hired woman employees, were beginning to make it clear that they found me not entirely without interest. It goes without saying that I remained faithful to my Delia, but it was nevertheless pleasurable to realize that a real-world social life was available to me, should I ever want it.

Not that I could visualize myself ever being less than fully satisfied with Delia.

But then it all began to change. Slowly, very very slowly, so that I don’t know for how long the tide had already ebbed before I first became aware. In my Delia’s eyes — I first saw it in her eyes. Where before they had been warm bottomless pools, now they seemed flat and cold and opaque; I no longer saw in them the candor and beauty of before. Also, from time to time I would catch upon her face a pensive frown, a solemn thoughtfulness.

“What is it?” I would ask her. “Tell me. Whatever I can do—”

“It’s nothing,” she would insist. “Really, darling, it’s nothing at all,” and kiss me on the cheek.

In this same period, while matters were unexpectedly worsening in the Dream, a slow improvement had begun in the sore. All the employees who were to be fired were now gone, all the new employees in and used to their jobs, all the new routines worked with and grown accustomed to, Mr. Miller seemed also to be growing accustomed to his new job and the new store. Less and less was he taking out his viciousness and insecurity on me. He had, in fact, taken to avoiding me for days at a time, as though beginning to feel ashamed of his earlier harshness.

Which was fine but irrelevant. What was my waking rime after all but the necessary adjunct to the Dream? It was the Dream that mattered, and the Dream was not going well, not going well at all.

It was, in fact, getting worse. Delia began to break dates with me, and to make excuses when I asked her for dates. The pensive looks, the distracted looks, the buried sense of impatience, all were more frequent now. Entire portions of the Dream were spent with me alone — I was never alone in the early nights! — pacing the floor of my room, waiting for a promised call that never was to come.

What could it be? I asked her and asked, but always she evaded my questions, my eyes, my arms. If I pressed, she would insist it was nothing, nothing, and then for a little while she would be her old self again, gay and beautiful, and I could believe it had only been my imagination after all. But only for a little while, and then the distraction, the evasiveness, the impatience, the excuses, all once more would return.

Until two nights ago. We sat in her convertible beneath a swollen moon, high on a dark cliff overlooking the sea, and I forced the issue at last. “Delia,” I said. “Tell me the truth, I have to know. Is there another man?”

She looked at me and I saw she was about to deny everything yet again, but this time she couldn’t do it. She bowed her head. “I’m sorry, Ronald.” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear the words. “There is.”

“Who?”

She raised her head, gazing at me with eyes in which guilt and pity and love and shame were all commingled, and she said, “It’s Mr. Miller.”

I recoiled. “What?”

“I met him at the country club,” she said. “I can’t help it, Ronald. I wish to God I’d never met the man, he has some sort of hold over me, some hypnotic power. That first night, he took me to a motel, and—”

Then she told me, told me everything, every action and every demand, in the most revolting detail. And though I squirmed and struggled, though I strained and yearned, I could not wake up, I could not end the Dream. Delia told me everything she had done with Mr. Miller, her helplessness to deny him even though it was me she loved and him for whom she felt only detestation, her constant trysts with him night after night, direct from my arms to his. She told me of their planned meeting later that very night in the motel where it had all begun, and she told me of her bitter self-knowledge that even now, after I knew everything, she would still meet him.

Then at last her toneless voice was finished and we were in silence once again, beneath the moon, high on the cliff. Then I awoke.

That was two nights ago. Yesterday I arose the same as ever — what else could I do? — and I went to the store as usual, and I behaved normally in every way. What else could I do? But I noticed again Mr. Miller’s muted attitude toward me, and now I understood it was the result of his guilty knowledge. Of course Delia had told him about me, she’d described all that to me during her confession, relating how Mr. Miller had laughed and been scornful to hear that “Ronald the sap” had never been to bed with her. “Doesn’t know what he’s missing, does he?” she quoted him as saying, with a laugh.

At lunchtime I drove past the motel she’d named, and a squalid place it was, peeling stucco painted a garish blue. Not far beyond it was a gunsmith’s; on the spur of the moment I stopped, I talked to the salesman about “plinking” and “varmints,” and I bought a snub-nosed Iver Johnson Trailsman revolver. The salesman inserted the .32 bullets into the chambers, and I put the box containing the gun into the glove compartment of my car. Last evening I carried the gun unobserved into the house and hid it in my room, in a dresser drawer, beneath my sweaters.

And last night, as usual, I dreamed. But in the Dream I was not with Delia. In the Dream I was alone, in my bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed with the gun in my hand, listening to the small noises of my mother and sister as they prepared for sleep, waiting for the house to be quiet. In last night’s Dream I had the gun and I planned to use it. In last night’s Dream I had not left my car in the drive as usual but a street away, parked at the curb. In last night’s Dream I was waiting only for my mother and sister to be safely asleep, when I intended to creep silently from the house, hurry down the pavement to my car, drive to that motel, and enter room 7 — it’s always room 7, Delia told me. always the same room — where it was my intention to shoot Mr. Miller dead. In last night’s Dream I heard my mother and sister moving about, at first in the kitchen and then in the bathroom and then in their bedrooms. In last night’s Dream the house slowly, gradually, finally became quiet, and I got to my feet, putting the gun in my pocket, preparing to leave the room. And at that point the Dream stopped.

I have been very confused today. I have wanted to talk to Mr. Miller, but I’ve been afraid to. I have been unsure what to do next, or in which life to do it. If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, will he still lie in the store tomorrow, with his guilt and his scorn? If I kill Mr. Miller in the Dream tonight, and if he is still in the store tomorrow, will I go mad? If I fail to kill Mr. Miller, somewhere, somehow, how can I go on living with myself?

When I came home from work this evening, I didn’t park the car in the drive as usual, but left it at the curb, a street away from here. My mind was in turmoil all evening, bur I behaved normally, and after the eleven o’clock news I came up here to my bedroom.

But I was afraid to sleep, afraid to Dream. I took the gun from the drawer, and I have been sitting here, listening to the small sounds of my mother and my sister as they prepare for bed.

Can things ever lie again as they were between Delia and me? Can the memory of what has happened ever be expunged? I turn the gun and look into its black barrel and I ask myself all these questions. “Perchance to Dream.” If I arranged it that I would never awake again, would I go on Dreaming? But would the Dream become worse instead of better?

Is it possible — as some faint doubting corner of my mind suggests — even remotely possible, that Delia is not what she seems, that she was never true, that she is a succuba who has come to destroy me through my Dream?

The house is silent. The hour is late. If I stay awake, if I creep from the house and drive to the motel, what will I find in room 7?

And whom shall I kill?

1982

Interstellar Pigeon

The natives didn’t name their planet casino for nothing — the crew members of galactic spaceship hopeful were losing their shirts.

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. Tint he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (111,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth.

Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

Why me?

Watching Captain Gregory Standforth sit at his desk and — stuff yet another bird — this one a blue-beaked yellow-backed Latter Sneezer from Degeb IV— Why me? wondered Ensign Kybee Benson, not for the first time. What flaw is there in me that I don’t suspect? Why did they choose ME?

There was no question why the Galactic Council had chosen Captain Standforth to lead this one-way trip into obscurity. Just look at him now: a tall, skinny, mild-eyed fellow with his nose and fingers jammed up that dead bird’s ass, tamping the excelsior in real tight. “Got to get it in real tight,” the captain said, “or the wings’ll sag.” Why me? thought Ensign Benson. I’m no misfit.

Captain Standforth was, and would be the first to admit it. Were it not for the seven generations of glorious Standforth’s preceding him in the Galactic Patrol, he never would have joined up, nor would they have taken him. Taxidermy was the only thing he really cared about, which was why strange stuffed birds from all over the known Universe pervaded the Hopeful like an eighth plague. Everywhere you looked, plastic eyes looked back, surrounded by feathers.

“Captain,” Ensign Benson said, “we really should talk about Casino.”

“In a moment.”

Ensign Benson, a social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, the man whose job it was to define each of the lost colonies once it was found, to study it and describe what it had become in its 500 years of solitude, brimmed to overflowing with facts about Casino, the first colony they were to visit. The name itself, Casino, had been a brave, irony; the colonists had been a group of compulsive gamblers, who had joined to flee the temptations of society. What had they become in the past 500 years? “Captain—”

“This is the most delicate moment, Ensign Benson.” The captain inserted a glittering green eye; balefully, one-eyed, the Latter Sneezer glared at Ensign Benson.

Why me?

“There’s a spaceship coming!”

“Six to five it crashes.”

Astrogator Pam Stokes, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion, entered the captain’s office to find the captain stuffing yet another bird and Ensign Benson ‘hopping tip and down on a nearby chair, rather birdlike himself. “Captain,” Pam said, “we’re about to land, sir.”

The captain looked up, startled, the one-eyed bird impaled on his right hand. “Land! Why?”

“Because we’re here, sir.”

“Here?” The captain looked at the bird, which looked back.

“Casino, Captain,” Ensign Benson said. “I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Pam nodded. “That’s right, sir. Fourth planet of the star Niobe.” Whipping out her ever-present slide rule, she said, “Fifteen sixteenths Earth’s size, one point oh oh seven six Earth’s density, fifteen point one six—”

Rising, the captain said, “Yes, yes, yes, Astrogator, thank you very much.”

“Just trying to keep you informed, sir. I may say, as astrogator, I had quite some time finding this spot. Celestial drift, you know.”

The captain, removing the bird from his fingers and edging toward the door, said, “Is that right?”

Absorbed in her slide rule, Pam said, “Given a mean deviation of point oh seven five—”

“I’ll just go supervise the landing,” the captain said and left with the bird.

“Alter for nebular attraction,” Pam mumbled, working the math, “on a scale of—”

Ensign Benson was beside her now. Stroking her smooth, tanned forearm with the tiny golden hairs all along its rounded length, he said, “I know a couple of mean deviations myself.”

“Oh, hello, Kybee,” she said, gave him a distracted smile and went away to think about the math.

On a grassy field not far from town, the spaceship landed, light as a feather (automatic pilot). A dozen citizens of Casino approached the great gleaming sausage and watched in admiration as an oval door in its side slid away to permit a ladder slowly to descend. Down that ladder, smiling heroically in the sunlight, resplendent in his Galactic Patrol uniform, came Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful’s handsome, idealistic second in command. Pausing two steps from the bottom, he raised his hand like a Roman centurion and cried, “Hail, Casinomen! We come in peace!”

A citizen approached. “Seven to two,” he said, “you don’t know what day it is.”

Billy’s smile went lopsided. He said, “What?”

“Do we have a bet, stranger?”

Billy shook his head. When things confused him — as they frequently did — he just went on doing what he was supposed to do. “I’m here to find out if you’re warlike,” he explained.

The citizen frowned. “What’s ‘warlike’?”

“It’s OK, Captain,” Billy called.

The captain appeared, birdless, looked at the far horizon and fell down the stairs. Billy helped him pick himself up as Ensign Benson also emerged from the ship, accompanying stout Galactic Councilman Morton Luthguster, who came massively down the ladder as though down a grand staircase to his coronation.

“So this is Casino,” the captain said, dusting himself off, looking around at a tree-studded landscape that looked much like northern Wisconsin in late September.

The citizen sidled up to him. “Seven to two you don’t know what day it is.”

The captain looked at his watch. “It’s ten minutes to six in the morning. Greenwich time, on Earth.”

“What day it is.”

With another look at his watch, the captain said, “August seventh, eleven thousand, four hundred and six.”

Of the citizen’s patience, not much was left. “Not the date,” he said. “the day.”

“The day?” The captain shook his head. “Where?”

“Here!”

“Back on Earth, it’s Tuesday. Unless my watch stopped.”

Councilman Luthguster, having reached the second step from the bottom, now spread his arms wide and declaimed, “Welcome, Casinomen! Welcome to the bosom of Mother Earth! I am Councilman Morton Luthguster; I am here among you to represent the Supreme Galactic Council, and I have full treaty-making powers.”

A citizen standing beside the ladder said, “Guess your weight.”

Luthguster looked down askance: “I beg your pardon.”

The citizen said. “Ten lukes says I can guess your weight within five-kilograms.”

“I would prefer if you didn’t,” Luthguster told him. Looking around himself, realizing there was no one responsible here, that these were all layabouts and scalawags, he said, “Take me to your leader.”

It was a normal day in the main plaza of downtown Casino. At benches and tables and grassy patches on the plaza itself — a large round area rather like a roulette wheel — pairs and small groups contested together, using various kinds of dice, cards, paddles, marbles, game boards, magnets and lengths of string. Some needed no equipment at all: “Bet you two lukes that cloud passes the hill before that cloud.” Next to three employment buses, potential fruit pickers, meat packers or assembly-line button pushers played 14-card monte against the employment agents; the winners took their ten Iukes’ wages and went elsewhere, while the losers climbed, muttering, aboard the buses, resigned to a six-hour workday for no pay. Through the crowd passed a ragged beggar, limping, rattling something in a tin cup and whining, “Gimme a break, will ya? Gimme a break.”

A prosperous-looking citizen counting out a recent handful of winning’s turned toward the beggar his self-confident eye: “What’s your proposition?”

The beggar rattled his cup. “Dice. High number. Two lukes — against a kick in the shin.”

“You’re on.”

As they bent over the cup, the Earthmen arrived in the plaza, escorted by several of the citizens who had watched them land, one of whom pointed across the plaza at a large white wooden structure that looked rather like an old Mississippi riverboat. “That’s the chief tout’s mansion there.”

“Ah,” Luthguster said, nodding his pompous head. “The man I must see. Captain Standforth, you and your men wait here. We don’t want to startle the head of government with a show of force.”

“Yes, sir.”

Luthguster waddled off with several citizens toward the chief tout’s mansion. Billy Shelby and Ensign Benson gazed around at the citizenry, many of whom gazed back in a rather predatory fashion. Captain Standforth, head back, mouth open, gaped skyward in an abstracted fashion, till all it once he whipped out his stun gun and fired into the air.

All around the plaza, losers ducked for cover while winners crouched protectively over game boards, card layouts and die tosses. A large, big-bellied bird, with a pink tuft on top of its orange head and a lot of bright scarlet feathers on its behind, fell out of the sky and landed dead at the captain’s feet. Admiringly, the captain picked it up by one green claw, while its fleas hurriedly packed their bags, left a note for the milkman and went leaping away. “Wonderful specimen,” the captain said, turning his prize this way and that. “Never seen anything like it.”

A cautious citizen approached, saying, “What did you do?”

“Taxidermy is my passion,” the captain explained. “I stuff birds.”

“Where do you stuff them?”

“In the ship.”

The beggar, limping worse than ever, approached the captain, rattling his tin cup. “Gimme a break, sir,” he whined. “Gimme a break, will ya?”

The captain, embarrassed, took a coin from his pocket and dropped it into the cup. “Here you are, my good man.” The beggar stared into his cup, dumfounded.

Billy Shelby said, “Shall I take the bird back to the ship. Captain?”

“Thank you, Lieutenant, thank you.”

Off went Billy with the bird.

Another citizen, pointing after the bird, said, “Even money you can’t do that again.”

Scratching his wrist, the captain said, “Eh?”

“Even money’s the best I can do,” the citizen warned him.

The captain looked slowly around the plaza, at last registering the human activity here. “Are they,” he said, pointing at one pair of dice players, “are they gambling?”

“They’re all gambling,” Ensign Benson assured him. “Fascinating, fascinating.”

“My goodness,” the captain said.

“They’ve turned their weakness into strength,” Ensign Benson went on. “Their vice into virtue. Their swords into— Well, no.”

They strolled together over to a group playing cards around a cement table. “Pardon me,” the captain said, “but is this a game of chance?”

“That depends,” said one of the players.

“I mean a gambling game.”

Another player — the prosperous citizen, in fact — said, “It’s a fine game, my friend, and very easy to learn. Care to sit in?”

“No, no. I’ll just watch.”

“Then come sit by me,” said the citizen, hospitable as a spider. “Name’s Scanney. I’ll explain it to you as we go.”

In the chief tout’s office, the chief tout himself, in appearance a cross between a distinguished politician and a sleazy gambler, sat at a desk playing a board game against himself. It looked something like Monopoly but was much more complex, being spread over several layers of boards, with ramps, elevators and slides. The chief tout held two dice cups. one in each hand, and played one hand against the other. It had been years since anyone — not even Scanney — would play against him.

He looked up from his left hand’s predicament as his secretary — that is, the loser in that day’s steno pool — came in to say, “Three to two you don’t know what Earth is.”

“Original Source of mankind,” the chief tout immediately responded. ‘“They brought us here five hundred years ago, said they’d be right back, haven’t been heard from since. Why?”

“They’re back,” the disconsolate girl said, counting out three hard-won Iukes onto the chief tout’s desk. “There’s a fat one ontside.”

“Send him in,” the chief tout said, smiling from ear to ear and rubbing his competing hands together.

A moment later. the fat one himself was ushered in, accompanied by two wolfishly grinning citizens. They’d be demanding a finder’s fee later on; the chief tout could tell just by looking at them.

Meanwhile, the fat one was in voice: “I am, Your Honor, proud to announce that I am Councilman Morton Luthguster, representative plenipotentiary from the Supreme Galactic Council, and it is my esteemed pleasure to welcome you back to the Confederation of Earth.”

“Haven’t heard from you people In quite a while,” the chief tout said.

“I am empowered,” Luthguster said, puffing himself up, “to negotiate with you on several fronts. Mutual defense, for instance. Trade agreements, technical advisory personnel. Earth can do much for you now that you’re back in the Confederation.”

“Trade agreements, eh?” Gesturing toward the game board, the chief tout said, “That’s what this game’s all about, in a way. Familiar with it?”

Luthguster gave the board a suspicious look. “Uh, no,” he said. “I don’t believe so.”

“Sit down here,” the chief tout said making room for a chair beside himself. “I’ll show you how it works.”

•

“I’m going to take a stroll around town,” Ensign Benson said. “You’ll be all right here, Captain?”

The captain nodded in a distracted way; most of his attention was on his new friend Scanney’s explanation of this fascinating card game. “I’m fine, Ensign Benson; you go ahead.

“Now, if you get two alike,” Scanney was saying, “that’s good. But three alike is even better.”

Vaguely worried, Ensign Benson said, You won’t play or anything, will you, Captain?”

“No, no, no, I’m just observing. Now, Mr. Scanney, what are those cards with the nooses?”

In the main corridor of the Hopeful. Billy Shelby passed Astrogator Pam Stokes, still too involved with her slide rule to notice either him or the bird he carried. He said, nevertheless, believing it good manners — and good for morale — to greet crew members when spotted. Unanswered, he went on to dump the dead bird in the captain’s office, then to make a quick round of the interior, reassuring himself that everything was spaceshipshape. In the main engine room. He found Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw whamming away at a pipe with a hammer. The sound was awful. “Hester? Something the matter?”

“No,” Hester said. “I’m just keeping my arm loose.” Fortyish, stocky and blunt-featured, Hester was blunt in manner and personality and rather blunt in brain as well.

“Our very lives,” Billy reminded her, “depend upon those engines.”

“Is that right?” Hester hammered some more, flailing away.

Billy blinked at every bang. “Hester, is it serious?”

Hester put down her hammer and turned to frown at Billy. “You tell me,” she said. Picking up a white plastic china coffee mug, she turned a spigot, filled the mug with black liquid and handed it to Billy. “Give that a taste.”

Doubtful, Billy said, “Taste?”

“Go on, go on.”

So Billy took a tiny sip, and his face wrinkled up like a cheap shirt. “Oog!” he said.

“You call that coffee?” Hester demanded.

“No! Is it supposed to be?”

“Yes, it’s supposed to—” Struck with sudden doubt, Hester took back the mug and sniffed it, “No, you’re right; that’s crankcase oil. Wait a minute, now.”

Turning away, Hester began following pipes with a pointing finger. Billy, making bad-mouth faces, headed for the door, but before he got there, Ensign Benson walked in, saying. “Bad news.”

“Don’t drink the coffee,” Billy said.

“What? No, this is worse. The captain got into a game.”

Hester looked away from her maze of pipes. “He what?”

“He lost the ship.”

“Oh, Captain, my, Captain,” Billy said. “Whatever made you do it?”

“I had a hunch,” the Captain said. He looked dazed.

A citizen passing with an armchair on his head — Scanney, the new owner, was moving into the Hopeful — paused to say, “You should never draw to an inside quork.”

The captain sat on his suitcase, far across the large field from his former ship. About him were his possessions, his birds and his crew: Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Ensign Kybee Benson, Astrogator Pam Stokes and Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw. “Oh my”, the Captain said. “What will I tell Councilman Luthguster?”

Luthguster rolled the four dice, turned over a card, moved a tiny pyramid three spaces to the left and groaned with disgust. “I don’t believe such dreadful luck!”

“Easy come, easy go.” the chief tout told him cheerfully. “That’s the motto on our money,” Presenting a document made ready by his now-grinning secretary, he said, “Now, Councilman, if you’ll just sign here and here and initial over here.”

Shaking his head, Luthguster signed. The two hovering citizens smirked at each other. “They’ll never understand this,” Luthguster said sadly, “back at the council.”

“Your luck’s bound to change,” the chief tout assured him. “Next inning, we’ll play for reciprocal tariff agreements. My move, I believe.”

“Damn, Pam,” Hester said, her personality not improved by eviction. “Where did you ever get a slide rule? Why don’t you use a pocket computer, like everybody else?”

“It was my mother’s mother’s,” Pam said, blinking as she looked up from the tool in question. And my mother’s. And my mo—”

“How many generations back?”

“Sixteen.”

Hester closed her eyes. “I withdraw the question.”

“Rather than quibble among yourselves, like the clotheads you are,” said Ensign Benson, who had no idea why his previous commanders had been discontented with his performance of duty, “why don’t you turn your little brains to how we get out of this mess?”

“I don’t think you should talk to the gentler sex that way,” said Billy, with many inaccuracies.

“Maybe Pam can find the answer in her slide rule,” Hester said, glaring at Pam, who was sunk in contemplation of her heirloom.

Ensign Benson, about to speak harshly, paused to frown at Pam. “Hmmm,” he said. “Pamela, dear?”

“Yes, Kybee?”

“You come along with me,” Ensign Benson said.

A bunch of the citizens were whooping it up in the plaza. “Did you ever,” one of them said. “see fish like those Earthmen?”

“It’s like walking into a kindergarten,” said another, “with loaded dice.”

“Scanney’s studying how to run that spaceship,” said a third. “He’s going straight to Earth. He figures he’ll own the whole place in two weeks.”

“Here come a couple of them.” said a fourth as Ensign Benson and Pam came strolling into the plaza.

Grins and nods and a few waves were exchanged between Ensign Benson and the sniggering locals, until he reached the group that had been discussing Scanney, where he said, in an offhand manner. “Nice little games you’ve got going here.”

“Want some action, Earthman?” Clouds, ants and in-out knockup were mentioned.

“Not this smalltime stuff,” Ensign Benson said with manifest disparagement. “Aren’t there any big-time games around this burg?”

“By big time,” a tittering citizen asked, “what do you mean?”

“What have you got?”

“The Dive,” several citizens volunteered.

“Sounds right. Lead me to it.”

Within The Dive — a great, cavernous place, in which the gaming tables were brightly, whitely lit, but the far walls and the high ceiling remained in windowless gloom — a kind of low intense buzzing was the only sound, as though a million bees were getting caught up on their back orders of honey. Citizens and croupiers and dealers hunched over the tables with no small talk, no conversation except the words necessary to keep the games going. “Ah, yes,” Ensign Benson said as the simpering citizens led him and Pam into the joint. “This will do just fine.”

A hostess approached, slinky in off-the-shoulder red. “Interested in a little action?”

Just to watch, for now,” Ensign Benson told her. “What’s the highest-money game here?”

“Koppel,” she said, pointing, “at that table right there.”

“Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” she said.

At the edge of the clearing, Hester busily, grumpily, steadfastly, clumsily worked at making a lean-to out of leafy branches. The captain sat on his suitcase among his birds. Billy paced back and forth, gazing mournfully from time to time at the distant Hopeful.

It was Billy who broke the silence: “Pam says the odds of anyone’s stumbling onto this place and rescuing us are eleven billion, four hundred sixty million to one.”

“Don’t talk about odds,” the captain said.

Hester said, “I could use a little help around here.”

Billy looked at her project. “What on Earth is that?”

“The same thing it is on Casino,” she said. “A lean-to.”

“It leans mostly that way,” Billy commented.

“It’ll keep the rain off.”

Billy looked skyward. “It isn’t gonna rain.”

“Wanna bet?”

The captain groaned and covered his face with his hands as Councilman Luthguster came blustering in, saying, “What’s going on around here?”

“Oh, Councilman,” the captain said, leaping to his feet and knocking over several birds. “I can explain.”

“You can?” Luthguster turned on the captain an eye as baleful as that on any of his birds. “You can explain why Ensign Benson is gambling?”

The koppel table was now the center of interest as half a dozen players faced Ensign Benson, the new shark in town. Having watched koppel for 20 minutes — it was a pokerlike game but with more cards in more suits and more complicated rules — having received a tiny frightened nod from Pam, Ensign Benson had converted his watch and camera and other salable possessions into lukes and had taken a seat at the game. Pam stood behind him, nervously fidgeting with her slide rule and from time to time nervously clutching at his shoulder, while Ensign Benson went through his first table of unbelieving opponents like a piranha through a cow.

The stakes were higher and the crowd of spectators was growing fast when the other Earth people came hurrying into The Dive. “Ensign Benson!” cried the captain.

“Hello, Captain,” Ensign Benson said, with a casual half wave, half salute. “And raise a hundred lukes,” he said, pushing forward a small stack of chips.

“You’ll ruin us!” the captain cried. “We can’t afford your gambling debts!” To the Casinomen at large, he announced, “Don’t gamble with this man; he has no money!”

“Wanna bet?” asked a bystander.

Calmly, raking in the lukes, Ensign Benson said, “I’m winning, Captain.”

“Ensign Benson,” the captain ordered, unheeding, “consider yourself under arrest. Return to the ship at once and confine your…” At that point, he ran down, blinking, remembering that he didn’t have a ship anymore. None of them had quarters to which they could confine themselves.

Then Billy leaned over to whisper in the captain’s ear, “Sir, he seems to be winning.”

“Never seen a man learn a game so fast,” said a bystander.

The captain said, “What?”

“Why don’t we make it interesting gents?” Ensign Benson said, riffling the outsize deck. “Ever hear of something called pot limit?”

On the Hopeful’s command deck, Scanney lolled at his ease on his favorite chair, chatting with a pair of his favorite cronies. “So we can’t dope out the hyperdrive,” he said. “When the time’s right, they’ll teach it to us themselves.”

“Boy, Scanney,” said a crony. “how ya gonna do that?”

“They’ll be around pretty soon, ready to dicker, but I don’t talk till tomorrow. A night in the open air; that’ll help.”

“You’re some operator, Scanney.”

“Yes, I am. Three to two it rains tonight.”

“I wouldn’t bet against you, Scanney.”

At that point, another Scanney crony ran in to say, “One of the Earthmen’s playing koppel at The Dive!”

“What?” Scanney sat upright and put his feet on the floor. “They better not use up their credit before they deal with me.”

“But the Earthman’s winning!”

“Impossible”, said Scanney. But he got to his feet, saying, “Come on, boys, let’s take a look at this wonder.”

Ensign Benson looked around the table at nothing but empty chairs. In front of himself, and piled on a special side table brought out for the purpose, was an amazing number of lukes. “Boys?” Ensign Benson said, “You quitting on me?”

“I don’t buck that streak anymore.”

“I may be crazy, but I ain’t stupid.”

The spectators gawked, eight deep, Pam stood behind Ensign Benson, nervously clutching her slide rule in one hand and his shoulder in the other. The captain, Billy, Hester and Councilman Luthguster stood just to the side, open-mouthed. Ensign Benson looked around. “Who’ll take a seat?”

“Ten lukes,” a bystander said, “says you don’t find anybody to play against you.”

“You’re on,” Ensign Benson said as Scanney and his cronies came pushing through the crowd.

“What’s this?” Scanney demanded. “Game over?”

“Not if you’ll sit in.”

Scanney looked at the assembled crowd, at the lukes piled up around Ensign Benson, at the ensign’s calmly welcoming smile. “Er,” he said.

“Unless you don’t feel up to a little game.”

“Up to it?” His public reputation, the presence of his cronies, his own bravado all combined to force him into that chair. “Deal, my friend, and kiss your worldly goods goodbye.”

Ensign Benson smiled at the bystander. “That’s ten lukes you owe me.”

“Will you take a check?”

“I’ll take anything you’ve got,” Ensign Benson said.

When Billy stepped out of The Dive for a breath of air, he saw Niobe, this planet’s sun, just peeping over the horizon. Night had come and gone, and now it was day again. Inside, the epic battle between Scanney and Ensign Benson went on, seesawing this way and that, Ensign Benson always ahead but somehow never able to deliver that final coup de grâce. From time to time, the participants and observers had paused to consume something that claimed to be coffee and something else that looked like a prune Danish — or possibly a stinging jellyfish — but the pauses were few and the concentration intense.

And suspense was turning at last into dread. Billy didn’t want to go back in there, but a sense of solidarity with the crew forced him finally indoors once more, where he circled the outer fringes of the crowd, decided solidarity didn’t mean he necessarily had to stand with them all the time and found himself a new angle of vision, near Scanney, instead.

A tense moment had been reached; yet another tense moment. Ensign Benson was pushing stack after stack of lukes into the middle of the table; when he was finished, a hoarse Scanney said, “I’m not sure I can cover that.”

“You want to concede?” Ensign Benson was also hoarse.

Billy watched Scanney study his cards. Then he watched Scanney’s hand reach down to a narrow slot under the tabletop and tap something there as though for reassurance. Tap a— Tap a— A card!

“I’ll stay,” Scanney said, his hand coming up without that card. Billy stared at the man’s right ear.

“Then cover the bet,” Ensign Benson said.

“Will you take my I.O.U.?”

“I’ll do better. You put up the ship.”

“The ship?” Scanney was scornful. “Against that bet?”

This was the moment Ensign Benson had been waiting for. He seemed to draw strength from Pam’s hand on his shoulder. “Against,” he said, voice calm, eyes unblinking, “against everything I’ve got.”

Again Scanney’s finger tips touched that hidden card. “It’s a bet,” Scanney said. “Deal the last round.”

Ensign Benson dealt the cards.

“Captain!” Billy yelled across the table, pointing at the black darkness above. “Shoot that bird!”

With a quick draw Bat Masterson himself would have admired, the captain unlimbered his stun gun and fired three blasts into the cavernous darkness of the ceiling. Spectators scrambled for cover, Scanney and Ensign Benson hunched protectively over their cards and chips and Billy slid forward and back like a master swordsman, although sans épée.

Ensign Benson was the first to recover. “What are you bird brains doing?”

“Well,” said the captain, embarrassed, bolstering his weapon as ancient dust puffs floated down into the light. “Well, uh, Billy, uh…”

“Sorry,” Billy said, palming the 14 of snakes. “I thought I saw a bird.”

“Indoors?”

“It happens,” Billy said. “I remember once my aunt Tabitha left the porch door open and—”

“Oh, never mind,” Ensign Benson said. “Scanney, I’m calling you.”

Billy looked at Scanney, whose finger tips were at that now-empty slot, and the expression on the man’s face was one of consternation and bewilderment, gradually becoming horror.

“Scanney?” Ensign Benson tapped his own cards on the table. “Want me to declare first?”

Everyone waited. Wide-eyed, slack-jawed, face drained of color, Scanney at last managed to nod.

“Fine.” Ensign Benson fanned out his cards. “Read ’em and weep.”

But Scanney didn’t; instead, he turned to look, with a world of understanding in his eyes, at the radiant, innocent face of Lieutenant Billy Shelby.

They all strolled back to the ship together, Earth people and Casino people in little chatting groups; there was general agreement that the night’s big head-to-head koppel game was the stuff of legend. The captain was delighted at the return of his ship but was even more relieved that Councilman Luthguster was taking the whole affair so well. “Personal contacts on the natives’ terms are vital on a mission such as this,” the councilman said. “I myself found it relaxed the chief tout if we played children’s games.”

A bit apart, Ensign Benson walked with Scanney, who had recovered from his losses and was becoming his old confident self. “Obviously,” Ensign Benson was saying, “all those lukes I won can’t do me much good on the ship.”

“I’ll be happy to invest them for you,” Scanney said.

“Not invest. I cleaned you out, Scanney, so what’s happening is, I’m staking you to a new start. It’ll be a few years before I can get back, and when I do, half of what you have is mine.”

“Hmm,” said Scanney.

“Oh, you’ll be able to siphon off a lot. But you can’t hide it all, so we’ll both make out.”

“It’s a deal,” Scanney said. As they shook on it, Hester came by, clutching her hammer and looking truculent. She said to Scanney, “I hope you didn’t mess up my engines.”

“I am a lucky man, madam,” he answered, “and a lucky man is one who doesn’t mess with engines he doesn’t understand.”

Hester frowned at Ensign Benson. “What’s he mean, ‘madam’?”

“It’s a local term for engineer,” Ensign Benson said.

Meanwhile, at the ship, Luthguster was making a farewell speech to the chief tout and the assembled Casino people: “And I think that when your chief tout promulgates the various treaties and agreements we reached in this most fruitful visit, you will all agree that Earth has been more than fair. More than fair.”

Under the speech, Ensign Benson went to Billy to say, “I finally figured out that bird shoot. Thanks.”

“Oh, you’re welcome. But the great part,” Billy said, “was how lucky you were, hand after hand.”

“That wasn’t luck. It was Pam.”

“It was?”

“God meant that girl, Billy, to be one of the great pieces of all time, but something went wrong somewhere, and she took the path of mathematics instead. She and her slide rule add up to one genius. It took her twenty minutes to figure out the odds in koppel; from then on, she gave me signals on my shoulder, and I knew the precise odds at every step of play. Ultimately, I couldn’t lose.”

“Unless somebody cheated,” Billy said.

“Which is where you came in. Thanks again.”

Luthguster at last was scaling the heights of his peroration: “I have been delighted,” he announced, “to be the individual who brought you this tremendous news and effected this magnificent reconciliation. And now we must bid you a fond farewell.”

“Tell them where you got it,” the chief tout said, “and how easy it was.”

As the Earth people started up the ladder, Hester’s hammer clanged inadvertently off the metal rail. “Careful with my ship,” Ensign Benson said.

The Earth people entered Ensign Benson’s ship. The ladder retracted and the door closed. Soon a great, powerful humming was heard. “Even money it blows up,” said a citizen.

“I’ll take that,” Scanney said.

Dream a Dream

Stirred by a bizarre nightmare, Nora awakens to a surprisingly passionate reality…

“I’m dreaming, Nora thought, and she was right, but it didn’t matter.

The dream was very realistic, even to the glitter on the knife in the hand of the tall Mayan priest. He faced Nora in a small chamber she knew to be at the base of the temple, and even while her attention was on the stone knife she was aware of the rightness of every detail, both in his costume and the room itself, a narrow stone-walled space with a dry-smelling thatch roof. Stylized hummingbirds and vultures flowed on the priest’s robes as he gestured, saying, “Well? Are you ready?”

Of course he isn’t speaking English, and of course I understand him. “Ready for what?”

“After the rains,” the priest said, “we must sacrifice a virgin to ensure fertility in the new fields.”

Astonished, almost offended, not yet scared, Nora said, “I’m not a virgin!”

His free hand extended toward her, “Come, you keep everybody waiting.”

A great crowd could be faintly heard outside. Nora shrank away, feeling the rough wall against her back through the thin white cotton tunic. “I’m a married woman,” she said. Safe in that other world, beyond the edge of the dream, Ray was now asleep in the cot next to hers, the two of them peaceful and at rest in the Central American night. “I’m twenty-seven years old,” Nora said. “I’ve been married nearly three years. I am not a virgin!”

“Of course you are.” His impatience made him draw quick cutting motions in the air with the blade. “There is no passion in your life,” he said, “—not for anything with juice in it. You married your husband not for love of him but of archaeology,” the word dripping with contempt. “You’ve never loved anything but dust. You’re a virgin, no question. Come along.” Eyes determined, his wiry hand closed around her arm.

“No!” She sat up straight in the dark, disturbing the mosquitoes, staring at the night. On the other cot, Ray turned heavily in his sleep, smacking his lips, a fiftyish man who slept profoundly after the hard physical days in the field.

“I’m not,” she whispered. The pressure of that bony hand could still be felt, a tight band around her upper arm. The glassless screened rectangle of the window let in air and the tiny night sounds of the jungle. Nora slowly lay back, hands holding the sheet under her chin, eyes very wide in the dark.

During breakfast, at one of the long tables in the dining shed, Nora pensively picked at her eggs and beans while Ray talked with the oil company man.

His name was Stafford, and he had come to this remote jungle camp five days ago for a stay of about a month. By day he wandered the high land to the west, and in the evenings after dinner he sat here in the dining shed in the circle of light, where he drew his tiny maps and made notes in a small, neat hand. Now he was saying something about tall mounds he had seen in the jungle, similar to those concealing the structures here in the main pan of Actun Ek, the Mayan city whose excavation Ray was directing. “Thanks, Bill,” Ray said. “We’ll have a look.”

Nora was relieved when breakfast was done and they could tramp on out to the site, where the workers already crawled over the high-stepped sides of Building B-l, the primary temple of Actun Elk. I was here last night, Nora thought.

The workers, Indian tribesmen who made their living from archaeological sites, had nearly finished the first task, clearing away the centuries of growth and decay, the earth and brush and trees that covered the cunningly nested old stones, the steep lines of stairs. Unlike the Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples were built solid, without rooms or corridors, just the steps and walls and sculptures reaching upward. Only at the base had there originally been the small thatch-roofed rooms built out from the temple’s side.

Nora and Ray worked behind the Indians, collecting shards, filling in site maps. This was Nora’s third year at Actun Ek, her eighth year since she had fallen in love with the dignity, strength, and confidence of the Mayan civilization, the impervious mystery of their individual persons. Who had they been? When they awoke in the morning, what had they thought of themselves and the jungle around them and the high temples to which they devoted their lives?

Human sacrifice: yes, that was part of it but hardly everything. Something was known of their agriculture, their trade, their religion, even their sports, but never very much. Never enough to hamper Nora’s imagination.

Every day, in her mind, as she gleaned her way across the uneven steps, Nora was a Mayan priestess. Not even Ray knew of this game, this fantasy she had lived and elaborated for eight years. She imagined her clothing, her food, the understated drama of her days. Little was known of the place of women among the Mayan upper class, so her invention could float unimpeded.

At dinner, Bill Stafford showed them, on his neat maps, the location of the mounds he’d seen. This earnest geologist seemed even younger than Nora, which from the beginning had pleased her. She’d married a man much older than herself, was mostly around people of his generation, and resented their usual assumption that she was too young to be serious. Stafford was barely out of engineering college, but there could be no doubt of his seriousness. He had a square-jawed, handsome face, softened by a faint vagueness of expression. His eyeglasses were square-lensed, with plastic frames just a bit darker than his tanned skin. His hair was blond but already very thin, sunlight reflecting from his scalp through his widow’s peak. He wore hiking shoes, khaki slacks, a short-sleeved white dress shirt; in a white hard-plastic pouch in the shin pocket, his pens and pencils were neatly arrayed. He shaved every day.

She didn’t dream that night, but she barely slept either. Every time she dozed off, the fear of the dream startled her awake. She spent the night remembering her life, seeing herself as Dr. Helm’s promising student, then as Mr. Helm’s gifted graduate student, then as Raymond Helm’s assistant, and now as Ray’s wife. She had not slept with him until after his divorce from Joanna. He was Nora’s first husband.

In another shed in the compound, Bill Stafford would be asleep. This is terrible, Nora told herself. I must get over this. I must sleep. Toward morning, she did.

“I’m just here to do the stuff on the ground,” Bill Stafford was explaining to her. “Confirm or deny the technology’s guesses.”

“Does technology guess?” Nora asked, following him. She had volunteered at breakfast to go with him to see if the mounds he’d described did contain buried structures. Perspiration ran down behind her ears, between her breasts.

“It’s all step by step.” Stafford told her. “We’ve got satellite pictures to map the terrain, aerial survey using infrared. SLAR scanning. Now we have to walk the groun—”

“What kind of scanning? Help here, will you?”

They were crossing a gully. He held his hand back for her. His teeth glistened when he smiled. Sweat made gray islands on his shirt. He said, “SLAR — for Side-Looking Airborne Radar.”

“Sounds very suggestive,” she said, laughing, and released his hand. Then she had to clasp his arm to keep from slipping backward on a muddy stone.

His hand pressed to the small of her back. “Careful.”

Not careful. “You’re all wet,” she said, showing her tongue, tracing with her fingertip a line of perspiration that ran from his throat down his chest and under the shirt.

Behind the glasses his eyes looked surprised, but when she kissed him he knew what it meant.

Before dinner, she used the primitive bucket-and-cistern-in-a-tree shower, the sun-warmed water splashing over her heated body. She lifted her right breast and, yes, his watchband had left a scratch. She smiled at it.

I wasn’t wrong, she thought late that night, slipping silently through the sleeping camp, away from Bill’s room, back toward her own cot. I was right in college, right to follow my own needs and grow at my own pace. I wouldn’t have been ready then for this. But now Pm right again!

She was brand-new, tingling with rebirth. The dream had rescued her before she withered, using her Mayans as the symbol. Her stone passion had pointed the way to a richer, truer passion of the flesh.

Not that she would run off with Bill, nor leave Ray. There was no need to throw away the life she already had, the work she’d already accomplished. She would still admire Ray just as much, esteem and help him, serve him and the Mayans and the work, absorbed and satisfied; but now there would be more. A lifetime of Bill Stafford’s smiled in her mind, all young, all loving and giving, all a kind of delicious dessert. And no one need ever know, no one need ever be hurt. She could have it all.

Ray’s breathing was long and regular. Nora slid between the cool, damp sheets.

The same cell. She stared, unbelieving. The same cell, the same rough thatch ceiling, square stone walls, tall imperious priest in all his finery, grasping the same rough-edged knife. “Now,” he said, “what we do with adulteresses…”

1983

Heaven Help Us

O great juju-kuxtil, take this sacrifice and give us a sign!

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young arid struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Stanndforth commanding, was at once dispatched to reestablish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

HEAVEN

On the command deck of Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Lieutenant Billy Shelby watched the image of Heaven grow larger on the view screen. “We’re coming in,” he said. “Pam? All secure?”

Astrogator Pam Stokes, beautiful arid brainy and blind to passion, paused in her contemplation of her antique slide rule to check the webbing that held her to the pod. “All set.”

“What an exciting moment,” Billy said. A handsome young idealist, he was the Hopeful’s second-in-command and probably the person aboard who believed most fervently in the ship’s mission. “I wish the captain were up here.”

Captain Gregory Standforth himself wandered onto the command deck at that moment, holding a stuffed bird mounted on a black-plastic-onyx pedestal. “Isn’t she a beauty?” he asked and held up this unlovely creature that in death, as in life, was blessed with a big belly, a pink tuft on top of its orange head and a lot of bright scarlet feathers on its behind. The captain had bagged it on their last planet fall, Niobe IV, a.k.a. Casino. “I just finished stuffing her,” he explained. Taxidermy was all he cared for in this life, and only the long, glorious traditions of the Standforth family had forced him into the Galactic Patrol. Conversely, only those traditions had forced the patrol to accept him.

“Heaven ahead, sir,” Billy said. “Secure yourself.”

The captain studied his trousers for open zippers. “Secure myself?”

“Take a pod, Captain, sir,” Billy explained. “Landing procedure.”

“Ah.” Settling himself into a pod, the captain slid his bird onto a handy flat surface, thereby inadvertently pushing a lever. A red light flashed on all the control consoles, and there came a sudden, brief whoosh. “Oh, dear,” the captain said. “Did I do something?”

Billy studied his console. “Well, Captain,” he said, “I’m sorry, sir, but you just ejected the laundry.”

A long, long time ago, it had been a church; but now it was a roofless pagan temple, dominated by the tall, roughhewn wooden statue of a fat god figure with a blurred face. The altar was made of consumer materials, rusted and ancient and broken: TV sets, washing machines, a truck tire. A religious ceremony was under way, complete with nearly naked virgin ready for sacrifice, supine on the altar, resigned to her fate. The worshipers below were dressed in animal skins or rough cloth. Beside the altar stood Achum, the priest, holding a stone knife high, its point aimed at the virgin’s breast. This particular virgin was Achum’s own youngest daughter, Malya, but he would not hesitate in his priestly duty. He intoned:

“O great Juju-Kuxtil. Oh, take, we beseech you, this sacrifice of our youngest, our purest, our finest daughter. Find this sacrifice worthy of your mighty eyes and defend us from the yellow rain. If this sacrifice be good in your eyes, give us a sign.”

Achum bowed his head in unbroken silence. He prayed, “If she should be spared, who is my own daughter Malya of only sixteen summers, O great Juju-Kuxtil, give us a sign.”

The Hopeful’s laundry fell on everybody.

Pandemonium. Achum and Malya and the congregation all struggled and fought their way out from under the laundry. “Achum!” the worshipers cried. “Achum, what’s happening?”

“A sign!” Achum shouted, spitting out socks. “A sign!”

A worshiper with a greasy work glove rakishly atilt across his forehead cried, “Achum! What does it mean?”

“I’m not sure exactly what it means,” Achum answered, looking around at this imitation of a rummage sale, “but it sure is a sign.”

A worshiper pointed upward. “Achum, look! From the sky! Something huge is coming!”

“As I understand it, Ensign Benson, these are a religious people.”

Councilman Morton Luthguster, stout and pompous, representative of the Galactic Council on this journey of discovery and reunion, sat in his stateroom in prelanding conference with Ensign Kybee Benson, social engineer, the saturnine, impatient man whose job it was to study the lost colonies as they were found and prepare reports on what they had become in the half millennium of their isolation.

“Well, Councilman,” Ensign Benson said, “they were a religious people five hundred years ago. The colony here was founded by the Sanctarians, a peaceful, pious community determined to get away from the strife of the modern world. Well, I mean, what was then the modern world. They named their colony Heaven.”

“Charming name,” Luthguster said, nodding slowly, creating and destroying any number of chins. “And, from what you say, a simple, charming people. I look forward to their acquaintance.”

“Landing procedure complete,” said the loud-speaker system in Billy Shelby’s animated voice.

“Ah, good,” Luthguster said, heaving himself to his feet. “Come along, Ensign Benson. I wonder if I recall the Lord’s Prayer.”

The Hopeful’s automatic pilot had set the ship gently down on a wide, barren, rocky plain, similar in appearance to several unpopulated islands of the coast of Norway. A door in the side of the ship opened, a ladder protruded itself slowly from within, like a worm from an apple, and once it had pinged solidly onto the stony scree, Councilman Luthguster emerged and paused at the platform at the ladder’s top. Captain Standforth, Billy Shelby and Ensign Benson followed, and all four stared down at the welcoming committee below.

Who were Achum, his unsacrificed daughter Malya and all the worshipers, every last one of them decked out in the Hopeful’s laundry. And when Achum looked up at that fat figure atop the ladder and recalled the god statue in his church, hope became certainty: Prostrating himself, with his forehead on the ground, he cried out, in a voice of terror and awe, “Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!”

The other worshipers, quick on the uptake, also prostrated themselves, and the cry went up from one and all: “Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!”

“Not very much like my religion,” Luthguster said and led the group down the ladder to the ground, where the worshipers continued to lie on their faces and shout out the same name. The instant Luthguster’s foot touched rock, Achum scrabbled forward on knees and elbows to embrace the councilman’s ankles. “Here! Here!” cried Luthguster, not at all pleased.

Achum half rose. “Hear, hear!” he shouted. “Hip, hip—”

“Hooray!” yelled the worshipers.

“Hip, hip—”

“Hooray!”

“Hip, hip—”

“Hooray!”

Ensign Benson had approached one of the prostrate worshipers, and now he attracted the fellow’s attention with a prodding boot in the ribs. “Say, you. What’s going on around here?”

“Juju-Kuxtil!” answered the wide-eyed worshiper and nodded in awe at Luthguster. “God! It’s God!”

Achum was on his feet, prancing around, crying, “A feast for Juju-Kuxtil! A feast! A feast!”

Luthguster, beginning to get the idea, looked around and visibly became more enamored of it. Frowning at him, Ensign, Benson said, “That’s God?”

“He’s shorter in person, isn’t he” said the worshiper.

The feast was outdoors and vaguely Polynesian in effect, with the visitors and the natives all sitting in a great oval. At the head of the oval, at Councilman Luthguster’s right hand, the priest Achum stood and began the feast with a speech: “The time foretold by the sacred writings has come! Juju-Kuxtil is here to save us, as it was written! We have put on the sacred raiment, and we shall be saved from the yellow rain!”

Sotto voce, while the speech went on, Councilman Luthguster asked Ensign Benson, beside him at his other hand, “What’s happening here?”

“Apparently,” Ensign Benson murmured, “some physical disaster struck this colony quite some time ago and drove these people from an advanced society, with modern religion, back to primitive paganism.”

“But what should we do?”

“Go along with them, at least for a while. Until we learn more.”

“But what’s this yellow rain he’s going on and on about?”

“We can’t ask questions,” Ensign Benson said. “We’ll find out later.”

Achum was finishing his speech: “Soon the great Juju-Kuxtil shall begin his mighty work; but first, we shall feast. A feast of welcome to Juju-Kuxtil and his angels!”

Cheers rose from the assembled natives. Achum took his seat, and platters of food — lumpy, anonymous brown stuff that smelled rather like mildew — were distributed. Hospitably, Achum said to Luthguster, “I hope you like dilbump.”

Luthguster blinked at his plate. “It looks quite, um, filling.”

Billy Shelby had seated himself next to the prettiest girl at the feast, who happened to be Achum’s daughter Malya. Smiling at her, he said, “Hi. My name’s Billy.”

“Malya.”

“What’s the matter? You aren’t eating.”

“I wasn’t planning on dinner today,” Malya explained, “so I had a big lunch.”

“No dinner? Why not?”

“I was about to be sacrificed when you all got here.”

Billy stared. “Sacrificed! Why?”

Wondering but not quite suspicious, Malya said, “For Juju-Kuxtil, of course. Don’t you know that?”

“Oh! Um. Well, I’m glad it worked out this way, and now you don’t have to be sacrificed, after all.”

She pouted prettily. “Don’t you want me to live forever with you on the Great Cloud?”

Sincerely, he said, “I’d like you anywhere.”

She gave him a sidelong look. “You don’t seem very much like an angel.”

“I can be surprisingly human,” he told her.

The fourth voyager on the Hopeful also at the feast was Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, a 40ish, blunt-featured, blunt-talking person who was much happier with her engines than at any social occasion, including religious feasts. She kept her eyes firmly down and did little more than poke at her soup and her dilbump until the native on her left said, “Excuse me.”

Hester looked at him. He was middle-aged, with a keen look about the eyes and the gnarled hands of a worker. “Yeah?”

“I was looking at that cloud you all fly around in.”

“I hope you didn’t mess it up,” Hester said.

“It’s hard to the touch. I thought clouds were soft and fluffy.”

“It isn’t a cloud,” said Hester, who didn’t believe in going along with other people’s misconceptions. “It’s a ship.”

“Make a nice lamp.”

Hester stared. “What?”

“I’m a carpenter,” the native said. “Name of Keech.”

“I’m Hester Hanshaw. Ship’s engineer.”

“What’s that?”

“I keep the engines running.”

Keech looked impressed. “All the time?”

“I mean I fix them,” Hester told him, “if something goes wrong.”

Looking skyward, Keech said, “All those clouds have engines? Fancy that.”

Covering her exasperation by a change of subject, Hester said, “What kind of carpentry do you do?”

“Oh, the usual. Sacrificial altars, caskets, suspended cages to put sinners in.”

“Cheerful line of work.”

“Tough to build things that last,” Keech commented, “with the yellow rain all the time. But we won’t have that anymore, will we, now that Juju-Kuxtil is here?”

“You mean Councilman Luthguster?”

“The million names of God,” Keech said solemnly. “Which one is that?”

“Number eighty-seven,” Hester said. “What’s in this soup? No, don’t tell me.”

On Achum’s other side sat Captain Standforth, brooding at his soup, and on his other side sat Astrogator Pam Stokes, brooding at her slide rule. “Fascinating,” she mumbled. “That asteroid belt.”

“Pam?” The captain welcomed any distraction from that soup; things seemed to be moving in it. “Did you say something?”

“This system contains an asteroid belt,” Pam told him, “much like the one in our own Solar System.”

“Oh, the asteroid belt,” the captain said, his mind filling with unhappy reminiscence. “I always have a terrible time navigating around that. You barely take off from Earth, you’re just past Mars, and there it is. Millions of rocks, boulders, bits of broken-off planet all over the place. What a mess!”

“Well, the asteroid belt in this system,” Pam said, “has an orbit that’s much more erratic. In fact…” Swiftly, she manipulated her slide rule. “Hmm. It seems to me…” She gazed skyward, frowning.

So did the captain, though without any idea what he was supposed to be looking at. He blinked, and a yellow stone dropped into his soup, splashing oily liquid in various directions.

“Of course!” said Pam, pleased with her calculations.

A stone bounced off the table near Councilman Luthguster’s right hand. A stone thunked into a platter of dilbump and slowly sank. A paradiddle of stones rattled in the center of the circle of feasters.

“The yellow rain!” cried Achum in sheerest horror.

Screams. Terror. The natives fled into handy burrows while the people from the Hopeful stared at one another in wild surmise. More stones fell. Achum dropped to his knees beside Councilman Luthguster, hands clasped together: “Juju-Kuxtil, save us! Save us!”

“It’s a meteor shower!” Ensign Benson cried.

“No,” Pam said, utterly calm, “it’s the asteroid belt. You see, its eccentric orbit must from time to time cross this—”

Clambering clumsily to his feet, Luthguster shouted, “Asteroids? We’ll all be killed!”

Taken aback, Achum settled on his haunches and gaped at the councilman. “Juju-Kuxtil?” Meantime, more stones fell.

Bewildered, the captain said, “Pam? Shouldn’t we take cover?”

“According to my calculations,” Pam answered, “this time we’re merely tangential with—”

A good-sized boulder smacked into the earth at Luthguster’s feet. In utter panic, spreading his arms to keep from losing his balance, he shrieked, “Stop!”

Still calmly explaining, Pam said, “it should be over almost at once. In fact, right now.”

She was right; no more rocks fell. Slowly, the natives crept back out of their burrows, peeking skyward. Achum, faith restored, bellowed, “Juju-Kuxtil did it! He did it!”

“Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!” the natives all agreed. Then they joined hands and danced in a great circle around Luthguster, singing, “For he’s a jolly good savior: for he’s a jolly good savior.”

After the adoration, Luthguster and the captain and Pam and Ensign Benson met on the command deck of the Hopeful for a conference. “I think it’s obvious what’s happened here,” Ensign Benson began.

“They think I’m God,” Luthguster said complacently.

“Heaven has become debased, degenerate.”

“I beg your pardon,” Luthguster said.

Captain Standforth cleared his throat. “Uh, Billy says they have human sacrifice.”

Luthguster assumed his most statesmanlike look. “I don’t believe we should be too harsh in our judgments, Captain. These people aren’t all bad. We shouldn’t condemn a whole society out of hand.”

“Of course not,” Ensign Benson said. “First, we have to understand why a society behaves a certain way. Then we condemn it.”

“According to the old records,” the captain said, “they were perfectly nice people when they left Earth — cleaned up after their farewell picnic and everything.”

“But no small settlement,” Ensign Benson said, “could survive a constant, unpredictable barrage of rocks from the sky. Everything they ever built was knocked down. Every machine they brought with them was destroyed. Every crop they planted was pounded flat. No wonder they returned to barbarism. You have to be hit on the head with a lot of rocks to think the councilman here is God.”

Luthguster puffed himself up like a frog preparatory to an answering statement; but before he could make it, Hester came in with Keech. Each carried an armload of yellow rocks. “Captain,” Hester said, “request permission to show a visitor around the ship.”

“Nice cloud you got here,” Keech said.

“His name’s Keech,” Hester explained. “He’s a carpenter; seems a little brighter than most. Thought I’d try to explain engines to him.”

“Certainly, Hester,” the captain said. He never denied anybody anything. “What are you doing with all those rocks?”

“Going to analyze them,” Hester said.

“Very good idea,” the captain said. He didn’t know what analyze meant.

Hester and Keech left, and Ensign Benson turned to Pam, saying, “Do these rockfalls happen often?”

“Very.”

“Every day?”

Pam shook her head. “Not necessarily. According to my calculations, the planet’s orbit intersects the asteroid’s orbit so frequently, in such a complex pattern, that to most people, it would seem utterly erratic.”

“Could you work out the pattern?”

“Of course. As a matter of fact, there should be another brief shower later today.”

“Then I’m glad,” Luthguster said, we’re all in the ship.”

“Billy isn’t,” the captain said. “He asked permission to go for a walk with the human sacrifice.”

“Bad,” Ensign Benson said. “When the rocks fall, the natives will lose faith in the councilman. They’ll want revenge.”

In the engine room, Hester explained engines to Keech, who looked bewildered but interested. “And from the generator,” she was saying, “electricity is stored in these cells for later use.”

“Pretty clever,” Keech admitted. “Given the right education and equipment, a human being could do the same stuff you angels do.”

“You’re beginning to catch on.”

Bong, said the ship. Keech look startled, Hester annoyed. Bong, bong, bong, bongbongbong. “Yellow rain!” Keech cried.

“I wish it would lay off,” Hester muttered.

“Do you realize,” Keech demanded, what all this is doing to my faith?”

On a blasted plain, amid evidence everywhere of prior bombardments, Billy and Malya reclined and kissed. All at once, she pulled back, frowning at him, saying, “Are you sure you’re a supernatural being?”

“I’m really not,” Billy confessed. “What I really am is a human being.”

“A human being?”

“Just like you. Well, not exactly like you. You’re a girl and I’m a boy.”

“I was beginning to suspect that,” Malya said. “But why does Juju-Kuxtil travel around with humans?”

“Well,” said Billy. “About Juju-Kuxtil…”

In rapture, she said, “He saved us from the yellow rain.”

“Ahhhh, yes and no,” Billy said, scuffing his foot in the rocks.

She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Of course,” she lied.

Nerving himself up to blurt out the real story, Billy said, “Well the truth is—”

Bong; a good-sized rock landed on his head. He fell over, unconscious. Rocks suddenly started bouncing all over the place. Flinging herself onto Billy to protect him, Malya cried, “I think I know what you were trying to tell me, Billy!”

In the roofless temple, Achum led a community discussion, “Now that Juju-Kuxtil has come and stopped the yellow rain,” he said, “Heaven is ours. We can build, travel, everything.” He gestured with broadly spread hands, smiling. The worshipers smiled back. A small yellow rock landed on Achum’s right palm.

Five minutes later, when the rockfall had ended, Achum and the worshipers came crawling back out of their burrows and none of them were happy. Juju-Kuxtil lied!” several shouted.

“Yes!” Achum thundered.

“Achum is a false priest!” one shouted.

“Wait a minute,” Achum said. “Hold on there.”

“You’re a false priest.”

“Now, hold on. In the first place, I’m not a false priest, and I’ll knock you down if you say that again. And in the second place, that’s a false god!”

“A false god?”

“That isn’t Juju-Kuxtil,” Achum explained. “It’s a demon trying to lead us astray. A demon disguised as Juju-Kuxtil!”

“A demon disguised as a god,” mused a worshiper. “Hmm. That makes sense.”

The captain had decided to go out looking for Billy while the others waited on the command deck. He had barely left when rocks started bonging again. “That’s funny,” Pam said, bending over her slide rule.

Ensign Benson said, “What’s funny?”

The captain entered, looking ruffled, saying, “Gee, are they sore.”

“Pam? What’s funny?”

“There shouldn’t be another asteroid fall,” she said, “for two days.”

“That isn’t asteroids,” the captain told her. “They’re throwing rocks at the ship.”

“Rocks at the ship!” Luthguster was incensed. “That’s Galactic property!”

“Actually, it’s mine,” Ensign Benson said.

“They were hollering, ‘Demon! Demon!’ ” the captain explained. “They think you’re a false Juju-Kuxtil.”

Luthguster gaped. “Me?”

“Councilman,” Ensign Benson said, “you’ve set back superstition on this planet four hundred years.”

Hester and Keech entered, Hester saying, “Captain, I—”

Luthguster ran around behind a pod, crying, “Look out! There’s one of them!”

“What?” Hester shook her head. “Oh, Keech is all right. I told him the whole story.”

“I’m the soul of discretion,” Keech said.

Hester turned to the captain. “Which do you want first, the good news or the bad?”

“Hester, I hate making decisions.”

“Start with the bad,” Ensign Benson said. “Then we’ll have the good for dessert.”

“Fine. The bad news is, the rocks damaged our lateral rockets. ‘We can’t navigate.”

“Oh, my goodness,” said the captain. “Can it be fixed?”

“I’ll have to go outside on a ladder.”

“Wear a hat,” Ensign Benson advised. “The weather’s getting worse out there.”

Pam, looking at a view screen, said, “What’s this?”

So they all looked and saw several natives approaching, pulling a wooden-wheeled cart filled with cloth.

“They’re bringing back our laundry,” the captain said.

Ensign Benson said, “I don’t think they cleaned it.”

“I’ll go get it,” Pam said.

Ensign Benson, whose dream that someday Pam would discover she was a human female had not yet died, said, “I’ll go with you.

They left, and the captain said, “Hester? You had good news?”

“I would be more than happy,” Luthguster said, “to hear good news.”

“I did a mineral analysis on those rocks,” said Hester. “The reason they’re yellow, every one of them is at least part gold.”

The natives had dumped the laundry at the foot of the ladder and had gone away with the cart, expressing their contempt. Pam and Ensign Benson cautiously descended, and when they reached the bottom, a hand reached out of the laundry and grabbed Pam’s ankle. “Eek!” she said, naturally.

Malya’s lovely face appeared among the shirts and the shorts. “Shh! It’s me, Malya; I’m on your side! Sneak me in before anybody sees!”

“My laundry never came back with a girl in it before,” Ensign Benson said.

Out of a cave onto the blasted plain staggered Billy, rubbing his head. “Ooh, that hurts,” he mumbled. “What kind of Heaven is this?” Raising his face and his voice, he cried, “Malya! Malya?”

A dozen natives leaped on him from all sides, pummeled him and, carried him away.

“So I have him hidden,” Malya said. She was on the command deck with the five Earthpeople and Keech.

“We’ll have to move the ship at once,” Luthguster said, “to his hiding place. This young lady can direct us.”

“We can’t navigate,” Hester reminded him “till I fix the lateral rockets.”

“We have a saying here,” Keech commented. “‘Into each life a little rock must fall.’”

The captain said, “It was a mistake to pretend to be gods.”

“I agree, Captain,” Ensign Benson said. “My error. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But as long as we’ve made the mistake, we’ll have to live with it. Councilman, you’ll have to go out there and reconvince them that you’re Juju-Kuxtil.

“Me? They’ll stone me!”

“The hand that cradles the rock rules this world,” Hester said.

“That isn’t nice,” Pain said. “People shouldn’t throw stones.”

“Why not?” Keech asked, “We don’t live in glass houses.”

The captain said, “if we tell them about the gold, won’t—”

Ensign Benson said, “The what?”

Hester explained, “The yellow rain is mainly gold. If this colony went into the export business, it could become rich.”

Keech said, “What’s gold?”

“I know you’re primitive,” Luthguster told him, “but that’s ridiculous.”

“I may be primitive,” Keech answered, “but it’s you wiseacres that’re in trouble.”

Ensign Benson said, “Pam, the rockfall pattern repeats, doesn’t it? You could do a yearly calendar with the rockfalls.”

“It’s a very complex pattern, but yes, of course.”

“Could you do it in an hour?”

“Oh, my goodness,” Pam said. “I’ll try.”

The captain said, “You have a plan to help Billy, Ensign Benson?”

“If Malya and Keech will help.”

“I’ll help,” Malya said. “I don’t want anybody to hurt Billy.”

Keech said, “Is gold something that makes you rich?”

Grinning, Hester said, “I told you he was smart.”

This time, in the roofless temple, it was Billy who was about to be sacrificed. He was tied and gagged and lying on the altar, with Achum holding the stone knife over him and the worshipers eagerly watching below. Achum prayed, “Great Juju-Kuxtil, we’re sorry we were misled. Please accept this demon as a token of our esteem.” He poised with the knife.

Keech came running in, crying, “Wait! I have come from Juju-Kuxtil’s cloud! I have much to tell you!”

“After the services,” Achum told him. “First the sacrifice, then the collection, then you can talk.”

“No, I have to talk now,” Keech insisted. “That is the real Juju-Kuxtil.”

Achum shook his head and waggled the stone knife. “Stuff and nonsense. There was more yellow rain after he supposedly made it stop.”

“He was testing our faith,” Keech said.

A worshiper mused, “A god pretending to be a demon disguised as a god to test our faith. Hmm. That makes sense.”

Achum wasn’t convinced. “How can you know that, Keech?”

“They took me to their ship. I mean the cloud. Also your daughter Malya; they took her there, too.”

“Malya?” Achum looked around, called, “Malya!”

“She’s still in the cloud,” Keech said. “And Juju-Kuxtil is going to come out and talk to us.”

Achum lowered. “Oh, he is, is he?”

“He sent me to get everybody to come hear his speech.”

“Oh, we’ll come,” Achum said. “Gather rocks, everybody! This time we’ll pelt him good! And bring along the sacrifice; we’ll finish the services later.”

In a corridor of the Hopeful, by an exit hatch, the captain, Pam and Ensign Benson prepared Councilman Luthguster for his public. “Now, do remember to turn on your microphone,” the captain said, yet again. “Your words will be transmitted through the ship’s loud-speaker.”

“Yes, yes,” said the extremely nervous Luthguster.

Handing the councilman a sheaf of papers, Pam said, “Just remember, it’s an eight-month cycle, and this planet has a sixteen-month year, so the cycle runs twice a year.”

“Young lady,” Luthguster said, clutching the papers, “I have no idea what you think you’re saying.”

“Now, Councilman,” Ensign Benson said, “there’s nothing to worry about.”

“There’s nothing for you to worry about. You’ll be in the ship.”

“You’ll be behind this shield.” Ensign Benson rapped the clear-plastic shield with his knuckles. “Just give them one of the speeches you’re famous for, and they’ll calm right down. They’ll sleep for a week.”

“I do have some small reputation as a peacemaker,” Luthguster acknowledged, though he continued to blink a lot. “Very well. For the future of mankind on this planet.” And he stepped onto the small platform that would swing out onto the side of the ship once the hatch was opened.

“Knock ‘em dead,” Ensign Benson advised him and pushed the button.

A frozen smile of panic on his face, Luthguster permitted himself to be swung slowly out into plain sight high on the side of the gleaming, cigar-shaped Hopeful. And below, bearing armloads of rocks and carrying the trussed-up Billy on a long pole, came the natives. They did not look particularly reasonable.

“People of Heaven,” Luthguster said, but, of course, he had forgotten to turn on his microphone, so nobody heard him. Flicking the thing on, he tried again:

“People of Heaven.”

“There he is! There he is!”

“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

A thousand stones hit the plastic shield. Luthguster ducked, then recovered, crying out, “Surely, some of you have sinned.”

“The stones bounce off him!” Keech shouted. “You see? It is Juju-Kuxtil!”

Achum, poised to throw another stone, hesitated, becoming uncertain. “Could I have been wrong?”

The other worshipers had already prostrated themselves, noses in the pebbles, and were wailing, “Juju-Kuxtil! Juju-Kuxtil!”

Privately to Achum, Keech said, “Would you rather be safe or sorry?”

“Juju-Kuxtil!” Achum decided and prostrated himself with the rest.

Quickly, Keech released Billy, while Luthguster delivered his speech:

“People of Heaven, I have tested you, and your faith is not strong. But I am merciful, and I will not return my golden rain to you for” — he consulted Pam’s papers — “two days. At ten-fifteen next Tuesday morning, watch out!”

“There you go, kid,” Keech said to the freed Billy. “Get to the ship before the councilman louses up.”

Billy scampered to the Hopeful while Luthguster rolled on:

“I will never be more than a stone’s throw from you all. Achum shall remain my representative here on Heaven, but I won’t need any more human sacrifices.”

“Drat,” the worshipers muttered. “No fun anymore.”

“Also, the man who is known among you as Keech will henceforth carry this list, which will tell you the times of all the golden rains that will ever be, from this day forward. You will be smart enough to get in out of the rain, but after every rain, there will be a time to gather stones together. The streets of Heaven are paved with good investments, and I will want them returned. Heaven knows what I’m talking about. Upon these rocks we shall build a mighty nation. Right on this spot here, I want these rocks of ages left for me. Keech will be in charge of all that. I will send ships from Earth to Heaven, and they will trade you machinery, medical supplies, technical advisors and everything else you need, in exchange for my rolling stones. Earth helps those who help themselves. Together, we shall make an Earth right here on Heaven. And remember, a vote for Juju-Kuxtil is a vote for peace, progress and sound financial practice.”

Keech led the worshipers in a resounding cheer as Luthguster was wheeled, waving and smiling, back into the ship, where, once the hatch was shut, Ensign Benson said, “Councilman, that may have been your finest hour.”

Luthguster was dazzled. “By Heaven, he said, “what a constituency!”

•

Near the foot of the ladder, Billy made a reluctant farewell to Malya. “Gee, I wish you could come along.”

“So do I,” Malya admitted. “Earth must be a wonderful place after Heaven.”

“Any place is Earth,” Billy told her, “With you there.”

They were deep in embrace when Ensign Benson appeared at the head of the ladder, calling, “Come on, Billy, or we’ll take off without you.”

“They can’t take off without me,” Billy confided to Malya. “I fly it.”

“But you must go. Goodbye, Billy.”

“Goodbye, Malya.”

Malya walked to a nearby rubble heap, where she and Keech watched the Hopeful prepare for take-off. “Gee, what a swell bunch,” Malya said.

“That Hester,” Keech said, “was the most sensible woman I ever met.”

“I wouldn’t call Billy exactly sensible,” Malya said, “but he was swell.”

“Lift-off,” Billy said. All six Earthpeople were present on the command deck.

“Captain,” Pam said, studying her console, “the ship is overweight.”

Diplomatically careful but with an edge of sarcasm, Ensign Benson said, “I believe the councilman smuggled gold aboard.”

“Smuggled?” Luthguster was all pompous bluster. “Merely a few souvenirs.”

“I’m sorry, Councilman Luthguster,” the captain said, “but you’ll have to eject them.”

“Humph,” said Luthguster.

Malya found Achum in the roofless temple, frowning at the statue of Juju-Kuxtil. She said, “What’s wrong, Father?”

“I’m still not sure about that crowd,” Achum told her. “No more human sacrifices. Would the real Juju-Kuxtil talk like that?”

Luthguster’s souvenirs crashed to the altar beside him. Achum froze, then his eyes swiveled to look at the fresh rocks on the altar. Still moving nothing but his eyes, he looked up at the statue. “Ahem,” he said. “I guess maybe he would.”

“Come along, Father,” Malya said. “Dilbump for lunch.”

Don’t You Know, There’s a War Going On?

There are two kinds of people — those who think there are two kinds of people and those who don’t.

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then cross the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3.

For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity. The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to reestablish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

The two armies were massed in terrible array, banners flying, the hosts facing each other across the verdant valley. The tents of the generals were magnificently bedecked, pennons whipping in the breeze. Down below, clergymen in white and black blessed the day and the pounded grass and the generals and the banners and the archers and the horses and those who sweep up behind the horses. Filled with a good breakfast, the soldiers on the slopes stood comfortably, happy to be a part of this historic moment, while the supreme commanders of both forces marched with their aides and their scribes down through their respective armies and out across the green sweep of neutral territory toward the table and the altar set up in the very center of the valley under a yellow flag of truce.

This was the first time these two supreme commanders had met, and they studied each other with a pardonable curiosity while the various aides exchanged documents and provided signatures. Is he fiercer-looking than me? the supreme commanders wondered as they eyed each other. Is his jaw firmer and leaner? Do his eyes flash more coldly and cruelly? Is his backbone more ramrod-stiff?

The ministers sprinkled holy water over the papers. The supreme commanders firmly shook hands — very firmly shook hands — and a great cheer went up from the multitudes on the slopes. The ceremony was complete. The name had been changed. The 300 Years’ War was now officially the 400 Years’ War.

“Look out!” someone shouted.

Soldiers gaped. Horses neighed and pawed the ground. Clergy and aides fled with cassocks and tunics flapping, Supreme commanders took to their heels and the great long silver bullet of the spaceship settled slowly, delicately, almost lazily into the very center of the valley, the massive base of the thing gently mashing the main altar into a dinner mat.

“Remember, Councilman,” Ensign Kybee Benson said, pacing the councilman’s cabin, “these are intelligent and subtle people, the descendants of philosophers.”

“Hardly a problem,” Councilman Morton Luthguster responded. “I’m something of a philosopher myself.”

Ensign Benson and Councilman Luthguster meshed imperfectly. Ensign Benson was almost painfully aware that the reason the councilman had been chosen to represent the Galactic Council on this endless, trivial, boring mission to the universal boondocks was simply that nobody at the Galactic Council could stand the man’s porposities anymore. Luthguster didn’t realize that; nor did he realize that it was Ensign Benson’s sharp-nosed personality that had won him a berth on the Hopeful (neither did Ensign Benson); but he’d certainly noticed that all his conversations with Ensign Benson left him with the sense that his fur had been rubbed the wrong way.

Ensign Benson’s face now wore the expression of a man eating a lemon. “Councilman, would you like to know which particular philosophy these philosophers philosophized about?”

“You’re the social engineer,” Luthguster pointed out, getting a bit prickly himself. “It’s your job to background me on these colonies.”

“Dualists,” Ensign Benson said. “They were dualists.”

“You mean they fought each other.

Lieutenant Billy Shelby, the Hopeful’s young second in command, knocked on the open door and entered the cabin, saying, “Sir, the ship has landed.”

“Just a second, Billy.” Taking a deep breath, displaying his patience, Ensign Benson said, “Not duelists, Councilman, dualists. They believed in the philosophy of dualism. Simply stated, the idea that there are two sides to every story.”

“At the very least,” Luthguster said. “Back in the Galactic Coun—”

“Gemini,” Ensign Benson interrupted. “That’s what they named their colony, after the twins of the zodiac. They’d originally considered Janus, after the two-faced god, but that suggested a duplicity they didn’t intend. Discussion and debate; that’s the core of their approach to life.”

“A civilized and cultured people, obviously.” Luthguster preened himself, patting his big round belly. “We shall get along famously.”

“No doubt,” Ensign Benson said. “Shall we begin?”

They followed Billy Shelby down to the main hatch, where the ladder had already been extruded, but the door was not yet open. Waiting beside’ it was Captain Standforth, tall and thin and vague, his stun gun ready in his hand. Pointing to the weapon, Luthguster said, “We won’t be needing that, Captain. These are peaceful scholars.”

“I thought I might shoot some birds,” said the captain. “For stuffing.” Bird taxidermy was the only thing in life the captain really cared about. Seven generations of Standforths had, unfortunately, made such magnificent careers in the Galactic Patrol that this Standforth had had no choice but to sign up when he’d attained the proper age, but the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, which everybody now knew — and which was why he had been assigned to the Hopeful.

“Shoot birds later,” Luthguster said, somewhat stiffly. “Let us begin peacably. Open the door, Billy.”

Billy pushed the button, the door opened and Luthguster stepped out onto the platform at the head of the ladder. ‘Fellow thinkers,” he cried out and fell back into the ship with seven arrows stuck in him.

“Rotten aim,” Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw said, wiping her hands on a greasy rag, then dropping it onto the cluster of pulled arrows. “You’ll live.”

“At least you could sound happier about it,” Luthguster told her. Lying here on the engine-room table, he was so enswathed in bandages that he looked like a gift-wrapped beach ball.

“It’s mostly all that blubber protected you,” Hester said unsympathetically. “You’re a very inefficient design.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

There was no doctor on the Hopeful, there being room for only five crew members and the councilman. Hester Hanshaw, 40ish, blunt of feature and speech and hand and mind, had taken a few first-aid courses before departure, with the attitude that the human body was merely a messier-than-usual kind of machine and that most of its ills could be repaired with a few turns of a screwdriver or taps of a hammer. (Pliers had been useful in the current case, plucking the arrows out of the councilman.) Hester never gave her engines sympathy while banging away at them, so why should she give sympathy to Luthguster? “I’ll give you some coffee,” she offered grudgingly.

Luthguster knew Hester’s coffee from hearsay. “No, thank you!”

“Don’t worry, you won’t leak. I plugged all the holes.”

Luthguster closed his eyes. A moan leaked out.

Lieutenant Billy Shelby, handsome, romantic, idealistic, bright as a bowling ball, clutched the microphone in his left hand, white flag in his right, and said, “Ready, sir.”

The captain hesitated. “Are you sure, Billy?”

“He already volunteered, Captain,” Ensign Benson pointed out. “Obviously we have to make contact with the Geminoids somehow.”

“I’m sure, Captain,” Billy said.

So the captain pushed the button, the door opened and Billy marched out onto the platform with the white flag high and the loud-speaker microphone to his mouth: “People of—” his voice boomed out over the valley, and a cannon ball ripped through the white flag to carom off the silver hull.

Billy gaped at the hole in the flag. “Gee whizz,” his amplified voice told the sunny day. “Don’t you guys believe in a flag of truce?”

“That ain’t no flag of truce!” a voice yelled from upslope. “It’s white!”

“Well, what color do you want?”

“Yellow! The color of cowards!”

“Wait right there,” Billy told the two encircling armies and went back into the ship. Carom! went a cannon ball in farewell.

“After dark,” Supreme Commander Krraich said, “we’ll deploy a patrol to sneak up on the thing and set fire to it.”

“I suspect, sir,” said an aide carefully (Krraich was known to dislike correction), “the thing is made of metal.”

Krraich glowered. Sneaking up on things and setting fire to them was one of his favorite sports. “It’s a fort, isn’t it?” he demanded. “Could be just shiny paint.”

“Sir, uh, cannon balls bounce off.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s metal. Could be rubber.”

“Rubber won’t burn, sir.”

Krraich turned his gaze full upon this pestiferous aide, whose name was Major Invercairnochinchlie. In the bloodshot eye of his mind, Krraich watched Major Invercairnochinchlie burn to the ground — kilt, sporran, gnarled pipe, tam and all. “What do you suggest, Major?”

Invercairnochinchlie swallowed. “Acid, sir?”

The other aides, also in formal officers’ kilts, all snickered and shifted their feet, like a corralful of miniskirted horses; aides liked to see other aides in trouble. But then, Krraich’s least favorite and most intelligent aide (the two facts were not unconnected), a colonel named Alderpee, said, “Sir, if I may make a suggestion?”

“You always do,” Krraich said, irritated because the suggestions were usually good.

“That thing out there is a fort,” Alderpee said. “A traveling fort. Think how we could use such a thing.”

Krraich had no imagination. “Your suggestion?”

“They’re about to send out a party under a flag of truce. We kidnap that party, apply torture and learn how to invade the fort. Then we take it over.”

Krraich was appalled and showed it. “Violate a yellow flag of truce?”

“Those people aren’t a part of our war,” Alderpee pointed out. “They’re innocent bystanders. The rules of battle don’t apply.”

“Ah.”

“And if we don’t do it,” Alderpee added, “the Antibens will.”

“How do you do? I’m Lieutenant Billy Shelby of the Interstel— Mmf!”

“There!” Colonel Alderpee cried. “I told you the Antibens would do it”

The chaplain, in his black dress uniform, sprinkled holy water over Billy, who sneezed. “Gesundheit,” said the chaplain.

“Thank you.”

“I am the Right Reverend Beowulf’ Hengethorg,” the chaplain explained. “I am here to ready you for torture.”

“Torture?” Billy gaped around at all the big, mean-looking, bulgy-armed men lining the periphery of the large, torchlit tent. “Gee whizz,” he said, “we’re here to be friendly. We came all the way from Earth just to—”

“Earth?” Wide-eyed, Reverend Hengethorg leaned close. “You wouldn’t lie to a reverend, would you?”

“Oh, no, sir You see, you were lost, and—”

“And on Earth,” the chaplain said, voice tensely trembling, “do they believe in Robert Benchley?”

“I’m the only possible volunteer. The councilman is wounded, Hester keeps the engines going, Pam Stokes astrogates and you understand the mission. I’m not necessary at all.”

“Well, Captain,” Ensign Benson said as they strode doorward together, “I have to admit you’re right. All captains are unnecessary; you’re one of the rare ones who know it.”

“So I’ll try to make peace with the other army,” the captain went on, “and ask them to help us rescue Billy.”

“And find out what’s going on here.”

“Well, I’ll certainly ask,” the captain said.

They had reached the door, where firmly the captain pushed the button. “There’s no point in carrying any flags,” he said. “These people don’t seem to respect any color.” He stepped outside.

“Good luck, Captain.”

The captain looked back over his shoulder. “Did you say some—” He dropped from sight. Thump crumple bunkle bong kabingbing thud.

Ensign Benson leaned out. to gaze down at the captain, all in a heap at the foot of the stairs. “I said, good luck.”

“Another one!” cried Colonel Alderpee. “Men, get that one or we’ll be using your heads for cannon balls!”

“The ultimate proof!” the Right Reverend Hengethorg was saying. “This fine young chap here has never even heard of Robert Benchley, much less read his work.”

Proud of his ignorance, Billy smiled in modest self-satisfaction at Supreme Commander Mangle. “That’s right, sir. What I mostly read is The Adventures of Space Cadet Hooper and His Pals Fatso and Chang. They just have the most—”

Supreme Commander Mangle, a knife of a man — a tall, glinty-eyed, bony, angry knife of a man — growled deep in his throat; a distant early warning. Billy blinked and decided after all not to give the supreme commander a plot summary of Cadet Hooper and His Pals Go to Betelgeuse.

Mangle turned his laser eyes on Hengethorg. “Reverend,” he said. His voice needed oiling. “Explain.”

“The people of Earth are Antibens like us,” the chaplain explained. “Must be! Not only does that prove the truth of our philosophy but we can ally ourselves with Earth and destroy the Bens, forever!”

Mangle brooded. Apparently, he was considering the advantages and disadvantages of allying himself with people like Billy Shelby, because when next he asked, “Are there any more at home like you?”

“So you’re from Earth,” Colonel Alderpee said.

Yes, I am,” Captain Standforth told him. “I’m terribly sorry, but would you mind scratching my nose? Just the very tip.” The captain had been tied with a lot of rope immediately upon arriving in this army’s camp, so now his fingers (and their nails) were imprisoned behind him.

Colonel Alderpee at first looked confused, then seemed on the verge of scratching the captain’s nose, then obviously bethought himself and snapped to several nearby soldiers, “Untie this man, I believe there are enough of us quell him if necessary.”

“Oh, I won’t need quelling,” the captain promised. “Just scratching.”

So the ropes were removed and the captain indulged in a good scratch while Colonel Alderpee went off to consult with Supreme Commander Krraich and a couple of chaplains in a far corner of the tent. Returning a minute later looking as though his own nose were now a bit out of joint, he said, “Well, Captain Standforth, I wouldn’t do it this way — I think it’s a waste of time — but before we get to the subject of our conversation, I am required to ask, you, an absolute alien, your position on the Benchley Paradox. So listen carefully.”

The captain listened, idly scratching his nose (now more for fun than for need).

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” Colonel Alderpee began.

“This world?” the captain asked. “Or Earth?”

“Any world! This is the Benchley Paradox; now, listen.”

“I do beg your pardon.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world,” the colonel repeated. “They are, Robert Benchley claimed, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t believe there are two kinds of people in the world. Now. Do you agree with that?”

“Absolutely,” the captain said. “Seems perfectly clear to me.”

Ensign Benson did not entirely believe it. Billy and the captain were both back, and each had made a tentative alliance with the locals — with different sets of locals. Upon their return, Ensign Benson had brought them both up to the command, deck and, while the wounded councilman and Hester and even the usually distracted Pam had all sat around listening, he had questioned both ex-prisoners. Their stories had dovetailed so thoroughly that Ensign Benson really had no choice but to accept the reality. “They are fighting,” he said at last, “over Robert Benchley.”

“A philosopher, I guess,” Billy said, scratching his head.

“Very important, anyway,” the captain added, scratching his nose.

“A smart-aleck, to judge from his paradox,” Ensign Benson said. “Perhaps even, a deliberate humorist.”

“Dangerous people, humorists,” Luthguster opined. “They should not be taken lightly.”

All around, the captain’s stuffed birds glared down from their perches, unwinking glass eyes peering from among feathers and beaks and claws of every color in the rainbow and a few colors outside the known rainbow of Earth. “All right,” Ensign Benson said. “I begin to see what happened. One of those original philosopher settlers, with that heavy-handed light touch professors love so well, introduced the Benchley Paradox, in which you prove Benchley right by disagreeing with him. Because if everybody agreed with the paradox, then there’d be only one kind of person in the world, and the paradox would be wrong. Are any of you pinbrains getting this?”

“Certainly,” said Luthguster, while the captain and Billy and Hester shook their heads and Pam doggedly worked her slide rule. The stuffed birds gaped down as though the very thought of the Benchley Paradox made them furious.

“The Gemini philosophers,” Ensign Benson went on, “had found a topic without the usual comforting weight of precedent behind it. Rather than cite old texts at one another, they were forced to think for themselves. Unable to appeal to prior authority, they couldn’t end the quarrel at all. Each succeeding generation became more rigid and less scholarly, until, by now—”

“Total war,” Luthguster finished, demonstrating his grasp of the situation.

“They sure don’t like each other much,” Billy agreed. “Boy, what they said about the Bens.”

“The Bens said some things, too,” the captain said, as though he felt it his job to defend his side in the war. “About the Antibens, I mean.”

Ensign Benson cleared his throat in a hostile manner. When every person and bird in the room was looking at him, he said, “All right. The first question is, What do they want from us?”

“An alliance,” Billy said. “To help them destroy the Bens.”

“Well, no,” the captain said. “Actually, they want an alliance to help them destroy the Antibens.”

Luthguster sighed, his wounds creaking. “Dealing with one colony at a time is trouble enough,” he said. “When they begin to multiply—”

“Divide,” corrected Ensign Benson. “We’re dealing here with mitosis, not sexual reproduction.”

“Mitosis,” Pam said, looking bright. “I know what that is.”

“You would,” Ensign Benson told her. “All right, let’s concentrate on the problem at hand. Obviously, Earth can’t send technical assistance or start trade programs while this war is going on, so our first job is to bring peace. Any suggestions?”

“Once my wounds heal,” Councilman Luthguster said, “I shall engage in shuttle diplomacy. I’ll speak with the political leaders, deliver their demands, conduct negotiations, and, eventually, I’ll find the happy middle ground where the language is vague enough so each side can believe it has won. Yes.” The councilman gazed radiantly at some wonderful image of himself in the middle distance.” “ ‘The Luthguster Peace,’ ” he quoted from some future history text.

“In the first place,” Ensign Benson said, “there are no political leaders on Gemini. From what Billy and the captain say, the society has been taken over entirely by the two groups of military commanders, with the assistance of the religious establishment. In the second place, this isn’t a war of territory or trade routes or anything else rational that can be negotiated. A war of philosophical difference is something else again. And in the third place, Councilman, I’ve seen you in action with local citizens before, and I don’t want to unite the bloodthirsty factions on Gemini by making them form an alliance against Earth.”

“Well, really,” Luthguster said, indignantly scratching his wounds.

“If you want a thing done right,” Ensign Benson said in disgust, “you have to do it yourself. Unfortunately.”

“The Right Reverend Beowulf Hengethorg,” Billy said, on his best behavior, “I’d like you to meet Ensign Kybee Benson, social engineer of the Interstellar Ship Hopeful.”

“Ensign,” echoed Reverend Hengethorg, as he grasped Ensign Benson’s outstretched hand in a grip of steel. “Is that a clerical rank, or military?”

“Somewhere between the two,” Ensign Benson said through clenched teeth; it was the first time since elementary school that he’d tried to out-squeeze another person in a handshake.

They were standing in the sunlight outside the large command tent while dozens of men armed with arrows and broadswords and maces and battle-axes and clubs and knives and metal-toed shoes sat around their several other tents, watching the two Earthlings with the flat expressions of carnivores looking at meat.

Ensign Benson had understood it was his job to visit both encampments, being introduced first to the Antibens by Billy and later to the Bens by the captain in his own effort at shuttle diplomacy — or shuttle philosophy. Now, feeling all those martial eyes on him, he reminded himself that this was, after all, the most sensible thing to do under the circumstances; pity he’d been smart enough to know it.

“It was a great moment for us all,” Reverend Hengethorg was saying, as he at last released Ensign Benson’s hand with a little superior smile, “when Lieutenant Shelby confirmed what we have for so long believed: that Earth is firmly Antiben. I may say I took it as a personal vindication.”

“Actually,” Ensign Benson said, massaging his fingers and speaking with caution, “Earth’s philosophical position anent the Benchley Paradox is somewhat more sophisticated than that. Essentially, I would say Earth’s position encompasses elements of both the Ben and the Antiben points of view.”

Reverend Hengethorg’s frown had something of the Inquisition in it. “Both points of view? How can a position encompass absolute contradictions?”

“Well, we don’t see the Bens and the Antibens as being absolutely contradictory,” Ensign Benson explained.

“They are on Gemini,” the reverend said. “But you must come with me to the chaplains’ tent and explain Earth’s position to the reverend fathers.”

“I’d like that.”

With the smiling, unconscious Billy trailing after, they walked together toward the chaplains’ tent, safely placed on the far side of the slope, and Ensign Benson said, “This is quite a large encampment. How many of your people are here?”

“Why, all of us,” Reverend Hengethorg said in some surprise. “Except for a few spies in the Bens’ camp, of course. Where else would we be?”

“Don’t you have a town? Forts?”

“I don’t know what you mean by town,” the reverend said. “We have had forts, but they were vulnerable to fire and siege and difficult to move, unlike that fort of yours, which we all admire very much.”

“So the women are right here with the army.”

“The women are in the army. We are all in the army.”

“Children?”

“Military school, just over there,” the reverend said, pointing toward a nearby copse from which came the shrieks of childish savagery.

“What about farms? Food?”

“We have our herds. We hunt and we pick fruits and so on in season.”

They walked past a smithy, where metal bits for harnesses were being hammered into shape. “How many of you are there?” Ensign Benson asked.

“That’s a military secret.”

“More than five hundred, I’d guess,” Ensign Benson said, looking around. “Fewer than a thousand.”

“If you say so.” The reverend clearly didn’t like having his military secret guessed at so easily and accurately.

“But as the population grows—”

“Why should it grow?” Gesturing around them, the reverend said, “We and the Bens have had stable populations for four hundred years.”

Ensign Benson nodded. “Birth control?”

The reverend shook his head. “War,” he said.

They had reached the chaplains’ tent. “My colleagues will be delighted to meet with you,” the reverend said. “There’s nothing we all like more than lively philosophical debate.”

“That’s fine.”

“Of course,” the reverend went on, “the liveliest philosophical debates take place under torture. But there’s no question of that here,” he said, holding open the tent flap, smiling wistfully to show how bravely he was taking the deprivation, “is there — Earth being our ally against the Bens.”

“Indeed,” Ensign Benson said and followed Reverend Hengethorg into the tent.

“Captain,” Pam said, tapping her finger tips against the frame of the cabin’s open door,

Captain Standforth looked up. A knife was in his right hand, a palmful of desiccated guts in his left, and a pitiful lump of orange feathers lay before him on the desk, oozing green blood. “Yes, Pam? I’m very busy. I must finish stuffing this Nibelungen nuthatch before it dries out.”

“There’s someone here,” Pam told him. “To see you. A man named Colonel Alderpee.”

“Oh, yes,” the captain said, rising, wiping green phlug from his hands onto his uniform jacket. “I told him he could drop by. He was very interested in the ship.”

“He certainly is,” said Pam.

He certainly was. The captain and Pam met him in a corridor well within the ship, one level above the entry port. Colonel Alderpee, looking very happy, was accompanied by a small, skinny scribe who earnestly scribbled notes to the colonel’s directives: “Granaries along here, I think. Horse stalls below; we’ll need straw. Oh, and moat detail to report at fifteen hundred hours.”

Seeing the captain and Pam, Colonel Alderpee said, “Ah, Captain, delighted! It’s a different fort from anything I’ve seen before, but very adaptable.”

“Colonel, what are you—” the captain began, then stopped with a squawk when he saw, ambling around the far corner of (the corridor, a purple cow, closely followed by a yellow-and-white polka-dotted dog. “What— What’s that?”

“Eh? Oh, the herd,” the colonel answered.

And it was. It was the herd and the herders and the herders’ dogs and the herders’ wives and children. And the army, with banners, marching to the squeal of bagpipes. And the clergy, with collection baskets, and the cooks and the smithies and the leatherworkers and the teachers and the glee club and the magicians and the storytellers and the horses and the hay and the forges and the whips and the thumbscrews and the tents (folded) and the extra arrow feathers and the cooking pots and the bits of string that might be useful someday and the unfinished wooden statues of horses and the supreme commander, Krraich, who shook the captain’s hand very hard and said, “I shall take command now.”

“Oh, my goodness,” the captain said to Pam. “We’ve got the Bens!”

Ensign Benson sat on a low stool in the chaplains’ tent, in the midst of the reverend fathers, both hearing them and asking them questions. And what he’d already heard had not been at all encouraging. He’d entered this den of iniquity intending by easy stages to lead the Antibens around to a more open point of view, but he’d soon seen it was hopeless. Never in his life had he met so many firmly closed minds.

Every approach he’d made to broaden the Benchley Paradox had brought angry frowns and mutterings of Heresy. Ensign Benson could imagine — far too well — what happened to heretics on Gemini, so by now he was simply vamping along, trying to figure out some way to get out of there alive. “if we accept the Runyon Postulate,” he was saying, “that all of life is six to five against, as glossed by Sturgeon’s Second Law, that ninety percent of everything is crud, we can then see that Benchley’s Paradox merely acknowledges that there will at all times be unenlightened people who—”

Were they mumbling “Heresy” again, for God’s sake? Was the word blasphemy being bandied about? “What I’m trying to say—” Ensign Benson began again, wondering what he was trying to say, and Billy came into the tent, crying, “Ensign Benson! Come look!”

“Look?”

“The ship!”

More trouble? “Excuse me,” Ensign Benson told the chaplains. “I must be about my captain’s business.” And he marched right on out of the chaplains’ tent.

To see, down in the center of the valley, the Hopeful filling up with Bens. “Oh, now what?” Ensign Benson cried, at the end of his tether.

“You,” said a knife-thin, harsh-faced resplendently uniformed man pointing a bony finger at Ensign Benson, “shall pay for this treachery.”

“Supreme Commander Mangle,” Billy said, with his party manners again, “may I present Ensign Kybee Benson.”

“Hello,” the supreme commander said. “You die now.”

“Wait a minute! I had nothing to do with that,” Ensign Benson said, pointing at the spaceship. Some clowns down there had started digging a moat. “I’ll take care of it right now.”

Mangle’s thin lips curled. “You expert us to permit you to return to your Fort?”

Ensign Benson looked at Billy, Who sighed but managed a brave little smile. “I know,” he said. “This is where I volunteer to stay as a hostage.”

“I don’t care who you are,” Hester said. “You can’t start a lot of fires in my engine room.”

“I’m the smithy,” the burly man explained, stacking his firebricks near the reactor, “and the sergeant says this is where I set up.”

“Well, you can tell your ser—”

Ensign Benson entered the engine room. “Hester.”

“Would you tell this—”

“Ssh! Come here!”

So Hester went there, and Ensign Benson said, “Forget him. Start the engines. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Billy will be worried,” Pam said.

“Billy will be all right,” Ensign Benson told her. “We’ll all be all right. You just plot the course. As for you, Captain, surely you know how to drive this thing.”

Pam and Ensign Benson and the captain were together on the command deck with a lot of squalling babies; Colonel Alderpee had decreed this space was the nursery. Councilman Luthguster was off making a courtesy call on Supreme Commander Krraich.

“Well,” said the captain doubtfully, “I have driven it, but that was a long time ago.”

“Just take her up,” Ensign Benson said, “and head southeast. Right, Pam?”

“Mm,” Pam said, lost, in her slide rule.

“Build boats,” Supreme Commander, Mangle said. “Tonight, we cross that moat.”

“Sir,” said an aide, coming into the tent, “the fort is leaving.”

They all went outside. The fort was gone. The moat remained, a ring of muddy water around a crushed altar.

“Sir? Do you still want the boats?”

“Kill that idiot,” Mangle said. “And bring me the hostage Earthling.”

Ensign Benson went to the commander’s tent (a.k.a. dining room) to explain the situation to a suspicious Colonel Alderpee and a glowering Supreme Commander Krraich. “The fort,” the colonel Pointed out, “is moving.”

“Plague,” Ensign Benson said.

They stared at him. They recoiled from each other. “Plague! Where?”

“Back where we came from. The ship’s instruments showed there was a breakout just due. Congratulations, gentlemen,” Ensign Benson continued, “you have at last won your war. Within a week, there won’t he a living Antiben on Gemini.”

Southeast across the surface of the planet ran the Hopeful, guided by Pam’s slide rule and steered erratically by Captain Standforth, who had to keep picking babies out of the controls. Diagonally ran the ship, down from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, around from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Western. Exactly opposite the original encampment, in similar climate and terrain, where they would be easy for Earth’s supply ships to find but where they would never again meet their enemies, the Hopeful set down and unloaded the Bens. “You’ve done a fine thing for Robert Benchley,” Colonel Alderpee said as the Bens and their beasts, their tents and their babies all deshipped.

“It was the least we could do,” Ensign Benson assured him. “After all, you had reached a stalemate in what was clearly a war of total extermination. Something had to be done.”

“Peace, it’s wonderful,” the colonel said, then frowned. “At least, I’ve heard it is.”

Councilman Luthguster made a speech promising wonders in aid and technical assistance to come from Earth. Some archers playfully lofted arrows in his direction, but they were only fooling, and the one flesh wound that resulted was easily patched by Hester with a snippet of stick-on plaster, meant for stemming leaks in boilers.

“I was beginning to rather like all those babies,” Captain Standforth said, a faraway look in his eye. “I wonder how you… Hmmmm.” He went away, to study his taxidermy books.

“Plague,” Ensign Benson said, as Billy was untied from the rack. “You’ll never see a living Ben on Gemini again.”

“And you took them away,” Reverend Hengethorg said, “so they couldn’t infect us.”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve done wonders.”

“I know,” Ensign Benson said.

Billy came over, massaging his chafed wrists. He looked taller. “Gosh, Kybee,” he said.

“Well, ta-ta,” Ensign Benson told the Antibens. “You’ll be hearing from Earth. Our job here is finished now.”

“Sir,” an aide said to Colonel Alderpee, “there’s a dispute among the men.”

The colonel gazed over the new encampment, the tents still being raised, the thud-thud of posts being driven into the virgin ground. “Dispute? Over what?”

“Well, some of the men say those people in the fort were from Earth, and some say they weren’t.”

“Really? Call a meeting. We’re mature adults; we’ll discuss it.”

1984

Hydra

Donald Westlake is one of the best and most popular mystery novelists in the U.S., creator of the Dortmunder gang and such books as HOT ROCK. BANK SHOT and JIMMY THE KID. He writes an occasional short story, and we’re delighted to offer this one.

“I’m afraid that’s the church again,” Carrie Morton said. “Greg, push on.”

“That’s all right, I like it,” Fay White told her, being polite, but Greg Morton had already pushed the bar on the slide projector — chip-clock — and after a brief interval of rectangular white, the wall reblossomed into yet another view of the same small concrete-block church roughly painted in pastels, glistening like a week-old wedding cake in the bright southern sun.

“Oh, dear,” Carrie said. “Too many of the same picture. But I just loved that church.”

“I’d be fascinated by those colors, too,” Fay said, hating herself for her spineless politeness but helpless to change her manner. A dozen years ago in college it had been like this, Carrie blithe and uncaring while Fay smiled and said it was all right; and now here they were again, just the same.

Chip-chip-chip-chip — “The people are so primitive,” Carrie said, as Greg struggled with the machine and they all stared at the white-again wall. “They’re alleged to be Christians, but what went on in that building seemed awfully jungle-jungle to me.”

Then why not photograph that, Fay thought, sipping gamely at her pre-dinner drink. She and Carrie and Greg all held tiny glasses of a heavy, too-sweet South American liqueur the Mortons had brought back, while Fay’s husband, Reed — no spineless politeness for him — sat contentedly with a glass of beer. I wish I were more like Reed, Fay thought. Self-confident and serene. I wish liked my friends more.

Clock. Four smiling children shyly posed in that same harsh sunlight beside a rusted, springless, dark green American car. “So childlike,” Carrie said, comfortably smiling.

“Well, they’re children,” Fay said, looking at the vulnerable little faces, the knobby brown knees.

“No, all of them, I mean.” Carrie laughed. “Such sweet people, but so naïve!”

“Ripe for agitators,” Greg said.

The picture on the wall trembled, and Fay frowned at the children. A withered arm? And wasn’t that — “Wait!” she said, but chip-clock, and they were looking now at a placid man walking down a dirt road, a large earthenware jug balanced on his shoulder. The road was dry and dusty, the land to both sides a sunbeaten brown. “Oh, it’s Hoo-lee-oh!” Carrie said happily.

“Was that— Was one of those—” Fay looked across the projector’s beam at Carrie, blond and sweet and recently maternal. “Was one of those children blind?”

But Reed was saying. “Agitators. Greg? Down there, too?”

“It’s the same old story,” Greg said, while Carrie turned her open smiling face to listen. “The big American company comes in, brings prosperity, jobs, consumer goods, education — medical care, for Christ’s sake — and the first thing you know the locals think it’s all theirs.”

“Hoo-lee-oh was our houseboy,” Carrie said, smiling at Fay. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is, being where there’s no servant problem.”

“Hoo-lee-oh?”

Carrie spelled it out, and it turned out to be Julio. “He made the most delicious wine,” Carrie said, “and used to bring us just jugs of the stuff. Not grape wine, from flowers or something. I never could understand how he grew anything at all — just look at the ground. When I think of my poor little kitchen garden; hopeless, tomatoes like acorns.”

“Miserable soil,” Greg said, “but naturally the politicals carried on all the time about pollution.”

“It’s the same up here,” Reed said. “Love Canal, all that. Mountains out of molehills.”

“Exactly,” Greg said. “People make mistakes, we’re all human, but you’d think it was deliberate. We aren’t barbarians, for Christ’s sake.”

Fay twisted around to look at Greg. “I read about some valley in Brazil,” she said, “where there’s so much industry now, so much pollution, nothing grows anymore. And birth defects, and—”

Greg nodded, mouth expressing disapproval. “The dead valley, I know. Believe me, the politicals beat us over the head with that one, even though it isn’t American companies, it’s all multinationals, European, South American. But they did go too far there, no question, we all know there have to be some controls. But what we have to realize, every one of us right here in the U.S.A., the world is going to pass us by.”

“I don’t follow,” Reed said.

Chip-clock. Julio and his jug became a very pregnant Carrie, in voluminous white top and pink slacks, blooming and beaming in front of their neat white modular company cottage. In the background, black lines like the smoke in a child’s drawing squiggled upward from the tall metal stacks. “I wore pink the whole time,” Carrie said, “so I’d have a girl.”

“Vickie’s such a little doll,” Fay took her.

Greg was saying to Reed, “If it weren’t for U.S. government regulations, PetChem wouldn’t have moved down there back in the sixties. I’m all for the environment — I mean, for Christ’s sake, we all breathe the same air — but you’ve got to weigh the factors. These countries in the south, they want our business, they’re ready to make an accommodation.”

“How far along were you?” Fay asked.

“Six months.” Carrie smiled dreamily, reminiscently, at the image of her pregnant self. “I carried so big, for a while I thought I was having triplets.”

“Of course, they breed like rabbits,” Greg said, “so they hardly show. The women. Walk along the road, you wouldn’t know they were pregnant at all. Squat, and poof.”

Laughing, Carrie said. “It’s not quite that easy.”

“Still,” Fay said, “I don’t suppose prenatal care is exactly up to our standards.”

“One reason we’re back,” Greg said. Chip-clock. “Also, we wanted Vickie born in the U.S.A.”

“That’s the company lake,” Carrie said.

The people along the shore were of no clearly defined types. “Even in bathing suits,” Fay said, “Americans look like Americans.”

Carrie said, “Remember the summer we both took cabins on Lake Monequois? Doesn’t it look like that?”

“Except for the volcanoes.”

“Maybe we can do the lake again next summer,” Carrie said. “Now that we’re back.”

“You can’t swim there anymore. They say it’s algae or something.”

“Oh, too bad.” Bur Carrie’s smile remained sunny, and she said, “Well, there’s still the ocean.”

Reed said, “Is that your Julio again? Are all those kids his?”

“I told you so,” Greg said, “like rabbits. Of course, we had to let the locals use the company lake. I mean we’re democratic, for Christ’s sake.”

A child behind Julio was crawling toward the water. Fay said, “Where’s his legs?”

Chip-clock. “What?” Greg said.

“Nothing. Never mind.” Fay frowned at the white wall.

Carrie said, “That’s the end of that box, honey.”

Greg’s watch was a masterpiece of several technologies. Consulting it, he said, “Seven fifty-three, dear. You wanted to know.”

“Oh, my goodness.” Carrie’s long legs had been curled beneath her while they watched the slides; now she unlimbered and rose, saying, “Dinner’s in five minutes. Later on, if we feel like it, we can look at the rest.”

Greg said, “Maybe that’s enough for tonight. One of the best things about being back, we’ve left all those hassles behind.”

Fay said to Carrie, “Can I help?”

“Oh, no, just relax.”

But of course Fay didn’t. Leaving Greg and Reed to talk about government restrictions, she followed Carrie to the kitchen, where small red lights on various machines gave assurance that the meal was coming along. Carrie said, peering through the oven window, “Lord, this is one thing I’m glad to get back to. Modem appliances.”

“Didn’t the company housing have all that?”

“Microwave? Are you kidding?” Lifting a pot lid, releasing a pillow of vegetable-scented steam, Carrie said, “All you get there is the basics. A tiny Italian refrigerator, barely enough ice cubes for two people — Do you know, if you had friends over for dinner, they’d bring their own ice cube trays? Honestly.”

“Other company people, you mean.”

“Who else was there? Fay, I can’t tell you how much we missed you and Reed.”

“We’re glad you’re back,” Fay said. And it was true. The uneasiness and discontent were all on Fay’s side, and pointless. Carrie was her best friend, since college, since they’d been dating the boys who were now their husbands. “Very happy you’re back,” Fay said, and impulsively kissed Carrie’s smooth, round cheek.

There really was nothing for Fay to do in the kitchen, and very little even for Carrie. The machines had everything under control. Having rime. Fay went through the bedroom into the bath to refresh her makeup and wash her hands. Returning, she passed what had been Greg’s den and was now the nursery, and movement caught her eye. Vickie was awake.

The baby had been asleep earlier, when they’d ail come in to look at her. Now Fay stepped into the nursery, half-lit by a small table lamp, and leaned over the crib to smile down at Carrie’s child.

Vickie was fair, like her mother, with wide-set eyes and pug nose. Her eyes were closed, but her pudgy hands and feet were moving, in that aimless way of infants learning their bodies. Light gleamed on her soft stretching throat.

Perhaps sensing Fay’s presence, the baby abruptly opened her eyes and gazed upward with intense concentration. Beautiful green eyes, darker than jade. Then the wide mouth opened and the baby gave a gassy smile, complete with bubbles.

It’s a trick of the light. Fay thought, but it wasn’t. Holding tight to the side of the crib, she watched Vickie laugh. We think we’re safe, she thought. We move the danger far away where it can only hurt people we don’t care about, and we stay here safe. But it’s coming, anyway.

In the doorway, Carrie said, “Fay? Dinner.”

I can’t let her guess I know. Fay thought, but when she turned the truth must have been plain in her eyes because Carrie, smiling with some irritation, said, “Oh, you noticed.”

“Carrie.”

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” Taking Fay’s arm, walking her out to the master bedroom, Carrie said, “There’s a company doctor knows all about it, there’s a little operation when Vickie’s just a bit older, there won’t be a trace.”

“A company doctor? This has happened before?”

“And they’re all just as healthy and happy as can be,” Carrie said, smiling her contented smile. “Come along to dinner.” She leaned close, the smile turning confidential. “But don’t mention it to anyone, all right? I mean, it’s going to be fixed.”

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t.”

And she wouldn’t. Following Carrie to the dining room, Fay knew she would never mention it to a soul. But she would remember. Clear in her mind’s eye it would remain, the vision of Vickie, the wide-set deep green eyes, the little pug nose, the forked tongue.

The World’s a Stage

“We’d better be getting our act together and taking it on the road,” said ensign Benson, “or we’ll be stuck on this planet forever.”

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than WOO colonies, all in sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

The two tramps, picturesquely filthy, sat by the side of the road in the dusty sunshine. They were dressed in more rags than seemed absolutely necessary given the mildness of the weather, and while one of them mused upon life more or less audibly, the other removed a battered, scruffy boot and frowned mistrustfully into it, as though expecting to find something alive in there. He sighed. He blew into the boot. He sighed. He put the boot on. He took it off again. He turned to his musing, muttering companion and said, “Didi?”

“Yes?”

“What do we do now?”

“We wait.”

A kind of inner earthquake of frustration vibrated through the tramp holding the boot. With a repressed scream, he cried, “For what?”

“For him,” Didi said. “He promised he’d meet us here, and we’re supposed to wait until—” He broke off, gazing upward past his friend’s filthy forehead.

“Well?” asked the other. “Go on, go on.”

“Oh, my gosh,” said Didi His voice, his manner, even his facial appearance, all had changed.

“What is it?” asked his friend, turning to look.

The two tramps stared upward at the slowly descending spaceship, a great silver corncob lowering through the empty air. “It’s Godot,” Didi whispered in awe. “He finally got here.”

Inside the spaceship, 27 birds watched Pam Stokes, astrogator, beautiful and brainy but blind to passion, play with her ancestral slide rule. The birds were all stuffed and wired to their perches around the Hopeful’s command deck, and from the expression in their glass eyes, they didn’t like it a bit. Or perhaps what they didn’t like was the sight of Captain Gregory Standforth disemboweling yet another bird on the control panel. Indigo ichor oozed through the dials and switches into the panel’s innards, where it would make a mysterious bad smell for the next several weeks.

A tall, skinny, vague-eyed, loose-wired sort of fellow, Captain Standforth was the seventh consecutive generation of Standforths to spend his life in the service of the Galactic Patrol and the first to be terrible at it. Much was expected of a Standforth, but in this case it was expected in vain. The captain had had no choice other than to follow the family footsteps into the patrol, and the patrol had had to take him, but neither had profited. All the captain wanted was to pursue his one passion, taxidermy — the stuffing of birds from everywhere in the universe — while all the patrol wanted was to never see or hear from him again

Thump. “Ouch!” said the captain. As vermilion blood mixed with the indigo ichor, he put his cut varicolored finger into his mouth, said, “Oog,” took it out again and made a bad-taste grimace. “Nn.” Turning to Pam, he said, “What was that thump? Made me cut myself.”

“Subsidence,” she said, rapidly whizzing the slide rule’s parts back and forth. “By my calculations, ground level must have eroded seven millimeters in the last half-chiliad. Therefore, the ship’s computer switched off engines before we actually—”

“Half-chiliad?” asked the captain. “What’s a half-chiliad?”

“Five hundred years. So that’s why we thumped when we landed.”

“Landed? You mean we’ve arrived somewhere?”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Standforth looked around at his birds. They looked back. “I wonder where we are,” he said. “I wonder what kind of birds they have here.”

“Wardrobe! Wardrobe!”

“Now what?”

“My wings keep falling off.”

“All right, I’ll get my needle and thread.”

He’s an airhead, Ensign Kybee Benson thought, raging murderously within while he struggled to appear calm and composed without. A clot head, a bonehead, a meal-head. Chowderhead, fathead. Muttonhead. No, he’s worse than all of those — he’s a Luthguster.

The Luthguster in question, Councilman Morton Luthguster of the Supreme Galactic Council, sealed on the other side of Ensign Benson’s desk, went obliviously on with his question. “Why name an entire planet after an actor? A planet called J. Railsford Farnsworth is ridiculous.”

“In the first place,” Ensign Benson said, swallowing brimstone, “the planet is named Hestia IV, since it is the fourth planet from its sun, Hestia. The colony’s full name is the J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company.”

Councilman Luthguster shook his jowly head. “Damn-fool name for a place,” he insisted “Detroit, now, that’s a name. Khartoum. Reykjavik. But J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company?”

A tap at the frame of the open office door was followed by the cheerful, optimistic, shiny young face of Lieutenant Billy Shelby, Hopeful’s second in command, who said, “We’ve landed, sir. We’re on the ground.”

“I know what landed means,” Ensign Benson snapped. “I felt the bump. And when I’ve finished explaining the situation to the councilman, we’ll be along.”

“OK,” Billy said happily. “We’ll be waiting at the air lock. At the door.”

“I know what an air lock is.”

Billy cantered off, and Ensign Benson returned to his task. As social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, he had the job of giving Councilman Luthguster the necessary background on each colony they visited. “When this sector of the universe was colonized,” he explained, “a special cultural fund was set up to bring the arts to the far-flung outposts of Man. A theatrical troupe from Earth was offered its own settlement and a subsidy and was meant to tour the other colonies with a repertory of ancient and modern drama. Of course, contact was lost almost immediately, so the troupe never got its transportation and therefore never toured. There’s no guessing what it’s become by now.”

Luthguster pursed fat lips. “So who is this fellow J. Railsford Farnsworth?”

“Founder of the repertory company. The actor-manager-director of the troupe.”

“Do you mean,” Luthguster demanded, puffing out like an adder, “that I shall be expected to discuss affairs of state with an actor?”

“I don’t think so,” Ensign Benson said. His face was expressionless, but his tense hand had crushed the plastoak arm of his chair. “J. Railsford Farnsworth would be about five hundred and forty-three by now, and that’s old even for an actor.”

Gathered around the air lock were two thirds of the Hopeful’s complement: Captain Standforth, Astrogator Stokes, Lieutenant Shelby and Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, a stocky, blunt woman with a stocky, blunt manner, who was saying, “I didn’t like that thump. Bad for the engines.”

“I didn’t like it, either,” Captain Standforth told her. “Made me cut myself.” He showed her the scratched finger.

Hester, the closest thing they had to a ship’s doctor, frowned at the scratch a millisecond, then said, “Paint a little anti-rust compound on it Be good as new.”

Bemused, the captain gazed at his finger. “Are you sure?”

Ensign Benson and Councilman Luthguster joined the group, and Billy armed the councilman with his microphone. “It’s all set,” he said. “Just talk straight into it.”

“Fine.”

“Not yet,” Ensign Benson said.

The councilman stepped out onto the small platform suspended halfway up the side of the ship, and his amplified voice rolled out over a dusty landscape reminiscent of certain sections of eastern Oklahoma in early June: “Citizens of J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Com— Aak!”

Inside the ship, Ensign Benson frowned. “Aak?”

Councilman Luthguster bundled hastily back into the ship like a stockbroker into the bar car. “Those aren’t peopled They’re, they’re things!”

“Stop talking into the microphone,” Ensign Benson said.

Billy looked out the air lock. “Oh, wow! Cute bug-eyed monsters!”

“What?” Stepping impatiently out onto the platform, Ensign Benson found himself gazing down on as motley a collection of creatures as ever was lit by the same sun. Nonhuman to a fault but, as Billy had said, cute. There were tiny round puffballs with human legs and wings and yellow wigs over fairy faces. Fall, androgynous sprites in tights. Hoppers with humps. And in front of them stood a beautiful womanoid with gauzy wings and a gauzy gown and long, pointed cars, and a big, hairy manoid with a great purple cloak and long feet that curled up into spirals at the end.

Loudly enough for Ensign Benson to hear, the manoid addressed the womanoid: “I’ll met by moonlight, proud Titania.”

In the doorway, the captain said, “That one over there looks like a bird, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t think so, Captain,” said Billy.

“What, jealous Oberon!” the woman was bellowing. “Fairies, skip hence: I have forsworn his bed and company.”

“I will not talk to things!”

“Tell that nitwit,” Ensign Benson said over his shoulder, “to stop talking into the microphone.”

Below, half the thingummys and jigmarigs were skipping away, while the womanoid frowned up at Ensign Benson. “Fairies, skip hence,” she repeated, even more loudly. “That’s you, buster!”

Ensign Benson called, “Where are the human beings around here?”

“Nowhere in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” jealous Oberon told him, apparently exasperated.

“I will not talk to things!”

“All right,” disgusted Oberon said, “let’s go, troupe.” As his whatsits and flumadiddles obediently sloped off, he turned back to call, “And I suppose that spaceship of yours is an example of kitchen-sink realism!”

The entire crowd shuffled away. They appeared to be removing wings and heads and appendages as they went, almost as though they were costumes; and 40 feet from the ship, they stepped around a curtain of air, one after the other, and disappeared.

Ensign Benson blinked. “Oh, boy,” he said.

The captain and Billy came out onto the platform, the captain saying, “Where did everybody go?”

“Um,” said Ensign Benson.

“Those were really keen creatures,” Billy said.

“And what a beautiful day,” the captain said, gazing skyward, stepping back from the ship the better to view the empyrean. “Is it morning here or after— Aak!”

“Another aak,” Ensign Benson moodily said, watching the captain tumble down the stairs to land in a dusty heap at the bottom.

“Kybee, look!” said Billy.

Ensign Benson followed Billy’s pointing finger. There in the middle of the field, an invisible curtain of air was lifting to reveal what seemed to be a house with its side wall torn away. In the kitchen, a woman wearing a slip stood wearily at her ironing board. In the living room, a man in a tom T-shirt sprawled on a sofa and drank beer.

Captain Standforth had picked himself up and was brushing himself off. Ensign Benson started down the ladder, intent on finding out what was going on here, and Billy came after. Above, Pam Stokes and Hester Hanshaw came tentatively out to the platform, Pam looking at the oddly sliced house and saying, “Did they miss a mortgage payment?”

Hester said, “Maybe all their weather comes from the other side.”

“Are the things still out there?”

“They’re gone, Councilman Luthguster,” Pam said. “You can come out.”

“Tell him to leave the microphone inside,” Ensign Benson called up the ladder, then said to the captain, “Let’s go find out the story here.”

“I suppose we have to.”

The captain and the ensign and Billy crossed the dusty field, meeting part way a frazzled woman wearing many frilly-but-worn garments and carrying a carpetbag. Smiling rather maniacally at Billy and speaking with an almost impenetrable Southern accent complicated by many odd little pauses, she said, “Ah have… all-wuz depended… on the… kahnd-ness of stranjuhs.”

“Me, too,” said Billy.

“As for me,” said Ensign Benson, “I’ve never depended on the kindness of strangers. Seems to work better somehow.”

In the living room, the man burped and yelled, “Stella!”

The frazzled woman stopped, frowned at Ensign Benson and said, completely without accent or affectation, “Say. What’s your story?”

“That’s what I meant to ask you,” Ensign Benson said. “What’s your story?”

“A Streetcar Named Desire, of course.”

Billy said, “What’s a streetcar?”

“I’ll tell you what my desire is,” Ensign Benson said, but the captain got there first, stepping forward to say, “Madam, if you please, take me to your leader.”

“Us,” said Ensign Benson.

“Oh, that story,” said the woman.

Royal-blue carpet with the Presidential seal in the middle. Large wooden desk, flanked by flags. The Oval Office.

Coming around his desk, smiling, hand outstretched, the President of the United States greeted the people from Earth. “Welcome back. Your safe return from barren Aldebaran has ignited the spirit of mankind. Welcome home to Earth.”

“Actually, Mr. President,” Councilman Luthguster said, puffing himself up, “we’re from Earth, and we wish to—”

“Well, of course you are,” the President said. Picking up a document from his desk, he said, “I have a proclamation here in honor of your voyage and return. ‘Whereas, in the course of human events…’ ”

Through the window behind the desk, the Washington Monument could be seen; but through the open doorway to the left, the same old dusty plain was visible. A group of people in overalls and sweat-bands wheeled a Trojan horse by. Two women in straw hats and tuxedos bucked and wung the other way.

The proclamation ran its course. At its finish, Councilman Luthguster squared his round shoulders and said, “Mr. President, I am empowered by the Galactic Council—”

Approaching Ensign Benson, the President firmly shook his hand and said, “Captain, your voyage into the unknown makes this the most important day in all creation.”

“Sir,” said Captain Standforth, “I’m the captain.”

“You,” the President reminded him, “are the captain’s best friend.” Turning to Pam Stokes, he said, “And you are the ship’s biologist.”

“Actually,” Pam said, “I’m the astrogator. I don’t think we’d need a biologist on a—”

“Of course you do.” Irritation seeped through the Presidential manner. “How else do we discover the killer virus that’s taken over the crew’s bodies?”

“Wait a minute,” Ensign Benson said. “You aren’t the President: you’re pretending to be the President. This is a play!”

“Well, of course it is!” the President cried. “And this is the worst rehearsal I have ever participated in!”

Luthguster harrumphed. “Do you mean to say,” he demanded, “that you are not empowered to deal on a primary level with a plenipotentiary from Earth?”

Frowning, the President said, “Have you come unglued, fella?”

Ensign Benson muttered, “Director — no. Producer — no.” Snapping his fingers, he said to the President, “Take me to your stage manager.”

The man sat atop a six-foot wooden ladder. Behind him were three rows of kitchen chairs, several occupied by solemn-faced people wearing their Sunday best. The man on the ladder said, “I’m the stage manager here. I guess I know just about everything there is to know about our town…”

The captain and the crew sat by the side of the dusty road. Billy took his boot off and looked in it. Councilman Luthguster, marching back and forth, announced, “This is absurd! These people can’t spend all their time play acting. They must have a government, an infrastructure. How do they get their food?”

“Of Mice and Men for an extended run,” suggested Ensign Benson.

Across the way, out in the middle of an empty field, a group of men in togas strolled out from behind an invisible curtain of air and began declaiming at one another. They all stood with one foot in front of the other. “That’s the part that bugs me the worst,” Ensign Benson said. “How do they appear and disappear like that?”

“Scrim,” said Hester.

Ensign Benson gave her an unfriendly look. “What?”

“I know what a scrim is,” Billy said. “We had one in the theater in college. It’s a big mesh screen. You paint a backdrop on it and hang it across the front of the stage. If you shine a light in front, you see the painting but you can’t see the stage. If you shine the light in back, the painting disappears and you see the stage.”

“Close but no pseugar,” said Hester. “That’s the original, old-fashioned kind of scrim, but then a way was found to alter air molecules so light would bend around them. Now a scrim is a curtain of bent molecules. You put it around a set and it shows you what’s beyond it. They used to use one in field questions for the S.E. degree, but of course it’s old-fashioned now.”

“Science is wonderful,” Ensign Benson said bitterly as he watched the men in togas disappear again behind their curtain of bent molecules.

“None of which solves,” Councilman Luthguster reminded them, “the problem of how to get in touch with whoever runs this blasted colony I’ll do no more play acting!”

Standing, the captain said, “Well, Hestia’s going down; there’s no more to do today. We’ll get an early start tomorrow.”

“Wasn’t it right here?” the captain asked.

“I thought,” said Pam vaguely, “it was more over that way, by those little trees.”

“There weren’t trees there before,” Ensign Benson said. “Those are cardboard, part of a set.”

“I am uninterested in sets,” the councilman said. “Totally uninterested. What I want is my room on the ship.”

“What I want,” said Hester, “is the bathroom on the ship.”

“Well, yes,” said Luthguster.

The little group stood on the plain, looking around. The captain said, “It was just— It was right around— I know it was over here somewhere.”

A man dressed in the front half of a horse costume came striding purposefully by, carrying the horse’s head under his arm. Billy said, “Excuse me. Have you seen our spaceship?”

“What?” The horseman looked around, then said, “Oh, right. They struck that set.” And he walked on.

“Struck?” echoed the captain. “Struck?”

“Theatrical term,” Pam told him. “It means to dismantle a set and take it oil the stage.”

“You can’t dismantle a spaceships,” the captain said. “Not in half an hour.”

“No,” Ensign Benson said, through clenched jaws. Smoke seemed to be coming out of his ears. “But you can put a curtain around it.” Glaring at Hester as though it were her fault, he said, “Our ship is surrounded by your goddamn bent molecules!”

Darkness fell, a bit at a time. “I think,” said the captain inaccurately, “I think we’ll just have to sleep on the ground.”

“Like camping out!” said the irrepressible Billy.

“Without the camp,” added the repressive councilman.

The captain said, “We’ll each have to find a declivity to sleep in.”

“I’ll need two declivities,” said Hester.

“Amen,” said the councilman.

“Kybee,” Pam said, “this is my declivity.”

“It’s important to retain our body heat,” Ensign Benson explained, trying to hunker down beside her.

“Thank you, Kybee,” Pam said, “but I’m really quite warm enough sleeping by myself.”

“You would be,” Ensign Benson muttered, thumping off across the darkling plain and all at once running into a spider web. “Ptchah!” he cried, flailing at the web, then realized it wasn’t a web at all. It was a, it was some sort of, it felt like a thin sheet or a—

Curtain.

“Oh, boy,” Ensign Benson said. Feeling the material with both hands, maintaining a lot of body contact with this drapery, he sidled along to the right, noticing how clothlike it was, giving when he pressed but resisting when he pressed too hard. Somewhere there would be, there had to be, an opening.

There. His right hand slipped off the curtain’s edge and fell forward against unresisting air, and all at once, instead of Hestia’s dull but protracted set, he was looking at somebody’s drawing room.

Comedy-of-manners time. A sofa centered, telephone on stand to its left. Several upstage doors for slamming. Occasional furniture along the walls. Steady, not-too-bright light, source uncertain.

Ensign Benson stepped through the break and inspected more closely. Windows fakes with painted views. Bookcase a painted facade. Telephone nonoperative. Water in ashtray, soap on mirror. Some sort of mottled obscurity high above blocking the sky. Sofa real and soft.

Turning about, he looked through the curtain of bent molecules at his shipmates settling down for the night on the dusty ground, like a small herd from some endangered species. Tell Pam about the sofa? Surely she wouldn’t mind sharing it. On the other hand, there was the rest of the crew.

Ensign Benson sighed. Pushing open the flap, he called, “Everybody! I found us a room.”

Hestia rose like thunder out of the horizon across the way. “I hear thunder,” Pam said, sitting up on the sofa, squinting in the rosy light, looking tousled and adorable and unavailable.

The other Earthlings, less adorable, rose from their beds of chair cushions and window draperies. “Rain,” grumbled Ensign Benson, stretching his stiff, sore back. “Just to make things perfect.”

But there was no rain, and when the thunder stopped, it became obvious that the sound had actually been some sort of approaching motor. For a few seconds the Earthers waited in silence, contemplating their morning mouths, and then an upstage door opened and a heedless young couple in evening dress-black tie for him, green flapper outfit for her — entered and slammed the door. “Tennis, anyone?” cried the boy, with a big toothy grin; then, as he reacted to the scene onstage, his grin became a toothless O of shock. “Lor!” he breathed.

The girl stared about in disbelief. “Well, I never!” she said, in character.

Captain Standforth clambered stiffly from his settee, saying, “Pm terribly sorry. Is this your place?”

The young man stared about in well-bred horror. “Look what you’ve done,” he said, “to this set.”

“We’ll fix it right up,” Billy promised, fluffing the pillow that had been his sole companion on the floor.

“I’ve a good mind,” the young man said angrily, “to report you to, report you to…”

Ensign Benson and Councilman Luthguster both leaned eagerly toward him. “Yes?” asked the councilman. “Yes?”

“To the agency!”

“Of course!” cried Ensign Benson.

The vehicle was a four-wheeled open land traveler with a simple metal-pipe frame and three rows of bucket seats. While the Earthfolk piled atop one another in the back — Pam deflecting Ensign Benson’s attempt to pile atop her — the annoyed thespians sat in front, the male kicking the engine to life and hunching over the handle bars. “We’ll see about this,” he said, and off they lurched.

Up a dusty slope they went and over the ridge and down the long, dusty road toward the settlement, a cluster of small buildings along an X of two streets.

“That’s the colony,” said Ensign Benson, staring around Hester’s shoulder. “Where we landed was nothing but an outdoor—”

“Rehearsal hall,” said Billy.

“They figured,” Ensign Benson said, “we were just actors, rehearsing a—”

“Space opera,” said Billy.

“Shut up, Billy,” said Ensign Benson.

Meanwhile, up front, the girl was pleading their case to her companion. “They’re just trying to attract attention,” she said. “Come on, Harv, you and I aren’t above stunts like that ourselves to get a part. They’re just between gigs, that’s all.”

“Then let ’em go to Temp, like the rest of us.”

“Come on, Harv, don’t be a producer.”

By then they were in the middle of the most utilitarian town the Earth people had ever seen. The buildings were drably functional and lacking in ornamentation, with none more than two stories high. Other stripped-down land travelers moved back and forth, and the several pedestrians, male and female, were mostly dressed in plain, drab jump suits. The few people in costume — a cowboy, a striped-pants diplomat, a belly dancer — stood out like parakeets in a field of crows.

The land traveler stopped. Reluctantly, the driver said, “All right, get out. I won’t report you.”

“Gee, thanks!” said Billy, bounding over the rail.

The others followed, and Ensign Benson said, “Where’s the agency?”

“Don’t milk the joke, fella,” the driver said and accelerated away But his girlfriend, behind his back, pointed and gestured toward a nearby gray-metal building, then waved a good-luck goodbye.

“She was nice,” Billy said.

“I’ve never dealt with agents before,” Luthguster said, frowning at the building. “Only principals.”

Ensign Benson stared at him. “You only deal in principles? Come along, Councilman; this I have to see.”

J. RAILSFORD FARNSWORTH SUCCESSORS — TALENT AGENCY read the inscription on the frosted fiber of the door. The Earthians filed into a small, bench-lined room personed by a feisty receptionist. “Well, look at what the omkali dragged in,” she said, surveying the bedraggled Terrans.

Hester glared at the girl. “Get smart with me, snip,” she said, “and I’ll breathe on you.”

“Harridan,” commented the receptionist calmly, flipping through a card file on her desk. “Battle-ax. Dyke. Sorry, got nothing for your type at the moment. We have your photo and resume on file?”

“Girlie,” Hester said, leaning over the desk, “if I had my socket wrench, I’d unscrew your head.”

“Just a minute, just a minute,” said Ensign Benson, interposing himself. “Is the boss here?”

The girl frowned at him, then smiled. “Oh, yes. You’re the captain.”

“That’s right, and he’s my best friend. Is the chief in?”

“You mean — the agent?”

“The man in charge,” said Councilman Luthguster.

The girl looked dubious. “Who shall I say is calling?”

The councilman drew himself up to his full round. “The Earth,” he said.

The girl looked him up and down. “I won’t argue,” she said.

Framed autographed photos — glossy 8 x 10s — covered every inch of wall space in the small windowless room. The rolltop desk was picturesquely old and battered, the wastebasket overflowing, the Leatherette sofa sagging, the two client chairs tired and gnawed.

So was the agent. A short and stocky man in a wrinkled jump suit with sleeve garters, he looked harried, sympathetic and negative. “I’m sorry, group,” he said. “I can’t tell you anything more than my girl did. Space opera just doesn’t move right now. How about a family drama?” Pointing to Billy, he said, “You could be the secret-faggot younger son.”

“Gee,” said Billy, “I don’t know.”

“Well, you do know the alternative,” the agent said. “If you’re not in rehearsal, you have to sign up with Temp. When something comes up that suits you, we’ll be in touch. In the meantime, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“Who’s Temp?” Ensign Benson asked. “Is he in charge here?”

The agent offered a brief smile, knowing, condescending and a bit irritated. “Don’t audition with me pal,” he said.

Councilman Luthguster said, “I assure you, my friend, continued play acting is the farthest thing from my mind. I am here representing the Galactic Council, and I wish to—”

“Oh, please,” the agent said, becoming really annoyed. “If you people don’t get out of here at once, I’ll put your photos and résumés in the inactive file and you’ll be permanently on Temp.”

“Go ahead,” Ensign Benson said.

The agent blinked at him. “What?”

“My name is Kybee Benson. I am not the captain and I don’t have a best friend; and if my picture is in your files, you’re a magician.”

“That goes for me double,” said Hester. “And I’m not a dyke.”

Ensign Benson stared at her. “You aren’t?”

“Wait a minute,” the agent said. Doubt curdled his face. “Who are you people?”

“A mission from Earth,” Ensign Benson said.

“Representing the Galactic Council,” Councilman Luthguster added.

“And I’m sorry to bother you,” Captain Standforth said, “but your people struck our ship.”

“So Temp is temporary employment,” Ensign Benson said, “and it’s the source for all the necessary labor in the colony.”

“That’s right.” The agent and the Earthpersons sat around a long table in a conference room. A secretary had distributed coffee and note pads and pencils and now sat poised to one side with her memo pad open.

“And,” Ensign Benson went on, “for the past five hundred years, you’ve been in rehearsal.”

“The assumption has always been,” the agent said, “that sooner or later, our transportation would arrive. ‘The show must go on eventually’ is our national motto. So we keep a group of shows ready to perform, the choice of which ones being based on popular vole. There’s a certain understandable growing negativity about space opera, which is why you’ve been having so much trouble.”

“Well, our troubles are over now,” Billy said, beaming at every body.

“Ours, too,” the agent said. Eagerly he leaned forward. “What’s our first stop on the tour?”

The captain said, “Tour?”

“It’ll make a difference,” the agent explained, “as to which plays we carry. You wouldn’t do Lysistrata in Gayville, for instance.”

“Sir,” said Luthguster, “you have misunderstood. We are an introductory mission representing the Galactic Council in this reabsorption of—”

“You mean, you aren’t our transportation?”

“Certainly not,” Luthguster said. “I assure you, sir, I am neither a play actor nor a tour director. I am—”

“In terrible trouble,” the agent finished. To his secretary — who had stopped note taking, the better to look shocked and horrified — he said, “Erase that bit, Emily, and don’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

“Oh, sir,” breathed Emily, with all the despairing fervor of any showbiz secretary ordered not to gossip.

The captain said, “Really, uh, your Honor, I’m sure we can arrange all the transportation you need.”

“I’m delighted and relieved to hear it,” the agent said. “When?”

“In two or three years,” Luthguster told him. “Five at the very most.”

The captain said, “All we need is to get to the ship and—”

“Impossible,” the agent said.

“I knew there had to be a kicker,” Ensign Benson said. “What is it?”

The agent pressed all his fingers to his chest in the time-honored agent’s gesture of innocence. “Bubee,” he said, “do I know where your ship is? No. Certain members of the rep company do. If you go to the rep company and tell them you’re here in a spaceship after five hundred years but you’re not their transportation, do you know what they’ll do?”

The Earth party shook its heads.

“Lynch you,” said Emily bitterly. She was shredding her pencil.

“Very probably,” said the agent.

Ensign Benson said, “Do you mean we can’t get our spaceship back because, if people know it’s real but not your damn tour bus, they’ll blame us?”

“I couldn’t have phrased it better myself,” the agent said. “Remember, five hundred years is a long rehearsal.”

Emily, sniffling solemnly over her note pad, murmured, “But what else could we have done? We never knew when…”

“Yes, Emily,” the agent said sympathetically.

Councilman Luthguster said, “But this is terrible; I can’t arrange for transportation or trade agreements or development aid or anything until I’m back in the ship.”

“But how to get there,” Pam said. “That’s the problem.”

All nodded dolefully. But then Billy leaped to his feet, his fresh face eager and alight. “Say, gang!” he cried. “Why don’t we — I dunno — put on a show?”

And what a show! Dorothy and the Wizard of J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company, and Selected Shorts. The agent helped arrange for cooperation from the craft guilds, and the sounds of cheerful hammering and more cheerful whistling rose up from the stage carpenters building the sets. Backdrops were flown, specialty acts were auditioned and Ensign Benson took to wearing jodhpurs and an ascot. Councilman Luthguster sang the bass notes, Billy gave pep talks from the tops of ladders and the captain flew squadrons of stuffed birds. The crew spent hours in the wardrobe shed, sequences from other shows were freely borrowed and even Emily chipped in, writing lyrics.

Curtain up!

“Somewhere over the welkin, skies are green…”

“Of thee I sing, hyperspace! Summer, autumn, winter, spring, hyperspace!”

“Toto, I don’t think we’re on Alpha Centauri anymore.”

“Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! It’s off to J. Railsford Farnsworth Repertory Company we go!”

“Whatever Toto wants, Toto gets.”

“Hee, hee, hee! And I’ll get that little dog, too!”

“Toto! Toto!”

“Dingdong, the dingbat’s dead!”

“Ignore the man behind that curtain!”

The finale! A scrim parted and a gasp went up from the audience as Hopeful appeared, gleaming in the Hestia light. Dorothy (Pam), the Cowardly Lion (the captain), the Scarecrow (Ensign Benson), the Tin Person (Hester), the Wizard (Councilman Luthguster) and Toto (Billy) marched, singing, toward their ship.

Along the way, the agent shook Councilman Luthguster’s hand. “Hurry back,” he said. “We’ll take lunch.”

Klonk-klonk, up the yellow-metal ladder. Snuck went the air-lock door. Sssssssssummmmmmmmm went the spaceship, up, up and away.

“What stage effects!” marveled the cheering throng. “What magic! What realism! What a finish!”

What — no encore?

1985

Hitch Your Spaceship to a Star

The astrologers of figulus knew the future, but they had yet to learn about naked truth.

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

Breakfast on the hopeful consisted of ocher juice, parabacon, toastettes, mock omelet, papjacks, sausage, (don’t ask) and Hester’s coffee. It was called Hester’s coffee because Hester made it and Hester drank it; the others had to draw the line somewhere.

This morning, all hands had gathered for the prelanding meal. At the head of the round table sat Captain Standforth himself, under the glassy eyes of nearly two score defunct birds mounted on the walls, the stuffing of which was his only true vocation. Descended from those Standforths, the ones who had so routinely over the past seven generations covered themselves with glory in the service of the Galactic Patrol, the captain had been compelled by both his family and destiny to enlist when his turn came, just as the patrol had been compelled by family and history to take him, inadvertently and unhappily proving that sometimes neither nature nor nurture may create character. Taxidermy? A Standforth? Regrettably, yes.

Gathered around, scoffing down the fabrifood, were the rest of the expendable captain’s expendable crew, plus his lone expendable passenger, Councilman Morton Luthguster, as plump and pompous as a pouter pigeon crossed with a blimp. The crew consisted of second-in-command Lieutenant Billy Shelby, young and idealistic but not to awfully bright; Astrogator Pam Stokes, very bright and very beautiful but a stranger to passion; Ensign Kybee Benson, whose encyclopedic knowledge of human societies did not keep him from being personally antisocial; and stockily blunt Chief Engineer Hester (of the coffee) Hanshaw, proud mistress of the engine room.

The captain wiped his lips on a toastette, then ate it. “Well,” he said to his murky band, “we’ll be landing soon.” His mild eyes gleamed with visions of this unknown planet and the unimaginable new birds he would soon disembowel.

Councilman Luthguster, swirling a forkful of papjack in pseudoleo, said, “What is this place we’re coming to, Ensign Benson? What are its characteristics?”

“No one knows for sure about this one, Councilman,” the ensign told him. “The old records simply say the colonies were a group of like-minded people whose goal was a simple life free of surprises.”

“Well, we’ll be a surprise,” the councilman said.

Jim Downey and Hank Carpenter stood gazing up into the clear green sky, where the sun — good old Ptolemy, nicknamed sun after the good old Sol from which their forebears had so long ago departed — poised midway up its morning arc. “They’re late,” Jim said.

“They’ll get here,” Hank assured him.

Councilman Luthguster said, “What’s the name of the place, Ensign Benson? I’ve noticed that the name the colonists give their settlements frequently offers a clue to their social structure.”

“It’s called Figulus,” Ensign Benson said.

“Figulus?”

Blank looks around the table. Billy Shelby said, “Wasn’t he one of the founders of ancient Rome? Figulus and Venus.”

“No, Billy,” said Ensign Benson.

Jim frowned skyward. “You don’t suppose they got the coordinates wrong? Landed someplace else on Figgy?” Behind them, on the knoll where they stood, the pleasant town dreamily awaited.

“They’re dawdling over their breakfast, like as not,” Hank replied. “In fact, there they come yonder.”

“Publius Nigidius Figulus,” Ensign Benson said. “He was the most learned Roman of his age, a writer and a statesman, died circa forty-five B.C.”

Billy looked sad. “Died at the circus? That’s awful.”

“Terrible,” the ensign agreed. “Figulus was most noted for his books on religion and—”

“We’re,” Pam Stokes said, her ancestral slide rule moving like a live thing in her slender-fingered hands, a subtle alteration simultaneously taking place in the faint aura of engine hum all about them, “here.”

Everyone jumped up to look out the view ports at Figulus, third of ten planets in orbit around the Sollike star called Ptolemy. Only Ensign Benson remained at the table, draining his vial of ocher juice. “And astrology,” he finished.

“People of Figulus—”

“Hi, Senator,” Jim said.

Councilman Luthguster frowned across the top of his P.A.-system microphone at the two locals at the foot of the extruded stairs. He was on the platform at the top. Both were middle-aged, mild-mannered, Jim with a gray cardigan and a pipe, Hank with eyeglasses and a tweed jacket. All four elbows sported leather patches. “I am a councilman,” he informed them.

“Ha!” said Hank. “That’s a five-buck you owe me, Jim.”

Jim scratched his head. “I would have sworn a plenipotentiary from Earth would be at least a senator.”

Councilman Luthguster stared. “I haven’t told you that yet,” he told the world through the P.A. system.

Just inside the ship where the others waited, Ensign Benson frowned and said, “What’s going on out there?” He edged closer to the open hatch, where he could hear both sides of the conversation.

“Well, in any event,” Hank was saying, while his pal Jim sadly produced a five-buck from his wallet and handed it over, “the councilman is not the one we have to talk to here. No, we want the man in charge.”

“You mean the captain?”

Hank said, “No, no, he’s just some sort of hobbyist along for the ride. We want the — what will you call him? Social scientist. Anthropologist.”

“Sociologist,” Jim suggested. “Ethnologist.”

Ensign Benson stepped out onto the light. “Social engineer,” he said.

“How do you do, sir,” Hank said, smiling behind his glasses, coming up the ladder with hand outstretched. “I’m Hank Carpenter, mayor of Centerville.”

Back on the ground, Jim made a dang-it gesture with his pipe. “I knew he’d be a Scorpio! Dang it, that’s what we should have bet on.”

Ensign Benson accepted Hanks firm but friendly handshake. “Centerville?”

“Well, sir,” Hank said, “it happens that this is the center of the universe. May not look like much, but that’s what it is and why our forebears came here. But let’s quit jawing. You and the councilman and the four inside the ship, come on to town and meet the folks.”

Ensign Benson held tight to the stair rail. “Four inside?”

“Well, there’s your captain,” Hank said. “Tall, skinny, distracted fella. A Pisces. And his number two, a nice young boy but not too quick upstairs — probably a Moon Child. Moony, anyway.”

“Show-off,” Jim said. He was still smarting over his fiver.

Hank went on, pretending not to notice. “Then there’s your navigator—”

“Astrogator.”

“Same thing, just gussied up. A highly motivated young person, probably female.”

“Not yet,” Ensign Benson muttered.

“But definitely Virgo.”

“That I’ll go along with.”

“Now, your engineer,” Hank went on, “a solid Taurus, but we just can’t decide if it’s a man or a woman.

“Nobody can,” Ensign Benson said.

“I heard that,” Hester said, coming out onto the platform to shake a wrench at the ensign. “I’m a woman, and don’t you forget it.”

“Why not?”

“Come on, folks,” Hank said, gesturing toward town. “You’ve had a long, hard journey; come along and relax.”

The captain, the lieutenant and the astrogator joined the three other earthlings on the platform and they all looked off toward town. A pretty little place with peaked roofs, a traditional white steeple and a sports ground alive with running, yelling children, it nestled in a setting of low hills where neat farms mingled with elm groves, the whole area very much like bits of Devon and Kent — the parts beyond commuting distance from London. “What a nice place,” Pam said, her slide rule for one instant forgotten.

“You’ll learn to love it,” Hank assured them, “in time.”

“Chick, chick, Nero,” Jim said as Hank explained to the Earthers, “Our energy sources are really very slender. No oil, no coal. Hydropower and solar power give us enough electricity to run our homes and businesses, but there was no way we could keep powered transportation. Fortunately, there were several indigenous animals capable of domestication, including the like of old Nero here.”

Nero, a gray-and-white creature that might very well pass for a horsy steed in the dusk with the light behind it was apparently quite strong; without effort it pulled this ten-seater surrey and its eight passengers along the gently up-and-down crushed-stone road toward the town. A farmer in a nearby field, plowing behind another Nero, waved; Hank and Jim and Billy and Hester waved back.

“Have any birds here?” the captain asked.

“Oh, all sorts.”

Ensign Benson had been deeply frowning, intensely brooding, acutely staring into the middle distance, but now all at once he nodded and said, “Hyperradio.”

Jim frowned around his pipe. “Say what?”

“You must be in hyperradio contact with one of the colonies we already visited.”

“Not us,” Jim said. “Never heard of hyperradio.”

“Then someone else has been here from off planet. Recently.”

“No, sir.” Jim shook his head and Nero’s reins.

Hank said, “You’re our first visitors in five hundred years. You’ll be starting the guestbook.”

Ensign Benson gave him the old gimlet eye. “You knew we were coming. You knew how many of us and where we were from and our mission. Somebody had to tell you all that.”

“Easy,” Hank said, grinning. “The stars told us.”

The town was small but busy, with a bustling, shop-filled main street, Nero-powered surreys and wagons everywhere, and an aura of prosperity and contentment.

“What’s that?” the captain asked as they made their way around a white-stone obelisk in its own little center-of-the-street garden.

“The peace memorial,” Hank said. “We’ve never had anybody to have a war with, but the town plan called for a memorial there — our ancestors’ original town back on earth had one at that spot — so about a hundred years ago, they just went ahead and put up a peace memorial.”

People waved as they went by, and a dressed-up reception committee waited out front of the grange hall. “I know you’ve all had breakfast,” Hank said, “but you could probably tuck into some real food. Come on.”

Everybody climbed out of the surrey. Billy Shelby, a happy and innocent smile on his face, said to Ensign Benson, “Golly, Kybee, isn’t this place nice?”

“I’m not so sure,” the ensign muttered, glowering at all those happy people. “Keep your eyes open, Billy. There’s something wrong here.”

It was a gala breakfast, laid on just for the visitors and with nearly 50 of the most prominent local citizens in attendance. The Terrans were introduced to, among many others, the principals of both high schools, three ministers, one priest, four doctors, both judges, the police chief, the editors of both newspapers… Oh, the list went on and on. Then they all sat at long trencher tables under crepe-paper decorations of umber and sienna — Earth colors — and happy chitchat filled the hall as the food came out.

Real eggs. Real homemade bread with real butter. Real bacon. “Hester,” Councilman Luthguster said, “this is what coffee taste like.”

“Not my coffee,” said Hester.

“I know,” said the councilman.

“How do you like the breakfast?” Hank asked.

“Fine,” said Ensign Benson, though, in fact, it was all as ashes in his mouth. Looking up, he noticed the designs painted high on the walls, just under the ceiling, 12 on each side, six along each end. Beginning at the front left, three designs incorporated rams’ heads, three involved bulls, then… “The zodiac,” Ensign Benson said.

“You know it, then.” Hank Carpenter seemed pleased.

“Astronomy. Publius Nigidius Figulus wrote on astrology.”

“One of the great early scholars in the science.”

Ensign Benson raised such a skeptical brow: “Science?”

Hank offered such an indolent chuckle: “You’re from Earth, of course,” he said, “where it doesn’t operate as efficiently.”

“Oh, really?”

“If you were to take an ordinary chemistry-lab experiment,” Hank suggested, “and try it under water, the results wouldn’t please you. Would that disprove the science or reflect the surroundings?”

“So what makes this place better surroundings than Earth?”

“To begin with,” Hank said, “our being at the center of the universe means there’s no distortion. Then, our year is precisely three hundred sixty days long, so we don’t have to keep eternally adjusting things. And Ptolemy’s system includes ten planets, and our planet has two moons and our sun; twelve. One heavenly body per house.”

“Oh, but you can’t seriously—”

“As the bumblebee said to the physicist,” Hank said, “All I know is, it works.”

The extremely beautiful blond girl to Billy’s left said, “Hi, I’m Linda. What’s your sign?”

“Billy.”

“Billy? No, that’s your name. When were you born?”

“About three-thirty in the morning,” Billy said. “Mom said everybody’s born at three-thirty in the morning. Can that be right?”

Linda thought about that. She had beautiful violet eyes. “You were born in July,” she decided and turned to talk to the person on her other side.

Ensign Benson ate toast, eggs, bacon, waffles; but he did not, in fact, taste a thing. He was thinking too hard. “If astrology works,” he said, “it rules out free will.”

“Not at all,” said Hank. The heavens don’t say certainly thus and so will happen, or everybody born at the same time in the same general area would be identical. Astrology deals in probabilities. For instance, the astral alignment so strongly suggested Earth would make fresh contact with its Lost Colonies now that we pretty well discounted any other possibility, but as to the exact make-up of the crew, there were some details we couldn’t be sure of.”

“Still,” Ensign Benson said, “you’re telling me you people can read the future.”

“The probabilities,” Hank corrected.

“Of course,” Pam Stokes said, an actual real piece of bacon in one hand and her ever-present slide rule in the other, “there are many ways to define the center of the universe.” She bit off a piece of crunchy bacon.

“Oh, sure,” Jim Downey agreed. “And they all work out to be right here.”

Pam frowned, “This doesn’t taste like bacon.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, it’s— Actually, it’s better.” Putting the slide rule down, she picked up a fork and had at the scrambled eggs.

Pointing, Jim said, “What is that little stick, anyway?”

“This slide rule? It’s a sort of calculator, used before the computer came in.”

“Like the abacus?” Jim picked it up, pushed the inner pieces back and forth, watched the little lines and numbers join and separate.

“I guess so,” Pam said, reaching for the toast, pausing in amazement when the toast flexed. “It was my mother’s,” she explained, “and my mother’s mother’s, and my mother’s mother’s mother’s and my mo—”

“Very interesting,” Jim said and put it down.

Ensign Benson, lost in thought, had stopped eating. “If you’re done,” Hank said, “We’ll show you to your house.”

The ensign looked at him. “My house?”

“You and your friends. We thought you’d probably all want to live together at first until you get to know the town, make friends, find employment—”

“Wait, wait a minute.” Ensign Benson was almost afraid to phrase the question. “How long do you expect us to stay?”

“I’m sorry,” Hank said, “You haven’t read your chart, of course. You’ll be here forever.”

Give Councilman Luthguster a crowd, he’ll make you a speech. “Earth can do much better for the people of Figulus.” He declared to the local citizens assembled at his table. “Technology, trade agreements. A chicken in every pot; a, a, a, a horse in every stable. Peace, prosperity—”

“We’ve got all that,” said a citizen.

“And a stable buck,” said another.

Councilman Luthguster paused in mid-flight. “Buck? A stable buck?” Visions of deer, all with symmetrical antlers, leaped into his head.

“That’s our unit of currency,” a citizen explained. “We have the quarter-buck, half-buck, buck, five-buck, sawbuck, all the way up to the C-buck and the grand-buck.”

“And it’s stable,” another said. “Been a long time since there was a drop in the buck.”

“It’s entered the language idiomatically,” said a citizen who happened to be a high school principal. “Pass the buck, for instance, meaning to pay a debt.”

“Buck the tide,” offered another.

“That’s to throw good money after bad.”

“Buck and wing.”

“To buy your way out of a difficult situation.”

The councilman stared, popeyed. “But that’s all wrong!”

A friendly citizen patted his hand. “You’ll learn them,” she assured him. “Won’t take long a strong-willed Leo like you.”

“Oh, no.” The councilman was firm on that. “How happy I am I’ll never have to learn such gibberish.’

His audience just smiled.

“If your stars tell you we’re staying here,” Ensign Benson said, “they’re crazy.”

“Look, friend,” Hank said. “What if the billions and billions of human beings scattered across the Galaxies were to learn that right here, smack in the middle of it all, was a place where they could find out almost everything about the future? What would happen?”

“You could do a great mail order business.”

“They would come here,” Hank said. “In their billions. Our town would be destroyed; our way of life would simply come to an end.”

Reluctantly, Ensign Benson nodded. “It could get difficult.”

“And that’s why the stars say you’ll remain here and never expose us to the rest of the human race.”

“Sorry,” the ensign said. “I understand your feelings, but we have our own job to do. We just can’t stay.”

“But you will,” Hank said apologetically but firmly. “You see, there’s an armed guard at your ship right now, and there will be for the rest of your lives.”

Odd how easily the next month flowed by. Billy Shelby got a paper route and a job delivering for the supermarket. Pam became a substitute math teacher at one of the high schools, where the male students could never figure out what she was talking about but flocked to her class anyway. Captain Standforth, roaming the country side with his stun gun, brought back many strange and — to him — interesting new birds to stuff. Councilman Luthguster took to hanging around down at city hall, and Hester Hanshaw became a sort of unofficial apprentice at the neighborhood smithy.

Socially, the local belief that ‘those who sign together combine together’ made it easy to met folks of similar interests. Herds of hefty Taurians took Hester away for camping trips, Billy joined a charitable organization called Caring Cancers, a Piscean gardening-and-water-polo club enrolled Captain Standforth, Pam linked up with the Friends of the Peace Memorial (an organization devoted to maintaining the patch of flowers and lawn around said memorial) and Councilman Luthguster joined the local branch of Lions Club Intergalactical.

Only Ensign Kybee Benson failed to make the slightest adjustment. Only he sat brooding on the porch of their nice white-clapboard house with the green shutters. Only he resisted the overtures of his sign’s organization (the Scorpio Swinging Singles Club). Only he failed to learn the local idioms, take an interest in the issues raised by the morning and evening newspapers (which gave the following day’s weather, with perfect accuracy), involve himself in the community. Only he refused to accept the reality of the local saying that meant the end of negotiation, parley, haggling. The buck stops here.

“Buck up, Kybee,” Billy said, coming up the stoop.

“What?” Ensign Benson, in his rocking chair on the porch, glared red-eyed at the returning delivery boy. “What is that supposed to mean in this miserable place?”

“Gee, Kybee,” Billy said, backing away a little, “the same as it does back on Earth. It means ‘Be cheerful; look at the sunny side’ ”.

“What sunny side? We’re trapped here, imprisoned in this small town for the rest of our—”

“Garr-rraaaghhh!” Ensign Benson announced, leaped to his feet and chased Billy three times around the block before his wind gave out.

Somehow, the second month was less fun. The area round about Centerville had shown to Captain Standforth its full repertory of birds; the board of aldermen would let Councilman Luthguster neither deliver a speech to them nor (as a noncitizen) run for office against them; the high school boys, having grown used to Pam’s useless beauty and having realized none of them would ever either claim her or understand her, now flocked away from her classes; at the supermarket, Billy was passed over for promotion to assistant produce manager; and a Nero kicked Hester in the rump down at the smithy, causing her to limp.

On the social side, things weren’t much better. Hester found her biking Taurians too bossy and quit. Caring Cancers met every week in a different members home to discuss, over milk and gingersnaps, possible recipients for its good works but so far hadn’t found any, which made Billy feel silly. The captain’s gardening-and-water-polo club kept postponing its meetings, necessitating constant rounds of messages and plan reshufflings. No two Friends of the Peace Memorial could agree on a flower arrangement. And Councilman Luthguster, after a hard-fought campaign in which he had taken an extremely active part, had been blackballed at the Lions Club.

More and more, the former space rovers hung around the house, vaguely fretful. The bilious green sky, the nasty sun (color of ochre juice), the two mingy little marble moons in the eccentric orbits all pressed down on the landscape, on the town, on their own little gabled house, with its squeaking floors and doors that stuck. The local citizens had brought from the Hopeful all their personal possessions — clothes, tools, video camera and monitor, the captain’s birds, Pam’s sky charts Billy’s collection of The Adventures of Space Cadet Hooper and His Pal Fatso and Chang, Ensign Benson’s folders of Betelgeusean erotica, the bound cassettes of Councilman Luthguster’s speeches to the Galactic Council (with the boos edited out), even Hester’s coffee mug — but all these things simply reminded them of their former lives, made their present state less rather than more bearable.

Centerville was a small town in no nation. Distractions were few and local. No movies or videos, only the Morning Bugle and the Afternoon Independent for reading matter, very little variety in clothing or food (all good, all stolid) and no real use for any of their skills or talents. In 500 years, the population had grown from the original 63 to just over 11,000, but 11,000 aren’t very many when that’s all there are.

Even the news that both high school bands would march in next month’s Landing Day parade didn’t lift their spirits a hell of a lot. That’s how bad things were.

Ensign Benson brooded alone in his rocking chair on the front porch, watching the world (hah!) go by, when a bit of the world in the person of mayor Hank Carpenter came up onto the stoop to say, “Hey, Kybee.”

The ensign gave him a look from under lowered brows. Hank cleared his throat, a bit uncomfortable. “We’re sending an ambulance,” he said.

“You’re what?”

“Sorry,” Hank said, looking truly sorry, “but we’ll be taking the captain over to the hospital for a while.”

“What for?”

“Well, uh, he’s about to commit suicide.”

Ensign Benson stared. He knew these people now; they didn’t lie and weren’t wrong. But the captain? He said, “I thought I’d be the first to snap.”

“Oh, no,” Hank assured him. “In fact, you’ll, uh, be the last.”

“That’s it,” Ensign Benson said. Rising, he pointed stern finger at Hank. “Keep your ambulance. We’ll take care of our own.”

“Well, if you’re sure you—”

But the ensign had gone into the house and slammed the door.

He found the captain upstairs in his room, fooling with a rope. “Come downstairs,” he said. “Now.”

In the kitchen Billy and Hester were making coffee — separately, in different pots. The ensign and the captain entered and the ensign said, “Watch him. If he starts drinking anything funny, stop him.”

Billy said, “You mean, like Hester’s coffee?” But the ensign was gone.

Soon he was back, with Pam and the councilman. “It’s time,” he told them all, “to quit fooling around and get out of here.”

“But, Kybee,” Billy said, “we can’t. These people know the future, and they say we’ll never leave.”

“Probabilities,” The ensign corrected him. “The future is not fixed, remember? There’s still free will. The probabilities are caused by our narrowing free will. Things will probably happen in this way or that way because we are who we are, not because the stars force us into anything.”

Hester said, “I don’t see how that helps.”

“We have to break out of the probabilities. Somehow or other — I don’t see it clearly yet, but somehow or other — if we do what we wouldn’t do, we’ll get out of here.

Pam said, “But what wouldn’t we do?”

The ensign gave her a jaundiced look. “I know what you wouldn’t do,” he said. “But I would do it, so that’s that. No, we need something that’s so far from the probabilities that… that…”

The others watched him. Ensign Benson seemed to be reaching down far inside himself, willing a solution where there was none. “Take it easy, Kybee,” Billy said.

Hester said, “Do you want some coffee? Billy’s coffee.”

Slowly, the ensign exhaled; it had been some time since he’d breathed. “I know what were going to do,” he said.

“No!” said the captain. “I won’t!”

“That’s the point,” Ensign Benson said.

Hester said, “There’s no way you’re going to get me to do a thing like that.”

Pam said, “Kybee, this is just a scheme of yours; I can tell.”

“Gosh, Kybee,” said Billy.

“My dignity,” said the councilman.

“Precisely!” Ensign Benson said. “Your dignity is what keeps the probabilities all lined up in a neat and civilized and predictable row. It’s the only way were ever going to get back onto the Hopeful. Think about it.”

They thought about it. They hated it. But that, of course, was the point.

“Hidy, Kybee. The captain feeling better?”

“Oh, we’ll all adapt, Hank.”

“What’s that you’re watching?”

“Just a little video I made of the captain shooting birds. Never saw one of these machines?”

“No, sir, can’t say I have.”

“They’re easy to operate. Come here, I’ll show you.”

One nice thing about knowing the future, you never have to worry about a rain date for your parade. The sun shone bright, the bands and the marchers were respendent, and this year, thanks to the Earthpeople, there would be a permanent record of the whole affair! Hank Carpenter, armed with the video camera, stood atop a wagon right down by the Peace Memorial, ready to tape the whole show.

And a real nice show it was. The South Side High School band led off, in uniforms of scarlet and white, and the North Side High School band, in blue and gold, brought up the rear. In between were contingents of the 4-H, the Grange, the police department, bowling leagues, volunteer firemen, a giggle of beauty-contest winners in a bedecked surrey; oh, all sorts of interesting things.

Including the crew of the Hopeful. Naked.

“Keep taping!” Ensign Benson yelled at Hank Carpenter. “Tape! Tape!” And he did, and they all looked at the tape later, and it was still impossible to believe.

What an array of uncomfortable-looking people. What a variety of flesh was here on display. What an embarrassment all the way around.

Captain Standforth and Hester appeared first, side by side but determinably separate. The captain sort of vaguely squinted and blinked, pretending to do difficult math problems in his head, while Hester marched along like an angry rhinoceros, daring anyone to tell her she was naked. The captain in the buff looked more mineral than animal: an angular, gawky armature, a scarecrow that wouldn’t scare a wren, an espalier framework for no known tree. Hester, on the other hand, merely became more Hester: chunky, blocky, squared-off.

A rosy astrogator came next: Pam Stokes blushing from nipple to eyebrow, accompanied by an ashen legislator. Councilman Luthguster, shaped very much like the balloons being carried by some of the younger spectators, appeared to have been drained by a vampire before leaving the house that morning. Upon this pallid sausage casing, the hobnails of embarrassed perspiration stood out in bold relief. Would he faint, or would he make it to Main Street? He suffered from the loss of his pomposity much more severely than the simple loss of his clothes.

Pam suffered from the loss of clothes. She was beautiful, but she didn’t want to be beautiful; she was graceful, but she didn’t want to be graceful; she was a treat, but the last thing on Earth — or Figulus — that Pam Stokes wanted to be was a treat. Her expression was like that sometimes seen in dentist’s offices.

Finally there came Billy and the ensign, and here the mark of the ensign’s determination really showed itself. Although it would certainly be embarrassing for him or for Billy to appear naked in public, it wouldn’t, in truth, be quite the horror it clearly was for the others, so for himself and Billy the ensign had escalated the attack.

They were dancing.

Arm in arm, the ensign leading, Billy following pretty well, they turned and turned in great loops, waltzing to John Philip Sousa’s The Thunderer — not impossible but not easy.

Nobody stopped them; nobody knew what to do but stand and gape. For two blocks past the astounded populace, down Broadway from Elm past Church to Main — that being the reach of the video camera — the captain paced, the chief engineer plodded, the councilman trudged, the astrogator inadvertently and unwillingly promenaded and the lieutenant and the ensign waltzed. At Main, surrounded by a populace still immobilized by disbelief, they broke and ran for it, around behind the crowd, through back yards and alleys and away. With many a hoarse cry and broken gasp, this unlikely herd thundered all the way home, up the stoop, across the porch, into the house and slammed the door.

Knock, knock.

“Who’s there?”

“Hank Carpenter, Miss Hanshaw. You folks all right in there?”

“Go away.”

“It’s been five days; you can’t just—”

Hank waited. He went over and sat on the porch railing and looked out at the sunny day. The rubbernecks who had filled this street at first had given up by now, and everything was back to normal. But what had it all been about, anyway?

This was one of those rare moments when the charts didn’t help. If it were simple madness, of course, that would explain a lot, since insanity can play merry hob with your probabilities, but somehow Hank didn’t believe lunacy was the answer.

The front door opened and Ensign Benson came out, carrying a thin folder. He shut the door behind himself, gave Hank a quick, nervous smile, then frowned out at the street.

“They’ve all gone,” Hank assured him.

“I didn’t know it would be quite that I bad,” the ensign said. “It does something to your nervous system to be naked in front of that many people.” He had a twitchy look to him and didn’t quite meet Hank’s eye.

“What we can’t figure out is why you did it.”

“So you could let us go, of course.”

Hank smiled in confusion. “You mean, we’d take pity on you because you lost your minds?”

“We didn’t lose our minds, just our clothes. You’ve got it all on tape, right?”

“I don’t know why you’d want such a thing,” Hank said, “but yes, we do.”

“Look at this,” Ensign Benson said, extending the folder.

Hank took it, opened, found himself reading a report to the Galactic Council about the lost colony known as Figulus. “Says here, the settlement was abandoned. Colonists long dead. Some unanticipated poison in the atmosphere.”

“Not suited for human life,” the ensign said. “As soon as we’re aboard ship, that’s the report we’ll send.”

“Why?”

“You’re keeping us here because you’re afraid well spread the news about you and a lot of people will show up to learn all about the future.”

Hank nodded. “Destroying our future in the process.”

“If anybody did arrive, the ensign said, “you’d blame us. You’d probably be mad enough to show that tape.”

“I’m beginning to see the light,” Hank said. “You were looking for a way to bust loose from the probabilities.”

“That’s right. What could we do that we wouldn’t do?”

“Walk down Broadway at high noon, naked, with a brass band.”

“As long as you have that tape,” Ensign Benson said, “we’ll do anything — anything — to keep the rest of the human race away from here.” Wanly he smiled. “And if this doesn’t work,” he said, “if you still won’t let us go, we’ll just have to get more improbable.”

“How?” Hank asked, a bit wide-eyed.

“I don’t know yet,” the ensign told him. “I hope I never know. How about you?”

Out, out, out across the illimitable void soared the Hopeful. Its crew, garbed in every piece of clothing they owned and not looking one another in the eye, had left Figulus without even having their charts done. They knew nothing of the future.

Just as well.

1989

Here’s Looking at You

Imitation is not always a form of flattery.

From the beginning of Time, Man has been on the move, ever outward. First he spread over his own planet, then across the Solar System, then outward to the Galaxies, all of them dotted, speckled, measled with the colonies of Man.

Then, one day in the year eleven thousand four hundred and six (11,406), an incredible discovery was made in the Master Imperial Computer back on Earth. Nearly 500 years before, a clerical error had erased from the computer’s memory more than 1000 colonies, all in Sector F.U.B.A.R.3. For half a millennium, those colonies, young and struggling when last heard from, had had no contact with the rest of Humanity.

The Galactic Patrol Interstellar Ship Hopeful, Captain Gregory Standforth commanding, was at once dispatched to re-establish contact with the Thousand Lost Colonies and return them to the bosom of Mankind.

When the sky filled with the roar of the descending ship, they all slithered into their holes to wait.

“You know,” Captain Standforth said, unclenching his fingers from the controls as the ship shuddered its last and sagged onto the ground, “I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this landing business.”

Groans answered him. Chipper young Lieutenant Billy Shelby, the person who normally dealt with landings — Captain Standforth was apt to take the term planetfall literally — managed a cheerful smile and even injected a little perkiness into his voice as he said, “Much better, sir. Why, this was quite smooth!”

Chief Engineer Hester Hanshaw, blunt in body, mind and mouth, gave Billy a look. “Not as smooth as you, you little toady.”

Billy’s handsome if not brilliant face clouded. He said, “What’s a toady?”

Astrogator Pam Stokes, who had been lost in study of her ancestral slide rule, wondering if it had been damaged in the landing, looked up and said, “Thursday, I think. Back on Earth, that is.”

In the baffled silence this created, Captain Standforth mused, “It’s that tricky business of not turning the engines off until you actually touch down; that’s the part I have the trouble with.”

“If we’ve landed on the damn planet,” Ensign Kybee Benson said, struggling out of the pod that had absorbed the brunt — though not all — of the impact, “let’s take a look at it.” A social engineer, an expert in comparative societies, Ensign Benson was responsible for studying each lost colony when it was found and describing its 500 years of unsung history. Being the only one aboard the Hopeful likelier to be interested in the planet than in the landing, he was the first to cross the command deck to the view-screens, switch them on and look out at a rolling and nearly treeless savanna that looked much like the Rift Valley in Kenya in August, before the rains. Each screen showed the landscape from a different direction, all the views very similar, each with low tan hills far in the background. “Hmmmm,” said Ensign Benson.

The five other travelers in the Hopeful crowded around: Captain Standforth, tall and craggy; Pam, beautiful, brainy and blind to passion; Hester, the human fireplug; Billy, the idealist; and Councilman Morton Luthguster, portly as a plum pudding, representative of the Galactic Council, who harrumphed and said, “Fine farmland, I should think.”

“Oh, should you?” Ensign Benson snarled. He despised his shipmates, each and every. They were here because they were misfits, home base delighted to be rid of them on this endless journey; but why was he here? Furious by nature, he said savagely, “We aren’t here for real estate, Councilman. Where’s the colony? Pam? You steered us here.”

“This is definitely the nexus,” Pam told him, the slide rule flashing in her slender fingers. “We are on the planet Matrix, fourth from the star Mohonk, gravity and air compatible with Earth—”

“It’s a big planet,” commented Ensign Benson.

“One point one nine three times the size of Earth,” Pam agreed. “Earth density to one point—”

“It’s a small colony,” the ensign interrupted.

“Oh, it’s here,” Pam assured him, getting the idea. “This is the place. The coefficients are—”

Billy, peering at one of the view-screens, said, “I see something out there. Little boxes or something.”

Everyone peered at the same screen. Thirty yards away on the tundra were low, slender structures of some kind.

“Then let’s take a look,” Ensign Benson said.

They watched the new creatures emerge from the giant silver ship. One, two, three, four, five, six. They watched, and absorbed, and studied.

Then, for the moment, they slid deeper into their holes, drawing the earth closed above them.

The slender structures were gravestones, made of metal. “Oh, dear,” said Pam.

Ensign Benson looked around at the bare land. A slight breeze blew. “There were forty colonists,” he said. “There are thirty-seven graves.”

Captain Standforth, who had been scanning the sky — bird taxidermy was his one passion — said, “What’s that? You mean the colony never survived at all?”

“Look at the dates,” Ensign Benson told him, gesturing at the letters and numbers etched into the metal. “Not one person was born here, and none of the original colonists lasted more than four years after arrival.”

Hester said, “But they didn’t all die at once, so it wasn’t poisoned water or an attack from hostile creatures.”

Billy said, “Forty colonists and only thirty-seven graves? How come, do you suppose?”

“Well,” Ensign Benson said, being uncharacteristically patient with Billy, his natural animosity softened by the presence of all those headstones, “I suppose there wasn’t anybody around to bury the last one, and the other two could have died away from the colony. After five hundred years, you know, Billy, they’d all be gone by now, anyway.”

“I guess so,” Billy said, nodding but glancing surreptitiously toward the horizon.

Councilman Luthguster pointed at something beyond the cemetery, farther from the ship. “Is that some sort of ruin?”

It was. They approached it and found that it was at the crest of a low fold in the land, with more ruins on the slope down from them. Crumbled remnants of poured quasi-parquet flooring, stubby bits of pseudostone wall, the entire area scattered with artifacts of domesticity: pots, coat hangers, plastic picture frames. During 500 years of neglect, accumulated rust, wind and dirt had gnawed at the husk of the fledgling colony, working tirelessly to make it unexist, coming closer to that goal with every passing year.

At the bottom of the fold in the terrain, among coatless buttons and doorless handles, the crew found a sturdy metal footlocker half-buried in the earth; buried deeper on one side, indicating the direction of the prevailing wind. The locker’s catches were closed, but it wasn’t padlocked. Inside were sheets of paper that had all but rotted away, photos faded to a nearly uniform beige and what looked like a video tape, but not of a sort Ensign Benson had ever seen. Picking it up, removing the cassette from its metal box, he showed it to Hester, saying, “Any idea what this is?”

“If that’s a tape,” Hester commented, “it’s goddam old.”

“Hester,” the ensign said, “if it’s anything in this forsaken place, it’s goddam old.”

“Well, that’s true,” Hester admitted. She took the cassette from the ensign’s hands and studied it. “Tape seems all right,” she said, “but we don’t have anything to play this on.”

“Then it doesn’t matter if it’s all right or not,” the ensign pointed out.

“Well, I’m wondering,” she said, turning the cassette in her hands, “if I could adapt it. If you read this tape the same way our machine does, with a laser, with the same kind of laser, maybe I could rewind it or something, fix the machine to take it.” She turned. “Captain?”

Captain Standforth guiltily looked down from the skies. “Yes, Hester?”

“Want me to see if I can play this tape?”

“Excellent idea,” the captain told her.

Down in the holes, they wove, they spun, they altered, they waited.

For two days, while the rest of the crew roamed and searched the surrounding area, collecting basketfuls of detritus and trash, examining remnants and ruins, learning nothing, Hester struggled with the ancient tape.

“It’s impossible,” she would announce at every meal, smudges of machine oil on cheeks and knuckles, the banked fires of frustration in her eyes. Sometimes it was impossible because the tape was not scanned in the way the machine knew how to scan; sometimes it was because the speed of the tape was unknown and d unknowable; sometimes it was because of incompatibilities at the magnetic or the electronic or simply the physical level. And always, having announced the impossibility, Hester would grumble and sigh and shake her head and wade back in to try some more.

Everyone else rooted for her, of course, partly wanting Hester to succeed simply because she was their shipmate and they wanted their shipmate to succeed, but also because they wanted to know what had happened to the Matrix colony and assumed the tape would tell them. That is, everybody but Ensign Benson assumed that. As the struggle to read the tape grew more and more prolonged, he came to believe it would turn out — if they ever did crack it — to be no damn use at all. Instead of the Rosetta tape, instead of the answer to the mystery of the colony’s failure, it would prove to be, in Ensign Benson’s private, unstated opinion, nothing more than some silly piece of entertainment, songs and dances perhaps, some piece of forgettable 500-year-old fluff brought along by the colonists to distract themselves during the long nights of their settlement’s youth. In a brand-new colony, after all, there is no downtown.

On the third day, Hester didn’t appear for lunch, she was so engrossed in the complexities of her impossible task. It was midafternoon when she emerged from the ship, looking as disgruntled as ever but with some sort of firm line of satisfaction in her jaw. She marched out across the dusty tan landscape toward Ensign Benson, who had been studying the grave markers yet again, hoping to find some inscription he hadn’t noticed before, some clue that had eluded him up till then. Reaching him, she stopped and put her stubby hands on her broad hips. “It’s there if you want it,” she announced.

He straightened, one hand to his aching back. “Hester? The tape?”

“That’s what I’ve been working on, isn’t it?”

“You found a way to play it!”

“I invented a way to play it,” Hester corrected, “and it wasn’t easy.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Then, unable to keep his doubts to himself any longer, he said, “What’s on it? A sports roundup? A wet-T-shirt contest?”

“Some gloomy-looking fellow sitting g at a table,” she told him. “That’s all I know. I’m sick of that damn thing, Kybee. You want to watch it, watch it.”

“I want to watch it,” he agreed.

“It’s in there, in my workroom next to the engine room,” she told him. “Just push the green button. It’s not the cleanest picture you’ve ever seen, but you can make it out.”

Doubtful, he said, “You don’t want to operate it yourself?”

“I don’t want to be anywhere near it,” Hester told him. “Not for a while. Go ahead, take a look.”

They were nearly ready. They slithered and groped toward the surface, moving unfamiliar parts, tiny clods of dirt dropping down past their shuuz. Shooz. Shoez. Shoes.

A terrible picture, with green horizontal lines of interference and a pink glow around every object. A raspy, furry buzz obscured the sound track. Ensign Benson leaned forward, squinted and listened.

“I am Hafter Kass,” said the frowning, bulky, steep-shouldered, despairing man seated at the black plastic table, elbows and forearms on the table before him, fingers nervously twining. Behind him was a blank wall with a closed door in it. “I am the real Hafter Kass,” the man said, leaning forward, staring intensely at the camera. Then rage broke through. “Do you hear me? The real Hafter Kass! Goddam it, the real one!”

“I believe you,” Ensign Benson murmured. “Honest, I do.”

As though reassured, Hafter Kass subsided into his chair. He was about 40, wearing a rough plaid old-fashioned tunic. He lifted a shaking hand to rub his mouth, then said, “Whoever you are, if anybody ever sees this, get off Matrix. Get off now! Before—”

He stopped and looked quickly over his shoulder, then back at the camera. “Have to get hold of myself,” he said.

“Good idea,” agreed Ensign Benson.

“We arrived three years ago,” Kass went on, “and almost immediately lost contact with the mother ship. That’s the worst of it, knowing there won’t be any help, ever. Not ever. Stuck here, doomed here—”

Again, Kass visibly brought himself under control. “They didn’t come out right away,” he said. “The… the things. But then they— No, wait, I’m not making any sense.”

“True,” Ensign Benson said.

“About two weeks after we landed,” Kass said, voice trembling, “they appeared. Creatures that looked exactly like us. Like specific ones of us.” He gestured toward the door behind him. Out there, hundreds of Hafter Kasses. Hundreds of Magla Damerons. Hundreds of—” He ran both hands through thinning hair. “Their clothing is exactly like ours, they look exactly like us, they have some kind of low-level telepathy, so they have our memories, our gestures, our expressions. Stee Venking, our zoographer — well, amateur zoographer — anyway, he says these creatures developed this as a defense against predators. Become the predator and it can’t eat you without being a cannibal.”

Kass gestured helplessly, looking around, then back at the cameras. “At first, we didn’t realize the horror of it. But then we found out what it means. You never know if you’re talking to a human being like yourself or one of them. You’re alone. Every one of us is alone, surrounded by thousands of… whatever they are.” He shook his head. “Well, we know what they are. If you kill one, it reverts to its real shape, a kind of fat eight-foot-long worm.”

“Ugh,” said Ensign Benson.

“There will never be a child born in this colony,” Kass went on. “How could any of us, any of us human beings, go to bed with — Never knowing if— That’s a part of the creatures’ defense mechanism, too. They make the predators die out, cease to reproduce.”

A chill ran through Ensign Benson at that; a life without even the possibility of sex? Couldn’t you just go along with what you saw, if what you saw was built the way, uh…

But then he frowned, thinking it through. What you saw might be shaped any way at all, but if you knew the odds were hundreds to one that the person in bed with you was really an eight-foot-long worm, even the horniest human being would begin to lose enthusiasm. Bad news.

Hafter Kass was going on, saying, “Is it any wonder most of us chose suicide?”

“No,” Ensign Benson told him. An odd, uncomfortable feeling had crept over him, a warmth he rarely experienced. Could it be sympathy? He watched the long-gone Hafter Kass with suspiciously moist eyes.

“That’s the only way, finally, we can tell us from them,” Kass went on. “When they die, they revert to their real shape. At first, we tried shooting them — each of us shooting his own imitations, because those were the only ones anybody could be sure of — but there’s just too many of them, an entire species. They never fight back, never try to shoot us, but it doesn’t matter. Violence isn’t part of their nature, because it doesn’t matter. They’ve found the ultimate defensive weapon.”

Again, Kass rubbed a shaking hand across his mouth. “One of the worst things,” he said, “is that after one of us dies, they still go on with the imitation. Your husband, your wife… You know they’re dead, but there they are, walking around. And again. And again. Hundreds of them. Smiling at you, calling you by the pet name that only the two of you knew.”

The door behind Kass opened, and a cluster of people, a dozen or more, came in, looking concerned, saying, “There you are, Hafter,” or “Why are you hiding in here. Hafter?”

Kass didn’t even turn as the people gathered around him. His expression bleak, he faced the camera. Beneath the friendly cries of the newcomers — two of them, Ensign Benson realized with a sudden shiver, identical Hafter Kasses — beneath their voices but clear and passionate, Kass said to the camera, “Get away from here. This is hell. This is the worst you can imagine. I may even be the last human alive here, there’s no way to know. I’m surrounded by people, and I’ve been in solitary confinement for three years.”

“Oh, Hafter,” one of the others cried, happy and careless, “you’re taping! Can I tape, too? Shall I sing?”

“No,” Hafter said. Rising, he moved the table, shoving the others out of his way as though they were dummies on rollers — none objected — and darkness descended as he approached the camera. There was a click, and the recording ended.

“Oh, boy,” Ensign Benson said. “Not good.” Decisively, he got to his feet, left Hester’s workroom, hurried through the ship to the exit and went down the ramp, looking around for the rest of the crew.

The nearest was Pam, walking diagonally away toward the ruined colony. “Pam!” Ensign Benson called, and when she turned, he waved to her to stop, to wait for him. “We’ve got to get into the ship!” he cried, trotting up to her.

She frowned as he approached. “Kybee? What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just get into the ship; I’ll go after the others.” And he hurried past her toward the ruins. But when he looked back after a few half-running paces, she was still standing there, frowning at him. “For God’s sake, Pam!” he yelled. “Get going!”

“Kybee?” Pam said. “What’s wrong?” But her voice came from behind him.

When Pam saw the strange woman beyond Kybee, she couldn’t understand who it might be. A survivor from the colony, for 500 years? One of the three without graves? But that was impossible. This attractive-looking woman was young, was certainly no more—

Was herself.

Dread touched Pam. All at once, she was not an astrogator, not a scientist, not a rational, civilized person, but a primitive creature feeling a sudden surge of the most basic fear. She stared, not understanding, and the woman stared back at her with an expression of horror. “Kybee!” they cried together. “What’s happening?”

He stared from one to the other. “Which— Which—”

“Kybee, it’s me! It’s Pam!” But it was the other one who said that.

Pam hurried toward Kybee, crying, “Don’t listen to her! She’s— She’s— I don’t know what she is!”

“The ship,” Kybee muttered, dazed. “Save the ship.”

“Yes,” Pam said, reaching for his arm, her terror deepening when he pulled away. “We’ll go into the ship,” she said. “We’ll figure out—”

But he was backing away, staring from her to the impostor, his eyes terrified. “How do I— How can I— You don’t get inside the ship!” And he turned and ran.

The Billys and the Hesters and the Ensign Bensons were building sheds and lean-tos. The Councilman Luthgusters were sorting through the food supplies Kybee had pushed out of the ship the day before so that the real crew members wouldn’t starve to death. The Pams were cooking on the makeshift stoves the Hesters had constructed. Most of the Captain Standforths had quit banging on the Hopeful’s door and yelling on the monitor cameras and had wandered off across the landscape, presumably in search of birds suitable for taxidermy.

In a horrible way, it was fascinating to see how the creatures worked it. The fear and disbelief and repugnance that were the natural reaction of the real crew members were perfectly mirrored in all the imitations. Then, as time went by without any change in the situation, with no further events, no escalation of threat, as horror became dulled, that, too, was echoed, the real and the fakes all calming together, getting used to this madness together.

If he were out there with the rest of them, would he behave any differently from the headshaking wide-eyed Ensign Bensons he watched on the viewscreens? No, he would not.

It was two days since Kybee had run back into the ship and sealed the entrance behind him, and he had not yet slept. What was he going to do? What were any of them going to do? They were doomed here, just like the original colonists. He couldn’t fly the ship alone, and even if he could, what about the others? He couldn’t just abandon them here, in this hell on Earth. Or hell on Matrix. “In this case,” Kybee muttered to himself, watching the mobs on the viewscreens, “hell really is other people.”

It was strange how circumstances changed attitudes. Kybee had always felt impatient loathing toward his shipmates, knowing himself to be the only truly sharp — and sharp-edged — person on the ship. He had thought it miserably unfair that he should be assigned to this team of losers on this mission into oblivion; what did he have in common with them?

It was only now, in this extremity, that he found himself drawing parallels, that he saw his own social prickliness as much of a liability as Hester’s bluntness or Pam’s unworldliness or the councilman’s pomposity. Damn it, somehow, damn it, in the course of their voyage, damn it, they had become a team, damn it, a unit, while his back was turned, damn it, some kind of stupid tribe. His shipmates were in trouble out there, damn it, and he was the only one in the universe who could help.

Except, of course, that he couldn’t. What was there to do? Forty colonists had spent four years trying to solve this problem, without success. How could he hope to do anything but keep the interior of the ship free of impostors by banning everything?

There’s something comforting about despair. When Kybee realized that there truly was no way out, that they were all stuck on Matrix for the rest of their lives, himself inside the ship and the rest of the crew outside amid the crowds of ersatz, A kind of peace descended on him. There’s nothing to be done; doom is at hand; no point struggling. Yawning, easy at last in his mind, warmed by the hopelessness of their situation, Kybee left the view screens and went to bed.

It was dark. He was suddenly wide awake. Sitting up, he spoke into the black room. “It isn’t the same. The colonists had to live here, somehow, live with those creatures forever. All I have to do is find the right five people and get them on the ship. That’s all.”

It was light. Kybee drank nearcoffee and brooded at the viewscreens. More of them were out there today. A couple of thousand by now. Food would become a problem soon. And as for finding the right Pam, the right Billy…

No. It was still impossible.

Nevertheless, the comfort of despair had been wrested from him. He had no choice. The task might be impossible, but he was going to have to try it, anyway. “The tape,” he told himself. “I’ll watch it again. I’ll watch it a hundred times if I have to. Maybe there’s a clue in it, maybe there’s something…”

He sighed and finished his nearcoffee and went off to watch again the final testament of Hafter Kass.

Kybee was slapping Hesters. His hand had begun to sting as he left reddened cheek after reddened cheek in his wake, but he persisted. “Kybee!” the Hesters cried, blinking, putting their hands up to their slapped faces. “What are you doing?” they cried, or, “What was that for?” or, “What’s the big idea?”

He didn’t answer, not a one of the stinking worms. He’d left the ship, sealing the entrance behind him, carrying the only electronic key that would work with the combination he’d just created, and now he was moving among the crowd, slapping and slapping.

What a mob there was, more than ever, and how they liked to mill around. Kybee shoved Billys and Ensign Bensons out of his way, seeking out the Hesters, slapping them, slapping them, and at last, one of the Hesters yelled, “What the hell was that for?” and slugged him back.

Seated at the viewscreens, Hester watched Kybee rove through the crowd, tweaking councilmen’s noses. “The bastard’s enjoying himself,” she told the air, watching Luthguster after Luthguster recoil, fat hands flailing the air, piggy eyes filling with tears, noses reddening.

Her own cheek still stung from that hefty wallop the bastard had given her. Having now watched that poor doomed fellow, Hafter Kass, on the tape, and having had Kybee point out to her that Kass described the worms as nonviolent, she could understand that violence was the only way to find the real wolf when surrounded by sheep in wolf’s clothing, but that still didn’t excuse him for hitting so hard. It’s because he was enjoying it, that’s all.

Still, being rescued from the legion of look-alikes was worth it, no matter what the cost. It had been really frightening down there for a while, not knowing who anybody was, surrounded by piss-poor imitations of herself — why couldn’t Kybee simply have noticed that the fake Hesters were dumpier and uglier than the original? — and never knowing if the ship would up and leave, abandoning her to an entire population of Captain Standforths and Councilman Luthgusters and second-rate Hesters for the rest of her life.

(The true long-range horror hadn’t occurred to her while she was out there and probably hadn’t yet occurred to the rest of the Earthlings still trapped out there, but now that she’d seen Hafter Kass’s description of life on Matrix, she knew just how horrible it would have been and how lucky she was not to be nonviolent.)

Outside, Kybee moved off the edge of one viewscreen’s range and was picked up by another, tweaking Luthgusters left and right. All reacted in the same roly-poly fashion, pained and astonished, waving arms and legs, and Kybee kept moving. And then one Luthguster, after Kybee turned his back, yanked off a shoe, ran up behind him and whammed him over the head with the heel.

“Now,” said Hester, smiling, “why didn’t I think of that?”

Out there, Luthguster kept swinging the shoe, shouting in rage, letting out all the mad emotions created by their mad situation, while the surrounding throng backed away, like cattle slightly disturbed at their feeding. Kybee went down under the rain of blows, huddling to the ground, and the councilman started kicking the fallen social engineer with his shod foot. Kybee rolled away, tumbling a nearby Billy and a Hester like ninepins, and Councilman Luthguster pursued him, hopping on one foot, that massive belly, like Falstaff’s flacon of sack, blooping over the ground. Kybee managed to scramble to his feet and come running toward the ship, Luthguster and his furious paunch bounding along in his wake.

“There you go, Kybee,” Hester said, nodding. “That’s the way to bring him home.”

The ship’s entryway controls were at her fingertips. Across the viewscreens came Kybee at a dead run, bowling a path through the shoals of Pams and pseudo ensigns, the councilman following, bobbing like an escaped grapefruit. Up the ramp came Kybee, heelmarks on his forehead and cheeks, eyes wild, voice echoing from the intercom, “Hester! Open up! Open up!”

Her fingers hovered on the controls. Luthguster came panting up the ramp, looking now more like a lobster than a grapefruit, and gave Kybee just one more whop. Then Hester opened up.

It was breasts he tweaked on Pam. In the first place, he simply couldn’t bring himself to behave harshly toward that beautiful face or harm that beautiful nose. And in the second place, when would he ever again get the opportunity to cop a feel in a noble cause?

“Kybee! Stop that!” Pam after Pam threw up protective arms, and when he reached for the second breast, back-pedaled in horror and shame. Exactly like Pam, of course, but not good enough. On he went.

If this doesn’t work, he told himself, clutching breast after breast, I’ll just have to escalate. The thought was not untinged with a kind of anticipation.

“Kybee! Stop that! What’s got into you?”

“It’s what’s getting into you, baby,” Kybee leered, and lunged for the other breast, and this Pam slapped feebly at his lupine fingers.

Slapped? Was that meaningful? To be certain, Kybee aimed for target number three.

“I’m sorry I gave you a bloody nose, Kybee,” Pam said.

“Dad’s all wry,” Kybee told her, tilting his head back, holding many blobs of absorbent cottonique to his nose while Hester held an ice pack to the back of his neck. Councilman Luthguster stood off to one side, looking, Kybee knew, pleased with this turn of events.

“Now that I know there was nothing personal in it,” Pam went on, “I’m not upset anymore.”

Kybee rolled his eyes. Some problems remain insoluble, no matter what.

“I think it’s stopped bleeding,” Hester said, stepping back, giving him a critical look.

Kybee lowered the bloody rags from his nose, straightened, breathed experimentally and said, “OK. Back into the fray.”

“Gee whiz!” said all the Billys.

“Kybee? Did I have a fly on my nose?” asked all the captains.

“The problem is,” Kybee said, back in the ship, in serious conclave with Hester, Pam and the councilman on the control deck, “the real Billy and the real captain are also nonviolent.”

Pam said, “Kybee, we can’t just leave them there.”

Hester said, “There has to be a way.”

“Glad to hear that,” Kybee told her. “What’s the way?”

“Beats me,” Hester said.

The councilman brooded at the viewscreens, where the walking, milling simulacra still included hundreds of himself. “Ghastly out there,” he said. “To see myself in the mirror in the morning and, of course, on election posters, that’s good enough for me.”

Kybee also looked at the viewscreens. “I used to think sometimes,” he said, “I’d be really content in a world where everybody was exactly like me. Well, half like me and half like Pam. Well, like Pam, but with modifications.”

Blinking without comprehension, Pam said, “Kybee? What can you mean?”

“But now,” Kybee went on, ignoring her for one of the few times since they’d shipped out together, “I’m going to have to find a new dream. When I’m shaving in—”

He stopped. He frowned at the viewscreens. “Could they?”

The others all sensed the change in him. Hester said, “Kybee, do you have something?”

“I don’t know,” Kybee turned toward the others, his manner intent but distracted, as though he were already outside, doing whatever it was. He said, “When we came aboard, they put a lot of sports equipment on, didn’t they? Bats and balls and rackets and all that.”

“Cluttering up my storage space,” Hester grumped.

Kybee nodded at her. “Still there, eh? Hester, get me a ball. A tennis ball or something.”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch! Hey, Billy! Toss it back!”

“Hey, Billy! Catch!”

And finally, out of a sea of lefties, one Billy caught it right-handed. Beaming, holding it up, this Billy called, “Want me to throw it back?”

“No, Billy, “ Kybee said. “You come along with me.”

“Mirror image,” Kybee explained to the others. “There was just a chance, when they did their imitations, they wouldn’t match us, they’d mirror us. Do what they see us doing, which isn’t exactly like doing what we do.”

“Gee,” Billy said, smiling at everybody, delighted and relieved to be back in the ship, “I don’t know how you think of things all the time, Kybee.”

Kybee looked at him. “Variety is good,” he said. “I’d be unhappy if everybody was the same as me. I’ll have to keep reminding myself of that.” He tossed the yellow tennis ball into the air and caught it. “And now,” he said, “to bring in the captain.”

“Oops. Sorry, Kybee,” said all the captains.

“And now the problem is,” Kybee told the others back in the ship, “the captain can’t catch a ball thrown at him. And even if he could, he isn’t sure if he’s right- or left-handed.”

Sonorously, Councilman Luthguster said, “He’s ambidextrous, you mean.” (He loved to say long words he could wrap his tongue around.)

“That’s what I mean,” Kybee agreed. “He’s equally inept with either hand.” He looked at the viewscreens. Out there, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon, the false crew members milled and trailed along, all except the Captain Standforths. One by one, they were moving toward the ship, looking up at the monitor cameras, waving and gesturing. Their thin reedy voices began to be heard on the open intercom: “Kybee? Billy? How about me out here? Hester? Hi, don’t forget about me! Hello?”

Pam stood beside Kybee, looking at the viewscreens. “Kybee? How can we save him?”

“I wish I knew,” Kybee said.

They turned the intercom off that night, but in the morning the captains were still there, crowding around the ship, more of them than ever. The numbers of the other faux crewpersons in the background seemed not to have increased by much, as though it were harder to create imitations once the original was gone, but the Captain Standforths had doubled overnight.

“More and more of them,” Kybee said grimly. “How are we ever going to sift through that mob?”

“O Captain, my captain,” Pam said, and sighed.

“The captain of his soul,” Hester said, and sighed.

“A captain courageous,” the councilman said, but didn’t sigh.

“And a right good captain, too,” Billy said, and brushed away a tear.

“Gimme a break,” Kybee said and went away to his own room to think.

“Kybee? Pam? Anyone at all?”

It was late afternoon. Captain Standforth felt lonely, sad, tired, worried and confused as he stood with all these bumbling fellows outside the Hopeful. Who were all these awkward people, anyway? “Why don’t you be off about your business?” he told a few nearby louts. “Go find your own ships.”

“This is my ship!” one of them announced, poking himself in the eye in his agitation.

“My ship!” cried dozens of others.

“Oh, really!” snapped the captain and raised his plaintive face to the monitor camera high on the Hopeful’s side. If only he’d caught that ball yesterday, things would be so different now. But he’d never been any good at sports. Back at the Academy–

“Captain. Listen up.”

It was Kybee’s voice, amplified over the speakers. The captain — and all these oafs around him — alertly listened up. Many of them even said, “Yes, Kybee?”

“Bad news, captain,” Kybee’s voice said.

Oh, dear, the captain thought. If only I’d caught that ball.

“There’s no way to tell which of you is real,” Kybee’s voice went on. “We can’t stay here forever. We have to leave. But if some other ship stumbled onto this place and found you, we could be vaporized for mutiny.”

Ah, thought the captain, so they can’t leave. No one wants to be vaporized.

“Tomorrow morning,” Kybee’s voice continued, “before we leave, we’re coming out to shoot all the captains. We’re sorry, Captain, but you can understand. That’s the only way we’ll be safe.”

The captain gaped at the ship, astounded and appalled. Shoot him? He looked around, and all the other captains were also astounded and appalled. Shoot them all?

And yet, of course, Kybee wouldn’t want to risk being vaporized by the authorities. It did make an awful kind of sense.

“Oh, dear,” Captain Standforth said. So did most of the others.

Morning. Kybee and Hester went out onto the ramp, armed with heavy laser guns, and looked around at a world crawling with thousands and thousands of Pams, councilmen, Billys, Hesters and Ensign Bensons, many, many more than ever before. But not one Captain Standforth.

“By golly, Kybee,” Hester said, “you were right.”

“Of course I was,” Kybee said, though he hadn’t, in fact, been at all certain it would work. “Tell them that everybody who looks like the captain is going to get shot, then everybody who can look like somebody else will.” He pointed his laser gun at a nearby councilman, the largest available target: “Where’s the captain?”

A hundred imitations pointed. “Betrayed!” wailed the voice of Captain Standforth from the shed in which he’d taken cover.

It took quite a while to convince the captain he wasn’t going to be shot, but even then, he was too nervous to handle the take-off, so Billy did, to everybody’s relief.

“That was fun,” said a Billy, watching the great silver ship soar upward.

“Oh, I don’t know,” a Hester said. “Let’s get out of these damn shoes.” Shoez. Shooz. Shuuz. Ssshhhuuuuuu…

2001

Come Again?

The fact that the state of Florida would give the odious Boy Cartwright a driver’s license only shows that the state of Florida isn’t as smart as it thinks it is. The vile Boy, execrable expatriate Englishman, handed this document across the rental-car counter at Gulfport-Biloxi Regional Airport and the gullible clerk there responded by giving him the keys to something called a Taurus, a kind of space capsule sans relief tube, which turned out on examination in the ghastly sunlight to be the same whorehouse red as the rental clerk’s lipstick. Boy tossed his disreputable canvas ditty bag onto this machine’s backseat, the Valium and champagne bottles within chattering comfortably together, and drove north.

This was not the sort of assignment the despicable Boy was used to. As by far the most shameless and tasteless, and therefore by far the best, reporter on the staff of the Weekly Galaxy, a supermarket tabloid that gives new meaning to the term degenerate, the debased Boy Cartwright was used to commanding teams of reporters on assignments at the very peak of the tabloid Alp: celebrity adultery, UFO sightings, sports heroes awash in recreational drugs. The Return of Laurena Layla — or, more accurately, her nonreturn, as it would ultimately prove — was a distinct comedown for Boy. Not an event, but the mere anniversary of an event. And not in Los Angeles or Las Vegas or Miami or any of the other centers of debauchery of the American celebrity world, but in Marmelay, Mississippi, in the muggiest, mildewiest, kudzuest nasal bowel of the Deep South, barely north of Biloxi and the Gulf, a town surrounded mostly by De Soto National Forest, named for a reprobate the Weekly Galaxy would have loved if he’d only been born four hundred and fifty years later.

There were two reasons why Boy had drawn this bottom-feeder assignment, all alone in America, the first being that he was in somewhat bad odor at the Galaxy at the moment, having not only failed to steal the private psychiatric records of sultry sci-fi-pic star Tanya Shonya from the Montana sanitarium where the auburn-tressed beauty was recovering from her latest doomed love affair, but having also, in the process, inadvertently blown the cover of another Galaxy staffer, Don Grove, a member of Boy’s usual team, who had already been ensconced in that same sanitarium as a grief counselor. Don even now remained immured in a Montana quod among a lot of Caucasian cowboys, while the Galaxy’s lawyers negotiated reasonably with the state authorities, and Boy got stuck with Laurena Layla.

But that wasn’t the only reason for this assignment. Twenty-two years earlier, when Boy Cartwright was freshly at the Galaxy, a whelp reporter (the Galaxy did not have cubs) with just enough experience on scabrous British tabloids to make him prime Galaxy material, just as despicable in those days but not yet as decayed, he had covered the trial of Laurena Layla, then a twenty-seven-year-old beauty, mistress of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay, a con that had taken millions from the credulous, which is, after all, what the credulous are for.

The core of the Golden Church of Sha-Kay had been the Gatherings, a sort of cross between a mass seance and a Rolling Stones world tour, which had taken place in stadiums and arenas wherever in rural America the boobs lay thick on the ground. With much use of swirling smoke and whirling robes, these Gatherings had featured music, blessings, visions, apocalyptic announcements, and a well-trained devoted staff, devoted to squeezing every buck possible from the attending faithful.

Also, for those gentlemen of discernment whose wealth far exceeded their brains, there had been private sessions attainable with Laurena Layla herself, from which strong men were known to have emerged goggle-eyed, begging for oysters.

What had drawn the younger but no less awful Boy Cartwright to Laurena Layla the first time was an ambitious Indiana D.A. with big eyes for the governorship (never got it) who, finding Laurena Layla in full frontal operation within his jurisdiction, had caused her to be arrested and put on trial as the con artist (and artiste) she was. The combination of sex, fame, and courtroom was as powerful an aphrodisiac for the Galaxy and its readers then as ever, so Boy, at that time a mere stripling in some other editor’s crew, was among those dispatched to Muncie by Massa (Bruno DeMassi), then owner and publisher of the rag.

Boy’s English accent, raffish charm, and suave indifference to putdowns had made him a natural to be assigned to make contact with the defendant herself, which he had been pleased to do, winning the lady over with bogus ID from the Manchester Guardian. His success had been so instantaneous and so total that he had bedded L.L. twice, the second time because neither of them could quite believe the first.

In the event, L.L. was found innocent, justice being blind, while Boy was unmasked as the scurrilous Galaxyite he in fact was, and he was sent packing with a flea in his ear and a high-heel print on his bum. However, she didn’t come off at all badly in the Galaxy’s coverage of her trial and general notoriety, and in fact a bit later she sent him the briefest of thank-you notes with no return address.

That was not the last time Boy saw Laurena Layla, however. Two years after Muncie it was, and the memory of the all-night freight train whistles there was at last beginning to fade, when Laurena Layla hit the news again for an entirely different reason: She died. A distraught fan, a depressingly overweight woman with a home permanent, stabbed L.L. three times with a five-and-dime steak knife, all the thrusts fatal but fortunately none of them disfiguring; L.L. made a lovely corpse.

Which was lucky indeed, because it was Boy’s assignment on that occasion to get the body in the box. Whenever a celebrity went down, it was Galaxy tradition to get, by hook or by crook (usually by crook), a photo of the recently departed lying in his or her casket during the final viewing. This photo would then appear, as large as physically possible, on the front page of the following week’s Galaxy, in full if waxen color.

Attention, shoppers: Next to the cash register is an intimation of mortality, yours, cheap. See? Even people smarter, richer, prettier, and better smelling than you die, sooner or later; isn’t that news worth a buck or two?

Getting the body in the box that time had been only moderately difficult. Though the Golden Church of Sha-Kay headquarters in Marmelay — a sort of great gilded banana split of a building with a cross and a spire and a carillon and loudspeakers and floodlights and television broadcasting equipment on top — was well guarded by cult staff members, it had been child’s play to Mickey Finn a staffer of the right size and heft, via a doctored Dr Pepper, borrow the fellow’s golden robe, and slip into the Temple of Revelation during a staff shift change.

Briefly alone in the dusky room with the late L.L., Boy had paused above the well-remembered face and form, now inert as it had never been in life, supine there in the open gilded casket on its waist-high bier, amid golden candles, far too much incense, and a piped-in celestial choir oozing out what sounded suspiciously like “Camptown Races” at half speed. Camera in right hand, he had reached out his left to adjust the shoulder of that golden gown to reveal just a bit more cleavage, just especially for all those necrophiles out there in Galaxyland, then it was pop goes the picture and Boy was, so far as he knew, done with the lovely late lady forever.

But no. It seemed that, among the effects Laurena Layla had left behind, amid the marked decks, shaved dice, plastic fingernails, and John B. Anderson buttons, was a last will and testament, in which the lady had promised her followers a second act: “I shall Die untimely,” she wrote (which everybody believes, of course), “but it shall not be a real Death. I shall Travel in that Other World, seeking Wisdom and the Way, and twenty years after my Departure, to the Day, I shall return to this Plane of Existence to share with You the Knowledge I have gained.”

Twenty years. Tomorrow, the second Thursday in May, would be the twentieth anniversary of Laurena Layla’s dusting, and an astonishing number of mouth-breathers really did expect her to appear among them, robes, smiles, cleavage, Wisdom, and all. Most if not all of those faithful were also faithful Galaxy readers, naturally, so here was Boy, pasty-faced, skeptical, sphacelated, Valium-enhanced, champagne-maintained, and withal utterly pleased with himself, even though this assignment was a bit of a comedown.

Here was the normally moribund crossroads of Marmelay, a town that had never quite recovered from the economic shock when the slave auction left, but today doing its best to make up all at once for a hundred and fifty years of hind teat. The three nearby motels had all quadrupled their rates, the two local diners had printed new menus, and the five taverns in the area were charging as though they’d just heard Prohibition was coming back. Many of the Sha-Kay faithful did their traveling in RVs, but they still had to eat, and the local grocers knew very well what that meant: move the decimal point one position to the right on every item in the store. The locals were staying home for a couple days.

Boy traveled this time as himself, a rare occurrence, though he had come prepared with the usual array of false identification just in case. He was also traveling solo, without even a photographer, since it wasn’t expected he’d require a particularly large crew to record a nonevent: “Not appearing today in her Temple of Revelation in the charmingly sleepy village of Marmelay, Mississippi…”

So it was the truth Boy told the clerk at the Lest Ye Forget Motel, unnatural though that felt: “Boy Cartwright. The Weekly Galaxy made one’s reservation, some days ago.”

“You’re a foreigner,” the lad in the oversize raspberry jacket with the motel chain’s logo on its lapel told him, and pointed at Boy as though Boy didn’t already know where he was. “You’re French!”

“Got it in one, dear,” Boy agreed. “Just winged in from jolly old Paris to observe the festivities.”

“Laurena Layla, you mean,” the lad told him, solemn and excited all at once. Nodding, he said, “She’s coming back, you know.”

“So one has heard.”

“Coming back tomorrow,” the lad said, and sighed. “Eight o’clock tomorrow night.”

“I believe that is the zshedule,” Boy acknowledged, thinking how this youth could not have been born yet when Laurena Layla got herself perforated. How folly endures!

“Wish I could see it,” the lad went on, “but the tickets is long gone. Long gone.”

“Ah, tickets,” Boy agreed. “Such valuable little things, at times. But as to one’s room…”

“Oh, sure,” the lad said, but then looked doubtful. “Was that a single room all by yourself?”

“For preference.”

“For this time only,” the lad informed him, speaking as by rote, “the management could give you a very special rate, if you was to move in with a family. Not a big family.”

“Oh, but, dear,” Boy said, “one has moved out from one’s family. Too late to alter that, I’m afraid.”

“So it’s just a room by yourself,” the lad said, and shrugged and said, “I’m supposed to ask, is all.”

“And you did it very well,” Boy assured him, then flinched as the lad abruptly reached under the counter between them, but then all he came up with was some sort of pamphlet or brochure. Offering this, he said, “You want a battlefield map?”

“Battlefield?” Boy’s yellow spine shriveled. “Are there public disorders about?”

“Oh, not anymore,” the lad promised, and pointed variously outward, saying, “Macunshah, Honey Ridge, Polk’s Ferry, they’re all just around here.”

“Ah,” Boy said, recollecting the local dogma, and now understanding the motel’s name. “Your Civil War, you mean.”

“The War Between the States,” the lad promptly corrected him. He knew that much.

“Well, yes,” Boy agreed. “One has heard it wasn’t actually that civil.”

In the event, Boy did share his room with a small family after all. In a local pub — taa-vin, in regional parlance — he ran across twins who’d been ten years old when their mother, having seen on TV the news of Laurena Layla’s demise, had offed herself with a shotgun in an effort to follow her pastoress to that better world. (It had also seemed a good opportunity for her to get away from their father.) The twins, Ruby Mae and Ruby Jean, were thirty now, bouncing healthy girls, who had come to Marmelay on the off chance Mama would be coming back as well, presumably with her head restored. They were excited as all get-out at meeting an actual reporter from the Weekly Galaxy, their favorite and perhaps only reading, and there he was an Englishman, too! They just loved his accent, and he loved theirs.

“It’s one P.M.,” said the musical if impersonal voice in his ear.

Boy awoke, startled and enraged, to find himself holding a telephone to his head. Acid sunlight burned at the closed blinds covering the window. “Who the hell cares?” he snarled into the mouthpiece, which responded with a rendition of “Dixie” on steel drum.

Appalled, realizing he was in conversation with a machine, Boy slammed down the phone, looked around the room, which had been transmogrified overnight into a laundry’s sorting area, and saw that he was alone. The twins had romped off somewhere, perhaps to buy their mother a welcome-home pair of cuddly slippers.

Just as well; Boy was feeling a bit shopworn this morning. Afternoon. And that had been the wake-up call he must have requested in an optimistic moment late last night. Most optimistic moments occur late at night, in fact; realism requires daylight.

Up close, the banana-split Temple of Revelation appeared to have been served on a Bakelite plate, which was actually the shiny blacktop parking area, an ebony halo broadly encircling the temple and now rapidly filling with RVs, tour buses, pickup trucks, and all the other transportations of choice of life’s also-rans.

And they were arriving, in their droves. Whole families, in their Sunday best. Sweethearts, hand in hand. Retired oldsters, grinning shyly, made a bit slow and ponderous by today’s early-bird special. Solitaries, some nervous and guarded in hoods and jackets too warm for the weather, others gaudily on the prowl, in sequins and vinyl. Folks walked by in clothing covered with words, everything from bowling teams and volunteer fire departments to commercial sports organizations and multinational corporations that had never given these people a penny. Men in denim, women in cotton, children in polyester. Oh, if Currier and Ives were alive in this moment!

Boy and the rental Taurus circled the blacktop, slaloming slowly among the clusters of people walking from their vehicles toward the admission gates. Show or no show, miracle or nix, revelation or fuggedabahdid, every one of them would fork over their ten bucks at the temple gate, eight for seniors, seven for children under six. Inside, there would be more opportunities for donations, gifts, love offerings, and so on, but all of that was optional. The ten-spot at the entrance was mandatory.

Everyone here was looking for a sign, in a way, and so was Boy, but the sign he sought would say something like VIP or PRESS or AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. And yes, there it was: MEDIA. How modern.

The media, in fact, were sparse in the roped-off section of parking lot around to the side of the banana split, where a second entrance spared the chosen few from consorting with the rabble. Flashing his Galaxy ID at the golden-robed guardian of the MEDIA section, driving in, Boy counted two TV relay trucks, both local, plus perhaps half a dozen rentals like his own. Leaving the Taurus, Boy humped onto his shoulder the small canvas bag containing his tape recorder, disposable camera, and a folder of the tear sheets of his earlier coverage of Laurena Layla, plus her truncated note of gratitude, and hiked through the horrible humidity and searing sun to the blessed shade of the VIP entrance.

It took two golden-robers to verify his ID at this point, and then he was directed to jess go awn in an keep tuh the left. He did so, and found himself in the same curving charcoal-gray dim-lit corridor he’d traversed just twenty years ago when he’d gotten the body in the box. Ah, memory.

Partway round, he was met by another fellow in a golden robe, next to a broad black closed metal door. “Press?” this fellow asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Yes, sir,” the fellow said, drew the door open, and ushered him in.

With the opening of the door, crowd noises became audible. Boy stepped through and found himself in a large opera box midway down the left side of the great oval hall that was the primary interior space of the temple. Raised above auditorium level, the box gave a fine view of the large echoing interior with its rows of golden plush seats, wide aisles, maroon carpets and walls, battalions of lights filling the high black ceiling, and the deep stage at the far end where L.L. used to give her sermons and where her choir and her dancer-acolytes once swirled their robes. The sect had continued all these years without its foundress, but not, Boy believed, as successfully as before.

The stage looked now as though set for some minimalist production of King Lear bare, half-lit, wooden floor uncovered, gray back wall unlit, nothing visible except one large golden armchair in the exact center of the stage. The chair wasn’t particularly illuminated, but Boy had no doubt it would be, if and when.

Below, the hall was more than half full, with the believers still streaming in. Sharing the box with Boy were the expected two camera crews and the expected scruffy journalists, the only oddity being that more of the journalists were female than male: four scruffy women and, with Boy, three scruffy men. Boy recognized a couple of his competitors and nodded distantly; they returned the favor. None of them was an ace like himself.

Ah, well. If only he’d succeeded in that Montana sanitarium. If only Don Grove were not now in a Montana pokey. If only Boy Cartwright didn’t have to be present for this nothingness.

The con artists who ran Sha-Kay these days would no doubt produce some sort of light show, probably broadcast some old audiotapes of Laurena Layla, edited to sound as though she were addressing the rubes this very minute rather than more than twenty years ago. At the end of the day the suckers would wander off, very well fleeced and reasonably well satisfied, while the fleecers would have the admissions money, fifty or sixty thousand, plus whatever else they’d managed to pluck during the show.

Plus, of course, TV This nonevent would be broadcast live on the Sha-Kay cable station, with a phone number prominent for the receipt of donations, all major credit cards accepted.

No, all of these people would be all right, but what about poor Boy Cartwright? Where was his story? “The nonappearance today in Marm—”

And there she was.

It was done well, Boy had to admit that. No floating down into view from above the stage, no thunderclaps and puffs of smoke while she emerged from a trapdoor behind the golden chair, no fanfare at all. She was simply there, striding in her shimmering golden robe down the wide central aisle from the rear of the hall, flanked by a pair of burly guardians to keep the faithful at bay, moving with the same self-confidence as always. Most of the people in the hall, including Boy, only became aware of her with the amplified sound of her first “Hosannas!”

That had always been her greeting to her flock, and here it was again. “Hosannas! Hosannas!” spoken firmly as she nodded to the attendees on both sides, her words miked to speakers throughout the hall that boomed them back as though her voice came from everywhere in the building at once.

It was the same voice. That was the first thing Boy caught. It was exactly the same voice he’d heard saying any number of things twenty years ago, hosannas! among them as well as oh yes! and more more!

She’s lip-synching, he thought, to an old tape, but then he realized it was also the same body, sinuous within that robe. Yes, it was, long and lithe, the same body he well remembered. The same walk, almost a model’s but earthier. The same pitch to the head, set of the shoulders, small hand gesture that wasn’t quite a wave. And, hard to tell from up here, but it certainly looked like the same face.

But not twenty years older. The same age, or very close to the same age, twenty-seven, that Laurena Layla had been when the fan had given her that bad review. The same age, and in every other respect, so far as Boy could tell from this distance, the same woman.

It’s a hologram, he told himself, but a hologram could not reach out to pat the shoulder of a dear old lady on the aisle, as this one now did, causing the dear old lady to faint dead away on the instant.

She’s real, Boy thought. She’s returned, by God.

A chill ran up his back as she ran lightly up the central stairs to the stage, the hairs rose on his neck, and he remembered all too clearly not the body in the box but the body two years before that, as alive as quicksilver.

She stopped, turned to face her people. Her smile was faintly sad, as it had always been. She spread her hands in a gesture that welcomed without quite embracing, as she always had. “Hosannas,” she said, more quietly, and the thousands below thundered, “Hosannas!”

Boy stared. Gray sweat beaded on his gray forehead. His follicles itched, his clothing cramped him, his bones were gnarled and wretched.

“I have been away,” Laurena Layla said, and smiled. “And now I have returned.”

As the crowd screamed in delight, Boy took hold of himself — metaphorically. You are here, my lad, he reminded himself, because you do not believe in this crap. You do not believe in any of the crap. If you start coming all over goose bumps every time somebody rises from the dead, of what use will you be, old thing, to the dear old Weekly Galaxy?

Onstage, she, whoever she was, whatever she was, had gone into an old routine, feel-good mysticism, the basic tenets of Sha-Kay, but now delivered with the assurance of one who’s been there and done that. The faithful gawped, the TV crews focused, the second-string stringers from the other tabs wrote furiously in their notebooks or extended their tape recorders toward the stage as though the voice were coming from there, and Boy decided it was time to get a little closer.

Everyone was mesmerized by the woman on the stage, or whatever that was on the stage. Unnoticed, Boy stepped backward and through the doorway to the hall.

Where the golden guardian remained, unfortunately. “Sir,” he said, frowning, “were you going to leave already?”

“Just a little reconnoiter, dear,” Boy assured him.

“I’m not supposed to let anybody past this point,” the guardian explained, looking serious about it.

This was why Boy never went on duty without arming himself with, in his left trouser pocket, folded hundred-dollar bills. It was automatic now to slide hand in and C-note out, the while murmuring; “Just need a quieter location, dear. Those TV cameras foul my recorder.”

The reason employees are so easy to suborn is that they’re employees. They’re only here in the first place because they’re being paid for their time. Whatever the enterprise may be, they aren’t connected to it by passion or ownership or any other compelling link. Under the circumstances, what is a bribe but another kind of wage?

Still, we all of us have an ass to protect. Hand hovering over the proffered bill, the guardian nevertheless said, “I don’t want to get in any trouble here.”

“Nothing to do with you, old thing,” Boy assured him. “I came round the other way.”

The bill disappeared, and then so did Boy, following the long curved hall toward the stage. More and more of the temple layout he remembered as he moved along. Farther along this hallway he would find that faintly sepulchral room where the body had been on display, placed there because crowd control would have been so much iffier out in the main auditorium.

That last time, Boy had had no reason to proceed past the viewing room, which in more normal circumstances would have been some kind of offstage prep area or greenroom, but he knew it couldn’t be far from there to the stage. Would he be closer then to her?

The likeness was so uncanny, dammit. Or perhaps it was so canny. In any event, this Laurena Layla, when close to people, kept moving, and when she stopped to speak she kept a distance from everyone else. Could she not be observed up close for long? If not, why not?

Though as Boy came around the curving hallway his left hand was already in his pocket, fondling another century, there was no guard on duty at the closed greenroom door; a surprise, but never question good fortune. In case the undoubted sentry was merely briefly away to answer mother’s call, he hastened the last few yards, even though the brisk motion made his brain-walnut chafe uncomfortably against the shell of his skull.

The black door in the charcoal-gray wall opened soundlessly to his touch. He slipped through; he pulled the door shut behind him.

Well. It did look different without a coffin in the middle. Now it was merely a staging area, dim-lit, with the props and materials of cultish magic neatly shelved or stacked or hung, waiting for the next Call. A broad but low-ceilinged room, its irregular shape was probably caused by the architectural requirements of the stage and temple that surrounded it. That shape, with corners and crannies in odd shadowed places, had added to the eeriness when Boy and his Hasselblad had been in here twenty years ago, but now it all seemed quite benign, merely a kind of surrealistic locker room.

There. The closed door opposite, across the empty black floor. That was the route Boy had not taken last time, when the viewers of the remains had been herded through the main temple and over the stage, past many opportunities to show their sorrow and their continued devotion in a shall we say tangible way, before they were piloted past the dear departed, out the door Boy had just come in, and down the long hall to what at this moment had been converted into the VIP entrance.

After a quick glance left and right, reassuring himself he was alone and all the stray dim corners were empty, he crossed to that far door, cracked it just a jot, and peered one eyed out at what looked like any backstage. Half a dozen technicians moved about. A hugely complex lightboard stretched away on the right, and beyond it yawned the stage, with Laurena Layla — or whoever — in profile out there, continuing her spiel.

She looked shorter from here, no doubt the effect of the high-ceilinged stage and all those lights. The golden chair still stood invitingly behind her, but she remained on her feet, pacing in front of the chair as she delivered her pitch.

How would it all end? Would she sit in the chair at last, then disappear in a puff of smoke? A trapdoor, then, which would make her devilish hard to intercept.

But Boy didn’t think so. He thought they’d be likelier to repeat the understated eloquence of that arrival, that L.L. would simply walk off the stage as she’d simply walked onto it, disappear from public view, and come… here.

She would not be alone, he was sure of that. Determinedly alone onstage, once free of the suckers’ gaze, she would surely be surrounded by her… acolytes? handlers?

Boy had his story now. Well, no, he didn’t have it, but he knew what it was: the interview with the returned L.L. The Galaxy had treated any number of seers and mystics and time travelers and alien abductees with po-faced solemnity over the years, so surely this Layla would understand she was in safe hands when she was in the hands — as he certainly hoped she soon would be — of Boy Cartwright. The question was how to make her see his journal’s usefulness to her before her people gave him the boot.

The old clippings; the thank-you note. Waggle those in front of her face, they’d at least slow down the proceedings long enough to give him an opportunity to swathe her in his moth-eaten charm. It had worked before.

His move at this point was to hide himself, somewhere in this room. This was where he was sure she would travel next, so he should conceal himself in here, watch how the scam proceeded, await his opportunity. Snick, he shut the stageward door, and, clutching his canvas bag between flaccid arm and trembling ribs, with its valuable cargo of clippings and thank-yous, he turned to suss the place out.

Any number of hiding places beckoned to him, shady nooks at the fringes of the room. Off to the right, in a cranny that was out of the way but not out of sight of either door, stood two long coatracks on wheels, the kind hosts set up for parties, these both bowed beneath the weight of many golden robes. Don one? At the very least, insert himself among them.

As he hurried toward that darkly gold-gleaming niche, a great crowdroar arose behind him, triumphant yet respectful, gleeful yet awed. Just in time, he thought, and plunged among the robes.

Dark in here, and musty. Boy wriggled backward, looking for a position where he could see yet not be seen, and his heel hit the body.

He knew it, in that first instant. What his heel had backed into was not a sports bag full of laundry, not a sleeping cat, not a rolled-up futon. A body.

Boy squinched backward, wriggling his bum through the golden robes, while the crowd noise outside reached its crescendo and fell away. He found it agony to make this overworked body kneel, but Boy managed, clutching to many robes as he did so, listening to his knees do their firecracker imitations. Down at mezzanine level, he sagged onto his haunches while he pushed robe hems out of the way, enough to see…

Well. This one won’t be coming back. In this dimness, the large stain across the back of the golden robe on the figure huddled on the floor looked black, but Boy knew that, in the light, it would be a gaudier hue. He felt no need to touch it, he knew what it was.

And who. The missing sentry.

I am not alone in here, Boy thought, and as he thought so he was not; the stageward door opened and voices entered, male and female.

Boy cringed. Not the best location, this, on one’s knees at the side of a recently plucked corpse. Hands joining knees on the floor, he crawled away from the body through the robes until he could see the room.

Half a dozen people, all berobed, had crowded in, Laurena unmistakable among them, beautiful, imperious, and a bit sullen. The others, male and female, excited, chattered at her, but she paid them no attention, moving in a boneless undulation toward a small makeup table directly across the room from where Boy slunk. They followed, still relieving their tension with chatter, and she waved a slender forearm of dismissal without looking back.

“Leave her alone now.”

This was said clearly through the babble by an older woman, silver-haired and bronze-faced in her golden robe, who stood behind the still-moving Laurena, faced the others, and said, “She needs to rest.”

They all agreed, verbally and at length, while the older woman made shooing motions and Laurena sank into a sinuous recline on the stool at the makeup table. Boy, alert for any eruption at all from anywhere, trying to watch the action in front of him while still keeping an eye on every other nook and cranny in the entire room — a hopeless task — watched and waited and wondered when he could make his presence, and his news, known.

The older woman was at last succeeding in her efforts to clear the area. The others backed off, calling final praises and exhortations over their shoulders, oozing out of the room like a film in reverse that shows the smoke go back in the bottle. Boy gathered his limbs beneath him for the Herculean task of becoming once more upright, and the older woman said, “You were magnificent.”

Laurena reached a languid arm forward to switch on the makeup lights, in which she gazed upon her astonishingly beautiful and pallid face, gleaming in the dim gray mirror. “What are they to me?” she asked, either to herself or the older woman.

“Your life,” the older woman told her. “From now on.”

Outside, the faithful had erupted into song, loud and clamorous. It probably wasn’t, but it certainly sounded like, a speeded-up version of “We Shall Overcome.”

Laurena closed her striking eyes and shook her head, “Leave me,” she said.

Boy was astonished. An actual human being had said, “Leave me,” just like a character in a vampire film. Perhaps this Laurena was from the beyond.

In any event, the line didn’t work. Rather than leave her, the older woman said, “This next part is vital.”

“I know, I know.”

“You’ll be just as wonderful, I know you will.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Laurena asked her. “I’ve trained for it long enough.”

“Rest,” the older woman urged. “I’ll come back for you in fifteen minutes.” And with that, at last, she was gone, leaving Laurena semi-alone, the raucous chorus surging when the door was open.

Boy lunged upward, grabbing for handholds among the robes, knees exploding like bags full of water. His first sentences were already clear in his mind, but as he staggered from concealment, hand up as though hailing a cab, movement flashed from off to his left.

Boy looked, and lunging from another hiding place, between himself and the stageward door, heaved a woman, middle-aged, depressingly over-weight, in a home permanent, brandishing a stained steak knife from the five-and-ten like a homicidal whale.

Good God! Have they both come back? Is there hope for Ruby Mae and Ruby Jean’s mom after all?

Laurena’s makeup mirror was positioned so that it was the whale she saw in it first, not Boy. Turning, not afraid, still imperious, she leveled her remote gaze on the madwoman and said, “What are you?”

“You know who I am!” snarled the madwoman, answering the wrong question. “I’m here to finish what my mother started!”

And in that instant Boy knew everything. He knew that the roused chorus in the temple auditorium meant that cries for help would go for naught. He knew that escape past the madwoman out that door toward the stage was impossible. He knew that he himself could make a dash for the opposite door, the one by which he’d entered, but that Laurena, by the makeup table, would never make it.

But he knew even more. He knew the scam.

However, what he didn’t know was what to do about it. Where, in all this, was poor Boy’s story? Should he zip out the door, report the murders, have that scoop? Should he remain here, rescue the maiden without risk to himself and in hope of the usual reward, have that scoop (and reward)? (The “without risk to himself” part tended to make that plan Plan B.)

How old was she, that was the question, the most important question of all. Answer that one first.

“Dears, dears, dears,” he announced in his plummiest voice, swanning forward like the emcee in Cabaret, “play nice, now, don’t fight.”

They both gaped at him. Like a tyro at the game arcade, the madwoman didn’t know what to do when faced with two simultaneous targets. She hung there, flat-footed, one Supphose’d shin before the other, knife arm raised, looking now mostly like a reconstructed dinosaur at the museum, while Laurena gave him a stare of cool disbelief and said, “And who are you?”

“Oh, but, dear, you must remember me,” Boy told her, talking very fast indeed to keep everybody off balance. “Dear old Boy, from the Galaxy, I still have your thank-you note, I’ve treasured it always, I brought it with me in my little bag here.” Deciding it would be dangerous to reach into the bag — it might trigger some unfortunate response from the dinosaur — he hurtled on, saying, “Of course, dear Laurena, one had to see you again, after all this time, report our meeting, tell the world we—”

The penny dropped at last, and now she was shocked. “You’re a reporter?”

“Oh, you do remember!” Boy exulted. “One knew you would!”

“You can’t stop me!” the madwoman honked, as though she hadn’t been stopped already.

But of course she could reactivate herself, couldn’t she? Boy told her, “One did not have the pleasure of meeting your mother, dear, I’m sorry to say, but one did see her in custody and at the trial, and she certainly was forceful.”

Whoops; wrong word. “And so am I!” cried the madwoman, and lumbered again toward Laurena.

“No no, wait wait wait!” cried Boy. “I wanted to ask you about your mother.” As the madwoman had now halved the distance between herself and the shrinking Laurena, Boy felt an increasing urgency as he said, “I wrote about her, you know, in the Weekly Galaxy, you must have seen it.”

That stopped her. Blinking at Boy, actually taking him in for the first time, a reluctant awe coming into her face and voice, she said, “The Weekly Galaxy?”

“Boy Cartwright, at your service,” he announced with a smile and a bow he’d borrowed from Errol Flynn, who would not have recognized it. “And as a reporter,” he assured her, “I assure you I am not here to alter the situation, but simply to observe. Madam, I will not stand in your way.”

Laurena gawked at him. “You won’t?”

“Good,” the madwoman said, hefted her knife, and thudded another step forward.

“But first,” Boy went hurriedly on, “I do so want to interview Laurena. Very briefly, I promise you.”

They both blinked at him. The madwoman said, “Interview?”

“Two or three questions, no more, and I’m out of your way forever.”

“But—” Laurena said.

Taking the madwoman’s baffled silence for consent, Boy turned to Laurena. “The silver-haired party was your grandmother,” he said.

Managing to find reserves of haughtiness somewhere within, Laurena froze him with a glare: “I am not giving interviews.”

“Oh, but, dear,” Boy said, with a meaningful head nod toward the madwoman, “this exclusive interview you will grant, I just know you will, and I must begin, I’m sorry to say, with a personal question. Personal to me. I need to know how old you are. You are over twenty-one, aren’t you?”

“What? Of course I—”

“Honest Injun?” Boy pressed. “One is not a bartender, dear, one has other reasons to need to know. I would guess you to be twenty-five? Twenty-six?” The change in her eyes told him he’d guessed right. “Ah, good,” he said with honest relief.

“That’s right,” the madwoman said.

They both turned to her, having very nearly forgotten her for a few seconds, and she said, “People don’t get older in heaven, do they?”

“No, they do not,” Boy agreed.

Laurena said, “What difference does it make?”

“Well, if you were twenty-one, you see,” he explained, “you’d be my daughter, which would very much complicate the situation.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Laurena said, which meant, of course, that she had every idea what he was talking about.

Now he did dare a quick dip into his bag, and before the madwoman could react he’d brought out and shown her his audiocassette recorder. “Tools of the trade, dear,” he explained. “No interview without the tape to back it up.”

Laurena finally began to show signs of stress, saying, “What are you doing? She’s got a knife, she’s going to kill me!”

“Again, darling, yes,” Boy said, switching on the machine, aiming it at her. “Just so soon as I leave, at the end of the interview.” Because now at last he knew what his story was, he smiled upon her with as much fondness as if she had been his daughter — interesting quandary that would have been, in several ways — and said, “Of course, in your answers, you might remove our friend’s reason for wanting to kill you all over again.”

Growling, the madwoman bawled, “Nobody’s going to stop me! I’m here to finish what my mother started!”

“Yes, of course, you are, dear,” Boy agreed. “But what if your mother did finish the job?”

The madwoman frowned. “What do you mean? There’s Laurena Layla right there!”

“Well, let’s ask her about that,” Boy suggested, and turned attention, face, and recorder to the young woman. “I must leave very soon,” he pointed out. “I only hope, before I go, you will have said those words that will reassure this lovely lady that her mother did not fail, her mother is a success, she can be proud of her mother forever. Can’t she, dear?”

Laurena stared helplessly from one to the other. It was clear she couldn’t figure out which was the frying pan, which the fire.

To help her, Boy turned back to the madwoman. “You do trust the Galaxy, don’t you?”

“Of course!”

“Whatever this dear child says to us,” Boy promised, “you will read in the Galaxy. Trust me on this.”

“I do,” the madwoman said with great solemnity.

Turning to the other, Boy said, “Dear, five million readers are waiting to hear. How was it done? Who are you? Time’s getting short, dear.”

Laurena struggled to wrap her self-assurance around herself. “You won’t leave,” she said. “You couldn’t.”

“Too bad,” Boy said with a shrug. “However, the story works just as well the other way” Turning, he took a step toward the hall door as the madwoman took a step forward.

“Wait!” cried the former Laurena Layla.

Content

Donald E. Westlake
Collected Stories

About Donald E. Westlake

Pseudonyms

Short Fiction Bibliography Chronological

Short Fiction Bibliography Alphabetical

1951

Veronica

My Father’s Chair

And You (poem)

1954

Or Give Me Death

The Appointment

1958

Arrest

Fluorocarbons Are Here to Stay!

1959

And Then He Went Away

Journey to Death

One on a Desert Island

Birth of a Monster

1960

An Empty Threat

Travelers Far and Wee A Fable of Futurity

Anatomy of an Anatomy

Man of Action

1961

Break-Out

Call Him Nemesis

I

II

III

IV

V

They Also Serve

The Spy in the Elevator

I

II

III

IV

Meteor Strike!

1962

Look Before You Leap

The Earthman’s Burden

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

1963

The Question

1964

Nackles

Just the Lady We’re Looking For

1965

Stage Fright

Paid in Full

The Spoils System

1966

Just One of Those Days

The Perils of the Sky Rangers (as Curt Clark)

Chapter 1 The Return of Doctor Gore

Chapter 2 Descending Doom

Chapter 3 Robot Deathtrap

Chapter 4 The Mask of Evil

Chapter 5 Quadruple Jeopardy

Chapter 6 The Final Reckoning

Domestic Intrigue

1968

It

1970

The Winner

1975

The Ultimate Caper

I. The Purloined Letter

II. The Shield of Ueltenplotz

1977

In at the Death

1978

The Girl of My Dreams

1982

Interstellar Pigeon

Dream a Dream

1983

Heaven Help Us

Don’t You Know, There’s a War Going On?

1984

Hydra

The World’s a Stage

1985

Hitch Your Spaceship to a Star

1989

Here’s Looking at You

2001

Come Again?