Before the Universe

I. The Gaylens

Except for Gaynor's snores, and the rustle of Clair twitching around in the bed, the room was very quiet. It was warm, and dusky, and altogether a pleasant room to sleep in. . . .

Until, coming through the glass walls, light began streaming in, from a rapidly rising sun. Quickly the room got brighter and brighter: then, suddenly, there was a faint click from Gaynor's bed, a buzz, and violently the bed turned over catapulting Gaynor to the floor, where he landed with an awakening yell and a thud. A second later, Clair's bed ejected its occupant as well.

Clair groaned and shoved himself to his feet. "I must be getting used to this, Paul," he said. "It didn't bother me much today."

"You may be getting used to it. There are some things that I'll never get used to," murmured Gaynor drowsily, holding his head in his arms. "The gas they use to put us to sleep every night, for instance. It makes me itch like the devil."

"Me too," said Clair, busily inspecting his teeth in a mirror. "I must be allergic to the stuff to some extent. We'll have to tell Gooper. Otherwise I might begin to break out with big rashes."

"And you wouldn't like that to happen to your screen-idol pan, would you?" sneered Gaynor viciously.

"Why not, bud?" snapped Clair, putting on a pair of socks weft of every color of the rainbow.

"Jocelyn might not like it—that's why not," said his friend, peering at Clair's socks, and then selecting a somewhat gaudier pair for himself.

"And what if it isn't Jocelyn?"

With a start Gaynor straightened up and stared at his companion. "If it isn't Jocelyn," he said wonderingly, "who or what—is it?"

"My business alone."

They weren't about to slug each other as a casual observer might have supposed. Fighting worlds before breakfast were only one of the inexplicable habits that had kept these two together for most of their young lives.

They made a strange pair—physicists both, and in perfect symbiosis. One was a practical engineer, fully qualified to toss around murderous voltages or pack them in little glass tubes of the other's design and inspiration. Perhaps they were drawn together by a mutual love for practical jokes of the lowest sort—like rigging up chairs with high-voltage, low-wattage electrical contacts, or cooking up delicious formal dinners which crumbled into gray powder before the eyes of the horrified guest.

Be that as it may—they were here. Where here was they did not know, nor could they have any way of knowing, so, as was their way, they made the best of whatever happened to them, though their present weird fix was probably the most unexpected incident in two unpredictable careers that moved as one.

"Art," said Gaynor warningly, "Jocelyn wouldn't like for us to be late."

"Good lord!" cried Clair resonantly. "Is she waiting for us?"

"Sure she is. We were supposed to have breakfast with her. Don't you remember?"

"I thought this was screen-test day," said Clair hopelessly. "These Gaylens have the most confused notion of the number of appointments a man can keep at one time."

"We have the screen-tests after breakfast," said Gaynor. "Or that seemed to be the idea." He draped an exceptionally fancy shawl about his shoulders.

"Like it?" he said, capering before his friend.

"All right for here," said Clair grudgingly. "But don't try to get away with that on Broadway. You'd be picked up in a second."

"This isn't Broadway. Come on."

Arm in arm, they strolled down a short stretch of corridor and stepped onto an undulating platform. Gaynor kicked at a protruding stud at his feet, and the thing went into motion, carrying them to the very door of a vaulted concourse of glass. There they dismounted and looked around the immense place.

A tall girl with the pale face of a perfect cameo, save that her eyes and the corners of her mouth were touched with something that the Italian carvers of the middle ages had never dreamed could be in the face of a woman—vivacity and wit—approached them.

"Ah, friends," she said bitterly.

"Sorry we're late," said Gaynor with a soft, foolish look on his face.

"Where do we eat, Jocelyn?" asked Clair practically.

"Right over here," she said as she piloted them to a long table with curiously slung hammocks for seats. "I've ordered."

"I don't see how you pick these things up," sighed Gaynor unhappily. "I've been trying to master their menus for weeks, and still every time I want food I get glue or a keg of nails."

"They must think you're mechanically inclined. Here are the eats." Jocelyn spoke as she saw a little disk set into the table begin slowly to revolve, a signal to take off elbows and hands under pain of being scalded. The top of the table neatly flipped over, and there before them was a breakfast according to the best Gaylen tradition.

Gaynor swore under his breath as he stared with a pale face at the wormy mass before him.

"Highly nutritious, I'm told," commented Jocelyn, plunging into her dish of the same with a utensil that looked like the spawn of a gyroscope and one of the more elaborate surgical instruments.

Gaynor dug in determinedly, thinking of bacon and eggs and toast and orange juice and strong coffee—in fact, of every delicious breakfast he had ever eaten on Earth before setting off on this screwiest of all journeys ever undertaken by man.

He was staring at the empty plate with a sort of morbid fascination when a Gaylen came up to their table.

"Quite finished?" asked the Gaylen.

"Quite," said Gaynor and Clair simultaneously. "Oh, quite."

"Then we shall now go to the recording studio," said the Gaylen. "Our duty to posterity must not be delayed."

"Okay, Gooper," said Clair. "But who does the talking?"

"All of you. Or whomever you want."

They mounted the moving ramp again, this time riding far into the recesses of the building before getting off into a glass-walled room obviously very thoroughly insulated against sound and vibration.

"Address that wall," said Gooper, pointing to a black, plastered partition. He was outside the glass.

"When does it go on?" asked Jocelyn.

"It went on the moment you entered," said the Gaylen with a smile. "Now begin at the beginning." Clair took a deep breath. Since neither of the others seemed anxious to speak, he began. "Well, my partners and I," he said, "are from a planet known as Earth—the third major satellite of a yellow dwarf star which may or may not be in this present universe. We don't know where it is—or where we are."

He stopped, waiting for one of the others to take up the tale.

"Go ahead, Art," said Gaynor. "You're doing fine."

Reluctantly, Clair continued. "Uh—well, we freely acknowledge that we never expected to get here. In fact, we weren't exactly sure that we'd ever get anywhere alive, since we were the first to experiment with a hitherto unknown—or unutilized, at least—force which we called protomagnetism.

"This force, protomagnetism, had quite a resemblance to the common phenomenon of ferromagnetism. The big difference was that it didn't act on the same substances, and that the force appeared to come from somewhere pretty strange. Where that somewhere was, we didn't know—don't know yet.

"But we built a ship—we called it the Prototype—which had, as its motive power, a piece of the element most favored by protomagnetism. We figured that, soon as we let it, the proto would drag on the element and pull it, together with the attached ship, to whatever place in space it came from. We also have artificial gravity for directing the ship in normal space, and plenty of food and oxygen regenerators— everything we could think of.

"That's the way we'd planned it, and that's the way it worked. I forgot to mention, though, that at the last moment we found we had to ship an extra passenger, a Miss Jocelyn Earle—the female among us—who was a newspaperwoman of sorts.

"Well—we got to the source of proto and found ourselves in a universe of perfect balance—a one hundred percent equipoise of particles distributed evenly through infinite space, each acting equally on every other. But, naturally, we upset all that. Our ship coming into that closed system was plenty sufficient to joggle a few of the particles out of position. Those particles joggled more, and more, and then the whole thing seemed to blow up in our face.

"Anyway, after a couple of false starts into some pretty weird planes and dimensions, we managed to get into this present space-time frame. This wasn't too good either, because we couldn't seem to find a planet by the hit-or-miss method. Planets were too scarce, especially the oxygen-bearing atmosphere-cum-oxidized-hydrogen hydrosphere type—unfortunately, the only type that could do us any good.

"Well—we couldn't find a planet—and we didn't find a planet. This planet reached out and found us. The first thing we knew, there was a tractor beam of sorts on us and we were snatched down out of the sky onto your very lovely world. Then you Gaylens crept up on us and slapped mechanical educators on us and taught us your language at the cost of a couple of bad headaches.

"It was a sort of a fantastic coincidence, we thought; until we found out that Gooper over there had been scanning the heavens for quite a while, looking for a new planet, or a wandering star, or anything that might be important enough to win him recognition. We would be ungrateful to say anything against our savior, but I admit we had some rather generally bitter reactions when we found that practically Gooper's sole reason for dragging us down out of the sky—his sole reason for having been looking at the sky, that is—was the hope of earning himself a name. One of the principal things I would like to do here is to establish our terrestrial system of nomenclature. Your way of giving every babe a serial number for identification, and making each person earn a name by doing something or discovering something of importance to the world may be right enough on a merit basis, but it seems to lead to complications.

"So Gooper—the one who found us—is now known as Gaynor-Clair. To avoid confusion he is known among us as Cooper."

II. Jocelyn Plays with Fire

"Thank you," said Gooper. "It's turned off now. You have made a valuable contribution to our knowledge, friends. But may I impose on your generosity with your time a little further?"

"Might as well," said Clair bitterly.

"A committee of our scientists wish to examine your ship, the Prototype. Will you explain to them its various functions?"

"Sure," said Gaynor. "Let's go."

They mounted the ramp and traveled a short distance.

Waiting for them was a group of about eight of their hosts, and Cooper introduced them hastily. Practically all of them had names—an accurate index of the scientific prowess of the group. One, a short, sweet-faced female, had been honored with the name of Ionic Intersection for an outstanding discovery she had made in that field. As Cooper presented her to Clair they both smiled.

"We've met already," said Clair.

"To put it mildly," laughed the girl. The Earthman shot her a warning look and muttered a word which Gaynor couldn't quite hear—though he tried. So Gaynor began the lecture by conducting his hosts through the ship.

"It's a bit crowded here," he said, "but, after all, we hadn't planned that it should be big enough to hold more than two. Most of these gadgets—air regenerators, lighting system, and so forth—are undoubtedly familiar enough to you. And Cooper has told me that you know all about artificial gravity—though I'm still waiting for an explanation of why you don't apply it, to commercial uses or to space-travel. But over here—come back into this room, please—is something that I'm pretty sure you don't know anything about." He beamed at Clair—this was the crowning achievement of their joint career.

"Right there. What we call the `protolens.' That's the thing that focusses the force of proto-magnetism on the tiny filament of—of an artificial element, atomic number 99. This element, like all the heavier ones, is—is like— The word he had sought was 'radioactive,' but he fumbled in vain for the Gaylen equivalent. "Say, Art," he said in English, "what's Gaylen for radium?"

Clair was also stymied. "I don't know that I've ever heard it. Will you" (to the Gaylens) "supply us with your word meaning an element of such nature that its atoms break down, forming other elements of lesser atomic weight and giving off—giving off an emanation in the process?"

His hosts only looked blank. Ionic Intersection said, "On our world we have nothing of that nature."

Gaynor turned back to Clair. "How's that, Art? I thought radioactivity was an essential of every element."

"Well, in a way, yes," said his partner thoughtfully. "But only detectably in the very heavy ones. And—Art—now that you think of it, have you seen, or heard any of our pals mention any of the really heavy elements? I haven't—they don't even use mercury in their lab thermometers. Although it would be a lot more efficient and accurate than the thermocouples they do have."

"I see what you mean," Gaynor said excitedly. "All their heavy metals, being heavy and therefore radioactive, have broken down to the lighter ones. Why, Art, we're in an old universe!"

"Probably. Maybe just an old sun, though—after all, the development of an entire universe probably wouldn't be uniform.... So anyway, that might explain a lot of things about these Gaylens—why, with all their knowledge of science, they die like flies to carcinoma and other cancers, for instance. Maybe we've got something we can give them for a present, as a sort of payment for their saving our lives." He smiled amiably at Ionic Intersection as he spoke, and the girl, though not understanding a word of their jabber in a "foreign tongue," smiled back.

Gaynor scratched his head. To the Gaylens he said, "This is going to take time to explain. More time than I'd figured, because this is the key-point of the structure of the Prototype. Let's step outside."

"I'll stay here," said Ionic Intersection. "Provided one of you will be so good as to show me the mechanical features of the ship. I'm not covering electronics any more—I decided to let someone else make a name for himself there."

"Very commendable," said Gaynor busily. "Jocelyn, point things out to the lady and see that nothing happens."

He, Clair, and the others filed out of the ship, and he leaned against the main door, swinging it shut, to continue his lecture.

"Unfortunately," he said, "I cannot demonstrate with a chunk of—of one of the elements I mean since we forgot to bring any along. But perhaps you have observed the phenomenon occasioned by the passing of an electric current through such inert gaseous elements as neon, argon, nitrogen, and so forth?"

"It is one of the most vexing riddles of our science," said one Gaylen.

"Well, that is a phenomenon closely allied with the force of which we spoke. The particles of the gases— " and he droned on, trying to explain the incomprehensible to the Gaylens. Gaynor could not stand still while speaking—a habit acquired in the lecture rooms of half-a-dozen universities, he had to walk back and forth. He did so now, but completed just one lap. For, as he, still talking, turned

He saw the Prototype quietly, and as if by magic, vanish!

Somehow, surely inadvertently, possibly in trying to produce a sample of radioactive matter in the condensers, Jocelyn had allowed the ship to be dragged out of this good universe once more by the awful force of protomagnetism.

III. Nova!

The Gaylens looked about blankly. "What happened?" asked one of them dumbly.

"She started the ship!" choked Gaynor. "She's gone. God knows where or how!"

"Surely she can be traced," said Gooper sympathetically.

"How? There's no such thing as a tracer for the Prototype—it might be anywhere and anytime, in any dimension or frame of the cosmos."

Clair nodded numb affirmation.

One of the Gaylens coughed. "Then this is probably the best time to tell you ..." he paused.

"Tell us what?" snapped Gaynor eagerly.

"Well—that you would be just as well off, in a way, if you were with your companion."

"I don't understand," said Gaynor, losing attention once more to the question of the whereabouts of Jocelyn and the Prototype.

"This planet will soon be unsuited to your temperament and physique," explained the Gaylen carefully.

"Stop beating around the bush," interjected Clair fiercely. "What's the secret?"

Gooper took over. "What he means," he said, "is that now we should tell you what we have successfully concealed from you for the duration of your stay—not wishing to inhibit your pleasure at again attaining security. In short ... our sun is about to become a nova. Within a matter of days, as we calculate it, and this planet will be well within the orbit of the expanding photosphere."

Gaynor actually reeled with the shocking impact that the words carried.

"But you— " he said inarticulately. "What will happen to you?"

Gooper smiled. "Our bodies will perish."

"But what will happen to your civilization? Why— " he was struck by a sudden thought— "why did you have us make a record for you—who is going to use it after the nova comes?"

"We are not unprepared," said Gooper. "Don't ask questions for a few seconds—come downstairs with me."

En masse they descended, walking into a large, bare room. Gooper proudly indicated a sort of pen in the center.

"Behold!"

Gaynor looked over the little fence, and recoiled at the horrors within. "What are they?" he gasped. For he was looking at a dozen or more small things that were at once slimy and calcined—like lizards, save that lizards were at least symmetrical. That was little to say of any animal, but certainly no more could be said of lizards, and not even that of these creatures. Blankly, he wondered how they could have evolved to their present fantastic condition.

One of the Gaylens pressed a floor-stud, and transparent shields slowly rose to curve about and cover the pen completely.

"That area," said Gooper, "is now a refractory furnace of the highest type, able to reproduce the conditions that will obtain on this planet when the nova occurs. Watch carefully."

Gaynor, in spite of himself, bent over the furnace as it slowly heated up. He shielded his eyes as electric currents went into play and made the floor within the pen white hot—and more. And still the lizard-like creatures crawled sluggishly around the sizzling floor, seemingly completely unaffected by the heat!

Tongues of burning gas leaped out from the shield, and the air became a blazing inferno within the little confine of the pen. Obviously the shield was an insulator of the highest type, and yet it slowly reddened, and Gaynor backed cautiously away from it, still observing the creatures.

"Watch!" cried Gooper tensely, pointing to one of the creatures. It, completely oblivious to the heat, was fumbling with a small pellet of something on the floor—possibly food, Gaynor thought as he tried to make out, through the glare and burning gases, just what Gooper wanted him to observe. Then Gaynor noticed, and thought he was going mad. The thing picked up the pellet—it was food, of a sort, apparently—and put it in its mouth. And the organs with which it picked the pellet up were hands—tiny, glassy-scaled, perfectly formed human hands.

"Enough," said Gooper. And slowly the gas flame died down and the floor cooled. They retreated into the next room, and Gaynor faced his hosts in baffled wonder.

"Now will you tell me what was the purpose of that demonstration?" he demanded.

"No doubt you wondered about the evolution of those creatures," said a Gaylen obliquely. "It should soothe you to know that they're not natural—what with surgical manipulation of the embryos and even the ova of a species of lizard, we produced them artificially. You noted two great features—complete resistance to heat, and a perfect pair of hands—more than perfect, in fact, because they have two thumbs apiece, which your hands and ours don't."

"Yes," said Clair, "I noticed them. And a nasty shock they gave me, too. What are they for?"

"Well, you should have guessed—the nova is the reason. We've known it was coming for quite a while—more than a thousand years. And so long ago the cornerstone was laid for the edifice which you have just seen."

"If there is one thing more than another I hate about you Gaylens—outside of your habit of keeping facts like the approach of a nova from us—it's your longwindedness," said Clair angrily. "I want to know just what those hellish horned toads have to do with the nova."

The Gaylen coughed delicately. "A third feature of the creatures which could not be displayed to you is that their brains—note that I say nothing about their minds—their brains are fully as large, proportionately, and as well-developed, as ours and yours."

"And," Gooper interjected, "we have a gadget invented by my great grandfather, Parapsychic Transposition, which allows us to transfer mentalities between any two living things with brain-indices of higher rating than plus six.... Do you begin to follow?"

"I think so," said Gaynor slowly. "But get on!"

"So, when the nova bursts, we shall—all the Gaylens shall—each have his mind and memories and—I think your word for it is psyche— transferred into the body of one of those little animals. And—our civilization, though no longer human, perhaps, will go on."

Clair gasped. "What an idea!"

"Our only chance of survival."

Clair collapsed onto a seat. "Ye gods!" he cried accusingly. "And you didn't tell us before!"

"We thought you could leave at any moment—and, if not, there are more of the lizard-hosts than are necessary."

Clair thought of the things he had seen in the pen, reviewing their better points, trying to shut out the memory of their utter, blasphemous hideousness. He looked at Gaynor, obviously thinking the same thoughts. The look was enough. "Speaking for my partner and myself," he said to the Gaylens, "the answer is no. The flattest and most determined no you ever heard in your born days."

"Very well," said Gooper quietly. "Whatever you wish. But—the nova will be on us in a week."

IV. The Archetype

"How's chances, Pavel?" asked Clair grimly, looking about their borrowed lab.

"Well, small. Small, if you're referring to the chances of the late John L. Sullivan appearing before us in a cloud of glory. But if you mean of our finding Jocelyn, or Jocelyn finding us—the chances are real small."

"That's about how I figured it," said his companion wearily. "Why even bother?"

"Earthman's burden, maybe. Anyway, the program is: first we manufacture some 99, then we make a protolens, then we build a ship around them.... How long did they say we had before this planet starts frying like henfruit on a griddle?"

"About a week. Is that plenty?"

"Well," said Gaynor soberly, "considering that it took us upwards of two years to finish the Prototype, when we had all the resources we needed, and enough radioactive substances to fill a pickle barrel, it isn't exactly too much time. Of course, we have the experience now."

"Right again," said Clair sullenly. "Doesn't it irritate you—this business of never being wrong?"

"Sorry, bud—it's the way I'm built. Like clockwork—you give me the data and I click out the answers, right every time.... Well, we seem to be missing just about everything. It will be sort of hard getting away from here without any sort of a ship. But does that stop the Rover Boys of space?"

"Yes," said Clair flatly. "Let's stop kidding ourselves. I'd sooner drink slow poison than have one of their psychotaxidermists put this nice brain of mine into one of those asbestos lizards. And I know like I know my own name that you would, too."

There was no answer to that. But Gaynor was spared the necessity of inventing one when the doorbell rang—just like on Earth. Eager for any distraction, he answered it.

Gooper stepped in, a rare smile on his face. "Greetings, friends," he said cheerily.

"Yeah?" growled Clair. "What are you happy about?"

"It's a fine day outside," said the Gaylen, "the air is bracing, all machinery's working beautifully—and we've worked out a solution to your particular problem."

"That so?" asked Gaynor. "What is it?"

"Wait a couple days and you'll see," said the Gaylen confidently. "We boys down at the Heavy Industries Trust want to surprise you."

"You might yell 'boo!' at us when we're not looking," said Gaynor sourly. "Nothing else could surprise us about you."

"I agree with my collaborator," confirmed Clair. "Go away, Gooper. And stay away until we send for you, please. We have a lot of heavy thinking to do."

"Oh, all right—if you want it that way," snapped Gooper, petulantly. He huffed out of the door, leaving the two Earthmen slumped despondently over a bench, thinking with such intensity that you could smell their short hairs frizzled with the heat.

Two days later they were still sitting, though they had stopped the flow of thought a few times for food, sleep, and the other necessities of the body.

"Art," said Clair.

"Yes?"

"Do you suppose that Gooper had the McCoy when he said that they'd solved our problem?"

"I doubt it. No good can come from a Gaylen—take that for an axiom."

"I know they've got bad habits. But where would we be if it weren't for them?"

"Are you glad you're here?" cried Gaynor savagely.

"Not very. But its better than lying poisoned in the Prototype. And their projector—the one they used to drag us in is a marvelous gadget—even you should admit that."

"Why?" asked Gaynor glumly.

"Because," said Clair complacently, "I just figured out an answer to our difficulties, and the projector forms a large part of it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah! Because all we have to do is to coax the Gaylens into letting us have some sort of a shell—a boiler or a water-tank will do, if it's gas-tight—and then fix it up for living purposes." Clair sat back triumphantly.

"And what good does that do us? We can't stay in it forever, if that's what you're driving at—even if we could get one that was a good enough insulator to keep out the heat."

"Far from it. I examined their traction-projectors, and learned how to work them. They're a good deal like our own artificial-gravity units, which, you may remember, are now floating around in the Prototype somewhere. Only these things are powered by electricity, and they don't require a great deal of that, either. I've been trying to dope out just how they work, but I haven't got very far, and Gooper keeps referring me to the experts in the field whenever I ask him. But I can handle them all right, so if we stick a quartz window in the shell, and install the projector, and seal it up nice and tidy—"

"We can take off !" yelled Gaynor. "Art, you have it!" He whooped with joy. "We can tack out into space— "

"Head for the nearest star— "

"Raise our own garden truck with hydroponics— "

"Maybe locate some radium— "

"Live long and useful lives until we do— "

"And if not, what the hell!" finished Gaynor.

"So we'll call up Gooper and have it done." Clair began punching the combination of wall-studs that customarily sent their host and name-sake dashing into the room, but for once he actually preceded the summons.

"Something I want to show you," he said as he entered.

"Lead on," said Clair exuberantly, and all together they mounted the moving ramp. Clair began to describe his brainchild.

But halfway through Gooper stamped his foot and uttered an impatient exclamation.

"What's the matter?" asked Clair, surprised. "Won't it work?"

"We wanted to surprise you," said Gooper mournfully. "Remember?"

"Distinctly. But where is this surprise?"

"Here," said Copper as they dismounted, leading the way into a rodm of colossal proportions. And there on the floor, looking small amid its surroundings, but bulking very large beside the hundred-odd men who were tinkering with it, was the very image of Clair's machine—a mammoth ex-steam boiler, fitted with quartz ports and a gastight door, containing full living quarters, supplies, and a gravity projector.

Clair and Gaynor staggered back in mock astonishment. "Pavlik," said Clair gravely. "I like their system of production here. No sooner does one dream up a ship than its on the ways and ready to be launched."

"Let's look the blighter over," said Gaynor. "What shall we call it?"

"Archetype," said Clair instantly. "The primitive progenitor of all space ships. Archie for short."

"Not Archie," said Gaynor, making a mouth of distaste. "No dignity there. How about calling it the Ark?"

"That'll do. Archetype she is, now and forever more." They entered the capacious port and looked cautiously around.

"Big, isn't it?" Gaynor commented superfluously.

"Very big. Hydroponics tanks and everything. Stores and spare parts too."

"We left little to chance," said Gooper proudly. "This may be the last job of engineering of any complexity that our people will do for some time, so we made it good and impressive, both. I don't see how, outside of diving into the sun, you can manage to get hurt in this thing."

"What are those?" suddenly asked Clair, pointing to a brace of what looked like diving suits.

"In case you want to explore our unaffected planet," said Gooper.

"Are there any?" cried Gaynor, his eyes popping.

"Only one. It will be well out of the danger zone. You can even settle the Ark there if you like, instead of living in space. Its gravity is a bit high, but not too much so."

"Look, Gooper," broke in Clair. "I just had a simply marvelous idea."

"What is it?" asked the Gaylen with suspicious formality.

"You have a bit of time left. If you work hard, enough time to fabricate more of these ships, to transport a lot of your people to that planet. Why not do it? You probably couldn't get all of them there in time, but a good nucleus, say, for development."

Gooper scratched his head thoughtfully. "Psychologies differ," he said finally. "And we stand in utter terror of space travel. We would sooner go through the fantastic hells of our ancient religious ancestors than venture outside the atmosphere. Without a doubt this has cost us much in knowledge we might have gained—but some things are unaccountable, and this is one of them, I suppose. Do you understand?"

"No," said Gaynor bluntly. "But I don't suppose there's much need to understand. It's a fact, and it's there. Well, there's an end. When can we take off? "

"Right now, if you wish," said the Gaylen. He gestured at a control man high in a little box stuck to one of the transparent walls, and slowly the mighty vaulted roof of the place split and began to roll back. "Just turn on the power and you'll flit away from the planet," he said. "After that, you're on your own."

V. The Proteans

"It is bigger than I thought," said Clair absently, staring through the port of the. Ark.

"Mean the planet?" asked Gaynor.

"What else, ape? Do we land?"

"I suppose so." Gaynor peered down at the mighty world spinning slowly beneath them. "Then the question is—how?"

"Find a nice soft spot and let go," suggested Gaynor. "Anyway, you're the navigator. You dope it out."

In answer, his companion sent the ship into a vicious lurch that spilled Gaynor out of the hammock into which he had just crawled. "Necessary maneuver," he explained genially.

"Necessary like a boil behind the ear," grunted Gaynor. "Let me take over."

Lazily they drifted down for a short period, then came to a near halt, perhaps five thousand feet above the ground, settled, fell again, halted; settled again, fell, and landed with a shattering jolt.

"Very neat, pal," said Clair with disgust oozing from his tones. "Very neat."

"I could do better with the practice," said Gaynor diffidently. "Do you want I should go up again and come down again maybe?"

"Heaven forbid!" said Clair hastily. "Let's get out and case the joint."

They donned fur garments thoughtfully laid out by one of the nameless builders of the Ark and stepped through the port. Clair took one deep breath and choked inelegantly. "Smells like the back room of McGuire's Bar and Grill," he said, burying his nostrils in his furs.

"How does the gravity strike you, Art?" said Gaynor.

"Easy, Pavlik, easy. A little heavier than is conducive to comfort, but agreeable in many ways. It seems to be dragging yesterday's dinner right out of my stomach, but it's not too bad. How's for you?"

"I feel sort of light in the head and heavy everywhere else. But I can thrive on anything that doesn't knock you for a loop."

"See any animal life?"

"Not yet. The Gaylens didn't mention any, did they?"

"No. But they couldn't—all they know about any of their planetary brethren is what they can see at long range," said Clair.

"True for you, Art. Now, what would you call this?" As he spoke Gaynor pulled from the flint-hard soil a thing that seemed a cross between planet and animal. It looked at him glumly, squeaked once, and died.

"Possibly you've slain a member of the leading civilization of this globe," said Clair worriedly.

"I doubt that. You don't find advancement coupled with soil-feeding."

"There's another reason why this thing isn't the leading representative of the life of this planet," said Clair, staring weakly over Gaynor's shoulder. "Unless they built it, which I don't believe."

Gaynor spun around and stared wildly. It was a city, a full-fledged metropolis which had sprung up behind his back. It was—point for point and line for line—the skyline of New York.

Then the city got up and began to walk toward them with world-shaking strides.

"You mean the city with legs?" Gaynor cried, beginning to laugh hysterically.

"My error," said Clair elaborately, passing a hand before his eyes. "I mean the giraffe."

Gaynor looked again, and where the city had been was now a giraffe. It looked weird and a trifle pathetic ambling across the flinty plain. It seemed to be having more than a little trouble in coordinating its legs.

"Must be an inexperienced giraffe," muttered Gaynor. "No animal that knew what it was doing would walk like that."

"You're right," said Clair vaguely. "But you can't blame it. It hasn't been a giraffe very long, and it wants practice. What next, do you suppose?"

"Possibly a seventy-ton tank." And the moment the words left Gaynor's mouth he regretted them. For the giraffe dwindled into a tiny lump, and then the lump swelled strangely and took shape, becoming just that—a seventy-ton tank, half a mile away, bearing down on them with murder and sudden death in its every line and curve.

Within a couple of yards of the humans the tank dwindled again to a thing more like a whale than anything else in the travelers' pretty wide experience—but with some features all of its own.

"Hello," said Gaynor diffidently, for lack of something more promising to say or do.

And a mouth formed in the prow of the creature. "Hello," responded the mouth.

"I presume you're friendly," said Gaynor, drawn and mad. "At lease, I hope so."

"Quite friendly," said the mouth. "Are you?"

"Oh, quite," cried Gaynor enthusiastically, sweat breaking forth on his brow. "Is there anything I can do for you to prove it?"

"Yes," said the mouth. "Go away."

"Gladly," said Gaynor. "But there are reasons for us being here— "

"Do they really matter?" asked the mouth. "To a Protean, I mean."

"To a what?"

"To a Protean. That, I deduce from your rather disgusting language, is what you would eventually come to call me, from my protean powers of changing shape. That's what I am—a Protean, probably the highest form of life in this or any universe."

"You're a little flip for a very high form of life," muttered Clair sullenly.

"I learned it from you, after all, the whole language. And naturally I learned your little 'flip' tricks of talking. Would you like a demonstration of my practically infinite powers—something to convince you?"

"Not at all necessary," interrupted Gaynor hastily. "I—we believe you. We'll leave right away."

"No," said the Protean. "You can't, and you know you can't. Moreover, while it is certain that your presence here disturbs me and my people with your very sub-grade type of thought, we have so constituted ourselves that we are merciful to a fault. If we weren't we'd blast the planet to ashes first time we got angry. I want to do you both a favor. What shall it be?"

"Well," brooded Gaynor, "there's a woman at the bottom of it all."

"Females again!" groaned the Protean. "Thank God we reproduce by binary fission! But go on—sorry I interrupted."

"Her name is Jocelyn, and she's lost."

"Well?" demanded the mouth.

"Well what?"

"Shall I see that she stays lost or do you want her to be found?"

"Found, by all means found!" cried Gaynor.

"Thanks. Wait for me." Then the Protean vanished for a moment and became a perfect duplicate in size and scale of the Ark. Then it flashed up and out of sight.

VI. New Sun—and Old

Gaynor stared at Clair—stared at him hard. Then he coughed. With a start his partner came to. "Anything wrong, Paul?" he asked soberly.

"Anything wrong. Anything wrong," murmured Gaynor quietly, almost to himself. Then he exploded, "Art, you bloody idiot, don't you realize that we were in the presence of a Protean—the mightiest organism of any time or space? It even admits it—it must be so!"

"I'm sorry, Paul," said Clair gently. "But I was busy with a theory. I noticed something, yes, but it didn't seem terribly important at the time. What happened to the giraffe we were talking to?"

Gaynor choked. It was rarely that this happened—but when it did something usually came of it. The first of these near-trances he had witnessed had come when Clair, in the middle of the Nobel Prize award, had glazed his eyes and stood like a log, leaving Gaynor to make a double speech of acceptance. And all the way back to America he had been in a trance, mumbling vaguely when spoken to, or not answering at all.

A dot appeared in the sky—two dots. As they swooped down Gaynor recognized, with a jumping heart, the Prototype being towed by what looked like the Archetype, but really was, of course, the Protean who had forced the favor on him.

Gently they landed, almost at his feet. And then the Ark turned into the whale-like creature again, and the mouth remarked, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"

"Yes. How do we get back to Earth?"

"Ha!" laughed the creature. "You can think up some funny ones. Please visualize the planet for my benefit. I'll have to explore your mind a little for this. Have I your permission to do so?"

"Certainly!" cried Gaynor.

"Thank you," said the Protean, as the man began to concentrate on the more salient features of his native planet.

"I said thank you," repeated the creature to the expectantly waiting Gaynor. "It's all over. You didn't have too much of a mind to explore."

Gaynor was disappointed—the Gaylen mind-teachers had been a lot more spectacular, and a lot less insulting. "Well," he asked, "funny as it may seem to you, how do we get back to the place?"

"You know already," said the Protean. "At least, your colleague does. Why don't you ask him? Now will you leave?"

"Certainly," said Gaynor, puzzled but eager. "And all our thanks to you for your kindness."

"Just being neighborly," said the Protean. Whereupon it dwindled into a tiny worm-like thing which slipped down an almost imperceptible hole in the ground, Gaynor looked blankly at Clair, wondering how best to broach the subject of getting back, but, before he could inaugurate a campaign to return the mental marvel to the world of cold realities, the door of the Prototype swung open wide, and Jocelyn Earle stepped out.

"The trip didn't do you any good," said Gaynor, inspecting her face. "Whose idea was it?"

"Are you being stern, Pavlik?" she asked, flinging herself into his arms. When they had disentangled she explained, indicating Ionic Intersection who stood smiling in the doorway, "Her idea, really—she couldn't stomach the idea of turning into a lizard to avoid the nova. She even preferred floating around in space—have you heard about the creeping quivers that space travel gives these sissified Gaylens?— well, she was even willing to face that instead."

"I felt," explained Ionic Intersection, "that I have something to live for now, since—well, something to live for. And I find that space travel isn't fractionally as bad as I'd expected—I almost like it now, in a way."

As if to punctuate her sentence, Jocelyn emitted a yelp. "Ye gods and little fishes!" she screamed. "Look at the sun!"

The others looked—it was worth looking at. Probably no human had ever seen a sun like that before at closer range than half a thousand parsecs—and lived. Great gouts of flame, and relatively miniature new suns composed of pure, raw, naked energy were spouting from it; rapidly and violently the heat and light from it were increasing, becoming uncomfortable even on this distant planet. It was becoming a nova by cosmic leaps and vast bounds.

"This is no place for us, friends—not while we've got what it takes to get away. So let's go—fast. I wouldn't put it past our Gaylen pals—with all due respect to you, Ionic Intersection—to have forgotten a decimal point or neglected a surd in their calculations. This planet may be as safe as they claimed—or it may not. I don't choose to take chances."

Shooing the ladies along ahead of him, Gaynor gently took Clair's elbow and walked him into the Prototype. "He's got a theory," he explained to the girls, neither of whom had ever seen him that way before. "It gets him at times like these, always. You'll have to bear with him; it's just another reason why he shouldn't marry."

Once they were all arranged in the Prototype and sufficient stores had been transferred from the Archetype, left to rust or melt on the planet of the Proteans, they took off and hovered in space far away from the wild sun.

"Now," said Gaynor, "we'll go home." So speaking, he took Clair by the arm once more, shaking him gently. "Theory-Protean-idea-home-theory-HOME!" he whispered in the entranced one's ear, in a sharp crescendo.

Clair came out of it with a start. "Do you know," he said quickly, "I've found the governing principle of our little mishaps and adventures?"

"Yes," said Gaynor, "I know. The Protean told me. He also told me that you knew how to apply that principle so as to get us home."

"Oh, yes. Home. Well, in order to get us home, I'll need your cooperation—all of your cooperation. I'll have to explain.

"I said a while ago that nothing was liable to hurt us in this universe. Well, nothing is. And the reason is that every stick, stone, proton, and mesotron in this universe is so placed and constructed that we can't get hurt. Don't interrupt—it's true. Listen.

"Let me ask a rhetorical question: How many possible universes are there? Echo answers: Plenty. An infinity of them, in fact. And the funny thing about it is that they all exist. You aren't going to argue that, are you, Paul? Because everybody knows that, in eternity, everything that is possible happens at least once, and the cosmos is eternal.... I thought you'd see that.

"There being so many universes, and there being no directive influence in the Prototype, there is absolutely no way of knowing, mathematically a provable point, just which universe we'll land in. But there has to be some determining factor, unless the law of cause-and-effect is meaningless, and all of organized science is phoney from the ground up.

"Well, there is a determining factor. It's—thought.

"Thought isn't very powerful, except when applied through such an instrument as the human mind, or rather through such a series of step-up transformers as the mind, the brain, the body, and the machines of humanity. But there are so many possible continua that even the tiny, tiny pressure of our thought-waves is plenty to decide which.

"What did we want before we hit the universe of the Gaylens? I don't know exactly what was in your minds, but I'll bet it was:' food, human companionship, supplies, and SAFETY. And we got all of them.

"So—the rest becomes obvious. To get home: Think of home, all of us, each preferably picking a different and somewhat unusual object to concentrate upon, so as to limit the number of possible universes that fit the description—you, Ionic, will try not to think of anything, because you come from a different universe; then throw in the switch to the protolens—you're home."

They had made five false starts, and had spent a full week in one deceptive home-like universe before they'd got the correct combination of factors to insure a happy landing, but this one indubitably was it.

Clair was at the controls—had been for days of searching, and now that they had identified their solar system was driving every fragment of power from the artificial-gravity units.

Jocelyn and Gaynor approached him with long, sad faces. "Well, kiddies?"'

"I love Jocelyn," said Gaynor unhappily.

"So," he said, not taking his eyes from the plate which mirrored stars and sun.

"And that's not the worst of it," said the girl directly. "I love Pavlik, too. Do you mind?"

"Bless you, my children," said Clair agreeably. "But don't you mind?" cried Jocelyn indignantly. "We want to get married."

"A splendid idea. I'm all for marriage, personally."

"Good!" said Jocelyn heartily, though a bit puzzled and annoyed. "What you ought to do is to find some nice girl who can cook and sew and marry her."

"Impossible," said Clair.

"Why?"

"My wife wouldn't let me. Ionic Intersection. We were married three days ago."

"What!" shrieked Jocelyn, and Gaynor cried, "You can't have been. We've been in space!"

"Sure. That's what made it so easy. You know the old law—the captain of a ship at sea can perform marriages."

"But— "

"But nothing. I'm the captain, and I performed the marriage—to me."

Gaynor reeled and clutched at a railing. "But—but since when are you captain—who appointed you?"

"Ha!" crowed Clair. "Shows how little you know about sea law. It's just like the case of a derelict—when the regular offficers and crew of a ship are unable to bring her to port—and you were definitely unable so to do anyone who can takes command. That's the law, and I'm sticking to it. And you'd better not question it—because if you do, I'll dissolve your marriage."

"Our marriage! What marriage?" cried Jocelyn, incredulity and delight mingling in her voice.

"The one I performed over you two not five minutes ago. Probably you thought I was whistling through my teeth," Clair very patiently explained. "Now are there any objections?"

No, there were no objections....