Grotto of the Dancing Deer : And Other Stories

The Civilization Game

For some time, Stanley Paxton had been hearing the sound of muffled explosions from the west. But he had kept on, for there might be a man behind him, trailing him, and he could not change his course. For if he was not befuddled, the homestead of Nelson Moore lay somewhere in the hills ahead. There he would find shelter for the night and perhaps even transportation. Communication, he knew, must be ruled out for the moment; the Hunter people would be monitoring, alert for any news of him.

One Easter vacation, many years ago, he had spent a few days at the Moore homestead, and all through this afternoon he had been haunted by a sense of recognition for certain landmarks he had sighted. But his visit to these hills had been so long ago that his memory hazed and there was no certainty.

As the afternoon had lengthened toward an early evening, his fear of the trailing man began to taper off. Perhaps, he told himself, there was no one, after all. Once, atop a hill, he had crouched in a thicket for almost half an hour and had seen no sign of any follower.

Long since, of course, they would have found the wreckage of his flier, but they might have arrived too late and so, consequently, have no idea in which direction he had gone.

Through the day, he’d kept close watch of the cloudy sky and was satisfied that no scouting flier had passed overhead to spot him.

Now, with the setting of the sun behind an angry cloud bank, he felt momentarily safe.

He came out of a meadow valley and began to climb a wooded hill. The strange boomings and concussions seemed fairly close at hand and he could see the flashes of explosions lighting up the sky.

He reached the hilltop and stopped short, crouching down against the ground. Below him, over a square mile or more of ground, spread the rippling flashes, and in the pauses between the louder noises, he heard faint chatterings that sent shivers up his spine.

He crouched, watching the flashes ripple back and forth in zigzag patterning and occasionally a small holocaust of explosions would suddenly break out and then subside as quickly.

Slowly he stood up and wrapped his cloak about him and raised the hood to protect his neck and ears.

On the near side of the flashing area, at the bottom of the hill, was some sort of foursquare structure looming darkly in the dusk. And it seemed as well that a massive hazy bowl lay inverted above the entire area, although it was too dark to make out what it was.

Paxton grunted softly to himself and went quickly down the hill until he reached the building. It was, he saw, a sort of observation platform, solidly constructed and raised well above the ground, with the top half of it made of heavy glass that ran all the way around. A ladder went up one side to the glassed-in platform.

“What’s going on up there?” he shouted, but his voice could be scarcely heard above the crashing and thundering that came from out in front.

So he climbed the ladder.

When his head reached the level of the glassed-in platform area, he halted. A boy, not more than fourteen years of age, stood at the front of the platform, staring out into a noisy sea of fire. A pair of binoculars was slung about his neck and to one side of him stood a massive bank of instruments.

Paxton clambered up the rest of the way and stepped inside the platform.

“Hello, young man!” he shouted.

The youngster turned around. He seemed an engaging fellow, with a cowlick down his forehead.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I’m afraid I didn’t hear you.”

“What is going on here?”

“A war,” said the boy. “Pertwee just launched his big attack. I’m hard-pressed to hold him off.”

Paxton gasped a little. “But this is most unusual!” he protested.

The boy wrinkled up his forehead. “I don’t understand.”

“You are Nelson Moore’s son?”

“Yes, sir, I am Graham Moore.”

“I knew your father many years ago. We went to school together.”

“He will be glad to see you, sir,” the boy said brightly, sensing an opportunity to rid himself of this uninvited kibitzer. “You take the path just north of west. It will lead you to the house.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Paxton, “you could come along and show me.”

“I can’t leave just yet,” said Graham. “I must blunt Pertwee’s attack. He caught me off my balance and has been saving up his firepower and there were some maneuvres that escaped me until it was too late. Believe me, sir, I’m in an unenviable position.”

“This Pertwee?”

“He’s the enemy. We’ve fought for two years now.”

“I see,” said Paxton solemnly and retreated down the ladder.

He found the path and followed it and found the house, set in a swale between two hillocks. It was an old and rambling affair among great clumps of trees.

The path ended on a patio and a woman’s voice asked: “Is that you, Nels?”

She sat in a rocking chair on the smooth stone flags and was little more than a blur of whiteness—a white face haloed by white hair.

“Not Nels,” he said. “An old friend of your son’s.”

From here, he noticed, through some trick of acoustics in the hills, one could barely hear the sound of battle, although the sky to the east was lighted by an occasional flash of heavy rockets or artillery fire.

“We are glad to have you, sir,” the old lady said, still rocking gently back and forth. “Although I do wish Nelson would come home. I don’t like him wandering around after it gets dark.”

“My name is Stanley Paxton. I’m with Politics.”

“Why, yes,” she said, “I remember now. You spent an Easter with us, twenty years ago. I’m Cornelia Moore, but you may call me Grandma, like all the rest of them.”

“I remember you quite well,” said Paxton. “I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Heavens, no. We have few visitors. We’re always glad to see one. Theodore especially will be pleased. You’d better call him Granther.”

“Granther?”

“Grandfather. That’s the way Graham said it when he was a tyke.”

“I met Graham. He seemed to be quite busy. He said Pertwee had caught him off his balance.”

“That Pertwee plays too rough,” said Grandma, a little angrily.

A robot catfooted out onto the patio. “Dinner is ready, madam,” it said.

“We’ll wait for Nelson,” Grandma told it.

“Yes, madam. He should be in quite soon. We shouldn’t wait too long. Granther has already started on his second brandy.”

“We have a guest, Elijah. Please show him to his room. He is a friend of Nelson’s.”

“Good evening, sir,” Elijah said. “If you will follow me. And your luggage. Perhaps I can carry it.”

“Oh, course you can,” said Grandma drily. “I wish, Elijah, you’d stop putting on airs when there’s company.”

“I have no luggage,” Paxton said, embarrassed.

He followed the robot across the patio and into the house, going down the central hall and up the very handsome winding staircase.

The room was large and filled with old-fashioned furniture. A sedate fireplace stood against one wall.

“I’ll light a fire,” Elijah said. “It gets chilly in the autumn, once the sun goes down. And damp. It looks like rain.”

Paxton stood in the center of the room, trying to remember.

Grandma was a painter and Nelson was a naturalist, but what about old Granther?

“The old gentleman,” said the robot, stooping at the fireplace, “will send you up a drink. He’ll insist on brandy, but if you wish it, sir, I could get you something else.”

“No, thank you. Brandy will be fine.”

“The old gentleman’s in great fettle. He’ll have a lot to tell you. He’s just finished his sonata, sir, after working at it for almost seven years, and he’s very proud of it. There were times, I don’t mind telling you, when it was going badly, that he wasn’t fit to live with. If you’d just look here at my bottom, sir, you can see a dent…”

“So I see,” said Paxton uncomfortably.

The robot rose from before the fireplace and the flames began to crackle, crawling up the wood.

“I’ll go for your drink,” Elijah said. “If it takes a little longer than seems necessary, do not become alarmed. The old gentleman undoubtedly will take this opportunity to lecture me about hewing to civility, now that we have a guest.”

Paxton walked to the bed, took off his cloak and hung it on a bedpost. He walked back to the fire and sat down in a chair, stretching out his legs toward the warming blaze.

It had been wrong of him to come here, he thought. These people should not be involved in his problems and his dangers. Theirs was the quiet world, the easygoing, thoughtful world, while his world of Politics was all clamor and excitement and sometimes agony and fear.

He’d not tell them, he decided. And he’d stay just the night and be off before the dawn. Somehow or other he would work out a way to get in contact with his party. Somewhere else he’d find people who would help him.

There was a knock at the door. Apparently it had not taken Elijah as long as it had thought.

“Come in,” Paxton called.

It was not Elijah; it was Nelson Moore.

He still wore a rough walking jacket and his boots had mud upon them and there was a streak of dirt across his face where he’d brushed back his hair with a grimy hand.

“Grandma told me you were here,” he said, shaking Paxton by the hand.

“I had two weeks off,” said Paxton, lying like a gentleman. “We just finished with an exercise. It might interest you to know that I was elected President.”

“Why, that is fine,” said Nelson enthusiastically.

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“Let’s sit down.”

“I’m afraid I may be holding up the dinner. The robot said—”

Nelson laughed. “Elijah always rushes us to eat. He wants to get the day all done and buttoned up. We’ve come to expect it of him and we pay him no attention.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting Anastasia,” Paxton said. “I remember that you wrote of her often and—”

“She’s not here,” said Nelson. “She—well, she left me. Almost five years ago. She missed Outside too much. None of us should marry outside Continuation.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”

“It’s all right, Stan. It’s all done with now. There are some who simply do not fit into the project. I’ve wondered many times, since Anastasia left, what kind of folks we are. I’ve wondered if it all is worth it.”

“All of us think that way at times,” said Paxton. “There have been times when I’ve been forced to fall back on history to find some shred of justification for what we’re doing here. There’s a parallel in the monks of the so-called Middle Ages. They managed to preserve at least part of the knowledge of the Hellenic world. For their own selfish reasons, of course, as Continuation has its selfish reasons, but the human race was the real beneficiary.”

“I go back to history, too,” said Nelson. “The one that I come up with is a Stone Age savage, hidden off in some dark corner, busily flaking arrows while the first spaceships are being launched. It all seems so useless, Stan…”

“On the face of it, I suppose it is. It doesn’t matter in the least that I was elected President in our just-finished exercise. But there may be a day when that knowledge and technique of politics may come in very handy. And when it does, all the human race will have to do is come back here to Earth and they have the living art. This campaign that I waged was a dirty one, Nelson. I’m not proud of it.”

“There’s a good deal of dirty things in the human culture,” Nelson said, “but if we commit ourselves at all, it must be all the way—the vicious with the noble, the dirty with the splendid.”

A door opened quietly and Elijah glided in. It had two glasses on a tray.

“I heard you come in,” it said to Nelson, “so I brought you something, too.”

“Thank you,” Nelson said. “That was kind of you.”

Elijah shuffled in some embarrassment. “If you don’t mind, could you hurry just a little? The old gentleman has almost killed the bottle. I’m afraid of what might happen to him if I don’t get back to the table.”

Dinner had been finished and young Graham hustled off to bed. Granther unearthed, with great solemnity, another bottle of good brandy.

“That boy is a caution,” he declared. “I don’t know what’s to become of him. Imagine him out there all day long, fighting those fool battles. If he was going to take up something, I should think he’d want it to be useful. There’s nothing more useless than a general when there are no wars.”

Grandma clacked her teeth together with impatience. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t tried. We gave him every chance there was. But he wasn’t interested in anything until he took up warring.”

“He’s got guts,” said Granther proudly. “That much I’ll say for him. He up and asked me the other day would I write him some battle music. Me!” yelled Granther, thumping his chest. “Me write battle music!”

“He’s got the seeds of destruction in him,” declared Grandma righteously. “He doesn’t want to build. He just wants to bust.”

“Don’t look at me,” Nelson said to Paxton. “I gave up long ago. Granther and Grandma took him over from me right after Anastasia left. To hear them talk, you’d think they hated him. But let me lift a finger to him and the both of them—”

“We did the best we could,” said Grandma. “We gave him every chance. We bought him all the testing kits. You remember?”

“Sure,” said Granther, busy with the bottle. “I remember well. We bought him that ecology kit and you should have seen the planet he turned out. It was the most pitiful, down-at-heels, hungover planet you ever saw. And then we tried robotry—”

“He did right well at that,” said Grandma tartly.

“Sure, he built them. He enjoyed building them. Recall the time he geared the two of them to hate each other and they fought until they were just two piles of scrap? I never saw anyone have such a splendid time as Graham during the seven days they fought.”

“We could scarcely get him in to meals,” said Grandma.

Granther handed out the brandy.

“But the worst of all,” he decided, “was the time we tried religion. He dreamed up a cult that was positively gummy. We made short work of that…”

“And the hospital,” said Grandma. “That was your idea, Nels…”

“Let’s not talk about it,” pleaded Nelson grimly. “I am sure Stanley isn’t interested.”

Paxton picked up the cue Nelson was offering him. “I was going to ask you, Grandma, what kind of painting you are doing. I don’t recall that Nelson ever told me.”

“Landscapes,” the sweet-faced old lady said. “I’ve been doing some experimenting.”

“And I tell her she is wrong,” protested Granther. “To experiment is wrong. Our job is to maintain tradition, not to let our work go wandering off in whatever direction it might choose.”

“Our job,” said Grandma bitterly, “is to guard the techniques. Which is not to say we cannot strive at progress, if it still is human progress. Young man,” she appealed to Paxton, “isn’t that the way you see it?”

“Well, in part,” evaded Paxton, caught between two fires. “In Politics, we allow evolvement, naturally, but we make sure by periodic tests that we are developing logically and in the human manner. And we make very sure we do not drop any of the old techniques, no matter how outmoded they may seem. And the same is true in Diplomacy. I happen to know a bit about Diplomacy, because the two sections work very close together and—”

“There!” Grandma said.

“You know what I think?” said Nelson quietly. “We are a frightened race. For the first time in our history, the human race is a minority and it scares us half to death. We are afraid of losing our identity in the great galactic matrix. We’re afraid of assimilation.”

“That’s wrong, son,” Granther disagreed. “We are not afraid, my boy. We’re just awful smart, that’s all. We had a great culture at one time and why should we give it up? Sure, most humans nowadays have adopted the galactic way of life, but that is not to say that it is for the best. Some day we may want to turn back to the human culture or we may find that later on we can use parts of it. And this way, if we keep it alive here in Project Continuation, it will be available, all of it or any part, any time we need it. And I’m not speaking, mind you, from the human view alone, because some facet of our culture might sometime be badly needed, not by the human race as such, but by the Galaxy itself.”

“Then why keep the project secret?”

“I don’t think it’s really secret,” Granther said. “It’s just that no one pays much attention to the human race and none at all to Earth. The human race is pretty small potatoes against all the rest of them and Earth is just a worn-out planet that doesn’t amount to shucks.”

He asked Paxton: “You ever hear it was secret, boy?”

“Why, I guess not,” said Paxton. “All I ever understood was that we didn’t go around shooting off our mouths about it. I’ve thought of Continuation as a sort of sacred trust. We’re the guardians who watch over the tribal medicine bag while the rest of humanity is out among the stars getting civilized.”

The old man chortled. “That’s about the size of it. We’re just a bunch of bushmen, but mark me well, intelligent and even dangerous bushmen.”

“Dangerous?” asked Paxton.

“He means Graham,” Nelson told him quietly.

“No, I don’t,” said Granther. “Not him especially. I mean the whole kit and caboodle of us. Because, don’t you see, everybody who joins in this galactic culture that they are stewing up out there must contribute something and must likewise give up something—things that don’t fit in with the new ideas. And the human race has done just like the rest of them, except we haven’t given up a thing. Oh, on the surface, certainly. But everything we’ve given up is still back here, being kept alive by a bunch of subsidized barbarians on an old and gutted planet that a member of this fine galactic culture wouldn’t give a second look.”

“He’s horrible,” said Grandma. “Don’t pay attention to him. He’s got a mean and ornery soul inside that withered carcass.”

“And what is Man?” yelled Granther. “He’s mean and ornery, too, when he has to be. How could we have gone so far if we weren’t mean and ornery?”

And there was some truth in that, thought Paxton. For what humanity was doing here was deliberate doublecrossing. Although, come to think of it, he wondered, how many other races might be doing the very selfsame thing or its equivalent?

And, if you were going to do it, you had to do it right. You couldn’t take the human culture and enshrine it prettily within a museum, for then it would become no more than a shiny showpiece. A fine display of arrowheads was a pretty thing to look at, but a man would never learn to chip a flint into an arrowhead by merely looking at a bunch of them laid out on a velvet-covered board. To retain the technique of chipping arrows, you’d have to keep on chipping arrows, generation after generation, long after the need of them was gone. Fail by one generation and the art was lost.

And the same necessarily must be true of other human techniques and other human arts. And not the purely human arts alone, but the unique human flavor of other techniques which in themselves were common to many other races.

Elijah brought in an armload of wood and dumped it down upon the hearth, heaped an extra log or two upon the fire, then brushed itself off carefully.

“You’re wet,” said Grandma.

“It’s raining, madam,” said Elijah, going out the door.

And so, thought Paxton, Project Continuation kept on practicing the old arts, retaining within a living body of the race the knowledge of their manipulation and their use.

So the section on politics practiced politics and the section on diplomacy set up seemingly impossible problems in diplomacy and wrestled with those problems. And in the project factories, teams of industrialists carried on in the old tradition and fought a never-ending feud with the trade unionism teams. And, scattered throughout the land, quiet men and women painted and composed and wrote and sculpted so that the culture that had been wholly human would not perish in the face of the new and wonderful galactic culture that was evolving from the fusion of many intelligences out in the farther stars.

And against what day, wondered Paxton, do we carry on this work? Is it pure and simple, and perhaps even silly, pride? Is it no more than a further expression of human skepticism and human arrogance? Or does it make the solid sense that old Granther thinks it does?

“You’re in Politics, you say,” Granther said to Paxton. “Now that is what I’d call a worthwhile thing to save. From what I hear, this new culture doesn’t pay too much attention to what we call politics. There’s administration, naturally, and a sense of civic duty and all that sort of nonsense—but no real politics. Politics can be a powerful thing when you need to win a point.”

“Politics is a dirty business far too often,” Paxton answered. “It’s a fight for power, an effort to override and overrule the principles and policies of an opposing body. In even its best phase, it brought about the fiction of the minority, with the connotation that the mere fact of being a minority carries with it the penalty of being to a large extent ignored.”

“Still, it could be fun. I suppose it is exciting.”

“Yes, you could call it that,” said Paxton. “This last exercise we carried out was one with no holds barred. We had it planned that way. It was described somewhat delicately as a vicious battle.”

“And you were elected President,” said Nelson.

“That I was, but you didn’t hear me say I was proud of it.”

“But you should be,” Grandma insisted. “In the ancient days, it was a proud thing to be elected President.”

“Perhaps,” Paxton admitted, “but not the way my party did it.”

It would be so easy, he thought, to go ahead and tell them, for they would understand. To say: I carried it too far. I blackened my opponent’s name and character beyond any urgent need. I used all the dirty tricks. I bribed and lied and compromised and traded. And I did it all so well that I even fooled the logic that was the referee, which stood in lieu of populace and voter. And now my opponent has dug up another trick and is using it on me.

For assassination was political, even as diplomacy and war were political. After all, politics was little more than the short-circuiting of violence; an election was held rather than a revolution. But at all times the partition between politics and violence was a thin and flimsy thing.

He finished off his brandy and put the glass down on the table.

Granther picked up the bottle, but Paxton shook his head.

“Thank you,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I shall go to bed soon. I must get an early start.”

He never should have stopped here. It would be unforgivable to embroil these people in the aftermath of the exercise.

Although, he told himself, it probably was unfair to call it the aftermath—what was happening would have to be a part and parcel of the exercise itself.

The doorbell tinkled faintly and they could hear Elijah stirring in the hall.

“Sakes alive,” said Grandma, “who can it be this time of night? And raining outdoors, too!”

It was a churchman.

He stood in the hall, brushing water from his cloak. He took off his broad-brimmed hat and swished it to shake off the raindrops.

He came into the room with a slow and stately tread.

All of them arose.

“Good evening, Bishop,” said old Granther. “You were fortunate to find the house in this kind of weather and we’re glad to have Your Worship.”

The bishop beamed in fine, fast fellowship.

“Not of the church,” he said. “Of the project merely. But you may use the proper terms, if you have a mind. It helps me stay in character.”

Elijah, trailing in his wake, took his cloak and hat. The bishop was arrayed in rich and handsome garments.

Granther introduced them all around and found a glass and filled it from the bottle.

The bishop took it and smacked his lips. He sat down in a chair next to the fire.

“You have not dined, I take it,” Grandma said. “Of course you haven’t—there’s no place out there to dine. Elijah, get the bishop a plate of food, and hurry.”

“I thank you, madam,” said the bishop. “I’ve had a long, hard day. I appreciate all you’re doing for me. I appreciate it more than you can ever know.”

“This is our day,” Granther said merrily, refilling his own glass for the umpteenth time. “It is seldom that we have any guests at all and now, all of an evening, we have two of them.”

“Two guests,” said the bishop, looking straight at Paxton. “Now that is fine, indeed.”

He smacked his lips again and emptied the glass.

In his room, Paxton closed the door and shot the bolt full home.

The fire had burned down to embers and cast a dull glow along the floor. The rain drummed faintly, half-heartedly, on the window pane.

And the question and the fear raced within his brain.

There was no question of it: The bishop was the assassin who had been set upon his trail.

No man without a purpose, and a deadly purpose, walked these hills at night, in an autumn rain. And what was more, the bishop had been scarcely wet. He’d shaken his hat and the drops had fallen off, and he’d brushed at his cloak and after that both the hat and cloak were dry.

The bishop had been brought here, more than likely, in a hovering flier and let down, as other assassins probably likewise had been let down this very night in all of half a dozen places where a fleeing man might have taken shelter.

The bishop had been taken to the room just across the hall and under other circumstances, Paxton told himself, he might have sought conclusions with him there. He walked over to the fireplace and picked up the heavy poker and weighed it in his hand. One stroke of that and it would be all over.

But he couldn’t do it. Not in this house.

He put the poker back and walked over to the bed and picked up his cloak. Slowly he slid it on as he stood there, thinking, going over in his mind the happenings of the morning.

He had been at home, alone, and the phone had rung and Sullivan’s face had filled the visor—a face all puffed up with fright.

“Hunter’s out to get you,” Sullivan had said. “He’s sent men to get you.”

“But he can’t do that!” Paxton remembered protesting.

“Certainly he can,” said Sullivan. “It comes within the framework of the exercise. Assassination has always been a possibility…”

“But the exercise is finished!”

“Not so far as Hunter is concerned. You went a little far. You should have stayed within the hypothesis of the problem; there was no need to go back into Hunter’s personal affairs. You dug up things he thought no one ever knew. How did you do it, man?”

“I have my ways,” said Paxton. “And in a deal like this, everything was fair. He didn’t handle me exactly as if I were innocent.”

“You better get going,” Sullivan advised. “They must be almost there. I can’t get anyone there soon enough to help you.”

And it would have been all right, Paxton thought, if the flier had only held together.

He wondered momentarily if it had been sabotaged.

But be that as it may, he had flown it down and had been able to walk away from it and now, finally, here he was.

He stood irresolutely in the center of the room.

It went against his pride to flee for a second time, but there was nothing else to do. He couldn’t let this house become involved in the tag-end rough and tumble of his exercise.

And despite the poker, he was weaponless, for weapons on this now-peaceful planet were very few indeed—no longer household items such as once had been the case.

He went to the window and opened it and saw that the rain had stopped and that a ragged moon was showing through a scud of racing clouds.

Glancing down, he saw the roof of the porch beneath the window and he let his eye follow down the roof line. Not too hard, he thought, if a man were barefoot, and once he reached the edge there’d be a drop of not much more than seven feet.

He took off his sandals and stuffed them in the pocket of his cloak and started out the window. But, halfway out, he climbed back in again and walked to the door. Quietly he slid back the bolt. It wasn’t exactly cricket to go running off and leave a room locked up.

The roof was slippery with the rain, but he managed it without any trouble, inching his way carefully down the incline. He dropped into a shrub that scratched him up a bit, but that, he told himself, was a minor matter.

He put on his sandals and straightened up and walked rapidly away. At the edge of the woods, he stopped and looked back at the house. It stood dark and silent.

Once he got back home and this affair was finished, he promised himself, he’d write Nelson a long apologetic letter and explain it all.

His feet found the path and he followed it through the sickly half-light of the cloudy moon.

“Sir,” said a voice close beside him, “I see that you are out for a little stroll…”

Paxton jumped in fright.

“It’s a nice night for it, sir,” the voice went on quietly. “After a rain, everything seems so clean and cool.”

“Who is there?” asked Paxton, with his hair standing quite on edge.

“Why, it’s Pertwee, sir. Pertwee, the robot, sir.”

Paxton laughed a little nervously. “Oh, yes, I remember now. You’re Graham’s enemy.”

The robot stepped out of the woods into the path beside him.

“It’s too much, I suppose,” Pertwee said, “to imagine that you might be coming out to look at the battlefield.”

“Why, no,” said Paxton, grasping at a straw. “I don’t know how you guessed it, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’ve never heard of anything quite like it and I’m considerably intrigued.”

“Sir,” said the robot eagerly, “I’m entirely at your service. There is no one, I can assure you, who is better equipped to explain it to you. I’ve been in it from the very first with Master Graham and if you have any questions, I shall try to answer them.”

“Yes, I think there is one question. What is the purpose of it all?”

“Why, at first, of course,” said Pertwee, “it was simply an attempt to amuse a growing boy. But now, with your permission, sir. I would venture the opinion that it is a good deal more.”

“You mean a part of Continuation?”

“Certainly, sir. I know there is a natural reluctance among humankind to admit the fact, or to even think about it, but for a great part of Man’s history war played an important and many-sided role. Of all the arts that Man developed, there probably was none to which he devoted so much time and thought and money as he did to war.”

The path sloped down and there before them in the pale and mottled moonlight lay the battle bowl. “That bowl,” asked Paxton, “or whatever it might be that you have tipped over it? Sometimes you can just make it out and other times you miss it…”

“I suppose,” said Pertwee, “you’d call it a force shield, sir. A couple of the other robots worked it out. As I understand it, sir, it is nothing new—just an adaptation. There’s a time factor worked into it as an additional protection.”

“But that sort of protection…”

“We use TC bombs, sir—total conversion bombs. Each side gets so many of them and uses his best judgment and…”

“But you couldn’t use nuclear stuff in there!”

“As safe as a toy, sir,” said Pertwee gaily. “They are very small, sir. Not much larger than a pea. Critical mass, as you well understand, no longer is much of a consideration. And the yield in radiation, while it is fairly high, is extremely short-lived, so that within an hour or so…”

“You gentlemen,” said Paxton grimly, “certainly try to be entirely realistic.”

“Why, yes, of course we do. Although the operators are entirely safe. We’re in the same sort of position, you might say, as the general staff. And that is all right, of course, because the purpose of the entire business is to keep alive the art of waging war.”

“But the art…” Paxton started to argue, then stopped.

What could he say? If the race persisted in its purpose of keeping the old culture workable and intact in Continuation, then it must perforce accept that culture in its entirety.

War, one must admit, was as much a part of the human culture as were all the other more or less uniquely human things that the race was conserving here as a sort of racial cushion against a future need or use.

“There is,” confessed Pertwee, “a certain cruelty, but perhaps a cruelty that I, as a robot, am more alive to than would be the case with a human, sir. The rate of casualties among the robot troops is unbelievable. In a restricted space and with extremely high firepower, that would be the natural consequence.”

“You mean that you use troops—that you send robots in there?”

“Why, yes. Who else would operate the weapons? And it would be just a little silly, don’t you think, to work out a battle and then…”

“But robots…”

“They are very small ones, sir. They would have to be, to gain an illusion of the space which is normally covered by a full-scale battle. And the weapons likewise are scaled down, and that sort of evens things out. And the troops are very single-minded, completely obedient and dedicated to victory. We turn them out in mass production in our shops and there’s little chance to give them varying individualities and anyhow…”

“Yes, I see,” said Paxton, a little stunned. “But now I think that I…”

“But, sir, I have only got a start at telling you and I’ve not shown you anything at all. There are so many considerations and there were so many problems.”

They were close to the towering, fully shimmering force field now and Pertwee pointed to a stairway that led from ground level down toward its base.

“I’d like to show you, sir,” said Pertwee, ducking down the stairs.

It stopped before a door.

“This,” it said, “is the only entrance to the battlefield. We use it to send new troops and munitions during periods of truce, and at other times we use it to polish up the place a bit.”

Its thumb stabbed out and hit a button to one side of the door and the door moved upward silently.

“After several weeks of battle,” the robot explained, “the terrain is bound to become a little cluttered.”

Through the door, Paxton could see the churned-up ground and the evidence of dying, and it was as if someone had pushed him in the belly. He gulped in a stricken breath and couldn’t let it out and he suddenly was giddy and nearly sick. He put out a hand to hold himself upright against the trenchlike wall beside him.

Pertwee pushed another button and the door slid down.

“It hits you hard the first time you see it,” Pertwee apologized, “but given time, one gets used to it.”

Paxton let his breath out slowly and looked around. The trench with the stairway came down to the door, and the door, he saw, was wider than the trench, so that at the foot of the steps the area had been widened into a sort of letter T, with narrow embrasures scooped out to face the door.

“You all right, sir?” asked Pertwee.

“Perfectly all right,” Paxton told the robot stiffly.

“And now,” said Pertwee happily, “I’ll explain the fire and tactical control.”

It trotted up the steps and Paxton trailed behind it.

“I’m afraid that would take too long,” said Paxton.

But the robot brushed the words aside. “You must see it, sir,” it pleaded plaintively. “Now that you are out here, you must not miss seeing it.”

He’d have to get away somehow, Paxton told himself. He couldn’t afford to waste much time. As soon as the house had settled down to sleep, the bishop would come hunting him, and by that time he must be gone.

Pertwee led the way around the curving base of the battle bowl to the observation tower which Paxton had come upon that evening.

The robot halted at the base of the ladder.

“After you,” it said.

Paxton hesitated, then went swiftly up the ladder.

Maybe this wouldn’t take too long, he thought, and then he could be off. It would be better, he realized, if he could get rid of Pertwee without being too abrupt about it.

The robot brushed past him in the darkness and bent above the bank of controls. There was a snick and lights came on in the panels.

“This, you see,” it said, “is the groundglass—a representation of the battlefield. It is dead now, of course, because there is nothing going on, but when there is some action certain symbols are imposed upon the field so that one can see at all times just how things are going. And this is the fire control panel and this is the troop command panel and this…”

Pertwee went on and on with his explanations.

Finally it turned in triumph from the instruments.

“What do you think of it?” the robot asked, very clearly expecting praise.

“Why, it’s wonderful,” said Paxton, willing to say anything to make an end of his visit.

“If you are going to be around tomorrow,” Pertwee said, “you may want to watch us.”

And it was then that Paxton got his inspiration.

“As a matter of fact,” Paxton said, “I’d like to try it out. In my youth, I did a bit of reading on military matters, and if you’ll excuse my saying so, I have often fancied myself somewhat of an expert.” Pertwee brightened almost visibly. “You mean, sir, that you’d like to go one round with me?”

“If you’d be so kind.”

“You are sure you understand how to operate the board?”

“I watched you very closely.”

“Give me fifteen minutes to reach my tower,” said Pertwee. “When I arrive, I’ll press the ready button. After that, either of us can start hostilities any time we wish.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“It may not take me that long, sir. I’ll be quick about it.”

“And I’m not imposing on you?”

“Sir,” Pertwee said feelingly, “it will be a pleasure. I’ve fought against young Master Graham until the novelty has worn off. We know one another’s tactics so well that there’s little chance for surprise. As you can understand, sir, that makes for a rather humdrum war.”

“Yes,” said Paxton, “I suppose it would.”

He watched Pertwee go down the ladder and listened to its footsteps hurrying away.

Then he went down the ladder and stood for a moment at the foot of it.

The clouds had thinned considerably and the moonlight was brighter now and it would be easier travelling, although it still would be dark in the denser forest.

He swung away from the tower and headed for the path, and, as he did so, he caught a flicker of motion in a patch of brush just off the trail.

Paxton slid into the denser shadow of a clump of trees and watched the patch of brush.

He crouched and waited. There was another cautious movement in the brush and he saw it was the bishop. Now suddenly it seemed that there was a chance to get the bishop off his neck for good—if his inspiration would only pay off.

The bishop had been let down by the flier in the dark of night, with the rain still pouring down and no moonlight at all. So it was unlikely that he knew about the battle bowl, although more than likely he must see it now, glittering faintly in the moonlight. But even if he saw it, there was a chance he’d not know what it was.

Paxton thought back along the conversation there had been after the bishop had arrived and no one, so far as he remembered, had mentioned a word of young Graham or the war project.

There was, Paxton thought, nothing lost by trying. Even if it didn’t work, all he’d lose would be a little time.

He darted from the clump of trees to reach the base of the battle bowl. He crouched against the ground and watched, and the bishop came sliding out of his clump of brush and worked his way along, closing in upon him.

And that was fine, thought Paxton. It was working just the way he’d planned.

He moved a little to make absolutely sure his trailer would know exactly where he was and then he dived down the stairs that led to the door.

He reached it and thumbed the button and the door slid slowly upward without a single sound. Paxton crowded back into the embrasure and waited.

It took a little longer than he had thought it would and he was getting slightly nervous when he heard the step upon the stairs.

The bishop came down slowly, apparently very watchful, and then he reached the door and stood there for a moment, staring out into the churned-up battlefield. And in his hand he held an ugly gun.

Paxton held his breath and pressed his shoulders tight against the wall of earth, but the bishop didn’t even look around. His eyes were busy taking in the ground that lay beyond the door.

Then finally he moved, quickly, like a leopard. His silken garments made a swishing noise as he stepped through the door and out into the battle area.

Paxton held himself motionless, watching the bishop advance cautiously out into the field, and when he was far enough, he reached out a finger and pressed the second button and the door came down, smoothly, silently.

Paxton leaned against the door and let out in a gasp the breath he had been holding.

It was over now, he thought.

Hunter hadn’t been as clever as he had thought he was.

Paxton turned from the door and went slowly up the stairs.

Now he needn’t run away. He could stay right here and Nelson would fly him, or arrange to have him flown, to some place of safety.

For Hunter wouldn’t know that this particular assassin had hunted down his quarry. The bishop had had no chance to communicate and probably wouldn’t have dared to even if he could.

On the top step, Paxton stubbed his toe and went down without a chance to catch himself, and there was a vast explosion that shook the universe and artillery fire was bursting in his brain.

Dazed, he got to his hands and knees and crawled painfully, hurling himself desperately down the stairs—and through the crashing uproar that filled the entire world ran an urgent thought and purpose.

I’ve got to get him out before it is too late! I can’t let him die in there! I can’t kill a man!

He slipped on the stairs and slid until his body jammed in the narrowness and stuck.

And there was no artillery fire, there was no crash of shells, no wicked little chitterings. The dome glittered softly in the moonlight and was as quiet as death.

Except, he thought, a little weirdly, death’s not quiet in there. It is an inferno of destruction and a maddening place of sound and brightness and the quietness doesn’t come until afterward.

He’d fallen and hit his head, he knew, and all he’d seen and heard had been within his brain. But Pertwee would be opening up any minute now and the quietness would be gone, and with it the opportunity to undo what he had so swiftly planned.

And somewhere in the shadow of the dome another self stood off and argued with him, jeering at his softness, quoting logic at him.

It was either he or you, said that other self. You fought for your life the best way you knew, the only way you knew, and whatever you may have done, no matter what you did, you were entirely justified.

“I can’t do it!” yelled the Paxton on the stairs and yet even as he yelled he knew that he was wrong, that by logic he was wrong, that the jeering self who stood off in the shadows made more sense than he.

He staggered to his feet. Without his conscious mind made up, he went down the stairs. Driven by some as yet unrealized and undefined instinctive prompting that was past all understanding, he stumbled down the stairs, with the throb still in his head and a choking guilt and fear rising in his throat.

He reached the door and stabbed the button and the door slid up and he went out into the cluttered place of dying and stopped in horror at the awful loneliness and the vindictive desolation of this square mile of Earth that was shut off from all the other Earth as if it were a place of final judgment.

And perhaps it was, he thought—the final judgment of Man.

Of all of us, he thought, young Graham may be the only honest one; he’s the true barbarian that old Granther thinks he is; he is the throwback who looks out upon Man’s past and sees it as it is and lives it as it was.

Paxton took a quick look back and he saw the door was closed and out ahead of him, in the plowed and jumbled sea of tortured, battered earth, he saw a moving figure that could be no one but the bishop.

Paxton ran forward, shouting, and the bishop turned around and stood there, waiting, with the gun half lifted.

Paxton stopped and waved his arms in frantic signaling. The bishop’s gun came up and there was a stinging slash across the side of Paxton’s neck and a sudden, gushing wetness. A small, blue puff of smoke hung on the muzzle of the distant gun.

Paxton flung himself aside and dived for the ground. He hit and skidded on his belly and tumbled most ingloriously into a dusty crater. He lay there, at the bottom of the crater, huddled against the fear of a bullet’s impact while the rage and fury built up into white heat.

He had come here to save a man and the man had tried to kill him!

I should have left him here, he thought.

I should have let him die.

I’d kill him if I could.

And the fact of the matter now was that he had to kill the bishop. There was no choice but to kill him or be killed himself.

Not only did he have to kill the bishop, but he had to kill him soon. Pertwee’s fifteen minutes must be almost at an end and the bishop had to be killed and he had to be out the door before Pertwee opened fire.

Out the door, he thought—did he have a chance? If he ran low and dodged, perhaps, would he have a chance to escape the bishop’s bullets?

That was it, he thought. Waste no time on killing if he didn’t have to; let Pertwee do the killing. Just get out of here himself.

He put his hand up to his neck, and when he lifted it, his fingers were covered with a sticky wetness. It was funny, he thought, that it didn’t hurt, although the hurt, no doubt, would come later.

He crawled up the crater’s side and rolled across its lip and found himself lying in a small, massed junkyard of smashed and broken robots, sprawled grotesquely where the barrage had caught them.

And lying there in front of him, without a scratch upon it, where it had fallen from a dying robot’s grasp, was a rifle that shone dully in the moonlight.

He snatched it up and rose into a crouch and as he did he saw the bishop, almost on top of him; the bishop coming in to make sure that he was finished!

There was no time to run, as he had planned to—and, curiously, no desire to run. Paxton had never known actual hate before, never had a chance to know it, but now it came and filled him full of rage and a wild and exultant will and capacity to kill without pity or remorse.

He tilted up the rifle and his finger closed upon the trigger and the weapon danced and flashed and made a deadly chatter.

But the bishop still came on, not rushing now, but plodding ahead with a deadly stride, leaning forward as if his body were absorbing the murderous rifle fire, absorbing it and keeping on by will power alone, holding off death until that moment when it might snuff out the thing that was killing it.

The bishop’s gun came up and something smashed into Paxton’s chest, and smashed again and yet again, and there was a flood of wetness and a spattering and the edge of Paxton’s brain caught at the hint of something wrong.

For two men do not—could not—stand a dozen feet apart and pour at one another a deadly blast and both stay on their feet. No matter how poor might be their aim, it simply couldn’t happen.

He rose out of his crouch and stood at his full height and let the gun hang uselessly in his hand. Six feet away, the bishop stopped as well and flung his gun away.

They stood looking at one another in the pale moonlight and the anger melted and ran out of them and Paxton wished that he were almost anywhere but there.

“Paxton,” asked the bishop plaintively, “who did this to us?”

And it was a funny thing to say, almost as if he’d said: “Who stopped us from killing one another?”

For a fleeting moment, it almost seemed to Paxton as though it might have been a kinder thing if they had been allowed to kill. For killing was a brave thing in the annals of the race, an art of strength and a certain proof of manhood—perhaps of humanhood.

A kinder thing to be allowed to kill. And that was it, exactly. They had not been allowed to kill.

For you couldn’t kill with a pop-gun that shot out plastic pellets of liquid that burst on contact, with the liquid running down like blood for the sake of realism. And you couldn’t kill with a gun that went most admirably through all the motions of chattering and smoking and flashing out red fire, but with nothing lethal in it.

And was this entire battle bowl no more than a toy set with robots that came apart at the right and most dramatic moments and then could be put back together at a later time? Were the artillery and the total-conversion bombs toy things as well, with a lot of flash and noise and perhaps a few well-placed items to plow up the battlefield, but without the power to really hurt a robot?

The bishop said, “Paxton, I feel like an utter fool.” And he added other words which a real bishop could never bring himself to say, making very clear just what kind of obscene fool he was.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Paxton shortly, feeling like that same kind of fool himself.

“I wonder…” said the bishop.

“Forget about it,” Paxton growled. “Let’s just get out of here. Pertwee will be opening up…”

But he didn’t finish what he was about to say, for he realized that even if Pertwee did open up, there’d be little danger. And there wasn’t any chance that Pertwee would open up, for it would know that they were here.

Like a metal monitor watching over a group of rebellious children—rebellious because they weren’t adult yet. Watching them and letting them go ahead and play so long as they were in no danger of drowning or of falling off a roof or some other reckless thing. And then interfering only just enough to save their silly necks. Perhaps even encouraging them to play so they’d work off their rebelliousness—joining in the game in the typically human tradition of let’s pretend.

Like monitors watching over children, letting them develop, allowing them to express their foolish little selves, not standing in the way of whatever childish importance they could muster up, encouraging them to think they were sufficient to themselves.

Paxton started for the door, plodding along, the bishop in his bedraggled robes stumbling along behind him.

When they were a hundred feet away, the door started sliding up and Pertwee stood there, waiting for them, not looking any different than it had before, but somehow seeming to have a new measure of importance.

They reached the door and sheepishly trailed through it, not looking right or left, casually and elaborately pretending that Pertwee was not there.

“Gentlemen,” said Pertwee, “don’t you want to play?”

“No,” Paxton said. “No, thank you. I can’t speak for both of us—”

“Yes, you can, friend,” the bishop put in. “Go right ahead.”

“My friend and I have done all the playing we care to do,” said Paxton. “It was good of you to make sure we didn’t get hurt.”

Pertwee managed to look puzzled. “But why should anybody be allowed to get hurt? It was only a game.”

“So we’ve discovered. Which way is out?”

“Why,” said the robot, “any way but back.”