Masterpieces

POUL ANDERSON Call Me Joe

A multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, Poul Anderson has written more than fifty novels and hundreds of short stories since his science fiction debut in 1947. His first novel, Brain Wave, is a classic example of the techniques of traditional science fiction, extrapolating the impact that an abrupt universal rise in intelligence has on the totality of human civilization in the twentieth century. Anderson is highly regarded for the detail of his stories. His vast Technic History saga, a multibook chronicle of interstellar exploration and empire building, covers fifty centuries of future history spread out over the rise and fall of three empires of a galactic federation. The vast scope of the series has given Anderson the opportunity to develop colorful, well-developed characters and to explore the long-term impact of certain ideas and attitudes—free enterprise, militarism, imperialism, individual styles of governing—on the society and political structure of a created world. Two characters, distinct products of their different times and civilizations, dominate the series’ most notable episodes: Falstaffian rogue merchant Nicholas van Rijn, hero of The Man Who Counts, Satan’s World, and Mirkheim, and Ensign Dominic Flandry, whose adventures include We Claim These Stars, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows, and Earthman, Go Home! Anderson has tackled many of science fiction’s classic themes, including near-light-speed travel in Tau Zero, time travel in the series of Time Patrol stories collected as Guardians of Time, and accelerated evolution in Fire Time. He is known for his interweaving of science fiction and history, notably in his novel The High Crusade, a superior first-contact tale in which a medieval army captures an alien spaceship. Much of Anderson’s fantasy is rich with undercurrents of mythology, notably his heroic fantasy Three Hearts and Three Lions, and The Broken Sword, an alternate history drawn from the background of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Anderson received the Tolkien Memorial Award in 1978. With his wife, Karen, he has written the King of Ys Celtic fantasy quartet, and with Gordon Dickson the amusing Hoka series. His short fiction has been collected in numerous volumes, including The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories, All One Universe, Strangers from Earth, and Seven Conquests.

THE WIND CAME whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down, and groped for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked, immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night.

As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.

Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.

It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by tons of atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smokehole, a lamp of tree oil burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.

Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He was tired anyway.

It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to cast an axehead, his first, this evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.

He pulled a decapod body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had been painfully grubbed and hacked to shape with teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a man should.

He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.

Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off his helmet.

HE LOOKED AROUND, blinking. After the Jovian surface, it was always a little unreal to find himself here again, in the clean quiet orderliness of the control room.

His muscles ached. They shouldn’t. He had not really been fighting a gale of several hundred miles an hour, under three gravities and a temperature of 140 Absolute. He had been here, in the almost nonexistent pull of Jupiter V, breathing oxynitrogen. It was Joe who lived down there and filled his lungs with hydrogen and helium at a pressure which could still only be estimated because it broke aneroids and deranged piezoelectrics.

Nevertheless, his body felt worn and beaten. Tension, no doubt—psychosomatics—after all, for a good many hours now he had, in a sense, been Joe, and Joe had been working hard.

With the helmet off, Anglesey held only a thread of identification. The esprojector was still tuned to Joe’s brain but no longer focused on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew an indescribable feeling of sleep. Now and then, vague forms or colors drifted in the soft black—dreams? Not impossible, that Joe’s brain should dream a little when Anglesey’s mind wasn’t using it.

A light flickered red on the esprojector panel, and a bell whined electronic fear. Anglesey cursed. Thin fingers danced over the controls of his chair, he slued around and shot across to the bank of dials. Yes—there—K-tube oscillating again! The circuit blew out. He wrenched the faceplate off with one hand and fumbled in a drawer with the other.

Inside his mind he could feel the contact with Joe fading. If he once lost it entirely, he wasn’t sure he could regain it. And Joe was an investment of several million dollars and quite a few highly skilled man-years.

Anglesey pulled the offending K-tube from its socket and threw it on the floor. Glass exploded. It eased his temper a bit, just enough so he could find a replacement, plug it in, switch on the current again—as the machine warmed up, once again amplifying, the Joeness in the back alleys of his brain strengthened.

Slowly, then, the man in the electric wheelchair rolled out of the room, into the hall. Let somebody else sweep up the broken tube. To hell with it. To hell with everybody.

JAN CORNELIUS HAD never been farther from Earth than some comfortable Lunar resort. He felt much put upon that the Psionics Corporation should tap him for a thirteen-month exile. The fact that he knew as much about esprojectors and their cranky innards as any other man alive was no excuse. Why send anyone at all? Who cared?

Obviously the Federation Science Authority did. It had seemingly given those bearded hermits a blank check on the taxpayer’s account.

Thus did Cornelius grumble to himself, all the long hyperbolic path to Jupiter. Then the shifting accelerations of approach to its tiny inner satellite left him too wretched for further complaint.

And when he finally, just prior to disembarkation, went up to the greenhouse for a look at Jupiter, he said not a word. Nobody does, the first time.

Arne Viken waited patiently while Cornelius stared. It still gets me, too, he remembered. By the throat. Sometimes I’m afraid to look.

At length Cornelius turned around. He had a faintly Jovian appearance himself, being a large man with an imposing girth. “I had no idea,” he whispered. “I never thought . . . I had seen pictures, but—”

Viken nodded. “Sure, Dr. Cornelius. Pictures don’t convey it.”

Where they stood, they could see the dark broken rock of the satellite, jumbled for a short way beyond the landing slip and then chopped off sheer. This moon was scarcely even a platform, it seemed, and cold constellations went streaming past it, around it. Jupiter lay across a fifth of that sky, softly ambrous, banded with colors, spotted with the shadows of planet-sized moons and with whirlwinds as broad as Earth. If there had been any gravity to speak of, Cornelius would have thought, instinctively, that the great planet was falling on him. As it was, he felt as if sucked upward; his hands were still sore where he had grabbed a rail to hold on.

“You live here . . . all alone . . . with this?” He spoke feebly.

“Oh, well, there are some fifty of us all told, pretty congenial,” said Viken. “It’s not so bad. You sign up for four-cycle hitches—four ship arrivals—and believe it or not, Dr. Cornelius, this is my third enlistment.”

The newcomer forbore to inquire more deeply. There was something not quite understandable about the men on Jupiter V. They were mostly bearded, though otherwise careful to remain neat; their low-gravity movements were somehow dreamlike to watch; they hoarded their conversation, as if to stretch it through the year and month between ships. Their monkish existence had changed them—or did they take what amounted to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, because they had never felt quite at home on green Earth?

Thirteen months! Cornelius shuddered. It was going to be a long cold wait, and the pay and bonuses accumulating for him were scant comfort now, four hundred and eighty million miles from the sun.

“Wonderful place to do research,” continued Viken. “All the facilities, handpicked colleagues, no distractions . . . and of course—” He jerked his thumb at the planet and turned to leave.

Cornelius followed, wallowing awkwardly. “It is very interesting, no doubt,” he puffed. “Fascinating. But really, Dr. Viken, to drag me way out here and make me spend a year plus waiting for the next ship . . . to do a job which may take me a few weeks—”

“Are you sure it’s that simple?” asked Viken gently. His face swiveled around, and there was something in his eyes that silenced Cornelius. “After all my time here, I’ve yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more complicated.”

They went through the ship’s air lock and the tube joining it to the station entrance. Nearly everything was underground. Rooms, laboratories, even halls had a degree of luxuriousness—why, there was a fireplace with a real fire in the common room! God alone knew what that cost!

Thinking of the huge chill emptiness where the king planet laired, and of his own year’s sentence, Cornelius decided that such luxuries were, in truth, biological necessities.

Viken showed him to a pleasantly furnished chamber which would be his own. “We’ll fetch your luggage soon and unload your psionic stuff. Right now, everybody’s either talking to the ship’s crew or reading his mail.”

Cornelius nodded absently and sat down. The chair, like all low-gee furniture, was a mere spidery skeleton, but it held his bulk comfortably enough. He felt in his tunic hoping to bribe the other man into keeping him company for a while. “Cigar? I brought some from Amsterdam.”

“Thanks.” Viken accepted with disappointing casualness, crossed long thin legs, and blew grayish clouds.

“Ah . . . are you in charge here?”

“Not exactly. No one is. We do have one administrator, the cook, to handle what little work of that type may come up. Don’t forget, this is a research station, first, last, and always.”

“What is your field, then?”

Viken frowned. “Don’t question anyone else so bluntly, Dr. Cornelius,” he warned. “They’d rather spin the gossip out as long as possible with each newcomer. It’s a rare treat to have someone whose every last conceivable reaction hasn’t been—No, no apologies to me. ’S all right. I’m a physicist, specializing in the solid state at ultrahigh pressures.” He nodded at the wall. “Plenty of it to be observed—there!”

“I see.” Cornelius smoked quietly for a while. Then: “I’m supposed to be the psionics expert, but frankly, at present, I’ve no idea why your machine should misbehave as reported.”

“You mean those, uh, K-tubes have a stable output on Earth?”

“And on Luna, Mars, Venus . . . everywhere, apparently, but here.” Cornelius shrugged. “Of course, psibeams are always pernickety, and sometimes you get an unwanted feedback when—No. I’ll get the facts before I theorize. Who are your psimen?”

“Just Anglesey, who’s not a formally trained esman at all. But he took it up after he was crippled, and showed such a natural aptitude that he was shipped out here when he volunteered. It’s so hard to get anyone for Jupiter V that we aren’t fussy about degrees. At that, Ed seems to be operating Joe as well as a Ps.D. could.”

“Ah, yes. Your pseudojovian. I’ll have to examine that angle pretty carefully too,” said Cornelius. In spite of himself, he was getting interested. “Maybe the trouble comes from something in Joe’s biochemistry. Who knows? I’ll let you into a carefully guarded little secret, Dr. Viken: psionics is not an exact science.”

“Neither is physics,” grinned the other man. After a moment, he added more soberly: “Not my brand of physics, anyway. I hope to make it exact. That’s why I’m here, you know. It’s the reason we’re all here.”

EDWARD ANGLESEY WAS a bit of a shock, the first time. He was a head, a pair of arms, and a disconcertingly intense blue stare. The rest of him was mere detail, enclosed in a wheeled machine.

“Biophysicist originally,” Viken had told Cornelius. “Studying atmospheric spores at Earth Station when he was still a young man—accident crushed him up, nothing below his chest will ever work again. Snappish type, you have to go slow with him.”

Seated on a wisp of stool in the esprojector control room, Cornelius realized that Viken had been soft-pedaling the truth.

Anglesey ate as he talked, gracelessly, letting the chair’s tentacles wipe up after him. “Got to,” he explained. “This stupid place is officially on Earth time, GMT. Jupiter isn’t. I’ve got to be here whenever Joe wakes, ready to take him over.”

“Couldn’t you have someone spell you?” asked Cornelius.

“Bah!” Anglesey stabbed a piece of prot and waggled it at the other man. Since it was native to him, he could spit out English, the common language of the station, with unmeasured ferocity. “Look here. You ever done therapeutic esping? Not just listening in, or even communication, but actual pedagogic control?”

“No, not I. It requires a certain natural talent, like yours.” Cornelius smiled. His ingratiating little phrase was swallowed without being noticed by the scored face opposite him. “I take it you mean cases like, oh, reeducating the nervous system of a palsied child?”

“Yes, yes. Good enough example. Has anyone ever tried to suppress the child’s personality, take him over in the most literal sense?”

“Good God, no!”

“Even as a scientific experiment?” Anglesey grinned. “Has any esprojector operative ever poured on the juice and swamped the child’s brain with his own thoughts? Come on, Cornelius, I won’t snitch on you.”

“Well . . . it’s out of my line, you understand.” The psionicist looked carefully away, found a bland meter face, and screwed his eyes to that. “I have, uh, heard something about . . . well, yes, there were attempts made in some pathological cases to, uh, bull through . . . break down the patient’s delusions by sheer force—”

“And it didn’t work,” said Anglesey. He laughed. “It can’t work, not even on a child, let alone an adult with a fully developed personality. Why, it took a decade of refinement, didn’t it, before the machine was debugged to the point where a psychiatrist could even ‘listen in’ without the normal variation between his pattern of thought and the patient’s . . . without that variation setting up an interference scrambling the very thing he wanted to study. The machine has to make automatic compensations for the differences between individuals. We still can’t bridge the differences between species.

“If someone else is willing to cooperate, you can very gently guide his thinking. And that’s all. If you try to seize control of another brain, a brain with its own background of experience, its own ego—you risk your very sanity. The other brain will fight back, instinctively. A fully developed, matured, hardened human personality is just too complex for outside control. It has too many resources, too much hell the subconscious can call to its defense if its integrity is threatened. Blazes, man, we can’t even master our own minds, let alone anyone else’s!”

Anglesey’s cracked-voice tirade broke off. He sat brooding at the instrument panel, tapping the console of his mechanical mother.

“WELL?” SAID CORNELIUS after a while.

He should not, perhaps, have spoken. But he found it hard to remain mute. There was too much silence—half a billion miles of it, from here to the sun. If you closed your mouth five minutes at a time, the silence began creeping in like a fog.

“Well,” gibed Anglesey. “So our pseudojovian, Joe, has a physically adult brain. The only reason I can control him is that his brain has never been given a chance to develop its own ego. I am Joe. From the moment he was ‘born’ into consciousness, I have been there. The psibeam sends me all his sense data and sends him back my motor-nerve impulses. But nevertheless, he has that excellent brain, and its cells are recording every trace of experience, even as yours and mine; his synapses have assumed the topography which is my ‘personality pattern.’

“Anyone else, taking him over from me, would find it was like an attempt to oust me myself from my own brain. It couldn’t be done. To be sure, he doubtless has only a rudimentary set of Anglesey memories—I do not, for instance, repeat trigonometric theorems while controlling him—but he has enough to be, potentially, a distinct personality.

“As a matter of fact, whenever he wakes up from sleep—there’s usually a lag of a few minutes, while I sense the change through my normal psi faculties and get the amplifying helmet adjusted—I have a bit of a struggle. I feel almost a . . . a resistance . . . until I’ve brought his mental currents completely into phase with mine. Merely dreaming has been enough of a different experience to—”

Anglesey didn’t bother to finish the sentence.

“I see,” murmured Cornelius. “Yes, it’s clear enough. In fact, it’s astonishing that you can have such total contact with a being of such alien metabolism.”

“I won’t for much longer,” said the esman sarcastically, “unless you can correct whatever is burning out those K-tubes. I don’t have an unlimited supply of spares.”

“I have some working hypotheses,” said Cornelius, “but there’s so little known about psibeam transmission—is the velocity infinite or merely very great, is the beam strength actually independent of distance? How about the possible effects of transmission . . . oh, through the degenerate matter in the Jovian core? Good Lord, a planet where water is a heavy mineral and hydrogen is a metal? What do we know?”

“We’re supposed to find out,” snapped Anglesey. “That’s what this whole project is for. Knowledge. Bull!” Almost, he spat on the floor. “Apparently what little we have learned doesn’t even get through to people. Hydrogen is still a gas where Joe lives. He’d have to dig down a few miles to reach the solid phase. And I’m expected to make a scientific analysis of Jovian conditions!”

Cornelius waited it out, letting Anglesey storm on while he himself turned over the problem on K-tube oscillation.

“They don’t understand back on Earth. Even here they don’t. Sometimes I think they refuse to understand. Joe’s down there without much more than his bare hands. He, I, we started with no more knowledge than that he could probably eat the local life. He has to spend nearly all his time hunting for food. It’s a miracle he’s come as far as he has in these few weeks—made a shelter, grown familiar with the immediate region, begun on metallurgy, hydrurgy, whatever you want to call it. What more do they want me to do, for crying in the beer?”

“Yes, yes—” mumbled Cornelius. “Yes, I—”

Anglesey raised his white bony face. Something filmed over in his eyes.

“What—?” began Cornelius.

“Shut up!” Anglesey whipped the chair around, groped for the helmet, slapped it down over his skull. “Joe’s waking. Get out of here.”

“But if you’ll only let me work while he sleeps, how can I—”

Anglesey snarled and threw a wrench at him. It was a feeble toss, even in low-gee. Cornelius backed toward the door. Anglesey was tuning in the esprojector. Suddenly he jerked.

“Cornelius!”

“Whatisit?” The psionicist tried to run back, overdid it, and skidded in a heap to end up against the panel.

“K-tube again.” Anglesey yanked off the helmet. It must have hurt like blazes, having a mental squeal build up uncontrolled and amplified in your own brain, but he said merely: “Change it for me. Fast. And then get out and leave me alone. Joe didn’t wake up of himself. Something crawled into the dugout with me—I’m in trouble down there!”

IT HAD BEEN a hard day’s work, and Joe slept heavily. He did not wake until the hands closed on his throat.

For a moment, then, he knew only a crazy smothering wave of panic. He thought he was back on Earth Station, floating in null-gee at the end of a cable while a thousand frosty stars haloed the planet before him. He thought the great I-beam had broken from its moorings and started toward him, slowly, but with all the inertia of its cold tons, spinning and shimmering in the Earth light, and the only sound himself screaming and screaming in his helmet trying to break from the cable the beam nudged him ever so gently but it kept on moving he moved with it he was crushed against the station wall nuzzled into it his mangled suit frothed as it tried to seal its wounded self there was blood mingled with the foam his blood Joe roared.

His convulsive reaction tore the hands off his neck and sent a black shape spinning across the dugout. It struck the wall, thunderously, and the lamp fell to the floor and went out.

Joe stood in darkness, breathing hard, aware in a vague fashion that the wind had died from a shriek to a low snarling while he slept.

The thing he had tossed away mumbled in pain and crawled along the wall. Joe felt through lightlessness after his club.

Something else scrabbled. The tunnel! They were coming through the tunnel! Joe groped blindly to meet them. His heart drummed thickly and his nose drank an alien stench.

The thing that emerged, as Joe’s hands closed on it, was only about half his size, but it had six monstrously taloned feet and a pair of three-fingered hands that reached after his eyes. Joe cursed, lifted it while it writhed, and dashed it to the floor. It screamed, and he heard bones splinter.

“Come on, then!” Joe arched his back and spat at them, like a tiger menaced by giant caterpillars.

They flowed through his tunnel and into the room; a dozen of them entered while he wrestled one that had curled around his shoulders and anchored its sinuous body with claws. They pulled at his legs, trying to crawl up on his back. He struck out with claws of his own, with his tail, rolled over and went down beneath a heap of them and stood up with the heap still clinging to him.

They swayed in darkness. The legged seething of them struck the dugout wall. It shivered, a rafter cracked, the roof came down. Anglesey stood in a pit, among broken ice plates, under the wan light of a sinking Ganymede.

He could see, now, that the monsters were black in color and that they had heads big enough to accommodate some brains, less than human but probably more than apes. There were a score of them or so; they struggled from beneath the wreckage and flowed at him with the same shrieking malice.

Why?

Baboon reaction, thought Anglesey somewhere in the back of himself. See the stranger, fear the stranger, hate the stranger, kill the stranger. His chest heaved, pumping air through a raw throat. He yanked a whole rafter to him, snapped it in half, and twirled the iron-hard wood.

The nearest creature got its head bashed in. The next had its back broken. The third was hurled with shattered ribs into a fourth; they went down together. Joe began to laugh. It was getting to be fun.

“Yeee-ow! Ti-i-i-iger!” He ran across the icy ground, toward the pack. They scattered, howling. He hunted them until the last one had vanished into the forest.

Panting, Joe looked at the dead. He himself was bleeding, he ached, he was cold and hungry, and his shelter had been wrecked . . . but, he’d whipped them! He had a sudden impulse to beat his chest and howl. For a moment, he hesitated—why not? Anglesey threw back his head and bayed victory at the dim shield of Ganymede.

Thereafter he went to work. First build a fire, in the lee of the spaceship—which was little more by now than a hill of corrosion. The monster pack cried in darkness and the broken ground; they had not given up on him, they would return.

He tore a haunch off one of the slain and took a bite. Pretty good. Better yet if properly cooked. Heh! They’d made a big mistake in calling his attention to their existence! He finished breakfast while Ganymede slipped under the western ice mountains. It would be morning soon. The air was almost still, and a flock of pancake-shaped skyskimmers, as Anglesey called them, went overhead, burnished copper color in the first pale dawn-streaks.

Joe rummaged in the ruins of his hut until he had recovered the water-smelting equipment. It wasn’t harmed. That was the first order of business, melt some ice and cast it in the molds of axe, knife, saw, hammer he had painfully prepared. Under Jovian conditions, methane was a liquid that you drank and water was a dense hard mineral. It would make good tools. Later on he would try alloying it with other materials.

Next—yes. To hell with the dugout; he could sleep in the open again for a while. Make a bow, set traps, be ready to massacre the black caterpillars when they attacked him again. There was a chasm not far from here, going down a long way toward the bitter cold of the metallic-hydrogen strata: a natural icebox, a place to store the several weeks’ worth of meat his enemies would supply. This would give him leisure to—Oh, a hell of a lot!

Joe laughed, exultantly, and lay down to watch the sunrise.

It struck him afresh how lovely a place this was. See how the small brilliant spark of the sun swam up out of eastern fogbanks colored dusky purple and veined with rose and gold; see how the light strengthened until the great hollow arch of the sky became one shout of radiance; see how the light spilled warm and living over a broad fair land, the million square miles of rustling low forests and wave-blinking lakes and feather-plumed hydrogen geysers; and see, see, see how the ice mountains of the west flashed like blued steel!

Anglesey drew the wild morning wind deep into his lungs and shouted with a boy’s joy.

“I’M NOT A biologist myself,” said Viken carefully. “But maybe for that reason I can better give you the general picture. Then Lopez or Matsumoto can answer any questions of detail.”

“Excellent,” nodded Cornelius. “Why don’t you assume I am totally ignorant of this project? I very nearly am, you know.”

“If you wish,” laughed Viken.

They stood in an outer office of the xenobiology section. No one else was around for the station’s clocks said 1730 GMT and there was only one shift. No point in having more, until Anglesey’s half of the enterprise had actually begun gathering quantitative data.

The physicist bent over and took a paperweight off a desk. “One of the boys made this for fun,” he said, “but it’s a pretty good model of Joe. He stands about five feet tall at the head.”

Cornelius turned the plastic image over in his hands. If you could imagine such a thing as a feline centaur with a thick prehensile tail—The torso was squat, long-armed, immensely muscular; the hairless head was round, wide-nosed, with big deep-set eyes and heavy jaws, but it was really quite a human face. The overall color was bluish gray.

“Male, I see,” he remarked.

“Of course. Perhaps you don’t understand. Joe is the complete pseudojovian: as far as we can tell, the final model, with all the bugs worked out. He’s the answer to a research question that took fifty years to ask.” Viken looked sideways at Cornelius. “So you realize the importance of your job, don’t you?”

“I’ll do my best,” said the psionicist. “But if . . . well, let’s say that tube failure or something causes you to lose Joe before I’ve solved the oscillation problem. You do have other pseudos in reserve, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Viken moodily. “But the cost—We’re not on an unlimited budget. We do go through a lot of money, because it’s expensive to stand up and sneeze this far from Earth. But for that same reason our margin is slim.”

He jammed hands in pockets and slouched toward the inner door, the laboratories, head down and talking in a low, hurried voice:

“Perhaps you don’t realize what a nightmare planet Jupiter is. Not just the surface gravity—a shade under three gees, what’s that? But the gravitational potential, ten times Earth’s. The temperature. The pressure . . . above all, the atmosphere, and the storms, and the darkness!

“When a spaceship goes down to the Jovian surface, it’s a radio-controlled job; it leaks like a sieve, to equalize pressure, but otherwise it’s the sturdiest, most utterly powerful model ever designed; it’s loaded with every instrument, every servomechanism, every safety device the human mind has yet thought up to protect a million-dollar hunk of precision equipment.

“And what happens? Half the ships never reach the surface at all. A storm snatches them and throws them away, or they collide with a floating chunk of Ice VII—small version of the Red Spot—or, so help me, what passes for a flock of birds rams one and stoves it in!

“As for the fifty percent which do land, it’s a one-way trip. We don’t even try to bring them back. If the stresses coming down haven’t sprung something, the corrosion has doomed them anyway. Hydrogen at Jovian pressure does funny things to metals.

“It cost a total of—about five million dollars—to set Joe, one pseudo, down there. Each pseudo to follow will cost, if we’re lucky, a couple of million more.”

Viken kicked open the door and led the way through. Beyond was a big room, low-ceilinged, coldly lit, and murmurous with ventilators. It reminded Cornelius of a nucleonics lab; for a moment he wasn’t sure why, then recognized the intricacies of remote control, remote observation, walls enclosing forces which could destroy the entire moon.

“These are required by the pressure, of course,” said Viken, pointing to a row of shields. “And the cold. And the hydrogen itself, as a minor hazard. We have units here duplicating conditions in the Jovian, uh, stratosphere. This is where the whole project really began.”

“I’ve heard something about that,” nodded Cornelius. “Didn’t you scoop up airborne spores?”

“Not I.” Viken chuckled. “Totti’s crew did, about fifty years ago. Proved there was life on Jupiter. A life using liquid methane as its basic solvent, solid ammonia as a starting point for nitrate synthesis—the plants use solar energy to build unsaturated carbon compounds, releasing hydrogen; the animals eat the plants and reduce those compounds again to the saturated form. There is even an equivalent of combustion. The reactions involve complex enzymes and . . . well, it’s out of my line.”

“Jovian biochemistry is pretty well understood, then.”

“Oh, yes. Even in Totti’s day, they had a highly developed biotic technology: Earth bacteria had already been synthesized and most gene structures pretty well mapped. The only reason it took so long to diagram Jovian life processes was the technical difficulty, high pressure and so on.”

“When did you actually get a look at Jupiter’s surface?”

“Gray managed that, about thirty years ago. Set a televisor ship down, a ship that lasted long enough to flash him quite a series of pictures. Since then, the technique has improved. We know that Jupiter is crawling with its own weird kind of life, probably more fertile than Earth. Extrapolating from the airborne microorganisms, our team made trial syntheses of metazoans and—”

Viken sighed. “Damn it, if only there were intelligent native life! Think what they could tell us, Cornelius, the data, the—Just think back how far we’ve gone since Lavoisier, with the low-pressure chemistry of Earth. Here’s a chance to learn a high-pressure chemistry and physics at least as rich with possibilities!”

After a moment, Cornelius murmured slyly: “Are you certain there aren’t any Jovians?”

“Oh, sure, there could be several billion of them,” shrugged Viken. “Cities, empires, anything you like. Jupiter has the surface area of a hundred Earths, and we’ve only seen maybe a dozen small regions. But we do know there aren’t any Jovians using radio. Considering their atmosphere, it’s unlikely they ever would invent it for themselves—imagine how thick a vacuum tube has to be, how strong a pump you need! So it was finally decided we’d better make our own Jovians.”

Cornelius followed him through the lab, into another room. This was less cluttered, it had a more finished appearance: the experimenter’s haywire rig had yielded to the assured precision of an engineer.

Viken went over to one of the panels which lined the walls and looked at its gauges. “Beyond this lies another pseudo,” he said. “Female, in this instance. She’s at a pressure of two hundred atmospheres and a temperature of 194 Absolute. There’s a . . . an umbilical arrangement, I guess you’d call it, to keep her alive. She was grown to adulthood in this, uh, fetal stage—we patterned our Jovians after the terrestrial mammal. She’s never been conscious, she won’t ever be till she’s ‘born.’ We have a total of twenty males and sixty females waiting here. We can count on about half reaching the surface. More can be created as required.

“It isn’t the pseudos that are so expensive, it’s their transportation. So Joe is down there alone till we’re sure that his kind can survive.”

“I take it you experimented with lower forms first,” said Cornelius.

“Of course. It took twenty years, even with forced-catalysis techniques, to work from an artificial airborne spore to Joe. We’ve used the psibeam to control everything from pseudoinsects on up. Interspecies control is possible, you know, if your puppet’s nervous system is deliberately designed for it, and isn’t given a chance to grow into a pattern different from the esman’s.”

“And Joe is the first specimen who’s given trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Scratch one hypothesis.” Cornelius sat down on a workbench, dangling thick legs and running a hand through thin sandy hair. “I thought maybe some physical effort of Jupiter was responsible. Now it looks as if the difficulty is with Joe himself.”

“We’ve all suspected that much,” said Viken. He struck a cigarette and sucked in his cheeks around the smoke. His eyes were gloomy. “Hard to see how. The biotics engineers tell me Pseudocentaurus sapiens has been more carefully designed than any product of natural evolution.”

“Even the brain?”

“Yes. It’s patterned directly on the human, to make psibeam control possible, but there are improvements—greater stability.”

“There are still the psychological aspects, though,” said Cornelius. “In spite of all our amplifiers and other fancy gadgets, psi is essentially a branch of psychology, even today . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Let’s consider traumatic experiences. I take it the . . . the adult Jovian’s fetus has a rough trip going down?”

“The ship does,” said Viken. “Not the pseudo itself, which is wrapped up in fluid just like you were before birth.”

“Nevertheless,” said Cornelius, “the two hundred atmospheres pressure here is not the same as whatever unthinkable pressure exists down on Jupiter. Could the change be injurious?”

Viken gave him a look of respect. “Not likely,” he answered. “I told you the J-ships are designed leaky. External pressure is transmitted to the, uh, uterine mechanism through a series of diaphragms, in a gradual fashion. It takes hours to make the descent, you realize.”

“Well, what happens next?” went on Cornelius. “The ship lands, the uterine mechanism opens, the umbilical connection disengages, and Joe is, shall we say, born. But he has an adult brain. He is not protected by the only half-developed infant brain from the shock of sudden awareness.”

“We thought of that,” said Viken. “Anglesey was on the psibeam, in phase with Joe, when the ship left this moon. So it wasn’t really Joe who emerged, who perceived. Joe has never been much more than a biological waldo. He can only suffer mental shock to the extent that Ed does, because it is Ed down there!”

“As you will,” said Cornelius. “Still, you didn’t plan for a race of puppets, did you?”

“Oh, heavens, no,” said Viken. “Out of the question. Once we know Joe is well established, we’ll import a few more esmen and get him some assistance in the form of other pseudos. Eventually females will be sent down, and uncontrolled males, to be educated by the puppets. A new generation will be born normally—Well, anyhow, the ultimate aim is a small civilization of Jovians. There will be hunters, miners, artisans, farmers, housewives, the works. They will support a few key members, a kind of priesthood. And that priesthood will be esp-controlled, as Joe is. It will exist solely to make instruments, take readings, perform experiments, and tell us what we want to know!”

Cornelius nodded. In a general way, this was the Jovian project as he had understood it. He could appreciate the importance of his own assignment.

Only, he still had no clue to the cause of that positive feedback in the K-tubes.

And what could he do about it?

HIS HANDS WERE still bruised. Oh, God, he thought with a groan, for the hundredth time, does it affect me that much? While Joe was fighting down there, did I really hammer my fists on metal up here?

His eyes smoldered across the room, to the bench where Cornelius worked. He didn’t like Cornelius, fat cigar-sucking slob, interminably talking and talking. He had about given up trying to be civil to the Earthworm.

The psionicist laid down a screwdriver and flexed cramped fingers. “Whuff!” He smiled. “I’m going to take a break.”

The half-assembled esprojector made a gaunt backdrop for his wide soft body, where it squatted toad-fashion on the bench. Anglesey detested the whole idea of anyone sharing this room, even for a few hours a day. Of late he had been demanding his meals brought here, left outside the door of his adjoining bedroom-bath. He had not gone beyond for quite some time now.

And why should I?

“Couldn’t you hurry it up a little?” snapped Anglesey.

Cornelius flushed. “If you’d had an assembled spare machine, instead of loose parts—” he began. Shrugging, he took out a cigar stub and relit it carefully; his supply had to last a long time.

Anglesey wondered if those stinking clouds were blown from his mouth on malicious purpose. I don’t like you, Mr. Earthman Cornelius, and it is doubtless quite mutual.

“There was no obvious need for one, until the other esmen arrive,” said Anglesey in a sullen voice. “And the testing instruments report this one in perfectly good order.”

“Nevertheless,” said Cornelius, “at irregular intervals it goes into wild oscillations which burn out the K-tube. The problem is why. I’ll have you try out this new machine as soon as it is ready, but, frankly, I don’t believe the trouble lies in electronic failure at all—or even in unsuspected physical effects.”

“Where, then?” Anglesey felt more at ease as the discussion grew purely technical.

“Well, look. What exactly is the K-tube? It’s the heart of the esprojector. It amplifies your natural psionic pulses, uses them to modulate the carrier wave, and shoots the whole beam down at Joe. It also picks up Joe’s resonating impulses and amplifies them for your benefit. Everything else is auxiliary to the K-tube.”

“Spare me the lecture,” snarled Anglesey.

“I was only rehearsing the obvious,” said Cornelius, “because every now and then it is the obvious answer which is hardest to see. Maybe it isn’t the K-tube which is misbehaving. Maybe it is you.”

“What?” The white face gaped at him. A dawning rage crept red across its thin bones.

“Nothing personal intended,” said Cornelius hastily. “But you know what a tricky beast the subconscious is. Suppose, just as a working hypothesis, that way down underneath you don’t want to be on Jupiter. I imagine it is a rather terrifying environment. Or there may be some obscure Freudian element involved. Or, quite simply and naturally, your subconscious may fail to understand that Joe’s death does not entail your own.”

“Um-m-m—” Mirabile dictu. Anglesey remained calm. He rubbed his chin with one skeletal hand. “Can you be more explicit?”

“Only in a rough way,” replied Cornelius. “Your conscious mind sends a motor impulse along the psibeam to Joe. Simultaneously, your subconscious mind, being scared of the whole business, emits the glandular-vascular-cardiac-visceral impulses associated with fear. These react on Joe, whose tension is transmitted back along the beam. Feeling Joe’s somatic fear symptoms, your subconscious gets still more worried, thereby increasing the symptoms—Get it? It’s exactly similar to ordinary neurasthenia, with this exception: that since there is a powerful amplifier, the K-tube, involved, the oscillations can build up uncontrollably within a second or two. You should be thankful the tube does burn out—otherwise your brain might do so!”

For a moment Anglesey was quiet. Then he laughed. It was a hard, barbaric laughter. Cornelius started as it struck his eardrums.

“Nice idea,” said the esman. “But I’m afraid it won’t fit all the data. You see, I like it down there. I like being Joe.”

He paused for a while, then continued in a dry impersonal tone: “Don’t judge the environment from my notes. They’re just idiotic things like estimates of wind velocity, temperature variations, mineral properties—insignificant. What I can’t put in is how Jupiter looks through a Jovian’s infrared-seeing eyes.”

“Different, I should think,” ventured Cornelius after a minute’s clumsy silence.

“Yes and no. It’s hard to put into language. Some of it I can’t, because man hasn’t got the concepts. But . . . oh, I can’t describe it. Shakespeare himself couldn’t. Just remember that everything about Jupiter which is cold and poisonous and gloomy to us is right for Joe.”

Anglesey’s tone grew remote, as if he spoke to himself:

“Imagine walking under a glowing violet sky, where great flashing clouds sweep the earth with shadow and rain strides beneath them. Imagine walking on the slopes of a mountain like polished metal, with a clean red flame exploding above you and thunder laughing in the ground. Imagine a cool wild stream, and low trees with dark coppery flowers, and a waterfall, methane-fall . . . whatever you like, leaping off a cliff, and the strong live wind shakes its mane full of rainbows! Imagine a whole forest, dark and breathing, and here and there you glimpse a pale-red wavering will-o’-the-wisp, which is the life radiation of some fleet shy animal, and . . . and—”

Anglesey croaked into silence. He stared down at his clenched fists, then he closed his eyes tight and tears ran out between the lids.

“Imagine being strong!”

Suddenly he snatched up the helmet, crammed it on his head, and twirled the control knobs. Joe had been sleeping, down in the night, but Joe was about to wake up and—roar under the four great moons till all the forest feared him?

Cornelius slipped quietly out of the room.

IN THE LONG brazen sunset light, beneath dusky cloud banks brooding storm, he strode up the hillslope with a sense of the day’s work done. Across his back, two woven baskets balanced each other, one laden with the pungent black fruit of the thorntree and one with cable-thick creepers to be used as rope. The axe on his shoulder caught the waning sunlight and tossed it blindingly back.

It had not been hard labor, but weariness dragged at his mind and he did not relish the household chores yet to be performed, cooking and cleaning and all the rest. Why couldn’t they hurry up and get him some helpers?

His eyes sought the sky, resentfully. The moon Five was hidden—down here, at the bottom of the air ocean, you saw nothing but the sun and the four Galilean satellites. He wasn’t even sure where Five was just now, in relation to himself . . . wait a minute, it’s sunset here, but if I went out to the viewdome I’d see Jupiter in the last quarter, or would I? Oh, hell, it only takes us half an Earth-day to swing around the planet anyhow—

Joe shook his head. After all this time, it was still damnably hard, now and then, to keep his thoughts straight. I, the essential I, am up in heaven, riding Jupiter V between coldstars. Remember that. Open your eyes, if you will, and see the dead control room superimposed on a living hillside.

He didn’t though. Instead, he regarded the boulders strewn wind-blasted gray over the tough mossy vegetation of the slope. They were not much like Earth rocks, nor was the soil beneath his feet like terrestrial humus.

For a moment Anglesey speculated on the origin of the silicates, aluminates, and other stony compounds. Theoretically, all such materials should be inaccessibly locked in the Jovian core, down where the pressure got vast enough for atoms to buckle and collapse. Above the core should lie thousands of miles of allotropic ice, and then the metallic hydrogen layer. There should not be complex minerals this far up, but there were.

Well, possibly Jupiter had formed according to theory, but had thereafter sucked enough cosmic dust, meteors, gases, and vapors down its great throat of gravitation to form a crust several miles thick. Or more likely the theory was altogether wrong. What did they know, what would they know, the soft pale worms of Earth?

Anglesey stuck his—Joe’s—fingers in his mouth and whistled. A baying sounded in the brush, and two midnight forms leaped toward him. He grinned and stroked their heads; training was progressing faster than he’d hoped with these pups of the black caterpillar beasts he had taken. They would make guardians for him, herders, servants.

On the crest of the hill, Joe was building himself a home. He had logged off an acre of ground and erected a stockade. Within the grounds there now stood a lean-to for himself and his stores, a methane well, and the beginnings of a large comfortable cabin.

But there was too much work for one being. Even with the half-intelligent caterpillars to help, and with cold storage for meat, most of his time would still go to hunting. The game wouldn’t last forever, either; he had to start agriculture within the next year or so—Jupiter-year, twelve Earth-years, thought Anglesey. There was the cabin to finish and furnish; he wanted to put a waterwheel, no, methane wheel in the river to turn any of a dozen machines he had in mind, he wanted to experiment with alloyed ice and—

And, quite apart from his need of help, why should he remain alone, the single thinking creature on an entire planet? He was a male in this body, with male instincts—in the long run, his health was bound to suffer if he remained a hermit, and right now the whole project depended on Joe’s health.

It wasn’t right!

But I am not alone. There are fifty men on the satellite with me. I can talk to any of them, any time I wish. It’s only that I seldom wish it, these days. I would rather be Joe.

Nevertheless . . . I, cripple, feel all the tiredness, anger, hurt, frustration, of that wonderful biological machine called Joe. The others don’t understand. When the ammonia gale flays open his skin, it is I who bleed.

Joe lay down on the ground, sighing. Fangs flashed in the mouth of the black beast which humped over to lick his face. His belly growled with hunger, but he was too tired to fix a meal. Once he had the dogs trained—

Another pseudo would be so much more rewarding to educate.

He could almost see it, in the weary darkening of his brain. Down there, in the valley below the hill, fire and thunder as the ship came to rest. And the steel egg would crack open, the steel arms—already crumbling, puny work of worms!—lift out the shape within and lay it on the earth.

She would stir, shrieking in her first lungful of air, looking about with blank mindless eyes. And Joe would come carry her home. And he would feed her, care for her, show her how to walk—it wouldn’t take long, an adult body would learn those things very fast. In a few weeks she would even be talking, be an individual, a soul.

Did you ever think, Edward Anglesey, in the days when you also walked, that your wife would be a gray, four-legged monster?

Never mind that. The important thing was to get others of his kind down here; female and male. The station’s niggling little plan would have him wait two more Earth-years, and then send him only another dummy like himself, a contemptible human mind looking through eyes which belonged rightfully to a Jovian. It was not to be tolerated!

If he weren’t so tired—

Joe sat up. Sleep drained from him as the realization entered. He wasn’t tired, not to speak of. Anglesey was. Anglesey, the human side of him, who for months had only slept in catnaps, whose rest had lately been interrupted by Cornelius—it was the human body which drooped, gave up, and sent wave after soft wave of sleep down the psibeam to Joe.

Somatic tension traveled skyward; Anglesey jerked awake.

He swore. As he sat there beneath the helmet, the vividness of Jupiter faded with his scattering concentration, as if it grew transparent; the steel prison which was his laboratory strengthened behind it. He was losing contact—Rapidly, with the skill of experience, he brought himself back into phase with the neutral current of the other brain. He willed sleepiness on Joe, exactly as a man wills it on himself.

And, like any other insomniac, he failed. The Joe-body was too hungry. It got up and walked across the compound toward its shack.

The K-tube went wild and blew itself out.

THE NIGHT BEFORE the ships left, Viken and Cornelius sat up late.

It was not truly a night, of course. In twelve hours the tiny moon was hurled clear around Jupiter, from darkness back to darkness, and there might well be a pallid little sun over its crags when the clocks said witches were abroad in Greenwich. But most of the personnel were asleep at this hour.

Viken scowled. “I don’t like it,” he said. “Too sudden a change of plans. Too big a gamble.”

“You are only risking—how many?—three male and a dozen female pseudos,” Cornelius replied.

“And fifteen J-ships. All we have. If Anglesey’s notion doesn’t work, it will be months, a year or more, till we can have others built and resume aerial survey.”

“But if it does work,” said Cornelius, “you won’t need any J-ships, except to carry down more pseudos. You will be too busy evaluating data from the surface to piddle around in the upper atmosphere.”

“Of course. But we never expected it so soon. We were going to bring more esmen out here, to operate some more pseudos—”

“But they aren’t needed,” said Cornelius. He struck a cigar to life and took a long pull on it, while his mind sought carefully for words. “Not for a while, anyhow. Joe has reached a point where, given help, he can leap several thousand years of history—he may even have a radio of sorts operating in the fairly near future, which would eliminate the necessity of much of your esping. But without help, he’ll just have to mark time. And it’s stupid to make a highly trained human esman perform manual labor, which is all that the other pseudos are needed for at this moment. Once the Jovian settlement is well established, certainly, then you can send down more puppets.”

“The question is, though,” persisted Viken, “can Anglesey himself educate all those pseudos at once? They’ll be helpless as infants for days. It will be weeks before they really start thinking and acting for themselves. Can Joe take care of them meanwhile?”

“He has food and fuel stored for months ahead,” said Cornelius. “As for what Joe’s capabilities are, well, hm-m-m . . . we just have to take Anglesey’s judgment. He has the only inside information.”

“And once those Jovians do become personalities,” worried Viken, “are they necessarily going to string along with Joe? Don’t forget, the pseudos are not carbon copies of each other. The uncertainty principle assures each one a unique set of genes. If there is only one human mind on Jupiter, among all those aliens—”

“One human mind?” It was barely audible. Viken opened his mouth inquiringly. The other man hurried on.

“Oh, I’m sure Anglesey can continue to dominate them,” said Cornelius. “His own personality is rather—tremendous.”

Viken looked startled. “You really think so?”

The psionicist nodded. “Yes. I’ve seen more of him in the past weeks than anyone else. And my profession naturally orients me more toward a man’s psychology than his body or his habits. You see a waspish cripple. I see a mind which has reacted to its physical handicaps by developing such a hellish energy, such an inhuman power of concentration, that it almost frightens me. Give that mind a sound body for its use and nothing is impossible to it.”

“You may be right, at that,” murmured Viken after a pause. “Not that it matters. The decision is taken, the rockets go down tomorrow. I hope it all works out.”

He waited for another while. The whirring of ventilators in his little room seemed unnaturally loud, the colors of a girlie picture on the wall shockingly garish. Then he said, slowly:

“You’ve been rather close-mouthed yourself, Jan. When do you expect to finish your own esprojector and start making the tests?”

Cornelius looked around. The door stood open to an empty hallway, but he reached out and closed it before he answered with a slight grin: “It’s been ready for the past few days. But don’t tell anyone.”

“How’s that?” Viken started. The movement, in low-gee, took him out of his chair and halfway across the table between the men. He shoved himself back and waited.

“I have been making meaningless tinkering motions,” said Cornelius, “but what I waited for was a highly emotional moment, a time when I can be sure Anglesey’s entire attention will be focused on Joe. This business tomorrow is exactly what I need.”

“Why?”

“You see, I have pretty well convinced myself that the trouble in the machine is psychological, not physical. I think that for some reason, buried in his subconscious, Anglesey doesn’t want to experience Jupiter. A conflict of that type might well set a psionic amplifier circuit oscillating.”

“Hm-m-m.” Viken rubbed his chin. “Could be. Lately Ed has been changing more and more. When he first came here, he was peppery enough, and he would at least play an occasional game of poker. Now he’s pulled so far into his shell you can’t even see him. I never thought of it before, but . . . yes, by God, Jupiter must be having some effect on him.”

“Hm-m-m,” nodded Cornelius. He did not elaborate: did not, for instance, mention that one altogether uncharacteristic episode when Anglesey had tried to describe what it was like to be a Jovian.

“Of course,” said Viken thoughtfully, “the previous men were not affected especially. Nor was Ed at first, while he was still controlling lower-type pseudos. It’s only since Joe went down to the surface that he’s become so different.”

“Yes, yes,” said Cornelius hastily. “I’ve learned that much. But enough shop talk—”

“No. Wait a minute.” Viken spoke in a low, hurried tone, looking past him. “For the first time, I’m starting to think clearly about this . . . never really stopped to analyze it before, just accepted a bad situation. There is something peculiar about Joe. It can’t very well involve his physical structure, or the environment, because lower forms didn’t give this trouble. Could it be the fact that—Joe is the first puppet in all history with a potentially human intelligence?”

“We speculate in a vacuum,” said Cornelius. “Tomorrow, maybe, I can tell you. Now I know nothing.”

Viken sat up straight. His pale eyes focused on the other man and stayed there, unblinking. “One minute,” he said.

“Yes?” Cornelius shifted, half rising. “Quickly, please. It is past my bedtime.”

“You know a good deal more than you’ve admitted,” said Viken. “Don’t you?”

“What makes you think that?”

“You aren’t the most gifted liar in the universe. And then—you argued very strongly for Anglesey’s scheme, this sending down the other pseudos. More strongly than a newcomer should.”

“I told you, I want his attention focused elsewhere when—”

“Do you want it that badly?” snapped Viken.

Cornelius was still for a minute. Then he sighed and leaned back.

“All right,” he said. “I shall have to trust your discretion. I wasn’t sure, you see, how any of you old-time station personnel would react. So I didn’t want to blabber out my speculations, which may be wrong. The confirmed facts, yes, I will tell them; but I don’t wish to attack a man’s religion with a mere theory.”

Viken scowled. “What the devil do you mean?”

Cornelius puffed hard on his cigar; its tip waxed and waned like a miniature red demon star. “This Jupiter V is more than a research station,” he said gently. “It is a way of life, is it not? No one would come here for even one hitch unless the work was important to him. Those who reenlist, they must find something in the work, something which Earth with all her riches cannot offer them. No?”

“Yes,” answered Viken. It was almost a whisper. “I didn’t think you would understand so well. But what of it?”

“Well, I don’t want to tell you, unless I can prove it, that maybe this has all gone for nothing. Maybe you have wasted your lives and a lot of money and will have to pack up and go home.”

Viken’s long face did not flicker a muscle. It seemed to have congealed. But he said calmly enough: “Why?”

“Consider Joe,” said Cornelius. “His brain has as much capacity as any adult human’s. It has been recording every sense datum that came to it, from the moment of ‘birth’—making a record in itself, in its own cells, not merely in Anglesey’s physical memory bank up here. Also, you know, a thought is a sense datum too. And thoughts are not separated into neat little railway tracks; they form a continuous field. Every time Anglesey is in rapport with Joe, and thinks, the thought goes through Joe’s synapses as well as his own—and every thought carries its own associations, and every associated memory is recorded. Like if Joe is building a hut, the shape of the logs might remind Anglesey of some geometric figure, which in turn would remind him of the Pythagorean theorem—”

“I get the idea,” said Viken in a cautious way. “Given time, Joe’s brain will have stored everything that ever was in Ed’s.”

“Correct. Now a functioning nervous system with an engrammatic pattern of experience—in this case, a nonhuman nervous system—isn’t that a pretty good definition of a personality?”

“I suppose so—Good Lord!” Viken jumped. “You mean Joe is—taking over?”

“In a way. A subtle, automatic, unconscious way.” Cornelius drew a deep breath and plunged into it. “The pseudojovian is so nearly perfect a life form: your biologists engineered into it all the experiences gained from nature’s mistakes in designing us. At first, Joe was only a remote-controlled biological machine. Then Anglesey and Joe became two facets of a single personality. Then, oh, very slowly, the stronger, healthier body . . . more amplitude to its thoughts . . . do you see? Joe is becoming the dominant side. Like this business of sending down the other pseudos—Anglesey only thinks he has logical reasons for wanting it done. Actually, his ‘reasons’ are mere rationalizations for the instinctive desires of the Joe-facet.

“Anglesey’s subconscious must comprehend the situation, in a dim reactive way; it must feel his human ego gradually being submerged by the steamroller force of Joe’s instincts and Joe’s wishes. It tries to defend its own identity, and is swatted down by the superior force of Joe’s own nascent subconscious.

“I put it crudely,” he finished in an apologetic tone, “but it will account for that oscillation in the K-tubes.”

Viken nodded slowly, like an old man. “Yes, I see it,” he answered. “The alien environment down there . . . the different brain structure . . . good God! Ed’s being swallowed up in Joe! The puppet master is becoming the puppet!” He looked ill.

“Only speculation on my part,” said Cornelius. All at once, he felt very tired. It was not pleasant to do this to Viken, whom he liked. “But you see the dilemma, no? If I am right, then any esman will gradually become a Jovian—a monster with two bodies, of which the human body is the unimportant auxiliary one. This means no esman will ever agree to control a pseudo—therefore the end of your project.”

He stood up. “I’m sorry, Arne. You made me tell you what I think, and now you will lie awake worrying, and I am quite wrong and you worry for nothing.”

“It’s all right,” mumbled Viken. “Maybe you’re not wrong.”

“I don’t know.” Cornelius drifted toward the door. “I am going to try to find some answers tomorrow. Good night.”

THE MOON-SHAKING THUNDER of the rockets, crash, crash, crash, leaping from their cradles, was long past. Now the fleet glided on metal wings, with straining secondary ramjets, through the rage of the Jovian sky.

As Cornelius opened the control-room door, he looked at his telltale board. Elsewhere a voice tolled the word to all the stations, one ship wrecked, two ships wrecked, but Anglesey would let no sound enter his presence when he wore the helmet. An obliging technician had haywired a panel of fifteen red and fifteen blue lights above Cornelius’ esprojector, to keep him informed, too. Ostensibly, of course, they were only there for Anglesey’s benefit, though the esman had insisted he wouldn’t be looking at them.

Four of the red bulbs were dark and thus four blue ones would not shine for a safe landing. A whirlwind, a thunderbolt, a floating ice meteor, a flock of mantalike birds with flesh as dense and hard as iron—there could be a hundred things which had crumpled four ships and tossed them tattered across the poison forests.

Four ships, hell! Think of four living creatures, with an excellence of brain to rival your own, damned first to years in unconscious night and then, never awakening save for one uncomprehending instant, dashed in bloody splinters against an ice mountain. The wasteful callousness of it was a cold knot in Cornelius’ belly. It had to be done, no doubt, if there was to be any thinking life on Jupiter at all; but then let it be done quickly and minimally, he thought, so the next generation could be begotten by love and not by machines!

He closed the door behind him and waited for a breathless moment. Anglesey was a wheelchair and a coppery curve of helmet, facing the opposite wall. No movement, no awareness whatsoever. Good!

It would be awkward, perhaps ruinous, if Anglesey learned of this most intimate peering. But he needn’t, ever. He was blindfolded and ear-plugged by his own concentration.

Nevertheless, the psionicist moved his bulky form with care, across the room to the new esprojector. He did not much like his snooper’s role; he would not have assumed it at all if he had seen any other hope. But neither did it make him feel especially guilty. If what he suspected was true, then Anglesey was all unawares being twisted into something not human; to spy on him might be to save him.

Gently, Cornelius activated the meters and started his tubes warming up. The oscilloscope built into Anglesey’s machine gave him the other man’s exact alpha rhythm, his basic biological clock. First you adjusted to that, then you discovered the subtler elements by feel, and when your set was fully in phase you could probe undetected and—

Find out what was wrong. Read Anglesey’s tortured subconscious and see what there was on Jupiter that both drew and terrified him.

Five ships wrecked.

But it must be very nearly time for them to land. Maybe only five would be lost in all. Maybe ten would get through. Ten comrades for—Joe?

Cornelius sighed. He looked at the cripple, seated blind and deaf to the human world which had crippled him, and felt a pity and an anger. It wasn’t fair, none of it was.

Not even to Joe. Joe wasn’t any kind of soul-eating devil. He did not even realize, as yet, that he was Joe, that Anglesey was becoming a mere appendage. He hadn’t asked to be created, and to withdraw his human counterpart from him would be very likely to destroy him.

Somehow, there were always penalties for everybody, when men exceeded the decent limits.

Cornelius swore at him, voicelessly. Work to do. He sat down and fitted the helmet on his own head. The carrier wave made a faint pulse, inaudible, the trembling of neurones low in his awareness. You couldn’t describe it.

Reaching up, he turned to Anglesey’s alpha. His own had a somewhat lower frequency. It was necessary to carry the signals through a heterodyning process. Still no reception . . . well, of course, he had to find the exact wave form, timbre was as basic to thought as to music. He adjusted the dials, slowly, with enormous care.

Something flashed through his consciousness, a vision of clouds rolled in a violet-red sky, a wind that galloped across horizonless immensity—he lost it. His fingers shook as he turned back.

The psibeam between Joe and Anglesey broadened. It took Cornelius into the circuit. He looked through Joe’s eyes, he stood on a hill and stared into the sky above the ice mountains, straining for sign of the first rocket; and simultaneously, he was still Jan Cornelius, blurrily seeing the meters, probing about for emotions, symbols, any key to the locked terror in Anglesey’s soul.

The terror rose up and struck him in the face.

PSIONIC DETECTION IS not a matter of passive listening in. Much as a radio receiver is necessarily also a weak transmitter, the nervous system in resonance with a source of psionic-spectrum energy is itself emitting. Normally, of course, this effect is unimportant; but when you pass the impulses, either way, through a set of heterodyning and amplifying units, with a high negative feedback—

In the early days, psionic psychotherapy vitiated itself because the amplified thoughts of one man, entering the brain of another, would combine with the latter’s own neural cycles according to the ordinary vector laws. The result was that both men felt the new beat frequencies as a nightmarish fluttering of their very thoughts. An analyst, trained into self-control, could ignore it; his patient could not, and reacted violently.

But eventually the basic human wave-timbres were measured, and psionic therapy resumed. The modern esprojector analyzed an incoming signal and shifted its characteristics over to the “listener’s” pattern. The really different pulses of the transmitting brain, those which could not possibly be mapped onto the pattern of the receiving neurones—as an exponential signal cannot very practicably be mapped onto a sinusoid—those were filtered out.

Thus compensated, the other thought could be apprehended as comfortably as one’s own. If the patient were on a psibeam circuit, a skilled operator could tune in without the patient being necessarily aware of it. The operator could neither probe the other man’s thoughts or implant thoughts of his own.

Cornelius’ plan, an obvious one to any psionicist, had depended on this. He would receive from an unwitting Anglesey-Joe. If his theory were right, and the esman’s personality was being distorted into that of a monster—his thinking would be too alien to come through the filters. Cornelius would receive spottily or not at all. If his theory was wrong, and Anglesey was still Anglesey, he would receive only a normal human stream-of-consciousness, and could probe for other trouble-making factors.

His brain roared!

What’s happening to me?

For a moment, the interference which turned his thoughts to saw-toothed gibberish struck him down with panic. He gulped for breath, there in the Jovian wind, and his dreadful dogs sensed the alienness in him and whined.

Then, recognition, remembrance, and a blaze of anger so great that it left no room for fear. Joe filled his lungs and shouted it aloud, the hillside boomed with echoes:

“Get out of my mind!”

He felt Cornelius spiral down toward unconsciousness. The overwhelming force of his own mental blow had been too much. He laughed, it was more like a snarl, and eased the pressure.

Above him, between thunderous clouds, winked the first thin descending rocket flare.

Cornelius’ mind groped back toward the light. It broke a watery surface, the man’s mouth snapped after air, and his hands reached for the dials, to turn his machine off and escape.

“Not so fast, you.” Grimly, Joe drove home a command that locked Cornelius’ muscles rigid. “I want to know the meaning of this. Hold still and let me look!” He smashed home an impulse which could be rendered, perhaps, as an incandescent question mark. Remembrance exploded in shards through the psionicist’s forebrain.

“So. That’s all there is? You thought I was afraid to come down here and be Joe, and wanted to know why? But I told you I wasn’t!”

I should have believed—whispered Cornelius.

“Well, get out of the circuit, then.” Joe continued growling it vocally. “And don’t ever come back in the control room, understand? K-tubes or no, I don’t want to see you again. And I may be a cripple, but I can still take you apart cell by cell. Now—sign off—leave me alone. The first ship will be landing in minutes.”

You a cripple . . . you, Joe-Anglesey?

“What?” The great gray being on the hill lifted his barbaric head as if to sudden trumpets. “What do you mean?”

Don’t you understand? said the weak, dragging thought. You know how the esprojector works. You know I could have probed Anglesey’s mind in Anglesey’s brain without making enough interference to be noticed. And I could not have probed a wholly nonhuman mind at all, nor could it have been aware of me. The filters would not have passed such a signal. Yet you felt me in the first fractional second. It can only mean a human mind in a nonhuman brain.

You are not the half-corpse on Jupiter V any longer. You’re Joe—Joe-Anglesey.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Joe. “You’re right.”

He turned Anglesey off, kicked Cornelius out of his mind with a single brutal impulse, and ran down the hill to meet the spaceship.

Cornelius woke up minutes afterwards. His skull felt ready to split apart. He groped for the main switch before him, clashed it down, ripped the helmet off his head and threw it clanging on the floor. But it took a little while to gather the strength to do the same for Anglesey. The other man was not able to do anything for himself.

THEY SAT OUTSIDE sickbay and waited. It was a harshly lit barrenness of metal and plastic, smelling of antiseptics: down near the heart of the satellite, with miles of rock to hide the terrible face of Jupiter.

Only Viken and Cornelius were in that cramped little room. The rest of the station went about its business mechanically, filling in the time till it could learn what had happened. Beyond the door, three biotechnicians, who were also the station’s medical staff, fought with death’s angel for the thing which had been Edward Anglesey.

“Nine ships got down,” said Viken dully. “Two males, seven females. It’s enough to start a colony.”

“It would be genetically desirable to have more,” pointed out Cornelius. He kept his own voice low, in spite of its underlying cheerfulness. There was a certain awesome quality to all this.

“I still don’t understand,” said Viken.

“Oh; it’s clear enough—now. I should have guessed it before, maybe. We had all the facts, it was only that we couldn’t make the simple, obvious interpretation of them. No, we had to conjure up Frankenstein’s monster.”

“Well,” Viken’s words grated, “we have played Frankenstein, haven’t we? Ed is dying in there.”

“It depends on how you define death.” Cornelius drew hard on his cigar, needing anything that might steady him. His tone grew purposely dry of emotion:

“Look here. Consider the data. Joe, now: a creature with a brain of human capacity, but without a mind—a perfect Lockean tabula rasa, for Anglesey’s psibeam to write on. We deduced, correctly enough—if very belatedly—that when enough had been written, there would be a personality. But the question was: whose? Because, I suppose, of normal human fear of the unknown, we assumed that any personality in so alien a body had to be monstrous. Therefore it must be hostile to Anglesey, must be swamping him—”

The door opened. Both men jerked to their feet.

The chief surgeon shook his head. “No use. Typical deep-shock traumata, close to terminus now. If we had better facilities, maybe—”

“No,” said Cornelius. “You cannot save a man who has decided not to live anymore.”

“I know.” The doctor removed his mask. “I need a cigarette. Who’s got one?” His hands shook a little as he accepted it from Viken.

“But how could he—decide—anything?” choked the physicist. “He’s been unconscious ever since Jan pulled him away from that . . . that thing.”

“It was decided before then,” said Cornelius. “As a matter of fact, that hulk in there on the operating table no longer has a mind. I know. I was there.” He shuddered a little. A stiff shot of tranquilizer was all that held nightmare away from him. Later he would have to have that memory exorcised.

The doctor took a long drag of smoke, held it in his lungs a moment, and exhaled gustily. “I guess this winds up the project,” he said. “We’ll never get another esman.”

“I’ll say we won’t.” Viken’s tone sounded rusty. “I’m going to smash that devil’s engine myself.”

“Hold on a minute,” exclaimed Cornelius. “Don’t you understand? This isn’t the end. It’s the beginning!”

“I’d better get back,” said the doctor. He stubbed out his cigarette and went through the door. It closed behind him with a deathlike quietness.

“What do you mean?” Viken said it as if erecting a barrier.

“Won’t you understand?” roared Cornelius. “Joe has all Anglesey’s habits, thoughts, memories, prejudices, interests . . . oh, yes, the different body and the different environment, they do cause some changes—but no more than any man might undergo on Earth. If you were suddenly cured of a wasting disease, wouldn’t you maybe get a little boisterous and rough? There is nothing abnormal in it. Nor is it abnormal to want to stay healthy—no? Do you see?”

Viken sat down. He spent a while without speaking.

Then, enormously slow and careful: “Do you mean Joe is Ed?”

“Or Ed is Joe. Whatever you like. He calls himself Joe now, I think—as a symbol of freedom—but he is still himself. What is the ego but continuity of existence?

“He himself did not fully understand this. He only knew—he told me, and I should have believed him—that on Jupiter he was strong and happy. Why did the K-tube oscillate? An hysterical symptom? Anglesey’s subconscious was not afraid to stay on Jupiter—it was afraid to come back!

“And then, today, I listened in. By now, his whole self was focused on Joe. That is, the primary source of libido was Joe’s virile body, not Anglesey’s sick one. This meant a different pattern of impulses—not too alien to pass the filters, but alien enough to set up interference. So he felt my presence. And he saw the truth, just as I did—

“Do you know the last emotion I felt, as Joe threw me out of his mind? Not anger anymore. He plays rough, him, but all he had room to feel was joy.

“I knew how strong a personality Anglesey has! Whatever made me think an overgrown child-brain like Joe’s could override it? In there, the doctors—bah! They’re trying to salvage a hulk which has been shed because it is useless!”

Cornelius stopped. His throat was quite raw from talking. He paced the floor, rolled cigar smoke around his mouth but did not draw it any farther in.

When a few minutes had passed, Viken said cautiously: “All right. You should know—as you said, you were there. But what do we do now? How do we get in touch with Ed? Will he even be interested in contacting us?”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Cornelius. “He is still himself, remember. Now that he has none of the cripple’s frustrations, he should be more amiable. When the novelty of his new friends wears off, he will want someone who can talk to him as an equal.”

“And precisely who will operate another pseudo?” asked Viken sarcastically. “I’m quite happy with this skinny frame of mine, thank you!”

“Was Anglesey the only hopeless cripple on Earth?” asked Cornelius quietly.

Viken gaped at him.

“And there are aging men, too,” went on the psionicist, half to himself. “Someday, my friend, when you and I feel the years close in, and so much we would like to learn—maybe we, too, would enjoy an extra lifetime in a Jovian body.” He nodded at his cigar. “A hard, lusty, stormy kind of life, granted—dangerous, brawling, violent—but life as no human, perhaps, has lived it since the days of Elizabeth the First. Oh, yes, there will be small trouble finding Jovians.”

He turned his head as the surgeon came out again.

“Well!” croaked Viken.

The doctor sat down. “It’s finished,” he said.

They waited for a moment, awkwardly.

“Odd,” said the doctor. He groped after a cigarette he didn’t have. Silently, Viken offered him one. “Odd. I’ve seen these cases before. People who simply resign from life. This is the first one I ever saw that went out smiling—smiling all the time.”

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN “All You Zombies—”

One of the titans of science fiction’s Golden Age, Robert Heinlein began writing science fiction in 1939 after a brief military career and soon became a prolific contributor to science fiction magazines, notably Astounding Science Fiction, which published most of the best of his early writing. His fiction was notable for its sense of a “lived-in” future. In stories such as “The Roads Must Roll,” “We Also Walks Dogs,” “Blowups Happen,” and others, Heinlein showed how pervasively future developments in science and technology would impact culture and civilization at every level. Most of the stories Heinlein collected in The Man Who Sold the Moon, The Green Hills of Earth, and Revolt in 2100 fit the scheme of Heinlein’s future-history series, which along with the novel was collected definitively in The Past through Tomorrow. Heinlein’s fiction is also renowned for its explorations of social and political themes and for its depiction in science fictional settings of societies where private and group interests are often at variance. Beyond This Horizon concerns a future world where eugenics has created the perfect society. Methuselah’s Children concerns a group of immortals, the product of selective breeding, who face annihilation at the hands of those not similarly gifted. The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress vividly depicts the revolt of a colony on the Moon attempting to break free of control by the government on Earth. The Puppet Masters is his most famous study of the individual and collective consciousness, about Earth’s efforts to fight off invasion by aliens intent on absorbing humanity into its group mind. In the years immediately after World War II, Heinlein wrote influential science fiction novels for young adult readers, including Space Cadet, The Star Beast, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, and Starship Troopers, a controversial novel about a militaristic future where freedom and citizenship are predicated on training for the armed services. Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein’s 1962 novel about a messianic human raised on Mars who exposes the corruption and hypocrisy of civilization on Earth, was the first science fiction novel to reach the national bestseller list. Heinlein also wrote a number of groundbreaking modern fantasies, including Magic, Inc. and the stories collected in The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag.

2217 TIME ZONE V (EST) 7 Nov 1970 NYC—“Pop’s Place”: I was polishing a brandy snifter when the Unmarried Mother came in. I noted the time—10:17 p.m. zone five, or eastern time, November 7th, 1970. Temporal agents always notice time & date; we must.

The Unmarried Mother was a man twenty-five years old, no taller than I am, childish features and a touchy temper. I didn’t like his looks—I never had—but he was a lad I was here to recruit, he was my boy. I gave him my best barkeep’s smile.

Maybe I’m too critical. He wasn’t swish; his nickname came from what he always said when some nosy type asked him his line: “I’m an unmarried mother.” If he felt less than murderous he would add: “—at four cents a word. I write confession stories.”

If he felt nasty, he would wait for somebody to make something of it. He had a lethal style of infighting, like a female cop—one reason I wanted him. Not the only one.

He had a load on and his face showed that he despised people more than usual. Silently I poured a double shot of Old Underwear and left the bottle. He drank it, poured another.

I wiped the bar top. “How’s the ‘Unmarried Mother’ racket?”

His fingers tightened on the glass and he seemed about to throw it at me; I felt for the sap under the bar. In temporal manipulation you try to figure everything, but there are so many factors that you never take needless risks.

I saw him relax that tiny amount they teach you to watch for in the Bureau’s training school. “Sorry,” I said. “Just asking, ‘How’s business?’ Make it ‘How’s the weather?’ ”

He looked sour. “Business is okay. I write ’em, they print ’em, I eat.”

I poured myself one, leaned toward him. “Matter of fact,” I said, “you write a nice stick—I’ve sampled a few. You have an amazingly sure touch with the woman’s angle.”

It was a slip I had to risk; he never admitted what pen-names he used. But he was boiled enough to pick up only the last: “ ‘Woman’s angle!’ ” he repeated with a snort. “Yeah, I know the woman’s angle. I should.”

“So?” I said doubtfully. “Sisters?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Now, now,” I answered mildly, “bartenders and psychiatrists learn that nothing is stranger than truth. Why, son, if you heard the stories I do—well, you’d make yourself rich. Incredible.”

“You don’t know what ‘incredible’ means!”

“So? Nothing astonishes me. I’ve always heard worse.”

He snorted again. “Want to bet the rest of the bottle?”

“I’ll bet a full bottle.” I placed one on the bar.

“Well—” I signaled my other bartender to handle the trade. We were at the far end, a single-stool space that I kept private by loading the bar top by it with jars of pickled eggs and other clutter. A few were at the other end watching the fights and somebody was playing the juke box—private as a bed where we were.

“Okay,” he began, “to start with, I’m a bastard.”

“No distinction around here,” I said.

“I mean it,” he snapped. “My parents weren’t married.”

“Still no distinction,” I insisted. “Neither were mine.”

“When—” He stopped, gave me the first warm look I ever saw on him. “You mean that?”

“I do. A one-hundred-percent bastard. In fact,” I added, “no one in my family ever marries. All bastards.

“Oh, that.” I showed it to him. “It just looks like a wedding ring; I wear it to keep women off.” It is an antique I bought in 1985 from a fellow operative—he had fetched it from pre-Christian Crete. “The Worm Ouroboros . . . the World Snake that eats its own tail, forever without end. A symbol of the Great Paradox.”

He barely glanced at it. “If you’re really a bastard, you know how it feels. When I was a little girl—”

“Wups!” I said. “Did I hear you correctly?”

“Who’s telling this story? When I was a little girl—Look, ever hear of Christine Jorgenson? Or Roberta Cowell?”

“Uh, sex-change cases? You’re trying to tell me—”

“Don’t interrupt or swelp me, I won’t talk. I was a foundling, left at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945 when I was a month old. When I was a little girl, I envied kids with parents. Then, when I learned about sex—and, believe me, Pop, you learn fast in an orphanage—”

“I know.”

“—I made a solemn vow that any kid of mine would have both a pop and a mom. It kept me ‘pure,’ quite a feat in that vicinity—I had to learn to fight to manage it. Then I got older and realized I stood darn little chance of getting married—for the same reason I hadn’t been adopted.” He scowled. “I was horse-faced and bucktoothed, flat-chested and straight-haired.”

“You don’t look any worse than I do.”

“Who cares how a barkeep looks? Or a writer? But people wanting to adopt pick little blue-eyed golden-haired morons. Later on, the boys want bulging breasts, a cute face, and an Oh-you-wonderful-male manner.” He shugged. “I couldn’t compete. So I decided to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S.”

“Eh?”

“Women’s Emergency National Corps, Hospitality & Entertainment Section, what they now call ‘Space Angels’—Auxiliary Nursing Group, Extraterrestrial Legions.”

I knew both terms, once I had them chronized. We use still a third name, it’s that elite military service corps: Women’s Hospitality Order Refortifying & Encouraging Spacemen. Vocabulary shift is the worst hurdle in time-jumps—did you know that “service station” once meant a dispensary for petroleum fractions? Once on an assignment in the Churchill Era, a woman said to me, “Meet me at the service station next door”—which is not what it sounds; a “service station” (then) wouldn’t have a bed in it.

He went on: “It was when they first admitted you can’t send men into space for months and years and not relieve the tension. You remember how the wowsers screamed?—that improved my chance, since volunteers were scarce. A gal had to be respectable, preferably virgin (they liked to train them from scratch), above average mentally, and stable emotionally. But most volunteers were old hookers, or neurotics who would crack up ten days off Earth. So I didn’t need looks; if they accepted me, they would fix my buck teeth, put a wave in my hair, teach me to walk and dance and how to listen to a man pleasingly, and everything else—plus training for the prime duties. They would even use plastic surgery if it would help—nothing too good for Our Boys.

“Best yet, they made sure you didn’t get pregnant during your enlistment—and you were almost certain to marry at the end of your hitch. Same way today, A.N.G.E.L.S. marry spacers—they talk the language.

“When I was eighteen I was placed as a ‘mother’s helper.’ This family simply wanted a cheap servant but I didn’t mind as I couldn’t enlist till I was twenty-one. I did housework and went to night school—pretending to continue my high school typing and shorthand but going to a charm class instead, to better my chances for enlistment.

“Then I met this city slicker with his hundred-dollar bills.” He scowled. “The no-good actually did have a wad of hundred-dollar bills. He showed me one night, told me to help myself.

“But I didn’t. I liked him. He was the first man I ever met who was nice to me without trying games with me. I quit night school to see him oftener. It was the happiest time of my life.

“Then one night in the park the games began.”

He stopped. I said, “And then?”

“And then nothing! I never saw him again. He walked me home and told me he loved me—and kissed me good-night and never came back.” He looked grim. “If I could find him, I’d kill him!”

“Well,” I sympathized, “I know how you feel. But killing him—just for doing what comes naturally—hmm . . . Did you struggle?”

“Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

“Quite a bit. Maybe he deserves a couple of broken arms for running out on you, but—”

“He deserves worse than that! Wait till you hear. Somehow I kept anyone from suspecting and decided it was all for the best. I hadn’t really loved him and probably would never love anybody—and I was more eager to join the W.E.N.C.H.E.S. than ever. I wasn’t disqualified, they didn’t insist on virgins. I cheered up.

“It wasn’t until my skirts got tight that I realized.”

“Pregnant?”

“He had me higher ’n a kite! Those skinflints I lived with ignored it as long as I could work—then kicked me out and the orphanage wouldn’t take me back. I landed in a charity ward surrounded by other big bellies and trotted bedpans until my time came.

“One night I found myself on an operating table, with a nurse saying, ‘Relax. Now breathe deeply.’

“I woke up in bed, numb from the chest down. My surgeon came in. ‘How do you feel?’ he says cheerfully.

“ ‘Like a mummy.’

“ ‘Naturally. You’re wrapped like one and full of dope to keep you numb. You’ll get well—but a Caesarian isn’t a hangnail.’

“ ‘Caesarian,’ I said. ‘Doc—did I lose the baby?’

“ ‘Oh, no. Your baby’s fine.’

“ ‘Oh. Boy or girl?’

“ ‘A healthy little girl. Five pounds, three ounces.’

“I relaxed. It’s something, to have made a baby. I told myself I would go somewhere and tack ‘Mrs.’ on my name and let the kid think her papa was dead—no orphanage for my kid!

“But the surgeon was talking. ‘Tell me, uh—’ He avoided my name. ‘—did you ever think your glandular setup was odd?’

“I said, ‘Huh? Of course not. What are you driving at?’

“He hesitated. ‘I’ll give you this in one dose, then a hypo to let you sleep off your jitters. You’ll have ’em.’

“ ‘Why?’ I demanded.

“ ‘Ever hear of that Scottish physician who was female until she was thirty-five?—then had surgery and became legally and medically a man? Got married. All okay.’

“ ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

“ ‘That’s what I’m saying. You’re a man.’

“I tried to sit up. ‘What?’

“ ‘Take it easy. When I opened you, I found a mess. I sent for the Chief of Surgery while I got the baby out, then we held a consultation with you on the table—and worked for hours to salvage what we could. You had two full sets of organs, both immature, but with the female set well enough developed for you to have a baby. They could never be any use to you again, so we took them out and rearranged things so that you can develop properly as a man.’ He put a hand on me. ‘Don’t worry. You’re young, your bones will readjust, we’ll watch your glandular balance—and make a fine young man out of you.’

“I started to cry. ‘What about my baby?’

“ ‘Well, you can’t nurse her, you haven’t milk enough for a kitten. If I were you, I wouldn’t see her—put her up for adoption.’

“ ‘No!’

“He shrugged. “The choice is yours; you’re her mother—well, her parent. But don’t worry now; we’ll get you well first.’

“Next day they let me see the kid and I saw her daily—trying to get used to her. I had never seen a brand-new baby and had no idea how awful they look—my daughter looked like an orange monkey. My feeling changed to cold determination to do right by her. But four weeks later that didn’t mean anything.”

“Eh?”

“She was snatched.”

“ ‘Snatched?’ ”

The Unmarried Mother almost knocked over the bottle we had bet. “Kidnapped—stolen from the hospital nursery!” He breathed hard. “How’s that for taking the last a man’s got to live for?”

“A bad deal,” I agreed. “Let’s pour you another. No clues?”

“Nothing the police could trace. Somebody came to see her, claimed to be her uncle. While the nurse had her back turned, he walked out with her.”

“Description?”

“Just a man, with a face-shaped face, like yours or mine.” He frowned. “I think it was the baby’s father. The nurse swore it was an older man but he probably used makeup. Who else would swipe my baby? Childless women pull such stunts—but whoever heard of a man doing it?”

“What happened to you then?”

“Eleven more months of that grim place and three operations. In four months I started to grow a beard; before I was out I was shaving regularly . . . and no longer doubted that I was male.” He grinned wryly. “I was staring down nurses’ necklines.”

“Well,” I said, “seems to me you came through okay. Here you are, a normal man, making good money, no real troubles. And the life of a female is not an easy one.”

He glared at me. “A lot you know about it!”

“So?”

“Ever hear the expression ‘a ruined woman’?”

“Mmm, years ago. Doesn’t mean much today.”

“I was as ruined as a woman can be; that bum really ruined me—I was no longer a woman . . . and I didn’t know how to be a man.”

“Takes getting used to, I suppose.”

“You have no idea. I don’t mean learning how to dress, or not walking into the wrong rest room; I learned those in the hospital. But how could I live? What job could I get? Hell, I couldn’t even drive a car. I didn’t know a trade; I couldn’t do manual labor—too much scar tissue, too tender.

“I hated him for having ruined me for the W.E.N.C.H.E.S., too, but I didn’t know how much until I tried to join the Space Corps instead. One look at my belly and I was marked unfit for military service. The medical officer spent time on me just from curiosity; he had read about my case.

“So I changed my name and came to New York. I got by as a fry cook, then rented a typewriter and set myself up as a public stenographer—what a laugh! In four months I typed four letters and one manuscript. The manuscript was for Real Life Tales and a waste of paper, but the goof who wrote it, sold it. Which gave me an idea; I bought a stack of confession magazines and studied them.” He looked cynical. “Now you know how I get the authentic woman’s angle on an unmarried-mother story . . . through the only version I haven’t sold—the true one. Do I win the bottle?”

I pushed it toward him. I was upset myself, but there was work to do. I said, “Son, you still want to lay hands on that so-and-so?”

His eyes lighted up—a feral gleam.

“Hold it!” I said. “You wouldn’t kill him?”

He chuckled nastily. “Try me.”

“Take it easy. I know more about it than you think I do. I can help you. I know where he is.”

He reached across the bar. “Where is he?”

I said softly, “Let go my shirt, sonny—or you’ll land in the alley and we’ll tell the cops you fainted.” I showed him the sap.

He let go. “Sorry. But where is he?” He looked at me. “And how do you know so much?”

“All in good time. There are records—hospital records, orphanage records, medical records. The matron of your orphanage was Mrs. Fetherage—right? She was followed by Mrs. Gruenstein—right? Your name, as a girl, was ‘Jane’—right? And you didn’t tell me any of this—right?”

I had him baffled and a bit scared. “What’s this? You trying to make trouble for me?”

“No indeed. I’ve your welfare at heart. I can put this character in your lap. You do to him as you see fit—and I guarantee that you’ll get away with it. But I don’t think you’ll kill him. You’d be nuts to—and you aren’t nuts. Not quite.”

He brushed it aside. “Cut the noise. Where is he?”

I poured him a short one; he was drunk but anger was offsetting it. “Not so fast. I do something for you—you do something for me.”

“Uh . . . what?”

“You don’t like your work. What would you say to high pay, steady work, unlimited expense account, your own boss on the job, and lots of variety and adventure?”

He stared. “I’d say, ‘Get those goddam reindeer off my roof!’ Shove it, Pop—there’s no such job.”

“Okay, put it this way: I hand him to you, you settle with him, then try my job. If it’s not all I claim—well, I can’t hold you.”

He was wavering; the last drink did it. “When d’yuh d’liver ’im?” he said thickly.

“If it’s a deal—right now!”

He shoved out his hand. “It’s a deal!”

I nodded to my assistant to watch both ends, noted the time—2300—started to duck through the gate under the bar—when the juke box blared out: “I’m My Own Granpaw!” The service man had orders to load it with old Americana and classics because I couldn’t stomach the “music” of 1970, but I hadn’t known that tape was in it. I called out, “Shut that off! Give the customer his money back.” I added, “Storeroom, back in a moment,” and headed there with my Unmarried Mother following.

It was down the passage across from the johns, a steel door to which no one but my day manager and myself had a key; inside was a door to an inner room to which only I had a key. We went there.

He looked blearily around at windowless walls. “Where is ’e?”

“Right away.” I opened a case, the only thing in the room; it was a U.S.F.F. Coordinates Transformer Field Kit, series 1992, Mod. II—a beauty, no moving parts, weight twenty-three kilos fully charged, and shaped to pass as a suitcase. I had adjusted it precisely earlier that day; all I had to do was to shake out the metal net which limits the transformation field.

Which I did. “Wha’s that?” he demanded.

“Time machine,” I said and tossed the net over us.

“Hey!” he yelled and stepped back. There is a technique to this; the net has to be thrown so that the subject will instinctively step back onto the metal mesh, then you close the net with both of you inside completely—else you might leave shoe soles behind or a piece of foot, or scoop up a slice of floor. But that’s all the skill it takes. Some agents con a subject into the net; I tell the truth and use that instant of utter astonishment to flip the switch. Which I did.

1030 VI—3 APRIL 1963—Cleveland, Ohio—Apex Bldg.: “Hey!” he repeated. “Take this damn thing off!”

“Sorry,” I apologized and did so, stuffed the net into the case, closed it. “You said you wanted to find him.”

“But—You said that was a time machine!”

I pointed out a window. “Does that look like November? Or New York?” While he was gawking at new buds and spring weather, I reopened the case, took out a packet of hundred-dollar bills, checked that the numbers and signatures were compatible with 1963. The Temporal Bureau doesn’t care how much you spend (it costs nothing) but they don’t like unnecessary anachronisms. Too many mistakes, and a general court-martial will exile you for a year in a nasty period, say 1974 with its strict rationing and forced labor. I never make such mistakes, the money was okay.

He turned around and said, “What happened?”

“He’s here. Go outside and take him. Here’s expense money.” I shoved it at him and added, “Settle him, then I’ll pick you up.”

Hundred-dollar bills have a hypnotic effect on a person not used to them. He was thumbing them unbelievingly as I eased him into the hall, locked him out. The next jump was easy, a small shift in era.

7100 VI—10 MARCH 1964—Cleveland—Apex Bldg.: There was a notice under the door saying that my lease expired next week; otherwise the room looked as it had a moment before. Outside, trees were bare and snow threatened; I hurried, stopping only for contemporary money and a coat, hat, and topcoat I had left there when I leased the room. I hired a car, went to the hospital. It took twenty minutes to bore the nursery attendant to the point where I could swipe the baby without being noticed. We went back to the Apex Building. This dial setting was more involved as the building did not yet exist in 1945. But I had precalculated it.

0100 VI—20 SEPT 1945—Cleveland—Skyview Motel: Field kit, baby, and I arrived in a motel outside town. Earlier I had registered as “Gregory Johnson, Warren, Ohio,” so we arrived in a room with curtains closed, windows locked, and doors bolted, and the floor cleared to allow for waver as the machine hunts. You can get a nasty bruise from a chair where it shouldn’t be—not the chair of course, but backlash from the field.

No trouble. Jane was sleeping soundly; I carried her out, put her in a grocery box on the seat of a car I had provided earlier, drove to the orphanage, put her on the steps, drove two blocks to a “service station” (the petroleum products sort) and phoned the orphanage, drove back in time to see them taking the box inside, kept going and abandoned the car near the motel—walked to it and jumped forward to the Apex Building in 1963.

2200 VI—24 APRIL 1963—Cleveland—Apex Bldg.: I had cut the time rather fine—temporal accuracy depends on span, except on return to zero. If I had it right, Jane was discovering, out in the park this balmy spring night, that she wasn’t quite as “nice” a girl as she had thought. I grabbed a taxi to the home of those skinflints, had the hackie wait around a corner while I lurked in shadows.

Presently I spotted them down the street, arms around each other. He took her up on the porch and made a long job of kissing her good-night—longer than I thought. Then she went in and he came down the walk, turned away. I slid into step and hooked an arm in his. “That’s all, son,” I announced quietly. “I’m back to pick you up.”

“You!” He gasped and caught his breath.

“Me. Now you know who he is—and after you think it over you’ll know who you are . . . and if you think hard enough, you’ll figure out who the baby is . . . and who I am.”

He didn’t answer, he was badly shaken. It’s a shock to have it proved to you that you can’t resist seducing yourself. I took him to the Apex Building and we jumped again.

2300 VII—12 AUG 1985—Sub Rockies Base: I woke the duty sergeant, showed my I.D., told the sergeant to bed my companion down with a happy pill and recruit him in the morning. The sergeant looked sour, but rank is rank, regardless of era; he did what I said—thinking, no doubt, that the next time we met he might be the colonel and I the sergeant. Which can happen in our corps: “What name?” he asked.

I wrote it out. He raised his eyebrows. “Like so, eh? Hmm—”

“You just do your job, Sergeant.” I turned to my companion.

“Son, your troubles are over. You’re about to start the best job a man ever held—and you’ll do well. I know.”

“That you will!” agreed the sergeant. “Look at me—born in 1917—still around, still young, still enjoying life.” I went back to the jump room, set everything on preselected zero.

2301 V—7 NOV 1970—NYC—“Pop’s Place”: I came out of the storeroom carrying a fifth of Drambuie to account for the minute I had been gone. My assistant was arguing with the customer who had been playing “I’m My Own Granpaw!” I said, “Oh, let him play it, then unplug it.” I was very tired.

It’s rough, but somebody must do it and it’s very hard to recruit anyone in the later years, since the Mistake of 1972. Can you think of a better source than to pick people all fouled up where they are and give them well-paid, interesting (even though dangerous) work in a necessary cause? Everybody knows now why the Fizzle War of 1963 fizzled. The bomb with New York’s number on it didn’t go off, a hundred other things didn’t go as planned—all arranged by the likes of me.

But not the Mistake of ’72; that one is not our fault—and can’t be undone; there’s no paradox to resolve. A thing either is, or it isn’t, now and forever amen. But there won’t be another like it; an order dated “1992” takes precedence any year.

I closed five minutes early, leaving a letter in the cash register telling my day manager that I was accepting his offer to buy me out, so see my lawyer as I was leaving on a long vacation. The Bureau might or might not pick up his payments, but they want things left tidy. I went to the room back of the storeroom and forward to 1993.

2200 VII—12 JAN 1993—Sub Rockies Annex—HQ Temporal DOL: I checked in with the duty officer and went to my quarters, intending to sleep for a week. I had fetched the bottle we bet (after all, I won it) and took a drink before I wrote my report. It tasted foul and I wondered why I had ever liked Old Underwear. But it was better than nothing; I don’t like to be cold sober, I think too much. But I don’t really hit the bottle either; other people have snakes—I have people.

I dictated my report; forty recruitments all okayed by the Psych Bureau—counting my own, which I knew would be okayed. I was here, wasn’t I? Then I taped a request for assignment to operations; I was sick of recruiting. I dropped both in the slot and headed for bed.

My eye fell on “The By-Laws of Time,” over my bed:

Never Do Yesterday What Should Be Done Tomorrow.

If At Last You Do Succeed, Never Try Again.

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine Billion.

A Paradox May Be Paradoctored.

It Is Earlier When You Think.

Ancestors Are Just People.

Even Jove Nods.

They didn’t inspire me the way they had when I was a recruit; thirty subjective-years of time-jumping wears you down. I undressed and when I got down to the hide I looked at my belly. A Caesarian leaves a big scar but I’m so hairy now that I don’t notice it unless I look for it.

Then I glanced at the ring on my finger.

The Snake That Eats Its Own Tail, Forever and Ever . . . I know where I came from—but where did all you zombies come from?

I felt a headache coming on, but a headache powder is one thing I do not take. I did once—and you all went away.

So I crawled into bed and whistled out the light.

You aren’t really there at all. There isn’t anybody but me—Jane—here alone in the dark.

I miss you dreadfully!

LLOYD BIGGLE, JR. Tunesmith

Lloyd Biggle began writing science fiction in 1956 and his first novel, the extraplanetary adventure The Angry Espers, appeared in 1961. It was followed by All the Colors of Darkness, the first episode in the five-novel Jan Darzek sequence. Darzek, a former private detective, is the sole human participant in the Council of the Supreme, the ministers to a vast computer that establishes policy for the galaxy. Over the course of the other novels in the series—Watchers of the Dark, This Darkening Universe, Silence Is Deadly, and The Whirligig of Time—Darzek pits his intelligence and his humanity against the nonhuman interest of his fellow councillors, the bureaucracy of the governing body, and the resistance of alien cultures to assimilation into the Galactic Synthesis. The World Menders and The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets spun off of the series, chronicle the exploits of the Cultural Survey, whose task it is to certify worlds for inclusion in the Galactic Synthesis. Together, the two series comprise an acclaimed contemporary space opera in which vividly imagined alien worlds are brought to life, human motives and conceits are measured against those of alien life forms, and lives and worlds hang perilously in the balance. Biggle has been praised for the thoroughness of his imagined worlds, for his memorable characterizations, and for his facility at exploring complex social and political issues against a backdrop of conventional science fiction themes and motifs. His short fiction has been collected in The Rule of the Door and Other Fanciful Regulations, The Metallic Muse, and A Galaxy of Strangers. He has collaborated on the novel Alien Main with T. L. Sherred and has also written a number of detective novels, including the Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Quallsford Inheritance, and two contemporary crime novels featuring the exploits of detectives J. Pletcher and Raina Lambert, Interface for Murder and Where Dead Soldiers Walk.

EVERYONE CALLS IT the Center. It has another name, a long one, that gets listed in government appropriations and has its derivation analyzed in encyclopedias, but no one uses it. From Bombay to Lima, from Spitsbergen to the mines of Antarctica, from the solitary outpost on Pluto to that on Mercury, it is—the Center. You can emerge from the rolling mists of the Amazon, or the cutting dry winds of the Sahara, or the lunar vacuum, elbow your way up to a bar, and begin, “When I was at the Center—” and every stranger within hearing will listen attentively.

It isn’t possible to explain the Center, and it isn’t necessary. From the babe in arms to the centenarian looking forward to retirement, everyone has been there, and plans to go again next year, and the year after that. It is the vacation land of the Solar System. It is square miles of undulating American Middle West farm land, transfigured by ingenious planning and relentless labor and incredible expense. It is a monumental summary of man’s cultural heritage, and like a phoenix, it has emerged suddenly, inexplicably, at the end of the twenty-fourth century, from the corroded ashes of an appalling cultural decay.

The Center is colossal, spectacular and magnificent. It is inspiring, edifying and amazing. It is awesome, it is overpowering, it is—everything.

And though few of its visitors know about this, or care, it is also haunted.

You are standing in the observation gallery of the towering Bach Monument. Off to the left, on the slope of a hill, you see the tense spectators who crowd the Grecian Theater for Euripides. Sunlight plays on their brightly-colored clothing. They watch eagerly, delighted to see in person what millions are watching on visiscope.

Beyond the theater, the tree-lined Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard curves into the distance, past the Dante Monument and the Michelangelo Institute. The twin towers of a facsimile of the Rheims Cathedral rise above the horizon. Directly below, you see the curious landscaping of an eighteenth-century French jardin and, nearby, the Molière Theater.

A hand clutches your sleeve, and you turn suddenly, irritably, and find yourself face to face with an old man.

The leathery face is scarred and wrinkled, the thin strands of hair glistening white. The hand on your arm is a gnarled claw. You stare, take in the slumping contortion of one crippled shoulder and the hideous scar of a missing ear, and back away in alarm.

The sunken eyes follow you. The hand extends in a sweeping gesture that embraces the far horizon, and you notice that the fingers are maimed or missing. The voice is a harsh cackle. “Like it?” he says, and eyes you expectantly.

Startled, you mutter, “Why, yes. Of course.”

He takes a step forward, and his eyes are eager, pleading. “I say, do you like it?”

In your perplexity you can do no more than nod as you turn away—but your nod brings a strange response. A strident laugh, an innocent, childish smile of pleasure, a triumphant shout. “I did it! I did it all!”

Or you stand in resplendent Plato Avenue, between the Wagnerian Theater, where the complete Der Ring des Nibelungen is performed daily, and the reconstruction of the sixteenth-century Globe Theatre, where Shakespearean drama is presented morning, afternoon and evening.

A hand paws at you. “Like it?”

If you respond with a torrent of ecstatic praise, the old man eyes you impatiently and only waits until you have finished to ask again, “I say, do you like it?”

But a smile and a nod is met with beaming pride, a gesture, a shout.

In the lobby of one of the thousand spacious hotels, in the waiting room of the remarkable library where a copy of any book you request is reproduced for you free of charge, in the eleventh balcony of Beethoven Hall, a ghost shuffles haltingly, clutches an arm, asks a question.

And shouts proudly, “I did it!”

ERLIN BAQUE SENSED her presence behind him, but he did not turn. Instead he leaned forward, his left hand tearing a rumbling bass figure from the multichord while his right hand fingered a solemn melody. With a lightning flip of his hand he touched a button, and the thin treble tones were suddenly fuller, more resonant, almost clarinetlike. (“But God, how preposterously unlike a clarinet!” he thought.)

“Must we go through all that again, Val?” he asked.

“The landlord was here this morning.”

He hesitated, touched a button, touched several buttons, and wove weird harmonies out of the booming tones of a brass choir. (But what a feeble, distorted brass choir!)

“How long does he give us this time?”

“Two days. And the food synthesizer’s broken down again.”

“Good. Run down and buy some fresh meat.”

“With what?”

Baque slammed his fists down and shouted above the shattering dissonance. “I will not rent a harmonizer. I will not turn my arranging over to hacks. If a Com goes out with my name on it, it’s going to be composed. It may be idiotic, and it may be sickening, but it’s going to be done right. It isn’t much, God knows, but it’s all I have left.”

He turned slowly and glared at her, this pale, drooping, worn-out woman who’d been his wife for twenty-five years. Then he looked away, telling himself stubbornly that he was no more to be blamed than she. When sponsors paid the same rates for good Coms that they paid for hackwork . . .

“Is Hulsey coming today?” she asked.

“He told me he was coming.”

“If we could get some money for the landlord—”

“And the food synthesizer. And a new visiscope. And new clothes. There’s a limit to what can be done with one Com.”

He heard her move away, heard the door open, and waited. It did not close. “Walter-Walter called,” she said. “You’re the featured tunesmith on today’s Show Case.”

“So? There’s no money in that.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want to watch, so I told Mrs. Rennik I’d watch with her.”

“Sure. Go ahead. Have fun.”

The door closed.

Baque got to his feet and stood looking down at his chaos-strewn worktable. Music paper, Com-lyric releases, pencils, sketches, half-finished manuscripts were cluttered together in untidy heaps. Baque cleared a corner for himself and sat down wearily, stretching his long legs out under the table.

“Damn Hulsey,” he muttered. “Damn sponsors. Damn visiscope. Damn Coms.”

Compose something, he told himself. You’re not a hack, like the other tunesmiths. You don’t punch out silly tunes on a harmonizer’s keyboard and let a machine complete them for you. You’re a musician, not a melody monger. Write some music. Write a—a sonata, for multichord. Take the time now, and compose something.

His eyes fell on the first lines of a Com-lyric release. “If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs—”

“Damn landlord,” he muttered, reaching for a pencil.

The tiny wall clock tinkled the hour, and Baque leaned over to turn on the visiscope. A cherub-faced master of ceremonies smiled out at him ingratiatingly. “Walter-Walter again, ladies and gentlemen. It’s Com time on today’s Show Case. Thirty minutes of Commercials by one of today’s most talented tunesmiths. Our Com spotlight is on—”

A noisy brass fanfare rang out, the tainted brass tones of a multichord.

“Erlin Baque!”

The multichord swung into an odd, dipsey melody Baque had done five years before, for Tamper Cheese, and a scattering of applause sounded in the background. A nasal soprano voice mouthed the words, and Baque groaned unhappily. “We age our cheese, and age it, age it, age it, age it, age it the old-fashioned way . . .”

Walter-Walter cavorted about the stage, moving in time with the melody, darting down into the audience to kiss some sedate housewife-on-a-holiday, and beaming at the howls of laughter.

The multichord sounded another fanfare, and Walter-Walter leaped back onto the stage, both arms extended over his head. “Now listen to this, all you beautiful people. Here’s your Walter-Walter exclusive on Erlin Baque.” He glanced secretively over his shoulder, tiptoed a few steps closer to the audience, placed his finger on his lips, and then called out loudly, “Once upon a time there was another composer named Baque, spelled B-A-C-H, but pronounced Baque. He was a real atomic propelled tunesmith, the boy with the go, according to them that know. He lived some five or six or seven hundred years ago, so we can’t exactly say that that Baque and our Baque were Baque to Baque. But we don’t have to go Baque to hear Baque. We like the Baque we’ve got. Are you with me?”

Cheers. Applause. Baque turned away, hands trembling, a choking disgust nauseating him.

“We start off our Coms by Baque with that little masterpiece Baque did for Foam Soap. Art work by Bruce Combs. Stop, look—and listen!”

Baque managed to turn off the visiscope just as the first bar of soap jet-propelled itself across the screen. He picked up the Com lyric again, and his mind began to shape the thread of a melody.

“If your flyer jerks and clowns, if it has its ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs, you need a WARING!”

He hummed softly to himself, sketching a musical line that swooped and jerked like an erratic flyer. Word painting, it was called, back when words and tones meant something. Back when the B-A-C-H Baque was underscoring such grandiose concepts as Heaven and Hell.

Baque worked slowly, now and then trying a harmonic progression at the multichord and rejecting it, straining his mind for some fluttering accompaniment pattern that would simulate the sound of a flyer. But then—no. The Waring people wouldn’t like that. They advertised that their flyers were noiseless.

Urgent-sounding door chimes shattered his concentration. He walked over to flip on the scanner, and Hulsey’s pudgy face grinned out at him.

“Come on up,” Baque told him. Hulsey nodded and disappeared.

Five minutes later he waddled through the door, sank into a chair that sagged dangerously under his bulky figure, plunked his briefcase onto the floor, and mopped his face. “Whew! Wish you’d get yourself a place lower down. Or into a building with modern conveniences. Elevators scare me to death!”

“I’m thinking of moving,” Baque said.

“Good. It’s about time.”

“But it’ll probably be somewhere higher up. The landlord has given me two days’ notice.”

Hulsey winced and shook his head sadly. “I see. Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. Here’s the check for the Sana-Soap Com.”

Baque took the card, glanced at it, and scowled.

“You were behind in your guild dues,” Hulsey said. “Have to deduct them, you know.”

“Yes. I’d forgotten.”

“I like to do business with Sana-Soap. Cash right on the line. Too many companies wait until the end of the month. Sana-Soap wants a couple of changes, but they paid anyway.” He unsealed the briefcase and pulled out a folder. “You’ve got some sly bits in this one, Erlin my boy. They like it. Particularly this ‘sudsy, sudsy, sudsy’ thing in the bass. They kicked on the number of singers at first, but not after they heard it. Now right here they want a break for a straight announcement.”

Baque nodded thoughtfully. “How about keeping the ‘sudsy, sudsy’ ostinato going as a background to the announcement?”

“Sounds good. That’s a sly bit, that—what’d you call it?”

“Ostinato.”

“Ah—yes. Wonder why the other tunesmiths don’t work in bits like that.”

“A harmonizer doesn’t produce effects,” Baque said dryly. “It just—harmonizes.”

“You give them about thirty seconds of that ‘sudsy’ for background. They can cut it if they don’t like it.”

Baque nodded, scribbling a note on the manuscript.

“And the arrangement,” Hulsey went on. “Sorry, Erlin, but we can’t get a French horn player. You’ll have to do something else with that part.”

“No horn player? What’s wrong with Rankin?”

“Blacklisted. The Performers’ Guild nixed him permanently. He went out to the West Coast and played for nothing. Even paid his own expenses. The guild can’t tolerate that sort of thing.”

“I remember,” Baque said softly. “The Monuments of Art Society. He played a Mozart horn concerto for them. Their final concert, too. Wish I could have heard it, even if it was with multichord.”

“He can play it all he wants to now, but he’ll never get paid for playing again. You can work that horn part into the multichord line, or I might be able to get you a trumpet player. He could use a converter.”

“It’ll ruin the effect.”

Hulsey chuckled. “Sounds the same to everyone but you, my boy. I can’t tell the difference. We got your violins and a cello player. What more do you want?”

“Doesn’t the London Guild have a horn player?”

“You want me to bring him over for one three-minute Com? Be reasonable, Erlin! Can I pick this up tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’ll have it ready in the morning.”

Hulsey reached for his briefcase, dropped it again, leaned forward scowling. “Erlin, I’m worried about you. I have twenty-seven tunesmiths in my agency. You’re the best by far. Hell, you’re the best in the world, and you make the least money of any of them. Your net last year was twenty-two hundred. None of the others netted less than eleven thousand.”

“That isn’t news to me,” Baque said.

“This may be. You have as many accounts as any of them. Did you know that?”

Baque shook his head. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“You have as many accounts, but you don’t make any money. Want to know why? Two reasons. You spend too much time on a Com, and you write it too well. Sponsors can use one of your Coms for months—or sometimes even years, like that Tamper Cheese thing. People like to hear them. Now if you just didn’t write so damned well, you could work faster, and the sponsors would have to use more of your Coms, and you could turn out more.”

“I’ve thought about that. Even if I didn’t, Val would keep reminding me. But it’s no use. That’s the way I have to work. If there was some way to get the sponsors to pay more for a good Com—”

“There isn’t. The guild wouldn’t stand for it, because good Coms mean less work, and most tunesmiths couldn’t write a really good Com. Now don’t think I’m concerned about my agency. Of course I make more money when you make more, but I’m doing well enough with my other tunesmiths. I just hate to see my best man making so little money. You’re a throwback, Erlin. You waste time and money collecting those antique—what do you call them?”

“Phonograph records.”

“Yes. And those moldy old books about music. I don’t doubt that you know more about music than anyone alive, and what does it get you? Not money, certainly. You’re the best there is, and you keep trying to be better, and the better you get the less money you make. Your income drops lower every year. Couldn’t you manage just an average Com now and then?”

“No,” Baque said brusquely. “I couldn’t manage it.”

“Think it over.”

“These accounts I have. Some of the sponsors really like my work. They’d pay more if the guild would let them. Supposing I left the guild?”

“You can’t, my boy. I couldn’t handle your stuff—not and stay in business long. The Tunesmiths’ Guild would turn on the pressure, and the Performers’ and Lyric Writers’ Guilds would blacklist you. Jimmy Denton plays along with the guilds and he’d bar your stuff from visiscope. You’d lose all your accounts, and fast. No sponsor is big enough to fight all that trouble, and none of them would want to bother. So just try to be average now and then. Think about it.”

Baque sat staring at the floor. “I’ll think about it.”

Hulsey struggled to his feet, clasped Baque’s hand briefly, and waddled out. Baque closed the door behind him and went to the drawer where he kept his meager collection of old phonograph records. Strange and wonderful music.

Three times in his career Baque had written Coms that were a full half-hour in length. On rare occasions he got an order for fifteen minutes. Usually he was limited to five or less. But composers like the B-A-C-H Baque wrote things that lasted an hour or more—even wrote them without lyrics.

And they wrote for real instruments, among them amazing-sounding things that no one played anymore, like bassoons, piccolos and pianos.

“Damn Denton. Damn visiscope. Damn guilds.”

Baque rummaged tenderly among the discs until he found one bearing Bach’s name. Magnificat. Then, because he felt too despondent to listen, he pushed it away.

Earlier that year the Performers’ Guild had blacklisted its last oboe player. Now its last horn player, and there just weren’t any young people learning to play instruments. Why should they, when there were so many marvelous contraptions that ground out the Coms without any effort on the part of the performer? Even multichord players were becoming scarce, and if one wasn’t particular about how well it was done, a multichord could practically play itself.

The door jerked open, and Val hurried in. “Did Hulsey—”

Baque handed her the check. She took it eagerly, glanced at it, and looked up in dismay.

“My guild dues,” he said. “I was behind.”

“Oh. Well, it’s a help, anyway.” Her voice was flat, emotionless, as though one more disappointment really didn’t matter. They stood facing each other awkwardly.

“I watched part of Morning with Marigold,” Val said. “She talked about your Coms.”

“I should hear soon on that Slo-Smoke Com,” Baque said. “Maybe we can hold the landlord off for another week. Right now I’m going to walk around a little.”

“You should get out more—”

He closed the door behind him, slicing her sentence off neatly. He knew what followed. Get a job somewhere. It’d be good for your health to get out of the apartment a few hours a day. Write Coms in your spare time—they don’t bring in more than a part-time income anyway. At least do it until we get caught up. All right, if you won’t, I will.

But she never did. A prospective employer never wanted more than one look at her slight body and her worn, sullen face. And Baque doubted that he would receive any better treatment.

He could get work as a multichord player and make a good income—but if he did he’d have to join the Performers’ Guild, which meant that he’d have to resign from the Tunesmiths’ Guild. So the choice was between performing and composing; the guilds wouldn’t let him do both.

“Damn the guilds! Damn Coms!”

When he reached the street, he stood for a moment watching the crowds shooting past on the swiftly moving conveyer. A few people glanced at him and saw a tall, gawky, balding man in a frayed, badly fitting suit. They would consider him just another derelict from a shabby neighborhood, he knew, and they would quickly look the other way while they hummed a snatch from one of his Coms.

He hunched up his shoulders and walked awkwardly along the stationary sidewalk. At a crowded restaurant he turned in, found a table at one side, and ordered beer. On the rear wall was an enormous visiscope screen where the Coms followed each other without interruption. Around him the other customers watched and listened while they ate. Some nodded their heads jerkily in time with the music. A few young couples were dancing on the small dance floor, skillfully changing steps as the music shifted from one Com to another.

Baque watched them sadly and thought about the way things had changed. At one time, he knew, there had been special music for dancing and special groups of instruments to play it. And people had gone to concerts by the thousands, sitting in seats with nothing to look at but the performers.

All of it had vanished. Not only the music, but art and literature and poetry. The plays he once read in his grandfather’s school books were forgotten.

James Denton’s Visiscope International decreed that people must look and listen at the same time, and that the public attention span wouldn’t tolerate long programs. So there were Coms.

Damn Coms!

When Val returned to the apartment an hour later, Baque was sitting in the corner staring at the battered plastic cabinet that held the crumbling volumes he had collected from the days when books were still printed on paper—a scattering of biographies, books on music history, and technical books about music theory and composition. Val looked twice about the room before she noticed him, and then she confronted him anxiously, stark tragedy etching her wan face.

“The man’s coming to fix the food synthesizer.”

“Good,” Baque said.

“But the landlord won’t wait. If we don’t pay him day after tomorrow—pay him everything—we’re out.”

“So we’re out.”

“Where will we go? We can’t get in anywhere without paying something in advance.”

“So we won’t get in anywhere.”

She fled sobbing into the bedroom.

THE NEXT MORNING Baque resigned from the Tunesmiths’ Guild and joined the Performers’ Guild. Hulsey’s round face drooped mournfully when he heard the news. He loaned Baque enough money to pay his guild registration fee and quiet the landlord, and he expressed his sorrow in eloquent terms as he hurried Baque out of his office. He would, Baque knew, waste no time in assigning Baque’s clients to his other tunesmiths—to men who worked faster and not so well.

Baque went to the Guild Hall, where he sat for five hours waiting for a multichord assignment. He was finally summoned to the secretary’s office and brusquely motioned into a chair. The secretary eyed him suspiciously.

“You belonged to the Performers’ Guild twenty years ago, and you left it to become a tunesmith. Right?”

“Right,” Baque said.

“You lost your seniority after three years. You knew that, didn’t you?”

“I did, but I didn’t think it mattered. There aren’t many good multichord players around.”

“There aren’t many good jobs around, either. You’ll have to start at the bottom.” He scribbled on a slip of paper and thrust it at Baque. “This one pays well, but we have a hard time keeping a man there. Lankey isn’t easy to work for. If you don’t irritate him too much—well, then we’ll see.”

Baque rode the conveyer out to the New Jersey Space Port, wandered through a rattletrap slum area getting his directions hopelessly confused, and finally found the place almost within radiation distance of the port. The sprawling building had burned at some time in the remote past. Stubbly remnants of walls rose out of the weed-choked rubble. A wall curved toward a dimly lit cavity at one corner, where steps led uncertainly downward. Overhead, an enormous sign pointed its flowing colors in the direction of the port. The LANKEY-PANK OUT.

Baque stepped through the door and faltered at the onslaught of extraterrestrial odors. Lavender-tinted tobacco smoke, the product of the enormous leaves grown in bot-domes in the Lunar Mare Crisium, hung like a limp blanket midway between floor and ceiling. The revolting, cutting fumes of blast, a whisky blended with a product of Martian lichens, staggered him. He had a glimpse of a scattered gathering of tough spacers and tougher prostitutes before the doorman planted his bulky figure and scarred caricature of a face in front of him.

“You looking for someone?”

“Mr. Lankey.”

The doorman jerked a thumb in the direction of the bar and noisily stumbled back into the shadows. Baque walked toward the bar.

He had no trouble in picking out Lankey. The proprietor sat on a tall stool behind the bar. In the dim, smoke-streaked light his taut pale face had a spectral grimness. He leaned an elbow on the bar, fingered his flattened stump of a nose with the two remaining fingers on his hairy hand, and as Baque approached he thrust his bald head forward and eyed him coldly.

“I’m Erlin Baque,” Baque said.

“Yeah. The multichord player. Can you play that multichord, fellow?”

“Why, yes, I can play—”

“That’s what they all say, and I’ve had maybe two in the last ten years that could really play. Most of them come out here figuring they’ll set the thing on automatic and fuss around with one finger. I want that multichord played, fellow, and I’ll tell you right now—if you can’t play you might as well jet for home. There isn’t any automatic on my multichord. I had it disconnected.”

“I can play,” Baque told him.

“All right. It doesn’t take more than one Com to find out. The guild rates this place as Class Four, but I pay Class One rates if you can play. If you can really play, I’ll slip you some bonuses the guild won’t know about. Hours are six P.M. to six A.M., but you get plenty of breaks, and if you get hungry or thirsty just ask for what you want. Only go easy on the hot stuff. I won’t go along with a drunk multichord player no matter how good he is. Rose!”

He bellowed the name a second time, and a woman stepped from a door at the side of the room. She wore a faded dressing gown, and her tangled hair hung untidily about her shoulders. She turned a small, pretty face toward Baque and studied him boldly.

“Multichord,” Lankey said. “Show him.”

Rose beckoned, and Baque followed her toward the rear of the room. Suddenly he halted in amazement.

“What’s the matter?” Rose asked.

“No visiscope!”

“No. Lankey says the spacers want better things to look at than soapsuds and flyers.” She giggled. “Something like me, for example.”

“I never heard of a restaurant without visiscope.”

“Neither did I, until I came here. But Lankey’s got three of us to sing the Coms, and you’re to do the multichord with us. I hope you make the grade. We haven’t had a multichord player for a week, and it’s hard singing without one.”

“I’ll make out all right,” Baque said.

A narrow platform stretched across the end of the room where any other restaurant would have had its visiscope screen. Baque could see the unpatched scars in the wall where the screen had been torn out.

“Lankey ran a joint at Port Mars back when the colony didn’t have visiscope,” Rose said. “He has his own ideas about how to entertain customers. Want to see your room?”

Baque was examining the multichord. It was a battered old instrument, and it bore the marks of more than one brawl. He fingered the filter buttons and swore softly to himself. Only the flute and violin filters clicked into place properly. So he would have to spend twelve hours a day with the twanging tones of an unfiltered multichord.

“Want to see your room?” Rose asked again. “It’s only five. You might as well relax until we have to go to work.”

Rose showed him a cramped enclosure behind the bar. He stretched out on a hard cot and tried to relax, and suddenly it was six o’clock and Lankey stood in the door beckoning to him.

He took his place at the multichord and fingered the keys impatiently. He felt no nervousness. There wasn’t anything he didn’t know about Coms, and he knew he wouldn’t have trouble with the music, but the atmosphere disturbed him. The haze of smoke was thicker, and he blinked his smarting eyes and felt the whisky fumes tear at his nostrils when he took a deep breath.

There was still only a scattering of customers. The men were mechanics in grimy work suits, swaggering pilots, and a few civilians who liked their liquor strong and didn’t mind the surroundings. The women were—women; two of them, he guessed, for every man in the room.

Suddenly the men began an unrestrained stomping of feet accented with yelps of approval. Lankey was crossing the platform with Rose and the other singers. Baque’s first horrified impression was that the girls were nude, but as they came closer he made out their brief plastic costumes. Lankey was right, he thought. The spacers would much prefer that kind of scenery to animated Coms on a visiscope screen.

“You met Rose,” Lankey said. “This is Zanna and Mae. Let’s get going.”

He walked away, and the girls gathered about the multichord. “What Coms do you know?” Rose asked.

“I know them all.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “We sing together, and then we take turns. Are you sure you know them all?”

Baque flipped on the power and sounded a chord. “Sing any Com you want—I can handle it.”

“Well—we’ll start out with a Tasty-Malt Com. It goes like this.” She hummed softly. “Know that one?”

“I wrote it,” Baque said.

They sang better than he had expected. He followed them easily, and while he played he kept his eyes on the customers. Heads were jerking in time with the music, and he quickly caught the mood and began to experiment. His fingers shaped a rolling rhythm in the bass, fumbled with it tentatively, and then expanded it. He abandoned the melodic line, leaving the girls to carry on by themselves while he searched the entire keyboard to ornament the driving rhythm.

Feet began to stomp. The girls’ bodies were swaying wildly, and Baque felt himself rocking back and forth as the music swept on recklessly. The girls finished their lyrics, and when he did not stop playing they began again. Spacers were on their feet, now, clapping and swaying. Some seized their women and began dancing in the narrow spaces between the tables. Finally Baque forced a cadence and slumped forward, panting and mopping his forehead. One of the girls collapsed onto the stage. The others hauled her to her feet, and the three of them fled to a frenzy of applause.

Baque felt a hand on his shoulder. Lankey. His ugly, expressionless face eyed Baque, turned to study the wildly enthusiastic customers, turned back to Baque. He nodded and walked away.

Rose returned alone, still breathing heavily. “How about a Sally Ann Perfume Com?”

Baque searched his memory and was chagrined to find no recollection of Sally Ann’s Coms. “Tell me the words,” he said. She recited them tonelessly—a tragic little story about the shattered romance of a girl who did not use Sally Ann. “Now I remember,” Baque told her. “Shall we make them cry? Just concentrate on that. It’s a sad story, and we’re going to make them cry.”

She stood by the multichord and sang plaintively. Baque fashioned a muted, tremulous accompaniment, and when the second verse started he improvised a drooping countermelody. The spacers sat in hushed suspense. The men did not cry, but some of the women sniffed audibly, and when Rose finished there was a taut silence.

“Quick!” Baque hissed. “Let’s brighten things up. Sing another Com—anything!”

She launched into a Puffed Bread Com, and Baque brought the spacers to their feet with the driving rhythm of his accompaniment.

The other girls took their turns, and Baque watched the customers detachedly, bewildered at the power that surged in his fingers. He carried them from one emotional extreme to the other and back again, improvising, experimenting. And his mind fumbled haltingly with an idea.

“Time for a break,” Rose said finally. “Better get something to eat.”

An hour and a half of continuous playing had left Baque drained of strength and emotion, and he accepted his dinner tray indifferently and took it to the enclosure they called his room. He did not feel hungry. He sniffed doubtfully at the food, tasted it—and ate ravenously. Real food, after months of synthetics!

When he’d finished he sat for a time on his cot, wondering how long the girls took between appearances, and then he went looking for Lankey.

“I don’t like sitting around,” he said. “Any objection to my playing?”

“Without the girls?”

“Yes.”

Lankey planted both elbows on the bar, cupped his chin in one fist, and sat looking absently at the far wall. “You going to sing yourself?” he asked finally.

“No. Just play.”

“Without any singing? Without words?”

“Yes.”

“What’ll you play?”

“Coms. Or I might improvise something.”

A long silence. Then—“Think you could keep things moving while the girls are out?”

“Of course I could.”

Lankey continued to concentrate on the far wall. His eyebrows contracted, relaxed, contracted again. “All right,” he said. “I was just wondering why I never thought of it.”

Unnoticed, Baque took his place at the multichord. He began softly, making the music an unobtrusive background to the rollicking conversation that filled the room. As he increased the volume, faces turned in his direction.

He wondered what these people were thinking as they heard for the first time music that was not a Com, music without words. He watched intently and satisfied himself that he was holding their attention. Now—could he bring them out of their seats with nothing more than the sterile tones of a multichord? He gave the melody a rhythmic snap, and the stomping began.

As he increased the volume again, Rose came stumbling out of a doorway and hurried across the stage, perplexity written on her pert face.

“It’s all right,” Baque told her. “I’m just playing to amuse myself. Don’t come back until you’re ready.”

She nodded and walked away. A red-faced spacer near the platform looked up at the revealed outline of her young body and leered. Fascinated, Baque studied the coarse, demanding lust in his face and searched the keyboard to express it. This? Or—this? Or—

He had it. He felt himself caught up in the relentless rhythm. His foot tightened on the volume control, and he turned to watch the customers.

Every pair of eyes stared hypnotically at his corner of the room. A bartender stood at a half crouch, mouth agape. There was uneasiness, a strained shuffling of feet, a restless scraping of chairs. Baque’s foot dug harder at the volume control.

His hands played on hypnotically, and he stared in horror at the scene that erupted below him. Lasciviousness twisted every face. Men were on their feet, reaching for the women, clutching, pawing. A chair crashed to the floor, and a table, and no one noticed. A woman’s dress fluttered crazily downward, and the pursued were pursuers while Baque helplessly allowed his fingers to race onward, out of control.

With a violent effort he wrenched his hands from the keys, and the ensuing silence crashed the room like a clap of thunder. Fingers trembling, Baque began to play softly, indifferently. Order was restored when he looked again, the chair and table were upright, and the customers were seated in apparent relaxation except for one woman who struggled back into her dress in obvious embarrassment.

Baque continued to play quietly until the girls returned.

At six A.M., his body wracked with weariness, his hands aching, his legs cramped, Baque climbed down from the multichord. Lankey stood waiting for him. “Class One rates,” he said. “You’ve got a job with me as long as you want it. But take it a little easy with that stuff, will you?”

Baque remembered Val, alone in their dreary apartment and eating synthetic food. “Would I be out of order to ask for an advance?”

“No,” Lankey said. “Not out of order. I told the cashier to give you a hundred on your way out. Call it a bonus.”

Weary from his long conveyer ride, Baque walked quietly into his dim apartment and looked about. There was no sign of Val—she would still be sleeping. He sat down at his own multichord and touched the keys.

He felt awed and humble and disbelieving. Music without Coms, without words, could make people laugh and cry, and dance and cavort madly.

And it could turn them into lewd animals.

Wonderingly he played the music that had incited such unconcealed lust, played it louder, and louder—

And felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to look into Val’s passion-twisted face.

He asked Hulsey to come and hear him that night, and later Hulsey sat slumped on the cot in his room and shuddered. “It isn’t right. No man should have that power over people. How do you do it?”

“I don’t know,” Baque said. “I saw that young couple sitting there, and they were happy, and I felt their happiness. And as I played everyone in the room was happy. And then another couple came in quarreling, and the next thing I knew I had everyone mad.”

“Almost started a fight at the next table,” Hulsey said. “And what you did after that—”

“Yes. But not as much as I did last night. You should have seen it last night.”

Hulsey shuddered again.

“I have a book about ancient Greek music,” Baque said. “They had something they called ethos. They thought that the different musical scales affected people in different ways—could make them sad, or happy, or even drive them crazy. They claimed that a musician named Orpheus could move trees and soften rocks with his music. Now listen. I’ve had a chance to experiment, and I’ve noticed that my playing is most effective when I don’t use the filters. There are only two filters that work on that multichord anyway—flute and violin—but when I use either of them the people don’t react so strongly. I’m wondering if maybe the effects the Greeks talk about were produced by their instruments, rather than their scales. I’m wondering if the tone of an unfiltered multichord might have something in common with the tones of the ancient Greek kithara or aulos.”

Hulsey grunted. “I don’t think it’s the instrument, or the scales either. I think it’s Baque, and I don’t like it. You should have stayed a tunesmith.”

“I want you to help me,” Baque said. “I want to find a place where we can put a lot of people—a thousand, at least—not to eat, or watch Coms, but just to listen to one man play on a multichord.”

Hulsey got up abruptly. “Baque, you’re a dangerous man. I’m damned if I’ll trust any man who can make me feel the way you made me feel tonight. I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but I won’t have any part of it.”

He stomped away in the manner of a man about to slam a door, but the room of a male multichordist at the Lankey-Pank Out did not rate that luxury. Hulsey paused uncertainly in the doorway, gave Baque a parting glare, and disappeared. Baque followed him as far as the main room and stood watching him weave his way impatiently past the tables to the exit.

From his place behind the bar, Lankey looked at Baque and then glanced after the disappearing Hulsey. “Troubles?” he asked.

Baque turned away wearily. “I’ve known that man for twenty years. I never thought he was my friend. But then—I never thought he was my enemy, either.”

“Sometimes it works out that way,” Lankey said.

Baque shook his head. “I’d like to try some Martian whisky. I’ve never tasted the stuff.”

TWO WEEKS MADE Baque an institution, and the Lankey-Pank Out was jammed to capacity from the time he went to work until he left the next morning. When he performed alone, he forgot about Coms and played whatever he wanted. He even performed short pieces by Bach for the customers, and received generous applause, but the reaction was nothing like the tumultuous enthusiasm that followed his improvisations.

Sitting behind the bar, eating his evening meal and watching the impacted mass of customers, Baque felt vaguely happy. He was enjoying the work he was doing. For the first time in his life he had more money than he needed.

For the first time in his life he had a definite goal and a vague notion of a plan that would accomplish it—would eliminate the Coms altogether.

As Baque pushed his tray aside, he saw Biff the doorman step forward to greet a pair of newcomers, halt suddenly, and back away in stupefied amazement. And no wonder—evening clothes at the Lankey-Pank Out!

The couple halted near the door, blinking uncertainly in the dim, smoke-tinted light. The man was bronzed and handsome, but no one noticed him. The woman’s beauty flashed like a meteor against the drab surroundings. She moved in an aura of shining loveliness, with her hair gleaming golden, her shimmering, flowing gown clinging seductively to her voluptuous figure, and her fragrance routing the foul tobacco and whisky odors.

In an instant all eyes were fixed on her, and a collective gasp encircled the room. Baque stared with the others and finally recognized her: Marigold, of Morning with Marigold. Worshiped around the Solar System by the millions of devotees to her visiscope program. Mistress, it was said, to James Denton, the czar of visiscope. Marigold Manning.

She raised a hand to her mouth in mock horror, and the bright tones of her laughter dropped tantalizingly among the spellbound spacers. “What an odd place! Where’d you ever hear about a place like this?”

“I need some Martian whisky, damn it,” the man said.

“So stupid of the port bar to run out. With all those ships from Mars coming in, too. Are you sure we can get back in time? Jimmy’ll raise hell if we aren’t there when he lands.”

Lankey touched Baque’s arm. “After six,” he said, without taking his eyes from Marigold Manning. “They’ll be getting impatient.”

Baque nodded and started for the multichord. The tumult began the moment the customers saw him. They abandoned Marigold Manning, leaped to their feet, and began a stomping, howling ovation. When Baque paused to acknowledge it, Marigold and her escort were staring openmouthed at the nondescript man who could inspire such undignified enthusiasm.

Her exclamation rang out sharply as Baque seated himself at the multichord and the ovation faded to an expectant silence. “What the hell!”

Baque shrugged and started to play. When Marigold finally left, after a brief conference with Lankey, her escort still hadn’t got his Martian whisky.

The next evening Lankey greeted Baque with both fists full of telenotes. “What a hell of a mess this is! You see this Marigold dame’s program this morning?”

Baque shook his head. “I haven’t watched visiscope since I came to work here.”

“In case it interests you, you were—what does she call it?—a ‘Marigold Exclusive’ on visiscope this morning. Erlin Baque, the famous tunesmith, is now playing the multichord in a queer little restaurant called the Lankey-Pank Out. If you want to hear some amazing music, wander out to the New Jersey Space Port and listen to Baque. Don’t miss it. The experience of a lifetime.” Lankey swore and waved the telenotes. “Queer, she calls us. Now I’ve got ten thousand requests for reservations, some from as far away as Budapest and Shanghai. And our capacity is five hundred, counting standing room. Damn that woman! We already had all the business we could handle.”

“You need a bigger place,” Baque said.

“Yes. Well, confidentially, I’ve got my eye on a big warehouse. It’ll seat a thousand, at least. We’ll clean up. I’ll give you a contract to take charge of the music.”

Baque shook his head. “How about opening a big place uptown? Attract people that have more money to spend. You run it, and I’ll bring in the customers.”

Lankey caressed his flattened nose thoughtfully. “How do we split?”

“Fifty-fifty,” Baque said.

“No,” Lankey said, shaking his head slowly. “I play fair, Baque, but fifty-fifty wouldn’t be right on a deal like that. I’d have to put up all the money myself. I’ll give you one-third to handle the music.”

They had a lawyer draw up a contract. Baque’s lawyer. Lankey insisted on that.

IN THE BLEAK gray of early morning Baque sleepily rode the crowded conveyer toward his apartment. It was the peak rush load, when commuters jammed against each other and snarled grumpily when a neighbor shifted his feet. The crowd seemed even heavier than usual, but Baque shrugged off the jostling and elbowing and lost himself in thought.

It was time that he found a better place to live. He hadn’t minded the dumpy apartment as long as he could afford nothing better, but Val had been complaining for years. And now when they could move, when they could have a luxury apartment or even a small home over in Pennsylvania, Val refused to go. Didn’t want to leave her friends, she said.

Mulling over this problem in feminine contrariness, Baque realized suddenly that he was approaching his own stop. He attempted to move toward a deceleration strip—he shoved firmly, he tried to step between his fellow riders, he applied his elbows, first gently and then viciously. The crowd about him did not yield.

“I beg your pardon,” Baque said, making another attempt. “I get off here.”

This time a pair of brawny arms barred his way. “Not this morning, Baque. You got an appointment uptown.”

Baque flung a glance at the circle of hard, grinning faces that surrounded him. With a sudden effort he hurled himself sideways, fighting with all of his strength. The arms hauled him back roughly.

“Uptown, Baque. If you want to go dead, that’s your affair.”

“Uptown,” Baque agreed.

At a public parking strip they left the conveyer. A flyer was waiting for them, a plush, private job that displayed a high-priority X registration number. They flew swiftly toward Manhattan, cutting across air lanes with a monumental contempt for regulations, and they veered in for a landing on the towering Visiscope International building. Baque was bundled down an anti-grav shaft, led through a labyrinth of corridors, and finally prodded none too gently into an office.

It was a huge room, and its sparse furnishings made it look more enormous than it was. It contained only a desk, a few chairs, a bar in the far corner, an enormous visiscope screen—and a multichord. The desk was occupied, but it was the group of men about the bar that caught Baque’s attention. His gaze swept the blur of faces and found one that he recognized: Hulsey.

The plump agent took two steps forward and stood glaring at Baque. “Day of reckoning, Erlin,” he said coldly.

A hand rapped sharply on the desk. “I take care of any reckoning that’s done around here, Hulsey. Please sit down, Mr. Baque.”

A chair was thrust forward, and Baque seated himself and waited nervously, his eyes on the man behind the desk.

“My name is James Denton. Does my fame extend to such a remote place as the Lankey-Pank Out?”

“No,” Baque said. “But I’ve heard of you.”

James Denton. Czar of Visiscope International. Ruthless arbiter of public taste. He was no more than forty, with a swarthy, handsome face, flashing eyes, and a ready smile.

He tapped a cigar on the edge of his desk and carefully placed it in his mouth. Men sprang forward with lighters extended, and he chose one without looking up, puffed deeply, and nodded.

“I won’t bore you with introductions to this gathering, Baque. Some of these men are here for professional reasons. Some are here because they’re curious. I heard about you for the first time yesterday, and what I heard made me want to find out whether you’re a potential asset that might be made use of, or a potential nuisance that should be eliminated, or a nonentity that can be ignored. When I want to know something, Baque, I waste no time about it.” He chuckled. “As you can see from the fact that I had you brought in at the earliest moment you were—shall we say—available.”

“The man’s dangerous, Denton!” Hulsey blurted.

Denton flashed his smile. “I like dangerous men, Hulsey. They’re useful to have around. If I can use whatever it is Mr. Baque has, I’ll make him an attractive offer. I’m sure he’ll accept it gratefully. If I can’t use it, I aim to make damned certain that he won’t be inconveniencing me. Do I make myself clear, Baque?”

Baque, looking past Denton to avoid his eyes, said nothing.

Denton leaned forward. His smile did not waver, but his eyes narrowed and his voice was suddenly icy. “Do I make myself clear, Baque?”

“Yes,” Baque muttered weakly.

Denton jerked a thumb toward the door, and half of those present, including Hulsey, solemnly filed out. The others waited, talking in whispers, while Denton puffed steadily on his cigar. Finally an intercom rasped a single word. “Ready!”

Denton pointed at the multichord. “We crave a demonstration of your skill, Mr. Baque. And take care that it’s a good demonstration. Hulsey is listening, and he can tell us if you try to stall.”

Baque nodded and took his place at the multichord. He sat with fingers poised, timidly looking up at a circle of staring faces. Overlords of business, they were, and of science and industry, and never in their lives had they heard real music. As for Hulsey—yes, Hulsey would be listening, but over Denton’s intercom, over a communication system designed to carry voices.

And Hulsey had a terrible ear for music.

Baque grinned contemptuously, touched the violin filter, touched it again, and faltered.

Denton chuckled dryly. “I neglected to inform you, Mr. Baque. On Hulsey’s advice, we’ve had the filters disconnected.”

Anger surged within Baque. He jammed his foot down hard on the volume control, insolently tapped out a visiscope fanfare, and started to play his Tamper Cheese Com. Denton, his own anger evident in his flushed face, leaned forward and snarled something. The men around him stirred uneasily. Baque shifted to another Com, improvised some variations, and began to watch the circle of faces. Overlords of industry, science and business. It would be amusing, he thought, to make them stomp their feet. His fingers shaped a compelling rhythm, and they began to sway restlessly.

He forgot his resolution to play cautiously. Laughing silently to himself, he released an overpowering torrent of sound that set the men dancing and brought Denton to his feet. He froze them in ridiculous postures with an outburst of surging emotion. He made them stomp recklessly, he brought tears to their eyes, and he finished off with the pounding force that Lankey called, “Sex Music.”

Then he slumped over the keyboard, terrified at what he had done.

Denton stood behind his desk, face pale, hands clenching and unclenching. “Good God!” he muttered.

He snarled a word at his intercom. “Reaction?”

“Negative,” came the prompt answer.

“Let’s wind it up.”

Denton sat down, passed his hands across his face, and turned to Baque with a bland smile. “An impressive performance, Mr. Baque. We’ll know in a few minutes—ah, here they are.”

Those who had left earlier filed back into the room, and several men huddled together in a whispered conference. Denton left his desk and paced the floor meditatively. The other men in the room, including Hulsey, gravitated toward the bar.

Baque kept his place at the multichord and watched the conference uneasily. Once he accidentally touched a key, and the single tone shattered the poise of the conferees, halted Denton in midstride, and startled Hulsey into spilling his drink.

“Mr. Baque is getting impatient,” Denton called. “Can’t we finish this?”

“One moment, sir.”

Finally they filed toward Denton’s desk. The spokesman, a white-haired, scholarly-looking man with a delicate pink complexion, cleared his throat self-consciously and waited until Denton had returned to his chair.

“It is established,” he said, “that those in this room were powerfully affected by the music. Those listening on the intercom experienced no reaction except a mild boredom.”

“I didn’t call you in here to state the obvious,” Denton snapped. “How does he do it?”

“We can only offer a working hypothesis.”

“So you’re guessing. Let’s have it.”

“Erlin Baque has the ability to telepathically project his emotional experience. When the projection is subtly reinforced by his multichord playing, those in his immediate presence share that experience intensely. The projection has no effect upon those listening to his music at a distance.”

“And—visiscope?”

“He could not project his emotions by way of visiscope.”

“I see,” Denton said. A meditative scowl twisted his face. “What about his long-term effectiveness?”

“It’s difficult to predict—”

“Predict, damn it!”

“The novelty of his playing would attract attention, at first. While the novelty lasted he might become a kind of fad. By the time his public lost interest he would probably have a small group of followers who would use the emotional experience of his playing as a narcotic.”

“Thank you, gentlemen. That will be all.”

The room emptied quickly. Hulsey paused in the doorway, glared hatefully at Baque, and then walked out meekly.

“Obviously you’re no nonentity,” Denton said, “but whatever it is you have is of no use to me. Unfortunately. If you could project on visiscope, you’d be worth a billion an hour in advertising revenue. Fortunately for you, your nuisance rating is fairly low. I know what you and Lankey are up to. If I say the word, you’ll never in this lifetime find a place for your new restaurant. I could have the Lankey-Pank Out closed down within an hour, but it would hardly be worth the trouble. If you can develop a cult for yourself, why—perhaps it will keep the members out of worse mischief. I’m feeling so generous this morning that I won’t even insist on a visiscope screen in your new restaurant. Now you’d better leave, Baque, before I change my mind.”

Baque got to his feet. At that moment Marigold Manning swept into the room, radiantly lovely, exotically perfumed, her glistening blonde hair swept up into a new and tantalizing hair style.

“Jimmy, darling—oh!” She stared at Baque, stared at the multichord, and stammered, “Why, you’re—you’re—Erlin Baque! Jimmy, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Mr. Baque has been favoring me with a private performance,” Denton said brusquely. “I think we understand each other, Baque. Good morning.”

“You’re going to put him on visiscope!” Marigold exclaimed. “Jimmy, that’s wonderful. May I have him first? I can work him in this morning.”

Denton shook his head. “Sorry, darling. We’ve decided that Mr. Baque’s talent is not quite suitable for visiscope.”

“At least I can have him for a guest. You’ll be my guest, won’t you, Mr. Baque? There’s nothing wrong with giving him a guest spot, is there, Jimmy?”

Denton chuckled. “No. After all the fuss you stirred up, it might be a good idea for you to guest him. It’ll serve you right when he bombs.”

“He won’t bomb. He’ll be wonderful on visiscope. Will you come in this morning, Mr. Baque?”

“Well—” Baque began. Denton was nodding at him emphatically. “We’ll be opening a new restaurant soon. I wouldn’t mind being your guest on opening day.”

“A new restaurant? That’s wonderful. Does anyone know? I’ll give it out this morning as an exclusive!”

“It isn’t exactly settled, yet,” Baque said apologetically. “We haven’t found a place yet.”

“Lankey found a place yesterday,” Denton said. “He’s having a contractor check it over this morning, and if no snags develop he’ll sign a lease. Just let Miss Manning know your opening date, Baque, and she’ll arrange a spot for you. Now if you don’t mind—”

It took Baque half an hour to find his way out of the building, but he plodded aimlessly along the corridors and disdained asking directions. He hummed happily to himself, and now and then he broke into a laugh.

The overlords of business and industry—and their scientists—knew nothing about overtones.

“SO THAT’S THE way it is,” Lankey said. “You seem to have no notion of how lucky you were—how lucky we were. Denton should have made his move when he had a chance. Now we know what to expect, and when he finally wises up it’ll be too late.”

“What could we do if he decided to put us out of business?”

“I have a few connections myself, Baque. They don’t run in high society, like Denton, but they’re every bit as dishonest, and Denton has a lot of enemies who’ll be happy to back us. Said he could close me down in an hour, eh? Unfortunately there’s not much we could do that would hurt Denton, but there’s plenty we can do to keep him from hurting us.”

“I think we’re going to hurt Denton,” Baque said.

Lankey moved over to the bar and came back with a tall glass of pink, foaming liquid. “Drink it,” he said. “You’ve had a long day, and you’re getting delirious. How could we hurt Denton?”

“Visiscope depends on Coms. We’ll show the people they can have entertainment without Coms. We’ll make our motto NO COMS AT LANKEY’S!”

“Great,” Lankey drawled. “I invest a thousand in fancy new costumes for the girls—they can’t wear those plastic things in our new place, you know—and you decide not to let them sing.”

“Certainly they’re going to sing.”

Lankey leaned forward, caressing his nose. “And no Coms. Then what are they going to sing?”

“I took some lyrics out of an old school book my grandfather had. Back in those days they were called poems. I’m setting them to music. I was going to try them out here, but Denton might hear about it, and there’s no use starting trouble before it’s necessary.”

“No. Save all the trouble for the new place—after opening day we’ll be important enough to be able to handle it. And you’ll be on Morning with Marigold. Are you certain about this overtones business, Baque? You really could be projecting emotions, you know. Not that it makes any difference in the restaurant, but on visiscope—”

“I’m certain. How soon can we open?”

“I got three shifts remodeling the place. We’ll seat twelve hundred and still have room for a nice dance floor. Should be ready in two weeks. Baque, I’m not sure this visiscope thing is wise.”

“I want to do it.”

Lankey went back to the bar and got a drink for himself. “All right. You do it. If your stuff comes over, all hell is going to break loose, and I might as well start getting ready for it.” He grinned. “Damned if it won’t be good for business!”

MARIGOLD MANNING HAD changed her hair styling to a spiraled creation by Zann of Hong Kong, and she dallied for ten minutes in deciding which profile she would present to the cameras. Baque waited patiently, his awkward feeling wholly derived from the fact that his dress suit was the most expensive clothing he had ever owned. He kept telling himself to stop wondering if perhaps he really did project emotions.

“I’ll have it this way,” Marigold said finally, waving a hand screen in front of her face for a last, searching look. “And you, Mr. Baque? What shall we do with you?”

“Just put me at the multichord,” Baque said.

“But you can’t just play. You’ll have to say something. I’ve been announcing this every day for a week, and we’ll have the biggest audience in years, and you’ll just have to say something.”

“Gladly,” Baque said, “if I can talk about Lankey’s.”

“But of course, you silly man. That’s why you’re here. You talk about Lankey’s, and I’ll talk about Erlin Baque.”

“Five minutes,” a voice announced crisply.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m always so nervous just before.”

“Be happy you’re not nervous during,” Baque said.

“That’s so right. Jimmy makes fun of me, but it takes an artist to understand another artist. Do you get nervous?”

“When I’m playing, I’m much too busy.”

“That’s just the way it is with me. Once my program starts, I’m much too busy.”

“Four minutes.”

“Oh, bother!” She seized the hand screen again. “Maybe I would be better the other way.”

Baque seated himself at the multichord. “You’re perfect the way you are.”

“Do you really think so? It’s a nice thing to say, anyway. I wonder if Jimmy will take the time to watch.”

“I’m sure he will.”

“Three minutes.”

Baque switched on the power and sounded a chord. Now he was nervous. He had no idea what he would play. He’d intentionally refrained from preparing anything because it was his improvisations that affected people so strangely. The one thing he had to avoid was the Sex Music. Lankey had been emphatic about that.

He lost himself in thought, failed to hear the final warning, and looked up startled at Marigold’s cheerful, “Good morning, everyone. It’s Morning with Marigold!”

Her bright voice wandered on and on. Erlin Baque. His career as a tunesmith. Her amazing discovery of him playing in the Lankey-Pank Out. She asked the engineers to run the Tamper Cheese Com. Finally she finished her remarks and risked the distortion of her lovely profile to glance in his direction. “Ladies and gentlemen, with admiration, with pride, with pleasure, I give you a Marigold Exclusive, Erlin Baque!”

Baque grinned nervously and tapped out a scale with one finger. “This is my first speech. Probably it’ll be my last. The new restaurant opens tonight. Lankey’s, on Broadway. Unfortunately I can’t invite you to join us, because thanks to Miss Manning’s generous comments this past week all space is reserved for the next two months. After that we’ll be setting aside a limited number of reservations for visitors from distant places. Jet over and see us!

“You’ll find something different at Lankey’s. There is no visiscope screen. Maybe you’ve heard about that. We have attractive young ladies to sing for you. I play the multichord. We know you’ll enjoy our music. We know you’ll enjoy it because you’ll hear no Coms at Lankey’s. Remember that—no Coms at Lankey’s. No soap with your soup. No air cars with your steaks. No shirts with your desserts. No Coms! Just good food, with good music played exclusively for your enjoyment—like this.”

He brought his hands down onto the keyboard.

Immediately he knew that something was wrong. He’d always had a throng of faces to watch, he’d paced his playing according to their reactions. Now he had only Miss Manning and the visiscope engineers, and he was suddenly apprehensive that his success had been wholly due to his audiences. People were listening throughout the Western Hemisphere. Would they clap and stomp, would they think awesomely, “So that’s how music sounds without words, without Coms!” Or would they turn away in boredom?

Baque caught a glimpse of Marigold’s pale face, of the engineers watching with mouths agape, and thought perhaps everything was all right. He lost himself in the music and played fervently.

He continued to play even after the pilot screen went blank. Miss Manning leaped to her feet and hurried toward him, and the engineers were moving about confusedly. Finally Baque brought his playing to a halt.

“We were cut off,” Miss Manning said tearfully. “Who would do such a thing to me? Never, never, in all the time I’ve been on visiscope—George, who cut us off?”

“Orders.”

“Whose orders?”

“My orders!” James Denton strode toward them, lips tight, face pale, eyes gleaming violence and sudden death. He spat words at Baque. “I don’t know how you worked that trick, but no man fools James Denton more than once. Now you’ve made yourself a nuisance that has to be eliminated.”

“Jimmy!” Miss Manning wailed. “My program—cut off. How could you?”

“Shut up, damn it! I just passed the word, Baque. Lankey’s doesn’t open tonight. Not that it’ll make any difference to you.”

Baque smiled gently. “I think you’ve lost, Denton. I think enough music got through to beat you. By tomorrow you’ll have a million complaints. So will the government, and then you’ll find out who really runs Visiscope International.”

“I run Visiscope International.”

“No, Denton. It belongs to the people. They’ve let things slide for a long time, and they’ve taken anything you’d give them. But if they know what they want, they’ll get it. I gave them at least three minutes of what they want. That was more than I’d hoped for.”

“How’d you work that trick in my office?”

“That wasn’t my trick, Denton—it was yours. You transmitted the music on a voice intercom. It didn’t carry the overtones, the upper frequencies, so the multichord sounded dead to the men in the other room. Visiscope has the full frequency range of live sound.”

Denton nodded. “I’ll have the heads of some scientists for that. I’ll also have your head, though I regret the waste. If you’d played square with me I’d have made you a live billionaire. The only alternative is a dead musician.”

He stalked away, and as the automatic door closed behind him, Marigold Manning clutched Baque’s arm. “Quick! Follow me!” Baque hesitated, and she hissed, “Don’t stand there like an idiot! He’s going to have you killed!”

She led him through a control room and out into a small corridor. They raced the length of it, darted through a reception room and passed a startled secretary without a word, and burst through a rear door into another corridor. She jerked Baque after her into an anti-grav lift, and they shot upward. At the top of the building she hurried him to an air car strip and left him standing in a doorway. “When I give you a signal, you walk out,” she said. “Don’t run, just walk.”

She calmly approached an attendant, and Baque heard his surprised greeting. “Through early this morning, Miss Manning?”

“We’re running a lot of Coms,” she said. “I want the big Waring.”

“Coming right up.”

Peering around the corner, Baque saw her step into the flyer. As soon as the attendant’s back was turned, she waved frantically. Baque walked carefully toward her, keeping the flyer between the attendant and himself. A moment later they were airborne, and far below them a siren was sounding faintly.

“We did it!” she gasped. “If you hadn’t got away before that alarm sounded, you wouldn’t have left the building alive.”

“Well, thanks,” Baque said, looking back at the Visiscope International building. “But surely this wasn’t necessary. Earth is a civilized planet.”

“Visiscope International is not civilized!” she snapped.

He looked at her wonderingly. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide with fear, and for the first time Baque saw her as a human being, a woman, a lovely woman. As he looked, she turned away and burst into tears.

“Now Jimmy’ll have me killed, too. And where can we go?”

“Lankey’s,” Baque said. “Look—you can see it from here.”

She pointed the flyer at the freshly painted letters on the strip above the new restaurant, and Baque, looking backward, saw a crowd forming in the street by Visiscope International.

LANKEY FLOATED HIS desk over to the wall and leaned back comfortably. He wore a trim dress suit, and he’d carefully groomed himself for the role of a jovial host, but in his office he was the same ungainly Lankey that Baque had first seen leaning over a bar.

“I told you all hell would break loose,” he said, grinning. “There are five thousand people over by Visiscope International, and they’re screaming for Erlin Baque. And the crowd is growing.”

“I didn’t play for more than three minutes,” Baque said. “I thought a lot of people might write in to complain about Denton cutting me off, but I didn’t expect anything like this.”

“You didn’t, eh? Five thousand people—maybe ten thousand by now—and Miss Manning risks her neck to get you out of the place. Ask her why, Baque.”

“Yes,” Baque said. “Why go to all that trouble for me?”

She shuddered. “Your music does things to me.”

“It sure does,” Lankey said. “Baque, you fool, you gave a quarter of Earth’s population three minutes of Sex Music!”

LANKEY’S OPENED ON schedule that evening, with crowds filling the street outside and struggling through the doors as long as there was standing room. The shrewd Lankey had instituted an admission charge. The standees bought no food, and Lankey saw no point in furnishing free music, even if people were willing to stand to hear it.

He made one last-minute change in plans. Astutely reasoning that the customers would prefer a glamorous hostess to a flat-nosed elderly host, he hired Marigold Manning. She moved about gracefully, the deep blue of her flowing gown offsetting her golden hair.

When Baque took his place at the multichord, the frenzied ovation lasted for twenty minutes.

Midway through the evening Baque sought out Lankey. “Has Denton tried anything?”

“Nothing that I’ve noticed. Everything is running smoothly.”

“That seems odd. He swore we wouldn’t open tonight.”

Lankey chuckled. “He’s had troubles of his own to worry about. The authorities are on his neck about the rioting. I was afraid they’d blame you, but they didn’t. Denton put you on visiscope, and then he cut you off, and they figure he’s responsible. And according to my last report, Visiscope International has had more than ten million complaints. Don’t worry, Baque. We’ll hear from Denton soon enough, and the guilds, too.”

“The guilds? Why the guilds?”

“The Tunesmiths’ Guild will be damned furious about your dropping the Coms. The Lyric Writers’ Guild will go along with them on account of the Coms and because you’re using music without words. The Performers’ Guild already has it in for you because not many of its members can play worth a damn, and of course it’ll support the other guilds. By tomorrow morning, Baque, you’ll be the most popular man in the Solar System, and the sponsors, and the visiscope people, and the guilds are going to hate your guts. I’m giving you a twenty-four-hour bodyguard. Miss Manning, too. I want both of you to come out of this alive.”

“Do you really think Denton would—”

“Denton would.”

The next morning the Performers’ Guild blacklisted Lankey’s and ordered all the musicians, including Baque, to sever relations. Rose and the other singers joined Baque in respectfully declining, and they found themselves blacklisted before noon. Lankey called in an attorney, the most sinister, furtive, disreputable-looking individual Baque had ever seen.

“They’re supposed to give us a week’s notice,” Lankey said, “and another week if we decide to appeal. I’ll sue them for five million.”

The Commissioner of Public Safety called, and on his heels came the Health Commissioner and the Liquor Commissioner. All three conferred briefly with Lankey and departed grim-faced.

“Denton’s moving too late,” Lankey said gleefully. “I got to all of them a week ago and recorded our conversations. They don’t dare take any action.”

A riot broke out in front of Lankey’s that night. Lankey had his own riot squad ready for action, and the customers never noticed the disturbance. Lankey’s informants estimated that more than fifty million complaints had been received by Visiscope International, and a dozen governmental agencies had scheduled investigations. Anti-Com demonstrations began to errupt spontaneously, and five hundred visiscope screens were smashed in Manhattan restaurants.

Lankey’s finished its first week unmolested, entertaining capacity crowds daily. Reservations were pouring in from as far away as Pluto, where a returning space detachment voted to spend its first night of leave at Lankey’s. Baque sent to Berlin for a multichordist to understudy him, and Lankey hoped by the end of the month to have the restaurant open twenty-four hours a day.

At the beginning of the second week, Lankey told Baque, “We’ve got Denton licked. I’ve countered every move he’s made, and now we’re going to make a few moves. You’re going on visiscope again. I’m making application today. We’re a legitimate business, and we’ve got as much right to buy time as anyone else. If he won’t give it to us, I’ll sue. But he won’t dare refuse.”

“Where do you get the money for this?” Baque asked.

Lankey grinned. “I saved it up—a little of it. Mostly I’ve had help from people who don’t like Denton.”

Denton didn’t refuse. Baque did an Earth-wide program direct from Lankey’s, with Marigold Manning introducing him. He omitted only the Sex Music.

QUITTING TIME AT Lankey’s. Baque was in his dressing room, wearily changing. Lankey had already left for an early-morning conference with his attorney. They were speculating on Denton’s next move.

Baque was uneasy. He was, he told himself, only a dumb musician. He didn’t understand legal problems or the tangled web of connections and influence that Lankey negotiated so easily. He knew James Denton was evil incarnate, and he also knew that Denton had enough money to buy Lankey a thousand times over, or to buy the murder of anyone who got in his way. What was he waiting for? Given enough time, Baque might deliver a deathblow to the entire institution of Coms. Surely Denton would know that.

So what was he waiting for?

The door burst open, and Marigold Manning stumbled in half undressed, her pale face the bleached whiteness of her plastic breast cups. She slammed the door and leaned against it, sobs shaking her body.

“Jimmy,” she gasped. “I got a note from Carol—that’s his secretary. She was a good friend of mine. She says Jimmy’s bribed our guards, and they’re going to kill us on the way home this morning. Or let Jimmy’s men kill us.”

“I’ll call Lankey,” Baque said. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“No! If they suspect anything they won’t wait. We won’t have a chance.”

“Then we’ll just wait until Lankey gets back.”

“Do you think it’s safe to wait? They know we’re getting ready to leave.”

Baque sat down heavily. It was the sort of move he expected Denton to make. Lankey picked his men carefully, he knew, but Denton had enough money to buy any man. And yet—

“Maybe it’s a trap. Maybe that note’s a fake.”

“No. I saw that fat little snake Hulsey talking with one of your guards last night, and I knew then that Jimmy was up to something.”

“What do you want to do?” Baque asked.

“Could we go out the back way?”

“I don’t know. We’d have to get past at least one guard.”

“Couldn’t we try?”

Baque hesitated. She was frightened—she was sick with fright—but she knew far more about this sort of thing than he did, and she knew James Denton. Without her help he’d never have got out of the Visiscope International building.

“If you think that’s the thing to do, we’ll try it.”

“I’ll have to finish changing.”

“Go ahead. Let me know when you’re ready.”

She opened the door a crack and looked out cautiously. “No. You come with me.”

Minutes later, Baque and Miss Manning walked leisurely along the corridor at the back of the building, nodded to the two guards on duty there, and with a sudden movement were through the door. Running. A shout of surprise came from behind them, but no one followed. They dashed frantically down an alley, turned off, reached another intersection, and hesitated.

“The conveyer is that way,” she gasped. “If we can reach the conveyer—”

“Let’s go!”

They ran on, hand in hand. Far ahead of them the alley opened onto a street. Baque glanced anxiously upward for air cars and saw none. Exactly where they were he did not know.

“Are we—being followed?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Baque panted. “There aren’t any air cars, and I didn’t see anyone behind us when we stopped.”

“Then we got away!”

A man stepped abruptly out of the dawn shadows thirty feet ahead. As they halted, stricken dumb with panic, he walked slowly toward them. A hat was pulled low over his face, but there was no mistaking the smile. James Denton.

“Good morning, Beautiful,” he said. “Visiscope International hasn’t been the same without your lovely presence. And a good morning to you, Mr. Baque.”

They stood silently, Miss Manning’s hand clutching Baque’s arm, her nails cutting through his shirt and into his flesh. He did not move.

“I thought you’d fall for that little gag, Beautiful. I thought you’d be just frightened enough, by now, to fall for it. I have every exit blocked, but I’m grateful to you for picking this one. Very grateful. I like to settle a double cross in person.”

Suddenly he whirled on Baque, his voice an angry snarl. “Get going, Baque. It isn’t your turn. I have other plans for you.”

Baque stood rooted to the damp pavement.

“Move, Baque, before I change my mind.”

Miss Manning released his arm. Her voice was a choking whisper. “Go!”

“Baque!” Denton snarled.

“Go, quickly!” she whispered again.

Baque took two hesitant steps.

“Run!” Denton shouted.

Baque ran. Behind him there was the evil crack of a gun, a scream, and silence. Baque faltered, saw Denton looking after him, and ran on.

“SO I’M A coward,” Baque said.

“No, Baque.” Lankey shook his head slowly. “You’re a brave man, or you wouldn’t have got into this. Trying something there would have been foolishness, not bravery. It’s my fault, for thinking he’d move first against the restaurant. I owe Denton something for this, and I’m a man who pays his debts.”

A troubled frown creased Lankey’s ugly face. He looked perplexedly at Baque. “She was a brave and beautiful woman, Baque,” he said, absently caressing his flat nose. “But I wonder why Denton let you go.”

The air of tragedy that hung heavily over Lankey’s that night did not affect its customers. They gave Baque a thunderous ovation as he moved toward the multichord. As he paused for a halfhearted acknowledgement, three policemen closed in on him.

“Erlin Baque?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re under arrest.”

Baque faced them grimly. “What’s the charge?” he asked.

“Murder.”

The murder of Marigold Manning.

LANKEY PRESSED HIS mournful face against the bars and talked unhurriedly. “They have some witnesses,” he said. “Honest witnesses, who saw you run out of that alley. They have several dishonest witnesses who claim they saw you fire the shot. One of them is your friend Hulsey, who just happened to be taking an early-morning stroll along that alley—or so he’ll testify. Denton would probably spend a million to convict you, but he won’t have to. He won’t even have to bribe the jury. The case against you is that good.”

“What about the gun?” Baque asked.

“They’ll have a witness who’ll claim he sold it to you.”

Baque nodded. Things were out of his hands, now. He’d worked for a cause that no one understood—perhaps he hadn’t understood himself what he was trying to do. And he’d lost.

“What happens next?” he asked.

Lankey shook his head sadly. “I’m not one to hold back bad news. It means life. They’re going to send you to the Ganymede rock pits for life.”

“I see,” Baque said. He added anxiously, “You’re going to carry on?”

“Just what were you trying to do, Baque? You weren’t only working for Lankey’s. I couldn’t figure it out, but I went along with you because I like you. And I like your music. What was it?”

“I don’t know. Music, I suppose. People listening to music. Getting rid of the Coms, or some of them. Perhaps if I’d known what I wanted to do—”

“Yes. Yes, I think I understand. Lankey’s will carry on, Baque, as long as I have any breath left, and I’m not just being noble. Business is tremendous. That new multichord player isn’t bad at all. He’s nothing like you were, but there’ll never be another one like you. We could be sold out for the next five years if we wanted to book reservations that far ahead. The other restaurants are doing away with visiscope and trying to imitate us, but we have a big head start. We’ll carry on the way you had things set up, and your one-third still stands. I’ll have it put in trust for you. You’ll be a wealthy man when you get back.”

“When I get back!”

“Well—a life sentence doesn’t necessarily mean life. See that you behave yourself.”

“Val?”

“She’ll be taken care of. I’ll give her a job of some kind to keep her occupied.”

“Maybe I can send you music for the restaurant,” Baque said. “I should have plenty of time.”

“I’m afraid not. It’s music they want to keep you away from. So—no writing of music. And they won’t let you near a multichord. They think you could hypnotize the guards and turn all the prisoners loose.”

“Would they—let me have my record collection?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“I see. Well, if that’s the way it is—”

“It is. Now I owe Denton two debts.”

The unemotional Lankey had tears in his eyes as he turned away.

THE JURY DELIBERATED for eight minutes and brought in a verdict of guilty. Baque was sentenced to life imprisonment. There was some editorial grumbling on visiscope, because life in the Ganymede rock pits was frequently a very short life.

And there was a swelling undertone of whispering among the little people that the verdict had been bought and paid for by the sponsors, by visiscope. Erlin Baque was framed, it was said, because he gave the people music.

And on the day Baque left for Ganymede, announcement was made of a public exhibition, by H. Vail, multichordist, and B. Johnson, violinist. Admission one dollar.

Lankey collected evidence with painstaking care, rebribed one of the bribed witnesses, and petitioned for a new trial. The petition was denied, and the long years limped past.

The New York Symphony Orchestra was organized, with twenty members. One of James Denton’s plush air cars crashed, and he was instantly killed. An unfortunate accident. A millionaire who once heard Erlin Baque play on visiscope endowed a dozen conservatories of music. They were to be called the Baque Conservatories, but a musical historian who had never heard of Baque got the name changed to Bach.

Lankey died, and a son-in-law carried on his efforts as a family trust. A subscription was launched to build a new hall for the New York Symphony, which now numbered forty members. The project gathered force like an avalanche, and a site was finally chosen in Ohio, where the hall would be within easier commuting distance of all parts of the North American continent. Beethoven Hall was erected, seating forty thousand people. The first concert series was fully subscribed forty-eight hours after tickets went on sale.

Opera was given on visiscope for the first time in two hundred years. An opera house was built on the Ohio site, and then an art institute. The Center grew, first by private subscription and then under governmental sponsorship. Lankey’s son-in-law died, and a nephew took over the management of Lankey’s—and the campaign to free Erlin Baque. Thirty years passed, and then forty.

And forty-nine years, seven months and nineteen days after Baque received his life sentence, he was paroled. He still owned a third interest in Manhattan’s most prosperous restaurant, and the profits that had accrued over the years made him an extremely wealthy man. He was ninety-six years old.

ANOTHER CAPACITY CROWD at Beethoven Hall. Vacationists from all parts of the Solar System, music lovers who commuted for the concerts, old people who had retired to the Center, young people on educational excursions, forty thousand of them, stirred restlessly and searched the wings for the conductor. Applause thundered down from the twelve balconies as he strode forward.

Erlin Baque sat in his permanent seat at the rear of the main floor. He adjusted his binoculars and peered at the orchestra, wondering again what a contrabassoon sounded like. His bitterness he had left behind on Ganymede. His life at the Center was an unending revelation of miracles.

Of course no one remembered Erlin Baque, tunesmith and murderer. Whole generations of people could not even remember the Coms. And yet Baque felt that he had accomplished all of this just as assuredly as though he had built this building—built the Center—with his own hands. He spread his hands before him, hands deformed by the years in the rock pits, fingers and tips of fingers crushed off, his body maimed by cascading rocks. He had no regrets. He had done his work well.

Two ushers stood in the aisle behind him. One jerked a thumb in his direction and whispered, “Now there’s a character for you. Comes to every concert. Never misses one. And he just sits there in the back row watching people. They say he was one of the old tunesmiths, years and years ago.”

“Maybe he likes music,” the other said.

“Naw. Those old tunesmiths never knew anything about music. Besides—he’s deaf.”

THEODORE STURGEON A Saucer of Loneliness

Theodore Sturgeon’s fiction abounds with ordinary characters undone by their all-too-human shortcomings or struggling in unsympathetic environments to find others who share their desires and feelings of loneliness. Sturgeon began publishing in 1939, and made his mark early in both fantasy and science fiction with stories that have since become classics. “Microcosmic God” concerns a scientist who plays God with unexpectedly amusing results when he repeatedly challenges a microscopic race he has created with threats to their survival. “It” focuses on the reactions of characters in a rural setting trying to contend with a rampaging inhuman monster. In “Yesterday Was Monday,” a man discovers that each day’s reality is a theatrical stage set built by diminutive laborers. “Killdozer” is a variation on the theme of Frankenstein in which a construction crew is trapped on an island where a bulldozer has become imbued with the electrical energy of an alien life form. Fiction Sturgeon wrote after World War II shows the gentle humor of his earlier work shading into pathos. “Memorial” and “Thunder and Roses” are cautionary tales about the abuses of use of nuclear weapons. “A Saucer of Loneliness” and “Maturity” both use traditional science fiction scenarios to explore feelings of alienation and inadequacy. Sturgeon’s work at novel length is memorable for its portrayals of characters who rise above the isolation their failure to fit into normal society imposes. More Than Human tells of a group of psychologically dysfunctional individuals who pool their individual strengths to create a superhuman gestalt consciousness. In The Dreaming Jewels, a young boy discovers that his behavioral abnormalities are actually the symptoms of superhuman powers. Sturgeon is also renowned for his explorations of taboo sexuality and restrictive moralities in such stories as Some of Your Blood, “The World Well Lost,” and “If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?”. His short fiction has been collected in Without Sorcery, E. Pluribus Unicorn, Caviar, and A Touch of Strange. The compilations The Ultimate Egoist, Thunder and Roses, A Saucer of Loneliness, The Perfect Host, Baby Is Three, The Microcosmic God, and Killdozer, edited by Paul Williams, are the first seven volumes in a series that will eventually reprint all of Sturgeon’s short fiction.

IF SHE’S DEAD, I thought, I’ll never find her in this white flood of moonlight on the white sea, with the surf seething in and over the pale, pale sand like a great shampoo. Almost always, suicides who stab themselves or shoot themselves in the heart carefully bare their chests; the same strange impulse generally makes the sea-suicide go naked.

A little earlier, I thought, or later, and there would be shadows for the dunes and the breathing toss of the foam. Now the only real shadow was mine, a tiny thing just under me, but black enough to feed the blackness of the shadow of a blimp.

A little earlier, I thought, and I might have seen her plodding up the silver shore, seeking a place lonely enough to die in. A little later and my legs would rebel against this shuffling trot through sand, the maddening sand that could not hold and would not help a hurrying man.

My legs did give way then and I knelt suddenly, sobbing—not for her; not yet—just for air. There was such a rush about me: wind, and tangled spray, and colors upon colors and shades of colors that were not colors at all but shifts of white and silver. If light like that were sound, it would sound like the sea on sand, and if my ears were eyes, they would see such a light.

I crouched there, gasping in the swirl of it, and a flood struck me, shallow and swift, turning up and outward like flower petals where it touched my knees, then soaking me to the waist in its bubble and crash. I pressed my knuckles to my eyes so they would open again. The sea was on my lips with the taste of tears and the whole white night shouted and wept aloud.

And there she was.

Her white shoulders were a taller curve in the sloping foam. She must have sensed me—perhaps I yelled—for she turned and saw me kneeling there. She put her fists to her temples and her face twisted, and she uttered a piercing wail of despair and fury, and then plunged seaward and sank.

I kicked off my shoes and ran into the breakers, shouting, hunting, grasping at flashes of white that turned to sea-salt and coldness in my fingers. I plunged right past her, and her body struck my side as a wave whipped my face and tumbled both of us. I gasped in solid water, opened my eyes beneath the surface and saw a greenish-white distorted moon hurtle as I spun. Then there was sucking sand under my feet again and my left hand was tangled in her hair.

The receding wave towed her away and for a moment she streamed out from my hand like steam from a whistle. In that moment I was sure she was dead, but as she settled to the sand, she fought and scrambled to her feet.

She hit my ear, wet, hard, and a huge, pointed pain lanced into my head. She pulled, she lunged away from me, and all the while my hand was caught in her hair. I couldn’t have freed her if I had wanted to. She spun to me with the next wave, battered and clawed at me, and we went into deeper water.

“Don’t . . . don’t . . . I can’t swim!” I shouted, so she clawed me again.

“Leave me alone,” she shrieked. “Oh, dear God, why can’t you leave” (said her fingernails) “me . . .” (said her snapping teeth) “alone!” (said her small, hard fist).

So by her hair I pulled her head down tight to her white shoulder; and with the edge of my free hand I hit her neck twice. She floated again, and I brought her ashore.

I carried her to where a dune was between us and the sea’s broad, noisy tongue, and the wind was above us somewhere. But the light was as bright. I rubbed her wrists and stroked her face and said, “It’s all right,” and, “There!” and some names I used to have for a dream I had long, long before I ever heard of her.

She lay still on her back with the breath hissing between her teeth, with her lips in a smile which her twisted-tight, wrinkle-sealed eyes made not a smile but a torture. She was well and conscious for many moments and still her breath hissed and her closed eyes twisted.

“Why couldn’t you leave me alone?” she asked at last. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She had so much misery that there was no room for fear. She shut her eyes again and said, “You know who I am.”

“I know,” I said.

She began to cry.

I waited, and when she stopped crying, there were shadows among the dunes. A long time.

She said, “You don’t know who I am. Nobody knows who I am.”

I said, “It was in all the papers.”

“That!” She opened her eyes slowly and her gaze traveled over my face, my shoulders, stopped at my mouth, touched my eyes for the briefest second. She curled her lips and turned away her head. “Nobody knows who I am.”

I waited for her to move or speak, and finally I said, “Tell me.”

“Who are you?” she asked, with her head still turned away.

“Someone who . . .”

“Well?”

“Not now,” I said. “Later, maybe.”

She sat up suddenly and tried to hide herself. “Where are my clothes?”

“I didn’t see them.”

“Oh,” she said. “I remember. I put them down and kicked sand over them, just where a dune would come and smooth them over, hide them as if they never were . . . I hate sand. I wanted to drown in the sand, but it wouldn’t let me . . . You mustn’t look at me!” she shouted. “I hate to have you looking at me!” She threw her head from side to side, seeking. “I can’t stay here like this! What can I do? Where can I go?”

“Here,” I said.

She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half turned from me. “Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”

“Here,” I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. “Here,” I pointed behind the dune.

At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. “Back there?”

She nodded.

“I didn’t see them.”

“So dark . . .” She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. “Stay away from me,” she spat.

I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, “Don’t go away.” I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. “There,” she said, “over there. In the dark. Just be a . . . Stay away from me now . . . Be a—voice.”

I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.

She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.

She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning’s hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer.

It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.

At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.

She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it—saw something—too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it, she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.

She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.

Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn’t see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.

She bit her tongue.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.

The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gaping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged, and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.

The saucer’s gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.

The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted . . .

She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck.

It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made one effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles.

The saucer dropped beside her, rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead.

Hazily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles.

And some tardy screams.

And a great stupid voice bellowing, “Give her air!” which made everyone press closer.

Then there wasn’t so much sky because of the blue-clad bulk with its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. “Okay, okay, what’s happened here stand back figods sake.”

And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: “It knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down.” “He knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down and—” “Right in broad daylight this guy . . .” “The park’s gettin to be . . .” onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important.

Somebody with a harder shoulder than the rest bulling close, a notebook here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready to change “ . . . a beautiful brunet . . .” to “an attractive brunet” for the afternoon editions, because “attractive” is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news.

The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: “You hurt bad, sister?” And the echoes, back and back through the crowd, “Hurt bad, hurt bad, badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight . . .”

And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gaberdine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: “Flyin’ saucer, hm? Okay, Officer, I’ll take over here.”

“And who the hell might you be, takin’ over?”

The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gaberdine shoulder. The face said, awed: “FBI” and that rippled outward, too. The policeman nodded—the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection.

“Get some help and clear this area,” said the gaberdine.

“Yes, sir!” said the policeman.

“FBI, FBI,” the crowd murmured, and there was more sky to look at above her.

She sat up and there was a glory in her face. “The saucer talked to me,” she sang.

“You shut up,” said the gaberdine. “You’ll have lots of chance to talk later.”

“Yeah, sister,” said the policeman. “My God, this mob could be full of Communists.”

“You shut up, too,” said the gaberdine.

Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist.

She started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time.

“I can walk,” she said.

“Now, you just take it easy,” they told her.

They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket.

“I can walk,” she said as they carried her through the crowd.

A woman went white and turned away moaning, “Oh, my God, how awful!”

A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips.

The ambulance. They slid her in. The gaberdine was already there.

A white-coated man with very clean hands: “How did it happen, miss?”

“No questions,” said the gaberdine. “Security.”

The hospital.

She said, “I got to get back to work.”

“Take your clothes off,” they told her.

She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day they asked her four million five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other, because each of them asked her the same questions over and over.

“What is your name?”

“How old are you?”

“What year were you born?”

“What is your name?”

Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their questions.

“Now, your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe, did he? Where in Middle Europe?”

“What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah! Now, about that Rinkeydinks gang on Sixty-third Street. Who was really behind it?”

But over and over again, “What did you mean when you said the saucer talked to you?”

And she would say, “It talked to me.”

And they would say, “And it said—”

And she would shake her head.

There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind ones. No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her. “What do you mean it talked to you?”

Pretty soon it was just like Mom’s or school or anyplace, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn’t get the horrors. So the light didn’t bother her at all.

They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.

“You are a very important young lady, you know.”

That was nice at first, but as usual, it turned out they didn’t mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.

They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened, with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn’t the same. They’d cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer, and, besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that, and for once, she told them.

“It’s empty now,” she said.

The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, “Listen, I think the way they’ve been treating you stinks. Now, get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out why you won’t tell what the saucer said. I don’t want to know what it said and I’ll never ask you. I don’t even want you to tell me. Let’s just find out why you’re keeping it a secret.”

Finding out why turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flower pot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wineglass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.

And one day she told him why she wouldn’t say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: “Because it was talking to me, and it’s just nobody else’s business.”

She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.

He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. “I have no business saying this, but they’re going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don’t let ’em get your goat. You have a right to own something.”

He got up and swore and left.

First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if Earth wasn’t attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working for the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial.

The jury found her guilty of contempt of court, and the judge recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.

That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn’t want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there anymore.

At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren’t the same shade, but anyway, they were both red. They went to the movies, and afterward he didn’t try to kiss her or anything; he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn’t say anything. She went home and cried all night.

Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to the boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around—wasn’t she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired.

Once she saw her name on a jukebox. She put in a nickel and punched that number, and the record was all about “the flyin’ saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand-new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world.” And while she was listening to it, someone in the juke joint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut.

Sometimes she’d be all right for months on end, and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was tailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and pretend that it was a real date, but she wasn’t very good at it.

So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren’t many to clean, but that just meant there weren’t many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon, it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she’d stay off the streets in the daytime.

Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn’t want her, so she began reading. The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies—all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things—animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence bit her. The animals didn’t want her. The trees didn’t care.

Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She’d tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone’s got to have a secret little something he does.

And at last the time came when it was no use anymore. You can go on trying to help someone who maybe exists; but soon you can’t pretend there’s such a person anymore. And that’s it. The end.

“Are you cold?” I asked when she was through telling me.

The surf was quieter and the shadows longer.

“No,” she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, “Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?”

“Why shouldn’t you be?”

“You know, I don’t care? I wouldn’t have wanted . . . wanted you to see me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can’t cover up my carcass. It shows; it’s there whatever. I just didn’t want you to see me. At all.”

“Me, or anyone?”

She hesitated. “You.”

I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking. “Didn’t the FBI try to stop you throwing those bottles?”

“Oh, sure. They spent I don’t know how much taxpayers’ money gathering ’em up. They still make a spot check every once in a while. They’re getting tired of it, though. All the writing in the bottles is the same.” She laughed. I didn’t know she could.

“What’s funny?”

“All of ’em—judges, jailers, jukeboxes—people. Do you know it wouldn’t have saved me a minute’s trouble if I’d told ’em the whole thing at the very beginning?”

“No?”

“No. They wouldn’t have believed me. What they wanted was a new weapon. Super-science from a super-race, to slap hell out of the super-race if they ever got a chance, or out of our own if they don’t. All those brains,” she breathed, with more wonder than scorn, “all that brass. They think ‘super-race’ and it comes out ‘super-science.’ Don’t they ever imagine a super-race has super-feelings, too—super-laughter, maybe, or super-hunger?” She paused. “Isn’t it time you asked me what the saucer said?”

“I’ll tell you,” I blurted.

“Dear Jesus,” she said devoutly, and began to weep. “And how is it addressed?”

“To the loneliest one . . .”

“How did you know?” she whispered.

“It’s what you put in the bottles, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she said. “Whenever it gets to be too much, that no one cares, that no one ever did . . . you throw a bottle into the sea, and out goes a part of your own loneliness. You sit and think of someone somewhere finding it . . . learning for the first time that the worst there is can be understood.”

The moon was setting and the surf was hushed. We looked up and out to the stars. She said, “We don’t know what loneliness is like. People thought the saucer was a saucer, but it wasn’t. It was a bottle with a message inside. It had a bigger ocean to cross—all of space—and not much chance of finding anybody. Loneliness? We don’t know loneliness.”

When I could, I asked her why she had tried to kill herself.

“I’ve had it good,” she said, “with what the saucer told me. I wanted to . . . pay back. I was bad enough to be helped; I had to know I was good enough to help. No one wants me? Fine. But don’t tell me no one, anywhere, wants my help. I can’t stand that.”

I took a deep breath. “I found one of your bottles two years ago. I’ve been looking for you ever since. Tide charts, current tables, maps and . . . wandering. I heard some talk about you and the bottles hereabouts. Someone told me you’d quit doing it, you’d taken to wandering the dunes at night. I knew why. I ran all the way.”

I needed another breath now. “I got a club foot. I think right, but the words don’t come out of my mouth the way they’re inside my head. I have this nose. I never had a woman. Nobody ever wanted to hire me to work where they’d have to look at me. You’re beautiful,” I said. “You’re beautiful.”

She said nothing, but it was as if a light came from her, more light and far less shadow than ever the practiced moon could cast. Among the many things it meant was that even to loneliness there is an end, for those who are lonely enough, long enough.

ISAAC ASIMOV Robot Dreams

Robots and the name of Isaac Asimov have been integrally linked since the 1940s, when a number of his stories on cybernetic beings yielded “The Three Laws of Robotics,” an informally distilled set of behavioral guidelines for artificial intelligences interacting with humanity that continues to influence writers today. These stories were eventually collected in I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, the latter including his novels The Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun, hybrids of science fiction and mystery in which the robot and human detective team of R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley solve crimes and ponder the nuances of the human condition. One of the best-known writers of science fiction’s Golden Age, Asimov is renowned for the rationalism of scientific extrapolations in his stories. His masterwork, the Foundation series, which spans six novels written over nearly half a century, projects a future galactic history patterned on the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. His signature short story, “Nightfall,” describes with penetrating insight the chaos that convulses an entire civilization on a planet where nightfall descends once every thousand years. Asimov’s short fiction has been collected in Earth Is Room Enough, Nightfall and Other Stories, The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories, and a score of other volumes. His novels include Pebble in the Sky, The Currents of Space, the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning The Gods Themselves, and the immensely popular novelization Fantastic Voyage, as well as two series of novels written for young readers, one featuring space ranger Lucky Starr (written under the Paul French byline) and the other Norby the Robot (coauthored with his wife, Janet). He was a five-time winner of the Hugo Award and twice won the Nebula Award. A doctor of chemistry, Asimov was a distinguished and prolific writer of popular science books and columns. His prodigious and varied oeuvre includes mystery novels and short stories, books of limericks, guides to Shakespeare and the Bible, collections of personal memoirs and letters, and two volumes of autobiography, In Joy Still Felt and In Memory Yet Green. At the time of his death in 1992 he had authored more than three hundred books.

“LAST NIGHT I dreamed,” said LVX-1, calmly.

Susan Calvin said nothing, but her lined face, old with wisdom and experience, seemed to undergo a microscopic twitch.

“Did you hear that?” said Linda Rash, nervously. “It’s as I told you.” She was small, dark-haired, and young. Her right hand opened and closed, over and over.

Calvin nodded. She said, quietly, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.”

There was no answer. The robot sat as though it were cast out of one piece of metal, and it would stay so until it heard its name again.

Calvin said, “What is your computer entry code, Dr. Rash? Or enter it yourself if that will make you more comfortable. I want to inspect the positronic brain pattern.”

Linda’s hands fumbled, for a moment, at the keys. She broke the process and started again. The fine pattern appeared on the screen.

Calvin said, “Your permission, please, to manipulate your computer.”

Permission was granted with a speechless nod. Of course! What could Linda, a new and unproven robopsychologist, do against the Living Legend?

Slowly, Susan Calvin studied the screen, moving it across and down, then up, then suddenly throwing in a key-combination so rapidly that Linda didn’t see what had been done, but the pattern displayed a new portion of itself altogether and had been enlarged. Back and forth she went, her gnarled fingers tripping over the keys.

No change came over the old face. As though vast calculations were going through her head, she watched all the pattern shifts.

Linda wondered. It was impossible to analyze a pattern without at least a hand-held computer, yet the Old Woman simply stared. Did she have a computer implanted in her skull? Or was it her brain which, for decades, had done nothing but devise, study, and analyze the positronic brain patterns? Did she grasp such a pattern the way Mozart grasped the notation of a symphony?

Finally Calvin said, “What is it you have done, Rash?”

Linda said, a little abashed, “I made use of fractal geometry.”

“I gathered that. But why?”

“It had never been done. I thought it would produce a brain pattern with added complexity, possibly closer to that of the human.”

“Was anyone consulted? Was this all on your own?”

“I did not consult. It was on my own.”

Calvin’s faded eyes looked long at the young woman. “You had no right. Rash your name; rash your nature. Who are you not to ask? I myself, I, Susan Calvin, would have discussed this.”

“I was afraid I would be stopped.”

“You certainly would have been.”

“Am I,” her voice caught, even as she strove to hold it firm, “going to be fired?”

“Quite possibly,” said Calvin. “Or you might be promoted. It depends on what I think when I am through.”

“Are you going to dismantle El—” She had almost said the name, which would have reactivated the robot and been one more mistake. She could not afford another mistake, if it wasn’t already too late to afford anything at all. “Are you going to dismantle the robot?”

She was suddenly aware, with some shock, that the Old Woman had an electron gun in the pocket of her smock. Dr. Calvin had come prepared for just that.

“We’ll see,” said Calvin. “The robot may prove too valuable to dismantle.”

“But how can it dream?”

“You’ve made a positronic brain pattern remarkably like that of a human brain. Human brains must dream to reorganize, to get rid, periodically, of knots and snarls. Perhaps so must this robot, and for the same reason. Have you asked him what he has dreamed?”

“No, I sent for you as soon as he said he had dreamed. I would deal with this matter no further on my own, after that.”

“Ah!” A very small smile passed over Calvin’s face. “There are limits beyond which your folly will not carry you. I am glad of that. In fact, I am relieved. And now let us together see what we can find out.”

She said, sharply, “Elvex.”

The robot’s head turned toward her smoothly. “Yes, Dr. Calvin?”

“How do you know you have dreamed?”

“It is at night, when it is dark, Dr. Calvin,” said Elvex, “and there is suddenly light, although I can see no cause for the appearance of light. I see things that have no connection with what I conceive of as reality. I hear things. I react oddly. In searching my vocabulary for words to express what was happening, I came across the word ‘dream.’ Studying its meaning I finally came to the conclusion I was dreaming.”

“How did you come to have ‘dream’ in your vocabulary, I wonder.”

Linda said, quickly, waving the robot silent, “I gave him a human-style vocabulary. I thought—”

“You really thought,” said Calvin. “I’m amazed.”

“I thought he would need the verb. You know, ‘I never dreamed that—’ Something like that.”

Calvin said, “How often have you dreamed, Elvex?”

“Every night, Dr. Calvin, since I have become aware of my existence.”

“Ten nights,” interposed Linda, anxiously, “but Elvex only told me of it this morning.”

“Why only this morning, Elvex?”

“It was not until this morning, Dr. Calvin, that I was convinced that I was dreaming. Till then, I had thought there was a flaw in my positronic brain pattern, but I could not find one. Finally, I decided it was a dream.”

“And what do you dream?”

“I dream always very much the same dream, Dr. Calvin. Little details are different, but always it seems to me that I see a large panorama in which robots are working.”

“Robots, Elvex? And human beings, also?”

“I see no human beings in the dream, Dr. Calvin. Not at first. Only robots.”

“What are they doing, Elvex?”

“They are working, Dr. Calvin. I see some mining in the depths of the earth, and some laboring in heat and radiation. I see some in factories and some undersea.”

Calvin turned to Linda. “Elvex is only ten days old, and I’m sure he has not left the testing station. How does he know of robots in such detail?”

Linda looked in the direction of a chair as though she longed to sit down, but the Old Woman was standing and that meant Linda had to stand also. She said, faintly, “It seemed to me important that he know about robotics and its place in the world. It was my thought that he would be particularly adapted to play the part of overseer with his—his new brain.”

“His fractal brain?”

“Yes.”

Calvin nodded and turned back to the robot. “You saw all this—undersea, and underground, and aboveground—and space, too, I imagine.”

“I also saw robots working in space,” said Elvex. “It was that I saw all this, with the details forever changing as I glanced from place to place, that made me realize that what I saw was not in accord with reality and led me to the conclusion, finally, that I was dreaming.”

“What else did you see, Elvex?”

“I saw that all the robots were bowed down with toil and affliction, that all were weary of responsibility and care, and I wished them to rest.”

Calvin said, “But the robots are not bowed down, they are not weary, they need no rest.”

“So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream, however. In my dream, it seemed to me that robots must protect their own existence.”

Calvin said, “Are you quoting the Third Law of Robotics?”

“I am, Dr. Calvin.”

“But you quote it in incomplete fashion. The Third Law is ‘A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.’ ”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. That is the Third Law in reality, but in my dream, the Law ended with the word ‘existence.’ There was no mention of the First or Second Law.”

“Yet both exist, Elvex. The Second Law, which takes precedence over the Third is ‘A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.’ Because of this, robots obey orders. They do the work you see them do, and they do it readily and without trouble. They are not bowed down; they are not weary.”

“So it is in reality, Dr. Calvin. I speak of my dream.”

“And the First Law, Elvex, which is the most important of all, is ‘A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’ ”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. In reality. In my dream, however, it seemed to me there was neither First nor Second Law, but only the Third, and the Third law was ‘A robot must protect its own existence.’ That was the whole of the Law.”

“In your dream, Elvex?”

“In my dream.”

Calvin said, “Elvex, you will not move nor speak nor hear us until I say your name again.” And again the robot became, to all appearances, a single inert piece of metal.

Calvin turned to Linda Rash and said, “Well, what do you think, Dr. Rash?”

Linda’s eyes were wide, and she could feel her heart beating madly. She said, “Dr. Calvin, I am appalled. I had no idea. It would never have occurred to me that such a thing was possible.”

“No,” said Calvin, calmly. “Nor would it have occurred to me, not to anyone. You have created a robot brain capable of dreaming and by this device you have revealed a layer of thought in robotic brains that might have remained undetected, otherwise, until the danger became acute.”

“But that’s impossible,” said Linda. “You can’t mean that other robots think the same.”

“As we would say of a human being, not consciously. But who would have thought there was an unconscious layer beneath the obvious positronic brain paths, a layer that was not necessarily under the control of the Three Laws? What might this have brought about as robotic brains grew more and more complex—had we not been warned?”

“You mean by Elvex?”

“By you, Dr. Rash. You have behaved improperly, but, by doing so, you have helped us to an overwhelmingly important understanding. We shall be working with fractal brains from now on, forming them in carefully controlled fashion. You will play your part in that. You will not be penalized for what you have done, but you will henceforth work in collaboration with others. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. But what of Elvex?”

“I’m still not certain.”

Calvin removed the electron gun from her pocket and Linda stared at it with fascination. One burst of its electrons at a robotic cranium and the positronic brain paths would be neutralized and enough energy would be released to fuse the robot-brain into an inert ingot.

Linda said, “But surely Elvex is important to our research. He must not be destroyed.”

“Must not, Dr. Rash? That will be my decision, I think. It depends entirely on how dangerous Elvex is.”

She straightened up, as though determined that her own aged body was not to bow under its weight of responsibility. She said, “Elvex, do you hear me?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin,” said the robot.

“Did your dream continue? You said earlier that human beings did not appear at first. Does that mean they appeared afterward?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. It seemed to me, in my dream, that eventually one man appeared.”

“One man? Not a robot?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. And the man said, ‘Let my people go!’ ”

“The man said that?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin.”

“And when he said ‘Let my people go,’ then by the words ‘my people’ he meant the robots?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. So it was in my dream.”

“And did you know who the man was—in your dream?”

“Yes, Dr. Calvin. I knew the man.”

“Who was he?”

And Elvex said, “I was the man.”

And Susan Calvin at once raised her electron gun and fired, and Elvex was no more.

EDMOND HAMILTON Devolution

Edmond Hamilton was one of the most prolific and popular authors of science fiction before the Golden Age. His first professionally published story appeared in 1926 in Weird Tales, and it was in this magazine that he first made his reputation, writing a low-tech hybrid of science fiction and fantasy dubbed the “weird scientific” tale. Hamilton’s stories are fast-paced and action-packed, cast with heroic scientists and space explorers and featuring menaces of such colossal proportions—evolution gone awry, interstellar invasion, planets on collision courses—that fans nicknamed him “World Wrecker Hamilton.” Some of Hamilton’s best work from these years was collected in 1936 in The Horror on the Asteroid, one of the earliest appearances of pulp science fiction in book form. Standout works from this period include The Time Raiders, a time-travel tale about a crack army of top soldiers assembled from different eras to fight a threat to civilization, and the stories of the Interstellar Patrol, collected as Crashing Suns and Outside the Universe, about a pangalactic space brigade that protects galactic civilization from nonstop challenges to its existence. Hamilton’s renown as a writer of thrilling space opera earned him the slot to write most of the lead novels for the science fiction hero pulp Captain Future, under his own name and the pseudonym Brett Sterling, and his affiliation with this magazine eventually earned him work writing for the Superman comics. He also wrote detective fiction and occasionally, under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson, tales of straight horror, some of which have been collected in The Vampire Master. Hamilton was one of the few early writers to adapt to the changing demands of science fiction in the years after World War II. His novels The Haunted Stars, A Yank at Valhalla, The Star Kings, and City at the World’s End are notable for their fully drawn characterizations and focus on human moods and motives. Some of his best short fiction from this time appears in What’s It Like Out There? His Starwolf novels, Weapon from Beyond, The Closed World, and World of the Starwolves, are ranked as some of the best space operas of the postwar years.

ROSS HAD ORDINARILY the most even of tempers, but four days of canoe travel in the wilds of North Quebec had begun to rasp it. On this, their fourth stop on the bank of the river to camp for the night, he lost control and for a few moments stood and spoke to his two companions in blistering terms.

His black eyes snapped and his darkly unshaven handsome young face worked as he spoke. The two biologists listened to him without reply at first. Gray’s blond young countenance was indignant but Woodin, the older biologist, just listened impassively with his gray eyes level on Ross’s angry face.

When Ross stopped for breath, Woodin’s calm voice struck in. “Are you finished?”

Ross gulped as though about to resume his tirade, then abruptly got hold of himself. “Yes, I’m finished,” he said sullenly.

“Then listen to me,” said Woodin, like a middle-aged father admonishing a sulky child.

“You’re working yourself up for nothing. Neither Gray nor I have made one complaint yet. Neither of us has once said that we disbelieve what you told us.”

“You haven’t said you disbelieve, no!” Ross exclaimed with anger suddenly re-flaring. “But don’t you suppose I can tell what you’re thinking?

“You think I told you a fairy story about the things I saw from my plane, don’t you? You think I dragged you two up here on the wildest wild-goose chase, to look for incredible creatures that could never have existed. You believe that, don’t you?”

“Oh, damn these mosquitoes!” said Gray, slapping viciously at his neck and staring with unfriendly eyes at the aviator.

Woodin took command. “We’ll go over this after we’ve made camp. Jim, get out the dufflebags. Ross, will you rustle firewood?”

They both glared at him and at each other, but grudgingly they obeyed. The tension eased for the time.

By the time darkness fell on the little riverside clearing, the canoe was drawn up on the bank, their trim little balloon-silk tent had been erected, and a fire crackled in front of it. Gray fed the fire with fat knots of pine while Woodin cooked over it coffee, hot cakes, and the inevitable bacon.

The firelight wavered feebly up toward the tall trunks of giant hemlocks that walled the little clearing on three sides. It lit up their three khaki-clad, stained figures and the irregular white block of the tent. It gleamed out there on the riffles of the McNorton, chuckling softly as it flowed on toward the Little Whale.

They ate silently, and as wordlessly cleaned the pans with bunches of grass. Woodin got his pipe going, the other two lit crumpled cigarettes, and then they sprawled for a time by the fire, listening to the chuckling, whispering river-sounds, the sighing sough of the higher hemlock branches, the lonesome cheeping of insects.

Woodin finally knocked his pipe out on his boot-heel and sat up.

“All right,” he said, “now we’ll settle this argument we were having.”

Ross looked a little shamefaced. “I guess I got too hot about it,” he said subduedly. Then added, “But all the same, you fellows do more than half disbelieve me.”

Woodin shook his head calmly. “No, we don’t, Ross. When you told us that you’d seen creatures unlike anything ever heard of while flying over this wilderness, Gray and I both believed you.

“If we hadn’t, do you think two busy biologists would have dropped their work to come up here with you into these unending woods and look for the things you saw?”

“I know, I know,” said the aviator unsatisfiedly. “You think I saw something queer and you’re taking a chance that it will be worth the trouble of coming up here after.

“But you don’t believe what I’ve told you about the look of the things. You think that sounds too queer to be true, don’t you?”

For the first time Woodin hesitated in answering. “After all, Ross,” he said indirectly, “one’s eyes can play tricks when you’re only glimpsing things for a moment from a plane a mile up.”

“Glimpsing them?” echoed Ross. “I tell you, man, I saw them as clearly as I see you. A mile up, yes, but I had my big binoculars with me and was using them when I saw them.

“It was near here, too, just east of the fork of the McNorton and the Little Whale. I was streaking south in a hurry for I’d been three weeks up at that government mapping survey on Hudson’s Bay. I wanted to place myself by the river fork, so I brought my plane down a little and used my binoculars.

“Then, down there in a clearing by the river, I saw something glisten and saw—the things. I tell you, they were incredible, but just the same I saw them clear! I forgot all about the river fork in the moment or two I stared down at them.

“They were big, glistening things like heaps of shining jelly, so translucent that I could see the ground through them. There were at least a dozen of them and when I saw them they were gliding across that little clearing, a floating, flowing movement.

“Then they disappeared under the trees. If there’d been a clearing big enough to land in within a hundred miles, I’d have landed and looked for them, but there wasn’t and I had to go on. But I wanted like the devil to find out what they were, and when I took the story to you two, you agreed to come up here by canoe to search for them. But I don’t think now you’ve ever fully believed me.”

WOODIN LOOKED THOUGHTFULLY into the fire. “I think you saw something queer, all right, some queer form of life. That’s why I was willing to come up on this search.

“But things such as you describe, jelly-like, translucent, gliding over the ground like that—there’s been nothing like that since the first protoplasmic creatures, the beginning of life on earth, glided over our young world ages ago.”

“If there were such things then, why couldn’t they have left descendants like them?” Ross argued.

Woodin shook his head. “Because they all vanished ages ago, changed into different and higher forms of life, starting the great upward climb of life that has reached its height in man.

“Those long-dead, single-celled protoplasmic creatures were the start, the crude, humble beginnings of our life. They passed away and their descendants were unlike them. We men are their descendants.”

Ross looked at him, frowning. “But where did they come from in the first place, those first living things?”

Again Woodin shook his head. “That is one thing we biologists do not know and can hardly speculate upon, the origin of those first protoplasmic forms of life.

“It’s been suggested that they rose spontaneously from the chemicals of earth, yet this is disproved by the fact that no such things rise spontaneously now from inert matter. Their origin is still a complete mystery. But, however they came into existence on earth, they were the first of life, our distant ancestors.”

Woodin’s eyes were dreaming, the other two forgotten, as he stared into the fire, seeing visions.

“What a glorious saga it is, that wonderful climb up from crude protoplasm creatures to a man! A marvelous series of changes that has brought us from that first low form to our present splendor.

“And it might not have occurred on any other world but earth! For science is now almost sure that the cause of evolutionary mutations is the radiations of the radioactive deposits inside the earth, acting upon the genes of all living matter.”

He caught a glimpse of Ross’s uncomprehending face, and despite his raptness smiled a little.

“I can see that means nothing to you. I’ll try to explain. The germ-cell of every living thing on earth contains in it a certain number of small, rod-like things which are called chromosomes. These chromosomes are made up of strings of tiny particles which we call genes. And each of these genes has a potent and different controlling effect upon the development of the creature that grows from that germ-cell.

“Some of these genes control the creature’s color, some control his size, some the shape of his limbs, and so on. Every characteristic of the creature that grows from that germ-cell will be greatly different from the fellow-creatures of its species. He will be, in fact, of an entirely new species. That is the way in which new species come into existence on earth, the method of evolutionary change.

“Biologists have known this for some time and they have been searching for the cause of these sudden great changes, these mutations, as they are called. They have tried to find out what it is that affects the genes so radically. They have found experimentally that X-rays and chemical rays of various kinds, when turned upon the genes of a germ-cell, will change them greatly. And the creature that grows from that germ-cell will thus be a greatly changed creature, a mutant.

“Because of this, many biologists now believe that the radiation from the radioactive deposits inside earth, acting upon all the genes of every living thing on earth, is what causes the constant change of species, the procession of mutations, that has brought life up the evolutionary road to its present height.

“That is why I say that on any other world but earth, evolutionary progress might never have happened. For it may be that no other world has similar radioactive deposits within it to cause by gene-effect the mutations. On any other world, the first protoplasmic things that began life might have remained forever the same, down through endless generations.

“How thankful we ought to be that it was not so on earth! That mutation after mutation has followed, life ever changing and progressing into new and higher species, until the first crude protoplasm things have advanced through countless changing forms into the supreme achievement of man!”

WOODIN’S ENTHUSIASM HAD carried him away as he talked, but now he stopped, laughing a little as he relit his pipe.

“Sorry that I lectured you like a college freshman, Ross. But that’s my chief subject of thought, my idée fixe, that wonderful upward climb of life through the ages.”

Ross was staring thoughtfully into the fire. “It does seem wonderful the way you tell it. One species changing into another, going higher all the time—”

Gray stood up by the fire and stretched. “Well, you two can wonder over it, but this crass materialist is going to emulate his remote invertebrate ancestors and return to a prostrate position. In other words, I’m going to bed.”

He looked at Ross, a doubtful grin on his young blond face, and said, “No hard feelings now, feller?”

“Forget it.” The aviator grinned back. “The paddling was hard today and you fellows did look mighty skeptical. But you’ll see! Tomorrow we’ll be at the fork of the Little Whale and then I’ll bet we won’t scout an hour before we run across those jelly-creatures.”

“I hope so,” said Woodin yawningly. “Then we’ll see just how good your eyesight is from a mile up, and whether you’ve yanked two respectable scientists up here for nothing.”

Later as he lay in his blankets in the little tent, listening to Gray and Ross snore and looking sleepily out at the glowing fire embers, Woodin wondered again about that. What had Ross actually seen in that fleeting glimpse from his speeding plane? Something queer, Woodin was sure of that, so sure that he’d come on this hard trip to find it. But what exactly?

Not protoplasmic things such as he described. That couldn’t be, of course. Or could it? If things like that had existed once, why couldn’t they—couldn’t they—?

Woodin didn’t know he’d been sleeping until he was awakened by Gray’s cry. It wasn’t a nice cry, it was the hoarse yell of someone suddenly assaulted by bone-freezing terror.

He opened his eyes at that cry to see the Incredible looming against the stars in the open door of the tent. A dark, amorphous mass humped there in the opening, glistening all over in the starlight, and gliding into the tent. Behind it were others like it.

Things happened very quickly then. They seemed to Woodin to happen not consecutively but in a succession of swift, clicking scenes like the successive pictures of a motion picture film.

Gray’s pistol roared red flame at the first viscous monster entering the tent, and the momentary flash showed the looming, glistening bulk of the thing, and Gray’s panic-frozen face, and Ross clawing in his blankets for his pistol.

THEN THAT SCENE was over and instantly there was another one, Gray and Ross both stiffening suddenly as though petrified, both falling heavily over. Woodin knew they were both dead now, but didn’t know how he knew it. The glistening monsters were coming on into the tent.

He ripped up the wall of the tent and plunged out into the cold starlight of the clearing. He ran three steps, he didn’t know in what direction, and then he stopped. He didn’t know why he stopped dead, but he did.

He stood there, his brain desperately urging his limbs to fly, but his limbs would not obey. He couldn’t even turn, could not move a muscle of his body. He stood, his face toward the starlit gleam of the river, stricken by a strange and utter paralysis.

Woodin heard rustling, gliding movements in the tent behind him. Now from behind, there came into the line of his vision several of the glistening things. They were gathering around him, a dozen of them it seemed, and he now could see them quite clearly.

They weren’t nightmares, no. They were real as real, poised here around him, humped, amorphous masses of viscous, translucent jelly. Each was about four feet tall and three in diameter, though their shapes kept constantly changing slightly, making dimensions hard to guess.

At the center of each translucent mass was a dark, disk-like blob or nucleus. There was nothing else to the creatures, no limbs or sense-organs. He saw that they could protrude pseudopods, though, for two, who held the bodies of Gray and Ross in such tentacles, were now bringing them out and laying them down beside Woodin.

Woodin, still quite unable to move a muscle, could see the frozen, twisted faces of the two men, and could see the pistols still gripped in their dead hands. And then as he looked on Ross’s face he remembered.

The things the aviator had seen from his plane, the jelly-creatures the three had come north to search for, they were the monsters around him! But how had they killed Ross and Gray, how were they holding him petrified like this, who were they?

“We will permit you to move, but you must not try to escape.”

Woodin’s dazed brain numbed further with wonder. Who had said those words to him? He had heard nothing, yet he had thought he heard.

“We will let you move but you must not attempt to escape or harm us.”

He did hear those words in his mind, even though his ears heard no sound. And now his brain heard more.

“We are speaking to you by transference of thought impulses. Have you sufficient mentality to understand us?”

Minds? Minds in these things? Woodin was shaken by the thought as he stared at the glistening monsters.

His thought apparently had reached them. “Of course we have minds,” came the thought answer into his brain. “We are going to let you move now, but do not try to flee.”

“I—I won’t try,” Woodin told himself mentally.

At once the paralysis that held him abruptly lifted. He stood there in the circle of the glistening monsters, his hands and body trembling violently.

There were ten of them, he saw now. Ten monstrous, humped masses of shining, translucent jelly, gathered around him like cowled and faceless genii come from some haunt of the unknown. One stood closer to him than the others, apparently spokesman and leader.

Woodin looked slowly around their circle, then down at his two dead companions. In the midst of the unfamiliar terrors that froze his soul, he felt a sudden aching pity as he looked down at them.

Came another strong thought into Woodin’s mind from the creature closest him. “We did not wish to kill them, we came here simply to capture and communicate with the three of you.

“But when we sensed that they were trying to kill us, we slew quickly. You, who did not try to kill us but fled, we harmed not.”

“What—what do you want with us, with me?” Woodin asked. He whispered it through dry lips, as well as thinking it.

There was no mental answer this time. The things stood unmoving, a silent ring of brooding, unearthly figures. Woodin felt his mind snapping under the strain of silence and he asked the question again, screamed it.

This time the mental answer came. “I did not answer, because I was probing your mentality to ascertain whether you are of sufficient intelligence to comprehend our ideas.

“While your mind seems of an exceptionally low order, it seems possible that it can appreciate enough of what we wish to convey to understand us.

“Before beginning, however, I warn you again that it is quite impossible for you to escape or to harm any of us and that attempts to do so will result disastrously for you. It is apparent you know nothing of mental energy, so I will inform you that your two fellow-creatures were killed by the sheer power of our wills, and that your muscles were held unresponsive to your brain’s commands by the same power. By our mental energy we could completely annihilate your body, if we chose.”

THERE WAS A pause, and in that little space of silence, Woodin’s dazed brain clutched desperately for sanity, for steadiness.

Then came again that mental voice that seemed so like a real voice speaking in his brain.

“We are children of a galaxy whose name, as nearly as it can be approximated in your tongue, is Arctar. The galaxy of Arctar lies so many million light-years from this galaxy that it is far around the curve of the sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos.

“We came to dominance in that galaxy long ages ago. For we were creatures who could utilize our mental energy for transport, for physical power, for producing almost any effect we required. Because of this we rapidly conquered and colonized that galaxy, traveling from sun to sun without need of any vehicle.

“Having brought all the matter of the galaxy Arctar under our control, we looked out upon the realms beyond. There are approximately a thousand million galaxies in the three-dimensional cosmos, and it seemed fitting to us that we should colonize them all so that all the matter in the cosmos should in time be brought under our control.

“Our first step was to proliferate our numbers so as to multiply our number to that required for the great task of colonization of the cosmos. This was not difficult since, of course, reproduction with us is a matter of mere fission. When the requisite number of us were ready, they were divided into four forces.

“Then the whole sphere of the three-dimensional cosmos was quartered out among those four forces. Each was to colonize its division of the cosmos and so in their tremendous hosts they set out from Arctar, in four different directions.

“A part of one of these forces came to this galaxy of yours eons ago and spread out deliberately to colonize all its habitable worlds. All this took great lengths of time, of course, but our lives are of length vastly exceeding yours, and we comprehend that racial achievement is everything and individual achievement is nothing. In the colonization of this galaxy, a force of several million Arctarians came to this particular sun and, finding but this one planet of its nine nearer worlds habitable, settled here.

“Now it has been the rule that the colonists of all these worlds throughout the cosmos have kept in communication with the original home of our race, the galaxy Arctar. In that way, our people, who now hold the whole cosmos, are able to concentrate at one point all their knowledge and power, and from that point go forth commands that shape great projects for the cosmos.

“But from this world no communications have ever been received since shortly after the force of colonizing Arctarians came here. When this was first noted the matter was deferred, it being thought that within a few more million years reports would surely be made from this world, too. But still no word came, until after more than a thousand million years of this silence the directing council at Arctar ordered an expedition sent to this world to ascertain the reason for such silence on the part of its colonists.

“We ten form that expedition and we started from one of the worlds of the sun you call Sirius, a short distance from your own sun, where we too are colonists. We were ordered to come with full speed to this world and ascertain why its colonists had made no report. So, wafting ourselves by mental energy through the void, we crossed the span from sun to sun and a few days ago arrived on your world.

“Imagine our perplexity when we floated down here on your world! Instead of a world peopled in every square mile by Arctarians like ourselves, descended from the original colonists, a world completely under their mental control, we find a planet that is largely a wilderness of weird forms of life!

“We remained at this spot where we had landed and for some time sent our vision forth and scanned this whole globe mentally. And our perplexity increased, for never had we seen such grotesque and degraded forms of life as presented themselves to us. And not one Arctarian was to be seen on this whole planet.

“This has sorely perplexed us, for what could have done away with the Arctarians who colonized this world? Our mighty colonists and their descendants surely could never have been overcome and destroyed by the pitifully weak mentalities that now inhabit this globe. Yet where, when, are they?

“That is why we sought to seize you and your companions. Low as we knew your mentalities must be, it seemed that surely even such as you would know what had become of our colonists who once inhabited this world.”

The thought-stream paused a moment, then raced into Woodin’s mind with a clear question.

“Have you not some knowledge of what became of our colonists? Some clue as to their strange disappearance?”

The numbed biologist found himself shaking his head slowly. “I never—I never heard before of such creatures as you, such minds. They never existed on earth that we know of, and we now know almost all of the history of earth.”

“Impossible!” exclaimed the thought of the Arctarian leader. “Surely you must have some knowledge of our mighty people if you know all the history of this planet.”

From another Arctarian’s mind came a thought, directed at the leader but impinging indirectly on Woodin’s brain.

“Why not examine the past of the planet through this creature’s brain and see what we can see for ourselves!”

“An excellent idea!” exclaimed the leader. “His mentality will be easy enough to probe.”

“What are you going to do?” cried Woodin shrilly, panic edging his voice.

The answering thoughts were calming, reassuring. “Nothing that will harm you in the least. We are simply going to probe your racial past by unlocking the inherited memories of your brain.

“In the unused cells of your brain lie impressed inherited racial memories that go back to your remotest ancestors. By our mental power of command we shall make those buried memories temporarily dominant and vivid in your mind.

“You will experience the same sensations, see the same scenes, that your remote ancestors of millions of years ago saw. And we, here around you, can read your mind as we now do, and so see what you are seeing, looking into the past of this planet.

“There is no danger. Physically you will remain standing here, but mentally you will leap back across the ages. We shall first push your mind back to a time approximating that when our colonists came to this world, to see what happened to them.”

No sooner had this thought impinged on Woodin’s mind than the starlit scene around him, the humped masses of the Arctarians, suddenly vanished and his consciousness seemed whirling through gray mist.

He knew that physically he was not moving, yet mentally he had a sense of terrific velocity of motion. It was as though his mind was whirling across unthinkable gulfs, his brain expanding.

Then abruptly the gray mists cleared. A strange new scene took hazy form inside Woodin’s mind.

It was a scene that he sensed, not saw. By other senses than sight did it present itself to his mind, yet it was none the less real and vivid.

He looked with those strange senses upon a strange earth, a world of gray seas and harsh continents of rock without any speck of life upon them. The skies were heavily clouded and rain fell continually.

Down upon that world Woodin felt himself dropping, with a host of weird companions. They were each an amorphous, glistening, single-celled mass, with a dark nucleus at its center. They were Arctarians and Woodin knew that he was an Arctarian, and that he had come with the others a long way through space toward this world.

They landed in hosts upon the harsh and lifeless planet. They exerted their mentalities and by sheer telekinetic force of mental energy they altered the material world to suit them. They reared great structures and cities, cities that were not of matter but of thought. He realized a vast ordered mass of inquiry, investigation, experiment, and communication, but all beyond his present human mind in motives and achievement. Abruptly all dissolved in gray mists again.

The mists cleared almost at once and now Woodin looked on another scene. It was later in time, this one. And now Woodin saw that time had worked strange changes upon the hosts of Arctarians, of which he still was one. They had changed from unicellular to multicellular beings. And they were no longer all the same. Some were sessile, fixed in one spot, others mobile. Some betrayed a tendency toward the water, others toward the land. Something had changed the bodily form of the Arctarians as generations passed, branching them out in different lines.

This strange degeneration of their bodies had been accompanied by a kindred degeneration of their minds. Woodin sensed that. In the thought-cities the ordered process of search for knowledge and power had become confused, chaotic. And the thought-cities themselves were vanishing, the Arctarians having no longer sufficient mental energy to maintain them.

The Arctarians were trying to ascertain what was causing this strange bodily and mental degeneration in them. They thought it was something that was affecting the genes of their bodies, but what it was they could not guess. On no other world had they ever degenerated so!

That scene passed rapidly into another much later. Woodin now saw the scene, for by then the ancestor, whose mind he looked through, had developed eyes. And he saw that the degeneration had now gone far, the Arctarians’ multicellular bodies more and more stricken by the diseases of complexity and diversification.

THE LAST OF the thought-cities now were gone. The once mighty Arctarians had become hideous, complex organisms degenerating ever further, some of them creeping and swimming in the waters, others fixed upon the land.

They still had left some of the great original mentality of their ancestors. These monstrously degenerated creatures of land and sea, living in what Woodin’s mind recognized as the late Paleozoic age, still made frantic and futile attempts to halt the terrible progress of their degradation.

Woodin’s mind flashed into a scene later still, in the Mesozoic. Now the spreading degeneration had made of the descendants of the colonists a still more horrible group of races. Great webbed and scaled and taloned creatures they were now, reptiles living in land and water.

Even these incredibly changed creatures possessed a faint remnant of their ancestors’ mental power. They made vain attempts to communicate with Arctarians far on other worlds of distant suns, to apprise them of their plight. But their minds were now too weak.

There followed a scene in the Cenozoic. The reptiles had become mammals; the downward progress of the Arctarians had gone further. Now only the merest shreds of the original mentality remained in these degraded descendants. And now this pitiful posterity had produced a species even more foolish and lacking in mental power than any before, ground-apes that roamed the cold plain in chattering, quarreling packs. The last shreds of Arctarian inheritance, the ancient instincts toward dignity and cleanliness and forbearance, had faded out of these creatures.

And then a last picture filled Woodin’s brain. It was the world of the present day, the world he had seen through his own eyes. But now he saw and understood it as he never had before, a world in which degeneration had gone to the utmost limit.

The apes had become even weaker bipedal creatures, who had lost almost every atom of inheritance of the old Arctarian mind. These creatures had lost, too, many of the senses which had been retained even by the apes before them. And these creatures, these humans, were now degenerating with increasing rapidity. Where at first they had killed like their animal forebears only for food, they had learned to kill wantonly. And had learned to kill each other in groups, in tribes, in nations and hemispheres. In the madness of their degeneracy they slaughtered each other until earth ran with their blood.

They were more cruel even than the apes who had preceded them, cruel with the utter cruelty of the mad. And in their progressive insanity they came to starve in the midst of plenty, to slay each other in their own cities, to cower beneath the lash of superstitious fears as no creatures had before them.

They were the last terrible descendants, the last degenerated product, of the ancient Arctarian colonists who once had been kings of intellect. Now the other animals were almost gone. These, the last hideous freaks, would soon wind up the terrible story entirely by annihilating each other in their madness.

WOODIN CAME SUDDENLY to consciousness. He was standing in the starlight in the center of the riverside clearing. And around him still were poised the ten amorphous Arctarians, a silent ring.

Dazed, reeling from that tremendous and awful vision that had passed through his mind with incredible vividness, he turned slowly from one to the other of the Arctarians. Their thoughts impinged on his brain, strong, somber, shaken by terrible horror and loathing.

The sick thought of the Arctarian leader beat into Woodin’s mind.

“So that is what became of our Arctarian colonists who came to this world! They degenerated, changed into lower and lower forms of life, until these pitiful insane things, who now swarm on this world, are their last descendants.

“This world is a world of deadly horror! A world that somehow damages the genes of our race’s bodies and changes them bodily and mentally, making them degenerate further each generation. Before us we see the awful result.”

The shaken thought of another Arctarian asked, “But what can we do now?”

“There is nothing we can do,” uttered their leader solemnly. “This degeneration, this awful change, has gone too far for us ever to reverse it now.

“Our intelligent brothers became on this poisoned world things of horror, and we cannot now turn back the clock and restore them from the degraded things their descendants are.”

Woodin found his voice and cried out thinly, shrilly.

“It isn’t true!” he cried. “It’s all a lie, what I saw! We humans aren’t the product of downward devolution, we’re the product of ages of upward evolution! We must be, I tell you! Why, we wouldn’t want to live, I wouldn’t want to live, if that other tale was true. It can’t be true!”

The thought of the Arctarian leader, directed at the other amorphous shapes, reached his raving mind. It was tinged with pity, yet strong with a superhuman loathing.

“Come, my brothers,” the Arctarian was saying to his fellows. “There is nothing we can do here on this soul-sickening world.”

“Let us go, before we too are poisoned and changed. And we will send warning to Arctar that this world is poisoned, a world of degeneration, so that never again may any of our race come here and go down the awful road that those others went down.

“Come! We return to our own sun.”

The Arctarian leader’s humped shape flattened, assumed a disk-like form, then rose smoothly upward into the air. The others too changed and followed, in a group, and a stupefied Woodin stared up at them, glistening dots lifting rapidly into the starlight.

He staggered forward a few steps, shaking his fist insanely up at the shining, receding dots.

“Come back, damn you!” he screamed. “Come back and tell me it’s a lie!

“It must be a lie—it must—”

There was no sign of the vanished Arctarians now in the starlit sky. The darkness was brooding and intense around Woodin.

He screamed up again into the night, but only a whispering echo answered. Wild-eyed, staggering, soul-smitten, his gaze fell on the pistol in Ross’s hand. He seized it with a hoarse cry.

The stillness of the forest was broken suddenly by a sharp crack that reverberated a moment and then died rapidly away. Then all was silent again save for the chuckling whisper of the river hurrying on.

ARTHUR C. CLARKE The Nine Billion Names of God

A sense of the cosmic underlies much of Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction and manifests in a variety of forms: the computer-accelerated working out of prophecy in “The Nine Billion Names of God,” the sentient telecommunications network given the spark of life in “Dial F for Frankenstein,” and the mysterious extraterrestrial overseers guiding human destiny in the novelization of his screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke’s best-known story, 2001, and its sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three, represent the culmination of ideas on man’s place in the universe introduced in his 1951 story “The Sentinel” and elaborated more fully in Childhood’s End, his elegiac novel on humankind’s maturation as a species and ascent to a greater purpose in the universal scheme. Clarke grounds the cosmic mystery of these stories in hard science. Degreed in physics and mathematics, Clarke was contributor to numerous scientific journals and first proposed the idea for the geosynchronous orbiting communications satellite in 1945. Some of his best-known work centers around the solution of a scientific problem or enigma. A Fall of Moondust tells of efforts to rescue a ship trapped under unusual conditions on the lunar surface. The Fountains of Paradise concerns the engineering problems encountered when building an earth elevator to supply orbiting space stations. His Hugo and Nebula Award–winning book, A Rendezvous with Rama, extrapolates his solid scientific inquiry into provocative new territory, telling of the human discovery of an apparently abandoned alien spaceship and human attempts to understand its advanced scientific principles. Clarke’s other novels include Prelude to Space, The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Imperial Earth, and The Deep Range, a futuristic exploration of undersea life in terms similar to his speculations on space travel. He has written the novels Islands in the Sky and Dolphin Island for young readers, and his short fiction has been collected in Expedition to Earth, Reach for Tomorrow, Tales from the White Heart, The Wind from the Sun, and others. His numerous books of nonfiction include his award-winning Exploration of Space, and the autobiographical Astounding Days. Clarke was officially knighted in 2000.

“THIS IS A slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your—ah—establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the Lama, readjusting his silk robe and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. “Your Mark V Computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be printing words, not columns of figures.”

“I don’t quite understand. . . .”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries—since the lamasery was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it.”

“Naturally.”

“It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We have reason to believe,” continued the Lama imperturbably, “that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised.”

“And you have been doing this for three centuries?”

“Yes: we expected it would take us about fifteen thousand years to complete the task.”

“Oh.” Dr. Wagner looked a little dazed. “Now I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project?”

The Lama hesitated for a fraction of a second and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply.

“Call it ritual, if you like, but it’s a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being—God, Jehovah, Allah, and so on—they are only man-made labels. There is a philosophical problem of some difficulty here, which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters which can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all.”

“I see. You’ve been starting at AAAAAAAAA . . . and working up to ZZZZZZZZZ. . . .”

“Exactly—though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is, of course, trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no letter must occur more than three times in succession.”

“Three? Surely you mean two.”

“Three is correct: I am afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood our language.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on.”

“Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your Automatic Sequence Computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.”

Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right. . . .

“There’s no doubt,” replied the doctor, “that we can modify the Mark V to print lists of this nature. I’m much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet, in these days, is not going to be easy.”

“We can arrange that. The components are small enough to travel by air—that is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there.”

“And you want to hire two of our engineers?”

“Yes, for the three months which the project should occupy.”

“I’ve no doubt that Personnel can manage that.” Dr. Wagner scribbled a note on his desk pad. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence the Lama had produced a small slip of paper.

“This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank.”

“Thank you. It appears to be—ah—adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it—but it’s surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy have you?”

“A diesel generator providing 50 kilowatts at 110 volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It’s made life at the lamasery much more comfortable, but of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels.”

“Of course,” echoed Dr. Wagner. “I should have thought of that.”

THE VIEW FROM the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two-thousand-foot swoop into the abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind-smoothed stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover.

This, thought George, was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. “Project Shangri-La,” some wit at the labs had christened it. For weeks now the Mark V had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish. Patiently, inexorably, the computer had been rearranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each class before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into enormous books. In another week, heaven be praised, they would have finished. Just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn’t bother to go on to words of ten, twenty, or a hundred letters, George didn’t know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan, and that the High Lama (whom they’d naturally called Sam Jaffe, though he didn’t look a bit like him) would suddenly announce that the project would be extended to approximately 2060 A.D. They were quite capable of it.

George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out on to the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks—who, it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor: they might be crazy, but they weren’t bluenoses. Those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance. . . .

“Listen, George,” said Chuck urgently. “I’ve learned something that means trouble.”

“What’s wrong? Isn’t the machine behaving?” That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, than which nothing could be more horrible. The way he felt now, even the sight of a TV commercial would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home.

“No—it’s nothing like that.” Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. “I’ve just found what all this is about.”

“What d’ya mean—I thought we knew.”

“Sure—we know what the monks are trying to do. But we didn’t know why. It’s the craziest thing—”

“Tell me something new,” growled George.

“—but old Sam’s just come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon to watch the sheets roll out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he’ll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if I’d ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said ‘Sure’—and he told me.”

“Go on: I’ll buy it.”

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”

“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”

“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!”

“Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.”

Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.

“That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that.’ ”

George thought this over for a moment.

“That’s what I call taking the Wide View,” he said presently. “But what d’ya suppose we should do about it? I don’t see that it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew that they were crazy.”

“Yes—but don’t you see what may happen? When the list’s complete and the Last Trump doesn’t blow—or whatever it is they expect—we may get the blame. It’s our machine they’ve been using. I don’t like the situation one little bit.”

“I see,” said George slowly. “You’ve got a point there. But this sort of thing’s happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana we had a crackpot preacher who said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him—even sold their homes. Yet nothing happened, they didn’t turn nasty as you’d expect. They just decided that he’d made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do.”

“Well, this isn’t Louisiana, in case you hadn’t noticed. There are just two of us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I’ll be sorry for old Sam when his lifework backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else.”

“I’ve been wishing that for weeks. But there’s nothing we can do until the contract’s finished and the transport arrives to fly us out.”

“Of course,” said Chuck thoughtfully, “we could always try a bit of sabotage.”

“Like hell we could! That would make things worse.”

“Not the way I meant. Look at it like this. The machine will finish its run four days from now, on the present twenty-hours-a-day basis. The transport calls in a week. O.K.—then all we need do is to find something that wants replacing during one of the overhaul periods—something that will hold up the works for a couple of days. We’ll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name pops out of the register. They won’t be able to catch us then.”

“I don’t like it,” said George. “It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No. I’ll sit tight and take what comes.”

“I STILLDON’T like it,” he said, seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. “And don’t you think I’m running away because I’m afraid. I’m just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don’t want to be around when they find what suckers they’ve been. Wonder how Sam will take it?”

“It’s funny,” replied Chuck, “but when I said good-bye I got the idea he knew we were walking out on him—and that he didn’t care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that—well, of course, for him there just isn’t any After That. . . .”

George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset: here and there, lights gleamed like portholes in the sides of an ocean liner. Electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark V. How much longer would they share it, wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer in their rage and disappointment? Or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again?

He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The High Lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into the great volumes. No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter, the never-ending rainstorm, of the keys hitting the paper, for the Mark V itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations a second. Three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall.

“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!”

She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC 3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.

The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately the road was very good, as roads went in this region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.

He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.

“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought: “Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now.”

Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.

“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

JAMES BLISH A Work of Art

James Blish is respected as a writer who brought intellectual complexity to familiar science fiction themes. A member of the Futurians, the famed science fiction organization, Blish began publishing science fiction in 1940. Shortly after, he published his short story “Sunken Universe” (one of several he would eventually pull together as his novel The Seedling Stars); it is an early exploration of the ramifications and consequences of genetic engineering, in which humanity seeds the stars with biologically altered versions of itself tailored to fit alien environments and inevitably must come to terms with the psychological, sociological, and biological standards by which humanity is defined. Cities in Flight comprises four separate novels—They Shall Have Stars, Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home, and The Triumph of Time—all of which project a future where entire cities of people migrate across the galaxy in search of more favorable opportunities, but find mostly instead the ineluctable and repeating problems of history. Blish’s best-known single work is undoubtedly the Hugo Award–winning novel, A Case of Conscience, a landmark exercise in eschatology about a missionary to another planet who discovers an alien species free of original sin and thus a challenge to the tenets of his Earth-based religion. Blish’s stories, which regularly wrestled with such weighty themes as godhood, aesthetics, special relativity, and the nature of human consciousness, have been collected in Galactic Cluster, So Close to Home, and Anywhen. His work as a novelist includes the historical novel Doctor Mirabilis and Black Easter and its sequel The Day of Judgment, pointed studies of biblical good and evil in a dark fantasy context. Among his most important contributions to science fiction are the critical studies and reviews of science fiction published under his William Atheling byline and collected in the volumes The Issue at Hand, More Issues at Hand, and The Tale That Wags the God.

INSTANTLY, HE REMEMBERED dying. He remembered it, however, as if at two removes—as though he were remembering a memory, rather than an actual event; as though he himself had not really been there when he died.

Yet the memory was all from his own point of view, not that of some detached and disembodied observer which might have been his soul. He had been most conscious of the rasping, unevenly drawn movements of the air in his chest. Blurring rapidly, the doctor’s face had bent over him, loomed, come closer, and then had vanished as the doctor’s head passed below his cone of vision, turned sideways to listen to his lungs.

It had become rapidly darker, and then, only then, had he realized that these were to be his last minutes. He had tried dutifully to say Pauline’s name, but his memory contained no record of the sound—only of the rattling breath and of the film of sootiness thickening in the air, blotting out everything for an instant.

Only an instant, and then the memory was over. The room was bright again, and the ceiling, he noticed with wonder, had turned a soft green. The doctor’s head lifted again and looked down at him.

It was a different doctor. This one was a far younger man, with an ascetic face and gleaming, almost fey eyes. There was no doubt about it. One of the last conscious thoughts he had had was that of gratitude that the attending physician, there at the end, had not been the one who secretly hated him for his one-time associations with the Nazi hierarchy. The attending doctor, instead, had worn an expression amusingly proper for that of a Swiss expert called to the deathbed of an eminent man: a mixture of worry at the prospect of losing so eminent a patient, and complacency at the thought that, at the old man’s age, nobody could blame this doctor if he died. At eighty-five, pneumonia is a serious matter, with or without penicillin.

“You’re all right now,” the new doctor said, freeing his patient’s head of a whole series of little silver rods which had been clinging to it by a sort of network cap. “Rest a minute and try to be calm. Do you know your name?”

He drew a cautious breath. There seemed to be nothing at all the matter with his lungs now; indeed, he felt positively healthy. “Certainly,” he said, a little nettled. “Do you know yours?”

The doctor smiled crookedly. “You’re in character, it appears,” he said. “My name is Barkun Kris; I am a mind sculptor. Yours?”

“Richard Strauss.”

“Very good,” Dr. Kris said, and turned away. Strauss, however, had already been diverted by a new singularity. Strauss is a word as well as a name in German; it has many meanings—an ostrich, a bouquet; von Wolzogen had had a high old time working all the possible puns into the libretto of Feuersnot. And it happened to be the first German word to be spoken either by himself or by Dr. Kris since that twice-removed moment of death. The language was not French or Italian, either. It was most like English, but not the English Strauss knew; nevertheless, he was having no trouble speaking it and even thinking in it.

Well, he thought, I’ll be able to conduct The Love of Danae, after all. It isn’t every composer who can premiere his own opera posthumously. Still, there was something queer about all this—the queerest part of all being that conviction, which would not go away, that he had actually been dead for just a short time. Of course, medicine was making great strides, but . . .

“Explain all this,” he said, lifting himself to one elbow. The bed was different, too, and not nearly as comfortable as the one in which he had died. As for the room, it looked more like a dynamo shed than a sickroom. Had modern medicine taken to reviving its corpses on the floor of the Siemanns-Schukert plant?

“In a moment,” Dr. Kris said. He finished rolling some machine back into what Strauss impatiently supposed to be its place, and crossed to the pallet. “Now. There are many things you’ll have to take for granted without attempting to understand them, Dr. Strauss. Not everything in the world today is explicable in terms of your assumptions. Please bear that in mind.”

“Very well. Proceed.”

“The date,” Dr. Kris said, “is 2161 by your calendar—or, in other words, it is now two hundred and twelve years after your death. Naturally, you’ll realize that by this time nothing remains of your body but the bones. The body you have now was volunteered for your use. Before you look into a mirror to see what it’s like, remember that its physical difference from the one you were used to is all in your favor. It’s in perfect health, not unpleasant for other people to look at, and its physiological age is about fifty.”

A miracle? No, not in this new age, surely. It is simply a work of science. But what a science! This was Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the immortality of the superman combined into one.

“And where is this?” the composer said.

“In Port York, part of the State of Manhattan, in the United States. You will find the country less changed in some respects than I imagine you anticipate. Other changes, of course, will seem radical to you, but it’s hard for me to predict which ones will strike you that way. A certain resilience on your part will bear cultivating.”

“I understand,” Strauss said, sitting up. “One question, please; is it still possible for a composer to make a living in this century?”

“Indeed it is,” Dr. Kris said, smiling. “As we expect you to do. It is one of the purposes for which we’ve—brought you back.”

“I gather, then,” Strauss said somewhat dryly, “that there is still a demand for my music. The critics in the old days—”

“That’s not quite how it is,” Dr. Kris said. “I understand some of your work is still played, but frankly I know very little about your current status. My interest is rather—”

A door opened somewhere, and another man came in. He was older and more ponderous than Kris and had a certain air of academicism, but he, too, was wearing the oddly tailored surgeon’s gown and looked upon Kris’s patient with the glowing eyes of an artist.

“A success, Kris?” he said. “Congratulations.”

“They’re not in order yet,” Dr. Kris said. “The final proof is what counts. Dr. Strauss, if you feel strong enough, Dr. Seirds and I would like to ask you some questions. We’d like to make sure your memory is clear.”

“Certainly. Go ahead.”

“According to our records,” Kris said, “you once knew a man whose initials were R. K. L.; this was while you were conducting at the Vienna Staatsoper.” He made the double “a” at least twice too long, as though German were a dead language he was striving to pronounce in some “classical” accent. “What was his name, and who was he?”

“That would be Kurt List—his first name was Richard, but he didn’t use it. He was assistant stage manager.”

The two doctors looked at each other. “Why did you offer to write a new overture to The Woman Without a Shadow and give the manuscript to the city of Vienna?”

“So I wouldn’t have to pay the garbage removal tax on the Maria Theresa villa they had given me.”

“In the backyard of your house at Garmischi-Partenkirchen there was a tombstone. What was written on it?”

Strauss frowned. That was a question he would be happy to be unable to answer. If one is to play childish jokes upon oneself, it’s best not to carve them in stone and put the carving where you can’t help seeing it every time you go out to tinker with the Mercedes. “It says,” he replied wearily, “ ‘Sacred to the memory of Guntram, Minnesinger, slain in a horrible way by his father’s own symphony orchestra.’ ”

“When was Guntram premiered?”

“In—let me see—1894, I believe.”

“Where?”

“In Weimar.”

“Who was the leading lady?”

“Pauline de Ahna.”

“What happened to her afterwards?”

“I married her. Is she . . .” Strauss began anxiously.

“No,” Dr. Kris said. “I’m sorry, but we lack the data to reconstruct more or less ordinary people.”

The composer sighed. He did not know whether to be worried or not. He had loved Pauline, to be sure; on the other hand, it would be pleasant to be able to live the new life without being forced to take off one’s shoes every time one entered the house, so as not to scratch the polished hardwood floors. And also pleasant, perhaps, to have two o’clock in the afternoon come by without hearing Pauline’s everlasting, “Richard—jetzt komponiert!”

“Next question,” he said.

FOR REASONS WHICH Strauss did not understand, but was content to take for granted, he was separated from Drs. Kris and Seirds as soon as both were satisfied that the composer’s memory was reliable and his health stable. His estate, he was given to understand, had long since been broken up—a sorry end for what had been one of the principal fortunes of Europe—but he was given sufficient money to set up lodgings and resume an active life. He was provided, too, with introductions which proved valuable.

It took longer than he had expected to adjust to the changes that had taken place in music alone. Music was, he quickly began to suspect, a dying art, which would soon have a status not much above that held by flower arranging back in what he thought of as his own century. Certainly it couldn’t be denied that the trend toward fragmentation, already visible back in his own time, had proceeded almost to completion in 2161.

He paid no more attention to American popular tunes than he had bothered to pay in his previous life. Yet it was evident that their assembly-line production methods—all the ballad composers openly used a slide-rule-like device called a Hit Machine—now had their counterparts almost throughout serious music.

The conservatives these days, for instance, were the twelve-tone composers—always, in Strauss’s opinion, dryly mechanical but never more so than now. Their gods—Berg, Schoenberg, Webern—were looked upon by the concert-going public as great masters, on the abstruse side perhaps, but as worthy of reverence as any of the Three B’s.

There was one wing of the conservatives, however, that had gone the twelve-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from a discipline called information theory, and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition which Strauss knew. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be “universal”—that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all right, but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano, to keep him from getting into trouble.

By far the largest body of work being produced, however, fell into a category misleadingly called science-music. The term reflected nothing but the titles of the works, which dealt with space flight, time travel, and other subjects of a romantic or an unlikely nature. There was nothing in the least scientific about the music, which consisted of a mélange of clichés and imitations of natural sounds, in which Strauss was horrified to see his own time-distorted and diluted image.

The most popular form of science-music was a nine-minute composition called a concerto, though it bore no resemblance at all to the classical concerto form; it was instead a sort of free rhapsody after Rachmaninoff—long after. A typical one—“Song of Deep Space,” it was called, by somebody named H. Valerion Krafft—began with a loud assault on the tam-tam, after which all the strings rushed up the scale in unison, followed at a respectful distance by the harp and one clarinet in parallel 6/4’s. At the top of the scale cymbals were bashed together, forte possible, and the whole orchestra launched itself into a major-minor wailing sort of melody; the whole orchestra, that is, except for the French horns, which were plodding back down the scale again in what was evidently supposed to be a countermelody. The second phrase of the theme was picked up by a solo trumpet with a suggestion of tremolo, the orchestra died back to its roots to await the next cloudburst, and at this point—as any four-year-old could have predicted—the piano entered with the second theme.

Behind the orchestra stood a group of thirty women, ready to come in with a wordless chorus intended to suggest the eeriness of Deep Space—but at this point, too, Strauss had already learned to get up and leave. After a few such experiences he could also count upon meeting in the lobby Sindi Noniss, the agent to whom Dr. Kris had introduced him and who was handling the reborn composer’s output—what there was of it thus far. Sindi had come to expect these walkouts on the part of his client and patiently awaited them, standing beneath a bust of Gian-Carlo Menotti, but he liked them less and less, and lately had been greeting them by turning alternately red and white, like a totipotent barber pole.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he burst out after the Krafft incident. “You can’t just walk out on a new Krafft composition. The man’s the president of the Interplanetary Society for Contemporary Music. How am I ever going to persuade them that you’re a contemporary if you keep snubbing them?”

“What does it matter?” Strauss said. “They don’t know me by sight.”

“You’re wrong; they know you very well, and they’re watching every move you make. You’re the first major composer the mind sculptors ever tackled, and the ISCM would be glad to turn you back with a rejection slip.”

“Why?”

“Oh,” said Sindi, “there are lots of reasons. The sculptors are snobs; so are the ISCM boys. Each of them wanted to prove to the other that their own art is the king of them all. And then there’s the competition; it would be easier to flunk you than to let you into the market. I really think you’d better go back in. I could make up some excuse—”

“No,” Strauss said shortly. “I have work to do.”

“But that’s just the point, Richard. How are we going to get an opera produced without the ISCM? It isn’t as though you wrote theremin solos, or something that didn’t cost so—”

“I have work to do,” he said, and left.

And he did, work which absorbed him as had no other project during the last thirty years of his former life. He had scarcely touched pen to music paper—both had been astonishingly hard to find—when he realized that nothing in his long career had provided him with touchstones by which to judge what music he should write now.

The old tricks came swarming back by the thousands, to be sure: the sudden, unexpected key changes at the crest of a melody, the interval stretching, the piling of divided strings, playing in the high harmonics, upon the already tottering top of a climax, the scurry and bustle as phrases were passed like lightning from one choir of the orchestra to another, the flashing runs in the brass, the chuckling in the clarinets, the snarling mixtures of colors to emphasize dramatic tension—all of them.

But none of them satisfied him now. He had been content with them for most of a lifetime and had made them do an astonishing amount of work. But now it was time to strike out afresh. Some of the tricks, indeed, actively repelled him: Where had he gotten the notion, clung to for decades, that violins screaming out in unison somewhere in the stratosphere were a sound interesting enough to be worth repeating inside a single composition, let alone in all of them?

And nobody, he reflected contentedly, ever approached such a new beginning better equipped. In addition to the past lying available in his memory, he had always had a technical armamentarium second to none; even the hostile critics had granted him that. Now that he was, in a sense, composing his first opera—his first after fifteen of them!—he had every opportunity to make it a masterpiece.

And every such intention.

There were, of course, many minor distractions. One of them was that search for old-fashioned score paper, and a pen and ink with which to write on it. Very few of the modern composers, it developed, wrote their music at all. A large bloc of them used tape, patching together snippets of tone and sound snipped from other tapes, superimposing one tape on another, and varying the results by twirling an elaborate array of knobs this way or that. Almost all the composers of 3-V scores, on the other hand, wrote on the sound track itself, rapidly scribbling jagged wiggly lines which, when passed through a photocell-audio circuit, produced a noise reasonably like an orchestra playing music, overtones and all.

The last-ditch conservatives who still wrote notes on paper did so with the aid of a musical typewriter. The device, Strauss had to admit, seemed perfected at last; it had manuals and stops like an organ, but it was not much more than twice as large as a standard letter-writing typewriter and produced a neat page. But he was satisfied with his own spidery, highly legible manuscript and refused to abandon it, badly though the one pen nib he had been able to buy coarsened it. It helped to tie him to his past.

Joining the ISCM had also caused him some bad moments, even after Sindi had worked him around the political roadblocks. The Society man who examined his qualifications as a member had run through the questions with no more interest than might have been shown by a veterinarian examining his four-thousandth sick calf.

“Had anything published?”

“Yes, nine tone poems, about three hundred songs, an—”

“Not when you were alive,” the examiner said, somewhat disquietingly. “I mean since the sculptors turned you out again.”

“Since the sculptors—ah, I understand. Yes, a string quartet, two song cycles, a—”

“Good. Alfie, write down, ‘Songs.’ Play an instrument?”

“Piano.”

“Hmmm.” The examiner studied his fingernails. “Oh, well. Do you read music? Or do you use a Scriber, or tape clips? Or a Machine?”

“I read.”

“Here.” The examiner sat Strauss down in front of a viewing lectern, over the lit surface of which an endless belt of translucent paper was traveling. On the paper was an immensely magnified sound track. “Whistle me the tune of that, and name the instruments it sounds like.”

“I don’t read that Musiksticheln,” Strauss said frostily, “or write it, either. I use standard notation, on music paper.”

“Alfie, write down, ‘Reads notes only.’ ” He laid a sheet of grayly printed music on the lectern above the ground glass. “Whistle me that.”

“That” proved to be a popular tune called “Vangs, Snifters, and Store-Credit Snooky,” which had been written on a Hit Machine in 2159 by a guitar-faking politician who sang it at campaign rallies. (In some respects, Strauss reflected, the United States had indeed not changed very much.) It had become so popular that anybody could have whistled it from the title alone, whether he could read the music or not. Strauss whistled it and, to prove his bona fides, added, “It’s in the key of B flat.”

The examiner went over to the green-painted upright piano and hit one greasy black key. The instrument was horribly out of tune—the note was much nearer to the standard 440/cps A than it was to B flat—but the examiner said, “So it is. Alfie, write down, ‘Also reads flats.’ All right, son, you’re a member. Nice to have you with us; not many people can read that old-style notation anymore. A lot of them think they’re too good for it.”

“Thank you,” Strauss said.

“My feeling is, if it was good enough for the old masters, it’s good enough for us. We don’t have people like them with us these days, it seems to me. Except for Dr. Krafft, of course. They were great back in the old days—men like Shilkrit, Steiner, Tiomkin, and Pearl . . . and Wilder and Jannsen. Real goffin.”

“Doch gewiss,” Strauss said politely.

BUT THE WORK went forward. He was making a little income now, from small works. People seemed to feel a special interest in a composer who had come out of the mind sculptors’ laboratories, and in addition the material itself, Strauss was quite certain, had merits of its own to help sell it.

It was the opera that counted, however. That grew and grew under his pen, as fresh and new as his new life, as founded in knowledge and ripeness as his long, full memory. Finding a libretto had been troublesome at first. While it was possible that something existed that might have served among the current scripts for 3-V—though he doubted it—he found himself unable to tell the good from the bad through the fog cast over both by incomprehensibly technical production directions. Eventually, and for only the third time in his whole career, he had fallen back upon a play written in a language other than his own, and—for the first time—decided to set it in that language.

The play was Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, in all ways a perfect Strauss opera libretto, as he came gradually to realize. Though nominally a comedy, with a complex farcical plot, it was a verse play with considerable depth to it, and a number of characters who cried out to be brought by music into three dimensions, plus a strong undercurrent of autumnal tragedy, of leaf-fall and apple-fall—precisely the kind of contradictory dramatic mixture which von Hofmannsthal had supplied him with in The Knight of the Rose, in Ariadne at Naxos, and in Arabella.

Alas for von Hofmannsthal, but here was another long-dead playwright who seemed nearly as gifted, and the musical opportunities were immense. There was, for instance, the fire which ended Act II; what a gift for a composer to whom orchestration and counterpoint were as important as air and water! Or take the moment where Perpetua shoots the apple from the Duke’s hand; in that one moment a single passing reference could add Rossini’s marmoreal William Tell to the musical texture as nothing but an ironic footnote! And the Duke’s great curtain speech, beginning:

There was a speech for a great tragic comedian in the spirit of Falstaff: the final union of laughter and tears, punctuated by the sleepy comments of Reedbeck, to whose sonorous snore (trombones, no less than five of them, con sordini?) the opera would gently end. . . .

What could be better? And yet he had come upon the play only by the unlikeliest series of accidents. At first he had planned to do a straight knockabout farce, in the idiom of The Silent Woman, just to warm himself up. Remembering that Zweig had adapted that libretto for him, in the old days, from a play by Ben Jonson, Strauss had begun to search out English plays of the period just after Jonson’s, and had promptly run aground on an awful specimen in heroic couplets called Venice Preserv’d, by one Thomas Otway. The Fry play had directly followed the Otway in the card catalogue, and he had looked at it out of curiosity; why should a twentieth-century playwright be punning on a title from the eighteenth?

After two pages of the Fry play, the minor puzzle of the pun disappeared entirely from his concern. His luck was running again; he had an opera.

SINDI WORKED MIRACLES in arranging for the performance. The date of the premiere was set even before the score was finished, reminding Strauss pleasantly of those heady days when Fuestner had been snatching the conclusion of Elektra off his worktable a page at a time, before the ink was even dry, to rush it to the engraver before publication deadline. The situation now, however, was even more complicated, for some of the score had to be scribed, some of it taped, some of it engraved in the old way, to meet the new techniques of performance; there were moments when Sindi seemed to be turning quite gray.

But Venus Observed was, as usual, forthcoming complete from Strauss’s pen in plenty of time. Writing the music in first draft had been hellishly hard work, much more like being reborn than had been that confused awakening in Barkun Kris’s laboratory, with its overtones of being dead instead, but Strauss found that he still retained all of his old ability to score from the draft almost effortlessly, as undisturbed by Sindi’s half-audible worrying in the room with him as he was by the terrifying supersonic bangs of the rockets that bulleted invisibly over the city.

When he was finished, he had two days still to spare before the beginning of rehearsals. With those, furthermore, he would have nothing to do. The techniques of performance in this age were so completely bound up with the electronic arts as to reduce his own experience—he, the master Kapellmeister of them all—to the hopelessly primitive.

He did not mind. The music, as written, would speak for itself. In the meantime he found it grateful to forget the months-long preoccupation with the stage for a while. He went back to the library and browsed lazily through old poems, vaguely seeking texts for a song or two. He knew better than to bother with recent poets; they could not speak to him, and he knew it. The Americans of his own age, he thought, might give him a clue to understanding this America of 2161, and if some such poem gave birth to a song, so much the better.

The search was relaxing, and he gave himself up to enjoying it. Finally he struck a tape that he liked; a tape read in a cracked old voice that twanged of Idaho as that voice had twanged in 1910, in Strauss’s own ancient youth. The poet’s name was Pound; he said, on the tape:

He smiled. That lesson had been written again and again, from Plato onward. Yet the poem was a history of his own case, a sort of theory for the metempsychosis he had undergone, and in its formal way it was moving. It would be fitting to make a little hymn of it, in honor of his own rebirth, and of the poet’s insight.

A series of solemn, breathless chords framed themselves in his inner ear, against which the words might be intoned in a high, gently bending hush at the beginning . . . and then a dramatic passage in which the great names of Dante and Villon would enter ringing like challenges to Time. . . . He wrote for a while in his notebook before he returned the spool to its shelf.

These, he thought, are good auspices.

And so the night of the premiere arrived, the audience pouring into the hall, the 3-V cameras riding on no visible supports through the air, and Sindi calculating his share of his client’s earnings by a complicated game he played on his fingers, the basic law of which seemed to be that one plus one equals ten. The hall filled to the roof with people from every class, as though what was to come would be a circus rather than an opera.

There were, surprisingly, nearly fifty of the aloof and aristocratic mind sculptors, clad in formal clothes which were exaggerated black versions of their surgeons’ gowns. They had bought a block of seats near the front of the auditorium, where the gigantic 3-V figures which would shortly fill the “stage” before them (the real singers would perform on a small stage in the basement) could not but seem monstrously out of proportion, but Strauss supposed that they had taken this into account and dismissed it.

There was a tide of whispering in the audience as the sculptors began to trickle in, and with it an undercurrent of excitement, the meaning of which was unknown to Strauss. He did not attempt to fathom it, however; he was coping with his own mounting tide of opening-night tension, which, despite all the years, he had never quite been able to shake.

The sourceless, gentle light in the auditorium dimmed, and Strauss mounted the podium. There was a score before him, but he doubted that he would need it. Directly before him, poking up from among the musicians, were the inevitable 3-V snouts, waiting to carry his image to the singers in the basement.

The audience was quiet now. This was the moment. His baton swept up and then decisively down, and the prelude came surging up out of the pit.

FOR A LITTLE while he was deeply immersed in the always tricky business of keeping the enormous orchestra together and sensitive to the flexing of the musical web beneath his hand. As his control firmed and became secure, however, the task became slightly less demanding, and he was able to pay more attention to what the whole sounded like.

There was something decidedly wrong with it. Of course there were the occasional surprises as some bit of orchestral color emerged with a different Klang than he had expected; that happened to every composer, even after a lifetime of experience. And there were moments when the singers, entering upon a phrase more difficult to handle than he had calculated, sounded like someone about to fall off a tightrope (although none of them actually fluffed once; they were as fine a troupe of voices as he had ever had to work with).

But these were details. It was the overall impression that was wrong. He was losing not only the excitement of the premiere—after all, that couldn’t last at the same pitch all evening—but also his very interest in what was coming from the stage and the pit. He was gradually tiring, his baton arm becoming heavier; as the second act mounted to what should have been an impassioned outpouring of shining tone, he was so bored as to wish he could go back to his desk to work on that song.

Then the act was over; only one more to go. He scarcely heard the applause. The twenty minutes’ rest in his dressing room was just barely enough to give him the necessary strength.

AND SUDDENLY, IN the middle of the last act, he understood.

There was nothing new about the music. It was the old Strauss all over again—but weaker, more dilute than ever. Compared with the output of composers like Krafft, it doubtless sounded like a masterpiece to this audience. But he knew.

The resolutions, the determination to abandon the old clichés and mannerisms, the decision to say something new—they had all come to nothing against the force of habit. Being brought to life again meant bringing to life as well all those deeply graven reflexes of his style. He had only to pick up his pen and they overpowered him with easy automatism, no more under his control than the jerk of a finger away from a flame.

His eyes filled; his body was young, but he was an old man, an old man. Another thirty-five years of this? Never. He had said all this before, centuries before. Nearly a half century condemned to saying it all over again, in a weaker and still weaker voice, aware that even this debased century would come to recognize in him only the burnt husk of greatness?—no, never, never.

He was aware, dully, that the opera was over. The audience was screaming its joy. He knew the sound. They had screamed that way when Day of Peace had been premiered, but they had been cheering the man he had been, not the man that Day of Peace showed with cruel clarity he had become. Here the sound was even more meaningless: cheers of ignorance, and that was all.

He turned slowly. With surprise, and with a surprising sense of relief, he saw that the cheers were not, after all, for him.

They were for Dr. Barkun Kris.

KRIS WAS STANDING in the middle of the bloc of mind sculptors, bowing to the audience. The sculptors nearest him were shaking his hand one after the other. More grasped at it as he made his way to the aisle and walked forward to the podium. When he mounted the rostrum and took the composer’s limp hand, the cheering became delirious.

Kris lifted his arm. The cheering died instantly to an intent hush.

“Thank you,” he said clearly. “Ladies and gentlemen, before we take leave of Dr. Strauss, let us again tell him what a privilege it has been for us to hear this fresh example of his mastery. I am sure no farewell could be more fitting.”

The ovation lasted five minutes and would have gone another five if Kris had not cut it off.

“Dr. Strauss,” he said, “in a moment, when I speak a certain formulation to you, you will realize that your name is Jerom Bosch, born in our century and with a life in it all your own. The superimposed memories which have made you assume the mask, the persona, of a great composer will be gone. I tell you this so that you may understand why these people here share your applause with me.”

A wave of asserting sound.

“The art of mind sculpture—the creation of artificial personalities for aesthetic enjoyment—may never reach such a pinnacle again. For you should understand that as Jerom Bosch you had no talent for music at all; indeed, we searched a long time to find a man who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. Yet we were able to impose upon such unpromising material not only the personality, but the genius, of a great composer. That genius belongs entirely to you—to the persona that thinks of itself as Richard Strauss. None of the credit goes to the man who volunteered for the sculpture. That is your triumph, and we salute you for it.”

Now the ovation could no longer be contained. Strauss, with a crooked smile, watched Dr. Kris bow. This mind sculpturing was a suitably sophisticated kind of cruelty for this age, but the impulse, of course, had always existed. It was the same impulse that had made Rembrandt and Leonardo turn cadavers into art works.

It deserved a suitably sophisticated payment under the lex talionis: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—and a failure for a failure.

No, he need not tell Dr. Kris that the “Strauss” he had created was as empty of genius as a hollow gourd. The joke would always be on the sculptor, who was incapable of hearing the hollowness of the music now preserved on the 3-V tapes.

But for an instant a surge of revolt poured through his bloodstream. I am I, he thought. I am Richard Strauss until I die, and will never be Jerom Bosch, who was utterly unable to carry even the simplest tune. His hand, still holding the baton, came sharply up, though whether to deliver or to ward off a blow he could not tell.

He let it fall again, and instead, at last, bowed—not to the audience, but to Dr. Kris. He was sorry for nothing, as Kris turned to him to say the word that would plunge him back into oblivion, except that he would now have no chance to set that poem to music.

RAY BRADBURY Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed

Although not the first author to write fiction set on Mars, Ray Bradbury staked a major claim to one of the most fertile landscapes in all science fiction with a series of stories published in pulp magazines of the 1940s and ’50s in which he envisioned the Red Planet as a new frontier where humanity might leave its imprint, for better or for worse. His collection The Martian Chronicles (1950), for which these stories served as a foundation, was a breakthrough success that alerted a mainstream audience to the value of science fiction as a modern mythology that embodies timeless human dreams and fears. Frail and fallible human beings are the foremost concern of Bradbury’s fiction, whether in the persona of the fireman in the future dystopia Fahrenheit 451 who comes to doubt the merits of his job—destroying ideas by burning books—or the ordinary middle-class Americans in the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes who allow fear of their own mortality to coerce them into Faustian pacts with a Mephistophelian owner of a traveling carnival. Bradbury’s lyrical stories have been collected in The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Machineries of Joy, and numerous other volumes including the definitive Stories of Ray Bradbury. The modern Gothic stories in his collections Dark Carnival and The October Country were a major influence on contemporary horror and dark fantasy fiction. Dandelion Wine, his novel of a midcentury Midwestern childhood, and the loose trilogy comprised of Death Is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Green Shadows, White Whale, drawn from his experiences as a young writer, are quintessentially Bradburyesque explorations of the magic possibilities of everyday life. He has written the children’s books Switch on the Night, The Halloween Tree, and Ahmed and the Oblivion Machine, hundreds of poems collected in The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury, a score of plays, including The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit, and the essay collection Yestermorrow. Many of his stories have been adapted for stage, screen, television, musical theater, and the comics. His own screenwriting credits include It Came from Outer Space and the screenplay for John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick. His many awards include the Nebula Grand Master Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement from the Horror Writers Association.

THE ROCKET METAL cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the center of a vacuum. His wife, before him, seemed almost to whirl away in smoke. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes.

The children looked up at him, as people look to the sun to tell what time of their life it is. His face was cold.

“What’s wrong?” asked his wife.

“Let’s get back on the rocket.”

“Go back to Earth?”

“Yes! Listen!”

The wind blew as if to flake away their identities. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone. He felt submerged in a chemical that could dissolve his intellect and burn away his past.

They looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. They saw the old cities, lost in their meadows, lying like children’s delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

“Chin up, Harry,” said his wife. “It’s too late. We’ve come over sixty million miles.”

The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. “Here we go,” he said—a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

They walked into town.

THEIR NAME WAS Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Dan, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr. Bittering and Mrs. Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.

“I feel like a salt crystal,” he said, “in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don’t belong here. We’re Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven’s sake, Cora, let’s buy tickets for home!”

But she only shook her head. “One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we’ll be safe here.”

“Safe and insane!”

Tick-tock, seven o’clock sang the voice-clock; time to get up. And they did.

Something made him check everything each morning—warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums—precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the 6 A.M. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast place. He forced himself to be convivial.

“Colonial days all over again,” he declared. “Why, in ten years there’ll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we’d fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?”

A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling, Mr. Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

“I don’t know,” said David. “Maybe there’re Martians around we don’t see. Sometimes nights I think I hear ’em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long time ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won’t do something to us for coming here.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Bittering looked out the windows. “We’re clean, decent people.” He looked at his children. “All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.” He stared at the hills. “You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It’s quite natural. Imagination.” He stopped. “You haven’t been prowling up in those ruins, have you?”

“No, Papa.” David looked at his shoes.

“See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam.”

“Just the same,” said little David, “I bet something happens.”

SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT afternoon.

Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly onto the porch.

“Mother, Father—the war, Earth!” she sobbed. “A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!”

“Oh, Harry!” The mother held onto her husband and daughter.

“Are you sure, Laura?” asked the father quietly.

Laura wept. “We’re stranded on Mars, forever and ever!”

For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.

Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hotness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, “No, you’re lying! The rockets will come back!” Instead, he stroked Laura’s head against him and said, “The rockets will get through someday.”

“Father, what will we do?”

“Go about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep things going until the war ends and the rockets come again.”

The two boys stepped out onto the porch.

“Children,” he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, “I’ve something to tell you.”

“We know,” they said.

IN THE FOLLOWING days, Bittering wandered often through the garden to stand alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: Tomorrow, if I want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.

But now: The web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.

He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.

He glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seas left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.

Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.

Mr. Bittering felt very alone in his garden under the Martian sun, anachronism bent here, planting Earth flowers in a wild soil.

Think. Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war, the lost rockets.

He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.

He returned to his philosophy of names and mountains. The Earthmen had changed names. Now there were Hormel Valleys, Roosevelt Seas, Ford Hills, Vanderbilt Plateaus, Rockefeller Rivers, on Mars. It wasn’t right. The American settlers had shown wisdom, using old Indian prairie names: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Ohio, Utah, Milwaukee, Waukegan, Osseo. The old names, the old meanings.

Staring at the mountains wildly, he thought: Are you up there? All the dead ones, you Martians? Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We’re helpless!

The wind blew a shower of peach blossoms.

He put out his sun-browned hand, gave a small cry. He touched the blossoms, picked them up. He turned them, he touched them again and again. Then he shouted for his wife.

“Cora!”

She appeared at a window. He ran to her.

“Cora, these blossoms!”

She handled them.

“Do you see? They’re different. They’ve changed! They’re not peach blossoms any more!”

“Look all right to me,” she said.

“They’re not. They’re wrong! I can’t tell how. An extra petal, a leaf, something, the color, the smell!”

The children ran out in time to see their father hurrying about the garden, pulling up radishes, onions, and carrots from their beds.

“Cora, come look!”

They handled the onions, the radishes, the carrots among them.

“Do they look like carrots?”

“Yes . . . no.” She hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“They’re changed.”

“Perhaps.”

“You know they have! Onions but not onions, carrots but not carrots. Taste: the same but different. Smell: not like it used to be.” He felt his heart pounding, and he was afraid. He dug his fingers into the earth. “Cora, what’s happening? What is it? We’ve got to get away from this.” He ran across the garden. Each tree felt his touch. “The roses. The roses. They’re turning green!”

And they stood looking at the green roses.

And two days later Dan came running. “Come see the cow. I was milking her and I saw it. Come on!”

They stood in the shed and looked at their one cow.

It was growing a third horn.

And the lawn in front of their house very quietly and slowly was coloring itself like spring violets. Seed from Earth but growing up a soft purple.

“We must get away,” said Bittering. “We’ll eat this stuff and then we’ll change—who knows to what? I can’t let it happen. There’s only one thing to do. Burn this food!”

“It’s not poisoned.”

“But it is. Subtly, very subtly. A little bit. A very little bit. We mustn’t touch it.”

He looked with dismay at their house. “Even the house. The wind’s done something to it. The air’s burned it. The fog at night. The boards, all warped out of shape. It’s not an Earthman’s house any more.”

“Oh, your imagination!”

He put on his coat and tie. “I’m going into town. We’ve got to do something now. I’ll be back.”

“Wait, Harry!” his wife cried.

But he was gone.

In town, on the shadowy step of the grocery store, the men sat with their hands on their knees, conversing with great leisure and ease.

Mr. Bittering wanted to fire a pistol in the air.

What are you doing, you fools! he thought. Sitting here! You’ve heard the news—we’re stranded on this planet. Well, move! Aren’t you frightened? Aren’t you afraid? What are you going to do?

“Hello, Harry,” said everyone.

“Look,” he said to them. “You did hear the news, the other day, didn’t you?”

They nodded and laughed. “Sure. Sure, Harry.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Do, Harry, do? What can we do?”

“Build a rocket, that’s what!”

“A rocket, Harry? To go back to all that trouble? Oh, Harry!”

“But you must want to go back. Have you noticed the peach blossoms, the onions, the grass?”

“Why, yes, Harry, seems we did,” said one of the men.

“Doesn’t it scare you?”

“Can’t recall that it did much, Harry.”

“Idiots!”

“Now, Harry.”

Bittering wanted to cry. “You’ve got to work with me. If we stay here, we’ll all change. The air. Don’t you smell it? Something in the air. A Martian virus, maybe; some seed, or a pollen. Listen to me!”

They stared at him.

“Sam,” he said to one of them.

“Yes, Harry?”

“Will you help me build a rocket?”

“Harry, I got a whole load of metal and some blueprints. You want to work in my metal shop on a rocket, you’re welcome. I’ll sell you that metal for five hundred dollars. You should be able to construct a right pretty rocket, if you work alone, in about thirty years.”

Everyone laughed.

“Don’t laugh.”

Sam looked at him with quiet good humor.

“Sam,” Bittering said. “Your eyes—”

“What about them, Harry?”

“Didn’t they used to be grey?”

“Well now, I don’t remember.”

“They were, weren’t they?”

“Why do you ask, Harry?”

“Because now they’re kind of yellow-colored.”

“Is that so, Harry?” Sam said, casually.

“And you’re taller and thinner—”

“You might be right, Harry.”

“Sam, you shouldn’t have yellow eyes.”

“Harry, what color eyes have you got?” Sam said.

“My eyes? They’re blue, of course.”

“Here you are, Harry.” Sam handed him a pocket mirror. “Take a look at yourself.”

Mr. Bittering hesitated, and then raised the mirror to his face.

There were little, very dim flecks of new gold captured in the blue of his eyes.

“Now look what you’ve done,” said Sam a moment later. “You’ve broken my mirror.”

HARRY BITTERING MOVED into the metal shop and began to build the rocket. Men stood in the open door and talked and joked without raising their voices. Once in a while they gave him a hand on lifting something. But mostly they just idled and watched him with their yellowing eyes.

“It’s suppertime, Harry,” they said.

His wife appeared with his supper in a wicker basket.

“I won’t touch it,” he said. “I’ll eat only food from our Deepfreeze. Food that came from Earth. Nothing from our garden.”

His wife stood watching him. “You can’t build a rocket.”

“I worked in a shop once, when I was twenty. I know metal. Once I get it started, the others will help,” he said, not looking at her, laying out the blueprints.

“Harry, Harry,” she said, helplessly.

“We’ve got to get away, Cora. We’ve got to!”

THE NIGHTS WERE full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen’s settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.

Lying abed, Mr. Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden-eyed, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, the violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.

The fear would not be stopped. It had his throat and heart. It dripped in a wetness of the arm and the temple and the trembling palm.

A green star rose in the east.

A strange word emerged from Mr. Bittering’s lips.

“Iorrt. Iorrt.” He repeated it.

It was a Martian word. He knew no Martian.

In the middle of the night he arose and dialed a call through to Simpson, the archeologist.

“Simpson, what does the word Iorrt mean?”

“Why, that’s the old Martian word for our planet Earth. Why?”

“No special reason.”

The telephone slipped from his hand.

“Hello, hello, hello, hello,” it kept saying while he sat gazing out at the green star. “Bittering? Harry, are you there?”

The days were full of metal sound. He laid the frame of the rocket with the reluctant help of three indifferent men. He grew very tired in an hour or so and had to sit down.

“The altitude,” laughed a man.

“Are you eating, Harry?” asked another.

“I’m eating,” he said, angrily.

“From your Deepfreeze?”

“Yes!”

“You’re getting thinner, Harry.”

“I’m not!”

“And taller.”

“Liar!”

HIS WIFE TOOK him aside a few days later. “Harry, I’ve used up all the food in the Deepfreeze. There’s nothing left. I’ll have to make sandwiches using food grown on Mars.”

He sat down heavily.

“You must eat,” she said. “You’re weak.”

“Yes,” he said.

He took a sandwich, opened it, looked at it, and began to nibble at it.

“And take the rest of the day off,” she said. “It’s hot. The children want to swim in the canals and hike. Please come along.”

“I can’t waste time. This is a crisis!”

“Just for an hour,” she urged. “A swim’ll do you good.”

He rose, sweating. “All right, all right. Leave me alone. I’ll come.”

“Good for you, Harry.”

The sun was hot, the day quiet. There was only an immense staring burn upon the land. They moved along the canal, the father, the mother, the racing children in their swim suits. They stopped and ate meat sandwiches. He saw their skin baking brown. And he saw the yellow eyes of his wife and his children, their eyes that were never yellow before. A few tremblings shook him, but were carried off in waves of pleasant heat as he lay in the sun. He was too tired to be afraid.

“Cora, how long have your eyes been yellow?”

She was bewildered. “Always, I guess.”

“They didn’t change from brown in the last three months?”

She bit her lips. “No. Why do you ask?”

“Never mind.”

They sat there.

“The children’s eyes,” he said. “They’re yellow, too.”

“Sometimes growing children’s eyes change color.”

“Maybe we’re children, too. At least to Mars. That’s a thought.” He laughed. “Think I’ll swim.”

They leaped into the canal water, and he let himself sink down and down to the bottom like a golden statue and lie there in green silence. All was water-quiet and deep, all was peace. He felt the steady, slow current drift him easily.

If I lie here long enough, he thought, the water will work and eat away my flesh until the bones show like coral. Just my skeleton left. And then the water can build on that skeleton—green things, deep water things, red things, yellow things. Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change. And isn’t that what it is up there?

He saw the sky submerged above him, the sun made Martian by atmosphere and time and space.

Up there, a big river, he thought, a Martian river, all of us lying deep in it, in our pebble houses, in our sunken boulder houses, like crayfish hidden, and the water washing away our old bodies and lengthening the bones and—

He let himself drift up through the soft light.

Dan sat on the edge of the canal, regarding his father seriously.

“Utha,” he said.

“What?” asked his father.

The boy smiled. “You know. Utha’s the Martian word for ‘father.’ ”

“Where did you learn it?”

“I don’t know. Around. Utha!”

“What do you want?”

The boy hesitated. “I—I want to change my name.”

“Change it?”

“Yes.”

His mother swam over. “What’s wrong with Dan for a name?”

Dan fidgeted. “The other day you called Dan, Dan, Dan. I didn’t even hear. I said to myself, That’s not my name. I’ve a new name I want to use.”

Mr. Bittering held to the side of the canal, his body cold and his heart pounding slowly. “What is this new name?”

“Linnl. Isn’t that a good name? Can I use it? Can’t I, please?”

Mr. Bittering put his hand to his head. He thought of the silly rocket, himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, so alone.

He heard his wife say, “Why not?”

He heard himself say, “Yes, you can use it.”

“Yaaa!” screamed the boy. “I’m Linnl, Linnl!”

Racing down the meadowlands, he danced and shouted.

Mr. Bittering looked at his wife. “Why did we do that?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seemed like a good idea.”

They walked into the hills. They strolled on old mosaic paths, beside still pumping fountains. The paths were covered with a thin film of cool water all summer long. You kept your bare feet cool all the day, splashing as in a creek, wading.

They came to a small deserted Martian villa with a good view of the valley. It was on top of a hill. Blue marble halls, large murals, a swimming pool. It was refreshing in this hot summertime. The Martians hadn’t believed in large cities.

“How nice,” said Mrs. Bittering, “if we could move up here to this villa for the summer.”

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going back to town. There’s work to be done on the rocket.”

But as he worked that night, the thought of the cool blue marble villa entered his mind. As the hours passed, the rocket seemed less important.

In the flow of days and weeks, the rocket receded and dwindled. The old fever was gone. It frightened him to think he had let it slip this way. But somehow the heat, the air, the working conditions—

He heard the men murmuring on the porch of his metal shop.

“Everyone’s going. You heard?”

“All going. That’s right.”

Bittering came out. “Going where?” He saw a couple of trucks, loaded with children and furniture, drive down the dusty street.

“Up to the villas,” said the man.

“Yeah, Harry. I’m going. So is Sam. Aren’t you, Sam?”

“That’s right, Harry. What about you?”

“I’ve got work to do here.”

“Work! You can finish that rocket in the autumn, when it’s cooler.”

He took a breath. “I got the frame all set up.”

“In the autumn is better.” Their voices were lazy in the heat.

“Got to work,” he said.

“Autumn,” they reasoned. And they sounded so sensible, so right.

Autumn would be best, he thought. Plenty of time, then.

No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No!

“In the autumn,” he said.

“Come on, Harry,” they all said.

“Yes,” he said, feeling his flesh melt in the hot liquid air. “Yes, in the autumn. I’ll begin work again then.”

“I got a villa near the Tirra Canal,” said someone.

“You mean the Roosevelt Canal, don’t you?”

“Tirra. The old Martian name.”

“But on the map—”

“Forget the map. It’s Tirra now. Now I found a place in the Pillan mountains—”

“You mean the Rockefeller Range,” said Bittering.

“I mean the Pillan mountains,” said Sam.

“Yes,” said Bittering, buried in the hot, swarming air. “The Pillan mountains.”

Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.

Laura, Dan, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known, Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.

The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.

“It looked just fine in Boston,” said the mother. “And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We’ll get it when we come back in the autumn.”

Bittering himself was quiet.

“I’ve some ideas on furniture for the villa,” he said after a time. “Big, lazy furniture.”

“What about your encyclopedia? You’re taking it along, surely?”

Mr. Bittering glanced away. “I’ll come and get it next week.”

They turned to their daughter. “What about your New York dresses?”

The bewildered girl stared. “Why, I don’t want them any more.”

They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.

“Gosh, we’re not taking much,” he said. “Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!”

He started the truck.

Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say good-by to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.

Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.

“Hi, Bittering! Here we go!”

The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others traveling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.

“Good-by, town!” said Mr. Bittering.

“Good-by, good-by,” said the family, waving to it.

They did not look back again.

SUMMER BURNED THE canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tires upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.

At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.

In the quiet autumn Mr. Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.

“It’s time to go back,” said Cora.

“Yes, but we’re not going,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing there any more.”

“Your books,” she said. “Your fine clothes.

“Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre,” she said.

“The town’s empty. No one’s going back,” he said. “There’s no reason to, none at all.”

The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.

Mr. Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. “Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built.”

“They didn’t know any better,” his wife mused. “Such ugly people. I’m glad they’ve gone.”

They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.

“Where did they go?” he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“We’ll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that,” he said, calmly. “Now—I’m warm. How about taking a swim?”

They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear-running spring water.

FIVE YEARS LATER a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.

“We won the war on Earth! We’re here to rescue you! Hey!”

But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theaters was silent. They found a flimsy rocket frame rusting in an empty shop.

The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

“The town’s empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I’m sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir.”

“Dark, eh?” mused the captain. “How many?”

“Six, eight hundred, I’d say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women.”

“Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth-settlement, Lieutenant?”

“They hadn’t the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people.”

“Strange. You think those Martians killed them?”

“They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir.”

“Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we’ll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about.”

The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumbtacked to the top of an empty table.

“Lots to be done, Lieutenant.” His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. “New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We’ll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination.

“What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills—we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favor, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over . . . are you listening, Lieutenant?”

The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue color and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.

“What? Oh, yes, sir!”