The Ghost of a Model T : And Other Stories

Physician to the Universe

He awoke and was in a place he had never seen before. It was an unsubstantial place that flickered on and off and it was a place of dusk in which darker figures stood out faintly. There were two white faces that flickered with the place and there was a smell he had never known before—a dank, dark smell, like the smell of black, deep water that had stood too long without a current to stir it.

And then the place was gone and he was back again in that other place that was filled with brilliant light, with the marble eminence looming up before him and the head of the man who sat atop this eminence and behind it, so that one must look up, it seemed, from very far below to see him. As if the man were very high and one were very low, as if the man were great and one, himself, were humble.

The mouth in the middle of the face of the man who was high and great was moving and one strained to catch the sound of words, but there was only silence, a terrible, humming silence that shut one out from this brilliant place, that made one all alone and small and very unimportant—too poor and unimportant to hear the words that the great man might be saying. Although it seemed as if one knew the words, knowing there were no other words the great man might be allowed to say, that he had to say them because, despite his highness and his greatness, he was caught in the self-same trap as the little, humble being who stood staring up at him. The words were there, just beyond some sort of barrier one could not comprehend, and if one could pierce that barrier he’d know the words without having heard them said. And it was important that he know them, for they were of great concern to him—they were, in fact, about him and they would affect his life.

His mind went pawing out to find the barrier and to strip it from the words and even as he did, the place of brilliance tilted and he was back again in the dusk that flickered.

The white faces still were bent above him and one of the faces now came closer, as if it were floating down upon him—all alone, all by itself, a small white-faced balloon. For in the dark one could not see the body. If there were a body.

“You’ll be all right,” the white face said. “You are coming round.”

“Of course I’ll be all right,” said Alden Street, rather testily.

For he was angry at the words, angry that here he could hear the words, but back in that place of brilliance he could hear no words at all—words that were important, while these words he had heard were no more than drivel.

“Who said I wouldn’t be all right?” asked Alden Street.

And that was who he was, but not entirely who he was, for he was more than just a name. Every man, he thought, was more than just a name. He was many things.

He was Alden Street and he was a strange and lonely man who lived in a great, high, lonely house that stood above the village and looked out across a wilderness of swampland that stretched toward the south until it went out of sight—farther, much farther than the human eye could see, a swamp whose true proportions could be drawn only on a map.

The house was surrounded by a great front yard and a garden at the rear and at the garden’s edge grew a mighty tree that flamed golden in the autumn for a few brief hours, and the tree held something of magnificent importance and he, Alden Street, was tied in with that great importance.

He sought wildly for this great importance and in the dusk he could not find it. It had somehow slipped his grasp. He had had it, he had known it, he’d lived with it all his life, from the time of childhood, but he did not have it. It had left him somehow.

He went scrabbling after it, frantically, for it was something that he could not lose, plunging after it into the darkness of his brain. And as he scrambled after it, he knew the taste again, the bitter taste when he had drained the vial and dropped it to the floor.

He scrabbled in the darkness of his mind, searching for the thing he’d lost, not remembering what it was, with no inkling of what it might have been, but knowing he would recognize it once he came across it.

He scrabbled and he did not find it. For suddenly he was not in the darkness of his brain, but back once more in the place of brilliance. And angry at how he’d been thwarted in his search.

The high and mighty man had not started speaking, although Alden could see that he was about to speak, that at any moment now he would start to speak. And the strange thing of it was that he was certain he had seen this all before and had heard before what the high, great man was about to say. Although he could not, for the life of him, recall a word of it. He had been here before, he knew, not once, but twice before. This was a reel re-run, this was past happening.

“Alden Street,” said the man so high above him, “you will stand and face me.”

And that was silly, Alden thought, for he was already standing and already facing him.

“You have heard the evidence,” said the man, “that has been given here.”

“I heard it,” Alden said.

“What have you, then, to say in your self-defense?”

“Not a thing,” said Alden.

“You mean you don’t deny it?”

“I can’t deny it’s true. But there were extenuating circumstances.”

“I am sure there were, but they’re not admissible.”

“You mean that I can’t tell you…”

“Of course you can. But it will make no difference. The law admits no more than the commission of the crime. There can be no excuses.”

“I would suppose, then,” said Alden Street, “there is nothing I can say. Your Honor, I would not waste your time.”

“I am glad,” said the judge, “that you are so realistic. It makes the whole thing simpler and easier. And it expedites the business of this court.”

“But you must understand,” said Alden Street, “that I can’t be sent away. I have some most important work and I should be getting back to it.”

“You admit,” said the high, great man, “that you were ill for twenty-four full hours and failed most lamentably to report your illness.”

“Yes,” said Alden Street.

“You admit that even then you did not report for treatment, but rather that you were apprehended by a monitor.”

Alden did not answer. It was piling up and there was no use to answer. He could see, quite plainly, that it would do no good.

“And, further, you admit that it has been some eighteen months since you have reported for your physical.”

“I was far too busy.”

“Too busy when the law is most explicit that you must have a physical at six month intervals?”

“You don’t understand, Your Honor.”

His Honor shook his head. “I am afraid I do. You have placed yourself above the law. You have chosen deliberately to flout the law and you must answer for it. Too much has been gained by our medical statutes to endanger their observance. No citizen can be allowed to set a precedent against them. The struggle to gain a sound and healthy people must be accorded the support of each and every one of us and I cannot countenance…”

The place of brilliance tilted and he was back in the dusk again.

He lay upon his back and stared up into the darkness, and although he could feel the pressure of the bed on which he lay, it was as if he were suspended in some sort of dusky limbo that had no beginning and no end, that was nowhere and led nowhere, and was, in itself, the terminal point of all and each existence.

From somewhere deep inside himself he heard the questioning once again—the flat, hard voice that had, somehow, the sound of metal in it:

Have you ever taken part in any body-building program?

When was the last time that you brushed your teeth?

Have you ever contributed either time or money to the little leagues?

How often would you say that you took a bath?

Did you at any time ever express a doubt that sports developed character?

One of the white faces floated out of the darkness to hang above him once again. It was, he saw, an old face—a woman’s face and kind.

A hand slid beneath his head and lifted it.

“Here,” the white face said, “drink this.”

He felt the spoon against his lips.

“It’s soup,” she said. “It’s hot. It will give you strength.”

He opened his mouth and the spoon slid in. The soup was hot and comforting.

The spoon retreated.

“Where…” he said.

“Where are you?”

“Yes,” he whispered, “where am I? I want to know.”

“This is Limbo,” the white face said.

Now the word had meaning.

Now he could recall what Limbo was.

And he could not stay in Limbo.

It was inconceivable that anyone should expect that he should stay in Limbo.

He rolled his head back and forth on the thin, hard pillow in a gesture of despair.

If he only had more strength. Just a little while ago he had had a lot of strength. Old and wiry and with a lot of strength left in him. Strong enough for almost anything at all.

But shiftless, they had said back in Willow Bend.

And there he had the name. He was glad to have it back. He hugged it close against him.

“Willow Bend,” he said, speaking to the darkness.

“You all right, old timer?”

He could not see the speaker, but he was not frightened. There was nothing to be frightened of. He had his name and he had Willow Bend and he had Limbo and in just a little while he’d have all the rest of it and then he’d be whole again and strong.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“Kitty gave you soup. You want some more of it?”

“No. All I want is to get out of here.”

“You been pretty sick. Temperature a hundred and one point seven.”

“Not now. I have no fever now.”

“No. But when you got here.”

“How come you know about my temperature? You aren’t any medic. I can tell by the voice of you that you aren’t any medic. In Limbo, there would be no medic.”

“No medic,” said the unseen speaker. “But I am a doctor.”

“You’re lying,” Alden told him. “There are no human doctors. There isn’t any such a thing as doctors any more. All we have is medics.”

“There are some of us in research.”

“But Limbo isn’t research.”

“At times,” the voice said, “you get rather tired of research. It’s too impersonal and sterile.”

Alden did not reply. He ran his hand, in a cautious rubbing movement, up and down the blanket that had been used to cover him. It was stiff and hard to the touch, but seemed fairly heavy.

He tried to sort out in his mind what the man had told him.

“There is no one here,” he said, “but violators. What did you violate? Forget to trim your toe-nails? Short yourself on sleep?”

“I’m not a violator.”

“A volunteer, perhaps.”

“Nor a volunteer. It would do no good to volunteer. They would not let you in. That’s the point to Limbo—that’s the dirty rotten joke. You ignore the medics, so now the medics ignore you. You go to a place where there aren’t any medics and see how well you like it.”

“You mean that you broke in?”

“You might call it that.”

“You’re crazy,” Alden Street declared.

For you didn’t break into Limbo. If you were smart at all, you did your level best to stay away from it. you brushed your teeth and bathed and used one of the several kinds of approved mouth washes and you took care that you had your regular check-ups and you saw to it that you had some sort of daily exercise and you watched your diet and you ran as fast as you could leg it to the nearest clinic the first moment you felt ill. Not that you were often ill. The way they kept you checked, the way they made you live, you were very seldom ill.

He heard that flat, metallic voice clanging in his brain again, the disgusted, shocked, accusatory voice of the medic disciplinary corps.

Alden Street, it said, you’re nothing but a dirty slob.

And that, of course, was the worst thing that he could be called. There was no other label that could possibly be worse. It was synonymous with traitor to the cause of the body beautiful and healthy.

“This place?” he asked. “It’s a hospital?”

“No,” the doctor said. “There’s no hospital here. There is nothing here. Just me and the little that I know and the herbs and other woods specifics that I’m able to command.”

“And this Limbo. What kind of Limbo is it?”

“A swamp,” the doctor said. “An ungodly place, believe me.”

“Death sentence?”

“That’s what it amounts to.”

“I can’t die,” said Alden.

“Some day,” the calm voice said. “All men must.”

“Not yet.”

“No, not yet. You’ll be all right in a few more hours.”

“What was the matter with me?”

“You had some sort of fever.”

“But no name for it.”

“Look, how would I know? I am not…”

“I know you’re not a medic. Humans can’t be medics—not practicing physicians, not surgeons, not anything at all that has to do with the human body. But a human can be a medical research man because that takes insight and imagination.”

“You’ve thought about this a lot,” the doctor said.

“Some,” Alden said. “Who has not?”

“Perhaps not as many as you think. But you are angry. You are bitter.”

“Who wouldn’t be? When you think about it.”

“I’m not,” the doctor said.

“But you…”

“Yes, I of all of us, should be the bitter one. But I’m not. Because we did it to ourselves. The robots didn’t ask for it. We handed it to them.”

And that was right, of course, thought Alden. It had started long ago when computers had been used for diagnosis and for drug dosage computation. And it had gone on from there. It had been fostered in the name of progress. And who was there to stand in the way of progress?

“Your name,” he said. “I’d like to know your name.”

“My name is Donald Parker.”

“An honest name,” said Alden Street. “A good, clean, honest name.”

“Now go to sleep,” said Parker. “You have talked too long.”

“What time is it?”

“It will soon be morning.”

The place was dark as ever. There was no light at all. There was no seeing and there was no sound and there was the smell of evil dankness. It was a pit, thought Alden—a pit for that small portion of humanity which rebelled against or ignored or didn’t, for one reason or another, go along with the evangelistic fervor of universal health. You were born into it and educated in it and you grew up and continued with it until the day you died. And it was wonderful, of course, but, God, how tired you got of it, how sick you got of it. Not of the program or the law, but of the unceasing vigilance, of the spirit of crusading against the tiny germ, of the everlasting tilting against the virus and the filth, of the almost religious ardor with which the medic corps kept its constant watch.

Until in pure resentment you longed to wallow in some filth; until it became a mark of bravado not to wash your hands.

For the statutes were quite clear—illness was a criminal offense and it was a misdemeanor to fail to carry out even the most minor precaution aimed at keeping healthy.

It started with the cradle and it extended to the grave and there was a joke, never spoken loudly (a most pathetic joke), that the only thing now left to kill a person was a compelling sense of boredom. In school the children had stars put against their names for the brushing of the teeth, for the washing of the hands, for regular toilet habits, for many other tasks. On the playground there was no longer anything so purposeless and foolish (and even criminal) as haphazard play, but instead meticulously worked out programs of calisthenics aimed at the building of the body. There were sports programs on every level, on the elementary and secondary school levels, on the college level, neighborhood and community levels, young folks, young marrieds, middle-aged and old folks levels—every kind of sports, for every taste and season. They were not spectator sports. If one knew what was good for him, he would not for a moment become anything so useless and so suspect as a sports spectator.

Tobacco was forbidden, as were all intoxicants (tobacco and intoxicants now being little more than names enacted in the laws), and only wholesome foods were allowed upon the market. There were no such things now as candy or soda pop or chewing gum. These, along with liquor and tobacco, finally were no more than words out of a distant past, something told about in bated breath by a garrulous oldster who had heard about them when he was very young, who might have experienced or heard about the last feeble struggle of defiance by the small fry mobs which had marked their final stamping out.

No longer were there candy-runners or pop bootleggers or the furtive sale in some dark alley of a pack of chewing gum.

Today the people were healthy and there was no disease—or almost no disease. Today a man at seventy was entering middle age and could look forward with some confidence to another forty years of full activity in his business or profession. Today you did not die at eighty, but barring accident, could expect to reach a century and a half.

And this was all to the good, of course, but the price you paid was high.

“Donald Parker,” said Alden.

“Yes,” said the voice from the darkness.

“I was wondering if you were still here.”

“I was about to leave. I thought you were asleep.”

“You got in,” said Alden. “All by yourself, I mean. The medics didn’t bring you.”

“All by myself,” said Parker.

“Then you know the way. Another man could follow.”

“You mean someone else could come in.”

“No. I mean someone could get out. They could backtrack you.”

“No one here,” said Parker. “I was in the peak of physical condition and I made it only by the smallest margin. Another five miles to go and I’d never made it.”

“But if one man…”

“One man in good health. There is no one here could make it. Not even myself.”

“If you could tell me the way.”

“It would be insane,” said Parker. “Shut up and go to sleep.”

Alden listened to the other moving, heading for the unseen door.

“I’ll make it,” Alden said, not talking to Parker, nor even to himself, but talking to the dark and the world the dark enveloped.

For he had to make it. He must get back to Willow Bend. There was something waiting for him there and he must get back.

Parker was gone and there was no one else.

The world was quiet and dark and dank. The quietness was so deep that the silence sang inside one’s head.

Alden pulled his arms up along his sides and raised himself slowly on his elbows. The blanket fell off his chest and he sat there on the bed and felt the chill that went with the darkness and the dankness reach out and take hold of him.

He shivered, sitting there.

He lifted one hand, cautiously, and reached for the blanket, intending to pull it up around himself. But with his fingers clutching its harsh fabric, he did not pull it up. For this, he told himself, was not the way to do it. He could not cower in bed, hiding underneath a blanket.

Instead of pulling it up, he thrust the blanket from him and his hand went down to feel his legs. They were encased in cloth—his trousers still were on him, and his shirt as well, but his feet were bare. Maybe his shoes were beside the bed, with the socks tucked inside of them. He reached out a hand and felt, groping in the dark—and he was not in bed. He was on a pallet of some sort, laid upon the floor, and the floor was earth. He could feel the coldness and the dampness of its packed surface as he brushed it with his palm.

There were no shoes. He groped for them in a wide semi-circle, leaning far out to reach and sweep the ground.

Someone had put them someplace else, he thought. Or, perhaps, someone had stolen them. In Limbo, more than likely, a pair of shoes would be quite a treasure. Or perhaps he’d never had them. You might not be allowed to take your shoes with you into Limbo—that might be part of Limbo.

No shoes, no toothbrushes, no mouth washes, no proper food, no medicines or medics. But there was a doctor here—a human doctor who had broken in, a man who had committed himself to Limbo of his own free will.

What kind of man would you have to be, he wondered, to do a thing like that? What motive would you have to have to drive you? What kind of idealism, or what sort of bitterness, to sustain you along the way? What sort of love or hate, to stay?

He sat back on the pallet, giving up his hunt for shoes, shaking his head in silent wonderment at the things a man could do. The human race, he thought, was a funny thing. It paid lip service to reason and to logic, and yet more often it was emotion and illogic that served to shape its ends.

And that, he thought, might be the reason that all the medics now were robots. For medicine was a science that only could be served by reason and by logic and there was in the robots nothing that could correspond to the human weakness of emotion.

Carefully he swung his feet off the pallet and put them on the floor, then slowly stood erect. He stood in dark loneliness and the dampness of the floor soaked into his soles.

Symbolic, he thought—unintentional, perhaps, but a perfect symbolic introduction to the emptiness of this place called Limbo.

He reached out his hands, groping for some point of reference as he slowly shuffled forward.

He found a wall, made of upright boards, rough sawn with the tough texture of the saw blade unremoved by any planing, and with uneven cracks where they had been joined together.

Slowly he felt his way along them and came at last to the place they ended. Groping, he made out that he had found a doorway, but there was no door.

He thrust a foot over the sill, seeking for the ground outside, and found it, almost even with the sill.

Quickly, as if he might be escaping, he swung his body through the door and now, for the first time, there was a break in darkness. The lighter sky etched the outline of mighty trees and at some level which stood below the point he occupied he could make out a ghostly whiteness that he guessed was ground fog, more than likely hanging low above a lake or stream.

He stood stiff and straight and took stock of himself. A little weak and giddy, and a coldness in his belly and a shiver in his bones, but otherwise all right.

He put up a hand and rubbed it along his jaw and the whiskers grated. A week or more, he thought, since he had shaved—it must have been that long, at least. He tried to drive his mind back to find when he’d last shaved, but time ran together like an oily fluid and he could make nothing of it.

He had run out of food and had gone downtown, the first time in many days—not wanting to go even then, but driven by his hunger. There wasn’t time to go, there was time for nothing, but there came a time when a man must eat. How long had it really been, he wondered, that he’d gone without a bite to eat, glued to the task that he was doing, that important task which he’d now forgotten, only knowing that he had been doing it and that it was unfinished and that he must get back to it.

Why had he forgotten? Because he had been ill? Was it possible that an illness would make a man forget?

Let’s start, he thought, at the first beginning. Let’s take it slow and simple. One step at a time, carefully and easily; not all in a rush.

His name was Alden Street and he lived in a great, high, lonely house that his parents had built almost eighty years ago, in all its pride and arrogance, on the mound above the village. And for this building on the mound above the village, for the pride and arrogance, his parents had been hated, but for all the hate had been accepted since his father was a man of learning and of great business acumen and in his years amassed a small-sized fortune dealing in farm mortgages and other properties in Mataloosa county.

With his parents dead, the hate transferred to him, but not the acceptance that had gone hand-in-hand with hate, for although he had a learning gathered from several colleges, he put it to no use—at least to no use which had made it visible to the village. He did not deal in mortgages nor in properties. He lived alone in the great, high house that now had gone to ruin, using up, bit by bit, the money his father had laid by and left him. He had no friends and he sought no friends. There were times when he did not appear on the village streets for weeks on end, although it was known that he was at home. For watching villagers could see the lights burning in the high and lonesome house, come nights.

At one time the house had been a fine place, but now neglect and years had begun to take their toll. There were shutters that hung crooked and a great wind years before had blown loosened bricks from the chimney top and some of the fallen bricks still lay upon the roof. The paint had peeled and powdered off and the front stoop had sunk, its foundation undermined by a busily burrowing gopher and the rains that followed. Once the lawn had been neatly kept, but now the grass grew rank and the shrubs no longer knew the shears and the trees were monstrous growths that almost screened the house from view. The flower beds, cherished by his mother, now were gone, long since choked out by weeds and creeping grass.

It was a shame, he thought, standing in the night. I should have kept the place the way my mother and my father kept it, but there were so many other things.

The people in the village despised him for his shiftlessness and his thoughtlessness which allowed the pride and arrogance to fall into ruin and decay. For hate as they might the arrogance, they still were proud of it. They said he was no good. They said that he was lazy and that he didn’t care.

But I did care, he thought. I cared so very deeply, not for the house, not for the village, not even for myself. But for the job—the job that he had not selected, but rather that had been thrust upon him.

Or was it a job, he wondered, so much as a dream?

Let’s start at the first beginning, he had told himself, and that was what he had meant to do, but he had not started at the first beginning; he had started near the end. He had started a long way from the first beginning.

He stood in the darkness, with the treetops outlined by the lighter sky and the white ghost fog that lay close above the water, and tried to swim against the tide of time back to that first beginning, back to where it all had started. It was far away, he knew, much farther than he’d thought, and it had to do, it seemed, with a late September butterfly and the shining gold of falling walnut leaves.

He had been sitting in a garden and he had been a child. It was a blue and wine-like autumn day and the air was fresh and the sun was warm, as anything only can be fresh and warm when one is very young.

The leaves were falling from the tree above in a golden rain and he put out his hands to catch one of the falling leaves, not trying to catch any single one of them, but holding out his hands and knowing that one of them would drift into a palm—holding out his hands with an utter childish faith, using up in that single instant the only bit of unquestioning faith that any man can know.

He closed his eyes and tried to capture it again, tried to become in this place of distant time the little boy he had been on that day the gold had rained down.

He was there, but it was hazy and it was not bright and the clearness would not come—for there was something happening, there was a half-sensed shadow out there in the dark and the squish of wet shoes walking on the earth.

His eyes snapped open and the autumn day was gone and someone was moving toward him through the night, as if a piece of the darkness had detached itself and had assumed a form and was moving forward.

He heard the gasp of breath and the squish of shoes and then the movement stopped.

“You there,” said a sudden, husky voice. “You standing there, who are you?”

“I am new here. My name is Alden Street.”

“Oh, yes,” the voice said. “The new one. I was coming up to see you.”

“That was good of you,” said Alden.

“We take care of one another here,” the voice said. “We care for one another. We are the only ones there are. We really have to care.”

“But you…”

“I am Kitty,” said the voice. “I’m the one who fed you soup.

She struck the match and held it cupped within her hands as if she sought to protect the tiny flame against the darkness.

Just the three of us, thought Alden—the three of us arraigned against the dark. For the blaze was one of them, it had become one with them, holding life and movement, and it strove against the dark.

He saw that her fingers were thin and sensitive, delicate as some old vase fashioned out of porcelain.

She bent with the flame still cupped within her hand and touched it to a candle stub thrust into a bottle that, from the height of it, stood upon a table, although one could not see the table.

“We don’t often have a light,” said Kitty. “It is a luxury we seldom can afford. Our matches are so few and the candles are so short. We have so little here.”

“There is no need,” said Alden.

“But there is,” said Kitty. “You are a new one here. We cannot let you go stumbling in the dark. For the first little while we make a light for you.”

The candle caught and guttered, sending flickering shadows fleeing wildly. Then it steadied and its feeble glow cut a circle in the dark.

“It will soon be morning,” Kitty told him, “and then the day will come and the light of day is worse than the darkness of the night. For in the day you see and know. In the dark, at least, you can think that it is not too bad. But this is best of all—a little pool of light to make a house inside the darkness.”

She was not young, he saw. Her hair hung in dank strings about her face and her face was pinched and thin and there were lines upon it. But there was, he thought, back of the stringiness and the thinness and the lines, a sense of some sort of eternal youthfulness and vitality that nothing yet had conquered.

The pool of light had spread a little as the flame had settled down and now he could see the place in which they stood.

It was small, no more than a hut. There was the pallet on the floor and the blanket where he’d tossed it from him. There was a crazy-legged table upon which the candle stood and two sawed blocks of wood to serve as chairs. There were two plates and two white cups standing on the table.

Cracks gaped between the upright boards that formed the walls of the hut and in other places knots had dried and fallen out, leaving peepholes to the world outside.

“This was your place,” he said. “I would not have inconvenienced you.”

“Not my place,” she said. “Harry’s place, but it’s all right with Harry.”

“I’ll have to thank him.”

“You can’t,” she said. “He’s dead. It is your place now.”

“I won’t need a place for long,” said Alden. “I won’t be staying here. I’ll be going back.”

She shook her head.

“Is there anyone who’s tried?”

“Yes. They’ve all come back. You can’t beat the swamp.”

“Doc got in.”

“Doc was big and strong and well. And there was something driving him.”

“There’s something driving me as well.”

She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes. “No one can talk you out of this? You mean what you are saying?”

“I can’t stay,” he said.

“In the morning,” she told him, “I’ll take you to see Eric.”

The candle flame was yellow as it flickered in the room and again the golden leaves were raining down. The garden had been quiet and he’d held out his hands, palms upward, so the leaves would fall in them. Just one leaf, he thought—one leaf is all I want, one leaf out of all the millions that are falling.

He watched intently and the leaves went past, falling all about him, but never a one to fall into his hands. Then, suddenly, there was something that was not a leaf—a butterfly that came fluttering like a leaf from nowhere, blue as the haze upon the distant hills, blue as the smoky air of autumn.

For an instant the butterfly poised above his outstretched palms and then mounted swiftly upward, flying strongly against the downward rain of leaves, a mote of blue winging in the goldenness.

He watched it as it flew, until it was lost in the branches of the tree, and then glanced back at his hands and there was something lying in his palm, but it was not a leaf.

It was a little card, two inches by three or such a matter, and it was the color of the leaves, but its color came from what seemed to be an inner light, so that the card shone of itself rather than shining by reflected light, which was the way one saw the color of the leaves.

He sat there looking at it, wondering how he could catch a card when no cards were falling, but only leaves dropping from the tree. But he had taken it and looked at it and it was not made of paper and it had upon its face a picture that he could not understand.

As he stared at it his mother’s voice called him in to supper and he went. He put the card into his pocket and he went into the house.

And under ordinary circumstances the magic would have vanished and he never would have known such an autumn day again.

There is only one such day, thought Alden Street, for any man alive. For any man alive, with the exception of himself.

He had put the card into his pocket and had gone into the house for supper and later on that evening he must have put it in the drawer of the dresser in his room, for that was where he’d found it in that later autumn.

He had picked it up from its forgotten resting place and as he held it in his hand, that day of thirty years before came back to him so clearly that he could almost smell the freshness of the air as it had been that other afternoon. The butterfly was there and its blueness was so precise and faithful that he knew it had been imprinted on his brain so forcefully that he held it now forever.

He had put the card back carefully and had walked down to the village to seek out the realtor he’d seen the day before.

“But, Alden,” said the realtor, “with your mother gone and all, there is no reason for your staying. There is that job waiting in New York. You told me yesterday.”

“I’ve been here too long,” said Alden. “I am tied too close. I guess I’ll have to stay. The house is not for sale.”

“You’ll live there all alone? In that big house all alone?”

“There’s nothing else to do,” said Alden.

He had turned and walked away and gone back to the house to get the card out of the dresser drawer again.

He sat and studied the drawing that was on the face of it, a funny sort of drawing, no kind of drawing he had ever seen before, not done with ink or pencil nor with brush. What, in the name of God, he thought, had been used to draw it?

And the drawing itself? A many-pointed star? A rolled-up porcupine? Or a gooseberry, one of the prickly kind, many times enlarged?

It did not matter, he knew, neither how the drawing had been made, or the strange kind of stiff, silken fabric that made the card itself, or what might be represented in the drawing. The important thing was that, many years before, when he had been a child, he had sat beneath the tree and held out his hand to catch a falling leaf and had caught the card instead.

He carried the card over to a window and stared out at the garden. The great walnut tree still stood as it had stood that day, but it was not golden yet. The gold must wait for the coming of first frost and that might be any day.

He stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time, or if the butterfly were only part of childhood.

“It will be morning soon,” said Kitty. “I heard a bird. The birds are astir just before first light.”

“Tell me about this place,” said Alden.

“It is a sort of island,” Kitty told him. “Not much of an island. Just a foot or two above the water level. It is surrounded by water and by muck. They bring us in by heliocoptor and they let us down. They bring in food the same way. Not enough to feed us. Not enough of anything. There is no contact with them.”

“Men or robots? In the ship, I mean.”

“I don’t know. No one ever sees them. Robots, I’d suspect.”

“Not enough food, you say.”

She shook her head. “There is not supposed to be. That’s a part of Limbo. We’re not supposed to live. We fish, we gather roots and other things. We get along somehow.”

“And we die, of course.”

“Death comes to everyone,” she said. “To us just a little sooner.”

She sat crouched upon one of the lengths of wood that served as a chair and as the candle guttered, shadows chased across her face so that it seemed the very flesh of it was alive and crawling.

“You missed sleep on account of me,” he said.

“I can sleep any time. I don’t need much sleep. And, besides, when a new one comes…”

“There aren’t many new ones?”

“Not as many as there were. And there always is a chance. With each new one there’s a chance.”

“A chance of what?”

“A chance he may have an answer for us.”

“We can always run away.”

“To be caught and brought back? To die out in the swamp? That, Alden, is no answer.”

She rocked her body back and forth. “I suppose there is no answer.”

But she still held hope, he knew. In the face of all of it, she had kept a hope alive.

Eric once had been a huge man, but now he had shrunken in upon himself. The strength of him was there as it had always been, but the stamina was gone. You could see that, Alden told himself, just by looking at him.

Eric sat with his back against a tree. One hand lay in his lap and the other grubbed idly, with blunt and dirty fingers, at the short ground.

“So you’re bent on getting out?” he asked.

“He talked of nothing else,” said Kitty.

“You been here how long?”

“They brought me here last night. I was out on my feet. I don’t remember it.”

“You don’t know what it’s like.”

Alden shook his head. “I don’t intend to find out, either. I figure if I’m going, I’d best be going now before this place wears me down.”

“Let me tell you,” Eric said. “Let me tell you how it is. The swamp is big and we’re in the center of it. Doc came in from the north. He found out, some way, the location of this place, and he got hold of some old maps. Geologic survey maps that had been made years ago. He studied them and figured out the best way for getting in. He made it, partly because he was strong and healthy…but mostly it was luck. A dozen other men could try it, just as strong as he was, and all of them might be lost because they weren’t lucky. There are quicksand and alligators. There are moccasins and rattlesnakes. There is the killing heat. There are the insects and no water fit to drink.

“Maybe if you knew exactly the way to go you might manage it, but you’d have to hunt for the way to go. You’d have to work your way through the swamp and time after time you’d run into something that you couldn’t get through or over and have to turn back and hunt another way. You’d lose a lot of time and time would work against you.”

“How about food?”

“If you weren’t fussy, food would be no trouble. You could find food along the way. Not the right kind. Your belly might not like it. You’d probably have dysentery. But you wouldn’t starve.”

“This swamp,” asked Alden, “where is it?”

“Part in Mataloosa county. Part in Fairview. It’s a local Limbo. They all are local Limbos. There aren’t any big ones. Just a lot of little ones.”

Alden shook his head. “I can see this swamp from the windows of my house. I never heard of a Limbo being in it.”

“It’s not advertised,” said Eric. “It’s not put on maps. It’s not something you’d hear of.”

“How many miles? How far to the edge of it?”

“Straight line, maybe thirty, maybe forty. You’d not be traveling a straight line.”

“And the perimeter is guarded.”

“Patrols flying overhead. Watching for people in the swamp. They might not spot you. You’d do your best to stay under cover. But chances are they would. And they’d be waiting for you when you reached the edge.”

“And even if they weren’t,” Kitty said, “where would you go? A monitor would catch you. Or someone would spot you and report. No one would dare to help a refugee from Limbo.”

The tree beneath which Eric sat was a short distance from the collection of huddled huts that served as shelter for the inhabitants of Limbo.

Someone, Alden saw, had built up the community cooking fire and a bent and ragged man was coming up from the water’s edge, carrying a morning’s catch of fish. A man was lying in the shade of one of the huts, stretched out on a pallet. Others, both men and women, sat in listless groups.

The sun had climbed only part way up the eastern sky, but the heat was stifling. Insects buzzed shrilly in the air and high in the light blue sky birds were swinging in great and lazy circles.

“Doc would let us see his maps?”

“Maybe,” Eric said. “You could ask him.”

“I spoke to him last night,” said Alden. “He said it was insane.”

“He is right,” said Eric.

“Doc has funny notions,” Kitty said. “He doesn’t blame the robots. He says they’re just doing a job that men have set for them. It was men who made the laws. The robots do no more than carry out the laws.”

And Doc, thought Alden, once again was right.

Although it was hard to puzzle out the road by which man had finally come to his present situation. It was overemphasis again, perhaps, and that peculiar social blindness which came as the result of overemphasis.

Certainly, when one thought of it, it made no particular sense. A man had a right to be ill. It was his own hard luck if he happened to be ill. It was no one’s business but his own. And yet it had been twisted into an action that was on a par with murder. As a result of a well-intentioned health crusade which had gotten out of hand, what at one time had been misfortune had now become a crime.

Eric glanced at Alden. “Why are you so anxious to get out? It’ll do no good. Someone will find you, someone will turn you in. You’ll be brought back again.”

“Maybe a gesture of defiance,” Kitty said. “Sometimes a man will do a lot to prove he isn’t licked. To show he can’t be licked.”

“How old are you?” asked Eric.

“Fifty four,” said Alden.

“Too old,” said Eric. “I am only forty and I wouldn’t want to try it.”

“Is it defiance?” Kitty asked.

“No,” Alden told her, “not that. I wish it was. But it’s not as brave as that. There is something that’s unfinished.”

“All of us,” said Eric, “left some unfinished things behind us.”

The water was black as ink and seemed more like oil than water. It was lifeless; there was no sparkle in it and no glint; it soaked up the sunlight rather than reflecting it. And yet one felt that life must lurk beneath it, that it was no more than a mask to hide the life beneath it.

It was no solid sheet of water, but an infiltrating water that snaked its way around the hummocks and the little grassy islands and the water-defying trees that stood knee-deep in it. And when one glanced into the swamp, seeking to find some pattern to it, trying to determine what kind of beast it was, the distance turned to a cruel and ugly greenness and the water, too, took on that tint of fatal green.

Alden crouched at the water’s edge and stared into the swamp, fascinated by the rawness of the green.

Forty miles of it, he thought. How could a man face forty miles of it? But it would be more than forty miles. For, as Eric had said, a man would run into dead-ends and would be forced to retrace his steps to find another way.

Twenty-four hours ago, he thought, he had not been here. Twenty four hours ago or a little more he had left the house and gone down into the village to buy some groceries. And when he neared the bank corner he had remembered that he had not brushed his teeth—for how long had it been?—and that he had not bathed for days. He should have taken a bath and brushed his teeth and done all the other things that were needful before he had come downtown, as he always had before—or almost every time before, for there had been a time or two as he passed the bank that the hidden monitor had come to sudden life and bawled in metallic tones that echoed up and down the street: “Alden Street did not brush his teeth today! Shame on Alden Street, he did not brush his teeth (or take a bath, or clean his fingernails, or wash his hands and face, or whatever it might be.)” Keeping up the clatter and the clamor, with the ringing of alarm bells and the sound of booming rockets interspersed between each shaming accusation, until one ran off home in shame to do the things he’d failed.

In a small village, he thought, you could get along all right. At least you could until the medics got around to installing home monitors as they had in some of the larger cities. And that might take them years.

But in Willow Bend it was not so hard to get along. If you just remembered to comply with all the regulations you would be all right. And even if you didn’t, you knew the locations of the monitors, one at the bank and the other at the drugstore corner, and you could keep out of their way. They couldn’t spot your shortcomings more than a block away.

Although generally it was safer to comply with the regulations before you went downtown. And this, as a rule, he’d done, although there had been a time or two when he had forgotten and had been forced to go running home with people standing in the street and snickering and small boys catcalling after him while the monitor kept up its unholy din. And later on that day, or maybe in the evening, the local committee would come calling and would collect the fine that was set out in the book for minor misdemeanors.

But on this morning he had not thought to take a bath, to brush his teeth, to clean his fingernails, to make certain that his toenails were trimmed properly and neat. He had worked too hard and for too long a time and had missed a lot of sleep (which, also, was a thing over which the monitor could work itself into a lather) and, remembering back, he could recall that he seemed to move in a hot, dense fog and that he was weak from hunger and there was a busy, perhaps angry fly buzzing in his head.

But he did remember the monitor at the bank in time and detoured a block out of his way to miss it. But as he came up to the grocery store (a safe distance from the bank and the drugstore monitors), he had heard that hateful metallic voice break out in a scream of fright and indignation.

“Alden Street is ill!” it screamed. “Everybody stay away from Alden Street. He is ill—don’t anyone go near him!”

The bells had rung and the siren blown and the rockets been shot off, and from atop the grocery store a great red light was flashing.

He had turned to run, knowing the dirty trick that had been played upon him. They had switched one of the monitors to the grocery, or they had installed a third.

“Stay where you are!” the monitor had shouted after him. “Go out into the middle of the street away from everyone.”

And he had gone. He had quit his running and had gone out into the middle of the street and stayed there, while from the windows of the business houses white and frightened faces had stared out at him. Had stared out at him—a sick man and a criminal.

The monitor had kept on with its awful crying and he had cringed out there while the white and frightened faces watched and in time (perhaps a very short time, although it had seemed long), the disciplinary robots on the medic corps had arrived from the county seat.

Things had moved swiftly then. The whole story had come out. Of how he had neglected to have his physicals. Of how he had been fined for several misdemeanors. Of how he had not contributed to the little league programs. Of how he had not taken part in any of the various community health and sports programs.

They had told him then, in wrath, that he was nothing but a dirty slob, and the wheels of justice had moved with sure and swift precision. And finally he had stood and stared up at the high and mighty man who had pronounced his doom. Although he could not recall that he had heard the doom. There had been a blackness and that was all that he could remember until he had awakened into a continuation of the blackness and had seen two balloon-like faces leaning over him.

He had been apprehended and judged and sentenced within a few short hours. And it was all for the good of men—to prove to other men that they could not get away with the flouting of the law which said that one must maintain his fitness and his health. For one’s health, said the law, was the most precious thing one had and it was criminal to endanger it or waste it. The national health must be viewed as a vital natural resource and, once again, it was criminal to endanger it or waste it.

So he had been made into a horrible example and the story of what had happened to him would have appeared on the front pages of every paper that was published and the populace thus would be admonished that they must obey, that the health laws were not namby-pamby laws.

He squatted by the water’s edge and stared off across the swamp and behind him he heard the muted sounds which came from that huddled camp just a short ways down the island—the clang of the skillet or the pot, the thudding of an axe as someone chopped up firewood, the rustle of the breeze that flapped a piece of canvas stretched as a door across a hut, the quiet murmur of voices in low and resigned talks.

The swamp had a deadly look about it—and it waited. Confident and assured, certain that no one could cross it. All its traps were set and all its nets were spread and it had a patience that no man could match.

Perhaps, he thought, it did not really wait. Maybe it was just a little silly to imagine that it waited. Rather, perhaps, it was simply an entity that did not care. A human life to it was nothing. To it a human life was no more precious than a snake’s life, or the life of a dragonfly, or of a tiny fish. It would not help and it would not warn and it had no kindness.

He shivered, thinking of this great uncaring. An uncaring that was even worse than if it waited with malignant forethought. For if it waited, at least it was aware of you. At least it paid you the compliment of some slight importance.

Even in the heat of the day, he felt the slimy coldness of the swamp reaching out for him and he shrank back from it, knowing as he did that he could not face it. Despite all the brave words he had mouthed, all his resolution, he would not dare to face it. It was too big for a man to fight—it was too green and greedy.

He hunkered in upon himself, trying to compress himself into a ball of comfort, although he was aware that there was no comfort. There never would be comfort, for now he’d failed himself.

In a little while, he thought, he’d have to get up from where he crouched and go down to the huts. And once he went down there, he knew he would be lost, that he would become one with those others who likewise could not face the swamp. He would live out his life there, fishing for some food, chopping a little wood, caring for the sick, and sitting listless in the sun.

He felt a flare of anger at the system which would sentence a man to such a life as that and he cursed the robots, knowing as he cursed that they were not the ones who were responsible. The robots were a symbol only of the health law situation.

They had been made the physicians and the surgeons to the human race because they were quick as well as steady, because their judgment was unfrayed by any flicker of emotion, because they were as dedicated as the best of human doctors ever had been, because they were tireless and unthinking of themselves.

And that was well and good. But the human race, as it always did, had gone overboard. It had made the robot not only the good and faithful doctor, but it had made him guardian and czar of human health, and in doing this had concocted a metallic ogre.

Would there ever be a day, he wondered, when humans would be done for good and all with its goblins and its ogres?

The anger faded out and he crouched dispirited and afraid and all alone beside the black waters of the swamp.

A coward, he told himself. And there was a bitter taste inside his brain and a weakness in his belly.

Get up, he told himself. Get up and go down to the huts.

But he didn’t. He stayed, as if there might be some sort of reprieve, as if he might be hoping that from some unknown and unprobed source he might dredge up the necessary courage to walk into the swamp.

But the hope, he knew, was a hollow hope.

He had come to the end of hope. Ten years ago he could have done it. But not now. He’d lost too much along the way.

He heard the footsteps behind him and threw a look across his shoulders.

It was Kitty.

She squatted down beside him.

“Eric is getting the stuff together,” she told him. “He’ll be along in a little while.”

“The stuff?”

“Food. A couple of machetes. Some rope.”

“But I don’t understand.”

“He was just waiting for someone who had the guts to tackle it. He figures that you have. He always said one man didn’t have a chance, but maybe two men had. Two men, helping one another, just might have a chance.”

“But he told me…”

“Sure. I know what he told you. What I told you, too. And even in the face of that, you never wavered. That is how we knew.”

“We?”

“Of course,” said Kitty. “The three of us. I am going, too.”

It took the swamp four days to beat the first of them.

Curiously, it was Eric, the youngest and the strongest.

He stumbled as they walked along a narrow ridge of land, flanked by tangled brush on one hand, by a morass on the other.

Alden, who was following, helped him to his feet, but he could not stand. He staggered for a step or two, then collapsed again.

“Just a little rest,” Eric panted. “Just a little rest and then I’ll be able to go on.”

He crawled, with Alden helping, to a patch of shade, lay flat upon his back, a limp figure of a man.

Kitty sat beside him and stroked his hair back from his forehead.

“Maybe you should build a fire,” she said to Alden. “Something hot may help him. All of us could use a bit of something.”

Alden turned off the ridge and plunged into the brush. The footing was soft and soggy and in places he sank in muck half way to his knees.

He found a small dead tree and pulled branches off it. The fire, he knew, must be small, and of wood that was entirely dry, for any sign of smoke might alert the patrol that flew above the swamp.

Back on the ridge again, he used a machete to slice some shavings off a piece of wood and stacked it all with care. It must start on one match, for they had few matches.

Kitty came and knelt beside him, watching.

“Eric is asleep,” she said. “And it’s not just tuckered out. I think he has a fever.”

“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” said Alden. “We’ll stay here until morning. He may feel better, then. Some extra rest may put him on his feet.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“We’ll stay another day,” he said. “The three of us together. That’s what we said back there. We would stick together.”

She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.

“I was sure you’d say that,” she said. “Eric was so sure and he was so right. He said you were the man he had been waiting for.”

Alden shook his head. “It’s not only Eric,” he declared. “It’s not only us. It’s those others back there. Remember how they helped us? They gave us food, even when it meant they might go a bit more hungry. They gave us two fishhooks out of the six they had. One of them copied the map that Doc had carried. They fixed up a pair of shoes for me because they said I wasn’t used to going without shoes. And they all came to see us off and watched until we were out of sight.”

He paused and looked at her.

“It’s not just us,” he said. “It’s all of us…all of us in Limbo.”

She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes.

“Did anyone,” he asked her, “ever tell you that you are beautiful?”

She made a grimace. “Long ago,” she said. “But not for years. Life had been too hard. But once, I guess, you could have said that I was beautiful.”

She made a fluttery motion with her hands. “Light the fire,” she told him. “Then go and catch some fish. Laying over this way, we’ll need the food.”

Alden woke at the first faint edge of dawn and lay staring out across the inky water that looked, in the first flush of day, like a floor of black enamel that had just been painted and had not dried as yet, with the shine of wetness showing here and there. A great awkward bird launched itself off a dead tree stub and flapped ungracefully down to skim above the water so that little ripples ran in the black enamel.

Stiffly, Alden sat up. His bones ached from the dampness and he was stiff with the chill of night.

A short distance away, Kitty lay curled into a ball, still sleeping. He glanced toward the spot where Eric had been sleeping when he himself had gone to bed, and there was no one there.

Startled, he leaped to his feet.

“Eric!” he called.

There was no answer.

“Eric!” he shouted again.

Kitty uncoiled and sat up.

“He’s gone,” said Alden. “I just woke up and he wasn’t there.”

He walked over to where the man had been lying and the imprint of his body still was in the grass.

He bent to examine the ground and brushed his hand across it. Some of the blades of grass yielded to his touch; they were beginning to spring back, to stand erect again. Eric, he knew, had not left just a little while ago. He had been gone—for how long, for an hour, for two hours or more?

Kitty rose and came to stand beside him.

Alden got to his feet and faced her.

“He was sleeping when I looked at him before I went to sleep,” he said. “Muttering in his sleep, but sleeping. He still had a fever.”

“Maybe,” she said, “one of us should have sat up to watch him. But he seemed to be all right. And we were all tired.”

Alden looked up and down the ridge. There was nothing to be seen, no sign of the missing man.

“He might have wandered off,” he said. “Woke up, delirious. He might just have taken off.”

And if that were the situation, they might never find him. He might have fallen into a pool of water, or become trapped in muck or quicksand. He might be lying somewhere, exhausted with his effort, very quietly dying.

Alden walked off the ridge into the heavy brush that grew out of the muck. Carefully, he scouted up and down the ridge and there was no sign that anyone, except himself the afternoon before, had come off the ridge. And there would have been some sign, for when one stepped into the muck, he went in to his ankles, in places halfway to his knees.

Mosquitoes and other insects buzzed about him maddeningly as he floundered through the brush and somewhere far off a bird was making chunking sounds.

He stopped to rest and regain his breath, waving his hands about his face to clear the air of insects.

The chunking still kept on and now there was another sound. He listened for the second sound to be repeated.

“Alden,” came the cry again, so faint he barely heard it.

He plunged out of the brush back onto the ridge. The cry had come from the way that they had traveled on the day before.

“Alden!” And now he knew that it was Kitty, and not Eric, calling.

Awkwardly, he galloped down the ridge toward the sound.

Kitty was crouched at the edge of a thirty-foot stretch of open water, where the ridge had broken and let the water in.

He stopped beside her and looked down. She was pointing at a footprint—a footprint heading the wrong way. It lay beside other footprints heading in the opposite direction, the footprints that they had made in the mud as they came along the ridge the day before.

“We didn’t stop,” said Kitty. “We kept right on. That can’t be one of ours. You weren’t down here, were you?”

He shook his head.

“Then it must be Eric.”

“You stay here,” he said.

He plunged into the water and waded across and on the other edge the tracks were going out—tracks heading back the way that they had come.

He stopped and shouted.

“Eric! Eric! Eric!”

He waited for an answer. There was nothing.

A mile farther on, he came to the great morass they had crossed the day before—the mile or more of muck and water that had eaten at their strength. And here, on the muddy edge, the tracks went into the sea of sucking mud and water and disappeared from sight.

He crouched on the shore and peered across the water, interspersed by hummocks that were poison green in the early light. There was no sign of life or movement. Once a fish (perhaps not a fish, perhaps only something) broke the water for an instant, sending out a circle of ripples. But that was all there was.

Heavily, he turned back.

Kitty still crouched beside the water’s edge.

He shook his head at her.

“He went back,” he said. “I don’t see how he could have. He was weak and…”

“Determination,” Kitty said. “And, perhaps, devotion, too.”

“Devotion?”

“Don’t you see,” she said. “He knew that he was sick. He knew he couldn’t make it. And he knew that we’d stay with him.”

“But that’s what we all agreed,” said Alden.

Kitty shook her head. “He wouldn’t have it that way. He is giving us a chance.”

“No!” yelled Alden. “I won’t let him do it. I’m going back and find him.”

“Across that last stretch of swamp?” asked Kitty.

Alden nodded. “Probably he was just able to make it. He more than likely is holed up on the other side somewhere.”

“And what if he didn’t make it? What if he never got across?”

“Then I won’t find him, of course. But I have to try.”

“What I’m worried about,” said Kitty, “is what you’d do if you did find him. What would you do about him? What would you say to him?”

“I’d bring him back,” said Alden, “or I’d stay with him.”

She lifted her face and tears were standing in her eyes. “You’d give him back his gift,” she said. “You’d throw it in his face. You’d make this last great gesture of his mean absolutely nothing.”

She looked at Alden. “You could do that?” she asked. “He has done a fine and decent thing. Thinking, perhaps, that it’s the last chance he’ll have for decency. And you wouldn’t let him keep it?”

Alden shook his head.

“He’d do as much for you,” she said. “He’d let you keep that final decency.”

On the morning of the eighth day, Kitty moaned and tossed with fever. The day before had been a sunlit nightmare of mud and saw grass, of terrible heat, of snakes and mosquitoes, of waning hope and a mounting fear that stirred sluggishly in the middle of one’s gut.

It had been crazy for them to try it, Alden thought, crazy from the very start—three people who had no right to try it, too out of condition, too ill-equipped, and in his case, at least, too old to try a thing like this. To cross forty miles of swamp took youth and strength, and all that any of the three of them had to qualify had been determination. Perhaps, he thought, a misplaced determination, each of them driven by something which, more than likely, they did not understand.

Why, he wondered, had Kitty and Eric wished to escape from Limbo?

It was something they had never talked about. Although perhaps they would have if there had been a lot of talk. But there had never been. There had been no time or breath for talk.

For, he realized now, there was no real escape. You could escape the swamp, but you could not flee from Limbo. For you became a part of Limbo. Once in Limbo and there was no place left for you in the outside world.

Had it been a gesture only, he wondered—a gesture of defiance. Like that foolish, noble gesture of Eric’s in leaving them when he had fallen ill.

And the question of their decision back there came to haunt him once again.

All he had to do, even in the glare of noonday sun, was to shut his eyes and see it all again—a starving, helpless, dying man who had crawled off the path and hidden in a clump of tangled underbrush so he could not be found even if one, or both, of his companions should come seeking him. There were flies crawling on his face and he dare not (or could not?) raise a hand to brush them off. There was a gaunt, black bird sitting on a dead tree stump, waiting patiently, and there was an alligator that lay in the water watching and there were many crawling, creeping, hopping creatures swarming in the grass and in the stunted brush.

The vision never changed; it was a fixed and terrible vision painted in a single stroke by imagination, which then had walked away and let it stand in all its garish detail.

Now it was Kitty, lying there and moaning through clenched teeth—an old and useless woman as he was an old and useless man. Kitty, with her lined face and her straggly hair and the terrible gauntness of her, but still possessed of that haunting sense of eternal youth somehow trapped tight inside her body.

He should go, he thought, and get some water. Bathe her face and arms with it, force some down her throat. But the water was scarcely fit to drink. It was old and stagnant and it stank of rotted vegetation and it had the taste of ancient dead things one tried hard not to visualize.

He went over to the small pack that belonged to Kitty and from it he took the battered and fire-blackened sauce pan that was the one utensil they had brought along.

Picking his way carefully down the tiny island on which they’d spent the night, he approached the water’s edge and scouted watchfully along it, seeking for a place where the water might appear a bit less poisonous. Although that, he knew, was foolishness; the water was the same no matter where one looked.

It was bitter water in a bitter swamp that had fought them for seven days, that had sought to trap them and had tried to hold them back, that had bit and stung them and tried to drive them crazy, that had waited, knowing there would come a slip or some misstep or fall that would put them at its mercy.

He shivered, thinking of it. This was the first time, he realized, that he had thought of it. He had never thought of it before; he had merely fought it. All his energy had been directed toward getting over that yard of ground ahead, and after that, another yard of ground.

Time had lost its meaning, measured only in a man’s endurance. Distance had come to have no significance, for it stretched on every side. There would always be that distance; there would be no end to it.

It had been a murderous seven days and the first two of them he had known he could not make it, that there was not another day left in him. But each day there had been another day left in him and he’d made each day to its bitter end.

Of the three of them, he thought, he was the only one who still was on his feet. And another funny thing: He knew now that he had another day left in him, that he had many other days left in him. He could keep on forever, if it took forever. Now the swamp could never stop him. Somewhere in that terrible, tangled greenness he had found a hidden strength and had gotten second wind.

Why should this be, he wondered. What was that inner strength? From what source had it come?

Was it, perhaps, because his purpose had been strong?

And once again he stood at the window, wondering if there’d be a butterfly this time or if the butterfly were only a certain part of childhood. But never questioning for a moment that the magic still was there, that it had been so strong and shining that thirty years could not have tarnished it.

So he had gone outside and had sat beneath the tree as he had sat that day when he was a child, with his hands held out, palms up, and the strange card laid across one palm. He could feel the edge of magic and could smell the new freshness of the air, but it was not right, for there were no yellow leaves falling down the sky.

He had waited for the frost and when it came had gone out again and sat beneath the tree with the leaves falling through the air like slow-paced drops of rain. He had closed his eyes and had smelled the autumn air tainted with the faintest touch of smoke, and had felt the sunlight falling warm about him and it was exactly as it had been that day so long ago. The autumn day of boyhood had not been lost; it was with him still.

He had sat there with his hands held out and with the card across one palm and nothing happened. Then, as it had failed to do that day of long ago, a leaf came fluttering down and fell atop the card. It lay there for an instant, a perfect goldenness.

Then suddenly it was gone and in its place atop the card was the object that had been printed on the card—a ball of some sort, three inches in diameter, and with prickly spikes sticking out over it, like an outsize gooseberry. Then it buzzed at him and he could feel the buzzing spreading through his body.

It seemed in that instant that there was something with him, or that he was part of something—some thinking, living, (perhaps even loving) thing that quivered somewhere very close to him and yet very far away. As if this thing, whatever it might be, had reached out a finger and had touched him, for no other purpose than to let him know that it was there.

He crouched down to dip the water with the battered, blackened pan from a pool that appeared to be just a little cleaner and a little clearer than it had seemed elsewhere.

And there had been something there, he thought. Something that through the years he had become acquainted with, but never truly known. A gentle thing, for it had dealt with him gently. And a thing that had a purpose and had driven him toward that purpose, but kindly, as a kindly teacher drives a student toward a purpose that in the end turns out to be the student’s own.

The little buzzing gooseberry was the gateway to it, so long as the gooseberry had been needed. Although, he thought, such a word as gateway was entirely wrong, for there had been no gateway in the sense that he had ever seen this thing, or come close to it or had a chance to find out what it was. Only that it was, that it lived and that it had a mind and could communicate.

Not talk—communicate. And toward the end, he recalled, the communication had been excellent, although the understanding that should have gone with communication had never quite come clear.

Given time, he thought. But there had been an interruption and that was why he must get back, as quickly as he could. For it would not know why he had left it. It would not understand. It might think that he had died, if it had a concept that would encompass a condition such as death. Or that he had deserted it. Or that somehow it had failed.

He dipped the sauce pan full of water and straightened, standing in the great hush of the morning.

He remembered now. But why had he not remembered sooner? Why had it escaped him? How had he forgotten?

From far away he heard it and, hearing it, felt the hope leap in him. He waited tensely to hear it once again, needing to hear it that second time to know that it was true.

It came again, faint, but carrying unmistakably in the morning air—the crowing of a rooster.

He swung around and ran back to the camping site.

Running, he stumbled, and the pan flew from his hand. He scrabbled to his feet and left the pan where it had fallen.

He rushed to Kitty and fell on his knees beside her.

“Just a few more miles!” he shouted. “I heard a rooster crowing. The edge of the swamp can’t be far away.”

He reached down and slid his hands beneath her, lifted her, cradling her, holding her tightly against him.

She moaned and tossed.

“Easy, girl,” he said. “We’re almost out of it.”

He struggled from his knees and stood erect. He shifted her body so that it rode the easier in his arms.

“I’ll carry you,” he said. “I can carry you all the way.”

It was farther than he’d thought. And the swamp was worse than it had ever been—as if, sensing that this stumbling, stubborn creature might slip out of its grasp, it had redoubled its trickery and its viciousness in a last attempt to seize and swallow him.

He had left the little food they’d had behind. He’d left everything behind. He had taken only Kitty.

When she achieved a sort of half consciousness and cried for water, he stopped beside a pool, carried water to her in his cupped hands, bathed her face and helped her drink, then went on again.

Late in the afternoon the fever broke and she regained full consciousness.

“Where am I?” she asked, staring at the green-blackness of the swamp.

“Who are you?” she asked, and he tried to tell her. She did not remember him, or the swamp, or Limbo. He spoke to her of Eric and she did not remember Eric.

And that, he recalled, had been the way it had been with him. He had not remembered. Only over hours and days had it come back to him in snatches.

Was that the way it would be with her? Had that been the way it had been with Eric? Had there been no self-sacrifice, no heroism in what Eric did? Had it been a mere, blind running from the pit of horror in which he awoke to find himself?

And if all of this were true, whatever had been wrong with him, whatever caused the fever and forgetfulness, was then the same as had happened to Kitty and to Eric.

Was it, he wondered, some infection that he carried?

For if that were true, then it was possible he had infected everyone in Limbo.

He went on into the afternoon and his strength amazed him, for he should not be this strong.

It was nerve, he knew, that kept him going, the sheer excitement of being almost free of this vindictive swamp.

But the nerve would break, he knew. He could not keep it up. The nerve would break and the excitement would grow dull and dim and the strength would drain from him. He’d then be an aged man carrying an aged woman through a swamp he had no right to think he could face alone, let alone assume the burden of another human.

But the strength held out. He could feel it flowing in him. Dusk fell and the first faint stars came out, but the going now was easier. It had been easier, he realized, for the last hour or so.

“Put me down,” said Kitty. “I can walk. There’s no need to carry me.”

“Just a little while,” said Alden. “We are almost there.”

Now the ground was firmer and he could tell by the rasp of it against his trouser legs that he was walking in a different kind of grass—no longer the harsh, coarse, knife-like grass that few in the swamp, but a softer, gentle grass.

A hill loomed in the darkness and he climbed it and now the ground was solid.

He reached the top of the hill and stopped. He let Kitty down and stood her on her feet.

The air was clean and sharp and pure. The leaves of a nearby tree rustled in a breeze and in the east the sky was tinged with the pearly light of a moon.

Back of them the swamp, which they had beaten, and in front of them the clean, solid countryside that eventually would defeat them. Although eventually, Alden told himself, sounded much too long. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, they would be detected and run down.

With an arm around Kitty’s waist to hold her steady as she walked, he went down the hill to eventual defeat.

The rattletrap pickup truck stood in the moonlit farmyard. There were no lights in the house that stood gaunt upon the hilltop. The road from the farmyard ran down a long, steep hill to join the main road a half mile or so away.

There would be no ignition key, of course, but one could cross the wires, then shove the truck until it started coasting down the hill. Once it was going, throw it into gear and the motor would crank over and start up.

“Someone will catch us, Alden,” Kitty told him. “There is no more certain way for someone to find out about us. Stealing a truck…”

“It’s only twenty miles,” said Alden. “That’s what the signpost said. And we can be there before there is too much fuss.”

“But it would be safer walking and hiding.”

“There is no time,” he said.

For he remembered now. It had all come back to him—the machine that he had built in the dining room. A machine that was like a second body, that was like a suit to wear. It was a two-way schoolhouse, or maybe a two-way laboratory, for when he was inside of it he learned of that other life and it learned of him.

It had taken years to build it, years to understand how to assemble the components that those others, or that other, had provided. All the components had been small and there had been thousands of them. He had held out his hand and thought hard of yellow leaves falling in the blue haze of autumn air and there had been another piece of that strange machine put into his hand.

And now it stood, untenanted, in that faded, dusky room and they would be wondering what had happened to him.

“Come on,” he said to Kitty, sharply. “There is no use in waiting.”

“There might be a dog. There might be a…”

“We will have to chance it.”

He ducked out of the clump of trees and ran swiftly across the moonlit barnyard to the truck. He reached it and wrenched at the hood and the hood would not come up.

Kitty screamed, just once, more a warning scream than fright, and he spun around. The shape stood not more than a dozen feet away, with the moonlight glinting off its metal and the Medic Disciplinary symbol engraved upon its chest.

Alden backed against the truck and stood there, staring at the robot, knowing that the truck had been no more than bait. And thinking how well the medics must know the human race to set that sort of trap—knowing not only the working of the human body but the human mind as well

Kitty said: “If you’d not been slowed up. If you’d not carried me…”

“It would have made no difference,” Alden told her. “They probably had us spotted almost from the first and were tracking us.”

“Young man,” the robot said, “you are entirely right. I have been waiting for you. I must admit,” the robot said, “that I have some admiration for you. You are the only ones who ever crossed the swamp. There were some who tried, but they never made it.”

So this was how it ended, Alden told himself, with some bitterness, but not as much, perhaps, as he should have felt. For there had been, he thought, nothing but a feeble hope from the first beginning. He had been walking toward defeat, he knew, with every step he’d taken—and into a hopelessness that even he admitted.

If only he had been able to reach the house in Willow Bend, that much he had hoped for, that much would have satisfied him. To reach it and let those others know he had not deserted.

“So what happens now?” he asked the robot. “Is it back to Limbo?”

The robot never had a chance to answer. There was a sudden rush of running feet, pounding across the farmyard.

The robot swung around and there was something streaking in the moonlight that the robot tried to duck, but couldn’t.

Alden sprang in a low and powerful dive, aiming for the robot’s knees. His shoulder struck on metal and the flying rock clanged against the breastplate of the metal man. Alden felt the robot, already thrown off balance by the rock, topple at the impact of his shoulder.

The robot crashed heavily to the earth and Alden, sprawling on the ground, fought upright to his feet.

“Kitty!” he shouted.

But Kitty, he saw, was busy.

She was kneeling beside the fallen robot, who was struggling to get up and in her hand she held the thrown rock, with her hand raised above the robot’s skull. The rock came down and the skull rang like a bell—and rang again and yet again.

The robot ceased its struggling and lay still, but Kitty kept on pounding at the skull.

“Kitty, that’s enough,” said another voice.

Alden turned to face the voice.

“Eric!” he cried. “But we left you back there.”

“I know,” said Eric. “You thought I had run back to Limbo. I found where you had tracked me.”

“But you are here. You threw the rock.”

Eric shrugged. “I got to be myself again. At first I didn’t know where I was or who I was or anything at all. And then I remembered all of it. I had to make a choice then. There really wasn’t any choice. There was nothing back in Limbo. I tried to catch up with you, but you moved too fast.”

“I killed him,” Kitty announced, defiantly. “I don’t care. I meant to kill him.”

“Not killed,” said Eric. “There’ll be others coming soon. He can be repaired.”

“Give me a hand with the hood on this truck,” said Alden. “We have to get out of here.”

Eric parked the rattletrap back of the house and Alden got out.

“Come along now,” he said.

The back door was unlocked, just as he had left it. He went into the kitchen and switched on the ceiling light.

Through the door that opened into the dining room, he could see the shadowy framework of the structure he had built.

“We can’t stay here too long,” said Eric. “They know we have the truck. More than likely they’ll guess where we were headed.”

Alden did not answer. For there was no answer. There was no place they could go.

Wherever they might go, they would be hunted down, for no one could be allowed to flaunt the medic statutes and defy the medic justice. There was no one in the world who would dare to help them.

He had run from Limbo to reach this place—although he had not known at the time what he was running to. It was not Limbo he had run from; rather, he had run to reach the machine that stood in the dining room just beyond this kitchen.

He went into the room and snapped on the light and the strange mechanism stood glittering in the center of the room.

It was a man-size cage and there was just room for him to stand inside of it. And he must let them know that he was back again.

He stepped into the space that had been meant to hold him and the outer framework and its mysterious attachments seemed to fold themselves about him.

He stood in the proper place and shut his eyes and thought of falling yellow leaves. He made himself into the boy again who had sat beneath the tree and it was not his mind, but the little boy mind that sensed the goldenness and blue, that smelled the wine of autumn air and the warmth of autumn sun.

He wrapped himself in autumn and the long ago and he waited for the answer, but there was no answer.

He waited and the goldenness slid from him and the air was no longer wine-like and there was no warm sunlight, but a biting wind that blew off some black sea of utter nothingness.

He knew—he knew and yet he’d not admit it. He stood stubbornly and wan, with his feet still in the proper place, and waited.

But even stubbornness wore thin and he knew that they were gone and that there was no use of waiting, for they would not be back. Slowly he turned and walked out of the cage.

He had been away too long.

As he stepped out of the cage, he saw the vial upon the floor and stooped to pick it up. He had sipped from it, he remembered, that day (how long ago?) when he had stepped back into the room after long hours in the cage.

They had materialized it for him and they’d told him he should drink it and he could remember the bitter taste it had left upon his tongue.

Kitty and Eric were standing in the doorway, staring at him, and he looked up from the vial and stared in their direction.

“Alden,” Kitty asked, “what has happened to you?”

He shook his head at her. “It’s all right,” he told her. “Nothing’s happened. They just aren’t there, is all.”

“Something happened,” she said. “You look younger by twenty years or more.”

He let the vial fall from his hand. He lifted his hands in front of him and in the light from overhead he saw that the wrinkles in the skin had disappeared. They were stronger, firmer hands. They were younger hands.

“It’s your face,” Kitty said. “It’s all filled out. The crow’s feet all are gone.”

He rubbed his palm along his jaw and it seemed to him that the bone was less pronounced, that the flesh had grown out to pad it.

“The fever,” he said. “That was it—the fever.”

For he remembered dimly. Not remembered, maybe, for perhaps he had never known. But he was knowing now. That was the way it had always worked. Not as if he’d learned a thing, but as if he’d remembered it. They put a thing into his mind and left it planted there and it unfolded then and crept upon him slowly.

And now he knew.

The cage was not a teacher. It was a device they had used to study man, to learn about his body and his metabolism and all the rest of it.

And then when they had known all that need be known, they had written the prescription and given it to him.

Young man, the robot in the barnyard had said to him. But he had not noticed. Young man, but he had too many other things to think about to notice those two words.

But the robot had been wrong.

For it was not only young.

Not young alone—not young for the sake of being young, but young because there was coursing in his body a strange alien virus, or whatever it might be, that had set his body right, that had tuned it up again, that had given it the power to replace old and aging tissue with new.

Doctors to the universe, he thought, that is what they were. Mechanics sent out to tinker up and renovate and put in shape the protoplasmic machinery that was running old and rusty.

“The fever?” Eric asked him.

“Yes,” said Alden. “And thank God, it’s contagious. You both caught it from me.”

He looked closely at them and there was no sign of it as yet, although Eric, it seemed, had begun to change. And Kitty, he thought, when it starts to work on her, how beautiful she’ll be! Beautiful because she had never lost a certain part of beauty that still showed through the age.

And all the people here in Willow Bend—they, too, had been exposed, as had the people who were condemned to Limbo. And perhaps the judge as well, the high and mighty face that had loomed so high above him. In a little while the fever and the healthy youthfulness would seep across the world.

“We can’t stay here,” said Eric. “The medics will be coming.”

Alden shook his head. “We don’t need to run,” he said. “They can’t hurt us now.”

For the medic rule was ended. There was now no need of medics, no need of little leagues, no need of health programs.

It would take a while, of course, for the people to realize what had happened to them, but the day would come when they would know for sure and then the medics could be broken down for scrap or used for other work.

He felt stronger than he’d ever felt. Strong enough, if need be, to walk back across the swamp to Limbo.

“We’d not got out of Limbo,” Kitty told him, “if it hadn’t been for you. You were just crazy enough to supply the guts we needed.”

“Please remember that,” said Alden, “in a few more days, when you are young again.”