The Human Edge

DANGER—HUMAN

The spaceboat came down in the silence of perfect working order—down through the cool, dark night of a New Hampshire late spring. There was hardly any moon and the path emerging from the clump of conifers and snaking its way across the dim pasture looked like a long strip of pale cloth, carelessly dropped and forgotten there.

The two aliens checked the boat and stopped it, hovering, some fifty feet above the pasture, and all but invisible against the low-lying clouds. Then they set themselves to wait, their woolly, bearlike forms settled on haunches, their uniform belts glinting a little in the shielded light from the instrument panel, talking now and then in desultory murmurs.

“It’s not a bad place,” said the one of junior rank, looking down at the earth below.

“Why should it be?” answered the senior.

The junior did not answer. He shifted on his haunches.

“The babies are due soon,” he said. “I just got a message.”

“How many?” asked the senior.

“Three—the doctor thinks. That’s not bad for a first birthing.”

“My wife only had two.”

“I know. You told me.”

They fell silent for a few seconds. The spaceboat rocked almost imperceptibly in the waters of night.

“Look—” said the junior, suddenly. “Here it comes, right on schedule.”

The senior glanced overside. Down below, a tall, dark form had emerged from the trees and was coming put along the path. A little beam of light shone before him, terminating in a blob of illumination that danced along the path ahead, lighting his way. The senior stiffened.

“Take controls,” he said. The casualness had gone out of his voice. It had become crisp, impersonal.

“Controls,” answered the other, in the same emotionless voice.

“Take her down.”

“Down it is.”

The spaceboat dropped groundward. There was an odd sort of soundless, lightless explosion—it was as if concussive wave had passed, robbed of all effects but one. The figure dropped, the light rolling from its grasp and losing its glow in a tangle of short grass. The spaceboat landed and the two aliens got out.

In the dark night they loomed furrily above the still figure. It was that of a lean, dark man in his early thirties, dressed in clean, much-washed corduroy pants and checkered wool lumberjack shirt. He was unconscious, but breathing slowly, deeply and easily.

“I’ll take it up by the head, here,” said the senior. “You take the other end. Got it? Lift! Now, carry it into the boat.”

The junior backed away, up through the spaceboat’s open lock, grunting a little with the awkwardness of his burden.

“It feels slimy,” he said.

“Nonsense!” said the senior. “That’s your imagination.”

Eldridge Timothy Parker drifted in that dreamy limbo between awakeness and full sleep. He found himself contemplating his own name.

Eldridge Timothy Parker. Eldridgetimothyparker. Eldridge TIMOTHYparker. ELdrlDGEtiMOthyPARKer——

There was a hardness under his back, the back on which he was lying—and a coolness. His flaccid right hand turned flat, feeling. It felt like steel beneath him. Metal? He tried to sit up and bumped his forehead against a ceiling a few inches overhead. He blinked his eyes in the darkness—

Darkness?

He flung out his hands, searching, feeling terror leap up inside him. His knuckles bruised against walls to right and left. Frantic, his groping fingers felt out, around and about him. He was walled in, he was surrounded, he was enclosed.

Completely.

Like in a coffin.

Buried—

He began to scream….

Much later, when he awoke again, he was in a strange place that seemed to have no walls, but many instruments. He floated in the center of mechanisms that passed and re-passed about him, touching, probing, turning. He felt touches of heat and cold. Strange hums and notes of various pitches came and went. He felt voices questioning him.

Who are you?

“Eldridge Parker—Eldridge Timothy Parker—”

What are you?

“I’m Eldridge Parker—”

Tell about yourself.

“Tell what? What?”

Tell about yourself.

“What? What do you want to know? What—”

Tell about….

“But I—”

Tell….

…well, i suppose i was pretty much like any of the kids around our town… i was a pretty good shot and i won the fifth grade seventy-five yard dash… i played hockey, too… pretty cold weather up around our parts, you know, the air used to smell strange it was so cold winter mornings in January when you first stepped out of doors… it is good, open country, new england, and there were lots of smells… there were pine smells and grass smells and i remember especially the kitchen smells… and then, too, there was the way the oak benches in church used to smell on Sunday when you knelt with your nose right next to the back of the pew ahead….

…the fishing up our parts is good too… i liked to fish but i never wasted time on weekdays… we were presbyterians, you know, and my father had the farm, but he also had money invested in land around the country… we have never been badly off but i would have liked a motor-scooter….

…no i did not never hate the germans, at least i did not think i ever did, of course though i was over in europe i never really had it bad, combat, i mean… i was in a motor pool with the raw smell of gasoline, i like to work with my hands, and it was not like being in the infantry….

…i have as good right to speak up to the town council as any man… i do not believe in pushing but if they push me i am going to push right back… nor it isn’t any man’s business what i voted last election no more than my bank balance… but i have got as good as right to a say in town doings as if i was the biggest landholder among them….

…i did not go to college because it was not necessary… too much education can make a fool of any man, i told my father, and i know when i have had enough… i am a farmer and will always be a farmer and i will do my own studying as things come up without taking out a pure waste of four years to hang a piece of paper on the wall….

…of course i know about the atom bomb, but i am no scientist and no need to be one, no more than i need to be a veterinarian… i elect the men that hire the men that need to know those things and the men that i elect will hear from me johnny-quick if things do not go to my liking….

…as to why i never married, that is none of your business… as it happens, i was never at ease with women much, though there were a couple of times, and i still may if jeanie lind….

…i believe in god and the united states of america….

He woke up gradually. He was in a room that might have been any office, except the furniture was different. That is, there was a box with doors on it that might have been a filing cabinet and a table that looked like a desk in spite of the single thin rod underneath the center that supported it. However, there were no chairs—only small, flat cushions, on which three large woolly, bearlike creatures were sitting and watching him in silence.

He himself, he found, was in a chair, though.

As soon as they saw his eyes were open, they turned away from him and began to talk among themselves. Eldridge Parker shook his head and blinked his eyes, and would have blinked his ears if that had been possible. For the sounds the creatures were making were like nothing he had ever heard before; and yet he understood everything they were saying. It was an odd sensation, like a double-image earwise, for he heard the strange mouth-noises just as they came out and then something in his head twisted them around and made them into perfectly understandable English.

Nor was that all. For, as he sat listening to the creatures talk, he began to get the same double image in another way. That is, he still saw the bearlike creature behind the desk as the weird sort of animal he was, while out of the sound of his voice, or from something else, there gradually built up in Eldridge’s mind a picture of a thin, rather harassed-looking gray-haired man in something resembling a uniform, but at the same time not quite a uniform. It was the sort of effect an army general might get if he wore his stars and a Sam Browne belt over a civilian double-breasted suit. Similarly, the other creature sitting facing the one behind the desk, at the desk’s side, was a young and black-haired man with something of the laboratory about him, and the creature further back, seated almost against the wall, was neither soldier nor scientist, but a heavy older man with a sort of book-won wisdom in him.

“You see, commander,” the young one with the black-haired image was saying, “perfectly restored. At least on the physical and mental levels.”

“Good, doctor, good,” the outlandish syllables from the one behind the desk translated themselves in Eldridge’s head. “And you say it… he, I should say… will be able to understand?”

“Certainly, sir,” said the doctor-psychologist—whatever-he-was. “Identification is absolute—”

“But I mean comprehend—encompass—” The creature behind the desk moved one paw slightly. “Follow what we tell him—”

The doctor turned his ursinoid head toward the third member of the group. This one spoke slowly, in a deeper voice.

“The culture allows. Certainly.”

The one behind the desk bowed slightly to the oldest one.

“Certainly, Academician, certainly.”

They then fell silent, all looking back at Eldridge, who returned their gaze with equivalent interest. There was something unnatural about the whole proceeding. Both sides were regarding the other with the completely blunt and unshielded curiosity given to freaks.

The silence stretched out. It became tinged with a certain embarrassment. Gradually a mutual recognition arose that no one really wanted to be the first to address an alien being directly.

“It… he is comfortable?” asked the commander, turning once more to the doctor.

“I should say so,” replied the doctor, slowly. “As far as we know….”

Turning back to Eldridge, the commander said, “Eldridge-timothyparker, I suppose you wonder where you are?”

Caution and habit put a clamp on Eldridge’s tongue. He hesitated about answering so long that the commander turned in distress to the doctor, who reassured him with a slight movement of the head.

“Well, speak up,” said the commander, “we’ll be able to understand you, just as you’re able to understand us. Nothing’s going to hurt you; and anything you say won’t have the slightest effect on your… er… situation.”

He paused again, looking at Eldridge for a comment. Eldridge still held his silence, but one of his hands unconsciously made a short, fumbling motion at his breast pocket.

“My pipe—” said Eldridge.

The three looked at each other. They looked back at Eldridge.

“We have it,” said the doctor. “After a while we may give it back to you. For now… we cannot allow… it would not suit us.”

“Smoke bother you?” said Eldridge, with a touch of his native canniness.

“It does not bother us. It is… merely… distasteful,” said the commander. “Let’s get on. I’m going to tell you where you are, first. You’re on a world roughly similar to your own, but many…” he hesitated, looking at the academician.

“Light-years,” supplemented the deep voice. “…Light-years in terms of what a year means to you,” went on the commander, with growing briskness. “Many light-years distant from your home. We didn’t bring you here because of any personal… dislike… or enmity for you; but for….”

“Observation,” supplied the doctor. The commander turned and bowed slightly to him, and was bowed back at in return.

“…Observation,” went on the commander. “Now, do you understand what I’ve told you so far?”

“I’m listening,” said Eldridge.

“Very well,” said the commander. “I will go on. There is something about your people that we are very anxious to discover. We have been, and intend to continue, studying you to find it out. So far—I will admit quite frankly and freely—we have not found it; and the concensus among our best minds is that you, yourself, do not know what it is. Accordingly, we have hopes of… causing… you to discover it for yourself. And for us.”

“Hey….” breathed Eldridge.

“Oh, you will be well treated. I assure you,” said the commander, hurriedly. “You have been well treated. You have been… but you did not know… I mean you did not feel—”

“Can you remember any discomfort since we picked you up?” asked the doctor, leaning forward.

“Depends what you mean—”

“And you will feel none.” The doctor turned to the commander. “Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself?”

“Perhaps,” said the commander. He bowed and turned back to Eldridge. “To explain—we hope you will discover our answer for it. We’re only going to put you in a position to work on it. Therefore, we’ve decided to tell you everything. First—the problem. Academician?”

The oldest one bowed. His deep voice made the room ring oddly.

“If you will look this way,” he said. Eldridge turned his head. The other raised one paw and the wall beside him dissolved into a maze of lines and points. “Do you know what this is?”

“No,” said Eldridge.

“It is,” rumbled the one called the academician, “a map of the known universe. You lack the training to read it in four dimensions, as it should be read. No matter. You will take my word for it… it is a map. A map covering hundreds of thousands of your light-years and millions of your years.”

He looked at Eldridge, who said nothing.

“To go on, then. What we know of your race is based upon two sources of information. History. And Legend. The history is sketchy. It rests on archaeological discoveries for the most part. The legend is even sketchier and—fantastic.”

He paused again. Still Eldridge guarded his tongue.

“Briefly, there is a race that has three times broken out to overrun this mapped area of our galaxy and dominate other civilized cultures—until some inherent lack or weakness in the individual caused the component parts of this advance to die out. The periods of these outbreaks has always been disastrous for the dominated cultures and uniformly without benefit to the race I am talking about. In the case of each outbreak, though the home planet was destroyed and all known remnants of the advancing race hunted out, unknown seed communities remained to furnish the material for a new advance some thousands of years later. That race,” said the academician, and coughed—or at least made some kind of noise in his throat, “is your own.”

Eldridge watched the other carefully and without moving.

“We see your race, therefore,” went on the academician, and Eldridge received the mental impression of an elderly man putting the tips of his ringers together judiciously, “as one with great or overwhelming natural talents, but unfortunately also with one great natural flaw. This flaw seems to be a desire—almost a need—to acquire and possess things. To reach out, encompass, and absorb. It is not,” shrugged the academician, “a unique trait. Other races have it—but not to such an extent that it makes them a threat to their co-existing cultures. Yet, this in itself is not the real problem. If it was a simple matter of rapacity, a combination of other races should be able to contain your people. There is a natural inevitable balance of that sort continually at work in the galaxy. No,” said the academician and paused, looking at the commander.

“Go on. Go on,” said the commander. The academician bowed.

“No, it is not that simple. As a guide to what remains, we have only the legend, made anew and reinforced after each outward sweep of you people. We know that there must be something more than we have found—and we have studied you carefully, both your home world and now you, personally. There must be something more in you, some genius, some capability above the normal, to account for the fantastic nature of your race’s previous successes. But the legend says only—Danger, Human! High Explosive. Do not touch—and we find nothing in you to justify the warning.”

He sighed. Or at least Eldridge received a sudden, unexpected intimation of deep weariness.

“Because of a number of factors—too numerous to go into and most of them not understandable to you—it is our race which must deal with this problem for the rest of the galaxy. What can we do? We dare not leave you be until you grow strong and come out once more. And the legend expressly warns us against touching you in any way. So we have chosen to pick one—but I intrude upon your field, doctor.”

The two of them exchanged bows. The doctor took up the talk speaking briskly and entirely to Eldridge.

“A joint meeting of those of us best suited to consider the situation recommended that we pick up one specimen for intensive observation. For reasons of availability, you were the one chosen. Following your return under drugs to this planet, you were thoroughly examined, by the best of medical techniques, both mentally and physically. I will not go into detail, since we have no wish to depress you unduly. I merely want to impress on you the fact that we found nothing. Nothing. No unusual power or ability of any sort, such as history shows you to have had and legend hints at. I mention this because of the further course of action we have decided to take. Commander?”

The being behind the desk got to his hind feet. The other two rose.

“You will come with us,” said the commander.

Herded by them, Eldridge went out through the room’s door into brilliant sunlight and across a small stretch of something like concrete to a stubby egg-shaped craft with ridiculous little wings.

“Inside,” said the commander. They got in. The commander squatted before a bank of instruments, manipulated a simple sticklike control, and after a moment the ship took to the air. They flew for perhaps half an hour, with Eldridge wishing he was in a position to see out one of the high windows, then landed at a field apparently literally hacked out of a small forest of mountains.

Crossing this field on foot, Eldridge got a glimpse of some truly huge ships, as well as a number of smaller ones such as the one in which he had arrived. Numbers of the furry aliens moved about, none with any great air of hurry, but all with purposefulness. There was a sudden, single, thunderous sound that was gone almost before the ear could register it; and Eldridge, who had ducked instinctively, looked up again to see one of the huge ships falling—there is no other word for it—skyward with such unbelievable rapidity it was out of sight in seconds.

The four of them came at last to a shallow, open trench in the stuff which made the field surface. It was less than a foot wide and they stepped across it with ease. But once they had crossed it, Eldridge noticed a difference. In the five hundred yard square enclosed by the trench—for it turned at right angles off to his right and to his left—there was an air of tightly-established desertedness, as of some highly restricted area, and the rectangular concrete-looking building that occupied the square’s very center glittered unoccupied in the clear light.

They marched to the door of this building and it opened without any of them touching it. Inside was perhaps twenty feet of floor, stretching inward as a run inside the walls. Then a sort of moat—Eldridge could not see its depth—filled with a dark fluid with a faint, sharp odor. This was perhaps another twenty feet wide and enclosed a small, flat island perhaps fifteen feet by fifteen feet, almost wholly taken up by a cage whose walls and ceiling appeared to be made of metal bars as thick as a man’s thumb and spaced about six inches apart. Two more of the aliens, wearing a sort of harness and holding a short, black tube apiece, stood on the ledge of the outer rim. A temporary bridge had been laid across the moat, protruding through the open door of the cage.

They all went across the bridge and into the cage. There, standing around rather like a board of directors viewing an addition to the company plant, they faced Eldridge; and the commander spoke.

“This will be your home from now on,” he said. He indicated the cot, the human-type chair and the other items furnishing the cage. “It’s as comfortable as we can make it.”

“Why?” burst out Eldridge, suddenly. “Why’re you locking me up here? Why—”

“In our attempt to solve the problem that still exists,” interrupted the doctor, smoothly, “we can do nothing more than keep you under observation and hope that time will work with us. Also, we hope to influence you to search for the solution, yourself.”

“And if I find it—what?” cried Eldridge.

“Then,” said the commander, “we will deal with you in the kindest manner that the solution permits. It may be even possible to return you to your own world. At the very least, once you are no longer needed, we can see to it that you are quickly and painlessly destroyed.”

Eldridge felt his insides twist within him.

“Kill me?” he choked. “You think that’s going to make me help you? The hope of getting killed?”

They looked at him almost compassionately.

“You may find,” said the doctor, “that death may be something you will want very much, only for the purpose of putting a close to a life you’ve become weary of. Look,”—he gestured around him—“you are locked up beyond any chance of ever escaping. This cage will be illuminated night and day; and you will be locked in it. When we leave, the bridge will be withdrawn, and the only thing crossing that moat—which is filled with acid—will be a mechanical arm which will extend across and through a small opening to bring you food twice a day. Beyond the moat, there will be two armed guards on duty at all times, but even they cannot open the door to this building. That is opened by remote control from outside, only after the operator has checked on his vision screen to make sure all is as it should be inside here.”

He gestured through the bars, across the moat and through a window in the outer wall.

“Look out there,” he said.

Eldridge looked. Out beyond, and surrounding the building the shallow trench no longer lay still and empty under the sun. It now spouted a vertical wall of flickering, weaving distortion, like a barrier of heat waves.

“That is our final defense, the ultimate in destructiveness that our science provides us—it would literally burn you to nothingness, if you touch it. It will be turned off only for seconds, and with elaborate precautions, to let guards in, or out.”

Eldridge looked back in, to see them all watching him.

“We do this,” said the doctor, “not only because we may discover you to be more dangerous than you seem, but to impress you with your helplessness so that you may be more ready to help us. Here you are, and here you will stay.”

“And you think,” demanded Eldridge hoarsely, “that this’s all going to make me want to help you?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, “because there’s one thing more that enters into the situation. You were literally taken apart physically, after your capture; and as literally put back together again. We are advanced in the organic field, and certain things are true of all life forms. I supervised the work on you, myself. You will find that you are, for all practical purposes, immortal and irretrievably sane. This will be your home forever, and you will find that neither death nor insanity will provide you a way of escape.”

They turned and filed out. From some remote control, the cage door was swung shut. He heard it click and lock. The bridge was withdrawn from the moat. A screen lit up and a woolly face surveyed the building’s interior.

The building’s door opened. They went out; and the guards took up their patrol, around the rim in opposite directions, keeping their eyes on Eldridge and their weapons ready in their hands. The building’s door closed again. Outside, the flickering wall blinked out for a second and then returned again.

The silence of a warm, summer, mountain afternoon descended upon the building. The footsteps of the guards made shuffling noises on their path around the rim. The bars enclosed him.

Eldridge stood still, holding the bars in both hands and looking out.

He could not believe it.

He could not believe it as the days piled up into weeks, and the weeks into months. But as the seasons shifted and the year came around to a new year, the realities of his situation began to soak into him like water into a length of dock piling. For outside, Time could be seen at its visible and regular motion; but in his prison, there was no Time.

Always, the lights burned overhead, always the guards paced about him. Always the barrier burned beyond the building, the meals came swinging in on the end of a long metal arm extended over the moat and through a small hatchway which opened automatically as the arm approached; regularly, twice weekly, the doctor came and checked him over, briefly, impersonally—and went out again with the changing of the guard.

He felt the unbearableness of his situation, like a hand winding tighter and tighter day by day the spring of tension within him. He took to pacing feverishly up and down the cage. He went back and forth, back and forth, until the room swam. He lay awake nights, staring at the endless glow of illumination from the ceiling. He rose to pace again.

The doctor came and examined him. He talked to Eldridge, but Eldridge would not answer. Finally there came a day when everything split wide open and he began to howl and bang on the bars. The guards were frightened and called the doctor. The doctor came, and with two others, entered the cage and strapped him down. They did something odd that hurt at the back of his neck and he passed out.

When he opened his eyes again, the first thing he saw was the doctor’s woolly face, looking down at him—he had learned to recognize that countenance in the same way a sheep-herder eventually comes to recognize individual sheep in his flock. Eldridge felt very weak, but calm.

“You tried hard—” said the doctor. “But you see, you didn’t make it. There’s no way out that way for you.”

Eldridge smiled.

“Stop that!” said the doctor sharply. “You aren’t fooling us. We know you’re perfectly rational.”

Eldridge continued to smile.

“What do you think you’re doing?” demanded the doctor. Eldridge looked happily up at him.

“I’m going home,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “You don’t convince me.” He turned and left. Eldridge turned over on his side and dropped off into the first good sleep he’d had in months.

In spite of himself, however, the doctor was worried. He had the guards doubled, but nothing happened. The days slipped into weeks again and nothing happened. Eldridge was apparently fully recovered. He still spent a great deal of time walking up and down his cage and grasping the bars as if to pull them out of the way before him—but the frenzy of his earlier pacing was gone. He had also moved his cot over next to the small, two-foot square hatch that opened to admit the mechanical arm bearing his meals, and would lie there, with his face pressed against it, waiting for the food to be delivered. The doctor felt uneasy, and spoke to the commander privately about it.

“Well,” said the commander, “just what is it you suspect?”

“I don’t know,” confessed the doctor. “It’s just that I see him more frequently than any of us. Perhaps I’ve become sensitized—but he bothers me.”

“Bothers you?”

“Frightens me, perhaps. I wonder if we’ve taken the right way with him.”

“We took the only way.” The commander made the little gesture and sound that was his race’s equivalent of a sigh. “We must have data. What do you do when you run across a possibly dangerous virus, doctor? You isolate it—for study, until you know. It is not possible, and too risky to try to study his race at close hand, so we study him. That’s all we’re doing. You lose objectivity, doctor. Would you like to take a short vacation?”

“No,” said the doctor, slowly. “No. But he frightens me.”

Still, time went on and nothing happened. Eldridge paced his cage and lay on his cot, face pressed to the bars of the hatch, and staring at the outside world. Another year passed; and another. The double guards were withdrawn. The doctor came reluctantly to the conclusion that the human had at last accepted the fact of his confinement and felt growing within him that normal sort of sympathy that feeds on familiarity. He tried to talk to Eldridge on his regularly scheduled visits, but Eldridge showed little interest in conversation. He lay on the cot watching the doctor as the doctor examined him, with something in his eyes as if he looked on from some distant place in which all decisions were already made and finished.

“You’re as healthy as ever,” said the doctor, concluding his examination. He regarded Eldridge. “I wish you would, though—” He broke off. “We aren’t a cruel people, you know. We don’t like the necessity that makes us do this.”

He paused. Eldridge considered him without stirring.

“If you’d accept that fact,” said the doctor, “I’m sure you’d make it easier on yourself. Possibly our figures of speech have given you a false impression. We said you are immortal. Well, of course, that’s not true. Only practically speaking, are you immortal. You are now capable of living a very, very, very long time. That’s all.”

He paused again. After a moment of waiting, he went on.

“Just the same way, this business isn’t really intended to go on for eternity. By its very nature, of course, it can’t. Even races have a finite lifetime. But even that would be too long. No, it’s just a matter of a long time as you might live it. Eventually, everything must come to a conclusion—that’s inevitable.”

Eldridge still did not speak. The doctor sighed.

“Is there anything you’d like?” he said. “We’d like to make this as little unpleasant as possible. Anything we can give you?”

Eldridge opened his mouth.

“Give me a boat,” he said. “I want a fishing rod. I want a bottle of applejack.”

The doctor shook his head sadly. He turned and signaled the guards. The cage door opened. He went out.

“Get me some pumpkin pie,” cried Eldridge after him, sitting up on the cot and grasping the bars as the door closed. “Give me some green grass in here.”

The doctor crossed the bridge. The bridge was lifted up and the monitor screen lit up. A woolly face looked out and saw that all was well. Slowly the outer door swung open.

“Get me some pine trees!” yelled Eldridge at the doctor’s retreating back. “Get me some plowed fields! Get me some earth, some dirt, some plain, earth dirt! Get me that!”

The door shut behind the doctor; and Eldridge burst into laughter, clinging to the bars, hanging there with glowing eyes.

“I would like to be relieved of this job,” said the doctor to the commander, appearing formally in the latter’s office.

“I’m sorry,” said the commander. “I’m very sorry. But it was our tactical team that initiated this action; and no one has the experience with the prisoner you have. I’m sorry.”

The doctor bowed his head; and went out.

Certain mild but emotion-deadening drugs were also known to the woolly, bearlike race. The doctor went out and began to indulge in them. Meanwhile, Eldridge lay on his cot, occasionally smiling to himself. His position was such that he could see out the window and over the weaving curtain of the barrier that ringed his building, to the landing field. After a while one of the large ships landed and when he saw the three members of its crew disembark from it and move, antlike, off across the field toward the buildings at its far end, he smiled again.

He settled back and closed his eyes. He seemed to doze for a couple of hours and then the sound of the door opening to admit the extra single guard bearing the food for his three o’clock mid-afternoon feeding. He sat up, pushed the cot down a ways, and sat on the end of it, waiting for the meal.

The bridge was not extended—that happened only when someone physically was to enter his cage. The monitor screen lit up and a woolly face watched as the tray of food was loaded on the mechanical arm. It swung out across the acid-filled moat, stretched itself toward the cage, and under the vigilance of the face in the monitor, the two-foot square hatch opened just before it to let it extend into the cage.

Smiling, Eldridge took the tray. The arm withdrew, as it cleared the cage, the hatch swung shut and locked. Outside the cage, guards, food carrier and face in the monitor relaxed. The food carrier turned toward the door, the face in the monitor looked down at some invisible control board before it and the outer door swung open.

In that moment, Eldridge moved.

In one swift second he was on his feet and his hands had closed around the bars of the hatch. There was a single screech of metal, as—incredibly—he tore it loose and threw it aside. Then he was diving through the hatch opening.

He rolled head over heels like a gymnast and came up with his feet standing on the inner edge of the moat. The acrid scent of the acid faintly burnt at his nostrils. He sprang forward in a standing jump, arms outstretched—and his clutching fingers closed on the end of the food arm, now halfway in the process of its leisurely mechanical retraction across the moat.

The metal creaked and bent, dipping downward toward the acid, but Eldridge was already swinging onward under the powerful impetus of his arms from which the sleeves had fallen back to reveal bulging ropes of smooth, powerful muscle. He flew forward through the air, feet first, and his boots took the nearest guard in the face, so that they crashed to the ground together.

For a second they rolled entangled, then the guard flopped and Eldridge came up on one knee, holding the black tube of the guard’s weapon. It spat a single tongue of flame and the other guard dropped. Eldridge thrust to his feet, turning to the still-open door.

The door was closing. But the panicked food-carrier, unarmed, had turned to run. A bolt from Eldridge’s weapon took him in the back. He fell forward and the door jammed on his body. Leaping after him, Eldridge squeezed through the remaining opening.

Then he was out under the free sky. The sounds of alarm screechers were splitting the air. He began to run—

The doctor was already drugged—but not so badly that he could not make it to the field when the news came. Driven by a strange perversity of spirit, he went first to the prison to inspect the broken hatch and the bent food arm. He traced Eldridge’s outward path and it led him to the landing field where he found the commander and the academician by a bare, darkened area of concrete. They acknowledged his presence by little bows.

“He took a ship here?” said the doctor.

“He took a ship here,” said the commander.

There was a little silence between them.

“Well,” said the academician, “we have been answered.”

“Have we?” the commander looked at them almost appealingly. “There’s no chance—that it was just chance? No chance that the hatch just happened to fail—and he acted without thinking, and was lucky?”

The doctor shook his head. He felt a little dizzy and unnatural from the drug, but the ordinary processes of his thinking were unimpaired.

“The hinges of the hatch,” he said, “were rotten—eaten away by acid.”

“Acid?” the commander stared at him. “Where would he get acid?”

“From his own digestive processes—regurgitated and spat directly into the hinges. He secreted hydrochloric acid among other things. Not too powerful—but over a period of time—”

“Still—” said the commander, desperately, “I think it must have been more luck than otherwise.”

“Can you believe that?” asked the academician. “Consider the timing of it all, the choosing of a moment when the food arm was in the proper position, the door open at the proper angle, the guard in a vulnerable situation. Consider his unhesitating and sure use of a weapon—which could only be the fruits of hours of observation, his choice of a moment when a fully supplied ship, its drive unit not yet cooled down, was waiting for him on the field. No,” he shook his woolly head, “we have been answered. We put him in an escape-proof prison and he escaped.”

“But none of this was possible!” cried the commander.

The doctor laughed, a fuzzy, drug-blurred laugh. He opened his mouth but the academician was before him.

“It’s not what he did,” said the academician, “but the fact that he did it. No member of another culture that we know would have even entertained the possibility in their minds. Don’t you see—he disregarded, he denied the fact that escape was impossible. That is what makes his kind so fearful, so dangerous. The fact that something is impossible presents no barrier to their seeking minds. That, alone, places them above us on a plane we can never reach.”

“But it’s a false premise!” protested the commander. “They cannot contravene natural laws. They are still bound by the physical order of the universe.”

The doctor laughed again. His laugh had a wild quality. The commander looked at him.

“You’re drugged,” he said.

“Yes,” choked the doctor. “And I’ll be more drugged. I toast the end of our race, our culture, and our order.”

“Hysteria!” said the commander.

“Hysteria?” echoed the doctor. “No—guilt! Didn’t we do it, we three? The legend told us not to touch them, not to set a spark to the explosive mixture of their kind. And we went ahead and did it, you, and you, and I. And now we’ve sent forth an enemy—safely into the safe hiding place of space, in a ship that can take him across the galaxy, supplied with food to keep him for years, rebuilt into a body that will not die, with star charts and all the keys to understand our culture and locate his home again, using the ability to learn we have encouraged in him.”

“I say,” said the commander, doggedly, “he is not that dangerous—yet. So far he has done nothing one of us could not do, had we entertained the notion. He’s shown nothing, nothing supernormal.”

“Hasn’t he?” said the doctor thickly. “What about the defensive screen—our most dangerous most terrible weapon—that could burn him to nothingness if he touched it?”

The commander stared at him.

“But—” said the commander. “The screen was shut off, of course, to let the food carrier out, at the same time the door was opened. I assumed—”

“I checked,” said the doctor, his eyes burning on the commander. “They turned it on again before he could get out.”

“But he did get out! You don’t mean…” the commander’s voice faltered and dropped. The three stood caught in a sudden silence like stone. Slowly, as if drawn by strings controlled by an invisible hand, they turned as one to stare up into the empty sky and space beyond.

“You mean—” the commander’s voice tried again, and died.

“Exactly!” whispered the doctor.

Halfway across the galaxy, a child of a sensitive race cried out in its sleep and clutched at its mother. “I had a bad dream,” it whimpered.

“Hush,” said its mother. “Hush.” But she lay still, staring at the ceiling. She, too, had dreamed.

Somewhere, Eldridge was smiling at the stars.