The Shipshape Miracle : And Other Stories

Immigrant

He was the only passenger for Kimon and those aboard the ship lionized him because he was going there.

To land him at his destination the ship went two light-years out of its way, an inconvenience for which his passage money, much as it had seemed to him when he’d paid it back on Earth, did not compensate by half.

But the captain did not grumble. It was, he told Selden Bishop, an honor to carry a passenger for Kimon.

The businessmen aboard sought him out and bought him drinks and lunches and talked expansively of the markets opening up in the new-found solar systems.

But despite their expansive talk, they looked at Bishop with half-veiled envy in their eyes and they said to him: “The man who cracks this Kimon situation is the one who’ll have it big.”

One by one, they contrived to corner him for private conversations, and the talk, after the first drink, always turned to billions if he ever needed backing.

Billions—while he sat there with less than twenty credits in his pocket, living in terror against the day when he might have to buy a round of drinks. For he wasn’t certain that his twenty credits would stretch to a round of drinks.

The dowagers towed him off and tried to mother him; the young things lured him off and did not try to mother him. And everywhere he went, he heard the whisper behind the half-raised hand:

“To Kimon!” said the whispers. “My dear, you know what it takes to go to Kimon! An I.Q. rating that’s positively fabulous and years and years of study and an examination that not one in a thousand passes.”

It was like that all the way to Kimon.

Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.

Kimon had been reached—either discovered or contacted would be the wrong word to use—more than a hundred years before by a crippled spaceship out of Earth which landed on the planet, lost and unable to go farther.

To this day no one knew for sure exactly what had happened, but it is known that in the end the crew destroyed the ship and settled down on Kimon, and wrote letters home saying they were staying.

Perhaps the delivery of those letters, more than anything else, convinced the authorities of Earth that Kimon was the kind of place the letters said it was—although later on there was other evidence which weighed as heavily in the balance.

There was, quite naturally, no mail service between Kimon and Earth, but the letters were delivered, and in a most fantastic, although when you think about it, a most logical way. They were rolled into a bundle and placed in a sort of tube, like the pneumatic tubes that are used in industry for interdepartmental communication, and the tube was delivered, quite neatly, on the desk of the World Postal chief in London. Not on the desk of a subordinate, mind you, but on the desk of the chief himself. The tube had not been there when he went to lunch; it was there when he came back, and so far as could be determined, despite a quite elaborate investigation, no one had been seen to place it there.

In time, still convinced that there had been some sort of hoax played, the postal service delivered the letters to the addresses by special messengers who in their more regular employment were operatives of the World Investigation Bureau.

The addressees were unanimous in their belief the letters were genuine, for in most cases the handwriting was recognized and in every letter there were certain matters in the context which seemed to prove that they were bona fide.

So each of the addressees wrote a letter in reply and these were inserted in the tube in which the original letters had arrived and the tube was placed meticulously in the exact spot where it had been found on the desk of the postal chief.

Then everyone watched and nothing happened for quite some time, but suddenly the tube was gone and no one had seen it go—it had been there one moment and not there the next.

There remained one question and that one soon was answered. In the matter of a week or two the tube reappeared again, just before the end of office hours. The postal chief had been working away, not paying much attention to what was going on, and suddenly he saw that the tube had come back again.

Once again it held letters and this time the letters were crammed with sheafs of hundred-credit notes, a gift from the marooned spacemen to their relatives, although it should be noted immediately that the spacemen themselves probably did not consider that they were marooned.

The letters acknowledged the receipt of the replies that had been sent from Earth and told more about the planet Kimon and its inhabitants.

And each letter carefully explained how they had hundred-credit notes on Kimon. The notes as they stood, the letters said, were simply counterfeits, made from bills the spacemen had in their pockets, although when Earth’s fiscal experts and the Bureau of Investigation men had a look at them there was no way in which you could tell them from the real thing.

But, the letters said, the Kimonian government wished to make right the matter of counterfeiting. To back the currency the Kimonians, within the next short while, would place on deposit with the World Bank materials not only equivalent to their value, but enough additional to set up a balance against which more notes could be issued.

There was, the letters explained, no money as such on Kimon, but since Kimon was desirous of employing the men from Earth, there must be some way to pay them, so if it was all right with the World Bank and everyone else concerned …

The World Bank did a lot of hemming and hawing and talked about profound fiscal matters and deep economic principles, but all this talk dissolved to nothing when in the matter of a day or two several tons of carefully shielded uranium and a couple of bushels of diamonds were deposited, during the afternoon coffee hour, beside the desk of the bank’s president.

With evidence of this sort, there was not much that Earth could do except accept the fact that the planet Kimon was a going concern and that the Earthmen who had landed there were going to stay, and take the entire situation at face value.

The Kimonians, the letters said, were humanoid and had parapsychic powers and had built a culture which was miles ahead of Earth or any other planet so far discovered in the galaxy.

Earth furbished up a ship, hand-picked a corps of its most persuasive diplomats, loaded down the hold with expensive gifts, and sent the whole business out to Kimon.

Within minutes after landing, the diplomats had been quite undiplomatically booted off the planet. Kimon, it appeared, had no desire to ally itself with a second-rate, barbaric planet. When it wished to establish diplomatic relationships it would say so. Earth people might come to Kimon if they wished and settle there, but not just any Earth person. To come to Kimon, the individual would have to possess not only a certain minimum I.Q., but must also have an impressive scholastic record.

And that was the way it was left.

You did not go to Kimon simply because you wished to go there; you worked to go to Kimon.

First of all, you had to have the specified I.Q. rating, and that ruled out ninety-nine per cent or better of Earth’s population. Once you had passed the I.Q. test, you settled down to grueling years of study, and at the end of the years of study you wrote an examination and, once again, most of the aspirants were ruled out. Not more than one in a thousand who took the examination passed.

Year after year Earth men and women dribbled out to Kimon, settled there, prospered, wrote their letters home.

Of those who went out, none came back. Once you had lived on Kimon, you could not bear the thought of going back to Earth.

And yet, in all those years, the sum of knowledge concerning Kimon, its inhabitants and its culture, was very slight indeed. What knowledge there was, the only knowledge that there was, was compiled from the letters delivered meticulously once each week to the desk of the postal chief in London.

The letters spoke of wages and salaries a hundred times the wages and salaries that were paid on Earth, of magnificent business opportunities, of the Kimonian culture and the Kimonians themselves, but in no detail, of culture or of business or any other factor, were the letters specific.

And perhaps the recipients of the letters did not mind too much the lack of specific information, for almost every letter carried with it a sheaf of notes, all crisp and new, and very, very legal, backed by tons of uranium, bushels of diamonds, stacked bars of gold and other similar knick-knacks deposited from time to time beside the desk of the World Bank’s president.

It became, in time, the ambition of every family on the Earth to send at least one relative to Kimon, for a relative on Kimon virtually spelled an assured and sufficient income for the rest of the clan for life.

Naturally, the legend of Kimon grew. Much that was said about it was untrue, of course. Kimon, the letters protested, did not have streets paved with solid gold, since there were no streets. Nor did Kimonian damsels wear gowns of diamond dust—the damsels of Kimon wore not much of anything.

But to those whose understanding went beyond streets of gold and gowns of diamonds, it was well understood that in Kimon lay possibilities vastly greater than either gold or diamonds. For here was a planet with a culture far in advance of Earth, a people who had schooled themselves or had naturally developed parapsychic powers. On Kimon one could learn the techniques that would revolutionize galactic industry and communications; on Kimon one might discover philosophy that would set mankind overnight on a new and better—and more profitable?—path.

The legend grew, interpreted by each according to his intellect and his way of thought, and grew and grew and grew …

Earth’s government was very helpful to those who wished to go to Kimon, for government, as well as individuals, could appreciate the opportunities for the revolution of industry and the evolution of human thought. But since there had been no invitation to grant diplomatic recognition, Earth’s government sat and waited, scheming, doing all it could to settle as many of its people on Kimon as was possible. But only the best, for even the densest bureaucrat recognized that on Kimon Earth must put its best foot forward.

Why the Kimonians allowed Earth to send its people was a mystery for which there was no answer. But apparently Earth was the only other planet in the galaxy which had been allowed to send its people. The Earthmen and the Kimonians, of course, both were humanoid, but this was not an adequate answer, either, for they were not the only humanoids in the galaxy. For its own comfort, Earth assumed that a certain common understanding, a similar outlook, a certain parallel evolutionary trend—with Earth a bit behind, of course—between Earth and Kimon might account for Kimon’s qualified hospitality.

Be that as if may, Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, a place to get ahead, the place to spend your life, the country at the rainbow’s end.

Selden Bishop stood in the parklike area where the gig had landed him, for Kimon had no spaceports, as it likewise failed to have many other things.

He stood, surrounded by his luggage, and watched the gig drive spaceward to rendezvous with the liner’s orbit.

When he could see the gig no longer, he sat down on one of his bags and waited.

The park was faintly Earthlike, but the similarity was only in the abstract, for in each particular there was a subtle difference that said this was an alien planet. The trees were too slim and the flowers just a shade too loud and the grass was off a shade or two from the grass you saw on Earth. The birds, if they were birds, were more lizardlike than the birds of Earth and their feathers were put on wrong and weren’t quite the color one associated with plumage. The breeze had a faint perfume upon it that was no perfume of Earth, but an alien odor that smelled as a color looked, and Bishop tried to decide, but couldn’t, which color it might be.

Sitting on his bag, in the middle of the park, he tried to drum up a little enthusiasm, tried to whistle up some triumph that he finally was on Kimon, but the best that he could achieve was a thankfulness that he’d made it with the twenty still intact.

He would need a little cash to get along on until he could find a job. But, he told himself, he shouldn’t have to wait too long before he found a job. The thing, of course, was not to take the first one offered him, but to shop around a little and find the one for which he was best fitted. And that, he knew, might take a little time.

Thinking of it, he wished that he had more than a twenty. He should have allowed himself a bigger margin, but that would have meant something less than the best luggage he could buy and perhaps not enough of it, off-the-rack suits instead of tailored, and all other things accordingly.

It was, he told himself, important that he made the best impression, and sitting there and thinking it over, he couldn’t bring himself to regret the money he had spent to make a good impression.

Maybe he should have asked Morley for a loan. Morley would have given him anything he asked and he could have paid it back as soon as he got a job. But he had hated to ask, for to ask, he now admitted, would have detracted from his new-found importance as a man who had been selected to make the trip to Kimon. Everyone, even Morley, looked up to a man who was sent to blast for Kimon, and you couldn’t go around asking for a loan or for other favors.

He remembered that last visit he had with Morley, and looking back at it now, he saw that, while Morley was his friend, that last visit had a flavor, more or less, of a diplomatic job that Morley had to carry out.

Morley had gone far and was going farther in the diplomatic service. He looked like a diplomat and he talked like one and he had a better grasp, old heads at the department said, of Sector Nineteen politics and economics than any of the other younger men. He wore a clipped mustache that had a frankly cultivated look, and his hair was always quite in place, and his body, when he walked, was like a panther walking.

They had sat in Morley’s diggings and had been all comfortable and friendly, and then Morley had gotten up and paced up and down the room with his panther walk.

“We’ve been friends for a long, long time,” said Morley. “We’ve been in a lot of scrapes together.”

And the two of them had smiled, remembering some of the scrapes they had been in together.

“When I heard you were going out to Kimon,” Morley said, “I was pleased about it naturally. I’d be pleased at anything that came your way. But I was pleased, as well, for another reason. I told myself here finally was a man who could do a job and find out what we want.”

“What do you want?” Bishop had asked and, as he remembered it, he had asked it as if he might be asking whether Morley wanted Scotch or bourbon. Although, come to think of it, he never would have asked that particular question, for all the young men in the alien relations section religiously drank Scotch. But, anyhow, he asked it casually, although he sensed that there was nothing casual at all about the situation.

He could smell the scent of cloak and dagger and he caught a sudden glimpse of huge official worry, and for an instant he was a little cold and scared.

“There must be some way to crack that planet,” Morley had told him, “but we haven’t found it yet. So far as the Kimonians are concerned, none of the rest of us, none of the other planets, officially exist. There’s not a single planet accorded diplomatic status. On Kimon there is not a single official representative of any other people. They don’t seem to trade with anyone, and yet they must trade with someone, for no planet, no culture can exist in complete self-sufficiency. They must have diplomatic relations somewhere, with someone. There must be some reason, beyond the obvious one that we are an inferior culture, why they do not recognize Earth. For even in the more barbaric days of Earth there was official recognition of many governments and peoples who were cultural inferiors to the recognizing nation.”

“You want me to find out all this?”

“No,” said Morley. “Not all that. All we want are clues. Somewhere there is the clue that we are looking for, the hint that will tell us what the actual situation is. All we need is the opening wedge—the foot in the door. Give us that and we will do the rest.”

“There have been others,” Bishop told him. “Thousands of others. I’m not the only one who ever went to Kimon.”

“For the last fifty years or more,” said Morley, “the section has talked to all the others, before they went out, exactly as I’m talking to you now.”

“And you’ve got nothing?”

“Nothing,” said Morley. “Or almost nothing. Or nothing, anyhow, that counted or made any sense.”

“They failed—”

“They failed,” Morley told him, “because once on Kimon they forgot about Earth…well, not forgot about it, that’s not entirely it. But they lost all allegiance to it. They were Kimon-blinded.”

“You believe that?”

“I don’t know,” said Morley. “It’s the best explanation that we have. The trouble is that we talk to them only once. None of them come back. We can write letters to them, certainly. We can try to jog them—indirectly, of course. But we can’t ask them outright.”

“Censorship?”

“Not censorship,” said Morley, “although they may have that, too; but mostly telepathy. The Kimonians would know if we tried to impress anything too forcibly upon their minds. And we can’t take the chance of a simple thought undoing all the work that we have done.”

“But you’re telling me.”

“You’ll forget it,” Morley said. “You will have several weeks in which you can forget it—push it to the back of your mind. But not entirely—not entirely.”

“I understand,” Bishop told him.

“Don’t get me wrong,” said Morley. “It’s nothing sinister. You’re not to look for that. It may be just a simple thing. The way we comb our hair. There’s some reason—perhaps many little ones. And we must know those reasons.”

Morley had switched it off as quickly as he had begun it, had poured another round of drinks, had sat down again and talked of their school days and of the girls they’d known and of week-ends in the country.

It had been, all in all, a very pleasant evening.

But that had been weeks ago, and since then he’d scarcely remembered it and now here he was on Kimon, sitting on one of his bags in the middle of a park, waiting for a welcoming Kimonian to show up.

All the time that he’d been waiting, he had been prepared for the Kimonian’s arrival. He knew what a Kimonian looked like and he should not have been surprised.

But when the native came, he was.

For the native was six foot, ten, and almost a godlike being, a sculptured humanoid who was, astonishingly, much more human than he had thought to find.

One moment he had sat alone in the little parklike glade and the next the native was standing by his side.

Bishop came to his feet and the Kimonian said, “We are glad you are here. Welcome to Kimon, sir.”

The native’s inflection was as precise and beautiful as his sculptured body.

“Thank you,” Bishop said, and knew immediately that the two words were inadequate and that his voice was slurred and halting compared with the native’s voice. And, looking at the Kimonian, he had the feeling that by comparison, he cut a rumpled, seedy figure.

He reached into his pocket for his papers and his fingers were all thumbs, so that he fumbled for them and finally dug them out—dug is the word exactly—and handed them to the waiting being.

The Kimonian flicked them—that was it, flicked them—then he said. “Mr. Selden Bishop. Very glad to know you. Your I.Q. rating, 160, is very satisfactory. Your examination showing, if I may say so, is extraordinary. Recommendations good. Clearance from Earth in order. And I see you made good time. Very glad to have you.”

“But—” said Bishop. Then he clamped his mouth tight shut. He couldn’t tell this being he’d merely flicked the pages and could not possibly have read them. For, obviously, he had.

“You had a pleasant flight, Mr. Bishop?”

“A most pleasant one,” said Bishop and was filled with sudden pride that he could answer so easily and urbanely.

“Your luggage,” said the native, “is in splendid taste.”

“Why, thank you—” then Bishop was filled with rage. What right had this person to patronize his luggage!

But the native did not appear to notice.

“You wish to go to the hotel?”

“If you please,” said Bishop, speaking very tightly, holding himself in check.

“Please allow me,” said the native.

Bishop blurred for just a second—a definite sense of blurring—as if the universe had gone swiftly out of focus, then he was standing, not in the parklike glade, but in a one-man-sized alcove off a hotel lobby, with his bags stacked neatly beside him.

He had missed the triumph before, sitting in the glade, waiting for the native, after the gig had left him, but now it struck him, a heady, drunken triumph that surged through his body and rose in his throat to choke him.

This was Kimon! He finally was on Kimon! After all the years of study, he was here—the fabulous place he’d worked for many years to reach.

A high I.Q., they’d said behind their half-raised hands—a high I.Q. and many years of study, and a stiff examination that not more than one in every thousand passed.

He stood in the alcove, with the sense of hiding there, to give himself a moment in which to regain his breath at the splendor of what had finally come to pass, to gain the moment it would take for the unreasoning triumph to have its way with him and go.

For the triumph was something that must not be allowed to last. It was something that he must not show. It was a personal thing and as something personal it must be hidden deep.

He might be one of a thousand back on Earth, but here he stood on no more than equal footing with the ones who had come before him. Perhaps not quite on equal footing, for they would know the ropes and he had yet to learn them.

He watched them in the lobby—the lucky and the fabulous ones who had preceded him, the glittering company he had dreamed about during all the weary years—the company that he presently would join, the ones of Earth who were adjudged fit to go to Kimon.

For only the best must go—the best and smartest and the quickest. Earth must put her best foot forward, for how otherwise would Earth ever persuade Kimon that she was a sister planet?

At first the people in the lobby had been no more than a crowd, a crowd that shone and twinkled, but with that curious lack of personality which goes with a crowd. But now, as he watched, the crowd dissolved into individuals and he saw them, not as a group, but as the men and women he presently would know.

He did not see the bell captain until the native stood in front of him, and the bell captain, if anything, was taller and more handsome than the man who’d met him in the glade.

“Good evening, sir,” the captain said. “Welcome to the Ritz.”

Bishop started. “The Ritz? Oh, yes, I had forgotten. This place is the Ritz.”

“We’re glad to have you with us,” said the captain. “We hope your stay will prove to be a long one.”

“Certainly,” said Bishop. “That is, I hope so, too.”

“We had been notified,” the captain said, “that you were arriving, Mr. Bishop. We took the liberty of reserving rooms for you. I trust they will be satisfactory.”

“I am sure they will be,” Bishop said.

As if anything on Kimon could be unsatisfactory!

“Perhaps you will want to dress,” the captain said. “There still is time for dinner.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Bishop. “Most assuredly I will.”

And wished he had not said it.

“We’ll send up the bags,” the captain said. “No need to register. That is taken care of. If you will permit me, sir.”

The rooms were satisfactory. There were three of them.

Sitting in a chair, Bishop wondered how he’d ever pay for them.

Remembering the lonely twenty credits, he was seized with a momentary panic.

He’d have to get a job sooner than he planned, for the twenty credits wouldn’t go too far with a layout like this one. Although he supposed if he asked for credit it would be given him.

But he recoiled from the idea of asking for credit, of being forced to admit that he was short of cash. So far he’d done everything correctly. He’d arrived aboard a liner and not a battered trader; his luggage—what had the native said?—was in splendid taste; his wardrobe was all that could be expected; and he hoped that he’d not communicated to anyone the panic and dismay he’d felt at the luxury of the suite.

He got up from the chair and prowled about the room. There was no carpeting, for the floor itself was soft and yielding, and you left momentary tracks as you walked, but they puffed back and smoothed out almost immediately.

He walked over to a window and stood looking out of it. Evening had fallen and the landscape was covered with a dusty blue—and there was nothing, absolutely nothing, but rolling countryside. There were no roads that he could see and no lights that would have told of other habitations.

Perhaps, he thought, I’m on the wrong side of the building. On the other side there may be streets and roads and homes and shops.

He turned back to the room and looked at it—the Earthlike furniture so quietly elegant that it almost shouted, the beautiful, veined marble fireplace, the shelves of books, the shine of old wood, the matchless paintings hanging on the wall, and the great cabinet that almost filled one end of the room.

He wondered what the cabinet might be. It was a beautiful thing, with an antique look about it and it had a polish—not a wax, but a polish of human hands and time.

He walked toward it.

The cabinet said, “Drink, sir?”

“I don’t mind if I do,” said Bishop, then stopped stock-still, realizing that the cabinet had spoken and he had answered it.

A panel opened in the cabinet and the drink was there.

“Music?” asked the cabinet.

“If you please,” said Bishop.

“Type?”

“Type? Oh, I see. Something gay, but maybe just a little sadness too. Like the blue hour of twilight spreading over Paris. Who was it used that phrase? One of the old writers. Fitzgerald. I’m sure it was Fitzgerald.”

The music told about the blue hour stealing over that city far away on Earth, and there was soft April rain and distant girlish laughter and the shine of the pavement in the slanting rain.

“Is there anything else you wish, sir?” asked the cabinet.

“Nothing at the moment.”

“Very well, sir. You will have an hour to get dressed for dinner.”

He left the room, sipping his drink as he went—and the drink had a certain touch to it.

He went into the bedroom and tested the bed, and it was satisfactorily soft. He examined the dresser and the full-length glass and peeked into the bathroom and saw that it was equipped with an automatic shaver and massager, that it had a shower and tub, an exercising machine and a number of other gadgets that he couldn’t place.

And the third room.

It was almost bare by the standards of the other two. In the center of it stood a chair with great flat arms, and on each of the arms many rows of buttons.

He approached the chair cautiously, wondering what it was—what kind of trap it was. Although that was foolish, for there were no traps on Kimon. This was Kimon, the land of opportunity, where a man might make a fortune and live in luxury and rub shoulders with an intelligence and a culture that was the best yet found in the galaxy.

He bent down over the wide arms of the chair and found that each of the buttons was labeled. They were labeled “History,” “Poetry,” “Drama,” “Sculpture,” “Literature,” “Painting,” “Astronomy,” “Philosophy,” “Physics,” “Religions” and many other things. And there were several that were labeled with words he’d never seen and that had no meaning to him.

He stood in the room and looked around at its starkness and saw for the first time that it had no windows, but was just a sort of box—a theater, he decided, or a lecture room. You sat in the chair and pressed a certain button and—

But there was no time for that. An hour to dress for dinner, the cabinet had said, and some of that hour was already gone.

The luggage was in the bedroom and he opened the bag that held his dinner clothes. The jacket was badly wrinkled.

He stood with it in his hands, staring at it. Maybe the wrinkles would hang out. Maybe—

But he knew they wouldn’t.

The music stopped and the cabinet asked, “Is there something that you wish, sir?”

“Can you press a dinner jacket?”

“Surely, sir, I can.”

“How soon?”

“Five minutes,” said the cabinet. “Give me the trousers, too.”

The bell rang and he went to the door.

A man stood just outside.

“Good evening,” said the man. “My name is Montague, but they call me Monty.”

“Won’t you come in, Monty?”

Monty came in and surveyed the room.

“Nice place,” he said.

Bishop nodded. “I didn’t ask for anything at all. They just gave it to me.”

“Clever, these Kimonians,” said Monty. “Very clever, yes.”

“My name is Selden Bishop.”

“Just come in?” asked Monty.

“An hour or so ago.”

“All dewed up with what a great place Kimon is.”

“I know nothing about it,” Bishop told him. “I studied it, of course.”

“I know,” said Monty, looking at him slantwise. “Just being neighborly. New victim and all that, you know.”

Bishop smiled because he didn’t quite know what else to do.

“What’s your line?” asked Monty.

“Business,” said Bishop. “Administration’s what I’m aiming at.”

“Well, then,” Monty said, “I guess that lets you out. You wouldn’t be interested.”

“In what?”

“In football. Or baseball. Or cricket. Not the athletic type.”

“Never had the time.”

“Too bad,” Monty said. “You have the build for it.”

The cabinet asked: “Would the gentleman like a drink?”

“If you please,” said Monty.

“And another one for you, sir?”

“If you please,” said Bishop.

“Go on and get dressed,” said Monty. “I’ll sit down and wait.”

“Your jacket and trousers, sir,” said the cabinet.

A door swung open and there they were, cleaned and pressed.

“I didn’t know,” said Bishop, “that you went in for sports out here.”

“Oh, we don’t,” said Monty. “This is a business venture.”

“Business venture?”

“Certainly. Give the Kimonians something to bet on. They might go for it. For a while, at least. You see, they can’t bet—”

“I don’t see why not—”

“Well, consider for a moment. They have no sports at all, you know. Wouldn’t be possible. Telepathy. They’d know three moves ahead what their opponents were about to do. Telekinesis. They could move a piece or a ball or a what-have-you without touching a finger to it. They—”

“I think I see,” said Bishop.

“So we plan to get up some teams and put on exhibition matches. Drum up as much enthusiasm as we can. They’ll come out in droves to see it. Pay admission. Place bets. We, of course, will play the bookies and rake off our commissions. It will be a good thing while it lasts.”

“It won’t last, of course.”

Monty gave Bishop a long look.

“You catch on fast,” he said. “You’ll get along.”

“Drinks, gentlemen,” the cabinet said.

Bishop got the drinks, gave one of them to his visitor.

“You better let me put you down,” said Monty. “Might as well rake in what you can. You don’t need to know too much about it.”

“All right,” Bishop told him agreeably. “Go ahead and put me down.”

“You haven’t got much money,” Monty said.

“How did you know that?”

“You’re scared about this room,” said Monty.

“Telepathy?” asked Bishop.

“You pick it up,” said Monty. “Just the fringes of it. You’ll never be as good as they are. Never. But you pick things up from time to time—a sort of sense that seeps into you. After you’ve been here long enough.”

“I had hoped that no one noticed.”

“A lot of them will notice, Bishop. Can’t help but notice, the way you’re broadcasting. But don’t let it worry you. We are all friends. Banded against the common enemy, you might say. If you need a loan—”

“Not yet,” said Bishop. “I’ll let you know.”

“Me,” said Monty. “Me or anyone. We are all friends. We got to be.”

“Thanks.”

“Not at all. Now you go ahead and dress. I’ll sit and wait for you. I’ll bear you down with me. Everyone’s waiting to meet you.”

“That’s good to know,” said Bishop. “I felt quite a stranger.”

“Oh, my, no,” said Monty. “No need to. Not many come, you know. They’ll all want to know of Earth.”

He rolled the glass between his fingers.

“How about Earth?” he asked.

“How about—”

“Yes, it is still there, of course. How is it getting on? What’s the news?”

He had not seen the hotel before. He had caught a confused glimpse of it from the alcove off the lobby, with his luggage stacked up beside him, before the bell captain had showed up and whisked him to his rooms.

But now he saw that it was a strangely substantial fairyland, with fountains and hidden fountain music, with the spidery tracery of rainbows serving as groins and arches, with shimmery columns of glass that caught and reflected and duplicated many times the entire construction of the lobby so that one was at once caught up in the illusion that here was a place that went on and on forever, and at the same time you could cordon off a section of it in your mind as an intimate corner for a group of friends.

It was illusion and substantiality, beauty and a sense of home—it was, Bishop suspected, all things to all men and what you wished to make it. A place of utter magic that divorced one from the world and the crudities of the world, with a gaiety that was not brittle and a sentimentality that stopped short of being cheap, and that transmitted a sense of well-being and of self-importance from the very fact of being a part of such a place.

There was no such place on Earth, there could be no such place on Earth, for Bishop suspected that something more than human planning, more than human architectural skill, had gone into its building. You walked in an enchantment and you talked with magic and you felt the sparkle and the shine of the place live within your brain.

“It gets you,” Monty said. “I always watch the faces of the newcomers when they first walk in it.”

“It wears off after a time,” said Bishop, not believing it.

Monty shook his head. “My friend, it does not wear off. It doesn’t surprise you quite so much, but it stays with you all the time. A human does not live long enough for a place like this to wear thin and commonplace.”

He had eaten dinner in the dining room, which was old and solemn, with an ancient other-worldness and a hushed, tiptoe atmosphere, with Kimonian waiters at your elbow, ready to recommend a certain dish or a vintage as one that you should try.

Monty had coffee while he ate and there had been others who had come drifting past to stop a moment and welcome him and ask him of Earth, always using a studied casualness, always with a hunger in their eyes that belied the casualness.

“They make you feel at home,” said Monty, “and they mean it. They are glad when a new one comes.”

He did feel at home—more at home than he had ever felt in his life before, as if already he was beginning to fit in. He had not expected to fit in so quickly and he was slightly astonished at it—for here were all the people he had dreamed of being with, and he finally was with them. You could feel the magnetic force of them, the personal magnetism that had made them great, great enough to be Kimon-worthy, and looking at them he wondered which of them he would get to know, which would be his friends.

He was relieved when he found that he was not expected to pay for his dinner or his drinks, but simply sign a chit, and once he’d caught onto that, everything seemed brighter, for the dinner of itself would have taken quite a hole out of the twenty nestling in his pocket.

With dinner over and with Monty gone somewhere into the crowd, he found himself in the bar, sitting on a stool and nursing a drink that the Kimonian bartender had recommended as being something special.

The girl came out of nowhere and floated up to the stool beside him and she said:

“What’s that you’re drinking, friend?”

“I don’t know,” said Bishop. He made a thumb toward the man behind the bar. “Ask him to make you one.”

The bartender heard and got busy with the bottles and the shaker.

“You’re fresh from Earth,” said the girl.

“Fresh is the word,” said Bishop.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “That is, if you don’t think about it.”

“I won’t think about it,” Bishop promised. “I won’t think of anything.”

“Of course, you do get used to it,” she said. “After a while you don’t mind the faint amusement. You think, what the hell, let them laugh all they want to so long as I have it good. But the day will come—”

“What are you talking about?” asked Bishop. “Here’s your drink. Dip your muzzle into that and—”

“The day will come when we are old to them, when we don’t amuse them any longer. When we become passé. We can’t keep thinking up new tricks. Take my painting, for example—”

“See here,” said Bishop. “You’re talking way above my head.”

“See me a week from now,” she said. “The name’s Maxine. Just ask to see Maxine. A week from now, we can talk together. So long, Buster.”

She floated off the stool and suddenly was gone.

She hadn’t touched her drink.

He went up to his rooms and stood for a long time at a window, staring out into the featureless landscape lighted by a moon.

Wonder thundered in his brain, the wonder and the newness and the many questions, the breathlessness of finally being here, of slowly coming to a full realization of the fact that he was here, that he was one of the glittering, fabulous company he had dreamed about for years.

The long grim years peeled off him, the years of books and study, the years of determined driving, the hungry, anxious, grueling years when he had lived a monkish life, mortifying body and soul to drive his intellect.

The years fell off and he felt the newness of himself as well as the newness of the scene. A cleanness and a newness and the sudden glory.

The cabinet finally spoke to him.

“Why don’t you try the live-it, sir?”

Bishop swung sharply around.

“You mean—?”

“The third room,” said the cabinet. “You’ll find it most amusing.”

“The live-it!”

“That’s right,” said the cabinet. “You pick it and you live it.”

Which sounded like something out of the Alice books.

“It’s safe,” said the cabinet. “It’s perfectly safe. You can come back any time you wish.”

“Thank you,” said Bishop.

He went into the room and sat down in the chair and studied the buttons on the arms.

History?

Might as well, he told himself. He knew a bit of history. He’d been interested in it and had taken several courses and done a lot of supplemental reading.

He punched the “History” button.

A panel in the wall before the chair lit up and a face appeared—the face of a Kimonian, the bronzed and golden face, the classic beauty of the race.

Aren’t any of them homely? Bishop wondered. None of them ugly or crippled, like the rest of humanity?

“What type of history, sir?” the face in the screen asked him.

“Type?”

“Galactic, Kimonian, Earth—almost any place you wish.”

“Earth, please,” said Bishop.

“Specifications?”

“England,” said Bishop. “October 14, 1066. A place called Senlac.”

And he was there.

He was no longer in the room with its single chair and its four bare walls, but he stood upon a hill in sunny autumn weather with the gold and red of trees and the blueness of the haze and the shouts of men.

He stood rooted in the grass that blew upon the hillside and saw that the grass had turned to hay with its age and sunshine—and out beyond the grass and hill, grouped down on the plain, was a ragged line of horsemen, with the sun upon their helmets and flashing on their shields, with the leopard banners curling in the wind.

It was October 14th and it was Saturday and on the hill stood Harold’s hosts behind their locked shield wall, and before the sun had set new forces would have been put in motion to shape the course of empire.

Taillefer, he thought. Taillefer will ride in the fore of William’s charge, singing the “Chanson de Roland” and wheeling his sword into the air so that it becomes a wheel of fire to lead the others on.

The Normans charged and there was no Taillefer. There was no one who wheeled his sword into the air, there was no singing. There was merely shouting and the hoarse crying of men riding to their death.

The horsemen were charging directly at him and he wheeled and tried to run, but he could not outrun them and they were upon him. He saw the flash of polished hoofs and the cruel steel of the shoes upon the hoofs, the glinting lance point, the swaying, jouncing scabbard, the red and green and yellow of the cloaks, the dullness of the armor, the open roaring mouths of men—and they were upon him. And passing through him and over him as if he were not there.

He stopped stock-still, heart hammering in his chest, and, as if from somewhere far off, he felt the wind of the charging horses that were running all around him.

Up the hill there were hoarse cries of “Ut! Ut!” and the high, sharp ring of steel. Dust was rising all around him and somewhere off to the left a dying horse was screaming. Out of the dust a man came running down the hill. He staggered and fell and got up and ran again and Bishop could see that blood poured out of the ripped armor and washed down across the metal, spraying the dead, sere grass as he ran down the hill.

The horses came back again, some of them riderless, running with their necks outstretched, with the reins flying in the wind, with foam dashing from their mouths.

One man sagged in the saddle and fell off, but his foot caught in the stirrup and his horse, shying, dragged him sideways.

Up on top of the hill the Saxon square was cheering and through the settling dust he saw the heap of bodies that lay outside the shield wall.

Let me out of here! Bishop was screaming to himself. How do I get out of here! Let me out—

He was out, back in the room again, with its single chair and the four blank walls.

He sat there quietly and he thought: There was no Taillefer.

No one who rode and sang and tossed the sword in the air.

The tale of Taillefer was no more than the imagination of some copyist who had improved upon the tale to while away his time.

But men had died. They had run down the hill, staggering with their wounds, and died. They had fallen from their horses and been dragged to death by their frightened mounts. They had come crawling down the hill, with minutes left of life and with a whimper in their throats.

He stood up and his hands were shaking. He walked unsteadily into the next room.

“You are going to bed, sir?” asked the cabinet.

“I think I will,” said Bishop.

“Very good, then, sir. I’ll lock up and put out.”

“That’s very good of you.”

“Routine, sir,” said the cabinet. “Is there anything you wish?”

“Not a thing,” said Bishop. “Good night.”

“Good night,” said the cabinet.

In the morning he went to the employment agency which he found in one corner of the hotel lobby.

There was no one around but a Kimonian girl, a tall, statuesque blonde, but with a grace to put to shame the most petite of humans. A woman, Bishop thought, jerked out of some classic Grecian myth, a blonde goddess come to life and beauty. She didn’t wear the flowing Grecian robe, but she could have. She wore, truth to tell, but little, and was all the better for it.

“You are new,” she said.

He nodded.

“Wait, I know,” she said. She looked at him. “Selden Bishop, age twenty-nine Earth years, I.Q., 160.”

“Yes, ma’m,” he said.

She made him feel as if he should bow and scrape.

“Business administration, I understand,” she said.

He nodded bleakly.

“Please sit down, Mr. Bishop, and we will talk this over.”

He sat down and he was thinking: It isn’t right for a beautiful girl to be so big and husky. Nor so competent.

“You’d like to get started doing something,” said the girl.

“That’s the thought I had.”

“You specialized in business administration. I’m afraid there aren’t many openings in that particular field.”

“I wouldn’t expect too much to start with,” Bishop told her with what he felt was a becoming modesty and a realistic outlook. “Almost anything at all, until I can prove my value.”

“You’d have to start at the very bottom. And it would take years of training. Not in method only, but in attitude and philosophy.”

“I wouldn’t—”

He hesitated. He had meant to say that he wouldn’t mind. But he would mind. He would mind a lot.

“But I spent years,” he said. “I know—”

“Kimonian business?”

“Is it so much different?”

“You know all about contracts, I suppose.”

“Certainly I do.”

“There is no such thing as a contract on all of Kimon.”

“But—”

“There is no need of any.”

“Integrity?”

“That, and other things as well.”

“Other things?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me.”

“It would be useless, Mr. Bishop. New concepts entirely so far as you’re concerned. Of behavior. Of motives. On Earth, profit is the motive—”

“Isn’t it here?”

“In part. A very small part.”

“The other motives—”

“Cultural development for one. Can you imagine an urge to cultural development as powerful as the profit motive?”

Bishop was honest about it. “No, I can’t,” he said.

“Here,” she said, “it is the more powerful of the two. But that’s not all. Money is another thing. We have no actual money. No coin that changes hands.”

“But there is money. Credit notes.”

“For the convenience of your race alone,” she said. “We created your money values and your evidence of wealth so that we could hire your services and pay you—and I might add that we pay you well. We have gone through all the motions. The currency that we create is as valid as anywhere else in the galaxy. It’s backed by deposits in Earth’s banks and it is legal tender so far as you’re concerned. But Kimonians themselves do not employ money.”

Bishop floundered. “I can’t understand,” he said.

“Of course you can’t,” she said. “It’s an entirely new departure for you. Your culture is so constituted that there must be a certain physical assurance of each person’s wealth and worth. Here we do not need that physical assurance. Here each person carries in his head the simple bookkeeping of his worth and debts. It is there for him to know. It is there for his friends and business associates to see at any time they wish.”

“It isn’t business, then,” said Bishop. “Not business as I think of it.”

“Exactly,” said the girl.

“But I am trained for business, I spent—”

“Years and years of study. But on Earth’s methods of business, not on Kimon’s.”

“But there are businessmen here. Hundreds of them.”

“Are there?” she asked.

She was smiling at him. Not a superior smile, nor a taunting one—just smiling at him.

“What you need,” she said, “is contact with Kimonians. A chance to get to know your way around. An opportunity to appreciate our point of view and get the hang of how we do things.”

“That sounds all right,” said Bishop. “How do I go about it?”

“There have been instances,” said the girl, “when Earth people sold their services as companions.”

“I don’t think I’d care much for that. It sounds…well, like baby sitting or reading to old ladies or…”

“Can you play an instrument or sing?”

Bishop shook his head.

“Paint? Draw? Dance?”

He couldn’t do any of them.

“Box, perhaps,” she said. “Physical combat. That is popular at times, if it’s not overdone.”

“You mean prize fighting?”

“I think that is one way you describe it.”

“No, I can’t,” said Bishop.

“That doesn’t leave much,” she said as she picked up some papers.

“Transportation?” he asked.

“Transportation is a personal matter.”

And of course it was, he told himself. With telekinesis you could transport yourself or anything you might have a mind to move—without mechanical aid.

“Communications,” he said weakly. “I suppose that is the same?”

She nodded.

With telepathy, it would be.

“You know about transportation and communications, Mr. Bishop?”

“Earth variety,” said Bishop. “No good here, I gather.”

“None at all,” she said. “Although we might arrange a lecture tour. Some of us would help you put your material together.”

Bishop shook his head. “I can’t talk,” he said.

She got up.

“I’ll check around,” she said. “Drop in again. We’ll find something that you’ll fit.”

“Thanks,” he said and went back to the lobby.

He went for a walk.

There were no roads or paths.

There was nothing.

The hotel stood on the plain and there was nothing else.

No buildings around it. No village. No roads. Nothing.

It stood there, huge and ornate and lonely, like a misplaced thing.

It stood stark against the skyline, for there were no other buildings to blend into it and soften it and it looked like something that someone in a hurry had dumped down and left.

He struck out across the plain toward some trees that he thought must mark a watercourse and he wondered why there were no paths or roads, but suddenly he knew why there were no paths or roads.

He thought about the years he had spent cramming business administration into his brain and he remembered the huge book of excerpts from the letters written home from Kimon hinting at big business deals, at responsible positions.

And the thought struck him that there was one thing in common in all of the excerpts in the book—that the deals and positions were always hinted at, that no one had ever told exactly what he did.

Why did they do it? he asked himself. Why did they fool us all?

Although, of course, there might be more to it than he knew. He had been on Kimon for somewhat less than a full day’s time. I’ll look around, the Grecian blonde had said—I’ll look around, we’ll find something that you fit.

He went on across the plain and reached the line of trees and found the stream. It was a prairie stream, a broad, sluggish flow of crystal water between two grassy banks. Lying on his stomach to peer into the depths, he saw the flash of fishes far below him.

He took off his shoes and dangled his feet in the water and kicked a little to make the water splash, and he thought:

They know all about us. They know about our life and culture. They know about the leopard banners and how Senlac must have looked on Saturday, October 14, 1066, with the hosts of England massed upon the hilltop and the hosts of William on the plain below.

They know what makes us tick and they let us come and because they let us come, there must be some value in us.

What had the girl said, the girl who had floated to the stool and then left with her drink still standing and untouched. Faint amusement, she had said. You get used to it, she had said. If you don’t think too much about it, you get used to it.

See me in a week, she had said. In a week you and I can talk. And she had called him Buster.

Well, maybe she had a right to call him that. He had been starry-eyed and a sort of eager beaver. And probably ignorant-smug.

They know about us and how do they know about us?

Senlac might have been staged, but he didn’t think so—there was a strange, grim reality about it that got under your skin, a crawling sort of feeling that told you it was true, that that was how it had happened and had been. That there had been no Taillefer and that a man had died with his guts dragging in the grass and that the Englishmen had cried “Ut! Ut!” which might have meant almost anything at all or nothing just as well, but probably had meant “Out.”

He sat there, cold and lonely, wondering how they did it. How they had made it possible for a man to punch a button and live a scene long dead, to see the death of men who had long been dust mingled with the earth.

There was no way to know, of course.

There was no use to guess.

Technical information, Morley Reed had said, that would revolutionize our entire economic pattern.

He remembered Morley pacing up and down the room and saying: “We must find out about them. We must find out.”

And there was a way to find out.

There was a splendid way.

He took his feet out of the water and dried them with handfuls of grass. He put his shoes back on and walked back to the hotel sitting by itself.

The blond goddess was still at her desk in the Employment Bureau.

“About that baby-sitting job,” he said.

She looked startled for a moment—terribly, almost childishly startled; but her face slid swiftly back to its goddess-mask.

“Yes, Mr. Bishop.”

“I’ve thought it over,” he said. “If you have that kind of job I’ll take it.”

He lay in bed, sleepless, for a long time that night and took stock of himself and of the situation and he came to a decision that it might not be as bad as he thought it was.

There were jobs to be had, apparently. The Kimonians even seemed anxious that you should get a job. And even if it weren’t the kind of work a man might want, or the kind that he was fitted for, it at least would be a start. From that first foothold a man could go up—a clever man, that is. And all the men and women, all the Earthians on Kimon, certainly were clever. If they weren’t clever, they wouldn’t be there to start with.

All of them seemed to be getting along. He had not seen either Monty or Maxine that evening but he had talked to others and all of them seemed to be satisfied—or at least keeping up the appearance of being satisfied. If there were general dissatisfaction, Bishop told himself, there wouldn’t even be the appearance of being satisfied, for there is nothing that an Earthian likes better than some quiet and mutual griping. And he had heard none of it—none of it at all.

He had heard some more talk about the starting of the athletic teams and had talked to several men who had been enthusiastic about it as a source of revenue.

He had talked to another man named Thomas who was a gardening expert at one of the big Kimonian estates and the man had talked for an hour or more on the growing of exotic flowers. There had been a little man named Williams who had sat in the bar beside him and had told him enthusiastically of his commission to write a book of ballads based on Kimonian history and another man named Jackson who was executing a piece of statuary for one of the native families.

If a man could get a satisfactory job, Bishop thought, life could be pleasant here on Kimon.

Take the rooms he had. Beautiful appointments, much better than he could expect at home. A willing cabinet-robot who dished up drinks and sandwiches, who pressed clothes, turned out and locked up, and anticipated your no-more-than-half-formed wish. And the room—the room with the four blank walls and the single chair with the buttons on its arm. There, in that room, was instruction and entertainment and adventure. He had made a bad choice in picking the battle of Hastings for his first test of it, he knew now. But there were other places, other times, other more pleasant and less bloody incidents that one could experience.

It was experience, too—and not merely seeing. He had really been walking on the hilltop. He had tried to dodge the charging horses, although there’d been no reason to, for apparently, even in the midst of a happening, you stood by some special dispensation as a thing apart, as an interested but unreachable observer.

And there were, he told himself, many happenings that would be worth observing. One could live out the entire history of mankind, from the prehistoric dawnings to the day before yesterday—and not only the history of mankind, but the history of other things as well, for there had been other categories of experience offered—Kimonian and Galactic—in addition to Earth.

Some day, he thought, I will walk with Shakespeare. Some day I’ll sail with Columbus. Or travel with Prester John and find the truth about him.

For it was truth. You could sense the truth.

And how the truth?

That he could not know.

But it all boiled down to the fact that while conditions might be strange, one still could make a life of it.

And conditions would be strange, for this was an alien land and one that was immeasurably in advance of Earth in culture and in its technology. Here there was no need of artificial communications nor of mechanical transportation. Here there was no need of contracts; since the mere fact of telepathy would reveal one man to another, there’d be no need of contracts.

You have to adapt, Bishop told himself.

You have to adapt to play the Kimon game, for they were the ones who would set the rules. Unbidden he had entered their planet and they had let him stay and, staying, it followed that he must conform.

“You are restless, sir,” said the cabinet from the other room.

“Not restless,” Bishop said. “Just thinking.”

“I can supply you with a sedative. A very mild and pleasant sedative.”

“Not a sedative,” said Bishop.

“Then, perhaps,” the cabinet said, “you would permit me to sing you a lullaby.”

“By all means,” said Bishop. “A lullaby is just the thing I need.”

So the cabinet sang him a lullaby and after a time Bishop went to sleep.

The Kimonian goddess at the Employment Bureau told him next morning that there was a job for him.

“A new family,” she said.

Bishop wondered if he should be glad that it was a new family or if it would have been better if it had been an old one.

“They’ve never had a human before,” she said.

“It’s fine of them,” said Bishop, “to finally take one in.”

“The salary,” said the goddess, “is one hundred credits a day.”

“One hundred—”

“You will only work during days,” she said. “I’ll teleport you there each morning and in the evening they’ll teleport you back.”

Bishop gulped. “One hundred—What am I to do?”

“A companion,” said the goddess. “But you needn’t worry. We’ll keep an eye on them and if they mistreat you—”

“Mistreat me?”

“Work you too hard or—”

“Miss,” said Bishop, “for a hundred bucks a day I’d—”

She cut him short. “You will take the job?”

“Most gladly,” Bishop said.

“Permit me—” The universe came unstuck, then slapped back together.

He was standing in an alcove and in front of him was a woodland glen with a waterfall and from where he stood he could smell the cool, mossy freshness of the tumbling water. There were ferns and trees, huge trees like the gnarled oaks the illustrators like to draw to illustrate King Arthur and Robin Hood and other tales of very early Britain—the kind of oaks from which the Druids had cut the mistletoe.

A path ran along the stream and up the incline down which the waterfall came tumbling and there was a blowing wind that carried music and perfume.

A girl came down the path and she was Kimonian, but she didn’t seem as tall as the others he had seen and there was something a little less goddesslike about her.

He caught his breath and watched her and for a moment he forgot that she was Kimonian and thought of her only as a pretty girl who walked a woodland path. She was beautiful, he told himself—she was lovely.

She saw him and clapped her hands.

“You must be he,” she said.

He stepped out of the cubicle.

“We have been waiting for you,” she told him. “We hoped there’d be no delay, that they’d send you right along.”

“My name,” said Bishop, “is Selden Bishop and I was told—”

“Of course you are the one,” she said. “You needn’t even tell me. It’s lying in your mind.”

She waved an arm about her.

“How do you like your house?” she asked.

“House?”

“Of course, silly. This. Naturally, it’s only the living-room. Our bedrooms are up in the mountains. But we changed this just yesterday. Everyone worked so hard at it. I do hope you like it. Because, you see, it is from your planet. We thought it might make you feel at home.”

“House,” he said again.

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

“You’re all upset,” she said. “You don’t begin to understand.”

Bishop shook his head. “I just arrived the other day.”

“But you do like it?”

“Of course I do,” said Bishop. “It’s something out of the old Arthurian legend. You’d expect to see Lancelot or Guinevere or some of the others riding through the woods.”

“You know the stories?”

“Of course I know the stories. I read my Tennyson.”

“And you will tell them to us.”

He looked at her, a little startled.

“You mean you want to hear them?”

“Why, yes, of course we do. What did we get you for?”

And that was it, of course.

What had they got him for?

“You want me to begin right now?”

“Not now,” she said. “There are the others you must meet. My name is Elaine. That’s not exactly it, of course. It is something else, but Elaine is as close as you’ll ever come to saying it.”

“I could try the other name. I’m proficient at the languages.”

“Elaine is good enough,” she said carelessly. “Come along.”

He fell in behind her on the path and followed up the incline.

And as he walked along, he saw that it was indeed a house—that the trees were pillars holding up an artificial sky that somehow failed to look very artificial and that the aisles between the trees ended in great windows which looked out on the barren plain.

But the grass and flowers, the moss and ferns, were real and he had a feeling that the trees must be real as well.

“It doesn’t matter if they’re real or not,” said Elaine. “You couldn’t tell the difference.”

They came to the top of the incline into a parklike place, where the grass was cut so closely and looked so velvety that he wondered for a moment if it were really grass.

“It is,” Elaine told him.

“You catch everything I think,” he said. “Isn’t—?”

“Everything,” said Elaine.

“Then I mustn’t think.”

“Oh, but we want you to,” she told him. “That is part of it.”

“Part of what you got me for?”

“Exactly,” said the girl.

In the middle of the parklike area was a sort of pagoda, a flimsy thing that seemed to be made out of light and shadow rather than anything with substance, and around it were half a dozen people.

They were laughing and chatting and the sound of them was like the sound of music—very happy, but at the same time sophisticated, music.

“There they are,” cried Elaine.

“Come along,” she said.

She ran and her running was like flying and his breath caught in his throat at the slimness and the grace of her.

He ran after her and there was no grace in his running. He could feel the heaviness of it. It was a gambol rather than a run, an awkward lope in comparison to the running of Elaine.

Like a dog, he thought. Like an overgrown puppy trying to keep up, falling over his own feet, with its tongue hanging out and panting.

He tried to run more gracefully and he tried to erase the thinking from his mind.

Mustn’t think. Mustn’t think at all. They catch everything. They will laugh at you.

They were laughing at him.

He could feel their laughter, the silent, gracious amusement that was racing in their minds.

She reached the group and waited.

“Hurry up,” she called and while her words were kindly, he could feel the amusement in the words.

He hurried. He pounded down upon them. He arrived somewhat out of breath. He felt winded and sweaty and extremely uncouth.

“This is the one they sent us,” said Elaine. “His name is Bishop. Is that not a lovely name?”

They watched him, nodding gravely.

“He will tell us stories,” said Elaine. “He knows the stories that go with a place like this.”

They were looking kindly at him, but he could sense the covert amusement, growing by the moment.

She said to Bishop: “This is Paul. And that one over there is Jim. Betty. Jane. George. And the one on the end is Mary.”

“You understand,” said Jim, “those are not our names.”

“They are approximations,” said Elaine. “The best that I could do.”

“They are as close,” said Jane, “as he can pronounce them.”

“If you’d only give me a chance,” said Bishop, then stopped short.

That was what they wanted. They wanted him to protest and squirm. They wanted him to be uncomfortable.

“But of course we don’t,” said Elaine.

Mustn’t think. Must try to keep from thinking. They catch everything.

“Let’s all sit down,” said Betty. “Bishop will tell us stories.”

“Perhaps,” Jim said to him, “you will describe your life on Earth. I should be quite interested.”

“I understand you have a game called chess,” said George. “We can’t play games, of course. You know why we can’t. But I’d be very interested in discussing with you the technique and philosophy of chess.”

“One at a time,” said Elaine. “First he will tell us stories.”

They sat down on the grass, in a ragged circle.

All of them were looking at him, waiting for him to start.

“I don’t quite know where to start,” he said.

“Why, that’s obvious,” said Betty. “You start at the beginning.”

“Quite right,” said Bishop.

He took a deep breath.

“Once, long ago, in the island of Britain, there was a great king, whose name was Arthur—”

“Yclept,” said Jim.

“You’ve read the stories?”

“The word was in your mind.”

“It’s an old word, an archaic word. In some versions of the tales—”

“I should be most interested sometime to discuss the word with you,” said Jim.

“Go on with your story,” said Elaine.

He took another deep breath.

“Once, long ago, in the island of Britain, there was a great king whose name was Arthur. His queen was Guinevere and Lancelot was his staunchest knight—”

He found the writer in the desk in the living room and pulled it out. He sat down to write a letter.

He typed the salutation:

He got up and began pacing up and down the room.

What would he tell him?

What could he tell him?

That he had safely arrived and he had a job?

That the job paid a hundred credits a day—ten times more than a man in his position could earn at any Earth job?

He went back to the writer again.

He wrote:

He got up and walked again.

There had to be more than that. More than just a paragraph.

He sweated as he walked.

What could he tell him?

He went back to the writer again:

He pushed back his chair and stared at what he’d written.

It was, he told himself, like any one of a thousand other letters he had read.

He pictured in his mind those other thousand people, sitting down to write their first letter from Kimon, searching in their mind for the polite little fables, for the slightly colored lie, for the balm that would salve their pride. Hunting for the words that would not reveal the entire truth:

No, it would never do to write like that.

Nor to write:

Back home he was one of a thousand. Back home they talked of him in whispers because he made the grade.

And the businessmen on board the ship, saying to him: “The one who cracks this Kimon business is the one who’ll have it big,” and talking in terms of billions if he ever needed backing.

He remembered Morley pacing up and down the room. A foot in the door, he’d said: “Some way to crack them. Some way to understand them. Some little thing—no big thing, but some little thing. Anything at all except the deadpan face that Kimon turns toward us.”

Somehow he had to finish the letter. He couldn’t leave it hanging and he had to write it.

He turned back to the writer:

He frowned at it.

But whatever he wrote, it would be wrong. This was no worse than any of another dozen things that he might write.

Must rush off to a conference.

Have an appointment with a client.

Some papers to go through.

All of them were wrong.

What was a man to do?

He wrote:

Morley would write him. An enthusiastic letter, a letter with a fine shade of envy tingeing it, the letter of a man who wanted to be, but couldn’t be, on Kimon.

For everyone wanted to go to Kimon. That was the hell of it.

You couldn’t tell the truth, when everyone would give their good right arm to go.

You couldn’t tell the truth when you were a hero and the truth would turn you into a galactic heel.

And the letters from home, the prideful letters, the envious letters, the letters happy with the thought you were doing so well—all of these would be only further chains to bind you to Kimon and to the Kimon lie.

He said to the cabinet, “How about a drink?”

“Yes, sir,” said the cabinet. “Coming right up, sir.”

“A long one,” said Bishop. “And a strong one.”

“Long and strong it is, sir.”

He met her in the bar.

“Why, if it isn’t Buster!” she said, as though they met there often.

He sat on the stool beside her.

“That week is almost up,” he said.

She nodded. “We’ve been watching you. You’re standing up real well.”

“You tried to tell me.”

“Forget it,” said the girl. “Just a mistake of mine. It’s a waste of time telling any of them. But you looked intelligent and not quite dry behind the ears. I took pity on you.”

She looked at him over the rim of her glass.

“I shouldn’t have,” she said.

“I should have listened.”

“They never do,” said Maxine.

“There’s another thing,” he said. “Why hasn’t it leaked out? Oh, sure, I have written letters, too. I didn’t admit what it was like. Neither did you. Nor the man next to you. But someone, in all the years we’ve been here—”

“We are all alike,” she said. “Alike as peas in the pod. We are the anointed, the hand-picked, stubborn, vanity-stricken, scared. All of us got here. In spite of hell and high water we got here. We let nothing stand in our way and we made it. We beat the others out. They’re waiting back there on Earth—the ones that we beat out. They’ll never be quite the same again. Don’t you understand it? They had pride, too, and it was hurt. There’s nothing they would like better than to know what it’s really like. That’s what all of us think of when we sit down to write a letter. We think of the belly laughs by those other thousands. The quiet smirks. We think of ourselves skulking, making ourselves small so no one will notice us—”

She balled a fist and rapped against his shirt front.

“That’s the answer, Buster. That’s why we never write the truth. That’s why we don’t go back.”

“But it’s been going on for years. For almost a hundred years. In all that time someone should have cracked—”

“And lost all this?” she asked. “Lost the easy living. The good drinking. The fellowship of lost souls. And the hope. Don’t forget that. Always the hope that Kimon can be cracked.”

“Can it?”

“I don’t know. But if I were you, Buster, I wouldn’t count on it.”

“But it’s no kind of life for decent—”

“Don’t say it. We aren’t decent people. We are scared and weak, every one of us. And with good reason.”

“But the life—”

“You don’t live a decent life, if that was what you were about to say. There’s no stability in us. Children? A few of us have children and it’s not so bad for the children as it is for us, because they know nothing else. A child who is born a slave is better off, mentally, than a man who once knew freedom.”

“We aren’t slaves,” said Bishop.

“Of course not,” Maxine said. “We can leave any time we want to. All we got to do is walk up to a native and say, ‘I want to go back to Earth.’ That’s all you need to do. Any single one of them could send you back—swish—just as they send the letters, just like they whisk you to your work or to your room.”

“But no one has gone back.”

“Of course no one has,” she said.

They sat there, sipping at their drinks.

“Remember what I told you,” she said. “Don’t think. That’s the way to beat it. Never think about it. You got it good. You never had it so good. Soft living. Easy living. Nothing to worry about. They best kind of life there is.”

“Sure,” said Bishop. “Sure, that’s the way to do it.”

She slanted her eyes at him.

“You’re catching on,” she said.

They had another round.

Over in the corner a group had got together and was doing some impromptu singing. A couple were quarreling a stool or two away.

“It’s too noisy in this place,” Maxine said. “Want to see my paintings?”

“Your paintings?”

“The way I make a living. They are pretty bad, but no one knows the difference.”

“I’d like to see them.”

“Grab hold then.”

“Grab—”

“My mind, you know. Nothing physical about it. No use riding elevators.”

He gaped at her.

“You pick it up,” said Maxine. “You never get too good. But you pick up a trick or two.”

“But how do I go about it?”

“Just let loose,” she said. “Dangle. Mentally, that is. Try to reach out to me. Don’t try to help. You can’t.”

He dangled and reached out, wondering if he was doing it the way it should be done.

The universe collapsed and then came back together.

They were standing in another room.

“That was a silly thing for me to do,” Maxine said. “Some day I’ll slip a cog and get stuck in a wall or something.”

Bishop drew a deep breath.

“Monty could read me just a little,” he said. “Said you picked it up—just at the fringes.”

“You never get too good,” said Maxine. “Humans aren’t … well, aren’t ripe for it, I guess. It takes millennia to develop it.”

He looked around him and whistled.

“Quite a place,” he said.

It was all of that.

It didn’t seem to be a room at all, although it had furniture. The walls were hazed in distance and to the west were mountains peaked with snow, and to the east a very sylvan river and there were flowers and flowering bushes everywhere, growing from the floor. A deep blue dusk filled the room and somewhere off in the distance there was an orchestra.

A cabinet-voice said, “Anything, madam?”

“Drinks,” said Maxine. “Not too strong. We’ve been hitting the bottle.”

“Not too strong,” said the cabinet. “Just a moment, madam.”

“Illusion,” Maxine said. “Every bit of it. But a nice illusion. Want a beach? It’s waiting for you if you just think of it. Or a polar cap. Or a desert. Or an old chateau. It’s waiting in the wings.”

“Your painting must pay off,” he said.

“Not my painting. My irritation. Better start getting irritated, Buster. Get down in the dumps. Start thinking about suicide. That’s a sure-fire way to do it. Presto, you’re kicked upstairs to a better suite of rooms. Anything to keep you happy.”

“You mean the Kimonians automatically shift you?”

“Sure. You’re a sucker to stay down there where you are.”

“I like my layout,” he told her. “But this—”

She laughed at him. “You’ll catch on,” she said.

The drinks arrived.

“Sit down,” Maxine said. “Want a moon?”

There was a moon.

“Could have two or three,” she said, “but that would be overdoing it. One moon seems more like Earth. Seems more comfortable.”

“There must be a limit somewhere,” Bishop said. “They can’t keep on kicking you upstairs indefinitely. There must come a time when even the Kimonians can’t come up with anything that is new and novel.”

“You wouldn’t live long enough,” she told him, “for that to come about. That’s the way with all you new ones. You underestimate the Kimonians. You think of them as people, as Earth people who know just a little more. They aren’t that, at all. They’re alien. They’re as alien as a spider-man despite their human form. They conform to keep contact with us.”

“But why do they want to keep contact with us? Why—”

“Buster,” she said. “That’s the question that we never ask. That’s the one that can drive you crazy.”

He had told them about the human custom of going out on picnics and the idea was one that they had never thought of, so they adopted it with childish delight.

They had picked a wild place, a tumbled mountain area filled with deep ravines, clothed in flowers and trees and with a mountain brook with water that was as clear as glass and as cold as ice.

They had played games and romped. They had swum and sunbathed and they had listened to his stories, sitting in a circle, needling him and interrupting him, picking arguments.

But he had laughed at them, not openly, but deep inside himself, for he knew now that they meant no harm, but merely sought amusement.

Weeks before he had been insulted and outraged and humiliated, but as the days went on he had adapted to it—had forced himself to adapt. If they wished a clown, then he would be a clown. If he were court fool, with bells and parti-colored garments, then he must wear the colors well and keep the bells ringing merrily.

There was occasional maliciousness in them, and some cruelty, but no lasting harm. And you could get along with them, he told himself, if you just knew how to do it.

When evening came they had built a fire and had sat around it and had talked and laughed and joked, for once leaving him alone. Elaine and Betty had been nervous. Jim had laughed at them for their nervousness.

“No animal will come near a fire,” he said.

“There are animals?” Bishop had asked.

“A few,” said Jim. “Not many of them left.”

He had lain there, staring at the fire, listening to their voices, glad that for once they were leaving him alone. Like a dog must feel, he thought. Like a pup hiding in a corner from a gang of rowdy children who are always mauling it.

He watched the fire and remembered other days—outings in the country and walking trips when they had built a fire and lain around it, staring at the sky, seeing the old, familiar skies of Earth.

And here again was another fire.

And here, again, a picnic.

The fire was Earth and so was the picnic—for the people of Kimon did not know of picnics. They did not know of picnics and there might be many other things of which they likewise did not know. Many other things, perhaps. Barbaric, folkish things.

Don’t look for the big things, Morley had said that night. Watch for the little things, for the little clues.

They liked Maxine’s paintings because they were primitives. Primitives, perhaps, but likewise not very good. Could it be that paintings also had been something the Kimonians had not known until the Earthmen came?

Were there, after all, chinks in the Kimonian armor? Little chinks like picnics and paintings and many other little things for which they valued the visitors from Earth?

Somewhere in those chinks might be the answer that he sought for Morley.

He lay and thought, forgetting to shield his mind, forgetting that he should not think because his thoughts lay open to them.

Their voices had faded away and there was a solemn night-time quiet. Soon, he thought, we’ll all be going back—they to their homes and I to the hotel. How far away, he wondered. Half a world or less? And yet they’d be there in the instant of a thought.

Someone, he thought, should put more wood on the fire.

He roused himself to do it, standing up.

And it was not until then that he saw he was alone.

He stood there, trying to quiet his terror.

They had gone away and left him.

They had forgotten him.

But that couldn’t be. They’d simply slipped off in the dark. Up to some prank, perhaps. Trying to scare him. Talking about the animals and then slipping out of sight while he lay dreaming at the fire. Waiting now, just outside the circle of the firelight, watching him, drinking in his thoughts, reveling in his terror.

He found wood and put it on the fire. It caught and blazed.

He sat down nonchalantly, but he found that his shoulders were hunched instinctively, that the terror of aloneness in an alien world still sat by the fire beside him.

Now, for the first time, he realized the alienness of Kimon. It had not seemed alien before except for those few minutes he had waited in the park after the gig had landed him, and even then it had not been as alien as an alien planet should be, because he knew that he was being met, that there would be someone along to take care of him.

That was it, he thought. Someone to take care of me. We’re taken care of—well and lavishly. We’re sheltered and guarded and pampered—that was it, pampered. And for what reason?

Any minute now they’d tire of their game and come back into the circle of the firelight.

Maybe, he told himself, I should give them their money’s worth. Maybe I should act scared, maybe I should shout out for them to come and get me, maybe I should glance around out into the darkness, as if I were afraid of those animals that they talked about. They hadn’t talked too much, of course. They were too clever for that, far too clever. Just a passing remark about existent animals, then on to something else. Not stressing it, not laying it on too thick. Not overdoing it. Just planting a suggestion that there were animals one could be afraid of.

He sat and waited, no as scared as he had been before, having rationalized away the fear that he first had felt. Like an Earth campfire, he thought. Except it isn’t Earth. Except it’s an alien planet.

There was a rustle in the bushes.

They’ll be coming now, he thought. They’ve figured out that it didn’t work. They’ll be coming back.

The bushes rustled again and there was the sound of a dislodged stone.

He did not stir.

They can’t scare me, he thought.

They can’t scare—

He felt the breath upon his neck and leaped into the air, spinning as he leaped, stumbling as he came down, almost falling in the fire, then on his feet and scurrying to put the fire between him and the thing that had breathed upon his neck.

He crouched across the fire from it and saw the teeth in the gaping jaws. It raised its head and slashed, as if in pantomime, and he could hear the clicking of the teeth as they came together and the little moaning rumble that came from the massive throat.

A wild thought came to him: It’s not an animal at all. This is just part of the gag. Something they dreamed up. If they can build a house like an English wood, use it for a day or two, then cause it to disappear as something for which they would have no further use, surely it would be a second’s work to dream up an animal.

The animal padded forward and he thought: Animals should be afraid of fire. All animals are afraid of fire. It won’t get me if I stay near the fire.

He stooped and grabbed a brand.

Animals are afraid of fire.

But this one wasn’t.

It padded round the fire. It stretched out its neck and sniffed.

It wasn’t in any hurry, for it was sure of him.

Sweat broke out on him and ran down his sides.

The animal came with a smooth rush, whipping around the fire.

He leaped, clearing the fire, to gain the other side of it. The animal checked itself, spun around to face him.

It put its muzzle to the ground and arched its back. It lashed its tail. It rumbled.

He was frightened now, cold with a fright that could not be laughed off.

It might be an animal.

It must be an animal.

No gag at all, but an animal.

He paced back toward the fire. He danced on his toes, ready to run, to dodge, to fight if he had to fight. But against this thing that faced him across the fire, he knew, there was no fighting chance. And yet, if it came to fighting, he could do no less than fight.

The animal charged.

He ran.

He slipped and fell and rolled into the fire.

A hand reached down and jerked him from the fire, flung him to one side, and a voice cried out, a cry of rage and warning.

Then the universe collapsed and he felt himself flying apart and, as suddenly, he was together once again.

He lay upon a floor and he scrambled to his feet. His hand was burned and he felt the pain of it. His clothes were smoldering and he beat them out with his uninjured hand.

A voice said, “I’m sorry, sir. This should not have happened.”

The man was tall, much taller than the Kimonians he had seen before. Nine feet, perhaps. And yet not nine feet, actually. Not anywhere near nine feet. He was no taller, probably, than the taller men of Earth. It was the way he stood that made him seem so tall, the way he stood and looked and the way his voice sounded.

And the first Kimonian, Bishop thought, who had ever shown age. For there was a silvering of the temple hairs and his face was lined, like the faces of hunters or of sailors may be lined from squinting into far distances.

They stood facing one another in a room which, when Bishop looked at it, took his breath away. There was no describing it, no way to describe it—you felt as well as saw it. It was a part of you and a part of the universe and a part of everything you’d ever known or dreamed. It seemed to thrust extensions out into unguessed time and space and it had a sense of life and the touch of comfort and the feel of home.

Yet, when he looked again, he sensed a simplicity that did not square with his first impressions. Basic simplicities that tied in with the simple business of living out one’s life, as if the room and the folks who lived within its walls were somehow integrated, as if the room were trying its best not to be a room, but to be a part of life, so much a part of life that it could pass unnoticed.

“I was against it from the first,” said the Kimonian. “Now I know that I was right. But the children wanted you—”

“The children?”

“Certainly. I am Elaine’s father.”

He didn’t say Elaine, however. He said the other name—the name that Elaine had said no Earthman could pronounce.

“Your hand?” asked the man.

“It’s all right,” said Bishop. “Only burned a little.”

And it was as if he had not spoken, as if he had not said the words—but another man, a man who stood off to one side and spoke the words for him.

He could not have moved if he’d been paid a million.

“This is something,” said the Kimonian, “that must be recompensed. We’ll talk about it later.”

“Please, sir,” said the man who talked for Bishop. “Please, sir, just one thing. Send me to my hotel.”

He felt the swiftness of the other’s understanding—the compassion and the pity.

“Of course,” said the tall man. “With your permission, sir.”

Once there were some children (human children, naturally) who had wanted a dog—a little playful puppy. But their father said they could not have a dog because they would not know how to treat him. But they wanted him so badly and begged their father so that he finally brought them home a dog, a cunning little puppy, a little butterball, with a paunchy belly and four wobbly legs and melting eyes, filled with the innocence of puppyhood.

The children did not treat him as badly as you might have imagined that they would. They were cruel, as all children are. They roughed and tumbled him; they pulled his ears and tail; they teased him. But the pup was full of fun. He liked to play and no matter what they did he came back for more. Because, undoubtedly, he felt very smug in this business of associating with the clever human race, a race so far ahead of dogs in culture and intelligence that there was no comparison at all.

But one day the children went on a picnic and when the day was over they were very tired, and forgetful, as children are very apt to be. so they went off and left the puppy.

That wasn’t a bad thing, really. For children will be forgetful, no matter what you do, and the pup was nothing but a dog.

The cabinet said, “You are very late, sir.”

“Yes,” said Bishop, dully.

“You hurt somewhere, sir. I can sense the hurt.”

“My hand,” said Bishop. “I burned it in a fire.”

A panel popped open in the cabinet.

“Put it in there,” said the cabinet. “I’ll fix it in a jiffy.”

Bishop thrust his hand into the opening. He felt fingerlike appendages going over it, very gentle and soothing.

“It’s not a bad burn, sir,” said the cabinet, “but I imagine it is painful.”

Playthings, Bishop thought.

This hotel is a dollhouse—or a doghouse.

It is a shack, a tacked-together shack like the boys of Earth build out of packing cases and bits of board and paint crude, mystic signs upon.

Compared to that room back there it is no more than a hovel, although come to think of it, a very gaudy hovel.

Fit for humans, good enough for humans, but a hovel just the same.

And we? he thought.

And we?

The pets of children. The puppy dogs of Kimon.

Imported puppy dogs.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the cabinet. “You are not puppy dogs.”

“What’s that?”

“You will pardon me, sir. I should not have spoken out. But I wouldn’t have wanted you to think—”

“If we aren’t pets, what are we?”

“You will excuse me, sir. It was a slip, I quite assure you. I should not have—”

“You never do a thing,” said Bishop bitterly, “without having it all figured out. You or any of them. For you are one of them. You spoke because they wanted you to speak.”

“I can assure you that’s not so.”

“You would deny it, naturally,” said Bishop. “Go ahead and do your job. You haven’t told me all they wanted you to tell me. Go ahead and finish.”

“It’s immaterial to me what you think,” the cabinet told him. “But if you thought of yourselves as playmates…”

“That’s a hot one,” Bishop said.

“Infinitely better,” said the cabinet, “than thinking of yourself as a puppy dog.”

“So that’s what they want me to think.”

“They don’t care,” the cabinet said. “It is all up to you. It was a mere suggestion, sir.”

So, all right, it was a mere suggestion.

So, all right, they were playmates and not pets at all.

The kids of Kimon inviting the dirty, ragged, runny-nosed urchins from across the tracks to play with them.

Better to be an invited kid, perhaps, than an imported dog.

But even so, it was the children of Kimon who had engineered it all—who had set up the rules for those who wished to come to Kimon, who had built the hotel, had operated it and furnished it with the progressively more luxurious and more enticing rooms, who had found the so-called jobs for humans, who had arranged the printing of the credits.

And if that were so, then it meant that not merely the people of Earth, but the government of Earth, had negotiated, or had attempted to negotiate with the children of another race. And that would be the mark of the difference, he thought, the difference between us.

Although, he told himself, that might not be entirely right.

Maybe he had been wrong in thinking, in the first flush of his bitterness, that he was a pet.

Maybe he was a playmate, an adult Earthman downgraded to the status of a child—and a stupid child, at that. Maybe, if he had been wrong on the pet angle, he was wrong in the belief, as well, that it had been the children of Kimon who had arranged the immigration of the Earth folk.

And if it hadn’t been simply a childish matter of asking in some kids from across the tracks, if the adults of Kimon had had a hand in it, what was the setup then? A school project, a certain phase of progressive education? Or a sort of summer camp project, designed to give the deserving, but underprivileged, Earthman a vacation away from the squalor of their native planet? Or simply a safe way in which the children of Kimon might amuse and occupy themselves, be kept from underfoot?

We should have guessed it long ago, Bishop told himself. But even if some of us might have entertained the thought, that we were either pet or playmate, we would have pushed it far away from us, would have refused to recognize it, for our pride is too tender and too raw for a thought like that.

“There you are, sir,” said the cabinet. “Almost as good as new. Tomorrow you can take the dressing off.”

He stood before the cabinet without answering. He withdrew his hand and let it fall to his side, like so much dead weight.

Without asking if he wanted it, the cabinet produced a drink.

“I made it long and strong,” said the cabinet. “I thought you needed it.”

“Thank you,” Bishop said.

He took the drink and stood there with it, not touching it, not wanting to touch it until he’d finished out the thought.

And the thought would not finish out.

There was something wrong. Something that didn’t track.

Our pride is too raw and tender—

There was something there, some extra words that badly needed saying.

“There is something wrong, sir.”

“Nothing wrong,” said Bishop.

“But your drink.”

“I’ll get around to it.”

The Normans had sat their horses on that Saturday afternoon, with the leopard banners curling in the breeze, with the pennons on their lances fluttering, with the sun upon their armor and the scabbards clinking as the horses pranced. They had charged, as history said they had, and they were beaten back. That was entirely right, for it had not been until late afternoon that the Saxon wall was broken and the final fight around the dragon standard had not taken place until it was nearly dark.

But there had been no Taillefer, riding in the fore to throw up his sword and sing.

On that history had been wrong.

A couple of centuries later, more than likely, some copyist had whiled away a monotonous afternoon by writing into the prosaic story of the battle the romance and the glitter of the charge of Taillefer. Writing it in protest against the four blank walls, against his Spartan food, against the daily dullness when spring was in the air and a man should be in the fields or woods instead of shut indoors, hunched with his quills and inkpots.

And that is the way it is with us, thought Bishop. We write the half-truth and the half-lie in our letters home. We conceal a truth or we obscure a fact or we add a line or two that, if not a downright lie, is certainly misleading.

We do not face up to facts, he thought. We gloss over the man crawling in the grass, with his torn-out guts snagging on the brambles. We write in the Taillefer.

And if we only did it in our letters, it would not be so bad. But we do it to ourselves. We protect our pride by lying to ourselves. We shield our dignity by deliberate indignation.

“Here,” he said to the cabinet, “have a drink on me.”

He set the glass, still full, on the top of the cabinet.

The cabinet gurgled in surprise.

“I do not drink,” it said.

“Then take it back and put it in the bottle.”

“I can’t do that,” said the cabinet, horrified. “It’s already mixed.”

“Separate it, then.”

“It can’t be separated,” wailed the cabinet. “You surely don’t expect me—”

There was a little swish and Maxine stood in the center of the room.

She smiled at Bishop.

“What goes on?” she asked.

The cabinet wailed at her. “He wants me to unmix a drink. He wants me to separate it, the liquor from the mix. He knows I can’t do that.”

“My, my,” she said. “I thought you could do anything.”

“I can’t unravel a drink,” the cabinet said primly. “Why don’t you take it off my hands?”

“That’s a good idea,” said the girl. She walked forward and picked up the drink.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked Bishop. “Turning chicken on us?”

“I just don’t want a drink,” said Bishop. “Hasn’t a man got a right to—”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course you have.”

She sipped the drink, looking at him above the rim.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Burned it.”

“You’re old enough not to play with fire.”

“You’re old enough not to come barging into a room this way,” Bishop told her. “One of these days you’ll reassemble yourself in the precise spot where someone else is standing.”

She giggled. “That would be fun,” she said. “Think of you and I—”

“It would be a mess,” said Bishop.

“Invite me to sit down,” said Maxine. “Let’s act civilized and social.”

“Sure, sit down,” said Bishop.

She picked out a couch.

“I’m interested in this business of teleporting yourself,” said Bishop. “I’ve asked you before, but you never told me—”

“It just came to me,” she said.

“But you can’t teleport. Humans aren’t parapsychic—”

“Some day, Buster, you’ll blow a fuse. You get so steamed up.”

He went across the room and sat down beside her.

“Sure, I get steamed up,” he said. “But—”

“What now?”

“Have you ever thought … well, have you ever tried to work at it? Like moving something else, some object—other than yourself?”

“No, I never have.”

“Why not?”

“Look, Buster. I drop in to have a drink with you and to forget myself. I didn’t come primed for a long technical discussion. I couldn’t anyway. I just don’t understand. There’s so much we don’t understand.”

She looked at him and there was something very much like fright brimming in her eyes.

“You pretend that you don’t mind,” she said. “But you do mind. You wear yourself out pretending that you don’t mind at all.”

“Then let’s quit pretending,” Bishop said. “Let’s admit—”

She had lifted the glass to drink and now, suddenly it slipped out of her hand.

“Oh—”

The glass halted before it struck the floor. It hovered for a moment, then it slowly rose. She reached out and grasped it.

And then it slipped again from her suddenly shaking hand. This time it hit the floor and spilled.

“Try it again,” said Bishop.

She said, “I never tried. I don’t know how it happened. I just didn’t want to drop it, that was all. I wished I hadn’t dropped it and then—”

“But the second time—”

“You fool,” she screamed. “I tell you I didn’t try. I wasn’t putting on an exhibition for you. I tell you that I don’t know what happened.”

“But you did it. It was a start.”

“A start?”

“You caught the glass before it hit the floor. You teleported it back into your hand.”

“Look, Buster,” she said grimly, “quit kidding yourself. They’re watching all the time. They play little tricks like that. Anything for a laugh.”

She rose, laughing at him, but there was a strangeness in her laughing.

“You don’t give yourself a chance,” he told her. “You are so horribly afraid of being laughed at. You got to be a wise guy.”

“Thanks for the drink,” she said.

“But Maxine—”

“Come up and see me sometime.”

“Maxine! Wait!”

But she was gone.

Watch for the clues, Morley had said, pacing up and down the room. Send us back the clues and we will do the rest. A foot in the door is all we expect from you. Give us a foot inside the door and that is all we need.

Clues, he had said.

Not fact, but clues.

And perhaps he had said clues instead of facts because he had been blinded like all the rest of them. Like the copyist who could not face up to the fact of battle without chivalry. Like those who wrote the letters home from Kimon. Like Maxine, who said quit kidding yourself, Buster, they’re watching all the time, they play little tricks like this.

And here were facts.

Facts he should send home to Morley.

Except he couldn’t send them.

Facts that he was ashamed to send.

You couldn’t write:

He sweated as he thought of it.

Or the kinder fact:

We are playmates—

You couldn’t write that, either. You simply couldn’t write it.

And yet, he said, the facts are there—the truth is there. And you must admit it. You must admit the fact. And you must admit the truth.

If not for Morley, if not for Earth, if not for fellow man, then you must admit it for yourself.

For a man may fool his friends, he may deceive the world—but he must be truthful with himself. Let’s forget the bitterness, he told himself—the bitterness and hurt. Let’s forget the pride.

Let us look for facts.

The Kimonians are a race more culturally advanced than we are, which means, in other words, that they are farther along the road of evolution, farther from the ape. And what does it take to advance along the evolutionary road beyond the high tide of my own race of Earth?

Not mere intelligence alone, for that is not enough.

What then would it take to make the next major stride in evolution?

Perhaps philosophy rather than intelligence—a seeking for a way to put to better use the intelligence that one already had, a greater understanding and a more adequate appreciation of human values in relation to the universe.

And if the Kimonians had that greater understanding, if they had won their way through better understanding to closer brotherhood with the galaxy, then it would be inconceivable that they’d take the members of another intelligent race to serve as puppy dogs for children. Or even as playmates for their children, unless in the fact of playing with their children there be some greater value, not to their child alone, but to the child of Earth, than the happiness and wonder of such association. They would be alive to the psychic damage that might be done because of such a practice, would not for a moment run the danger of that damage happening unless out of it might come some improvement or some change.

He sat and thought of it and it seemed right, for even on his native planet history showed increasing concern with social values as the culture improved.

And something else.

Parapsychic powers must not come too soon in human evolution, for they could be used disastrously by a culture that was not equipped, emotionally and intellectually, to handle them. No culture which had not reached an adult stage could have parapsychic powers, for they were nothing to be fooled around with by an adolescent culture.

In that respect at least, Bishop told himself, the Kimonians are the adults and we are the adolescents. In comparison with the Kimonians, we have no right to consider ourselves any more than children.

It was hard to take.

He gagged on it.

Swallow it, he told himself. Swallow it.

The cabinet said, “It is late, sir. You must be getting tired.”

“You want me to go to bed?”

“It’s a suggestion, sir.”

“All right,” he said.

He rose and started for the bedroom, smiling to himself.

Sent off to bed, he thought—just as a child is sent.

And going.

Not saying: “I’ll go when I am ready.”

Not standing on your adult dignity.

Not throwing a tantrum, not beating your heels upon the floor and howling.

Going off to bed—like a child when it’s told to go.

Maybe that’s the way, he thought. Maybe that’s the answer. Maybe that’s the only answer.

He swung around.

“Cabinet.”

“What is it, sir?”

“Nothing,” Bishop said. “Nothing at all … that is. Thanks for fixing up my hand.”

“That’s quite all right,” said the cabinet. “Good night.”

Maybe that’s the answer.

To act like a child.

And what does a child do?

He goes to bed when he is told.

He minds his elders.

He goes to school.

He—Wait a minute!

He goes to school!

He goes to school because there is a lot to learn. He goes to kindergarten so that he can get into first grade and he goes to high school so that he can go to college. He realizes there is a lot to learn, that before he takes his place in the adult world it must be learned and that he has to work to learn.

But I went to school, Bishop told himself. I went for years and years. I studied hard and I passed an examination that a thousand others failed to pass. I qualified for Kimon.

But just suppose.

You went to kindergarten to qualify for first grade.

You went to high school to qualify for college.

You went to Earth to qualify for Kimon.

You might have a doctorate on Earth, but still be no more than a kindergarten youngster when you got to Kimon.

Monty knew a bit of telepathy and so did some of the others. Maxine could teleport herself and she had made the glass stop before it hit the floor. Perhaps the others could, too.

And they’d just picked it up.

Although just telepathy or stopping a glass from hitting the floor would not be all of it. There’d be much more of it. Much more to the culture of Kimon than the parapsychic arts.

Maybe we are ready, he thought. Maybe we’re almost finished with our adolescence. Maybe we are on the verge of being ready for an adult culture. Could that be why the Kimonians let us in, the only ones in the galaxy they are willing to let in?

His brain reeled with the thought.

On Earth only one of every thousand passed the examination that sent them on to Kimon. Maybe here on Kimon only another one in every thousand would be qualified to absorb the culture that Kimon offered them.

But before you could even start to absorb the culture, before you could start to learn, before you ever went to school, you’d have to admit that you didn’t know. You’d have to admit that you were a child. You couldn’t go on having tantrums. You couldn’t be a wise guy. You couldn’t keep on polishing up false pride to hold as a shield between you and the culture that waited for your understanding.

Morley, Bishop said, I may have the answer—the answer that you’re awaiting back on Earth.

But I can’t tell it to you. It’s something that can’t be told. It’s a thing that each one must find out for himself.

And the pity of it is that Earth is not readily equipped to find it out. It is not a lesson that is often taught on Earth.

Armies and guns could not storm the citadel of Kimonian culture, for you simply could not fight a war with a parapsychic people. Earth aggressiveness and business cunning likewise would fail to crack the dead-pan face of Kimon.

There is only one way, Morley, Bishop said, talking to his friend. There is only one thing that will crack this planet and that is humility.

And Earthmen are not humble creatures.

Long ago they forgot the meaning of humility.

But here it’s different.

Here you have to be different.

You start out by saying, I don’t know.

Then you say, I want to know.

Then you say, I’ll work hard to learn.

Maybe, Bishop thought, that’s why they brought us here, so that the one of us in every thousand who has a chance of learning would get that chance to learn. Maybe they are watching, hoping that there may be more than one in every thousand. Maybe they are more anxious for us to learn than we are to learn. For they may be lonely in a galaxy where there are no others like them.

Could it be that the ones at this hotel were the failures, the ones who had never tried, or who might have tried and could not pass.

And the others—the one out of every thousand—where were they?

He could not even guess.

There were no answers.

It was all superstition.

It was a premise built upon a pipedream—built on wishful thinking.

He’d wake up in the morning and know that it was wrong.

He’d go down to the bar and have a drink with Maxine or with Monty and laugh at himself for the things that he’d dreamed up.

School, he’d told himself. But it wouldn’t be a school—at least not the kind of school he’d ever known before.

I wish it could be so, he thought.

The cabinet said, “You’d better get on to bed, sir.”

“I suppose I should,” said Bishop. “It’s been a long, hard day.”

“You’ll want to get up early,” said the cabinet, “so you aren’t late to school.”