Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Pilot Plant

Afterwards, Garnett found it difficult to decide which gave him the greater shock—the aircraft or the voice.

It had been a diamond-sharp morning in early Spring, with the green expanses of the airfield curving into the distance like the sunny cricket pitches of boyhood. From the comfort of his car Garnett watched the plane which had monopolised his life for five years go through an advanced phase of its flight development programme. The two-seat interceptor shimmered across the sky high up in the south then banked into a long, shallow dive aimed at the runway. As the machine approached, with the menacing silence of transonic speed, several hares which had been sitting on the turf shifted uneasily, displaying a kind of prescience, and began to run.

“Will pull out at approximately eight gravities.” The voice of chief test pilot Bill Makin, picked up by Garnett’s special car radio, sounded remote and somehow irrelevant.

The aircraft bit down into the denser air close to the ground and the invisible force fields that were its wings suddenly attained a ghostly visibility as air-borne moisture condensed into flickering grey streamers in the shock wave. At the far end of the runway the aircraft levelled out for a second then reared up into an impossible-looking climb.

If the wing generators were to fail about now, Garnett thought, indulging himself in a moment of melodrama, twenty tons of stainless steel and ceramic fuselage would land on top of my car. I would be killed.

“Something wrong here!” Makin’s voice had gone hard. “I’m losing my wings!”

The tattered rags of grey mist which had been flapping on the invisible wings, like a Valkyrie’s cloak, abruptly vanished. Garnett watched incredulously as the massive fuselage began to sink below its anticipated flight path then, suddenly very heavy, enter a definite and irrevocable dive. Ejector charges burst the centre section open and the precious cockpit hurled itself upwards, frantically breaking the suicide pact in which the rest of the plummeting airframe was now involved.

Garnett slammed the car’s starter button with the heel of his hand but the warm engine perversely missed its cue. He glanced over his shoulder. The fuselage was somersaulting down on him, so close that he saw the seriate rivets of its belly plates. The car’s engine whirred uselessly—and then he heard the voice.

It said, “Get me out of this, Xoanon.”

Garnett had time for one instant of wonderment before he was swept away from the sunny spring morning in a bomb-burst of sound, pain and darkness.

The room was small but airy, and its chairs had the flawless convexities of furniture never used. Garnett’s bed was positioned where he could see, beyond the banked foliage of elm trees, the distant slopes of the Pennines.

Only very reluctantly, and over a period of weeks, had the drugs begun to release their grip on his brain. He was aware of his mind clearing from the bottom like a glass of aerated water, during which process there was a slow escalation of thought. At first he could little more than observe the rhythm of hospital routine, then he began to cope with his personal affairs and, a little later, to pick up the threads of his working life. For a while the realisation that he was owner and chief engineer of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was less important than the fact that weeks of lying in bed had given him a permanent ache in, of all the unlikely places, his heels. But gradually the knowledge ceased to be a kind of distant landmark with which to orientate himself and there came a vague feeling that it might be pleasant to get back to work. It might be pleasant, and yet there was a disturbing element somewhere….

“If you won’t drink milk I’ll simply have to put you on a course of calcium tablets.” Janice Villiers shrugged as she spoke and let her eyes wander disinterestedly around the mushroom-coloured walls of his room. She was the dietician at the discreetly expensive clinic in which he had found himself, and Garnett had the impression she had got the job by mistake. She had lush black hair, a slight cast in one eye and a kind of forthright sexiness which struck a faintly jarring note amid the pervading professional blandness.

“I don’t need milk,” he said. “My bones are as good as you’ll get.”

“It isn’t bones I’m thinking about, it’s your nerves. You must be a pretty tough little fellow to have recovered as well as you did, but your system has taken a beating. Do you want a cigarette?”

She had been quick to notice his size, or lack of it, even though he was in bed. Garnett turned his head away angrily, ignoring the offered pack. Who the hell did she think she was, making personal comments to important patients? He saw his fine-featured jockey’s face frowning at him from a mirror and sought an unrevealing way to express his anger.

“Tell me,” he said tersely, ‘do you smoke in the other patients’ rooms?”

Janice smiled and returned his stare. Her eyes were a strong, clear grey, but the slight in-turning of one of them gave her a ruefully conspiratorial look. She shook her head.

“Well, what makes you think you can get away with it in my room?” Garnett spoke coldly, but was astonished to discover that part of him was pleased with her answer.

Janice shrugged again and lit up her cigarette. “Were you afraid when you saw that plane dropping down on to your car?”

“Isn’t that an … unprofessional sort of a question?” He was working hard to elicit the normal respectful responses, but she seemed not to notice.

“Did you think you were going to die?” Her small oval face was intent.

Garnett shook his head uncertainly, remembering. Get me out of this, Xoanon. It had been a quiet, clear, perfectly normal voice—except for the fact that it had no apparent owner. He had read stories with the well-worn literary gimmick in which a man in a panic had heard screams, then realised they were coming from his own mouth, but this was rather different. He was not even the praying type, and had he been he knew of no deity by the name of Xoanon.

“Supposing you did die,” Janice persisted. “Did you ever think what you would most like to find on the other side?”

Garnett laughed incredulously. “For God’s sake! Have you been reading pamphlets on how to be an interesting conversationalist?” As on her previous visits, he finally gave up trying to establish anything other than the timeless man-woman relationship. “All right then, what would you like to find?”

“I would like,” she said, inhaling deeply and talking through the smoke with a kind of hard expertise which he found strangely annoying, ‘to waken up in a great hall with one of those vaulted green ceilings, but so big and high up that it was misty looking. And I would like to find myself in a chair facing a wise old man who was removing a kind of earphone set from my head. And I would like him to be saying, ‘Well, that was a sample of life on Sol III. If you would really like to study that planet there are a hundred thousand million of those lives to go through—or would you prefer to look at some of the other inhabited worlds of the universe?’ ;”

Garnett blinked. “That’s quite a concept—are you a writer?”

“No. I just worry about dying. I’m not cut out for it, I guess.” She smiled and brushed a speck of ash from the white linen of her uniform.

Garnett felt a pang of concern. He was fairly sure the girl was being flippant, but there was something in her face. Perhaps she really had a problem of some kind and had been speaking to him on a level of honesty which most people rarely reach. He failed to see how anyone with her stake in life could be obsessed with death, but somehow the subject kept cropping up in her conversation, and he had no idea of how to react. In the silence he became aware of barriers clanging into place between them and was amazed to discover how strongly he wanted to break through.

“Janice,” he said uneasily, using her name for the first time. “I’m getting out of this place in a few days, and … I wonder if you would have dinner with me some evening?”

She glanced up at him, apparently pleased but hesitating.

“I’ll still be on sticks,” he said quickly, feeling gauche, ‘but my hair’s growing back again where they put the plate in my skull. I won’t always have this tonsure, you know.”

Janice smiled whitely, stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. “Thank you,” she said. “It sounds nice. Let’s discuss it later.” She went out, closing the door gently.

Garnett slumped back feeling both elated and aghast. He also had a suspicion she had left at that moment simply because her illicit cigarette was finished and if it had burned out sooner she would have gone that much earlier. What, he wondered, had made him do it? And what did he think he would be able to do for her? The latest pile of blue-covered, spiral-bound reports from the works occupied his attention for some time, and then Nurse McFee came to re-make his bed. She was a motherly woman, with bright red forearms and a faintly Scots accent.

“I was speaking to the dietician,” he said casually, “and I …”

“Oh, she’s begun visiting you, has she?” Nurse McFee grunted fiercely as she pulled back the bed clothes. “I wondered when she would get round to you.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you must be getting better.” Nurse McFee pounded his pillows into submissive fluffiness and refused to speak again. When she had gone Garnett settled down for his afternoon doze, acknowledging sleepily that he would probably be better off if he stopped the Janice Villiers thing right then and there. He slid peacefully into unconsciousness, and sometime during the drowsy afternoon his brain, which had hesitated so long, took the final decisive step out from under the canopy of the drugs.

He awoke in a panic.

A glance at the clock showed him it was several minutes before four. He pulled the televu off the bedside table on to his lap and punched out the works number. There was a delay, during which the little screen remained blank, then the face of the operator appeared, glowing in the grey depths like a submerged pearl.

“Mr. Garnett!” The tiny face assumed perfect miniature lineaments of surprise.

“Hello, Connie,” Garnett said brusquely. “Put me through to Mr. Dermott.” He waited impatiently while the connection was being made. Ian Dermott was his general manager and had been with the organisation since its early days back in the Sixties, handling the administrative and commercial side. He was directly and solely responsible to Garnett because the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was a rarity in its field in that it was privately owned. When Clifford Pryce, inventor of the generated wing, had died in 1978 he had willed the company to Garnett, along with a complicated system of legal safeguards designed to prevent him from bringing in public money by the issue of even a single debenture. Not that there had been any likelihood of fresh capital being required—the Pryce-Garnett T.6 orbital interceptor had been on the boards of the Coventry design offices then and it was an obvious winner right from the start.

The T.6’s main engine was a hydrogen-burning jet with an advanced type of ion-augmented thrust, but the aircraft’s big selling point was the Pryce generated wing—the invisible, steel-hard force field which could fan out ten metres for low-speed flight and progressively reduce in size as speed increased. At Mach 8 the wing generators; were switched off altogether, allowing the hurtling, white-hot fuselage to sustain itself by body lift alone without the impending drag of even a vestigial wing. During the research and development stages there had been delays due to the fantastic precision called for by Pryce’s design for the wing electronics. In the end the bugs had been ironed out and, as a private venture financed by profits from military orders, the company was now developing a larger generated wing system capable of supporting a civil airliner.

Which was why Garnett was in a panic.

“Hello, Tony.” Dermott’s face appeared in the screen. “What’s all this then? Why aren’t you catching up on your sleep? You’ll need it when you get back you know.”

“Hello, Ian. Sorry to interrupt you, but this is important and I want you to issue the initial paperwork right away.”

Dermott adjusted his glasses, looking puzzled. “Of course, Tony. What is it?”

“I’m cancelling the twenty-metre wing project.”

Dermott lowered his head for a few seconds, apparently staring at his hands, then he looked up coldly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You can’t do that.”

The words shocked Garnett. He had expected the other man perhaps to show surprise or resentment, but not step so completely out of line, and out of character. “I’m doing it,” he said. “In fact, I’ve done it. From the moment I informed you I was cancelling, the project was dead.”

“Tony, are you sure you’re feeling all right? You just can’t do this, you know.”

Garnett took a deep breath. “Issue an immediate stop-work order to the design, production, test, purchasing and planning staff concerned.”

“For God’s sake, Tony! Why? Just tell me why.”

‘Because it will lose money. We won’t be able to sell it. Do you want a better reason? So far we’ve sunk the best part of a million pounds into that wing—money that I’ll have to write off against research and development costs of the T.6 wing.”

‘But we were in full agreement that the big wing is just what civil aviation is waiting for.”

“It is,” Garnett agreed grimly, ‘but not with our reliability figures. Our own Air Registration Board and the American F.A.A. have always regarded a fatal accident rate of one in every hundred million flights as being a reasonable objective, although in practice they treat one in ten million flights as an acceptable figure. In more convenient terms, this is an accident rate of 1 \u215? 10{\super

\u8722?7}. It has taken us four years to achieve .92 \u215? 10{\super

\u8722?6} with the smaller T.6 wing, which is just inside military necessity standards and a whole order below civil standards. But now we are proposing to produce the twenty-metre wing, which will have a reliability about half that of the T.6 wing, not for the military but for the civil market! It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

Dermott looked impatient. ‘But this is nothing new, Tony. All those figures have been thoroughly discussed. Gedge and the rest of the reliability team are confident that …’

“If they are very lucky,” Garnett interrupted, ‘they might make military standard in five years, civil standard in ten. By that time the R&D costs would be astronomical and we would still have to sell the first unit. The public won’t take to an invisible wing that vanishes if there’s a power failure.”

Dermott’s face suddenly smoothed into a look of relief. “So that’s it,” he said softly. “You haven’t recovered from the accident! You had me really worried. Tony, the prototype that dropped on to your car was proving a special power system—you remember the new lightweight alternator from Schuylers—and, needless to say, that is one bought-out component which we won’t …”

“What is this?” Garnett shouted incredulously, feeling his temper break. “Are you telling me that the accident has affected my mind? This decision has nothing to do with my personal experience.”

“Look at it this way, Tony. Before the accident you were one of the prime movers in the twenty-metre wing project. You over-ruled every objection. You let some of our best engineers resign because they argued against it. Now, after the accident, you want to drop the whole thing like a hot rivet. What other conclusion … ?”

“Ian!” With an effort Garnett held his voice level. “I am speaking to you now as owner of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company. Right now, right this minute, you must issue those stop-work orders or give me your resignation. Which is it to be?”

“I’m damned if I’ll take this from …’ Dermott stopped talking and his face seemed to ripple in the depths of the tiny television screen. He paused for a long moment and when he resumed speaking his voice was dulled. “I’m sorry, Tony. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. I’ve been under somewhat of a strain. You’re quite right, of course—these decisions are yours to make and it was unforgivable of me to … I’ll issue the stop-work orders immediately.”

Garnett’s anger had gathered too much emotional momentum for him to match the other man’s abrupt change of manner. “See that you do!” He broke the televu connection, dropped the instrument on to the bedside table, then realised he was trembling and covered with perspiration. He lay back and stared at the shifting, green-toned light reflected on the ceiling from the trees outside his open window. The faint sound of children laughing was carried in on the warm air across what seemed to him like interplanetary distance. There’s a gulf, he thought irrelevantly, between those who go to work and those who go to school.

Another gulf had opened up between things as they were before the accident and things as they were now. The conversation with Ian Dermott had been little short of fantastic, but the man had made one good point. Garnett knew he was absolutely right in dropping the twenty-metre generated wing but there was no disputing the fact that once, and not so long ago, he had believed in the project whole-heartedly.

Perhaps a long serious illness always made things seem strange, but there was much to explain. The violent reaction of the normally phlegmatic Dermott, the fact that Garnett seemed to be developing a Don Quixote complex over an unhappy girl when he knew perfectly well he could not spare the time, and there was always—he realised he was falling asleep—that voice. He had never heard of anyone called Xoanon. There was a thing called a xoanon. The odd, back-of-the-dictionary word meant a primitive statue, supposed to have fallen from heaven.

As exhaustion claimed him, and the room tilted ponderously away, Garnett managed to smile. Aircraft might occasionally fall from the sky, but that was all.

It was simply a question of scale.

The photograph gleaming on his desk was a routine publicity shot. It had been taken by a staff cameraman and showed a newly elected works beauty queen posed against a background of the production line, in which were ranged the great incomplete machines, brooding sullenly over their inability to fly. Garnett stared down at the picture, aware that his heart had begun the swift, striding beats of excitement. This was the answer if only he could believe it.

It had taken him over a month to begin suspecting there was anything wrong with the Pryce-Garnett organisation. Another month had passed while he tried unsuccessfully to put his finger on the source of his unease, but there was almost nothing to go on.

The feeling was so faint Garnett could compare it only with the subliminal impulse of recognition he felt when being introduced to a person from his home town of Portsmouth. He had always explained the phenomenon by assuming that in living for many years in one area one was bound to glimpse practically all its inhabitants, and that their faces were filed away in the deeper reaches of memory. His suspicions about the organisation were equally vague, based on similar instinctive reactions.

He sat back in his chair, lit his pipe and stared at the opposite wall of his office through a screen of aromatic smoke. Large but infrequent drops of warm August rain struck across the windows. It was four months since the morning of the accident in which he so nearly lost his life. Afterwards he had learned that the fuselage itself had cleared the top of his car but the starboard tailplane had raked through the roof, spinning the heavy vehicle out of its way like a matchbox. Although he had lost a piece of his skull and broken both arms and one leg, everyone assured Garnett he was lucky to have come out of it alive. He agreed with them, but during the weeks of convalescence which followed his abrupt cancellation of the twenty-metre wing project he had been impatient to get back to work. As soon as it had been possible to wrest reluctant agreement from the doctors he had returned, walking at first with the aid of a stick although, when he had realised that using it made him appear a good inch shorter, he quickly managed to get around unaided.

He had returned too soon, Garnett acknowledged to himself as he drew on the sweet smoke, but in a way the past two months had been invaluable. Had he been fit enough to plunge back into the demanding complexities of his job the subtle, the very subtle, impressions of wrongness would have been swamped. As it was, he had been forced to spend his days in comparative inactivity during which, for the first time, he had been able to take a long impartial look at his own business.

He had begun by arranging with McIntyre, the head of the printing department, that a copy of everything which went through the machines would be sent to his office. The consequent flow of commercial and technical brochures, handbooks, reports and minutes had provided him with several hours of solid reading every day. Although he owned the company in its entirety Garnett had always considered himself an airframe specialist, which he had been when Pryce took him on, and had never had time to read more than a fraction of the organisation’s internal publications. The sheer quantity was astonishing—reports from the medical officer, the safety officer, the sales teams, the various project designers, the publicity officer, the production planning departments, the purchasing officer, the production centres, the personnel department. Experimental, flight test, security, wind tunnel, canteen, fire service. Wages, drawing offices, photographic, spares, transport, maintenance. Stress office, stores, analytical, reliability, tool room …

Garnett began to realise that a large number of his department heads actually enjoyed writing reports and broadcasting them, while others tended to be terse and uninformative. Also, some departments tended to function more crisply and efficiently than others. Strangely, these characteristics of individuals and groups did not remain constant—over-articulate heads might suddenly fall quiet, efficient teams appear to become sloppy, or vice versa. From the welter of paper a picture had begun to emerge, but it was like a television picture in which the lines had been shuffled into a random sequence. Much information was given or implied but he lacked the key which would enable him to systemise it. All he had to go on was a vague feeling, so formless that he dare not mention it to anyone. The only near-concrete fact was that overall company efficiency seemed to have deteriorated, but this could have been explained as a temporary fluctuation, or simply the effect of his own absence—until he had seen the photograph.

A frozen instant of time was trapped under the glossy surface of the picture, and in that unique instant half a dozen aircraft fitters had passed behind the smiling girl at whom the camera had been aimed. They were all perfectly normal men, but one was carrying a wing unit mounting plate which was too big for him. He was a small man but that was not the reason the plate appeared too large. It would have been outsize even on a tall person—it was, in fact, a plate which could only have been used on the cancelled twenty-metre wing!

The implications were so vast that Garnett refused even to consider them before making; one or two elementary checks.

“I’ll be in the Number Three drawing office,” he said as he burst through the outer office. Miss Fleet, his secretary, and her two assistants glanced up in surprise as he passed. He took the lift to the third floor of the Technical Block and went in to the co-ordinating section which occupied the rear of Number Three. The grey-coated clerks who ran the section were flustered at seeing him and stood back respectfully and yet challengingly as he hauled out master assembly drawings and register books. But Garnett knew the complex system and it took him only several minutes to establish the part number of the mounting plate and to trace its history. The plate had been schemed, stress approved and detailed early in the year, but the stop-work order had been issued before the drawings reached the shops. As far as Pryce-Garnett was concerned the mounting plate existed on paper only.

Garnett left the drawing office and walked down the stairs thoughtfully. One approach would have been to find the foreman in charge of the production centre where the component had been made and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. This was Garnett’s first impulse, then he began to think about what was involved. There was the baffling question of motive—the company as a whole had only a distant and very faint possibility of profit from the twenty-metre wing project, so there was no point at all in individuals tinkering with it under cover. Security angle? There might have been at one time, but shortly before he died Clifford Pryce had insisted on publishing full details of his system. Pryce-Garnett had a comfortable head-start, of course, but every country in the world which had sufficiently advanced aircraft and electronics industries was travelling at full speed along the same technological highway. In any case, spies did not work in this way.

The rain had stopped by the time Garnett left the Technical Block and the air was heavy with the smell of moistened dust. He began to walk towards the main shops. There was also the question of how many individuals were involved and who they were. It was not comparable with a case of two or three shop floor personnel getting together to make and smuggle out, say, a component for a broken washing machine. The fitter who had been carrying the mounting plate would only be one link in what must be a very long chain. There would be his immediate foreman and the shop supervisor above him; someone in Supplies must have ordered in the expensive, ultra high tensile steel; someone in Stores must have received and issued it; at least two men in the jig and tool drawing office must have been involved in preparing the tooling drawings and instructions, which in turn brought in the Tool Room superintendent; someone in Accounts must have covered up as much as possible from that end, but it would be impossible to conceal it from the management for very long …

Ian Dermott!

Garnett recalled Dermott’s unexpected and completely uncharacteristic reaction on the day he had called him from the clinic to cancel the twenty-metre wing. His discovery provided an explanation for that, but it was of a sort that only necessitated further explanations. He realised he had stopped walking as his vaulting brain had robbed his body of blood, and he picked up his step again, feeling his heels stick to the warm tarmac. Beyond the saw-tooth roof of the main shop a T.6 screamed across the airfield on full boost, the red glow of recombining calcium ions trailing from its jet pipes.

Passing into the comparative darkness of the shop Garnett moved through the banks of tape-controlled sculpture milling machines which gnawed patiently into billets of gleaming alloy. Although there were eight thousand people in the company he had been able to half-identify the fitter carrying the plate in the photograph simply because he was one of the few men in the place who were not taller than Garnett. No amount of self-discipline had ever been able to prevent him being specially aware of others his own size, feeling that much in common with them and hating them for it.

He headed for the area indicated in his memory as the region in which he had previously seen the fitter, then realised he was going towards the experimental machine shop. Garnett nodded his approval of the conspirators’ choice—the experimental shop was a small and completely self-contained unit with a full range of modern tools. It was a place where unusual jobs were the order of the day and where it would be easy to conceal unauthorised work. As he neared the doors it occurred to Garnett that he ought to be more circumspect than to rush in and collar his man, but his initial astonishment was giving way to a reckless fury.

An electric truck burst its way through the heavy sheet rubber doors and Garnett walked in behind it, avoiding the noisy slap of the doors as they closed. He looked around, ignoring the curious glances of the machine operators, and recognised the small figure of the fitter seated at a wall bench with his back to the door. Garnett walked across to him and, hearing his footsteps, the fitter turned. His eyes widened as he saw Garnett and he froze on the stool, cigarette drooping from his lips.

A definite reaction, Garnett thought with satisfaction. “I want to have a word with you,” he said.

The other man’s oil-streaked face remained immobile, staring.

Garnett became impatient. “Let’s go into the office.”

Saliva gleamed at the corners of the fitter’s mouth. He rolled gently forward on to the tool-cluttered bench, mashing the burning cigarette against his face, then slipped sideways to the floor. Several of his workmates came running as Garnett caught the falling body and lowered it.

“Ring the medical department,” he ordered, ‘and carry him into the supervisor’s office.” The stocky, white-coated figure of Raine, the experimental shop super, appeared and directed the strangely difficult operation. Garnett was puzzled for a moment at the awkwardness of the grunting men doing the carrying, then he noticed the fitter’s body was still in the sitting attitude with rigid arms and legs. He stood by until a young doctor and two male nurses arrived with a stretcher. The doctor looked surprised at Garnett’s presence in the workshop but he cleared the office efficiently and began to examine the inert fitter.

Garnett felt a touch on his sleeve and looked round to see a worried-looking boy in the green overalls of a graduate apprentice. “Excuse me, sir. I’m Jack Elkin. That’s my uncle in there. Victor Elkin. Is he all right? I came round from Centre 83 when I heard he had collapsed.”

“I don’t know,” Garnett replied. “You’d better wait and speak to the doctor. He may want to question you about your uncle’s medical history.”

The boy hesitated. “Well, he isn’t an epileptic or anything like that, but he’s been working very long hours in the last couple of months—ever since the firm sent him down to Harlech on that special training course. He might be suffering from nervous exhaustion.”

Garnett frowned. “The firm sent him where?”

“Harlech, sir.”

“You mean in Wales?” Garnett felt slightly silly. “Where the Men come from?”

“Yes, sir. He never talked about it and I don’t even know the names of the others who went. I assumed it was on some kind of classified work, what with Harlech being so close to the missile ranges at Aberporth and Ty Croes.”

“Quite right,” Garnett said with a knowing briskness he did not feel. He went back into the glass box of the office, noting that Elkin’s limbs had been straightened.

The doctor stood up. “I’ll have to get him to hospital. His pulse, respiration, temperature and blood pressure are near enough normal, but he’s far down in coma. It’s as though his brain had been switched off. Did you … ?”

“Come to my office later,” Garnett interrupted. “I must go.”

He walked quickly back to the Technical Block, feeling the now-familiar exhaustion begin to grow in him like a leaden core. Back in his office he rang for Miss Fleet and she came in with notebook and pen, exuding normalcy.

“Since I’ve been in hospital,” he said, ‘has the company established an office or booked any kind of accommodation for special courses in or near Harlech?”

“You mean, where the Men come from?”

He nodded.

“Of course not, Mr. Garnett.” She dismissed the subject as being ridiculous and got down to the business of the day. “I’ve left a list of people who rang while you were out, and Mr. Moller called in from Photographic for a second.”

“Very well,” he said tiredly, reaching for his pipe. “That’s all.” As he loaded the bowl with moist yellow strands Garnett tentatively identified the emotion causing the fluttering hollowness in his chest—it was the beginnings of fear. His momentary glimpse of the other organisation hidden inside his own works had shown it to be disturbingly large, and he had a conviction Elkin’s sudden paralysis had merely been the first flexing of its muscles. Tackling Elkin direct had been not exactly a mistake—he searched for a suitable word—it had been a non-cybernetic move. The specific application of cybernetics to aircraft production control was a subject on which Garnett had written a book years before the T.6 had claimed his life, and now one of the opening paragraphs was assuming a new and nightmarish appearance of relevance to the present situation.

“An aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments—one must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.”

Approaching Elkin had been the equivalent of tinkering with an individual department, but a good cyberneticist never grabbed a tiger by the tail, not without simultaneously taking a powerful grip of its other extremities. Garnett took a clean sheet of graph paper and began to draw a block diagram of the other organisation as he saw it. In the top square he put Ian Dermott’s name; in the bottom one Victor Elkin’s; in between he put question marks in departments he believed must be involved. It occurred to him that, except for the photograph, he had nothing to show but a very personal kind of evidence, which made the photograph an object of some value. He picked it up and scanned it closely.

An impossibly long time dragged by before his heart resumed beating.

The beauty queen still smiled beneath the picture’s glazed surface, but none of the men behind her were carrying anything!

The obvious conclusion, the one every sane person in the world would agree on, was that Garnett had made a stupid mistake. After all, he had returned to work too soon and had been under a considerable strain. Garnett smiled wryly, almost grateful that all traces of doubt were eliminated. He took his pen, drew a new off-shoot to his diagram, and in it printed, “C. R. Moller, Chief Photographer.” Re-lighting his pipe he pulled the comforting smoke deep into his body. Chris Moller, the cadaverous ex-R.A.F. cameraman, must have realised his mistake and substituted a picture taken a few seconds earlier or later than the vital one. Again, it was hardly first-class evidence but it was good enough for Garnett. There were quite a few question marks on his diagram which had to be replaced with names, but when he finally had those identities the parasite—the machine for secretly producing aircraft parts nobody would ever buy—was going to find itself in trouble. I may be small, Garnett thought in an illogical surge of confidence, but I’ve never met anybody big enough to step on me. Impelled by the freshly released adrenalin in his blood he stood up, limped ferociously around the office, then calmed down enough to decide what he ought to do. It seemed fairly obvious.

“Next on the menu,” he muttered, ‘is a trip to Harlech.”

He picked up the televu on his private line and punched the number of the Carvill Clinic. As he waited for them to find Janice Villiers he felt the bright bubble of confidence begin to tremble. Since leaving the clinic he had had two rather unsatisfactory dinner dates with her, and a third which had been a downright fiasco. Right from the start she had talked freely about her affairs, (“Not love affairs, Tony—the qualification always sounds so excusatory!”), and the effect had been to throw him into a rage which cumulatively became uncontrollable. And yet, because he had deliberately entered her world and not she his, he had been unable to express his anger honestly and in the end had resorted to a vicious attack on her odd, epigrammatic mode of conversation.

“Talking to you,” he had said coldly, in the middle of a discourse on the incongruity of an infinitely small present sandwiched between an infinitely large past and a similar future, ‘is like standing by while somebody tears off every day on one of those ghastly calendars.” She had given him a level stare, displaying the deviation in her eye, and had smiled knowingly but sadly. After that there had been nothing—Garnett felt he had slammed a door.

“Hello, Jan.” He tried to sound casual as Janice’s face suddenly glowed in the depths of the little screen.

“Hello, Tony. How are you?”

“Quite well. I’ve been drinking my milk regularly. It … it does seem to help the nerves.” He wondered if she would find that acceptable.

“Apologies hurt me too,” she said with one of her white, perfect smiles. “What is it, Tony?”

“I’ve got to drive down to Wales tomorrow. I’ll be coming back over the weekend sometime. I wondered if you would go with me.” He waited, realising his attempt to sound like a different person had flopped, but she was kind and answered quickly, agreeing to go. When the arrangements were made and the connection broken, Garnett sat staring across his expanse of gooseberry-coloured carpet which was silvered in places by footprints. He was elated but his pleasure was tempered by the discovery of how deeply he was involved with Janice Villiers, the black-haired stranger who was two dismaying inches taller than he. On the surface he was planning a casual ‘affair’ but there was one disturbing fact the significance of which, even with his sketchy acquaintance with Freud, was obvious.

Ten minutes before, he had decided, with all the trappings of cold logic, that the next step ought to be the trip to Harlech—but this was not the case! There were half a dozen avenues of investigation open to him right here in the Pryce-Garnett works, any one of which could yield valuable information. It was not too late to call off the journey, and yet he knew he was going to go.

Hormones, he decided comfortably, are lousy cyberneticists.

Driving fast in Garnett’s superb, though oversized car, was a little like flying in an under-the-radar jet, and in normal circumstances he would have annihilated the distance from Coventry to Harlech in a very short time. But with the black-clad girl coiled like a whip on the seat beside him the journey was too pleasant not to prolong. He drove north to Rhyl then followed the coast road south against a sea whose clean blue horizon caused him a near-physical pain by its demands for emotional responses the adult Garnett had almost lost. He breathed deeply, trying to fill himself with the bright pastel colours of the morning air.

“Have you been to Harlech before?”

Garnett shook his head. “No. I’m looking forward to seeing it.”

“I am too. Places that have figured in songs are different somehow. There’s a kind of imminence.” Janice lit a cigarette. “You know, this trip may not help you much. It would have been better to hire a private detective.”

“Never thought of it,” Garnett said in genuine astonishment. “I suppose they really do exist.”

Janice laughed. “Of course they do! One of my best friends runs a small agency.”

Garnett tried to kill a pang of annoyance. “Interesting work, I suppose.”

“I’m sure it would only take him a matter of hours to find out which of your employees have been to Harlech. That’s the sort of thing he does all the time. Shall I give him a call?”

“Let’s see how I get on first,” Garnett said ungraciously. He had told Janice only enough to give her the impression he was on a commercial security investigation of some kind, and was beginning to wonder whether he had said too little or too much. Debating the point, he drove in silence for a while and it was then, just as he was beginning to relax, that the first cool tendrils of alarm began to reach up from the depths of his nervous system.

Filled with a kind of astonishment, Garnett instinctively slowed the car and the white road markers began arrowing beneath at a more leisurely rate. He was disturbed—his quickened pulse and breathing made that clear—but there was no discernible reason. If I were a Philip Marlowe, he thought, this feeling would be caused by the fact that I had subconsciously noted the too-frequent appearance of a certain car in the rear-view mirror, but I haven’t seen any vehicles at all for some time. Could that in itself be a wrong note? No, roads like this one would be relatively empty in late morning.

Garnett depressed his right foot again and the seat urged against his back as the car responded. Janice gave him a speculative stare through a grey voodoo mask of cigarette smoke. The machine continued its effortless, whispering progress between mountains and sea, but now Garnett could feel his alarm increase with every minute. It grew with each fresh glimpse of soaring rock faces and each new involution of the road until the psychic pressure became almost intolerable … then came a partial answer.

“Janice,” he said thoughtfully. “Do you know much about this déjà vu thing?”

“Nothing. I’ve heard it defined as the opposite of uncanniness.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, uncanniness is a feeling of strangeness in familiar circumstances, déjà vu is a feeling of familiarity in strange circumstances. Have you got that feeling now? Is that what’s the matter with you?”

Garnett nodded uncertainly. “I get the feeling I’ve been here before, and yet … Good God!”

“What is it?” Janice stubbed out her cigarette.

“I have been here before! With Clifford Pryce!”

“Problem solved,” Janice said cheerfully. “Gone the way of all para-normal phenomena.”

Garnett felt no better. The problem had been solved on one level—but how could he have forgotten? During one of his meetings in Liverpool with Pryce, while they were still discussing the terms of Garnett’s engagement, the old millionaire had decided the day was too hot for sitting indoors and insisted on going for a long drive. Garnett, drunk on visions of the new future opening before him, had not paid much attention to anything outside the car, but he should have remembered the exhilarating high-speed run down the Welsh coast. Why, at the turning point they had even lunched in Harlech! Garnett had travelled considerably and at the age of thirty-eight was beginning to realise he could not clearly remember every day of his life. He could, however, remember the high spots and they did not come any higher than the time he had been given the chance to create the T.6—so how could he have forgotten?

They reached Harlech at midday. Garnett stopped the car in the main street and sat for a moment deciding what he ought to do next. The village was a linear scatter of blocks of sunshine, shadow and stone which appeared not to have changed in the last hundred years. Where was he to start? And what was he to say? “Pardon me, is there a local establishment where men are trained to secretly manufacture aircraft components nobody would buy?”

It dawned on Garnett he had been nursing an illogical hope that the mere fact of his being in Harlech would trigger off new events which would lay all the answers out in front of him, but of course it was not going to be like that. This was a fact he had subconsciously understood all along and the sudden conscious realisation led him to his first direct thoughts about the forthcoming evening and night. It seemed too good to be true. He had never before met a girl who might have tempted him to try fitting marriage into his high-paced career, yet with Janice the question of legal entanglements did not arise. She preferred her ‘natural relationships’ and that being the case Garnett was more than happy to go along with her.

Janice patted her black hair into place. “Where are we staying, Tony? I ought to freshen up.”

“Not here. There’s a new motel at Llanbedr, about twenty minutes further down the coast. Shall I drop you there and come back?”

“No, I’ll be all right.” They got out and Garnett noticed she had not changed into flat-heeled shoes to help equalise their heights. He told himself it was because conventions about height, like all other conventions, were unimportant to her, all part of the wonderful grab-bag of goodies he was getting for nothing. After touring the village together they went into the dim coolness of an inn and ate incredibly good sandwiches of home-cured ham, washed down with heavy tankards of ale. She ate and drank with a kind of mannish gusto which he would have found disconcerting had it not fitted in so perfectly with his vision of her as his wayward child of nature, purveyor of guiltless enjoyments.

“You aren’t happy about all this, are you, Tony?”

Garnett looked up from filling his pipe. “I’m happy about us, but I’ve got … problems at the works and I probably ought to be back there doing something about them. You were quite right about the detective agency. I feel slightly lost.”

“Why do you worry so much about your work? From what you’ve told me you’ve spent: your whole life flying aeroplanes, or building them, or having them drop on your head.”

Garnett ruefully stroked the still-bristly hairs under which the stainless steel plate completed his skull. “Perhaps it’s egotism. Some people sell shoes for a living, or write in ledgers—I put those big birds up in the sky. And now they have my name on them, so I want them to be good.”

“So that your name will live on, etcetera.”

“Something like that, yes.” Garnett found himself on the defensive.

“You aren’t an egotist, Tony. You’re a solipsist.” Janice laughed without removing her cigarette, which gave her lips an unexpectedly cruel twist. “Your name won’t live on, you know. Look, you’re going to live for seventy or eighty years if you’re lucky. Supposing you were an all-round genius and you spent that time developing a longevity drug which increased your life span to a thousand years. You aren’t going to do that, but let’s suppose it anyway. Imagine then that you devoted your thousand years to studying science and became absolute master of the physical universe—which you aren’t going to do either. Suppose next that you used your fantastic powers to gather up every star in the galaxy and arrange them to spell out your name in letters a thousand light years high …’

“I sense,” Garnett put in, ‘you’re trying to get some message over to me.”

“The message is that, even after you had done all those things, still there would come a day when an intelligent being could survey the universe and find no trace of your existence.”

“It wouldn’t alter the fact that I had existed. It doesn’t matter how short a time I live—if I make something good, the fact that I did so will be just as real after a billion years as after ten minutes.”

“Horsefeathers!” Janice looked mildly surprised. “I think that’s the first time I ever said that word. The proper occasion must never have arisen before, but it did just then.”

“Same to you. Let’s get out before we have a stand-up fight.” Garnett drained his glass and they went out into the bright, impersonal infinities of the summer afternoon. He was relieved there was no need to talk as they walked, for this time he was determined nothing should go wrong between them yet he had felt himself being drawn into another row by her determined futility. At least, he thought, it provided a working explanation for the aimlessness of her personal life. Garnett found himself wishing Janice was not so blindingly attractive—born into a more homely body she might have been forced to explore the possibilities of a permanent relationship. As it was she had no shortage of philosophical fellow-travellers. Men, he admitted, like Tony Garnett.

They spent the afternoon walking in the village and its environs. Garnett’s pockets filled with pipe cleaners and boxes of matches as he worked round the local shops trying to talk to people without being conspicuous. Finally he had to give up. Almost by instinct he could put his finger on the subtlest flaw hidden behind the massed symbolism of an engineering drawing, but this village, as far as Garnett was concerned, remained simply an ordinary village.

He rolled the big car gently down the coast to Llanbedr and found the motel, which turned out to be a scattering of pink chalets on a hillside overlooking a sea-lapped airfield. Numb with excitement Garnett rented two chalets from the sports-coated proprietor, noting with satisfaction how the man gaped at Janice. The motel, he learned, had no restaurant facilities but a reasonable dinner could be had at the hotel in Llanbedr.

“My feet hurt,” Janice said as they walked up the winding path to the little single-roomed buildings. “Give me a couple of hours to get them back into shape, then I’ll be ready to eat.”

As he set the bags down inside her doorway she stepped out of her shoes and turned to him. Their first kiss was good, just as he had always known it would be; he kept his eyes open to print the few racing seconds on his memory.

“Easy, Tony, easy,” she murmured. “We’ve got lots of time.”

Garnett stepped back reluctantly and lifted his case. “We solipsists are all the same, you know. See you about eight.” His throat was dry.

In the silence of his own chalet he shaved, changed his clothes and lay tensely on the unfamiliar bed watching a pale, three-quarters moon slide across the window. Since the establishment of the permanent Lunar bases in the mid-Seventies, ten years earlier, Garnett had come to regard the moon as just another geographical location, a place he might visit someday. But tonight it was just the same old moon the poets knew, and nobody could ever walk on that.

He called on Janice at eight and found her standing at her door, smoking as usual, and wearing a white dress fastened with gold clasps giving it a faintly classical look which suited the Delian atmosphere of the lush summer evening. They walked to the hotel in Llanbedr, had several drinks, a simple dinner, and returned to the motel in the twilight. Garnett thought vaguely that they should go to her chalet but Janice stopped determinedly at his so he led her in and closed the door.

Their second kiss was much longer, even more perfect than the first and Garnett felt her lithe body drive forward against his own with a force he could barely match. It was everything he could have asked for, except for one tiny thing—the words. The words were unimportant but suddenly Garnett found himself greedy for them, needing them, and they forced themselves up from his throat.

“I love you, Janice.” He waited, and felt her arms untwine slightly. You fool, he screamed inwardly, what are you doing?

“I like you, Tony,” she said. “I like you a lot.”

It isn’t too late, he thought, she has said she likes me and maybe that’s better than love—why ruin it all now? But aloud he found himself demanding the age-old response and in a few thunderous seconds they were standing apart, arguing. The words, all the wrong ones, came too fast for him to comprehend, and Janice stuck to everything she had ever said about human relationships with a ruthless, uncompromising honesty which filled him with rage. The realisation that he would have been content for her to lie about loving him made Garnett even more furious. Finally she turned away from him, shrugged, and took a cigarette from her purse.

“If you light that thing,” he said coldly, “I’m leaving.”

Janice flicked her lighter on. “What is the saying about ultimatums? You should never issue an ultimatum because …’

Garnett snatched the cigarette from her mouth, crumpled it and shouldered his way outside, slamming the door behind him. He had taken a dozen steps in the darkness towards where he imagined his chalet to be when he remembered they had been in his chalet. Swearing incoherently he began to turn back then realised the ludicrousness would be too much for him. Once into Janice’s chalet, he ripped off his jacket and lay down on her bed, sick with dismay. He had no expectations of sleep, but the exhaustion inherited from the accident closed black arms around him within a matter of minutes and he dropped into an uneasy sleep.

The explosion came hours later.

Garnett sat up gasping in pitch darkness, so disorientated that for one panicky moment he was unable to find even his own identity. The air was still filled with reverberations from the heart-stopping blast and not far away someone had begun to scream patiently and regularly, like breathing. A shifting orange light was beginning to move across the window when Garnett got to his feet and opened the door. The light was coming from flames that were fanning up through the crazily twisted roof of the chalet where he …

Janice!

Garnett ran quickly, risking a broken ankle on the strange ground, and threw himself through the chalet’s gaping doorway, beyond which the air was almost solid with billowing mortar dust. Please Janice, he pleaded, please be all right. He found her, still in the white dress, lying face downwards beneath curling streamers of flowered wallpaper which the explosion had stripped from the walls. Sliding his hands under her, he lifted then hesitated, sickened, knowing he had no business moving a human body which felt like that. The flames increased their grip on the wreckage. Garnett clenched his teeth, stood up with the limp body in his arms and carried it out on to the grass where people in night clothes had begun to gather. He knew as he folded Janice down on the ground she was at that moment launching out across the eternity of which she had always been so afraid. Incredibly, her lips moved for a moment, so slightly that at first he thought it might be shadow movements from the fire. He put his ear to her mouth.

‘… difficult, very difficult. Late. I have it. I have it now, Xoanon. I …’ The words stopped with unmistakable finality and Garnett rolled away from her, burying his face in the grass. When he stood up again somebody had covered Janice with a yellow raincoat and the world was rocking around him, reduced to a meaningless montage of luridly-lit faces, black tree-shapes arid distant black reaches of impassive sea. The floating faces spoke to him excitedly, questioning, but he ignored them, standing beside the body until an ambulance arrived and the attendants loaded the strangely small bundle into it. The boyish-looking doctor’s eyes narrowed professionally as he looked at Garnett and suggested that he lie down, but Garnett brushed him away—for the second time that night nothing could satisfy him but ancient, formal words, this time with the police. F’accuse!

Janice’s death had not been an accident.

She died because she was sleeping in the wrong chalet, and the invisible others had made a mistake. Garnett felt he shared the responsibility—something his conscience would settle with him later—but it carried the tiniest seed of consolation in that the mistake had been bigger than the unknown organisation suspected. Until now all his evidence had been entirely negative or personal, the type of witness that would cause people’s eyes to drift away in embarrassment. But an attempt had been made on his life, the name Xoanon had been spoken again, and Janice was dead….

The police inspector who took charge was a big man with a malarial complexion and baffled brown eyes. Garnett limped up the wooden steps into the motel office behind him, aware that his legs were weakening, and sat down on a magazine-littered couch. The inspector cleared a little space in the scurf of paperwork covering the desk then set his key-ring in the middle of it, somehow conveying his anxiety to get away.

“You look pretty tired, sir. We’ll get this over as soon as we can. You can make an official statement tomorrow.”

“I’m all right,” Garnett said. “I want to make a statement now. I’m Garnett of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company and I have reason to believe that tonight’s explosion was intended to kill me because …’

The inspector’s hands made little swimming movements in the cone of light from the office’s single overhead fitting and he smiled uneasily. “Forgive me, Mr. Garnett. I think you should lie down. The shock …’

“I’ve already told you I’m all right, inspector. Will you let me speak? The men who set the bomb, or whatever it was, are …’

“I’m sorry, Mr. Garnett. I’m going to ask one of my men to have the doctor see you.” The inspector stood up and moved towards the dark rectangle of the open door.

Garnett leaped to his feet and had to grab the desk for support. He tried hard to make his voice cool and reasonable. “Inspector, I’m trying to give you the facts about the bomb explosion that took place here a little while ago.”

“That’s just the point, Mr. Garnett. We have all the facts. There was no bomb—it was a meteorite.”

“A meteorite?”

“That’s right. Quite a small one apparently, but was seen for miles. We’ve had reports of it from half a dozen places up and down the coast. A rare but entirely natural occurrence, sir—so there wasn’t any bomb. Now will you see the doctor? I think you should.” The inspector went out and Garnett heard him whispering to a waiting constable.

Garnett lurched to the door and sat on the polished wooden steps, staring upwards as he waited for the doctor. The sky contained no answers. It remained impersonal, anonymous, and beyond the mountains dawn was already beginning to overpaint the fainter stars.

The Pryce-Garnett organisation was a ‘second generation’ aircraft firm, as distinct from the long-established giants all of which had been founded by World War I aviators. It employed a total of only eight thousand men based in factories at Liverpool and Coventry, and had been given its toe-hold in the fiercely competitive industry solely by the introduction of the Pryce generated wing. The bulk of the electronics equipment associated with the wing was still produced at Pryce’s original plant in Liverpool, but the airframe fabrication and assembly unit in Coventry had become the company’s headquarters. Most of its senior management lived close to Coventry and it was there that Garnett headed on Sunday afternoon as soon as he was freed of his obligations to the authorities at Llanbedr.

He took the shorter route across the Welsh mountains, driving as fast as he dared in view of his condition. The events surrounding Janice’s death had punished him both mentally and physically, and he was reminded how the surgeon who had patched him up after the accident had commented that he might never fully get over it. Garnett had written that off at the time as pessimism but he was beginning to understand what the man had meant.

The big car hissed occasionally as it flashed through scattered rain showers. Once or twice on the journey he glimpsed newspaper billboards on which were scrawled, MOTEL GIRL KILLED BY FIREBALL. Part of him was forced to admire how merely describing Janice as a ‘motel girl’—whatever that might be—had added just the right connotation of shady sexuality to the story. The rest of him was filled with a brooding anger which at times caused his forehead to prickle painfully with sweat and turned his heart into a pulsating pillow, threatening to explode his ribs. In a way he was almost glad of the anger because an adversary who could guide meteorites down on to pin-point targets was someone of whom he would normally have been very afraid. As it was, Garnett was going to come to grips with his enemy in the only way he knew, and was looking forward to it.

It was late afternoon when he reached Coventry and swung round the outskirts to Baginton where Ian Dermott, his general manager, lived. Observation and deduction both indicated Dermott as top man in the mysterious ‘other’ production unit, but looking at his home Garnett was impressed by its sheer normality. The big redbrick house radiated friendliness through its helmet of rain-soaked ivy and the bright lawns vapoured introspectively in the sun. He parked outside the iron gates and walked up the drive, half expecting to be challenged at every step, but the place was silent until he rang the doorbell. As he waited Garnett began to feel foolish, but Janice was dead and there were questions which had to be answered, or at least asked. What was going on at the factory? Why had Janice mentioned someone known as Xoanon in her last breath? Was she one of them? How did one set about steering a meteorite? And why … ?

The door opened. Dermott stood there in a maroon silk dressing gown and with a pair of television glasses in his hand.

“We’ve got to have a talk,” Garnett said flatly.

“Of course, Tony. It’s good to see you. Come in. How was your trip to Wales?” Dermott stood back and cheerfully ushered Garnett into the hall, smiling down at him. “I’ve been watching television alone—becoming addicted to it, I’m afraid. I was able to take it or leave it while big screens were popular but these little gadgets have hooked me.” He held up the glasses. The little eye-sized screens glowed with movement like distant bonfires and a thin wisp of music escaped from the earpiece.

Garnett stared at the familiar, amiable face. “All right, Ian. You’ve done your sane, sensible, crumpets-for-tea bit—now let’s have our talk. What the hell have you been up to?”

“Up to! What do you mean, Tony?” Dermott turned and led the way into the spacious sitting room he used as a kind of office.

“I’m going to blast this thing out into the open,” Garnett said to the other man’s back. “I’m going to kick up the biggest row this country has ever seen, whether you talk or not. This is your only chance to talk about it in private—and you know me well enough to know I mean that.”

Dermott’s shoulders sagged slightly and he turned round. His face was suddenly very pale, almost luminescent. After a long, clock-ticking pause he said, “I suppose we must make the effort.”

“Never mind making efforts. Start making sense.”

Dermott swayed slightly and when he spoke his voice was harsh. “We are, as you suspected, completing a twenty-metre wing unit.”

Garnett had known, yet hearing it shocked him. ‘But why? For God’s sake why? Who wants it?”

“The customer’s name is Xoanon. I’ve never seen him. He’s an … I suppose you’d call it an extraterrestrial.”

Garnett remained silent—this was what he had dreaded since the first slithering premonitions the night he had sat on the motel steps and stared into a hostile sky.

“Neither Xoanon nor any of his race,” Dermott continued, ‘have ever set foot on Earth. They are human, but from a world with lower gravity. Their craft is in a three-hundred kilometre orbit.”

“That’s impossible. They couldn’t get away with it. Our radar would lamp them the first time round, unless …’

Dermott nodded. “Electron absorption screens—we’ll have something like that ourselves soon.”

Futile as it was, Garnett was unable to prevent himself from arguing. ‘But why do they want an aircraft wing?”

“There is a very important reason, but it can’t be disclosed.”

A pressure was building up within Garnett’s temples. “It still doesn’t make sense. If they can’t land—how do they expect to get hold of the wing unit?”

Dermott seemed slightly surprised by the question. “We will deliver, of course. Using a T.6.” Something about the way he spoke caused a convulsive upheaval in Garnett’s subconscious but he had no time to guess what it might mean. The anger, dulled by shock, was growing in him again.

“What sort of a person are you, Dermott? What did they buy you with?”

“I wasn’t bought, Tony—any more than you were.”

“Than I was!” The room slanted momentarily, then righted itself.

“Yes, Tony. You still don’t understand, do you? They got you before any of us. The instrument they use has been hidden in the sea close to the Welsh coast for years. It seems to be a device for recording the patterns of electrical activity in a person’s brain and then transmitting it to the spacecraft. Up there they construct an analogue—don’t ask me how—and by adjusting it force the weaker electrical activity of the brain into new patterns.

“What it boils down to is, if you get close enough to the device for an initial reading to be made they can influence you from that moment on. If necessary absolute control can be exerted but usually it is enough just to nudge a person’s thinking in the desired direction—that was how the twenty-metre wing project got under way in the first place. There were only half a dozen key men involved, you and I being two of them, but you had to go and lose part of your skull. The metal plate riveted into it acted like a screen and broke your link with Xoanon. When you cancelled the project we had to go underground, which meant that a total of forty personnel had to be put under almost complete control so that they would finish the wing unit and do it in secrecy.

“It would have been much easier to kill you, of course, but Xoanon doesn’t work that way. I’m explaining all this in the hope that you can eventually be persuaded to join us again.”

Garnett shook his head, unable to speak as he struggled to assimilate all he had just heard.

“Think it over,” Dermot said. “I’ll get you a drink. You look as though you could use one.” He moved to a sideboard which glittered with cut glass and silver.

“I am thinking it over. I’m thinking about Janice Villiers. I take it Xoanon is dismissing that as an unfortunate error.”

“Errors,” Dermott said, still busy at the sideboard, ‘can be compensated for.” When he turned round again only one of his hands held a glass. The other trembled slightly under the weight of an obsolescent, but nonetheless effective, automatic pistol. “We are sorry about this, Tony, but the project is too important….”

“You wouldn’t dare fire that thing. Somebody would hear it.”

Dermott shook his head. “I’ve sent Jean and the two boys away for a week, so let me assure you I will use it, but …”

Garnett had been shifting his balance while the other man spoke. He leaped sideways and dived for the cover of the massive desk which occupied a corner of the room. Dermott’s arm jerked up, the big pistol went off like a ton of high explosive and Garnett felt himself stopped as though he had run into a wall, his chest muscles paralysed with agony. He caught the desk for support then realised the bullet had almost missed him, scribing a bloody tangent across his ribs. The discovery brought with it a surge of elation. Honour’s satisfied, he thought illogically. Ian has made his point. He’ll call it quits now and I’ll go away and stay out of his life for ever.

But Dermott lurched forward, arm outstretched stiffly and face contorted with the loathing a man always feels for an animal he has failed to dispatch at the first blow. Garnett tried desperately to move, but there was no time. Dermott pointed the automatic at his head at a range of only a few feet and fired again. As he tried to jerk his head out of the way Garnett felt himself flicked off the edge of the desk like a fly. He landed heavily on the floor behind the desk and lay motionless, wondering why he was still alive. One side of his face, including the eye, was raw with a burning pain he recognised as being caused by muzzle blast and his ear was ringing like an anvil, but where had the bullet gone? Something hard was lodged in the back of his mouth. For an instant he recalled stories of soldiers who had bullets pierce their skulls and travel all round their heads on the inside, then he realised the hard object was a tooth. The bullet had hit him high on the cheek and had passed straight out the other side, smashing his back teeth on the way. He had been lucky.

Several cautious footsteps sounded as Dermott approached.

Garnett held his breath and hoped there was enough blood distributed over his head and chest to convince Dermott a coup de grace was unnecessary. After a few seconds he heard him pick up his televu from the desk and punch out a number.

“Hello, Bill.”

“Hello, Ian. Has it happened?” Garnett recognised the voice of his chief test pilot, Bill Makin.

“Yes—he came here, as we expected. I had to take certain steps. You know what I mean.”

“I know.”

“There’ll be trouble, of course. This is as far as we can go. You’d better deliver the unit right away.”

“I thought there still were difficulties with dimensional stability.”

“Only a centimetre or so at maximum chord. It’s acceptable. Anyway, we’ve run out of time.”

“What will you do with the … ah … waste products?”

“Don’t worry about that. Just deliver the goods.”

“I’m already plotting the flight profile. See you.”

Dermott set the televu down, stood for a moment then came round the desk and grabbed a fistful of Garnett’s jacket. He screamed in terror as Garnett brought up his legs and kicked, then he went down clutching his belly. Garnett propelled himself upwards, grunting with the effort. The televu set almost flew out of his fingers as he lifted and swung, but it connected with Dermott’s head. The screaming stopped. Garnett lifted the pistol purposively, hesitated, then worked it into his belt—Dermott had just tried to murder him but he had not been responsible for his own actions. Nor was he the one responsible for what had happened to Janice.

He dragged the unconscious man all the way into the kitchen, tied his wrists with the silk dressing gown cord and locked him in a cupboard. By the time he had finished he was drenched with perspiration and was leaving bloody footprints on the floor. He cleaned himself up in the bathroom as best he could, taped a clean towel across his ribs and put patches of skin-coloured medical plastic on his cheeks. Blood from the ruptured gums kept trickling into his throat so he made two plugs of cotton and bit down on them. The whole operation took only a matter of minutes, at the end of which his image in the full-length mirror appeared almost normal. There was a certain spiky look, like that of a sick bird, but that was pretty good considering the way he felt.

Garnett carefully locked the door behind him and limped out to his car which greeted him like an old friend as he settled into the seat. He slid it meticulously through the Sunday evening traffic, not risking an encounter with the police, and reached the works in reddish evening sunlight. A patrol officer saluted as he drove through the main gates and threaded among the silent workshops on his way to the field. The square-finned shape of a T.6 crouched outside the flight shed, impassively drinking in the contents of a mustard-coloured fuel bowser. Garnett was too far from the men who moved around it to decide if they were the regular ground crew or Xoanon-controlled draftees. Scanning the line of parked vehicles he found what he wanted—the white sports car belonging to Bill Makin.

Garnett slipped into the test pilots’ building by the rear entrance, went along the corridor and stopped outside Makin’s office. There was the question of how much feedback was built into Xoanon’s control system—if the spacecraft acted as a sort of clearing house for sense impressions then every man under control might know what was happening to all the others, in which case Makin could be expecting him. He extricated the heavy weapon from his belt, thankful there had been no necessity for a quick draw, and gently opened the door. Makin was already in his silver pressure skin and was bent over his personal computer, waiting tensely. Beyond the Venetian blinds the evening sky was turning peacock green.

Garnett levelled the automatic.

“Don’t move, Bill. Don’t make a sound. You’ve got a passenger on this trip.”

Makin remained hunched over the machine, but he shook his head without turning round. “I have—but not you, Tony. The wing unit is strapped into the second seat. Even you couldn’t get in there with it.”

“I don’t think you understand—I’m not permitting delivery of the unit. You’re taking me in its place.”

“What makes you think so?”

The task of thinking up a direct verbal reply which did not sound like something out of an old film was too much for Garnett’s patience and imagination. He stepped forward and gently laid the gun muzzle against Makin’s neck, but the time for words or any other sort of reply had already passed. Makin slid down on to the floor and lay, like a doll, with both arms reaching blindly into the air. As Garnett stared down at him, remembering Elkin, the fitter who had also been ‘switched off’, the computer chimed softly and rolled out a curling tongue of grey paper. Garnett snatched it and ran his eye down the printed figures—they were a complete set of parameters defining the flight profile for a maximum altitude T.6 sortie.

A few minutes later Garnett limped out of the test pilots’ building, doing his best to imitate Makin’s careful walk. The pressure skin was several sizes too large for him but none of the ground crew seemed to notice anything wrong. Garnett discovered that the loneliness of the astronaut, the age’s solitary hero figure, began from the moment he donned his egg-shell head and silver limbs. The T.6 waited for him, its belly replete with fuel, and the late sunlight splayed across the sky, masking everything that lay beyond.

Garnett had never actually flown a T.6 before and the fact that he was able to consider doing so, even with his experience in the aircraft’s simulator, was a tribute to the way in which the aircraft industry had tackled one of its oldest problems. Even before the end of the era of the reciprocating engine the demands upon the pilot of the large, fast transport were nearing the theoretical maximum capacity of the human nervous system. A limiting factor had been the sheer quantity of eye movements the pilot was called upon to make as he gathered discrete information from his instrument array and processed it into control movements. The answer had lain in a new philosophy of cockpit design which ushered in the age of the black box, starting with the first autoland systems. Its culmination was the fully automated cockpit which was the most valuable part of the machine and which could be lifted bodily out of any aircraft and installed in any other type, allowing the pilot to concentrate on where he was going and not on the mechanics of getting there.

The ground crew stood around disinterestedly as Garnett walked to the aircraft and worked his way up the spring-loaded hand and toe holds to reach the open cockpit. Actually, due to the fact that the T.6 was a true self-starter, there was nothing for the crew to do once the fuelling operation was completed. Now that he was about to take its controls into his own hands Garnett was impressed as never before by the machine’s sheer power. The huge cylinder was literally nothing but an engine and fuel system, with a contrived niche on top for two men and an assortment of mountings below for weapons. It was not armed, being still in final development, but it was one of the most fantastically extravagant products of a society with the arm-bearing mentality.

As he slid into the front seat Garnett realised, with a keen sense of shock, that he disliked the T.6 and all it stood for. Thoughts like that had never crossed his mind until now but then, as Dermott had explained, an outsider had been ‘nudging’ his ideas towards a certain end. It was difficult to comprehend that the whole twenty-metre wing project had been brought into being at the instigation of an alien figure known as Xoanon. Men’s lives had been twisted to meet that end and a girl called Janice had died. Garnett felt the gnawing bitterness of regret for everything that might have been. Up there, up in the lofty three-hundred kilometre orbit, Janice’s death probably seemed an infinitesimal event, but it had been an important one in his life. Soon he would be up there himself, though, and then he was going to make Janice important to Xoanon as well. The automatic in his belt was a pretty insignificant payload for the T.6 but, properly used, it should be sufficient.

Garnett wanted to unload the crated twenty-metre wing unit but doing it might have attracted too much suspicion, so he sealed the cockpit and checked over the flight plan. It called for a takeoff at seventeen-fifty hours, gradual climb to twenty thousand metres to clear the denser air strata, and then a fully boosted ballistic-style climb to engine shutdown at 250 kilometres. This would give enough momentum for the ship to coast the remaining fifty kilometres to what presumably was rendezvous altitude. He was more than ten minutes too early and was tempted to blast off anyway then adjust the flight path to suit, but there was the danger of alerting the whole of Regional Command. The flight was bound to be illegal—Makin had not had time even to file a flight plan—but as long as he did not loiter around at medium altitudes there was little anybody could do to stop him. They were unlikely to loose one of their robotic nimrods on an unidentified aircraft flying out of the country. There was also the danger of alerting the spacecraft but he had a feeling Xoanon already knew what was going on—the precious wing unit would be his guarantee of safe conduct.

At zero minus five he flicked over a series of toggles and the great engine, which extended from the ship’s nose, under his seat and all the way back to the tail, cleared its throat and gave voice, an indefinitely prolonged explosion even at minimum power. Keeping the radio switched off to eliminate distracting queries from the tower he released the brakes and steered the T.6 out to the end of the main runway. The configuration scope showed that the machine’s invisible wings were spread to their full extent.

Poised at the end of the runway, staring into the flame-coloured feathers of the sunset, Garnett was suddenly afraid to make the flight. The feeling was something like the one which had followed Dermott’s first grazing shot across his chest. He wanted to get away, escape into normal life, not project himself into the inhuman, anti-human coldness of the three-hundred kilometre orbit. But when his chronometer said it was time to go he kicked off the brakes and let the machine do all his thinking and worrying. The sound of the engine faded out a few seconds later as the T.6 went supersonic. He barely had time to get it on to the south-easterly bearing specified in the flight plan, and check his course, when the altimeter registered twenty thousand metres. At that point he surrendered all authority to the black boxes.

The T.6’s nose lifted higher as the built-in computers, unhampered by fears or regrets, drove it up beyond the atmosphere in a clean, pure curve. Garnett grunted with pain as the ion-boost came on and the high gravities tore at his wounds. The boost worked by seeding the jet stream with calcium particles which were ionised and accelerated by an engine-driven oscillator. To prevent the aircraft building up a huge electrical potential, negative and positive ions were blasted out alternately, recombining in a long reddish flare behind the jet pipe. When the atmosphere became too tenuous for turbine efficiency the fuel flow was terminated and the T.6 continued upwards on ion propulsion alone. Finally that too was shut down and the machine coasted on to find its orbit.

Inside the cockpit Garnett felt small, lonely and cold. With the T.6 in free fall and everything switched off, except for life-sustaining equipment, there was nothing for him to do but wait. In good health and different circumstances he might have been able to enjoy his first look at the unshielded stars, great cities wheeling in the blackness, but he could think only of hot coffee, a yellow-lit book-lined room, a good chair … and rest….

The spacecraft took him swiftly and easily, before he realised what was happening.

It came from behind and Garnett only became aware of its arrival when the stars progressively vanished until only a handful shone in a circle ahead of him. The circle was filled in abruptly and he knew the T.6, large as it was, had been engulfed the way a swooping bird takes a gnat. Lights suddenly shone from above to reveal a grey metal cavern, the walls and ceiling of which were criss-crossed with frames and braces of surprisingly Earth-like design. The silence which surrounded him was gradually replaced by faint sounds and he guessed air was being pumped into the compartment. His guess was confirmed as the T.6, which had been hanging contentedly a few metres above the floor, began to wallow gently and drift to one side in the currents. At the same time the cockpit canopy turned white as a coating of frost materialised on the aircraft. Flexible metal hoses tipped with suction cups snaked put from half a dozen wall panels and the T.6 became steady, held fast.

Garnett took a deep breath. He had known from the start there would be no chance of escape after he shot Xoanon—this simply confirmed it. He opened the cockpit, stood up and launched himelf upwards with his legs. The roof was higher than he had estimated in the dim light and for several long seconds he felt vulnerable and helpless, drifting up into the interlaced structure of beams, cables and pipes. Finally he connected with a truss and worked himself through it into a reasonably secure position, feeling like a bird in the roof of a barn.

While he waited for someone to appear down below Garnett partially unzipped the pressure skin and withdrew the automatic. It was almost a certainty that the aliens knew who had delivered the wing unit so there was little point in trying anything but the the most direct tactics. Besides, with the weapon in his hands he might be in a position to find the answer to his big question—why did the builders of this tremendous ship want the wing of a relatively primitive aircraft? Why did they want it so badly they were prepared to hang in orbit for several years while their puppets carried out the construction? Why … ?

A large section of the wall slid away and Garnett found himself looking down at a group of five aliens silhouetted against powerful blue-white light which streamed into his metal cave.

They appeared to be human, as Dermott had predicted, but humans who floated assuredly in the air like fish, controlling their altitudes with little arm and leg movements which caused disproportionately large shadow plays in the mingling light rays. He had time for a few fleeting impressions—almost childishly small bodies, silt-coloured skin, wispy hair, darkly lambent eyes—then the alients were swimming towards his empty craft. As he took aim it occurred to Garnett that he had completely forgotten to allow for zero gravity conditions when he brought the automatic pistol. Under these circumstances its fierce recoil would make it less effective than a bow and arrow, but it was too late to worry about it—the aliens must not be allowed to get their hands on the wing unit. Pain arced across his chest from the recoil as he fired. The aliens tumbled in panic and dived back through the doorway while thunderous multiple reverberations battered against the metal walls. Knowing he had deliberately aimed to miss, Garnett for the first time understood that a pistol’s sound is one of the most important factors in its potency as a weapon.

He opened the faceplate of his helmet, hardly noticing the smell of the alien air. “Where is Xoanon?” he shouted. “I want Xoanon.”

The aliens remained out of sight but their shadows moved anxiously across the glittering, frosty whiteness of the trapped T.6. Garnett waited with his eyes fixed on the brilliant trapezoid of the doorway, wondering if Xoanon would dare to appear. He watched tensely, aware of his own heart beats, yet when the movement finally came it took him completely by surprise—for it was inside his helmet!

Something cold brushed against his eyebrow and, from close up, a flash of brightness stabbed into his eye.

Sobbing with fear, Garnett scrabbled frantically at the helmet with his free hand, then abruptly he held still. It had been only the tiny flip-down television screen which formed part of the suit’s communications system. The fact that it had dropped into place in front of his left eye meant someone on the alien ship had begun to broadcast on his personal frequency.

Garnett moved his eye forward to the little screen and found himself peering into a large room with pale green lighting and what appeared to be clusters of silver threads running vertically between its floor and ceiling. The room was circular and its walls were banked with what was obviously a tremendously complex instrument array. Several aliens in black coveralls appeared to be entangled in the silver strands at different heights, but as each was positioned close to groups of controls Garnett realised the threads took the place of conventional furniture.

In the centre of the room a single, almost normal, chair held a white-haired man who had one arm missing from just below the shoulder. The slight figure of an alien woman floated behind the chair but Garnett’s attention was fixed on its occupant. There was an authoritative look about the time-scarred face and intent, unflinching eyes which told him….

“You are Xoanon?”

“Yes. And you are Mr. Garnett.”

A violent shuddering fit seized Garnett and pain radiated from different centres in his body. Anything I do, he thought, had better be done soon.

“I’m going to kill you, Xoanon.” At his words several aliens high up in the silver skeins twisted away from their control panels but Xoanon dismissed them with a rapid wave of his single arm. He leaned forward in his chair, dark eyes like gun muzzles.

“Mr. Garnett,” he said quietly, “I have no desire to use violence against you.”

“I can understand that,” Garnett said. “Facing an armed man is rather more difficult than aiming meteorites at him from the safety of your ship.”

“That isn’t my point. If it were necessary I could kill you without leaving this chair. I could, for example, withdraw the air from your sector of the ship.”

“You could,” Garnett conceded, ‘but I have enough oxygen here for several hours. At the end of that time there would be very little left of your wing unit.”

The old man’s face became bleak. “You must not touch the unit, Mr. Garnett. We have waited too long to permit anything to happen to it now. I must advise you that several members of my crew have armed themselves and are returning to the vicinity of your aircraft. I repeat, we have no desire to use violence, but we will not allow you to damage the unit. Now let us talk more reasonably—I know you well enough to be convinced we can be friends.”

Garnett was astounded at the idea. “No, Xoanon, you don’t know me.” He suddenly became aware of the woman behind Xoanon—could she be the old man’s daughter? He had not thought of the aliens as having daughters, sons, wives.

“I know you,” the old man insisted, ‘and now we must talk before it is too late. Some of my crew are running out of patience. This ship, although large by your standards, is regarded by my people as an ordinary commercial vessel, the equivalent of one of your tramp steamers. I could lie to you about its purpose. I could say it is a mercy ship filled with enough serum to save the lives of a billion people, or that it had some other equally important role, but I give you the simple truth. It is a rather old, rather shabby freighter which a long time ago, during a routine journey, suffered a major breakdown—an explosion which destroyed essential equipment and at the same time deprived us of much of our workshop facilities.

“At that time the ship had a crew of almost two hundred, all of whom had a very natural desire to return to their home planet, so we took a number of risks,” Xoanon glanced momentarily at the stump of his arm, ‘and got our vessel as far as this planet. However, our troubles were only beginning. We were unable to land and even if we had been able to put down your high gravity would have made us almost helpless. The component we required was not available on Earth, naturally enough, nor was the means to manufacture and deliver it. No solution at all would have been possible but for the fact that our ship normally travelled to a number of ‘backwoods’ planetary systems and therefore was fitted with a standard brain-to-brain communications device. Our engineers were able to effect a number of illegal modifications to it and …’

“I don’t understand,” Garnett interrupted. “What use would an aircraft wing be to a ship this size?”

Xoanon smiled faintly. “To you it is an aircraft wing—to my engineers it is one of a system of drive thrust deflectors without which the ship cannot be manoeuvred. It is necessary to employ a force field, as you call it, because no physical deflector can exist for more than a few seconds in the drive stream.”

“I see,” Garnett said grimly. “So you took over a man called Garnett and had him order his firm to build a unit the size you needed.”

The old man shook his head. “It wasn’t that simple. The first person we took over was called Clifford Pryce….”

“Pryce ! But that means …’

“Yes, Mr. Garnett. When we reached your world it had an electronics industry of sorts, but our requirements were far beyond its capabilities, so far …’

Garnett stopped listening. There had been a movement of shadows near the doorway. Two aliens carrying what looked like weapons sped through the opening and vanished into the dimness beyond the T.6. Garnett decided to get closer to the wing unit so as to be certain of destroying it with his first shots and began working his way downwards, trying to remain in cover. At the same time his mind swung dizzily over chasms of thought opened by Xoanon’s words.

“Exactly when,” he said, ‘did you take over Pryce?”

“I have already given you that information. It was in your year 1940.”

“But that was …”

“Several years before you were born, Mr. Garnett. At that time Clifford Pryce was a young radio engineer. It was necessary for us to guide his development so that he could ‘invent’ the force field generator. We had to steer him into aviation in order that he would not find some more obvious application than constructing aerofoil surfaces, and at the same time made him a multi-millionaire so that we could retain control of the new invention. The aircraft you refer to as the T.6 had a triple function—it gave your technicians the experience they needed to develop successfully the larger force field unit, it financed the larger unit and, most important, it …’

“It provided the means to get the unit into your hands,” Garnett finished, listening to the strangely distant sound of his own voice. He spoke automatically, all his attention centred on the task of moving downwards without swinging out into view of the two aliens. “You said you know me, Xoanon—but you don’t. You have learned nothing at all about the primitives down there if you think you have just presented a case against my killing you. Not one inhabitant of my world would hesitate in this situation. By your own admission you have twisted people’s lives, you have tampered with Earth’s very history, you have provided a new dimension in weapon building for a race which specialises in weapon building….

“And you took a human life. A very human life.” Garnett reached the metal floor and began to work his way towards the T.6, talking feverishly. “You can have the unit, Xoanon, but you must come here and collect it in person, and pay for it in person. I am close enough to the T.6 to guarantee to put a bullet into the unit unless you come through that doorway within the next five minutes.” Without warning from his stomach, Garnett found himself retching violently, each convulsion tearing the wound in his chest until his eyes blurred with tears. When he had recovered, he again noticed the wispy-haired woman behind Xoanon. She had the typical silt-coloured alien complexion, but her eyes were large and somehow disturbing.

Xoanon remained seated. ‘Before you act, Mr. Garnett, let me remind you of a few basic facts. I told you it was necessary to steer Clifford Pryce into the aircraft industry so that he would not concentrate on more obvious applications of the force field generator. Has it occurred to you that the field could make an excellent instrument of defence in, for instance, the form of a city-sized dome?”

Garnett was no longer listening. He had become the matrix for a ferocious concentration of pain, nausea, exhaustion and, above all, the sheer psychological shock of being translated from his own physical and mental universe into another in which different players played a different game to strange rules. Worlds tilted crazily beneath his feet and spun away, stars became black orbs in a continuum of blinding light. Garnett was foundering, falling, but he hung desperately to the one unalterable fact which remained to him.

“The girl,” he whispered hoarsely. “You can change all the rest, but not that—now get down here or I start blasting the unit apart.”

Xoanon rose from his chair. “You haven’t yet learned …”

“Enough!” Garnett shouted desperately. “No more talk. If you want the unit—come for it!” He dragged his suit microphone free of its socket and pushed it away from him. It twinkled briefly in the shaft of light then floated up into the dimness, and when he looked back into the screen Xoanon’s chair was empty. As he lay waiting for the old man to appear in the doorway several dark, trembling globules escaped from his helmet and drifted away on his breath. Blood, he thought. The old bastard has to get here soon….

Shadow movements disturbed the light again, then Xoanon silently appeared, holding himself upright in the shifting air by gripping the edge of the doorway. Garnett stared at him over the sights of the automatic. He looked frail and helpless—but not as helpless as Janice had been.

“I haven’t finished talking, Mr. Garnett, you …’

“I’ve finished listening,” Garnett shouted. He tightened his finger on the trigger, but there was a new flurry of activity as the alien woman ducked under Xoanon’s arm. She straightened up with a strangely clumsy movement and launched herself towards Garnett.

“Get out of the way,” he warned frantically. “You’ll get yourself killed.”

The woman caught a vertical frame and pulled herself down in front of him, disregarding the pistol.

“Take it easy, Tony,” she said gently. “You’ve been neglecting your milk again, haven’t you?”

Garnett stared up at her face. It was the colourless face of an alien woman, but those eyes….

After a long time he said, “Janice.”

She nodded and Garnett felt himself slide over the edge of reality into darkness.

The woman cradled his head in thin brown arms with a kind of reverence. “You did love me,” she whispered. “You did!”

Though large by Earth standards, the spaceship was in fact a rather old and rather shabby commercial vessel, the equivalent of a tramp steamer. Nor did the fact that its main drive had not been activated for forty-five Earth years make the task of getting under way any easier. There were many unforeseen difficulties in preparing for the journey and after three days it was still far from ready.

Garnett opened his eyes and found himself wrapped in a soft, warm cocoon which was anchored to the wall of a green and silver room. There was the smell of hot soup and he realised he had not eaten for a long time. He raised his head and looked around.

She was there beside him—the woman who had looked at him with Janice’s eyes. He remembered vaguely that she had been there on earlier occasions when he had wakened and fallen back into the sleep on which his body was gorging itself. Then he had been able to accept the impossible, but how—how could it be?

“Awake at last,” she said quickly, nervously. “It must have been the smell of food. The way to a man’s heart…. What disgusting anatomical details some of these sayings conjure up—or is it just my mind?”

Garnett closed his eyes and smiled peacefully. He knew Janice Villiers when he heard her.

“Are you going to sleep again, Tony? Or am I too horrible to look at?”

He took her hand. “I’m not going to sleep, so stop asking questions and provide a few answers.”

“All right, all right—don’t let the fact that you’re bigger than I am now go to your head. I can only remember part of what Xoanon told me. He said the only way they could control somebody down there was for one of them to have his own identity temporarily erased so that the new patterns could be impressed on his brain. Xoanon called it becoming a living analogue, whatever that means. He said a person they were controlling existed in two bodies at once, one up here and one down there. If anything happened to the body on Earth the identity was preserved up here—it’s a bit like astral bodies, isn’t it?”

“That means you too were under control?”

Janice shook her head. “I wasn’t—not until they discovered their mistake when they tried to kill you, then they had to act quickly. One of their women voluntarily died for me, Tony. Or, at least, her identity is in indefinitely prolonged storage—but she still had to go through it. Her name was Temnare. I’ve learned something from her.”

Garnett thought in silence. “I wasn’t under control though. If the meteorite had killed me, that would have been the end.”

“I know. Xoanon wasn’t: happy about it, but the population of the ship has grown to over three hundred and all of them will die eventually unless they get it back to their own world. The vitamin shortages caused by synthetic food are already chronic—look at my new hair! What would you do in a case where the life of one stranger was weighed against the lives of three hundred friends?”

“Well, if you put it like that…. Whose side are you on anyway?”

“I’m on their side. I’m one of them now. I can’t go back to Earth with you, Tony.”

He had known it was coming, and the decision was strangely easy. “I’m not going back to Earth either. I’m finished building aeroplanes and, from what the doctors told me, a low-gravity world is just what I need. Besides, all this hasn’t really changed anything so far as I am concerned. You might as well get ready to laugh—but I …’ He hesitated.

Janice smiled. “Go ahead and say it, Tony—some things have changed.”