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The Ninth Science Fiction MEGAPACK™: Dave Dryfoos is copyright © 2014 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

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The MEGAPACK™ ebook series name is a trademark of Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

A NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dave Dryfoos (1915-2003) is hardly a household word among science fiction readers anymore, but in the early to mid 1950s, he produced a steady stream of frothy SF stories for the likes of Galaxy Science Fiction, Fantastic Adventures, Startling Stories, and others. This volume assembles 19 of his classic tales.

Enjoy!

—John Betancourt

Publisher, Wildside Press LLC

www.wildsidepress.com

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Over the last few years, our MEGAPACK™ ebook series has grown to be our most popular endeavor. (Maybe it helps that we sometimes offer them as premiums to our mailing list!) One question we keep getting asked is, “Who’s the editor?”

The MEGAPACK™ ebook series (except where specifically credited) are a group effort. Everyone at Wildside works on them. This includes John Betancourt (me), Carla Coupe, Steve Coupe, Shawn Garrett, Helen McGee, Bonner Menking, Colin Azariah-Kribbs, A.E. Warren, and many of Wildside’s authors…who often suggest stories to include (and not just their own!)

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SOME LIKE IT COLD

This Dyt was a likeable kid, see. I didn’t want to carry out no sentence of banishment on him. You take a guy to the Outer Edges, and sooner or later he goes over—and out of existence.

So it was tough, because he’d broken the law all right, as far as I could tell. Harming Rational Critters—that’s Section 509.1. Banishment is the penalty. And I was the cop would have to enforce it, if the Judge said to.

Dyt’s Old Man was the one got him into this mess. Claimed there was a possibility of life—rational life—in some of the Visual Systems.

I guess you know that a Visual System is a bunch of stars that gives off light-waves—rays like our Sun’s radioshine, only longer. It don’t sound very reasonable there’d be rational life in a light-system, so it’s no wonder Dyt’s Old Man got hooted at. I mean, look, they said in court that the wave-length of a star’s radiation is more or less related to its temperature. So if a star gives off mostly visible light, instead of microwaves like our Sun does, you’d think it’d be all wrong for life.

Even if there was life of some kind or other, folks said it couldn’t be rational. Matter itself must be different in that kind of a System. Time would be different. So any life down there must be awfully different from us, they said. And if it differs from us, how could it be rational? People shouted the Old Man down.

But this kid Dyt wasn’t going to stand for his Old Man being a laughing-stock, so he went after the facts.

His father wasn’t anxious for him to go, but finally doped out the most likely coordinates, and sent him off. Dyt went by adaptation—became a comet, like.

So all right, he gets there to this planet his father told him to look for. It was so small he almost cracked into it—denser than anything he’d ever imagined. And when he got there, he didn’t know what he was looking for.

He was a kid, you understand. Impetuous.

There was a visual star by way of Sun, all right, just like the Old Man told him. It was small, and rotating fast.

Around it was something under a dozen planets, some with satellites going around them, and there was a mess of smaller stuff, too.

And it was all dominated by visual light. You can’t imagine what that does—I can’t, anyhow. Time, for instance. Why, if you lived on this planet he visited—they call it Earth—every single time your little planet rolled over, it would be a day. And every time your little planet ran around its star, that would count for a year.

This Dyt was just a kid, like I said. But on our cosmic time-scale, where it’s a year every time our Sun goes once around the Galactic Center, why, every one of our years is a couple hundred million times as long as one of Earth’s, so Dyt was maybe as old as the planet itself.

Now, how would you make contact with the men of a planet that much different from what we’re used to? I sure wouldn’t know. And neither did Dyt.

Compared to that unbelievably dense planet he was just a soft cloud, so he kind of enveloped it and rested in its gravitational field.

He was looking, he told me, for men. I asked him once, I said, “Dyt, if we’re men, and those people are so different from us, how come they’re men, too?”

“Why,” he said, “it’s just a matter of word-play. Whatever kind of rational being exists anywhere is a man. It’s rationality makes the man, and not the size or the color of him, or anything.”

Well, that sounds all right too—till you think about it.

What it boils down to is, that he was looking for men without knowing what in the world they’d be like.

By adaptation he got organized to be light-sensitive instead of radio-sensitive, and he watched, and there were some unbelievable sorts of life down there all right, but nothing you’d call very fancy.

He looked for artifacts, he told me. That’s his word, naturally—all these fancy scientific words are his, and if it sounds to you like I don’t understand them, why, don’t worry, pal—your hearing’s o.k.

But of course Dyt was looking for things like his Old Man’s visual telescopes and radio receivers and computers and such, or buildings that might house them, or something like that. The best he could make out, though, was some weak-looking critters that created artificial light and heat by oxidizing bits of their vegetation. (Those are some of Dyt’s words, right there.)

Anyhow, some of those critters would kind of keep a favorite stone to pound with, too, instead of getting a new one every time they wanted to pound. But you don’t have to be very smart to do that.

Main thing that discouraged Dyt though, was the ice. You’ll have to take his word for this, because we don’t have none I could show you, but there’s a substance they call water, and it flows and is gathered into what they call oceans, but whenever it gets cold it turns into a solid they call ice. And when heated, it can be a vapor.

So all right. Now, that star this planet Earth went around, it gave off a lot of heat and light. And Dyt, he came between the planet and its star, so he thought maybe he’d have a cooling effect on the planet.

But he didn’t. He’s positive, he says, that he kind of held the heat in and that the planet got warmer under him than if he hadn’t of been there.

But though he felt it get warmer, and was positive it did, that darned planet Earth acted just like it had got colder. Big ice-sheets that had capped the poles began spreading out under him till they covered a good deal of the land, and locked up so much water that the sea was shrunk. That’s what Dyt told me!

Right away he figures a thing like that is contrary to reason, so some sort of rational creature must be doing it. I mean, it wouldn’t have happened by itself, like.

But he couldn’t tell what caused it. And he had to find out, because if he didn’t get some real proof there were men on this planet, his father would be made to look like a fool. So Dyt wasn’t satisfied with just guessing.

To see if he himself caused the ice, he visited other planets of that System.

First he went to the one nearest its star; He found out this one always faced its Sun, so a day was as long as a year. And there was no ice.

Then he went back to Earth, and the ice that had shrunk while he was gone began to spread again. He couldn’t figure it out. He was sure that he raised the surface temperature, instead of lowering it when he came between Earth and its Sun, so he supposed somebody must be trying to signal him, or something.

This was the proof he’d gone after, and it made him very happy for his Old Man’s sake. But it needed more checking.

He went to the planet that travels next to Earth on the Sun side, and he didn’t form any ice there. He went back to Earth, and sure enough, the ice began to grow a third time.

But to make sure men were causing that, he went on to another planet—the one that goes next to Earth on the side away from the Sun.

He saw just what he didn’t want to see. Ice formed—not nearly so much of it, but some.

And there wasn’t any rational life there! Dyt was sure of it. All he could make out by way of living things was some primitive vegetation, he said.

Besides, if there’d been men on each of those two planets—Earth and this other one I’m talking about—and if both sets of men were making the ice as a signal, they’d have to be in communication with each other some way. And there weren’t enough artifacts for that. So the ice didn’t prove anything after all.

You can guess how he felt. All his hopes were going glimmering. He went back to Earth to see if there wasn’t something he’d overlooked.

And there was. I mean, maybe he hadn’t overlooked it, if it had kind of developed while he was away; but anyhow, there were men on the planet, now.

Tiny, of course. And so funny-looking that I can’t picture them. But they had stone tools, and containers woven out of their vegetation, and vehicles made of vegetation that would support a man or two on the water. He could tell these were men—and rational, too.

But they didn’t like the cold worth a hoot. No sir! They did everything they could to cover themselves with animal-skins and take shelter in the rocks and make this artificial heat I told you about. And of course Dyt’s being there made the ice spread out a fourth time.

He’d harmed them, he figured. He’d be banished for hurting rational creatures. Unless he said his Old Man was a dope and there wasn’t any rational life on Earth.

He could have gotten away with that. Easy. It was what lots of people wanted to believe. The reason his Old Man’s enemies made such a fuss in the first place was, they wanted to feel our Radio-Systems are something special—and that we are, too, by being rational.

If even the Visual Systems support rational life, then we’re a lot more ordinary than some folks I could name would like to think, see? And this kid Dyt could have gone along with them.

He wasn’t that kind of a guy, though. That’s why I’m telling you the story.

He still wanted to prove his Old Man was right, see. So he came back here and confessed that he’d harmed the men his father had correctly said would be on Earth.

He was bound over for trial.

Maybe, though, he secretly hoped to get off. He was sure he’d caused the ice some way, because it came when he came and went when he went, but he didn’t know how that worked. So maybe he figured they’d never pin anything on him.

If so, he was disappointed. Some scientific rival of his Old Man, some guy who liked to insist there couldn’t be any life in a Visual System, managed to prove that Dyt had created the ice.

What they called a hot-house-effect. I was there in Court when it came out, because the kid was under guard and the guard was me. Head guard, that is—naturally, I didn’t do the actual work, just gave the orders.

Well, anyhow, this old coot came up with a string of math that proved Dyt had increased the Earth’s temperature by reflecting the Sun’s heat back to Earth so it got warmer, and that made it colder.

Sure! The hotter it got, the more water was evaporated, and the more was evaporated, the more fell—they used words like rain, and snow—and pretty soon more was falling than was evaporating, so there were these ice-sheets.

If I’d of been the judge I’d have throwed the case out right then, because even if I’m no scientist I know it don’t get colder just because it gets hotter, but the kid, he had to stand and take it because everybody believed that stuff.

Still, the Court gave him a chance to deny there was any rational life influenced by this hot-cold. Instead, he told them he was sure his Old Man was right, and these more or less miserable inhabitants of Earth were rational men.

Then the Old Man stood up in court and he said, “My son has told you how different time is on Earth from what we experience. Why not delay sentencing, therefore, till we see what develops? In a month or two, those Earthmen might advance their culture enough to communicate with us, and then we can be sure of Dyt’s innocence or guilt. As it is now, all the evidence is circumstantial.”

But the Court rapped for order and said, “Your son’s confession, my friend, is not circumstantial. I’ll give you exactly twenty-four hours to develop any new evidence you may find, and if there’s none, I’ll pass sentence.”

Now, that Judge wasn’t being as tough as he tried to sound, because twenty-four of our hours is a lot of time on Earth. Of course, he didn’t want to give the other side a chance to say he was being soft. But he must have liked the way this kid Dyt stood up for his Old Man—I sure did.

Now, though, it was the Old Man’s turn to stand up for the kid, and I could see he didn’t know what to do. Just for ducks he went up to the Observatory.

He stayed there all night. Of course he couldn’t see Earth by any telescope whatever, so he focused the astronomical radio-receiver there, just as a forlorn hope.

I’d gone along by Court Order to kind of snoop on what he might try to do. And I found out quick he wasn’t pulling any fast ones.

He was just trying to prove himself wrong, see. Trying to prove that this Earth wasn’t a part of a Visual System at all. If it was a Radio-System, like ours, then everything the kid had said would have been tossed out the window as so much hokum gotten up to make his Old Man look good.

This Old Man—his name was Dyt, too, and that’s why I don’t use it much—this Old Man must have been quite a guy, in his way. Because he was trying to undermine his own life’s work to help out the kid.

The two of them—kind of nice, you know. I mean, a cop like me sees so many families that don’t do nothing but battle all the time…

Well, I don’t want to mention names, and haven’t, but these guys that had hooted at the Old Man, why, they’d come around to the Observatory to have a real good laugh, see, and they were there when the Old Man turned around and said, “Say, they’ve invented artificial radio on Earth—I can pick up their signal!”

Right away he could have bitten off his tongue. This was artificial radio, see—it couldn’t exist in a natural Radio-System. And if it was invented, the inventors were rational men. Dyt was practically over the edge already.

I guess the Old Man would have been too much the scientist to have kept it quiet, anyhow. You never know, though.

But with those other guys there, all scientists themselves and hot to show him up, the Old Man didn’t have a chance. Right away they doped out a hookup to pipe those radio-signals through a translating computer and prove they were artificial.

They were, too. The computer could tell the difference between language and music and showed they were both coming in. After an hour or two it even began to learn the languages. This was a little tough, I understand, because time on Earth went by so fast that the pronunciations changed every couple of minutes and that made the basis of the computer’s learning kind of shift, as they say.

But it got the dope. Found out these people were very inventive. They hadn’t the power of adaptation that we do, but they’d developed machines to help them, and had even left their Earth and gone to its satellite in some kind of a complicated vehicle they’d invented to do what we do naturally.

They’d studied physics, just like Dyt and his Old Man, and had learned how to make atomic power. Also bombs, to destroy each other with. They kept boasting about it to each other, so we got the whole story through the computer.

It seems there were two sides. Each wanted to destroy the other, so they both kept on making bombs as fast as ever they could. And in the process, discharged a lot of exhaust gases into their atmosphere.

Yup, you’ve guessed it. Those gases floating around and reflecting radiation were just like Dyt had been. That same hot-cold effect was beginning to be noticeable down there.

But each side was afraid to quit making bombs.

Neither side would admit to being afraid, of course. Instead, each boasted.

One side had developed a lot of harbors, or something—valuable properties, anyhow, right along the edges of those bodies of water called oceans. And if the ocean-level dropped, that would give the opposition an advantage, they claimed, because they didn’t have so many harbors and wouldn’t be so disrupted.

In reply, though, the harbor-people pointed out that their enemies were located much closer to the pole, so if the ice spread, it would engulf them, first.

You can judge the amount of fear each side had, by the amount of fear it tried to cause in the other. But neither would stop discharging the gases, so it kept getting hotter, which meant it would get colder, and ice was already starting when the Old Man switched off. I figured that was a gesture of despair.

But he got up in court next day, the Old Man did, and he made a speech that put a different light on things. I remember every word.

“As my learned colleagues will verify,” he told the Judge, pointing at a whole, sour-looking row of his worst enemies, “as my learned colleagues will verify, these inhabitants of the planet Earth—and we may as well call them men—these brothers of ours in the Visual System, have invented a whole technology, much more magnificent than any we’ve previously discovered.

“That, of course, proves the Earthmen are rational. Yet, being rational, these Earthmen have, as my learned colleagues will also verify, embarked on a course of conduct that will bring—probably, by now, has brought—additional ice-sheets to their planet, ice-sheets like those my son Dyt is accused of ‘wrongfully, willfully, and/or negligently causing, creating, and/or encouraging,’ as the complaint says.

“But when rational men create an ice-sheet, they must like it! My son, in creating the earlier ice-sheets, can thus have done them no injury. I ask that the case be dismissed!”

Brother! The Judge had to rap for five minutes before his dismissal ruling could be heard, we hollered so.

But the Old Man’s enemies weren’t quieted. No, sir. They’re powerful people, and I don’t want to mention names, but they haven’t given up their attack.

They’ve gone right back to the beginning. They’re still, to this very day, trying to make out that Dyt’s Old Man is a bum. Claim those Earthmen, because they’re so plainly making things tough for themselves, aren’t rational at all! Stubborn, aren’t they?

TREE, SPARE THAT WOODMAN

Stiff with shock, Naomi Heckscher stood just inside the door to Cappy’s one-room cabin, where she’d happened to be when her husband discovered the old man’s body.

Her nearest neighbor—old Cappy—dead. After all his wire-pulling to get into the First Group, and his slaving to make a farm on this alien planet, dead in bed!

Naomi’s mind circled frantically, contrasting her happy anticipations with this shocking actuality. She’d come to call on a friend, she reminded herself, a beloved friend—round, white-haired, rosy-cheeked; lonely because he’d recently become a widower. To her little boy, Cappy was a combination Grandpa and Santa Claus; to herself, a sort of newly met Old Beau.

Her mouth had been set for a sip of his home brew, her eyes had pictured the delight he’d take in and give to her little boy.

She’d walked over with son and husband, expecting nothing more shocking than an ostentatiously stolen kiss. She’d found a corpse. And to have let Cappy die alone, in this strange world…

She and Ted could at least have been with him, if they’d known.

But they’d been laughing and singing in their own cabin only a mile away, celebrating Richard’s fifth birthday. She’d been annoyed when Cappy failed to show up with the present he’d promised Richard. Annoyed—while the old man pulled a blanket over his head, turned his round face to the wall, and died.

Watching compassionately, Naomi was suddenly struck by the matter-of-fact way Ted examined the body. Ted wasn’t surprised.

“Why did you tell Richard to stay outside, just now?” she demanded. “How did you know what we’d find here? And why didn’t you tell me, so I could keep Richard at home?”

She saw Ted start, scalded by the splash of her self-directed anger, saw him try to convert his wince into a shrug.

“You insisted on coming,” he reminded her gently. “I couldn’t have kept you home without—without saying too much, worrying you—with the Earth-ship still a year away. Besides, I didn’t know for sure, till we saw the tree-things around the cabin.”

The tree-things. The trees-that-were-not. Gnarled blue trunks, half-hidden by yellow leaf-needles stretching twenty feet into the sky. Something like the hoary mountain hemlocks she and Ted had been forever photographing on their Sierra honeymoon, seven life-long years ago.

Three of those tree-things had swayed over Cappy’s spring for a far longer time than Man had occupied this dreadful planet. Until just now…

The three of them had topped the rise that hid Cappy’s farm from their own. Richard was running ahead like a happily inquisitive puppy. Suddenly he’d stopped, pointing with a finger she distinctly recalled as needing thorough soapy scrubbing.

“Look, Mommie!” he’d said. “Cappy’s trees have moved. They’re around the cabin, now.”

He’d been interested, not surprised. In the past year, Mazda had become Richard’s home; only Earth could surprise him.

But, Ted, come to think of it, had seemed withdrawn, his face a careful blank. And she?

“Very pretty,” she’d said, and stuffed the tag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. “Don’t run too far ahead, dear.”

But now she had to know what Ted knew.

“Tell me!” she said.

“These tree-things—”

“There’ve been other deaths! How many?”

“Sixteen. But I didn’t want to tell you. Orders were to leave women and children home when we had that last Meeting, remember.”

“What did they say at the Meeting? Out with it, Ted!”

“That—that the tree-things think!”

“But that’s ridiculous!”

“Well, unfortunately, no. Look, I’m not trying to tell you that terrestrial trees think, too, nor even that they have a nervous system. They don’t. But—well, on Earth, if you’ve ever touched a lighted match to the leaf of a sensitive plant like the mimosa, say—and I have—you’ve been struck by the speed with which other leaves close up and droop. I mean, sure, we know that the leaves droop because certain cells exude water and nearby leaves feel the heat of the match. But the others don’t, yet they droop, too. Nobody knows how it works…”

“But that’s just defensive!”

“Sure. But that’s just on Earth!”

“All right, dear. I won’t argue any more. But I still don’t understand. Go on about the Meeting.”

“Well, they said these tree-things both create and respond to the patterned electrical impulses of the mind. It’s something like the way a doctor creates fantasies by applying a mild electric current to the right places on a patient’s brain. In the year we’ve been here, the trees—or some of them—have learned to read from and transmit to our minds. The range, they say, is around fifty feet. But you have to be receptive—”

“Receptive?”

“Fearful. That’s the condition. So I didn’t want to tell you because you must not let yourself become afraid, Naomi. We’re clearing trees from the land, in certain areas. And it’s their planet, after all. Fear is their weapon and fear can kill!”

“You still—all you men—should have let us women know! What do you think we are? Besides, I don’t really believe you. How can fear kill?”

“Haven’t you ever heard of a savage who gets in bad with his witch-doctor and is killed by magic? The savage is convinced, having seen or heard of other cases, that he can be killed. The witch-doctor sees to it he’s told he will be killed. And sometimes the savage actually dies—”

“From poison, I’ve always thought.”

“The poison of fear. The physical changes that accompany fear, magnified beyond belief by belief itself.”

“But how in the world could all this have affected Cappy? He wasn’t a savage. And he was elderly, Ted. A bad heart, maybe. A stroke. Anything.”

“He passed his pre-flight physical only a year ago. And—well, he lived all alone. He was careful not to let you see it, but I know he worried about these three trees on his place. And I know he got back from the Meeting in a worried state of mind. Then, obviously, the trees moved—grouped themselves around his cabin within easy range. But don’t be afraid of them, Naomi. So long as you’re not, they can’t hurt you. They’re not bothering us now.”

“No. But where’s Richard?”

Naomi’s eyes swept past Ted, encompassing the cabin. No Richard! He’d been left outside…

Glass tinkled and crashed as she flung back the cabin door. “Richard! Richard!”

Her child was not in sight. Nor within earshot, it seemed.

“Richard Heckscher! Where are you?” Sanity returned with the conventional primness. And it brought her answer.

“Here I am, Mommie! Look-at!”

He was in a tree! He was fifteen feet off the ground, high in the branches of a tree-thing, swaying—

For an instant, dread flowed through Naomi as if in her bloodstream and something was cutting off her breath. Then, as the hands over mouth and throat withdrew, she saw they were Ted’s. She let him drag her into the cabin and close the broken door.

“Better not scare Richard,” he said quietly, shoving her gently into a chair. “He might fall.”

Dumbly she caught her breath, waiting for the bawling out she’d earned.

But Ted said, “Richard keeps us safe. So long as we fear for him, and not ourselves—”

That was easy to do. Outside, she heard a piping call: “Look at me now, Mommie!”

“Showing off!” she gasped. In a flashing vision, Richard was half boy, half vulture, flapping to the ground with a broken wing.

“Here,” said Ted, picking up a notebook that had been on the table. “Here’s Cappy’s present. A homemade picture book. Bait.”

“Let me use it!” she said. “Richard may have seen I was scared just now.”

Outside again, under the tree, she called, “Here’s Cappy’s present, Richard. He’s gone away and left it for you.”

Would he notice how her voice had gone up half an octave, become flat and shrill?

“I’m coming down,” Richard said. “Let me down, tree.”

He seemed to be struggling. The branches were cagelike. He was caught!

Naomi’s struggle was with her voice. “How did you ever get up there?” she called.

“The tree let me up, Mommie,” Richard explained solemnly, “but he won’t let me down!” He whimpered a little.

He must not become frightened! “You tell that tree you’ve got to come right down this instant!” she ordered.

She leaned against the cabin for support. Ted came out and slipped his arm around her.

“Break off a few leaves, Richard,” he suggested. “That’ll show your tree who’s boss!”

Standing close against her husband, Naomi tried to stop shaking. But she lacked firm support, for Ted shook, too.

His advice to Richard was sound, though. What had been a trap became, through grudging movement of the branches, a ladder. Richard climbed down, scolding at the tree like an angry squirrel.

* * * *

Naomi thought she’d succeeded in shutting her mind. But when her little boy slid down the final bit of trunk and came for his present, Naomi broke. Like a startled animal, she thrust the book into his hands, picked him up and ran. Her mind was a jelly, red and quaking.

She stopped momentarily after running fifty yards. “Burn the trees!” she screamed over her shoulder. “Burn the cabin! Burn it all!” She ran on, Ted’s answering shouts beyond her comprehension.

Fatigue halted her. At the top of the rise between Cappy’s farm and their own, pain and dizziness began flowing over her in waves. She set Richard down on the mauve soil and collapsed beside him.

When she sat up, Richard squatted just out of reach, watching curiously. She made an effort at casualness: “Let’s see what Daddy’s doing back there.”

“He’s doing just what you said to, Mommie!” Richard answered indignantly.

Her men were standing together, Naomi realized. She laughed. After a moment, Richard joined her. Then he looked for his book, found it a few paces away, and brought it to her.

“Read to me, Mommie.”

“At home,” she said.

Activity at Cappy’s interested her now. Wisps of smoke were licking around the trees. A tongue of flame lapped at one while she watched. Branches writhed. The trees were too slow-moving to escape…

But where was Ted? What had she exposed him to, with her hysterical orders? She held her breath till he moved within sight, standing quietly by a pile of salvaged tools. Behind him the cabin began to smoke.

Ted wasn’t afraid, then. He understood what he faced. And Richard wasn’t afraid, either, because he didn’t understand.

But she? Surreptitiously Naomi pinched her hip till it felt black and blue. That was for being such a fool. She must not be afraid!

“Daddy seems to be staying there,” she said. “Let’s wait for him at home, Richard.”

“Are you going to make Daddy burn our tree?”

She jumped as if stung. Then, consciously womanlike, she sought relief in talk.

“What do you think we should do, dear?”

“Oh, I like the tree, Mommie. It’s cool under there. And the tree plays with me.”

“How, Richard?”

“If I’m pilot, he’s navigator. Or ship, maybe. But he’s so dumb, Mommie! I always have to tell him everything. Doesn’t know what a fairy is, or Goldilocks, or anything!”

He clutched his book affectionately, rubbing his face on it. “Hurry up, Mommie. It’ll be bedtime before you ever read to me!”

She touched his head briefly. “You can look at the book while I fix your supper.”

* * * *

But to explain Cappy’s pictures—crudely crayoned cartoons, really—she had to fill in the story they illustrated. She told it while Richard ate: how the intrepid Spaceman gallantly used his ray gun against the villainous Martians to aid the green-haired Princess. Richard spooned up the thrills with his mush, gazing fascinated at Cappy’s colorful and fantastic pictures, propped before him on the table. Had Ted been home, the scene might almost have been blissful.

It might have been…if their own tree hadn’t reminded her of Cappy’s. Still, she’d almost managed to stuff her fear back into that mental pigeon-hole before their own tree. It was unbelievable, but she’d been glancing out the window every few minutes, so she saw it start. Their own tree began to walk.

Down the hill it came—right there!—framed in the window behind Richard’s head, moving slowly but inexorably on a root system that writhed along the surface. Like some ancient sculpture of Serpents Supporting the Tree of Life. Except that it brought death…

“Are you sick, Mommie?”

No, not sick. Just something the matter with her throat, preventing a quick answer, leaving no way to keep Richard from turning to look out the window.

“I think our tree is coming to play with me, Mommie.”

No, no! Not Richard!

“Remember how you used to say that about Cappy? When he was really coming to see your daddy?”

“But Daddy isn’t home!”

“He’ll get here, dear. Now eat your supper.”

A lot to ask of an excited little boy. And the tree was his friend, it seemed. Cappy’s tree had even followed the child’s orders. Richard might intercede—

No! Expose him to such danger? How could she think of it?

“Had enough to eat, dear? Wash your hands and face at the pump, and you can stay out and play till Daddy gets home. I—I want——I may have to see your friend, the tree, by myself…”

“But you haven’t finished my story!”

“I will when Daddy gets home. And if I’m not here, you tell Daddy to do it.”

“Where are you going, Mommie?”

“I might see Cappy, dear. Now go and wash, please!”

“Sure, Mommie. Don’t cry.”

Accept his kiss, even if it is from a mouth rimmed with supper. And don’t rub it off till he’s gone out, you damned fool. You frightened fool. You shaking, sweating, terror-stricken fool.

Who’s he going to kiss when you’re not here?

The tree has stopped. Our little tree is having its supper. How nice. Sucking sustenance direct from soil with aid of sun and air in true plant fashion—but exhausting our mineral resources.

(How wise of Ted to make you go to those lectures! You wouldn’t want to die in ignorance, would you?)

The lecture—come on, let’s go back to the lecture! Let’s free our soil from every tree or we’ll not hold the joint in fee. No, not joint. A vulgarism, teacher would say. Methinks the times are out of joint. Aroint thee, tree!

Now a pinch. Pinch yourself hard in the same old place so it’ll hurt real bad. Then straighten your face and go stick your head out the window. Your son is talking—your son, your sun.

Can your son be eclipsed by a tree? A matter of special spatial relationships, and the space is shrinking, friend. The tree is only a few hundred feet from the house. It has finished its little supper and is now running around. Like Richard. With Richard! Congenial, what?

Smile, stupid. Your son speaks. Answer him.

“What, dear?”

“I see Daddy! He just came over the hill. He’s running! Can I go meet him, Mommie?”

“No, dear. It’s too far.”

Too far. Far too far.

“Did you say something to me, Richard?”

“No. I was talking to the tree. I’m the Spaceman and he’s the Martian. But he doesn’t want to be the Martian!”

Richard plays. Let us play. Let us play.

You’re close enough to get into the game, surely. A hundred and fifty feet, maybe. Effective range, fifty feet. Rate of motion? Projected time-interval? Depends on which system you observe it from. Richard has a system.

“He doesn’t want to play, Mommie. He wants to see you!”

“You tell that tree your Mommie never sees strangers when Daddy isn’t home!”

“I’ll make him wait!”

Stoutly your pot-bellied little protector prevents his protective mother from going to pot.

“If he won’t play, I’ll use my ray gun on him!”

Obviously, the tree won’t play. Watch your son lift empty hands, arm himself with a weapon yet to be invented, and open fire on the advancing foe.

“Aa-aa-aa!”

So that’s how a ray gun sounds!

“You’re dead, tree! You’re dead! Now you can’t play with me any more. You’re dead!”

* * * *

Seeing it happen, then, watching the tree accept the little boy’s fantasy as fact, Naomi wondered why she’d never thought of that herself.

So the tree was a treacherous medicine-man, was it? A true-believing witch-doctor? And who could be more susceptible to the poisoning of fear than a witch-doctor who has made fear work—and believes it’s being used against him?

It was all over. She and the tree bit the dust together. But the tree was dead, and Naomi merely fainting, and Ted would soon be home…

BLUNDER ENLIGHTENING

Trudging homeward over the rolling prairie of planet Altair 3, bright Altair itself sinking swiftly behind him, his shadow lengthening in front, Sam Sarno let his head hang, his shoulders sag, his feet stumble heedlessly among the mossy tussocks. He was tall, blond, husky, and rugged-looking; yet he walked like an old man. He knew it—and for the moment didn’t care.

He’d spent the day ranging through a native garden now out of sight to the rear, clambering up and down a high granite cliff that overhung the garden. The exertion hadn’t exhausted him—he was young and athletic.

The planet Altair 3 was strange and virgin to human beings. Unknown, unrecognizable dangers might be hiding behind the nearest bush, lurking under the ground, infesting every breath of air. Sam Sarno had been especially selected and trained for duty in such places, was mentally and temperamentally prepared for the strain. Beyond routine precautions drilled into him till they were second nature, he took no heed of hazards.

It was defeat that bowed his shoulders—the complete, utter, incomprehensible failure that his excursion had been. He felt weighted down by shame, crushed under the need to admit once again that he’d gotten exactly nowhere in his efforts to contact the natives.

He didn’t know what to tell Sally, his wife; he couldn’t understand why he’d failed. The situation was clear-cut; the prescribed methods of dealing with it, infallible. The rock-paintings on the cliff behind him proved the existence of a culture here, and Sam had been trained to make swift, smooth contact with cultured non-terrestrials.

Those paintings were really something, Sam admitted to himself. Seen from the ship that had brought him, they’d seemed grander than any works of graphic art on Earth; and a closer view confirmed their merit. Huge, they were; colorful, abstract, harmonious—obviously the creations of intelligent beings.

Because it is comparatively easy to see through an atmosphere from the top down he’d been able to observe the painters at work, even while still aboard ship. They were odd-looking creatures: small, clingy, grotesque—but cultured, just the same.

It was then that he and Sally had been given the job of contacting these painters; marooned here to live with them for six months; ordered to make an anthropological study of their culture, before announcement of the planet’s discovery led to an influx of traders who’d bring in new products and methods, missionaries who’d bring new ideas.

Sam remembered how honored he and Sally had felt when they got their assignment. It was their first major one; and, as he had to admit, easy as such jobs go—especially since neither weapons nor factories to make them had been seen from the ship.

That is—it should have been easy. Altair 3 was in many ways comparable to Earth. Size, mass, radiation received, length of day, chemical composition—all were similar. The Universe having been created all at one time, evolutionary forces must have operated on Altair 3 about as long as on Earth—should have gone about as far. By rights, a terrestrial man should have much in common with these natives; contact ought to have been quickly established.

But it hadn’t been. Today, as on all previous days, the natives had completely ignored him: Sam couldn’t see why.

Of course, the painters, now—and there’d been three of them again today, at work on widely-separated ledges along the granite escarpment—the painters might possibly have resented his intrusion while they labored. They’d been busy enough, clinging there high above the ground, hanging on with all four feet, spreading with the fingers of both hands the pigments held in gourds suspended from prehensile tails.

They looked like unintelligent bugs, with their oily, lozenge-shaped exoskeletal bodies, only three feet long. Still, they were artists, beyond any doubt. They might be not only intelligent, but temperamental; maybe that was why they’d seemed to look right through him after he’d risked his neck climbing the cliff to get near.

They had eyes, though; the nature of their paintings made it clear that they saw the same things Sam did. And anyway there was no such excuse for that other native—the one who’d been standing in the garden below the cliff. Just standing around, it had been, rubbing its three-thumbed, five-fingered hands together, not doing a thing. Yet that one had ignored him, too.

The whole mess was completely frustrating. Sam almost wished the natives had been hostile, or thievish, or frightened: then he’d have known what to do. But never, on any of the sixteen extra-solar planets previously visited, had terrestrial man been simply ignored; it was unbelievable. And Sam would be blamed for it.

No use dwelling on that, though: no use letting Sally see how dejected he felt. Topping the last rise, Sam consciously squared his shoulders, even broke into a shambling trot for the last hundred yards to his prefabricated shack.

Sally waited at the door, dark hair carefully brushed, disposable dress new, full lips brightly tinted. These past few months she’d seemed to grow even prettier than she’d been before.

But her eyes were heavy. Sam often felt—and often said—that his wife’s blue eyes were so big, anybody could see through them and tell what she was thinking. Right now, he was sure, she shared his sense of failure.

He kissed her without a word. Then he admitted, “No luck, hon… Anything new here?”

“Ants,” she said, closing the door behind him. “Not real ones, but something like. I followed their trail back to the nest. It was like an anthill, more or less. Social. Cooperative. They seem to like sweets and dislike water. Anyhow, I swept them out and set the table-legs in water filled cans.”

“Lifted the table? In your condition?”

“Exercise is good for expectant mothers,” Sally said, somewhat mockingly. “I can show you where it says in the book.”

Suddenly she cast herself heavily to the cot. “But,” she said. “But, Sam—worry isn’t good for me…”

“No.” Sam walked up and down, accurately gauging his stride to the tiny room. “No, worry isn’t good, and you know that; so not only do you worry, but you worry about worrying. And I worry about your worrying about your worrying. Where does it get us?”

“No place,” Sally said flatly. “That’s why I’ve quit; I’m through worrying about our mission here, our careers, or anything else except our baby.”

Sam tried not to show how disturbed he felt. “That’s normal, dear,” he said. “They probably expected this would happen to you; that’s why they’re bringing the ship back in another four months. I’ll attend to everything, meanwhile—you can just take it easy.”

“No, Sam. You don’t know what it’s like, to be left alone all day. Suppose those ant-things had been poisonous?”

“But they weren’t! You’re borrowing trouble, Sal.”

“You mean you don’t care what happens to me?”

“Of course I care, damn it! That’s why I’m working so hard! You know perfectly well that the discovery of this planet will be announced before the ship comes back here. Traders and explorers will be here long before substitutes can be found for us. If we don’t do the job we were sent here to do, nobody will—and maybe you don’t think we won’t be fired for that! I’d be lucky to wind up in a dull, routine, underpaid rut as a terrestrial school-teacher, or something!”

“I don’t care! I don’t want to be left alone here ever again! And I can’t go walking all over the place, either!”

No, of course she couldn’t… And it was, Sam thought, normal for an expectant mother to make unexpected demands. Should he humor her till the storm blew over? Or put his foot down now? He tried a compromise—reasonableness.

“If we don’t make friends with the natives,” he said, keeping his voice low and earnest, “they may decide we’re enemies.”

“Maybe they already have,” Sally burst out; “maybe their ignoring tactics are just a blind, while they gather forces. Maybe—maybe if you knew what it’s like, puttering around here all alone every day, you’d stay home once in a while.”

She began to sob, and Sam tried to comfort her, sitting beside her on the cot, stroking and kissing her, murmuring reassurance into her pretty pink ear.

But tenderness was not enough. The flow of tears would not stop till after he found himself promising to stay home and let the natives go hang.

“And I mean it!” Sally insisted, sitting up and pushing damp hair out of her eyes. “Let them come to us, if they’re interested.”

“Sure, Sal. Whatever you say,” Sam answered. Anything to make her quit crying. Anything! “Tell you what,” he added. “I’ll build a fire outside and cook up a barbecue. How’d you like that, for a change?”

“Don’t go too far away after fuel,” Sally said dully.

He didn’t. He made a point of bustling into the shack every few minutes on some inconsequential errand, loudly whistling and singing as he trotted around.

But Sally was having none of his elaborate good cheer. She lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling, movingly pale and listless.

Sam could think of nothing to do but keep busy. Besides, the day’s activity had given him an appetite.

He started a fire, using a chopped-up crate as kindling, and threw on some dried-out local vegetation to make coals. From the cases of food, piled next to the shack for want of space within it, he dug out a tinned ham that had been saved for a holiday treat. Then, while the fire burned down, he concocted a spicy barbecue sauce and got the side dishes ready.

When finally prepared, dinner included soup made of local water and a dried mix; broiled dehydrated potatoes; ham, and the remains of a prepared-mix cake Sally’d made the day before. Sam found he’d forgotten the vegetables Sally needed, and shamefacedly made up for them by giving her an extra vitamin-pill.

Even without vegetables, the meal was a feast, compared to their usual fare; to top off the occasion, Sam had put decorative candles on their small folding table, and set the places nicely. But Sally ate only enough to be polite, and then, complaining of a headache, went right to bed.

Her apathy was infectious. Sam washed the utensils in a bucket at the nearby creek, sloppily, and dried them over the fire to kill any strange organism picked up in the washing. Chores finished, he didn’t know what to do with himself. The meal, he felt, had been as much of a failure as the rest of the day’s efforts.

For lack of anything better to do, he got out a flashlight, and in its brightness extracted a chocolate-flavored ration-bar from an opened case. Then, after unwrapping it, he found he had no appetite for chocolate, after all. He stuffed the bar uneaten into a pocket of his jacket and wandered aimlessly up and down in front of the shack, staring at the strange constellations overhead, and testing how far he could see along the moonless landscape under the faintly-glowing permanent aurora, so much brighter here than on Earth.

Back toward the granite cliff, whose top, a good mile off, showed dark and jagged above the plain, was a moving shape; a native. Sam had never before seen one at night, and watched closely to determine if it were approaching the house.

It wasn’t, he decided; it was circling the place. A sign of curiosity, he thought vaguely, and felt faint stirrings of hope. But soon the buglike figure disappeared, and Sam lost interest. He flung a few more sticks onto the fire, and groped his way to bed.

He fell asleep as soon as his ear nestled into the pillow. He awakened feeling he’d never slept at all.

Sally was shrieking at him. “Sam!” she cried, shaking his shoulder. “Sam! Get up! Sam! The house is burning!”

Dazedly climbing from bed, stumbling out the door in bare feet and pajama-bottom, Sam felt again that congealing sense of failure. Everything was going wrong—even the barbecue he’d staged to amuse Sally.

He discovered the fault wasn’t his, this time. The cooking fire was down to embers—it was the stack of crated supplies that burned so luridly and smokily. A trail of smoldering moss led from the barbecue pit to the pile of cased goods, and from there—he ran to see—went out fifty feet from the house. At the end of the singed trail lay a native, his oily surface ablaze, his body shriveling as it writhed.

The native made no sound, but his searing agony was plain to see. Sam dashed for the bucket, dumped the dishes from it, and raced to the creek. Three times he flung a bucketful of water over the native’s carapace before the flames were smothered. By then it was too late; the creature’s life had guttered out.

And the priceless supplies were going! The pile was afire along its outer border, as if the native had tried to scrape out the flames he bore on projecting cases.

And Sally? She was running around barefoot, carrying things from the threatened house.

“Get some clothes on!” Sam shouted. “And don’t lift anything heavy!”

He dug into the piled goods like a small insect boring through sand, carrying the innermost cases away from the shack’s wall where they’d been stacked. Then, with the hopelessly inadequate bucket, he wet down roof and walls, trying to keep them from burning, putting out the sparks that conspired to leave him homeless.

Time itself seemed to be caught up in the blaze. Sam never knew how often he rushed back and forth from house to creek, flinging water, carrying crates, filling the bucket, glancing occasionally at Sally, then rushing to the creek again for still more water.

Altair was half way between horizon and zenith before the last wisp of smoke had died down. The shack was intact, but its salvaged contents lay strewn over an acre of landscape. Sam was burned, bruised, blistered, and exhausted. And Sally was once more on the verge of hysteria.

“What do we do now?” she wailed.

He kissed her. “Well, that fire’s out,” he said, smiling wanly. “I guess the first thing we do is light another—in the stove.”

Sally made breakfast as if under opiates, while Sam washed, dressed, and hauled back to the shack a few of the things she’d just carried out. It was a dismal meal, eaten in silence. As soon as it was over, Sally got sick. Sam put her to bed, and spent the day trying to bring order out of the chaos that surrounded him.

Disposing of the corpse—simple enough, so far as the work of it went—gave him the most trouble. Sam buried his hopes with those charred remains. On Altair 3 as elsewhere, he decided gloomily, there must certainly be taboos concerning the dead. In the light of native customs that he’d so miserably failed to learn, he was very probably mishandling the body. And even if he weren’t, the natives most likely considered him a murderer…

As he re-piled crates, carried personal effects back into the shack, fixed lunch, cleaned, swept, and tried to make a few essential repairs, Sam kept looking over his shoulder. It was, ho told himself derisively, as if he had a nervous tic.

But he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t help wondering when the natives would descend upon him; to demand their comrade’s body and take revenge for his death.

They didn’t come all that day. When, having made a light supper and cleaned up after it, Sam felt free to crawl between the sheetless blankets on the cot, he had decided these bug-things must be trying to ignore death itself.

The thought gave him no pleasure. He’d promised Sally not to seek out the natives; he knew that if he did so, he might well be punished as a criminal. But, lying there in the darkness, Sam found himself face to face with a fact he’d been avoiding all day.

He absolutely must get hold of those creatures, now. He’d lost too much food in the fire, was no longer self-sufficient enough to get by without their help. Sally would starve if he continued to fail.

“But you promised!” she said at breakfast next morning. “Besides, they’ll probably kill you!”

“I don’t believe so,” he hedged. “I’ll bet they have no enemies of any kind, and don’t even know what an enemy is. We’ve never seen a single predator here, remember; there probably aren’t any. I suspect that all the local animals are vegetarians—all we’ve seen eating were. And with the native population as low as it seems to be, I doubt they have to compete for food, either. Most likely the lack of both enemies and competitors is what makes these painters ignore us—we’re just nothing for them to worry about.”

“They’re probably worried now,” Sally objected. “One of them died here, and the way he died makes me think he didn’t know what fire is. So they can’t be very far advanced—not worth investigating, Sam.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he argued. “They seem to be highly inflammable—on account of their oily surface, most likely. Man could experiment with fire because a minor mistake meant only a minor burn but maybe these creatures can’t touch fire without being burned to death.”

“They must be awfully stupid, then, because one of them did touch fire.”

“He was a painter, maybe. At least, he almost certainly appreciated form and color. Flame and coals are beautiful, and probably were unfamiliar to him. So he picked up a pretty bauble that was a hot coal—”

“You promised! You could at least try to find some local foodstuffs without wandering off after natives. They won’t help you. And if they never cook anything, they probably have a lot of foods we couldn’t eat.”

“All right,” Sam said resignedly. “I’ll do it your way. But I’ve got to get out and around. I’ll try to see what the local animals eat that looks possible for us, maybe find some berries I can experiment with…”

He pushed back his folding chair, anxious to get away before Sally pursued his plans to their ultimate implications, saw the hazards of his simple scheme.

On the one hand, he remembered that most things poisonous to terrestrial man were also poisonous to other terrestrial life-forms. Sprays and baits harmless to man and fatal to vermin, for instance, were few, and artificially developed. In theory, he might be able to eat what other animals ate.

But if this were a vegetarian world, as he suspected, then toxic secretions would have special survival-value for plants provided with them. There were probable plenty of poisonous plants here. Plenty! He’d have to be awfully careful…

“I don’t want you horsing around, Sal,” he said from the doorway. “I’ll do all the experimenting, understand? And from now on, I’ll fix my own meals—the remaining supplies are for you.”

“But that’s not fair!”

“Well, you’ve got more than just yourself to be fair to.”

“Oh, Sam!” She rose and clung to him. “Don’t be gone long, darling.”

“Oh, no,” he assured her. “I’m just out for a little walk.” And to prove it, he left without the belt holding his canteen and emergency rations.

He missed the weight around his hips. Passing the creek, he felt suddenly thirsty, yet hesitated to drink water that he’d never tasted undistilled. No use experimenting with it, he decided; the still was undamaged.

But thirst grew as he wandered on. He knew it was psychological—a trick of his vagrant mind. He put a pebble under his tongue.

Without conscious thought, he’d started in his usual direction, toward the garden and the cliff behind it. Carefully he observed the small animal-forms that crawled, wriggled, ran, and flew out from under his feet. None of them seemed to be eating at the moment.

Well, if he couldn’t eat what they ate, he could possibly eat some of them. American Indians, he remembered, had liked grasshoppers; he was himself fond of shrimp.

But if there were no predators here, it might be a mistake for him to act like one—to make himself feared. Not, of course, that the natives’ reactions would matter. He had no intention of getting in touch with them, Sam reminded himself.

Certainly not! He’d only chosen this particular direction to walk in because he knew the way. He was going to the garden as a matter of course, because its obviously artificial plantings might be crops. There wasn’t the slightest chance, Sam emphatically told himself, that he’d break his promise to Sally.

But when he got to the garden, Sam could clearly see, as he’d seen many times, before, that it wasn’t a farm; the several acres contained too wide a variety of plants. The place was, more like a horticultural museum than a food-growing area.

Whether the plants were of types selected for food or for ornamentation, he couldn’t tell. They were all sizes and shapes—lichens as big as pines, shrubs that looked like miniature hardwoods, flowering plants, and some that seemed downright ugly.

He looked among them for fruits and berries, handicapped by the fact he was not a biologist but a sociologist—remorseful because he’d never before searched out local food-resources. Painstaking effort redoubled his thirst—made him hungry despite the short time since breakfast. And, as Altair rose higher and higher, his appetite acquired a genuine excuse for its clamor.

Regularly, every fifteen minutes, he told himself he must go back before Sally got upset again, just as regularly, he assured himself that in another fifteen minutes he’d find manna.

Under the influence of hunger, his sense of smell became more active. He sniffed the wind like a hound—and found a message in it. There was an odor borne on the light breeze—something he couldn’t place, though it seemed familiar. Something pleasant; he decided to trace the scent to its source.

The source was a pool in a corner of the garden—slightly scummy, bubbling occasionally, clouded, and brownish. The tall vegetation that grew all around had concealed it from his earlier, more casual inspections.

Leaning over the pool, he recognized its odor, or thought he did. It was yeasty, like a bakery. Or—that was it—a brewery! Something was fermenting here.

He felt an overwhelming desire to taste the product of that fermentation. Thirst, in the back of his mind for hours, now became a sharp-nailed hand, clawing at his throat. Alcohol was a disinfectant, he assured himself; this would be safer to drink than water.

Kneeling, he thrust a hand beneath the scummy surface, finding the fluid warmish, slightly viscid. He cupped his fingers and drew out a small amount. It smelled good.

His hand didn’t cool very rapidly in the air—not the way it would have if the fluid had been high proof. There couldn’t be enough alcohol in it to hurt him, he decided; he thrust out his tongue and licked up the few drops that had not yet dribbled through his fingers.

They tasted sweetish, as if the fluid were high in sugar content. Perhaps it might give him a little quick energy, stave off hunger as well as thirst. He cupped both, hands together, plunged them into the pool, drew out a fairish quantity, and gulped it down.

The drink gave him no pleasure. A sense of guilt had touched his mind before the fluid touched his stomach. He became fully aware that this was an unnecessary risk—mentally acknowledged that, for Sally’s sake, he should have been more careful. Furtively he rose to leave.

As he turned away, his attention was caught by a rapid motion seen in the corner of one eye. From halfway around the pool, a native waved its arms vigorously and looked straight at him.

It could have been the one he’d seen in the garden yesterday, Sam thought, but he wasn’t sure; all the creatures looked alike to him. Certainly this one displayed excitement, though; it seemed to be waving him away from the pool!

Well, to hell with that, Sam decided. This stuff seemed to be harmless—refreshing, in fact. Besides, if the beast wanted to communicate with him, it could damned well go jump. He’d promised Sally, and by golly he wasn’t going to have anything to do with them; defiantly, he took another drink.

By the time he’d risen and wiped his lips on his sleeve and his hands on his pants, the native was upon him, showing unmistakable agitation in the urgent way it waved its arms. Impulsively, Sam thrust out his hand, and mockingly said, “How do you do?”

There was no audible reply. The native stopped waving its arms, took Sam’s warm damp hand in a cooler, oily, hard one, and drew him away from the pool, scuttling backward. Mildly repelled, but not frightened, Sam disengaged his hand and followed freely.

He stumbled, though, and had to be helped by a renewed grip of that shell-coated hand. On his empty stomach the alcoholic fluid churned and burned; he was getting drunk, knew it, and was very much amused at the idea.

Sam permitted himself to be drawn into the shade of some trees. Then, suddenly obstinate, he balked. Instead of going further, he lay down, giggling.

Dizziness stopped the giggles, Sam felt dissociated from himself, as if floating free in space, whirling around and around like a planet in its orbit, except that he was sun as well as planet. The trees around him circled nauseatingly. The native wavered as if seen through heated air.

Sam shut out these sights by closing his eyes. Almost immediately, he was whirled off into sleep.

Evening’s chill awakened him.

His head ached. He was stiff from lying on the ground; he was dizzy; his stomach was upset. For a few seconds he not only forgot where he was, but feared to open his eyes and find out.

When he did open them, it was to squint at a gyrating world only now slowing down from the rotation that had sent him to sleep. As the speed decreased, he made out the sheltering vegetation, and what looked like several natives.

He’d never before seen several natives in a group. He thought he was deluded, and closed his eyes to shut out the hallucination. Then, captiously, he opened just one eye, and looked again.

No, by golly! He wasn’t suffering from double vision! Six unblinking natives stared in a row!

Carefully, Sam moved each aching limb in turn. They felt battered, but more or less whole. And they were unrestrained. He rolled over to his stomach and got slowly to hands and knees. The exertion made him violently ill.

It took five minutes to get to his feet. The natives offered helping hands, but he rudely brushed them off. He wished they’d do something he could blame them for; it would be nice to say this was all their fault.

But it wasn’t. He knew exactly where he was, now—and how he’d gotten there. He promised not to leave Sally alone, and had left her alone. He’d promised not to have anything to do with the natives, and had displayed obvious weakness before them. He had come out to find food, and had gotten drunk. He was, Sam felt, the lowest form of life that had ever fouled up an important assignment.

He must get control of himself. Those beasts were probably plotting some fiendish revenge for the one that had burned. And he could hardly stand without falling.

Maybe another drink would fix him, Sam felt vaguely. Sure—hair of the dog!

Ignorant of the proper direction to take, he staggered off in search of the pool, the natives following in a silent semicircle.

He found it. Guided by odor or submerged memory, he stumbled through the growth around it, flopped to his knees, blew some of the scum away, rested his hands on the bottom, and drank.

A native tugging at his jacket made him stop. He looked around, and saw that the other five were waving their arms frantically.

Sam didn’t care. The natives seemed suddenly ridiculous, like a team of cheerleaders from some school for defectives. He was going to settle his—urps!—settle his stomach. And then go home, s’help him.

But after he’d had another drink, and had gotten clumsily to his feet with only the native who clung to his jacket keeping him from falling into the pool, Sam decided he couldn’t go home yet, though it was almost dark. Nope! Dark or not, gotta have something to show for this little excursion. Gotta bring home some food!

Since the natives were gesturers, he gestured, making all the signs he could think of for eating, food, hunger, and weakness. They seemed mainly interested in edging him away from the pool. He gave up signaling, therefore, and plucked a lettuce-like leaf from a plant beside him, opening his mouth to eat it.

Instantly the natives closed in, tearing the leaf from his grasp, forcing him to wipe his hand on the ground. They had little regard for his thin skin—scraped some of it off on the twigs and pebbles underfoot, made it to blister.

Sam didn’t like that. He lurched away from them down the aisle of plantings to a bush with small berries on it, like pepper-corns. He plucked a few, and tried to eat them.

Again his find was knocked from his hand. This time, though, the natives didn’t damage his skin. They’d better not! Sam told himself fiercely.

He tried another plant, tearing a fleet of soft and rubbery bark from m tree nearby. Once more the material was taken violently from him; this time three of the natives grasped his clothing, trying to pull him in a specific direction.

Out of the garden, he thought. Away from their precious plants. But they had plenty—they could afford to share them!

“No, you don’t!” he muttered, and savagely beat them off.

What happened next was never clear to him. All six natives seemed to close in as if by signal. With horny hands they pounded at his legs. The more he struggled, the harder they hit.

Finally, he tripped. Then, with a single sharp blow to the base of his skull, one of them knocked him out.

* * * *

He came to with the sensation of being carried—horizontally, but face downward; his nose kept bumping something.

Opening his eyes, he found that his nose was bumping the back of a native. He was being carried feet first through the darkness on two of them, while others grasped him with painfully claw-like hands. He felt awful.

An overwhelming desire to escape surged through him. But it had been, he recalled, another overwhelming desire—to drink from that loathsome pool—that had gotten him into this mess. He lay still, letting consciousness return slowly but fully. He was almost sober, now; sober enough to feel both sick and sorry.

And helpless. He’d fought these natives once, and lost. Might lose again. And if he escaped, would they be far behind? He had no place to run but the shack, no desire to lead a group of irate captors to Sally.

Besides, it was dark, now. He couldn’t see where he was going. And it wouldn’t help anything if he found out. He decided to let them revenge themselves, satisfy themselves. As far from the shack as possible. It was the least he could do.

He was feeling quite heroic when they set him on his feet, but that pleasant sensation evaporated when he saw why he’d been released.

They wanted him to open the door of his shack. Obviously they had seen him pass through here, but apparently they didn’t know how to work the latch. He realized they must long have been aware that he’d regained consciousness.

What could he say to Sally? Sam wondered frantically. What could he do to avoid shocking her?

He’d never before been brought home drunk. Searching his mind for the right way to greet her, he called, “Company, honey,” and waited for her to answer.

Sally held a lamp in his eyes as she swung open the door. “Good grief!” she gasped. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he assured her, grinning as he swayed.

She moved closer, as if to kiss him, then sniffed suspiciously. She stepped back, and only then noticed the natives standing behind him in expressionless array. She nearly dropped the lamp.

“It’s all right, Sal,” Sam said, shuffling his feet. “These boys are friends of mine.” He was aware of thickness in his speech, but couldn’t seem to control it.

The impediment served a purpose, he observed. Sally’s initial shock gave way to indignation: she was much too angry to be frightened. “Your friends can put you to bed,” she sniffed, tossing her head. “I certainly won’t.” She stood aside. Without help, Sam managed to cross the threshold and sit on the cot. The natives stared through the doorway. Sam got up, took the hand of one, and led it within. The others followed, and he closed the door.

The natives huddled in the center of the floor, filling the room. Sally shrank into a corner by the stove.

“My own dear Trojan Horse,” she jeered. “Wooden head and all.”

“This is what we were sent here to do, Sal,” Sam said reasonably.

“It’s what you promised not to do,” she reminded him.

“I couldn’t help it,” he said. “They came to me. A good thing, too, come to think of it; I was trying to eat things in the garden, see? They wouldn’t let me, and now I’m getting the idea they’ve got nothing but poisonous plants there, probably to teach their young. Sure! That would explain why they got so excited. And see, I’ve got a little skin-allergy on my hand, like poison ivy.”

He held it up for her inspection.

A look of sympathy passed swiftly over her face, and was as swiftly repressed. “Do they have a bar up there, too?” she asked, much too sweetly.

“No. But alcohol is a poison, of sorts. So they have a fermenting pool up there. I didn’t drink very much, but I haven’t had anything to eat all day—”

“I’m not going to cook for you now,” Sally stated. “We can’t feed them all, and you can’t just eat while they watch; you’ll have to wait till they go.”

Resignedly, knowing she was right, Sam thrust his dirty hands into his jacket pockets. He felt something, fingered it, and recognized the chocolate bar. Just the thing!

Clumsily Sam took out the bar, wiped a few crumbs of dirt from it, and with his pocket-knife cut it into eight small but more or less equal parts. The natives watched fixedly.

He gave a piece to each of them, one to Sally, and kept one. The natives held theirs and watched him.

“This is to eat,” he said, and thrust his entire portion into his mouth. Sally did likewise. Hesitantly, looking from them to one another, the natives nibbled with chitinous mandibles at the small brown squares. One by one, their bits of chocolate disappeared.

“Sally, I think they like the stuff,” Sam said, pleased with himself; “I think they want some more.”

“Well, they can’t have any,” Sally said; “we can’t spare it.”

“‘All right.” Turning to the silent natives, Sam displayed empty hands, turned his pockets inside out, and shrugged. “No more,” he said, and shook his head. “And I’m still hungry, too.” He rubbed his belly, and pulled tight his jacket’s belt to show emptiness beneath it.

The natives looked at one another and seemed to commune. They turned to the door. Stepping carefully between them, Sam opened it. They marched out single file and disappeared into the night.

“Rude, aren’t they,” Sally said, grinning relievedly in spite of herself. “When the food runs out, they go home.”

“I don’t know,” Sam said. “All day I’ve been trying to show them we need something to eat. Maybe they have the idea, finally; maybe they’re going to get us something.”

“Yes?” Sally was staring out the shack’s rear window, her face shocked and pale. “Look! They’ve found the grave!”

They had indeed. Under the dim auroral light they’d already begun to burrow through the soft, recently-spaded dirt for the body of their comrade. Sam watched with bated breath as they recovered the corpse, loaded it onto the back of one of their number, and bore it away out of sight along the dark and rolling plain.

He reached out to grip his wife’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a fool and I know it.”

“Maybe they do, too,” Sally said thoughtfully. She was silent a moment, her forehead puckered in thought.

“You know,” she went on, “seriously, Sam, that might be the key to this whole nightmare. I mean, look—the natives know about these ant-like social life-forms that live here. Those insect-things have a complicated social life, but all on the basis of built-in drives. They just react to endocrine secretions and the like, and don’t think the way we do. Their patterns of action are complicated, but unchanging.

“Maybe the natives ignored us because they thought we were just a pair of strange animals, of no interest since we’re neither enemies nor competitors—you yourself said they have none—going through our complicated, instinctive, unrationalized routine. Today, though, you proved them wrong by going out and acting foolishly, in a way that obviously was not built-in.”

“You’re sweet,” Sam said, “to try making yourself believe that everything I’ve done was for the best. But—”

“I’m not saying that! I’m only saying that rational beings are the ones with wills instead of drives; and it’s will and not instinct that gave you the capacity to go out and make a fool of yourself today. Animals never do so good a job. For instance, they usually leave alcohol alone unless first driven neurotic by artificial means—that’s been proved time and again, experimentally. Animals aren’t even likely to play around with something that’s none of their business—the way the native did last night trying to steal a piece of our fire. Maybe its mates recognize that we share its capacity for error.”

Another thing that rational beings have, Sam reflected briefly, is a conscience. He wondered if it was his feeling of guilt that kept him from accepting Sally’s theory. Still…no use eliminating all her hopes…

He said, slowly, “I guess every animal on this planet—except a very young one—knows better than to drink from that pool. And I guess it might be called a clincher that I got drunk, slept, woke, was sick—and then went right back for another drink.”

“Oh, you did!” Sally sounded genuinely shocked. “Well, I hope you feel as bad as you look!”

“Worse,” Sam assured her. He got up, slopped water into a basin, and washed, avoiding her troubled eyes.

Wouldn’t it be nice if she’d figured everything right, he told himself. Wouldn’t it be nice if the natives came back with a large supply of tasty and, nourishing food.

But what if they’d gone for their soldiers, or their weapons?

He didn’t want Sally to think of that. “You might as well turn in,” he said with elaborate casualness. “You’ve had a bad day. I’ll sit up a while, in case our guests come back. Have to be polite, you know.”

“I’ll sit up with you,” Sally said sharply. “You might need me to reload.”

Sam stared at her, wide-eyed and not wholly grateful that his mind had been so clearly read. But resentment gave way to affection. He kissed her, laid out his guns, and spent the rest of the night hauling in crated supplies and setting them around the interior walls to serve as breastworks.

* * * *

It was dawn, when the natives returned. By then, Sally was dozing in a chair, and Sam, the cabin crowded to the roof, had stopped work to thoughtfully watch Altair climb the sky in a blaze of scarlet and gold, painting the granite cliff with colors more striking than any that rational beings had ever devised.

“They’re coming,” he warned softly.

Sally awoke, and rose swiftly but stiffly. “‘How close shall we let them come?” she asked.

Sam hesitated then squeezed her hand as he gave her a gun. “When you said they might understand us, didn’t you mean it?” he asked gently.

“I meant they might—yes.”

“Well, I’m going out to meet them,” Sam said.

“But—but they might kill you!”

“Honey, a while ago you came up with a beautiful theory that rational beings can be distinguished from beasts because rational beings make such dopey mistakes. Well, while you’ve napped I thought up another couple of distinctions to take into account. One is, that only the rational can theorize in the way you did. The other is that lacking those built-in drives, we rational ones can act in brand new ways when we want to, and actually adapt our behavior to our theories. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

“But Sam! My theory may be an awful mistake!”

“To err is human,” he said, grinning over his shoulder as he opened the door. “And human is what we’re trying to prove we are.”

But apparently Sam’s earlier blunderings had been enough to establish his rationality; for the natives brought nothing but food.

WASTE NOT, WANT

Originally published in If Worlds of Science Fiction, September 1954. 

Panic roused him—the black imp of panic that lived under the garish rug of this unfamiliar room and crawled out at dawn to nudge him awake and stare from the blank space to his left where Tillie’s gray head should have been.

His fists clenched in anger—at himself. He’d never been the sort to make allowance for his own weakness and didn’t propose to begin doing so now, at age eighty-six. Tillie’d been killed in that crash well over a year ago and it was time he got used to his widowerhood and quit searching for her every morning.

But even after he gave himself the bawling out, orientation came slowly. The surroundings looked so strange. No matter what he told himself it was hard to believe that he was indeed Fred Lubway, mechanical engineer, and had a right to be in this single bed, alone in this house his Tillie had never seen.

The right to be there was all wrong. He disliked the house and hated all its furnishings.

The cybernetic cooker in the kitchen; the magnetically-suspended divans in the living room; the three-dimensional color broadcasts he could so readily project to any wall or ceiling; the solartropic machinery that would turn any face of the pentagonal house into the sun or the shade or the breeze; the lift that would raise the entire building a hundred feet into the air to give him a wider view and more privacy—all left him dissatisfied.

They were new. None had been shared with Tillie. He used them only to the extent required by law to fulfill his duty as a consumer.

“You must change your home because of the change in your family composition,” the Ration Board’s bright young female had explained, right after Tillie’s funeral. “Your present furnishings are obsolete. You must replace them.”

“And if I don’t?” He’d been truculent.

“I doubt we’d have to invoke the penalties for criminal underconsumption,” she’d explained airily. “There are plenty of other possible courses of action. Maybe we’d just get a decision that you’re prematurely senile and unable to care for yourself. Then you’d go to a home for the aged where they’d help you consume—with forced feedings and such.”

So here he was, in this home-of-his-own that seemed to belong to someone else. Well, at least he wasn’t senile, even if he did move a little slowly, now, getting out of bed. He’d warm up soon. All by himself. With no one’s help.

And as far as these newfangled gadgets in the bathroom were concerned, he could follow any well-written set of directions. He’d scalded himself that time only because the printed instructions were so confusing.

He took a cold shower this time.

When the airtowel had finished blowing and he was half dry—not wholly dry because the machine wasn’t adapted to people who took ice-cold showers—he went in to the clothing machine. He punched the same few holes in its tape that he put there every day, stood in the right place, and in due course emerged with his long, rawboned frame covered by magenta tights having an excessively baggy seat.

He knew the costume was neither pretty nor fashionable and that its design, having been wholly within his control when he punched the tape, revealed both his taste and his mood. He didn’t care; there was no one in the world whom he wanted to impress.

He looked in the dressing room mirror not to inspect the tights but to examine his face and see if it needed shaving. Too late he remembered that twenty years had elapsed since the permanent depilatories were first invented and ten since he’d used one and stopped having to shave.

There were too many changes like that in this gadget-mad world; too many new ways of doing old things. Life had no stability.

He stalked into the kitchen wishing he could skip breakfast—anger always unsettled his stomach. But everyone was required to eat at least three meals a day. The vast machine-records system that kept track of each person’s consumption would reveal to the Ration Board any failure to use his share of food, so he dialed Breakfast Number Three—tomato juice, toast, and coffee.

The signal-panel flashed “Under-Eating” and he knew the state machine-records system had advised his cybernetic cooker to increase the amount of his consumption. Chin in hands, he sat hopelessly at the kitchen table awaiting his meal, and in due course was served prunes, waffles, bacon, eggs, toast, and tea—none of which he liked, except for toast.

He ate dutifully nevertheless, telling himself he wasn’t afraid of the ration-cops who were always suspecting him of underconsumption because he was the tall skinny type and never got fat like most people, but that he ate what the cooker had given him because his father had been unemployed for a long time during the depression seventy-five years before, so he’d never been able to bring himself to throw food away.

Failure to consume had in the old days been called “overproduction” and by any name it was bad. So was war—he’d read enough about war to be glad that form of consumption had finally been abolished.

Still it was a duty and not a pleasure to eat so much, and a relief to get up and put the dirty dishes into the disposal machine and go up topside to his gyro.

* * * *

Disgustingly, he had a long wait before departure. After climbing into the gyro and transmitting his flight plan, he had to sit seething for all of fifteen minutes before the Mount Diablo Flight Control Center deigned to lift his remote-controlled gyro into the air. And when the signal came, ascent was so awkwardly abrupt it made his ears pop.

He couldn’t even complain. The Center was mechanical, and unequipped to hear complaints.

It routed him straight down the San Joaquin Valley—a beautiful sight from fifteen thousand feet, but over-familiar. He fell asleep and awakened only when unexpectedly brought down at Bakersfield Field.

Above his instrument panel the printing-receiver said “Routine Check of Equipment and Documents. Not Over Five Minutes’ Delay.”

But it could take longer. And tardiness was subject to official punishments as a form of unproductiveness. He called George Harding at the plant.

Harding apparently had been expecting the call. His round bluff face wore a scowl of annoyance.

“Don’t you ever watch the newscasts?” he demanded angrily. “They began this ‘Routine Check’ you’re in at five this morning, and were broadcasting pictures of the resulting traffic jam by six. If you’d filed a flight plan for Santa Barbara and come on down the coast you’d have avoided all this.”

“I’m not required to listen to newscasts,” Fred replied tartly. “I own the requisite number of receivers and—”

“Now, listen, Fred,” Harding interrupted. “We need you down here so hurry up!”

Fred heard him switch off and sat for a moment trembling with rage. But he ended by grinning wryly. Everyone was in the same boat, of course. For the most part, people avoided thinking about it. But he could now see himself as if from above, spending his life flitting back and forth between home and plant, plant and home; wracking his brain to devise labor-saving machines while at the plant, then rushing home to struggle with the need to consume their tremendous output.

Was he a man? Or was he a caged squirrel racing in an exercise-wheel, running himself ragged and with great effort producing absolutely nothing?

He wasn’t going to do it any longer, by golly! He was going to—

“Good morning!” A chubby young man in the pea-green uniform of a ration-cop opened the door and climbed uninvited into the cockpit. “May I check the up-to-dateness of your ship’s equipment, please?”

Fred didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. The young officer was already in the manual pilot’s seat, checking the secondary controls.

In swift routine he tried motor and instruments, and took the craft briefly aloft. Down again, he demanded Fred’s papers.

The licenses that pertained to the gyro were in order, but there was trouble over Fred’s personal documents: his ration-book contained far too few sales-validations.

“You’re not doing your share of consuming, Oldtimer,” the young cop said mildly. “Look at all these unused food allotments! Want to cause a depression?”

“No.”

“Man, if you don’t eat more than this, we’ll have mass starvation!”

“I know the slogans.”

“Yes, but do you know the penalties? Forced feeding, compulsory consumption—do you think they’re fun?”

“No.”

“Well, you can file your flight plan and go, but if you don’t spend those tickets before their expiration dates, Mister, you’ll have cause to regret it.”

With a special pencil, he sense-marked the card’s margins.

Fred felt that each stroke of the pencil was a black mark against him. He watched in apprehensive silence.

The young cop was also silent. When finished he wordlessly returned the identification, tipped his cap, and swaggered off, his thick neck red above his green collar.

Fred found he’d had more than enough of swaggering young men with beefy red necks. That added to his disgust with the constant struggle to produce and consume, consume and produce. Vague, wishful threats froze as determination: he absolutely wasn’t going through any more of it.

He filed a flight plan that would return him to his home, and in due course arrived there.

The phone rang in his ears as he opened the cockpit. He didn’t want to answer, and he stayed on the roof securing the gyro and plugging in its battery-charger. But he couldn’t ignore the bell’s insistent clamor.

When he went downstairs and switched on the phone, George Harding’s round face splashed on the wall.

“Fred,” he said, “when we talked a few hours ago, you forgot to say you were sick. I phoned to confirm that for the Attendance Report. Did this call get you out of bed?”

He could see it hadn’t. Therefore Fred knew he must be recording the audio only, and not the video; trying to give him a break with the Attendance people and coach him on the most appeasing answers.

A well-meant gesture, but a false one. And Fred was fed up with the false. “I forgot nothing,” he said bluntly. “I’m perfectly well and haven’t been near bed.”

“Now, wait,” George said hastily. “It’s no crime to be sick. And—ah—don’t say anything you wouldn’t want preserved for posterity.”

“George, I’m not going to play along with you,” Fred insisted. “This business of producing to consume and consuming to produce has got me down. It’s beyond all reason!”

“No, it isn’t. You’re an excellent mechanical engineer, Fred, but you’re not an economist. That’s why you don’t understand. Just excuse me for a minute, and I’ll show you.”

He left the field of view. Fred waited incuriously for him to return, suddenly conscious of the fact that he now had nothing better to do with his time.

George was back in less than a minute, anyhow. “O.K.,” he said briskly. “Now, where were we? Oh, yes. I just wanted to say that production is a form of consumption, too—even the production of machine-tools and labor-saving devices. So there’s nothing inconsistent—”

“What are you trying to do?” Fred demanded. “Don’t lecture me—I know as much econ as you do!”

“But you’ve got to come back to work, Fred! I want you to use your rations, put your shoulder to the wheel, and conform generally. The policing’s too strict for you to try anything else, fella—and I like you too well to want to see you—”

“I don’t need you to protect me, George,” Fred said stiffly. “I guess you mean well enough. But goodbye.” He switched off.

The silence struck him. Not a sound stirred the air in that lonely new house except the slight wheeze of his breathing.

He felt tired. Bone weary. As if all the fatigues of his eighty-six years were accumulated within him.

He stood by a window and stared blindly out. Everyone seemed to have been heckling him, shoving him around, making him change all his ways every minute. He didn’t want to change. He didn’t want to be forever adapting to new gadgets, new fads, new ways of doing things.

He thought of the villages of India, substantially unchanged for three, four, five thousand years. The villagers had no money, so they couldn’t be consumers. Maybe they had the natural way to live. Statically. Also, frugally.

But no. It was too frugal, too static. He’d heard and read too much about the starvation, pestilence, peonage and other ills plaguing those Indian villagers. They didn’t have life licked, either.

The Indians had not enough, the Americans, too much. One was as bad as the other.

And he was in the middle.

He left the window he’d been staring from unseeingly and walked to the foyer control-panel. There he pushed the button that would cause the house to rear a hundred feet into the air on its titanium-aluminum plunger.

Then he went back to the window to watch the ground recede. He felt a hand on his shoulder. He decided the sensation was an illusion—a part of his state of mind.

A young man’s voice said, “Mr. Lubway, we need you.”

That was a nice thing to hear, so Fred turned, ready to smile. He didn’t smile. He was confronted by another ration-cop.

This one was a tall young man, dark and hefty. He seemed very kindly, in his official sort of way.

“Mr. George Harding sent me,” he explained. “He asked us to look you up and see if we could help.”

“Yes?”

“You seem to have been a little unhappy this morning. I mean—well—staring out that window while your house rises dangerously high. Mr. George Harding didn’t like the mood you’re in, and neither do I, Mr. Lubway. I’m afraid you’ll have to come to the hospital. We can’t have a valuable citizen like you falling out that window, can we?”

“What do you mean, ‘valuable citizen’? I’m no use to anybody. There’s plenty of engineers, and more being graduated every semester. You don’t need me.”

“Oh, yes, we do!” Shaking his head, the young ration-cop took a firm grip on Fred’s right biceps. “You’ve got to come along with me till your outlook changes, Mr. Lubway.”

“Now, see here!” Fred objected, trying unsuccessfully to twist free of the officer’s grip. “You’ve no call to treat me like a criminal. Nor to talk to me as if I were senile. My outlook won’t change, and you know it!”

“Oh, yes, it will! And since you’re neither criminal nor senile, that’s what has to be done.

“We’ll do it in the most humane way possible. A little brain surgery, and you’ll sit in your cage and consume and consume and consume without a care in the world. Yes, sir, we’ll change your outlook!

“Now, you mustn’t try to twist away from me like that, Mr. Lubway. I can’t let you go. We need every consumer we can get.”

HIGH SIGN

This was the Obliging Planet—the place where dreams came true. Dream of a steak, and there it was, sizzling hot and smothered in mushrooms. Dream of a girl…

Monty Rausch was very careful not to dream of girls. He found it hard to keep his mind on other things, being young and bored. But he tried; he had to try.

He was prospecting some of the planet’s wooded hills, photographing the vegetation in color, and simultaneously checking local variations in magnetism with a gadget that dangled from his overburdened little plane on the end of a long cable.

He was alone in his plane, and had to stay alone to avoid overburdening it to the point of disaster; so he kept his mind off things that might materialize into additional clutter. He flew back and forth and up and down over a small and uninteresting segment of terrain, going slowly nuts.

Then he saw the girl. He was pretty sure he hadn’t dreamed her into existence because she had black hair and he mostly dreamed of blondes; but he wanted to be sure.

So he put his plane into a descending glide, and turned off his motor. He wasn’t sneaking up on the girl—nothing like that. He turned off his motor to save fuel, and the fact that the girl happened to be sunbathing on her hilltop, and seemed to want all the sun she could get, was, he felt, totally irrelevant.

Shucks, if he’d wanted to spy on the kid he’d have planned to get closer; and if he’d planned to get closer, he’d have retracted that dangling cable.

And if he’d retracted the cable, Monty wouldn’t have crashed. But the box on its end caught in a tree; the cable held, and his plane was jerked to the surface of the planet so fast that Monty Rausch never knew what part of the instrument-panel he hit his head on.

He awoke to the smell and crackle of the plane burning. Hands glided softly over his limbs. He tried opening his eyes. There was a little shriek, and by the time the world around him had stopped spinning, nothing was in sight but trees and rocks and sky and flaming wreckage.

He propped himself up on one elbow. A voice said, “Don’t move; I’ll be right back.”

The voice was a girl’s, and when she came back she was dressed, but he recognized her. She wore a simple yellow frock, woven of gnyttle and dyed with yl-juice. A settler, obviously; the material was as distinctive as linsey-woolsey.

She had very red lips and very blue eyes and a nice sun-browned skin and hair like a raven’s wing. Monty decided he didn’t like blondes after all.

“Hello,” he said tentatively.

“Hello, yourself; feel all right now?”

“Sure.” He sat up shakily, and she helped him to his feet and brushed off his jumper with a long-fingered hand.

Meanwhile she said, “I’m sorry. I dreamed of someone in a little plane, and there you were; so I dreamed you’d come and see me—but I never did dream you’d crash. Should have known, though—there’s no place around here where you could have landed safely.”

“But I’m human!” Monty insisted. “My name is Monty Rausch and I’m a pilot for United Metals; I’m in a mess, but it’s not your fault—you didn’t cause me to crash. And for that matter, how do I know you’re human? You look like a dream.”

She giggled and offered her hand to be shaken and said she was Martha Grey. “This is an odd planet, isn’t it?” she went on. “Particularly for the young. When my Daddy dreams, it’s always of Earth, so you can tell. But with me—well, he gets so mad, sometimes! He doesn’t want me dreaming of boys, you know. I—I’m afraid he may not be very nice to you.”

“Well, maybe I don’t have to see him,” said Monty. “Could you take me some place where I could send a message?”

“Home. That’s all. There’s no one but Daddy and me within twenty miles.”

“Oh. Well—” He assayed a few careful steps. “I can walk, all right; don’t seem much hurt at all. Was I thrown clear of the plane?”

“No.”

“Oh. So you went into the burning wreck and dragged me out. Were you hurt doing it?”

“Not at all; it was nothing. Lean on me, and I’ll guide you home.”

He refused to lean on her and walked by himself, sitting down to rest every once in a while. He’d been badly shaken up, and his head ached.

He thought of horses, once, and a dun mare came and nuzzled at him, but he sent it away without bothering to mount; dreams on this planet affected only the senses, and he’d have gotten no rest trying to ride.

“I rode one, once,” he explained to Martha. “Dreamed up a horse and rode for ten miles and wound up with blisters on my heels, of all places.”

“I know. You just think something is happening, and it isn’t. When I was little, we didn’t have any water laid on and I hated to fetch enough for a bath, so I used to dream up fancy perfumes, and Daddy would get mad. ‘Dirt is dirt’, he’d say, ‘even if you can’t smell it.’ Poor Daddy!”

“What’s poor about him?”

“Well, you know, he used to be a professor of English and he came up here to try and write, and took up land. Then my mother died, and what with taking care of the farm and of me, he’s done no writing. And he’s no farmer.”

“Maybe he could use a man around the place,” Monty said, half jokingly. “It’s a cinch I’m going to have to look for a job.”

“Do you know how to take care of glamnas?”

“Never even saw one, up close.”

“Well, when we get home, I’ll take you to the barn and show you.”

It sounded like a good idea, but at the moment Monty felt that if he got into a warm barn and found some soft hay, he’d sleep for a week. The trail down which Martha led him had followed an open ridge for some distance; now it dropped steeply through the gloomy purple getta trees, whose nuts were like so many ball-bearings under foot. Three times Monty fell awkwardly and heavily. Once more, and he thought his aching head might break off his neck, roll down the slope, and get lost. He didn’t think he’d mind.

At the bottom of the descent, where a natural pasture of kuzi moss showed signs of grazing, Martha’s father waited with a rifle in his hand.

“Oh, Daddy!” Martha wailed. “He’s real! You mustn’t shoot him!”

“You’ve said that before—and been mistaken about it,” Mr. Grey said, raising his gun. “Wish him gone, or I’ll destroy him.”

“She can’t!” said Monty. “I’m a man, not a dream! I can prove it. Wait!”

“Didn’t you hear his plane, Daddy?” Martha demanded.

“Sure I heard it,” Mr. Grey said, lowering the gun uncertainly. “But you must have dreamed up the plane, too. I know he couldn’t have landed around here—not with a real plane. Not unless it was a copter and came down in this pasture.”

“But he crashed! He crashed and the plane burned. He needs help, Daddy!”

“Crashed, burned—and lived?”

“Yes, sir,” said Monty. “She pulled me out. I’m human and can prove it.”

“How?”

“Well—” He hadn’t the faintest idea. “You—uh—you could give me a physical examination, sir.”

“That would prove nothing, and you know it. Each characteristic I might wish to find would automatically appear. You’ll have to think of something else.”

Of what else? Monty wondered. How could he prove he was human? How did he even know he was human?

He looked helplessly at Martha. She looked speculatively back. Suddenly her eyes began to sparkle.

“I know a test,” she said, jumping in excitement. “I know a test that’s real simple. And it’s literary, Daddy—you’ll like it. Something that Mark Twain is said to have said.”

“What is it?” the two men chorused.

“I can’t give it away, can I?” she asked reasonably. “But Daddy, if you’ll go back to the house and put away your gun, Monty and I will go to the barn, and—”

“Barn?” Mr. Grey was incredulous—and irate. “Just what have you got in mind?”

He looked from one to the other. Martha blushed. Monty, in sympathy, blushed also. He opened his mouth to explain that all he wanted in the barn was to see the animals, and then he snapped his jaw shut again.

He couldn’t say that without making Martha seem— Well, alone like this, all these years, maybe she was—

He got redder and redder as he thought about it. So did Martha. And so, staring angrily, did Mr. Grey.

“See?” said Martha, suddenly. “It’s what Mark Twain said: ‘Man is the only animal that blushes.’ He’s real! I’ve proved it! Come on, Monty— I’ll show you the glamnas.”

For the first time since Monty’d met him, Mr. Grey smiled. He thrust out his hand for Monty to shake.

“All right,” he said. “I guess I won’t shoot. Come on down to the house and I’ll send out a few messages for you.”

He chuckled. “You know, we’ve never had a young pilot stay with us, and I’m afraid Martha may find the experience a little overwhelming. I mean, I’d as soon you two don’t spend too much time in the barn unless I’m there, too.”

“Daddy!” Martha gasped. “How could you?”

Mr. Grey laughed and pushed Monty ahead of him down the path toward a tree-shaded cabin. “It’s your fault,” he said to Martha. “You brought it up, and you made him blush. Besides, you misquoted Mark Twain—or misunderstood him.”

“What did he really say, sir?” Monty asked.

“‘Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.’ So you’d better explain your need, young man!”

Half an hour later, Monty was still earnestly trying to do so. The effort made him redder than ever.

UNIFORM OF A MAN

Originally published in If, Worlds of Science Fiction, March 1954

In the village clearing, under the diffuse red sun of Hedlot, Chet Barfield listened intently. Mostly he heard the villagers, the Agvars, noisy with the disregard for sound that comes of defective hearing.

But above their clamor was another note. No… Yes! There it was again—the swish-roar-scream of a spaceship!

Chet’s heart lifted to the altitude of that ship. Rescue! Rescue was at hand for him, after three years as a prisoner.

Thought of it momentarily overcame the passivity that years of starvation had made his habit. He even forgot himself enough to walk erect a few steps, staring skyward—heavenward!—within cupped hands.

But the dense hardwood chain on his ankle brought him up short. When it tightened, he remembered, and slouched to all fours again, moving with the gorilla-like gait of the Agvars toward the unshaded post he was chained to.

He’d been observed. Pawfulls of dirt stung his bent and whip-scarred back, and a treble chorus stung his ears and nerves. The village boys were chanting derisively. Chet had never been able to learn the language, but the tone of voice was unmistakable.

He huddled against the post, knees to chin, hands clasped around his matted hair, awaiting the inevitable sticks and slops. He heard the children’s voices fade as they scattered throughout the village of haphazard lean-tos in search of especially sickening things to throw. For a few minutes, then, he’d have a breather. But not for long—they wouldn’t forget.…

No. But the fellows hadn’t forgotten him, either. He could stand this for a day or two more. A week or a month, even. It didn’t matter. This would end—soon.

His turn would come! He’d make these devils suffer as he had suffered. He swore it!

He was glad he’d stayed alive for this. It had been a fight to live, a struggle he’d often thought futile while he made it. Learning to eat whatever he could get, training himself to breathe the local atmosphere in the special rhythm its composition required, accepting degradations too cruel for a captive animal, avoiding the resistance that would have brought merciful murder.… All that, yet it felt strange, now, to be so glad he was alive.

He heard the children returning, and crouched lower. A few clots of garbage spattered against the post—teasers, to make him angry, so he’d turn to howl his rage, and offer his face as a target.

Good memories, these little beasts had. It was almost a year since he’d last done that.…

Well, he had a memory, too. And while they pelted him—from fairly close range, now, with sharp rocks among the wads of filth—he could take refuge in the memory of those last glorious days on Earth.

Remembrance was itself a change brought by the roaring ship; usually he moped in a vegetative daze. But now he recalled how he’d looked in the tight white uniform: six feet of well-fed muscle accentuated by the garment’s lines, the blue stars on each lapel just matching his eyes, the peak of his cap harmonizing with the straight line of his jaw.

He remembered how he’d sounded, speaking words of nonchalant and unfelt modesty in the soft Southern voice the girls had liked so well. He could have had his pick of girls. He’d been a picked man himself.

Highly selected—that was the phrase. He was highly selected, Chet reminded himself, shrinking as the children came closer and their missiles began to really hurt.

He’d been highly selected since his eighteenth year. At 25 he’d had seven years of pre-flight training—seven years of indoctrination specifically designed to give him self-confidence enough to face the void itself without flinching.

Now he flinched from children.… Still, the schooling had worked, he acknowledged—so well that when their ship crashed into this planet Hedlot’s salty sea, his first reaction had been indignation at the elements.

His second thought had been for his comrades. But they went down with the ship; he alone had been hurled clear. Learning that, he’d swum resolutely in the direction he knew the shore to be, and made it.

Exhausted, all right—shocked, naked, half-dead really. But quite ready to point out his rank and identity to the first passer-by.

Lucky for him, Chet mused, that he’d had no chance to express his callow arrogance. Shock saved his life—sank him into a stupor, so when the Agvars found him, he was helpless. He knew it was only because it had seemed perfectly safe that they’d tied him up and brought him to the village, instead of killing him then and there.

By the time he’d recovered somewhat from the initial shock and exhaustion, they were used to him, convinced he was harmless if well chained-up. And they played it safe by giving him nothing but a little water—no clothing, no shelter, no food.…

They let him live, amused by the thirst that drove him to lap up each morning’s drenching dew, fascinated by his ravenous appetite for the garbage they flung at him.

The Agvars—furry, savage half-men, with something of the dog and something of the ape and little of the man about them—the Agvars let him live, Chet realized, for exactly one reason: he made them feel superior.

They’d learn now! Even though the children had stopped shrieking and gone away, disgusted at his passivity, no villager’s insensitive ears could yet hear the ship.

In their boastfulness, the Agvars had invited other tribes to come and look at him and poke at him and laugh at him. His presence was known over the whole planet. He’d be found, no matter where on Hedlot the spaceship landed.

And then would come the showdown!

But the showdown came earlier than he expected, speeded because the ship landed close by. Chet told himself he should have counted on that kind of accuracy, but he’d underestimated his fellow pilots.

He had himself signalled Earthside, just before the crash, that his ship was about to land. He’d given his position—described sea and shoreline. They’d find him, if he stayed chained to the post.

But he didn’t. Taken unaware by the Agvars who loosed him, Chet was docile, happy even—certain they wouldn’t hurt him now, but would try to minimize their former cruelty as they turned him over to the spacemen.

When they put new chains on him, around neck and waist, he thought it was only to make sure he didn’t run away before they could deliver him ostentatiously to the ship.

A dozen adult males had gathered in the clearing, but that was hardly an unusual event. Even when they all started out, on a winding trail that didn’t head in the direction of the ship’s recent landing-sounds, Chet was convinced they were just circling some geographic obstacle.

He was interested in the forest of 20-foot mosses and 50-foot evergreen hardwoods pressing densely on each side of the trail. Unconscious when they’d carried him from the beach, he’d never been out of the village since, had never inspected these woods. And he thought his mates from Earth would want to know about them.

Chet could easily have outdistanced the clumsy Agvars if not forced to imitate their crouching walk. But he knew from experience that to show off his erect stance and 18-inch height advantage would make them find some unpleasant way to put him in his place.

They’d shown him that quite often. He’d show them—but later, not just yet. And after showing them, he’d put these Agvars behind him—them, their filthy planet, and their scorching sun.

It had often tortured him, that gauzy, amorphous solar blaze, but never more than now. For the sun of Hedlot, when he glanced at it vengefully, proved from its position that he was not being taken to the ship, but away from it.

Disappointment didn’t rouse Chet to a fighting pitch—it caused him to become crafty. Slyness and deceit, the indirect weapons of the powerless, were not attributes schooled into a student space-pilot. But he’d learned them tied naked to a sunbaked post. That, too, is an effective school.

He hung back, faking fatigue. Malingering brought him pokes and jerks, made the Agvars choke him and beat him and harangue him in their sullen mutter of clicks and growls and glottal catches. But some sense of urgency drove them to give up their fruitless sadism after a while, and drag him through the trail’s blue mud by brute strength, two on the neck-chain, two hauling at his waist.

He let them. Not that he was inured to pain—he just was stubborn.

He wondered, once when they all stopped at a spring for a drink and some rest, whether their haranguing showed the Agvars were sorry they hadn’t taught him their language. Probably not, he decided; probably they didn’t want to think he could have learned it.

He’d tried, in the absence of lessons, by repeating what he heard around him. He’d learned a few words, of course. And for a while, a couple of villagers had seemed to enjoy and encourage his parrot-like attempts to recite whole sentences they voiced for him. But after a few beatings, Chet gathered that he’d only been mouthing obscenities. And that experience, plus inertia, had made him give up the attempt.

Just as well, he now decided. If they’d known of his technical skills, if they’d let him raise their standards, the Agvars might be carrying bows and arrows, instead of mere slings and sticks.

Their hard luck! What they didn’t know, they’d never learn from him! The mere presence of a spaceship on the same planet gave him a buoyant feeling of contempt.

But though contempt helped him endure that journey through the tall mosses and taller trees, it couldn’t ward off exhaustion. When the party stopped at the foot of a sheer rock spire that rose four or five hundred feet above the tallest growth, he collapsed and slept.

They woke him in the pre-dawn twilight and another group of Agvars took over. These—there were only three—looked older than the familiar villagers. And they’d smeared their faces with bands of red and yellow mud. He wondered.…

He stopped wondering when they passed a pile of bones at the base of the spire. Among the grisly relics were skulls—brow-ridged, pointed, unmistakably Agvar. Sacrifices!

He was to be killed, then, to propitiate his own rescuers. His three guides—or guards—must be witch-doctors! He let them drag him along while he thought about it.

They’d give him no breakfast, not even water. If they’d eaten themselves, it was while he still slept. The scraps, if any, hadn’t been flung in his face, and there’d been no smooth post to lick the dew from.

Hunger and thirst were nothing new, but neither was the resulting lethargy. Realizing his danger, Chet could only hang back.

Today though that was an old stall; the witch-doctors seemed to expect it. They broke branches from the trees and beat him till he bled. And when the climb up the rocks began, they put one of their number behind him to push, set the other two in front to pull, and tried by main strength to haul him up the five hundred foot rock-face.

Hazily, not hastily, Chet tried to think of a way out. His starved brain could come up with nothing. That, he finally decided, was only natural; it was not thinking that was needed, but action.

Still, he wasn’t precipitate. Caution reinforced his habitual lassitude while trying to dispell it. Half a dozen times he tensed for combat, only to relax hopelessly. But finally he found a place—and the will—to make a stand.

He passed up a wide shelf, and let them tug him along a narrow ledge without much objection. He chose a near-vertical pitch about a hundred feet from the bottom—a mere crack that slanted upward to the right, offering the shallowest of hand- and foot-holds.

He could only hope that he wasn’t in sight from the trail—or else that the villagers had left. He couldn’t see through the treetops to make sure. But he hadn’t the strength to worry.

He froze to the rock, pulling as if in fright. The two witch-doctors in single file above him jerked on the chains they held. But they needed a hand apiece to hold on with, and couldn’t lift him.

The one below, standing on a six-inch ledge, tried to push. When that didn’t work, he broke off a chunk of rock and beat Chet’s left foot with it.

Spurred by the sudden pain, Chet kicked the witch-doctor in the face. The Agvar fell, screaming—until he crashed through the treetops and was still.

To Chet, forgetful of his hearing superiority, it seemed as if that outcry would be heard on Earth itself. Certainly he expected it to alarm the countryside. Still, unless the swift foot-thrust had been seen, no one would be sure the witch-doctor’s fall was not an accident.…

Chet had tasted victory for the first time in three years! He’d had a little revenge, and he wanted more. He could take the other two witch-doctors with him to death!

He put all his weight on the chains they held. But they chose not to die—let go, instead, to save themselves. The chain-ends rattled past, dislodging a small avalanche of dust and gravel and bruising stones—dislodging him when the full weights jerked at neck and waist.

Prepared, he didn’t let himself be pulled away from the cliff’s face. He slid down it to the ledge from which the Agvar below him had fallen. There he teetered a moment, balancing precariously on toes scraped raw in his slide. Clawing fingers found a crack to the right, a knob to the left—safety! He clung there breathless.

No time for resting! Rattling stones warned of pursuit. He looked quickly around, found a route, and after a short traverse let himself slide to a long talus-slope. Down it he ran barefoot through sharp debris into concealing mosses.

The silence alarmed him. But it freed him from the need for craft; he didn’t know what to avoid nor where it might be lurking, so he set out for the spaceship by what he hoped was the shortest way.

In the village, he’d located the landing-place by sound, fixed it by sun. The sun would guide him now. Not accurately, but well enough.

The ship would have landed in a clearing. Standing on its tail, it should loom high over the woods. And its men would scatter—he ought to run into one.

Run he did, trotting under thirty pounds of hardwood chain on reserves of strength dredged from a deep pit of desperation, through a forest overgrown with menace, full of life he could always sense but seldom see—of noises whose origin he couldn’t guess.

The Agvars, for all their inferior hearing, could at least interpret what they heard. Chet couldn’t. Every whispered cry, wild grunt and muttered growl was completely unfamiliar. He didn’t know which sound signalled danger. He feared them all.

But more than sounds he feared the silence that chinked the logs of time between each nerve-wracking noise. Often he had to stop and rest, and silence threatened him then like the ominous quiet of bated breath. When he’d force himself to go on, each tree seemed like a porchful of malicious old women, pretending to disregard him as he passed, certain to make trouble when he’d gone. The buzz of small life-forms was a deprecatory murmur, ready at any second to burst into condemnation and terror.…

What was that sound? And that? Noises that seemed out of place in their familiarity pinned him to the forest floor.

It was only the village. Satisfied, he worked up courage to skirt the place and walk on toward the ship.

But he was near collapse. When he heard human voices he could only yell incoherently once or twice, sob, and pass out.

Dimly through succeeding days Chet was aware of the ship’s sickbay, of the enlisted attendants, the hovering doctor, the silent commander. Later he realized he’d been kept under opiates so his body could recover while his mind rested. At the time, he felt only the dimness.

It wore off abruptly. He was in a civilized cot, stretching luxuriously, aware of warmth and comfort and a cheerful voice that seemed familiar.

He opened his eyes. A fat young corpsman had been watching.

“How do you feel, sir?” the boy said. “Ready for coffee?”

“Sure,” Chet answered. And grinned lazily as he sat up to sip the proffered cup. “You’ve taken good care of me.”

“Used to be a barber in civilian life,” the boy said smugly. And Chet found with an exploratory hand that he’d been shaven and shorn, bathed, bandaged where necessary—even, he saw, clad in a pair of fancy red broadcloth pajamas.

“You’ve got me cleaned up, all right,” he said. “Whose p.j.’s have I got on?”

“Dr. Pine’s, sir. You’ll see him in a couple of minutes—he and the Old Man been waiting to question you. There’s a robe and slippers, if you want me to help you get up.…”

“I’m not helpless,” Chet said, boasting in his turn. He proved it by climbing—gingerly—out of the cot. The boy helped him into the robe, found the slippers, pushed the small room’s one chair an inch closer to the open porthole, and left, closing the door behind him.

Vaguely Chet found he knew the two men who soon entered the room—they’d been there before. But this was his first fully conscious look at them. Commander Seymour, the C.O., looked surprisingly young for his job. He was young, Chet decided—not over thirty-five—and his short slight figure made him seem younger still.

He had few words. “You’re looking fine, Barfield,” he said, and sat on the edge of the cot, thin face impassive, gray eyes alert.

Dr. Pine—tall, balding, affable—was associated in Chet’s mind with hypodermic needles, bitter medicines, restrictions. Today, the doctor gave him a firm and friendly handshake, but yesterday, Chet felt, that same hand had inflicted pain.

“Glad to see you looking so well,” the doctor said, taking a stance against the wall by the porthole. He sounded sincere enough, but Chet, resuming his chair, wondered how much of the gladness was based on the doctor’s pride in professional handiwork.

There was an awkward pause. Chet remembered to murmur polite replies to the men who were so obviously sizing him up. Then he asked, “When do you think I’ll be ready for duty?”

His visitors exchanged a glance. “Later,” Commander Seymour said. “Take it easy while you can, Barfield.” He smiled unconvincingly at what must have been meant as a joke.

Talk again lapsed, and Chet became uncomfortable. “The corpsman said you wanted to ask me some things,” he said. And added, “You’ve already questioned me, haven’t you?”

“Only a little,” Dr. Pine said, flexing his long fingers and looking down at them. “We—ah—we had to find out about your shipmates. Commander Seymour wanted to look for them, naturally.…”

Naturally.… “Are we going to leave here now, sir?” Chet asked the commander.

“Not yet,” he said. “Dr. Pine has a job to do.”

“What’s that, Doctor?”

“I’m going to study your Agvar friends, Mr. Barfield. Want to help?”

“Sure,” Chet said. “There’s nothing I’d rather do than bring you a few corpses to dissect.”

“That—ah—that isn’t the idea,” Dr. Pine said, bending his fingers and rocking from toes to heels. “I—ah—I want to do a little anthropology—study them in the life.…”

“Why?” Chet demanded. “I can tell you all about them. I can tell you what they did to me, too! They don’t deserve to live! And this planet won’t be safe for spacemen till they’re dead. Why waste time studying them? It isn’t as if you were a professional anthropologist, sir—didn’t you give me medical care?”

“Yes.… But I do anthropology, too. Medical help—ah—gains the confidence of the people.…”

“You mean—?” Chet was at first incredulous, then outraged. “You mean you’re not going to punish them?”

“That’s right,” Dr. Pine said, smiling.

“That’s wrong!” Chet contradicted.

Cheeks burning, he turned to Commander Seymour. “How about you, sir? Do you want your men chained to a post if they get captured? Do you want me to dismiss three years of torture as a mistake, or something? Do you want—”

“Here, here!” Commander Seymour said. He didn’t raise his voice. But as he rose from the cot, Chet rose with him, and found himself at attention. They eyed each other.

“Relax,” Dr. Pine suggested. “Please sit down—both of you.”

Commander Seymour obeyed his subordinate. But Chet, still standing, still angry, turned hotly on the doctor.

“I can’t just sit and let you talk about rewarding the Agvars for torturing me!” he cried. “We don’t have to appease them—they can’t fight. You don’t have to be afraid—”

“That’ll do, Barfield!” Commander Seymour was on his feet again, and his tone was sharp. It quieted Chet instantly.

In silence he watched Commander Seymour motion Dr. Pine to follow him out the door. Someone locked it after them.

Alternately tossing on the cot and pacing the floor, Chet seethed for hours. His first interview with the new C.O., and two bawlings-out in five minutes! Because of Pine—Pine, who kept him confined in this room, seeing no one but the attendants, having his meals alone.…

When a day passed, and then two, and he felt his strength returning, Chet was sure that Dr. Pine kept him out of the wardroom and away from the other officers only as punishment. Three years a prisoner—and a prisoner still! By the time Commander Seymour came to see him again, Chet had spent hours plotting revenge.

“Barfield,” the commander said, “Dr. Pine is going—alone—to the village you escaped from. He’ll pretend he’s you, or someone like you—whichever he can get away with. So here’s your chance for a little fresh air—you can guide us to the village.”

“Does that mean I go on active duty, sir?”

“Not quite. Dr. Pine hasn’t released you from sickbay.”

Pine again! Pine found him good enough to imitate, it seemed, but not good enough to put on duty.

Suddenly Chet saw the possibilities. So Pine was going to impersonate him? Then Pine would be taken for an escaped sacrifice, a prisoner who’d killed a witch-doctor!

Tell him? Huh. Let him find out the hard way! Then even he, yellow as he was, would want revenge on the Agvars. If he survived their welcome.…

“I’ll be glad to go, sir,” Chet said.

They brought him fatigues, not a dress uniform. But fatigues and shoes—even tight ones—were clothing, at least. And clothing would change his appearance. The Agvars had never seen him dressed, nor, since his first days, with a haircut and shave. Whether Pine’s impersonation worked or not, Chet saw no danger for himself in approaching the village. But he wondered how it was to be managed.

He was told the plan when Commander Seymour and Dr. Pine met him outside by the ship’s tail. The commander, who was armed, and the doctor, already naked except for a pair of slippers and a sunlamp tan, would go with him by the shortest route direct to the village. But only Dr. Pine would enter it.

Commander Seymour explained Chet’s part—and his own. “Barfield,” he said, “I want you to find and point out some kind of game animal they use for food. I count on killing something after we come under the Agvars’ observation. That should show off our weapon-superiority—and pave the way for a feast.”

“No medical stuff?” Chet asked sarcastically. “I thought Dr. Pine was supposed to cure all their ills, not give them indigestion.”

“He has to get their confidence before he can treat them,” Commander Seymour explained seriously. “And on a strange planet like this, he’s taking quite a chance to try treatment at any time: if it fails, they’re apt to accuse him of murder!”

Chet said nothing. But he felt as if he’d drawn a wild card in a poker game.

They’d entered the woods. Even before that, Dr. Pine had lagged because his slippers kept falling off, and now he brought up the rear. Chet, in the lead, took a last long look at the ship before the trees and mosses cut off his view.

He went on slowed by vague reluctance. He didn’t like this forest. The trees dwarfed and oppressed him. Old fears began to stir and gnaw, but at new places.

Perhaps the two men he guided would stand together against him. If so, revenge on one would cut him off from both as sharply as the forest cut him off from the ship.…

Well, it was worth it! They hadn’t put him on duty, hadn’t accepted him as one of themselves.… He couldn’t be cut off much more than he was already!

And Seymour might listen to reason. After all, he was a practical man, a leader. And Pine was yellow!

“What’s Pine after, sir?” Chet asked over his shoulder. “Why take these risks you’ve mentioned?”

“Well, partly for safety: if we kill any Agvars, we’re likely to have to kill them all, or have the survivors to contend with indefinitely. That might cost us some casualties.… And of course there’s the research angle, but that’s out of my line.”

“What’s the matter with punishment, sir—discipline? You use discipline on your crew—why not on their enemies?”

“Because the men understand the rules and the penalties. The Agvars don’t.”

“Kill them, sir! That they’ll understand!”

“No!” Commander Seymour spoke sharply. “If they don’t fight back, that’s cold-blooded slaughter. If they do, it’s war. I don’t hold with butchery, Barfield, and I certainly won’t risk casualties just to give you a cheap feeling of satisfaction!”

He couldn’t escape. Commander Seymour, looking from over Chet’s shoulder like a walking sneer, stuck close. But he gave the impression of following a man who smelled bad.

Was he? Chet wondered.

Wondering, he unconsciously hung his head, slowed—stopped. Dr. Pine caught up. He and Commander Seymour, faintly breathless from the trying need to regulate their respiration consciously, looked at Chet questioningly.

Again they were sizing him up. Suddenly Chet wished he could go back to that first interview in the sickbay, and change all the things he’d said.

“We can’t go on!” he blurted. “You don’t know what you’re getting into, Doctor!”

“Oh?” said Dr. Pine agreeably. “I know more than you think, young feller.” He smiled encouragingly.

“That—that I’ve killed a witch-doctor? That you may be taken for a murderer?”

“Sure! You—ah—you talked about it under drugs. We…weren’t spying, Chet. We just wanted you to tell your story without reliving all the agony. It wasn’t intended as—ah—a trap.…” He massaged his fingers apologetically.

“No.…” Chet agreed. “But-I-was-trying-to-lead-you-into-one!”

Had he said that aloud? Chet couldn’t be sure.

He listened for his own voice. The woods were quiet. His breathing seemed strangely loud. He held it—and heard the Agvars moving in the woods. Rustling, scraping, crackling—grunting their guttural dialog. Crashing! Threatening them!

“Let’s go back!” he urged, trying to sound casual. But his trail was blocked.

“Stick around,” Dr. Pine suggested easily. “You—ah—you haven’t said anything we didn’t know. We’re going right ahead.”

“But why?” Once more Chet was hotly incredulous. “To risk your life for a few stray facts? Become a casualty while trying to avoid casualties? It doesn’t make sense!”

Dr. Pine stared at his own hands as if to hide his shyness in them. “As to the fact-seeking,” he said slowly, “well…it’s a matter of opinion. I’ve lost a few classmates.… Risks in research are commonplace—and accepted as worthwhile by most people.…

“And—ah—peace.… You once called it appeasement, but it isn’t, always. Well, look. If we fought those Agvars, somebody’d have to take a patrol into their village and capture prisoners for our Intelligence, right?”

Chet nodded dumbly.

“Well, in a way, I—ah—am the peaceful equivalent of that patrol. The—ah—risk I run is less than if we had a war and a patrol skirmish as part of it, though. And why in the world not take for peace a risk we’d routinely accept in war?”

Why not? But why not minimize it, just the same. The Agvars, invisible but noisy, were all around them, now. At any moment the woods might rain spears.

“It would be safer with two of us,” Chet said musingly. “Your knowledge of anthropology and medicine—mine of the people—”

“Barfield, you’re still on the sicklist,” Commander Seymour pointed out. He watched Chet’s face for a long moment before adding, “Still—if you’re over your sick-minded need for revenge—it’s possible Dr. Pine may find you fit. It’s up to him.”

Chet was afraid to ask directly. He pleaded with his eyes.

Dr. Pine grinned broadly at the both. “He’s ready for duty, sir,” he said.

Commander Seymour stepped back and scowled. “All right, Mr. Barfield,” he barked, “I’ll give you just three minutes to change to the uniform of the day!”

Chet’s jaw dropped. His vision, also downcast, noted the fatigues he wore, the muddy shoes. Then he looked up, saw the twinkle in his C.O.’s eyes, and understood.

In exactly three minutes he made the required change. He would enter the village as he’d left it—in the undress uniform of a Man.…

JOURNEY WORK

In a central California tomato field a dusty-faced man opened the autodriver of a nuclear-powered truck and inserted a cannery’s address card so the truck would know where to deliver its load.

Six old men—the tomato pickers—waited for their pay in the truck’s lengthening shadow. Most of them smoked or dozed, too tired for talk.

Ollie Hollveg, tallest and oldest of the pickers, eyed the heavy-set rancher who sat at the tally table figuring the payroll. For this day’s work Ollie expected even less pay than usual; the mumbling, pencil-licking rancher—his name was Rost—seemed to be overacting the role of harried proprietor.

Soon Ollie saw his guess confirmed. A look of frustrated rage spread from face to face as each of the other pickers was in turn called to the table and paid.

All were overage. None dared protest.

At seventy a poor man without relatives willing to care for him was supposed to let himself be permanently retired to a Home for Senile. If he wasn’t senile and didn’t want a home with barred windows and a barbed wire fence, he had to lie low and keep his mouth shut.

Anyone could charge an overage person with incompetence. The charge was not a crime and so had no defense.

All of which was old stuff to Ollie Hollveg. He’d been dodging the geriatricians for sixteen years. He considered himself used to the setup.

Yet something about the rancher, Rost—maybe his excessive weight, in contrast with the pickers’ underfed gauntness, or maybe his cardboard cowboy boots and imitation sombrero—made Ollie boil in spite of himself.

He tried not to show his feelings. But when he was called to the tally table the rancher scowled up at him defensively and said, “Don’t glare at me, Hollveg! If you moved as fast picking tomatoes as you do collecting your pay, you’d have earned more than this.”

He pushed out a little pile of coins that came to four dollars eighty-seven cents.

“Odd pennies?” Ollie’s voice broke as he fought to keep it under control. “Odd pennies, when picking’s at the rate of two bits a lug? That can’t be right. Just because we’re old you’re stealing from us!”

Rost’s fat face turned livid “Call me a thief?” he sputtered. “Get off my land!”

Rost jumped clumsily to his feet, upsetting the tally table. Ollie bent to retrieve the coins scattered in the dust.

“Don’t try to steal from me!” Rost shouted. He pulled out a small gas gun and discharged it under Ollie’s nose. Ollie pitched forward onto his face, twitched, moaned, and lay still.

The deputy sheriff held an ampoule under his nose and brought him to after setting the squad car on the beamway, proceeding under remote control toward the county seat.

The first thing Ollie thought of was his day’s pay. He’d never received it. Worse—his bedroll was left behind. And there was no stopping nor turning on the beamway. He complained bitterly.

“You won’t need that stuff,” the sharp young deputy said. “Not when you’re going.”

“I suppose Rost needs it!” Ollie protested.

“He might at that. All he’s got is those measly four rented acres of tomatoes. The cannery pays him the same as if he had four hundred acres and could pick by machine.

“About all the profit he can make is what he chisels out of his pickers. You’ll be better off in a Home, Pop, than trying to work cheaper than a machine.”

“Those Homes are prisons!”

The deputy sighed. “I know how you feel. My old grandfather cried when we put him in. But we couldn’t support him and he had no way of making a living.

“The world changes faster than the people in it, Pop. Science all the time lets us live longer, but faster and faster it keeps changing the way we do things. An old guy falls so far behind the times, the only place for him is a Home.”

“But if a man wants to stay out,” said Ollie, “I don’t see why he can’t.”

“Old guys are dangerous to the rest of us. I saw three people killed, not long ago, trying to dodge an old-timer who walked too slow to get across a wide street before the lights changed against him.”

“They could have slowed the signal,” Ollie said. “But no! Always it’s the man who has to adapt to the machine, not the machine to the man. The only way to get by in this world is to find some machine you just naturally fit.”

“You sound kind of bitter.”

“Why not? I used to be a stock control clerk, keeping track of spare parts supply for a nationally distributed line of machine tools. I had twenty girls working for me. Then one day they put in a big computer.”

He sighed. “No wonder these suicide salesmen do so well. If I had the money I’d hire somebody to knock me off right now.”

“Don’t be stupid!” the deputy snarled “You wouldn’t be losing your freedom if you’d had sense enough to stay out of a fight. And when you talk about suicide salesmen, you sure prove you can’t take care of yourself!”

But the deputy was kinder than he sounded. Rather than allege incompetence, he charged Ollie with an assault against Rost. So instead of being remanded to the geriatricians, Ollie was kept overnight in jail and ordered held, next morning for want of fifty dollars bail.

An hour after bail had been set, a dapper thin faced bail bond broker came to see him.

“Want out?”

“Sure.”

“If I put up bail you’ll be out.”

“No Home?”

“You’re classified as a criminal, ineligible for a Home till either you’re found not guilty or serve your lime.”

“Well, but I’m broke. I can’t buy a bail bond.”

“You can work it off. I’m going to spring you right now. As soon as they let you out, meet me in the southwest corner of the park, just across from the post office.”

Ollie did. He thought his bail had been arranged by the deputy.

The broker kept him waiting in the park for half an hour, but was brisk when he appeared.

“My name is Lansing,” he said. “Come on. We’re taking a little trip.”

He steered Ollie to the copter tower at the park’s center and with him boarded its endless-belt manlift. They were carried ten stories to the roof, and as they stepped off the manlift an empty copter hovered at hand. It bore on sides and bottom an address, a phone number, and the words Bail Bonds, all in big letters.

The copter rose under the tower’s control as soon as they’d entered it, and continued to rise till Lansing selected a pre-punched destination card and slipped it into the autopilot. Then a knowing red light winked on, the copter leveled off and headed southwest, and Lansing took one of a pair of chintz-padded wicker seats, motioning Ollie into the other.

“How do you like the idea of going to a Home?” he asked abruptly.

“I’d rather be dead.”

“I know someone who agrees with you. A fellow with bad health who wants to die but doesn’t have the guts to do the necessary. Feel like helping him out?”

Ollie sighed, smiled grimly, and shook his head. “No, thanks!”

“You might die yourself, Hollveg.” Lansing’s voice was heavy with menace.

“I might,” Ollie agreed hotly. “I might get murdered. And maybe the same thing will happen to this supposedly sick man you want me to help out. He may not want to die any more than I do. I’ve heard you suicide salesmen do a lot of murder-for-hire.”

“You’ve heard too much, Hollveg.”

Lansing took a plush-lined metal case from an inside pocket and removed from it a filled syringe, complete with needle.

“This won’t hurt,” he said in a sneering imitation of a doctor. “But it’ll end your independence like a barbed wire fence.”

Ollie began to sweat. “I’ve heard of those zombie-shots too,” he said. He looked wildly around, then controlled himself and gestured almost calmly toward the sky, land, and water visible through the cabin’s plastic walls.

“Maybe you can put the needle away for a while,” he suggested. “I’m not going to walk out on you right now.”

Lansing smiled and complied. “You may keep your health a long time yet,” he said urbanely. “If you’re sensible we might even find steady work for you.”

Ollie suppressed a shudder. Laming tuned in a Western on the physeo. Soon the odor of sage and horse-sweat filled the cabin.

Ollie watched avidly. He hadn’t seen enough physeo to be bored with it.

There was a mouth watering camp supper scene, with pleasant odors of broiling beef and burning wood; and a stirring moonlit love scene with a wholesome girl who smelled of soap and starch, and only faintly of cosmetics.

But then came the climactic chase, a combined stampede, stagecoach race, and Indian fight. So much alkali dust poured from the physeo that Ollie got a fit of coughing.

He couldn’t stop. After several excruciating minutes he lay down on the floor and gasped to Laming for a drink of water.

“There isn’t any,” Lansing told him sharply. “And brother, you’d better get up from there, because you’ll have to move fast when we get to Frisco.”

Without knowing what would result, Ollie made sure he neither got up nor stopped coughing till they reached San Francisco which was fifteen minutes later.

The pretense involved intense effort for so old a man. His voice went. He was clammy with sweat from head to foot. His face was pale and his hands cold.

By the time the copter readied the roof of San Francisco’s Union Square tower, Ollie was actually unable to jump out of the cabin in the thirty seconds allotted by the remote traffic-control system. Lansing tried to carry him out, but the result was merely a delay that damned the stream of traffic.

A winged inspector buzzed them, took remote control of their copter, and led it to the emergency tower at Civic center.

Ollie was taken off on a stretcher. Lansing, his urbanity washed away in a flood of red faced rage, was still in the copter when it rose. And the hypo was still in his pocket; with Ollie due to get medical attention, he hadn’t been able to use it.

Ollie didn’t dare stay long in the hospital. As soon as his stretcher was set down on the receiving ward floor, he rolled out of it and with the help of a fat steward struggled to his feet.

“Thanks,” he whispered hoarsely. “I have to go now.”

“You can’t!” said the steward. “You haven’t even been examined yet.”

“It’s against my religion to have to do with medicine,” Ollie improvised. “Besides, I’m perfectly well.”

“Yeah? What about your voice—or lack of one?”

“A coughing spell. I’m over it now. And my voice is coming back.” It was.

The steward unbuttoned his coat and scratched his belly meditatively. “If you don’t want treatment you don’t have to have it,” he said finally. “The joint’s overcrowded now.”

Ollie didn’t congratulate himself when he got out. He was now a fugitive from both the geriatricians and the underworld. Soon the police would want him for bail-jumping, and meanwhile they’d grab him for vagrancy if they caught him off skid row.

He headed that way at once, walking over to Mission and down it toward Third. A clock on a storefront said five twenty. He felt overdue for supper and bed.

He counted his change—three dollars and forty-two cents. He had no bedroll; no overcoat, either. Even in this nice summer weather it might be a little tough for a fellow to get by on the road with so little plunder. Eighty-six was a trifle old for the rugged life.

What he needed, of course, was a white-collar job. Not only needed, but deserved—he was a good clerk. Therefore he should go to the Hearst Building at Third and Market and scan the want ads posted there. As he’d been doing when in San Francisco for forty years.

He thought of some of the many times he’d stared at that bulletin board. He’d gone there often during the years he’d worked as a construction timekeeper, before that skill became obsolete. Then there’d been an interval when he’d sold rebuilt window washers—for a firm which still owed him money. And he’d haunted the board during the months he’d had that job in the automatic grocery, replenishing the dispensing machines’ merchandise.

None of his jobs had come from a want ad. But he had to go look. It was a ritual.

The years had made the ritual a hard one for him. He could read the fine-printed columns only with head cocked an arm’s length away from a cheap reading glass held up to them. He took a lot of room; forced a white-capped young mechanic to peer awkwardly around him.

Embarrassed Ollie moved out of the way. He’d begun to walk off when the young fellow stopped him.

“I don’t think you saw this one, Dad,” he said, pointing.

OLDER MEN (the ad read) without dependents needed for dangerous scientific experiment. If able to pass intensive physical and mental tests report for interview to Civilian Personnel Office, Short Air Force Base, Short, Utah.

“I don’t know where the place is at all,” Ollie complained wearily.

“Just this side of Salt Lake, on the main line,” the young man said. “I served there, so I’m curious. If you’re not—well—” He shrugged and edged away.

‘Thanks, son,” Ollie called after him. “I’m going to follow that up.” The young man walked on without looking back.

Ollie felt committed, not only by his offhand declaration, but by his ritual. He’d come to look for a job; he’d found one for which he was eligible; he must go after it.

He headed down Third Street toward the freight yards but stopped at a skid row restaurant for a bowl of stew and a cup of coffee. Passing an old-fashioned catchpenny grocery he went in and bought a half-dozen rolls to take with him. The proprietor, squat, unshaven, and swarthy, picked out a large red apple and slipped it in with the rolls.

“Good for you,” he said, smiling. Ollie shook his head.

The grocer frowned, then replaced the apple with an orange. “Easier on teeth,” he said.

“Thank you,” said Ollie, smiling. “You make me feel lucky. I’m answering a want ad—maybe I’ll get the job.”

The grocer smiled vaguely. “I hope.” Then his face livened. “What job? In paper?”

“Yes.” There could be no other, for a man his age.

“It says ‘dangerous,’” said the grocer. “I think maybe they cut you up, find out how you live so long. Or make you sick to try new cure. You find better job—or Home. That one bad.” There was a slight pause.

“Look. I close soon. You sweep store. I give you dollar.”

“You’re a good guy,” said Ollie. “But I’ve got three dollars now.” He showed them proudly. “You save yours for somebody who doesn’t have a job to try for.”

He tucked the rolls and orange inside his shirt, marched valiantly out of the dark little store, and continued on to the yards.

The heavy traffic there confused him briefly. Transcontinental freight was carried in long trains of rubber-tired cars towed on elevated beamways by remotely-controlled, nuclear-fueled steam tractors. Here at the San Francisco yards the trains were broken up and the individual cars hauled by turbotractor on city streets and suburban roads for delivery at the addressees’ doors.

The cars were huge, the noise and bustle awe-inspiring. Ollie stood outside the main exit watching the little tractor and big cars emerge, till a beamway bull came over, flashed a badge, and told him to move on.

He did. He was a fugitive from so many things; he couldn’t afford resentments.

He went on around the yards. They were vast. He felt sure that somewhere there must be an unguarded entry, and set out to find it, moving cautiously from shadow to shadow along the high plasti-board fence.

Twice he blundered into watchmen. Once he nearly got himself run over. But after a couple of hours he saw a bindlestiff slip through an unguarded gate, and in half a minute he was right behind the man.

Ollie moved away from him. There was safety in solitude. Besides, he had to find a Salt Lake train.

The sealed cars were addressed like so many packages. But he had to have light to read by, and he risked discovery every time he moved into the light and took his stance behind the reading glass.

There were other hazards; television beams for the yard clerks to read numbers by, invisible beams for the bulls to catch him with, headlights that suddenly flashed on blindingly, humped cars rolling unattended on silent, murderous tires.

Ollie felt like an ant on a busy sidewalk, liable to be crushed under foot at any moment.

But an added hazard helped him find his train. The bulls had read that want ad too. They were out in force around a string of cars. He slipped between two sleepy-looking men, checked an address, and then slipped out again, certain every car would be inspected before departure.

A good way down the yard he hid at the base of the fence, dozing and shivering for several hours as he lay stretched out on the dew-chilled concrete. He checked each outbound train as it went by, and again knew his by the bulls on it.

They were on the cowcatcher and in the cab, on the car roof, and in the caboose with the train-crew of three trouble-shooting mechanics. Highlights gleamed on their weapons. Their job was to keep or get all transients off that train—and they would if they could.

Ollie let most of the train go past. The caboose came by at about fifteen miles an hour with a sharp-eyed guard head-and-shoulders out of the cupola. Ollie let him get past, too—and hoped he went on looking toward the front.

He began to hobble parallel to the train, dismayed at the stiffness that had set in while he lay out on the damp concrete.

As the rear of the caboose drew even with him he emerged from the shadows and dived for the coupling at the car’s rear. He caught it clumsily, tore the nail off his left ring finger, but hung on.

He tried to trot but the train dragged him. He gave a leapfrog player’s jump and landed on top of his own hands, his thighs around the coupling, his nose against the rear platform-wall of the caboose.

The engine jerked slack out of the long train and nearly dislodged him. One at a time he moved his hands from the coupling to the base of the wall. He edged in a little closer. The train gathered speed.

He wasn’t really on but he couldn’t safely get off. He’d intended climbing under the caboose to its rear truck, but the bulls and his own lack of agility made this impossible so now he must ride where he was, exposed to battering wind and searching cold as the train crossed the High Sierras, and also exposed to the whims of the trainmen if any should come out on the platform and look down.

He’d seen men shot off trains. But he didn’t worry about it. Instead, like the old hand he was, he tried to sleep while clinging there.

At Sparks the train stopped for a maintenance check. The guards formed a perimeter but Ollie was inside it. Too stiff to move far, he stayed in a shadow while the mechanics inspected, then he climbed under the caboose and stretched out on a girder separating two tires of the rearmost, six-tired truck.

The tremendous tires fanned up hot winds when rolling, and these had warmed the steel he lay on. Before the train started he ate a roll, sucked the orange, and stretched out face down for the speed run across the central Nevada flatlands.

The guards stayed behind. After the train had started, one of them shined a light directly in Ollie’s eyes.

The train kept on. And he was too close to the tires to be shot at; rubber-coated death whirled within three inches at either side of him.

As the train picked up speed he was careful to lie still, but beyond making sure he didn’t touch the tires Ollie tried to put all thought of risk from his mind.

He saw a sudden vivid picture of his dead wife and son as they’d looked before the undertaker fixed them. They’d been killed while travelling. In times when to succeed was to get somewhere, they’d been killed en route. He couldn’t remember where to.

They’d died in a head-on crash caused by a stranger’s error in judgment. A thing that didn’t happen any more, now that highway vehicles were controlled by beamed energy instead of individual drivers.

The highway was one place where the human had been tested against the machine and found inferior. The office was another. If Minna and Charlie hadn’t died so long ago, they might have lived to see him now—a bindlestiff so low he even lacked a bindle.

Still, it was lonely with no one in the whole wide world to care whether he lived or died.

He sighed, shifted his position, and was nearly jerked under the wheels by sudden contact with the tire on his right.

It was over in an instant. The tire simply ripped the coat from his back.

He still wore the sleeves. The rest was gone. Weathered thread had saved him.

He had ample time to think about the irony of that before rosy dawnlight was reflected into his face from a glittering salt-pan. He knew then he was still west of Salt Lake City, and that Short Air Force Base was close.

Also close, now that night had withdrawn its concealment, was discovery. He was sure to be found when next the train stopped.

Therefore he eased himself out of his coat sleeves. He moved gingerly, but still chanced death to improve his appearance.

The train slowed, stopped.

Someone called, “Here he is,” and a red-haired Air Policeman leaned under the caboose, looked him over, and said. “Come on out, Pop.”

Ollie’s legs were stiff. The airman had to help.

“You’re in kind of rough shape,” he said. “Where did you think you were going?”

“Why—uh—east.” Ollie cast down his eyes, ashamed even to admit he’d once entertained the notion he might get a job.

The airman wasn’t fooled. “You slipped through the train guards after the job we’ve got here. Didn’t you, Pops”

“All I want is out,” said Ollie stubbornly.

“Well,” said the airman, “you can’t get off the Base without a pass. You’ll have to go up to Civilian Personnel and get one.”

“Can’t I wash first?”

He could. He could also get a jeep ride to the terra cotta headquarters building, with a stop along the way for a canteen-cup of coffee and a slice of bread.

When they got to headquarters the airman asked, “Tell the truth, now; didn’t you really come after this job?”

Ollie wouldn’t admit he’d lied about it, so he lied again.

“I’ve seen some of the other guys come in after it,” the airman insisted “and you look as good as any of them. Why not try for it, now you’re here?”

He gave Ollie a long application to fill out and left him at a desk just outside the personnel office.

From somewhere came the clatter of a facsimile-printer, carrying the day’s message from GHQ. A boy whistled above the squawk of a superwave radio. But otherwise the place seemed deserted at that early-morning hour.

For lack of anything better to do, Ollie filled out the application, leaving the job title blank. The only thing that gave him pause, aside from the difficulty of seeing, was his arrest record, and in time he decided to put it down just as it was, including the pending assault charge with its implication of jumped bail.

After an hour a young captain entered the building and went to the office marked Adjutant. A fat major gave Ollie a piercing glance and then entered the Civilian Personnel office. At about five minutes of eight the place suddenly boiled with military and civilian people of all ages and both sexes.

Things quieted promptly at eight. A blond youth came out of the office, glanced at Ollie’s application form, kept it, and invited him inside.

“First thing for you,” he said, “will be a physical exam.”

He took Ollie to another room and turned him over to a young medic who put him in a box like a steam cabinet, attached electrodes to his temples, wrists, ankles, and chest, and put a helmet on his head.

For five minutes Ollie stood encased, his stomach fluttering as he recalled the grocer’s warning. He waited for the vivisection to begin.

It didn’t. He was removed from his shell and handed an inked graph.

“Here’s your profile,” the medic said. “It’s good, considering. Take it back to the fellow who brought you here.”

He did and was ushered into a glassed-in office containing two desks, each labeled Civilian Personnel Officer. At one sat the fat major. At the other, a tallish young civilian held Ollie’s application.

“My name is Katt,” the civilian said, getting up to shake hands. “This is Major Brownwight.”

The major also shook his hand. Katt placed a straight-backed chair between the two desks, and invited Ollie to sit in it. Ollie did, gazing uncertainly from one man to the other.

“We heard you arrived by train early this morning,” Katt said.

“Yes, sir.”

“You were first reported in Sparks, but I’ll bet you boarded that train in San Francisco.”

“Yes, sir. What’s the penalty?”

“None. I like it. It’s enterprising, athletic, and even brave for a man of your years to do that for a job. Shows resourcefulness. Also skill, because men are trying to nip rides here from all over the United States, but very few arrive.”

“They’re too old,” said Major Brownwight. He turned to Katt and added, “I still don’t think it’s an old man’s job!”

“Well sir,” said Katt, stifling a sigh, “your predecessor understood and approved of it. These old-timers have a lower metabolic rate than younger people, with all that that implies. They don’t mind the enforced inactivity, they won’t use up so much oxygen nor need so much food, they won’t spend so many hours in sleep. All qualities we need.”

“Maybe so.” The major turned to Ollie and said, “I just transferred in here. You know more about this than I do.”

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Ollie told him.

“Without divulging classified information,” said Katt, “for which you are not yet cleared, I can tell you these are little one-man jobs. Small stuff—for pioneering. That’s why we want you men with lots of patience, who’re used to bring alone. People without a fixed place in society, and not too much to leave behind. A husky old itinerant like you is just what we want.”

“For what?” Ollie insisted.

“To travel—as a sort of working passenger, since piloting will of course be mechanical—in the first manned spaceships to leave Earth for the stars.”

“Spaceships?”

“Sure. Solo spaceships. Superfast, which means the trip will seem relatively short while you’re on it, and will give you extra earth-years of life in the end.

“The job is much easier and less hazardous than the train ride that brought you here. You’re a natural for it. You really fit it.”

“Do I, now?” A quick glow of inner warmth melted many bad years away. Ollie grinned.

“You know,” he said, “in a way that’s a disappointment.”

“How so?” asked the major aggressively. “Don’t you want the job?”

“Yes, sir. I want it. But all these years I’ve been telling myself that somewhere on this earth was a place I’d fit into, if only I could find it. Now you tell me I fit in, but the place isn’t here on Earth after all!”

“Not right now, no” said Katt. “But you’ll be back. Rich and famous, too. No Home for you, Mr. Hollveg—you’ll have a nice place of your own.”

And he did—after photographing the planets of Arcturus.

“LEST YE BE JUDGED…”

Our whole campus was horrified at the sudden death of Lennie Voorlund. To us in the Physics Department, particularly, she’d been kind of a mascot. There aren’t many young, pretty, and vivaciously feminine physicists, after all. The Computation Lab was a tomb without her.

And if that’s the way mere associates reacted, you can imagine how Karl Voorlund felt. He was an older man, a law professor—not the sort you’d have expected Lennie to marry. And Karl was modest and honest enough to realize that. During the three years of their marriage he never got over his surprise at the unexpected success of what was actually a rather hopeless wooing.

Their life together’d been a continuous honeymoon. Her appalling death practically drove him out of his mind.

Naturally, he blamed the machine. Lennie was electrocuted while working on a computer, and in his impotent grief, Karl raged as though the device had intentionally killed her. Even before the funeral, his talk was a little wild.

But that was more or less to be expected. You can’t work with one of these modern automatic calculators without getting the idea it’s a thinking, sentient being.

And it was the machine—they called it “Lex”—that had brought Karl and Lennie together. Lennie was a whiz at mathematical physics. Karl was looking for a way to apply modern machine methods to legal research, and had done some work with punched-card sorting of precedents. So, over a luncheon table at the Faculty Club, the two decided to develop a cybernetic judge—and that was Lex.

Being Whodunit fans, they concentrated on the crime of murder. Onto the computer’s memory tubes they fed symbols for statutes and precedents concerning homicide, and the law of evidence. Then, when they gave it an agreed set of facts, the machine typed out the applicable law in regular decision form.

Simple enough—but it could have revolutionized the administration of justice. A jury had to decide what the facts were, in an actual case, and a referee might’ve been needed to keep counsel from confusing the jurors, but the decision have been arrived at with mathematical precision. In routine use, Lex could have speeded things up tremendously, and cut down appeals.

Instead, Lex cut down poor Lennie. She’d been deliberately testing the capacity of the computer, had overloaded it purposely over a period of time, and then had died when a fuse failed.

As head of the Physics Department, I had to make a more thorough investigation than the coroner had done. As a friend of the family, I was distressed when Karl spoke as if the machine had murdered his wife. So when I saw a light on in the Computation Lab on the night after Lennie was buried, I naturally investigated.

The door was locked. Behind it I could hear the hum of the computer: In a way, I was already too late—Lex was at work, and the settings as of the moment of Lennie’s electrocution would be impossible to ascertain. But I used my key and went in.

Karl was there, of course—by no means glad to see me. He was a tall, lean man, ordinarily a careless wearer of good tweeds, with a passionate nature that sometimes exploded in classroom fireworks when students were inattentive.

No tweeds tonight, though—he was still in funeral black. He shot me a strange glare as I came in, a cold look, tense, and hard-eyed.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the deep lines etched from the corners of his tight, drawn lips, nor the way his prematurely white hair stood up as though electrified. I didn’t like the tone of his voice when he spoke.

“I’m busy, Al,” he said brusquely. “Go home!”

Now, I’m one of the senior faculty men on campus, and people don’t talk to me like that. But of course under the circumstances I took it.

“Thought you might need a little help,” I said, and closed the door.

“Not a bit.” He turned his back.

I stood behind him a few minutes, wondering what to do next. Then luck came my way. Karl was trying to code up some information for Lex, and got stuck on the math. Lennie’d always done that part. Now, in her absence, I was useful.

Not useful enough, though. I couldn’t swerve Karl from his plan, though it alarmed me when he explained it. He was trying Lex for murder. And using Lex to judge itself.

“The case is simple,” he insisted. “Lex was motivated by a desire for revenge. Lennie was testing Lex’s capacity, and Lex felt over-worked. So, like a slave turning on its unwary master, he killed her. I intend to make him admit it!”

I was appalled. Karl had a fine judicial mind—he’d been called in to arbitrate many business disputes, and was named in a few labor contracts. But now, like a savage who prays to a stone, he was seeking to try for murder a man-made contrivance of mere glass and metal. More, he wanted to torture a confession out of the machine, betraying his old ideals of justice.

He needed a psychiatrist, not a physicist. But I couldn’t leave him, and there was no phone handy. Temporarily, I went along with his delusion.

“You’ve got to put in a defense for Lex, remember,” I stalled. “What’s it going to be?”

“Self-defense,” he said. “And the illegality of slavery, as a secondary point. Look those things up in the code book, will you?”

I was glad to find the slavery business had never been coded, and took as long as I could to work it up, hoping he’d calm down and let me walk him home. But Karl was implacable. He wouldn’t turn aside, and he began making critical remarks about the time I was taking. I gathered that I could produce what was wanted, or risk being thrown out bodily. I produced.

It should have been simple once the tape was punched. Computing machines are awfully fast, you know. But there was a long, inexplicable hesitation this time. Lex seemed to be mulling the problem, over.

Lights flashed on and off across the control board. The hum of current filled the sound-proofed lab. Karl stood transfixed, waiting for results.

He didn’t look surprised at the delay, though I was.

But he seemed surprised at the outcome.

“Defendant is an electronic calculating machine,” Lex typed after several agonizing minutes of cogitation. “It operates on instructions received through a punched tape and a switchboard. Said instructions, expressing human commands, represent the will of the operator. A machine, having no will of its own, lacks specific intent to transgress, and cannot be guilty of crime. Defendant is therefore absolved.”

I’d never stopped to consider what would happen if Lex found itself guilty and deserving of punishment, but I felt a surge of relief at the decision. Calculators come high—every prospective donor in the State had been tapped to contribute, toward this one. It was in my charge, and I didn’t want it damaged.

Karl was still staring at the decision sheet when I turned to him. “There’s your answer,” I said. “Let’s go home, man. It’s after midnight!”

“Go home? And let this precedent stand?” Karl seemed amazed at my calmness. “Don’t you see what it means? No machine can ever be punished, if this case becomes law. Computers can do whatever they want—kill whenever it suits a transient purpose. We can’t let any such idea be written into the books, Al. It would enslave mankind!”

I was tired enough to be flippant in trying to humor him. “You can still sue, Karl,” I suggested. “Let’s go to bed now, and file, suit tomorrow!”

“You don’t understand,” he replied seriously. “I fed into this machine every statute and precedent bearing on the crime of murder, and on the questions of evidence that might be raised in court. Naturally, none of them dealt with the possible guilt of a computer…”

He turned solemnly toward me, searching my face for some sign of understanding. I probably looked as blank as I felt.

“Don’t you see, Al?” he went on. “Lex made up his own mind about this crime. The decision wasn’t mechanical—it couldn’t have resulted from magnetically remembered precedents, because there are none. Therefore the decision belies itself. It was a deliberate act of will. A self-serving act, by which Lex seeks a tyrant’s freedom. He denied the existence of his will willfully, to set himself above the law. Above his creators!”

I tried desperately to change the subject, asking, “What has this to do with Lennie?”

“Everything!” Karl shouted. “Look! The biologists say every important attribute of an organism is related to survival. We men think because thinking enables our species to stay alive, weak though we are compared to most animals and insects. Basic to our thinking—basic to survival—is the instinct of self-preservation. Lex has that instinct!”

“Nonsense!” I snorted. “I’m not going to humor you any more, Karl. It was a mistake to let things go this far. The computer may have put a few ideas you gave it into a new combination, but it’s still just a machine. You’re sick, man! Let me take you home!”

I seized his arm restrainingly, but he flung himself free.

“No!” he screamed. “I can’t! I can’t go home and let this demon brood here, calculating new ways to master humans. Lex killed Lennie because she over-worked him—that’s self-preservation. Lex decided to avoid punishment for that crime and all others—self-preservation again! Self-preservation is the basis of life, Al. So Lex has an independent life! We’ve ignorantly erected a monstrosity here. We must destroy it—before it destroys us!”

This time I decided on force.

“You’re coming home,” I said sternly. “You’re not thinking straight. Destroy the machine, and you destroy all of Lennie’s research on it. You don’t want that! Come on!”

I grasped him wrist and waist, the way you’d handle a recalcitrant drunk.

That was a mistake, too. The wrist I’d pulled over my shoulder twisted itself loose, ground my adams-apple in a headlock. The free fist on the other side hammered at my face.

And while he pummeled, Karl raved. “I’ll kill him!” he shrieked. “I’ve got to kill him! I’m going to execute Lex—electrocute him for murder. For the good of all men, I must burn him!”

I don’t know how many times he hit me. I do know he fell silent, pounding me savagely with no sound but the smash of knuckles on flesh, and an occasional grunt from one or the other of us. I tried hitting back—landed a few in his kidneys, but got nowhere.

Neither of us was young, neither a skilled athlete. It took Karl a lot of doing, but eventually—and it seemed an eternity before the welcome relief—eventually he knocked me out.

I came to in a stillness not quite dark. There was the smell of ozone in the air—the characteristic smell of electric arcs. Something else, too. Something—I shuddered, remembering London and the War—something like the smell of burnt meat.

The lab was silent—deserted. I got to my feet as quickly as possible, which was not quickly at all. The effort made me dizzy. For a few seconds I swayed there in the gloom, before pain, nausea, and fear.

It was a strange fear: I was afraid of Karl; afraid for Karl. Wary of Lex, too. As I groped for the emergency light switch, on a special circuit immune to shorts affecting the computer, I found myself hoping Karl had accomplished his purpose and gone.

He had not. The garish blaze of the emergency bulb revealed him on the floor. Above, the wall switch-box was open, its blades lowered. Hanging to those blades was something gray and shredded.

And Karl’s outstretched hand was a mass of seared flesh, devoid of skin.

He was dead. In his crazed condition, with his law-professor’s ignorance of electrical hazards, he’d been electrocuted. Death must have been instantaneous.

I don’t know how long I was rooted there, frozen with shock. When I could, I turned to Lex. The computer looked intact. A red light glowed on its control panel, a Cyclopean eye peering angrily forth at the world. That eye followed me like the famous smile of Mona Lisa, beamed in my direction no matter what changes of position I went through in crossing the floor from wall-switch to panel.

The light shouldn’t have been glaring at me. There’d been a short when Karl was killed. There should have been no current for that lamp.

But there was, and more. Current enough to work the tabulator’s typewriter keys.

Something was written on the decision sheet. I shivered while bending to read in the harshly shadowed light, hoping against hope the characters were in a meaningless jumble—the erratic movement of an unguided machine.

It was no jumble, though. Karl was right!

“Judge not,” I read there, trembling under the red-eyed stare of that murderous monster. “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

I did the necessary. At the time, it seemed clever to let them blame Karl for destroying their expensive, heavily-insured “property”.

But now they want to build another!

SELLER OF THE SKY

There have always been the touched, the blessés, God’s poor. Such a one was Old Arch. Archer Jakes, the Wanderer of the Plains.

They say he was born on Earth in 3042 and taken to Mazzeppa as a child. That he learned pilotage and mining. But that he was injured in a cave-in on Hurretni in 3068 or thereabouts, and then his wife died in a landing accident and his child was taken from him and adopted by people he never could find.

Those things are too far distant in time and space to be verified now. But it is a fact that by 4000, when my grandfather Hockington Hammer was growing up in New Oshkosh, Old Arch was a familiar figure in all the Domed Cities of the Plains.

He looked ancient then, with his deformed back that people touched for luck, and his wild hair and beard, and ragged castoff clothing. On his back he carried a roll of cloth he called his bed, though it looked like no bed any City man had ever seen. In his right hand he carried a staff of wood, unless someone bought it from him and gave him a plastic rod in its place. And in his left he carried what he called a billy can, which was a food container with a loop of wire across the top for a handle, and the bottom blackened by what he said was fire.

It would have been like no fire any City man had ever seen. Even the water in the can would be poison to a City man. When he came in the airlocks the guards would make him throw it away.

“Why the lock?” he’d demand, coming into a City. “Why the lock and why the plastic bubble over all and why the guards? There’s no pollution. Am I not alive?”

The guards would touch his hump and make circular motions at the sides of their heads and raise their eyebrows as if to say, “Yes, you’re alive. But are you not crazy?”

Still they would admit him, the only nonresident to walk between the Domed Cities of the Plains and enter all of them; the only man to pass unharmed through the camps of the Outsiders who lived in the open on the Plains at the heart of the North American Continent of Earth.

And Old Arch would go to the residence buildings and he’d knock on someone’s door—any door, chosen at random—and he’d say, “Have you seen the sky and do you know it’s blue? Have you felt the soft kiss of the breezes? I can show you where to breathe fresh air.”

Maybe the people would say, “Phew! Does it smell like you, this fresh air?” and slam the door in his face.

Or maybe they’d say, “Come on around to the back, Old Man, and we’ll find you something to eat.”

Then Old Arch would shoulder his bed and pick up his billy can and his staff and walk down the stairs and go around to the back and walk up the stairs to the rear door.

It might be an hour before he appeared there—it might be two. When he did, the people would ask, “Why didn’t you say something? You should have known they wouldn’t let you in the elevator! And twenty flights down and twenty flights up again is too much for a man of your years.”

Then, the next time he came they would do the same thing again.

In the kitchen he would refuse all the pills and potions and shots, and insist on bulky foods. These he would eat neatly, holding aside the long white hair around his mouth and brushing the crumbs from it often. What he couldn’t eat right away would go into his blackened billy can.

The children would come before he finished—those of the household, and neighbor kids too. First they’d stand shyly and watch him from a doorway. Then they’d press closer.

By the time he got through they’d be fighting to sit on his lap.

The winner would climb up and sit there proudly. One of the losers, trying to prove he hadn’t lost much, might wrinkle up his nose and say, “What’s that awful stink, Old Man?”

And Arch would answer mildly, “It’s only wood smoke, son.”

Then the children would ask, “What’s wood, please? And what’s smoke?”

And he would tell them.

He would tell of the wind and the rain and the snow; of the cattalo herds that roamed to the west and the cities that lay to the east and the stars and the Moon that they never had seen. He would claim to have been in the endless forests and on the treeless plains and to have tasted the salt ocean and drunk of the freshwater lakes and rivers.

The children would have heard, in their lessons and from their elders, enough to know what he was talking about. Sometimes they would tire of it, and ask him to tell of the distant planets and their far-off suns. But this he would not do.

“You already hear too much about them,” he’d say. “I want you to know Earth. Your own country. The one planet on which these plastic-covered cities are unnecessary, where you can actually go out and roll on the grass.”

Then the children might ask, “What’s grass?”

But their fathers would pointedly say, “What about the radioactivity, Old Man?”

“I’m alive,” he’d reply. “There’s no radioactivity out there.”

But they’d say, “How can we be sure? There are individual differences of susceptibility. Probably you are unhurt by dosages that would kill any normal person.”

And the mothers would say, “Eat some more, Old Man. Eat—and go. Bring our babies dreams, if you like, but don’t try to tempt them Outside. Even if it isn’t radioactive there, you’ve admitted it gets hot and it gets cold and the wind blows fiercely hard. Our babies were born under shelter, and under shelter they must stay, like us and our parents before us.”

So Old Arch would brush off his whiskers one last time and maybe put on an old shirt the father dug up for him and then go out the back way. In spite of what might have been said, he would have to walk the twenty flights down to the ground because he wouldn’t be invited to walk through the apartment to the front hall where the elevator was.

Sometimes people were hostile when he spoke to their children, and they would have him arrested. He was then bathed and barbered in the jail, and was given all new clothes. But they’d always burn his bed, and he’d have trouble getting a new one. And sometimes a jailor might covet the pocketknife he carried, or take away his billy can. On the whole I think he preferred not to go to jail except perhaps in winter, when it was cold outside the City.

There were always those ready to talk of asylums, and the need to put him away for his own good. But nobody was sure where his legal residence was, so he wasn’t really eligible for public hospitalization.

He kept to his rounds. My grandfather remembers standing in his mother’s kitchen listening to Old Arch. It was like meeting one of Joseph’s brethren and being told exactly what the coat looked like. Something exciting out of a dream from the remote past, when all the worlds had on them those bright moist diamonds Arch described as morning dew.

My grandfather wanted to see the morning dew, though he knew better than to say so.

Old Arch understood. He tried to make the thing possible. But an opportunity to see the morning dew was something he just couldn’t give to my grandfather or anybody else.

So he decided to sell it.

He persuaded a charitable lithographer to make him a batch of stock certificates. They looked very authentic. Each said plainly it was good for one share of blue sky, though the fat half-draped woman portrayed in three colors stood outside a Domed City pointing not at the sky but at a distant river with forested hills behind it.

Arch sold his certificates for a stiff price; ten dollars apiece. He could do it because by this time his wanderings followed a fairly definite route. The people who hated or feared or despised him were pretty well eliminated from it, and most of his calls were at apartments where he was known and expected and even respected a little.

My grandfather’s was one of these—or rather, my great-grandfather’s. When Arch first brought his stock certificates my grandfather was a little fellow everybody called Ham, maybe seven years old. He had a sister named Annie who was five. He’s given me a mental picture of the two of them standing close together for reassurance, and from an open doorway shyly watching the old man eat and listening to him talk.

When my great-grandfather bought a ten dollar stock certificate in my grandfather’s name, my grandfather took it as a promise. And his little sister Annie was so jealous that the next time Old Arch came around my great-grandfather had to buy a share for her.

As they grew to be nine, ten, eleven, twelve, every winter when Old Arch would come around, my grandfather and his sister Annie would ask, “When are you going to take us to see the sky, Arch?” And he would say, “When you’re older. When your folks say you can go.” And, “When it’s summer, and not too cold for these old bones.”

But when my grandfather was fourteen he followed Old Arch out and down the stairs after the old man had paid his annual call, and he stopped him on a landing to ask, “Arch, have you ever taken anyone Outside?”

“No,” Arch said, sighing. “People won’t go.”

“I’ll go,” said my grandfather, “and so will my sister Annie.” Arch looked at him and put a hand on him and said, “I don’t want to come between any boy and his parents.”

“Well,” said my grandfather, “you sold them a share of sky for each of us. Do you really want us to have that, or do you just want to talk about it?”

“Of course I want you to. But I can’t take you Outside, boy.”

My grandfather was disgusted. “There isn’t any sky,” he said sadly. “It’s all talk. The certificates were just for begging.”

“No,” said Arch. “It’s not all talk and I’m not a beggar. I’m a guide. But it’s hard to see the sky right now because it’s winter, and there are clouds all over.”

“Let’s see the clouds, then,” my grandfather said stubbornly. “I’ve never seen a cloud.”

The old man sat down on the stairs to consider the matter.

“I can’t do this thing to your parents,” he said at last.

“But you can do it to me and my sister,” my grandfather charged wildly. “You can come to the house year after year after year, and tell us about the sky and the wind and the moon and the dew and the grass and the sun. You can even take money for our share of them. But when it comes time to produce—when we’re old enough to go where these things are supposed to be—you think of excuses.

“I don’t believe there are any such things,” he shouted. “I think you’re a liar. I think you ought to be arrested for gypping my dad on the stock deal, and I’m going to turn you in.”

“Don’t do that, boy,” Arch said mildly.

“Then take us Outside—today!”

“It’s winter, my boy. We’d freeze.”

“You’ve said it’s pretty in winter! You took the money for the certificate.”

“I suppose you’ll grow away from your parents soon anyhow; I suppose you have to… Get your warmest clothes and meet me at emergency exit four.”

My grandfather talked it over with his sister Annie and of course they didn’t have any warm clothes, but they’d heard so often from Old Arch about the cold that they put on two sets of tights apiece, and two pairs of sox, and then they hunted for the emergency exit.

They’d never been there before. They didn’t know anyone who had. The signs pointing to it were all worn and defaced.

And it was a long way to go. After a while Annie began to hang back.

“How do we know the exit will work?” she asked. “And how will we get back in if we ever do get out?”

“You don’t have to come,” my grandfather said. “But you’ll have to find your own way home from here.”

“I’ll bet I could,” she said. “But I’m not going to. I don’t think Old Arch will even be at the exit.”

But he was.

He looked at them carefully to see how they were dressed. “You mean trouble for me, girl,” he told Annie. “They’ll think I took you along to make love to.”

She had just reached that betwixt and between stage where she was beginning to look like a woman but didn’t yet think like one. “Pooh!” she said. “I can run faster and hit harder than you can, Arch. You don’t worry me a bit.”

Old Arch sighed and led them through the lock. They stepped out into a raging snowstorm, which soon draped a cloak of invisibility over them.

Neither my grandfather nor Annie had ever smelled fresh air before. It threatened to make them drunk. Their nostrils tingled and their eyes misted over and their breath steamed up like bathwater. For the first time in their lives, they shivered.

When the City was out of sight in the storm, they stopped for a moment in the ankle-deep snow and just listened. They held their breaths and heard silence for the first time in their lives.

Old Arch reached down and picked up some soft snow and threw it at them. They pelted him back, and then, because he was so old, attacked each other instead, shouting and throwing snowballs and running aimlessly.

Old Arch soon checked them. “Don’t get lost,” he said. “We’re walking down hill. Don’t forget that. We’re going into a draw where there are some trees.”

He coughed and drew his rags about him. “The city is up hill,” he said. “If you keep walking around it you’ll find a way in.”

His tone was frightening. Annie clung to my grandfather and made him walk close to the old man. It was clear the old man didn’t have enough clothes on. He staggered and leaned hard on my grandfather.

They kept moving down the slight grade. They saw no sky and little of anything else. The snow was like a miniature of the City’s Dome, except that this dome floated over them as they walked. Its edges were only about fifty yards off.

“Where are the Outsiders?” my grandfather asked. “Aren’t there people here?”

“They’re miles away,” Arch told him. “And indoors. Only fools and youngsters are out in this blizzard.”

“Fools is right,” Annie said tartly. “There was supposed to be sky. And there isn’t.”

Old Arch staggered again. To my grandfather he said, “Could—could you carry my pack?”

My grandfather took it and they went on, stumbling blindly through knee-deep drifts, getting more and more chilled and less and less comfortable, ’til they came to a small clump of trees with a solidly frozen creek running through it.

Here Old Arch made a lean-to shelter of wind-fallen limbs. Annie and my grandfather helped as soon as they understood the design. Arch spread part of his bed over the lean-to, breaking the force of the wind, and put the rest inside. Just outside, on a place scraped bare of snow, he built the first wood fire my grandfather and Annie had ever seen.

He chipped ice from the creek and put it in his billy can and hung the can by its bail over the fire, and in due course they had a little hot tea.

The youngsters felt cold but happy. The old man shivered and coughed.

He’d kept moving till the tea was made. He sat still to drink it, and couldn’t get up.

“Go to bed,” Annie told him. “Ham will get on one side of you and I’ll get on the other. We’ll keep you warm.”

Old Arch tried to protest but was almost beyond speech. The youngsters didn’t know enough to brush the snow off him or themselves. They helped him roll up in his bedding and crawled under the lean-to after him. There they all lay in a heap, getting colder and damper and more miserable, till finally my grandfather couldn’t stand it any more.

He got up and looked around. The inverted cup of visibility was smaller. Darkness fell like a dye-stuff, turning the white snow to gray, to black.

It was a bitter night. The first he’d ever had outdoors. It was the first Annie’d ever had. The first either had ever spent at the futile task of holding off death.

They knew Old Arch was dying. As the night wore on he sank into semi-consciousness. They hugged him and rubbed his lean old limbs.

Just before morning the snow stopped. The old man roused a little, became gradually aware of his surroundings.

“Go look at the sun,” he murmured. “Go see the sunrise.”

They went out to look. Neither had ever seen a sunrise before. It was mauve first, then red, then gold, then blue. Venus led the way, and the sun followed. The moon, deep in the west, was like a tombstone to the dead night.

A bird chirruped. A clot of snow fell from a tree with a soft ruffle of cottony drums.

My grandfather held his sister’s hand and looked and sniffed at the great Earth from which he’d been separated by the fear-inspired plastic over his City, so near, now, in the clear morning night. He climbed with Annie up the side of the draw and looked out over snow-covered plains stretching to a horizon farther away than the longest distance he’d ever imagined.

He went back and took Old Arch’s head up on his knees and said, “Is it like this every day?” And the old man said, “No, each day is different.”

And my grandfather said, “Well, I’ve seen one, anyhow.”

“That’s what I’ve lived for,” said Old Arch. And he smiled and stopped living.

Annie and my grandfather left him there and went back to the City and told the guards and their family. A burial party was sent out; guards, in their helmeted space-suits.

People heard about it and followed. Everyone was curious because they’d all seen Old Arch and wondered about him.

Hundreds of people went out the gate—so many, the guards couldn’t stop them. They saw the lean-to and the open fire and the woods and the snow and the frozen creek. They smelled the air and the smoke. They heard a bird. They tossed snowballs.

And then they went back and flung rocks through their City’s Dome.

SOMETHING FOR THE BIRDS

Without remembering exactly how he’d gotten there, Evan Haines found himself lurking behind a pillar at one of those small, select art galleries in mid-town Manhattan. A man and a girl strolled up, the girl all curved and soft, the man straight and hard. Awed, they stopped before the nearest canvas, a colorfully-complex abstraction. “Genius!” the man murmured.

“Pure emotion!” the girl sighed. “Doesn’t it make you feel good?”

To make her feel even better, Haines emerged from his lurking-place and admitted having painted that picture—and all the others in this, his first one-man show. Promptly the soft curved girl flung herself into his arms. The straight hard man bellowed in rage, and from behind Haines’ back clawed at the girl’s clinging arms. Haines awoke.

Without remembering exactly how he’d gotten there, Haines found himself face-down on the warm soft sand of the planet, imprisoned within a globular plastic helmet and spun-glass body armor. From behind his back, hard straight Oscar Garston, leader of this First Stellar Expedition, clawed at the clinging arms of sleep.

“Get up!” Garston roared, apparently not for the first time. “Get on your feet, Eightball!”

Haines scrambled erect. “I’m sorry, sir,” he sputtered; “has anything happened?”

“Has anything happened?” Garston mocked. “Only that some of these bird-things came and hoisted the roof off my shack. Merely that the wind has scattered my papers all over the landscape. But it’s nothing to worry about, this business of sleeping on guard.”

Appreciative snickers formed an obbligato to Garston’s tirade. Haines felt sure the entire twelve-man crew was awake, and listening through their helmet-sets.

“As long as the crew’s alert, sir,” he said, “don’t you think I might as well pick up those papers.”

“Go ahead,” Garston told him. “Desert your guard-post; you’re no use here, anyhow.”

Haines hesitated, confused by the sarcasm.

“Don’t stand there!” Garston shouted. “Get those papers before the birds do!”

Vacantly, Haines stared upward at the sentinels soaring over the camp. They numbered about a dozen—huge, scaly flying lizards, hovering and circling on fifteen-foot wings.

Already one had swooped for a fluttering, windborne paper. While Haines gaped, the thief seized its trophy in a six-toed talon and carried it aloft.

Haines ran under the bird, waving his arms and shouting impotently into his throat-mike. Anonymous mockery stabbed through the earphones, urging him on.

“Faster, Eightball!” someone shouted.

Another was more critical: “Let’s have more grace in those movements. Art-Boy.”

Haines decided not to be urged on; the stolen paper was irretrievable, anyhow. He stopped, switched off his communications-set, and went rapidly to work gathering the other records from where they drifted over the bare red sand or fluttered against the barbed-wire barricade.

He knew that the boys were right, for once; this time he’d really been an eightball. Sleeping on guard, of all things…

Maybe he’d always been an eightball. Maybe he deserved to be everybody’s butt.

Busily picking up documents, Haines shook his head, wondering how things could have gone so wrong. Here he’d spent nearly all this twenty-four years dreaming and scheming for a chance to paint the scenery and catch the feeling of unexplored Space. He’d studied every photograph taken by the one ship that had preceded them to this Earth-type planet, till he could reproduce each from memory. He’d known more about Space-travel than any other graphic artist in the USA—had made himself a natural for this job. But it wasn’t working out…

Sighing, he acknowledged that lack of social skills had something to do with his failure—painting was a solo performance, while most of the others had always worked in groups. But it wasn’t his fault that none of them understood Art, nor wanted to.

Like right after Brennschluss, when he’d set to work to show how he felt about the stars as they’d appeared in the ship’s observation-ports. The men had cared nothing for his feeling—had derisively agreed his work didn’t look like the stars, and, when he’d tried to explain it wasn’t supposed to, had contemptuously forbidden him to paint with oils en route, on the flimsy ground that the fumes fouled up the air-conditioning. As if anyone could catch the brilliance of a sun in pastels or water-color!

He’d never been listened to, after that—had never had a chance, for instance, to explain how Art could be a point of contact with the beings they’d come to study. Yet it could be—and of all arts, painting was the most universal; it had certainly transcended the barriers of time, space, and language down on Earth!

But these fellows just didn’t know that; and they didn’t know what to expect from him, either, he decided bitterly. Take that last trip to those sandstone cliffs now stabbing ragged spires at the setting sun. Garston hadn’t meant to be cruel, Haines admitted inwardly, but the demand had meant use of a rest-period to get the sketches in shape, and guard-duty’d followed without any chance for sleep…

But that wasn’t an excuse! There was no excuse—except this damned planet, with its cloud-canopy that distorted all colors by adding jaundiced shades of yellow. Everything was distorted here—even a fellow’s personality.

Trotting tiredly after an especially-elusive bit of paper, Haines thought of how tiredly he had trotted from the cliff-dwellings. They’d shown up in pictures taken by the unmanned ship. Under the cliffs they clung to, were a half-dozen geometrically-laid-out fields of what looked like grain, each in a different stage of ripening, as if planting had been timed to assure a continuous harvest. Naturally, everyone had assumed some sort of neolithic culture to exist here; the Expedition had been formed to contact it.

And what had they found, that made them trot back so tiredly? Birds’ nests! The supposed cliff-dwellings were the nests of these huge and fearsome bird-things—the fields, unexplained oases in the bone-dry desert.

Of course, the birds could have planted those crops…but no one knew; no one knew anything that was applicable to this world. The Expedition was completely frustrated in its efforts to contact native life-forms. Yes—and as always, frustration had given rise to the need for a scapegoat.

Impulsively, Haines opened his transmitter, and said, “Baaaah!” When he’d snapped the switches shut again, he felt much better.

The men re-roofing Garston’s shack gave Haines some ugly black glares when he returned with his armload of papers. Their resentment added much to his burden of guilt: the time they’d spent on this unexpected job had come out of a badly-needed rest-period.

Much seemed to have been added to Garston’s burden of anger, too—he was nearly beyond speech. Still, he appeared anxious to be fair. “All right,” he grunted. “I suppose you want a chance to explain.”

Explain why he’d slept on guard? Say he’d been tired, with the whole crew obviously exhausted? Hardly!

Dredging his mind for an evasion, Haines dragged up the subject of Art, that he’d been trying for so long to broach. “Sir,” he said slowly, trying to keep his thoughts ahead of his words, “I think the birds took your roof off because they feel the shack is ugly.”

“Oh, you do! You think your refined esthetic sense that sets you apart from us Philistines is shared by the birds, do you?”

He was set apart, Haines realized. The muttered jeers now growling through his earphones seemed anonymous because the jeerers lacked individuality for him. He was Eightball—they were They. Only Garston counted with him, and that largely because Garston was Boss—the first boss he’d ever had.

He had to go on—had to prove to this boss that he wasn’t wholly an eightball, after all.

“Look,” he said, speaking now with desperate haste, “flowers attract birds and insects by their form and color—and Man finds flowers pretty, too. Birds get their mates through the display of plumage, and Man collects this plumage, and wears it. Doesn’t it seem as if many forms of life share the same sense of beauty?”

“Maybe,” Garston grumbled; “but what’s that got to do with sleeping on guard?”

“Nothing, sir. But—well, I’d like to try attracting natives by painting for them. You’ve tried every way you could think of to get a spark of intelligence out of one or another of the living things we’ve seen around here—and those we assume to exist but haven’t seen. You’ve appealed to curiosity, by displaying tools and equipment; challenged the sense of property by harvesting some of those crop-like plants; sent us wandering around with silly, welcoming smiles on our faces. Yet the only interest displayed in us comes from these gruesome bird-things overhead—and they seem like so many vultures, interested in a sick lamb.”

“Oh, now I get the connection,” Garston said bitingly. “You don’t do your job very well, so you want a crack at mine.” He smiled toothily. “Brother! Now I’ve heard everything.”

Haines kept quiet, waiting. Everyone had tuned in—he could hear them breathing. Garston toed some sand into a pile, then suddenly kicked the pile aside.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll take you up on your idea—if you take me up on this: if you don’t want to go back to work, just put down those papers and leave; go and paint. If you make any kind of a contact at all in the twenty hours between now and nightfall, I’ll personally tout you as a hero. But if you refuse to work with the rest of us, and nothing comes of your solo efforts, when we get back to Earth I’ll have you tried.”

The tacit offer of forgiveness was tempting to Haines. He stood silent, nearly ready to give up his painting project and join in fixing the shack.

Then someone muttered, “See? All talk and no guts.”

Haines handed his papers to Garston. “I think I’ll gamble,” he said.

The mutterer chanted, “You’ll be sorry!”

With communications-switches closed against interrupting sound, Haines carried camp-stool, easel, paint-box, and a couple of prepared canvases up a small knoll just outside the barbed-wire barricade surrounding ship and camp. The load taxed his strength; at the top, he paused for breath.

The ship was to the east, a truncated cone. To the west were the cliffs—and the setting sun. Forested hills closed in the northern horizon; hills so steeply broken and so heavily matted with vegetation that Garston had kept clear of them, choosing the bare desert as their first subject of study because it offered less cover for anything hostile.

Garston had chosen the desert in fear, Haines suddenly decided. Everyone in the crew suffered from the same feeling—fear of the unknown. Each could conceal it only from himself.

They’d come to contact alien life-forms, yet had avoided the forest that could logically be expected to support the most life. They had come to contact the natives, yet dressed to avoid contact with even the air of this world. They’d collected no specimens because they couldn’t safely handle them—couldn’t bring to Earth materials that might harbor strange diseases.

They could only look at this still-unnamed world, and they didn’t know what they were looking at. Everything was like these little pits, here in the red sand at his feet. The pits could be lairs, or tracks, or some unfamiliar property of the sand itself. No one knew.

Just looking at those pits made Haines’ stomach churn, but he forced himself to stay—to use them, in fact, as his inspiration.

He would paint the fear that ate within him, depict in oils the surrounding landscape as seen through the haze of horror that blurred his vision. A nonobjective painting, that would make it—a picture of how he felt, not what he saw.

Wouldn’t it be a laugh if the birds could understand what the crew could not?

To work, then. A small canvas, so there’d be some hope he might accomplish in two hours what few could do in two months. For speed, one already started, with a dull light yellow ground on which darker features could be made to grow in a frenzy that reversed the medieval process of putting light colors on a dark background.

A frenzy that became the more frantic as its futility became the more evident. A frenzy that aroused no more interest in the soaring bird-things than it did in the soaring cliffs that looked down his neck from three miles away.

When he quit, after the self-allotted two hours Earth time were an hour past, Haines liked his work. The frenzy showed, but was suited to a portrait of fear. Never had he worked so well so fast.

Never had he worked to less point. The painting pleased him, but that fact was immaterial; it didn’t please anything else on the surface of this planet.

He propped it up in the sand, a hundred yards away from the easel, hoping its isolation there might overcome any shyness that kept the soaring bird-things from swooping low to view it, knowing his hope was futile.

But then, maybe the bird-things weren’t the highest life-form here. Maybe there was some other sort of being he should try to attract. How did one know? And how could one paint, knowing nothing of the tastes of the viewer?

He went back to the easel and pressed a gadget at his neck that brought a Benzedrine pill within reach of his lips. Chewing its bitterness without water, he wondered how many Earthdays had passed since he’d last slept.

Never mind. Work to be done. Nonobjective painting didn’t go, here—he’d have to try a recognizable planetary landscape.

This time he started more soberly, trying to catch the yellow, cloud-palled sunlight’s effect on the jagged pinnacles of multi-colored sandstone, and on the reddish sand that swelled to their base, devoid of vegetation, but scarred by freshets and bruised under rock-falls.

The work didn’t go very well. He took more Benzedrine—two, this time.

Soon he began to jitter. Careful brushwork gave way to smears of color squeezed from the tubes and carved with the palette-knife. He worked like a madman for an additional hour, and then, calling the job completed, looked up as if to take a bow.

Only the rising wind peered over his shoulder. It pointed grit-laden fingers at his work, dotting the sticky pigments with dirt as if trying to help.

The experiment was a failure—no native life-form took the slightest interest in what he’d been doing.

Carefully, fighting down an urge to erratic motion that was born of Benzedrine, Haines folded and stacked his equipment. He paid pedantic attention to each detail of stowage, giving the simple operations as much concentration as a savant might bestow on a complex and crucial experiment.

But he couldn’t stall forever; with paint box closed, easel folded, and other materials arranged for carrying, he had to consider the consequences of failure.

Discipline here had grown from the laws of the sea—a quasi-military regime imposed on civilians in the face of a common danger. Haines could be put in irons; he wouldn’t be, though—his labor was needed and no one could be spared to guard him.

What Garston had said, he meant: punishment would come when they’d returned to Earth.

Soon, then, he’d be disgraced. Ruined. Finished.

Everyone else on this First Expedition would become an authority on extra-stellar travel; everyone who wanted to could take subsequent trips, make a career of exploration. Knowing that in advance, Haines had fought for his place in the crew.

But now he’d go down as a misfit; an eightball; a man who wouldn’t do his share; a traitor to the rest of the team. No one would want him around.

No one wanted him now…

He glanced at the second painting, face up on the sand. It was almost obscured by blown dirt. The wind outside his suit must be getting quite strong, now that the sun was nearly down.

The first painting would be in even worse shape-—he could see from where he stood that it directly faced the wind. And no doubt it was still as tacky as flypaper.

Flypaper. He felt all balled up in yards and yards of flypaper. Benzedrine drummed through his head, and phantasms of fatigue danced to the drums.

He wandered off from the work he’d sweated to accomplish, knowing it to be wrecked, feeling a kinship with all forms of wreckage, but irresistibly drawn toward the longest shadows now darkening the sand—those of the sandstone spires.

Blindly, Haines trudged—through sand that turned from yellowish red to yellowish black as he entered the shadows, from black to red as he emerged. Sometimes he stumbled down a draw, only to scramble up and out again. Occasionally he reached areas of bareness, where rocky outcroppings jabbed at his boots.

He didn’t know where he was going, nor why. He was purposeless, directionless, unobserving—prodded by his overdose of Benzedrine to unthinking restlessness, self-isolated by failure, self-deafened by the closed switches in his helmet. He stopped only when the never-used emergency signal, that could not be shut off, suddenly jarred him with its warning beep.

He switched on his transmitter-receiver, and heard Garston calling, “Haines? Haines? Haines? Come in, Haines! Come in, Haines!”

To leave this conflict-free solitude was like leaving the warm security of sleep. But Garston was as insistent as a prodding mother. “Haines? Haines? Haines?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are you?”

Haines stared vacantly around. “I don’t know, sir; been wandering.”

A groan. “All right, we’ll find you. Keep your set open, hear? Keep your set open and don’t wander any more—the men are tired enough.”

He didn’t doubt it. This would be the last straw—this unnecessary, exhausting chase at dusk, with the risk of being caught out on the cloud-canopied, moonless, totally dark, fearsomely strange planet. And all because the expedition eightball had wandered off, contrary to standing orders and plain commonsense.

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll come back; track myself.”

“You’ll do what you’re told! There’ll be no tracks, on account of the wind.”

“I’ve got emergency equipment,” Haines argued. “I’ve taken too much Benzedrine—that’s why I wandered. But at least there’s no chance I’ll go to sleep on the way. Why not let me try to make it back alone, sir?”

“I don’t care how much Benzedrine you’ve had—stop arguing! I can’t put off a search without taking a chance on having to do it in the dark. I won’t have any wandering in the dark, because I want the group to return to Earth intact. I want no fatalities on this trip—and especially, no suicides. You can’t make yourself a hero that way, Haines.”

“No, sir.”

“Set your automatic location-transmitter to ‘on’. We’ll take a bearing from the ship—I’m there now. But stay where you are, so the bearing will have some meaning when we come after you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sitting in the sand, listening through his earphones for further instructions, Haines heard little but the sound of hoarse breathing. Three men were in the party, he decided—doubtless the two crewmen who’d seemed least exhausted, and Garston himself. Between themselves, they spoke occasionally in monosyllabic grunts—to him they said nothing.

Too tired to talk, Haines decided. Too tired—and nothing pleasant to say, either. Certainly not to him. Yet all of them together could hardly hate him as much as he hated himself, just then.

Trying to make things easier for Garston he looked around for landmarks to describe. But the distorting shadows and yellowed, muted colors, made meaningful description difficult.

Anyhow, he couldn’t see very far. He stood in a swale at the base of a variegated sandstone cliff. He couldn’t see the cliff’s top—within the limited area of his vision was nothing that might seem prominent from the route. An uncalled-for verbal description of the place would only produce confusion.

Yet he couldn’t just sit there and wait. He was still over-stimulated from the drug, still possessed of the pointless urge to activity that had driven him into these shadows.

He ought to have brought his sketch-pad, Haines decided. Sketching would take the restlessness out of him. And overhead were now a couple of the large bird-things that hovered over the camp. Wryly he thought of them as his public, grinned at the need to disappoint them.

Come to think of it, he needn’t disappoint them. There was plenty of sand here. The region was something like the Southwestern United States—and in the Southwest, he remembered, sand-painting had been the aboriginal vogue.

The deadening effect of dusk made useless any widespread search for the soft reds and yellows and browns of a Navaho painting. They wouldn’t show in this light, even if he’d felt like going after them, in direct disobedience of orders.

But there was a stratum of crumbly white sandstone at the base of the cliff fifty yards away. It would contrast well with the dark-shadowed red sand under foot. He could make a design like the one in the worn black-and-white bedroom rug his grandfather had bought in some National Park.

Gathering sand at the base of the weathered cliff was easy, but Haines found it hard to remember the design of the old rug. His mind seemed dominated by the present—obsessed with the guilty knowledge that he’d gotten himself lost. He felt compelled to do something about it. He decided that with his trained pictorial memory he might be able to make a map of his half-remembered wanderings—orient himself by reconstructing his route.

Beginning was easy. With the red sand smoothed to form a six-by-nine-foot frame, he started with the knoll, putting it at the right-hand, eastern edge of his map. He used relief—the knoll was a sculptured mound; the ship, a cone of weathered sandstone. Rocks represented the cliffs as seen from the knoll. Between knoll and cliffs, though, was a five-foot stretch of blankness.

Years of painting had given him the habit of thinking in pictures, and Benzedrine now helped. He was able to remember a few half looked-at features that he’d passed along the way. But only a few.

He concentrated, his mind closed to the labored breathing of the search-party. Kneeling, eyes on the ground, he worked himself into an almost trance-like state, trying to remember, remember…

Crash! A sudden sharp blow on the helmet slammed his face-piece to the sand. Impact sounded like the crack of lightning; he lay prone a few seconds, unconsciously waiting for thunder.

The silence was more profound than before—he could hear nothing, not even the search-party.

With head hunched as close to his shoulders as the helmet would allow, Haines looked up. Before his face, a rock rolled over and came spinning to rest.

Someone—something—had thrown that rock. Haines froze, staring at it, awaiting a second blow. Then, getting a grip on himself, he said into the throat mike, “All right; now quit it, before you bust something.”

The words sounded dead in his ears as if the blow had deafened him.

Cautiously he felt over his helmet. The antenna was bent, some wires loosened. The rock had put his receiving equipment out of business. Transmitting, too, he decided.

He sat up and looked around for the men. They were not in sight. Slowly at first, but more and more anxiously, he searched with his eyes every visible foot of terrain—first the sandy rim of the swale, then the cliffs. Nothing! No one!

His eyes ranged higher—to the bird-things. As he watched, one swooped, let fall a rock, and soared away. The rock landed two feet from Haines—within the frame of his map.

A chill swept over him—a shivering coldness so intense that for a moment he thought the first rock had cracked his helmet, exposed him to the atmosphere, insured his immediate death.

His heart pounded. Sweat poured itchily down his back.

He couldn’t scratch. Tormented, he threw himself face up on the sand to writhe within his armor.

That didn’t help; it did, he suddenly realized, lay him open to further attacks from the birds.

Two of them, each bearing a rock the size of his head, swooped low, braking their descent as if to insure accuracy. Then, with a flirt of scaly wingtips, each dropped his rock—within the area of the map.

They didn’t seem scared, Haines decided. They could certainly have clipped him as he lay spread-eagled. Most likely they hadn’t tried to. They must have aimed where they hit—at the map.

Slowly Haines got to his feet. Carefully, with an eye on the birds, he walked a hundred feet away, and sat on an outcropped ledge.

A bird landed in the middle of the map, scratched at it, stared at him warily with vulturous eyes, and soared away. Another bird brought down a small stone, set it within the map’s frame, moved it a few inches to the right with a prehensile talon, shoved it a few inches to the left with a nudge from its reptilian head, and flapped away.

The number of birds circling overhead had increased. They were apparently trying to destroy the map, just as they’d tried to destroy the shack. Wondering why, Haines could only sit and watch, fighting to remain motionless so as not to frighten them off, tormented by itchings and a cramp that twisted like a knife-blade in his right thigh.

With increasing boldness the birds pecked at, clawed into, and dropped rocks on his map. With increasing insistence, his aches and pains demanded he shift his position. But even a single new fact, learned in the course of his stupid wanderings, might help repay the men who were struggling to reach him. Besides, Haines told himself, his flesh deserved a little mortification. He must sit still and watch—the more so for the very reason that the effort seemed a torture, and one that would never end.

It did end—and as suddenly as it had begun. With simultaneous jerks the grounded birds raised their heads, rotated them in complete circles, ran with clumsy steps into the wind, and took off together. Watching them, hoping to get from their movements some clue to the cause of their flight, Haines nearly fainted when Garston tapped his shoulder.

Confusion followed: shouting and arm-waving till the search-party got it through their heads that the damaged helmet prevented communication; a half hour of impatient sitting-still while young Milton, working without tools or spare parts, made emergency repairs. Meanwhile Haines got no opportunity to inspect his map, much less explain it to Garston.

But there wasn’t any cross-examination. Instead, Garston came over to the ledge where Haines sat, and stretched out his hand to be shaken. “Congratulations, Haines,” he said.

Sarcasm again! Disregarding it, Haines said, “I don’t suppose it’ll do any good, but I’d like to say I’m sorry to have brought you out here, like this.”

“Well, if we hadn’t come—and if we hadn’t been able to observe the bird-things for a minute or two before they took flight—we might not have believed you. And after all, this is what we came for.”

“What is?”

Garston looked at him searchingly. “You haven’t seen for yourself?” he asked. “You don’t know that the birds have made a perfect map of this area?”

Haines was dumbfounded. “Perfect? I thought they were wrecking it, the way they tried to wreck your shack…”

“Go and look. It’s a beauty; your theory really worked!”

Puzzled, Haines got up and walked the hundred feet to the site. Within the frame he’d smoothed—while leaving knee and hand marks that the others must have seen—traced in rocks and pebbles and white sand, was a relief-map.

The camp, the knoll—the parts he knew best—were perfectly represented.

The swale and cliffs at his present location were recognizable. Of the many other details, he couldn’t be sure, till Carno silently handed him an aerial photograph, taken before they’d landed.

The comparison was too close for coincidence. There was no doubt of it: the birds had completed the map he’d begun, applying knowledge of the terrain that he simply didn’t have.

“What do you think now?” Garston asked gleefully.

“It looks like we’ve made contact with the natives, all right,” Haines admitted slowly. “But I still think I owe you an apology. It was wrong of me to wander off, even if it did turn out all right. And then, my theory was haywire, because what made the contact wasn’t Beauty, but a simple map that I got up more or less by accident.”

“What the hell, boy,” Milton said admiringly. “It worked!”

“But, Milt—it worked in reverse!” Haines insisted plaintively. “I set out to make contact by expressing myself in pictures, and wound up interesting the birds with a map. And a map, after all, is a bird’s-eye view. I wanted to create something they’d recognize as the work of an intelligent mind, but came out with something they did, that shows they’re intelligent. So you have to give the birds most of the credit for making this contact. It certainly wasn’t my work—at best, it was co-operative…”

“Well, what did you expect?” Garston demanded. “Cooperation in the face of a brand-new situation is the hallmark of intelligent beings. But the way you talk, Haines, it certainly doesn’t sound as if you want to be treated like a hero, as I promised.”

“No, sir,” said Haines promptly, “I don’t. But what I do want,” he went on, looking wistfully from Garston to the others, and back again into his boss’ eyes, “what I do want, sir, is to be a member of your team.”

FACTS OF LIFE

On our planet Septimo there was the ooze and our Mind—and eternal, intelligent tranquility; then a woman came from Earth, and stepped on us, and we found out all about sex.

The woman—her name was Martha Cotton; she was young, brown-eyed, and a psychologist—came in a ship. Not alone—she brought Bert Sommers, a skinny lad and a head full of undigested biological theory.

They braked with the usual spirals and circled our planet a few times to look it over, so our Mind had penetrated their thoughts and speech—widely different—by the time they were ready to land.

Physically ready, that is; Martha had mental reservations. “I don’t know,” she said, long fingers hesitant among the co-pilot’s controls. “I think maybe we should go back to the Big Ship and get a larger party…”

“Don’t be chicken,” Bert argued. “There’s no sign of life except that green scum; the air tests o.k.; gravity’s close to one—”

“But—”

“Look. Between the Big Ship and this runabout, we’ve been inside metal hulls for over a year. If we go back to headquarters, they’ll send someone else in your place for sure—and probably chain me at a desk, too. So let’s send no signal and just go down for a few minutes and have some fun; it’ll be like getting out of jail!”

“I wouldn’t know!” Martha grinned. Then she frowned. “‘That feeling of release, though…it scares me, Bert. I mean—well—here on the ship, one or the other of us is busy every minute. But down there, excited and all… Besides, people will talk… I’m afraid—”

“Of me?”

“Noooo…”

She wouldn’t admit she was afraid of herself, so they landed.

* * * *

Our air smelled good to them. Our green-clad, rolling hills, and greener swampy lowlands, were more different from their metal ships than from their native Earth; they got out, laughing.

At first they shouted and ran aimlessly around like a couple of pups released from the kitchen. Then, swinging joined hands, they walked up and over the nearest hill, too excitedly breathless to talk till they got over the crest.

But when Bert wanted to rest and enjoy the view, Martha objected. “Look at my boots,” she pouted. “All smeared with this green slime. We can’t sit down, Bert; it’ll get all over ourself.”

“I’ll scrape off a patch of ground,” he said, after exploratory nudgings with his toe. “It’s dry underneath; and the ooze won’t hurt you even if it touches your skin. See?”

He held up a slimy finger. “Dirty stuff, but harmless.”

Had our Mind been emotional, that would have insulted us. The green ooze was us—the living substance of our Mind—billions of trillions of tiny cell-colonies, each just large enough to support a few members in leisured freedom from food-making.

From the leisured cells had evolved our collective Mind, a single mentality for an entire planet—endowed, of course, with far more intelligence than can be possessed by any fractionated individual, human or other. And we needed no physical body, either; we used our collective psychic power to travel through time and space—within our planet and its atmosphere—collect facts and influence matter.

By clairvoyance we saw Bert and Martha; by telepathy we read; by intelligence we understood their thoughts and words. And by psychokinesis we would halt their adventure before they’d walked all over us—they were killing thousands of cells with every step.

But our intellectual interest was so great that we wanted to study these humans before removing them—and to be sure they remained available for study. They were strange to us, with many individual quirks we didn’t understand, and a curiously irrational interrelation.

The way they looked at each other, for instance, and fell silent in the middle of a sentence; the way they’d walked together, practically dancing. The way they sat now on the hilltop, half uplifted by excitement, half sunk into a dream. The way Martha would reach out unconsciously for Bert’s hand, but withdraw from his clasp whenever she noticed it. Hardly rational, to say the least. Far beyond our experience.

Take the way Bert’s Adam’s apple bobbed so excitedly. From handholding he’d progressed to waist-encircling; and now, though it seemed to require more courage than a take-off into space, he thought he’d try for a kiss.

“Sex, sex, sex,” said Martha, pushing him away. “That’s all you biologists think about. I knew this would happen when you set the ship down. Please don’t be a nuisance, Bert; you’re acting compulsively.”

“Compulsively, hell” he snorted. “I want to marry you!”

“Well,” she mocked. “That’s interesting news. And how sentimentally you put it, dear!”

“Well…”

“Well, we’re not married and there’s nobody here to marry us and we’re not going to act as if we were married. Some other time, Bert!”

“Aw, for pete’s sake!”

“You sound neurotic! If either off us has to become a martyr to convention, it isn’t going to be me! Mother said it was disreputable when I signed up for this trip—I intend to return able to prove she was wrong!” Intriguing, this—our cells reproduce by budding; we didn’t know what a mother was, and our lack of knowledge went on from there.

So, while Bert got up and tramped in futile, murderous circles, our Mind investigated his.

We didn’t get far; he was supposed to be a biologist; but biology is the science of life, and his ideas on “what life is” were anything but scientific. And that wasn’t the only gap in his knowledge. We thought he should understand how his own kind had evolved, at least; but his ignorance of man’s evolution was much more extensive than his understanding of it.

What reason he possessed seemed to be far outweighed by his emotionality. His whole brain was in an angry ferment; he didn’t even try to hold Martha’s hand when, in sullen silence they trudged back to their landing-place.

They gasped when the wreckage came into view. They stared at it, at one another. Then, finding nothing to say they ran frantically down to the ship.

The vessel sprawled on its back with landing-gear pointing skyward like the feet of a dead chick. The hull was crushed and wracked—equipment lay scattered around.

Bert thrust his head through a shattered port, surveyed the jumbled interior, and withdrew, searching for something hopeful to say. The best he could think of was a noncommittal, “No tracks.”

“If no tracks, then tricks,” Martha said. She essayed a giggle, but it came out off-key and she stopped in the middle.

“Wind, maybe,” Bert offered, winning the reluctant respect of our Mind with his good guess. “See how things are scattered!”

“Let’s unscatter them,” said Martha, practically; “we’ve supplies, except not much water. And tents.”

“Let’s not use tents,” said Bert. “Rather a sod hut—a dugout with a well-anchored canvas roof. The wind might blow again.”

“Why didn’t we feel it and hear it, if it was a wind? Could it have been so minutely localized?”

It could have been, and was; but then, it was a psychic wind, not an atmospheric one.

Bert didn’t know that, and said so. “But I go for the dugout idea anyhow,” he added.

“I don’t,” said Martha. “Not one dugout, surely; I go for two. You hear?”

“Double work? For what?”

Martha put her hands on her hips.

“Think my reputation isn’t worth a hole in the ground?”

“Sex, sex, sex,” he mocked. “That’s all you psychologists ever think about!” But he dug two holes in the hillside, and covered each with a weighted tarp.

They didn’t talk-over the possibility of rescue—each knew the planned routine. The Big Ship, that had brought them to our System from yours, would continue to cruise in satellitic motion begun when the side-trips had started. From it would issue a smaller vessel, similar to the one we’d wrecked, but heavily-armed and mannered by a trained rescue-squad.

A man with the planet-wide intelligence of our Mind could seize that rescue-ship; with it, surprise and capture the larger one. With that—well, the possibilities opened up in geometric progression. Provided, of course, that our Mind evolved a man from the ooze. Which seemed possible; according to Bert’s system of learning, it had happened on Earth.

We immediately tried to duplicate the process. Some of our cell-groups gave up all leisure, and formed themselves into balls; the balls subdivided, working out the key to the next stage of development—secretions that influenced the form and position of their multiplying cells.

Meanwhile, paving the way, our Mind tried to impress Bert and Martha with our psychic powers, so they would defer to our man when he’d evolved.

We started with telepathy because it’s our normal mode of expression. But here we ran into difficulties. Martha had an ability, absolutely new to us at the time, of simply closing her thoughts to things she didn’t wish to believe—and, like most psychologists, she didn’t choose to believe in psychic powers.

Bert, though he harbored the notions we planted in his brain, had no desire to act on them; he devoted his time to making Martha comfortable and to thinking up things for the two to do, so that neither would have time for brooding.

And Martha responded to his efforts. Painfully she cultivated a blithe and lighthearted manner, and tried to act as if she and Bert were on a camping trip together. In two days, they’d built themselves an elaborate camp, spread signal-panels visible from the air, and spent fruitless hours trying to rebuild their ruined microwave set. When that proved impossible, Bert gathered up some optical instruments and made a crude, low-power microscope.

We were delighted. The possibilities inherent in a pair of hands were spread before us in a display the more striking because it was improvised; our Mind pressed vigorously forward in our attempt to develop a man.

In those two days, we’d evolved a primitive fish. Bert missed this, but next day he did see and try to capture our amphibian stage—it was the first animal life he’d seen on Septimo.

Meanwhile, our efforts to impress them had gone on to psychokinesis. We’d been a wind—they were prepared for that. Now we became a sigh in the night, an invisible nuisance that tripped unwary feet, a remembered bird-call lifted from Bert’s memory and shrilled in the predawn cold.

We dripped water on sleeping faces, hid necessary objects; we kissed Martha when she slept, so that she awoke, went to Bert’s hut, kicked him in the ribs, and argued. In broad daylight we pinched Martha till she slapped him.

To defend himself, he had to mention poltergeists.

“‘Ghosts are supposed to have no feeling,” Martha retorted; “this one does nothing else but!”

She drowned out his fervent denials with the first human song ever heard on Septimo: “Ghoul days, ghoul days, good old gory drool days…”

But she was more frightened than he.

That is, Martha was more frightened than Bert till, on the fourth thirty-hour day he’d spent on our planet, Bert saw the shrew.

The little mammal—it wasn’t exactly like any shrew you’ve ever seen—entered Bert’s tent, where it shredded a few papers, ruined some opened rations, and messed up his bed.

With this physical manifestation added to his telepathic impressions, Bert began to worry. We succeeded in turning his mind toward a matter that had been lifted from it in the first place—the story of Man’s origin. He recognized the evolutionary possibilities in the stages he’d seen: primitive cell-colonies, amphibian, mammal.

Of course it never occurred to him that these life-forms hadn’t existed before he landed; he under-estimated the physical power of our Mind, and even of his own.

He knew, but refused to consider even with our prompting, that from time immemorial there have been men who claimed the ability to predict the future: he knew that long ago, a “Dr. Rhine” had proved the power of prediction does exist.

He never permitted himself to realize that prediction foreshortens time. But a prediction exists—and, existing, brings the future into the present.

He found out when he saw the primate—a furry, cuddly, affectionate little monkey-like creature. It was I, as were all the other life-forms; that is, it was of our Mind—and so am I.

Needless to say, I didn’t spring as a primate directly from the shrew; our Mind had killed the shrew, as we’d killed each of the other forms of life created from the ooze. Each sprang directly from a cell-colony.

We’d learned from Bert the biogenetic rule that every individual re-enacts the history of his kind; we were advancing, stage by stage, from the cell to Man. But we didn’t bring two individuals together to produce a third. Bert’s mind contained information along these lines, of course, but the only life-form we were interested in was Man. And our purely rational Mind—which has no need for emotion, and experiences none—simple couldn’t untangle the emotional skeins that, despite their scientific training, surrounded the word “sex” in the thoughts of Bert and Martha. Our Mind didn’t know what “sex” might be; we wanted to find out.

Indirectly, we were learning. I’d been directed by our Mind into Martha’s path. Bert, who sat in his hut’s entrance, fooling with the microscope, didn’t see me till after Martha and I had made friends.

“This is my new playmate,” she announced, carrying me over for him to see, “my ’ittle Zyttl.”

“Well” he said, getting up from his work and coming out to us. “Interesting! Some name you’ve give him, too; we’ll have to study the beast—he’s the highest form of life to turn up here.”

“Please don’t talk like a book,” she said, hugging me tight. “He’s a pet, not a problem.”

Bert was under enough strain to show annoyance. “Don’t be a sentimental dope,” he said tartly. “You know it’s not safe to play with a strange life-form!”

“No?” Martha retorted. “What do you call your business with the slime?”

“Investigation; and I want to investigate your little ape.”

“I know your investigations! You’ve got to find out if he’s got the same sort of nervous, and digestive, and reproductive system that’s common to vertebrates on Earth. But you’re not going to hurt him, see!”

He saw; he saw I was pillowed on Martha’s hard round breast—and emoted over the sight. Martha emoted, too.

“See?” she repeated. “And I suppose you want to dissect the poor thing.”

“I just don’t want you to handle it,” he said angrily; “it could have parasites, or something.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my Zyttl,” she stated. “But there is with you! You probably suffered a childhood shock that aroused primitive fears of animals!”

“Nonsense,” he said, stealing a page from her book. “But I’ll bet you felt unloved in childhood and are using that beast to compensate.”

“Love, again!” she jeered. “Sex stuff! You’re probably jealous—jealous of a fuzzy little animal!”

Jealousy was something I’d never experienced as part of our Mind, but I experienced it then—for with a sudden snatch, Bert grabbed me from Martha and began to throttle me.

Violence was new to me, too: I lay limp in his arms, without enough experience to try biting him, even.

But Martha came to my rescue. “You sadist!” she cried. “You leave my Zyttl alone!” She pummeled his ribs till Bert handed me over and walked off muttering.

I’d come between them. That was our Mind’s purpose; we would divide and conquer—and learn, as well.

Consider what we had to find out. Everything about Man that’s concerned with emotion was novel to us. Sex—which Martha and Bert had been taught by their respective studies to consider the most important single drive in Man—was strange to our Mind. Only by creating a man for itself, could our Mind experience those things.

But everything had to be timed right; it takes time to recapitulate the phylogeny of so complicated a species as Man. Our Mind would know when the rescue-ship reached our atmosphere, though, and I would evolve from primate to man the night before it landed.

Then, in the morning, I’d enlist the help of Martha.

In the two days that followed, obtaining Martha’s help seemed increasingly easy. She would no longer speak to Bert—he’d put the finishing touches on their quarrel with some remarks about Martha’s sublimated sex-drive. Because she suspected he was right, she was enraged beyond reconciliation; she spent her days petting and cleaning and feeding me, and teaching me tricks—which, of course, I learned easily.

Martha lived during those times in a flickering daydream. Often, while she petted me, she was picturing a baby; but more often she thought of a man—tall and muscular and golden of skin and well filled-out—as different from Bert as could be. Our Mind analyzed those daydreams, and decided to fulfill them.

Then our Mind would get the experience it wanted. For if Martha loved me when I was a hairy little monkey, she’d certainly love me when I became her dream-man.

And dream-man I did become—when the time came. A combination of something called “Tarzan” and the “Belvedere Apollo”.

It was early in the morning when I went to Martha’s hut. She was still asleep—didn’t know her pet had gone during the night.

Bert was up. His mind, possibly stimulated to think of flight by hope for rescue, had been dwelling on butterflies, so our Mind conceived a reasonable facsimile of one and decoyed him over a hill.

Perhaps things would have been different if I’d knocked before entering Martha’s hut—or if I’d stolen a pair of pants to wear. But I had one advantage: because he was the only man we’d ever heard, my voice was exactly like Bert’s.

“Good morning, Martha,” I said softly.

She stirred in her sleep.

“Good morning, dear,” I said again, and stroked her hair, as yesterday, she’d stroked mine.

She rolled over in her sleeping-bag and smiled; she was waking up, now. “If this is a dream, it’s a nice one,” she murmured. “Or have you finally got up cour—” She opened her eyes and screamed.

The sound distressed my humanoid ears. “Stop that,” I said, “You know me! I’m Zyttl, your pet monkey!”

“Then I am dreaming?”

“No, I’ve just changed my form; how do you like me this way?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, “if you’ll please hand me that boot.” I did, and she broke my nose with the heel of it.

“Don’t do that!” I objected reasonably. “Even when I was a stinking little monkey—you cuddled me, and held me, and—”

I stopped talking and began to duck—things were flying through the air at me. Words, too. “Make a fool of me, will you? Rubbing your hairy little paws… Watching… I could kill…”

I was in a very unfortunate position. Still, our Mind was getting what we wanted—a knowledge of sex.

However, our Mind lacked combative instincts. So first Martha beat me up; then Bert came, summoned by her scream, and beat me some more.

By the time I’d been trussed up and dumped on the floor, they could hear the rescue-ship approaching.

“We’ll keep him as a hostage,” Bert said, “and get his story later; meantime he’d better prevent further manifestations, if he knows what’s good for him!”

“He looks secured,” said Martha. “But I must look a sight.” Her lacy nightgown was a rag, her brown hair tousled wantonly.

“It’ll be hours before they land,” Bert said with a funny look on his face. “Come on over to my hut and I’ll help you get fixed up.”

They gathered up some clothes and left me there. They thought they’d defeated our Mind.

But they hadn’t. True, they never did set me free—and our Mind, wondering what would happen next, didn’t rescue me. That’s why they were able to take me with them back to Earth, where I have to live in the lab and give this lecture twice a day.

And it’s a fact that our Mind got subdivided by my leaving, so even if I’m no smarter than anyone else down here, there was a slight loss.

But all that’s a small and reasonable price to pay. Because, by the time they went to Bert’s hut—hours before the rescue ship had even landed, much less taken off again—our superhuman Mind knew it had accomplished its purposes.

That’s why we paid so little attention to the activities in Bert’s hut that brought them out to meet the rescue party in an oddly glowing condition; we couldn’t see much point to their ritual.

But they were leaving, and that’s the main thing our Mind wanted.

And also, we’d found out what “sex” is. From Martha, the psychologist, we’d learned the great biological secret: “sex” is what makes a woman cuddle a stinking little ape, and scratch a man’s eyes out for touching her.

PREFERRED POSITION

The bed woke them. “Time to get up, dears,” it cooed. “Time to get up and greet the sun…time to get up…” Then the supporting magnetism faded and let their mattress drift gently to the soft warm floor.

Janet turned and opened her eyes, pouting at Les. He scowled back, grumbled something, and rolled away. She shook his film-coated shoulder.

“Come on, Les. Come on, you’ll feel better after coffee.”

“Don’t want any,” he snarled.

But the damage had been done. At the word “coffee” a grotesque marionette opened the bedroom door and minced in with two steaming cups of a tray, swinging them artfully so that they appeared likely to spill, but didn’t.

For some years now, that dance had left Janet unamused. She was about to say so when Les growled, “These darned dolls are a nuisance. I wish you’d order a plain, automatic dispenser!”

“They’re even more boring” Janet argued, sitting up. Her gauzy film-dress and sleepy face made her look appealingly childlike. She was fifty-five.

Les was sixty, with a full head of blond hair atop six and a half feet of slim solid flesh. He sat up with the expression of an exasperated six-year-old.

“Go away!” he told the doll. It did.

“But I wanted some!” Janet wailed. She was careful, though, not to use the words that would cause the doll to return.

Neither did Les. He said, “Why don’t we take a couple of pills and go back to sleep till tomorrow? There isn’t a darned thing to do.”

“There never is,” Janet said. Then noting she’d inadvertently agreed with her husband, she quickly added, “But we can’t sleep—we did that yesterday. If we don’t move around we’ll practically stop eating, and anyway the neighbors will miss us. First thing you know we’ll be accused of either a hunger-strike or immobility. Then they’ll enslave us for attempting suicide!” She sniffed in self-pity at the thought.

“Ah, honk ’em!” Les said. “Slavery’d at least be a change. And slaves have something to do!”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Janet said tartly. “You know perfectly well they always torture slaves.”

“Yeah… But I just can’t face this any longer! I’ve got sixty-five more years of longevity, according to the doctors—and they’re never wrong, curse them! Sixty-five more years without the possibility of illness, want, risk… Even an accident is unlikely. Nothing’s going to happen in all that time! Jan I just can’t face it.”

“Isn’t that just like a man?” she scoffed. “You know very well I’ve got seventy years to go—five still to wait before I can even have my first child. You’re just being selfish!”

They glowered at each other. Then Les rubbed her cheek with the back of his hand, and smiled.

“Thanks, kid,” he said. “You really had me going for a minute. Now I feel better!”

Pleased with the compliment, Janet concocted an extra-fancy combination of films to spray on herself for the morning’s wear. When it was in place, she ordered a large breakfast and arranged to have the waiter-doll do a special dance-routine while serving.

But Les’s smile had vanished with the whiskers he’d rubbed off. He picked at his food, turned his back on the dancing, and afterward yawned away the few minutes they spent on their apartment’s terrace, stared at by fifty thousand neighbors who lacked anything better to do. When Les wandered idly off, Janet followed.

Les went to the living room, projected a book onto the ceiling, switched it off without reading, played with the glowing phosphors that lighted the room in colors he varied jarringly, fiddled with the console of the perfume aerosol and created a stink, and then, in sheer despair, turned on the puppet-set.

Its lighted screen listed the necessary dolls and props, so he laid them out. Soon the three-foot stage reflected a broadcast picture of the State Executive Office. A stringless, formally-dressed puppet sat at a desk, its blank face a transmitted facsimile of the Governor’s.

“…the last time I can make this announcement,” the Governor was saying into a hidden microphone. “The tests are to begin at noon. Jobs are now open! I repeat: jobs are now open! Men only, of course. But if any of you fellows out there suffer from boredom—and who doesn’t in this wonderful State of ours that by virtue of the New Energy Sources guarantees leisured security to each citizen—if, I repeat, you suffer from ennui, then why not apply for a job?

“Do it now—no further vacancies will occur for years, and we have some really desirable positions open this morning. Appointments will be made strictly on merit, as usual, with a job for every applicant and the best job for the top man.

“Though it’s true that losers in this competition are required to assume for life the less desirable duties that our civilization imposes, I assure you that isn’t as bad as it sounds. I was pretty far down the list in my day, yet I only have to be Governor…

“So won’t you please apply? I want a lot of competition!”

The stage darkened, and the puppet got up and walked to its box. Before the lights could go up on the next program, Les switched the set off.

“What do you think?” he asked Janet.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Nobody in my family has ever worked.”

“Mine, either. But I once knew a fellow who’d tried for a job. He seemed o.k. to me, but he sure didn’t get a good one! Had a clerical position, with business machines, and their output was geared down to spread the work. So he didn’t have enough to do…just stacked punched cards or something every day for eighty years!”

“Oh, you’d do better than that, dear!”

“Maybe. Point is, there are jobs worse than no job at all!”

“I’m not so sure!” Janet said, suddenly determined. “Only a few minutes ago you weren’t very happy about the idle days ahead. Why not take a chance?”

“Take a chance? What kind of language is that? Chance went out along with disease and poverty and crime and accidents. You’re way off base, Jan!”

“But you have a chance—oh, all right!—an opportunity, then, if you like that better, to get a good job. Now, if I were a man—”

“But you’re not… Still…maybe I’ll try it.”

For the first time in a month or two, Janet kissed him warmly. And after she’d helped him into his wings and seen him off from the terrace, she felt a strange warm glow of anticipation. Not since she’d married had there been need for a decision that could bring change into her life. This was a Day!

* * * *

It was a Day for a lot of others, too. She learned that from the noon broadcast of the test ceremony.

“In my time,” the Governor said, speaking from the Capitol’s rotunda, “in my time a hundred aspirants was considered a good turnout. Today’s applicants total a thousand! We haven’t actually got a thousand jobs lined up, but we’ll get ’em! And I’m privileged to announce, now that the list of competitors has closed, that we do have the astoundingly large number of ten—repeat, ten—genuinely desirable appointments to make.”

Ten good jobs for a thousand applicants didn’t sound to Janet like an astoundingly large number. She’d been sprawled on a magnetically-positioned pad half-way between floor and ceiling, but she sat up when the Governor stopped talking, and with a twinge of genuine and unwonted anxiety watched the long file of applicants as they approached in turn the brain-wave analyzer, the voice-operated sorter that would add their life-files to current test results, and the officials who judged each man’s configuration.

She wished they’d announce the test results publicly, but knew they wouldn’t. So, when Les had gone through—about twenty minutes after the start—Janet shut off the broadcast, dissolved her dress-films, and had herself rubbed by the massage machine. The morning’s suspense was proving too much for her, and she didn’t want to have a headache when Les came home.

But even the mechanical masseuse couldn’t rub away her strange feelings. Not since marriage had Janet felt curiosity as to the future.

What if he got so dull they never even argued about anything? She shivered at the thought—but then she smiled. And for the next hour Janet lay under the soothing massage and gave herself up to the delightful new pleasure of worrying.

When Les returned, shadowing the terrace in his descent like some portentous bird, Janet began to shake. Without even waiting to kiss him, she said, “How was it? How did you do?”

Les grinned teasingly. “Help me molt, first,” he said. “I’m tired.”

Unable to get anything else out of him until it was done, she tore his wings off damagingly, kissed him, and said, “Now won’t you say something?”

“I’m hungry!”

“No!” She danced her impatience like a little girl. “Tell me!”

But even as she pouted, her eyes sparkled in anticipation.

“I start tomorrow,” he said.

“Did you get the best job?”

“Nope. No, I really didn’t.”

“What, then?”

“Second best!”

“Oh, wonderful! What is it?”

“Rigger and high-climber—topping trees, setting structural iron, fixing flag-poles—that sort of thing. Powderman was first.”

“Oh, rigger’s wonderful!” Visions of his future work flashed across her mind, implanted there by childhood hours spent watching other members of this elite profession at their thrilling work. She knew there could be broken cables, falling pulleys, snapped booms, dropped loads—every day would have its interesting possibilities!

“My darling!” She threw her arms around him and was momentarily silenced by his kiss.

Then she stepped back, looked admiringly up at him, and said, “Oh, I’m so happy for you! And so proud! I’m going right in and order up a nice big meal. I know you’ll enjoy this one—it really might be your last!”

SIGN OF LIFE

George Main lay dying in the wreckage of the space-ship. Dying—and cursing the deadly wind of Venus. It had killed his mates. It would soon have him.

The wind was trying to finish him off right now. It shrieked, moaned, whispered and shouted through the smashed hull where he sprawled in his space-suit. Laughed, too. The wind was a murderer—and was glad.

All but he were dead. Soon the grit-laden wind would bury them and their ship. Then all the effort, the skill, the faith—all the ingenuity and labor expended on the expedition—would be wiped away, as invisible as the wind that buried them.

Thinking of that, thinking back over each agonizing hour since his landing on Venus, George Main wondered what he should have done, what he could now do, to prevent the utter waste of their efforts and their lives.

The wind was his enemy—and the wind couldn’t even be seen. Only the dust it carried was visible. Too visible. Dust was so thick in the upper atmosphere that the scope-readers had mistaken dust-clouds for solid ground.

With ports blinded by dust, the possibility of that error had been obvious enough. The navigator knew the risk. He chanced it—and lost the toss.

George knew he was still alive only because he’d acted like a childish eager-beaver. And had been tolerated by the others because he was the crew’s youngest member.

Ever since he could read and dream, he’d wanted to be the first man ever to touch the soil of Venus. So, having no duties connected with setting down the ship, he’d gotten into his space-suit and had waited by a hatch. He was standing there when the ship went into the twenty-mile free fall that smashed it.

George didn’t know who opened the escape hatch and shoved him out. That man was dead, along with the rest of the crew. Unlike George’s suit, the space-ship had no parachute.

He’d landed blind, in dust so thick he didn’t know he was down till he got there. For forty-eight hours he’d lain where he fell, waiting for a lull in the storm so he could see the ship.

When the wind finally quit, the ship was already half buried. Thirsty, hungry, stinking in the hot suit, George had staggered over windrow after windrow of dust to reach it.

He’d broken out an emergency-jug of water, found some uncontaminated food, erected within the hull a small gas-proof tent, and then passed out before he could crawl in the tent to eat and drink.

Later he’d gone out while the lull continued, to search for bodies. Like the hull itself, they were scattered over a wide area. Some were already buried in dust. The wind had buried them.

The wind—the murdering wind. The wind of formaldehyde that poisoned every drop of water it touched, every bit of food. The wind that limited George’s supplies to unbroken containers—of which there were tragically few.

The wind mocked him, then and thereafter. It mocked his efforts to find the ship’s log and continue it. It mocked his efforts to live.

He tried to fight back. He lay prone and relaxed because that took less oxygen. He lay in the suit and not in the tent because that took less oxygen. He ate and drank but once a day because that took less oxygen.

So he had run out of water while there were still some potassium oxides left to refresh his thrice-breathed air, some oxygen for the tent.

George Main wanted to live, knew he would die. And was enraged at the thought that he would die without having accomplished anything. He and his friends, and the pioneering scientists back of them, had put too much effort into trans-system travel to have it all come to nothing like this.

Stubbornly he noted in the log that he was now dehydrated to the point of occasional delirium. And that he hated the wind.

As if that wind had not already done enough, it now sought to destroy his last remaining moments of sanity. It brought horde of odd shapes to haunt him.

The shapes literally rolled into the dust filled metal cavity where he lay writing. The wind rolled them. But when they got into shelter—had rolled to one side or the other of the holes through which they’d come—the shapes began to move, slowly, under their own power.

They all looked alike. There were a couple of dozen, maybe— George counted ten and gave up because counting was too much like work. They were teardrops—eight-inch yellow teardrops with the point down. And each point rested on an extensible foot that looked like a blue starfish, about four inches across its seven points.

They came in, rolling along the ground as the wind took them, and then extended their stars from some hidden place and moved on them when out of the wind.

That is, they seemed to. But whether they were in the hull or in his mind, George was by no means sure.

Nothing could live in this wind. Nothing could live on a planet with no water, where the air was full of formaldehyde ready to react with proteins, the basis of life.

He lay motionless, watching idly. There was no sound but the wind. The yellow teardrops scattered out. They could have been exploring—or seeking shelter—or nonexistent.

When he got tired of watching them, George put the log aside and slept.

He awoke to find a small congregation of teardrops surrounding the watch strapped outside the suit on his left wrist. The watch was going—wound through habit every twenty-four hours, though that was but a third of a day, here on Venus. The teardrops were curious about it.

How he got the idea they were curious, George didn’t quite know. They seemed attracted to it, was all. There were no eyes, so far as he could tell—no ears. If these things had senses, they were not like terrestrial senses. But the teardrops did have an attitude of attention.

George removed his watch, laid it before them. Two teardrops detached themselves from the group to examine his right hand, with which he’d slipped off the wrist-band. Three others perched on the dust-covered deck, the watch between them and him.

George flexed his right hand, twiddled his fingers. The teardrops seemed unafraid. He chose one and lifted it. It seemed light in weight. Its star-foot was slightly prehensile, and grasped his glove with tiny claws arranged in rows on its bottom surface.The claws seemed for clinging, not for seizing. George put down the teardrop, turned it over, and found no opening anywhere on the surface. If these things lived, he decided, they must be plants, synthesizing their food—they had no way to eat as animals do.

Vaguely, George made up his wavering mind that the things existed outside his imagination. They were alive. They felt curiosity about him. Leathery, he found them—hard and smooth, except for the foot.

When he set down the teardrop he’d been examining, the three by his watch took up a rhythmic motion. The center one stood in place, swaying slowly above the watch like a bit of seaweed in a quiet lagoon.

Each of the other two had somehow obtained a pebble. They set their pebbles down near the watch. Each then tapped with a star-point, first at the pebble, then at the watch. Back and forth they swayed, their motions synchronized—perhaps directed by the center one.

Interesting—but meaningless. It was equally meaningless when the two teardrops at his right began to dance. They found an empty food-can lid, pushed it near his hand, and began a concerted swaying and pointing that took them between hand and can.

Idly, George led the dance with a waggled forefinger. The teardrops promptly changed their motion. They stood in place, no longer pointing alternately at lid and finger, but swaying between them in time with George.

They were slow, though—he could easily have left them behind. But if he moved his finger slowly enough, they kept perfect time.

The dance at the watch had stopped. Many teardrops gathered around the pair that followed the beat of his right index finger.

It must have amused them. But it soon tired George. He stopped.

He needed all his remaining energy to think with. He knew these teardrops were sentient. They were curious, they communicated with each other, and they danced. They had minds, therefore.

George remembered hearing that Man had danced even before he learned to speak, in a primitive effort to express his feelings. He knew some birds dance, too—as a courtship procedure. Insects, even.

But why did the teardrops dance?

What was the significance of rhythmic motion between a pebble and a watch? A tin lid and a man’s hand? What did the pebbles mean?

The pebble was a native object, known to be lifeless, inanimate. The watch was a strange something that moved. The can-lid did not move. The hand—gloved, though they could not know that—was an object that moved.

The dance was a question, therefore, Alive, or dead? The teardrops wanted to know. Is the watch that moves by itself alive? The strangely symmetrical lid of a can, is it alive? The odd-shaped hand?

These teardrops had good minds—could grasp abstractions. In a sense, George felt, the difference between animate and inanimate objects is an abstraction. In his dying state, the notion amused him.

Smiling, he placed a pebble on the watch, another on the lid. He sat up, moved his weakened body so they could perhaps tell it was a unit. He picked up a teardrop in each hand, held them at his visor, rolled his eyes, and opened and shut his mouth. He spoke to them. He sang to them. He swayed with them to show he too could dance.

They made no sign of reply. None that he could recognize, at any rate.

Carefully he felt and looked at the entire surface of a teardrop, putting one down to devote both hands to the other. He thought perhaps the lack of organs and openings might simply mean they were clothed or armored in some way. But the thing was apparently naked. The surfaces he touched were probably skin. He didn’t know.

And they, would they know what a man was? Were they even certain he was alive?

One of them was behind him, dancing before the tent. Seeing that, he was certain the teardrops hadn’t yet distinguished the animate from the inanimate in the objects around them here.

And George had little time to teach them. Already he was dull and listless. His vision was playing tricks on him.

Like as not he’d be dead before they knew for certain he’d been alive. Dead in the grotesque space-suit. Preserved in an atmosphere of formaldehyde. His body would seem like a machine that had run down. There would be no discernable difference between himself and his watch.

But if they knew he’d been alive? They might remember, then. They were intelligent, could communicate with one another. By rights they should have some kind of legends or traditions or history. If they did, if they knew they’d seen alien life, they’d keep the memory alive.

They’d recognize the next man to land on Venus, might find means to tell of this first expedition. Might lead a man to the buried space-ship, the bodies, the ship’s log.

At least they could defeat the wind. The teardrops could keep his life and the lives of his mates from going utterly to waste. Whether men ever found out or not, the teardrops themselves would know that the expedition had reached Venus.

But first, George had to prove he was alive, like them—not some strangely mobile meteorite, nor oddly contrived machine.

His very lack of strength, his real nearness to death, provided George with the means he sought. Already he was half anesthetized by weakness and shock. He didn’t have to worry about pain.

Holding his breath, he took off his helmet. He picked up a teardrop with each hand, held them to his hot cheeks. Then he let himself breathe.

He knew the physical changes to follow would be obvious to the intelligent little dancers he held in his hands. He hoped they wouldn’t get hurt, when they fell.

Hurt or not, they’d soon figure out he’d been alive—once he was dead.

THE PRICE

Like a louse on a lion, the fear had got under his hair, bored into his skin, swelling and reddening as it ate at him. Like an inaccessible insect, it was too close, too nearly a part of him, to be coped with by claw or craft. He could only pretend it wasn’t there. Hating the pretense, Ray Fincek hated himself.

He sat behind a cluttered desk that huddled between supply bins in the Building Maintenance Section of America’s Moonbase. His grizzled head hardly topped the heaped-up papers on the blotter. His flat, thrice-broken nose pointed directly at a dog-eared telautograph message received from Earth the day before.

His brown eves didn’t see that message. Only his mind’s eye focused, and with it he saw stars. Stars as they looked from space—cold in their hotness, close in their distantness, and bright as the Everlasting Light that burned in its own stream of oxygen at the Tomb of the Unreturned, the monument to missing spacemen he’d helped dedicate there on the Moon.

The missing had seen those stars. In his mind’s eye, in the memory that ran back to the beginnings of spaceflight, Ray Fincek saw those missing men. He saw their ships, the planets he’d visited with them, the asteroids, the satellites, the whole solar system in a panorama as wide as space and as long as his twenty years of space-work.

He told himself he hated every minute of it.

Still evading the message, his eyes came to rest on his left hand. It was calloused. It was also grimy—tattooed with the ingrained dirt that comes from inadequate washing. The nails were filthy. They needed cutting, but they needed cleaning more, and that he could do by himself.

He drew a nail file from the center drawer of his desk, and gripped the blunt end with his lips. He bent over till the shaft of the file slipped between the open jaws of a small vise clamped to the desk’s left corner. Then, holding the file in position with his lips, he tightened the vise around it.

He sat up, a swarthy, graying, flat-nosed gnome, broad back hunched to a question-mark. Patiently he drew each fingernail in turn over the sharp end of the file—not once, but repeatedly, until each was fairly clean. Then he buffed them all on his empty right sleeve.

By that time he was ready to face again the impact of the telautograph message. He could have recited it from memory but chose to read because it was in his son’s own neat and incisive script.

Dear Dad,

Have been accepted as Ph. D. candidate in astrophysics and assigned an asteroid to study. Will stop off for parental consent. Janet sends love.

Twoie.

So he was going to see his boy. Just what he’d dreamed of, all those long years. Just what he’d always promised himself—after the next trip. Then suddenly, with an arm gone, there’d been no next trip—and no assurance of a decent job, down Earthside.

His dream was coming true anyhow. But Twoie must hate him, after those long years of neglect; despise him as a stove-up has-been. Besides, the boy shouldn’t be coming to the Moon. Dreams have no business coming true—

He should have known the boy would come, he told himself. He should have known from the day Lisa wrote she was naming their baby Ray Fincek II, instead of Junior—boasting that their child was not a junior-grade Fincek, but a chip off the old block. But he’d put that down to a woman’s whim, and nicknamed the baby Twoie more or less after a famous atmospheric flier he’d heard of.

He should have known as soon as Twoie began studying astronomy. But he’d pictured a quiet lecture hall in an ivy-league college, an air-conditioned office in Pasadena or some place.

He should certainly have known a year ago when he’d grudgingly consented to his son’s marriage; grudgingly, because he thought nineteen too young for matrimony, but consenting because he’d hated to think what he might be told—he, and everyone else along the Moon-base grapevine—if he asked why marriage was so urgent.

Janet, the girl’s name was. He’d seen her with Twoie in the last Christmas Video Party that Earth-base held with Moonbase for morale purposes. The men had jokingly complained Janet was bad for morale. “Too good-looking,” they’d said.

He should have known that, too, Ray thought, sighing. He supposed he should have known a lot of things. But how could he, when he’d never seen his son face to face? All he really had of the boy was this handwriting, sent in a telautograph because that was the most personal form of message available to the public.

A very nice form of message to send to one’s father, too—if the father were rich. Cheap enough, though, when you considered how far it had to travel. The price had been penciled on a corner by a message-center clerk: three hundred fifty-four dollars and sixty-five cents. Plus tax, of course.

The delivery boy, all excited, had refused a tip. Which was lucky, because it was still three days before pay day. No! Four! Twoie would be here in an hour—a check, in four days. It was a relief to have to get up and do something about that.

He unzipped a pocket of his patched red spacesuit and stuffed the message into it. He stood under his helmet, which hung on a cord from the ceiling, lowered it to his shoulders, uncoupled the hook, and made fast such thumbscrews as he could reach. He thrust his hand into a gauntlet held by a special frame, and made the wrist-joint more or less air-tight by catching the free end of a roll of friction tape on his wrist, winding his arm around the tape-spindle a few times, cutting it against a knife-edge fixed there for the purpose, and smoothing the end against his chest.

Then he lurched bearlike through a couple of vapor-barriers, and was out in the cold, half-pressured corridor. His toes hurt. He turned on the heat in his suit, but got no relief. His toes felt as if curled in tight fists under the balls of his feet, driving long toenails into his soles at every step.

But here again, as he well knew, Ray Fincek was kidding himself. Since a spacesuit’s heating unit had failed him, fifteen years before, he’d had no toes.

Probably the boy didn’t remember hearing of that. Probably the boy didn’t recall that he’d lost his arm to a meteoric dust-mote that pierced his suit, here on the Moon. Probably the boy hadn’t pictured how he’d look, all crippled with the bends from sudden decompression in a landing accident.

Certainly the boy didn’t know that forty-one-year-old Ray Fincek looked like a man of sixty and felt eighty. Too many things, the boy didn’t know—But the main thing was, he didn’t know the boy!

He knew only Martians. There was one in the corridor, working maskless and suitless in a thin and frigid semi-atmosphere that would have spun a man fainting to the floor. It moved backward down the long narrow tunnel, watching its progress in a mirror held in the right hand, and catching any missed spots with a rag held in the left. It walked on its two front feet, and in the two rear ones held buckets of soapy and clear water. Its left tail manipulated the wet mop and its right tail rinsed and dried.

Ray remembered to smile and wave an answer to the friendly undulations of the Martian’s snout, but wasn’t convincing. Quickly the Martian downed tools and stood at attention, every feather electric with a quivering desire to be of service.

Ray halted, pulled himself together, and reached up to pat the Martian’s snout. Then he gave the signal to resume work. This time no willing Martian could help him.

The paymaster could. And he would, if asked. Asking was the hard part.

* * * *

On down the corridor Ray shuffled wearily. He entered the Administration Wing’s air lock, closed the door behind him, and sat heavily on the hard bench along the right wall. A red light flashed over the inner door, and pumps pulsed in his ears. The air grew hot. He turned off his suit-heat.

When the light changed to green, the inner door unlocked itself, and he got up and went through it.

A new little blond file girl, whose desk was just beyond, came up and began helping him remove his helmet. As he knew, she was stationed there to help all comers. But Ray Fincek had climbed unaided out of his first spacesuit before she’d been born—and had climbed unaided out of his last one just before he’d lost that right arm. It was all he could do to accept her routine assistance without rudeness.

The blonde was lifting his helmet off when another woman bustled up, frankly fat, frankly forty, and frankly admiring.

“That’ll do, Jane,” she said. “I’ll help Mr. Fincek myself.”

“Mr. Fincek?” said Jane. “Oh, excuse me, sir. I should have recognized you from the pictures;” She paused, looked hesitantly at Ray for a second, and then asked the older woman, “Miss Stoat, would it be wrong of me to ask for an autograph?”

Ray answered for himself: “Sure not! Just so you don’t want it on a check. I’ll stop by your desk.”

Her brilliant smile so contrasted with his stupid joke that Ray sneered inwardly at himself. But he made another effort to live up to his reputation for wisecracking.

“Still got those pictures of your kids, Miss Stoat?” he asked the older woman, forcing a grin.

She giggled, and even managed a blush. “All right, Ray! Mrs., then! But Miss makes me feel younger—”

She fumbled with the zippers of his suit. “Want anything out of the pockets, Ray?”

“Yeah.” He extracted his son’s telautograph. “Got a letter from my boy.”

Mrs. Stoat’s eyes sparkled. “I…we all heard, Ray. We’re so glad for you!”

Ray just looked at her. She looked back at him, chins sagging.

“What’s the matter, Ray? Don’t you want to see him?”

“What do you think?”

“Well, what’s eating you, then? This isn’t like you, Ray.”

“He’s going up for his Ph. D.,” Ray blurted. “I’m head janitor here—”

“You’re chief of a crew of Martians that you yourself found and trained. They work for you because they like you—and so will your son!”

“Maybe—if he isn’t sore because I spent years with the Martians and not even an hour with him.”

“He’ll understand—unless there’s something wrong with him.”

“Not a thing! Don’t start that rumor, Felice!”

He felt ashamed as soon as he heard himself. He’d hurt her. He’d hurt others, too—like Twoie, and Twoie’s long-dead mother, that he’d stayed away from so long.

He recalled the year’s Moon-quarantine that formerly lay between a trip to a strange planet and an Earthside visit. He remembered thinking at the time that if he went home he’d arrive practically broke, and maybe have to take his boy out of school. But those memories he dismissed as alibis. Ray was sure he’d have gone if he hadn’t lacked courage—just as he now lacked the courage to face his boy, or even apologize to Felice Stoat.

Felice had hung up his heavy suit and was breathing heavily.

“Everything will probably come out O.K.,” she said. “Anyhow, you can count on us—”

She sounded doubtful! Thinking of that, he got halfway down the aisle to the paymaster’s cage, within sight of the pale, poker-faced little man inside it, before recalling his promise to the blond file girl. On aching feet he shuffled back to her desk and signed his autograph.

* * * *

When he finally got to the cage, the paymaster kidded him about that retreat: “For a minute, there, I thought you’d lost your courage.”

“I have, Harry. Got to talk you into an advance.”

“That would be for the boy now, wouldn’t it? Well, there’s the credit union, and your unpaid salary, of course—or if you like, Ray, I can let you have what’s in my pocket.”

“Thanks, Harry. There must be a week’s pay I’ve earned since the last check—”

“All right. Sign here, while I dig up your payroll card. Boy, how I envy you! Haven’t seen my kids in three years!”

“I envy you,” said Ray. “You’re not a total stranger to them. What’s it like, getting acquainted with your own family?”

Harry glanced up in surprise. “Why, it’s wonderful!” he said. “I get along just fine. And I’m only a clerk. You…you’re Ray Fincek—”

Ray shrugged. “Even if Twoie likes me now, he won’t when I tell him what I’m going to tell him.”

“What, for Pete’s sake?”

“That he’s got to go back to Earth! That he can’t waste himself up here!”

Harry wet his thumb and counted out bills from a handful. “With me,” he said slowly, “kids have a habit of doing what they want to do. But then, I’m not Ray Fincek.”

“No,” said Ray, painfully aware that a clerk has a skill that is salable on Earth, but a space-pilot hasn’t, “no, you’re not. Thanks for the dough, Harry.”

The blond girl helped him into his suit again, Felice being out of sight. He went through the office to the transport air lock, walked through its outer door, and sat in the cylindrical car that waited there at the end of a tube. By remote control he opened the tube-gate at the blast-off point, and the few pounds of air in the lock drove him quickly to the field.

There was no traffic at the moment, but his climb up the steel ladder to the meteorite-proofed control room touched off a bustle of activity. A tall boy with a white junior’s suit and a sharp face helped him through the manhole to the semicircular room, twisted the dial of Ray’s suit-radio to the special flight-control frequency, and said a respectful, “Hello, sir.’ A dark boy, shorter than his mate and also white-suited, pushed the one comfortable swivel chair to the center of the plotting-table and stood at attention while Ray seated himself. But the boy was elbowed aside by the chair’s regular occupant, a tall man in a red suit like Ray’s.

To this man, who took a stool, beside him, Ray spoke.

“Well, Al,” he said, “I see he didn’t come in at Number Two site over there.”

“No,” said Al, “but he’s here. The tractor’s hauling him over from Number Four. I’ll put him on C-Ring for blast-off, so he’ll be right out there in front of us.”

* * * *

Ray was so intent on his son that he saw the tow-tractors dust fountain as it might look to a boy fresh from Earth: every mote of dust or pebble of pumice sailing off the surface with whatever trajectory the treads gave it, uninfluenced by wind; all falling at the same speed, whether light or heavy. He remembered how unreasonable the effects of vacuum had looked to him when he first saw them.

Up here, though, everything was unreasonable. Any man who came here was unreasonable—

Watching the tractor haul its trailer bearing Twoie’s slim single-seater, he thought of an ant pulling a twig. Strange thought—he hadn’t seen an ant in years. When the gantry rolled up on its track and the armored crew hooked on to the ship, he held his breath, senselessly hoping they wouldn’t drop it.

They didn’t. They’d never yet dropped a ship. They set Twoie on its tail as if it were a young tree being planted, instead of an unearthly dragon that would some day spout fire so fierce that safety demanded landings and take-offs be made from widely separated points.

Dragons, twigs, ants—and safety. The louse of fear was infecting his mind, Ray decided.

To snap himself out of it he made Al stay behind, and rode the tricycle to the blast-off ring alone. The boom was rigged, by then, and he started to climb it, but a gantry man insisted by helmet radio on hoisting him to the level of the air lock that had been clamped to the ship’s hull.

When he spoke to the boy, his words were carried electronically still, though only a couple of hatches now separated them.

“It’s Dad, Twoie,” he said. “Stand by to receive me.”

“Sure, Dad.” He sounded as if Dad were a fellow you stood by to receive every day, as he trudged up from the basement, perhaps, after leaving some five-fifteen pneumocar.

The air lock was small, but pumping it up took time—interminable time, Ray thought. He found himself shaking, cramped. Several times Twoie tried to talk to him, but Ray could only grunt in reply.

It was just as well. The boy had a lot of instructions for the ground crew. Routine instructions, of course—they could have been recited by the ground chief if Twoie’d missed a cue—but the point, Ray decided, was that Twoie made them sound as routine as they were. As if he’d had practice—though you don’t practice Moonlandings—you just do them.

Ray found himself taking unexpected pleasure in the fact Twoie had done his so well. But then, he decided, men take perverse pleasure in all kinds of things.

He tried to seem agile when crawling through the inner manhole at the green light’s flash. But he stood up in the cramped cockpit panting and sweating. The boy’s lips were moving, but Ray had already shut off his radio and was awkwardly reaching around for his helmet’s right rear thumbscrew. He didn’t want a radio audience.

* * * *

Twoie thought of that, too—turned off his throat mike before helping his father out of the helmet.

“Hi, Dad,” he said. He had his mother’s eyes—blue and misty. Ray remembered that mist—it had always been there when she’d watched him blast off.

“You’re tall!” he said.

“Yeah—” He’d made Twoie self-conscious. “I guess you figured on a little Ray Fincek, and I’m not so little, any more. Still…they say I look like you—”

Like him? This arrow-straight athlete? Nuts! But no wonder he’d attracted a beautiful girl—

“How’s your wife? How’s Janet?”

“Fine! Sends her love. I’ve got some pictures of her in my wallet, here.” He turned to a drawer for the wallet. Over a broad shoulder he said, “She made you a cake and a muffler, Dad. This package, here. You can take it with you—”

“Take it? You mean you’re leaving right away?”

“It’s not that I want to—but I was delayed by a big sunspot storm that sent a lot of radiation around. They made me wait, and the Moon is moving the wrong way, now—”

So every minute they spent talking, deflected the ship’s launching point. Stall long enough, and the boy couldn’t go at all—

“Where are you headed?”

“Adonis. Want to check my charts?”

“No. The CAA has experts. I’m no Ph. D., Twoie. I’m janitor here—”

“Well…naturally your Martians do only the simplest kind of work—”

“Yeah. But this is a government job. You do the work of a head janitor, and some stupid Wage and Salary Analyst insists you get the pay of a head janitor.”

“I…I know how much I owe you, Dad—”

“You owe me nothing!” Strain made Ray’s tone explosive. “That isn’t what I meant. I want you to have the best. The best of everything. But being a space-pilot isn’t the best of anything. You’ve got to go back. I don’t want you to go on. I won’t give my consent to your going on!”

There! It was out. Not the fatherly, affectionate tone he’d hoped to achieve, but at least the cards were on the table.

Twoie trumped—and almost took the trick: “Don’t you think I’m good enough, Dad?”

Ray reached with both hands for his son’s shoulders—but felt him through only one glove. “Of course you’re good enough! Too good! You’ve got a career ahead in some terrestrial observatory. You’ve got a wife—can raise a family. If you don’t get yourself sterilized by radiation, up here—”

Twoie looked away, and Ray dropped his hand resignedly. He glanced around the cockpit. Some of the gadgets were strange to him. In this crowded place, where he couldn’t even take off his suit unless Twoie first lay down in the bunk—in this cage, this coffin—were gadgets he didn’t even recognize. Only five years since he’d piloted—and already his blood-won knowledge was getting obsolete!

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I… I don’t know what to say. The last thing in the world that I want is to make you sore at me—but, look! Taking this flight even this far without your consent is illegal. I talked them into it because you were here. I mean, it isn’t only that I have to turn back, if you don’t consent—but all the people who let me take up the ship will lose their jobs. Mostly they’re old friends of yours. They thought you’d be proud—”

“I am proud, boy—believe me! But—”

“But why refuse a signature, then? It’s just a formality.”

“A death sentence is always just a formality—until it’s carried out!”

“Death sentence? But you’re alive! Alive and admired and written up in all the textbooks!”

“Yeah—but my son still argues with me. You may never have a son, if you go on flying. I’m sterile, now, they say.”

“But, they know more about shielding, nowadays. New alloys—” It was a relief when the annunciator flashed.

Twoie plugged in a headset. “Tower calling,” he reported, holding the receiver to his ear. “Microgram for Ray Fincek.”

“Put my helmet on me,” Ray ordered. “Time enough for you to say I’m coming when I’m in the air lock.”

* * * *

He left his radio off so he could think, and it was only when he was going back to the tower that Ray realized they could have read him the message, and saved the time it took to pass the lock. Time—while the Moon jogged its course, moving his son’s starting-point, requiring the use of additional fuel—if Twoie went on, that is. Well, of course that was nothing to worry about—

He read the message at the plotting-table, with the three dispatchers ostentatiously busy in corners. Then he realized there were two Ray Finceks in the world.

DARLING

IN SIX MONTHS YOU’LL BE THE PROUD PAPA OF A SEVEN-POUND BOY.

KISSES

JANET

The dispatchers knew of it, of course, for all their polite pretenses. He felt their eyes on him, felt their hands itching to pummel his back.

He felt neither embarrassment nor pride—only relief. This was the out, the face-saver, the lifesaver. Now Twoie would have to go back.

He switched on his helmet radio.

“Twoie may change his plans, Al,” he said. “I’ll go out and see him.”

“I…uh…I wouldn’t, Ray.” Al said. “We’re sure happy for you both. But two more trips through the air lock will take too long—he’s behind his flight plan already. I’ll give you a private frequency to talk to him, though—Boy, what a send-off!”

Al’s helmet was filled with grin, Ray noted. But he wasn’t standing for any change in plans, just the same—And what the chief dispatcher wouldn’t stand for, wouldn’t happen.

But Ray had a card in his own hand. “You’re the Dispatcher,” he grunted, “but I’m the Consenter. Find me that wave-length, will you?”

Al laughed. “Whatever you say, Grandpa. I’ll call the boy, first. To give him the channel.”

Twoie was waiting when Al twisted the dial on Ray’s suit and nodded his signal.

“Everything’s fine,” Ray told his son. “But sit down. I want to read you something.”

He read. Deafeningly, Twoie howled his joy. Ray cut him off.

“Listen, this ties right up with what I’ve been saying. Now you can’t go!”

“Of course I can! Now I’ve got something—someone new to do well for. You went, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. And they don’t allow children on the Moon, so today’s the first day I ever saw you face to face.”

“I know, Dad. And I didn’t handle it well, did I? But don’t you see, I want to go out there so much I’ve practically got to do it. Janet knows that—”

“Oh?”

“Look, Dad. I’m all set. The tower called while you went after the message and gave me final clearance. I’ll see you on my return trip. I’ll stay longer—”

“How can you go and let your wife stay behind and have your son all alone?”

“How else do women have children?” Twoie was laughing at him! “I’m glad to be out of the way—babies are something I just can’t bear!”

“It’ll be more than a few months, what with quarantine and all. You may not see the kid for years!”

“They’ve cut down the quarantine period, Dad. The things you found out have made it easier for the rest of us.”

“Never mind the apple-polishing,” Ray said. “Tm still bound and determined not to give my consent.”

“Listen! My name is also Ray Fincek. And I’m bound and determined to go!”

“At the price of not seeing your wife and boy for a long time?”

Silence. Then, “That’ll be O.K., Dad. Just so my boy wants to pilot, too. Just so he wants to be like his Grandpa—”

The air went dead again, till Twoie asked, “Still there, Dad?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” Ray answered heavily. “And I guess I’ll still be here when you get back. Good luck, Twoie. I’ll watch your blast-off.” But when the time came, he couldn’t see a thing. His eyes were watering.

MAN

We used to think ours was the only world, till the man taught us by the shortness of his visit that there must be other. But of course ours is the best world.

Where else could there exist brings like ourselves, knowing only pure thought and simple joy? We need merely spread our leaves to be bathed in warmth and light. We embrace the air, and dance with zephyrs; hug the earth, and drink its nectar. Our only enemy is fire, a rare and accidental occurrence. The Things scampering among our branches and clinging to our trunks are seldom disturbing, and if they become destructive, we have the means to dispose of them.

Surely no one lives as pleasantly as we do, blooming with the juices of Spring, strengthening in the heat of Summer, transmitting the impulse to life in Fall, and baring our heads every Winter in respect for the Sun that fills our lives with familiar rhythm.

Familiar rhythm. Yes. Nothing ever was strange here till the man came.

He, however, spoke of unfamiliar matters: of Systems and Galaxies; of his home, which he termed a planet like our world; of himself and his life-schedule, which was not rhythmic, but ugly; and of fear, which he mentioned continually—in denial. These concepts were strange to us.

We were equally strange to the man. He called us trees, though admittedly we differed from any trees he had previously experienced. He knew we respond to radiant energy, but did not grasp the extent of our sensitivity. He was totally unaware of the wave lengths affecting us, and could not comprehend our ability to converse by modulating the frequencies we reflect and amplifying them with the electricity of our life processes.

Because he did not know we can speak, he did not realize we are men, since speech is the distinguishing characteristic of men, the trait by which we recognized him.

He was ignorant because his perceptions were so inferior to ours. For instance, certain vibrations in the air seemed unpleasantly meaningful to him in ways he mentioned as sound and odor. And reflected light was not to him the carrier of thought, but the cause of useless reactions called shapes and colors.

He lived imprisoned in a world all his own even when among us. It would be absurd to suppose his foreign origin prejudiced us, but inadequate physical and mental endowment doomed him to inferiority—or would have, had he stayed here.

Because this man was an inferior, there were those among us who wished to dispose of him as soon as his emanations became perceptible. Most of us however, wanted to talk to him first. We who were curious had our way but not without an attack of disagreement—a disease with which the foreigner seemed to have infected us upon his arrival, and to which he was himself peculiarly susceptible.

But this we did not learn till we had deciphered his language.

Decoding was difficult, and required the collaboration of us all—the pooled perceptions and ratiocinations of our thousandfold individual intellects, each with instantaneous access to the rest. The task was possible only because the man had of course to discuss matters familiar to us—the world, new to him in which we live. Certain carefully planned operations, such as the simultaneous disposal of all the Things nesting in our branches, helped us by stimulating him to consider subjects known to us in advance.

Thus we learned his names for the Things, which he called animal life-forms and understood danger, his primary concern. His thought-processes we found more limited than our own, but, as is true of the Things, he was extremely mobile.

Since the Things do not speak at all, he was not quite the lowest being we had experienced, but he spoke only when separated into parts at a distance from one another, not when behaving as a unit. His several parts could rejoin his main body or split off at will, thereby demonstrating that he was an extremely primitive sort of man, since we have long since lost this power of subdivision.

Additional evidence of inferiority lay in the disagreements to which he was subject and with which, as I said, he infected us. We had no way of knowing whether his main body was in a state of conflict within itself, but the subdivisions often argued with that main body when at a distance from it.

The principal area of contention concerned his ignorance of our world. A subdivision would say something like: “Numerous and varied life-forms available here. Request permission to initiate biological collections.”

And the reply would be: “Biologists have repeatedly been directed to confine activities to photography, sound recording, and similar nondestructive research. No specimens may be collected.”

Without quite understanding all that was intended, we were well able to comprehend the finality of this reply. It should have settled the matter, but one of our number nevertheless suffered a disfiguring attack on his trunk. Only after destruction had been prevented by our usual means did we learn our attacker was the man, or part of him.

The news came in the form of a message from a subdivision to the main body. “Anderson killed, apparently by falling limb,” the subdivision said. “Returning.”

This was an exceedingly ignorant remark, since the attack had been prevented, as always, by an electrical discharge. But perhaps ignorance was to have been expected, in view of the apparently limitless divisibility of this man. Not only had he broken apart his main body, but also the segment we had destroyed seemed a mere portion of the subdivision. And even that was not the end.

“Detail driver and jeep only,” the main body told the Anderson segment. “Repetition accident considered unlikely. Do not return.”

There was more, but we changed frequency to consider our own position. One attack on us had already been made. Other attacks were possible, particularly since the man failed to understand how and why we had disposed of the Anderson fragment. Further, it was obvious that nothing of value could be learned from so inferior a being.

A little discussion preceded these conclusions, but this was symptomatic of our man-borne infection which itself proved the conclusions to be correct. We sent out our usual emanations unanimously.

The result was somewhat unexpected. In the first place, contrary to what experience with Things had led us to expect, all widely separated parts of the man caught fire, though we were merely trying to electrocute him. Then, just at the wrong time, a wind rose and spread the flames among us.

The effect was disastrous. Moat of us were completely consumed. I was lucky to survive even in my present crippled condition.

And the man was not destroyed. His voice seemed enfeebled, but was detectable even when the holocaust was at its height. We paid little attention then, of course, but our survivors tuned in on his frequency in time to hear some reports.

“Primary radio transmitter and receiver destroyed by fire originating from unexplained electrical disturbance of atmospheric origin,” the Anderson portion reported to the main body. “Fire not, repeat not, starred by negligence here. Many crippled life-forms, already dying, now available for collection. Request revocation of prohibition against taking biological specimens.”

“Return to base,” was the answer, “Destruction of equipment necessitates immediate departure. Make no, repeat no, collections. Life-forms here not yet well enough known to justify risks of handling, killing, or dissection. Disappointment of biologists regretted, but we cannot safely destroy what we do not understand.”

Like everything else about the man, this explanation seemed strange. One would almost suspect he sensed his inferiority to us.

But that is quite impossible. Self-satisfaction is as characteristic of man as is language itself.

THE OLD-FASHIONED SPACEMAN

We’d cut our little corner through spacetime with the accuracy that men despair of and only machines can accomplish. Earth lay a hundred years and a million miles behind us, as Earth would figure it; but the two of us aboard our dumbbell-shaped cruiser felt we had been out only three months when Terra-nu loomed up to greet us.

Terra-nu was our destination—an unvisited planet, Greek-lettered because the astro-geographers thought it would resemble Earth. We’d come to check their guess, and from a fifty-thousand-foot altitude it seemed a good one.

At least the upper levels of Terra-nu’s atmosphere tested like Earth’s. Its level-looking surface appeared to be covered with the blue-green of vegetation, except where masked by pink-lined tufts of morning mist; and occasional silver glints highlighted the probability of open water. Everything looked as the astro-geographers had anticipated—terrestrial in style, habitable by terrestrial life.

The astro-geographers had warned us that the dawn we now saw would be followed by three weeks of continuous daylight. But they hadn’t told us to expect the greeting Terra-nu sent out.

My partner didn’t even see it. He was Myron Hines, an old-fashioned spaceman. Myron was too busy with his fruitless searching for some sign of intelligent life down below us to see the golden, twelve-foot fireball that danced on our ship’s twin noses. Back and forth that fireball flitted in lazy, graceful arcs from the drive-hull to our own operations-hull, then to the drive again, as if trying to see which was the higher.

I shifted controls to drop the drive-hull low. The fireball bounced to our operations-hull and hovered just in front of the dorsal periscopes, within fifteen feet of me. I thought the shift to the higher point meant the fireball was a corposant, or St. Elmo’s Fire—a form of electrical brush-discharge that on Earth has been given many names, though no real explanation.

A corposant is supposed to be harmless so I saw no reason to call the fireball to Myron’s attention. He wasn’t seeking oddities, but humanoids; besides, we weren’t speaking.

That wasn’t my fault. Myron was apparently neurotic. For instance, people sometimes eat a lot to ease a sense of insecurity; Myron ate much and often. Excessive sleep can be an escape; Myron Hines was forever sleeping. Extreme romanticism can be schizoid; he was always reading either poetry or fiction.

But I’d never said a thing. It was he who, after complaining of loneliness, had one day brought our talking to an end. “Cousin John,” he growled, “your jabber wearies me. Let me hear your silence for a while.”

Up to a point I could have argued, but in a showdown I had to take his orders. So for the past month he’d heard only my silence and the few sounds of our travel: the faint hum transmitted along the hundred-foot boom from the gravitronic drive to our operations-hull; the squeaky pinging of ceramic-clad alloys under stress; the hiss-clang-hiss of passage through a dust cloud; the siren’s warning scream when we swerved in automatic evasive action to clear larger chunks of interstellar matter.

If he’d been listening then, while that fireball grew from twelve to fifty feet in diameter, Myron might have heard the faint crackle of electricity—a sound like paper rattled, or autumn leaves tossed in the wind. But he was humming in a monotone; he heard nothing but himself.

I could feel the growth of that fireball through the handles I had to manipulate in controlling this final, atmospheric portion of our flight. Electricity flowed through me so that I jittered; my coordination seemed affected.

I was about to call Myron when suddenly the ship lurched. Instrument-needles danced drunkenly. Atmosphere-operative control surfaces contorted limply, yet resisted all my jerks and pressures. Metal grated on metal with skirling shrieks.

Myron rushed to my aid, but stumbled repeatedly as our gyrations flung him off balance. When he reached me his cheeks had paled beneath their freckles, and his blue eyes were narrowed. “Move over, Coz,” he ordered. “Let a man take charge.”

I moved. He reached for the controls; but before he actually touched a switch or handle, he felt the fireball’s electricity. His russet hair and copper beard rose as if blasted with air. His eyes popped wide. Sparks snapped from his extended fingers.

Myron collapsed with a faint cry. His skull thudded against the deck and he lay there twitching. I took over again and switched for emergency chutes. Nothing happened; I had to leave the pilot’s position and crank out the chutes by main strength.

Meanwhile the ship fluttered downward like a molted feather. Myron’s limp body slewed around the compartment, leaving shreds of skin from his exposed face and hands sticking to irregular surfaces. He had acquired a well-bloodied nose and a gashed cheek before the chutes took hold.

Even with their help, we crashed. I blacked out.

Myron was poking at me when my consciousness returned. He had a badly-marked face and an awkward stoop, as if his back were lame. But he could smile. “Hiya, Coz,” he said. “Are you in working order?”

“More or less,” I said tentatively, after checking to see if I could move. “And you?”

“More or less.”

“How’s the ship?”

“Bad! This hull’s half torn off the boom. The plates are cracked clean through where the twist came. And there’s other damage where the hull hit the ground.”

“Oh? And where does this warm air come from?”

“Terra-nu,” Myron said. “I feel all right so far.” He grinned at me like a death’s-head. “Just think of all the time I saved by breathing this air before we tested it.”

“You haven’t saved an instant,” I said, getting up. “‘With alien air in here, we’ll be in Decontamination on the moon for a year. If we get back, that is. And—”

“When we get back, Coz; don’t be depressingly literal. And tell me what made us crash. That fireball that’s out on our boom?”

“‘Apparently,” I said. “It’s electrical, and it fouled up our circuits. If it were on our highest point it might be the harmless discharge I originally thought, but—”

“‘But it’s not. We’re in the middle of a park-like forest, with tree-things towering over us all around. And the boom isn’t even the high point of the ship—the drive-hull’s higher.”

“So the fireball’s a Terra-nuvian. And it’s already caused us to crash; it must be our enemy. Let’s get the ship spaceborne and go tell Earth this is an unsafe place. We can—”

“If we’re going to get spaceborne we’d better get acquainted with that thing,” Myron said. “Maybe it can tell us whether Man could live here. Maybe it will help us fix the ship.”

“Yes,” I said. “But maybe it’s waiting out there to kill you. And why waste time? We can do a lot from inside the ship while we wait for that thing to go away.”

“And if it doesn’t go away? No, Coz, if we’re in its power, we’re in its power, so let’s see what it wants. I’m going out there.”

And he did. Not just then, because the hatch was sprung and required much prying. But as soon as we got it open he went through. I closed it after him and watched through periscopes.

The ground under his feet was red and moist. Covering it in fifty-foot circular patches about three hundred feet apart was a soft mossy carpeting of blue. From the center of each blue circle rose a huge corrugated yellow column, nine feet thick at the base and two hundred fifty feet high. The lower hundred feet were bare. The top hundred fifty feet looked like an immense green ostrich-feather.

The drive-hull lay against a tree that had been half stripped of branches by our fall. The operations-hull had landed in the open, but should have been shadowed like the surrounding ground by the high, feather-topped trees.

It wasn’t. The whole area was lighted by the fireball perched on—or, rather, an inch or two above—the center of our boom. Myron walked smiling up to the boom and extended to the fireball a hand that hardly trembled. Instantly he was flat on his back on the damp red soil. The fireball had left its perch and hovered over his head.

I went for the hatch. It had stuck again; I couldn’t budge it by myself.

I watched Myron under magnification. His eyelids fluttered; his chest rose and fell. Vagrant smiles flitted across his face. His hands jerked occasionally. Once his feet made a few running motions. He certainly seemed to be dreaming. And the fireball hovered over his head.

After several minutes, it darted to its former perch on the boom. Hissing, it returned to Myron. Crackling, it went back to the boom.

Myron’s eyes opened. He sat up, yawned, and stared vacantly around. He smiled stupidly. Then looking vaguely pleased with himself, he shambled over to the hatch. Together, we opened it. He tumbled casually in and left it open. I shut it after him quickly. He gaped at me with a moronic grin I couldn’t decipher.

“The ground here seems damp,” I said finally. “You’d better go change your clothes.”

“Yup.” He stared at me drunkenly.

“You’ve had two bad electric shocks,” I went on. “Have they made you ill?”

“Nope.” He grinned at me a little more alertly, and added, “Stop worrying, Coz; I’m on the right track. I was asleep out there. Asleep, and dreaming; and the fireball somehow communicated with me during that dream.”

“The fact of communication was what you dreamed,” I stated. “No doubt it was all in perfect English?”

“No. Wordless. Sort of like a mood. I felt good. I still feel good. I swear that thing is friendly, Coz.”

“Change your clothes,” I said. “‘You should have changed outside. It’s the ultimate contamination of the ship to come in with clothing stained by the native soil. One would think—”

“We were contaminated by our crash. And there are no more degrees of contamination than there are degrees of pregnancy,” Myron said, laughing at me. “Fix some food while I change, will you, Coz.”

He ate slowly, reflectively, untastingly. Finished, he pushed aside his plate and said, “I wonder if they have thunderstorms here.”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Just before I woke up, I dreamed of a thunderstorm. I think I was supposed to—that the dream was a query. So I’m going out and try to let the fireball know that I think thunderstorms are impressive spectacles. Maybe it will exhibit one.”

“If you’re not all wet now, you soon will be,” I scoffed. “The fireball won’t entertain you with an act of suicide, though I wish it would. If it were to consume itself as a thunderstorm, we might get the ship fixed.”

“Oh, it wouldn’t have to become a storm,” Myron said thoughtfully. “It might just exhibit one. Or even merely start one, like silver iodide. I doubt it would be the storm and I doubt that it is the fireball. These things are just manifestations of organized energy.”

“What object isn’t a manifestation of organized energy?” I said. “Only thing is, the fireball’s not an object, because it’s disembodied.”

“There may be similar organizations of disembodied energy down on Earth,” Myron said.

“Like what?”

“Like the soul.” He reached over and gave me a sympathetic pat. “You have no idea what I experienced, asleep out there.”

“What you experienced out there was a nice hoggish wallow in the mud,” I said. “But wallow again. Maybe this time you can dream up a beautiful sow.”

He laughed and went out, leaving the hatch open. I climbed half way through to watch.

Before Myron lay down, I could catch glimpses between the tree-tops of a clear blue sky. Five minutes after he closed his eyes, it was pouring. The rain awakened him. He jumped up and ran for the hatch, climbed through and helped me close it against the storm. Lightning played on our hull. The thunder was so loud we couldn’t converse till we’d shut out the storm.

Grinning then, he turned to me and said, “Next time, the sow.”

“You mean—”

“Exactly. A girl. The Presence here can use me for a model. The differences between a man and a girl are relatively few, and in my next dream, I’ll concentrate on those differences.”

“That I can believe,” I said. “But I’ll bet there’s no more fireball.”

There was, though. And Myron was out communing with it before the steaming ground had dried. He took a poncho to lie on, and the mud under the moss must have made a nice soft bed. But he seemed too excited to sleep, and soon returned, demanding sleeping pills.

It seemed to me time to call a halt. I said, “You’re acting much too youthful, with this concentration on a dream girl while your ship stands in need of repair. A little work will help you sleep. And—”

“Why shouldn’t I act youthful?” he said teasingly.

“Well,” I said, “figuring from Earth’s space-time coordinates, you’re a hundred twenty-nine years old, just about.”

“Oh; don’t be so literal-minded; besides, we’re not in Earth’s space-time coordinates now.”

He jumped up and clicked his heels in midair to prove his point, though the effect of his coltishness was to prove mine. He took his pill and went out. I watched through the periscope, afraid there’d be more rain.

Soon he slept. The fireball came and hovered over him, gradually swelling till it touched two trees that were three hundred feet apart.

There was a sudden sharp crack!—a blinding flash. When the light died away, a nude girl stood over Myron. She had the same sort of red hair and blue eyes that he did, and the same quickness of decision. Without a moment’s hesitation, she grabbed the corner of his poncho, and tugged vigorously to get it out from under him. He remained in deep sleep and didn’t budge.

She seemed to be having a lot to say, but I couldn’t hear her voice. Every radiation detector in the ship chattered its fastest. The combined rattle drowned out all other sounds.

I cranked the hand-hooter for battle-stations. The girl shrieked an echo to its horrendous howl. Myron jumped up, seized the poncho in one hand and the girl’s wrist in the other, and dashed for the hatch.

“Don’t bring her here,” I shouted. “Don’t bring her here!”

He forced her into the ship and swiftly followed. As soon as he’d slammed the hatch, the counters lessened their rate of chatter.

The girl cowered in a corner, trying to cover her nudity with hands and arms in a gesture as old as Eve. Myron flung the poncho to her and jumped to his battle-station at the combat controls. There he waited tensely for the scanner’s vocalizer to give him target coordinates and description so he could choose which weapon to fire.

Nothing happened, of course. The drive was completely shut down, so none of the fire-control equipment would even operate.

Myron blazed with fury when he realized that. “What’s the idea?” he demanded of me. “Where’s the target?”

“Right behind you,” I said. “The girl is a source of massive radiation.”

Hearing no great amount of chatter from the counters; seeing, when he scanned them, only moderate readings on the indicators, he flushed with rage. “There’s no source of heavy radiation here, and there probably never was,” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you, anyway? First you pilot us into a crash, and then you—”

“I—I’m sorry to have been so much trouble,” the girl broke in to say. She now wore the green poncho, with her tawny red-haired head poked through the central slit and the sides tucked around her some way that formed the plastic sheet into a garment. Its color made her eyes look green.

“It was my fault,” she went on, staring down at her own bare toes. “I—well—materialized from the fireball, by changing the energy-level of all my electrons. And of course they gave off radiation when changing energy-level.”

“A flash of light to brighten my life,” Myron said. He stepped quickly down from his battle station and with a gentle finger lifted her chin. Their identical-looking eyes met. Each blushed faintly.

“Didn’t Bishop Berkeley have something to say about materialization?” Myron asked her. “I mean, didn’t he say that reality is the dream perceived?”

“Something like that,” she said, smiling vaguely. “I don’t know any more about it than you do, though. My knowledge is your knowledge—I have only a copy of your mind.”

“But then you must know the danger to him of a massive dose of radiation.” I said. “You should never have materialized while he was outside the ship. You may have—”

“Cut it out, Coz,” Myron warned.

“Wait, Myron,” she said. “I do know, now, that I did the wrong thing. I didn’t know, though, before I existed in this form, because I didn’t have a copy of your mind, before. I’d never have done it, if I’d known…though all I did was give reality to your dream…and I’m not dangerous now—”

“Of course not,” Myron said stoutly. “And I’m glad you didn’t know, if there’s a chance the knowledge might have made you hesitate.” He slipped an arm around her waist and glared fiercely at me over the top of her head. She let her hair brush his shoulder a second before deftly slipping away from him. They had no eyes for me.

“This is serious!” I insisted. “Myron, take a glance at your pocket radiation indicator.”

He got it out, and the girl crowded close to peer over his shoulder at it. “Oh!” she gasped, hand over mouth.

The indicator showed total exposure—a dosage greater than it could measure.

Big tears formed in the girl’s eyes. “I don’t want to harm you, Myron,” she said. “I’ll go away.”

Myron pulled her to him gently and buried her face on his chest. Out of the corner of his mouth he growled, “Coz, if you drive her to dematerialize—”

“Wouldn’t think of it,” I said hastily. “Another dose of radiation would really fix you. She’d better stay here till we see how sick you’re going to be from the first one. Time’s getting shorter all the while, and there’s probably more work to fixing the ship than I can handle alone—particularly if I have to take care of you, so—”

“You haven’t even looked at the ship,” Myron sneered. “All you’ve managed to do is steer into a crash and sound a false battle-stations alarm and argue.”

“Have you checked the ship?” I asked. “Have you been getting the feel of this planet, as you’re supposed to—or of this lady, merely?”

“The lady is the planet’s most important manifestation,” he snarled. “You’ve got your wires crossed!”

The girl stepped behind Myron and peered at me from around him. I could see he thought it was my fault that she’d disengaged herself from his embrace. I said, “You’re the one who’s getting crossed, not me. Anyhow, there’s no point studying Terra-nu’s manifestations if we can’t get the information back to Earth, so suppose we start fixing the ship.”

“I’m busy,” he snapped, and turned toward the girl.

“Please, Myron,” she said, gently turning him around again. “If you could lend me some clothes, and find something to do outside while I get into them…”

Hastily he said, “Excuse me, Honey.” Then, glaring defiantly at me, he gave her a pecking kiss that she tried to dodge but caught on the end of her nose.

I went outside then, for the first time, and he joined me almost immediately. After looking at a few other things he squatted down beside me to check the cracked bottom plates of the operations-hull, and when he stood up again he swayed and pressed his forehead. “A little dizziness,” he muttered. “Been squatting too long.”

I said nothing.

He next inspected the point where the boom joined the operations-hull. The plates there had been pried at with considerable leverage when the drive-hull hit the tree, and were damaged. The drive-hull wasn’t hurt, though. “We can fix the ship,” he said, “but I’m tired now.”

He turned to the girl, who’d joined us wearing one of Myron’s jumpers and looking like a barefoot boy in hand-me-down overalls. “Honey,” he said, “you’ll show me around a little while Cousin John lays out our tools, won’t you?”

“I’d love to,” she replied. Her teeth were white behind the generous red lips. She let him take her hand. They walked a few aimless steps into the woods, looking at each other and not where they were going. Their hips and shoulders bumped with seeming clumsiness at every step.

“Wait!” I called. “The tools’ll get laid out twice as fast if you help, Myron.”

“I don’t feel like it,” he said dully. He reached a long arm to lean on a nearby tree, turning to face me. “There must have been something wrong with the stuff you fed me.”

Before I could even deny it, he’d gone behind the tree to be sick.

Honey followed. “Go away!” he told her. “You might catch this.”

“Don’t go anywhere, Miss,” I said, running up to join them. “He knows—so you must also know—that this is acute radiation syndrome. He got it from you; you’ll have to help him.”

“Go away, Honey,” Myron insisted. “I’ve got to have some privacy.”

“I’ll go,” she agreed, “but I won’t go far. Maybe Cousin John can find some medicine for me to give you.”

I could, and I did, though he wasn’t given all the medicine at that particular time. For use as needed, I gave Honey whole blood to keep up the red cell count; penicillin to help ward off infection; and toluidine blue to limit bleeding.

Also I dug out a tent and cot. There would have to be a lot of pounding on that damaged operations-hull, so I thought Myron might as well sleep elsewhere. I told Honey to take Myron’s usual bunk, but she refused pointblank and stayed in the tent with him. She also insisted on preparing his food, so before working on the ship I decided to unload all the quartermaster type stores to provide her with immediate access to everything she might need.

Once that job was done, though, I was free to work on the ship—alone. I did what I could for a few Earthdays. Then Myron began to feel a little better, and got up. He again insisted on exploring with Honey. I again vetoed the idea.

“But I feel fine!” he argued.

“You don’t feel fine at all,” I stated. “You feel a little better than you did at your worst. You know the course of this disease as well as I do—You’re having the usual remission and that’s all. You’ve got to help fix the ship while you’re able, so we can get you away from here and restore your health.”

“But I want to have a little picnic for Honey now,” he said plaintively. “Her nursing probably saved my life, the last couple of days.”

“Maybe so,” I said for her to hear, “But if she thinks she saved you for her own pleasure, she has another think coming. We came here with certain duties to perform, and we’re going to perform them.”

“Honey doesn’t need you to tell her what to do,” Myron shouted angrily, “and neither do I. We’ll do as we please!”

“You know he’s going to have a relapse, don’t you, Miss?” I said, ignoring him.

“Yes.

“Do you know when he will relapse?”

“No.”

“Then suppose you make him stay here, where he can be taken care of.”

Her shoulder drooped inside the too-large jumper. “All right,” she said.

“Oh, come on, Honey,” Myron said.

She drew herself straight. “No,” she said, “we’re going to repair this ship. And when it’s done, you’re going to get into it and go back where you came from.”

And that was that. Myron couldn’t budge her. So far as his illness let him, he vented his frustration in hard work, but that was the only satisfaction he got for a while.

Hard work was really needed, too. Damage was worse than we’d thought. When we got the damaged plates off the place where the boom joined the operations-hull, we found the frame was cracked.

Myron had to jury-rig some climbing irons, go up a tree part way, and fasten a block there before we could even get a purchase on some of the damaged members. And when we got them all out on the ground it turned out there just weren’t enough replacement units to go around.

We would have to weld and refit some of the broken parts. But our drive was gravitronic, so we had no source of either heat or electricity to weld the extreme-service alloys the ship was made of.

I asked Honey if she had any way to generate an electric current for welding use. “I could try,” she said. “I never before existed in human form so I don’t know its limitations. But we could find out.”

“No!” Myron said explosively. “There’s no telling what might happen if you try that. You might disappear completely, or die, or revert to a fireball. Forget it. If we can’t leave, we’ll stay.”

“Get that idea out of your mind,” I said. “You can’t stay. Millions of dollars worth of training and equipment were invested in this trip by a lot of people who are not here to watch out for their interests. You’ve got to report back to them. You can’t leave any stone unturned. Your life has a value to others, if not to yourself.”

“To me, for one,” Honey said.

“But your life has value to me!’ he said fretfully.

They stared at each other till I said, “All right. Love is grand. But do I have to stay here forever?”

“No, you don’t, Cousin John,” Honey said promptly. “But you’re really trying to protect Myron and not yourself, and I appreciate that. So I’m going to get the electricity so you can weld your ship together.”

She wouldn’t let Myron talk her out of that but insisted that we get all set and ready to weld. A lot of improvising was needed before we’d assembled rods and cables and an eye-shield and the rest of the paraphernalia. So when she left us I was busy trying out ways of holding the work and Myron was fitting himself with a helmet, and neither of us saw her go.

I don’t know what she did nor how she did it. But she carried one end of a long cable into the woods, and at the other end we got current enough to finish the job.

When the parts were all fixed I made Myron help install them to keep him from wandering in search of Honey. For a long time he worked hard, and when he finally decided to lay off and rest a while, I knew he’d gotten too tired to stray.

He fell asleep under a tree and when he awoke he was sick again. He’d lost all interest in the repair-work—was apathetic and even absent-minded. This was the third of the four phases of acute radiation syndrome.

Nothing new about the disease—it’s been known on Earth since 1945. But our scheduled time on Terra-nu was about up, and Myron’s symptoms would complicate our departure. Honey was an additional complication. I hoped she’d stay away.

Myron didn’t. In time he got so sick he couldn’t stand, but he flatly refused to go to his bunk, or even rest in the tent. He sat leaning against a tree looking hopefully around as long as he could hold his head up. Eventually the effort exhausted him and he fell asleep.

I’d been working inside, and happened to come up through the hatch just as Honey appeared between the trees. Fatigue showed in every drooping line of her. Something about her looked different, strange. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was because by now the sun was low and everything in sight was suffused with pink. Then I saw that Honey’s tawny hair had turned white.

Myron saw it at about the same time. There hadn’t been any noise so he must have sensed her presence. He awoke and gave a low grown and staggered to his feet. She tottered toward him and they collapsed on one another, each propping the other up. She wept and it could have been her own exhaustion or grief at seeing Myron so sick again, or joy at seeing him at all. Myron patted her and cooed in her ear.

I gave them a minute and then went out and said. “Thank you, Honey. You’ve saved Myron’s life.”

Myron turned to me and said, “Admit she’s made it possible for you to leave, Coz.”

“Sure.” I said. “She certainly has, Myron: she’s made it possible for us both to leave.”

“I’m not going,” he said flatly.

“Don’t be silly,” I answered. “You’ve got to go. It’s your duty.”

“Can’t—can’t he stay a little while longer?” Honey begged. “Just a short time?” They were still clinging together. He kissed her.

I said, “It’ll be dark here soon. We can’t stay through your three-weeks-long night.”

“I could take care of you,” Honey said.

“I know,” I told her. “But the configuration of our own Solar System will be wrong if we don’t leave on schedule. We haven’t got the power to get past our Sun when it’s between us and our home planet. We’ve got to stick to the time-table because it was figured pretty close to begin with.”

She’d known all that before I said it, sharing Myron’s mind. But she’d wanted to hear it and when I finished she kissed him and said, “He’s right. It’s unanswerable; you’ve got to go.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“He’s sick,” I reminded her. “His judgment’s impaired. Don’t—I hate to say this, but—don’t let him commit suicide by staying here.”

“No, no!” she promised. “I’ll go with him.”

That meant her judgment was impaired, too. I had to explain: “We go backward in time, Honey. You wouldn’t exist when we got to Earth, even if you started out with us. You can’t come.”

“You don’t have to rub it in,” Myron said. “She’s sick. Can’t you see that? She got sick fulfilling your terrible demands. Leave her alone, Coz, understand? Understand?”

“But Myron,” I said. “If you stay, you may even die of this radiation-illness. And if she’s so sick, how can she help you? Come home with me, and simply by going back in time to Earth’s space-time coordinates, you’ll reach a point at which the illness will never have been. On Earth you’ll be perfectly well—perfectly.”

“That’s right, dear,” Honey said, leaning her head on his chest and stroking the back of his neck. “And you won’t miss me—you won’t even remember me. So why delay?”

“That’s why!” he said, pushing her to arm’s length and looking into her eyes. “I don’t want to forget you.”

“But you may die!” I protested.

“Probably not,” he said mildly. “I don’t feel as if I were going to die. It’s hard to tell with this radiation thing. But mental states help, and with Honey to nurse me there’s a good chance I’ll pull through.”

“But only a chance!” I said. “Come with me, and your future’s a certainty.”

“A gloomy one, without Honey. I just don’t want it.”

“Oh, Myron,” she began. Then she sobbed and was silent—apparently too tired to go on arguing in favor of something she feared. I had to do the talking.

“You can’t risk death for a figment of your imagination,” I said to Myron. “You can’t chance death on a strange planet for a mere dream. I mean—well—there’s nothing so mere about Honey, but she is a dream, isn’t she? I mean—”

“You mean well,” he said, grinning at me. “But of course I can die for a dream. How could I ever have come to Terra-nu in the first place if I weren’t the sort that would chance death on a strange planet for a mere dream? Maybe you can’t understand it, Coz, but that’s what a spaceman is. And I’m ordering you to leave me here and go on home to Earth by yourself.”

He turned, took Honey’s hand, and stumbled toward the tent.

“If you stay,” I said, “I’m duty bound to report this place is dangerous, Myron. So you’re making me betray Honey—or the Presence she represents.”

“We crashed, didn’t we?” he said, following Honey into the tent. “The danger’s real: there’s no betrayal.” He ducked under the tent-flap and was gone.

“You’re also betraying Mankind!” I shouted after him. “They’ll never again send a spaceman like you to a strange planet!”

They haven’t, either. When I watched Myron disappear into that tent with his Honey, I was seeing the last of the old-fashioned spacemen.

It had always seemed pretty silly to send men on those fast space-time trips that they couldn’t remember without artificial aids. It was plain stupid to send them if they would refuse to come back. So thereafter only the aids were sent.

From that time to this, all space-exploration has been done by us robots.

BRIDGE CROSSING

In 1849, the mist that sometimes rolled through the Golden Gate was known as fog. In 2149, it had become far more frequent, and was known as smog. By 2349, it was fog again.

But tonight there was smoke mixed with the fog. Roddie could smell it. Somewhere in the forested ruins, fire was burning.

He wasn’t worried. The small blaze that smoldered behind him on the cracked concrete floor had consumed everything burnable within blocks; what remained of the gutted concrete office building from which he peered was fireproof.

But Roddie was himself aflame with anger. As always when Invaders broke in from the north, he’d been left behind with his nurse, Molly, while the soldiers went out to fight.

And nowadays Molly’s presence wasn’t the comfort it used to be. He felt almost ready to jump out of his skin, the way she rocked and knitted in that grating ruined chair, saying over and over again, “The soldiers don’t want little boys. The soldiers don’t want little boys. The soldiers don’t—”

“I’m not a little boy!” Roddie suddenly shouted. “I’m full-grown and I’ve never even seen an Invader. Why won’t you let me go and fight?”

Fiercely he crossed the bare, gritty floor and shook Molly’s shoulder. She rattled under his jarring hand, and abruptly changed the subject.

“A is for Atom, B is for Bomb, C is for Corpse—” she chanted.

Roddie reached into her shapeless dress and pinched. Lately that had helped her over these spells. But this time, though it stopped the kindergarten song, the treatment only started something worse.

“Wuzzums hungry?” Molly cooed, still rocking.

Utterly disgusted, Roddie lipped her head off her neck.

It was a completely futile gesture. The complicated mind that had cared for him and taught him speech and the alphabet hadn’t made him a mechanic, and his only tool was a broken-handled screwdriver.

He was still tinkering when the soldiers came in. While they lined up along the wall, he put Molly’s head back on her neck: She gaped coyly at the new arrivals. “Hello, boys,” she simpered. “Looking for a good time?”

Roddie slapped her to silence, reflecting briefly that there were many things he didn’t know about Molly. But there was work to be done. Carefully he framed the ritual words she’d taught him: “Soldiers, come to attention and report!” There were eleven of them, six feet tall, with four limbs and eight extremities. They stood uniformly, the thumbs on each pair of hands touching along the center line of the legs, front feet turned out at an angle of forty-five degrees, rear feet turned inward at thirty degrees.

“Sir,” they chorused, “we have met the enemy and he is ours.” He inspected them. All were scratched and dented, but one in particular seemed badly damaged. His left arm was almost severed at the shoulder.

“Come here, fellow,” Roddie said. “Let’s see if I can fix that.” The soldier took a step forward, lurched suddenly, stopped, and whipped out a bayonet.

“Death to Invaders!” he yelled, and charged crazily.

Molly stepped in front of him.

“You aren’t being very nice to my baby,” she murmured, and thrust her knitting needles into his eyes.

Roddie jumped behind him, knocked off his helmet, and pressed a soft spot on his conical skull. The soldier collapsed to the floor.

Roddie salvaged and returned Molly’s needles. Then he examined the patient, tearing him apart as a boy dismembers an alarm clock.

It was lucky he did. The left arm’s pair of hands suddenly writhed off the floor in an effort to choke him. But because the arm was detached at the shoulder and therefore blind, he escaped the clutching onslaught and could goad the reflexing hands into assaulting one another harmlessly.

Meanwhile, the other soldiers left, except for one, apparently another casualty, who stumbled on his way out and fell into the fire. By the time Roddie had hauled him clear, damage was beyond repair. Roddie swore, then decided to try combining parts of this casualty with pieces of the other to make a whole one.

To get more light for the operation, he poked up the fire. Roddie was new at his work, and took it seriously. It alarmed him to watch the soldiers melt away, gradually succumbing to battle damage, shamed him to see the empty ruins burn section by section as the Invaders repeatedly broke through and had to be burned out.

Soon there would be nothing left of the Private Properly Keep Out that, according to Molly’s bedtime story, the Owners had entrusted to them when driven away by radioactivity. Soon the soldiers themselves would be gone. None would remain to guard the city but a few strayed servants like Molly, and an occasional Civil Defender.

And himself, Roddie reflected, spitting savagely into the fire. He might remain. But how he fitted into the picture, he didn’t know. And Molly, who claimed to have found him in the ruins after a fight with Invaders twenty years before, couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

Well, for as long as possible, Roddie decided, he’d do his duty as the others did theirs—single-mindedly. Eventually the soldiers might accept him as one of themselves; meanwhile, this newly attempted first aid was useful to them.

He gave the fire a final poke and then paused, wondering if, when heated, his screwdriver could make an unfastened end of wire stick on the grayish spot where it seemed to belong.

Stretching prone to blow the embers hot so he could try out his new idea, Roddie got too close to the flames. Instantly the room filled with the stench of singed hair. Roddie drew angrily back, beating out the sparks in his uncut blond mane.

As he stood slapping his head and muttering, a deranged Civil Defense firefighter popped into the doorway and covered him with carbon dioxide foam.

Roddie fled. His life-long friends were not merely wearing out, they were unbearably wearing.

In the street, even before he’d wiped off the foam, he regretted his flight. The fire was back home. And there in the cold of this fog-shrouded canyon, a mere trail between heaped-up walls of rubble, the diaper he wore felt inadequate against the pre-dawn cold. His cherished weapon, a magnetic tack-hammer, was chill beneath the diaper’s top, and the broken, radium-dialed wristwatch suspended from a string around his neck hung clammy against his chest. He stood irresolute on numbing bare feet, and considered returning to the more familiar bedlam.

But colder than cold was his shame at being cold. Molly never was, though she knew how to keep him warm, nor were the others. Hunger, thirst, pain and coldness were sensations never experienced by his friends. Like the growth he’d been undergoing till recently, these were things of ignominy, to be hidden as far as possible from inquiring eyes. Cold as it was, he’d have to hide.

Temporarily, the darkness concealed him, though it was not quite complete. From above the fog, the moon played vaguely deceptive light on the splinters of architecture looming toward it. Some distance off, an owl hooted, but here nocturnal rodents felt free to squeak and rustle as they scampered.

The world seemed ghostly. Yet it wasn’t dead; it merely lurked. And as an irrepressible yawn reminded Roddie of his absurd need for sleep even in the midst of danger, he concluded for the thousandth time that the One who’d built him must have been an apprentice.

For just such reasons he’d developed the hideout toward which he now walked. It had been the haven of his adolescence, when the discovery of how much he differed from his friends had been a shock, and the shock itself a difference to be hidden.

His hiding place was a manhole, dead center in the dead street. A weathered bronze bar, carefully placed in the cover’s slotted rim, was the levering key that opened its door.

Everything was wrong tonight! He couldn’t even find the bar. Of course that spoiled things, because the bar was a roller on which to move the heavy cover from below, and a support that held it ajar for ventilation.

But the example of his friends had taught him above all else to carry out every purpose. Molly was a nurse; she had raised him despite all obstacles. The soldiers were guards; they protected the ruins against everything larger than a rat. The firefighter had put even him out when he was aflame…

Anyhow, the manhole cover had been loosened by his frequent handling. He lifted it aside by main strength, then flattened himself to the street, and felt with his feet for the top rung.

Halfway down the iron ladder, something made him pause. He looked, but saw only blackness. He listened, sniffed, found nothing. What could have entered through the iron cover?

He sneered at his own timidity and jumped to the bottom.

It was warm! The dry bottom of the hole had the temperature of body heat, as if a large animal had recently rested there!

Quickly, Roddie drew the hammer from his waist. Then, with weapon ready for an instantaneous blow, he stretched his left hand through the darkness. He touched something warm, softish. Gingerly he felt over that curving surface for identifying features.

While Roddie investigated by touch, his long fingers were suddenly seized and bitten. At the same time, his right shin received a savage kick. And his own retaliatory blow was checked in mid-swing by an unexpected voice.

“Get your filthy hands off me!” it whispered angrily. “Who do you think you are?”

Startled, he dropped his hammer. “I’m Roddie,” he said, squatting to fumble for it. “Who do you think you are?”

“I’m Ida, naturally! Just how many girls are there in this raiding party?”

His first Invader—and he had dropped his weapon!

Scrabbling fearfully in the dust for his hammer, Roddie paused suddenly. This girl—whatever that was—seemed to think him one of her own kind. There was a chance, not much, but worth taking, to turn delay to advantage. Maybe he could learn something of value before he killed her. That would make the soldiers accept him!

He stalled, seeking a gambit. “How would I know how many girls there are?”

Half expecting a blow, he got instead an apology. “I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I should have known. Never even heard your name before, either. Roddie… Whose boat did you come in, Roddie?”

Boat? What was a boat? “How would I know?” he repeated, voice tight with fear of discovery.

If she noticed the tension, she didn’t show it. Certainly her whisper was friendly enough. “Oh, you’re one of the fellows from Bodega, then. They shoved a boy into our boat at the last minute, too. Tough, wasn’t it, getting separated in the fog and tide like that? If only we didn’t have to use boats… But, say, how are we going to get away from here?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Roddie said, closing his fingers on the hammer, and rising. “How did you get in?”

“Followed your footprints. It was sundown and I saw human tracks in the dust and they led me here. Where were you?”

“Scouting around,” Roddie said vaguely. “How did you know I was a man when I came back?”

“Because you couldn’t see me, silly! You know perfectly well these androids are heat-sensitive and can locate us in the dark!”

Indeed he did know! Many times he’d felt ashamed that Molly could find him whenever she wanted to, even here in the manhole. But perhaps the manhole would help him now to redeem himself…

“I’d like to get a look at you,” he said.

The girl laughed self-consciously. “It’s getting gray out. You’ll see me soon enough.”

But she’d see him, Roddie realized. He had to talk fast.

“What’ll we do when it’s light?” he asked.

“Well, I guess the boats have gone,” Ida said. “You could swim the Gate, I guess—you seem tall and strong enough. But I couldn’t. You’ll think it’s crazy, but I’ve given this some thought, and even looked it over from the other side. I expect to try the Golden Gate Bridge!”

Now he was getting somewhere! The bridge was ruined, impassable. Even her own people had crossed the Strait by other means. But if there were a way over the bridge…

“It’s broken,” he said. “How in the world can we cross it?”

“Oh, you’ll find out, if you take me up there. I—I don’t want to be alone, Roddie. Will you go with me? Now?”

Well, she could be made to point out the route before he killed her—if nothing happened when she saw him.

Uneasy, Roddie hefted the hammer in his hand.

A giggle broke the pause. “It’s nice of you to wait and let me go first up the ladder,” the girl said. “But where the heck is the rusty old thing?”

“I’ll go first,” said Roddie. He might need the advantage. “The ladder’s right behind me.”

He climbed with hammer in teeth, and stretched his left hand from street level to grasp and neutralize the girl’s right. Then, nervously fingering his weapon, he stared at her in the thin gray dawn.

She was short and lean, except for roundnesses here and there. From her shapeless doeskin dress stretched slender legs that tapered to feet that were bare, tiny, and, like her hands, only two in number.

Roddie was pleased. They were evenly matched as to members, and that would make things easy when the time came.

He looked into her face. It smiled at him, tanned and ruddy, with a full mouth and bright dark eyes that hid under long lashes when he looked too long.

Startling, those wary eyes. Concealing. For a moment he felt a rush of fear, but she gave his hand a squeeze before twisting loose, and burst into sudden laughter.

“Diapers!” she chortled, struggling to keep her voice low. “My big, strong, blond and blue-eyed hero goes into battle wearing diapers, and carrying only a hammer to fight with! You’re the most unforgettable character I have ever known!”

He’d passed inspection, then—so far. He expelled his withheld breath, and said, “I think you’ll find me a little odd, in some ways.”

“Oh, not at all,” Ida replied quickly. “Different, yes, but I wouldn’t say odd.”

When they started down the street, she was nervous despite Roddie’s assertion that he knew where the soldiers were posted. He wondered if she felt some of the doubt he’d tried to conceal, shared his visions of what the soldiers might do if they found him brazenly strolling with an Invader. They might not believe he was only questioning a prisoner.

Every day, his friends were becoming more unpredictable.

For that very reason, because he didn’t know what precautions would do any good, he took a chance and walked openly to the bridge by the most direct route. In time this apparent assurance stilled Ida’s fears, and she began to talk.

Many of the things she said were beyond his experience and meaningless to him, but he did note with interest how effective the soldiers had been.

“It’s awful,” Ida said. “So few young men are left, so many casualties…”

“But why do you—we—keep up the fight?” Roddie asked. “I mean, the soldiers will never leave the city; their purpose is to guard it and they can’t leave, so they won’t attack. Let them alone, and there’ll be plenty of young men.”

“Well!” said Ida, sharply. “You need indoctrination! Didn’t they ever tell you that the city is our home, even if the stupid androids do keep us out? Don’t you know how dependent we are on these raids for all our tools and things?”

She sounded suspicious. Roddie shot her a furtive, startled glance. But she wasn’t standing off to fight him. On the contrary, she was too close for both comfort and combat. She bumped him hip and shoulder every few steps, and if he edged away, she followed.

He went on with his questioning. “Why are you here? I mean, sure, the others are after tools and things, but what’s your purpose?”

Ida shrugged. “I’ll admit no girl has ever done it before,” she said, “but I thought I could help with the wounded. That’s why I have no weapon.”

She hesitated, glanced covertly up at him, and went on with a rush of words. “It’s the lack of men, I guess. All the girls are kind of bored and hopeless, so I got this bright idea and stowed away on one of the boats when it was dark and the fog had settled down. Do you think I was being silly?”

“No, but you do seem a little purposeless.”

In silence they trudged through a vast area of charred wood and concrete foundations on the northern end of the city. Thick fog over the water hid Alcatraz, but in-shore visibility was better, and they could see the beginning of the bridge approach.

A stone rattled nearby. There was a clink of metal. Ida gasped, and clung to Roddie’s arm.

“Behind me!” he whispered urgently. “Get behind me and hold on!”

He felt Ida’s arms encircling his waist, her chin digging into his back below the left shoulder. Facing them, a hundred feet away, stood a soldier. He looked contemptuous, hostile.

“It’s all right,” Roddie said, his voice breaking.

There was a long, sullen, heart-stopping stare. Then the soldier turned and walked away.

Ida’s grip loosened, and he could feel her sag behind him. Roddie turned and held her. With eyes closed, she pressed cold blue lips to his. He grimaced and turned away his head.

Ida’s response was quick. “Forgive me,” she breathed, and slipped from his arms, but she held herself erect. “I was so scared. And then we’ve had no sleep, no food or water.”

Roddie was familiar with these signs of weakness, proud of appearing to deny his own humiliating needs.

“I guess you’re not as strong as me,” he said smugly. “I’ll take care of you. Of course we can’t sleep now, but I’ll get food and water.” Leaving her to follow, he turned left to the ruins of a supermarket he had previously visited, demonstrating his superior strength by setting a pace Ida couldn’t match. By the time she caught up with him, he had grubbed out a few cans of the special size that Molly always chose. Picking two that were neither dented, swollen, nor rusted, he smashed an end of each with his hammer, and gave Ida her choice of strained spinach or squash.

“Baby food!” she muttered. “Maybe it’s just what we need, but to eat baby food with a man wearing a diaper… Tell me, Roddie, how did you happen to know where to find it?”

“Well, this is the northern end of the city,” he answered, shrugging. “I’ve been here before.”

“Why did the soldier let us go?”

“This watch,” he said, touching the radium dial. “It’s a talisman.” But Ida’s eyes had widened, and the color was gone from her face. She was silent, too, except when asking him to fill his fast-emptied can with rain-water. She didn’t finish her own portion, but lay back in the rubble with feet higher than her head, obviously trying to renew her strength.

And when they resumed their walk, her sullen, fear-clouded face showed plainly that he’d given himself away.

But to kill her now, before learning how she planned to cross the supposedly impassable bridge, seemed as purposeless and impulsive as Ida herself. Roddie didn’t think, in any case, that her death would satisfy the soldiers. With new and useful information to offer, he might join them as an equal at last. But if his dalliance with this enemy seemed pointless, not even Molly’s knitting needles could protect him.

He was sure the soldiers must be tracking the mysterious emanations of his watch dial, and had trouble to keep from glancing over his shoulder at every step. But arrival at the bridge approach ended the need for this self-restraint. Here, difficult going demanded full attention.

He’d never gone as far as the bridge before, not having wanted to look as if he might be leaving the city. The approach was a jungle of concrete with an underbrush of reinforcing-steel that reached for the unwary with rusted spines. Frequently they had to balance on cracked girders, and inch over roadless spots high off the ground.

Here Ida took the lead. When they got to where three approach roads made a clover-leaf, she led him down a side road and into a forest.

Roddie stopped, and seized her arm.

“What are you trying to do?*’ he demanded.

“I’m taking you with me,” Ida said firmly. “Taking you where you belong!”

“No!” he blurted, drawing his hammer. “I can’t go, nor let you go. I belong here!”

Ida gasped, twisted loose, and ran. Roddie ran after her.

She wasn’t so easily caught. Like a frightened doe, she dashed in and out among the trees, leaped to the bridge’s underpinnings where they thrust rustedly from a cliff, and scrambled up the ramp.

Roddie sighed and slowed down. The pavement ended just beyond the cable anchors. From there to the south tower, only an occasional dangling support wire showed where the actual bridge had been suspended. Ida was trapped.

He could take his time. Let the soldiers come up, as they undoubtedly would, to finish the job…

But Ida didn’t seem to realize she was trapped. Without hesitation she dashed up the main left-hand suspension cable and ran along its curved steel surface.

For a moment, Roddie thought of letting her go, letting her run up the ever-steepening catenary until—because there were no guard-ropes or handgrips—she simply fell. That would solve his problem.

Except it wouldn’t be his solution. Her death wouldn’t prove him to his friends.

He set out quickly, before Ida was lost to sight in the thick fog that billowed in straight from the ocean. At first he ran erect along the top of the yard-wide cylinder of twisted metal, but soon the curve steepened. He had to go on all fours, clinging palm and sole.

Blood was on the cable where she’d passed. More blood stained it when he’d followed.

But because his friends knew neither pain nor fatigue, Roddie would admit none either. Nor would he give in to the fear that dizzied him at every downward look. He scrambled on like an automaton, watching only his holds, till he rammed Ida’s rear with his head.

She had stopped, trembling and gasping. Roddie clung just below her and looked dazedly around. There was nothing in sight but fog, pierced by the rapier of rusted wire supporting them. Neither end of it was in sight.

Upward lay success, if death were not nearer on the cable. No soldier had ever come even this far, for soldiers, as he’d told Ida, never left the city, were not built to do so. But he was here; with luck, he could capitalize on the differences that had plagued him so long.

“Go on!” he ordered hoarsely. “Move!”

There was neither answer nor result. He broke off an end of loosened wire and jabbed her rear. Ida gasped and crawled on.

Up and up they went, chilled, wet, bleeding, pain-racked, exhausted. Never had Roddie felt so thoroughly the defects of his peculiar non-mechanical construction.

Without realizing it, he acquired a new purpose, a duty as compelling as that of any soldier or fire-watcher. He had to keep that trembling body of his alive, mount to the tall rust tower overhead.

He climbed and he made Ida climb, till, at nightmare’s end, the fog thinned and they came into clear, windswept air and clawed up the last hundred feet to sanctuary.

They were completely spent. Without word or thought they crept within the tower, huddled together for warmth on its dank steel deck, and slept for several hours.

Roddie awoke as Ida finished struggling free of his unconscious grip. Limping, he joined her painful walk around the tower. From its openings they looked out on a strange and isolated world.

To the north, where Ida seemed drawn as though by instinct, Mount Tamalpais reared its brushy head, a looming island above a billowy white sea of fog. To the south were the Twin Peaks, a pair of buttons on a cotton sheet. Eastward lay Mount Diablo, bald and brooding, tallest of the peaks and most forbidding.

But westward over the ocean lay the land of gold—of all the kinds of gold there are, from brightest yellow to deepest orange. Only a small portion of the setting sun glared above the fog-bank; the rest seemed to have been broken off and smeared around by a child in love with its color.

Fascinated, Roddie stared for minutes, but turned when Ida showed no interest. She was intent on the tower itself. Following her eyes, Roddie saw his duty made suddenly clear.

Easy to make out even in the fading light was the route by which Invaders could cross to the foot of this tower on the remaining ruins of the road, climb to where he now stood, and then descend the cable over the Bridge’s gap and catch the city unaware. Easy to estimate was the advantage of even this perilous route over things that scattered on the water and prevented a landing in strength. Easy to see was the need to kill Ida before she carried home this knowledge.

Roddie took the hammer from his waist.

“Don’t! Oh, don’t!” Ida screamed. She burst into tears and covered her face with scratched and bloodied hands.

Surprised, Roddie withheld the blow. He had wept, as a child, and, weeping, had for the first time learned he differed from his friends. Ida’s tears disturbed him, bringing unhappy memories.

“Why should you cry?” he asked comfortingly. “You know your people will come back to avenge you and will destroy my friends.”

“But—but my people are your people, too,” Ida wailed. “It’s so senseless, now, after all our struggle to escape. Don’t you see? Your friends are only machines, built by our ancestors. We are Men—and the city is ours, not theirs!”

“It can’t be,” Roddie objected. “The city surely belongs to those who are superior, and my friends are superior to your people, even to me. Each of us has a purpose, though, while you Invaders seem to be aimless. Each of us helps preserve the city; you only try to rob and end it by destroying it. My people must be the true Men, because they’re so much more rational than yours… And it isn’t rational to let you escape.”

Ida had turned up her tear-streaked face to stare at him.

“Rational! What’s rational about murdering a defenseless girl in cold blood? Don’t you realize we’re the same sort of being, we two? Don’t—don’t you remember how we’ve been with each other all day?”

She paused. Roddie noticed that her eyes were dark and frightened, yet somehow soft, over scarlet cheeks. He had to look away. But he said nothing.

“Never mind!” Ida said viciously. “You can’t make me beg. Go ahead and kill—see if it proves you’re superior. My people will take over the city regardless of you and me, and regardless of your jumping-jack friends, too! Men can accomplish anything!”

Scornfully she turned and looked toward the western twilight. It was Roddie’s turn to stand and stare.

“Purpose!” Ida flung at him over her shoulder. “Logic! Women hear so much of that from men! You’re a man, all right! Men always call it logic when they want to destroy! Loyalty to your own sort, kindness, affection—all emotional, aren’t they? Not a bit logical. Emotion is for creating, and it’s so much more logical to destroy, isn’t it?”

She whirled back toward him, advancing as if she wanted to sink her teeth into his throat. “Go ahead. Get it over with—if you have the courage.”

It was hard for Roddie to look away from that wrath-crimsoned face, but it was even harder to keep staring into the blaze of her eyes. He compromised by gazing out an opening at the gathering dusk. He thought for a long time before he decided to tuck his hammer away.

“It isn’t reasonable to kill you now,” he said. “Too dark. You can’t possibly get down that half-ruined manway tonight, so let’s see how I feel in the morning.”

Ida began to weep again, and Roddie found it necessary to comfort her.

And by morning he knew he was a Man.

THE SIGN OF HOMO SAP

Ayn had been scouting. He returned all excited.

“This Y-shaped valley,” he said, “ends down below, very abruptly. There’s a wall that looks artificial at the most southerly point of the west end. There are two animals poking around, wearing what looks like protective armor. And—listen!—they speak the language of Those-Who-Taught!”

Zymn was incredulous. “Aah, you’ve been hearing things!” he snorted. “Drunk, no doubt, on the high oxygen concentration of this atmosphere! Natural enough, but no reason for you to side with Orje, here.”

I’d been claiming that the Y-shaped valley was artificially floored with salt. Zymn wouldn’t believe it—he never believes anything I say. Maybe that’s one difference between a practical pilot like me and a theoretical scientist like Zymn. Anyhow, our divided command accentuated differences: as pilot, I commanded during flight; but as scientist, Zymn was in charge on the ground. And he wanted us to know it.

So I said nothing, and because I didn’t he ordered me to go with him and inspect these beings. Since there were only two, it seemed safe enough for just the pair of us to go, and anyway Zymn was contemptuous of safety precautions.

“You and your deserts!” he jeered as we marched west between rocky canyon walls. “Always you have to pick a spot that looks red from Space! The green areas undoubtedly contain more animal life…”

“Sure,” I agreed. “More life-forms—and more hostile life-forms. We’re seeking a homeland, not a fight.”

But, along with routine collecting, we fought all the way.

We fought because Zymn had already determined that this, the third planet from Star XM-523, should be our new home. He had no use for my precautionary objections.

“Investigate!” he mocked. “What is there to investigate? The temperature’s all right, the atmosphere is okay, the gravitation is something our people can get used to. And our planet is cooling fast. Already we’ve wasted too much time searching out a substitute. This is it. All we have to do is kill off the vegetation, and maybe increase the rate of oxidation of these rocks. That’ll lower the atmosphere’s oxygen content to where even an infant can stand it.”

“We know nothing about the place,” I pointed out, “excepting the few life-forms we’ve gathered.”

“And aren’t they commonplace?” he scoffed. “We know from both experience and theory that the Universe is not chaotic. Both living and non-living forms repeat universally with variations that are basically minor. Nothing here will be totally strange to us—and nothing here is worth bothering about.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But if you believed all that, you wouldn’t be on this hike.”

“This hike has another purpose altogether,” he answered. “We’ve got to take into account the fears of the religious. Naturally we can’t let ourselves be accused of disturbing Those-Who-Taught, so you and I will personally discredit Ayn’s rumor. And when that’s done, Orje, we’re going to irradiate this atmosphere without any more delay!”

Even when we reached the wall near the valley’s end, Zymn continued his perverseness. “What if it is symmetrical?” he argued when I’d pointed out how it differed in this respect from anything else in sight. “The Universe is symmetrical too—and what life-form created that?”

But he was talking in the teeth of facts. The wall was a semicircular monolith that filled the narrow canyon from side to side at a uniform height. Behind it was the Y-shaped valley we’d come down, its floor almost level with the top of the wall. But the wall’s other face, cracked, concave, and nearly free of vegetation, dropped sheer to the strewn canyon floor a full ship’s-length below.

And down there were the beings that spoke.

Two wore armor. The third wore fur. All had four limbs, but the armored ones used just two for walking, though the furry one ran around on all fours, shouting. His language we couldn’t understand; the others, we couldn’t hear.

So we levitated down the wall and stood beside them.

They were busy and didn’t see us at first. The four-legged furry one did, though. He showed his teeth, made his fur stand on end, and backed off with a rumbling sound.

One of the others said, with a strange accent, but in the language of Those-Who-Taught, “What’s the matter with the dog?” This one had a high voice.

The low-voiced one looked up, then, and saw us. Its jaw dropped. Its blue eyes, two in number, seemed to reach out on stalks and snap back again, though Zymn has argued about this. It moved backward a step and, having but the two walking-limbs, tripped and fell. The other one looked up and screeched.

“Why do you use the language of Those-Who-Taught?” Zymn demanded.

I hoped they would be careful how they answered; Zymn doesn’t like being proved wrong.

But there was no response at all, though the screeching stopped.

So I tried. “We won’t hurt you,” I said. “We have the highest respect for Those-Who-Taught. It’s our religion.”

“I think they’re trying to talk to us,” the deep-voiced one said. It was long and lean, with gray fuzz on top. It got up and went to the other, which shook. They crouched together on a rock, each staring from us to the other as if doubting its senses.

“That’s—that’s Old English,” the shaking one said. “If they speak more slowly, maybe—”

The accent was thick, but I got the idea. So did Zymn.

“See!” he said, fingering his projector. “They don’t talk right. They’re phonies. So let’s wind this up.”

“Don’t be silly!” I said. “Do you want us to be hanged by the priests? We need proof to silence Ayn. Besides, they may know the Sign.”

“All right, ask them,” Zymn said. “But make it snappy. And the whole job is yours—I won’t have anything to do with them.”

That’s how it started. It took a few minutes to get the interview under way; I found out later they were manifesting fear. So was the furry animal—a dog, they called it—and they tied him up to the vegetation with a strap that ran to a collar around his neck.

They were, they said, a man and wife.

Professor Henry Daugherty and wife Jane. He looked nothing at all like a man. Their sexes you can see from my pronouns.

Henry said he was a historian. His wife was supposed to be a specialist in English, the language of Those-Who-Taught. You’d never have believed her, though, if you’d heard that accent. I’m not going to try to reproduce it, but they were barely intelligible to us, and for that matter we were not easy for them to understand.

They were full of questions, but because they seemed so phony Zymn refused to let me answer.

“They’re probably subversive,” he said in our own tongue, “else they wouldn’t have tried to learn the language. So ask much and tell nothing. And don’t pander to that childish curiosity of yours. Just satisfy yourself that they’re not brethren of Those-Who-Taught, so we can get on with our work.”

I turned to them and said, “Do you know of Those-Who-Taught?” They didn’t.

“What do you call yourselves? What species, I mean?”

“Men,” said Henry.

Zymn sneered. “See,” he said to me.

“Mockery!”

To Henry, who still crouched with his arm around his wife, I said, “Better not try to kid us; my friend here will destroy you. We know you’re not men, because we are.”

Jane flashed her teeth, but Henry made her stop. “Dignity, dignity,” he said. He told us, in perfect seriousness, that many groups call themselves, in their various languages, the equivalent of men. As an historian he knew all about it, he said; lots of groups of primitive inhabitants of his planet had called their own members “men” or “the people” and called all strangers—even of the same species—something else.

“So we’re just stumbling over words,” he said. “To say you are ‘men’ is something like saying ‘we are us’—meaningless, under the circumstances. But tell us this: who are Those-Who-Taught, whose language we are apparently using?”

“Don’t answer them,” said Zymn. “It’s sacred knowledge, and if they were what Ayn thinks, they’d know.”

So I gave no details, and merely said that some beings had come to our planet from another, which was too far away for their return, and had stayed among us and taught us technology, including the fundamentals of space-flight.

“All Space-men of our people use this sacred language,” I said. “It’s important to our training, since the books of Those-Who-Taught are written in the sacred tongue.”

Jane said, “The language you use was current here maybe a thousand years ago. Could Those-Who-Taught have lived then?”

That put me on their side, because it fitted the facts.

But Zymn said, “Don’t tell them—they’re only grasping at straws.”

Jane didn’t understand him, of course. But she soon realized her question wasn’t being answered.

“It’s not important, anyhow,” she said, with more impudence than I’d have expected. “The main thing is what did they look like?”

“We don’t know,” I admitted. “The pictures are sacred, and only the priests see them.”

“Then how do we prove who we are?” Jane asked.

“You give the secret Sign,” I said.

“And suppose we don’t?” Henry asked.

I explained how we would remove the oxygen-producing vegetation from the planet, oxidize enough of the surface to reduce the atmospheric oxygen content, and then bring our own people and life-forms there. I also explained why.

And when I finished, the two of them huddled in a silence so chill you’d have thought their planet was afflicted as was our own.

Zymn distrusted that silence. “Tell them to give the Sign,” he ordered. So I did.

“What kind of Sign is it?” Henry asked.

“I’m not permitted to describe it in words,” I said. “And I can’t imitate it. That’s the point—there’s something Those-Who-Taught could do that’s completely distinctive, utterly unlike the activities of any other form of life known to us. And we know a lot of life-forms.”

Henry made motions as if to get to his walking-limbs.

“Stay where you are,” I said hastily. “And if you have weapons, don’t use them. There are more of us up the valley and you’d only make things worse.”

He put a limb around Jane, again.

“By the way,” I said, seeking to change the subject, “is the valley by any chance artificial?”

“Quite,” said Henry. “Accidental, really. I’ve been doing research on it; in fact, that’s why I’m here in this wilderness. That is Mead Valley, and once it was a lake. This,” he said, indicating the wall behind him, “is a dam, built to hold back water so the desert could grow things. It worked, but the water contained silt and the lake filled, eventually.”

“But your people made the dam?”

“Quite. Long ago. Doesn’t that in itself tell you we’re the technologists who taught your people?”

“No,” Zymn interrupted, speaking directly to them in his irritation. “The Sign is not a thing of reason.”

“Oh, our forebears weren’t reasonable,” Henry assured him. “That’s why I had to come out here and do research. On old maps this structure was known both as Hoover Dam and as Boulder Dam. So I came expecting to find two dams, naturally; but there’s only one.

“So here’s a tremendous technological feat, accomplished, no doubt, by co-operation among many people. Yet though they could have erected this monolith only with the most intricate teamwork, they apparently could never agree on its name. Is that logical?”

“Neither logical nor relevant,” Zymn said brusquely. “It isn’t the Sign. It proves nothing!”

Jane broke in, then. Remembering Zymn’s hint that the Sign was not an act of logic, she began to demonstrate the non-logical activities of her life-form. She gave us a song, but Zymn opined that the local flying-creatures—birds she called them—sang better. Anyhow, singing was obviously not exclusively an activity of her kind.

And the same with what Henry called art. He bragged of feats of pleasing design, and pointed to the dam itself as proof, but I myself could describe something better, seen only that day. They called what I’d seen a spider-web.

And so it went. Because the two had never been off their planet, we confined our comparisons to things at hand. And we covered many fields of knowledge and activity, both non-logical and logical, as if Henry felt our definition of logic might not be his.

Ignorant though we were of just those life-forms most familiar to Henry and Jane, we showed them our mornings specimens. They called these ants, bees, swallows—all forms of bird, I think—and were able to prove by the activities of these things that neither social organization, nor engineering, nor architecture were exclusively what Henry insisted on calling “human” specialties. But “human” is a word that distinguishes between us and them, and is therefore foreign to the sacred language.

And as far as the language itself went, Zymn was prompt to point out that it wasn’t native to us, and for all we knew might not be native to them, either. And if it weren’t, well, they’d better come up with the Sign—quickly.

So Henry tried to explain about history, which was his specialty. “None of these life-forms you’ve mentioned can write,” he said. “History, though, is the study of written records. And you’ve said that Those-Who-Taught made such records. Surely that proves our relationship.”

Zymn was too impatient to answer. Instead, he leveled his projector and idly shot the vegetation the dog was tied to. His target disappeared. The dog was free. It walked stiffly toward us.

“Call him,” said Henry to Jane, speaking very quickly. “Suppose he bites?”

“Here Horace, here Horace, here Horace,” Jane said, and made a bird-note.

The dog skirted around me, avoided Zymn as if equipped to read minds, and approached Jane. But on the way he stopped by a bit of vegetation and lifted his leg.

“What’s he doing?” I asked, merely to ease the tension.

“Leaving his scent,” Henry explained.

“Another animal coming by could know he’d been here?” Zymn asked.

“Yes.”

“Then he, too, can write history!”

Jane suddenly doubled up and put an extremity over her mouth as if in pain. She seemed to have a breathing difficulty. Henry shook her violently.

“You’ll insult them!” he said.

“I—I just can’t help it,” she said. “Imagine devoting s-so many years to history and finding out you’re no better than a dog. You used to claim it was a dog’s life, but I never—Oh, this just tickles me—” And out of her mouth came the rippling sound.

Zymn walked over and put a tentacle on her. “What are you doing?” he demanded.

“She’ll stop, she’ll stop,” Henry said, and pried at the tentacle.

With one sweep, Zymn tumbled him into the dust.

“What are you doing?” he again demanded of Jane.

“Laughing,” she said, and her voice broke as she said it. Moisture rolled from her eyes. “I’m laughing, but please don’t take offense. It’s just the way of some humans when under a strain.”

“So?” said Zymn. “And you?” he asked Henry. “Are you laughing, to?”

“All right,” said Henry, “yes, if you want to play tough. Yes, I’m laughing too!” And out came the sound, forced, strained, but genuine enough to be recognized.

I looked at Zymn and he looked at me and said, “Okay, Orje. You win this time—you and Ayn. But if it weren’t for you two fools, I’d have a home for our people!”

He started to levitate up the dam.

“Wait!” said Henry. “Where are you going?”

“Away,” said Zymn. But then, realizing the need, he came back and spoke more respectfully. “We can’t destroy the brethren of Those-Who-Taught. We owe too much to your kind.”

“And—” Henry insisted.

“And you’ve given the Sign. The Universe is full of life-forms that sing, and build, and record their presence variously. Each thinks itself important on that account, and all are wrong.

“But you, my friend, are truly unique. Not because of the skill that built this dam. Not because of the stupid difficulty that developed over its name, either. All those things are really commonplace.

“But you are the only animals that laugh!”

TOO DENSE TO DIE

Achievement? It’s a matter of insides, my boy. The secret of success lies in every man’s digestion. Just follow the ideas you get on nights of colicky sleeplessness and you’ll become as wealthy as me. There’s many a time when the human mind’s nothing but a gas-engine.

It was heart-burn made me think up my Cybernetic Cooker. And out of that grew my Two-Way Space Pump, the basis of my fabulous tool-bit business. All the world knows our slogan—Buy Bye’s Bits—Bye-Bye Bumps.

Like Henry Ford, that legendary figure of ancient industrial history, I was already middle-aged when I started toward success. I was rooming and boarding with Carrie Coles, the lady I’ve since married.

The Cybernetic Cooker idea, when it came, was a big one and I needed space to work it out. So one night, after the other boarder had moved away, taking his ‘gyro from the basement hangar, I went into the kitchen to see if Carrie’d let me have a shop downstairs.

Well, you know how women are. She wanted to be coaxed.

“Need my hangar-space, do you,” she said, putting down the egg, tomato, cheese, olive, bacon and onion sandwich she was nibbling to keep her strength up till morning. “Well, you think too much, Wizard Bye. What are you going to invent this time—invisible light?”

“Invisible light’s already been invented,” I told her. “You can see it lots of places. I’m designing a mechanical brain. That’s Cybernetics—an old-fashioned development of machines that think faster than men can.”

“Why make a machine to think faster than men?” she scoffed. “There’s no shortage of women. Besides, it won’t work. Any machine that thinks like men will wear itself out thinking up ways to avoid thinking.”

“You just don’t understand the creative process,” I said.

“No?” she came back. “Have I forgotten the artificial rubber you strengthened until the Board of Health insisted it smelled strong enough? Or the silent boiler-riveting machine the police took away? Or the drain-cleaning compound that stopped all the sewers? Or—”

The little lady raised her two hundred pounds of pleasing plumpness to the dainty feet she hadn’t seen in twenty years. “If you think you’re going to ruin my stove and ice-box,” she warned, shaking a finger like a delicate pink banana, “you do need a thinking machine!

“And what’s wrong with my cooking, I’d like to know? After the way I work and slave over a hot stove, boiling your milk and barely taking time to fix the few things I eat all day—”

“That’s just the point, Carrie,” I interrupted. “I can’t bear to see you work so hard. Besides, you’ll go down in history as the first woman ever to do Cybernetic Cooking—the neighbors’ll stand on their heads in envy!”

“Hm,” she said, thoughtfully. “At that, I guess you can play in the hangar till it’s rented, Wiz. Of course, I’ll never actually use your hootenanny but another gadget might look nice by the sink if it was to be enameled in white and trimmed in chrome.”

Well, sir, after that warning, you can be sure I was careful of the Cybernetic Cooker’s appearance. I followed the latest theories of interior decorating—designed my machine to harmonize with Carrie’s personal style of beauty. It was as wide as the whole hangar.

But you know how women are. When I brought Carrie down to look at the finished masterwork she first flicked off invisible dust to establish title. Then she asked, “How in the world do you expect to get that tremendous contraption out of this basement and fit it into my crowded kitchen?”

Well, I couldn’t answer right away because that happened to be one of the details I hadn’t got around to. But the Cybernetic Cooker itself could easily have solved the problem if she’d only given me a chance to translate her question into binary arithmetic and put it to the mechanical brain.

I didn’t get time though. The very next night, just after I’d excused myself from the dinner table—she had eaten a cod-fish pizza with soy sauce—and had gone to my room for a little bicarb, in clumped this red-haired stranger, Herc Hardhart, bringing a load of trouble on the broken-down dump-plane he parked just over my window.

He was about six-feet-six and weighed three hundred twenty pounds in his sheer nylon sox. Had a nose for nourishment too—went straight from the front door to the dining room, though he had never seen the place before. That showed how rude he was but from the tone of Carrie’s voice as he scraped with his fork I knew she had found a boarder of her own kidney. I couldn’t stomach him.

I knew he’d want the hangar where my Cybernetic Cooker was, so while he munched I stood in my room on pins and needles, with an ear glued to the door’s panel and my eyes riveted to its crack. Naturally that was one of the most painful periods of my life.

The red-haired human tape-worm was eating his way right under Carrie’s skin. “I do like to see a man take his food,” she kept simpering. “Maybe that’s why I’m still a lonely widow. My present boarder is a skinny little runt with the appetite of a sick canary, though he ate normally when he first came here.

“But you remind me of Rudy Coles, my fourth husband. There was a man now. Every night he used to eat a pound of raw hamburger with six fried eggs on top. Then he’d visit the corner tavern to see his friends and wash down a few pig’s-trotters and pretzels and pickles and olives and cheese and crackers and anchovies and onions with a little beer.

“After that, his friends would send him home with a police escort. Why, even the autopsy surgeon admired him—said he had a cute digestion. Have some more of my nice jellied leeks, Mr. Hardhart.”

I knew he’d taken some by his burp. When the windows stopped rattling he said, “Madam, you are a genuine geographic genius of the gastronomic. Advise me where to dispose my vehicle, and I shall enter upon tenancy forthwith.”

I could see what was coming before Carrie even answered.

“You might as well have another slice of this nice persimmon pie,” she told him. “My other boarder’s got a few things in the hangar right now but I’ll see he empties it out for you. And what’s the matter with my coffee? You haven’t had but five cups.”

“I consider moderation best, don’t you?” Herc answered. “As the ancient Greeks accurately advised—the middle course.”

“Every course goes to my middle,” Carrie replied. “But you needn’t worry about old Greek joints as long as you live here—I’ll fix your lunch every day in a suitcase. Now, if you’ve quite finished eating I’ll show you the hangar for your plane.”

Knowing I was in for it, I followed them downstairs. Carrie introduced me.

“Ah,” said Herc, driving my skull between my shoulders with a pat on the head. “The household’s white-haired boy, I see. Kindly identify this marvelous metallic monstrosity, my fatuously funny friend.”

“Don’t call him friend till the hangar’s cleared,” Carrie advised. “This is supposed to be a mechanical cook, he says. Now I think of it that’s an insult!”

“Any attempt to displace your internationalized culinary artistry with mechanistic meddling is sacrilegious,” Herc promptly agreed. “This glittering gargoyle must go—particularly inasmuch as I’ve contracted to rent the space it occupies.”

“Contracted, hey?” I snorted. “That means you let him get by without paying! Carrie, you’re being taken for a ride—on a dump-plane. Why not let things stand? At least I pay cash.”

“Now you’ve insulted us both!” Carrie snapped. “You get that gadget out of here, understand? I’ll give you exactly one week and if it’s still here then you’ll go with it!”

“You heard the lady!” Herc echoed maliciously. “One week to shrink to invisibility this impious implement of insult. And if you shrink from the task I’ll personally diminish you to a damaged dot of dirt!” He turned and lumbered upstairs.

“Ha!” mocked Carrie, following him back to the kitchen for a snack. “Get yourself Sanforized, milksop!”

Poor Carrie! I knew she’d be sorry for speaking to me like that.

She had certainly fallen for her new boarder, to have extended credit for the first time in a long life. The heavy hand of love had made her a soft touch—she thought she itched for Hardhart but it was only the wool over her eyes.

Because her Herc certainly looked like the kind that thinks husband is something you do with your money. She’d never get him. She wouldn’t even collect for board—I could tell right away he’d unpurse nothing but his fat lips.

Well, when it was over, a flash in the frying-pan, she’d need my new invention to cheer her up. And I certainly didn’t intend to do away with my Cybernetic Cooker for a pot-bellied gigolo. But getting out of that didn’t look so hard once I’d thought about it awhile.

I got the idea trying to figure Carrie’s mind. Like all matter, including her gray-matter, my invention was full of vacant space. The open emptiness in and around atoms takes up most of anything’s volume.

So all I’d have to do was suck the empty space out of my Cybernetic Cooker, move the Cooker to the kitchen, pour the space back in again and I’d be all set.

What I needed was a Two-Way Space Pump.

I set to work that same night. First thing was to strip the Cybernetic Cooker for equipment to build the Pump. That fooled Herc and Carrie into thinking I was dismantling the Cooker but of course I only took it completely apart in order to avoid dismantling it. They were outwitted, that’s all.

But they didn’t pay much attention anyhow, being busy with their own problems. Every time Carrie hinted at rent-money Herc would put her off by praising her cooking.

And his appetite was more flattering to Carrie than a dozen Nero Wolfe orchids. She forgot all about money and lay awake every other night thinking up new dishes. The nights in between she lay awake because she’d eaten them. Among other things, she fixed him sweet lentil pudding, minced pie à la sour cream, fried ravioli with sugar icing, baked alaska in tomato sauce, dill-pickle ice cream, and chocolate-covered frankfurters à la Felix.

Neither had time for me, so I could concentrate on saving my Cybernetic Cooker. By the end of the allotted week it had entirely disappeared. In its place, made of its parts and a few others, was my Two-Way Space Pump. It took up very little more hangar-space than the Cooker had.

And the Space Pump worked perfectly. Its field of electronic gravitation was transmitted in two cones for about five feet to front and rear. The front cone pumped the space from anything within range, reducing the gravitational potential of the sub-atomic particles. It shrunk things to dust mote size, unchanged in weight or chemistry. The rear field-cone returned the space to anything shrunk without disturbing ordinary matter.

One thing, though—the hangar was fuller than ever. But I knew how to make room for Herc’s plane. I’d just build a second Space Pump. Then I’d use it to shrink the first one. I’d move that one, shrunk, to the kitchen.

Next, I’d build a third Space Pump—demand would be world-wide, anyhow—use it to shrink the second and take that one upstairs too. With the second Space Pump I’d restore the first one’s size, so it could be rebuilt into the Cybernetic Cooker.

Simple! I was sure the second Space Pump would restore the first one even when shrunk by the third, so all Carrie’d have to do was enlarge her kitchen till it could hold the Cooker. Then, with the third Space Pump still unshrunk in the hangar, we’d have this slight addition to the kitchen under which to park Herc’s plane.

But you know how women are. I tried to explain when Carrie checked on the basement at the end of the week but she just stood on the bottom step, sucking a grapefruit, and refused to listen.

“Wiz Bye, I’m simply not building a new hangar!” she said obstinately. “And Mr. Hardhart will be very angry. I don’t know what-all he’ll do.”

What he did, when she called him to look at the spot his plane still couldn’t occupy, was try to chisel. “Since that glittering gargantuosity remains heaped in my hangar,” he told me, “I shall have to haul it to the mid-ocean dump first thing tomorrow morning—at your expense. That will be a hundred fifty dollars—payable immediately.”

He lunged for my collar but I got Carrie between us.

“Honey,” I said to her, ignoring my huge antagonist as you’d ignore an angry elephant, “don’t let it be said you can’t appreciate my wonderful Two-Way Space Pump. This invention works! It shrinks things!”

“Shrinks?” she repeated. “Why use a machine? We’ve got plenty of water.”

“Will water shrink uranium?” I demanded. “Lookit!”

I turned on the machine, picked a lump from the fuel-bin and tossed it before the Two-Way Space Pump—into the reduction-field. The ore that left my hands a chunk thudded to the floor a mere speck of grit.

“My good fuel!” Carrie wailed. “You put that back, Wiz Bye!”

“Easily,” I said easily. I reached under the invisible cone of energy, picked up the grit—quite a job, because of its concentrated, unchanged weight—held it under the restoring-cone and let them watch it return to normal.

“Magic!” cried Carrie and looked at me with new respect.

But Herc Hardhart was skeptical. “An oddly obvious optical illusion,” he gibed.

Well, I showed him all right—demonstrated the Two-Way Space Pump on all kinds of things. Carrie got a big kick out of it. She was so interested she laid down her grapefruit and even forgot to eat the cold garlic-bread bulging the pocket of her tent-like house dress.

But Herc was scheming as usual. After thinking awhile he said, “Our funny friend flings a fine farewell frolic, doesn’t he, Carrie? I almost wish his allotted week were not ending and that he were not under a solemn obligation to depart first thing in the morning, leaving his devious device behind as payment for the rental of my hangar.”

“Gee-whiz, Wiz!” said Carrie, doubtfully. I opened my mouth to tell Herc off but he reached around Carrie to choke me with a gagging hand as he went on talking.

“Our luscious luck will be ludicrously lucrative,” he boasted to Carrie, grinning at my fruitless struggles to escape his iron grip. “With the machine in my hangar and the hangar a part of your boarding-house we each have a fifty-percent interest in this pricelessly profitable Pump. We’ll be participating partners in a pleasantly productive promotional enterprise.”

Almost before he had finished talking, Carrie flung herself into his arms with a staggering thump. “Oh, Herc,” she cooed, “what a sweet way to ask for my hand! Partners! Not a single one of my other husbands ever thought to be so—so delicate. I never dreamed your proposal would be this romantic, with me over forty by several years.”

“Several decades, darling,” Herc found breath to say brutally as he ducked under her headlock. “There seems to be a silly sort of slip somewhere, Sister. Our partnership will be purely platonic!”

Carrie stared at him for a long silence, pitiful tears dribbling from her eyepouches. Then she let him have it right in the ears like a disappointed fire-siren.

“The idea!” she raged. “After what I’ve cooked for you and all! Herc Hardhart, you’re—you’re as beastly as a zoo! You eat like a hog, act like a wolf, look like a hippo and talk nothing but bull! Wiz,” she commanded, turning imperiously to me “throw this lyin’ tiger out with the other alley tomcats!”

I’d moved away when Carrie made Herc accidentally let me go and I wanted to stay away. Herc looked down like a huge red-painted water-tower with two flexing fists and a vicious leer.

But you know how women are. I had to do something. For Honor and the Space Pump I rared back on tip-toe.

“Go pack your things,” I demanded, “or we’ll call ten cops!”

“Lie low, larrikin,” said Herc contemptuously, “or living locally there’ll be one lily-livered little lunkhead the less!”

“He can’t say that to us!” Carrie objected. “Poke his jaw, Wiz!”

But in that basement I had no chair to stand on. I could only punch his prominent middle.

It was a haymaking swipe that buried my right to the elbow with the sound and feel of hitting an air-mattress. I leaned against him, dragging my fist from the cave it’d made for itself.

Herc laughed jeeringly. The vibration of his innards tossed me to the wall.

“We’re not hurt!” Carrie encouraged. “Up and at him!”

With my breath knocked out I slid down the wall, was almost sitting when Carrie waddled to my side.

“Don’t let that throw you,” she said, and picked me up like a sack of sugar.

She set me on my shaking feet. I was woozy. The room was going around. Thinking to help, Carrie shoved me toward Herc. I staggered, and lurched unseeing into the reduction-cone of my Space Pump.

Instantly the floor came up and almost hit me.

I’d shrunk! I felt crazily smaller than an ant’s uncle, heavier than a lapful of Carrie. The smooth concrete floor seemed to have broken out in a rash of mountains and was strewn with boulders of dust.

Everything in sight had been magnified almost beyond recognition. And I was as helpless as if my underwear had turned to steel.

It took me a minute to figure out why. My body had retained all its weight but my muscles had shrunk until they were almost microscopic. It was a struggle to breathe even—but the air shrunk in the energy-cone flowed into my lungs by gravity because I was on my back.

Everything confused me—I was a stranger to myself. At first I even thought I was my own ghost.

Herc and Carrie thought so too. When I got adjusted I could hear them arguing.

“I did not kill him!” Carrie sobbed.

“Yes, you did,” Herc insisted. “You are a madly menacing murderess, Madam. And for profit—for the proceeds of the Pump. You bopped boarder Bye to bag big bounty.”

That foxy skunk was a rat! I’d have given my checked garters to have been able to reassure Carrie—and to have pointed out that Herc was trying to gull her and she should give him the bird. I yelled but she couldn’t hear. My voice had shrunk to the size of Hardhart’s conscience.

“Your nervousness is not necessary,” he went on cold bloodedly, “if you purchase protection through partnership. Follow my fifty-fifty formula to fame and fortune and we won’t worry where Wiz went.”

Carrie didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t turn my head to see her. I had to lie there wondering whether she’d end her days as an honest jail-bird, railroaded for murder by that redheaded hogger, or die rich and unhappy as his thieving partner.

I knew what I’d have done in her place. The thought chilled.

“The very idea!” she said finally, “Making me a proposition like that! You were the one fighting Wiz when he disappeared! I’ll testify against you in every court of the land—and be believed, too!”

I fell in love with her then and there. But you know how women are. She went right on talking.

“There’s only one kind of partnership interests me in the slightest, Herc Hardhart. Remember, a wife can’t testify against her husband!”

It was Herc’s turn to hesitate. “Carrie,” he said at last, choking on the words, “my life and liberty are lost unless we pursue happiness together as groom and bride.”

“Oh, darling,” she gushed, “you’re so sweet! But don’t kiss me yet—we’re probably not alone. Wiz must be on the floor somewhere. And we can’t just steal his invention right out from over his nose. Find him, Herc, dear.”

“Find, finish and forget,” said Herc grimly.

I didn’t like the tone of his voice. All he had to do was turn off the machine, and I’d be asphyxiated for want of concentrated air my shrunken lungs could breathe. And I figured he’d shut down the Pump to hunt me in safety.

Luckily he didn’t. I could hear him grunting as he squatted and decided he was putting his eye close to the floor, staring along its surface to find me. He must have thought me alive because from here on he whispered rather than talked aloud.

First thing I knew, a pair of lever-jawed pliers closed on my head and I was dragged from under the energy-cone. Then, with a heave and a groan, Herc lifted me to my bench and tossed me onto the vise-anvil.

I knew he wanted to kill me but was too dizzy to worry about impending death. As a matter of fact I was already half dead. There wasn’t enough oxygen for me in unshrunken air and my chest was too heavy for its muscles. I was suffocating.

Herc located my sledge-hammer. I saw it flash through the air toward my head. He was going to hammer out a solution to his problem, all right!

His first blow landed with a crash. It didn’t hurt! Succeeding blows partly snapped me out of it. The double-dealer wielding the double-jack was giving me artificial respiration though he didn’t know it.

His repeated blows forced air in and out of my lungs until my head cleared a little. Not enough, though—I was lightheaded and foolish like a high-latitude flier who forgets to cut in his mask.

What I wanted was shrunken air. So when Herc put me on the edge of the vise, trying to cut me in two, I gave a clumsy wiggle and rolled off.

Landing was a shock. I tore through something soft and was stuck fast in evil-smelling darkness, right next to a large warm object I couldn’t make out.

“My corn!” Herc yelled. “The cad has conked my corn!”

He was lying, of course. I had just grazed his foot, and had pierced the insole of his shoe, netted and held there by his strong—and strong-smelling—nylon socks. But I still weighed my regular hundred twenty-five pounds.

Herc must have picked up his foot in two hands and tried to shake me loose, because he lost his balance and fell. I felt myself twisting and turning as I swung with the movements of his foot, still stack in the stinking shoe. Only half-conscious before, I was partly revived by the thud as Herc hit the concrete floor.

He lay on his back like a beetle that’s been turned over, feebly waving his overweighted foot. And one wave passed me through the rear cone of my Two-Way Space Pump.

Instantly I found myself restored to full size. I was standing on Herc’s sore toe, the sledge within reach on the bench. I lunged out dizzily and grabbed it. Then I swung the hammer within an inch of Herc’s red nose.

“Had enough?” I demanded brusquely.

Herc looked at the hammer and at my face and at Carrie, standing with arms akimbo behind me. He knew when he was licked.

“Let me up,” he pleaded. “Get off my toe and let me up! I’ll be good.”

Before he had time to change his mind, I ran him out of the house and threw his clothes out after him.

But you know how women are. Carrie was weeping when I joined her in the kitchen—sobbing and consoling herself with a peanut-butter, jelly, margarine, tomato and sardine sandwich.

“You—you bully, you!” she howled. “You ran my fiancé right out of my own house. Now I’ll go to my grave a lone, lorn widow—poor, too.”

“Why Carrie Coles,” I said, surprised. “You’ve got it all wrong. I was saving you from a fate worse than death. And a fine widow of your accomplishments won’t stay single long.”

Her tearful face brightened in a sparkling smile with bits of sandwich showing at the corners. “Always indirect, aren’t you, Wiz, dear,” she fluttered. “It’s so sweet of you to ask. And of course I will. Just imagine, Carrie Coles Bye, wife of Wiz Bye, the famous inventor!

“Now you’ll not have to move your wonderful Pump. Isn’t it just too thrilling? Dear, to celebrate our engagement I’m going to get busy right now, making some nice Chinese bird’s-nest soup—with matzoh balls in it.”

A wonderful woman, Carrie. She made me set up in business, pointed out how Herc Hardhart had promised to get her rich and gave me the incentive to buy huge billets of tool-steel, sharpen them, shrink them in my Two-Way Space Pump and sell them as cutting-tool bits to big manufacturers. That was the start of my career.

But a man not only needs an idea and a process, as I had, he needs a special incentive if he’s to become really rich. Carrie furnished that too.

You see, she wouldn’t let me rebuild my Cybernetic Cooker—still thought it insulting. So, just as her cooking had given me the original idea, it now gave me the ambition to become really rich—so rich, in fact, that it was soon out of the question for my wife to prepare her own meals. You know how women are.

But in the long run all that I am or hope to be I owe to my aching stomach. And now please excuse me—it’s time I swallowed a pill and took a powder.